Here is a link describing a peruvian gang that killed people to extract their fat and sell to cosmetic industry. Sounds familiar? Yeah, I thought of two things as soon as I saw the headline. Tamanous and Fight Club, at least in Fight Club they took it from plastic surgery clinics.

what...you thought the Ideas presented in cyberpunk was all made up?

For centuries in the Andes there have been stories about demons called pishtacos (see here for a gang named after them) that hunted and killed people for their fat, extracting it for their own nefarious purposes. Allegedly, sometimes it happened overnight, sometimes people would slowly weaken over the course of days or weeks, and when dead would be found to have no body fat.

Oddly enough, stories of these creatures started surfacing after the arrival of Europeans in South America. The most common reason for the demons' behaviour was that white men's machines needed greasing, and native fat was the best of all for that purpose.

This story is heir to a long tradition of fear of the colonialist power's abuse of the native people of the region. It also may be associated with a disease indigenous to the area (see here ).

Well, of course not, I'm not that naive. And I know that organlegging is an already lucrative shady business, it just happen you don't see people geting caught for it everyday.

Ok, for a moment I was really curious to see what this "strange" disease was. Chagas disease is by no means, an unknown disease in Latin America, or at least, it is not unknown by those who wen to school for at least 5 years. Most poor people here live in huts made of mud and twigs, which are perfect for the vector bugs create their nest. It is definitely a horrible disease and now you made me wonder how an Awakaned version of it would be like... uhm, ideas...

Is it wrong that I originally read the "spirit"s name as pistachio?

Hmmm, sounds like an intresting idea for a extraplaner menace, and another reason to stay away from dark allys. Perhaps Tamanous (Under some guise) hires a group of runners telling them that someone is kidnapping people and stripping them of their flesh. Tramanous thinks its a new gange moveing on their terratory, its actualy a exterplaner menace, or perhaps a experment in magic gone awry where someone was playing on the subconscious of mages to creat spirtes out of their culters darkest nightmares....
(Starts preping his next run)
PS: Thanks for the insperation