Mayday Plays - Delta Green: Psychotic Operas 2 - Mayday Roleplay Edition

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Mayday Roleplay, Black Project Gaming, and the Green Box proudly present Psychotic Operas: Collected Fictions Inspired by Delta Green. In this edition of Psychotic Operas, you will hear "Burning A Barn" by Vinay Gupta, "Outbreak" by Melonbread, "Icebox" by Nick Brown, "Night Terrors" by Kevin Ham, "Employee Assisstance Program" by magnificentophat, and "Picking Up The Pieces" by Vinay Gupta. To hear the rest of this year's Psychotic Operas, check out Black Project Gaming at blackprojectgaming.com and the Green Box podcast at greenboxpod.com. These stories contain elements of suspense, horror, extreme violence, and other mature content. Listener discretion is advised. Published by arrangement with the Delta Green Partnership. The intellectual property known as Delta Green is a trademark and copyright owned by the Delta Green Partnership, who has licensed its use here. The contents of this podcast are © their respective authors, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property. STORIES "Burning A Barn" by Vinay Gupta - Read by Tom of The Green Box "Outbreak" by Melonbread - Read by Doug of Black Project Gaming "Icebox" by Nick Brown - Read by Aaron of Mayday Roleplay "Night Terrors" by Kevin Ham - Read by Zakiya of Mayday Roleplay "Employee Assisstance Program" by magnificentophat - Read by Vince of Black Project Gaming "Picking Up The Pieces" by Vinay Gupta - Read by Caleb of Mayday Roleplay MUSIC & SOUND EFFECTS Epidemic Sound (https://www.epidemicsound.com/) Freesound.org (https://freesound.org/) DELTA GREEN LINKS Delta Green (http://deltagreen.com/) Night at the Opera Subreddit (https://discord.gg/WVARhRaqrH) PARTNERS Black Project Gaming (https://blackprojectgaming.com/) The Green Box (https://greenboxpod.com)

Mayday Roleplay, Black Project Gaming, and The Green Box proudly present Psychotic Operas, Collected Fictions Inspired by Delta Green The Roleplaying Game. Tonight we bring you tales of operations gone wrong, agents gone mad, and forbidden knowledge better left forgotten. These stories contain elements of suspense, horror, extreme violence, and other mature content. Listener discretion is advised. In the fall of 2020, the Night of the Opera Delta Green Roleplaying Community hosted a contest for microfiction.

The contest solicited submissions of microfiction, short works of writing that took place in the Delta Green universe, and took less than 10 minutes to consume. The rules were simple. Entry was open to everyone over the age of 18. There were no limits on how many entries could be submitted, and there was no limit on not safer work content. Submissions closed on October 31st, and the Night of the Opera community spent the next two weeks voting for their favorite entry and the content most able to be used in the Delta

Green game. Winners were announced on November 16th, and among the entries were a number of incredible short stories. In an attempt to promote more Delta Green fan content, a joint effort by Mayday Roleplay, Black Project Gaming, and The Green Box, with the explicit permission of the authors, was undertaken to record these stories. Thus, the psychotic operas were reborn. You can hear the complete collection of 2020's fictions in special episodes hosted by each

podcast. For more information on Black Project Gaming, please visit blackprojectgaming.com. All of Mayday Roleplay's work can be found at maydayroleplay.com. Green Box content can be found at greenboxpod.com. You can also join the Night of the Opera community at r-forward-slash-night-at-the-opera-on-reddit. Now, let's begin. Burning a barn by Vinay Gupta. The smoke from the burning out building rises quietly into the sky.

I am standing beside the police car, an empty jerry can in my hand, composing the report in my head. My job is not to investigate the crime and identify a perpetrator, but to tell a story which will allow life to continue for the poor civilian SOBs who share the world with the thing that should not be. He'll be reprimanded, of course, and will try to keep into closer eye on him in the future. Keep him on the base, keep him well fed, keep him out of trouble. But bored, he becomes sullen, depressed, dangerous, and we risk losing his cooperation.

And that is bad for the war effort. So he'll be reprimanded, sure, and another family meets a tragic end wondering what in God's name has come through their windows in the middle of the night of fangs and unnatural hunger. At least he tells us where he's been now, we don't have to wait for the local reports. Jeff, I just could not help myself, he said to me this morning. I'm sorry. So I followed the procedure, got the address, for Christ's sake, he brought a piece of

mail from the house back with him, considerably handed it to me with the same hands, and I went to cover up a few more civilian casualties of the war effort. Vlad, as he's known around the base, is the radioactive vampire. He's an honest to God spook from beyond the grave, funny accent, pale skin, bloodshot eyes when he's recently fed, the works. We inherited him from the Nazis. He worked for Heisenberg, and came to us as part of the package and operation paper clip. The German files say he's been an asset for about five generations, falling in alongside

one faction or another, before finally being brought fully into the fold by the Nazis. Somebody figured out that vampires don't suffer from radiation poisoning, and he was moved from doing internal security, putting the fear of God into the SS, to being a lab monkey for the German Fission Program. I used to grind pigments from my paints in university, Jeff, when I could still see the colors and paint, and the work is not so different. I am blessed to have a fine, steady pair of hands, he says. Somebody else could do most of his lab work, he's a low-level tech, but in doing the work,

he stays familiar with the technology and the equipment, and that matters. He's useful. Four or five times since the war, he's gone into live hot nuclear piles and freed up a jammed control rod, or repositioned a charge that slipped in a test warhead during transport to the test site. Five-minute job, then we let him cool off in a shielded tank for a couple of weeks or however long it takes, and then he's back on the night shift in the labs. He likes the work, makes him feel useful, saves lives, far, far safer than trying to

fix the problem with a hook-hop pole, or having a scared, expendable, poorly trained volunteer, to what must be done, while living an imminent fear of their own, pending death, from radiation sickness. If he wasn't so fucking nice, it would be easier to deal with his occasional laywalls. You just can't believe he does it, but he does. We keep him under control the same way the Nazis did. We treat him like a human being, he's not a monster to us, he's an asset. Outbreak by Mellonbred.

Agent Daya Zahirskarina was leaving her apartment, eyes downcast, lost in thought. When she was hit by a car, the car was drifting and it hit her side on with a deliberate whip-like arc. She fell, went crunch, and skidded on the wet pavement. Her first thought was that one of her shoes had fallen off, her second was to reach for the bodyguard in her SOB holster, her dominant arm was mangled from the collision, and the attempt produced only an uncontrolled thrashing motion. Someone stepped out of the car, which she could hear but not see, her eyes were focusing

at different distances, producing a fuzzy depth of field effect around everything. She suspected this might be the end of the conversation. She tried to reach the gun with her offhand, clawing at the flaps of her blazer ineffectually. Then they were on top of her. One of them knew what he was doing, the other had more enthusiasm than experience. They got her peace, her badge, and her foam, which she heard clatter on the pavement. So much for the tracking function. They got her into the car, lifting when she couldn't walk.

Both scrupulously avoided striking her in the head. That may have been too little too late. Even before they bagged her, she was having trouble with her vision. The first telltale sigh and the collision had scrambled her brains. The second was when she puked inside the bag they put over her head. Definitely a concussion. The car ride contained little useful information for Daria, and there were three of them, one on either side of her and one driving.

Two men and a woman, older sounding, but no way to know. They lifted the bag for a second to make sure she didn't choke, but held her face away so she couldn't see. She was having trouble focusing anyway. She listed who might be behind this, but gave up when she couldn't hold more than one or two possibilities at a time. At the safe house, they continued to know what they were doing. They had guns, which she hadn't seen, but suspected, and never got in a situation where

she might grab one off them, even with her hands tied. But despite all that, there was this air of hastiness and desperation. Like whatever they were doing had been planned by the last living brain cells the trio could scrape together. We know who you look for, Dr. Carino, says the tall guy, early 60s maybe. They called her doctor, so they had got some wires crossed, somewhere. She shrugged off a couple seconds of micro sleep. He was still talking.

Project Beehive, you know the one it was based on, down in Puerto Rico. Outbreak? Overcoat? It was difficult to think, Strizik would know better, maybe she should give them his number. Her arm was killing her, bent at a weird angle and handcuffed to the other. The shorter guy was talking. Your head lice did some work on us, we, we wanted, he looked ready to kick something. The inability to recall words was killing him.

She could relate. We want you to undo it. Ah, so they were patients from the old days before the handover, fuck it was so hard to keep track of all this shit. Daria licked her lips and croaked out a reply. What look? The third one, the woman, grunted something unintelligible and hit Daria in the stomach. She was small, which just meant her fists had a smaller surface area to deliver the

same hammer blow, which derailed the interrogation when Daria inhaled some of her own vomit. The big guy left the room in a hurry, or stepped far enough outside her field of vision she couldn't see him. Her eyes were still fucked up and now they were full of sweat, tears, snot and stomach acid. Maybe he didn't like violence. So the short guy made sure her airways were unfucked so she could talk. The woman babbled something which the guy appeared to sort of understand.

She gave up and passed him a note Daria couldn't see. He didn't like whatever it said. He turned back to her and smiled anyway. You want to attempt again to get smart with us? No, what work did they do? She screwed up her face and thought, her arm really fucking hurt. Who did it? Do you remember?

I need you to describe symptoms. He scowled, but it was a thinking scowl, not a precursor to striking her again. I forget sometimes what I'm trying to speak, you know? Daria nodded. Inside she drunkenly stumbled through the file cabinets of her own brain, looking for the right drawer. She, he pointed to the woman, can't use words at all. The small woman scowled, her scowl was for sure the striking kind.

The big guy, he's, uh, he's, uh, he's de-violenced. You can't use a, the man lifted his jacket to show the pistol on his belt. Daria nodded. And do you remember who did it? How they did it? That made the little guy angry. If I could, if I had a picture in my head for it, we wouldn't have this fucking, this fucking thing happening, now would we?

The aphasic woman handed him another hastily scribbled note. He squinted at it, sketched something and passed it back to her, turned back to Daria. It was 99 and poor to, on the island, there was a guy. He had a, the guy tapped his ear, made a circular motion, a hearing aid. So he was one of Strix after all. Daria closed her eyes, like she was thinking, which was a mistake, triggering another wave of nausea. It was now or never.

And did you ever take this pill and forget you, Aile? That was it. The aphasic woman blinked, licked her lips, spoke intelligibly for the first time in a decade. Will you marry me? The short man was stunned, delighted. Why were those her first words? Had she been trying to ask that all these years, unable to express the concept through

drawings and hand movements? She asked again. Will you marry me? And she pulled out her gun. Will you marry me? And shot him twice through the solar plexus with a practice motion. The no longer aphasic woman stood, drooling, gun held loosely. Her pupils flickered between their widest and narrowest bands, capturing the room around

her at a frame rate far in excess of what her eyes should have been able to process. When the third guy came through the door holding Daria's gun, which it appeared he could use after all, wondering what the hell was happening. It wasn't even a contest. She blew him away with a range-perfect three-round group. Five gunshots in a room without earplugs. Daria's hearing was about as fucked as her vision. She had to imagine the woman still mouthing.

Will you marry me? She didn't have to imagine the woman turning to look at her. That was for sure happening where she could see it. The woman's hand jerked. The gun pointed at Daria's stomach. That wasn't supposed to happen. Okay, she found the right activation phrase. Now what was the stop code?

Will you marry me? What was the fucking stop code? Her head hurt. She was having trouble remembering. Icebox by Nick Brown. I understand that you have clearance. I understand that I'm allowed to tell you about Texas, but your having clearance doesn't mean it's okay for me to just...

I'm saying people that get into my position can't talk about what's eating us because the ideas are like poison. I know you've been at this longer than I have and probably listen to patients even further down the road than I am, but I bet they didn't want to tell you what's burned into their eyelids either, because believe me, I wouldn't share the things I've seen with my worst enemy. But now Susan's finally gone for good. It's just me and the poison sat here, and I'm starting to get the sense that I'm not

one of the lucky ones that get to go out like heroes. So if you got the nod to come visit and make sure I can manage another neither two more at the opera, I don't suppose either of us have a lot of choices left. So I'll talk about Texas, and you can tell Slater that I'm not too cracked for the field, and he doesn't need to feed another kid into this goddamn grinder just yet. It's not the things you expect that stick with you. I mean, don't get me wrong. The sounds Wilson made when it carried him away were fucking memorable.

Finding the bodies of those poor, miserable bastards it threw back for whatever reason. I'm sure that wasn't a picnic, psychologically speaking. I'm just saying it's the little details that you can't shut out. I shot the man Huxley on his own front lawn because he had read a poem, and that is not going to affect my sleep tonight one bit. But then I had to check the house, and the only thing to miss was that he deframed photos of himself with it. All around the house, like it was normal.

He had portraits of himself and that thing as a couple, even though he couldn't have believed for a second that she really looked like that, that she was human. That's the part that's choking me up on the inside, I guess. I've lost my friends, my career, just any kind of hope. Coming up without the fight and returning for the chance to hold this shit out, to fight back. But was there any point? Is there any actual reason for me to keep walking into the fire, losing my actual mind

when there are people out there so lonely and stupid and whatever, crazy, that they'll invite a swivel-headed fucking man-eating cancer puppet into their house and smile for the photos? I guess that's the poison. I already know that we've lost. Night Tears by Kevin Ham. You don't like to sleep with a nightlight. Even as a child, you thought it was for kids who were afraid of the dark.

You prefer to sleep in total darkness, or close to it, but like many people, live in a world where escaping any night-time light is impossible. There's a soft blue glow from the network storage unit next to your silent and dark computer. There's a small green dot on a charging cell phone as it sits on the pillow next to your head. A terrible habit, keeping a phone in the bed by the way. It leads to all sorts of midnight social media excursions, which interrupt a perfectly normal

sleep schedule. The blue glow, though, casts a web of shadows onto the ceiling. It's pretty obvious when you think about it for more than a second, but unit is next to the computer. The light hits all manner of cables, monitor stands, and peripherals, then casts their shadow onto the ceiling. It's the primordial feeling of waking up at night, seeing unfamiliar shapes and shadows and getting that quick jump in your chest before the rational portion of your brain wakes

up and calls you a dummy. You really wouldn't feel like such a dummy if you were sleeping under a banyan tree on the belt and looking at a leopard. You'd need that jump to get you up and moving, defend yourself. For a few seconds, you even consider what that fight would look like. You game out, leaping up, grabbing for a spear or a shield to defend yourself, the leopard roaring and pouncing. But only for a few seconds.

You sigh, move, to roll over and find the cold side of a pillow and get back to sleep. A small part of you wants to roll the other way. Just check the phone for a second. But you don't roll left, you don't roll right. You stay on your back. You send the mental command again. This is something you do thousands of times a day, ordering your body about without any thought.

Again, nothing. You look up at the shadows again, different this time. Different patterns of crisscrosses, blobs and ends. You're more awake now. Annoyed yourself right out of that pseudo sleep of barely awake. It'll be harder to get back to sleep now. A couple solid blinks of the eyes and the shadows stop moving. You never saw them start moving, really, but there's this sensation that they've stopped.

Things have gone too still, too quiet. Now, you truly can't move. While the urges to move your arms, your legs, your neck are all there, the body just refuses to comply. It's almost like the shadows know. As now they start moving again. Moving not with random chaos, but with purpose. Unraveling, constricting and writhing toward the periphery of your vision.

You slam your eyes left and right, left and right, left and right, hoping that the force of the back and forth somehow breaks your head free. Nothing moves for you. But outside of you, everything moves. Undulating with a quickening pulse, shadows streak down your walls and out of your vision. Your feet go ice cold as the blanket is pushed up. Sharp little needles like you've sat wrong for too long prick up both legs. Now your arms.

You feel your hair matting down then a shadow falls across your eyes. It's not like the darkness of the room, but like a wet cloth pulled tight over your head. You open your mouth, but nothing comes out. Nothing comes as you try to scream. Nothing goes in. A cold, wet feeling that cuts off your breath with a moist noise that makes you wretch. The wretching seems to draw in the cold. You try to scream, but cannot.

You try to breathe, but cannot. You try to move, but cannot. You try to wake. Daylight filters in through your drawn curtains as you bolt up in the sitting position. You run your hands up and down your body, but everything is familiar. Your hair is dry, your legs no longer covered in pinpricks. You hardly even broken a sweat during your nightmare. Beside you, your phone vibrates out of your morning alarm.

You groggily step out of bed and into the bathroom, turning on the shower. After a few seconds it's warm, steam starting to rise already as you step in. The instant you touch the water, you violently cough. Three, four good hacks as you double over in a muscle spasm forces your eyes shut. You feel it before you see it. A cold mass of shadow the size of your fist pours up out of your throat onto the floor of the shower. You force your eyes open just as it slips down the drain.

Employee Assistance Program by Magnificent Toppat. A knock on the frame of his office door broke Louise's concentration. Hey, Louise, you mind stepping into my office for a moment? Shit. They're onto me. He knew the state would come when they drag him away, kicking in. Louise, serve to Louise, anybody home? Another knock brought him back to reality.

Sorry, lost in thought, let me just finish up this email and then I'll be right over. Louise sat at his desk, watching the second stick by on the desktop's clock until enough time had passed that he plausibly could have finished writing an email. What's this about, Bill? Well, you just came back from the field and I wanted to know how you're doing. I'm fine. He stared blankly across the desk, not really focusing on Bill's eyes. He's real, you know he's real, you checked him last week, if he was real, you'd know.

Look, I know this has been a stressful time for all of us, but I've gotten some reports from colleagues who are concerned about you. Louise stared at Bill's hands, not a trace of the bright fuchsia, the color he'd come to dread. Don't think about it, just don't think about it, don't think about it and he won't know he's not one of them but he's still a doctor. Images bubbled up unbidden, people dying, melting from the inside out as rivers of goo tinge with blood poured out of their mouths onto the ground.

You just haven't seen yourself lately and Rita said she saw you breaking into one of the dispensers outside of the bathroom yesterday. Fuck. Please don't tell me you were trying to get drunk off a hand sanitizer. Louise flicked his eyes back up to Bill's face. Sorry, bad joke, you want me to walk you over to the EAP office, there's no shame in it. He'd only spike the soap boxes in his building. If any imposter washed your hands with the stuff, their skin would stain.

I'd just have to get some soap on my palm then I can shake the counselor's hand and watch for the colors. Sure, just...let me just wash up first. Bill smiled. Take as much time as you need. Louise almost collapsed as the bathroom door swung shut behind him. He staggered over to the sinks, gripping the counter with both hands to stabilize himself. You're going to be okay, maybe you'll even tell him about everything, tell him about

them. Louise applied the small amount of pressure he was capable of to the pump, so only the thinnest trickle of soap drizzled out onto his hand. But before he could smear the fluid across his skin, he saw the colors change, his palm slowly turning bright pink. A scream echoed out of the bathroom. Picking up the pieces by Vinay Gupta. We drive out to the crash site to take over from the local PD.

They've cordoned off the area and isolated the few first responders that have been inside. We'll deal with them later, click click. We suit up in the parking lot and head in. Nothing on the Geiger counter and the spatio-temporal anomalies are within safe human range now. We'll experience a little glitching later, but nothing like those first cops hit when they saw into the 14th century and met their dead grandmothers and so on. They are needless to say pretty shaken. In a few days they won't remember a damn thing, we'll take care of that.

We'll do the usual exit interviews before we drug them to see if there are any observations from their glimpses into the past we can use. Maybe do some recruiting. It's a lot easier to take somebody who's seen it first hand and done a good job of coping and bring them in than to do a selective exposure and pick out the crack-ups the hard way. One in a 50, one in a 100 will take back with us for further debriefing and evaluation rather than drug them. That's tomorrow's problem.

We check each other's suits, make sure the seals are all intact, batteries charged, reagent tanks full and pressurized. And inside there's half a time machine above the concrete floor at about a 45 degree angle, the rest buried in the floor. It's a small model, 23rd century, home built by the looks of it. Square aluminum tube frame, bucket seats, field generators, power cells, no life support systems or environmental controls, a garage launch into a time when the air is easy to breathe and the climate temperate.

Two dead passengers, both partially embedded in the concrete, they didn't suffer. Little shock will have killed them a little before they planted in the ground. They look like college kids, but they're probably in their 60s given the time period of the tech. By then we live about 300 years on average, at least the ones who can build time ships. The occupants have done a good job localizing baseball caps, shorts, cap, t-shirts and sandals. If it wasn't New York in February they would have passed just fine. It's the fourth dead ship this week.

To sell up the line will just keep sending agents until somebody arrives in one piece. Does whatever it is they're here to do and leaves either back up the line or suicide which is surprisingly common or they'll make their lives here off the grid and try not to mess up the time stream more. Always risky. Obviously they don't talk to us on the job if they can avoid it. Security has not changed. There is, however, a village we maintain for the temporal strays, the survivors of missions

who don't leave and don't suicide. It's generally safer than them making lives alone, particularly given their life spans. They're early, always briefed about it, at least the general principles before they jump back. Kind of a deterrent measure with our peers up the line. If they make contact and give us the right passwords we guarantee them three square meals a day for the rest of their lives and the company of their fellow time travelers where they can mostly be themselves.

There's a couple hundred of them. We don't even know where. It's the most tightly guarded secret that I know of. We have to be extensively briefed because we're first contact in the event we meet a live one that we want to keep alive. We need to be able to convince to negotiate. That means we have to know enough to cut a deal and talk into stress time traveler with no reason to trust us down from their ledge, whatever it might be.

We infer from the high failure rate that in critical time periods rival bands of time people do stuff to the space time continuum which makes time jumps hazardous. Some kind of chafing or ECM that flips ships off course into the past or future just plants them into the ground. If we saw four failures odds are whatever is going on is serious enough a lot of people are willing to die to get two agents across time in hats and shorts to fix it. 60 year old men look like teenagers giving up their long long lives for best not to ask, best not to know.

Enough to know that the struggle at least in some timelines continues. In some timelines we make it far enough out there to send missions back here. This become an article of faith for nearly all of us who are briefed in on time travelers. At least someone we made it. The agents from the future and occasional terrorists, freedom fighters, mercenaries, spies, saboteurs, historians, soldiers and tourists, if we can even tell the difference, are all luckless refugees now. The ones we keep alive and protect either succeeded or failed in their missions, neither

us nor them can tell what happens without further communication from the future and we have to not care which way their job went. We especially do not want to know what their mission was, that's tomorrow's problem. They're all terrified of the unintended consequences of their visit, as are we. Say if you're to contact DGE give us the password and slip out of history then to leave a mysterious body at the bottom of a lake they say. No evidence, no questions. Once in the village they can live normal lives, sometimes quite long ones, talk to people

from their time period and know that we are smart enough not to listen in. If we make a change based on data from the future we could wink all the time travelers out of existence and all the horrendous things they have prevented would be doomed to happen. We just don't have the capability to handle knowledge from the future safely, one ripple could blow the entire timeline and there is no safe level of exposure to tomorrow. They know, we know, don't ask, don't tell. We need them to keep coming, doing whatever it is they do and so we protect and care for the arrivals who survive, that's the deal.

And we don't tell them, although I'm sure the agents already know, is that there also are final reserve. If the wheels come off the situation so badly that there is no future unless something gets done they're all free to leave the village and take whatever they need that we can equip them with at any time. Even the terrorists may come from a timeline where humanity is wiped out or worse and we don't have, can't have an opinion unless it matters. Not while the survival of our entire timeline is imperiled.

If they know that some eight year old kid in Iowa has to die now and the team that was supposed to hit him wound up in a wall or 1868, we let them go, hell we escort them. Don't ask, don't tell, doesn't happen very often, they strongly tend to stay put. A lot of them are enhanced, 23rd, 24th century, they are pretty post-human. We have a couple of guys who are four or five hundred years old passed along from the renaissance. Immortal alchemists, no, no, no. The Philosopher's Stone was a ruse, they were already functionally speaking immortal before they even got there.

They just needed a lab to make gold to travel or to make a better lab, Dr. Frankenstein I presume. So when and if the gates of hell open or very bad things get off a spaceship or seed our ecosystem with a deadly virus, the temporal agents are sitting around waiting for the day. The ones up the line, the ones here, they all need us to survive or they, their families, the entire worlds and histories they were sent here to protect, will simply wink out of existence.

I got into temporal about five years ago, my kids third birthday party, picnic and park. All my friends, our families, toddlers, babies, the dog, grill, bruise, a little slice of paradise of what we are trying to defend. A man who looked a little like those two poor dead bastards buried in the concrete floor came up to me with my kid in my arms, stuck out his hand and said, hi, I'm Bill, you know me from work, I am Barbaleth. It was a weird handshake. He did something odd with two fingers.

At the time all I knew was it was an agent code word, relay up the line immediately, wait for further instructions, follow the lead of the incoming agent. I shift the kid on my hip to free up access to my concealed, I got real alert. Bill says, and of course I didn't understand it at the time, stand down, we are not in any danger, I just knew exactly when and where you would be from the party photos, just call it in, come and pick me up within half an hour. Then he ate a hot dog, so that's the start of how I wound up working temporal. We go back to the car, take the moon suits off and get the cleanup kit, somebody in the

village made it for us, three resonators on burly tripods that we screw into the ground and some not that dangerous plasma power packs. Nothing you could use to build a time machine, the energy isn't high enough and the field generators don't do the same things, nasty incident if they get loose but not the end of the world. It takes a couple of hours until everything is ready to go, the tripods surround the crash ship and we go back out to the car and pull the trigger, nothing happens. We go back inside, no dead guys, no ship, no cube shaped hole in the concrete, just our

inert metal sticks bolted to the floor, the whole thing never happened. We don't really know how it works, but if we get there in time, at most six hours after the crash we will often see the same agents again, embedded in some other wall in a few days. We guess the rig sends a signal up the time stream telling them to abort that launch and they just try again until it works, but you know the rules, don't ask, don't tell, protect the integrity of the timeline at all costs. I like the idea we are saving the lives of our successors centuries in the future some

days, cleaning up time machine crashes is one of the better parts of this job, Barbalith. Thank you for listening to Psychotic Operas, presented by Mayday Roleplay, Black Project Gaming and The Green Box, and the Night of the Opera community. Join us again next time as we present even more stories inspired by the Delta Green Roleplaying game. If you like what you heard, consider joining the Night of the Opera subreddit at r-forward-slash-night-of-the-opera. For more Delta Green content, check out Mayday Roleplay, Black Project Gaming, and The Green Box podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Until then, we'll be seeing you.