Backstory #

This whole affair began as some combination of “Anti-Capitalism Demonstration”, “Anti-Entity Weapon”, “Mystic Experiment”, and “Hey, what does this thing do?”
Naturally, the Baron Montichello is behind this one.

To quote my original notes: “As the person who started this entire mess, it is important to answer the question of why this experiment was performed. Although the baron himself is crazy, the people he works for aren’t: What follows is a list of potential reasons I can work through later. [See above reasons.]
Due to some combination of these factors, the Baron decided to run this experiment. To do this, he got some of his agents placed as employees, used the “hiding it under the tablecloth” method to hide the ritual circle in the break room, brainwashed anyone who was going to blow the whistle, and (due to this mass brainwashing) was eventually caught by resident saboteur Professor Hawthorne.”

They think they have sucessfully disabled the ritual, but directed the investigators to the mall anyway to check (under the guise of “go buy me this book, I’ll pay you back, call me if you have any problems”). This is a good thing, as what they actually did was fuck things up even further. Specifically by (accidentally) binding a sentient meme into it.

What is the Baddie’s Plot? #

Depends on the baddie:

Baron Montichello: #

He isn’t present, acting as more of a greater-scope baddie for this one (feel free to replace his influence with “cultists” for your campaign if need be.) However, what he wanted out of this was chaos on the streets.

Professor Hawthorne: #

As was previously established, their goal is to make sure they actually disabled the ritual earlier. If they are called, they’ll try to pretend they haven’t seen it, but will make use of their knowlege from when they mucked with it earlier. They don’t know about the secret ritual in the pharmacy, so if the investigators blindly follow their instructions, they’ll leave a backdoor open for the aforementioned sentient meme to go muck around. Speaking of which:

The Meme: #

At the start, the meme isn’t very cognizant. During the events of this scenario, its two objectives are:

• Infect the minds of shoppers with greed (ritual objective),
• and Spread itself to as many living hosts as possible (personal objective). Thus, it will seek to keep people alive, coming in, and stuck within.

As more people fall victim, it’ll start getting smarter, and the arrival of the investigators will mark the seeds of an actual plan: get the investigators to break the part of the ritual that’s forcing the greed effect, then release the victims as sleeper agents to maintain its current level of intelligence.
Of course, this will only work if they don’t just dash to the end or immediately decide to go murderhobo.