Session Overview
Time travel is, it turns out, deeply inconvenient. Waking up in 1942 with a head wound, no coffee, and a burning suspicion that history might be about to go sideways would test anyone's composure — and this session, H-Cell proved they are nothing if not adaptable. From the genteel discomforts of Tynum Manor to the sensory detonation of wartime Cairo, the team picked up their aliases, their period-appropriate firearms, and one very important lead from a café owner with an excellent nose for a bribe. Operation El Alamein is on the clock. The Black Sun is already in the desert. And somewhere out there, a seven-foot-tall whatever-it-is is looking for guides and digging equipment.
No pressure.
A Rude Awakening (Or: The One Where Hanover Finally Joins the Party)
The others had been on their feet for a day already when Hanover finally surfaced.
She woke in an unfamiliar bed, wearing unfamiliar clothes, in a room that smelled aggressively of fresh whitewash and antiseptic. The blackout cloth over the window told her it was wartime. The bandage wrapped around her throbbing head told her it had not been a gentle arrival. Three other beds sat neatly made and empty around her, and on the nightstand — blessedly — a glass of water, which she drank with the urgency of someone who had been unconscious for three days and knew it.
Daisy, the ward nurse, bustled in with the warm efficiency of someone who had seen far stranger things than four sodden Americans washed up on a Devon beach. "You were in a terrible state," she reported cheerfully. "Like drowned cats, the four of you." She confirmed the date — Monday the 19th of October, 1942 — and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the others had been up and about since yesterday and were last seen in the main wing having lunch.
Doctor Selwyn arrived shortly after with his bag and his bedside manner, ran through the full examination — temperature, pulse, eyes, the lot — and pronounced Hanover fit for duty. All things considered, remarkably good news.
Meanwhile, in the camp commander's office, a certain ex-Special Operations sniper had been browsing the bookshelves with the studied nonchalance of a man who was absolutely not casing the room for weapons. The ceremonial swords on the wall and the letter opener on the desk were noted; the absence of anything more immediately useful was also noted. When the camp commander returned, Haze offered a perfectly genuine compliment about the book collection. The commander thanked him, informed the group that their missing colleague had awoken and was asking after them, and held the door open with the unmistakable energy of please leave my office now.
"A captain will do," he added, when Hertz addressed him rather too informally.
The door was, mercifully, not allowed to hit anyone on the way out.
Nineteen Forty-Two. Yes. Really.
The reunion in the medical room was warm, if slightly bewildering for the newly conscious member of the party.
"It's good to see you up and about," said Hertz. Then came the cascade of context from the others, delivered with the slightly exhausted tone of people who had already processed the impossible and were now simply managing it: "You're not going to believe this." "It's nineteen forty-two." "We had a lovely chat with a navy man — Harry Lane, believe it or not." "For a while they did suspect us of being German, just as a heads up."
Daisy returned with a tray — steaming pot of tea, a ham sandwich, an apple — and Hanover thanked her with the graciousness of someone who had privately been hoping for coffee but was choosing her battles.
Over the afternoon, the party put the remaining hours to use. The library and available papers were combed thoroughly for any sign that history had departed from the expected course. It had not. The war was proceeding precisely as remembered. The staff, for their part, were perfectly pleasant and revealed absolutely nothing of note beyond what they already knew — though to be fair, that particular social gambit had never been their most reliable method. Hertz accepted this outcome with philosophical equanimity.
Hex, meanwhile, had slipped into one of his quieter episodes. Not absent exactly — he would follow if pointed in the right direction — but distant, unreachable, somewhere behind his own eyes. Hanover asked after him with concern. Haze, who had seen this before, offered a measured assessment: overwhelmed, probably needs time. Hertz suggested, practically, that it could be explained as shell shock. It wasn't wrong. The period, at least, provided excellent cover for a man struggling with the weight of the impossible.
That night, distant sirens wailed. Flak guns thumped. The drone of bombers rolled across the darkness like distant thunder. Tynum Manor itself remained untouched — quiet and strange, a village that didn't yet know it was living on borrowed time.
The Papers Know Your Name
Dawn broke. Breakfast was had. And then an army transport lorry pulled up outside, driven by a young private with a delivery — travel papers, properly stamped, official-looking.
With the wrong names on them. Or rather: the right names. The cover aliases. The Deepwell identities.
"Trevor Ford," confirmed Hertz, staring at the document with an expression that could only be described as intensely interested. "That's not what we told them when we got here."
"The original note we got — from our time — said to use those aliases," Haze recalled, staring at his own papers. "But none of this makes sense."
In the rattling, bone-jarring back of the army lorry — England's road network in 1942 being what it was — the party chewed over the implications. Someone in the 1940s knew who they were going to be before they arrived. Which meant either the arrangement went back much further than anyone had let on, or... "If we never get back to our own time," Hanover offered, "we might have to live through the decades and start the arrangement ourselves in the sixties."
A comfortable thought. Absolutely not unsettling in any way.
Hertz noted, almost as an aside, that most road signs would have been taken down during the war to confuse potential invaders — so navigating by signs was off the table regardless. It was that kind of lorry ride.
Welcome to Exeter, Gentlemen and Lady
Several bone-rattling hours later, the truck pulled up before a requisitioned stately home on the outskirts of Exeter, and waiting for them as they clambered out of the tailgate was Chief Petty Officer Harry Lane.
Not their Harry Lane, as it turned out. This Harry was a man — clearly a different generation entirely. But as Hertz studied him during the pleasantries, something tugged at recognition. The bearing. The set of the jaw. A distinct family resemblance to a Harry Lane they had met elsewhere and elsewhen. The world, it seemed, was fond of certain faces.
Lane welcomed them with the warm efficiency of a man who ran a very busy operation and had neither the time nor the inclination for extended pleasantries. He offered drinks, bathroom facilities, and the briefing room — in roughly that order. Hanover asked about coffee. Was diplomatically told that this was Britain in 1942. Accepted tea.
The briefing room held a large map table, a board along one wall, and — standing in front of it, looking precisely as they remembered him from 2024, not a day younger — Alastair Finch.
"No surprise," he said, before anyone had quite gathered themselves to react. "All is as expected. Welcome back to Exeter, gentlemen and lady."
Hanover told him they would need him to fill in some gaps.
"I will not be filling in any gaps," Finch replied, with the serene finality of a man who has decided this before you even sat down.
The Scions of the Black Sun
Finch — true to form — got straight to the point.
Three days. That was the runway. In three days, Montgomery's Eighth Army would advance on Rommel's forces at El Alamein, and the chaos of that advance would create exactly the kind of cover that a small team could exploit — or that a very dangerous enemy could use to disappear.
The enemy in question: a Karatechia cell operating in North Africa, calling themselves the Scions of the Black Sun. Lane produced a Manila file, and the photographs came out one by one.
First: Karl Von Drexler. Tall. Drawn. Fifties. Immaculate desert uniform. Himmler's personal mystic, with an arrogance that came through even in still photography. Haze recognised the name — the Scions, as he recalled it, were Karatechia turncoats who defected at some point during the war. The kind of men who changed their allegiance but not their nature.
Second: Doctor Erica Brandt. Neatly uniformed, shoulder-length bob, cold smile. A scientist with esoteric and, according to the file, allegedly unpleasant biological research interests. The word "allegedly" was doing considerable heavy lifting in that sentence.
Third: no name given. Just a photograph of a seven-foot-tall figure with an otherness about him that needed no caption. Hanover clocked it immediately and asked Finch directly whether he agreed that their quarry had what they'd come to call the Innsmouth look. Finch allowed that it was possible. He hadn't met the fellow personally, he noted, but he looked like a man — or creature — not to be trifled with.
The mission: find out what the Scions had been doing in the El Alamein–Cairo area. And whatever it was, put a stop to it before Montgomery's advance swept the whole region into chaos and gave them a chance to vanish.
Getting there: a plane to Gibraltar, an overnight stopover to refuel, then a six-to-seven-hour night flight into Cairo at high altitude. Their local contact on the ground — a bright young British colonial officer named Lieutenant Graham Pendleton — would be waiting for them. Unaware of the real reason they were there. Useful nonetheless.
Finch noted, when Hertz pressed him on what specifically the Karatechia were after in Egypt, that their interest in the country's ancient history was itself reason enough to stop them. He was evasive about specifics in the particularly deliberate way of someone who knows exactly what the specifics are and has decided you don't need to.
Arming for the Desert
The party had half a day at the facility before departure, and they used it.
Haze went immediately to the armory and range, because of course he did. A bolt-action rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, ammunition for all three — packed into a duffel with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this before, across several decades and at least one timeline. Fortune, as it happened, was smiling: a scoped bolt-action was available, and Haze spent the remaining time on the range familiarising himself with period weapons, drawing on the bone-deep instincts of a career sniper. Some things translate across eras.
Hanover made her way to the signals department and spent a productive-if-humbling afternoon attempting to adapt everything she knew about modern communications technology to 1940s radio equipment. The gap between theory and practice turned out to be significant. What she came away with was a receive-only portable radio, a toolkit, notebooks, and a solid working knowledge of Morse code and the common ciphers of the period — more than enough to be useful, if not quite what she'd hoped for. She also requisitioned, from the armory, brass knuckles, garroting wire, and a combat knife. Foregoing the light pistol. Linda Johnson, it seemed, had strong opinions about close-range problem-solving.
Hertz sought out Finch for one final attempt at intelligence about what the Karatechia were actually looking for. Finch deflected with the smooth expertise of a man who deflects professionally. What Hertz did find — with rather better luck than expected — was a standard reference text on hieroglyphic decipherment tucked away in the facility's library. He also picked up a pistol and a combat knife, presumably in that order of intellectual priority. He also acquired the knife.
Into the Blue
They said their farewells to Finch and Lane — one familiar, one newly encountered and carrying the ghost of a family resemblance — and were driven to an RAF base in Wiltshire where a Douglas Dakota transport plane was waiting.
The flight to Gibraltar. The overnight stopover. The long dark haul across the Mediterranean, high and cold, with flak bursting in the darkness below like angry fireworks aimed at someone else. They arrived intact — shaken, perhaps, but intact — on the afternoon of the 22nd of October, 1942.
One day before the Second Battle of El Alamein.
Cairo
Cairo hit like a physical thing.
The city was alive in a way that wartime cities sometimes are — all the more vivid for the shadow over them. Egyptians, Britons, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders moved through streets where old Islamic architecture met newer European boulevards, where bazaars and cars and horse-drawn carriages and livestock occupied the same improbable space. The smells. The noise. The sheer density of it all, pressing in from every direction.
Lieutenant Pendleton — young, bright, helpful, and blissfully ignorant of the actual purpose of his assignment — was waiting for them and immediately proved his worth by leading them through the old quarter to a café he knew. Run by a man named Omar Hassan. Excellent coffee. The kind of place where deals were made, information exchanged, and the proprietor had an almost supernatural awareness of what was being whispered at every table.
Hanover introduced herself as Linda — "Hi, I'm Linda", with a slight bow that communicated out-of-place American with remarkable precision — and Omar lavished compliments upon her with the enthusiasm of a man who genuinely meant every word and also understood the value of a warm welcome.
Hertz — operating as Trevor — offered a handshake, which Omar accepted with both hands and considerable vigour, then called for coffee.
What arrived was extraordinary. Small thimble cups, thick and dark and fragrant with cardamom, accompanied by pastries soaked in rosewater and honey. Hanover downed several cups in rapid succession and sat back with the visible relief of a person who has been waiting for this moment since waking up in 1942. Omar watched approvingly. "I like a woman who enjoys her coffee."
Then, business.
Hertz asked Pendleton — quietly — whether it was safe to speak openly. Omar, who was still very much present and had exceptionally good hearing, acted wounded by the implication. His café was completely safe, he assured them. They should unburden themselves freely.
Hanover, taking this at reasonable face value, told him they were looking for Germans. Specifically, a very large one. Haze helpfully added that "very large" meant roughly a foot taller than himself.
Omar's expression shifted — not alarmed, but interested. He had heard whispers, he said. Germans in the desert, looking for guides and digging equipment. Talk of a hidden oasis. He was, however, at this point, clearly signalling that his memory improved significantly with appropriate encouragement.
Hanover slid a middling bribe across the table under the guise of paying for more coffee. Omar made the money disappear with a sleight of hand that suggested this was not his first such transaction, then called for refills.
Three Germans, he confirmed. Including a large man. Guides, digging equipment, transportation — all requested. A hidden oasis mentioned in passing, location not disclosed. Tight-lipped, these Germans. But his cousin, who worked at the dromedary pens, might know where they went. He would have to ask.
Hanover expressed gratitude, praised the coffee — and gently encouraged her companions to do the same. Haze obliged, saying he preferred coffee to tea and that this particular variety had a nice kick. Hertz called it a good acquired taste and said he was quite enjoying it.
Pendleton looked on, faintly scandalized by the coffee-over-tea heresy, as only a man of his era and nationality could be.
Outside, the city hummed with the particular energy of a place that knows something enormous is about to happen. Somewhere in the desert, three dangerous people and at least one something-else were digging for things that should stay buried.
Omar's cousin, apparently, knew the way.
To be continued...
H-Cell's current situation, as a helpful field report:
- Location: Omar's Café, Cairo, Egypt. October 22nd, 1942.
- Time until El Alamein kicks off: Approximately one day.
- Lead status: One bribed café owner, one cousin at the dromedary pens, and approximately zero idea what a hidden oasis in the Egyptian desert might contain. (The hieroglyphics textbook is getting promoted to priority reading.)
- Hex status: Present in body. Elsewhere in spirit. Shell shock: a reasonable cover story.
- Coffee status: Obtained. Hanover is visibly more functional as a result.
- Historical timeline: Intact, as far as anyone can tell. For now.
- Road signs: Gone. Obviously. Hertz was right about that.
The Scions of the Black Sun are out there. Himmler's personal mystic, an allegedly unpleasant biologist, and a seven-foot something with the Innsmouth look are digging for something in the desert on the eve of one of the war's decisive battles. Whatever it is, Finch thinks just the fact that they're looking is reason enough to stop them.
That is, historically, not a reassuring thing for Finch to say.