WIDOWMAKERS - Part Four

 

Investigating Universal Alignment

The threads lead here. The details surrounding Universal Alignment will paint a broader picture of what Delta Green is dealing with, and will eventually point them to the true source of the horror in Wehring. 

The Campus

The campus is a large complex that was formerly a christian youth summer camp operated outside of Wehring. See 'Gethsemane Christian Youth Centre' in 'Widowmakers Pt. 3' for further details on its acquisition by Universal Alignment. Under Universal Alignment's stewardship, little has been changed with the camp. Its only entrance is a gravel road that leads to a gate. The land around the camp is not fenced off, though canny agents will note that trail cameras are installed in high trees as you get closer to the campus. Agents who are trained in stealth infiltration will be able, with time and caution, to avoid them and get as far as the treeline. Agents may also get a good vantage of the Campus by hiking a nearby low mountain, though reconnaissance in this way will require a magnifying scope to properly see the Campus with any detail. If Majestic-12 or Universal Alignment have good cause to fear they're being spied on by Delta Green, an occasional guard patrol will work its way up this mountain and search for evidence of foot-traffic, and lie in wait should they think the agents are likely to return to it. 

The Campus consists of 17 Buildings: 12 dormitory cabins that can house 12 in each, though only about 6-7 of these are in use, at the centre of the 12 cabins is a paved area with two flagpoles, one bearing the star-spangled banner and the other bearing the state flag of Connecticut. One complex a Dining hall, kitchen, a boardroom, and a general-purpose meeting room, with a door that leads to a concrete cellar. What used to be the Manse for the priest is now staff dormitories and offices. The chapel remains and is used for meditation classes, and there is a longhouse that is partially used for storage and teaching. A storage shed contains various tools for groundskeeping. The gate to the drive to the Campus is normally open from sunrise to sundown. 

The Campus doesn't post armed guards to its gate or require showing identification to enter, you can just drive down the gravel road and be right there in the centre of the Campus without any hassle. Staff are normally available and willing to talk, though they'll clam up if overt questions about the deaths are posed, and pressing them for answers will result in a Protector being called and the agents being told to leave, lest the police be called. Agents that ask can be shown around the Campus' facilities and be given a sort of scripted introduction to the group, its founding, and its goals. Asking to see the directors of the group isn't always very easy. Agents posing as civilians are told they can get in contact with the group's directors through their contact info on their website (which is true, but only for Strickland and Burke. Burke seldom checks his email). Agents posing as press will be politely told that the Directors aren't very interested in giving any interviews. Agents who approach the members of the campus as federal agents investigating Spaniard's death will be received with fear and deferred to one of the directors immediately. Majestic has coached them not to refuse Federal Agents so as not to raise suspicion and how to conduct themselves during an interview. They give few meaningful or helpful answers and never say anything that would (knowingly) incriminate the group, additionally, the interviews are secretly recorded for NRO DELTA to inspect later to try to determine if the federal agents investigating them are legit, or the work of Delta Green. 

Personnel

Surveilling the campus in either of these ways will eventually earn them some details on the personnel on-site at the campus.

Directors

Agents who ask or watch the campus extensively will identify three members who are designated as Universal Alignment's directors: Noah Burke, the "Executive Director", a PhD student dropout and former teaching assistant from Harvard; Mark Foote, the "Site Safety and Security Director", a gulf war veteran and security contractor; and Robert Strickland, the "Personnel Director", an aging hippie and author on psychedelics and their use in medicine. 

Further details on these individuals are listed further down in this post. 

Teachers

There about about 6 teachers on the Campus at any point. These are a mix of very highly-regarded yogis from the New England area and others, specializing in "energy healing" and your run-of-the-mill alternative medical practices. Investigating them reveals that none of them have notable criminal records beyond the odd charge for resisting arrest or public intoxication, nor are any of them known to move in notable occult circles in Delta Green's purview. 

They vary in age from their late 20s to mid-40s and are generally inobstrusive, though all of them fear federal law enforcement and fear the agents will take any excuse to twist their words against them to throw them in jail for a crime they didn't commit should they fail to find the actual culprit. 

Protectors

The Protectors will likely strike agents as the most alarming members of Universal Alignment's personnel. The Protectors are essentially the group's security guards. They occasionally patrol the grounds, and are responsible for locking and unlocking the buildings and front gate at the beginning and end of each day. More often than not, beyond these patrols, they stay in their offices in the Manse, reviewing the security footage collected from cameras around the campus and sleeping in shifts. They do no openly carry weapons when going about their daily business in mauve polo shirts and black baseball caps. They carry a can of bear mace, a large flashlight, with them and a radio with them at all times. They do have access to weapons in a safe in their wing of the Manse, and will be instructed to begin carrying them by their handlers if / when Majestic-12 discovers that Delta Green is prowling- or just whenever Mark Foote starts getting really paranoid. 

Their armament contains Sig Sauer medium pistols with three magazines each, M16A2 Assault Rifles with three magazines each, and a bulletproof vest.

If the agents are posing as anything except law enforcement, they will not speak to them, and will politely, but firmly, evade them if they try to make them answer questions. If they believe the agents represent a legitimate law enforcement body, they will answer questions, but are vague and uninformative in their answers. 

The Protectors are paid staff members of Universal Alignment, who handles their own private security, the security staff are led by Mark Foote. Investigating into the staff members will reveal that all of them are former employees of the Breckenridge Corporation, and that they all left the corporation within days of each other. Experienced Agents will know that Breckenridge is the security company of choice for Majestic-12. If this is your agent's first encounter with Majestic-12 or Breckenridge, they will be informed of this when they turn in their next report to A-Cell. Prior to working with Universal Alignment, and Breckenridge before them, all of the Protectors worked in Army Intelligence and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. 

The Protectors, for their part, know nothing of the truth with regards to Universal Alignment. From what they have been told, Universal Alignment is a testing ground for a psychological operations experiment run by the U.S Air Force.

Students

The Students of Universal Alignment are a mish-mash of wash-ups, trying to see if maybe Universal Alignment will be what it takes to pull their life out of the gutter, and seasoned alternative medicine practitioners who haven't seen through the group's bullshit. None of them know anything of the unnatural and would be appauled if they were to learn the true purpose of the group. 

Optionally, should you find it appropriate, one of the students might be an Adept of the Fate, whose mission it is to enroll at Universal Alignment "until they kill him" and report his findings to his Lord in dreams. Particularly daring agents may use the adept as a go-between to the Fate, should they decide they require Club Apocalypse's help in uprooting Universal Alignment. 

Board of Directors

Agents are most likely to turn their suspicions to the directors of the group, indeed, lots of strangeness is to be found in their number. 

Noah Burke

Noah Burke was a PhD student from Harvard. His masters thesis, accessible should the agents or their contacts have connections in Harvard, can be dug up: "Moloch: Human and Animal Sacrifice in the Mediterranean of Antiquity", a treatise on the prevalence of human and animal sacrifice in many pagan and pre-christian religions in the mediterranean, particularly in North Africa and the Levant. he dropped out after travelling to Turkey to study for his PhD, with little explanation. Colleagues of Burke claim he had become interested in a few regions alluded to in texts he had read, purporting that there were "Subterranean temple-complexes that would rival Malta's Hypogeum" which were hidden in the foothills of Anatolia. When he returned abruptly, he dropped out and refused to reconnect with his old colleagues. None of them have seen or heard from him in years. Investigating this trip will find many documents missing and sealed by the Air Force with little explanation. Asking connections in law enforcement will earn the agents rumors he was investigated by the air force for being an iranian spy or something of that ilk. 

Asking Delta Green gets the report on Operation: TABLE DANCER.

Burke lives in the Manse on the Campus are seldom leaves. When he does, he is closely watched. 

Robert Strickland

Robert Strickland moved in many circles during the 60s in the hippy scene in California and Washington. He rubbed elbows with the Beach Boys and Charles Manson (spending most of his time fearfully urging them to sever ties with Manson, who he was deathly afraid of), before moving North and going "straight", deciding to try to legitimize the hippy psychedelic movement through academia. He was studying a PhD in psychology at Kent State in 1970, and witnessed helplessly as the woman he loved was gunned down  by the National Guard.

His writing on psychedelics brought him to the attention of many peoples, and he was approached more than once to pursue some "research projects" for the government, though he scornfully refused these offers, remaining independent. 

In 1990, he was approached to sign on with a group called Universal Alignment to help further their research into alternative medicine. He was fooled by them, and it was only a matter of months in that he realized what it was he had involved himself with. 

Strickland was told that it was a psychological operations research program run out of the Air Force, and had been threatened into silence. Since then, he's put two-and-two together. The voices he's heard, and visions, the deaths. He knows there is something profoundly evil and alien afoot at Universal Alignment. He has communed with Eihort in his dreams and sees the god has the thing he's been looking for, an intelligence only unlocked through meditation (and psychoactive substances), and that all his years spent on mushrooms, DMT, and LSD, floating in the sensory deprivation tank in his basement, has allowed him to reach out and touch this immense intelligence. 

He is not a person of interest to Delta Green, or if he was, his file must have been incinerated when it was disbanded, or misplaced. His history can be found by those with any background in the occult (the hippy movement and psychedelics research very much fits the definition of an occult belief).

Mark Foote

Mark Foote came from an Air Force family, and his two younger brothers still serve in it to this day, stationed in Germany and Okinawa. Mark never flew planes, though, his protanopia-type colorblindness saw to that. Instead, he found himself serving in the Military Police, before moving up to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. 

Foote was eventually approached to work privately as a contractor for the Breckenridge Corporation by an old friend from the Force, and made arrangements to resign. He took his work deadly seriously and took pride in it, guarding cutting-edge research projects that would secure America's future. Eventually, he received word he'd be working on something that was dizzyingly sercretive, an Air Force psychological operations research program. It all seemed a little kooky to him at first. and he wasn't over the moon about the uniforms, but he was never one to say "no" to a good paycheque, so he signed on and moved out. Majestic-12, his true employers, sees Foote as a guard dog for their project and thinks little of him. They have miscalculated. 

Foote has been having dreams, and his occasional trips to the cellar of the main complex isn't just to beat the heat, but to meditate. Eihort has reached out to him and revealed profound secrets to him. Foote has, over the last seven years, become a tool of the Lord of the Labyrinth, a contingency against its captors in Majestic-12. He obeys Eihort first, and Majestic-12 second. 

Foote's history is much more difficult to dig up, and those that do risk raising Majestic-12's attention if not done through a proxy. 

Spooky Figures

Majestic-12 has Breckenridge private security to protect the Campus, but they have their own men in place as well, just to make sure. Two agents of NRO DELTA, Dwayne Simmons and Cameron Phelps (codenamed ACROBAT 1 and 2,) are on the Campus, one of them works on the Breckenridge security team while the other poses as a groundskeeper. They watch the Campus intently and report all of their findings to their case officer, ACROBAT Actual. 

Kicking it up the Chain

A-Cell requests occasional mission reports to be submitted by cells in the event that they are unable to complete the mission, so that another cell may resume the mission, or use what they've learned for later operations. 

Should players made specific requests for information, or should hit a stumbling block and find themselves unsure of where to turn to. A-Cell will provide them with a bit of information regarding Noah Burke, who they reveal was once a person of interest to Delta Green, during an operation in 1990, Operation TABLE DANCER.

After-Action Report: Operation TABLE DANCER

15MAR90

EYES ONLY // DELTA GREEN // TABLE DANCER CLEARANCE REQUIRED

After-Action Report: Operation TABLE DANCER

Agents of Delta Green were alerted to a potential unnatural incursion involving the ongoing "Vagrant Slayings" in Boston, a series of murders committed aqgainst the homeless population of the city. Eyewitness testimonies reported that many of the victims were not killed by a human being, but rather were killed when parasite, arachnoid creatures burrowed from their chests, killing them. 

Agents inserted themselves into the investigation under the auspices of behavioral therapy specialists getting involved to try to coax out "meaningful" answers from eyewitnesses. Agents learned that many of the victims had been visited by a young man whose name was not given, but whose appearance was described to them. Agents narrowed the investigation to a list of three potential culprits. 

1. Dante Aguila, A prominent drug dealer known to associate with “satanists and voodoo types”. A person of interest with connections to other murders in the Boston underworld with “occult” elements.
2. Joshua Webb, A “person-of-interest” flagged by Delta Green and former inmate of Arkham Asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Webb’s file contained ramblings about “spiders” that lived beneath his skin which encouraged him to self-harm.
3. Noah Burke, A PhD in Archaeology student from Harvard who had recently returned from the Middle East and was drifting from job-to-job. Closest match to physical descriptions given by witnesses, though dismissed as a suspect by authorities for his agoraphobic tendencies and physical weakness.

Additionally, Agents made inroads with an antiquarian and occultist in Boston by the name of Bernice Cartfield. Cartfield operates an antiques shop in the Dorchester neighborhood and peddles in antiques, some of genuine unnatural providence, though it is often played up and some are sold fraudulently. Agents were preparing to strike a deal with her for a copy of an occult text they believed would enlighten them on the nature of the enemy when they were ordered to withdraw.

Agents were forced to abort the investigation after word came down that the Air Force Office of Special Investigation had taken jurisdiction over the investigation - which many of them guessed to be agents of Majestic-12. The operation was aborted, and agents failed to monitor the persons of interest afterwards. 

END OF REPORT