Goodnight, Irene (A Delta Green NPC)

Nathan Rosario

It’s a bright, rainy morning in the mid-late Triassic, 230 million years ago and change. A Thursday, if anyone cares to crunch the numbers. The rainforests of Pangaea's southeastern hook teem with vibrant, noisy life; the Great Dying is twenty million years in the rearview mirror, and ever-opprotunistic evolution has spent the time filling every niche that can be filled.

In the rainforest, there is a library: a basalt labyrinth of honeycombed chambers and terraced pyramids, of aqueducts and canals and reservoirs and blocky monolithic structures that seem to have been carved out of the bones of mountains, or deposited there by visitors from afar. Here the whole course of Earth’s history is recorded on granite slabs and diamonite crystal.

Somewhere in the maze, a distant descendent of the Tully Monster crawls down a hallway on its one muscular foot. In one clawed hand, at the end of a rubbery green-brown tendril, it holds a slab of granite covered in minute crosshatched carvings. In the other it has a knobbly striped gourd, hollowed out and filled with some bright pink liquid, which it sips from by its feeding arm. The dangling tendrils of its cephalobrachia idly fiddle with a thin crystal stylus.

The conomorph is slow, but this doesn’t matter: there’s no rush when one has all the time in the world.

It emerges into an enormous vaulted chamber, slowly navigates through the maze of desks. Somewhere on the far side of the room, another researcher breaks the silence with a barrage of angry clicks and whistles; cynodont docents chatter and laugh as they scramble up the wall-shelves to the maintenance tunnels high above, stolen lunch in hand.

The conomorph reaches its stone desk and sets down its tablet and gourd. It has a window all to itself, gazing out over the city’s black stone, the emerald green of the rainforest, the hazy blue of the Tethys Ocean. The librarian fiddles with a device on the desktop, a lattice of silvery metal and crystal. Components with no apparent connection to each other spin and twist in total silence, smooth as water. A crystal diode pulses soft red.

The conomorph moves its vocal apparatus near the device.

**

230 million years in the future, Agent Roche has fucked up. He knows it, the rest of his cell knows it (well, knew it), and right about now his life expectancy is between one and three minutes depending on how long the fire door lasts. He’s got a dumb phone in one shaking hand and a .45 with three bullets left in the other.

He autodials the number at the top of his contact list and holds the phone to his ear. It rings once before he hears an automated response.

“The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please hang up and try again.”

He croaks out his code phrase.

“Hi, I was looking to get an estimate on an ant problem...”

Tinnitus peaks in his right ear, followed by a woman’s voice.

“Switchboard; what's the situation?”

**

Irene May Marshall was born in Baltimore in the fall of 1921. If there was a biopic on her life, there’d be some inspirational bullshit about how she was born into poverty but managed to work her way out by virtue of a sharp mind, determination, a 210 wpm typing speed and a memory like a bear trap; she’d tell you that the real reason she got offered a secretarial position with the US navy was because she was able to pass as white.

Three months after she cashed her first paycheck, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and her career solidified like Roman concrete: soldiers can be bought by the gross, commanding officers can be pulled hot and fresh from the West Point assembly line whenever you please, but a skilled plate-spinner is worth twice their weight in gold.

She crossed paths with P4 Division several times during the war, though she had no personal interaction with the unnatural until she was poached in 1947 and read-in to Delta Green.

It’s worth noting that her response to the Innsmouth report was a shrug.

**

The first lesson of the Cowboy Years was that Delta Green couldn’t sustain itself. Transitioning to clandestine cells could slow the collapse, but now that the organization had been severed from its keeping-shit-together apparatus and all its institutional knowledge had gone up in flames, information entropy and the grind of personnel loss would render the group an ineffectual band of reactionary domestic terrorists thrashing blindly against threats they didn’t understand and / or made up entirely on their own. Desperate plans were cooked up in bulk during the mad scramble for survival.

DG had learned about the Librarians during the war; the Japanese had unsuccessfully attempted to make contact, and P4 had inherited (stolen) enough of their research for DG to try again every few years to no success. Why the Librarians answered the door this time is known only to them.

Eventually, an agreement was hashed out:

1) The Librarians would call on Delta Green for occasional wetwork (in service, they said, of a future that was "mutually tolerable”) against unspecified enemies.

2) Delta Green would be permitted to send one member into the deep past, where they would serve as a research fellow and program coordinator from a position better suited to big pictures.

“One member” was something of a formality: from the beginning the Librarians had only showed interest in Irene. Leadership would have chosen her anyway, if she hadn’t volunteered.

**

Irene was half of the plan: the other half has become the backbone of modern Delta Green operations.

The ubiquitous burner phones that the organization relies on are useless for normal calls; they aren’t connected to any wireless network (and in fact, can’t be), but their SIM cards have been inscribed with the Sign of Chotha and this sends any calls made on them 230 million years into the past where Irene receives them with the device on her desk, where she’ll transfer the caller to their intended recipient. Most agents don’t realize that she exists, and those that do typically think she’s a member of one of the command cells.

There’s a mild cognitohazardous effect inherent in using a phone marked by the Sign of Chotha, but desperate times call for omnivorous measures. It does less psychological damage than using Twitter, anyway.

All of these phones are supplied - for the moment, at least - by an small electronics recycling company in Florida. Agents Jacobs and Chakramurti fudge the numbers a bit, take some junk phones for themselves, and spend a few all-nighters a year in hypergeometric trance. Then the cards are plugged in, and the phones are sent out to PO boxes and dead drops across the country for pickup by cell handlers. 

The phones are unremarkable, other than being old and typically in poor shape. Correctly identifying the Sign of Chotha would require pre-existing knowledge on the unnatural and an intact phone, though correctly identifying that something strange is going on will take very little thought at all: inquisitive agents will be told that the Program has leverage with the wireless companies to keep things secure.
 

** 

Using Irene in Your Games

Irene serves as both an in-universe explanation for something typically handwaved at the table, and as a potential hook into scenarios involving the yithians, their Library, Tsan-Chan, Zothique, Moss Covered Arrowhead, Hy(per)borea, etc.

The existence of a magically secure line of communication is, no doubt, a convenient solution to a lot of Delta Green's problems. But it does make easy fodder for the development of new and novel problems. Delta Green's communications under Irene are reliable and secure, but they are also centralized and specialized. If one of the components breaks, it could sink the entire operation.

Irene Marshall,  Switchboard Operator & Program Lynchpin

• Appearance: In the few surviving photos of Irene, she’s a grim-faced woman with short brown hair and glasses. That body died in 1971.

• Manner: Direct. Practical. Professional. Detached. Doesn’t mix work and private life. Always looking at the bigger picture. Serves as the first bearer of bad news.

• Wants: The continued survival of humanity. Aiding Delta Green is just the most convenient way to do that at the moment, or so she justifies it to herself. She’s playing a long game that does not necessarily align with the national interests of the Program or conform to their beliefs about how the universe works.

• Secrets: 
• In speaking with the other researcher-abductees, Irene is starting to piece together a picture of the Yith-Tindalos time war, the mechanics of universes and timelines, and the many pasts and futures of earth. If she went off script and starting slipping in her own objectives to agents' briefings, she might be able to trigger a timeline split before being noticed by DG or the Librarians.
• Her son, now in his 70s, has cultivated an expansive conspiratorial ecosystem to explain his mother’s sudden death. He is, by accident, dangerously close to stumbling onto a Delta Green operation (GOLDPAN) that A) did not destroy the vector and B) has been entirely lost by modern DG. 

What Irene Can Do

• Transfer calls between any phones marked with the Sign of Chotha. (The phone isn’t technically necessary, but it’s a convenient foci.) Calls must be temporally linear and have a tendency to lose connection after a minute or two due to limited bandwidth. 
• Forcibly sever the connection to a specific device by undoing the Sign of Chotha. This is typically requested by agents about to be compromised, or by Irene herself when she notices any unusual activity.

Calls require an appropriate pass phrase to be transferred: Irene will report any violations up the chain, and will do a bit of character acting to get info out of whoever’s making the unauthorized call (typically as the spouse of the agent, who is thrown under the bus as a drug dealer or domestic terrorist.)

I'll let y'all come up with the code phrases on your own, but they will contain, at minimum:

• Transfer to each fellow cell members
• Transfer to the cell handler
• Transfer to adjacent cell's point-of-contact
  
• Emergency transfer to a command cell
• Emergency intelligence dump

Irene is unlikely to actually answer the call unless it's on an emergency line.

What Irene Can’t Do

• Provide detailed information on unnatural threats - the Librarians greatly limit the archives access of their abductees, and punish even minor infractions with expulsion and memory-wipe. Irene either doesn't know, or isn't able to tell agents directly.
• Send calls out of chronology or back in time - she technically could do this, so long as certain events remain stable, but even in those specific use-cases Irene can't fucking stand time travel.

 

Ways This Can Go Terribly Wrong

• MAJESTIC / March Tech discovers and reverse-engineers the Sign of Chotha.
• A glitch in the ritual triggers a cascading Cell-type scenario.
  
• The Librarians decide that the terms of the agreement have been fulfilled and will not be renewed.
•  Irene is ejected from the Library for accessing the forbidden sectors.
• A Hound manages to pierce the Library's defenses.
• A Flying Polyp breaks out of the containment wing.
• The Sign of Chotha inadvertantly attracts a threat no one saw coming.
• Someone tries taking their phone through a Tillenghast Resonator.
• Atlantean Time Police raid the Library (got a tip about potential liao smuggling) 
• Agents Jacobs and Chakramurti are burned and have to go to ground / are killed. 
• An ENGLISH-Class time loop scenario occurs.
• A researcher-abductee breaks under acclimatization strain and gets a hold of a lightning gun.
• Irene gets fed up with A-Cell and tells them to go fuck themselves.

 

**

Agent Roche manages to leave a panicked 14-second message with his handler before his organs go out for some fresh air. She gets up from dinner (mid-grade Italian, colleague's 60th birthday), feigning an upset stomach, heads to the bathroom, and calls N-Cell. 

Irene runs a tendril over a crystal bulb. 

N-Cell's handler gets a brief message about a package that got delivered to the wrong address again, sends a call out to Agent Horn. 

Irene prods at a glittering cluster of metallic pustules. 

Agent Horn cuts off what had been a nice night with his girlfriend, puts on his jacket, and heads out into the cold to the green box, where he very carefully picks up an Amazon shipping box containing a lot of bundled up white-t-shirts, crumpled magazines, and a poorly-taxidermied coyote. He loads it in his 2005 CRV and starts driving out towards the handoff point.

Irene inscribes a summary of the Battle of Midway on a slab of granite with a stylus of liquid silver.

The poorly-taxidermied coyote claims no more victims tonight.