Session Overview
No monsters. No gunfire. No dimensional horrors reached out to unmake anyone. And yet this was, in its own quietly devastating way, one of the most unsettling sessions yet. Huddled in a freezing fishing cottage on the Normandy coast, your operatives did something almost more dangerous than fighting: they listened to Erica Brandt. And what she had to say about the Schwarzwasser project, the beings in the depths, and the resonance pillar sitting in that canvas bag like a coiled spring, was enough to cost Hertz a small but meaningful piece of his sanity — and earn him something far stranger in return. The clock is ticking. Tomorrow, they go in.
The Morning After the End of the World
The evening of the 5th of December, 1942. Nearly two months after the operatives had believed it to be.
The fire crackled in the grate of the little fishing cottage, and Harry Lane — dependable, unflappable Harry Lane — was stoking it with the quiet efficiency of a man who has been told where to be and what to bring, and asked no further questions. Tea was on. Bread and cheese sat on the table. Outside, the Normandy coast did what Normandy coasts do in December: it was grey, cold, and deeply unwelcoming.
By morning, the smell of tea and bacon had replaced the existential void, as it so often does. Most of the group surfaced from sleep in various states of dishevelment. Singh, however, did not surface at all.
Hertz was the one who confirmed what everyone had quietly suspected. He watched Singh carefully — sat him in a chair, noted the absence of any voluntary movement, any eye-tracking, any sign that the man inside was still home. He wasn't. Singh responded to direct physical prompts the way a marionette does: mechanically, without will. Whatever had been behind those eyes had simply... gone elsewhere. Or nowhere.
No one dwelt on this for long. There was work to do.
Dispatches from the Future (Relatively Speaking)
Haze was the first to ask the obvious question: "What's happened in the last few months?"
Harry Lane, bless him, had answers. The North Africa offensive had gone well — Monty had driven Rommel out of the desert, just as Finch had predicted. And speaking of Finch: there was a package. Brown paper, tied with string, addressed to Haze and Hertz by name. Harry had clothes ready for them before they'd arrived, had known who was coming, had been briefed down to the individual. When Hertz pressed him on how exactly Finch had known all this, Harry's response was essentially the human equivalent of a shrug wrapped in a naval uniform. Finch had told him. That was sufficient.
The package confirmed the broad strokes: the team had been officially declared dead, the North Africa operation had gone to plan, and there were... predictions, about what was coming next.
Hertz summarised the contents for Aldridge with characteristic efficiency, and Aldridge, who has always preferred problems with clear shapes, cut straight to it: "What's the job?"
"Our goal," Hertz explained, "is to break into that facility — where they made that monster, the Ungenhauer — and put a stop to any more of his kind coming after him."
Aldridge processed this with the expression of a man who has learned to accept a great deal of very strange information at short notice. "The facility in the mountains," he confirmed. "We gear up and get it done."
Harry could provide a route via local resistance contacts, small arms, explosives. Heavier weaponry would arrive with the assault forces. He would not, he made clear, be joining them for the assault itself — his job was getting them there, and he had other things to attend to. Aldridge thanked him for his work with what sounded like genuine warmth, which from Aldridge is saying something.
The Woman Who Watched the Walls of the Universe
It was Harry who suggested they might find it useful to speak with Brandt.
She was sitting at the far end of the cottage, clutching her notebooks, her expression the particular kind of thousand-yard stare that only develops when you've been briefly dissolved into the fabric of reality and reconstituted slightly wrong. Hertz invited her to the table. She got up, walked over, sat down, and asked — with the weariness of someone who has given up pretending — "What do you want?"
What followed was, in many respects, the most illuminating briefing the group had ever received. Which is also to say: deeply, profoundly troubling.
Hertz established the baseline: they believed the facility's activities should be ended, and those in charge were not the sort to be reasoned with. Brandt did not disagree — but she had context.
"The people at that facility are fools," she said, with that faraway look of someone who has seen too much and processed too little of it. "They think they would be gods. They do not know what they meddle with."
She was not speaking in code. She was speaking from six years of close study of things that cannot, ultimately, be studied. She'd come to understand — the hard way, the extremely hard way — that these entities were not forces to be controlled or negotiated with. They were weather conditions. You survived them, or you didn't.
Aldridge, who had been following this conversation with the expression of a man trying to read a map in a foreign language, couldn't help himself: "Are you talking in some kind of code?"
Hertz did his best. He explained the Deep Ones — an aquatic civilisation that had existed alongside humanity for longer than anyone cared to reckon with, largely unbeknownst to the surface world. Aldridge received this information, took a long moment with it, and arrived at: "We are not alone." Then: "And they kept this covered up."
"Take a military perspective," Haze offered, with the pragmatism of a man who has trained himself to treat the incomprehensible as simply another tactical problem. "Infiltrate, destroy, exfil, everyone hopefully stays alive."
"We need something more than small arms," Aldridge pointed out. "These things can swallow bullets."
Brandt laughed. It was not a comforting laugh. "You sound just like the researchers at the facility," she said. "Arguing that you must bargain from a position of strength. As if your strength has any meaning to creatures who built cities when your ancestors were still in the trees."
Operation Black Water: A History Lesson Nobody Wanted
Schwarzwasser, Brandt explained, was a project to forge an alliance between the Reich and the beings in the depths. The terms were straightforward, in the horrible way that cosmic bargains tend to be: the entities had designs on humanity as breeding stock and offered mastery over land in exchange. Drexler had refused. Not because he disagreed with the concept — but because the idea of an Aryan grovelling before these creatures was, apparently, a bridge too far. He went looking for leverage instead. Something to bargain from strength.
This brought up the matter of a place Brandt referred to as Neu de Baum Castle — and here Hertz's memory supplied something useful. He'd read a paper. Not about a castle — because what had stood there was no longer a castle, or indeed much of a mountain. It was the site of what appeared to be a failed Nazi atomic weapon test, notable primarily for the significant portion of mountainside that was simply... absent, and the elevated background radiation that made the area a brisk walk toward personal medical disaster.
He was not wrong. Brandt confirmed it: Neu de Baum had been a hub for early Schwarzwasser research, where they believed they'd found a means to access what they called an infinite power source at the centre of the universe — to punch between worlds. The experiment had deleted the castle. And a generous chunk of the mountain around it.
Drexler, in his infinite wisdom, saw this not as a reason to stop, but as proof they were on the right track. They simply lacked the proper tools. So he spent three years — right up until the moment he encountered the wrong end of a grenade — finding them. And he glanced meaningfully, as Brandt told it, toward the canvas bag. The one containing the resonance pillar.
Haze told Brandt, quite clearly, not to get any ideas about the pillar.
Brandt was not planning to. She was simply explaining what Drexler believed: that with the pillar, properly used, they could demonstrate to these beings that humanity could access the same dimensional energies — not as supplicants on their knees, but as peers. As a force to be reckoned with.
"That will not stop them," she added, and her voice carried the flatness of certainty. "They will try anyway. And last time they tried this, they destroyed most of the mountainside. This time—"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
The Problem with Asking Whether You Can Trust Someone
The question of Brandt's trustworthiness sat over the table like weather.
Aldridge tried to read her. He got close — close enough to catch something genuine. What he saw was not the posture of a woman playing a long game. It was defeat. Pure, exhausted resignation. She was telling the truth not out of any redemptive impulse, but because nothing felt worth lying about anymore. "She's just defeated," he told the group. "Not coming from a position of victory. It's like — why not just get this done? It's all pointless."
Hertz's read was... different. He became convinced, with quiet clarity, that Brandt was manipulating him specifically — steering him toward completing Drexler's work, because he was the only one present with the theoretical knowledge to actually do it. Whether that assessment was correct, or whether Hertz's increasingly complicated relationship with the resonance pillar was colouring his perception, was harder to determine. (Both could be true. That's the fun of it.)
Haze looked Brandt in the eye and asked, simply: "Are you a Nazi?"
Brandt confirmed she was a party member. It was generally required, she said, to operate in the upper echelons of the Karotechia. Haze followed up: did she personally believe in Nazi ideology?
"I did," she said. Past tense. Short, flat, final.
Aldridge settled the practical question for everyone. Brandt wasn't batting for their enemies anymore. She was an enemy of their mutual enemy. That, for now, would have to be enough.
Hertz proposed speaking with her privately — with Haze listening in as redundancy — to have her explain how the device worked, and to judge whether her guidance could be trusted. If everything went wrong, Aldridge offered cheerfully, they would just blow everything up as plan B.
Hertz vs. the Geometry of Reality (A Sporting Contest)
What followed was, depending on your perspective, either an intensive crash course in dimensional mechanics or a sustained assault on one man's intellectual dignity.
Brandt began coaching Hertz through the theoretical framework of the resonance pillar using her notebooks. The GM described it, with some relish, as a Nazi scientist teaching an Allied intelligence officer an alien ritual designed by a dead Nazi. Which is the sort of sentence that sounds made up but apparently isn't, in this timeline.
The actual instruction, it turned out, was less theory and more muscle memory. Brandt wasn't explaining why the pillar worked — she was explaining how to operate it, in the way a control tower talks down a pilot who has never flown before: push here, pull this, turn that, and try not to think too hard about what you're touching.
Hertz's mind stretched itself around the concepts. Most of them. He lost a small but non-trivial piece of his sanity in the process — and gained something else: a single point of genuine, deep, Unnatural understanding. Something shifted. The kind of shift that doesn't shift back.
By nightfall, he'd grasped the theoretical framework well enough to articulate it: the pillar was a focusing array, constraining dimensional energy into a stable and controllable flow. Like a lens, if the lens had opinions about being used and occasionally pulsed with inner light that moved in ways light shouldn't.
He also began to notice, with the creeping discomfort of someone who has started to intuit things they cannot explain, that patterns were forming on the pillar's surface. Faint lights, moving within it. It was almost eager.
Then the harder concepts hit him like a wall. The ideas slid off. His mind simply could not hold them — the geometry was too alien, too fundamentally incompatible with human intuition. He sat with the failure for a moment, then called Haze over and asked Brandt to try again, fresh ears.
Haze approached this with the focused practicality of a man accustomed to learning lethal techniques under time pressure. He made it further than anyone expected. Against odds that would have made any sensible bookmaker refuse to take the bet, he grasped it — not the theory, not even close, but the technique. The procedure. If Hertz fell, Haze would have something to work with.
(The table's collective surprise was audible. These things happen.)
By the following morning — the 7th of December — Brandt synthesised her teaching, recontextualised the pieces that hadn't landed, and tried once more with Hertz. The pillar practically radiated encouragement at this point, which is a sentence that should be more alarming than it apparently felt in the moment. And this time, with his accumulated strange understanding pressing at the edges of his thoughts, Hertz made it. Just. Rolling a 3 on an Intelligence check taken at a brutal penalty. The concept clicked into place.
The pillar, the GM noted, seemed satisfied. Hertz felt a connection to it that he couldn't quite articulate and probably shouldn't examine too closely.
Intelligence, Plans, and the Reckoning of Tomorrow
While Hertz and Haze had been engaged in their impromptu seminar on impossible physics, Aldridge had been doing what Aldridge does: reviewing intelligence, inventorying equipment, and preparing for violence in a systematic and professional manner.
Harry Lane shared what he knew about the target: a remote headland, minimally garrisoned as far as anyone could tell, presenting to reconnaissance as little more than a handful of huts and an exercise square. Rarely visited. Which, as everyone understood by now, meant nothing — the interesting parts would be elsewhere. Below ground. Built into the cliffs, near the water.
That was Brandt's contribution to the tactical picture: the above-ground facility was largely irrelevant. The ritual would take place in a sublevel carved into the cliffs themselves. That was where they needed to go. That was where they would need to bring the pillar.
The assault was tomorrow. A full-scale attack was coming — Harry made sure they understood this. It would not be just the four of them. Assault forces would hit the facility from the expected direction. The operatives' role was to use that noise, that chaos, as cover to come in from the opposite side. Infiltrate the sublevel. Control the breach. Or, if control proved impossible, destroy everything and run.
Resources were confirmed: small arms, reasonable ammunition for each person, and the equivalent of a backpack full of high explosives. Aldridge considered this. "What else can we gather on the way?"
The water of dissolution — two doses, confirmed to have come through the dimensional transit with them — was examined, distributed, and its delivery method debated. Brandt's eyes lit up when she saw the vials. Physical contact was sufficient, she confirmed. Splash, blade, injection — anything that put the substance in contact with the target. As for the sanctified oils: she replied with a rhetorical question. Given everything they had learned, did they really think the holy oils wouldn't do something?
Fair point.
Hertz made one observation that landed quietly, in the way that the most telling things often do: "A violent death is of rather less concern to me now than the alternative." Haze told him, with genuine feeling, to write a will. He had family back home.
The matter of Singh was resolved practically: Harry Lane would keep him, and Finch's organisation would arrange proper custody. Brandt's fate was settled in a brief private conversation between Haze and Harry — she would not be coming with them to the facility, and she would be handed specifically to Finch's specialist department. Not regular intelligence. Finch's people. Harry confirmed, without elaboration, that he understood completely. He was, as always, already on the same page.
Denouement Approaching
By the afternoon of the 7th, the plan was as set as it was going to get. The assault was tomorrow. The facility was waiting. Somewhere below the cliffs of Cap de la Hague, in a sublevel built for purposes that had already destroyed one mountainside, the Schwarzwasser project was preparing to try again.
The operatives had the pillar. They had the dissolution. They had explosives, sidearms, and whatever Hertz had picked up from three days of being taught impossible things by a resigned former true believer. They had each other.
The fire crackled. Harry set out more bread and cheese. Outside, the December dark came down fast over Normandy.
Tomorrow.
To be continued...
A session of planning, revelation, and deeply inadvisable education in alien mechanics.
- Singh: Still present in body. Somewhat less so in every other respect.
- The resonance pillar: Technically an asset. Definitely sentient-adjacent. Absolutely fine.
- Brandt: Neutralised, resigned, and soon to become Finch's problem. Genuinely unclear whether this is good news.
- Hertz's sanity: Slightly reduced. His Unnatural score: slightly increased. Net result: unknown, probably haunting.
- Haze: Somehow grasped the operational procedure for an alien dimensional focusing array through sheer military-science bloody-mindedness. The table was as surprised as anyone.
- Quote of the Session: "I am sure that when it comes to it, it will prove that I have forgotten everything, and we will all die horribly." — Hertz, with the cheerful practicality of a man who has made peace with his situation.
- Status: Armed, briefed, and approaching the cliff's edge. The final session is coming.