Initial Hook: Agent Merriweather and Agent Nashihara were part of a two-man team setting up and maintaining Green Boxes throughout the southwestern United States. Both men have missed important check-ins and failed to transmit necessary authorization codes; they are believed dead, missing or compromised.

Merriweather wore an ankle monitor as part of his duties, which has been transmitting from a static position for over 48 hours now.

What Happened: Merriweather and Nashihara were disgraced DG agents. They brought down a cell of Dagon-influenced human traffickers together, but Merriweather was implicated in the operation by mundane authorities. DG decided to burn him to minimize their exposure, though they cut him a sweet deal involving only house arrest. This morphed into working group HOME ON THE RANGE, with Nashihara supplying and sanitizing green boxes throughout the region while Merriweather played office manager in his house.

Tensions grew between the two agents, with Nashihara blaming Merriweather for ending both their careers by getting caught. Merriweather, for his part, went mad while studying the contents of the Black Binder and Black File and began plotting his ascension with the help of Charles "Chuck" Mackenzie, the owner of Tenderloin Time.

Merriweather failed his ritual, but Mackenzie succeeded in his. Now he festers in a cocoon-like pocket kingdom beneath the slaughterhouse, ready to awaken as the Blood Moon Butterfly.

En Route Briefing: The agents are told to report to a gas station in rural West Texas. There, they meet with their gin-soaked handler, Bonner, next to the white noise of a humming electrical transformer in the parking lot.

Bonner gives them the information above. They are to travel to Merriweather's ranch house, which had an active green box in the storage shed out back. There may be anomalous objects or phenomenon onsite. They are to investigate what happened to the agents and sanitize the site. He gives them a phone number to report into or for questions.

The Ranch House

There is a dirt-caked F150 parked out front. There are blood stains and hair in the back seat. [Forensics or Search: The hair is from at least four different individuals. Chemical testing of the blood would reveal that of at least six. ]

Inside, the remains of Agent Nashihara are butchered on the coffee table, the cuts of his meat carefully arranged in a ring around cleanly removed organs and bones. [0/1d4 SAN] Power has been shut off, but a charred lump of flesh is sitting in a camping stove in the kitchen. Merriweather was a hoarder, though trash that filled the room has been pushed to the sides - the bare space of floor containing Merriweather's parts is marked with a spiral of cursive symbols drawn in white paint. [Occult or Anthropology: The characters are a mix of Avestan (the language of Zoroastrian scripture) and Classical Chinese. You can think of no culture or religious group that you know of that would speak both - this might be a made-up pidgin.] Skirting around all this trash without breaking the bare circle requires a Dexterity check.  Crossing the border of the spiral will cause a sharp headache, swimming vision, and the unshakable taste of burnt meat that lingers for hours. [1/1d2 SAN]

The ranch house consists of a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom and basement. All filthy.

The kitchen contains the Black Binder. The bathroom contains only a notebook depicting several manic drawings of a man transforming into a butterfly. It looks like the butterfly was colored with blood. The bedroom has the Computer and a photograph of two men in military fatigues: short with brown hair, tall with red hair.

The Black Binder

An unmarked 3-ring binder containing less than a hundred pages.

Skim: Anonymous first-person account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Clearly machine-translated.

Complete Reading: Hours

A scene stands out among the rest: A woman arrives in the village, announcing that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions. When the villagers say they have nothing to give, that they have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry. A fight breaks out among the villagers as she leaves, twirling her parasol.

The Computer

Older model with printer. Unsecured. Riddled with malware. Currently on screensaver.

- Filled with porn, including some extreme vore stuff and what looks to be commissions to furry artists for images of a man transforming into a red butterfly [like those found in the bathroom]
- A manifesto is open in a word document on the desktop. It consists of several hundred pages of utterly incoherent doomsday prophecy mixing Malthusian catastrophe, Christian millennialism, global warming, social darwinism, and the rise of a capitalist-technofascist government from the economic fusion of China and the United States. It seems totally unedited [Psychotherapy or HUMINT: Probably written while in a manic state.]

- Thumb drive containing untitled.mp4 plugged into tower. SAN 1d6, Unnatural +2%, Indefinite runtime

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman wearing an oversized sweatshirt over a Cheongsam dress sits atop a pile of human bodies underneath the shade of a red umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill background, and soldiers can sometimes be spotted at the periphery of the footage, piling on more bodies or attempting to set the corpse-pile alight.

The woman is eating from a charred shank of meat. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says: [Mandarin] "The principle act of power is to consume that which cannot defend itself from power." After a beat: "And that's it. The rest is just... dressing. Smoke."

At ten minutes: [Mandarin] "Are you enjoying this? I'm enjoying this."

At half an hour: [Mandarin] "It's not going to stop, you know. It's never going to stop."

The video has no end point. Any Agents watching lose an additional 1 SAN and 1 WP for every further half hour. Watching for two hours yields one point of Unnatural, watching for six or more yields two [but an additional SAN check for 0/1d4 made at a -20].

The Basement

No light here but what you bring. Bare concrete.

Six quickly constructed plywood cubicles, painted with sigils similar to those found in the notebook upstairs, and at the entrance to the pocket dimension beneath Tenderloin Time.

A large splatter of dried viscera covers the center of the floor, still vaguely sticky. Tufts of red hair stick out like grass. SAN 0/1d4

A ragged mouth forms when they investigate closer. SAN 0/1d4

"Oh, hello! Don't worry about me. I deserved it, of course. Couldn't fulfill the principle act of power! Chuck could, I couldn't, this is what I deserve. At least it's nice and quiet down here. Actually, could you shoot me? Right in the head, Mr. Officer Sir. Ms. Officer Ma'am if applicable. Sorry, can't see too well anymore. I think it's around here somewhere, still. Starvation is a terribly slow way to go, you see."

[Speak with the mouth further: This is what remains of Leonard Merriweather. He and his pal Chuck were behind this. Chuck's ritual went off just fine at Tenderloin Time, Leonard failed his with sloppy sigil setup. Leonard used his old contacts with DG/the Dagon cult/Tiger Transit to purchase six victims for human sacrifice (three apiece), while Chuck funded the entire operation and did the necessary legwork for the house-bound Merriweather.]

Nashihara's Apartment

Meticulous agents might want to clean up Nashihara's apartment, too. It's located in Austin (a seven hour drive, but on the way to Tenderloin Time). It's spartan and very clean, the only item of note being Nashihara's go-bag hidden in a vent by the door: a small black duffel bag containing an unloaded 10mm handgun, three fake passports and five fake driver's licenses with the deceased's face and various fake names, a heavy black Maglite, a hunting knife, a pair of striped boxers, and $10,000 cash.
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:45, Wed 03 June 2020.

Green Box for "Ardent Rain" / Meat Madness

The interior of the Quonset hut is sweltering in the West Texas heat. The interior smells of sweat, metal, and the acrid tang of gunpowder. The far wall is dominated by a fully stocked reloading bench, well-organized with hex, allen and armorer's wrenches hanging from a pegboard above the work-space. Next to the pegboard hangs a poster displaying instructions on disassembling and reassembling a Kalashnikov rifle. [The text and labels are all in Russian, but the operation itself is simple enough to be virtually foolproof, and with enough practice can be done in less than thirty seconds.]

[Investigating the bench: Agents with Firearms at 50% or higher can attempt to build an additional clip of whatever ammo they like or require. Failure on the roll only indicates that they either don't know how to make the bullets, or the bench lacks specific tools and materials needed. Pre-built and scattered in the drawers are the following: a fifty round box of 9mm ammunition, an opened paper box containing thirty-two loose 10mm rounds. Eight unopened 50-round boxes of "CCI Blazer .45 ACP 230-grain FMJ ammunition". Hidden beneath the workspace is a Steyr MPi81 9mm submachine gun, stashed in a foam lined case, with three spare 32-round clips. All serial numbers have been painstakingly filed off.]

[Successful Search: Hanging from a peg from the door behind you is a leather shoulder holster housing a Mateba Model 6 Unica Autorevolver. The semi-automatic revolver is chambered in .357 Magnum, and is fully loaded. [1d12 damage] A critical success finds a heavy butcher's cleaver. The blade is pitted with rust and stains, deposited under some empty cardboard boxes stacked near the reloading bench.]

A large metal drum sits in the corner. A white, downward-pointing arrow is painted on its side. [Demolitions, Military Science, or an appropriate Craft or Science: this drum is a massive improvised pyrotechnic device. It is filled with an oil gas mixture as well as a homemade napalm. It is designed to set the mixture alight and then allow it to flow out a hole in the bottom, indicated by the arrow on the side.] Next to it are six shells which look like either gigantic bullets or tiny artillery shells. [Military Science: 25mm rounds from a naval autocannon. The yellow-painted tips indicate them to be MK210 High Explosive Incendiary Tracers.]

The only other furniture in the hut are six military cots (four folded up against the wall), and a greasy, off-orange colored couch slumping before a small combination TV/VCR against the south wall. Both items look like they're from the 90's. Underneath the TV is a small shelf of videos and  a few books. "Bambi" and "Predator" are among the few labeled tapes.

[Investigating the shelf: Most of the unlabeled tapes consist of surveillance from various government installations in Washington D.C. (including the Library of Congress, Hoover Building and White House). All are dated 11 FEB 2011. About fifteen minutes into each tape the cameras shut down for four minutes before restarting - to show the interior of the wrong building... it's almost as if the cameras and tapes were physically switched between each other while filming. 0/1 SAN

Most of the books are a collection of badly printed dual-language Bibles with faded leather covers, their alternate pages in terrible English. The first person to read one cover to cover - taking 1D6 days -, and succeeding at a Power roll will be able to permanently understand that language fluently, though not speak or write it (realizing this for the first time costs 1/1D4 Sanity loss).

Copies in the set includes: Traditional Chinese, Dutch, German, Latin, Swedish, Korean, and a language that can't be identified...

A thick three-ring binder full of surveillance photographs of varying quality. They all appear to be focused on a Catholic orphanage and its employees, engaged in mundane day-to-day chores. [Anthropology, History, or Intelligence: Certain street signs, addresses, and advertisements can be seen in some photos, which can be traced to Belfast. Reading the entire binding yields little information, there is no writing or other justification provided. The final photograph has a single nun (not visible in any other photos) circled in red ink, next to a frantically scribbled notation: "HER".]
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:39, Sun 05 Apr 2020.

Inspiration:

A combination of the excellent shotgun scenarios "TAKE-HOME CONTAINER" and "The Offal Truth".
http://fairfieldproject.wikido.../take-home-container
http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/the-offal-truth