Ankhs but no Thanks - A Play Report

 

a plaster cast of the titular ankh

I ran Ankhs but no Thanks, a Delta Green scenario by mellonbread. The party consisted of:

Karina Lask, AKA 'Rowan,' a woman in her mid forties who still looked twenty-five thanks to a vampire bite that so far has had no other effects.

Sophie Walley, an actual twenty-something who worked for the CIA's Covert Influence Group who would look more at home on someone's Instagram feed.

They were told a coroner friendly in New Jersey had found something weird and wanted Delta Green to check it out. The coroner's office was a converted bungalow with a climate-controlled shipping container shoved through a hole in the wall. It served as a relatively more secure lockup and after sealing the gaps between the metal and the bungalow's drywall with insulation, it kept the office cold too. Despite the ramshackle nature of his workplace, Dr. Goldberg was a real doctor and kept his certificates framed on a wall. He showed the Agents over to his find.

The man's name was Delbert Potemkin, age 42. He had a gunshot wound, but the coroner had ruled that out as the cause of death. Somehow he'd been shot in the perfect sweet spot with no major arteries or vital organs. That plus there weren't any signs of shock. The guy seemed to have just dropped dead. The Agents shrugged "So what?" Dr. Goldberg pointed over at the table where he had weighed and stored Potemkin's organs after the autopsy. Neither of the Agents had Medicine or Biology, both of the organs were shriveled and unrecognizable. Rowan thought she saw something vaguely aorta-shaped on one of them, courtesy of her First Aid. "The victim shouldn't have been alive in the first place," the coroner explained, "You can...survive acute liver failure, but not like that. Plus his belly should've been swollen and his eyes jaundiced. That and the heart, which I'm pretty sure is not a case of postmortem decay. It was collapsed in on itself when I pulled it out of his chest cavity."

Everyone stood around in silence for a moment. "Look, I realize the guy's properly dead now and the whole thing might not even matter anymore, but I feel like you should check it out, just to be sure? Oh, and keep an eye out for his pancreas, I couldn't find the damn thing." Rowan drove Sophie to the crime scene while she cooked up a few fake social media profiles in the backseat. The two planned to pose as estranged nieces. There was a squad car parked out front and a cop playing Pokemon Go on his phone, but that was about it for site security. Sophie failed her Persuade roll, but her legend, CHA and Persuade were all high enough anyway that the guy still let them in on the condition that he hang around to make sure they didn't mess up the place. 

The two women ducked into the study, out of sight of the cop. The window was obviously smashed through with a brick. Between the two Agents' individually high Criminology and Search scores, they surmised that the perp had tossed the place but was interrupted. Given the creaky floorboards, they surmised he'd heard Potemkin walking towards the study after he heard the break in. They also found a hidey-hole under a loose floorboard. It contained a singular shoe box caked in dust. Rowan stuffed it into her duffel bag. Normally it just carried an assortment of 'Delta Green stuff,' but today it was serving double duty as a prop for their "we're two sisters stuck in this town with nowhere to stay" act. They also nabbed a photo of a younger Potemkin at what appeared to be a dig-site along with several other people. The two Agents bullshitted a story about their 'uncle' having had a cat named Tibbles, so Rowan and the cop went into the backyard to look for it. This left Sophie free to search the house. She found the bathroom medicine cabinet to be mysteriously empty of 'old people meds' and a shriveled organ in a jar under the kitchen sink. 

The Agents excused themselves and stopped by one of the neighbors. The woman turned out to be the one who had called the police. She bought their sob story and invited them inside for snacks. They discovered that a few years ago, Potemkin was having some unknown health issues. Some doctor would come visit for house calls. Eventually, the neighbor's husband came down from upstairs. He had recently retired from working at the hospital. The Agents quizzed him, eager to know more about their 'uncle.' He explained that while he only saw Potemkin in the hospital a few times, he knew the doctor by their car, a old teal sedan with angry red headlights. It stood out in the parking garage. The guy worked in internal medicine, and he'd heard through the rumor mill that Potemkin had some sort of liver problem.

The Agents drove off to an empty park and sat in the car to examine the contents of the dusty shoe-box. Inside they found a wad of thick cushioning plastic wrap and a scrap of old paper. The plastic had clearly held something for a long time to the point that it had left an imprint. It was at this point I had to decide what the heck a 'five-sided ankh' was. Neither of the Agents had Archeology or Forensics to reconstruct the missing object by its footprint, so the best they could guess was it was some sort of teardrop shaped thing with a bunch of spikes coming out of the middle. The paper just had "For Emergencies" scribbled on it. The two had a sinking feeling in their stomachs. Potemkin was obviously an Egyptologist, but he didn't fit the mold of the wizard they were expecting. He hadn't tossed his brain in the trash and hidden his lungs, liver, intestines, and stomach in canopic jars around his house as one might expect from traditional mummification.

They brought their finds back to Dr. Golberg, who had finished running a print found at the crime scene. He was holding it back from the wider police department to give the Agents a chance to screen for 'weirdness.' Their perp was Julius Pope, a felon convicted of a few violent crimes but currently released on parole. The Agents asked if Goldberg could make a cast to figure out what had been inside the plastic wrap and he obliged. This didn't take long, and he presented his findings to Rowan and Sophie. Both of them immediately recognized the shape. It was an ankh. A weird one, to be sure, more like a whisk. The doctor had also lifted some 2D impressions from the plastic wrap, places where rust and dust had rubbed off. The two Agents felt a sinking feeling in their stomachs as the pieces started fitting together.

It was early afternoon, so the Agents headed over to catch Pope's house before he came back from work. Sophie crouched in the bushes behind his house until she was satisfied the only occupant was Pope's girlfriend, passed out on the couch. She snuck in through the back sliding door and searched Pope's room. She found an old signed book and a graduation ring, but no weird ankh. She got a beep on her phone from Rowan, there was a car pulling into the driveway. Sophie had Stealth, so scrambling for the bushes wasn't any problem. She watched the house through a zoom lens for the next hour or so. That combined with her decent Alertness meant she spotted the ankh dangling around Pope's neck as he and his girlfriend canoodled on the couch. After the two went to sleep, Rowan pulled the car up directly in front of the house and Sophie went back inside. She succeeded on her Stealth roll, and was able to slip the ankh off Pope's neck without waking either of them up. Satisfied with their efforts, the two of them called the scenario there.

For her Home scene, Sophie decided to Stay on the Case, running down Potemkin's colleagues from the dig-site photo. She succeeded on her Bureaucracy roll and gained SAN from the 1D6-3 roll, so I said that there was refreshingly little to find. A few of the older professors in the photo had already died, but the rest hadn't published anything weird or fallen ill. She also got her hands on the report from the excavation. The ankh was the only real thing of interest discovered at the site, at least of interest to Delta Green.

Rowan hung onto the ankh and decided to Study the Unnatural. She'd offered it to Sophie but she refused. Given her Anthropology, History, and Occult, I figured she'd find a ritual of some kind if she failed a SAN roll with a penalty equal to her Unnatural score. Her player was also a bit of an ancient Egypt nerd in real life, so I asked her what specific sort of thing she was looking for (as a way to pick what ritual she might find). She offered the myth of Isis and Osiris. Rowan discovered an interesting variation on the myth, preserved into Arabic alchemy. As usual, Osiris' evil brother Set tricks him, chops his body into fourteen pieces, and scatters him all across Egypt. Isis collects the pieces of her late husband, but first, she cuts them into even tinier pieces until "they were finer than the grains of sand of the Nile." In further deviation, Isis only seeks help from Thoth, the god of knowledge, in bringing Osiris back. Thoth teaches her the magic words to raise her husband from the dead. When Osiris returns, Thoth warns them both that just as the words brought him back, they could also be used to destroy him. So Osiris hid them in an ankh he made sure to always carry with him. After that descriptive text, I offered Raise From Essential Saltes. Rowan's player opted to only learn the words of power that could raise and return the dead to their essential saltes. She lost 1D10 SAN instead of the 1D20 learning the full ritual entails, but still gained +1% Unnatural. We decided the profound effect the SAN loss had on her was planting doubts as to whether there was some incantation that could reduce her, also an unnaturally long-lived person, to dust.