Operation Shadowed Past: Chapter Four

Finding unwelcome answers in the Delta Green RPG using Mythic 2e

Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this document are ©SolumProtocol, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

Photo by Salih Altuntaş: https://www.pexels.com/photo/snowy-lakefront-cabin-in-bolu-turkiye-31176431/

---

Taylor Hunting Lodge, 11AM

Tracy eventually convinced me that tinted windows and thick snow could only do so much to hide a gun pointed out the back window of an SUV, so I placed the rifle down next to me and pulled out a cigarette. The kid had passed out as soon as we hit the main road out of Minneapolis, but Tracy gave me a withering look in the rearview mirror.

“2nd hand smoke increases the chances of lung cancer, you know, especially in minors.” she said archly. I blew out a puff of smoke and gestured vaguely with the cigarette.

“Every minute from now is a gift for that kid.” I said in a monotone. “He’s lucky to be alive.” I added, stubbing out the cigarette and rolling down the window.¹

“Any idea what that thing was?” Tracy asked nervously.

“I honestly have no fucking idea.” I said. “It looked human, when it was on the other side of the door, but something was off about it.” I glanced at my rifle and grimaced. “Tough bastard though. We hit it square in the body 3 times and all we got in exchange was a couple drops of blood, if that. If this thing is working with the Robinsons, we might need some more firepower.” My brow furrowed as I recalled what the creature had been offering Anderson when it was still in the guise of a Pharmaceutical Rep. It had been offering evidence against the Robinsons, and it didn’t seem to be lying. I ran it by Tracy, and she frowned.

“Maybe it worked for the Order?” She said thoughtfully. “The Robinsons have attracted a lot of attention. Maybe the cult wants to cut ties.”

“He was offering it with the understanding that the investigation would stop there.” I said. “There’s a lot going on here, we need a lot more information before we have anything we can actually action.” I leaned forward and glanced down at the teenager snoozing in the passenger seat. “What are we going to do with this kid?” I asked.

“What else can we do with him?” She said pointedly. “We bring him along.”

---

We arrived at the Taylor Lodge just before noon.² The snow had gone from a light flurry to a hailstorm just after we left Minneapolis, and I felt the car slip and slide more than once as we drove Highway 61 out of town. The Lodge was down a narrow, bumpy and frost ridden side road and even poor traumatized Charlie couldn’t sleep through the rocky journey. Tracy parked as close as possible to the dilapidated building before placing the handbrake on. She kept the engine running and the state of the art heating unit started to groan at the strain of keeping the interior warm. I glanced at the dash, where there was a temperature flashing a single digit and shuddered.³ The Taylor Lodge was old and dark and seemingly half buried under the recent snowstorm.⁴ There was a large pile of snow that didn’t quite obscure a pristine black SUV, not too different from the one we were sat in functionally, but likely much, much more expensive. Anderson’s car, if I was any judge, and here long enough to be under a metric shit-ton of snow. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. I returned the Winchester to the case, slung it over my shoulder and the three of us jogged from the car to the entryway, trying not to get lost in the dense slurry of snow.⁵ I half expected the door to be frozen shut, but it was open, slightly ajar and letting in an ungodly amount of cold. We went inside and dragged the doors closed behind us, blocking out the worst of the icy chill.⁶ There was no power, so I handed Charlie a flashlight and redrew the Winchester, but before I could begin handloading the rounds in, I heard the telltale click of a firearm being readied.

“Don’t move.” a gruff voice said from the darkness. I saw Charlie tense, and he panned the flashlight into the darkness.

“Dad?” He asked tentatively, taking a step forward. The bead of a red dot sight blinked outwards, lining up with Charlie’s chest. I placed the gun down carefully, and Tracy placed a restraining hand on the kid's arm.⁷

“Get your fucking hands off my son.” The voice said with deadly calm, as the red dot jerked abruptly to Tracy’s forehead. I stood calmly, my hands still raised, and interposed myself between the source of the light and Tracy.

“John Anderson?” I asked, attempting to remain non-responsive as the red dot traced a threatening line from my forehead to my chest. Charlie and Tracy felt tense behind me, but I tried to exude an aura of calm that likely came off more as indifference as I struggled to reign in the feeling of voiding numbness that had taken over my body.⁸ There was a pungent smell in the room, almost overwhelming, that I couldn’t place my finger on.⁹ Judging by the looks on the others faces they could smell it too, a stink that clung to my nostrils, unavoidable and overpowering. I pointed at Charlie. “Whoever is after you nearly killed your son today.” I said plainly, keeping my hands in the air. “We got him out of your apartment, safe and sound. We just want to talk. I get the feeling that we might be after the same thing.”

“And what is that?” The voice growled.

“The Robinsons.” I said plainly. “They were scared of you, I think. I want to know why.”¹⁰ The laser sight clicked off, but the man didn’t emerge from the darkness. His voice, when he spoke, had lost some of the gruff edge, but it still sounded suspicious.

“And what exactly do you want with them?” He asked softly. I took a moment to ponder that question, feeling an odd, disconnected clarity in my dissociated state. I wanted to kill them, obviously. But I didn’t know Anderson’s angle well enough to share that yet. I took a risk by keeping it vague, but I had to hope the man’s experience in the intelligence field would let him read between the lines.

“They have information on a group that my friends and I have been monitoring.” I said. When the voice didn’t respond, I added. “Once we extract that information from them, what happens to the Robinsons is up to you.” The silence stretched as we stood in tense silence until finally, the voice sighed, and a figure emerged from the shadows.

“Fuck it. That will do.” Anderson said with a sigh.

---

I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting from John Anderson. I knew he was retired from the air force and that he lived in an expensive high rise apartment with his angsty goth child, so I suppose I had been expecting a straight-laced military type. Anderson wasn’t that, at least, not at the moment. A tall man with shaggy, almost matted hair and haunted dark eyes, he had about a weeks worth of uneven, greying beard growing on his gaunt cheeks. If it weren’t for the military grade carbine and SWAT vest, I would have taken him for a street bum. I glanced at Charlie, to see if he registered any surprise at his father’s appearance, but the boys features were cloudy, as though he was drifting between annoyance, anger and relief.

“You look like shit, dad.” He said, eventually. Anderson’s lips twitched slightly, and he pulled his son into an awkward embrace.

“Come on. I’ve got a space heater further in.” He said, after checking over his son for a few moments. We followed, taking in the dire state of the infrastructure as we walked deeper into the lodge.

“Did you chose this location for a particular reason?” I asked as we walked.¹¹

“It’s been called the Taylor Lodge for the last decade or so, but back in the 80s it was the Dusklight Hunting Lodge, and you needed a very exclusive membership to access the property. If you had to ask how much, you couldn’t afford it. I’ll give you three guesses on a pair of names that were on that membership list.” Anderson grunted.

“Did you find anything here?” I asked curiously. It seemed a tenuous link at best, but it didn’t hurt to ask.¹²

“Nope. Nothing but sink holes, ice and a fuck ton of structural damage.”¹³ He chuckled mirthlessly. “Although the structural damage is something, at least.” He pointed a flashlight at the wall and chuckled again. The wall had been slashed with three, jagged rends, stained black with dried blood. “Bear didn’t fucking do that.” He huffed, continuing down the hallway. I shared a look with Tracy, who had paled at the sight, and we both panned our flashlights around the hallways, taking in the numerous other details that dotted the Lodge. Once you noticed them, they were hard to miss. The floor had been torn up in places, and claw marks and signs of violence were all evident on every surface. Whatever had bulldozed through here, it had really fucked the place up. I crouched down and looked at the damage to the floor.¹⁴ Something with wide, padded feet had torn the floor apart. Combined with the claw marks, and the damage to the walls, I couldn’t help but see the similarity to the beast that had chased us back in Anderson’s apartment.

“Do you know what did this?” I asked Anderson tensely.¹⁵ He didn’t answer, leading us to a locked door and turning his haunted, dark eyes over to me.

“I do.” He said softly. “For my sins.”

---

Inside the room, or Anderson’s Base of Operations as he chose to call it, was a small portable gas generator, a few lamps and, thank god, a few industrial space heaters. The room was almost uncomfortably warm and we all had to strip off our winter gear within 5 minutes of being there. The warmth was a deliberate choice, according to Anderson. He had set up a large corkboard, with pictures of each of the Robinsons alongside several handwritten notes.¹⁶ One of them, in large, block letters said ‘MJ-6-2-9: Project Blackwood’. Anderson tapped that after giving us a each a bottle of room temperature water.

“This, I think, is the source of it.” He said. “My son likely told you I was former USAF intelligence, and he’s right, but there was more to it. The years leading up to my retirement, I worked out of an Airbase that required Security clearance so high, even most of the pencil pushers at the Pentagon don’t have it.” He sipped the water and sat heavily in the chair. “MAJIC clearance projects were like a wet dream for us in the intelligence field. These are the people that won us the Cold War, you understand? Cutting edge is putting it mildly. I was the Air Force’s contact for Bosun AFB, advising on a project designated MJ-6-2-8, codename ‘Charon’. I can’t describe to you what I saw on just that project, from a National Security standpoint, but also because you wouldn’t fucking believe me.”

“You’d be surprised.” I said dryly. I had taken my notebook out and jotted down a few of the key points. MAJIC was unfamiliar to me, but Landry was higher up the food chain and had been active in the 90s, so it might be something he was familiar with. Hell, with his background, maybe he even had the clearance. Anderson eyed me critically, and then shrugged.

“You might be right.” he said. “You want to know what fucked this place up?” He gestured to the cracked floors and bloodstains, and I nodded. He plucked the Project Blackwood folder from the wall and opened it up. Most of the text was covered in black blocks, redacted and blacklined, but there were a few polaroid’s, and even though I had been half expecting it, I still flinched. A swollen, frozen humanoid figure with a craggy, fang filled maw and pitiless, black eyes glared out of the frame.¹⁷

“For Fuck sake.” I muttered. I glanced over the small amount of text available in the file and scowled at Anderson. “These fucking things are man made?” I asked, my voice dangerously low. I had been hovering on the edge for a while, still not feeling part of my body but reading these sparse reports, these lab reports had me so pissed off so much that I slammed back into my body with an almost visceral force. I glared at Anderson as he shuffled around to the corkboard, almost sheepish.

“I didn’t know about those.” He said defensively.

“Oh, well that's alright then.” I said, throwing my hands up. “So there’s a government blacksite that’s creating cutting age aeronautic technology, and fucking Were-Yetis?”

“A Wendigo.” Tracy said next to me. She had started looking through the files as well, a similar look of disgust on her usually demure features. “Subject retains limited rational ability and problem solving skills when transformed, and can revert to human when sleeping, killed or, in rare cases, at will.” She read. She glanced at me, then at Anderson. “One of these things is hunting you.” She said. “They nearly killed your son, in your place.” She added, cutting Anderson’s response off.

“At least one.” He grumbled. “Look. Bosun AFB was shut down in ‘99. I didn’t know why at the time, and they moved Project Charon over to Montana, but scuttlebutt said whatever they were studying over in the labs had triggered containment protocols.” He took another swig of water and spat it out onto the floor. “I saw the containment protocols, and they had gear that makes the modern military look like fucking medieval peasants. When I retired, I moved out here to keep an eye on it, to make sure that base stayed closed. So you can imagine my fucking surprise when a Pharmaceuticals company out of NYC swoops in and purchases the surrounding land, right?” Things were starting to fall into place. I sat heavily in the desk and pulled out my pack of cigarettes, offering one to Anderson while he filled us in. The Robinson family had used their legitimate business to buy up a few seemingly empty and abandoned plots of land throughout the area back in 2005. Anderson had watched them from afar, keeping tabs on them but it wasn’t until the disappearances started that he started ramping up his investigations. He had sent a few things through old contacts in the USAF, but hadn’t gotten a response, so had been going it alone. Finally, he had tracked down an old stash of records and found this folder for Project Blackwood. When I asked him why he believed the photos when they looked so unrealistic, he snorted.

“You noticed the smell?” He growled, throwing back a tarp in the corner of the room. I heard Tracy gag, but I couldn't bring myself to be surprised. A pile of what could only be described as partially frozen goo was puddled in the corner, fur, teeth and claws sticking out of it like small ships in a particularly rancid pond. The smell was horrific. “This one tracked me down an hour out of St Cloud. I dragged it here in a tarp, and it looked like this by the time I got the heating going.”

The monster seemed sensitive to heat and fire, and could be killed with high caliber, armor penetrating rounds, a fact included in the report and was likely the only reason Anderson was still alive.

“This is all a lot to take in.” I said as Tracy poked at my ribs with an assortment of balms she had pulled from her knapsack. I tried not to think about how many crystals and herbs had been added to the standard issue trauma kit as she poked at me, but judging by the herbal smell, it was a lot.¹⁸

“Understandable.” Anderson grunted. He had a significant paunch underneath his combat apparel, but was still a powerful built man. In the stark heat of the space heaters, it was clear he hadn’t bathed for a while.

“Why are you so keen to tell us all this?” I asked, letting out a grunt as Tracy continued to prod at my bruises.

“Because I’m out of fucking time.”¹⁹ He said, an edge of palpable despair in his voice. “Tomorrow morning, Airman Stephen Stewert is going to return to his home.”

“The Missing Airman?” I asked, perplexed. “What does that have to do with the Robinsons?”

“Stewart’s dead.” Anderson said bluntly. “His old man worked at Bosun. He was an engineer.” He took a long drag of his cigarette, having purloined a second from my dwindling stores, and then sighed. “They want the dad. They’re sending one of these monsters after him, disguised as his son. And I need to stop them.”²⁰ There was a moment of tense silence at this proclamation, as Anderson stared around at us with an intense gaze and I realized that this was a man on the edge of losing it. I don’t know what he had seen in the air force, or in the last few weeks, but I recognised a man barely holding it together when I saw one. Still, he was our best shot at the Robinson family, and I wasn’t holding out much hope for the data back at the safe house.

“I need to make a call.” I sad, pushing out of my seat and heading towards the door. Anderson growled a protest, but I forestalled him. “I’ll be back in a moment. We’re in on this, I just need to notify my team. After that, you can explain to me how the fuck we’re supposed to capture one of these things.”²¹

---

This scene did not go how I was expecting at all. I assumed Anderson would be dead, we’d have to poke through his belongings and then try to chase up another lead. Instead, the man was alive and full of wonderful intel! The dice were kind this scene. I am still learning about the progress track. Looking back, even though this was a lot of information, I think I would have limited this to 2 Progress, rather than 4. All of it was discovered in the same scene, so it would make sense to lump it all together. Still, I like the way this is going! Thanks for reading!

1. POW X 5 (To end Acute Episode) - 72/30 - Still dissociating. Next one at -10

2. Oracle: Is the weather bad? Very Likely - 58 Yes.

3. POW X 5(To end Acute Episode) 91/40 - Next test no penalty.

4. Oracle: Any cars outside? 50/50 - 17 Yes. Nice Car? 50/50 10 Extreme yes. Buried under snow? Likely - 06 Extreme yes.

5. Oracle: Is the door open? 50/50 35 Yes. I can always tell I’m unsure/nervous about a scene when I start asking these basic questions, instead of just assuming either way.

6. Oracle: Is there Power? Unlikely - 55 No. Random Event - 69 Close a thread. Find John Anderson. Threaten Official. Is Anderson Alive? 50/50 35 - Yes

7. Oracle: John Anderson Motivation - Damage Affluence

8. Oracle: Are there any Any smells? Unlikely - 26 Yes. Familiar smells? Unlikely - 81 No. Smells Table: Powerful smell. Booze? 100 Extreme no.

9. Oracle: Can the others smell it? 50/50 07 Extreme yes.

10. Oracle: Is he convinced? Unlikely - 26 Yes.

11. Oracle: Did he? Unlikely - 29 Yes Is there a reason Anderson came here? 50/50 18 Yes. Former Robinson Holdout? 50/50 40 Yes.

12. Oracle: Is there anything pertinent to the investigation at the lodge? Very Unlikely - 58 No.

13. Oracle: Is the condition of the lodge relevant? Likely - 68 - Yes.

14. Oracle: Familiar? Very Likely - 10 Extreme yes.

15. Oracle: Does he? Likely - 47 Yes. Does he know the name? 50/50 59 Yes

16. Oracle: Does Anderson have an MJ connection? - 66 Yes Random Event. PC Positive - Guide Misfortune.

17. Sanity: 74/39 -1 SAN

18. Tracy Skill: First Aid(+20% Trauma Kit) 70/80 Healed back to full.

19. Oracle: Is it about the airman? Likely - 52 Yes Dead and replaced? 50/50 - 54 yes

20. Oracle: Is he kind of crazy? Likely - 49 Yes.

21. End Scene. Progress +2 for finding Anderson. +2 (6/10) For discovering Project Blackwood. Chaos Factor 5. Next Scene is FLASHPOINT - ‘Block Exterior’