Op Ev Ice

Briefing

Elly and Bors Griffin, prominent right-wing social media personalities, were unnaturally murdered.

ICE wants to parade their killer in front of the cameras. The Program wants their killer stopped discreetly.

The Truth

The man running the investigation killed them, so that the Program would send him the Agents.

ICE special-agent-in-charge Cranach is a sorcerer. He wants to test a spell to summon Azathoth with less risk of incinerating everything. So he designed a ritual to emulate an Elitzur-Vaidman bomb tester. The Agents are the photons.

At the murder scene, the Agents are either refracted or reflected towards a nail salon or a restaurant. From either location, they’re reflected toward a slaughterhouse. After the slaughterhouse, they detect an inconclusive answer. So Cranach sends them through again.

Emission

The Agents arrive at a temporary ICE office at a former WeWork in Mesa, Arizona. A glass-walled office has been refitted as an interrogation room, one pane now one-way glass.

ICE SAIC Cranach orders the Agents “Find the illegal who did this. I don’t want to hear from you until you have him.”
On the drive, their phones thump and buzz with notifications as Cranach posts about the murder on social media.

Crime scene

• An OANN van is filming. Reporter Kamantha Redland looks at the Agents, then into the camera lens teleprompter. She reads “This terrible murder. But now, there’s a ray of light, as ICE agents are on the scene.” Redland will try to interview the Agents, with leading questions about how great ICE is.
• Mesa PD cordoned off the crime scene. The Griffins’ bodies are in their garage.
• A+ human blood, sprayed at high velocity.
• Bootprints in the blood lead out to the driveway, disappear at the road.
• Forensics/Medicine 20+: Cuts went straight through bone without slowing.
• Forensics/Physics 30+: Blood spray followed arcs inconsistent with gravity.
• Criminology 30+: Elly’s nails are freshly manicured. Can check receipts or find a not-yet-uploaded video on her phone, in which she calls the salon staff “illegals.” Points to NailSAT.
• Forensics 30+: Some stains on Bors’s shirt aren’t blood, they’re barbecue sauce. Similar clues to BombBBQ.

NailSAT or BombBBQ

Either has a big mirror on the wall.

• NailSAT employee Anna Soto admits seeing Elly, who threatened to call ICE on Anna for being disrespectful. Anna mentioned the threat to her brother Bastian, who works at the JBS Beef Plant slaughterhouse.
• BombBBQ’s sign is a happy pig with a lit fuse on its back. Cook Lorimer Pacquiao remembers Bors. Bors sent two racks of ribs back. Waiter Bastian Soto threatened to kill him. Bastian’s currently at his other job - the slaughterhouse.

If the Agents try to visit both NailSAT and BombBBQ before the slaughterhouse, an ICE roadblock doesn’t let them through, on Cranach’s orders.

Slaughterhouse

There’s an observation room above the cutting floor, with one-way glass to surveil workers.
Workers flay and cut. Bastian slices the throats of hanging cattle. Beyond him, cattle are stunned. The process doesn’t resemble the Griffins’ murder.
Bastian is ready to flee the Agents; either his coworkers or his sister tipped him off that feds were looking for him.
He didn’t murder the Griffins.

• SIGINT 30+: Bastian’s phone has been at NailSAT and BombBBQ, and never at the Griffins’ house.
• Bastian’s locker has a knife and boots with A+ human blood on them. But:
  • Forensics 30+: Distorted fingerprints on the knife. The boots don’t quite fit him.

When the agents leave the slaughterhouse (with or without arresting Bastian), Cranach calls them. If they won’t frame Bastian, he insists they return to the Griffins’ garage to look for more evidence. “If you fail to comply, that is destructive interference with an ongoing investigation. You’re risking your superpositions.”

Return to crime scene

Redland recites the exact same words as before.
In the garage, the Griffins’ corpses are now levitating.
They dissolve into white fire that drips and pits the garage concrete. Their phones lay intact by the ruin.

If check the victims’ phones again, a new video has appeared. Timestamped days earlier.

Video

Four masked ICE agents come together from the corners of the garage and meet in the center, chanting. If unmute: drums and shrieks. No human words.

Elly comes through the door and falls sideways toward the feds. Angles are warped, magnified and shrunk around the central mass. She’s cut apart.

Bors sprints into frame yelling, and dies likewise.

Blood warps and twists in the air, splattering around the garage.

The ICE agents get in a line facing the camera.

• First unmasks. Has a face like one of the Agents, ravaged with carcinomas. He cuts his own throat, and dissolves into fire.

• Second unmasks. Kamantha Redland, the OANN reporter who’s right outside. She chants nonsense syllables, and dissolves into fire.
  • If the Agents grab Redland and make her watch the video, it terrifies her. But she points out melanomas on the doppelganger’s neck that she doesn’t have.
    • Cranach told her to read what’s on the teleprompter whenever the Agents walk by. That’s all Redland knows.
      • Occult 30+: ritual magic can have unwitting participants.

• Third unmasks. His face is a mess of blood and twitching muscle below asymmetrical horns. He clicks his tongue; you hear a buzzing shriek and impossibly loud drumbeat inside your head. He dissolves into fire.

• Fourth unmasks. SAIC Cranach. He draws a slaughterhouse knife with a gloved hand, and dips it in the blood.
• He tells the camera “There, the ritual’s started. You’re testing something for the Program. This is the safest way to test it, in fact. The method’s called Elitzur-Vaidman. You’re taking part in… an initiation. If it’s a dud, you’ll be fine. If the initiation is live, you still have a half chance of survival.”
• He walks out, leaving the bloody bootprints.
  • Physics 30+: The “Elitzur-Vaidman bomb tester” is a thought experiment, framed around testing something profoundly dangerous with less risk. It involves light choosing a path at semi-transparent mirrors. (One-way glass and teleprompters are semi-transparent mirrors).
  • Physics/Military Science 40+: Nuclear bombs don’t ‘explode.’ They ‘initiate.’

HUMINT roll: Cranach’s lying about this being “for the Program.” It’s for his own curiosity.
If the Agents contact Cranach, he tells them to go to either NailSAT or BombBBQ, then from there to the slaughterhouse. You choose! He can’t observe your choice at this stage. If an Agent starts telling him, he hangs up. If they text him, they instantly receive back an animated sleeping emoji, its eyes closed.

Wherever the Agents drive

Thumps and whistles from phone notifications fade into omnipresent music. Drumbeats and shrieking flutes. If Agents silence their phones, the sound continues from above.

• If one look at the sky, it fades to white. The stars are still visible, shockingly bright. They waver, dancing to a rhythm.
• And there’s something at the center of the sky. Orange fire swirling around the center of it all.
  • Anyone who looks at it feels suction on their eyes.
  • Then they fall up.
  • If their car window is open, they may roll Strength or fall into the sky, screaming toward the center of everything. If not, they hit the car’s ceiling. They may be stuck there for some time.
• When (if) the Handler decides, Azathoth’s attention passes. Gravity points back toward the center of the Earth for everyone. Sky’s still white though. Drums and flutes still loud.

Endings

A) Break out of the ritual

Back to the WeWork to kill Cranach?

There’s security at the entrance.
In the empty WeWork halls, the least sane Agent sees the monster from the video either through or reflected in half-transparent glass.
Cranach’s willing to explain his plan, if they ask, before it comes down to guns against spells.

Anywhere But Here?

The Agents hear piping and thunderclaps for hours. The light of the bright white sky invades through curtains. And then it passes. Everything is normal again.

B) Agents go back where they went the first time

NailSat/BombBBQ
The workers are terrified. Especially if the Agents have blood on their uniforms or eyes protruding from their sockets.

Slaughterhouse

Workers have fled. The plant is not completely still. Carcasses swing on hooks, rocking in no wind.
If the Agents pay attention, they rock faster and faster, beyond what residual momentum could be left from the conveyor lines. Cow carcasses whirl, chaotic, out of sync. Then line up, pulled as if by gravity, pointing at a center somewhere in the sky.

And then they fall. Everything is normal again. The Agents have made an interaction-free measurement; they’ve confirmed the spell works, and know what Cranach intended with it.

C) Agents go to the other location

BombBBQ/NailSAT

The drums and flutes are deafening inside the Agents’ heads. And then they hear a pop. They’re not just close. They’re here.
Parked cars implode with a crunch. Gouts of boiling metal whip around into orbits, circling the fire-crowned black hole that has manifested at the facade of the building ahead. Azathoth is summoned.

Stat blocks

ICE Special-Agent-In-Charge Munson Cranach (Remorseless sorcerer)

STR 10, CON 14, DEX 10, INT 16, POW 20, CHA 12
HP 12, WP 20, SAN 0
SKILLS: Alertness 70%, Athletics 50%, Dodge 70%, Firearms 50%, HUMINT 60%, Occult 60%, Stealth 50%, Unnatural 30%

ATTACKS: Flash-bang grenade 70%. (Each target is stunned. After the stun wears off, the target suffers a −40% penalty to all actions for 1D6 turns)

Hideous Death Spells 10% Lethality, one target per turn

SPELLS: Infallible Suggestion, Song of Power, Summon Azathoth, Summon Doppelganger, Various Gruesomely Described Death Spells

ICE Security Guards

STR 14, CON 14, DEX 12, INT 10, POW 10, CHA 12
HP 14, WP 10, SAN 50
SKILLS: Alertness 60%, Athletics 60%, Dodge 50%, Firearms 50%, HUMINT 40%
ATTACKS: Light Pistol 50%, D8

Bastian Soto (Framed slaughterhouse worker)

STR 12, CON 12, DEX 10, INT 10, POW 10, CHA 10
HP 12, WP 10, SAN 50
SKILLS: Alertness 40%, Athletics 40%, Dodge 40%, HUMINT 50%
ATTACKS: Slaughterhouse knife 60%, D6
Kamantha Redland (OANN reporter drawn into casting Cranach’s ritual)
STR 10, CON 10, DEX 10, INT 12, POW 12, CHA 14
HP 10, WP 12, SAN 60
SKILLS: Alertness 40%, HUMINT 60%, Persuade 60%, SIGINT 30%

The Nuclear Chaos at the Heart of Everything

AURA OF POWER: Any human present when Azathoth manifests is automatically at −40% on all rolls (except SAN). A character that fails the SAN roll for encountering Azathoth cannot act for 1D10+2 turns, instead goggling in abject terror at its monstrous form and its overwhelming, terrifying presence.

CONSUMPTION: Azathoth emerges on Earth from a summoning area and expands to consume all nearby matter in atomic fire. Some manifestations of Azathoth grow slowly, some quickly. On the first turn—or in the first minute, or the first hour, or the first day—Azathoth consumes a five-meter radius with Lethality 10%. On the second, its radius grows 10 more meters with Lethality 20%. On the third, it grows 15 meters with Lethality 30%, and so on. If its Lethality rating exceeds 99%, it simply consumes anything in its path with no roll required or allowed. This chaotic energy cannot be Dodged. The maximum extent of its growth is unknown. Some say Azathoth will inevitably consume the Earth.

DISMISSAL: Certain hypergeometric principles are known to cause Azathoth to cease manifesting in a summoning, utilizing ancient forces to restrain and re-trap its power at the center of the universe. That requires access to or knowledge of a ritual that dismisses Azathoth, a successful activation roll, and the permanent expenditure of 7 POW.

DREAD NAME: The secret name of Azathoth (some say it is hidden in the Necronomicon) is reputed to summon the being to Earth with a single word at the permanent cost of 10 POW. Thankfully, so far, this word has been lost to time.

TRANSCENDENT: Azathoth is beyond Earthly science and all hypergeometry except those rituals which affect its arrival and dismissal. All attacks against Azathoth fail. Its form at the center of the universe can never be destroyed.

SAN LOSS: 1D20/1D100

Credits

This was an entry to the 2020 shotgun scenario contest. Written by James Pitt.