Who watches the sky?

The adventure: A deebee with a terminal disease and/or fatal wounds kept himself alive long enough to care for an orphaned human child.

Structure

Exposition

The party runs across the remains of a human village. It appears to be the target of a brutal simvan attack a week earlier. There were five survivors who are still in the process of burying their dead. Many of the corpses show signs of being eaten by animals. One of the survivors claims she saw a young human child in the company of a W'Kell who managed to escape. The W'Kell had been a regular visitor for the past several years and must have made a home someplace nearby. Besides the normal supplies one would expect, the W'Kell also regularly purchased pain medication in increasing doses.

Conflict

Assuming the party tracks down either the child, the W'Kell or the raiding party, they will come across the raiders who are in the process of tracking the child.

Rising Action

The Simvan leadership (Chief and Shaman) are utterly intractable. No amount of coercion or persuasion will deter them from killing the child. The players may be able to convince some of the Simvan followers to defect or withdraw.
If the players give the leadership a chance to escape or retreat, they will take it. They are patient hunters, after all. They will use this opportunity to prepare an ambush and traps, even getting allies to assist them. They will never stop.

Climax

Evidence of a prophecy is with the Simvan leaders. When the players get the gist of the prophecy, it will be worded such as to reveal what effect that this player has had versus the raiders so far in this adventure. It will probably be something along the lines of 'the child will be the death and destruction of the simvan leader and/or the leader's shaman and everything they have strived to achieve.' Of course, the players should not be able to make a direct connection yet between the child and the player.
The W'Kell is making a last stand in an unlikely place. He is a shifter. He felt a rift opening that he was going to use as an escape. He does not know to where or when it rifts to, only that it is safe. Trying to ensure it connects to someplace safe is what really takes it out of him.

Falling Action

When the party approaches him, he will tell them about the rift, ask them to take care of [insert character's name here] and say that he can stabilize the rift just long enough to send one person through. The W'kell man names the child something the player should recognize. Either the player's name or some version of it or maybe a secret name the player included in his or her backstory but never mentioned to the others. If the player has a keepsake, the W'kell man gives it to the child, or maybe the players give it to the child from the W'kell's things. If the characters desire it, give the W'kell enough of a backstory in the form of relatives left behind in a W'kell settlement several years earlier, from which he ran with the child when he learned the Simvan were chasing him. This would give a grateful player someone else to talk to and perhaps inform of his fate.

Resolution

Leave it up to the party to figure out what to do with the child as they come to realize it is this character at a younger age. The effort to open and stabilize the rift is enough to kill the W'Kell, but this is not unavoidable if the party has the ability to save him. Even if they do, however, his terminal illness is enough to kill him in the next day or so. This could lead to an interesting meeting/reunion between the W'Kell and the adult character.

Components

Goals

The intention of this plot is to involve the party in an urgent and drametic affair that ends with a surprise reveal.

Stakes

Apparently the Simvan were looking for a child and went out of their way to kill all the children in the village, even eating them. Their intentions for the child seem obvious.

Moral Quandaries

Should the players watch them eating or search their bags when they catch up to the Simvan, the Simvan will still have butchered body parts with them from the village. If any of the players is a Simvan, this could cause a serious amount of concern about that player character. It could even cause that PC to have a personal crisis.

Backdrops

Past Events

This isn't the first village this simvan tribe has destroyed. The two Simvan leaders have been hunting that child its entire life. They started by hunting its mother while she was still pregnant. She ran into a bunch of W'Kell settlers and that's where this W'Kell man encountered her. The players can learn this if they interrogate any of the Simvan tribesmen or if they have a chance to speak with the W'Kell.
After five years, many of the tribesmen are disillusioned with the hunt.
This adventure is designed to fulfill the backstory of a player character. One player who grew up as an orphan or in a foster family can be eligible for this. This adventure establishes that character as having originated in the Rifts Earth future and being rifted back to Earth's past, to the 21st century, to become that player character. Because of this, the GM will have to have a talk with the player and make sure they have no idea what happened to their character's parents or why they ended up at an orphanage or in a foster family. It would also be good to reveal that the character was first raised by a black man of whom they have fond memories before they ended up in the orphanage/foster family. You could even give the player a keepsake they remember or even still have from before they can remember. Communicating more than this would give away too much from the impact of the final scene.

While this adventure was written for a specific Savage Rifts campaign, it can be tailored to any setting and campaign with very little effort. There is always a player who was raised without parents in every party, right?