Little Adventure: No Statute Limitations

[taalismn]

Just a passing adventure campaign idea...

While browsing a market someplace on Rifts Earth, the PCs come across a merchant selling various items, one of which is advertised as a pre-rifts sculpture of a crying little girl.
It doesn't take long for a mage or psychic in the group to figure out the 'statute' is an actual human being, petrified.
A handy application of a Stone to Flesh spell(make a scroll of it conveniently available if the PCs don't have the spell in their arsenal) and they have a bawling eight year old little girl on their hands.
Careful questioning of the kid will reveal that the girl actually dates back to the Coming of the Rifts and the Great Disaster. She remembers her family taking shelter in a building when a 'monster' came in and...well, that's when she got petrified.

Following up on some of her statements should lead to the PCs learning from the seller that the girl was part of a find of 'statues' hauled from pre-Rifts ruins, and the immediate seller bought just the one 'statute' from a third party. If the PCs decide to try to find any other petrified people and reunite the little girl with her family, this can start a backtrack quest to find when the 'statue' collection was last together and where the individual 'pieces' are now.

This adventure can take a number of directions. Taking care of the kid(who's scared out of her wits) can be a chore; finding safe sanctuary and trustworthy people willing to take her in and deal with her issues a task in itself. The kid may be a whiny needy brat who the PCs decide is better off re-stoned until they find something definite. Maybe there's a wildcard factor and the kid soaked up so much PPE as a statue over the centuries she begins manifesting supernatural powers. The back trail may take the PCs into trouble and there might be false leads, or the trail may be decades old because the 'statutes' weren't a recent find but have been sold off over the years from the salvagers' collection. Some of the statues may turn out to be real statues or they may have been destroyed.

If the PCs aren't doing this out of charity, the GM can have the kid's parents/family be Golden Age scientists or other figures of some importance who may hold valuable information that the PCs can profit from(this might be indicated by the little girl having a keepsake from her family that she grabbed like an ID chip or encoded flash drive with hints of what the family was doing).