Died Suddenly
OPERATION PARROT DELILAH
By MyNephew
Pareidolia is the tendency to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, so that one detects a pattern where there is none.
Hook
In the past month the homes of Alice, Bob and Carol (ABC) have been invaded and graffitied with messages:
"WE KNOW YOU"
"DO YOU HAVE A SOUL?"
"HOW DO YOU LIVE?"
Emails, texts and robocalls bombard them.
These Agents are years retired from field operations after an opera gone tragically awry. Four Agents died gruesomely. David also survived, but has not yet been attacked.
They are concerned the hostile party will escalate or expose them un-deniably.
In the last week, Bob and Carol were graffitied again.
Identify and stop the attacker.
Handler Summary
ABC are field-retired Delta Green agents that monitor/manage an online conspiracy theorist Anti-Vaxx trolling group that targets the recently bereaved.
Eve was one such target. She is retaliating by identifying and counter-harassing these anonymous trolls.
Delta Green thinks the cell’s past is back to haunt them
Eve does not know about Delta Green.
This scenario is supposed to revolve around uncomfortable “we work with horrible people” interviews.
The realisation this is a mundane case should be slow.
Killing Eve should not be the first solution.
The ABC Meeting
The Agents are directed to meet ABC (& D) to receive instructions.
ABC monitor the online conspiracy sphere, including the Anti-Vaxx movement.
They are tasked with steering online discourse on social media, publicly connecting vocal figures together so that conspiracist threats to Delta Green can be misled or socially discredited by association, efficiently and en masse.
ABC catalysed the "Died Suddenly" meme-movement, scraping obituaries and social media posts for deaths that occurred shortly after vaccinations in order to make their bereaved relatives into ‘cautionary tales’.
“It is necessary to inhabit the character of a sociopath in order to maintain status within the group.”
Alice and Bob enthusiastically externalise the grief and helplessness they still experience (The Disaster) by joyously cyberbullying and humiliating grieving relatives for making "uninformed idiotic choices", goading their followers to do the same.
They love their job. If pressed, they readily explain the vital importance of keeping leashes on “these online psychos” with obvious relish.
Bob openly uses it to process his trauma. Alice refuses to acknowledge this. They are unshakeably convinced the importance of managing conspiracist discourse justifies their behaviour.
Carol has convinced herself that she must do the same to maintain control of the mob they created, choosing to believe they are unwilling duty-bound ringleaders.
Alice and Bob are snarky and dismissive of the Agents and will deflect with memes about modern softness if challenged on the nature of their work.
Carol wants to talk about the attacks, not work.
David is baffled; he’s a nursing home janitor, lives an extremely normal life, and has no contact with the others.
In the wake of the graffiti harassment (The Attacks) ABC demanded this meeting to receive assurances that “the threat” will be dealt with.
The Attacks
All four live in different East Coast states.
At some point this year, ABC each awoke to find messages in their houses in mud or paint from the garage.
Each alerted Delta Green and installed CCTV, door alarms, or similar home security devices.
Bob and Carol were graffitied again this week, the security systems catching nothing - entry outside the field of view, motion sensors not tripped, cameras blinded by IR laser.
Bob is spiralling into Castle Doctrine home-fortress paranoia.
Alice will mention other “whiners” have been “attacked” (Similar Scenes).
The Disaster
Asking about the opera that lead to their retirement reveals bitterness and pain - the plan relied on another agent who failed a SAN check mid-raid on a cult, all the Agents lost friends as a result, none of them much like other agents or civilians nowadays.
David and Carol are trying to pretend it never happened. Alice and Bob can’t get past it.
Describe the opera however you like - it’s not relevant to Eve’s case.
Eve
Eve is the attacker.
Her husband Fred died of heart failure ten months ago.
Eve's heartfelt eulogy was scraped and distributed to ABC's 'communities' at her lowest point. They’ve made her grief inescapable since.
Eve, a sysadmin and consummate hacker, decided to fight back.
Using fake social media accounts to penetrate ABC's community, she breached several private groupchats used to coordinate the Died Suddenly mob.
Eve found the real names of hundreds of members, marking particularly poisonous targets.
Since then, she has been traveling around the country stalking and terrifying those she deems deserving - ABC among them, unrelated to their Delta Green ties.
How?
Eve collects all her targets’ online activities she can gain access to before setting her attack in motion.
With disturbing frequency, she finds far darker activity than participating in Died Suddenly during her surveillance.
Her harassment is vaguely-worded to let the target panic themselves with their most shameful secrets.
A few have posted confession-apologies.
One killed himself.
Eve wants more.
Viable targets are physically surveilled; their homes, daily routine, neighbours, security.
She will use this to execute a 'raid' on the target's home, scratching messages into paint or glass, using locally available paint to daub on walls and doors.
After Eve reminds the target that the internet can touch the real world too, a commercial spam server automates personalised direct electronic harassment.
If the target's behaviour doesn't change, she will strike their home again, if she deems it safe.
Eve has visited fifty targets, graffitied fourty, twenty of them twice.
Eve owns an unregistered gun. She tries not to acknowledge that she'll probably use it soon.
Threads
The Server
Excellent compsci or serious resources can trace the messages back to the spam server, where hacking or traffic surveillance might acquire the recipient list, leading to further targets to establish more dates/locations Eve visited.
An internet denizen from a young age, Eve is fanatical about anonymity-as-security, and good at it.
Server space is effectively anonymised, buried under layers of proxy obfuscation.
It is effectively impossible to trace from the server back to Eve herself.
Similar scenes
ABC have each heard from handfuls of followers about graffiti or messages.
Ten ‘admit’ online to being victims of harassment, of which five reported it to the police. Nationwide, twenty community members have filed police reports.
Their houses were broken into and graffitied.
Commonalities are vague accusatory messaging, locally-sourced daubing material, absence of witnesses, evaded security, communications harassment.
Unless these details are specifically mentioned in the enquiry, it takes 72 man-hours of trawling police harassment reports to collate and refine records down to only relevant cases. Each specific query saves 12 hours.
Victims will not volunteer why they were targeted if contacted through the police, and be outright hostile if ABC are mentioned (“they doxxed me!?”).
Transport
Eve's OPSEC's primary weakness is, of course, IRL - she has to physically travel to these peoples' homes.
She bought two old beaters in cash under fake names, a blue Nissan Micra and a tan Ford Escort.
Eve manufactures business justifications (data centre visits, client interviews) to fly to places she can't drive, using public transport and her legs to get to her targets.
Her Ford will show up on traffic management cameras linking three cases in Eve’s home state, none of them ABC.
The Nissan appears on camera near Alice’s house, as well as a couple of other targets in the same state.
The car sellers can be traced - they will try to avoid an interview, but describe the same woman.
Airport CCTV will show Eve disembarking near Similar Scenes once Agents know her face.
The Obituary
Eve’s name will show attached to Fred’s unremarkable obituary, among thousands in the Died Suddenly archives.
Escalation
Soon, Eve will move on a target in a semi-rural area.
He is paranoid, armed and waiting.
He will boast on social media, posting photos of interrupted graffiti and a buckshot-holed fence she fled past. He didn’t pursue; “you never know how many of ‘em there are.”
He accurately describes Eve, wearing unobtrusively-obfuscatory clothing (beanie, bulky jacket etc.).
Eve caught a few pellets in the side as she fled, seeking treatment at a hospital a couple of hours drive away, arriving by taxi saying someone tried to assault her in a suburb twenty miles in the other direction. Her Nissan can be found on sparse CCTV in the area.
This isn’t enough to put her off, though she will more carefully surveil targets in future, prepared to shoot back next time.
Resolution
If Eve is caught early enough, counselling or psychotherapy might still save her.
If she is not caught, she will continue attacking targets, one every week.
A return to an ABC house is inevitable.
Eventually, she will be interrupted during an attack and be ‘forced’ to shoot her target, meaning attention and evidence.
After this watershed moment, it gets easier every time.
It doesn’t bring Fred back though.
One night, a target will be waiting for her. Better draw quick…
Thanks to MrNightmare and lalonde for advice and san checks.
Credits
Died Suddenly; OPERATION PARROT DELILAH was written by MyNephew for the 2025 Shotgun Scenario contest.
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qu63fd69BXzsmF8hykqy_K0MpqMUewpgqb6017fvrCs/edit