The Arrangement

 

Nottsuo

Agent Delfino leaves the car at the end of the driveway, right in front of the rusted gate and its corroded “DANGER - NO TRESPASSING” sign. He steps out of the car, opens the trunk, and hoists the lifeless body of Agent Wallace over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

The overgrown gravel path is dimly lit by Delfino’s red-filtered flashlight. Twin rows of pine trees block out all but a thin strip black sky. It can’t take more than a minute, minute and a half, to reach the house. The adrenaline cedes ground to hazy, sluggish exhaustion.

It would have been a nice house, eighty years ago when the mill in town was still open and the GI Bill meant you could own a home on a single income. Economic entropy bears down on its shoulders with decades of repair jobs put off till money’s less tight; what’s left of the overgrown lawn fights a losing battle against encroaching undergrowth. There’s no porch light, no light at all from inside. All the windows are boarded up, blackout curtains drawn.

Delfino presses the doorbell button, hears nothing; he presses it again, and it fires off a harsh electric buzz.

He waits, idly sucking at his lip.

Dead bolt slides, chains rattle, door swings inward.

The pale woman standing there could be anywhere between 24 and 49. Long black hair, lank and unwashed, falls down to her waist. Dark circles highlighting grey eyes. Faded blue pajama pants, no socks, a Frazetta pastiche t-shirt where an eight-breasted, phallus-tailed monstrosity holds a uselessly branched sword towards the unreadable broken-stick-and-burn-scar name above its head.

“What.” It’s a command, not a question. Delfino swallows, and says what he was trained to say.

“Excuse me, ma’am, would you be able to spare a moment for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?”

Asset FENNEC gives him a joyless smile of crooked, nicotine-yellow teeth.

“You can try, but I take my eucharist tartar.” Her voice is bad whiskey, each syllable weighed down with vocal fry and rolling waves of gothic apathy. An intrusive memory mutters in Delfino’s head:

 Azarath, metrion, zinthos…

The woman’s eyes linger on Wallace’s corpse for a moment.

“Sure hope you’ve got something to pay with this time, I’m done taking credit from you fuckos.”

Delfino digs in his pocket and removes two small copper coins, their faces worn down to indistinguishable nubs. These he offers to the woman in an open palm: she plucks them out of his hand, gives them a sniff, and nods in slight approval. 

“Aw, you’re learning. Ain’t that cute.”

“Plus the body,” Delfino says, though he wishes he could say anything else. Fewer loose ends this way. An unsolved missing persons report is less trouble, on the whole. They’ll do a brief search, find some planted evidence, and conclude that he wandered off and committed suicide somewhere he couldn’t be found.

The woman nods.

“Bring it round back, I’ll meet you at the garage.”

She shuts the door, and there’s the rattle of chain and the shunk of the deadbolt falling back into place.

**

Fennec sticks the two aes of  Zul-Bha-Sair into the pocket of her bathrobe and shuffles back through the dark house. She pokes her head into the living room where BB, washed in silvery-blue light from the glowing TV, takes up most of the sagging couch. A half-built Unit-00 model lies in pieces on a standing tray. Fennec leans over the couch arm and gives him a kiss on the cheek, and wants nothing more in that moment than to say fuck the Arrangement and return to her couch and cuddle up next to her man and let the green triangle idiots shoot themselves in the balls like they always do. But the Arrangement is the Arrangement, and it is bound with greater ties than words and paper.

“Pause it for me, love. Shitshow to deal with.”

BB grabs the remote, and Paul Hollywood’s face freezes mid-sentence.

“What do they want?”

“The usual. Begging for help as soon as they need to get some dead asshole’s passwords. So much for knowledge is death.”

BB throws up his hands in mock despair.

“Help, help, I can’t look at a fucking book without going craaaaaAAAAAAzy.”

Fennec mock-swoons like a Harlequin cover heroine.

“My god, I'm all the way up to my ankles in the black seas of infinity; guess I’ll just die.”

“How dare those nasty nasty fish men exist; they’re almost as bad as the Welsh!”

Fennec snrks, shakes her head, fishes a joint out of her breast pocket. “Yog, what a fuckin’ joke.” 

BB wordlessly hands her a lighter.

“Want me to keep an eye on them?”

“Yeah. Just one tonight, doesn’t look stupid enough to cause trouble but better safe.” 

BB nods, and then waves a hand at the TV. The lighter click-click-clicks behind his words.

“Can you believe this guy?” 

Fennec takes a long drag and blows a cloud through her pursed lips.

“Right? Who wants a fucking ganache for a s’more? Is nothing sacred?”

**

In the kitchen cupboard to the left of the sink, a spider passes by two inexpertly-spun ceramic mugs belonging to DOPEY SHITHEAD and FUCKASS THUNDERCUNT.

**

The garage door rattles up; Fennec looks no more amused than before, despite the joint now dangling from her lip. She waves a hand at a work table covered in a blue plastic tarp.

Delfino lays Wallace out on the table. Three hours ago, he was complaining about his sciatic nerve and munching his way through a bag of banana chips. Now he’s just empty lungs.

Fennec paces around the body, prodding at it occasionally with a finger (nails painted black, goetic sigils in silver; Paimon, Astaroth, Stolas, Decarabia, Buer) then leaning in for a sniff.

“Egh. Lipitor always gives me the shits. What do you want and how far back?”

Delfino weighs his words like a Scrooge & Marley balance sheet.

“The last fifteen minutes,” he says at last. “Everything after he went into the barn. We need to know what he saw, what was in the book, and what killed him.”

Fennec narrows her eyes, and the hint of a smirk crosses her lips.

“Oh, you really fucked this one, didn’t you?”

Delfino doesn’t take the bait. Grenadine says nothing.

“We need to know.”

Seemingly satisfied, Fennec pulls a switchblade from her bathrobe pocket and starts cutting open Wallace’s shirt along the seams. She flicks her eyes up at Delfino.

“Watching costs extra. If that’s your bag, I've got a cousin out in Ann Arbor who gets real slutty with it.” She jerks her head towards the garage door. “Wait out there. I’ll get you when I’m done.”

**

On the wall in the den, a framed photograph depicts a skinny woman in an enormous sunhat and a very fat man in a Hawaiian shirt standing po-faced and rigid in their best American Gothic in front of the Salem Museum of Witchcraft.

**

Delfino wanders off a few steps and waits, his flashlight illuminating a circle of grassy driveway at his feet. A thousand generations of homo erectus tense their shoulders in the shadows of his mind.

There are noises from the garage: smacks, gurgles, slurps, wet coughs, sharp cracks, crunching and grinding and gulping. Delfino imagines a pair of speakers propped up on top of the garbage, playing a recording; Fennec just stands there, pulling on her joint with self-satisfied smugness. Wallace is simply gone from Delfino’s vision, vanished from the table by trap door or some similar stage magic contraption. That’s all.

The bushes rustle nearby. Delfino catches a pungent whiff of pond-scum and fish-rot, jerks his flashlight up and on to catch a glimpse of something large and bluish and shimmering through the underbrush; an enormous silvery eye contracts its pupil and blinks its nictitating membrane before Delfino instinctively dips the flashlight back to his feet.

“You planning on being a Keystone Cop tonight?” The voice from the dark brush is deep and slightly slurred, as if spoken through novocaine.

Delfino has enough wherewithal to answer “No, not tonight.”

“Then we don’t have a problem. Pretend I’m not here.”

There’s no more voice and no more rustling; just Delfino desperately trying to not think about the pink elephant crouched less than twenty feet away.

**

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior Brown was fourteen when his father was hung as a witch. By that point BB had already buried three of his step-siblings and he had no tears left to shed, though his father deserved none of them in any case: For-the-Glory-of-God-Alone Brown was the sort of a man who only needed an excuse.

For the next twenty years BB lingered in the decaying cabin, living off of what remained of the family fortune and what odd jobs a reclusive man of letters might find. The sickness that had gripped him since childhood progressed unimpeded: his hair fell out, his body bloated to thrice the size of a normal man, his skin grew pale and blueish, his eyes bulged in their sockets.

Shortly after turning 35, he received an unexpected caller. A woman with an isopod tongue claiming to be a cousin from his mother’s side of the family, carrying an invitation. It would all make sense in a few days more, as soon as they reached Y’ha-nthlei.

**

The memories of Agent Wallace swirl around Fennec’s inner eye. Mostly garbage: eat enough brains and the scope of human experience turns into a muddy brown slush even before factoring in screen time. She flushes out the childhood traumas, parents’ divorce, FBI academy, social security number, middle-class ennui, passwords, code phrases and clandestine meetings and brushes with the supposedly unnatural. The green triangle folks - whatever the hell they were calling themselves nowadays - kept plenty of secrets. Their half of the Arrangement held provisions for brutal retaliatory violence should any of those secrets be breached, but in nearly 50 years Fennec hadn’t seen anything worth sharing. It’d be like spilling the beans on a 1st-grader’s hide-and-seek spot.

Fennec winnows down the record of a man’s life to the last fifteen minutes, holding onto the briefest whiff on context. Something about a crooked man with a crooked book using a bit of crooked religion in the new old-fashioned way  to collect a crooked harem blah blah blah dark triad banalities. Fucking wizards. Hand a wizard the barest scrap of actual power and the creativity just vacates his skull. Treasure hunting or sex crimes, no other options.

Wallace-Fennec throws open the barn door, bringing their gun up to aim at a haggard, grey-haired man in dirty underwear with age-crinkled tattoos spattering his arms and neck. They squeeze the trigger and put three bullets in the target’s center of mass before he can get a single syllable out and he collapses to the dirt floor next to the altar he made of fruit-crates.

Wait Wallace-Fennec thinks. He was talking to something.

Wallace-Fennec whips their head around, checking corners. Six bullets left. Nothing moves. Delfino will have heard the gunshots, he’ll be here soon.

The book is open on the altar, the pages a snarl of asemic pseudoglyphs layered like a magic-eye puzzle. Wallace's gaze flits to the page and Fennec doesn’t recognize its contents at first glance. Something clicks in Wallace's head and he sees it, and Fennec sees it too.

She sees [JABBERWOCKY] hanging in the air above the altar, [AND THE MOME RATHS OUTGRABE], and her brain attempts to identify [THE JAWS THAT BITE, THE CLAWS THAT CATCH] through process of negation but before it can go further than the first [IT IS NOT] her reflexive defenses slam the emergency eject button and she violently sprays a chunky bile-brown slurry across the concrete floor. The memory cuts out like a yanked power cord and is devoured by a suicide-rush of specialized phagocytes.

**

Fennec doesn’t remember the name her parents gave her. She doesn’t remember their names, either: she was six when smallpox swept up the valley and her world was obliterated. Memory holds on to the faceless shapes of parents, friends, all her extended family, the village and its neighbors - all gone because of 186 kilobase pairs of DNA.

Maybe she could have made it to a village on the other side of the mountain. Maybe she could have lived for a while off of what she knew about good plants and bad; maybe she could have. But she was six years old and everyone she had ever known was dead, and the terrified thoughts clutching her numbed heart told her that she was sick, too.

She stayed in the village, too scared to leave and not knowing what to do even if she could. She scared off wild animals from the bodies for as long as she could: shouting, throwing stones, waving a stick around. Days passed. She didn’t get sick.

She got very, very hungry.

**

The garage door rattles up, gravel crunches underfoot.

“The fuck did you do? What the fuck?”

Delfino can’t help a moment of deer in the headlights as Fennec storms out into the driveway. The dimmed red flashlight can’t fully hide the ashen tinge of her face or the blood around her mouth; Delfino’s pattern-seeking brain, oblivious to context, compares it to a toddler’s first spaghetti dinner.

The pink elephant moves behind him. The h. erectus chorus screams RUN, and to their terror Delfino’s feet remain frozen.

“Fuck! Hold it!” she shouts to the form in the undergrowth before turning her eyes back to Delfino. “What the fuck were you two doing?”

“I don’t know! They just told us he had the book, they never told us what it was!”

“Yog fucking- are they trying to get people killed?”

Delfino makes some gesture between a shrug and throwing his hands up in despair.

“It sure fucking feels like it sometimes. Were you able to get anything?”

“Nothing, not a fucking thing. Did you burn it?”

“Yeah. It’s gone.”

“Good.”

Delfino makes a spur-of-the-moment choice that will have consequences, but not immediate ones.

“They wanted us to bring it in.”

Fennec snorts.

“Of course they did. Of course they fucking did.” She pauses for a beat before making a similarly consequential choice. “Jesus fucking Christ. Never let them tell you it's secrets man was never supposed to know. Bullshit. Knowing about fission isn’t dangerous; trying to build a breeder reactor in your back yard is, and the world is filled with fuckheads all trying to be Evan Hahn.”

**

The Arrangement: Without warning or announcement, one or more human bodies will be delivered. Information stored within their protein-based processing cores will require extraction and transmission, as dictated; the remainder will require disposal. Payment will be rendered on delivery. Secrecy will be maintained. Violations will be met with lethal force.

**

The car pulls out of the driveway and its engine fades down the road. BB emerges from the brush, his size reduced from hippopotamus to human once more.

“You alright?” he asks.

Fennec takes a deep breath and combs her memories: there’s a sharp, instantaneous cut between cracking Wallace’s skull open between her teeth and standing, hunched over and gasping and tear-blinded, bracing against the table with a splatter of vomit on the floor.

“Yeah. It’s out. Universe heard us talking shit and decided to knock me down a few pegs.”

BB shakes a fist at the dark sky and hisses. 

“Zeusss…” 

That gets a weak laugh out of her, followed by a twinge of stomach pain and a hand pressed to her side.

“Ow. How dare I be punished for my excellence in hubris.”

“Second only to your mastery in humility.” The brief humor drains out of BB’s face “Should we put out a notice?”

Fennec nods, wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Yeah. Not fucking up twice on this one.”

“Mm. You go let everyone know, I’ll clean up the mess.”

“Do we have room in the freezer?”

“If I thaw out the salmon my cousin sent us, yeah.”

“Good, wrap it up and stick it in there. I’ll figure out what to do with it tomorrow.”

Pre-dawn is upon them by the time they finish up and shuffle to bed. The mystery of the ganache will wait for another night.
 

**

Using Fennec and BB in a Game

• Fennec & BB provide a solution to a couple problems that agents are liable to run into (needing information from a corpse, trying to get rid of a corpse), so a couple minor inconveniences are built in to avoid them fully negating those stressors:

• They take payment primarily in the currency of Zothique (or other assorted preternatural-adjacent valuables. Junk from Green Boxes, basically, but it's got to be the special junk.)
• The Arrangement started in the Cowboy Years, and the Program proper doesn't actually know about them, and neither do the Outlaws. The PCs will find themselves with an Asset that will put a target on their backs if they aren't careful.
• They'll help as far as the Arrangement dictates and anything beyond that is up to whim.
• They have friends in low places in case the PCs try to double-cross them.

• They work better in higher-pulp games, naturally, though you could easily tone them down for something more serious. They're also best for downtime between sessions, since that way you can slow-burn the reveal of who they are and what their deal is, and maybe weave in a shotgun scenario for when you have missing players. 

• They've been together for 187 years and they've made it work. Lean into that. 

• The actual origin of the Arrangement still lives in undefined narrative convenience land, because it doesn't really matter. They're the weird NPCs who "help" because it's less of a hassle that way, and because they know they'll be around long after the last green triangle is gone.

• I actually wrote these two up as part of a "Dan writes a romantasy" post, under the auspices of "I want to write about an extremely stable and healthy long-term romantic relationship where the two leads are, by most human standards, visually repulsive". We didn't get to see much of that side of them in this story, but I still have the old draft so expect more in the future.

• Why not, here's here's their original descriptions:

Fennec - Ghoul. Professional wizard hunter. Skin pale grey-brown and heavily calloused. Disconcertingly thin. Terrible posture. Hair stringy and long, limited to mane on neck. Large eyes that reflect light like a cat. Enormous Dorito shaped ears. Head somewhere between a jackal, a horse and daeodon, thin-skinned and skullish. Yellow teeth fit for tearing meat and crushing bone. Band T-shirt (Divine Tumor Ultradeath Corpse-Magus 2019 US Tour). Olive cargo shorts. Fluorescent pink-blue Crocs (only footwear wide enough to accommodate her weird cloven feet). Laughs like a strangled hyena. Smells like rotten meat and some unidentifiable oily musk.

By-The-Blood-of-Our-Most-Precious-Savior “BB” “Bubbles” Brown - Deep One hybrid. IT specialist, web developer, open-source enthusiast, veteran Wikipedia editor. Approximately the size and shape of a hippopotamus. Soft cephalopodic body pulses with chromatophores and luminescent dots underneath plates of crustacean armor. Towards the front, where most of the tentacles are, the exoskeleton forms a sort of clamshell hinge surrounding his primary mouth and the remains of his body

Despite being a New England Puritan by birth, BB is not part of the [Dagon-Hydra] clan - his lineage originates with the [Scylla-Cetus] dyad, who were forced out of the territory by Dagon-Hydra in the early 1800s.

Like all Deep Ones, BB is a sequential hermaphrodite - male throughout most of the year, then transitioning to female for the summer mating season (as is typical in an environment with few or no females)

**

These posts are fun, and I've still got several in the tank. The Mythos Kick continues.