Session Overview
They came to consciousness smelling of paint, antiseptic, and something distressingly agricultural — stripped of everything, wearing scratchy wool gowns that felt at least two decades out of date. As it turned out, they were rather more than two decades out of date. October 1942. Dorset. Wartime Britain. H-Cell had, by any reasonable measure, completely and utterly cocked it up — and now had to talk their way out of a locked room, past a suspicious constable, and into the confidence of a very interested man from a very vague government department. Business as usual, then.
An Unpleasant Way to Wake Up
The first thing Hertz registered was the smell. Paint. Antiseptic. Something earthy and faintly agricultural that had no business being in a medical facility. The room had the feel of somewhere hastily converted — four bays screened by curtains, three of them occupied by the party, the fourth drawn shut and silent. The gowns they wore were scratchy natural fibre, stiff and old-fashioned in a way that was difficult to immediately articulate but deeply unsettling for a man whose instincts ran toward precision.
'Hello?' Hertz called toward the curtained bay.
No response.
Right, then.
While Hertz was methodically scanning for CCTV cameras (there were none) and checking his arms for injection marks (there were none of those either), Haze was already on his feet — unsteady, clearly running on will alone — casing the room with a soldier's eye. One door. One window, heavily blacked out and barred from the outside. He had nothing on him. No phone, no belongings, nothing. A quick check of the nightstand drawers confirmed they were equally empty. Haze jammed a chair under the door handle, because of course he did.
The barred window and the locked door told them everything they needed to know about their current status: guests, technically. Prisoners, functionally.
Brandy Bay, Sunday the 18th of October
The door handle rattled. Someone on the other side found the chair's resistance baffling.
'Hello? Are you awake in there?' A woman's voice, warm and no-nonsense. She identified herself as Daisy, a nurse, and the location as Tynum Manor House.
Hex pressed her for details. Haze asked about the date, the question carrying the very specific weight of a man who suspected the answer was going to be bad.
'You were found at Brandy Bay,' Daisy informed them through the door, with the cheerful practicality of someone accustomed to dealing with difficult patients. 'Washed up like four drowned rats, the Home Guard said. Lucky they found you when they did, really. Today is Sunday, the eighteenth of October...'
She paused.
'...nineteen forty-two.'
Haze removed the chair from under the door handle.
Daisy bustled in with the efficiency of someone who had seen far stranger things than three confused Americans in hospital gowns, accompanied by two large men in military-looking uniforms who positioned themselves either side of the door and studiously pretended the entire situation was perfectly normal. She checked Haze's vitals by hand, clucked with professional satisfaction, and delivered the next piece of unwelcome news: they had been asleep for three days. Their clothes — damaged beyond repair by the tide and sand — had been disposed of. Replacements were being arranged. Behind the curtain, their fourth, Hanover, had taken a blow to the head and had not yet come around, though the doctor reported her vitals as normal.
When Doctor Selwyn and Constable Kraft arrived with Daisy's tea trolley, the interrogation — conducted with the polite, implacable suspicion of a man who had been doing this job since before any of them were born — began in earnest.
The Art of the Cover Story
Constable Kraft was lean, grey-haired, possessed of an impressive moustache, and wearing a uniform that fit him the way a borrowed suit fits a man at a funeral — technically adequate, but clearly not made for him. He reviewed his notebook. He fixed them with the patient gaze of a man who had heard every lie the English Channel had ever washed ashore.
The group's situation was not ideal. No identification. American accents. No papers. Washed up on a Dorset beach with no registered shipping in the area and no missing persons report from any nearby base. To a wartime constable, this was, at minimum, worth a raised eyebrow.
'And you've got no papers, no identification,' Kraft said. 'Do you even have names?'
They gave him names. Hex went with James Smith. Hertz offered Alastair Ferguson with the calm confidence of a man who had absolutely not just invented that on the spot. The constable noted, with admirable dryness, that they seemed to have a lot of Smiths present.
'Cousins,' Haze said. 'Removed.'
Hex went for the intelligence community cover: they were on a classified operation, obviously they hadn't carried papers — getting captured with identification in enemy territory would have been rather dangerous, wouldn't it? Hertz backed this up by suggesting they couldn't say more, and could they perhaps speak with an American military contact?
Kraft was unconvinced, but not unreasonable. 'That's exactly what a German spy would want me to think,' he pointed out, and he wasn't wrong.
When the constable — on the basis of a rather intimate examination conducted while the group was unconscious — raised the possibility that they might be American, or possibly Jewish, on the grounds of certain physical evidence, Hertz deployed his most devastating weapon: logic. He pointed out, with some precision, that concluding three circumcised men were German spies required positing months of pre-planned surgical preparation. The constable acknowledged this was probably fair.
Hex, perhaps feeling the interrogation was going too smoothly, chose this moment to remark that Americans were always 'a cut above the Brits when it comes to taste and fashion.' The constable bristled. To his credit, Hex appeared to immediately recognise that needling the man responsible for one's continued freedom was perhaps not the wisest tactical choice — but the words were already out.
Hertz, at this point, simply asked if they might have a newspaper to read.
Kraft summarised their story with the weary precision of a man writing a report he didn't entirely believe: covert American agents, secret mission, unpleasantness at sea, washed ashore unplanned. He told them they weren't free to go but could walk the grounds under escort. Daisy would bring dinner. Tomorrow would be busy.
He knocked on the door to leave.
'We won't attempt to escape before dinner,' Hertz assured him gravely.
Eighty Years from Home
Left alone with their broth, bread, and boiled turnips — the full glamour of wartime rationing — the group had a moment to absorb the sheer enormity of what had happened to them.
They were in 1942. October. Dorset. Their phones were gone. Their gear was gone. Hanover was unconscious behind a curtain. They had no identification, American accents in wartime Britain, and their only assets were a physicist, an ex-sniper, and a cyber security specialist whose skills were approximately eighty years ahead of any technology in the building.
Hertz raised the question carefully: their organisation almost certainly wasn't called Delta Green in 1942. Perhaps whispering those words to any American military contact who showed up might help. Perhaps mentioning Cap de la Hague would raise the right flags. Hex suggested that invoking secrecy might attract exactly the kind of attention they needed.
And then Haze's memory snagged on something — a detail, rising through the fog of the past few days. The company. The payments. They had started in the late 1960s, regular as clockwork, every five years from then onwards.
The implication hung in the air between them.
'We might have been the ones who set that up,' Hertz said slowly. 'We can't assume we're getting back the short way.'
The full weight of being stranded over eighty years in the past settled onto the room like a physical thing. Outside, air raid sirens wailed. Anti-aircraft fire crumped in the distance. Eventually the all-clear sounded, and no bombs fell nearby.
The night passed.
A Very Suspicious Monday Morning
Morning brought hot water, flannels, towels, and clothes: ill-fitting trousers, an over-large shirt, a jacket that was slightly too tight in the shoulders, all made of stiff scratched wool with the ergonomic comfort of wearing a small field. The young woman who brought the washing things carefully averted her eyes from Haze and Hex with the focussed determination of someone finding the ceiling extremely interesting. Daisy, to her credit, merely blushed a little and got on with things.
(Finding clothes that fit Haze was, apparently, an ongoing logistical challenge. 'He's larger than average,' Daisy explained. This was one way of putting it.)
Dressed and escorted out into Tynum Manor House itself, the operatives got their first proper look at their situation. The manor was grand — Elizabethan, all oak panelling and friezes and paintings — now converted wholesale into a military outpost for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. The formerly sculpted gardens had been given over to military use. About eight to ten guards were visible, a mix of young men and older Home Guard types, armed with revolvers. No perimeter fence. Just a gate over the road. The breakfast queue in the great hall canteen fell silent as every head turned to look at the newcomers.
Hertz, sensibly, used the two-day-old newspaper he'd requested to quietly check whether history was behaving itself. It was. October 1942: the Battle of the Atlantic, the long slog, America in the war since late '41, the tide just beginning to turn. Everything lined up with what he knew. They were, at least, in the right history.
Hex, meanwhile, made a rather less successful attempt to map the guard patterns. One of the sentries noticed him paying rather too much attention and confronted him with the direct energy of a man who has been told to watch for German spies and has found someone behaving like a German spy.
What followed was a small masterpiece of interpersonal recovery. Somehow — through sheer force of character and what can only be described as a spectacular moment of genuine human connection — Hex turned a hostile confrontation into something approaching warmth. The guard who had come to challenge him left the conversation feeling, inexplicably, positively disposed toward Hex.
Some men are just built for this.
The Man from the Vague Department
Around noon, a British military staff car arrived at the gate. After a brief exchange with the guard, it was admitted and drew up to the building. A man in his late twenties stepped out: Royal Navy uniform, an air of purposeful competence, and the manner of someone who already knew rather more about the situation than he was letting on.
Shortly afterwards, a guard came to collect the operatives and brought them to the master's study — leather chairs, maps spread on a large table, bookcases lining the walls. The base commandant was there, and introduced the three conscious prisoners ('The other one hasn't come around yet') before tactfully taking his leave.
Chief Harry Lane invited them to sit and asked them, pleasantly, to explain in their own words how they came to be here.
The operatives obliged. Bioluminescence in the water. An isolated school of something. The sea becoming, as Hex put it with admirably British understatement, 'unnecessarily choppy.' And then: the beach. The gowns. Three days unconscious.
Lane listened. He told them he'd already read the reports — he wanted their words. He told them his department had been tracking unusual weather phenomena in the Channel. This wasn't the first incident. It was, however, the first time anyone had washed up alive. Previously, only fishermen had reported strange lights in the sea.
He confirmed they appeared to have survived one of these incidents, which made them of considerable interest to his department. He expressed appropriate hope for Hanover's speedy recovery.
Then — and here the conversation shifted in register entirely — a second figure made himself more fully known. He had been in the room, had been listening, and now addressed them with the cheerful authority of a man from a very minor government department with the full backing of the Admiralty, one that he rather doubted they'd have heard of.
'Try us,' said Hex.
Hertz glanced at his colleagues. Then, carefully, he said one word.
'Pisces?'
The official's expression changed.
'Now that,' he said slowly, 'is a very interesting name. Where would three washed-up American GIs have heard that name before?'
'He's slightly older,' Hertz said, 'and certainly not a GI.'
The conversation that followed had the comfortable rhythm of people who have suddenly realised they are in the same peculiar business. The official — representing a minor department overseeing specialist war-related projects, fully backed by the Admiralty — acknowledged awareness of their American counterparts' lines of inquiry into this kind of thing. He confirmed that the group's exposure to the incident made them uniquely suited to something his department had in mind. He used the phrase 'ever so juicy lemons' with what appeared to be genuine affection.
'You're also deniable,' Hex observed.
'I'm rather pleased we're on the same wavelength,' the official agreed.
'Press-ganged by the British,' Hertz muttered, 'again.'
The proposal was simple: come with him, travel to field HQ, receive a briefing, and hopefully things would go rather swimmingly. Transport and cover identities would be arranged for this afternoon. Accommodation for Hanover would naturally be provided.
Haze looked at Hex. Hex looked at Hertz. Hertz looked at the ceiling.
The official took his leave.
The three operatives were left alone in the study — still technically detained, still eighty years from home, still wearing clothes that itched — with an agreement of sorts freshly made and an entirely unknown mission somewhere ahead of them.
'Here we go again, gentlemen,' Haze said.
Hertz questioned, with some justification, what exactly they had just agreed to and why anyone thought they would be good at it.
'This mission,' Hex said, 'will probably be aimed at stopping whatever it was that happened to us. And Hanover's far better equipped to talk about the weird than any of us.'
He wasn't wrong. He was also, currently, in 1942 Dorset in an itchy wool jacket.
To be continued.
To be continued...
H-Cell: now operating approximately 83 years before their original remit, in a country that is actively being bombed, on behalf of an organisation that doesn't yet have their name, for reasons that will apparently be explained at field HQ. Progress.
- Hanover remains unconscious — still on contract, as noted, but not yet available for comment.
- The party successfully persuaded a 1940s British constable that they were probably not German spies. Probably.
- Hertz's realisation that the company payments started in the late 1960s and the group are currently in 1942 has created what is technically described as "a situation."
- Daisy blushed. Twice. Haze has apparently transcended time periods.
- Quote of the session: "We won't attempt to escape before dinner." — Hertz, to a man who controls their entire freedom of movement.
- Current status: detained, under-dressed, 8 decades displaced, and apparently exactly what someone needed.