Ghost Heart

Back in 2009, Glowing Monkeys was calling out research into regenerating human hearts, using principles discovered several years earlier following experiments by cardiac researcher Doris Taylor on rat hearts. The research had taken the basic substructure of a rat heart and cultured cells within the framework to regenerate the organ. The company Cytograft (no longer in operation) used “tissue engineering by self-assembly” to build scaffold-free vascular grafts.

There’s potential for adventure in the combination of identity, replacement, empty structures and something new inhabiting an old framework that suits a number of Sanction Genre Setups.

By Appointment — Vacancy

Task at Hand: A ghost, from a hunting lodge on the boundary of the property, arrives at the house furious that somebody else has gazumped them from their haunting. Worse, the intruder looks exactly like them.

What’s Going On: A spiritualist discovered that a ghost can be removed from its memories and personality, leaving behind an incorporeal framework: an empty human shape into which another spirit can settle. She has been manufacturing these “vacancies” for ghosts desperate to escape the places, objects or circumstances binding them after death.

Twist: The ghost client is a fading mess of discarded personality elements, while the imposter at the hunting lodge is from far afield and unaware that they have moved in where no vacancy existed. The client exists as memories and habits given independent existence when the spirit was stripped bare, but it fades and fractures as time goes on. Neither lies at fault, but without the spiritualist to provide the method and means—which include use of a Ghost Jar—the client will fade away. The spiritualist has never de-incorporated a transitioned spirit, so it might work or could destroy two perfectly viable ghosts.

QkSLVa — The Better Monster

Task at Hand: A pharmaceutical research team disappears after reporting a breakthrough in repairing the damage caused by repeated QkSLVa use. The squad is sent to recover the scientists, their research and any surviving test subjects.

What’s Going On: Researchers have been stripping organs from captured supernatural creatures down to their underlying biological scaffolds, then reseeding them with human cells. The resulting replacements retain some of the donor creature’s extraordinary properties without initially displaying obvious supernatural corruption.

Twist: The technique works perfectly. There is no rejection and no immediate psychological deterioration. The missing researchers left voluntarily because their employers intended to suppress it. Replacing enough of yourself with monster-derived organs might cure QkSLVa dependency—but raises the uncomfortable question of how much can be replaced before “human” becomes merely a description of the cells inhabiting the scaffold.