Provenance

Epilogue: Denouement

Thursday, September 9, 2004, 2:40 p.m. EDT

Club Apocalypse, New York, New York

The mist disappeared, and each agent found themselves in the New York office of Stephen Alzis, in the basement of Club Apocalypse. They each held glasses, now drained of fluid. In front of them stood a smiling Stephen Alzis. On his desk sat Madame Sosostris' Tarot deck.

Alzis picked up the deck and rifled through it. His smile slowly dissipated. He shuffled the cards in his hand. His expression turned to one of intense concentration. He slowly went through the deck card by card.

Agent MICHAEL stared at the cards as Alzis silently examined the deck. When Alzis reached the last card, MICHAEL was certain that there were only 21 Major Arcana cards in the deck. The King in Yellow card was not one of them.

Alzis stared at the deck for what seemed like an eternity. He placed the cards back in their box, and closed it. He looked up at the agents. "Your debt is paid, in full. You may go." He sat down in his chair, and stared at the wall to his right. The agents looked at each other, turned, and left the office.

They said nothing until they were outside Club Apocalypse. Their rental car was still parked in front of the club. As they walked to it, MICHAEL said with a slight grin, "Alzis has all the cards, and yet he seems disappointed."

MORGAN replied, "Alzis believes..."

MICHAEL cut him off with a cutting motion across his throat. They climbed into the car, and MAYA drove them to the airport.

As MAYA merged into New York traffic, MORGAN said, "Y'all want to go to Switzerland?" He explained that in 1928 Austria he stashed several occult items in a Swiss bank. The items were left for an American by the name of Joshua Frost. The safe deposit box was paid up for 80 years. With luck, the items would still be there. One of the items, an African fetish, was bound in the skin of some type of Mythos creature. Underneath the tanned hide was a stone with a strange design carved into it. He wasn't sure, but he suspected that the item had magical power.

The idea of finding magical items didn't seem to appeal that much to MAYA. However, there was something else. "Chocolate!" she cried. "Let's go to Switzerland!" MICHAEL also agreed to go with them. MORGAN and MAYA were recovering from injuries sustained on their mission in Florida, and had taken leave time. MICHAEL had made excuses from work in order to visit Stephen Alzis. That visit took far less real time than he had expected. They could all afford to spend a couple of weeks recuperating in Switzerland. They hadn't had a real vacation in a couple of years, anyway.

The agents drove to John F. Kennedy International airport. MAYA returned the rental car. They proceeded to the international departures terminal. A quick check at an internet kiosk showed that a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight was leaving for Geneva, with a stop in Amsterdam, at 6:10 p.m. They ran to the ticket counter, bought tickets, and checked their luggage. They sprinted to the security checkpoint. With the help of their government credentials, they made it through security in record time. They were among the last people to board the flight, which left the gate on time.

Friday, September 10, 2004, 9:55 a.m. CEST

Geneva International Airport, Geneva, Switzerland

The agents arrived in Geneva after a 50 minute layover in Amsterdam. They had been travelling for almost 10 hours and were tired, yet MORGAN was too excited about his artifacts to sleep. After clearing customs, he asked the others if they wanted to go with him to the Union Bank of Switzerland. MICHAEL said he was too tired, but MAYA agreed to go with MORGAN. MICHAEL would check them into the hotel and wait for them there.

They split up. They loaded their luggage, except for a nearly empty carry-on, into a taxi cab. MICHAEL took the taxi to a relatively nice, reasonably priced hotel (or as reasonably priced as he could find, given the strength of the Euro versus the American dollar). He took a long, hot bath, curling and uncurling his toes in order to relieve stress. He saw that in a movie once... Then, he climbed out of the tub, dried off, dressed, and lay down on the bed.

MAYA and MORGAN proceeded directly to the Union Bank. MORGAN walked up to a teller and tried out the German he had learned from his Austrian host back in 1928. The look on the teller's face showed that MORGAN hadn't retained much German on the transit back to present time. He switched to English. "I need to empty my safety deposit box, please."

The teller smiled, and — in perfect, if accented, English — asked MORGAN for his account number. He gave the teller his account number, which he had memorized more than 75 years ago.

The teller punched the number into the computer. He frowned. He punched the number in again. He stood up. "Excuse me, one moment." The teller went to his manager's office. MORGAN and MAYA exchanged concerned glances.

The manager walked up to the teller's terminal. The manager typed in the account number. He looked up at the agents and, with a smile, asked them to accompany him to his office. The agents followed the bank manager. Once inside the office, the manager asked MORGAN if he had his key. MORGAN said that he did not, that it had been lost some time ago. The manager asked the agent for his identification. MORGAN handed the manager his passport. The manager looked at it and typed some information into the computer. The manager gave a slight shrug. He stood up, smiled, and asked MORGAN to follow him. MAYA left the office with the two men, but stood in the lobby, waiting.

The bank manager escorted MORGAN to a secure room. He left for a few minutes, and then came back with a large metal box. The manager handed MORGAN a key, then he unlocked the box with his master key. He smiled and excused himself, leaving MORGAN alone with the large deposit box.

MORGAN opened the box. All of his items were there. The box, though, was not the same one he handled in 1928. Apparently they moved his items to a different box during the intervening years. MORGAN had brought his carry-on bag to carry the stuff. He pulled the items from the deposit box and placed them in the carry-on. He closed and locked the box, and pocketed the key. The agent left the secure room, and thanked the manager.

He met up with MAYA and told her that he had everything. They left the bank, hailed a cab, and rode to the hotel.

They walked up to the desk clerk. MORGAN found the room MICHAEL had acquired for them, and MAYA received the pass card for her own room. They went upstairs to MICHAEL's and MORGAN's room. They knocked on the door, waking MICHAEL. He opened the door.

Once inside, MORGAN placed his bag on the bed. "Would you like to see what I have?" he asked, beaming? He opened the bag without waiting for an answer. Inside were a magician's cassock, a wand, an athame, a morbidly dessicated human hand — a hand of glory — the African fetish, and an African drum.

MAYA pointed to the cassock. "Ooo, you know, that cape and wand would make a good Halloween costume. Dibs!"

"So if you get a letter from Hogwarts, you're all set!" said MICHAEL.

MORGAN pulled out the fetish. He carefully unwrapped it. He displayed the strangely marked stone underneath the wrappings. They didn't know what to make of it. MORGAN typed an e-mail asking questions about the carving and his other items. He sent it to the secure Delta Green mail server. It was a simple information request, of low priority. It could take a few days for them to receive an answer.

The agents spent the rest of the day napping and taking it easy in an effort to combat jet lag. Their vacation had begun.

Sunday, September 12, 2004, 11:26 p.m. CEST

Novotel Genève Centre, Geneva, Switzerland

MORGAN checked his e-mail. There was a message from A cell. The carving was something called an "Elder Sign". It was a magically powerful artifact used to ward malevolent entities. It couldn't do much to protect someone who may be wearing it, but it could effectively protect a doorway or a window. Some creatures were reputedly harmed by it if it came into contact with them.

The rest of the e-mail explained the occult significance of MORGAN's other items. None of them seemed to be anything truly out of the ordinary. Whether any of them, beyond the Elder Sign, had actual magical power was impossible to determine. Nonetheless, MORGAN was pleased that his plan for saving the artifacts had been worthwhile.

Friday, September 24, 2004, 10:15 a.m. CEST

Geneva International Airport, Geneva, Switzerland

Earlier in the week, MORGAN had shipped his artifacts back to Atlanta via DHL. Before he did that, he had gone to the World Health Organization and used his his CDC credentials to cut through the bureaucratic red tape involved in mailing a human hand. Then he packaged the hand separately, and shipped it with the proper documentation. The rest of his artifacts he sent as "souvenirs".

The agents boarded their KLM flight to return to JFK in New York. They had an incredibly relaxing time in Switzerland. It was the first time they had spent time together outside of a Delta Green operation.

They landed in New York about 11 hours later. With hugs all around, they departed for their homes. The next Monday they would be back at work, well rested.

* * *

The next few months were relatively uneventful, in Delta Green terms. They received several requests for information that only they could provide due to their "day job" positions. MICHAEL came across a couple of strange cases in his position as an FBI agent, but none of them turned out to have any mythos significance.

MAYA spent her free time completing the renovations to her kitchen. Her house in New Orleans garden district was coming along nicely. Her next big renovation project would be the bathroom.

MICHAEL had been studying electronics in his spare time, in an attempt to make the sonic gun he "liberated" in Rumford, Maine functional. After completing his third semester, MICHAEL worked on the gun once more. While soldering a wire between what looked to be a couple of battery terminals, the soldering iron slipped. The iron touched the end of one of the terminals. There was a shower of sparks and loud popping. The sonic gun grew very hot. MICHAEL dropped to the floor. The gun sputtered and sparked on his work bench. The sparking subsided with an ominous hiss. He inspected the gun, but all of the internal electronics were fried. The weapon was now a useless lump of slag. MICHAEL threw the remnants into a box and stormed out of his make-shift workshop. The next day he cancelled his enrollment in next semester's electronics class.

His electronics project over, MICHAEL spent some time thinking about Alzis and the Tarot deck. The Tarot deck included the King in Yellow card. The King in Yellow, according to what MORGAN skimmed in Revelations of Hali, was related to Hastur. MICHAEL suspected, and Agent KIM implied, that Alzis had some relationship with Nyarlathotep. Could they have been used by Grays and the Mi-Go, in the year 2149, to prevent Alzis/Nyarlathotep from obtaining the complete King in Yellow deck? Did the Grays and/or the Mi-Go summon them into the future? Or had Hastur? Apparently the complete deck was an artifact of incredible power. He didn't believe it was a bad thing that Alzis did not possess the entire deck.

MORGAN spent his free time reading his scanned copy of Revelations of Hali, the book they stole from Bert Sebring. He finished reading the book by Halloween. In it he found reference to three spells, "Create Gate", "Call Hastur", and "Converge Time and Space". He decided to learn "Create Gate", as that appeared to be the most useful of the spells. Try as he might, though, MORGAN had great difficulty learning the intricately detailed patterns that make up a gate. By early June, 2005, he still had not learned the spell, though he thought he was getting close.

On the night of June 9, 2005, MORGAN's studies were interrupted. He, and the other agents, received a phone call from A Cell. They were "invited to a night at the opera". Another Delta Green operation was on.

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Note: The beginning of this "session", up to the point where the characters leave Club Apocalypse, was played on 16 April 16 2005, after completing the God of War chapter. The rest of this "session" was completed on 14 May 2005.