The Child of the Woods
Briefing
July 2 1995
Fly to Burlington, Vermont asap.
Keep our presence as quiet as possible. Federal agents are to operate without identifying themselves.
Send arrival times to Agent Irene by email, she will meet us in the arrival area. She has a sign for Mr Green. She introduces herself as Eugenia Carcaterra, because she’s operated in the area under that alias before.
When we all arrive she takes us to a conference in a nearby hotel.
Briefing: She was running a local operation on a nearby mountain with some local friendlies. There is a suspected supernatural presence. Confirm and report back. She will coordinate. If there is a situation we don’t have to resolve the situation, unless it’s easy to do, Agent Irene is happy to call in the big guns to sort it out.
Nearest town is Townsend, several thousand people there. There are a cluster of other small towns <1k in each. There is a scattered rural population as well. Probably less than 10k overall in the area.
Friendly points of contact:
- Old Thomas. Native American local. Lives out in the wilderness.
- Deputy Fitzgerald, local sheriff’s deputy in Townsend. He lives in a trailer park near Mill Village but works in Townsend. Lives alone.
The Mission
We do some shopping for survival gear, sleeping bags etc. And head off to interview the deputy.
Deputy Fitzgerald is caucasian and scruffy. He’s got a can of Budweiser in his hand, it’s just after lunch and despite us ringing ahead, he’s only half-dressed. The interior of the trailer is not really smelly, but he’s been neglecting it and himself, and drinking a lot.
We ask him to tell us what he’s seen.
“It wasn’t a mudslide, I’ll tell you that much. Stay out of the woods, all of them!”
The “not a mudslide” was up on Clastenbury Mountain. It happened 1/6/95. He’s been drinking pretty heavily to keep the night-terrors at bay since then. Half the sheriff’s department and some civilians died in the mudslide.
There are petty criminals around but no obvious organised crime. There might be some, like drug smuggling, but nothing obvious.
The state has appointed new police and people have moved on.
He’s not the only survivor, but not many. Some of the others have ended up in mental institutions. Old Thomas may not have been there, but he’s not sure.
The “mudslide” tore the old sheriff apart. This made Fitzgerald pass out and he woke up, said it was a mudslide. Everyone seemed to buy the story.
Old Thomas is a woodsman and Deputy Fitzgerald doesn’t know him all that well.
Irene/Eugenia says that the photos of the victims have been removed by Delta Green. They show people torn apart by something. She said it didn’t seem to be a big beast but her tone of voice was scared/disturbed.
We drive out of Mill Village and yomp up to Owlshead Mountain to observe Clastenbury Mountain from a distance. We’re about 1.5km away and there are no obvious signs of either a mudslide nor a giant rampaging monster. The wildlife seems normal.
We head on to Old Thomas’ shack. On the way through the woods to the shack Tristan and Harriet notice someone about 75m in a tree looking through a rifle scope at them. Camilla is unaware. Harriet holds her hands out and steps towards him.
As they get closer and Harriet starts to call (instead of holler) “hello” he slides down from his tree. There’s an exchange of pleasantries, which goes better when Harriet drops Eugenia’s name. He’s a bit sexist, things like “should have more men with you” but this moves to banter which seems friendly. He invites them back to his place.
It’s an old-time shack, few facilities. He invites everyone to sit down.
Harriet sweet-talks him into telling her about what went on.
He says it wasn’t a mudslide, it was a Child of the Woods. That’s what the legends call them. According to the legends, it’s a child of the Winged Ones that came down in the beginning of time to mine strange ores. It can make itself invisible, it feasts on people and has killed many of them.
There are rites to appease it, but he doesn’t known them. There may be records of such rites in a local library or university, but we could also try to find a shaman.
Burbury or Montpelier seem to have universities or resources about shamanism that might help.
Old Thomas reckons, from the tracks he saw, the Child of the Woods is around the size of an elephant. He drew his impressions of the tracks but they are just confusing.
The Winged Ones talk with buzzing voices. They’re not inherently hostile but are dangerous foes if you mess with their stuff or enter their areas. They tend to be more active at night.
Harriet reckons the Winged Ones are probably Mi-Go, who are extra-terrestrial or inter dimensional flying beings who fit the description and the attitude. She informed the others.
Camilla and Harriet had a pyjama party on Owlshead Mountain and observe Clastenbury Mountain in shifts. They notice at odd intervals there are trees that move the wrong way, against the wind. With the last one, Harriet and Camilla mark the last position of this phenomenon fairly well so they can go and look at it more closely. Tristan stayed with the car.
When they check in, Eugenia has already tracked down an anthropologist’s report about the summoning of the Winged Ones.
- Transcript of 1933 recording of a Pentacook Shaman calling upon a Winged One. There is a specific arrangement of chants and plants/herbs to bring a Winged One. We can’t really judge what the anthropologist thinks of it.
- They have found some academic sources but they are still collating them. The abstracts suggest that if you appease the old spirits you’ll be ok, as will pilgrims. Tristan’s intuition suggests that if we go there appearing to be worshippers of the Old Ones then we’ll be safe.
- We told Agent Irene our plans, in case we disappear, and our location for the disturbance to give them a starting point
We decided to go to the landslide area first, give whatever the scary thing is time to move on, just in case. The ground here was all torn up. There were some odd stones in the area too. There was a pit trap in the path as we approached the main area. Off the path there was a wild-haired man, who appeared to be wearing white body paint on his torso, and tatty jeans.
We decided to take our time and encircle him. Tristan is not stealthy, and distracts him by playing near the trap, Camilla and Harriet snuck off to encircle him. As they were doing that, the man approached Tristan, and was carrying a large, rusty lumber axe.
Tristan said hi and the man replied, but it seems off, like he was saying lines from a TV show or something rather than responding naturally and that gave the impression he was crazy. Tristan managed to get him to leave and he headed back to his rock. Camilla and Harriet snuck closer but as we got to within about 50m it became obvious that he’d seen us. We drew weapons and told him to drop the axe. He responded “Please kill me” and charged us. He was a fast mover, appreciably faster than Harriet, despite her light load.
We delayed and shot him at 20m, Camilla's gun jammed after her first shot, but a large calibre pistol round to the leg, and a three round burst from a carbine to the arm and he was left reeling (<1/3 HP) but the bullets had less effect on him than expected. Tristan was smug about it - he’d said it seemed off and we should just flee.
Session Two
The fight ended quickly, a three-round burst to the chest put the hostile down. We waited for Camilla to clear the jam, Harriet switched to her pistol (in hindsight pistol and baton would have been smarter) and they approached. Harriet kicked the axe that he’d dropped away before getting too close (smart move, although not necessary this time.) Camilla handcuffed him, which went remarkably smoothly, the hostile seemingly shoved his wrists into the cuffs, and we decided to take him out of the forest for questioning which went pretty smoothly with Tristan’s help.
In the car, it turned out his name is Cooter McGee. He said that the Star People did this to him. He had been able to call on them in the past, but not for many years. By the time we got him back to the car his wounds had all healed but his torso was still rippling and changing like he was bulking up. Harriet thought it was a bit like a werewolf transformation, although that was her only frame of reference. (See end for some more information.) The way he answered questions was odd, sometimes he gave away information pretty freely, sometimes he seemed aware that he shouldn’t talk about a particular topic and covered whatever he might have said by talking nonsense, giving lines from TV shows or similar. However, we managed to glean quite a bit of useful information:
- Cooter believes he’s the only one like him.
- The Guardian got the “other group” - the massacre a few weeks ago.
- It is a nasty beast that protects the area and kills people that aren’t meant to be there.
- He has never figured out a den for the Guardian, it wanders around as it pleases, although it’s meant to protect Clastenbury Mountain so it largely stays there.
Cooter was not helpful at first when we asked if he’s seen the Guardian by day, but we managed to persuade him to open up and he said that had seen it day and night.
We called in to Agent Irene and explained the situation. She agreeed that we should hand Cooter to over to Deputy Fitzgerald then go back and explore. We did that, handing Cooter over near town. Fitzgerald was drunk; he swerved all over the road, well his half of the road at least, and decided to put Cooter in the drunk tank. The irony is not lost on us. He was going to be held for 24 hours without charge. (Although we didn’t see it, Agent Irene arranged for him to be picked up by some new friends in nice suits who will take care of him. Knowing Delta Green, that’s probably take carerather than “take care”.)
Irene looked up Cooter McGee for us in presumably the FBI database. He had been reported dead after escaping an insane asylum some decades ago, in the fifties. There had been a manhunt and he was shot during that, but his body was never found, obviously. He had a track record of killing people camping on the mountains going back about twenty years before that. He’s pretty spry for a guy in his 80’s!
Irene passed our evidence up the line, and was going to try to get a strike team. She thought with what we had already this is a maybe. More evidence would definitely be good.
We decided to go to the place where we saw potential signs of the Guardian last night and look for signs of it. The trek to the spot was uneventful, although we took it slowly and carefully, aware that we might be being hunted.
We searched through the area. Harriet found very odd tracks. It looked like someone had taken a rake and disturbed the ground with it. In the spaces between footprints the markings seem to change as well. There was a resemblance to what Old Thomas drew for us, although we wouldn’t have recognised the tracks from his drawing without finding them first, because they were so mutable. But we documented several of them.
There are multiple broken branches, but they are all older branches. It looked like the creature is as tall as the trees, and as it brushed by, the older, drier or more brittle branches were breaking off. The trees can get up to 15m tall. Gait appears to be 5-10m but erratic. We got photos of all of this.
We decided we couldn’t get more useful information from the site of the recent massacre, so we went and warned Old Thomas that things might get hairy, gave him a lift into town and bought him lunch. We got the photos developed and gave them to Irene. She ran it up the chain of command and the kill team were summoned. Operation Black Flag is a go!
We were asked to stay around on stand by. Agent Joseph Bremmer was the team leader for the kill team, he talked down to everyone. Oliver Bloch was the team’s explosive expert. There is a big game hunter from Australia, or maybe South Africa, plus three other veterans. They didn’t really interact with us much, except Bremmer, who seemed to know his stuff in asking relevant questions about the Guardian and where they might find it. Tristan has a strong intuition that they are all going to die.
They were armed for tanks: LAWs, Anti-Materiel Rifles and the like. After his intuition hit, Tristan wanted them to wear GPS and cameras, Camilla managed to persuade them that it would be useful training footage and a backup in case shit goes sideways: we could go in and find their bodies. (OOC we joke about their red shirts since they don’t even have stats…) We promised to keep the footage for in-house training purposes only.
They told us to stay back in town, with Agent Irene, but we decided to observe the fight from Owlshead Mountain. We see an extended fight, maybe three minutes long, largely lit up by explosions and lots of dying. The Guardian is a quadruped whose body is covered with long, long tentacles that resemble wooden spikes. It is somewhat like a shoggoth, the tentacles give that impression. They tried to abort after it appeared unshaken by a LAW to the face - those things are designed to kill tanks remember - but it chased them down and killed them all.
Irene informed us that we’re up next. Tristan suggests getting the CIA to get a napalm strike on the area. Harriet pointed out that we could contact the Mi-Go and ask them to remove the Guardian. They tend to want strange precious metals. We asked Irene to supply these and Old Thomas for the necessary herbs for the ritual we have been given, which are all local.
It took a day to prepare the ritual, which went smoothly. Harriet has just successfully completed her first ritual! The Mi-Go eventually answered. It denied knowledge of the Guardian, but Harriet drew it in the dirt, added some photos of the footprints and withdraws. (The Mi-Go is shy - and sanity bending if you see it as Camilla finds out.) The voice of the Mi-Go was strange, it’s a buzzing through which words can be discerned rather than clearly heard. The lore describes it as sounding like a swarm of bees in which a voice can be heard, which is a great description of what we heard.
The Mi-Go accepted the evidence that there was a Servitor (which Cooter called a Guardian) here and told us to return on the new moon to receive aid to deal with it. That was in about a week.
Irene thought that this is a left-field solution, but wasn’t going to interfere.
Harriet and Camilla went and retrieved what little of the remains they could of the kill team and their cameras. They ended up burying the parts in a pit in the forest, and successfully recovered at least some hard drives.
Tristan watched the video. He gained some extra insight. The Servitor looks like a tree when it’s standing still. It shrugged off a rocket launcher hit. It can shoot out tentacles to some distance. It runs really fast.
On the night of the new moon, the Mi-Go confirmed that they have is no record of a facility here but, despite that, there is actually a facility here. They were going to assist us. They placed an item on the ground to help us take care of the Servitor/Guardian. It was a metal star with carvings on it and a biological coating. Even with no scientific background it was quite tempting to look at, but Camilla and Harriet resisted and stuck to the mission. Apparently “contact is required for optimal dispersal”. However, “redistribution is unlikely to have serious consequences for terrestrial beings.”
We told Irene and Tristan what was going on, Tristan was organising a napalm strike in case we didn’t survive. We tried to attract the Servitor’s attention, and were successful, but Harriet and Camilla were oblivious (some terrible rolls and no luck left), until it got within 7m (it started at 100m) and then all hell broke loose. For us this was still ranged attack distance, for the Child of the Woods, its melée range. Fortunately we’d heard what Tristan said about it shrugging off a LAW to the face so we were in melée defensive mode, waiting for a chance to use the star.
The Guardian attacked, trying to bite Camilla, shoot a tentacle at Harriet, but it failed at both. Harriet was playing defence, parrying with her batons, Camilla dodged. Camilla tossed the star at the Guardian, which just disappeared in a flash. Definitely the good kind of anti-climax, at least in Harriet’s eyes, that fight could have gone sideways very, very fast.
They called Tristan to call off the airstrike, then briefed Agent Irene and returned the star to the Mi-Go. Whilst waiting to return the star to the Mi-Go, we gave Old Thomas a lift back out to his shack. Camilla and Harriet may have given him a hard time about two girls fixing the problem and getting rid of the Guardian.
A few days later, Camilla’s gloves and coat exploded into weird corrosive gas, fortunately she wasn’t wearing it at the time!
We captured Cooter, defeated the monster. 100% success!
Delta Green took Cooter away and interrogated him. They briefed us about what they found out. Cooter’s body adapts to whatever you try to do to him. By the time they got him to somewhere safe, he’s developed a sub-dermal bony shell and is even more bullet resistant. Some time in the past he tried to hang himself and he no longer needs to breathe. He asked the Mi-Go to heal him, they made him able to heal from everything…
We get another three months of down time before the next mission.
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