"Following the Trail" Quest Outline Rough Draft

------------------------------------------------------Quest: Following the Trail-------------------------------------------------------

The players are called to Unity to meet with a research team that has started working to develop an inoculation against the metamorphing process. It is explained to them that their head researcher, Dr. Velvet Jewel, had left a week ago to the current epicenter of metamorph activity, Pon Lookout, to do some field research on finding a way to inoculate ponies from being able to be transformed into metamorphs. She went dark shortly after arriving, and the players must track her down.

Through their journey in the Forest outside Pon Lookout, players will have to evade and/or fight metamorph patrols while looking for signs of Velvet's presence. Eventually they find a ruined camp site where Velvet was conducting field research, complete with a dead metamorph on a makeshift operating table. The players find a cassete tape left behind, and upon playing it hear Velvet's report as of 5 days ago. She discovered a metamorph corpse and ran some tests, and found a promising lead. There is a correlation between the metamorphs' lack of magic and the method Tirek used to drain ponies of their magic. The ponies who had turned into metamorphs had traces of an anti-magic compound that was found in ponies during Tirek's reign of terror. During the Tirek crisis, some of Velvet's colleagues established an outpost southwest of the Crystal Empire to try and find a reversal for Tirek's process while in hiding. During this time, various ponies fleeing Tirek found refuge here, and the outpost became something of a small village. It was abandoned once Tirek was defeated, but Velvet suspects that there may still be research data left behind. On the casette tape, Velvet declares that she's heading for this abandoned outpost and hopes that the ruins will hold answers.

Stray, now obsessed with finding an inoculation procedure to prevent ore ponies from suffering the fate of Arend and Bee Bop, insists that they follow Velvet's trail to the abandoned outpost. On their way back to Pon Lookout to leave, they run across a party of metamorphs gathering to make a push into Pon Lookout to kidnap more ponies. The players must figure out a way to stop them. Their success will break the back of the metamorph effort in the area and end the threat to Pon Lookout.