Operation HUMBUG Part 3: Pay to Play

 

“Everyone there had at one time or another been into Satanism, or, like myself, had dabbled around the edges for sexual kicks.”

-Sammy Davis, Jr.

The night rolls on as the Spahn slowly fills in and H-Cell work their respective undercover identities and positions to learn more about the three bands playing this evening, hoping to narrow down which one contains their target, the self-styled “Serrano’s Shadow.” 

Although now confident that the band TULU are just a group of good-natured nerds from Glendale to whom the “Slumberer of Relyah” is nothing more than an archaeological hoax that makes for a good aesthetic, they still have a part to play even after their set, as HERMES has (through the liberal expenditure of cocaine) landed an invite into the green room with them. Likewise, having been hired as a barback under an assumed name, HAZEL has managed to gain access to the VIP bar on the second floor. HELEN, HESTON, and HOLDEN continue to mingle with the crowd below undetected, getting a better idea of the social scene at play, as well as learning a bit more about their two remaining targets of investigation, that the membership Tezcatlipocha is trying to keep their links to the Mexican NSBM scene quiet, and that Tellurian Omega has an esoteric bent to their art. 

But there’s more to the Spahn than H-Cell’s investigation into the so called “Higher Order.” Its owner, “Andre Balcazar” has a truly bizarre fixation with snakes and potentially troubling connections to a certain defunct occult criminal organization from New York City. His friend and regular patron, Eric Hillman, is supposedly an “astrologer to the stars” with a genuinely uncanny recall of astrological positions over the last century, and some truly horrifying burns on the right side of his body. 

And as TULU finishes their set to a roaring crowd, HAZEL hears the dismay in Tellurian Omega’s booking agent as slick man in black ascends the stairs to the Cielo Lounge. 

Part 3 will start at 2:00 pm CST on Saturday June 1st

Kali Yuga Master Post here

Recollections and Observations coming soon

Operation HUMBUG Part 2: Strange Scenes

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril

-Oscar Wilde

It is the evening of Thursday May 6th, 2021 and H-Cell has established itself in Los Angeles. They’ve made contact with two friendlies, a cult “Exit Counselor” and a supremely corrupt LA sheriff deputy and member of the “Compton Executioners” deputy gang, and they’ve discovered parties unknown have been cooking meth in the green box.

The Spahn, a biker roadhouse turned underground music club, is the venue their target “Serrano’s Shadow” is going to play. The line-up of Friday is TULU, Tezcatlipocha, and Tellurian Omega. Among those three bands is the person they're looking for, though positively IDing them will be a challenge. HELEN is in the process of introducing herself to the local “scene” as a prospective music writer, while HERMES plots a way to bug the green room. HAZEL has managed to successfully get a job as a barback at the Spahn, and shakes the hand of her new employer, a man with a curiously familiar stylized eye tattoo on his wrist… 

Game starts at 2:00 pm pst, Friday May 10th

Kali Yuga Master Post here

Recollections and Observations coming soon

Delta Green Friendly: Captain Otto Koller, Texas Department of Public Safety and Friendly

 

Captain in the Midland District of the Highway Patrol and member of the Texas’s State Intelligence Team, working primarily as a liaison between the SIT’s internal departments and the Highway Patrol. Well liked and well known, he tends to get around and knows at least one person on a first name basis at every sub-district of the Department of Public Safety, and has plenty of friends in Austin. 

Koller's main role is he constantly has an ear to the ground when it comes to Texan state law enforcement, in particular with the highway system. He has a very, very good reputation among his collugues as a guy who can help out with strange and complicated cases. He's always happy to take something off the hands of someone who doesn't really want to deal with the inexplicable, and makes it the problem of the feds, which is to say, Delta Green. Such cases have a way of just going away.

Koller is ideal as a friendly for one of the better organized Outlaw Cells, though he works just as well for the Program. His main asset is as an intelligence gathering resource, he's always on the look out for what he refers to as "the forces of darkness" when it comes to cases across the state of Texas and through SIT he essentially has established his own network of friendlies. However, he simply isn't Cell Leader material. He doesn't have the stomach for the inherent criminality most Delta Green oeprations require. 

While he's something of a seeker, Captain Koller ultimately doesn't want to know too much. He should also be prevented from knowing too much about anything henoius the Agents do, for in his heart, Koller is a genuinely decent human being. This means that if he catches wind of the Agents doing something monstrous, he'll attempt to intervene. It also means that the increasingly repressive and inhumane operations that mark Operation Lone Star and the 2nd Trump administration will put him in moral crisis, and he will steadily loose influence as things continue. 

OTTO KOLLER - Highway Patrolman of Mystery 

STR 14, CON 14, DEX 12, INT 12, POW 13, CHA 17

HP 14, WP 13, SAN 60

Skills: Alertness 60% Bureaucracy 60% Criminology 40% Drive 50% Firearms 40% First Aid 30% Forensics 50% Foreign Language (Texas German) 25%, Foreign Language (Spanish) 20%,  HUMINT 70% History 20% Law 50% Melee Weapons 50% Navigate 40% Occult 20% Persuade 60% Psychotherapy 20% Search 40% Unarmed Combat 60%

Bonds:
Marisol Koller (Wife) 17

Hilda and Carlos Koller (Teenage Children) 17
The Guys and Gals at the DPS (various colleagues) 17

Linda Moontree (Yoga Instructor and Personal Astrologer) 12

Motivations:
-It’s Up to Us to Keep the Chaos at Bay 

-The Healthy Mind and Healthy Body Require One Another

-I’m from the Texas DPS and I’m Here to Help

-Keep Work Away From Home 

Description and Personality:

6'3'' muscular, fastidously clean, flawlessly polite, and with a warm smile, Captain Koller seems every bit a caricature of a white hat from an old western film. Extremely health conscious and very superstitious, Koller neither drinks nor smokes and always has his rosary beads and some charms on him.  The CD collection in his car is a strange mix of classic 90s country, Hildegard von Bingen, Gregorian Chants, and Ravi Shankar. He is a devout Catholic, having been raised as such, but has some very new agey occult interests as well. 

Death's Head in the High Desert

 

Arizona, 1945. Photo by Fritz Henle

The following is a play-report/micro-fiction I wrote for Karotechia prologue scenario Fin ran for us a while back. I think it might be overly long, but I'm generally pleased with it. Creative feedback would be appreciated. Without further ado, I present to you;

Death's Head in the High Desert

The Brotherhoood of the Road: A Delta Green Element

The Brotherhood of the Road 

By Marc “grandini” Dilazzaro
Special thanks to Tophat

Cars in a circle, little lamb in the middle

All the headlights, so bright, he ain't cast a shadow off
Sick - SALEM

 

 The ritual is always the same, but the place and people almost never are. Six cars formed in a circle facing one another in a lonely, abandoned place off the highway, each car’s driver standing to the side of their idling vehicle. It is night, the headlights come together to form a fully lit circle, in the center of which is a bound individual, often a teen runaway, but not always. The Man manifests to take what is his. He does not cast a shadow.

Operation HUMBUG Part 1: Tribute Bands

If this corrective effort fails, millions of human bodies will indeed inevitably be chopped to pieces and chewed up by iron and gas. But even the habitues of the chthonic forces of terror will not learn one-tenth of what nature promises its less idly curious, but more sober children, who possess  in technology not a fetish of doom but a key to happiness. They will demonstrate this sobriety the moment they refuse to acknowledge the next  war as an incisive magical turning point, and instead discover in it the image of  everyday actuality. And they will demonstrate it when they use this discovery to transform this war into civil war and thereby perform that Marxist trick which alone is a match for this sinister runic humbug.
-Walter Benjamin, Theories of German Fascism (1930)

With Halina Esfahani (aka SHIELD MAIDEN) being remanded to "recommended" psych ward by her parents, Peter DeVille (Zonnenrand) electing to be a cooperative witness in his own trial, and their "mass shooting as mass ritual" plot being thoroughly thwarted, Operation OPAQUE LENS can be considered a resounding success. But there's more to this case than two lost souls choosing stochastic terrorism. 
 

Shortly before Halina's hard drive fried itself, a mocking notepad message typed itself on the monitor, indicating that parties unknown had full access to her machine remotely. Fraught interrogations indicated that Halina was a "consort" of an online, right wing occultic milieu calling itself the "Higher Order." One with more rigorous OPSEC and cybersecurity than most, and one with access to Real Occult Power through the amassing of a digital library of tomes. 

Though OPSEC protocols are only as good as the willingness to follow them.  Halina, or "Klaus Barbi Girl" to use her online moniker, maintained a telegram chat with another member of the Higher Order going by "Serrano's Shadow." Though he did not reveal his name or the name of his band, he intimated to Halina that he'd be playing at the Spahn in Culver City in early May. If H-Cell can positively ID "Serrano's Shadow," they could potentially get access to the Higher Order's custom server "The Great Library" without arousing suspicion. Well, that's the ideal, at least.

Posted May 3, 2024

Kali Yuga Now Master Post Here

Thoughts and Spoilers coming soon

Operation OPAQUE LENS Part 2: Friends Are Where You Find Them

April 17th, 2021
Odessa, Texas

By Alexis Guenier 

"There died a myriad
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation".

 
So goes Ezra Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberlay, a poem army veteran Steven Ortiz liked so much he made it his screen name. From what has thus far been gathered from his writings and activities since getting back from Afghanistan in 2016, Ortiz was searching for either meaning or community, or whatever passed for either online, but when he died screaming in a van outside Odessa, showering those who gave him a ride in blood and brain matter, he was definitely running from something. 

H-Cell knows a few things. They know Ortiz went to visit two online friends in Globe, Arizona. They know they were called Zonnenrand and SHIELD MAIDEN. They know they talked about a ritual. They know Ortiz brought an armalite that saw action in Vietnam. They know he didn’t leave with it. They know something scared Ortiz real bad and that he was desperately trying to get back home to Birmingham. They know he didn’t make it far.

And they know that “Zonnenrand” just saw Ortiz’s telegram account come back online, and that he’s hoping his friend is okay. 

Saturday, April 6, 2024 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Kali Yuga Now Masterpost here