THE GLOVECLEANER ARMY
Christopher D. Nichols
Subject: DG: EH Sidebar: The Glovecleaner Army
Sent: 22 January 1999 04:34
Work on another sidebar for EH. This one is not quite what I really
think it should be, so, I'd really like any help you can toss this way.
The biggest problem is that, the hooks to allow DG agents into this are
weak. How do investigators find out about this? What can they do with
it when they discover it?
Here's what I've got so far.
***
EH SIDEBAR: The Glovecleaner Army
Furtive men, shuffling through the alleys and subways bearing sheaves of
paper. A page or two under a wiper blade. Another tacked to a
telephone pole. Again, pages slid into a used book. A hundred points
of contact, and suddenly, a pattern forms. A book written across the
confused minds of a hundred innocent by-standers. This is the work of
the glove-cleaners, and no-one understands its purpose, not even the
glovecleaners themselves.
As EMERALD HAMMER progresses, the glovecleaners are slowly stirred into
action. Their actions become more frequent, their products more closely
related, the results more nakedly terrible. The unrelated actions of a
hundred obsessed nobodies, suddenly become the workings of a horrible
hive-mind. Now, the glovecleaners have a purpose.
A young woman in Germany begins writing snippets of (Mythos text #1),
placing them where another glovecleaner find them. Later that week, she
by chance meets another glovecleaner. They begin work on passing along
(Mythos text #1), and as the days pass, discover the isolated
glovecleaners of Europe, all now bizarrely compelled to copy out
portions of (Mythos text #1), creating a network based on the
unexplainable desire to gloveclean.
Then, a Lord of the Fate steps in, slightly redirecting the flow of
pages. Bit by bit, page by page, the tome falls into Stephen Alzis'
hands.
This pattern repeats elsewhere, centering around an actuary in Sydney,
Australia (Pacific Rim glovecleaners) and a retired janitor in Detroit
(the American glovecleaners). (Mythos text #2) and (Mythos text #3)
fall into Alzis' hands.
The method of transit for these works is troubling. A glovecleaner in
Oklahoma drops a couple of pages in a used book and sells it. The person
who buys the book reads it on a flight to Denver. The pages are found
and read. The reader later assaults the stewardess, and drops the
notes. Several flights later, a stewardess finds and reads them, and
then serves a lunch that gives the passengers food poisoning. And the
notes wind up in a lost carry-on bag in New York. A luggage handle
steals the unclaimed bag, including notes. Later, reading the
glovecleaned pages while walk, he fails to pay attention and is struck
and kill by a taxi. As the baggage handler dies on the street, and an
Adept, who just happens to be passing by, picks up the pages and takes
them to Club Apocalypse. And so it goes, sometimes sparking more
violence, sometimes less, always forging a trail of hurt and malice.
Where does Delta Green come in? Through the course of the
investigations of DG agents, assorted random victims may have in their
possession items which show that they possessed glovecleaned pages
recently. Envelopes with no return addresses, extra pages left behind,
and other evidence. In time, agents should luck across a glovecleaner.
By tracing back to the coordinating source, the agents may find ... a
female student, an actuary, and an old man who don't ready understand
what they're doing or why. And behind that the Fate and Stephen Alzis.
Chris Nichols
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