Codename
RookSeven operations · Jul 2021 – present

Operation Fulminate

The cell's first activation. A six-year-old boy, Brandon, wandered out of the wilderness near the Devil's Chair — reported missing in 1980. R-Cell (Samson, Bear, Liv, Birch, Caddie) was scrambled ahead of the official FBI response to a ranger station riding out a building storm.

Brandon proved telekinetic, scarred with surgical incisions, and carrying a bead implanted beneath a green nape tattoo. He was pursued by five-metre phasing humanoids — the K'n-Yani — and a swarm of pale, pain-immune children who methodically destroyed every vehicle at the station. A compelled civilian, Henry McAllistor, delivered the demand: give us the boy.

A second Brandon arrived with fleeing campers — a clone, one of many, kept in fugue states and experimented on in the Blue Caverns. Caddie cut the bead out of Brandon Prime, killing his powers. The cell fought the giants off with molotovs, shotguns, and a headshot landed one turn before a teleport.

Operation Malta

Dr Tibault Grieves was found torn open on his own driveway, his girlfriend Amanda Griffin dead inside, and a BSL-4 lab hidden behind his kitchen wall. Grieves' body melted into blue candy-glass at sunrise. The samples flown toward the CDC went down over Idaho.

The cell tracked a silicon-ammonia lifeform — human tissue reproduced by an alternative biochemistry, vulnerable to UVB and fire — from a greenbelt caravan, where Samson was nearly consumed and lost a chunk of his chest to Caddie's scalpel, out to the crash site at Lolo, Montana, and then across the state in a running pursuit: a grizzly torn in half, a stolen Taurus, a biker-bar shootout, an elderly couple's destroyed house, and finally a sugar beet processing plant in Hesper, where Agent Nobel's Vietnam-era flamethrower and Willow's roller door full of sunlight put the thing down.

Grieves' hard drive gave up the three fragments that would go on to define the campaign:

• The name Michael Bellek
• The substance ARD15, tagged Longevity
• The codename Majestic

His lab had been paid for in cashier's cheques from Potentia Holdings LLC, Cayman Islands.

The operation also drew the attention of whoever was funding him. An ambush at Ophelia Tunney's house in Olympia cost the cell Bear, their vehicle, and their operational security. In the aftermath Chester Smythe (Agent Nobel) accepted a faked death and a new identity, and Birch fled an Army CID manhunt.

Operation Cardinal

A viral video showed Terri Santos vanishing from a bench in the town square. Witnesses said she burst into flame and turned to ash. The video showed only absence.

The trail led to the Church of the Twelve Martyrs and its Host, Erol Salzo III — actually Gyles Root, a body-hopping entity in the third generation of stolen Salzo flesh, with a coterie of the same: Jake Elliot (Samuel Woodman) and Andy Welks (Nicholas Heaton). Hospital records showed male residents dropping out of the medical system at ages 10, 11 and 16 — the ages at which they were taken. Women of the compound had been chemically miscarried for decades.

Agent Femur was captured on overwatch, tortured with a cattle prod through the night, gave up Delta Green and his true name, and was then ridden as a puppet against his own cell.

The infiltration went catastrophically loud: an exploded house, a decapitation, a body-swap failing twice against Samson's POW 75, and finally the underground Cavern of the Bat — an inner temple with a pit, five bound-spirit candles, a vomited shoggoth, and Silence Root, Gyles' half-shoggoth son, who nearly ate Willow twice. The cell killed all of them and burned the sanctuary.

Willow left with The Testament of the Twelve Martyrs. Femur left to hide his family.

Operation Tiger Island

R-Cell sat as judges over the surviving members of Task Force Tiger Island and their disastrous mission to village TI-19 in Myanmar: the Chauchua, the temple of the Singer in the Skin, the box full of devouring red mist, and Mona's possession. Four contradictory accounts, one bombed temple.

The panel found Rick and Mona responsible for letting something out of the jungle by way of a necklace handed over by the fixer U Laing. Rick later “committed suicide” in Bangkok. Mona died of drug-resistant MRSA.

Operation Brass Mirror

A neurologist's forum post about a patient muttering nigra capra silvarum and magna mater. The vector was Jerusalem artichoke chips served at a book club brunch, grown in soil from Matthew Fulton's allotment and carrying a Shub-Niggurath prion that drove infected brains into runaway overdrive — surfacing as lycanthropy, pyromania, somatoparaphrenia, Capgras delusion, intermittent explosive disorder.

The chain ran allotment → AgriGen Bioworks, with a CEO eating and re-eating dirt, a basement DNA printer writing prion genes into soil bacteria, and Tucker, a twenty-year-old anaconda turned adaptive-camouflaged horror → DCrypt Solutions next door, where tech lead Deborah Horne had implemented Ian Berger's “Fertility Algorithm”: a digital transcription of an Earth Mother fertility dance, sourced through Norm McFadden's wife and New Life Fertility, and intended as a cyberweapon. It jumped the air gap.

Berger, shot in the arm and mildly tortured, turned collaborator, working with Dutch on a hypergeometric counter-exorcism. A critical failure stripped out the virus's propagation governor instead, and it began spreading over power lines.

Then unknown operators arrived in black SUVs. The cell won the firefight — Willow and Samson holding the bullpen, Liv adapting to violence with a sword through two throats — but lost Caddie. They torched DCrypt and pushed on to the AgriGen greenhouse, where the Fulton-Thing shed motile brains and came within a roll of stinging Liv to death before Samson's shotgun ruptured it and Dutch set the whole tinderbox alight. Willow came out on 2 HP.

Running concurrently: Chester established that Michael Bellek is Gavin Ross, former MAJESTIC-12 leadership, manufacturing fresh blue blood out of people — and exfiltrated with a trove of encrypted data. And Hugh Morris met the unnatural for the first time in a kickboxing ring, against an ARD-dosed opponent who mutated, killed three people, and threw Hugh into a concrete wall.

Operation Filament

The long one. A closed campus shooting whose evidence didn't add up: Bradley McKay killed three sorority women with a rifle from a manufacturer that doesn't exist, in a calibre that doesn't exist, carrying a phone whose browser history pointed at impossible IP addresses and which held photographs of a murder that never happened, of a victim who is still alive.

The software was Picky Eater — a search aggregator and malware requiring bespoke circuitry, dismissed by NSA's Operation DIVING BELL as Not Actionable. In truth an attention-focusing engine that feeds an observer's most salient beliefs back into itself until reality accommodates them: a bubble, a private universe, courtesy of an indifferent creative force its designer had named Yog-Sothoth.

The chain of custody was a chain of victims.

• Robert Wallace, radicalised inside a green-energy surveillance-state dystopia of his own imagining, headshot by his own hallucinated Jade Helm operators — his corpse materialising at his father Cordell's feet twenty years older and shredded.
• Prof. Charles Bower, whose bubble popped him back into a world that still prosecuted him. Suicide during trial.
• Working Group NARNIA at Kerber Wilson & Associates — an entire CIA–FBI task force gone into bubbles that popped before the cell arrived. Only Fallon Taylor came through intact, because he preferred books to screens. Two others surfaced back in New York when their bubbles popped, but their minds did not come with them — both drifted into the city's transient population, where Delta Green eventually found them. Audra Powell had spent two decades of subjective time as First Director in a world where Delta Green had won, and came out of her National Clandestine Services Museum shooting. Her cat, Mr Toots, broke her.
• Vicki King, hiding from Reapers in a rotting Pennsylvania house while her twin daughters waited in a version of it that wasn't theirs. Rehomed with the Amish branch of her own family.

All of it traced back to Dr Wesley Cool, MIT mathematician, Vicki's absent lover, who built Picky Eater and then vanished into a bubble where he was the Revealer — MIT rebuilt around Wesley Court, Meaning Without Master as the sole curriculum, a nineteen-year-old thought-construct of Vicki King typing his journal forever.

In the High Building the cell found the Zann Aetherophone, repurposed as a vehicle to travel deeper — and followed him through it into the All-Is-One: black sand, polygonal stone, inscriptions no one could look at for long, and Cool wired into a self-regenerating melange of hardware seeding Picky Eater across the multiverse.

Hugh exerted will, and called something. Tawil al'Umr, the Guide, drifted down, spoke with Cool, and unmade him.

Then it took each agent alone atop a stone column and asked what they sought.

• Willow asked for the Threshold and received the revelation of Yog-Sothoth. She failed the SAN test and rolled 1D100 for the damage — and took 5 points. She survived the revelation.
• Dutch answered the three questions correctly and accepted the invitation to rejoin the infinite.
• Liv asked to go home. Hugh asked to see his parents.
• Samson asked for the Picky Eater infection to be destroyed. It was.