TAKE-HOME CONTAINER

### Briefing

Players have been sent to cleanup the site of a botched assignment. **Agent Mackenzie** shot and killed his partner, **Agent Merriweather**. When **Agent Nishihara** checked in, **Mackenzie** fled the scene was shot down by state police one car chase later. **Nishihara** is dealing with that end of the mess so you have time to finish the investigation and clear out.

Information [in brackets] is that which cannot be found with ordinary observation.

### The Ranch House

A lonely, decaying place in the middle of the wide open nowhere. The sky is an oppressive sheet of lead. The fields are fallow. The windows are boarded. There is a **truck** out front, and a **barn** beside.

Agents will begin in media res (**Cold Cut Open**).

### Cold Cut Open

The half-eaten body of **Agent Merriweather** lies neatly butchered in the middle of the **living room**, the cuts of his meat carefully arranged in a ring around cleanly removed organs and bones. **SAN 0/1d6**

* A charred lump of flesh sits smoking in a pan perched atop a camping stove.
* Trash that filled the room has been pushed to the sides - the bare space of floor containing **Merriweather**'s parts is marked with a spiral of cursive symbols drawn in white paint.
* [ *Occult*, *Archaeology*, or appropriate *Languages* indicates they are a hybrid of Avestan and Classical Chinese ]
* Crossing the border of the spiral will cause a sharp headache, swimming vision, and the unshakable taste of burnt meat.

### The Kitchen

Cabinets torn apart and cleaned out. Trash and canned / boxed food thrown everywhere. Blood splatters on floor, bullet holes in the wall. The **Black Binder** lies open on the floor.

#### The Black Binder

An unmarked 3-ring binder containing less than a hundred pages.

**Skim:** Anonymous first-person account of events in a famine-struck village during the Taiping Rebellion. Clearly machine-translated.

**Complete Reading:** Hours

A scene stands out among the rest: A woman arrives in the village, announcing that the army of Hong Xiuquan will arrive soon and is in need of provisions. When the villagers say they have nothing to give, that they have already started eating their dead, the woman notes that this is acceptable under the law of Heaven, but that the approaching army will be just as hungry and far more able to act upon it. A fight breaks out among the villagers as she leaves, twirling her parasol.

### The Computer

Older model with printer. Unsecured. Riddled with malware. Currently on screensaver.

* Ye gods that is a lot of porn.
* **The Manifesto** is open in a word document on the desktop.
* Thumb drive containing **untitled.mp4** plugged into tower.

#### The Manifesto

Several hundred pages of remarkably coherent doomsday prophecy mixing Malthusian catastrophe, Christian millennialism, global warming, social darwinism, and the rise of a capitalist-technofascist government from the economic fusion of China and the United States.

#### untitled.mp4

**SAN 1d6, Unnatural +2%**, **Indefinite runtime**

City street. Daylight filtered through smoke. A woman in an oversized sweatshirt sits atop a throne of bodies underneath the shade of a yellow umbrella. Bright red butterflies sit sunning their wings. Indistinct shouts and chaotic sounds fill background. She is eating from a charred shank of meat. With mouth full, she looks to the viewer and says:

[Mandarin] "The principle act of power is to devour that which cannot defend itself from power."

At ten minutes: [Mandarin] "Are you enjoying this? I'm enjoying this."

At half an hour: [Mandarin] "It's not going to stop, you know."

The video has no end point. Any Agents watching lose an additional 1 SAN and 1 WP for every further half hour. Handlers, add whatever you like.

### The Basement

No light here but what you bring. Bare concrete.

* Six plywood cubicles, painted with the same sigils found on the **barn**.
* A large splatter of dried viscera covers the center of the floor, still vaguely sticky. There are tufts of red hair sticking out like grass. **SAN 0/1d4**
* A ragged mouth forms when they investigate closer. **SAN 0/1d4**
* "Oh, hello! Don't worry about me. Nosirree. I deserved it, of course. I couldn't fulfill the principle act of power! Chuck could, I couldn't, this is what I deserve. It's nice and quiet down here. Actually, could you shoot me? Right there in the head, Mr. Officer Sir. Ms officer Ma'am if applicable. Starvation is a terribly slow way to go."
* [Speak with the mouth further: This is **Leonard**. he and his pal **Chuck** were behind this. **Chuck's** ritual went off just fine in the barn, **Leonard** failed his with sloppy sigil setup. They ended up kidnapping six people to sacrifice for the first ritual.]

### Upstairs

A grimy bathroom and a trash-filled bedroom. Very gross, two items of note.

* Photograph of two men in military fatigues. Short with brown hair, tall with red hair.
* A series of colored pencil drawings showing images of a human being transforming into a creature not entirely unlike a **massive, blood-red butterfly**. On the back of one are some sloppy sigils and a list of hardware supplies: plywood, bungee cords, zip ties, duct tape, bleach, crowbar, paint.

### The Truck

A dirt-caked F150. There are blood stains and hair in the back seat [ *Criminology* or *Forensics*: The hair is from at least four different individuals. Chemical testing of the blood would reveal that of at least six. ]

### The Barn

Padlocked shut. Windows boarded up. Cursive symbols painted in white on all sides with the largest drawn on the primary doors.

* **If barn is entered through windows or skylight:** Interior is empty. Rusting pens and dust. If they leave through the door, see **Outcomes**.
* **Barn entered through front doors:** Agents enter the **Abbatoir**

### Abbatoir

**SAN 1d10 / 1d20**

There is a crashing wave of voice, of howling and moaning and wordless cries for help at such volume and density that it bleeds together and becomes indistinguishable, desperate noise.

* Dim red light barely illuminates a vast, circular room. Stone stairs descend to a central basin wherein lies the **Maggot King**.
* In the midst of the feast, mouth mashing on a bloody pulp of parts, the **King** is clearly singing some jolly anthem. The words are indistinct but the tone is clear: he is gloating.
* Each tier is lined with cages. Each cage is filled corner to corner and top to bottom with naked, screaming humans. Skeletal arms stick out from the bars, a supplicating forest of cracked nails and abrased skin. Those on the bottom are crushed to pulp by those above them. Those by the bars are pressed against them with enough force to break their bones.
* They are aware of the Agents as they approach, and though they have long since lost their faculties they are clearly pleading for release.
* Meandering in the aisles between cages are two **cutters**. At occasional intervals, they will reach into a cage with knifelike fingers and casually carve off an arm, a leg, a shank, a head, and toss it to the **Maggot King** in the center. They will take notice of the Agents' interruption of their task, and will seek to do the same to them.

#### Cutters

Like a scarecrow made out of well-oiled razors. A single emberlike eye glows in the hunchbacked lump of its head.

**HP** 26, **Armor** 3, **Dex** 45

Hand of Blades 65% 1d10 AP 3

* **Arms for days**: Agents gain +20% to \*Dodge\* when in close quarters combat with a **cutter**.

#### Maggot King

A truck-sized mass of flesh, all mouth and fat roll. A little tuft of brown hair at the top. The eyes didn't stretch with the rest of the face.

**HP** 40 , **Armor** 2, **DEX** 15

Roll-over 5% Lethality 90, Swallow 50% 2d10

* **Sessile**: Doesn't move. Not one bit. Not ever.
* Will attack a threat that's close enough, but is completely helpless at range and dependent upon the **cutters** for protection.

### Outcomes

* **Agents flee the Abbatoir**: One of the **cutters** will pursue them. It will get bored after a few miles, though they may now pass in and out of the broken seal as they please.
* **Agents tear down the barn**: A tide of thousands of bodies pour out of the collapsing **barn**. The **cutters** are with them, and clearly not pleased. The **Maggot King** screeches in the background as its larval form melts into goo.
* **Agents** burn down the barn: as above, but everything is on fire.
* **Agents leave everything alone and pray nothing happens**: Nothing happens. This lasts for a week (if it's not interfered with beforehand) when the **Maggot King** finishes his metamorphosis and rises as the **Blood Moon Butterfly**. Every living being, down to bacteria, within twenty miles is liquified and absorbed instantly. **untitled02.mp4** emerges online. Massive riots and violent government crackdowns sprout like mushrooms on the corpse of the body politic, and will not end for a long, long time.
* **Maggot King is killed**: Nothing else happens! You get a gold star.
* **untitled.mp4 is watched**: The woman will appear again in other contexts, favoring the background of news footage of institutional violence. In time, she might make a more direct appearance.

## Credits

TAKE-HOME CONTAINER was written by Dan D for the 2019  shotgun scenario contest.

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 document are © Dan D, excepting those elements that are components of the Delta Green intellectual property.

TAKE-HOME CONTAINER is not available here under CC-BY-SA.