Hot damn Horsemen, I was settling into bed and happened to glance at the thread on my phone.. lo and behold, I'm in my chair and the desktop is humming to life again. Can't give a proper response on a P-Sec!
While perhaps, at some points, not exactly what I needed , it's certainly the kind of stuff I'm looking for and vast swathes of it are things I'll easily be able to adapt to my purposes. It hits all the marks of the character's backgrounds and motivations perfectly, to the point I'm ashamed not to have come up with it myself, though I admit, I doubt I've got the experience to have done so. While I'm still appreciative for any other input, might be all I need to get the ball rolling. Love the idea about the spirits coming to the adept. Really that's something that the affinity edges should be causing in the first place (and she's maxed out at a full 5 spirit affinity edges, I let her take one as Ghosts instead of all nature spirits. The rest are sorts you'd encounter in cities: City, Hearth, Prairie, Wind). Playing the White Vor against the Red Vor that way is also great.. I knew about that conflict, but I wasn't sure how to use it for this character. Up to now, it had just looked like more of an obstacle rather than opportunity, a difficulty in getting the Vor to be a threat to Gep as opposed to a means to it.
Few questions and corrections, just in case you don't mind noting how these might alter your original conception of the arc:
The street sam (Mr. Duma), is one we're pretty much just forgetting was ever part of the group thus far. He made it to the Johnson meet and a couple interrogations where he just stood nearby being scary. Having said that, the player wants to come back into the game later when his schedule clears up, so I also don't want to convert him to an NPC that goes gallivanting around causing major plot developments and getting killed. Is the Africa connection primarily on his behalf, or did you conceive of it more for the "cradle of civilization" angle being linked with the immortals, previous ages, so on?
On your serial killer angle, are you referencing the serial killer they tracked down as their first run? I wasn't sure if I missed something about a different killer in reading your arc break down. I did intentionally set the guy up as having the potential to be recurring, so he could blend nicely. They got hired by some middle-manager type whose son went missing while slumming it with some girl in Redmond; their job was just to find the kid and drag back whoever was responsible. Long story short, turns out it was an Astral Space Preservation Society member who went bonkers. Was previously a non-awakened academic, awakened within the background count of the Chicago Containment Zone during a cleanup, heard "a sound from so far away" became obsessed with it, "The Sound" told him how to bring it closer, started using pseudo blood magic to start redirecting mana lines in the area to make a gate, blah, blah. Kirkland, on a hunch, had his decker buddy check out what the Johnson did with this guy, fearing maybe they wanted to use him. He was shipped off to some prison, but there was no record of his arrival nor any signs that he'd escaped or been sent to a research division. Red tape/paperwork wise, he just seemed to vanish.
Being as I don't have the Lagos book at the moment: Why Lagos? Does it have some great significance to a plot of this type that I should be aware of or could another scummy, magic soaked city be substituted with ease?
On the Shaman front, his totem is actually Coyote, he's just a cat burglar in the general sense (sneaky, high profile thefts) as opposed to being a shaman of Cat. Not that important though, what is more so is that White-Bear at least believes his former CO to be dead, which is how he became officer of his team in the first place (field promotion due to the CO's death). It was the Shaman's XO that betrayed him (a ruthless knife specialist adept) by going ahead with wiping out a town (one of those abandoned, crumbling "middle of no-where" towns that dot the Sioux Nation) of what turned out to be innocent people (who a corp paid the XO and the rest to remove), then blamed it on the Shaman saying he assensed the folks and told the team they were a Bug hive. Shaman got the blame for a massacre and was made to seem the one being paid by the corp, the XO got brownie points for exposing a corrupt officer in the ranks. My previous mention of the team feeling remorse would come from the XO and the rest regretting this pinning of blame and trying to track down White-Bear to see if they can bring him back into the fold (with him believing, quite justifiably, that they're coming to kill him and indeed may have had that intent at first). None of this is to say that the CO couldn't still end up fulfilling the same role you originally quoted, which could actually be pretty darned interesting, but it would mean White-Bear's former mentor and father figure seemingly coming back from the dead to be a bad guy (be it actual coming back as a Shedim or just metaphorical coming back in his popping up as a Toxic).