Session Overview
The drums have stopped. The flutes are silent. The world, against all reasonable expectation, continues to exist — and H-Cell is responsible for that, which is either deeply reassuring or deeply terrifying depending on how you feel about the state of the people who saved it. This session saw the operatives wrestle with the unglamorous aftermath of preventing an apocalypse, scatter to their separate corners to decompress (with varying degrees of success), and then reconvene over fast food to discover that the universe — or something in it — has been leaving them breadcrumbs. All roads, it seems, lead to the south coast of England. Someone, or something, is very deliberately pointing them there. The only question is whether it's a rescue line or a noose.
Aftermath: The Smell of Burning and Bad Decisions
The immediate crisis was over. The convergence had been stopped. The critical moment had passed, and with it, the impossible sound — those drums, those flutes, that wrongness at the edge of hearing — had finally, mercifully, gone quiet. What remained was considerably less metaphysical and considerably more awkward: a van full of cable-tied researchers and security personnel, a colleague bleeding out on the floor, and Doctor Takanawa.
Poor Doctor Takanawa.
'It sounds like he's essentially being microwaved,' Haze noted, with the flat pragmatism of a man who has learned to emotionally compartmentalise at industrial scale. 'There ain't really much we can do.' He was right. Whatever process had been set in motion within the good Doctor was not something a field kit was going to address, and explaining to a paramedic that your colleague was glowing in the ultraviolet spectrum and cooking from the inside out was the sort of conversation nobody was prepared to have tonight. Hex was still unconscious, having taken a bullet that had removed him from the evening's proceedings entirely, which left Haze and Hertz to sort out the mess.
And what a mess it was.
Delta Green's priorities, in order, are admirably clear in theory and absolutely nightmarish in practice: stop the incursion, obscure the incursion, obscure Delta Green's involvement, secure advanced technology, save lives. The incursion was stopped. Marvellous. Now came the obscuring.
Hertz's eye was drawn to the CCTV cameras mounted in the corners of the room — quietly recording everything, storing it locally, and batch-uploading to a remote server every night at midnight. The clock was ticking. Approximately ninety minutes remained before everything the cameras had captured — the operatives, the chaos, all of it — transmitted itself into the digital ether. Hertz sat down at the console and got to work. The delete commands flew, the upload was severed, and the immediate evidence of their presence was contained. First win of the evening's mop-up.
The researchers, however, were a thornier problem. Seven of them, bound and confused, with families who would notice their absence and whose last known location was this facility. Hertz reasoned through the cover-up with the methodical grimness of a man who had not signed up for this and was nevertheless doing the maths: the missing CCTV footage, the arson investigation that would inevitably follow a fire, the insurance investigators, the absence of bodies. A fire might actually raise more questions than it answered. Haze, meanwhile, was more direct in his thinking.
The decision, ultimately, was not entirely theirs to make. Hertz placed a carefully coded call to their handler, confirming — in the dry language of people who've agreed never to say what they actually mean on the telephone — that an unnatural incident had been resolved, but that there were 'affected individuals requiring attention.' The response came back equally measured: return the damaged goods to the warehouse, clean up, and come home.
The facility burned. Hex was loaded into the car. The captive researchers were handed off to armed figures who materialised out of the dark to receive them, their futures now a matter for people considerably further up the chain. It was not a clean resolution. It was the only resolution. And as the operatives drove away from the glow on the horizon, each of them quietly pocketed their twenty-five sanity points like change from a transaction they'd rather not examine too closely.
Scattered: The Art of Not Coping
A couple of months passed. Each operative went their separate way to process — or, in some cases, to not process — what had happened.
Haze: Into the Woods
Haze, to his credit, had a plan. A cabin in the woods. A legally registered rifle. The discipline of early rising, running, and shooting — the ritual comfort of a man whose world makes more sense when he can apply physics and precision to something. He turned off his phone, cut contact with everyone including Princeton, and let the routine do its work. The woods were quiet. The routine was soothing. His rifle optics, however, were not cooperating — shots landing somewhere other than where the sights suggested, passing through targets to strike things behind them, defying the basic geometry of ballistics. He polished the lenses. He checked the zero. He kept shooting. It helped, in the way that doing something helps even when the thing itself is slightly wrong.
It was whilst policing his brass — a meditative ritual of its own, picking up spent casings, accounting for every round — that he found it. A casing that didn't belong to his rifle. Warped and melted in a way that implied heat, except there hadn't been any heat. The surface bore something that wasn't quite a marking and wasn't quite not one — a glyph that seemed to shift just slightly when you weren't looking directly at it. Haze turned it over in his hands, applied his not-insubstantial knowledge of unusual things, and came up with nothing except the absolute certainty that this was wrong. He bagged it separately from the rest of his brass and filed it under 'problems for later.'
Hertz: On the Case
Hertz did not decompress. Hertz does not, as a rule, decompress. What Hertz did was stay on the case — poring through patents, research filings, and government databases, mapping the financial and institutional genealogy of the hollow beam array they'd destroyed. It cost him time he probably owed his son Jack, and he paid it anyway, because the physics was right there and the question wouldn't let go.
The array, he discovered, was funded by something called Olympian Advances — a subsidiary of March Technologies Inc. The founder of March Technologies: a retired US Air Force Lieutenant General, a decorated Vietnam fighter pilot, a man whose career between 1980 and 2004 was so heavily classified it practically radiated do not look at this from the records. The kind of classified that isn't about protecting national security so much as it's about protecting very specific individuals from very specific scrutiny.
Then his screen flickered. The font shifted in a way that screens don't shift. Hertz, being Hertz, ran the diagnostics and found something that shouldn't have been there — a corrupted data packet, buried in his files. He dug it out, cracked it open, and found two things: a low-resolution photograph of a coastline that reverse image searching identified as Dorset, England, and fragments of financial records for something called the Weymouth Deep Energy Project. The financials were wrong — clearly wrong to anyone who looked at them, even if the specifics of how they were wrong required a forensic accountant to articulate. And then, extracted from the last fragments of corrupted data, two final pieces: a plain text message reading the signal is louder than you know, and GPS coordinates for a warehouse in Weymouth, Dorset.
Hertz sat back. 'How bizarre,' he said, to no one in particular.
Hex: Ghost in the Machine
Hex was having a harder time of it. The dissociative episodes weren't getting better — he'd seen a familiar building reflected in a shop window as a taller, brutalist version of itself, all wrong dimensions and wrong materials, before the reflection snapped back to normal. He was monitoring his suite of digital dead drops, the anonymous channels where informants left tips, when a file appeared that the metadata insisted had always been there. Hex ran every check he knew. The file was real. It existed. He hadn't imagined it.
Inside: a book cipher. The plain text phrase staring back at him was The black dog hunts at midnight, accompanied by a grid of numbers. Hex knew what a book cipher was — you needed the right book, the right edition, to unlock it. He searched for the phrase as a book title. Nothing. He searched for the black dog legend, cross-referencing British folklore, supernatural accounts, regional mythology. The results were vast and unhelpful. Every trail went cold. He had the cipher and no key, and the frustration of a man who is very good at his job being defeated by the one thing his skillset couldn't crack.
Then a message arrived from Hertz, asking if they could meet.
When and where, Hex replied, and meant it.
Hanover: Documents and Deliveries
Hanover, meanwhile, had been doing what Hanover does — working her way through a document review, the kind of painstaking, careful linguistic archaeology that most people would find excruciating and she found genuinely engaging. Most documents were routine. One was not. She can't quite explain what made her hands slow and her attention sharpen, but something in the translation set off every instinct she had, and by the time she'd finished she'd quietly copied it under the guise of digitisation, slipping it into her files with the casual competence of someone who has done this sort of thing before.
She came home to find her keys not where she'd left them, then exactly where she'd left them. She chalked it up to stress. She was probably right. Probably.
The postman arrived just as she opened the front door — nearly nose-to-nose with her — and delivered a package addressed to her. Inside: a 1950s collection of Dorset folklore, vintage and slightly musty, annotated throughout in a hand she didn't recognise. The marginal notes returned again and again to things from the deep and unseen currents, the handwriting urgent in places and cramped in others, as if the annotator had been running out of either time or courage. And as she leafed through it, something fell out from between the pages — a coin. Old British pre-decimal, shaped like a shilling, but wrong in the hand. The density was off. The heft was off. It hadn't been warped by heat, but it had been warped by something, and on its surface, etched into the metal, were the initials W.B. and the date 1942.
Hanover looked at it for a long moment. Then she picked up her phone.
The Arby's Summit
January. A few months after the world nearly ended, four operatives sat down in a local Arby's in Washington DC and tried to have a normal meal. (Delta Green really does pick the venues.)
Hertz arrived first, settled in, and ordered a soda water. Haze arrived next, slightly on edge in the way of a man whose senses have been unreliable lately — the cold January air sharp against his face, and then, inexplicably, the brief cold sensation of something scaly brushing against his leg as he approached the door. Nothing there. He pushed through into the warmth and found Hertz.
'Life is weird,' Haze said, by way of greeting, and they shook hands. 'But I've had some time to recover. Have you had any calls from work?'
'I've been working on something myself,' Hertz told him. 'Intrigued. I was hoping maybe you could help me with it, actually — that's the reason you're here.'
Hanover arrived third, greeted the two men with a cheerful 'Hi, fellas,' and confirmed she was at the right table when questioned. Haze, by way of prompting recognition, mentioned he'd shaved his beard. And Hanover experienced something odd — a sudden vivid impression of a harder, colder, more haggard version of him, the image there and gone like a déjà vu that didn't quite resolve into anything she could hold. She filed it away. She was getting good at filing things away.
Then Hex arrived. Over half an hour late, slightly dishevelled, having paused at the door to experience a sudden rush of metallic taste, the smell of old blood and ozone, the distant sound of the sea, and the sharp reek of seaweed — all of which vanished the moment he stepped inside. The hostess, admirably unfazed, noted that his friends were already there, that he was over half an hour late, and offered him a drink.
'Coke,' Hex said. He spotted Hanover and his face shifted. 'You're a sight for sore eyes. Where have you been?'
'South America,' she said. 'On something I probably shouldn't say more about. Definitely not a pleasure, but.' She smiled anyway.
The pleasantries were brief. Hex looked around the table — two faces he knew, two he was still calibrating — and observed, with the directness of someone who's learned to cut to it, that everyone there seemed to be present because they could help each other. Hanover agreed. 'All roads lead to the same place,' she said. Hex nodded slowly.
'I think I have something that might help you,' he told her. 'Though I'm not certain.'
The Man from UPS
They were barely into their starters when Hertz spotted him: a man in a distinctive brown delivery uniform, entering the restaurant, speaking to the hostess, being directed to their table with the polite inevitability of a bad omen in workwear. Hertz asked, with admirable calm, whether anyone had placed an order.
No one had.
The delivery man approached and presented a package addressed — and this was the part that required a moment — to the table. Not to a name. To the table. Hex took it, signed for it, and opened it. Inside was yesterday's edition of the Times of London, and one of the front page teasers, in crisp broadsheet font, read: The Black Dog Hunts at Midnight — see page twelve for the exclusive report.
The silence around the table had a particular quality to it.
Hex's expression, for anyone watching him closely, was that of a man who has just been handed the missing piece of a puzzle by a postman from God-knows-where. 'The black dog,' he said, connecting it immediately to the book cipher sitting encrypted on his machine, 'originates in those areas — various areas around Dorset.' He confirmed the real headline on the Times website, because it is deeply important to be certain that reality is real when you work for Delta Green. The headline was genuine.
Hex laid out his theory: someone had been in contact with each of them, deliberately, breaking the information across different channels, different recipients, making it impossible to trace. Hertz frowned. 'No one sent me anything,' he said.
'You found something yourself,' Hex acknowledged. 'Doesn't mean the same hand didn't arrange for you to find it.'
What We Know: Weymouth
The food arrived. They ate. And piece by piece, across the table, the picture assembled itself.
Hertz had financial connections linking the people who'd funded the array to the Weymouth Deep Energy Project — connections that were clearly wrong in ways he couldn't fully articulate without a forensic accountant, probable shell companies moving money to destinations unknown. He'd found a corrupted data packet with a photograph of the Weymouth coastline and GPS coordinates for a warehouse there. The signal is louder than you know, the message had read.
Hex and Hertz worked the book cipher together at the table, Hex reading coordinates, Hertz finding the corresponding words in the newspaper article, the plaintext emerging word by word. When they had it, Hanover read it aloud, steadily, as if she were reading a verdict:
'Weymouth Deep Energy Project disturbance at the core. Lifeguard failed. The anchor is loose. Expands the contact, the crossing. Reference Nightingale three seven. Use deep well alias. The path is set.'
The table was quiet for a moment.
'This could be a trap,' Hanover offered.
'Why would someone be setting a trap for us?' Hertz asked, with the genuine bafflement of a man who has not yet fully internalised what sort of person ends up on Delta Green's radar.
Hex asked whether anyone had been having strange experiences. The answer, delivered by everyone in various tones of understatement, was yes, obviously, continuously. Hanover produced the book she'd been sent — Dorset folklore, things from the deep, unseen currents. Hex noted, almost to himself, that black dogs originate from exactly those areas.
Then Haze put the bullet casing on the table.
He'd found it at his range, he explained. Didn't belong to his rifle. Didn't belong to any heat source he'd encountered. Had something on it he couldn't identify but knew was wrong. He handed it to Hanover, who examined it alongside the warped coin from her package, and felt the same wrongness in both — not identical, but related, the way two objects exposed to the same force retain some echo of it.
Hanover looked at the rune on the casing. Her expression changed.
She knew that rune. Not from a textbook — from Yuma. From a context she and Hex both shared and neither of them had wanted to revisit. The rune was associated with the entity Dagon. And her gut — that trained, paranormal instinct that exists below articulation — told her this wasn't just symbolic. Something was genuinely, actively wrong with the object in her hands. She attempted to push further into that wrongness, to understand it more deeply. The attempt did not go well. She pulled back, shaken, and settled for telling the group what she knew.
'The rune on the bullet casing,' she said, leaning in, 'relates to the entity Dagon. Which Hex and I have both encountered. And this—' she held up the casing '—appears to be some form of dangerous hypergeometry. Not just a symbol. The real thing.'
And then: 'Lifeguard,' Hex said quietly. He and Hanover exchanged a look. They'd seen that word before — in the document trove recovered from an earlier operation, in direct connection with Dagon. It wasn't a generic term. It meant something specific to something very old and very unpleasant.
'Past missions are linking together,' Hex said.
Hanover pulled out her documents — the ones she'd quietly copied during her review. She'd found, buried in the Karotechia archives, records of a 1942 operation: Delta Green operatives conducting a precision raid against a Karotechia facility at Cap de la Hague, with local resistance assistance. German records of the same engagement, from the other side of the barbed wire. The warped coin in her hand bore the initials W.B. and the date 1942. Karotechia documents from the same period referenced something called Schwarzwasser — Blackwater. W.B. Her German field report had described Operation Blackwater as a failure.
Then she opened the new document that had just been shared — another Karotechia memo, this one classified top secret, dated the 16th of December, 1942. She translated as she read, the German rolling into English steadily. Operation Blackwater debriefing. The Blackwater Initiative described as a decisive success. The final communion with Dagon fully secured.
She stopped.
She checked against her original translation. Then checked again.
'It's very different,' she said. The words were carefully even. 'This one seems to say they were successful. The original said it was a failure.'
The table looked at her. Then at the document. Then back at her.
Because the document, as far as anyone could determine — including Hanover herself — had not been altered. It was the same physical file she had worked from. No substitution. No tampering. The ink was the same. The paper was the same. The document was unchanged.
Her memory of what she had translated was also unchanged.
Both could not be true. Both were.
To Be Continued...
The world continues to exist, which is nice. H-Cell's current status, however:
- Hex is having sensory episodes that smell like the sea and old blood — presumably unrelated to the impending coastal investigation (presumably)
- Haze's rifle range has become a delivery address for cursed artefacts, which is not what the lease agreement covers
- Hertz found a haunted data packet in his files, discovered a classified military career with two decades of blackouts, and is somehow the most composed person at the table
- Hanover is now in possession of a warped pre-decimal coin, a book of Dorset folklore annotated by person or persons unknown, and a Karotechia document that has apparently rewritten itself
- Operation Blackwater: successful or failed? The answer appears to depend on when you look
- Someone — or something — has been coordinating breadcrumbs across multiple operatives through multiple channels. Whether this someone is a friend is left as an exercise for the reader
- All roads lead to Weymouth. A small town on the south coast of England with a deep energy project, a warehouse with GPS coordinates, and something very wrong at its core
- The anchor is loose. Whatever that means, it does not sound good.
Sanity checks survived: several. Questions answered: almost none. Spicy quarter-pound brisket sandwiches consumed: at least one.