The Missing Mass Problem

Run Date: 3 October 2010

Game Date:  Marcy (2010?? – ambiguity)

Charlotte, Sam and Father Tom were invited to “a night at the opera” in Chicago, where they met up with two new operatives, Mark Strom and Beth Cole, both of whom had worked for Delta Green in various (sub operative) capacities for some time.

This time they were sent to investigate a series of mysterious deaths, which took place on and around the campus of the University of Chicago.   As they were reviewing the autopsy data from four apparently unrelated individuals their handler received a call from a Mr. Mark Green, who had just come from identifying his daughter’s body at the morgue.  Laura’s death was as odd and inexplicable as those which they were investigating.  Her father said that it was ‘her and not her’ that he’d identified.   Her body had been dwarfed and mangled.   The other deaths involved missing and partially organs and bones.

The team began by investigating Laura’s home.   There they found some notes pertaining to her research (she was a graduate student studying under the famous Chen-Men Soung), and a tremendous amount of data on her amazing computer system, with the rest of the home being what one would expect from a graduate student’s budget.  They also found e-mails and explicit texts linking her to Dr. Soung.   Evidently she had had a romantic liason with him, which she broke off two months before, due to pressure of work and her awareness of an encroaching physical problem.

Laura had been shrinking.  Slowly.  Losing height and mass.  She had altered her clothing, and her habits, to hide her condition from the world, but eventually had died as result of organ failure which the coroner had attributed to her ‘dwarfism’ (though she had been a healthy woman of 5’6″ just months before).

Of the other victims, Anita Sanchez had cleaned Dr. Soung’s home, and developed osteoporosis at the age of 30, then fell down the stairs and died.  She had recently had a physical exam and been in fine health.   Nicolas Winters, who had shared an office with Dr. Soung, developed Alzheimer’s over the course of two months (in his mid sixties) and died of it.  Mary Estes, who was a receptionist at Olman, a research firm which Dr. Soung consulted for, died of kidney failure (one kidney was deformed, the other mysteriously missing).  Antonio Huertes, a night watchman at Fermilab where both Soung and Green had laboratories, died of a ‘heart attack’, as that organ had literally exploded.   Checking with the families of the others (except for Dr. Winters, who had no surviving family) showed that none had any signs of problems before their death.

Eventually, Charlotte and Beth went to speak to Dr. Soung, and keep him occupied while Father Tom, Sam and Mark investigated his house.   The men found signs of excessive consumption of alcohol and sleeping pills, and little in the way of edible food.   Not much else, not even a home computer, but a roomful of books on a wide variety of subjects.  Meanwhile, the women spoke to Dr. Soung.   Beth was shocked and amazed at his mathematical formula, and engaged him in a brief (but far too revealing) conversation about his findings on the stellar neighborhood and the missing mass problem.   While she was recovering from that, Charlotte found him unable to manage a basic conversation about the size of his staff.

The team was convinced that Soung was the key, but not that he was necessarily the plotter behind what was going on.   They were determined that Olman and/or Fermi labs were involved as well, but at a loss how to enter either place.  They determined that the next step was to talk to Kashe Koyu, Dr. Soung’s teaching assistant, and find out what was going on (perhaps to warn her that she was in danger as well).    However, as they went to approach Kashe after her session, they found out that she had collapsed in class and was taken to the ER.

They went to the campus hospital, but found that she was in isolation as a possible contamination risk.   They tried to get in to see her, but Sam was quarantined when he claimed to have been the EMT who brought her in.

The rest of the team decided to confront Soung again, carefully.  They showed up at his house (after he got home) with some take out Italian food, and began to make sympathetic noises about all the bad fortune around him.  He seemed to have been oblivious to the death and destruction, and, once told, his distress (though probably genuine) was strangely short lived.  This confirmed Father Tom’s initial feeling that he was displaying schizophrenic symptoms.

Then Charlotte excused herself.  She admitted that she had been feeling ill since they had interviewed Dr. Soung the day before.  She went to a ‘private’ (and very discreet) physician, and stayed for an MRI while the rest of the team pondered how to continue their investigation…

Y2K (ll+10)

Run Date: 8 August 2010
World Date: 31 December 2009

Charlotte and Toni, the two survivors of October’s ‘incident’, were contacted via e-mail by Damian of Delta Green, and ‘invited’ to meet with Big Al at a classy restaurant in New York City on the afternoon of New Years Eve.

Once there they were treated to a snazzy lunch, and presented with the facts of the case. An unusual number of individuals had ‘gone missing’ in Manhattan over the past couple of weeks (about twice the normal rate). The number included a number of homeless folks, who were sufficiently perturbed by the events that they were willing to speak with the authorities.  They were given a couple of hours to investigate, then asked to ‘patrol’, and they were given FBI consultant badges.

They had enough time to attempt to contact one woman who had escaped a kidnapping attempt (and been told her kidneys would be harvested) and to interview a homeless activist.  The activist was convinced that the government was behind the dissappearances, and  was belligerant, but arranged for them to interview a homeless man who had encountered strange things in the sewers.  The homeless man was barely coherent, but described little grey men in the sewers, and nearly being trapped  under a manhole cover which had been welded shut.

By then it was time to begin patrolling.  They drove around in a Delta Green supplied rental vehicle until they spied what appeared to be an incipient riot.  A number of disreputable individuals were attempting to tip over a tour bus, accusing the passengers of organ harvesting.  Charlotte and Toni radioed for help, then went to stabilize the situation, but were soon overwhelmed (as someone was shooting into the crowd).

They awoke some unknown time later, in a damp, locked room.  Also present were Sam, Mark, Tom, John, Travis, Sarah, and Betty, who were also waking up, and nearly a dozen mute people, wandering aimlessly about the chamber, one of whom was severely injured but seemed inured to the pain.   After some time of confusion and comparing notes, it was determined that five of them, Charlotte, Toni and Mark (a private investigator), Sam (a paramedic) and Tom (a priest) all came from the same riot at the bus.  The other four, John (a Wall Street banker),  Sarah (a student), Travis (a skate punk) and Betty (a homeless woman) had been snatched from various places in the city during the day.  They were each missing some personal belongings (outerwear, cel phones, and Charlotte, Sam  and Mark were also missing guns).

Charlotte soon picked the lock on the door, and they discovered that they had been locked in a pumping station, and the only exit seemed to be through the storm sewers.  They found that their missing belongings had been stowed in a trash bag and tossed in the sewers.  Things were recovered, but water damaged.  There was another room nearby, but it was locked and would require an electronic key card to enter.

As they began to tromp through the sewers, it soon became clear that things were even worse than that.  They began to develop fevers, and came across passages which had been blocked off and marked with CDC quarantine tape.  There were occasional manhole covers above, but they were universally welded shut.  Things got even worse than that, as it became necessary to swim through part of the sewer, and Father Tom had his arm torn off by a giant albino alligator!  Charlotte and Mark shot the creature (their sidearms weren’t damaged by the water after all) and drove it off.  Sam struggled to help Father Tom with his massive bleeding, finally cauterizing the wound with an improvized charge from the batteries salvaged from Toni’s cel phone and portable radio, but feared that the priest, already suffering from a high fever, was not long for this world.

Eventually the party found itself (apparently) under Times Square, while the sounds of the celebration ranged above.  Their progress was blocked by a grate which cut across the sewer.  Travis volunteered to squeeze through the blockage, and was immediately torn apart by a *something* lurking in the shadows.  Charlotte and Mark both opened fire on the thing, bu it was too late for Travis.  As his body washed up against the grate, they found a note on it describing a reality TV show, in which he was the ‘mole’, tasked with getting his comrades to this point at a particular time.

The survivors decided to make their way back (and be anywhere other than at the ‘right’ place at the ‘right’ time).  On their way back they found the bodies of two security guards, who had apparently broken into the sewers from one of the ‘quarantined’ side passages.  Guns and a key card were recovered from their bodies.

Then they reached the pool where Father Tom had been attacked.  It was filled with body parts from the dazed hospital gown clad people they’d originally woken up with.  Evidently the alligator had eaten well.

They continued on, and eventually got back to the locked door.  It led through a ‘secret passage’ in the back of a janitor’s closet in a laboratory.  Eventually, the horrific secret of Dr. Frank’s research was found, and the truth revealed.  They had been infected with a virus which would leave them as mindless, cannibalistic creatures in a few scant hours unless they could find the possible cure (a different drug being researched in the same lab).  They found the drug, but there were only five doses to split amongst eight of them.  Father Tom and Sam who collapsed first, were given full doses of the drug.  The rest of them each took a half dose.

They awoke to find that John, Mark and Sarah had not survived the ‘cure’.  Charlotte, Father Tom and Sam were back to normal.  Betty and Toni survived, but were strangely changed by their experiences…

Scapel!

Run Date: 25 July 2010
World Date: ?? October (2010?)

On the same chilly night in October five people (Freddie, a repeat ‘alien abductee’,  Fred McFall  a.k.a. ‘Warlock’, a 30-something hacker living in his mother’s basement, Charlotte Weatherford, the not-so-scandalous child of a wealthy family, Charlie McCallister, a professional blogwriter, and Toni Jones, a physical anthropologist) each found themselves falling in and out of consciousness while being cut open by unseen assailants.  Each awoke in their own home, in a bathtub full of ice, with primitive sutures in their abdomen.

Each one separately called for medical assistance, and ended up in the ER.  Each fell once more out of consciousness, and awoke, strapped to gurneys,  in the same ‘recovery room’.  Soon the unconscious ‘Warlock’ was wheeled into the room and Freddie taken out.  They were told that it would be about half an hour, and then Charlotte would be taken for examination.

They were told that they were in the CDC offices in Atlanta, Georgia, because their profiles had tripped a search code.   They were told that, although they’d been found cut open in ice filled bathtubs, there was no sign of any sort of m’tampering’ with their internal organs. The nurses then left along with Dr. Sauvage, after unstrapping the patients, but before giving them any sort of satisfactory idea of why they were there.

A quick search of the room found very little to go on. Charlotte found a scrap of paper under the pillow of her guerney, which had a hospital URL on it.  As they began searching their room a Dr. Marcus came in, claiming to be an endocrinologist and mentioning the ‘Genesis Project’.  Toni, in near hysterics, grilled the man on who he was and what they were doing there, and he turned and fled.

‘Warlock’ picked a lock, and they found an inner office, empty except for planned parenthood pamphlets and a very out of date computer.   Warlock was eventually bring up the URL, a hospital database page describing a patient found in a bathtub, missing a kidney.  At about that time, they overheard Dr. Sauvage ‘debriefing’ the nurses, one of whom demanded an explanation of the entire thing.  They heard some very odd and disturbing noises then, electrical sounds, screams, and something sort of  ‘squishy’.  They heard several one sided phone calls which referred to having to arrange a helicoptor accident to explain the dissappearance of the nurse, and to ‘dealing with’ the ‘subjects’.

They had an idea of how frequently the halls were patrolled, and realized that they had about five minutes before the next one.  They collected everything which could possibly be useful (including pamphlets and pens so Charlie could take notes), then, moving as fast as they could in their weakened and painful state, picked the lock in the external door.  There was a fire door, but sounds from below indicated it would be hard to sneak out that way.

They found themselves in a deserted seeming medical office suite, but soon found Dr. Sauvage, with strange, alien appendages and blissfully closed eyes, gorging himself on the innards of the nurse who had brought Charlotte down.  They hastily, but stealthfully, withdrew.

There was an operating theatre, and another set of fire stairs, but someone was down them as well, and coming up.  They hurridly withdrew to an atrium, and took the rickety, very slow elevator to the only other floor.  It turned out to be a basement, where further horrors awaited.  There were two barrels overflowing with toxic sludge, a boiler room and elevator machinery room, both filled with satchel charges counting down from fourteen, a pile of rotting lumber, a storage closet, and a laboratory.  In this last room, they spied a nurse (not one any of them recognized) and two classic ‘grays’, big headed, tiny bodied aliens, who were vivisecting the unlucky Freddie.

As the terrified patients scrambled around to find some sort of weapons, Charlie tried to brazen it out and convince the aliens that Sauvage had sent him to get them.  His charade ended terribly, but gave both Toni and Charlotte time to run for the elevator.  Warlock tried to rescue him, but ended up shot himself.  As the elevator left, he ran to the machinery room and grabbed a satchel bomb, which he used to try to hold off the human accomplice of the aliens.  He was shot (and the bomb exploded) just as Toni and Charlotte raced from the building.

They awoke in another emergency room, in Atlanta General.  After some time to recover, and contact their respective families, they were approached by the mysterious “Dr. Marcus”, who offered them a chance to join Delta Green and fight against the forces at whose hands they had sufferred.