Delta Green After Action Report. Midnight Sun

     I had the opportunity to jump into an M-EPIC game titled Midnight Sun written by Will Roy and run by TopHat, with a fellow M-EPIC agent. I chose the pregen, Canadian Federal Agent Gerard Prunier, because he had a high Bureaucracy score.  The other player was Officer Katie MacLey who was trained as a CSIS Intelligence Officer. We were called in to investigate a missing persons case in the frozen tundra. A team of six mineral prospectors were staking claims in northern Canada, and the American member of the group was claimed to be “fine” by the prospectors but there was neither hide nor hair of him, thus he was the missing person.  Some perusal of the paperwork of said prospectors indicated that they started forging another man’s signature halfway through their land claiming expedition.  To us, that indicated there may be a second missing person so we decided time was of the essence.  

After swooping in on two of the expedition who were gathering supplies, and using hard tactics to interrogate them, we realized three points. First, the leader of the expedition and his right-hand man were staying inside the ruins of a paddleboat steamer in the middle of an icy lake in the frozen tundra. Secondly, likely the whole group had slain the missing American, but as for the missing second man, they were scared out of their wits when confronted with that question. Third, they were very concerned about keeping the boiler in the ship fed with firewood. Gerard Prunier lost a point of sanity and marked a point of helplessness as he regretted using his lawyer-speak misdirection to “promise” one of the suspects immunity and then turned him in to the Mounties. 

In part because Gerard was briefed on the unnatural and in part because I thought lack of fire could be used as a bargaining chip to convince the two members of the prospecting team in the frozen north to surrender, Gerard prepared to take a fire extinguisher. Also, because Gerard wanted to blow up the boiler, if necessary, a grenade was requisitioned. However, Gerard was given a flash-bang instead of a frag grenade. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Gerard took it.  

Katie suggested and convinced M-EPIC to drop us around terrain cover with a helicopter, near the wrecked ship that served as a base for the remaining prospectors.  Katie took care of requisitioning the firearms so Gerard was given a Lee Enfield rifle with a very nice scope and Katie was sporting a shotgun.  Katie, ever the tactician, recommended a frontal assault with the helicopter and as the bird swooped in on the boat, Gerard was shot rather severely with a rifle from one of the prospectors defending the boat.  Thanks to the armored vest he was bloody but still operational.  

Jumping out of the copter into a nicely convenient snowdrift, Katie and Gerard gathered their faculties and began shooting the prospector with the rifle.  Wounded and behind cover, the rifle prospector went down as the leader of the prospectors began to emerge from a stairwell that was at an angle, because the entire boat was at an angle.  Thanking M-EPIC’s requisition system, Gerard threw the flash-bang into the open stairwell and stunned the leader for a turn, buying enough time for Katie and Gerard to handcuff both prospectors and relieve them of their weapons. 

Before interrogations began in earnest, there were sounds like pounding from deeper within the ship.  Thinking of the prospector’s fear of the boiler and desire to constantly keep it fed, Katie and Gerard made their way into the ship’s boiler room.  Katie put her ear to the side of the boiler. It spoke. 

Terrified of the voice’s promise of riches beneath the land if we just kept it warm, Katie and Gerard opened the boiler a crack and flooded it with the contents of the fire extinguisher. Then things happened very fast. A Thing came out of the boiler, discorporate because of the extinguisher’s blast and then reformed into something humanoid made out of ash.  Expletives were uttered and the M-EPIC duo tried to close the boiler. Unfortunately, they only caught the ash-creature around the torso with the doors.  Katie tried to shoot it while Gerard attempted to bring the fire extinguisher down on its head. Both failures lead to the ash-creature screaming and lunging for Katie, catching her in a wicked and fatal embrace.  Katie’s last words were “Run and scuttle the ship” as the creature burned Katie into ash and then retreated into the warmth of the boiler.  

Terrified and desperate, Gerard ran out of the boiler room and looked for method to sink the ship and bury it into the frozen ice and water below, when a shout from the top of the deck reached him.   It was a strange native man that the prospectors in handcuffs looked none to happy to see. Shaken with exposure to the unnatural, Gerard had a very brief very pointed conversation where the man said he could get rid of the monster, but there would be a cost, “Just not for you.” Grim at the loss of his partner, Gerard agreed and led the two handcuffed prospectors by gunpoint down off the ship while the native man began to build a pyre. 

Nightfall arrived.  An aurora borealis covered the sky as the native gentleman began beating on a drum and singing in a language Gerard did not recognize.  Belatedly Gerard realized that the northern lights should not be present at his location when the shaman or whomever he was approached the two prisoners with a bone knife unsheathed.  Frozen in absolute horror Gerard could not even make a sound as the man opened up the necks of both prospectors with his knife, chanting all the while.  Then it happened. Twin aurora borealises erupted from the blood of the human sacrifices.  Gerard could see the ash-thing from ship’s boiler standing straight up against the night sky, confused as the beautiful auroras on the ground swirled around him like dolphins hunting a particularly tasty fish.  The ash-thing screamed but screams turned into echoes as the creature was enveloped into light and swirled up into the air, rising higher and higher until it turned into a far away blood red stain on the aurora borealis in the heavens. 

Months later the nightmares and inability to tell between dreams and reality had mostly subsided for Gerard.  His therapist was an old Mounty. He said Gerard had done good out there when the Earth touched the Heavens and spirits moved across the frozen north.  He thought of Katie sometimes, but more often than not he thought about the next phone call he would receive from M-EPIC.