Session Overview
They had a plan. A good plan, even — the kind with overwatch positions, radio coordination, and sensible prioritisation of objectives. Then Hertz accidentally shot the sand, the desert swallowed them whole, and Hanover learned that offering yourself as a distraction target is only a good idea until it very much isn't. The Oasis of Whispers delivered on every syllable of its name this session — and what came up from beneath it made the drums of the previous night sound positively welcoming by comparison.
"Right, Gather Round the Bonnet"
The morning after that unsettling first watch, the sound of distant drums still fresh in the memory, Captain Aldridge smoothed a map across the bonnet of a jeep and got down to business. The intelligence was old, sourced from aerial photographs, approximate in its scale (don't take it seriously, he noted drily, which is a deeply reassuring thing to hear before an assault on a Nazi occult site). Still, it told them enough: a wadi to the east offering a covered approach, a cave entrance to the west, and high ground to the south commanding a view down into the bowl-shaped depression where the oasis sat.
Haze took one look at the terrain and immediately started building a plan in his head. The idea was elegant enough — get the anti-aircraft gun up on those southern cliffs for overwatch, use the wadi for a covered ground assault, and let the German-made AA gun pass unnoticed by the incoming German plane. "Beauty of the AA gun — it's a German AA gun," he observed, which was either brilliant or the kind of lateral thinking that sounds brilliant right up until it isn't.
Hertz, for his part, volunteered to operate the anti-aircraft gun. His reasoning — that the geometry of targeting a moving aircraft was essentially an applied physics problem — was not entirely wrong. Aldridge did the polite thing and didn't say what he was clearly thinking.
The plan that eventually crystallised ran as follows: secure the oasis first, shoot down the plane if it appeared second, storm the cave third. Hex wondered aloud whether they might do better to let the plane land and then capture it — "I'm sure some of these special forces chaps must be able to fly. At least one of them." Aldridge responded with a gesture that can only be described as how hard could it be, which inspired precisely zero confidence.
Hanover had pulled out the translations and confirmed what the journal suggested: a ritual was underway at the site, aimed at retrieving some kind of artefact from the cave, with the plane standing by to extract it. Whatever it was, it was important enough to have brought Karl von Drexler himself into the desert.
Destroy it or retrieve it? Hertz mused. "Presumably destroying said artefact would be good. Retrieving it might be better depending on what it is, but we don't know what it is." Sensible enough. They'd cross that particular bridge when they came to it.
With the tactical discussion concluded, Haze attempted to assess the plan through the lens of military doctrine. His analysis was... largely inconclusive. The plan sounded reasonable to everyone anyway, which perhaps says something about the bar being set.
The Sound on the Radio
Before setting off, Hanover attempted to scan the radio frequencies — hoping for German signals intelligence that might tell them more about what waited at the oasis. The equipment was old, unfamiliar, cranky in the heat. She found nothing useful.
What she found instead was worse.
As the dial swept across the frequencies, the speaker crackled — and then came the sound. High-pitched. Irregular. Like someone playing a flute who had never heard music and was perhaps not entirely human. Those who had been present for the events that had come to be known as Observer Effect recognised it immediately. A sanity roll was required. Hertz absorbed it with only a marginal deterioration. Hex did not absorb it at all.
His eyes glazed. His expression emptied. And then, softly, he began to hum.
The tune was the same one coming from the radio. He whispered fragments of it under his breath, lost somewhere that was not the back of a desert truck in 1942. He was still physically present, technically speaking. In every other meaningful sense, Hex had temporarily left the building.
With a man down and time pressing, they set off. Haze took the navigation, confident with his knowledge of desert terrain and a decent eye for landmarks. He rolled spectacularly, magnificently, impressively wrong. The critical failure sent them on a looping approach that deposited the entire convoy at the northern edge of the oasis rather than the southern high ground — the precise position from which they had zero tactical advantage and maximum visibility to German sentries.
"Change of plan, guys," Haze said, surveying the horizon. And then, a beat later: "Sorry."
What the Desert Showed Them
They stopped just short of detection and went to ground. From their position, they could now see what waited for them.
The oasis sat in its natural bowl, shimmering in the heat. A machine gun emplacement commanded a north-eastern arc. German desert vehicles were parked in a loose cluster — no armour, thankfully. Multiple pairs of sentries patrolled in steady rotations. A field tent enclosure sat to one side.
And at the water's edge, kneeling with both hands submerged in the pool, was Drexler.
The water around him glowed. Blue-green, like deep-sea bioluminescence dragged up into the desert sun — wrong in every way that mattered. Blue-green candles burned at the four cardinal points. Drexler chanted steadily, his voice carrying enough that Hanover could partially read his lips and observe the ritual configuration.
She recognised it. From Pendleton's notes, from the paraphernalia, from the particular shape of the words: this was a ritual of appeasement. Whatever was in — or beneath — that pool, Drexler was making introductions.
"Stop him," Hanover said, with the quiet certainty of someone who has just confirmed their worst suspicions.
The plan became: Haze engages from behind the truck's engine block as cover, drawing attention northward while the rest manoeuvre east to the wadi and assault from there. Hertz, Hex, and Hanover would move quietly toward the wadi while Haze provided the distraction.
Hertz moved quietly. Right up until the moment he didn't, and his pistol discharged into the sand.
The crack echoed across the oasis like a dinner bell. Every German head turned north.
The Battle of the Oasis
Combat is, in the grand tradition of TTRPG firefights, simultaneously more and less controlled than any plan ever accounts for.
Haze was first to act. He had one target: Drexler, kneeling at the pool's edge, mid-ritual, completely exposed. The shot was good — it should have been lethal. Instead, inexplicably, impossibly, the round clipped Drexler's arm rather than landing where Haze had aimed it. As if something had nudged the bullet aside at the last possible moment. Haze watched Drexler's blood drip into the glowing water — and watched the water drink it in, absorbing it rather than diffusing it, the way water should. No bloom of red. Just gone.
It cost him something, watching that. Small, but real.
Haze pulled back behind the truck's engine block. The German machine gunner swung his weapon north and let loose — and somehow missed entirely. A second soldier, however, acquired a different target.
Hanover had positioned herself as a distraction. Deliberately, knowingly, with full awareness that she had no armour, no combat training, and no particular gift for making herself small. The calculation was that enemy fire directed at her was fire not directed at the assault group. It was, in purely tactical terms, correct.
In every other sense, it was a terrible idea that became a catastrophe almost immediately.
The bullet hit her before she could move clear. It dropped her on the spot — no dramatic fall, no last words, no opportunity to reassess. She was simply there, and then she was not. (The desert is not sentimental.)
Haze, jaw tight, put a well-placed round into the machine gunner. Badly wounded him, at least. Then the wadi erupted.
Aldridge came over the lip of cover like a man who has been in too many firefights to waste time being cautious, lobbed a grenade that dispatched two soldiers simultaneously, and pulled his rifle for a third. Singh followed close behind, methodical and steady. One of Hedgehog's riflemen sprinted across open ground and put a bullet directly between a German soldier's eyes — a shot that would have been remarkable in any context and was, under fire, extraordinary. Webb charged up beside him with a shout of "leave some for me!", caught a man in the shoulder before taking a round through his own — and went down bleeding.
Taffy, meanwhile, had his eyes on a different prize entirely. With the gleeful focus of a man who has found his calling, he sprinted to a position, shouted "fire in the hole!", and lobbed a satchel charge into the middle of the German vehicle park. A round later, it detonated. The explosion was, by any measure, glorious — diesel and high explosives combining into a column of fire and black smoke that was probably visible from Cairo.
Taffy took possession of the captured machine gun post with the energy of someone accepting an inheritance.
The Thing from the Cave
It came out of the western cave entrance between one breath and the next.
Massive was the word, but it was the wrong word — it suggested simple size, and Das Ungerhauer was not simply large. He was wrong in his dimensions. Too dense. Too fluid in his movement, that aquatic grace that looked nothing like the way a land animal should move. His coat drank the light around it rather than reflecting it. His skin caught iridescence where the sun touched it. His joints bent in ways that human joints don't. And his face — flat, expressionless, those black eyes that reflected nothing back.
Aldridge put a critical hit into him. A shot that should have dropped a man. Das Ungerhauer absorbed it and kept walking.
Singh, visibly shaken by watching his captain's shot fail to register, nevertheless steadied himself and added another solid hit. Das Ungerhauer absorbed that too.
Hex had been moving down the tent corridor when the creature emerged, and had troubles of his own to manage.
The Tent
Hex pushed his weapon through the tent's entrance and ordered the occupants to surrender. Inside, he found two German soldiers with rifles drawn — and at the back, Doctor Erica Brandt, gathering her books with the focused urgency of someone who intends to leave regardless of what's happening outside.
The first soldier did not get the opportunity to make a decision about surrendering. Hex shot him at point-blank range. The second soldier took one look at what remained of his colleague, took one look at Hex, and put his rifle on the ground. Some calculations don't require much time.
Brandt fired twice at Hex. Both shots went wide — perhaps because she was more interested in her books than in the gunfight, or perhaps because some part of her recognised that the people currently attacking this camp might represent an exit she could use.
Drexler, at the pool's edge, was intensifying his ritual. More urgent now. Faster. Something that might have been desperation in the angle of his shoulders.
And then he reached into the water and pulled.
What came up resisted briefly — root-like tendrils withdrawing from the ground as though they had been anchored deep in the earth, unwilling to release. But they released. And Drexler stood with the object in his hands.
Only Haze could see what the object was connected to, in his peripheral vision — those root-tendrils withdrawing back into the sand, made of a material he knew. He had seen it before, in another context entirely, in another part of the world. It was the same substance as the filament heart.
The same substance.
He filed that thought away for later, because later was currently occupied by Das Ungerhauer.
Temporary Insanity and Other Tactical Complications
Das Ungerhauer walked across the battlefield to Private Harris — who had been trying to staunch the bleeding from Webb's shoulder wound — and killed him. Not shot him. Not knocked him down. Killed him. One blow.
What followed could most charitably be described as a general collapse of composure.
Taffy: temporarily insane, but channelling it productively into the machine gun. Aldridge: temporarily insane, channelling it significantly less productively into a charge with a combat knife. (It did not go well for Aldridge.) Haze: temporarily insane, which in his case manifested as dropping the sniper rifle and emptying his submachine gun at Das Ungerhauer from roughly twenty metres, screaming internally in a way that expressed itself as extremely committed automatic fire. The bullets set Das Ungerhauer back. They did not drop him.
Hertz, keeping what passed for a level head, quietly removed a grenade from the belt of one of the nearby soldiers. He had a target in mind.
Singh was going wibble, as the situation was accurately described. Webb was somewhere between unconscious and worse. The battlefield had become a mixture of fire, exploded vehicles, glowing water, and people in varying states of psychological dissolution.
Hex, caught in another dissociative episode as the drums beneath the pool grew audible to everyone, lowered his weapon, walked out of the tent, and knelt at the water's edge. Waiting. The thing in the water was coming, he understood, in some deep part of himself that had been compromised for some time. His master was arriving.
Das Ungerhauer's wounds, it was noted at this point, were healing. The shots that had already hit him were disappearing.
Taffy's machine gun hit something deep enough that even Das Ungerhauer noticed — the first shot to visibly register as pain. He swung his club at Aldridge and missed, partly because of it. And that small window was enough.
Haze pulled himself back from the edge by sheer force of will. He had the submachine gun already. He used it. Critical success — not lethal, but significant enough that Das Ungerhauer went down, riddled with bullets and, for the moment, on the ground.
Aldridge, still temporarily insane, took the opportunity to stab him repeatedly with a combat knife, rolling what anyone at the table would describe as a very impressive result for a man currently divorced from his own rational faculties.
Hertz Throws a Grenade
Drexler was wading into the pool now, the ritual object in his hands, the water rising around him as something beneath it pushed upward. The bioluminescence had gone past eerie and into actively blinding, pulsing green-blue light bright enough to cast shadows in full desert daylight. The drums were no longer distant — they were a physical presence, something you felt in your chest rather than heard with your ears.
The pool was overflowing. Glowing water spread across the flat rock in thin sheets, lapping at boots, soaking into the ground. The ground that was, everyone was beginning to notice, no longer entirely solid.
Hertz threw the grenade.
It was a good throw, under the circumstances — slightly beyond comfortable range, but the angle was true. The physics, as he might have noted, checked out.
Drexler was reduced to pink mist. The ritual object dropped to the ground, completely, frustratingly, impossibly unscathed.
Hex was kneeling at the water's edge, within the blast radius, lost in a dissociative certainty that his master was coming and that the pool was a door. He didn't register the grenade until there was nothing left to register.
Hertz stood in the aftermath and did something small and human: he felt it. The loss of a colleague, even a complicated one. One sanity point. Quietly paid.
The Ground Opens
What the grenade did not stop was the pool.
Dark shapes were circling in the water — moving through it the way sharks move, but also through the ground beneath it, sliding through solid rock with a deliberate, sentient grace. One passed beneath the ritual site and the stone rang like a struck bell. The sky turned greenish. Stars appeared in daylight — wrong stars, stars that belonged to no constellation anyone at the table could name. The drums synchronised with heartbeats. The ground softened.
Not metaphorically. The desert floor was becoming quicksand, the solid earth liquefying beneath their feet, and the things in the water were in it too.
Haze tried to climb onto a vehicle and sank deeper for the effort. Hertz called out to Brandt — still at the water's edge, absolutely transfixed, scribbling notes in her journal with the dedication of a scientist watching something unprecedented — and asked, in what was perhaps the most hopeful question of the session, if she knew how to stop it. Whether she spoke English remained unclear. Whether anyone was in a position to act on the answer was even less clear.
The water rose. Gently, almost tenderly. Past knees, past waists, past chests. The drums synchronised. The wrong stars wheeled overhead. The ground ceased to be ground.
And then it closed over their heads.
But they did not drown.
To be continued...
Where are they now? Somewhere else entirely. The question of where — and whether "where" is even the right word — will be answered next session.
Casualties this session:
- Hanover — shot in the opening exchange, having presented herself as a distraction target. The distraction worked. This is cold comfort.
- Hex — caught in Hertz's grenade blast while kneeling at the pool's edge in a dissociative fugue, awaiting a god that doesn't have a good track record with its worshippers.
- Private Harris — decapitated by Das Ungerhauer, who apparently skipped the section of the Geneva Convention regarding proportional force.
- Private Webb — last seen bleeding heavily from a shoulder wound. Prognosis unclear.
- Das Ungerhauer — down, but given his demonstrated ability to heal gunshot wounds, "down" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Key revelation filed under "extremely concerning": the thing Drexler pulled from the pool is made of the same material as the filament heart. Whatever that means, it means something.
State of the battlefield when the sand closed over everyone: one intact ritual object sitting in a glowing pool, one temporarily-insane captain still clutching a combat knife, one theoretical physicist up to his neck in metaphysically questionable quicksand, and wrong stars in a green sky.
Hertz: the only person who successfully threw a grenade, maintained their sanity, and stayed present throughout. He also accidentally started the entire engagement by shooting the sand. Multifaceted.