Session Overview
The cell touched down in England and were immediately reminded that the British have their own way of doing things — namely, classified traffic-clearing glyphs, endless tea, and a deeply unsettling object the size of a dining table sitting in a warehouse outside Weymouth that might, might, be related to the thing that ate Captain Aldridge. No pressure. Welcome to the United Kingdom.
Gentlemen, Ladies, Welcome to England
Heathrow is the kind of airport that wears you down even before you've been through passport control — a cathedral to mild inconvenience, overpriced sandwiches, and existential dread. The cell emerged into arrivals jetlagged, alert, and carrying the particular tension of people who know the world is considerably worse than it appears. They were not, perhaps, at their most charming.
They didn't need to be. A woman was already waiting.
Mid-thirties, close-cropped hair, tailored suit, sturdy shoes — the kind of sensible footwear that suggests a person who has had to run across difficult terrain before and expects to do so again. She held a board with their cover names: James Smith, Linda Johnson, Robert Hunt, Trevor Ford. The very beige anonymity of the names said everything about who'd chosen them.
"Gentlemen, ladies," she said, stepping forward with the easy confidence of someone who knows exactly where she's parked. "Welcome to England."
Hanover answered warmly that it was a pleasure to be there. The pleasantries were brief. The woman — Harry Lane, though that would come later — had transport waiting.
A Bubble of Very Classified Clear Space
The government Range Rover outside was, to put it charitably, discreet. Blacked-out windows, a heavyset driver named Pete, and an inexplicable knack for finding clear road in the dense arterial press of the M25. Not suspiciously clear road. Impossibly clear road. The kind of bubble of empty tarmac that simply does not occur on Britain's busiest motorway at any hour, under any conditions, for any reason.
Before anyone could ask about that, Pete tapped an app on the centre console — displaying a glyph that was somehow uncomfortable to look at directly, like a thought you couldn't quite finish — and confirmed the vehicle was secure. The screen returned to normal. Nobody commented. This was, apparently, fine.
With the privacy screen effectively sorted, Harry Lane relaxed and introduced herself properly: Harry Lane, Paranormal Intelligence Section for Counterintelligence Espionage and Sabotage. PISCES. Britain's answer to the same question Delta Green was answering, approached with rather more institutional patience and considerably more tea.
She offered Red Bull from the centre console mini fridge. Hanover accepted. Hertz declined with a quiet "I will not," as though he'd been personally affronted by the suggestion. (Fair enough. The man works in quantum physics. He has standards.) Harry mentioned there was Talisker if anyone needed something stronger. Nobody said no to that.
She acknowledged the history — relations between PISCES and Delta Green had not always been easy — with the diplomatic understatement of someone who'd clearly read the files and found them wanting. But she was pragmatic about it. "Borders mean nothing to the entities we face," she said. They were all just ants, relative to what was out there.
Hex confirmed the cell had prior history with Deep Ones. He was honest about it: they hadn't stopped them, just kicked the can. Harry took that in stride. "Some days, that's all we can do," she said. "But the buggers are up to something, or someone has disturbed them — we're not sure which."
It was about then that Hanover interrupted to ask if anyone else had heard brass band music and a voice on the radio.
The radio wasn't on.
She tried to make sense of the voice — reached for it the way you reach for a word on the tip of your tongue — and came up empty. Hex gently noted the radio's absence. He suggested it was probably connected to things they'd already seen. Nobody disagreed. Nobody pushed the point either, because some questions are better left unasked in a moving vehicle with classified glyphs on the dashboard.
The Situation, As She Understands It
The briefing proper happened in fits and starts as the Range Rover left the M25 and merged onto the M3, accelerating toward the southwest at a speed that would have been alarming in any vehicle that wasn't apparently exempt from all known traffic laws. A few weeks ago, Harry explained, something washed up on the shores of Dorset. It confused locals, killed wildlife — rapidly, horribly, with accelerated decomposition that had no business happening in the timeframe it did — and ever since, things had been going odd. Unusual manifestations. Increased community tension. Restless locals in Weymouth.
Hex named it before she had to: the Deep Energy wind farm project off the coast. Harry confirmed PISCES had reached the same conclusion. That's why they'd reached out to the specialists.
Hertz — who had been quietly processing everything with the expression of a man who has just been handed an equation that doesn't balance — leaned toward the nearest colleague and murmured, barely above a whisper: "The reserve?" Haze confirmed, with the patience of a man who has explained this before: yes, that's Delta Green. Well done.
The financial picture that emerged from the collective intelligence was murky in a way that suggested deliberate obscurity. Deep Energy had very deep pockets. A consortium backing them through green and sovereign funds, but no names attached. Their books didn't reflect the money haemorrhaging out of them. Someone, somewhere, was very interested in what was happening off the Dorset coast. Harry admitted PISCES hadn't been able to get to the bottom of it either, and appeared to find the ongoing legal case between a subcontractor and the wind farm company genuinely entertaining — "like two scorpions in a jar," she said, with the fond tone of someone watching a sport they enjoy.
Hanover asked about the historical anomalies — the perturbations, the way things that had happened seemed to be shifting, timelines snagging like fabric on a nail. Harry said she personally hadn't spotted them, but their contact in Exeter reported they were happening, and she trusted him.
(The GM, at this point, helpfully clarified for the table the exact shape of what was shifting: an alternate history where the Axis won the Second World War, where much of Europe and the former Empire had been under Axis control since the mid-1950s, where the Reich had replaced the Soviet Union in something that looked like a Cold War. A reminder that when Delta Green says things are bad, they mean it on a civilisational scale.)
There was a detour through gun laws — Haze, to absolutely nobody's surprise, asked — which Harry handled with the practised patience of someone who'd anticipated the question. England, she explained, essentially had none. If firearms became necessary, PISCES had means to arrange them. But they did not walk around openly armed. This was, she implied, a feature rather than a bug.
Hertz asked how the traffic bubble worked. Harry told him it was classified. He accepted this with the equanimity of a man who has learned that some doors are locked for good reason.
A Name from Occult Circles
Somewhere on the motorway, a piece of recognition settled into place for Hanover. PISCES — the name wasn't new. It surfaced in occult literature, the kind of obscure circles where these things get whispered rather than written. An organisation interested in containing and controlling the unnatural. Not burning it all down. Not "stop the incursion, obscure the incursion, secure the assets." Something more... acquisitive. Whether that was a comfortable distinction or an uncomfortable one remained to be seen. But it was worth knowing.
Tea, Infinite Tea, and One Very Oxford Professor
They passed Stonehenge on the way — a fact the session noted without ceremony, because when you're en route to investigate a possibly eldritch object on the Dorset coast, ancient monolithic stone circles are simply part of the scenery. Eventually they arrived at a grey concrete block of a building that screamed provincial British government offices in the way that only buildings designed in the 1970s to be dispiriting can manage. Cold, grey, drizzling. Exeter in January. Perfect.
Inside, past the security door and open-plan office clutter, a meeting room. And in it: a gentleman who was the Platonic ideal of an Oxford professor. Thinning grey hair. Wire-framed spectacles. Leather elbow patches on his tweed jacket. Oxford shoes. He stood to greet them with genuine warmth, as though Americans appearing in his DEFRA cover office after a transatlantic flight was the most natural thing in the world.
Fincher.
Hertz stepped forward to shake his hand and introduce himself. Fincher's eyes lit up — a fellow academic — and confirmed that Hertz's particular speciality would be most useful. Hanover introduced herself by codename. Fincher identified her at once: signals intelligence, sideline in the occult. Haze shook Fincher's hand — and immediately, in the spirit of professional courtesy, warned him that there was something wrong with his colleague Harry.
Fincher dismissed this with the absolute firmness of someone who has heard this before and found it tiresome. Harry had been extensively checked. She was fine. The kind of thing Haze was suggesting only happened once. Harry, for her part, gave Haze a look that suggested she was filing this away for later.
Fincher deduced Hex by elimination — the forensic accounting specialist — shook his hand, and invited them all to sit. He offered instant coffee or tea — "endless supply of tea" — and dispatched Harry to fetch it with the casual ease of a man utterly comfortable delegating. The cell settled in.
The Filament Heart
Fincher's briefing was methodical, slightly fumbling with the laptop connection to the screen, and quietly alarming.
It had started roughly three weeks prior, in late December. Something had washed up on the Dorset coast after a vicious storm. Images appeared on the screen: an object, and the wildlife around it. Dead things, decomposing at rates that were simply impossible. A dog — a spaniel, as it happened — had run up to sniff the object and dropped dead on the spot. It had been cremated before an autopsy could be performed. The other wildlife showed advanced decomposition far beyond what the timeline allowed, but with a particular quality that made it more disturbing rather than less: the organic bonds had been severed cleanly. No oozing. No liquids. As if time itself had been... edited.
Fincher declined to share PISCES's suspicions about what the object was, not wanting to lead them down blind alleys. He would show them. Let them form their own conclusions.
The object had been named the filament heart. Slightly heart-shaped, if you squinted. When they'd extracted a sample — using diamond-tipped robotic manipulators, requiring considerably more force than anticipated, yielding only the smallest possible quantity — it hadn't come away as a discrete chunk. It was filamentous. A tightly woven web of material. And when the extraction site was examined afterwards, there was no mark. No pockmark, no scar, no cracking. As if the sample had never been taken.
Hertz, methodical as ever, worked through the implications systematically:
- A centrifuge and gas chromatograph were among the equipment at the secure facility — recognisable, even hastily assembled.
- The object showed photophosphorescence when exposed to higher UV bands, but was otherwise unresponsive to standard tests.
- No radiation or anomalous fields had been detected. Contact skin-to-skin with the object appeared deleterious to living matter, but proximity was ostensibly safe.
- The object had been at the facility roughly a fortnight. The lab technician on site had been there ten days. He appeared healthy, though equipment around the object was failing at an above-average rate — capacitors shorting, circuit board traces corroding. He attributed this to budget cuts and poor equipment quality. (He was, as the GM drily noted, giving off significant "Brent Spiner in Independence Day" energy — fascinated by the science, entirely unbothered by the implications.)
- The weight of the filament heart, the lab technician mentioned, depended on how you measured it and which way up it was. They hadn't resolved that.
- The woven lattice structure of the filament sample implied construction rather than organic formation. Something had made this.
The object was approximately one and a half to two metres at its longest dimension. It had arrived from the southwest — washed up on Chesil Beach, several miles up the coast from Weymouth. The drift came from the direction of Cap de la Hague.
Hertz noted that Cap de la Hague is pretty much due south of Chesil Beach.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
Fincher wrapped up the briefing by strongly advising the Americans not to carry firearms on British soil. The local police took a very dim view. He also apologised for the limited resources available to assist — there had been, he explained with genuine regret, "a terrible outbreak of the fairies in the Highlands," and a good portion of the department had been forced to go north to deal with it. He appeared entirely sincere about this. The cell took it in stride. These things happen.
Quarters had been arranged at the local Travelodge. Pete would drive them to Weymouth in the morning. Harry would serve as their liaison.
What a Fortnight Does to Equipment (And Everything Else)
The drive to the Travelodge, the night's rest, a perfunctory British hotel breakfast — and then the Range Rover again, heading east. The warehouse on the industrial estate outside Weymouth was nondescript to the point of aggression, the kind of building specifically designed not to attract attention. The security arrangements, however, were anything but nondescript.
Inside, a jury-rigged cleanroom: hanging clear plastic sheeting, air filtration equipment, large hoses, and the hastily assembled analysis station Hertz had been told to expect. A lab technician in a white coat met them. The object, he explained, defied conventional analysis. It appeared completely inert by most measures, yet obviously wasn't.
Haze, who had heard enough, flatly declined to look at it. He had his reasons. Good ones.
Hanover wanted to see it immediately. Hertz specified he would view it from a safe distance — specifically via camera, before committing to any proximity. The lab technician walked them through the findings, answered Hertz's methodical questions, confirmed the camera feeds were active, and helped Hanover into a positive-pressure bunny suit with external air supply. She passed through the airlock — a blast of gas, a wash of blue light, a change of hose connection — and entered the cleanroom.
The filament heart sat on a stainless steel surgical table.
Hanover walked around it. Examined it carefully. And then a memory pushed its way in, unbidden and entirely unwelcome: the inner sanctum of the Church of the Twelve Martyrs. The meteorite. The feeling of wrongness that had preceded everything that came after.
The feeling was the same. The scale was different — this was considerably larger — but the quality of it, the particular texture of the wrongness, was identical.
She stood her ground. She held it together. But she was certain.
Back in the main space of the warehouse, Hex hadn't needed to go anywhere near the cleanroom for the memories to hit. They arrived uninvited: gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades detonating at close quarters, the sounds of Captain Aldridge being consumed. The creature screaming father through many mouths — the thing they had later understood was called Silence Root, the child of something that did not have a name they wanted to say aloud.
Hex held that together too. Just about.
The two of them compared notes. The filament heart was like the meteorite, Hanover said — but bigger. The original had been perhaps a foot across. You could pick it up. This was a different order of magnitude.
And then Hex mentioned, almost as an aside, that he was hearing brass music and a deep voice speaking from the speakers. Had been hearing it since they arrived. It was messing with his head.
Hanover confirmed she'd heard something on the radio in the car that morning. Nothing comparable to what Hex was describing — a different sound entirely, and she'd been, as the GM put it, mercifully spared that particular frequency. Haze admitted he'd experienced a couple of brief sensory anomalies since landing, though nothing musical — just fleeting wrongnesses that corrected themselves, the kind of thing you might attribute to a long-haul flight if you were inclined to lie to yourself about it.
Hertz, for his part, said he was just frowning at all of them.
(Honestly, the most rational response available.)
A Name for the Thing That Ate Three People
Hanover, still processing everything she'd felt in the cleanroom, tried to reach for connections — to find the thread that linked the filament heart to Silence Root, to name the category of thing they were dealing with. The first attempt slipped away from her. The second caught.
She came out of the cleanroom, removed the bunny suit, and waited until she was well out of any potential earshot of the object before she said what she'd worked out.
A Shoggoth. Possibly proto-Shoggoth. The Church of the Twelve Martyrs thing — the meteorite that had grown, and woken, and screamed, and eaten people, and required small arms and a grenade to put down — matched the descriptions from occult texts well enough that she was willing to commit to the name. It was their best reference point. It wasn't certainty. But when something that might be a Shoggoth is sitting on a table in a warehouse outside Weymouth at a scale considerably larger than the last one you encountered, ten percent chance it's the same category of threat still warrants covering it with something heavy and getting more ordnance into the room.
Harry had already stepped out to make phone calls before Hanover finished making the argument.
Hex reflected that they'd now encountered something in this family, and then a Deep One, within fairly rapid succession. A pattern of escalating encounters. He asked whether entities like Shoggoths coexist with other threats or compete for dominance. Nobody had an answer. They had no way of knowing.
What they knew was this: something constructed, possibly living, definitely wrong, was sitting in a warehouse in Weymouth. The historical timeline was shifting. The Deep Ones were disturbed or stirring. The anomalous sounds were getting more frequent.
The time was around ten o'clock in the morning.
It was going to be a long day.
To be continued...
Current situation: The cell is in Weymouth, Dorset. They have eyes on the filament heart. They have a working hypothesis about what it is, a PISCES liaison making phone calls about ordnance, and a physicist who is frowning very hard at all of them.
Threats identified: One possible proto-Shoggoth (contained, for now). Deep One activity in the area. Historical timeline perturbations centred on the Weymouth Deep Energy Project. A lab technician who is having the time of his professional life and absolutely should not be.
Sounds heard by the cell (running tally): Brass band music — Hanover, Hex. Deep voice speaking gibberish — Hex. Brief unspecified sensory anomalies — Haze. Hertz remains entirely unaffected and would like it noted he finds this suspicious about everyone else.
Firearms situation: Complicated.
Tea situation: Apparently endless.