Operation Shadowed Past - Chapter One
An Icey Reception 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 Ryan Klaus: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-house-in-the-snow-covered-mountains-19727172/
Debrief Diner - Seattle - January 16, 2007 - 7AM
“You’re looking well.” Landry said, lying through his teeth as usual. I slumped into the booth opposite him and looked at the frozen strawberry milkshake that had been placed in front of me by the absent minded waitress and shot an irritated look at my Case Officer. Landry flashed his teeth at me in a humorless smile before continuing. “I’m not being facetious, Katherine. Director Oakes’ Special Response teams are notorious for burning through agents. That fact that you're still standing is impressive in and of itself.”
“I’m going to assume you didn’t call me here to give me a pep talk.” I said, my eyes narrowed. He flashed his teeth again before waving an immaculately clean white gloved hand.
“Of course. Please, have a taste of the milkshake. It truly is the best in Seattle.” We sat in tense silence for a minute or two until I finally broke and took a sip of the milkshake, which was actually very good. “They make it with soy milk, you know.” He whispered conspiratorially.
“And here I thought we hunted down abominations.” I said flatly.1
“Excellent, your sense of humor is still intact.” Landry said lightly. He insisted on continuing this stream of small talk and pitter patter for another 10 minutes, before he finally relaxed, dropping the overly cheerful veneer and matching me slump-for-slump. The shift in body language was sudden and jarring, and I tried to hide my shock.
“Shit, Landry, you doing ok?” I asked in surprise. Once the façade dropped, he seemed to age ten years, the dark circles under his eyes becoming more pronounced by the second until he looked as exhausted as I felt. Hell, maybe even more so.
“I had to be sure.” Landry said softly. “I need you on this upcoming Op, Kat. But I can’t bring you along if your like the rest of them.”
“The rest of them?”
“Oakes’ people. I’ve worked with them before. I salvaged Montford, but I can’t have him running point, especially not on this.” He looked at me seriously, all humor and cheer gone, so I shrugged.
“I’m still me.” I said, keeping my face expressionless so he couldn’t see the lie. “Do we have a lead?”
“We do.” We said tightly. “Hope you packed warm. We’re heading to Minnesota.”
Minneapolis Airport, Minnesota - 2PM
Landry filled me in on the case on the drive to the airport. Using the collection of journals and diaries we had acquired from the cultists over the last few years, as well as a few sources Landry chose not to mention, he had managed to piece together a nebulous understanding of the Order of Midnight’s structure and membership.
“The Order has a few members hiding in plain sight, with their symbols and finery, but its all fake.” He told me, his voice frenetic. “They’re paid actors and patsies, living a fake, news friendly life. The few public facing organizations with supposed ties to the order are also fake, shell companies with falsified ID’s. Matching the people mentioned in Roth’s journal against real people has been a challenge, but we’ve narrowed some down.” I had been shuffling through the paperwork he had handed me earlier while he spoke, and I help us a picture that was pinned to the front.
“The Robinson Family?” I asked2
“Exactly.” He said. “Unlike the people you encountered in the course of your work thus far, the Robinsons are still heavily involved with the Cult’s day to day activities. The public facing Order, from their online presence to their falsified consulting credentials are all fabricated by these three people. That’s the lead. Mostly.” The opening the Program had found was simple. The various companies, both the false shell companies and the real ones, had all been using an advanced form of identity theft to populate their falsified work streams. Social security numbers, pictures and even bank details. That had been Landry’s in. A friendly in the Federal Trade Commission had begun an investigation on a dubious and possible illegally obtained tip and tracked down one of their hubs in New York, only to find an abandoned office block. They had tracked them down to a safe house in Minnesota, a few hours drive out of Minneapolis, but by the time the FTC team got there, the Robinson’s were gone.
“Fortunately they hadn’t had time to clean up.” Landry said cheerfully. “There’s a whole host of data there, a dozen cabinets, a few laptops and an old school computer server. That’s where you and the team come in.” The team would pose as data experts and liase with the FTC team to work through the data to find what we needed. The folder had pictures of the safe house, a small single story building in the middle of the prairies. There were three rooms; a small living area, an office, and a tiny kitchenette with a small walled off bathroom. The office had the bulk of the data and it was filled wall to wall with filing cabinets, accordion binders and old tech.
“And the FTC team is happy to let us just sift through the data and pass on what’s useful?” I asked skeptically.
“So far, yes. They’ve been assigned to chase down other leads. More specifically, they need hard evidence of the Identity Theft and other bad business practices if there’s any actual charges to be brought against the Robinsons.”
“I assume if those leads end up not going anywhere, they’ll come knocking on our door?”
“A fair assumption. I suggest you have something to give them.”
I spent the flight to Minneapolis reviewing the file Landry had given me.3 He would be staying in Seattle and using his resources to try to track down any pertinent information about the Robinsons, but he gave me a secure line if I had any follow up questions. There wasn’t a lot to go on, truth be told. The Robinsons were a family of entrepreneurs. Mary Robinson was the CEO of their pharmaceutical company, Metrix, while her husband, Dennis Robinson, ran their consulting business. Their son, 24 year old Jeffery Robinson, seemingly shadowed both of them as a PA/Secretary/Heir Apparent.4 Roth’s journal mentioned them all individually by their given name and profession and Landry had some other supporting evidence for their involvement with the Order. The tip Landry had given the FTC was clearly obtained through less than legal means, which meant that they needed something concrete to justify the warrants, but Landry suspected that they may have been using unnatural means to perform most of the fraud, so it could well be a dead end, or at least, not an end we want the FTC digging into.5 Landry was dubious that the trio were still in Minnesota. Airport security had their picture, as did the state troopers and highway patrol, but the three were as unassuming as you could get, three plain faces in business casual, and who knew what kind of unnatural bullshit they were working with. They could be halfway across the country by now, and we would have no way of knowing. Our only lead, unless the FTC team turned something up, was this pile of safehouse data.6 It felt like long odds.
A storm hit just as we were preparing to touch down, which distracted me from my rumination. Honest to God, I thought we were going to crash as we circled the landing strip for 20 minutes while the pilot told us in a shaky voice that everything would be fine. I heard the hostess’ muttering ominously at the back of the plane and did my best to eavesdrop. I hadn’t paid much attention to the weather reports, given my overabundance of distractions, but the crew had been paying attention and the skies were supposed to be clear today. The storm subsided as suddenly as it arrived, sun shining through the clouds as though it had been there the whole time. Everyone on the flight breathed a sigh of relief when we finally touched down.7
I retrieved my rifle case from the bag check and headed out to the cab ranks.8 I had a couple thousand in small bills tucked into my carry on, blood money from my time with the TAG team. The pay rise had been nice, but it felt wrong somehow to spend the difference in pay on myself, so I had squirrelled it all away for use next time the call for a mission came. I was digging in my bag for a $20 bill when a body crashed into me, nearly knocking me flat. I looked down, and saw a pair of sparkling blue eyes looking happily up at me.
“Tracy?” I asked, bemused, and the Park Ranger squeezed me in a bear hug, lifting my feet off the ground. More than the pain of her bone crushing embrace, I felt a slight burning at the back of my eyes that felt dangerously close to tears. I buried that down quickly.
“It’s good to see you Kat.” Tracy Castor said, her voice muffled. We were both dressed up in puffy jackets to fend off the subzero temperature, but her voice came through clear.
“It’s good to see you too, Trace, but what’s with the hug?” I asked gruffly, feeling a complicated mix of emotions. She placed me on the ground and took a step back before she socked me hard in the arm.
“The last time I saw you, you were covered in blood and looked like you had aged five years in a handful of hours!” She said, as though explaining something to a child. “That was nearly 10 months ago!” She added emphatically. “You couldn’t drop a line or send an email in that time?” I opened my mouth to respond, but found that I didn’t really have an answer. After a moment, Tracy rolled her eyes and hooked her arm through mine. “Nolan said you were busy, and Montford said you were wrapped up in something unpleasant, so I don’t blame you for not reaching out. It’s good to see you. The team I’ve been working with is a little dry, with lots of interesting energy. We’ve done good work, but I’ll be glad to have you along for this one, if only to have someone to throw at the other two every now and then.”
Tracy guided me to a black SUV with a rental plate, and we loaded my gear in the back before Tracy slipped into the drivers seat.9 It was just the two of us in the car and the safe house was a 2 hour drive form the airport, so Tracy filled me in on what she had been up to since I joined up with SOC-TAG. Tracy and Montford had continued running jobs but it was mostly small scale, a few clean ups, evidence disposal and the like. There was a new member of the team, and I got the sense from the way Tracy talked around them that they had a ‘strong personality’. The rest of the team arrived on the previous flight so would be meeting us at the safehouse, which was fine by me. It was nice talking to Tracy again. She reminded me of Danny and Markus, in that my mom would have called her a ‘free spirit’. Under her thick winter coat, she was wearing a tie die hoodie and a large, strange shaped crystal on a twine string around her neck. She had added a streak of blue to her tawny brown hair, as well as a few piercings to the top of her ear. I caught my reflection in the rearview once or twice and could only feel grateful that one of us, at least, looked to be doing well.10
Robinson Safe House, Minnesota - 4PM
After an hour or so we pulled off the highway and out into the middle of butt-fuck Nowhere, MN. I could see the Safehouse about half an hour before we actually reached the damn thing, the area around it so flat and featureless that it was hard to keep track of our progress along the road. There was a familiar silhouette camped out front, a pair of tactical binoculars tracking our progress and a rifle slung over his shoulder. I wasn’t expecting a warm greeting when I got out of the car, and I didn’t receive one. Montford took me in, shrugged and turned to Tracy.
“She said they’ve hit the server.” He said, his expression blank. Tracy frowned.
“What does that mean?” She asked.
“It means that those files she had been decrypting are gone.”
“Fuck!” Tracy swore. She stomped into the house, leaving me with Montford.
“Want to fill me in? I thought we had just got here?” I asked. Montford’s cold eyes turned to me and he shrugged.
“Our teammate is a quick worker.” He said, a note of begrudging respect in his voice. “Come on. It’s been a while, but you’ll remember her. She remembers you, anyway.”
The interior of the safe house looked slightly more organized than the pictures in the folder, as though someone had attempted to sort the piles into some form of order before giving up. I didn’t immediately recognize the small woman angrily tapping at a small notebook laptop, but when her sharp eyes looked up at me, I had a memory of those same eyes looking at me in disgust over a bloody and incoherent Tabitha Abel back in Seattle.11
“Ms Reynolso?” I asked, and the woman tsked, and turned back to her screen.
“You owe Castor $10, Andy.” She said over her shoulder, before she continued glaring at her computer. I raised an eyebrow at Montford and he grunted before fishing out a few bills to pass over to Tracy, who took them with an air of silent, smug satisfaction.
“Thought you were dead.” He grumbled without a hint of shame.
“Charming.” I replied. I walked away from him and tried to get a look at Candela Reynolso’s screen. “Apparently we’ve lost something?” I said to her politely. She didn’t break her gaze from the screen, but she did respond.
“Our best lead was a pair of encrypted folders on this machine.” She said, slapping the desktop computer behind her notebook with enough force to rattle it’s wiring. “But there was a deadmans switch. I managed to close off the network before more damage was done, but that data is gone.”
“Any idea what was in the files?” I asked.
“It was a registry or something.” Tracy said vaguely. What the fuck that meant I had no idea.
“Fantastic.” I said. I placed my rifle case on the dilapidated couch in the living room and stripped out of my puffy jacket. “No use wasting anymore time then.” I said, rolling up my sleeves.
Welcome to Operation Shadowed Past, and the -10 Temperatures of a Minnesota winter. I’ve had to cut this scene halfway because it goes on for a while. I’m excited to get back to the more standard Delta Green opening, as well as a few familiar characters! I'll be using the Progress Tracker optional rule for this Mission, so I’ll flag when I hit milestones. The thread it is attached to is “Deal with the Robinsons.” Let’s see how it turns out! Thanks for reading!
Not relevant to the story at all, but I am lactose intolerant IRL and Soy milk is my least favorite milk replacement.
I populated this mission hook using 3 resources - The Culprit Table of Rogue Handler and the Modern and Eldritch books of Random Tables.
Oracle: Is Landry Coming with? 50/50 88 No.
Nearly all names in this mission come from the Book of Random Tables Modern
Oracle: Does Landry think the Robinsons are still in Minnesota? Unlikely - 92 Extreme no
Hook 1 - Authorities seized a cultist safe house in Minnesota. Assistance was requested to sift through numerous laptops, smartphones, and documents that were found.
Hook 2 - Unnatural Storms plague the area
Google tells me that you can check a Sports or Hobby rifle as long as it’s licensed.
Oracle: Is it just us in the car? Likely - 10 Extreme Yes
End Scene. Chaos factor 5. Test Scene 4 - Interrupt Scene - Move Away from Thread - Pin ID theft on Robinsons.
This is Candela Reynolso, the IT expert from Operation Haruspex.
Great hook with the Robinsons as entrepreneurs hiding cult stuff. Not sure if we'll see them more directly or they'll stay in the shadows, but I'm looking forward to it either way.
And I always get the feeling that someone (Landry this time) is holding something back hahah.
Fantastic as usual, Solum!
Another great lead into a casefile, as always. Let's start tearing down the Order of Midnight!