From: Shane Ivey
To: "'mib@cyberspace.org'"
Subject: EH X, minor revisions
EMERALD HAMMER Ch. X: City of the Dead
Mexico City, Mexico
Desperate remnants of the Cali cartel, once the greatest cocaine
lords in the world, now spend their fearful lives under the dominion of
masters more evil than their worst enforcers could imagine. Each of them
has passed through death and been pulled back to life by the vile science of
Nazi sorcerers. Each of them lives in terror of the day when their masters
will revoke this life and reduce them to "ye liveliest awefulness."
Amidst the disparate rushing horrors of the Emerald Hammer, certain
of the Karotechia learn that one of their prized tomes, the fragmentary
scrolls called the Pnakotic Manuscripts, are held by occultists in Mexico
City. Their Cali slaves, once feared in Mexico as lords, were the pawns of
choice. One of the Bischofe takes the Cali gang to Mexico to find and
retrieve the Manuscripts.
But the pawns see an opportunity, here. In New York City they met
cultists who offered a possible way out: the Brotherhood of the Yellow Sign
can be found across the world, but especially in the sites of ancient
Mesoamerican ruins. Careful signals were sent; the Cali cartel planned a
meticulous betrayal.
Delta Green takes an interest in Mexico City when rumors spread that
refugees from the shattered drug cartel of Cali, Colombia, have come in the
company of a Karotechia sorcerer pursuing unknown ends. Intelligence is
scant at first; even if the investigators are aware of the other events of
the campaign, they are unaware of any connection between prior events and
the current activities of the Cali Bauer and the Bischofe who leads them.
After an introduction to Mexico City, its culture, crime, and
politics, through the lense of the American embassy and intelligence and law
enforcement agencies, the investigators follow their first clues, known
prior contacts of the Cali cartel, from the cartel's salad days when it
dominated the massive cocaine trade for which Mexico has always been a
conduit. In the underworld of Mexico City the Cali are known to be in
decline, but some figures are rumored to still be in their pocket. The
investigators pursue EPR revolutionaries and cops and soldiers with three
loyalties each, until one of them tells them that the Cali gang, a ragged
and desperate group, have been looking for a particular gang of
devil-worshippers, Satanists and pagans who are as secretive as they are
deadly; and the source tells them that the Cali gang said cryptically that
they were driven by another, but they had a plan to destroy him. As they
find this first gem, the investigators suffer their first reprisal, as
terrorists attack the investigators and a number of other American
functionaries and allies across the city. Meanwhile, things are strange in
the city, the streets are more confusing and disorienting than ever, with
vaguely unsettling encounters with unseen night wings and disturbing
croaking cries in the air.
The investigators can follow clues of the Satanist coven to an area
they are reputed to haunt, a shanty-town occupied almost entirely by the
throngs of homeless urchins which lurk in the city's gutters and shadows.
When they disappear, nobody knows why or how; but all of them know that
sometimes men and women come around, and sometimes they take children away,
never to return. Some of these men and women are well-known, business
persons with ties to the police and the political arena, but at least one
child, if the investigators can find him, witnessed them in bloody rituals
in a temple on the Street of the Dead. The investigators can follow these
clues to the bright side of the city, where businessmen smoke cigars in
window-lit offices by day and cut out the living hearts of their sacrificial
victims by night, all in the name and power of Tetep, the dark god or devil
worshiped by others as the Black Man or the Devil, and his strange
barrel-shaped demons. The investigators face their second reprisal, as mob
thugs (wrestlers earning money as hired killers and goons, no doubt) and
corrupt cops assault them. Then a "terrorist" gang--rapidly seized and
killed by the vigilant city police and army--bombs the American embassy,
hopefully while some of the investigators are present at the CIA station or
FBI legat's office.
Then things get bizarre in the city. Walking the streets, alleys
change and melt, and hissing monsters lurk in the shadows. Theatre troups
enact the King in Yellow with utter precision, though they have never seen
nor heard it. In the city's greatest cathedral a woman suffers stigmata in
her side, bleeding out of a great gaping wound and then decaying,
decomposing, but never quite dying; when a priest attempts to help her, they
are both consumed in pale flames which do not burn them, but devour anything
or anyone else who comes too close. The mighty Aztec temples on the Street
of the Dead overflow in blood and echo with the deafening sound of bells and
flutes and joyous song. Smoke or fog obscures every window and mirror in
the city, and those who peer too closely are driven mad by what they see.
The children rise and follow the sound of strange pipes into tunnels beneath
the Street of the Dead, and none will bother to follow or hinder them
except, possibly, the investigators.
The underworld is far below the city, in great caverns seemingly
miles down, amid the ruins, thousands of years old, of a civilization never
known after the Aztecs above. There are ghosts, or entities which seem to
be ghosts, but they have little power beside the Tetep coven which conducts
its rites in the heart of the dark ruins. There are mountains of the bones
of children, which come alive and grow flesh again only to bleed into rivers
of gore which empty into the abysses which flank the temples. Monsters fly
in the black vaults, serpentine hunting horrors come to take the sacrifices
of hundreds of urchins from the coven, who invoke their greatest powers,
seeking their very god himself, as unknown enemies pursue them. The Cali
gang and its allies attack; in the chaos, the gory rivers and lakes turn to
thick and bitter mists, and dreamy unreality twists the hard horror and
music of the temples, and the ghosts of the Kn'yani ruins coalesce in the
presence and demons of Hastur and the Lake of Hali. Followers of the Yellow
Sign join the Bauer, attacking the Bischofe and attempting to overwhelm the
Tetep coven before they flee into the streets of Carcosa, never to be seen
again.
Perhaps Delta Green can decide who survives, and who finally holds
the Pnakotic Manuscripts and their alien secrets which were science and
inspiration to the Tetep coven as, calling on the dark messenger who was
their god, they ventured at times into other realities and powers.