Operation Winter Strain: Chapter Ten
Trying to save a life 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.
Thumbnail Photo by Andy Vu: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-stars-during-evening-3330895/
The Church of the 5 Days Dead - 9PM
The kids name was Vince Rucker. Fresh from high school with a genuine passion for photography and a love of his hometown, he had been a photographer for the local paper for just under a year. I called Landry quickly as Jasper drove us off-road between the trails to try to save time, causing the old van to bump and rock while making a series of unpleasant sounds.
“A local kid from the newspaper just approached the church.” I told him. There was sigh on the other end of the line.
“Can I judge from the swearing I can hear from our colleague that you are advancing towards the church, despite the pre-arranged plan?” Landry asked in a weary tone.
“Correct.” I said.
“Try to keep this a fact finding mission.” Landry warned. “We are still waiting for the test results from the analyzer, and I don’t want you going in half cocked with a a head full of assumptions.”
“Gotcha” I said as I hung up. I reached behind me and pulled the gym bag with our weapons in, doing a final check as we sped up the dirt road towards the church. Any chance we had of heading the boy off via the shortcut was dashed when the car began to make a burning smell and wouldn’t tick above 50MPH.
“I think you’ve broken it.” I observed, looking at the various lights flickering on the dash.
“Its supposed to be usable off road.” Jasper muttered angrily.1 We came across the kids' battered sedan not long after 9PM, parked in a side ditch just out of sight. The car was empty, so we parked behind it and got out. The church was a 5 or 10 minute hike further up the trail and there was just enough light from the moon and stars above us to make out the trail. We both knew better than to get out our flashlights. I offered Jasper his shotgun, but he shook his head and gestured for me to leave it in the car.2 Now that we were out in the open, I had expected the place to smell like the warehouse, musty and moldy, but the air smelled normal, a soft breeze blowing through the surrounding underbrush.
“Follow my lead.” Jasper said. He crouched low and moved swiftly up the path.3 He ghosted forwards, leading me along the trail with one arm tucked beneath his parka, holding his side arm I imagined, and I followed a few steps behind with my MP5 held low.4 We reached the edge of the road, leading to the church, but saw no sign of the kid.5 I glanced around, trying to find any sign of him, with no luck.6 There were three cars parked untidily outside the church, but no sign of the one that had stopped me outside the CDC forward base. The town councilor wasn’t present then. All of the cars were shabby and coated in rust, looking barely road legal.7 Other than that, the church looked mostly like it had in the photos., but for one thing. A furrow in the dirt, not too far from the main path. It wasn’t fresh, I didn’t think, at least no more fresh than the identical one I had seen at the warehouse. I crouched down, and saw the slight film of slime, and gestured to Jasper. I saw him grit his teeth in the dark.8 I felt a pang in my stomach, a moment of powerlessness until I saw, to my slight relief, an indent in the ground. Someone had knelt here and recently as I could still feel the residue of body warmth. I lowered myself closer to the ground and searched for anything to indicate a trail, tracks or boot prints or something and I gestured for Jasper as as I saw a series of boot prints that just about resembled a trail.9 It circled wide around the parking lot and passed the Church, around to the back of the building. I gestured for Jasper to follow me.10 We found him a moment later, his camera held loosely in his hand as he inexpertly hid behind a tree near the rear of the church. He was staring, fixedly at the rear wall, and even in the dark I could see his face was pale, a muscle in his cheek twitching erratically. He stood motionless, and didn’t react as we approached. Jasper hissed something at the boy and grabbed his arm, but he didn’t respond. I followed his gaze.11 Unseen from Debbie’s photos, there was a small window on this side of the church. It was a strange design choice, as the only view the would have was of the 100 or so yards between it and the large, bluff rock of the dune and a few spindly trees. The more horrifying aspect, and what had likely triggered the boys paralysis, was the view that the window offered. The other window on the side of the building was made of stained glass but this one was simple two way glass. While there had been no visible light from the front, a soft, blue pulsing light seeped from this window and offered an uninterrupted view into the church.12 The walls were coated with familiar, ominous, glowing blue mushrooms which pulsed faintly, like an alien heartbeat. The soft blue glow cast light on several unnatural shapes that dwelled in the gloom. Lumpy and all too familiar mushroom infested husks were lying unmoving on the floor.13 That gave me pause, but it wasn’t what had frozen the boy, as horrifying a sight as it was. No.14A large, wholly unnatural form was curled in the center of the room, floating in the midst of the glowing mushrooms. The fungi around the room pulsed in time with the creature’s own, stronger glow. The pattern of pulsing lights sketched out a form that was mostly humanoid, but also not human at all. It was suspended in the air, limbs curled around its large bulk and a head hanging limply down. As we stood there and Jasper tried to shake the boy awake, the form shifted, the limbs going limp and hanging down as a single, large eye cracked open, the iris electric blue and utterly alien as it looked directly at us.15
The smell hit me like a wave. The stench of mold, rot and fermented, fetid corpses rolled out of the church like a tangible force. I tried not to gag and turned to Jasper.
“We need to leave. Now.” I said to Jasper in a hiss. My gun might be useful against those mushroom horrors, which even now were slowly shambling to their feet, but I had no idea what that big fucking creature was capable off. “Throw him over your shoulder if you have to, but lets fucking move already.” Jasper looked at me, but I saw his nose twitch, and a shadow of understanding flicker in his eyes.
“Kid, you need to fucking move snap out of it.” He said, giving the boy a final shake.16 The boy looked over at him, still trembling and eyes full of unshed tears, but he nodded shakily and we started moving.
“You two lead and throw him in the back of the van. I’ll drive.”17 Jasper and the kid broke into a sprint and I jogged after them, my eyes darting between my feet in front of me and the church behind me. Jasper stumbled over something in the dark, but the kid kept running. I put on a bust of speed and hauled Jasper to his feet just as the doors of the church crashed open and the horrors burst out.18 The creature lumbered into the sky, its luminescent skin outlining its form hovering in the darkness.19 It didn’t seem to have wings or any other visible indicator that it should be able to fly, but it tumbled through the air as though perpetually falling and catching itself, it’s limp limbs splaying and flailing as it lurched through the air towards us. A single, infernal eye glowed in its chest, but I could see it still had a human head, its feature seemingly demure and resting. It lurched forward and I gave Jasper a shove towards the car. My heart pounded in my ears like a drum as we ran desperately through the frozen twigs and underbrush as I took one last look behind me. I couldn’t stand and shoot, as much as I wanted to. We needed to get out, and regroup, and I had no idea if the gun would even be of any use. I slung the MP5 over my shoulder and broke into a sprint.20 Progress was slower than I would have liked, the three of us stumbling over the uneven path downhill towards the parked cars and while the creature tumbled through the sky, it didn’t seem to be gaining any ground on us.21 We reached the van a moment or two later, and Jasper grabbed the boy bodily before he could run for his own car. We had parked ready for a quick escape, facing downhill and ready to go while the kid’s old beater was still partially in the ditch. Jasper wrestled the kid in through the van’s doors and then threw himself in afterwards, and I jumped into the driver's seat, gunning the engine and slamming my foot down on the gas.22 We had clearly done a disservice to this van, as the engine made a series of protesting noise before lumbering to life and coasting down the trail at a handful of miles per hour. In the wing mirror, I saw the glowing form pick up speed, it’s eye locked onto us as it loped unnaturally through the air. The boy had started crying. Jasper was holding the shotgun across his legs and darting a look outside, but I didn’t know how much use it was going to be firing from a moving car in the middle of the night. I whispered sweet nothings to the car as I tried to squeeze a bit of extra speed out of it. We hit a shaper decline in the trial and the car began to pick up speed, toping out at 50 MPH, which was pretty fucking speedy on the winding dirt road. I glanced behind, and saw the baleful eye watching us as we slowly pulled ahead onto the road. By the time we hit the highway, it was gone.23
CIA Safehouse - 11PM
The kid passed out once we hit the outskirts of Sagebrush, at which point Jasper started swearing again under his breath, a palpable release of tension we had both been holding in as we drove along the highway.
“I think we lost it a few miles back.” I said over my shoulder.
“Seems that way.” Jasper said.
“Let's hope Joe and Landry have something for us, or we’re going to need some bigger guns.” I said, hitting the gas.
30 minutes later, we had flopped the kid into a fold out couch in a back room of the safehouse and flopped ourselves onto a couch in the sitting room.
“Is there any alcohol in the house?” Jasper asked, looking at the ceiling despondently.
“Two cases at least” I said, “but its the cheapest shit I could find.” I rummaged around in the box and pulled out a bottle of cheap scotch. Landry appeared from the kitchen and swatted at my hand, plucking the bottle away.
“You can drink yourself to sleep after the debrief.” He chastised. “I’m not expending any extra mental energy muddling through your semi coherent report.” He took a seat and waved a hand expectantly, so I shrugged and leaned back on the sofa.
“It was a shit show.” I said blandly. “And I was right. We should have burned down that church first thing this morning.”
We gave a basic run through of events, the cars in the lot and the monsters within the walls of the church, as well as the new witness we now had to worry about. Landry began tapping at the arm of his chair nervously and making non-committal, slightly annoyed sounds until we finished.
“Tell me more about this aberration that flew after you.” He asked immediately after I had finished speaking.
“Basically human in shape.” Jasper said. “But big. He looked almost asleep. His human parts, his arms and legs at least kind of floated along after him. But he was glowing in time with those mushrooms, like the ones we found in the warehouse.”
“And he had a giant eye in the center of his chest.” I pointed out. Jasper shuddered.
“Yes he did. About the size of a beach ball, with a blue iris and jagged, cat like pupil.” Jasper finished.24
“That is interesting.” Joe said. He had joined us halfway through the recap, a mug of coffee clutched in one hand while the other nervously twirled a worn down pencil. “There was no human DNA in the slime that was found at the scene. I wouldn’t have thought it had come from anything even remotely human. You said you found more at the church?”
“Yes. I didn’t get a good enough look at the creature to know if it was the same source.” My nose told me it was, though, but I didn’t mention that.25
“Well, I ran an analysis on it. It’s similar to the mushroom and the blood samples taken from the CDC agents. It isn’t natural, not in the way we understand nature anyway. Looking at it under a microscope gave me the worst migraine of my life. Whatever this is, we can’t let anyone else get a look at it. If that creature exudes this slime, then I wouldn’t let it near you.”26
“Why?” Jasper asked.
“It’s the vector for the illness.” He said. “I found trace amounts of it in the CDC agent's blood. Removed from the agents, the few cells of this Ooze that was left in the sample devoured the blood cells over the course of a few hours, leaving a few vials of slime in their place. I’m fairly certain the fever that kills the victims is what keeps the slime in check.”
“Why didn’t we pick anything up in the autopsy?”
“We have a few working hypotheses.” Landry said. “Either the fever that kills them destroys the last of the slime or…” He trailed off.
“Or it takes more than a few days to grow in the corpse.” Joe finished with a note of distaste. “Given that these cultists have been stealing the corpses, I’m inclined to believe the latter.”
“What happens if the person doesn’t die of a fever?” I asked.
“We don’t have enough data to say for sure, but given that you’ve encountered two different types of monstrous creatures related to this slime and the mushrooms, I would guess that nothing good happens.” Joe said. We all sat with that a while, before the conversation continued.
“Speaking of mushrooms.” Joe said.27 “I couldn’t find any matches in that book you lent me. The prose descends into what I can only describe as megalomaniacal rambling in the later chapters, and the whole thing reads like a hypothetical fantasy treatise, given that it is purporting to be a study of millennia extinct fungi. But it did give me a lead on a study from the 1930s that it claimed was one of the primary sources.” He held out a print out, and I leafed through it.
“Miskatonic.” Jasper said, rolling his eyes. “Nothing good comes out of Miskatonic University”
“My accounting degree would agree with out.” I said derisively, flipping through the report. At the back, on the last page, someone had sketched a series of drawings with a light touch and remarkable attention to detail. It was a near exact replica of the mushroom seen at the warehouse and the church.
“This is it.” I said, surprised. “It's from Oklahoma?”
“It’s indigenous to a very specific part of Oklahoma.” Joe corrected. “A cave system that runs deep underground. The primary expedition found a few peculiar samples and reported back to Miskatonic, but the follow up expedition disappeared with all hands, somewhere underground. Official sources blamed a cave in, and investigators couldn’t find the entrance from the initial report.” I hummed, mostly to fill the silence. Nancy had suspected some form of deep, dark network of tunnels, but running all the way from Arizona to Oklahoma? That seemed a bit of a stretch.
“Anything of interest in this report?”
“Don’t eat the mushrooms.” Joe said.
“No shit.” Jasper said with an exasperated sigh.
“One explorer was documented to have eaten one of these mushrooms during the expedition. What exactly happened to him is left unsaid apart from the fact that he died, but before he died, he became obsessed. It is given little attention in the report, but there’s some accompanying correspondence available from the Miskatonic online archive that mentions that the man, referred to only as Karl, had been increasingly irate about the mushrooms, as well as secretive and sneaking about the camp late at night.” Joe sipped his coffee. “Karl is spelt with a K, by the way.”
“You don’t think its the same ‘K’ from the note?” I asked incredulously. “Didn’t you just say he died?”
“The official report said he died.” He said. “The correspondence, however, just said he was gone.”
“He would have to be over 100 years old.” I said.
“That doesn’t mean much in our line of work.” Landry said drily.
“Still.” I said. “Seems like a stretch. I don’t suppose we have a database of cult members of the Order of Midnight we could compare it to?”28
“The CIA probably has that.” Jasper said nervously. “I know that I don't have the clearance for it though.”
“The church still needs burning down, and the monsters still need killing” I said, earning a few dark looks and reluctant nods.
“Is there anything else?’ Jasper said.
“Nothing pertinent to the rest of the mission. I’m sure that if they want to spread this sickness, they would have to spread it deliberately. I suspect someone spiked the water in Sagebrush to trigger the initial outbreak.”
“Slim chance of another outbreak then?” I said.
“No, as long as we move quickly and burn everything. I‘m putting together a treatment plan for if something like this happens again. Pump the heat up, manage the fever and in extreme cases a blood transfusion.” He tapped his mug. “That last one will be hard to explain in the report.” He mused.
“We’ll figure it out.” Landry said.
“There is one loose end.” I said. “The counsellor. He wasn’t at the church. We also don’t know if there’s any other stashes of these mushrooms.”
“Let’s cut the head from the beast first.” Landry said. “We can wrap up the councilor afterwards.”
Landry and Nate agreed to watch the councilor's office tomorrow morning, when we hit the church. They also agreed to give the journalist kid the “talk” tomorrow and put him under the ‘usual surveillance’ whatever that meant. Jasper tried to explain it to me.
“Standard procedure is for the subject to undergo a period of observation after a potential Friendly’s first contact. If they hold it together, we either leave them, or bring them in if they could be useful. If it looks like they can’t hold it together or they might run their mouths, we let them know exactly how much of a bad idea that would be.”
“Huh.” I said, nonplussed. “That’s different from my experience.” Jasper shrugged.
“Me too. Jasper said with a slight grin. “I fell into the middle of an investigation and was told I could either get with the program or get dumped in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Sounds about right.”29
Fire is one of the most useful tool a Delta Green agent can have, 2nd only to a good therapist. Thanks for reading!
Oracle: Is the Vince’s car at the spot? 50/50 13 - Yes. Is he there? 50/50 71 No.
Oracle: Mushroom smell? Likely - 87 No
Skill: (Stealth) Jasper- 59/70 Kat - 10/24
Oracle: Find the boy? Likely - 65 - No.
Skill: Search - 68/97 Success. (Note: I really need to stop rolling these 90+ skills haha)
Oracle: More than two cars outside the church? 50/50 26 - Yes. Including the familiar one? Likely - 71 - No.
Oracle: Anything else of note? 50/50 35 Yes. A camera? 05/50 97 Extreme no.
Sanity:(Helplessness) 78/48 -1 Sanity. Any tracks or signs of the boy, or anyone else? Very Unlikely - 13 Yes
Oracle: Does it lead towards the church? 50/50 53 - No.
Oracle: Taking photos at the rear of the building? Very Likely - 67 No. In trouble? 50/50 11 Yes (Random Event: NPC Action - Leave People)
Oracle: Anything of note on the church? Likely - 47 Yes. Window? Likely - 18 Yes.
Oracle: Glowing blue mushrooms? Certain - 72 Yes. Monster? 50/50 - 03 Extreme
Sanity(Unnatural): 95/47. 1d8 Loss. rolled a 2 - Projected all onto a bond. (Extremely lucky roll here)
Insert a lot of ‘no’ answers to description questions here. Need a better monster creating table. Oracle: Does it notice us? 50/50 - 19 Yes.
Sanity(Unnatural): 30/47 -1 Sanity loss, projected.
Jasper Skill: Psychotherapy - 9/10 (I mostly rolled this for the sake of rolling I wasn’t expecting him to get it, wow, good on you Jasper.)
Skills:(Athletics) Kid and Kat Pass - Jasper Fumble 66/50
Oracle: Does the big one fly? 50/50 12 Yes. Move faster than normal? 50/50 47 No.
Oracle: Does it have wings? 50/50 81 No
Pursuit:(Athletics VS flight) - Everyone fails with 80+ rolls.
Oracle: Do we reach the car before testing again? 50/50 06 Extreme yes.
Pursuit: (Drive VS Fly) another failed check, followed by Kat: 54/58 Vs Monster 57/40
End Scene. Chaos factor 5. Test Scene 10 - As Expected.
Oracle: Does goo have human DNA? Very Likely - 95 No
Oracle: Flammable? Likely - 41. The same make up as the mushroom? Likely - 70
Oracle: Goo Caustic/Corrosive? 50/50 51 No. Vector for disease? Very Likely - 73 Yes.
Oracle: Are mushroom in the book? Very Likely - 96 No.
Oracle: Does CIA have that? Unlikely - 12 Yes.
End scene. Chaos factor 5. Test Scene - 1 altered Scene - Remove Character
I'm picturing a blue sleeping stay-puffed marshmallow with a giant eye in his tum-tum.
The description of the room and the creature at the beginning was so awesome! I could picture it in all its alien glory.