Delta Green: Running Through Apocalypse Protocol

I’ve been meaning to run my presumed default DG setting (which is more or less a version of Lighthouse’s).through Tariq Ali’s “Apocalypse Protocol” (as featured in Whispers of the Dead vol. 3) for a while now, might as well get it done.

Here’s how it works: you get four questions about how the apocalypse has shaken out. The answers you choose bump a value up and down between Very Low and Very High in one of 5 categories, then you tally those values up and the final result tells you how much to adjust the PC skills associated with that category.

1. Resource Scarcity - How hard is it to get stuff? (Requisitions & Spending Your Own Money)
2. Social Instability - How functional is everything? (Bureaucracy and Law)
3. Mythos Knowledge - How easy is it for the lay population to learn about the Unnatural? (Unnatural and Occult)
4. Exposure - How much does the public know about anti-mythos orgs? (Stealth and Disguise)
5. Supernatural Hostility - How dangerous are unnatural entities towards the general populace? (Survival and Alertness)

Going higher than +2 is a human extinction event; going lower than -2 gets DG an Ally with potentially better odds of survival than they do.
 
I really like this system: it’s open-ended enough that you can plug basically whatever scenario you might want into it (the article itself provides several example apocalypses, plus how you can chain them together), and even if you don’t use the skill modifications the questions push you towards “how is the world is different and how does this affect the players?” You could easily drum up your own questions, alternative answers to the questions provided, or even adjust the skills so long as you have [+1, +1, -2]  for the first question and [+1, -1] for the rest.
 
The one modification I’d make out of the box is the Mythos Knowledge category, since the Occult and Unnatural skills are opposed to each other in Delta Green and Call of Cthulhu. But the only tweak needed to address that is have one go down if the other goes up and treat the stat as the accuracy of Mythos knowledge, rather than its prevalence - high Unnatural, low Occult means that pre-existing occult traditions have taken a hit in the face of magic that actually works, high Occult low Unnatural means that any legitimate information out there is drowning in rampant bullshit.
 
Preamble over.
 

1. Is the apocalypse mundane or supernatural?

• Mundane
• SI +1, RS +1, MK -2

The slow apocalypse of the 21st century rolls on. Child-abusing billionaires set the world on fire and watch the burn with a shit-eating grin. Every year things are just a little bit worse. Every summer is the new hottest on record. Every quarter your paycheck buys less. Every election the fascists take more power. Some motherfucker invented an infinite pornography machine that crashed the global economy. There’s still a Super Bowl, but ad spots go for cheap nowadays. There hasn’t been a new model of iphone for five years. You keep your ration booklet in your pocket, in case the app goes down. The revolution is always tomorrow.
 

2. Will humanity fight or embrace the supernatural?

• Embrace
• MK +1, SH -1

Of course they embrace it. Wouldn’t you, when everything else has failed? Something needs to bridge the gap. People dabble in the supernatural out of spite, love, greed, desperation, ideology, stupidity, all the usual reasons. Sometimes it works out: a lot of the time it doesn’t. New religious movements spring up like mushrooms after rain.
 
The thing about the supernatural is that there’s no such thing as the supernatural: there’s natural, preternatural, and shit someone made up. Maybe you’ll never know enough to turn the preternatural into the everyday natural, because there’s not enough data or because there’s not enough computational power between your ears.
 
Humanity already drastically overestimates its ability to control the infinite fractal complexity of the world around them. Wading into uncharted waters is like playing Mao with a loaded gun, but when there are no other options…
 

3. Will mundane state actors survive or be destroyed?

• Survive
• SI -1, RS+1

Apocalypse necessitates revelation: the veil comes down, the mask comes off, so it's better to say  that mundane state actors have changed. An organization might keep the same name but they might not really be the same group, or maybe they’re just revealing what they’ve always been.
 
There are international and intranational wars, pockets of violent anarchy and feuding warlord fiefs. Nation-states that exist on paper often lack the ability to enforce their laws across all of their claimed territory. But by that same token there are those places where the boot that once oppressed has lifted at last, even for a moment.
 

4. Will anti-mythos orgs appeal to the public or covertly reorganize themselves?

• Appeal to the public
• Ex +1, SH -1

This is something that’s always mildly bugged me about Delta Green (and the rest of this genre, for that matter); in order for things to remain secret enough that real-world history is unaltered, every single incident needs to be handled perfectly. The monster never survives, the wizard never gets away, the vector never spreads, there are never any witnesses, photographs, video footage, nothing. Nothing ever happens in a crowded location. Nothing ever happens in a country without an anti-Mythos org, and there is just so much shit happening in the States alone.

If you want supernatural incidents to be secret, they have to be both rare and low-impact. Otherwise the option is resorting to wide-scale magic (hello SCP wiki). 

Covert ops make sense when you’re playing as Cowboys trying to avoid MAJESTIC stomping your heads in, but if you’re playing as the Program (i.e., from a position of power)... shit, man. You can run the conspiracy in broad daylight and suffer no consequences.

And then on top of all that, the Mythos (or whatever supernatural force de jure is at play) is an excuse. It’s an infinite fractal boogeyman. It’s a goose that can lay golden eggs for the ruling class faster than a Cadbury production line. Pick a target demographic, make some unsubstantiated claims, use a complicit media machine to whip the public into a frenzy and casually throw out an anonymous tip line for people to rat on their neighbors. 

If you think for a picosecond that parties within the United States government, in the wake of 9/11, would not loudly weaponize the existence of al-Azif as part of anti-Islamic fearmongering I have not one but two bridges in Brooklyn to sell you. 

And on the flip side, for any organization that isn’t irredeemably evil / for timelines when Mythos knowledge is high, going public means you can educate that public as a form of damage mitigation. Cat’s out of the bag, so Elmo's gonna be teaching kids about how to recognize a Color out of Space.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk 

Final Tally

• Resource Scarcity +2
• Worldwide economic depression brought about by a cascade of drearily predictable and utterly stupid factors.
• Requisitions: -20%, new defaults -20% (Standard & Unusual), -40% (Major), -60% (Extreme)
• Spending Your Own Money: -20%, new defaults -20% to Standard, Unusual, & Major expenses 
• Social Instability +0
• A different flavor of chaos. The pieces have been shuffled around a bit. But it's 202█, that's just how life is now.
• Bureaucracy: No change, default remains 10%
• Law: No change, default remains 0% 
• Mythos Knowledge -1
• Accurate information is hard to come by. Government suppression, a weakened press, rampant AI-hallucination, and cults feeding their own misunderstandings of their objects of worship have rendered much of the information available highly suspect, if not totally worthless. A few reliable sources are out there, but they’re often either limited access or difficult to find unless someone already in the know points you in the right direction.
• New religious movements, however, are fucking everywhere. 
• Unnatural: -10%, default remains 0%
• Occult: + 10%, new default 20% 
• Exposure +1
• Anti-mythos organizations have to operate with at least some public facing side. This doesn’t mean that they are necessarily accountable to the public (many of them still involve masked men in unmarked vans, but that’s policing in the 21st century for you.), but it does mean they usually have some oversight on paper. It also means that there are a decent number of NGO mythos orgs out there.
•  Stealth: -10%, new default 0%
•  Disguise: -10%, new default 0%  
• Supernatural Hostility -2
• This doesn’t mean that Mythos hazards have stopped being hazardous, but represents both a wider range of the Unnatural (i.e. not all of it is hazardous, most of it is just weird) and a much better understanding of how not to get killed by it. Knowing about tigers doesn’t intrinsically make the tiger less dangerous, but it can help you in avoiding circumstances where a tiger puts you in danger. Once folks are getting Darwin Awarded live on tiktok, people will start start taking some basic precautions.
• Survival: +20%, new default 30%
• Alertness: +20%, new default 40%  

More vibes than lore, but that's why I like this system. The blanks can get filled in as needed. Would love to see what other people have done with it.

What do people know about the Mythos? Part 3

Part 1, Part 2

Last installment for a while, since as you'll see shortly I am really stretching what qualifies as the Mythos. But I suppose that is part of the point. Anyway, fun series, definitely will return to the format in the future (probably for public domain goodie roundups). 

Nodens

1) An obscure Celtic god, about whom next to nothing is known besides associations with healing, dogs, and syncretization with Mars. Ruins of a single dedicated temple survive at Lydbey Park in Gloucestershire. Potential connection with the mythological figure of Nuada Airgetlám.
 
2) One of the central deities of the Temple of Three Corners.
 

The Temple of Three Corners

Welsh neopagan group active 1963-1972, then resurrected June-November of 1995. Occasional splinter groups have claimed to practice a direct continuation or reformed version of the religion, but rarely grow beyond a dozen members or last more than a few years.
 
The Temple’s belief system is founded on the premise that human sapience is both an evolutionary and spiritual dead end; sapience cuts humans off from awareness of and participation in greater spiritual reality through the Three Impediments of symbol, speech, and self. Each Impediment is thought of as standing between the initiate and a god of the greater Greco-Roman world representing freedom from that Impediment.

• Hypnos exists beyond symbol; consciousness fills the mind with fictions and desires, which impede the ability to understand true reality through our dreams.
• Bast exists beyond speech; consciousness is a transmissible disease and its vector is language, which alienates man from its animal nature.
• Nodens exists beyond the Self; consciousness prevents the spirit from returning to the Abyss from which it was violently torn by the Great Division that formed the base and corrupt physical world.

The Temple’s exoteric ideology was deeply misogynist (sapience was the fault of women providing care for infants, women ought to be wholly controlled by men as property, etc) fascist-primitivist (post-agricultural societies have been a losing war against the forces of femininity and sapience, necessitating a return to hunter-gatherer bands consisting of a clutch of dominant men and their enslaved harem), and anti-natalist (new human life should not be brought into the world unless steps are taken to loosen the hold of the Three Impediments on them).
 
Surprising absolutely no one, they were just as bad as they sound.

‘Axhloo-Dhol Languages

Disputed linguistic theory positing a direct relationship between the extinct language isolates ‘Axhloo (spoken in British Columbia until 1824) and Dhol (spoken in eastern Tibet until 1846). The two languages are poorly documented, with only a single grammar compiled for each shortly before the deaths of the last native speakers. It wasn’t until the 1990s that a link was proposed, based on apparent lexical correspeondences in common root words too high for random chance.
 
If the languages are indeed genetically linked, they would represent the furthest time-depth ever reconstructed for historical linguistics; archaeological evidence from Dhol-speaking sites, though sparse, has been dated to 25,000 years before present. The leading hypothesis (beyond a hoax, misinterpreted data, or any number of conspiratorial rabbit holes) is that the ‘Akhloo and Dhol are highly conservative descendents of a potentially artificial ritual language, though without any further data this cannot be confirmed or ruled out.

Special Cross-Agency Investigation Program

An extremely boring-sounding program by which various agencies and departments of the United States federal government may cooperatively investigate an assortment of vaguely-defined incidents in the name of national security.

Dunwich

Farming community in central Massachusetts, historically associated with witchcraft due to repeated ergotism outbreaks in the late 17th/ early 18th century. The village was disincorporated on April 28th, 1938 as part of preparations for construction of the Quabbin Reservoir; the 16 remaining inhabitants were relocated to the nearby town of New Salem.
 
A 1928 Miskatonic University investigation of supposed supernatural cattle mutilations and other livestock loss around the farm of Zechariah Whateley (at that time owned by his grandson Wilbur) was adapted into the 1970 horror movie The Dunwich Horror.

Lavinia Whateley

Official documentation of Lavinia Whateley’s life is limited to a 1878 baptismal registry with the Dunwich Methodist Church, four appearances in the US census from 1880 to 1920, and a death certificate in absentia from 1933.
 
Interviews collected by Misk. U. professors Henry Armitage, Francis Morgan, and Warren Rice during their 1928 investigation provided little additional information: Lavinia was albino, unschooled, did not attend church past the age of 12, was only rarely seen in town, and had a reputation for promiscuity due the out-of-wedlock birth of her son Wilbur in 1913.
 
“Lavinia’s Stone”, a glacial erratic boulder found off the Quabbin Park hiking trail, was featured on Atlas Obscura in 2011. It was engraved by an unknown hand as follows:
 

LAVINIA WHATELEY
Lived and died near this stone
In the village of Dunwich
1878 - 1926
She deserved better.

Wilbur Whateley

While the discrepancies in accounts of Wilbur’s age have long been explained as a clerical error, the identity of Wilbur Whateley’s father has puzzled historians for decades. The Miskatonic investigation claimed external supernatural influence had greatly accelerated Wilbur’s early childhood development and deformed his body, but this has remained a fringe position since its inception. The interviewed inhabitants of Dunwich favored offhand explanations that Wilbur’s father was a passing tramp, and early academic study of Dunwich tended to favor the theory that Wilbur was a brother, cousin, or other relative of Lavinia’s instead of her son; the modern scholarly consensus from the 1970s onward claims that Wilbur was  Zechariah’s son by incest.

“Mom”

A figure supposedly appearing in the dreams of individuals from around the world. Descriptions generally align with that provided in the initial 2004 Livejournal post: a dark-skinned woman in her mid-to-late 50s with a robust build and black hair, dressed in hide clothing and shell-bead jewelry. Encounters, if remembered, are nearly always in the midst of an outdoors environment with no other signs of human presence.
 
A 2022 survey by the University of Kentucky polled nearly a thousand self-described contactees and split purported encounters into three broad categories:

1. Positive - the woman expresses sympathy, encouragement, support or guidance to the contactee; common in those who had been the subject of traumatic events, severe long-term stress, addiction, chronic illness, and sudden loss.
2. Scared Straight - the woman expresses disapproval, disdain, or disgust with the contactee’s actions; most commonly regards mistreatment of partners, children, or marginalized populations.
3. Nonverbal - the woman appears but does not speak; facial expression and body language may be positive or negative.

Tower of the Elephants

The primary residence of Andalusian alchemist and philosopher Ibrahim ibn al-Yara, gaining its name from the dual bas-reliefs that flanked the main entrance. The tower was torn down during the siege and capture of Toledo in 1085, though by that time it had been empty for nearly 90 years.
 
Among his many scientific and scholarly pursuits, al-Yara sought to make contact with entities of the upper heavens and exploit their greater knowledge of the cosmos; he claims to have succeeded in doing so and been gifted the “heart” of an entity he calls Y-G-K-SH. No elaboration has yet been found, due both to the fragmentary nature of the text and al-Yara’s subsequent death.

The Hound of Cimmeria

Scythian-Cimmerian mercenary who fought for both the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Medo-Babylonian alliance during the latter’s conquest of the former. Records from both sides portray him as an exceptionally skilled swordsman of few words, melancholic disposition, and unflinchingly direct problem-solving. A considerable folk tradition built up around his purported adventures, with stories surviving into the Greco-Roman period and beyond: the last known pre-modern portrayal of the Hound (in the form of the wandering swordsman MacAoinne) is found in the anonymous 12th-century Middle Irish romance The Sword and the Phoenix, which was not rediscovered until 1932.

The Craighten House

A supposedly cursed manor near the village of Craighten in County Galway, Ireland. Said to have been owned by a reclusive and elderly madman before it was destroyed by a sinkhole sometime in the 1830s. Local folklore associates the house with a variety of paranormal occurrences: inexplicable lights and sounds in the sky, deaths by seemingly unique fungal infection, the Craighten pig-men, and an incident where the sun appeared to turn green.

Hildred Castaigne

New York man who made national headlines in 1920 for the brutal murder of a recluse named Hobart Wilde. When arrested, Castaigne claimed to have also killed his psychiatrist Dr. Geoffrey Archer, his cousin Louis Castaigne, and Louis’ fiancee Constance Hawberk; none of these additional claims were true, though all three supposed victims told police that Castaigne had been acting more erratic and aggressive than usual in the days leading up to the murder.
 
Castigaine was declared unfit for trial, as he had suffered permanent brain damage while falling from horseback four years earlier.
 
During police questioning, Castaigne accused his targets of conspiring with Wilde to steal his birthright as the scion of the “Imperial Dynasty of America”. Dr. Archer corroborated that these delusions were the result of brain damage Castaigne had suffered four years prior after falling off his horse. Castaigne was declared unfit for trial on grounds of insanity, but escaped from police custody and committed suicide in a nearby phone booth via home-made cyanide pill before he could be moved to an asylum.

Kuangyuan (狂元)

The “crazy essense”; an oncoming historical epoch hypothesized by Chinese sociologist ███ █████ in 1996; characterized by global economic, ecological, and psychological collapse. Civilization would survive only through the efforts of a cadre of transhuman scientist-occultists imposing a new social structure on humanity, merging methods of esoteric Taoist cultivation with the principles of communism.

da_libre_liber.7zip

Collection of 153 (as of present) esoteric and occult works in plaintext format, including Kitab al-Layl, Liber Ivonis,  Cultes des Gouls, De Vermis Mysteriis, Dhol Chants 1-16, The Revelations of Galagi, The Black Book, On Healing the Sick, The Stellar Almanac, A Preliminary Grammar of the Aklo Language, A World Without Doors, The Testaments of Carnamagos and The Dyzan Dissection.
 
First iteration posted online in 2010: individual text files of the current collection were hosted on github until the maintainer pulled it down in response to widespread LLM-scraping of the site’s contents, stating “I’m not gonna be the guy who let Copilot learn how to turn people inside out”.

The Seven Cryptic Books of Xi’an

A series of seven jiǎndú texts dated to the late Western Zhou dynasty (800s BCE), each consisting of seven poems written as 49-by-49 grids of large seal script characters. Each poem is reversible and readable along multiple axes, and may be further subdivided into smaller component grids, giving each poem thousands of potential readings (See also the Star Gauge of Su Hui).
 
Complicating matters further, a 2010 study determined that poems may be formed with characters from different grids interlaced with each other at multiple levels of complexity and with different inter-textual patterns. An attempt to calculate all possible readings through AI analysis was started in 2025 by graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University, but the project was shuttered shortly after inception for unclear reasons.
 
The books were previously known as the Books of Hsan in the West due to an erroneous transcription of Xi’an (capital of Shaanxi and site of the books’ discovery): [ɕan] (rendered Hsan in Wade-Giles and Xan in Pinyin) is not a valid syllable in Mandarin.
 

Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten

1839 German text by Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt, based in large part on the 1610 witch-hunting manual of Solomon Kane. Concerned primarily with the methods of detecting, tracking, identifying, capturing, torturing and killing followers of “The Black Goat”. This entity has been conflated with Éliphas Lévi’s interpretation of Baphomet by later occultists, despite Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie being published in 1856.

The Alexis

Bulk carrier ship sailing under a Taiwanese flag of convenience found adrift in the southern Indian Ocean with all hands missing in 2018. No signs of violence or disturbance of the crew’s belongings, save that one of the cargo containers had been opened and its contents removed. Images of the large metal statue of a half-melted mass of wailing human figures quickly spread across social media, with amateur sleuths and conspiracy theories alike attempting to find some explanation or source for “The Screaming”. None, as of present, has been found.

The Red One

Purported encounter with a UFO (Close encounter, second kind) in the central highlands of Guadalcanal. Account written in 1916 and published in 1918, likely describes events a decade or more prior.
 
The entity or object is described as a large, deep red sphere without apparent marking or variation, that induced a violent mania in the local inhabitants wherein they would offer “the Red One” the severed heads of sacrificial victims.
 
An attempt to corroborate the account in 1953 resulted in nothing: the supposed landing site could not be located, and interviews with locals were split between no one living in that area of the island at all, or that a few very small villages died of an epidemic in the 1920s.

l'Ultimo Ridotto

A self-sustaining arcology, designed by the Italian futurist Alfonso Schiavio as humanity’s defense against the eventual cooling of the sun. Had it been completed (an act even admitted by Schiavio to be wholly impossible due to the sheer cost in resources, time, and sustained political will) it would have been a black pyramid nearly eight miles high and extending further underground capable of supporting 3 million inhabitants.
 
Construction of a four-person test model, three stories tall and designed for a ten-year experimental period, began in 1924 but was not completed until 1935: this bankrupted Schiavio and his associates (as support from the Fascists was predominantly verbal rather than material, and performative even then).
 
The site was bombed during the Allied invasion and buried beneath the resultant landslide: it has not been excavated.

The Skin Bibles

Legendary occult tomes bound in cured human skin. Four are dedicated to the “Old Gods” of prehistoric Europe (creation, destruction, the Earth and the Moon), while a later fifth book entailed the “forebearer to the Christ-myth” in the form of a figure called “All Mer”. A sixth text, Pavor et Famēs, was purportedly found and subsequently lost or destroyed by Soviet troops in Bohemia in 1945.
 
All currently known copies of the books are 19th century forgeries; the earliest mention of the texts is dated 1568, however.

Chthulus

“The earth-eater”: A minor demon from the occult works of John Dee with a reasonably sound but not entirely airtight etymological history.

Yog-Sothoth

A divine or semi-divine figure in the Latin and Greek Necronomicon, credited with producing the ordered cosmos from primordial chaos. The name does not appear in the fragments of the earliest known Greek recension, however: there it is rendered as the widely-known gnostic demiurge of Ialdabaoth. A cramped or sloppy hand, read in low light or from a deteriorating manuscript, might easily turn Ιαλδαβαώθ into Ιογζοθοώθ, and this would be well within the precedent of occult names and their notoriously unstable spelling.
 
Al-Hadrat uses neither term in the Arabic version of the text, either calling it Bāb al-Lanhaya (the Gate of Infinity) or using one of his signature asemic monograms.

Order of the Golden Bough

English occult fraternal society and new religious movement based on the mythic framework put forth by James Frazer. Two men affiliated with the group were convicted in the kidnapping and murder of lawyer Harvey Gates in the spring of 1918; the assailants believed Gates to be the unrecognized bastard son of Prince Albert Victor and sought to use regnal sacrifice of the true heir of England to bring an end to the Great War.

Horsehead and the Blind Girl

A pair of cryptids consisting of a horned, horse-headed giant and a blind albino teenager; supposedly first sighted in the backwoods of North Carolina during the summer of 2020. The initial photograph was quickly identified as a still from the Kickstarter trailer for the independent horror film Carvers; the producers of the film had ghosted their backers midway through the failed campaign, and weren’t able to be contacted despite concerted efforts by lost media enthusiasts. The campaign page was taken down in February of 2021.
 
In July of 2026, a candid video of the Blind Girl’s actress was posted to Threads by user @█████ (claiming to have shot the footage at the Richmond KY Buc-ee’s on July 16.); when asked “Hey, hey, I’m sorry, but were you in Carvers?”, the woman responds “Dunno. Maybe I dreamt I was a unicorn.” before walking off. A second woman (dark hair, Meshuggah t-shirt) flips off the camera before the two exit the aisle. @█████  does not follow them.

Sunny Smiles Farm

Defunct health food company (previously part of the Rochefoucauld Group business syndicate) specializing in free-range, cruelty-free meats. The former CEO was found murdered in his home in October 2019, having been stabbed over twenty times and then hung by a belt from the foyer banister. Police investigation found signs of four separate break-ins around the house and a three-minute gap in the house’s security system coinciding with the attack, but were unable to meaningfully identify the assailants; gallons of livestock blood mixed with barbershop hair refuse were dumped throughout the house to obscure any genetic material.

Shubbsy-Bubbles

Twitch streamer and v-tuber personality; self-described “world’s greatest big-titty goth mommy girlfriend”. Suspended five times for violation of Twitch’s Terms of Service (subsequently re-instated in all cases.)
 
SWATted mid-broadcast in December of 2022; the VOD was swiftly taken down by Twitch, which didn’t stop the relevant clip from appearing on social media hours later. The clip is limited to the mostly-incoherent sound, of the  SWAT team’s entry into the home office. Internet sleuths were able to extract a few fragments of Shubby’s response from the audio, though the only thing that could be reconstructed with any meaningful success is the streamer nonchalantly saying:
 
“Gentlemen, gen[tlemen] [...] [four?] at a [time?]”
 
Shubby was released from police custody hours later, with no charges filed. Police have consistently declined to comment about the incident. Damages were, according to Shubbsy in her first return stream, handled out of court.

Mu

A fictitious lost continent of the Pacific invented by Augustus Le Plongeon and further developed by James Churchward, Ignatius Donnelly, and other such luminaries of imagining shit that isn’t there. Despite its obvious nonexistence and second-fiddle position to Atlantis, Mu keeps attracting those who like their ancient pasts vague and pale skinned; one such group, the Holy Shaker Way gained significant notoriety for the mass suicide of the group’s 23 members on the uninhabited Samin Island, believing that in doing so their spirits would be  shepherded by the Muian god Kalanatoa and returned to the stars.

Eschatology and Genesis

Incomplete script of 2-act play performed across the American west during the 1870s by the pseudonymous patent medicine seller Dr. Talos. Highly controversial and thoroughly demonized in its day for its scandalous use of nude actors, inclusion of blasphemous religious content, and propensity to start riots.

The Claw

A 102.54 carat sapphire named for its distinctive shape. Purported by one hagiographical source to be a relic of 5th-century martyr St. Severian of Scythopolis, who received it during an angelic visitation and later used it to perform healing miracles. Currently held by the Pelerine Order of Our Lady of Concilliation at their mother-house in Buenos Aires.
 

4 Roads to R'lyeh

ProfDyer

Some alternate takes on Cthulhu and its return 

1. The Plaquemines Raid and the All-Souls Massacre

November 1907: New Orleans is gripped with a three-day spate of racially-motivated violence after a headline story in the Times-Democrat reports a police raid on a “voodoo cult” blamed for multiple kidnappings in Plaquemines Parish. Ghoulish descriptions of human sacrifice stir the public into a frenzy and by the evening of November 2nd, white rioters aided by police storm the city prison and embrace new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves. 45 of the 47 men arrested during the raid are murdered, and the rioters disperse into the city in mobs to root out other members of the perceived conspiracy. By the time the Louisiana National Guard is deployed on November 5th a further 172 people are confirmed dead and over 500 are injured, with the overwhelming majority of casualties inflicted on the city’s minority population.

The following year, inspector John Legrasse of the New Orleans Police Department presents an artifact supposedly recovered from the raid to a meeting of the American Archaeological Society. The malachite sculpture depicts a hunchbacked, winged, octopus-headed figure sitting atop a base inscribed with unidentified hieroglyphs, and is accompanied by Legrasse’s story of a heretofore unknown yet expansive and well-organized cult working towards the destruction of the world order.

Legrasse fails to convince most of the AAS members, and the Society declines his donation. Despite this, he manages to sell it sometime before his death in 1910, with the purchaser then selling it to Miskatonic University’s antiquities department in 1925. There the statue is the subject of several papers of increasingly-dubious hypotheses before it is quietly moved to a dusty corner and forgotten until the liquidation of the special collection in 1968 when it is sold to UC Berkeley.

The agreed-upon account, after hindsight takes its cut, is that the Times-Democrat had latched on to the presence of vodou paraphernalia at the site over evidence that the kidnappings were part of mundane hostage-taking between rival smuggling operations; as with most instances of racial violence in the US, the All-Souls Massacre has fallen into obscurity in the mainstream public consciousness, and is referenced mostly as another example of the dangers of yellow journalism.

2. Xenoteuthis megadaemon

Cthulhu’s sire species, before they became the Star Spawn, were a clade of extremely territorial, extremely aggressive, extremely intelligent and highly adaptable solitary ambush predators. They weren’t at the apex of the oceanic food chain, but they were easily the smartest and the nastiest things in the warm seas of their homeworld. Casual Geographic would have a field day with them.

This state of affairs went on for millions of years with only minimal changes.  As non-obligate sapients, xenteuthis were not dependent on their self-awareness for survival;  their massive brains provided enough success to justify the caloric cost, but their lack of sociality prevented any way to pass knowledge on from one generation to the next.

But in a statistical anomaly (though not an impossibility) xenoteuthis could Dream, and in Dreaming, they possessed the means to sire a Great Old One. Time took care of the rest.

The psychic gestalt of the species shaped a god in their own image, and it grew old and potent in the collective subconscious until at last it gained critical mass and transitioned into the Real. The species was remade, suborned into semi-autonomous extensions of their living god, and they expanded their reach to the stars. In finding the empire of the Elder Things there they did what their forebearers had always done: fight for territory.

The crusade ended with a whimper, in orbit around a backwater colony world. Cthulhu was crippled and sank beneath the sea, and there it rested for 444 million years, until at last the stars were right.

Humanity had no shield against Cthulhu's influence; no Great Old One of our own, no novel brain architecture to dampen the psychic onslaught, no miracles of parascience, no means of escape. And so for just under two minutes, every single human being on Earth had their psychology overwritten by that of an organism that kills and cannibalizes its own species as a matter of course.

When it had all passed, when those hundred-odd seconds were over and Cthulhu departed to the distant stars, everyone left alive remembered exactly what they had done.

3. The R'yleh Expeditions

R’lyeh rose from the sea in March of 1925, though its master has yet to emerge from its ancient vaults. Perhaps he is still sleeping, if indeed he truly exists; perhaps the city and its lord are one and the same. It ultimately doesn’t matter.

The ruined city has expanded steadily with each passing year, growing over the course of a century from a single island to an archipelago to a microcontinent. The surrounding ocean teems with life not seen for hundreds of millions of years, and more bizarre life that had been evolving in isolation in the hidden city for all those epochs. 

Reality is breaking down. More people succumb to his influence with each year; trapped in alien dreams, devoured by the things that slip between the thin places, broken beneath the unbearable psychic weight of his presence. There are wars and rumors of wars, famines and slaughters and the mad gnawing of a species with its foot in the trap. Many deny the reality, circling their wagons and declaring that it is all a hoax, or that it isn’t as bad as reported, or that it’s always been like this, or that Jesus is coming tomorrow. Many try desperately to make contact with the silent god through worship, hoping to save themselves if they cannot save the world. Many are simply resigned to the weary world’s slow apocalypse, scheduling their suicides in advance.

And there are those few who believe that the Lord of R’lyeh might be stopped. Perhaps even killed. There were more in the early years, before the scope of the danger was fully understood. Their expeditions to the island-city have failed, one and all: the Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the UN, the EU, dozens of others, all failed. Those that pushed past the storms and teeming waters still had to survive landfall; those that managed to set foot on the black beaches were rebuffed. Those that returned home did so bloodied and broken, clutching scraps of insight so brief and tenuous that hardly anything could be learned.

The budgets thinned with the decades until they were an anorexic whisper, and then nothing. The public-private partnerships failed to be realized, as corporate powers found it more profitable to monetize the rot than to hunt a solution that wasn’t there. Most NGOs went belly-up as the cost of attrition outpaced donations. Only the true believers and the truly desperate remain now, scraping together ramshackle missions on shoestring budgets and aiming themselves with a hope and a prayer to spit in the eye of God.

4. What is to Come

We created R’lyeh. Not with intention, but that’s no consolation. As industrial modernity slouched through history towards Bethlehem and was born, so too was born in our Dreaming the scion of all our sublimated terrors. We could see the shape of the future, where men would learn new ways to kill and revel in killing, and we recoiled. We built a fortress of denial, projected all our own failings on a savage Other pounding at the gates, but the enemy has been inside all along and no walls can hold back the coming century. They cannot hold back the abyss of the future, and the monster we made to fill it.

We need not worry about Cthulhu's rising: he is already here, and he is risen indeed.

Even More Short Reviews of Delta Green Actual Plays

 Part 1, Part 2

This will likely be the last one of these for a while: got thoroughly burnt out on the whole thing as I was drafting it, and I’ve stopped listening to all of these in the months since I started compiling the post. At some point I’ll probably resume one or two, but who knows: my podcast listening has taken a hit across the board thanks to changes at work eating up my attention for much of the year so far.

Black Flare

I find this one complicated to recommend: It’s well-put together, the Handler knows their stuff, and the idea of having players new to Delta Green as an RPG playing characters new to Delta Green the organization is appealing. I don’t think it works in practice, though: the opening opera is too open-ended and slow-paced for players new to this sort of investigation (especially when they have a tendency to treat the investigation like D&D characters grilling a shopkeeper) and that makes for bad radio in spite of the generally high quality of all the individual components.

The anomaly in season 1 was too vague and hands-off to be an interesting threat. There’s an episode that’s nearly entirely devoted to the tedium of muddling through some difficult-to-visualize spatial fuckery effects, which never gelled together as something spooky. 

 (I think the spookum was a lloighor, so my bias is on active and on the field already) 

There’s a really good interstitial episode (the cell meets their handler on a freighter ship in the aftermath of a battle with Deep Ones) but then the first five and a half episodes of Season 2 are a red herring with enough feet dragging that it felt more of “oh fucking finally” when we finally got to the real hazard instead of a satisfying build up to it. The action was great when things finally started popping off, but the path to get there was frustrating.

Another issue, which is very much down to personal preference even more than the last, is that I really don’t like how Hollis’ player runs the character; Hollis acts as a sort of continual obstruction to the others, vaguely dancing around questions and being purposefully unhelpful with a blunt “It’s need to know and you don’t need to know”. I can’t tell how intentionally frustrating they’re supposed to be - it’s not an unreasonable part to play in the story - but I think it compounds the bad radio problem by impeding the other PCs from being active investigators and pushing them towards passivity, which doesn’t play well with the already slow pace. 

Hand on the Door

Not as goofy as PTBP, but probably the closest to it tone-wise out of everything I’ve listened to, and I think it does a decent job of threading the needle. It’s absurd, but not so absurd that it negates its own stakes with that absurdity. That said, it does have a tendency to meander and it’s another slow burn investigation despite the threat being something that should have everyone freaking the fuck out. There’s no reason for the PCs to know that the guy they’re investigating is messing with shoggoth biomatter, but the characters knew by the time I stopped listening that the perp has figured out how to refold proteins through unnatural means and the players should probably be leaning into the entirely reasonable panic of “Jesus Christ someone could make a transmissible prion disease with this shit”.

Chaos Springs Eternal

Civilian PCs in a weird little Louisiana town stumbling into the supernatural. More CoC than DG, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it a DG actual play. 10-15 minutes of non-game talk at the beginning of each episode, which is too much for me to sit through without skipping but might not be for other folks. It’s a slow burn and I was with it for a while, but fell off when they got to the helpful magical ghoul character. I like a helpful magical ghoul character from time to time but this one felt too Call of Cthulhu for me, if that makes sense. Not enough of the DG razzle and / or dazzle.

This Line Isn’t Secure

A dedicated Impossible Landscapes run. Very much on the audio drama side of the spectrum, and very good at it. Players and handler work together like a well-oiled machine. Editing / effects / sound quality are extremely good, deft balance of horror vs humor and how the absurd surreality of Carcosa lends itself to both. I feel better about the character arcs than in something like Redacted Reports because we know how this ends, there's not going to be any tail end that stretches out past the climax. Definitely want to return to this one, and I give it a very high recommendation.

Delta Pink

Someone affiliated with the show left a comment on one of my older roundup posts asking if I might do a review: Unfortunately, it didn’t really pan out.

After listening to Session 0 and most of episode 1 I feel like Delta Pink, like Get in the Trunk, is goofy in a way that doesn’t really land for me. The group behind this AP typically plays Shadowrun, and that influence shows like the proverbial and thematically appropriate pink mohawk. They’re still playing Shadowrun characters here in Delta Green; goofy stereotypes unmoored from reality. Factor that as you will into whether or not you want to check it out.

Stories and Lies: God’s Teeth

It’s unfair to compare anyone running God’s Teeth to the original AP, but it’s also unavoidable. 

Go Forth opens like a hammer to the face. Here’s the mission; do it now. You’re immediately in the shit and on the back foot, scrambling for purchase when all your options are bad and you have no time and no resources. I think it’s the most powerful opener in RPGs by a country mile, with Deep Carbon Observatory coming in second.

So I feel like Stories and Lies is doing a disservice to the module by portraying Clove as stable and put-together and having the agent who read the folder beat around the bush during the briefing. The urgency that makes the opening work has been lost and at that point I don’t know why the module was chosen.

 

RPPR: The Labor of Dogs

The only one of these I am actively listening to at time of writing: this one's an all-timer. Not just the name (which is an all-timee in and of itself), but in just how good the component missions are - I think we're done with 3/5 at this point, and each one has been a very distinctly 2020s flavor of awful and weird. Like I would almost call it cringe horror? It's leaning into the ripped-from-the-headlines reality of "sorry, the villains here are evil and stupid and their vapidity is matched only by their temporal power and they will combine the two into lethal danger for everyone around them in an attempt to squeeze a bit of profit they don't need from a source they don't understand." That's the good shit. The real danger isn't Cthulhu, it's some C-suite trying to exploit Cthulhu in stupid ways.

Final Notes

Most of this post is just a simple divergence between what I want to listen to and what people want to make. So it goes, no harm no foul. My perspective is skewed six ways to Sunday on this matter so everything I’ve said so far should be taken with a sizable grain of salt. I don’t know. I feel kinda bad about being down on nearly all of them. Ah well. There will always be more, and maybe I'll come around to one or two when I'm in a better state for what they're offering.
 

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. 

 

 

 

 

She Sings at the End

 

crocutable

[Heads up: this one goes a bit harder than usual, enough so that I'd rather be safe than sorry and stick a warning up front. Gore, references to sexual violence, and a lot of 2026-grade hopeless bleak despair to follow.]

 

它餓

Interior. A TV kitchen set, illuminated by dim lights far above the sound stage. A pile of animal carcasses - endangered, exotic, unidentifiable - spills off the counter and onto the floor. Flies swirl in granular black clouds.

A woman stands at the chopping block, cleaver in hand, grinning out at an audience only she can see. Her apron reads:

 FUCK
 MARRY
 KILL
 THE COOK

She’s not wearing anything else.

"We really have to stop meeting like this: what will the neighbors think?"

She draws a bird of paradise from the mound and the blade falls with a wet sli-chunk. 

"The line that divides man from beast is abhorrence of the flesh. The beast harbors no illusions of its own nature; man glimpses the truth - that he is a machine designed to eat, fuck, and die - and recoils, screaming Lord take this thorn from my side!"

She sticks a feather in her hair and sweeps the mangled scraps of the bird off the counter and into a blue plastic bin.

"Desperate to prove that he is master of his own body, to prove that he is anything but a meat-fuck machine, he will kill and rape and consume and enslave and he will build a placid island of corpses on the black sea of infinity. With trembling hand and seething mind he will drive his knife deep between his ribs and carve out his own heart.”

She slices open an orangutan’s belly, pulls out its intestines, weaves them in her fingers like a cat’s cradle.

"But he can't resist the destiny of complex life, no matter how much he cuts away. He cannot rid himself of his desire and he cannot satisfy it. Sepsis blooms in his mutilated spirit… and he rots. "

She tosses the entrails off-screen and brings down the cleaver on a neat row of thylacine pups.

"Grunting in darkened rooms, they give obsequience to me."

Several heavy blows sever a giraffe's head from its neck; its purple tongue hangs out cartoonishly.

"The abyss stares back with the reflection of one's own face."

She sticks her hand up the stump of the creature's neck and puppets its mouth open and close. Glassy eyes roll in their sockets.

"NUMBER! GO! UP! YAAAAAAAAAAY!"

She smiles with gleaming teeth as the lights flicker out.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn this way."

The screen fades to black. White text, jittering from the film reel, displays a real-time global death count of livestock updated by the second. 

 

**

 

 

Item OΔ-TS10B CINNABAR

Blue plastic milk crate containing twenty-eight Fujifilm VHS cassettes. Recovered via dead drop handoff in 1993, last documented in 2000, current whereabouts unknown. Prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong. 

Seven tapes currently in storage; three recovered during Operation HAVERSHAM in 2007 (prior owner claimed to have purchased them from an anonymous seller in Hong Kong in 1995), one purchased from the 2010 Black Auction, two found during 2014-2016 field storage consolidation and inventory, and one recovered in 202█ during CSC team's investigation of Agent Merriweather’s death.

 

**

 

1982: Operation GRISTMILL - Emergency activation of Hong Kong assets to counter emerging threat in Kowloon Walled City. Primary and secondary vectors neutralized; all known Three Stars Movement members terminated. Three of four agents KIA; survivor considered unfit for continued duty and retired (d. 1988; self-termination via gunshot). No further activity detected during follow-up.

 

**

 

Crumpled piece of notebook paper:
SPELL LIST
1. Enlarge
2. Know Guilt
3. Octopus Flesh
4. Fear
5. Creeping Gloom (as Cloudkill)
6. Regenerate
7. Sculpt Flesh
8. Call Down the Void

 

**

truthFINAL.docx
(Hill, 202█)

1431-page manifesto/journal in over a dozen iterations dating back to 2014. From 2017 onwards, the document is dominated by Hill’s belief in what he calls the Empire to Come; an eternal fascist state formed at the culmination of human history by the economic and social fusion of China and the United States. By virtue of being the only technological civilization to survive anthropogenic climate change (through the violent purge of “degenerate elements”), the Empire to Come would be the de-facto great power of the post-Anthropocene world, enslaving or exterminating any of the remaining “racially-inferior subhumans of the new stone age”, and later making contact with the alien civilization that originally seeded earth with life.

Hill is convinced that he is in contact with one of the Empire’s semidivine “god-eater” inhabitants, and that this entity (referred to as “the Whore” in the document) speaks to him from the future through video media. He likewise believes that service to the Whore, in the form of feeding her through the MEAT BOX, will be rewarded with a place of honor in histories not yet written as a vanguard of the Empire not yet made: itemized lists of offerings begin with store-bought meat and swiftly escalate to include wildlife, stolen pets, livestock, and ultimately human beings. Hill views his patron with equally obsessive desire and disgust; significant space is devoted to his method of keeping himself free the Whore’s influence through ritualized semen retention and meditative fantasies of sexual violence against her. 

Viewed as a whole, the document indicates that Hill’s contact with the vector exaggerated and intensified pre-existing psychological trends, with sudden shifts in 2017 and 2019 correlating to his acquisition of untitled.mp4 from a file-sharing site as part of a bulk lot of pirated pornography and Tape #0 from an anonymous online seller, respectively. It is unclear, however, how much direct influence the vector had over Hill's mental and emotional deregulation and later physical mutations.

 

**

1968: The Cultural Revolution's anti-cult operations arrest and execute seventy-six members of the Great Lady Society in Shanghai. Two survivors manage to evade capture and smuggle themselves to Hong Kong.

 

** 

 

Tape #12

Exterior. Day. 

An orange wall of burning rainforest rises above a line of blackened earth. A woman stands facing the inferno, her back to the approaching camera. As the camera turns to view her in profile, she raises a curled pangolin to her mouth and bites through its armor; scale shards cut into her gums and blood drips down her chin. She crunches for an uncomfortable minute, winces as she swallows.

“Sure hope that guy enjoys his 20,000 pictures of Rouge the Bat's big stinky feet.” 

**

2014: Photograph posted to r/urbanexploration in a thread titled "Nope. Not today, Satan." Image is of a darkened doorway with no room visible beyond. Two phrases are painted on the concrete wall: "AN ABYSS” in black, and below that in red “A MIRROR".

**

Item recovered during investigation: Black 3-ring binder with no identifying marks or labels; 55 sheets of blank looseleaf paper plus a single page containing an anonymous account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Irregularities and errors in the text indicate machine translation. 

The passage details the arrival of an unnamed woman with noblewoman’s clothes but “a vulgar manner”. She announces that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions; when the villagers say they have nothing to give and have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. With the villagers unsure how to respond, the woman reaches into her sleeve and throws a single dumpling into the mud. “Let’s see which of you is favored.”

Violence erupts among the villagers as she departs, laughing as she twirls her parasol.

 

**

 

1869: A young man, hollow-faced and grim, arrives in Shanghai. He finds work on the docks - it pays little, but he is a stranger to neither poverty nor hunger. He looks no one in the eye, only past or through them, as if forever watching something that isn’t there. Perhaps it was, once. Perhaps it will be.

**

One-star Amazon reviews for The Seventh Goddess: Reconstructing Matriarchal Anatolian Religion in Light of Recent Discoveries at Boncuklu Tarla (Iverson, 2018)

• "A meandering cavalcade of bad archaeology, worse sociology, Jungian psychoanalysis and second wave gender-essentialism. The evidence provided for the central hypothesis is cherrypicked and spurious at best, and easily disproven with other sources." 

• "Reads like a parody."

• "I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go full ancient aliens. If you’re going to be a nutjob might as well lean into it and throw some nephilim in there.

• "Author had a meltdown and deleted their twitter over one piece of fanart whomp whomp

• "Was honestly expecting an ad for yoni eggs at the back.

• "The seated woman of Catalhoyuk has never been done this dirty."

• "𒈠𒄠𒁲𒄑𒌍𒀀𒉿𒂗𒋾𒀊"

• "Spends an entire chapter desperately trying to explain how a male skeleton buried in women’s clothing is anything else."

• "They got they’re tits are out"

**

Tape #5

Snow clarifies into grainy footage of a grimy strip club. Neon lights; music bass-boosted into atonal thumping. An enormous woman sits cross-legged on the stage, surrounded by the limp bodies of naked men. She tears a big bloody chunk from a man’s neck with her teeth, bobs her head in time with music that’s not playing as she chews. Then she stands up, stretches, yawns, and looks down the camera and out of the screen. She smiles, winks, and cartwheels off the stage, bolting towards the door in the back of the club with the speed of an Olympic sprinter. The door shatters and she vanishes from view.

Tape continues for eight minutes before police sirens are heard in the distance and the screen fades back into snow.

 

**

1873: A Shanghai dockworker describes visions of heaven to those who will listen. He tells them how the weight of humanity's evil deeds has grown so great that the cycle of karma has become unbalanced. There can be no escape through virtuous acts: the Middle Way is closed off, the course of the Tao is askew. Even the foreign Christ cannot absolve what has been committed. The only means of salvation is to cast all one’s deeds onto the Great Lady, the sin-eater who takes all debaucheries and grotesqueries into herself. There is no forgiveness in service to her, but there is freedom.

 

**

Tape #17

Exterior. Night. Dead of winter.

A woman in a backless black silk dress stands in foot-deep snow underneath the arch of the Union Stockyard Gate. Wind howls, snowflakes whirl. She doesn’t react to the cold as she sharpens a knife against an obsidian whetstone. A trussed bison hangs from a noose originating out of frame, slowly drifting, twisting, back and forth. 

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing folks that he existed in the first place. Sinners don’t want forgiveness, they want someone to blame. They want a man with a sharp suit and a bladed tongue, stepping into their life like a pharaoh of old to offer them just enough rope to hang themselves. Someone they can outwit before the debt comes due. But they never do, and you and I both know that it’s all coming from inside the house.”

The camera pans up, following the rope to its vanishing point. A black hole and its wan orange accretion disk dominates the sky, pulsing and thrashing and lashing out with fuligin tendrils. Stars fall towards it in long, curved arcs and vanish beyond the event horizon. Low moaning grows in intensity until the endless crashing wave of noise threatens to consume all other sensory input and the camera snaps back down to the woman and the silence of deep winter. She holds a bloody finger up to her lips.

“Shhh. Don’t wake the baby.”

 

**

 

1922: An old man, now, bedridden and fading, looks out the window and watches the rain. He hasn’t worked on the docks for forty years; he hasn’t given a sermon in ten. Whether human frailty or his brushes with the divine that have brought him here, it doesn’t matter. The Great Lady Society devours itself; factionalism among the inner circle has made the situation unstable, untenable; there will be a mad, violent scramble for power the moment he dies, and some of his lieutenants might not wait that long.

But the men walking up to that precipice are no more than far-away shadows passing through his vision. He sits and watches the rain, and sixty-some years ago he huddles in the same downpour in a half-collapsed shack that he never left. Clammy and burning with fever, he is bones and rags and a pit that devours itself.

Just a few feet away, a woman lies curled in the mud, the faint rise of her ribs the only sign of life. She’d been here when he staggered in and collapsed hours ago; she might have done the same, just a few hours before that.

He prays, but his mouth is too dry for words and his thoughts slur together into meaningless chaos. Sense-memories blur together: farm, sermon, baptism, hunger, an angel in the upper air…

The woman’s lips twitch; he hears her voice, clear and steady like starlight and still water…

“Take this and eat of it; this is my body, which will be given up for you.”

He reaches out a trembling hand, and drags himself towards her.

 

**

Item found in field storage: Grey sweatshirt, XXXL. Cuffs stained with dried blood.

Item found in field storage: Article printout from a Japanese paranormal website (May 02 2018) describing sightings of a "starving woman" (ue-onna) cryptid in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures.

Item found in field storage: Polaroid photograph of archaeological dig site. Headless skeletons lie in spokes around a small cavity containing voluptuous female figurine.

Item found in field storage: Carrying case containing 8cm black granite figurine of masturbating, obese woman. 

 

**

707 CE: A novice at Samye monastery suffers a manic episode while fasting. He steals dyed sand from the storeroom, locks himself in his cell, and when the elder brothers last they force the door open, find the novice weeping inconsolably: he has painted a mandala of the eight hot hells and at their center there is a voluptuous goddess, nude but for the black veil covering her face and the golden symbol in its center. 

 

**

Tape #10

Exterior. Day.

Howling wind; choking dust. Brown clouds veil the sun’s silver disk. A tattered American flag flaps on the other side of three layers of chain link and barbed wire. Dark shadows of low buildings are barely visible through the shroud. 

A man speaks, his voice pasted in from a lower-quality recording.

“This criticism of the president’s executive order is baseless: Class-III demographics have historically been a drain on the nation’s resources, and the federal work-settlement program finally presents an opportunity for those individuals to engage as productive members of society.”

A woman with a black umbrella walks into frame from the left. The camera moves to follow her, settling about ten feet behind as she walks through a maze of rusted vehicles in what is presumably a parking lot, past an empty guard station with a shattered barrier, and down an empty road for three hours forty-four minutes.

The empty road turns into a cluster of empty buildings. Many burned, all empty.  Shattered storefronts like broken teeth. A jackknifed semitruck blocks an intersection. Woman and camera turn right for a few blocks, then she stops and points up at a desiccated corpse hanging from a streetlight by a cargo belt. The camera zooms in to a plywood sign fastened around its neck, but whatever was painted on it has long been worn away.

“Drought is God’s punishment for sexual deviancy, or so I heard on the news. They cut to commercial right after, so I couldn’t catch the rest. The divine pleuroma hates anal penetration and loves same-game parlay, you learn new things every day.”

A gust of wind sends the corpse swinging and tears the umbrella from the woman’s hand. She watches it tumble away like a dandelion seed.

“Dingaling-ding, Dr. Pavlov; I want strange fruit for dinner.”

 

** 

 

244 BCE: A petitioner from a village outside of Sarnath, arrives in Pataliputra. He pleads with the guards to grant him an audience with the great Ashoka, telling them that his village is tormented by a mahāpreta, a ghost so hungry that it feeds on the living and ignores all offerings made to appease it. He is turned away as another beggar and madman, but for three desperate days he returns until a young captain takes pity on him and passes word to Tivala. By the time the prince persuades his father to see the pilgrim, it is already too late: the man has starved to death on his own feet.

**

 

Video #12

Interior. The camera pans over hundreds of naked, emaciated people packed into the antiseptic stainless steel of a meatpacking plant. Men with face shields and submachine guns stand along an elevated walkway and stare down at the trudging mass, implacable, bored. A man’s voice ripples over shitty loudspeakers: “And the ʟᴏʀᴅ said: “Tx’uragh dzmllik a’andlat! Again I say unto you: if a man should lay down his life in service of the Great Ones he shall be lifted up! For it is written that you shall love your enemies and forgive those who persecute you!”

Video ends abruptly.

**

Tweet: Cartoon depiction of the Venus of Boncuklu Tarla in Pride flag bodypaint, captioned “Getting kinky with it since 10,000 BC”; Posted June 15 2021 by @████████.

**

 

Tape #9

Heavily-degraded footage of a room, dimly lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb. Cracked concrete wall covered in graffiti. A pile of corpses fills the frame. A cardboard sign sits on a wooden chair, displaying an RCA test pattern and the text PLEASE STAND BY. Occasional humming and heavy footsteps can be heard from offscreen. No apparent end to footage.

**

461 BCE: The magus, his hands shaking, steps into the garden to collect himself. The night air is cool but brings no comfort: the exorcism failed. The merchant’s wife is dead, her body burst open like a rotting fruit. Jahi and Bushyasta had resided in her, and they had laughed at every invocation of Ahura Mazda until their host had choked on blood and vomit. The magus attempts to pray, but finds no solace in it. The daevas’ laughter renews itself in his mind at each mention of the holy name.

**

 

Video #3

Exterior. Dusk.

Waves sussurate on sand. From out of frame, the voice of an elderly man deliriously mumbles over and over in Koine Greek: "Lord, take this thorn from my side..."

His pleading goes unanswered and eventually fades into soft, stuttering whimpers. A large, dark shape rises from the water, backlit by the last smear of orange in the west. The tape degrades into static and then nothing.

 

**

 

3581 BCE: The men of the koryos, drunk on glory and exuberant red thoughts, put the village to the sword. A cheer goes up as flames erupt in thatch. Sky Father smiles on them today: it is a day for slaves and plunder, cattle and sheep, lamentations and gore. 

Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, strikes down an old man with a spear; Hsulaʕwes barks “Posti bhebhudhi!” off to his left and Kuonikos spins to face the burning longhouse. His brain shorts for a moment struggling to square how the woman emerging from the structure even managed to stand up, let alone walk: Kuonikos has never encountered obesity before. 

Before a second thought can command his body, the woman raises her arm and points a thick finger at him. A single word booms in Kuonikos’ thoughts like the memory of thunder…

Ṕ̴̰̰̇Ḧ̴̺̓’̷̜̘̎N̶̗͔̾G̶̥̿L̷̗̹̈́U̵̬̾̈́I̶͓̿̐X̴̤͋́H̸͎̥͑Ŗ̸͔̄

…and Kuonikos, son of Kuon Ghe, is struck with the greatest pain he has experienced or imagined. All thought, all awareness, all sense of self evaporate in violence as his skin is degloved scalp to toe, his anal sphincter collapses, his guts fall out in a shower of blood and shit, his lungs rot in his chest.

It still takes three days for him to die.

**

Tape #20

Exterior. Day.

Handheld camcorder footage date stamped MAY 03 1996; recorder walks along a dirt path next to a creek. Mountains bear down over the greenery, claustrophobic. Light fog; no birdsong.

A woman speaks from off-camera:

“In times of need, when the earth and sky gave no aid, they came to the caves. Priestesses fattened on pemmican and mammoth meat, spirits ablaze with sacred psilocybe, would descend alone into the dark places to speak with the dead and the spirits of things older than the moon and sun.”

The camera emerges from the woods to a clearing at the head of a valley. The overgrown ruins of an Orthodox chapel abut the cliff-face. Warning signs in Russian and Georgian demand the reader turn back or be shot. The lopsided bulk of a Soviet troop carrier rusts where it came to rest. Faded graffiti tags splatter vehicle, church, rock wall in acrylic petroglyphs.

Stepping around brush and rubble, the camera enters the chapel through a hole in the wall. Time has reduced the iconostasis to a pile of rotting wood, bird shit, saints peeled of paint until they are faceless shapes. The altar and the stone it rested on lie disturbed, thrown aside by some moment of violence to reveal an open pit into the rock, sloping away into darkness. The camera goes just up to the edge, peering down into the gloom.

“You can fly too close to more than just the sun.”

The camera drops suddenly into the hole; the tape ends with a flash of black and then static.

 

**

 

Tape #26

Totalizing, featureless dark. Raspy breathing, footsteps on stone, the brush of a hand against an unseen wall. No light has ever reached this place.

At 11 seconds, a woman begins speaking. Unidentifiable words, flat intonation. Echoes bounce in irregular, chaotic waves. Yellow subtitles flicker at the bottom of the screen.

“My name is ████, of the ████████; my mother was ███████; her mother was █████. I was inducted into the mysteries by █████████████████. ██████ son of █████ was the love of my heart. I have no daughters nor sons.”

The mantra goes on. Her voice grows rough as recitation wears at her throat. She stumbles and skips over words, chokes on her breath, repeats phrases or names in loops, stops suddenly and starts anew from the beginning. Acoustic analysis provides the lightest implication of her surroundings.

On the 23rd cycle, she pauses midway and then resumes after an extended exertion. 

Running water is briefly audible on the 58th cycle.

On the 71st cycle, she slips and falls, and lays still for two minutes and ten seconds. All following cycles are recited with severe discomfort.

By the 110th cycle, there’s not enough space for an echo. Her footsteps transition into the shuffle of hands and knees, and then a sporadic dragging.

During the 135 cycle, she stops moving at all.

She stops speaking midway through the 294th cycle, repeating “the love of my heart” twice before falling silent. Ragged breathing continues for another seven hours and twelve minutes; footage continues indefinitely afterwards.

**

1925: China has been in a state of war, civil and otherwise, for nearly a century. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. J. Elias arrive in Shanghai by steamer ship. They will leave a string of corpses in their wake as they attempt to dismantle the Great Lady Society, and by week's end three of them will be dead, two will be in jail, and one will vanish into the night. On July 7th 1962, he will emerge from the Siberian forest, approach a Soviet guard station, request a doctor in perfect Russian, and keel over dead on the spot.

**

Tape #??

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of corpses underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill the background. She is eating a charred shank of meat with a human foot attached. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:

“We’ve been here before, haven’t we?”

She’s speaking in English, this time. Her subtitles are a meaningless snarled jumble: Hanzi, Mkhedruli, Avestan, Latin, Devanagari.

"You know the line already, I won’t bore you by repeating it."

She swallows her mouthful, but doesn’t take another bite. A butterfly lands on her shoulder; she ignores it.

“There were seven of us, once. The mother. The hunter. The witch. The warrior. The exile. The fool. And me. Seven sisters, not of blood but of bond, all gone. Now there’s just me. They left me behind, or I went on ahead.”

She flicks the butterfly away.

"I appreciate the company."

She resumes eating in silence, with no apparent endpoint.

**

Basement
Concrete and cinder block. High enough to stand upright, but you cannot shake the instinct to duck. Buzzing incandescent bulb; murky gold-orange light. Cool, wet air reeks of meat, shit, and fear.

• Handcuffs dangle from a pipe affixed to the wall.
• Floor drain caked in brown-black sludge.
• Bear-resistant trash disposal. MEAT BOX scribbled in paint pen over every available inch of surface space.
• CRT television with built-in VCR player on dusty workbench.
• Light blue plastic milk crate containing one VHS tape; cardboard box labeled in Hanzi by two different hands
• Bold permanent marker: DO NOT VIEW
• Shaky pencil: SHE SINGS AT THE END

  

**

Video #NaN

Exterior. Day. 

A woman in a blood-crusted Vikings jersey stands in knee-deep snow, suburban housing behind her, and stares directly down the camera barrel.

“I regret to inform you that the future is an illiterate fascist in a bunker raping his lobotomized daughters, forever. The LLM side-loaded into his proprietary brain implant showers him with praise. His sons, arrayed like the shining hosts of heaven in their electric trucks, will ride out into the concentration camps for sport and will stack the dead like buffalo skulls.” 

She stumbles sideways, as if struck by a heavy wind. The snow is undisturbed.

“A quart of wheat for a dogecoin, and three quarts of barley for an etherium; but do not damage the soylent or Mr. Beast’s kitchen.”

She grimaces, as if straining to keep down vomit. Words struggle for purchase.

“The last men on Mars will eat each other. An agoge will be built on the National Mall. The mighty ones shall cry out ‘Father! Father!’ to a god that died before the sun was born.”

Somewhere in the distance, a dog bays. She staggers towards the camera. An eye has changed: black sclera, red iris, gold pupil like an inverted Y.

“There is a worm in the heart of the universe and its law is red.”

She steps back, closes her eyes, and takes a long, deep breath. In. Out. Again. Then she opens her eyes and shrugs.

“But what are you gonna do? I’m just the-”

A gunshot cracks; the bullet hits her in the back of the head and bursts out from her right temple. She falls forward in a limp pile with a soft whumph.

She doesn’t get back up.

Twenty seconds later, two men in tactical gear and balaclavas enter the frame. They inspect the body, exchange a few muffled words, and the tape ends.

**

The final act is upon us. With the poise and elegance of a kalpa's practice, the soprano takes the stage for one last aria. She smiles at the shadowed audience, raises a hand…

It is the end of the last opera in the world.

**

Well then, here we are. This post took three years to write, possibly a bit longer, and there’s an entire scrapped essay about the process. (I still have the draft, if folks want to read it: let me know in the comments.)

(Edit: Essay written, here it is.)

Tā È will be a familiar face to longtime readers of the blog (if I haven’t borked it, those characters at the top should translate as “she is hungry” - this isn't technically her name, just the label on that first tape, but it works in a pinch). The form she takes here is an amalgamation of sources: her first iteration was a minor mod / reference to 2016 shotgun scenario Do Not View by Trung Bui (see Operation HYACINTH) where I swapped out Y’golonac for the Bloated Woman from Masks of Nyarlathotep. Then she shows up in untitled.mp4 in the Lighthouse Field Guide and TAKE-HOME CONTAINER, and then once (possibly twice, depending on how you interpret the Secret Mark recitation) in my anomalous media post.

Anyway, surprising absolutely no one, the Bloated Woman’s writeup in Masks of Nyarlathotep and the Malleus Monsteorum is absolutely terrible, and it's that special kind of bad where the part of my brain that has dumb ideas is compelled by its badness goes "you should totally make a good version of this idea as a writing challenge / for style points." 

From there she also inherited some theories I had about Tom Haan from The Magnus Archives: I totally understand why he got dropped from the show (having the most prominent Chinese character be a cannibalistic monster does skew close to some old Yellow Peril tropes), but! in 2/3 of his on-air appearances, Tom dabbles in Christianity-flavored flesh horror; I was expecting his plot to have some connection to the Taiping Rebellion (since that would be the historical context where you'd most likely get all three factors in one place), but TMA didn't go that route and I kept it in my back pocket. Hopefully I didn't fuck it up. 

I guess I do need to finish that essay now: this outro is getting bogged down with me summarizing it.

It took so much self-control to not have her drop "This is your coming century!" in the last tape.