Session Overview
The filament heart sits in its warehouse like a patient, terrible secret, and H-Cell has spent this session doing what Delta Green operatives do best: pulling at threads until the whole tapestry unravels into something deeply, cosmically wrong. From a security audit that ended with demolition charges on the to-do list, through fishermen's hushed confessions at a Dorset quay, to a pub television showing a world that shouldn't exist — and finally to a small boat swallowed by something vast and dark beneath the channel — this was a session of slow-burning dread punctuated by the kind of revelations that make you question not just the mission, but the entire shape of history itself. And then the lights went out.
All That Keeps the Thing Inside
The session opened where the last one left off: the warehouse containment facility, the filament heart lurking in its secured room like a bruise on reality, and the team very much aware that the building around it was designed to keep people out rather than things in. A distinction that, under present circumstances, felt rather important.
Harry had stepped outside to make calls, and when she returned, she made a beeline for Haze. "I understand that you're the group's security consultant," she said. "Heavy weapons specialist." Haze, with the particular weariness of someone who has seen what these things can do, confirmed he was the closest they had to one. Harry asked for an audit. He got to work.
What followed was a methodical, expert sweep of the building — and what Haze determined was not comforting. His trained eye traced the structural bones of the place, identifying load-bearing points where demolition charges, precisely placed, could bring the entire building down on itself like a controlled demolition. Not a plan you draft unless you've seriously considered the alternative.
Meanwhile, Hex was quietly running his own mental audit — specifically, trying to recall whether the creature from their previous encounter had ever been confirmed dead. The answer, dredged up with grim certainty, was no. No kill confirmed. No body recovered. The thing that had eaten a captain's helmet, captain still inside, had simply... not been found. He shared this with the group, and the temperature in the room dropped several degrees without anyone touching a thermostat.
Haze laid out his recommendations to Harry with the calm precision of a man who has given a lot of thought to worst-case scenarios:
- Explosive charges positioned beneath the filament heart itself, ready to detonate at a moment's notice.
- Demolition charges at the structural points he had identified, set to collapse the building inward and bury the thing.
- Round-the-clock CCTV monitoring — crucially, with a second observer monitoring the first, to catch the moment someone watching the screen starts to drift into whatever passes for madness near these objects.
- Rotating armed teams, heavy weapons, no one standing watch alone.
"If it gets up," Haze explained, with the tone of a man outlining sensible contingencies, "the guards attempt to stop it with firearms. If that fails, we detonate the building remotely." He presented this to Harry as if he were suggesting enhanced fire suppression systems. Which, in a sense, he was.
Harry took it in. She would need to make calls. Call in some favours. "They should be able to get some or all of what you've asked," she said — and then, almost as an afterthought: "Although they may need your help placing the charges. Specifically inside the containment zone." A tomorrow problem, she said. (No one visibly shuddered. They are professionals.)
Hertz, meanwhile, was thinking about the larger picture — which is where Hertz tends to operate. He raised the question of what the group actually intended to do about all this beyond securing a warehouse, and that brought the conversation around to the anchor. Haze had been turning a theory over in his mind since the previous session, and now he voiced it: the decoded message had mentioned that the anchor was loose. What if the filament heart was the anchor? A physical object, not a metaphorical one. And if it had been disturbed — washed ashore in that storm, hauled out of the deep — that would explain rather a lot about the current situation.
Hex connected this immediately to the Weymouth Deep Energy project. An offshore wind farm, turbines being sunk into the seabed, footings drilled into bedrock. It was, when you thought about it, precisely the sort of activity that might dislodge something that had been sitting undisturbed on the channel floor for decades. He recalled the details of the legal dispute he had previously uncovered — a subcontractor named Jones Engineering, accusations of substandard concrete in the footings, structural failures — and wondered aloud whether the survey data might pinpoint exactly where something had gone wrong. Or rather, where something had been found.
The wind farm, the GM noted, was large. North of fifty turbines, visible from Portland by the lighthouse, out in the channel. A significant area of seabed to search without something more specific to go on. They would need information. They would need to go to Weymouth.
The Symbol on the Paper
Before anyone could head anywhere, Hanover had been quietly doodling.
It was the sort of absent-minded drawing you don't notice yourself doing — hand moving on paper while the conversation flows around you — until you look down and realise you've drawn something precise. Something that wasn't quite from memory and wasn't quite from imagination. She held it up. "This. I think the symbol I saw was this." She posted it to the group's shared channel for everyone to examine.
The symbol had an eye-like quality to it, but Hex noted it seemed layered — as if multiple symbols had been overlaid on top of one another, each individually recognisable but combined into something new. Hanover brought her knowledge of occult symbolism to bear on it, and came up with... nothing. Not "nothing familiar" in the ordinary sense, but genuinely nothing matching anything she had encountered before. Harry Lane, consulted separately, was equally at a loss.
Undeterred, Hanover turned to university archaeological databases — and here she had considerably more luck, her search cutting through the academic bureaucracy with surgical efficiency. Whether any results would ultimately prove useful remained to be seen, but the avenue was open.
What did happen, and unnerved everyone at the table, was Hex's experience while staring at the symbol. "I don't know if I was staring at that symbol for too long," he said, "but there was a strange map just come up." Not on any screen he had opened. Just there, briefly, before it vanished. "Like a street map. The streets weren't recognised. It was more like a grid. And the names — they're not familiar at all. And it was a strange font." He tried to hold onto it, to sketch it from memory. Whatever he'd seen slipped away like a dream on waking, leaving only the wrongness behind.
And then two new documents appeared in their shared files. No notification. No sender. Just there.
Haze read the first one aloud. It bore the header of a Nazi-era ministry — a Ministry of Population and Purity, Department of Demographic Optimisation — and was dated April 1958. (Note that date. 1958. File that away.) Report DOP 5800 3EUR described population "optimisation" programmes across the European Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines. Birth rates. The transport of "volunteers." Reproductive experiments with an unidentified "element." Subject mortality increasing with repeated interactions.
Hanover read the second. Ministry for Energy and Special Projects. Department for Anomalous Power Generation. October 1959. Report APG/TU 59001 detailed the resource utilisation of something called "Primaris biologics material" — 125,000 units consumed — to fuel anomalous power generators across Central Europe and the Eastern Front, with projections for expansion.
The silence after Hanover finished reading was the particular silence of people doing very unpleasant mental arithmetic.
Haze voiced what everyone was thinking: the documents described using an unidentified element on something — the "primary biological material" — to generate power. The Deep Ones as fuel. Or the filament heart as catalyst. Or both. "I assume they're using an unknown element on the Deep Ones to generate power," he said. "The Primaris biological material could be the thing in the way."
A Nazi state, apparently still operational into the late 1950s, running industrial-scale supernatural power generation programmes. That was the shape of what they were looking at. The implications were considerable, and the group had barely begun to process them when Haze made a practical suggestion: they should go to Weymouth.
Dissociative Episodes and Verification Protocols
In the midst of all this — because these things happen in the middle of briefings, as any Delta Green operative will tell you — the group paused to address the growing problem of their own perceptions.
Hanover mentioned it first, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone reporting a minor but persistent fault: she was seeing visual disturbances. Faces looking subtly wrong. Symbols appearing on surfaces. Not always, not constantly, but more frequently and more widely distributed than the episodes she had experienced before.
Haze confirmed he had noticed something similar — Harry's face, when they had first arrived, had done something he couldn't quite describe. He had not mentioned it at the time, which was perhaps understandable given the circumstances.
Hex described his own anomalies: brass music when handling certain devices, a strange voice accompanying it. "It's been relatively... not heard it," he noted, in the way someone notes that a migraine hasn't come back yet, with more resignation than relief. His theory — voiced carefully, because it was the kind of theory that, once stated, becomes harder to dismiss — was that what they were experiencing was time bleeding in. The alternate timeline, whichever version of history had diverged from theirs, was advancing. Catching up. And the people around them in the original timeline might already be living in a world that had been quietly, invisibly rewritten.
This prompted Hex to propose something practical: they should log all anomalous experiences systematically, looking for patterns and increasing frequency. And they should re-establish their verification protocol. The code words. The response pairs. The system designed to determine, in a moment of crisis, whether you were talking to the person you knew or to something wearing their face.
Hex chose "Charlie" with the response "X-ray." Hanover chose "Alpha" and "Bravo." Haze settled on "Waffle" and "Domino." (You'll note these reveal something about each operative's psychological profile. We leave the interpretation as an exercise for the reader.) Hertz, who had drifted somewhat during the code-word discussion — entirely in character, he was keen to note — agreed he would come up with something. Eventually.
The question of the anchor itself remained thorny. "Is it an anchor for time," Hex asked, "or an anchor for something else — a being?" And the corollary: even if they could return it to its original location, getting it back to the exact right point was a question of precision they couldn't currently guarantee. An imprecise restoration might simply create another alternate timeline, and they would be no better off — just differently ruined.
Hertz applied his theoretical physics training to the problem and found it coming up short. Everything he had ever been taught said the past was fixed and the future unreachable. Current circumstances suggested his knowledge might be incomplete. He did not find this thought especially comforting.
The Quay at Weymouth
Pete drove them down. Weymouth in January: grey and cold and salt-smelling, the kind of coastal town that has a particular austere dignity out of season. The promenade stretched before them, a Victorian clock tower commemorating a queen, Portland Bill visible in the middle distance, and on the far eastern side of the bay, a grand art deco hotel built directly into the cliff — the sort of building that suggests better-heeled visitors in better-heeled times.
Down at the quay marina, past the promenade, the fishing boats still came and went. Pleasure craft, tourist vessels, working trawlers. Hanover moved among the fishermen with the ease of someone who knows how to listen, getting a feel for the place, the mood, the texture of local discontent.
The discontent was not hard to find. The Deep Energy project's exclusion zone had cut the fishing grounds off, and what the boats did bring up from the affected area was wrong — misshapen fish, sickly catches, things that looked like they'd come up from somewhere that didn't quite share the same biological rules as the rest of the English Channel. The fishermen were unhappy in the specific, pointed way of people who have watched their livelihoods quietly disappear while being told it's for the greater good of renewable energy.
Hex engaged one of the younger fishermen more directly — the older hands being inclined toward dismissiveness, the way of people who have decided that what they can't explain, they simply won't look at. This one was different. He leaned in and told them quietly: at night, near the wind farm, there were shapes moving in the water. Green and blue glows in the deep, the kind that make your head hurt to look at. Not like any bioluminescence he had ever seen in his life. The older fishermen called it algae and went back to their pints. He'd never seen anything like it.
Could he take them out to see it?
He looked around. Not on the skipper's boat, he said. But he'd got his Pa's boat. It'd fit four or five of them. Once the moon was up — it was a new moon tonight, nice and dark, easy enough to slip into the exclusion zone without being noticed. He introduced himself: Sam. They arranged to meet him at the docks at moonrise.
The Shape That Shouldn't Be
With the evening trip arranged, the group turned to the Deep Energy project's shore-side offices — located on an industrial estate on the far side of town, the kind of anonymous office building that could be processing insurance claims or, apparently, coordinating occult seabed engineering.
It had, it turned out, a visitor centre. A public-facing effort to win over local goodwill: informational displays, a café, and a large, detailed scale model of the wind farm layout. The sort of thing local planning committees get invited to tour before being told the consultation period has technically already closed.
Hanover attempted to breach the site's networks while they browsed, and found the security rather more robust than expected — everything locked, all patches current, no way in. She noted it for future attention. (Every locked door is just a skill improvement waiting to happen.)
Hertz, however, had stopped in front of the scale model.
He was staring at the turbine layout with the expression of a man who has noticed that something is profoundly, architecturally wrong with a building — not the obvious structural failure, but the subtle kind that a physicist feels in their bones before they can articulate it. He voiced it quietly: wind turbine patterns are laid out for optimal airflow, for maximising energy yield, and the mathematics of that produces regular, predictable arrangements. This one was wrong. Too many overlapping wind fields. Too many positions where turbines would actively interfere with each other's efficiency. No competent engineer would design it this way.
He took photographs on his phone and began reconstructing the overhead layout in his head, working through the geometry. And then the mathematics clicked into place, and Hertz went pale.
The turbine arrangement — viewed from above, as a pattern — was the glyph. The same non-Euclidean symbol that had appeared on the bullet casing. Rendered across the seabed of the English Channel, fifty-odd turbines serving as the lines of an impossible shape drawn in steel and concrete. The mental image of it seemed to struggle to stay in his head, as if some part of his mind was trying to protect him by refusing to hold it — but he held on, at the cost of something he couldn't quite quantify.
He looked up. "There's definitely a connection between this and what we were sent before," he told the team, and then, when pressed: the layout was not how you would build a wind farm for energy generation. Someone with the authority to override engineering objections had ensured it was built exactly like this. Most of the workers had probably just been paid and never knew. "It suggests that whatever they've done was not by accident," he concluded. "Just happened to disturb something whilst installing this facility... that's a very unlikely coincidence anyway."
Haze stated what that implied: there was a mastermind. Someone who knew what was down there. Someone who wanted whatever had been sleeping on the seabed to wake up.
The Olympics, 1960
They found a pub for dinner before the evening's expedition — warm and low-ceilinged and smelling of chips and real ale, the kind of pub that feels like the same pub that has always existed in Weymouth and always will. There was a television in the corner showing a retrospective on the 1960 Rome Olympics.
The more attention they paid to it, the more something felt off.
Hex caught it first, his memory for historical detail snagging on something wrong: the USA was competing against Greater Imperial Germany rather than the Soviet Union. He turned that phrase over in his head. Greater Imperial Germany. 1960. The German athletes had a look about them — the particular facial structure, the slight protrusion of the jaw — that the team knew well from a previous mission, from a Massachusetts seaport, from the files of a certain H.P. Lovecraft that had turned out to be rather less fictional than advertised. The Innsmouth look. And they were dominating the aquatics. Comprehensively.
The American athletes, meanwhile, were showing something else. Glimpses of iridescent patches on their skin. The occasional wrong angle of a joint.
No one else in the pub was disturbed by this broadcast. It was background noise to them. Just a sporting retrospective.
Hex checked the online records for the 1960 Rome Olympics. The Paralympics — the first ever held, following on directly from Rome, a watershed moment in the history of sport — were simply absent. No mention. No records. Gone from the timeline as if they had never been organised.
He explained what they were seeing to the group, and the implications spread outward like cracks in ice. Greater Imperial Germany. 1960. The Nazis had not merely survived the war — they had won it, and were now fielding an Olympic team of Deep One hybrids against an America that appeared to be running its own supernatural programme. Not eradicating the unnatural. Weaponising it.
"It's propaganda as much as anything," Hertz observed, with the careful precision of a man who has decided that detached analysis is the only way to process an Olympic broadcast from an alternate fascist dystopia. "The superiority of their side over our side — if our side is even our side anymore." He was not sure, from what he had been told of Deep Ones, that they were truly allied with the Nazi regime. They were physically superior to humans. It felt rather more likely that they were infiltrating it.
Haze speculated that what the original documents described was a mutual arrangement — a deal struck in 1942, a divergence point, and then decades of both parties wondering who was really in control of whom. "The next arms race," he suggested, "became about who could genetically engineer a better soldier."
Hex absorbed all of this and found himself suddenly, unexpectedly overwhelmed by it. Not by the Germans winning. By the Americans. By the possibility that the organisation he had devoted his professional life to — a country that Delta Green had served, messily and at great cost, because it was at least trying to fight the darkness — had in another version of history simply decided to join it. He sat with his drink and tried to hold that thought at arm's length, and mostly failed.
The GM had confirmed it, when Hertz pressed: the timeline diverged in December 1942. It was now, in that alternate history, the 1960s. The divergence was advancing at roughly eighteen years for every real-world month. Which meant it would catch up — to their present, to their world, to the exact moment they were sitting in this pub — within weeks.
And it overlapped, precisely, with what they had experienced at the Holobeam array.
Into the Exclusion Zone
Sam was waiting for them at the docks as arranged, under a clear, cold January sky with no moon to betray them. Hex had brought a bottle of whiskey — the correct currency for a favour from a fisherman who didn't need to know what he was transporting into an exclusion zone. They boarded the small motorboat in life jackets, the harbour lights falling away behind them, and headed out into the dark of the channel.
The wind farm announced itself before it was fully visible. A thickness in the air. A metallic quality to the atmosphere that had no meteorological explanation. And then the lights — deep in the water, blue and green, pulsing in a rhythm that felt almost biological. Beautiful, in the way that certain dangerous things are beautiful. Sam had described them accurately: nothing natural produced light quite like that, with that particular quality that pressed against the back of the eyes.
Haze scanned the horizon as the boat pushed forward, and the turbine blades began to do something to his vision. Their rotation overlapped and fractalled, geometry compounding on geometry, each blade spawning impossible angles at the edge of perception. He reached for Hertz's shoulder and gripped it, trying wordlessly to point at what he was seeing. Hertz looked. Hertz saw turbine blades. He glanced at Sam. "He's just fascinated by the luminescence," he said, with the calm of a man improvising smoothly, while next to him Haze stared at the breathing darkness with an expression of profound focus and refused to be anything other than fine.
Sam looked back from the pilot's seat. "Is everything alright?"
They were not entirely alright. But they were still operational.
And then the sea changed. No wind. No clouds. Perfectly calm conditions — and violent, choppy waves, materialising from nothing, slamming the small boat with mechanical regularity. And beneath the sound of the hull, beneath the splashing and the creak of the motor, Hex heard it: the deep bass drumming of the turbines, and beneath that a rhythm he recognised.
He had heard it before. In the darkness, at the edge of consciousness, after the Deep Ones had taken everything from him and left him with questions he still couldn't fully answer. The rhythm of the mad sultan's court, reaching up through the water column and through the hull and directly into the part of him that had never entirely come back from that mission.
The tears came before he fully registered them. He was swaying with the rhythm, wide-eyed, entirely aware of what was happening to him and entirely unable to stop it, watching through the membrane of a lucid waking dream as something ancient and vast played its song through fifty steel turbines and the bones of the English Channel.
Hanover and Hertz watched the boat lurch. Sam was mouthing something at the helm — words they couldn't hear over the thrumming of the turbines and a new sound, growing louder: a high-pitched piping, coming from everywhere and nowhere, the lights in the sea intensifying until the water itself seemed to glow.
Then the lightning.
A flash that had no source, no cloud, no storm to explain it. A sensation of falling that had nothing to do with direction. And then cold water, everywhere, and pressure, and light below rather than above, and the drums and the flutes audible even underwater as H-Cell was pulled under the English Channel.
Washed Ashore
There were hands. Unknown hands, dragging them out of the water in fragments of half-memory, hauling them onto something solid. And then darkness, and then something else.
They came to in a room with whitewashed walls and the particular quality of light that suggests artificial sources rather than windows. Hospital gowns. Beds. Music playing somewhere nearby — the tinny, distant quality of a radio or a gramophone. Hanover was there, somewhere on the other side of a curtain. The others were in the same room, breathing, alive, with no immediate answers about where here was.
The session ended there, in the dim stillness of a room that could be anywhere, in a timeline that might not be theirs.
To be continued...
H-Cell's current status can be summarised as: wet, confused, and in possession of approximately one more mystery than they started with. On the positive side, no one has detonated the warehouse yet, Sam appears to be a very good boat handler, and Hertz earned a piece of sanity damage that was absolutely, definitively worth it for what he discovered. The alternate timeline is now in the 1960s and counting. The anchor may be the problem. Or the solution. Or both. The turbines are a glyph. Greater Imperial Germany is winning the Olympics. The 1960 Paralympics have been erased from history. And H-Cell is in a room with whitewashed walls and no immediate explanation for how they got there.
Ticks earned, madness accrued, and whiskey deployed: one bottle. Current whereabouts of the party: unknown. Current whereabouts of Sam: also unknown, and someone should probably check on that.
Next session: answers, presumably. Or at least different questions.