Scenario Outline: Operation HOI POLLOI

CALIFORNIA UBER ALLES
or OPERATION HOI POLLOI

HOOK

• Your agents are called to liaison with local law enforcement in Sacramento, California after a mass shooting at a synagogue leaves twenty dead and other injured. This might be in their official capacity as federal agents, or it might be A-Cell being proactive, as the perpetrators are members of the Bear Flag Republic, a white supremacist militia that Delta Green suspects of being connected to the Karotechia. When manifestos taking responsibility for the attack begin being mailed to television and radio news stations across the state, it quickly becomes apparent that the situation is worse than anyone first believed. Inserted into the manifesto are lines from the accursed play, "The King in Yellow".
• A-Cell's directives for your agents are to contain the outbreak of the King in Yellow through any means necessary, identify the origin of the manifestos destroy it and whoever is responsible for distributing them, and to cover everything up .

INVESTIGATION

• Whoever is authoring the manifestos, they're connected to the Bear Flag Republic, so if your agents want to find them, they have to go after the Republic. The shooter's weapons appear to be AK-47s and shotguns with the serial numbers removed - but not all the way. ATF forensic specialists can trace the dealer to "Mettle Munitions and Survival Gear" and its owner Holden Wagner, whose FBI file points to a longwithstanding relationship with white nationalist groups across the West Coast. Putting the thumb screws to Wagner can point you to the fortified cabin of the BFR's leader, Horst Jaeger. 
• Investigating the homes of the Sacramento shooters (Francis Drinkwater, Earl Withers, and Walter Wyatt) indicates the rot spread to them before they conducted their act of mass murder. Their homes have all been uniquely and hideously afflicted the King in Yellow. Drinkwater's home contains a machine that prints imperfect and incomplete renditions of the manifesto, Wyatt's home is haunted by the ghost of a headless child, a spectre from Wyatt's previous service with the Karotechia, and Withers' girlfriend has shredded their copy of the King in Yellow and mixed it with their baby formula into a gray, pulpy paste that she's been feeding to her baby. 
• A kink in the Karotechia's plans is that American news stations don't jump to read whatever deranged manifesto comes through their door, meaning the message of the King in Yellow hasn't been broadcast to the wider public, but that isn't to say there's no danger. At every television and radio station the manifesto's arrived at, uniquely hideous and deranged things have begun to happen. Some are subtle, others have spiralled outwards in sanity-shredding violence, as radio station employees murder and torture each other for information about "the play".
• Stopping the press from inspecting the contents of the manifestos might be challenging. Some players might think of put the word out of anthrax letters at least to get them to leave the letters alone. Of course, USAMRIID will absolutely want to get involved if there's legitimate talk of Anthrax. 
• As the agents dig up more answers, it becomes apparent that the author of the manifestos is Allen Bhrunt, a former editor of the Neo-Nazi publication "The Review" who was saved from financial destitution by sympathizers in the BFR. It appears the Karotechia entrusted penning the toxic manifestos to Bhrunt. As they dig up more and more answers, it quickly becomes apparent that Bhrunt is no longer residing in our world, and instead resides in a nightmare reflection of Sacramento where a weird and horrible war has torn the country apart. In the final push to locate and eliminate him, the agents are harassed by soldiers of the King in Yellow-obsessed "New Russian Imperium",  the exmilitary brigands calling themselves "The American Constitutional Forces" and their "Tsan-Chanese" military advisors.

THREATS

• The Bear Flag Republic, on the orders of the Karotechia, have deployed hit teams of four men to stakeout radio stations where manifestos have been sent, as well as other known locations-of-interest to the agents (such as the houses of the shooters responsible for the incident the agents are reporting). They are armed with a motley assortment of arms and armour, including two tasers for each team. Their objectives aren't actually to kill the agents, although they've been authorized to if it comes to it. Rather, the Karotechia wants them to kidnap the agents and bring them to the BFR's compound in the hills outside of Modesto, California.
• Agents brought to the compound are exposed to "The Message". "The Message" is what they're calling the copy of The King in Yellow, and the Karotechia's plan is to then release these agents and allow them to regroup with Delta Green, hoping that they will then infect their cellmates, then their cross-cell contacts, until a majority of the organization is infected and the conspiracy implodes.
• The tainted manifestos have different effects on the different stations. In some, the text on mail that has touched the letters containing the manifesto has impossibly changed to lines and excerpts of the cursed play, but in other stations the effect has been more drastic, such as with 91.3 KUOP, the NPR broadcast station in Stockton, CA. The station's manager, Barbara Pickett, read the manifesto herself and it has had a profound effect on her. Pickett, a US Army Signal Corps veteran, brought a homemade "Cloak of Illusions" and her shotgun to the station the next day. One-by-one, at gunpoint, Barbara has kidnapped, tortured, and murdered her own staff. Although only a few days will likely have past for the agents, at KUOP, weeks of unremitting horror have elapsed. When agents arrive, the station is ensorcelled to hide the carnage, but it won't take long before the weirdness is too much, and one agent snaps out of the illusions. 
• Delta Green has practiced the STATIC Protocol before and are using it now. The agents are monitored by a "shadow team" with explicit orders to intercept all messages, writing, and media the agents create to inspect them for signs of contamination. If they have reason to suspect the agents are compromised, they are to kill them. It's nothing personal, thank you for your service.
• Agents will likely try to find the author of the manifestos through Horst Jaeger / Ronald Pringle, the BFR's leader. If they're able to capture Pringle for interrogation at his cabin, his answers are nonsense and it's obvious he doesn't know where the author's gone. As the interrogation continues, it slowly becomes obvious to the agents that they're no longer in their own world. Indeed, as they return to civilization (or, what should be civilization) they find themselves in a nightmarish facade: Flattened and scorched suburbs, skyscrapers pocked with bulletholes. California.... in the year 2038. 

The Night World: California at War. 

• California of 2038 is a baffling nightmare. The entire state is an apocalyptic warzone. From what the agents can gather from battered and feverish refugees, America has ravaged itself in decades of non-stop civil war. What remains of the government forces on the West Coast have thrown in with Chinese occupation forces, though everyone keeps calling them "Tsan-Chan" instead of "China". The Tsan-Chanese and "government forces" are, at that moment, trying to retake Sacramento from "Imperial Russian Occupation Forces". All signs point to Allen Bhrunt, the author, being held by "Imperial" forces at a broadcast station there, where an English reading of the King in Yellow is being broadcasted over hijacked radio waves with the purpose of sowing madness and destruction to any English-speaking listeners. With no other obvious way to escape the hellish night world (and perhaps egged on by servants of the King), the agents will need to trek across the blasted San Joaquin Valley to Sacramento.
• On their trek North, agents may encounter:
• Foraging bands of "American servicemen", some of their equipment salvaged and slapdash, some of it startling advanced. They claim to be remnants of the "Constitutional Government" here to "keep the peace". In practice, they carry themselves with all the discipline and valor of a roving gang of bandits. 
• Tsan-Chanese Occupation forces. Few in number but wielding advanced equipment. The Tsan-Chanese also make open use of hypergeometry: psychic operators called Scramblers buffet enemy minds with attacks that stop the brain from processing language (this is occasionally used on civilians and their own troops as an "innoculation" against exposure to the King in Yellow). They also deploy Unfolders, pale and eerily serene "people" who, in combat, unfurl themselves into tank-sized, plasticky, amorphous horrors resistant to conventional weapons. 
• Imperial Russian Occupation forces. Paratroopers deploying over the valley "Red Dawn"-style and roving columns of mechanized infantry. The Russians don't make a lot of use of hypergeometry in the field, but they use the Yellow Sign and the King in Yellow as devastating weapons of psychological warfare. Unencrypted radios and televisions are being confiscated and destroyed by the Americans and Chinese, and on the road North, the agents learn why. Abandoned cars sit on the sides of roads, their drivers having drowned themselves in the nearest stream or thrown themselves from the nearest rooftop - en masse. 
• Bhrunt is no great challenge to kill. Once agents have infiltrated the shoddy broadcast station the Russians have erected, he practically begs for them to kill him and free him from this nightmare. Killing him brings the agents out of the horrific nightmare and back to reality - a hospital bed recovering from the last major violent encounter they had before they went to the Night World (likely the explosive raid on Horst Jaeger's cabin).