The Department of Works

**The Department of Works**, generally referred to as just **The Department**, was an unlisted branch of the British government that dealt with supernatural occurrences. It had a key role in events such as Pleasant Green’s disappearance and reappearance, Neboad’s return to Hadleigh, and the Albion event at Blackfriars. While generally perceived to be on the side of good, it wasn’t above using clandestine or even lethal measures to achieve its aims. The Department, in its most recent form, was disbanded in 2021.

## Early History

One of the Department’s agents, Parker, claimed it had been in existence in some form or another for as long as *"the other side"* - the followers of Nyarlathotep in his various forms. She also said that both sides got absorbed into the establishment around 500 years ago. Dr. Eleanor Peck viewed the organisation as more of a secret society than a traditional government agency believing the Department’s roots likely stemmed from efforts by James I to oppose the occult efforts of John Dee and Edward Kelley. Early members of what would become the Department are rumoured to have included Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Isaac Newton, and a number of members of the Royal Society.

Discovered evidence that the Department’s most recent form is a result of being more openly active during the Second World War in order to curtail Nazi efforts to contact the Elder Beings.

## The 1917 Albion Event at Silvertown

By the First World War, the Department not believed to have been as integrated into the British government as it would become during the Second World War. However, the organisation was in existence during this time and in 1917 it was forced to respond to an Albion event in Silvertown, London. The event threatened to overrun London when a trans-dimensional portal opened. To combat this, the drastic step was taken of bombing the area in order to close the portal. Officially, the incident was reported as a factory explosion.

## The Second World War

The Department’s most recent form, as a government ministry called 'The Department of Works' appears to have come about from being more openly active during the Second World War in order to curtail Nazi efforts to contact the Elder Beings.

## The Somerton Man

In 1948, the body of a man was discovered on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. The origin of the man was a mystery for decades and the man’s death became one of the most notorious unsolved cases of the 20th century. According to Parker, the Somerton Man was an American from Innsmouth, working as an assassin for Obed Marsh. This assassin was assigned to track down and kill a Department operative, Alf Boxall, who was working in the area at the time. However, Boxall was able to intercept and kill the assassin first.

## The Pleasant Green Incident

In 2016, a small village in England called Pleasant Green came to the attention of the Department when a new numbers station began transmitting from its location. Further attempts at investigation were hindered when surveillance drones getting closer than 500 feet above the village became subject to interference that caused them to lose power. Similarly, satellite imagery showed a blank circle with a roughly 2-mile radius extended out from the centre of the village.

In response, the Department sent in a specialist operative, Blake Hornsby, to investigate further but he returned to the team outside the village soon afterwards in a daze before falling into a comatose-like state. Observers noting no activity in the village came to the conclusion that Hornsby’s state likely matched that of the Pleasant Green residents.

Ultimately, the numbers being transmitted were determined to be the aphelion (51.483) and perihelion (34.952) of a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt called Haumea. Hornsby’s fugue state eventually spread to two other Department operatives, Simon and Dr. Fallon and soon afterwards, the physical village itself disappeared and would not reemerge for another four years. In the aftermath of this, Johnson had all records of the village expunged and the whole incident classified at *Cobalt India* level.

## The Giant Snake at Lindisfarne

Johnson deployed two agents, Mary Lairre and Arjun Taleb, to investigate an anomaly that had emerged at Lindisfarne. They discovered that local druids were worshipping a giant snake god that had recently awoken and threatened to devour a large section of the northeast coast of England. Unfortunately, while managing to successfully seal the shrine where the snake god was located, Taleb’s interaction with the serpent did catastrophic and permanent mental damage.

## The 2017 Fracture Event at Hadleigh

In 2017, the Department sent one of its most experienced agents, Mary Lairre, along with a new recruit, Jonathan Hicks, to Hadleigh in Essex in response to indications of an accelerated fracture event. Lairre and Hicks discovered that a medieval wizard, Neboad, was seeking to reclaim a book of spells he gifted to James Murrell in the 19th century. Neboad’s plan was to trade with the book’s rightful current owner, Seth Taylor, a descendant of Murrell by marriage - Taylor would gift the book back to Neboad and in return the wizard would use his magic to conjure Taylor’s dead wife and child.

Neboad’s magic ended up creating a fracture event that incorporated the present, an imagined past of 1943, an alternative past of 1977, an alternative present, and the real past of 1603. Eventually, Lairre adjusted Neboad’s spell so that Seth and his conjured family, along with the Murrell house, could be removed from the timeline and continue to exist after the fracture event was closed.

## The 2017 Glamis Castle Incident

Soon after the Hadleigh event, Lairre, Johnson and Parker, were deployed to Scotland to investigate an event at Glamis Castle designated at *Cerulean Harvest* level. This event involved the disappearance of two American tourists at the castle, one of whom, Libby Ward, was known to the Department as a monster hunter.

It quickly emerged that the Americans had used a secret door in the castle to travel into Avalon, another dimension filled with the folkloric tales of the British Isles which acts as a natural repository of sorts for all the folkloric narrative that does not narratively fit within the ‘real world’. As Johnson had previous experience in this repository, he led the three-person team. During the mission, Johnson realised that Lairre’s existence as both a person in the real world and as the folkloric ghost of Borley Rectory meant that Avalon was beginning to collapse. In response, Lairre left her team to find the second American, Carlton Murray, with expediency. However, this led to her falling into Ward’s trap - a containment banishment.

The Department agents turned the tears in reality caused by Lairre’s presence to their advantage and brought another Mary Lairre from an alternative future to rescue her past-self from Ward’s entrapment. This eventually led to Ward herself being entrapped in her banishment, an item that Lairre was keen to keep as an ornament on her mantlepiece.

## The 2018 Albion Event at Blackfriars

In 2018, a trans-dimensional sinkhole opened up in Blackfriars, London. This was quickly identified as an Albion event: the intrusion of a dimension created by the collective subconsciousness of the present-day population of England. This dimension was similar to Avalon but populated by characters and events of population’s nostalgic, mis-remembered and over-simplified history.

Johnson, now Head of the Department of Works, was lost in this portal as it swallowed up his car while he was travelling between meetings. His deputy, Miranda Hyde, classified the event as at *Eburnean Ultra* level but assigned Parker and Lairre to retrieve him in an unsanctioned rescue attempt. Unfortunately, the Albion event possessed Johnson, who turned on his rescuers and returned to the Department command post alone. He relieved Miranda Hyde of command and reclassified the event as *Cinnabar Nemesis*, which made him, as the Head of Department, the de facto leader of the country whose authority superseded the Prime Minister and the monarch.

Hyde, who was suspicious of this turn of events, tried to countermand Johnson’s order under Article 7 of a 1972 accord, but she was unable to stop Johnson from successfully ordering a nuclear payload to be detonated over London. The nuclear explosion supercharged the ley lines along which Albion’s powers had accumulated. While this was the possessed Johnson’s plan, it was also the means by which Lairre and Parker were able to travel to a key point in English history and prevent Albion’s nostalgic historical fiction from being created in the first place by killing Geoffrey of Monmouth.

## Activities in Iraq

The Department took custody of Melody Cartwright in Iraq after a newly acquired informant of their, Barbara Sayers, made them aware of Cartwright’s imprisonment at the hands of Dr. Allen and Daisy Marsh in Mosul, Iraq. Sayers, who had originally supported Allen and Marsh’s efforts, helped Cartwright to escape but Sayers was murdered in retaliation. Cartwright went straight to the local police and was then picked up by a Department operative, known only as the Mystery Woman, who debriefed Cartwright to establish the extent to which she might have become a vessel for Ipqu-Aya.

These debriefings were long, exhausting and traumatic for Cartwright, although she acknowledged that their medical care likely saved her life after her imprisonment at the hands of Dr. Allen. Eventually it was decided that she should be taken out of Iraq. However, these plans were foiled when, on their way to the airport, Cartwright’s vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device at which point she escaped Department custody.

## The Second Rendlesham Forest Incident

In 2019, a number of Department resources were committed to monitoring events unfolding in Rendlesham Forest. Throughout the year, a resident, Henry Akeley, had been trying to warn the police and his former lecturer, Dr. Eleanor Peck, of a growing threat that was in some way connected with his Babalon Working activities with Amelia Fenner’s Suffolk Coven in 1980.

This developing situation was one that the Department appears to have been well aware of long before Akeley tried raising the alarm. They were aware of the continued existence of a coven in Suffolk and their goals to summon the Thelemic goddess, Babalon, in an attempt to reverse the various problems of the 21st century - pollution, disease, famine, war and climate change. However, what the coven did not know was that Babalon and all the strange occurrences Akeley was experiencing were actually signs of an attempt by Nyarlathotep to summon Azathoth from the Dreamlands.

To monitor this, the Department had deployed a deep-cover agent, the Mystery Woman, to infiltrate the coven. She did this by nurturing a romantic relationship with one of its members, April Marston. This cover was so successful that April and ‘Isabel’ married and lived together in Saxmundham.

Meanwhile in Rendlesham, strange radio broadcasts and the seeming possession of another member of Fenner’s coven, Walter Brown, made Akeley suspicious. Akeley then went missing, having been possessed by Nyarlathotep, and in response to the imminent arrival of the investigative podcasters, Matthew Heawood and Kennedy Fisher, the Department deployed another operative into the field. John Silence took on the identity of local vicar, Albert Wilmarth (whom the Department sent on holiday with a ‘surprise’ postcode lottery win), in an effort to watch over the podcasters and influence their investigation.

Further signs of escalation in the area led to yet another operative being deployed. Parker made contact directly with Kennedy Fisher. When Fisher was kidnapped by April Marston, Parker joined in the rescue attempt organised by Heawood. However, Parker and Silence made their excuses to split from Heawood and Dean Perry, and worked with the Mystery Woman to sabotage Akeley/Nyarlathotep’s Babalon Working. Kennedy managed to affect her own escape but was taken out of harm's way by Silence. After the event, ‘Isabel Marston’, April Marston and Henry Akeley all went missing, and John Silence completed his undercover assignment when Albert Wilmarth returned from holiday.

It is implied that April Marston and Henry Akeley are in the custody of the Department somewhere, when Parker explains afterwards that “it’s complicated”.

## The Reappearance of Pleasant Green

Further investigation of the radio signals that Henry Akeley had recorded, as well as those captured on the tapes of sessions between Dr. Jonathan Willett and his patient, Charles Dexter Ward, led to the discovery of a connection forgotten between the dwarf planet of Haumea and disappearance of the English village of Pleasant Green.

Parker explained that the Department as a whole had a vague memory of the Pleasant Green Incident but that no records of any kind made any mention of it or the village. This went far beyond the cover-up that Johnson engaged in immediately after the event as - in 2017, there appeared to be no difficulty remembering the now highly classified event. Uncovering this institutional amnesia became a priority when it emerged that Obed Marsh planned to use an astrological alignment that would cause Pleasant Green to reappear to attempt another ritual to summon Azathoth.

At this point, the wider British government got involved and the Department was placed under the the control of COBRA. The government’s decision was to deploy the British Army in response to the threat posed by Marsh and Nyarlathotep. However, key figures in the Department itself were concerned that such military involvement would not only be useless but perhaps even disruptive to their attempts at frustrating Marsh’s plans. The Department of Works, or at least certain members of it, therefore provided false intelligence that directed the army to deploy on the Isle of Skye. In an effort to make the deception effective, nearly all of the Department’s own assets were deployed on Skye as well, with the exception of Parker and John Silence.

Unfortunately, Parker and Silence were not able to rescue Heawood from Pleasant Green as the magical forces surrounding the village as it began to merge with the Dreamlands meant that only Kennedy Fisher was allowed in because of her occult heritage. Heawood and Fisher were able to stop Marsh’s ritual, but Heawood disappeared as a result - apparently lost to the Dreamlands.

## Dissolution and Aftermath

During the Mystery Machine’s investigations of The Whisperer in Darkness and The Shadow over Innsmouth, the Department of Works was given far greater public exposure than it had had to deal with for many years. COBRA’s involvement with the Department during the reappearance of Pleasant Green signalled a change in how the agency and parliament interacted. Given the threat Azathoth posed, the fact that Cinnabar Nemesis was not used again would suggest that such far reaching powers had been curtailed by 2020.

These reduced powers and autonomy and increased exposure allowed political enemies of the Department to attack a now weakened foe. In 2021, Wilberforce Ashton-Heath, a Conservative MP, amassed enough political will to abolish the Department of Works under the auspices of budget cuts.

This came as an enormous shock to the Department, who would have seen their fair share of political threats to their existence through the years of economic uncertainty and austerity. However, Ashton-Heath had backers that the Department had, up to this point, been completely unaware of - The Church of Starry Wisdom. An occult, fascist organisation with ties to far-right and esoteric groups around the world, the Church was run by Ashton-Heath’s sister, Caroline Morse. In the aftermath of the breakup of the Department, former operative, Victoria Ness, suggested that the organisation was too distracted by recent events and belligerents such as the Soldiers of Ipqu-Aya, Henry Akeley’s Suffolk Coven and the Esoteric Order of Dagon.

However, despite being officially disbanded, many members of the Department continued to fight for the cause. By 2023, many elements of the Department had gone underground, being hunted down by the Church, but were still communicating with each other and trying as best as possible to continue their work. Parker assigned ex-operatives Marcus Byron and Victoria Ness to work with Kennedy Fisher in investigating the death of Theo Martin after it was determined that he was murdered in the search for a notebook belong to his grandfather, Phillip Gibson. While there was no clear understanding of the importance of the notebook, members of the Department were keen to find it simply because they knew the Church wanted it, which indicated a weakness in the Church that could be exploited. When this investigation led to the reappearance of Matthew Heawood, various disparate elements of the Department aided Byron and Fisher - they raced back to London from Essex without triggering a single speed camera or highway patrol, and Byron was able to get Heawood seen by esoteric specialists in an unlisted unit of Whittington Hospital that was still operating.

Caroline Morse and Wilberforce Ashton-Heath were defeated at Dunwich in 2023 at the Church of Starry Wisdom, and after this the press received a number of anonymous tips (presumably from disgruntled Department employees) that linked the now missing MP with far-right fascist groups. However, so far, it’s unknown whether the fall of the Church will lead to the re-establishment of the Department.

## Staff

### Management

* Johnson - Head of Department (2018) (promoted at some point between "Fugue State" and "Albion")
* Miranda Hyde - Deputy Head of Department (2018)

### Early Members

* Nicholas Hawksmoor (17th-18th century)
* Sir Isaac Newton (17th-18th century)
* Sir Christopher Wren (17th-18th century)

### Recent and Current Operatives

* Alf Boxall (1940s)
* Marcus Byron
* Gerhart
* Jonathan Hicks
* Mary Lairre
* Mystery Woman
* Victoria Ness
* Parker
* John Silence
* Arjun Taleb

### Assets/Informants

* Ben
* Dr. Fallon
* Phillip Gibson
* Blake Hornsby
* Moorehead
* Barbara Sayers
* Simon

### Other Staff

* Clive (security guard)
* Danvers (driver)
* Jeff (security guard)
* Miss Stone (quartermaster)

## Mentioned Classifications

All event classifications in the Department follow a similar naming structure of two words, the first being an obscure colour.

* *Cobalt India* - The 2016 Pleasant Green Incident was classified at this level.
* *Cerulean Harvest* - The 2017 Glamis Castle Incident was classified at this level.
* *Cinnabar Nemesis* - The 2018 Blackfriars Albion Event was re-classified at this level by a possessed Johnson.
* *Eburnean Ultra* - The 2018 Blackfriars Albion Event was originally classified at this level.

Security clearance for individuals follows a less uniform pattern of naming:

* Foxtrot
* Delta Protocol
* Blue Legacy

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 TWiD: "Episode 5"
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 TWiD: "Episode 6"
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Mythos: "Albion"
4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 TSoI: "Rubaiyat"
5. ↑ TSoI: "The Somerton Man"
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Fugue State"
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 TSoI: "Pleasant Green"
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Mythos: "Mythos"
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Mythos: "Glamis"
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 TSoI: "Apartment 6"
11. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 1"
12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 TWiD: "Episode 8"
13. ↑ TWiD: "Episode 7"
14. ↑ TSoI: "Haumea"
15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 THoTD: "Episode 3"
16. ↑ THoTD: "Episode 8"
17. ↑ THoTD: "Episode 1"
18. ↑ THoTD: "Episode 2"
19. ↑ THoTD: "Episode 10"