Session Overview
The desert had been survived. Barely. The party limped back into Cairo with sand in their boots, a bullet lodged somewhere it shouldn't be, and a dead German scientist's journal full of secrets no one had yet been able to read. This session was quieter than the last — no explosions, no firefights, no ancient horrors (well, almost none) — but the kind of quiet where every conversation feels like it's sitting on top of something that wants to eat you. Pendleton got his first real look at what the Scions of the Black Sun are up to, and the news was... not great.
Dust, Camels, and Coffee
Two days of desert travel will humble anyone. The camels were returned to Omar's yard in the pale grey light of a Cairo morning, Omar himself greeting the bedraggled operatives with the quiet hospitality of a man who has seen many strange foreigners emerge from the desert looking worse for wear. Coffee was produced. Breakfast was dispatched with a boy. No one complained.
What the party brought back with them — beyond the bruises, the exhaustion, and Haze's somewhat pressing medical situation — was Doctor Erica Brandt's journal. Dense, technical, entirely in German, it had yielded only fragments on the journey home: coordinates, dates, the occasional symbol that hinted at something deeply unpleasant. The bulk of it remained obstinately unreadable. Someone, clearly, was going to need to translate it.
There was also the small matter of the date marked inside. A deadline. Originally five days away — but a small mercy from the universe: a recalculation placed it a full week out. The party had room to breathe. Relatively speaking.
"You've All Seen Better Days"
British Military HQ received them with the slightly pained politeness of an organisation that had been told these people were important and was doing its best to believe it. They were escorted to Lieutenant Graham Pendleton's office with minimal fuss, which was itself a relief.
Pendleton looked up at them and, with the weary candour of a man who had clearly dealt with worse, observed: "God, you are — you've all seen better days, haven't you?"
He was not wrong.
Hertz got straight to it, explaining that their suspicions had been confirmed — there was indeed a Nazi team operating in the desert, they had been unfriendly, and they had found something at the dig site before fleeing. Pendleton, to his credit, took this in stride, though he made the entirely reasonable point that Nazi artefact-smuggling ranked somewhere below his more immediate wartime concerns. The country, he noted, was rather riddled with both fanatical Germans and stone tablets.
Hanover pressed harder. The worry, she explained, wasn't the artefact itself — it was what it might represent. Coded documents. Sensitive intelligence. Something that couldn't be dismissed. Pendleton acknowledged this but wanted something more solid before he could go to command with a request for resources. Then Hertz asked the key question: did Pendleton speak German?
Passable military German, as it turned out.
The journal was produced. Hanover handed it over with a firm insistence on eyes only — the sort of phrase that, when delivered in a sufficiently clipped tone, tends to be obeyed. Pendleton settled in, began leafing through the pages, and within a relatively short time had extracted the following:
- The journal belonged to Doctor Erica Brandt — brilliant, precise, and, it emerged, increasingly terrified.
- She distrusted Karl von Drexler deeply and made no effort to hide it in her private notes.
- There were repeated references to something she called Das Ungeheur — the monster.
- The scientific notation touched on what she called "unstable synthesis" and, remarkably, alchemy.
- The final entries described preparation to remove an artefact from a place referred to as the Oasis of Whispers, with a Luftwaffe transport plane scheduled to make a hard landing in the desert in approximately a week.
Hertz made a valiant effort to suggest the alchemy references might be less absurd than they appeared. "We still haven't worked out the secret behind Greek fire, Lieutenant. There may be more to it than we give credit." It was a good argument. Hanover attempted to press the case further — suggesting the alchemical language might be a code concealing something more operationally significant. Pendleton remained diplomatically unconvinced, though he filed away the possibility. (Hanover earned the bruise that comes from rolling well enough to know you almost had it.)
Pendleton agreed to keep the journal overnight for a more thorough translation. The group would return in the morning.
"I Have Been Shot"
It was at this point that Pendleton noticed Haze for the first time and, with some alarm, asked if he was aware he had been shot.
"I have been shot," Haze confirmed, with the particular weariness of someone who has been carrying this information for two days across open desert on the back of a camel. "I've been shot before, and it still hurts like hell — and I had to ride one of those bloody camel things out. Did not help."
Pendleton immediately stuck his head out the door and called for a corpsman. Haze, with considerable enthusiasm, requested that someone please remove the bullet. A medic arrived, fussed with some professional urgency, produced a stretcher, and Haze was carried out — which left Hanover and Hertz to handle the remaining logistics with Pendleton.
Before being wheeled away, Haze managed to get in one last useful observation: the enemy had the journal, they knew what was in it, and they had already demonstrated a willingness to blow up landmarks to destroy evidence. Pendleton ought to be careful. Pendleton acknowledged the warning graciously — and then noted, with the serene pragmatism of a military intelligence officer, that if anything in the journal was pertinent to the war effort, he would naturally have to notify command.
"Yes," he added, when the point was pressed. "Obviously."
Meanwhile, at the Military Hospital
The surgery to remove the bullet was not, by any clinical standard, a pleasant experience. Haze gritted his teeth through the procedure with the stoicism of a man who had endured considerably worse — and came out the other side stitched, patched, and measurably more intact. Morphine and whiskey were administered in quantities that would have made a lesser person question their life choices.
Haze, being Haze, immediately asked if he could take some morphine with him.
His bedside manner was apparently persuasive enough, because the doctor agreed — with the pointed caveat that Haze should confirm he understood the dosage, gesturing meaningfully to a line on the bottle: "Do not go past this mark, or you will die."
Haze received the full trauma pack — morphine, bandages, field dressings — with the satisfaction of a man who had just acquired something genuinely useful. He also noted, with characteristic practicality, that part of the morphine was for himself and part was potentially for a party member who had demonstrated a concerning tendency to run toward explosions. No names were given. The doctor did not ask.
The surgeons advised him not to overstress the wound. He nodded in the way people nod when they have absolutely no intention of following medical advice.
The Map Room, and the Corridor Conversation
While Haze recuperated and Hertz had the good sense to stay well clear of the hospital, Hanover put her considerable administrative talents to work navigating the British military bureaucracy. A request, the right questions asked in the right tone, and an adjutant was duly produced — who showed them both to the map room.
There, they found it: the Oasis of Whispers, roughly 180 miles southwest of Cairo, deep in the western desert. No major settlements nearby. Noted for occasional Bedouin use. A French expedition had visited in the late 1920s, though whatever they found wasn't in the file. The terrain around it was flat — comfortably flat. Flat enough, say, for a light aircraft to land.
The pieces were coming together with the particular unease of pieces that fit too neatly.
In the corridor outside Pendleton's office, Hanover and Hertz talked through the implications in low voices. Hertz reasoned that if they knew the plane was coming, stopping it might be sufficient on its own — intercept the transport, deny the enemy their extraction, let the desert do the rest. The tactical options were limited but not nonexistent. He mused aloud about truck-mounted anti-aircraft weapons with the lateral thinking of a physicist who has decided military logistics is just another systems problem.
The cover story question came up as well. The truth — ancient artefact, Nazi occultists, alchemical monster — was not going to move command. What might? Hertz suggested framing it as biological weaponisation: an ancient plague, dormant for ten thousand years, being reactivated for use against Allied forces. Hanover agreed that an unstable, unpredictable Nazi was, if anything, even more alarming than a regular one.
Then Hanover raised the Pendleton problem. He had the journal now. He'd be reading it. And some of what was in that journal was not the sort of thing a man's mind should be left alone with overnight.
"We need to keep an eye on him," she said quietly.
Hertz, reluctantly and with visible distaste, agreed — and noted that if it came to the worst, Pendleton did occasionally venture into Cairo. An ambush could be arranged. Made to look like opportunist criminals, perhaps, or sympathisers. He did not enjoy saying it. He said it anyway. That is rather the nature of Delta Green.
"Mad as a Box of Frogs" — But Still Dangerous
The next morning, they found Pendleton exactly where they had left him. Or rather: they found what Pendleton had become after a sleepless night with Brandt's journal.
He was dishevelled. His office was a landscape of empty tea cups, half-eaten sandwiches, and sheets of translation notes. When Hertz greeted him and asked how he was doing, Pendleton looked up with the mild confusion of a man who had lost track of linear time. When told it was 0800, he refused to believe it.
"Can't be right. You were just here."
Hertz offered the gentle observation that time had a way of getting away from one, especially in the lab. Pendleton accepted this with the desperate gratitude of a man who needed a mundane explanation.
What he had found in those notes was anything but mundane.
Brandt's journal, translated in full, revealed a picture of Das Ungeheur — the monster — that defied easy categorisation. Not fully human, she had written. Possibly crossed with what her notes euphemistically described as underwater people, a phrase that landed with particular weight for at least one member of the group. The creature suffered from significant physical defects and required what she called an alchemical cocktail to maintain his physical integrity. More pressingly: she believed Drexler was exerting some form of malign influence over the creature — controlling him, she suspected, against his will. Her notes included speculation on how she might usurp that control for herself.
"She claims he's exerting some kind of malign influence over this..." Pendleton trailed off, looking slightly haunted by his own translation.
Hertz offered the charitable suggestion that this might be psychological conditioning, or pure fantasy. Hanover said nothing for a moment. Then Pendleton moved on to the ritual.
He began describing it — the components, the structure, the intent — with the hesitant precision of a man trying to explain something he hadn't entirely made sense of yet. Hanover's expression shifted. She knew what she was hearing. The ritual described in those notes was real. Not metaphor. Not code. Not delusion. There was knowledge in those pages that should not exist, written by a woman who had somehow obtained it.
"There is stuff in here," Pendleton said, with a certain quiet horror, "that she should not know."
"Yeah," Hanover said simply.
She steered the conversation onto safer ground — professionally, efficiently — redirecting to the compound Brandt had called the water of dissolution. "Before we get too far into dancing in the woods," she suggested pleasantly, "can you tell us about this aqua dissolution thing?"
Pendleton, grateful for the concrete, described it. The recipe was extensive: methyl sulfate, mercury, and two ingredients that defied straightforward interpretation — pure water filtered through the tombs of the ancient dead, and dust from a virgin's bedsheets. He had already written it up. He thrust the notes at Hanover with the urgency of a man who wanted them out of his office. She tucked them away without visible reaction.
Logistics, Plans, and a Nunnery
The practical conversation that followed had a surreal quality common to Delta Green operations — the mundane arrangements for dealing with something fundamentally impossible.
Haze, now present and ambulatory if not entirely comfortable, cut through the philosophical fog with a soldier's instinct: they had a date and a location for an enemy asset extraction. That was actionable intelligence. Could Pendleton provide transport? Pendleton could see what he could arrange. Could Haze also have a word with the armory about a bazooka? Pendleton told him to talk to the armory about the bazooka.
(Reader, he was going to talk to the armory about the bazooka.)
Transport, combat support, air cover — all on the table, all to be arranged. Pendleton, thoroughly persuaded by this point that something real and dangerous was happening at that oasis, agreed to see what he could come up with. "These are clearly dangerous operatives," he said, with the tone of a man updating his threat assessment in real time.
The ingredient list was the remaining puzzle. Hertz, with his background in theoretical physics and materials science, could identify the organic compounds readily enough — the kind of things that were available but required the right channels. The water filtered through ancient tombs pointed to an obvious location: the necropolis outside Cairo, where pharaohs and their contemporaries had been buried for millennia. A lead worth following.
The fourth ingredient required a different kind of expertise. Hanover applied herself to the problem — and arrived at a conclusion that was both completely literal and deeply inconvenient. The dust from a virgin's bedsheets was exactly what it said. Actual dust. Actual bedsheets. Belonging to someone who had, without equivocation, never used them for anything else.
She shared this with the group.
There was a brief pause.
Hertz suggested the nearest Coptic Christian nunnery.
And on that note — the gathering of occult compounds from ancient tombs and religious orders firmly on the agenda — the session drew to a close.
To be continued...
Next time: the party attempts to acquire alchemically significant dust from a convent, which is either the most mundane or most deranged thing Delta Green has ever asked its operatives to do. Possibly both. The Oasis of Whispers awaits, a Luftwaffe transport plane is incoming, and somewhere in the desert, Doctor Brandt's monster is being held together by an alchemical cocktail that our heroes are now attempting to replicate.
Current Status Report:
- Haze: bullet removed, morphine acquired, camel grudge formally established
- Hanover: clean, rested, in possession of a deeply unsettling recipe
- Hertz: functional, thinking about anti-aircraft logistics and nunneries simultaneously
- Pendleton: has not slept, has read things he cannot unread, doing his best
- The Journal: translated, filed, actively everyone's problem now
Quote of the Session: "I have been shot. I've been shot before, and it still hurts like hell — and I had to ride one of those bloody camel things out." — Haze, establishing the correct hierarchy of grievances.