Operation Fleeting Storm

Overview: A trio of Delta Green agents went up against a cult devoted to the Pretender-in-Feasting and failed. Now, using clues left by their predecessors, the agents on clean-up need to cauterize the infection before it spreads.

Initial Hook: Agents are provided with plane or train tickets to Memphis, Tennessee. They meet their handler at the FBI Field Office in Memphis. They are on the appropriate guest lists but are treated coldly and suspiciously by everyone in the building.

The agents are tasked with cleaning up another failed working group. Agent Kelsey is dead, shot in the head six times, which the county coroner deemed a "suicide."  Agents Barnes and Santos are at large. Tea Company used a call and response that the surviving agents (if any) may respond to: "What do you do when the exterminator is late?" The correct response is: "Burn the apartment down."

What Happened: Adam Boucher was a young man born into relative wealth and prestige, descended from French immigrants who were wealthy "landowners" (read: slave owners). They transitioned into the garment over they course of the 19th century. Today they own both overseas sweatshops supplying Walmart and fancy boutiques in several international cities.

When his great aunt, the "famous" Parisian occultist and herbalist Adeline Boucher finally passed away, he inherited a silver tureen, a large chunk of cash, a vintage and a slim libretto - Banquet du Prétendant. Boucher drank the Bordeaux with his wife, and both were converted into one of the pretender's "colonies." They converted others, and now he and most of his staff are given over to wholly unnatural forces.

Tea company attempted to infiltrate the WorkSteady offices by having Santos pose as an OSHA inspector and Kelsey pose as a job applicant. Barnes was providing overwatch and support. Santos was found out and killed, while Kelsey was "hired" and forcibly converted into one of the pretender's "colonies." He escaped and killed himself before the process could be complete.

En Route Briefing: The handler explains that Agent Kelsey, a trusted DG agent in a deep cover mission nearby, was discovered dead in his apartment three days ago. The county coroner deemed his death a suicide, even though he appears to have been shot in the head six times. The agents need to question the county coroner and determine what happened to the two remaining members of his cell, Working Group TEA COMPANY. The agents also need to keep a low profile - the fact that Agent Kelsey was found by local authorities is... not ideal.

The agents' handler is setting the necessary gears in motion to give the agents a joint terrorist task force designation in the Memphis area. It will take a week for all the paperwork to be done, but they may not have a week. They agents will need to investigate immediately and maintain a low profile until then.

Emma Mason, the county coroner, is available for interrogation in the next room. The handler suggests the agents start there. He also offers Kelsey's apartment for his cover identity, and the hotel Santos and Barnes were staying at. He also knows the location of a green box that the team requested access to; he can grant them access as well.

TEA COMPANY: The handler, if asked, will tell the agents that Tea Company's mission was tracking down known cognitohazardous texts and historical artifacts. Kelsey was a historian and antiquarian who could verify the items, and Santos and Barnes were agents with federal clearance who could go in and flash badges to requisition them. They had a lead on something in the Memphis area, but due to the nature of their work, strict information quarantine protocols were in place, so the handler does not know exactly what they are looking for at the time of Agent Kelsey's death.

Agent James Kelsey: A solid and dependable program friendly, though he saw very little actual action. Sending him into WorkSteady undercover was a mistake.

Agent Charlotte "Charlie" Barnes: Utterly crazy with about 10 SAN left, she will head to the green box at around the time the players arrive. She will take the pipe bombs and single page from the libretto. She is armed with a knife and her service weapon, and extremely paranoid and twitchy.

Agent Gabriel Santos: Deceased, moldering in the basement of the administrative office of WorkSteady with a bullet in the brain. Barnes is telling the truth about this, at least.

The Colonies:

The Imago:

The Dimensional Shambler: Like a radially-symmetrical gorilla with no head and no skin but worse. It stumbles and sways drunkenly before slipping, skipping or tumbling between dimensions in a violent, wet pinwheels.
This message was last edited by the GM at 07:16, Wed 20 Jan 2021.

La Fête du Prétendant: The libretto of an unperformed French operetta in three short parts. The front cover identifies it as a political satire. It seems to be from the 1700s or earlier. The pages are vellum but have been poorly preserved. The whole thing is crumbling apart.

Skim:

Full Reading: The 1st Act- Mostly exposition, explaining in song that the pretender intends to escape "the colonies" in order to hold a grand feast with his allies and plot his overthrow of "true king."

The 2nd Act- The Pretender arrives at the colonies, which are depicted by a chorus of singers in costumes "resplendent with ants" in an apparent pun. The Unwelcome Guest arrives and devours some of the chorus.

The 3rd Act- The Pretender flees to the homestead of a vassal. The Pretender consumes an ortolan drowned in Armagnac on stage while the surviving members of the colonial chorus sing their fealty. Afterward the colonies self-cannibalize while the Pretender sings. The Unwelcome Guest arrives and threatens The Pretender. The play is resolved through deus ex machina as a yellow tapestry is unfurled to represent the True King. He banishes the Unwelcome Guest and offers The Pretender clemency if he revokes his claims. The Pretender accepts, disembowels himself, and performs a closing song with strange, dissonant notes and heavy flute accompaniment.

Addendum - Design Notes: All actual spell information is here. The spell Fascination are the lyrics to the Pretender's final song in the play. Complex diagrams and bizarre, specific instructions for costumes and set design are included. Some of these instructions, if performed, are actually summoning spells. The final page is a depiction of the True King's tapestry, which is actually the Yellow Sign.

Full Reading- The  1d4 SAN loss, plus yellow sign exposure. Contains the spell Fascination, and if Barnes has not defaced it yet, the spells to summon the Pretender and a Dimensional Shambler. The last place has a design of the tapestry used to represent the True King who arrives in act three. It is actually a depiction of the Yellow Sign.

Node 1: The Interrogation of Emma Mason
Description: A plump woman in her mid 50s clutches a Styrofoam cup of coffee in a tiny, cramped interrogation room. She has a pleasant face and gray hair, blue eyes, and prim wire-framed glasses.
Free Clue: Emma is plainly terrified and will seem earnest when she says this was well and truly a suicide. She practically falls over herself in an attempt to cooperate. She doesn't read like a cultist at all. All six of the gunshots to the head were really self-inflicted. It strains plausibility, but she sincerely claims it to be true.
HUMINT: Emma is hiding something. She's scared because Barnes already intimidated her into silence: she was asked to hide the details of the tapeworms in her autopsy report. Or else.
Medicine, Surgery, or Science (Biology): If asked, Emma Mason will let them see the corpse, which is yet to be destroyed. A dissection will reveal that agent Kelsey was infested - like absolutely crammed to the gills with - tapeworms when he died. A Forensics roll can recover this as well.
Persuade: Emma Mason responds well to intimidation, but can also be persuaded to trust the agents if they disavow Barnes. She might even be possible to flip into a friendly, covering up deaths in the wake of the agents over the length of the operation.

Node 2: The Late Kelsey's Apartment.
Description: Largely empty with carboard boxes everywhere and a mattress and some bedding on the floor. He was still moving in, it seemed. There is a cheap digital camera and a tripod set up in one corner, pointing at the bed.
Free Clue: The digital recorder has a file in it, but moving towards it makes the floorboards squeak. Revealing a hidden stash underneath, the agents find a bottle on unmarked pills, a TEC-9 with a 32-round magazine and an assault grip, and a number of small data cards from the digital recorder. They are arranged in a little medical pill box, with each file in a date. Reviewing them in the recorder shows that Kelsey was recording himself sleeping for some reason. The one in the recorder is Kelsey's Recording. There is a post-it note on the camera: burning the apartment down.
Viewing Kelsey's Recording: "Hello Mr. Green. I sure hope this is Mr. Green. If not... hello whoever is watching. If you don't know who I am or what I'm talking about you should turn this off and run as far as you can from Memphis. If you're law enforcement you should contact your superiors with this immediately. We might have a friendly in your department who can... escalate this properly. I can't explain everything, nobody can, but... the tea company is compromised. Fatally. I am compromised. Fatally. Do not trust Barnes. She abandoned us in there, and she's... she's been not okay for a long time. Santos didn't make it. Boucher sniffed him out and his office manager shot him. They... they did something to me. I can't. I don't have long. Boucher had a book, we managed to recover it. La Fête du Prétendant. We got it from his house and stored it in the green box, but we were too late. He's already used it. You need to stop Boucher, and his staff. They are the vector, but they're preparing something worse. The pretender is coming soon, I can feel it, and... and..." His hand trembles and he raises a gun to his temple. "I need to do this. I need to do this. Tell Marianne I love her and I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Okay." If they keep watching, they see him pull the trigger. The first shot isn't fatal, but the second and third ones should have been. 0/1 SAN. If they keep watching, they see tapeworms writhing about in the gun wounds. The tapeworms seem to be reconstituting his flesh somehow. He fires all six bullets from the snub-nose, reducing most of his skull and face to a bloody red nothing. The gargling husk of Kelsey is still alive, somehow, as he gropes for a canister of some sort of liquid off-camera. He dumps the canister over his head, howls in agony, and finally at long last dies as the worms stop writhing. 1/1d6 SAN. Watching to the end and making an Alertness check identifies a label on the canister - a common household pesticide.
Successful search roll: Keys to the green box, marked D1 and G1, and hidden in a ceiling light fixture.
Pharmacy: Identifies the unmarked pills as flunitrazepam, also known as rohypnol. It is a powerful and well-known hypnotic.
Reporting into Handler: Bonner doesn't care, either way, but will try to help and accommodate reasonable requests. He prefers Barnes be recovered but trusts the agents' discretion. Schulte will request that both the book and Barnes be recovered, with priority given to agent Barnes. Both will caution strongly against killing her outright - they strongly recommend talking to her. If asking, the handler will attempt to contact Barnes through a secure channel one more time. With a successful Luck check, she will agree to a meet. If mention of Boucher's name in Kelsey's recording is made known to the handler, they will offer to look into his background. In a day's time the agents will receive information providing the clues 1 and 2 from Boucher's residence, making a break-in less than necessary.

The Boucher Residence
Free Clue: There are strange yellow stains on the sheets in the bedroom and allow over the bathrooms. Golden, bright yellow hues. They also find correspondence from Iseldis Vigouroux, Boucher's deceased great aunt.
Anthropology or History: Adam Boucher was splurging on researching his family history, it seems. His study is filled with textbooks on genealogy, commercial DNA reports and Ancestry.com printouts, and the like. Focus was paid on his late aunt, who seems to have been a practicing occultist and herbalist. She is touted a "golden cure" for alcoholism and opium addiction. There are dark rumors about her being an abortionist or poisoner for hire, but for the most part she seems to have been regarded as a fraud.
Accounting, Search of 40% or higher or a successful roll of either: A receipt of sale for a silver tureen to a pawn shop in Memphis proper. If asked the pawn shop owner can verify seeing both the bottle of wine and the book. He felt he couldn't sell either and suggested he just drink the wine.
Search 50% or higher: They find the discarded wine bottle in the basement. There is a yellow residue inside. Golden, bright yellow.


The Administrative Office
Free Clue: Everyone working here is weird. Blank faces, blunted affect, staring daggers at you. You're not wanted.
Accounting: Getting their hands on some financial documents will show that a large donation from Caleb Weeks, a semi-wealthy local real estate developer who runs a series of Christian charter schools. Cursory research shows he is a dyed-in-the-wool Republican type, with many rants on social media against welfare and the "deep state." It seems unlikely he'd donate a huge sum to affordable housing. This money was originally earmarked for a new housing unit in West Memphis, but more has been directed toward the "WorkSteady Job Center" in recent days. That fact that most of their money comes from private donations and grants, rather than tax credits, is noteworthy and strange on its own.
Accounting 60%: A singed manila folder of receipts shows that an inordinate sum - about $7,000 - was spent getting a small package through customs. Most of it was for waivers, insurance, lawyer fees, and the like. The package itself? $20 worth of live bedbugs, bought off a "prank" service on the dark web that mails feces, glitter bombs, live pests (like bedugs or termites) or other unpleasant packages to the customer's enemies. They had it delivered here, to the office.
Alertness 50%: Agent Santos' corpse molders in the basement. They have poorly covered up the smell by dusting him with carpet deodorizer, but the smell can be detected from upstairs. Entering the basement at all makes it immediately obvious, with no roll or skill threshold necessary.
Bureaucracy: Grabbing pretty much any random paperwork will show that the admin office has not been responsive to resident complaints. They are also making no effort at HUD compliance, not requesting withdrawals from repair funds, not setting up required resident interviews, not duly marketing vacancies to undeserved communities. They won't be able to get away with operating in this way for more than a quarter or two before getting all their tax credits pulled.
Computer Science: Surveillance footage showing Kiara Wilkes entering the lobby and leaving with a package.
Computer Science or Sigint 40%, or getting unrestricted access to an open employee terminal: It looks like everyone stopped exchanging chats, emails, or any other kind of inter-office communication about a month ago. The last few exchanges are among worried lower-level employees, noting their employers' strange behavior.

Hartford Terrace
Free Clue: Residents say that this used to be a nice place to live, but within the last year or so the WorkSteady folks stopped making repairs and let the trash pickup lax. Some complain of bedbugs.
Alertness: There are, indeed, bed bugs. There is a telltale, musty smell and they can spotted crawling on furniture. Crushing one reveals a bright yellow fluid inside.
Computer Science: There is a community computer in the lobby, and an even slightly inventive hacker can use it to crack into the building's office files. Security footage shows Kiara Wilkes behaving strangely and intentionally spreading bed bugs?
Persuade: Individual residents will talk about the strange ideas Kiara has and the turn she took when she became property manager.

The WorkSteady Job Center
Free Clue: The site is under construction, just some skeletal steel columns into the freshly-poured foundation. The basement is extensive - unreasonably cavernous - and has been poured into strange, curved dimensions.
Art (Architecture), an appropriate Craft, or a successful Intelligence -20% roll: This basement designed is absurdly expensive, and you can't think of a legitimate or even illegitimate use for it. It looks like perhaps it was designed to collect a large amount of fluid. It looks a bit like an underground skate park; lots of weird slopes, bowls and curved ramps and things. Most of the construction materials were used on this strange concrete... art piece? Secret, weirdly-designed reservoir?
HUMINT: Patrick Dean lives here now. He watches the cameras. Always. He will aggressively pursue and kill anyone who enters the basement and wipe the footage. He barely sleeps.
SIGINT or Computer Science: There are security cameras everywhere. Everywhere. Way too many for a construction site for a non-profit. None of the footage is uploaded to the Internet, it is all stored only in a laptop in the trailer. This is all really unusual. Alertness itself is enough to notice the camera.
This message was last edited by the GM at 02:38, Fri 25 Sept 2020.

NPCS

County Coroner: Emma Mason

Executive Director of WorkSteady: Adam Boucher

Agent James Kelsey: Deceased.

Agent Charlotte "Charlie" Barnes: Crazy with 15 SAN. Knows Fascination and Summon: Dimensional Shambler and baby, she's willin' to use it.

Évrard Toutain: Author of the grimoire. Successful history or occult reveals his background as an unssuccessful opera writer in France during the late 1700s. He drank himself to death and is a musical footnote, but he wrote an occult examination of the golden ratio and its relationship to music that some highly praise shortly before he died. The operetta seems to have penned the year of his death, possibly written while his brain was liquefying.

Riley Hawkins: Admin Assistant. Stringy ginger kid in his early 20s, if even that. Has a scruffy beard and is wearing a green button-down shirt tucked sloppily into his khakis and a clashing red tie.
Maddison Doyle: Admin Assistant. Mid twenties with shoulder-length black hair and green eyes. She is wearing a sleeveless, floral-print dress.
Martha Moss: CFO. A stout, middle-aged black woman in a no-nonsense pantsuit. She wears immaculate red lipstick and looks like she could be running for office.
Ian Armstrong: Senior Accountant. Thin but tall older man with salt-and-pepper hair and a short, carefully groomed beard. Wears a suit and tie, always.
Eliza Jackson: Secretary. Olive-skinned, early 30s, with eyes as blue as a Husky. She wears a professional blouse, a cardigan and a bright yellow skirt.
Patrick Dean: Office Manager. Barrel-chested and potbellied balding white guy. Wears a baby blue Polo T shirt, khaki pants, and a gun on his hip.
Kiara Wilkes: Property Manager. Not actually converted, but fiercely loyal. Has a baseball bat at Hartford Terrace in her office. Will be fully converted in a few days. Black, short, curly hair. Early 30s. Anxious and high-strung. Wears beige colored jeans and a Polo shirt, like a mini Patrick Dean.
Courtney Boucher: Adam's wife, also infected and works at the office. Thin with a short blonde bob. Wears a shiny lilac blouse and professional skirt.

Incidentals:
Caleb Weeks: Wealthy idiot that they used fascination on. If contacted, he will confirm that Fascination was used on him but wants no part of the investigation. His little taste of SAN loss was enough, thank you.
Honest Eddie: Pawn shop owner.
Iseldis Vigouroux: Boucher's great aunt. Her plot to summon the Pretender is a failed Lazarus scheme. Her apartment holds the essential saltes of some deceased masters, 2d4 (7) doses of the dust of the thresholds, and an aggressive rat-thing familiar.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:27, Sun 14 June 2020.

My dearest great-nephew,

I have bequeathed to you a curious book from my personal collection and a silver tureen I was told is a family heirloom. I have also included a 1921 Bordeaux, an excellent year. Please drink it with your darling wife in my memory as soon as you receive it, as I fear the dreadful American climate will turn it to vinegar.

It was such a joy and comfort to meet you and Courtney before I fell into eternity. Drink up in good health, dear nephew. I am certain I will see you again soon, in either this the world or the next.

Machine-translated note:

My dear little nephew,

I left you a curious book from my personal collection and a silver soup tureen that was told to me is a family heirloom. I also included a 1921 Bordeaux, an excellent year. Please drink it with your darling wife in my memory as soon as you receive it, as I fear the terrible American climate will turn it into vinegar.

It was such a joy and comfort to meet you and Courtney before falling into eternity. Drink healthy, dear nephew. I am sure that I will see you again soon, in this world or in the next.

The Tureen

The silver tureen looks perfectly ordinary to normal inspection. A successful History roll, or 20% Archaeology or higher, will reveal it is very old, from the French Middle Ages around the 12th century or so.

The tureen is a cursed item with the power to manifest more of the Syrup. Any amount poured inside will be tripled in a few short seconds. The tureen will fill to the brim in under a minute, and will then stop producing Syrup. The cultists use it to accelerate the transformation of converts, force-feeding a restrained victim the Syrup

The Syrup and the Pretender's Feast

The Syrup is summoned when the Pretender is summoned. Usually it just dries out. If inserted into a host, the amount is usually too small to be effective. The host's immune system eliminates the foreign, anomalous matter like it would bacteria. If inserted into a smaller creature, however, it can subsume that creature entirely. Hollowing it out and leaving only an exoskeleton filled with more Syrup.

The cultists have figured out that by inserting the Syrup into parasites, then inserting enough parasites into a person, they can conquer that person's immune system and convert them into a Colony. The tureen allows them to greatly speed up this process by giving them a massive dose of the Syrup beforehand.

Their ultimate goal is to amass a large enough concentration of Syrup in the construction site basement to summon the Pretender's "pagaent." Essentially a riptide of Syrup large enough to swallow the world. Treat this as a god - if summoned the Pretender will do what it wants before departing, likely paving the way in some fashion for its liege, the Yellow King.

The Colony Men
Colonies are quite feeble, being former human beings who largely consist of hollowed out bags of skin, filled with the Syrup. What remains of their human form is weak and feeble, thoroughly infested with an enormous number of parasites.

They have only 8 HP and only succeed in STR, DEX or CON contests with a roll of 50 or lower, but regain 1 hitpoint per round. Pesticides or utter bodily destruction is needed to destroy them. The Unwelcome Guest can defeat them by shunting them out of this reality.  The tuning fork also works, since it will rupture the parasites that largely control the the colonies.

The Pageant

AURA OF POWER: Any human in the pageant's presence
is automatically at −20% on all rolls (except SAN). A
character that fails the SAN roll for encountering the pageant
cannot act for 1D4 turns, instead goggling in abject terror.

COALESCE: The pageant is summoned when enough of the syrup is congeals in  single location. Once enough syrup is amassed, the pageant will coalesce in 1d4 turns. It parades about for a short time, exposing as many humans to its terrible presence as possible, before taking whatever dread actions it feels like.

DISCORPORATION: A successful attack with a Lethality
rating of 10% or higher, or dealing 30 or more damage to the pageant in a single turn with explosives, fire or hypgeometric attacks, causes the pageant loose cohesion, exploding in
a film of syrup that coats everything nearby . Each character
present must make a CON roll. On a failure, the syrup finds some existing infection, parasite or undiagnosed health problem to exploit in the victim. The pathogen, empowered by the syrup, festers and risks turning the victim into one of the pretender's colonies. The exact effects of this are up to the Handler (treat this as essentially a body horror version of yellow sign exposure).

GRASP AND ABSORB: The pageant can
reach out with extruded pseudopods or by peeling off "dancers"
"and servers" from its larger mass, and absorb prey
within itself. The slime may spread this attack to two or
even three targets in one turn: with two attacks, each is
at 70% and inflicts 2D6 damage instead of a Lethality
rating; with three attacks, each is at 60% and inflicts
1D10 damage. Against a single target it is a 90%, Lethality 10% attack.

SAN Loss: d6/d20
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:48, Sun 26 July 2020.