Temporary Reality Anamoly - Sun, Oct 27, 2019

Luke opened the session by recapping that the team had previously been split between two versions of the same house, neither of which was safe.

• Justin and the alternate Matthew McCarter had explored the ground floor and upper rooms of a dark version of the house.
• They were watched by two young girls who gave contradictory claims about where their mother was: upstairs, in the basement, or simply busy.
• When McCarter and Justin moved to clear the second floor, the girls attacked with a kitchen knife.
• McCarter stopped one of the girls by kicking her down the stairs.
• Upstairs, McCarter found a computer gutted down to its frame, with components snapped and the monitor smashed.
• In the wreckage, he found a lab-built Picky Eater device still intact enough to pocket.

In the night version of the house, Frank Booth and Philomena had followed the sound of country radio to a locked bedroom.

• Behind the door was Vicky King, terrified and armed.
• Vicky had been hiding for years, running Picky Eater on a humming desktop computer to keep the “Reapers” off her trail.
• Vicky believed her daughters were gone and did not know where they were.
• When Frank unplugged the computer, night became day.
• The two realities collapsed into one.
• Vicky suddenly found herself in a house full of strangers and reunited with her daughters.

The reunion was interrupted when two agents of the National Child and Family Services came through the front door from another world.

• These agents appeared to be versions of Justin and McCarter.
• They wore cowls stitched with runes.
• They had mouths in their palms.
• The team killed them.
• Frank covered their faces while Vicky held her daughters and wept.

Afterward, the girls confessed that they had built their own Picky Eater device from plans on their mother’s computer.

• They had wanted to find their father, whom their mother had never spoken about.
• Instead, they found somewhere with impossible colors, stone blocks, an old man by a strange machine, and a very tall figure in robes who told them to be silent.
• Their father’s name was revealed as Wesley Cole.
• Wesley Cole is a mathematics professor at MIT.
• The team noted that MIT keeps recurring in the investigation, along with Charles Bauer, Nora Bridget, Kim Boyer, and now Wesley Cole.

Luke noted that Matthew McCarter had shot himself in the face in the prior session.

• Because of that, Luke assigned McCarter a loss of 1 SAN.
• McCarter was close to his breaking point afterward.

The team discussed what exactly had happened with Vicky King, her daughters, and the versions of Picky Eater.

• Justin questioned whether the Picky Eater plans were on King’s computer even though Vicky herself had not seemed to understand what happened.
• The group reasoned that Vicky had pulled her daughters into her alternate reality, where they grew up and then created their own Picky Eater device.
• The group was unsure whether the robed, hooded versions of Justin and McCarter came from Vicky’s Picky Eater-created reality or from the girls’ Picky Eater-created reality.
• The working assumption was that the robed agents came from Vicky’s version of reality.

The team confirmed that Vicky was no longer preventing them from searching the house.

• Vicky remained terrified and convinced that more Reapers would come.
• She believed the house was no longer safe.
• She wanted to leave with her daughters.
• She asked whether the team had a car.

The team discussed whether they could call Antonia Pitzerelli.

• They did not trust their own phones because of Picky Eater contamination.
• They also questioned whether Pitzerelli’s phone could be trusted.
• The team considered using a landline or another random phone, but remained cautious about phones in general.

The group reviewed what they knew about how Picky Eater spreads.

• They believed, based on prior experience, that in their world it spread by proximity.
• People had to be in roughly the same room for contamination to occur.
• They did not know whether a person needed to have the chip, the app, or some other connection to be affected.
• They also did not know whether the rules changed between realities.

Philomena theorized that once a Picky Eater chip was running in a system, it might gradually destabilize more of that reality as Picky Eater instances spread onto other phones.

• She compared this to Bradley McKay’s case.
• McKay’s system broke, and he snapped back to his reality while still having Picky Eater on his phone.
• Philomena suggested Picky Eater might be trying to break down the barriers between realities.
• She also noted that when the team snapped back to their own reality, they dragged someone across with them.

Frank pointed out that the current situation with Vicky was a different data point.

• In Vicky’s case, Picky Eater had been running inside the alternate world.
• The computer in the team’s current world had already been destroyed and was not running.
• When Frank unplugged the computer in the alternate reality, that ended the alternate state.
• The group noted as players that when McCarter killed Wallace, that also caused a collapse back to another reality.
• Luke allowed an INT × 5 roll to think through what made Vicky’s situation different.
• The conclusion was that Vicky may have been running Picky Eater longer than anyone else they had encountered so far.

The team questioned Vicky about whether she had been running Picky Eater in the other reality.

• Philomena attempted to persuade Vicky at a penalty.
• The roll failed badly.
• Vicky said she did not know what Philomena meant by another reality.
• Vicky acknowledged that she had run Picky Eater so it could hide her from Family Services and the Reapers.
• She insisted that Philomena sounded crazy.

Philomena tried to convince Vicky that leaving the house would put her in more danger.

• She warned Vicky that the police would find her outside, separate her from her children, and treat her as unstable.
• Vicky did not believe the house was safe.
• Vicky remained convinced that the Reapers had already found them and would send more people.
• Vicky begged the team to take her and the girls somewhere safe.

The attempt to keep Vicky calm failed.

• Vicky grabbed a lamp from a table.
• She raised it and came at Philomena, shrieking.
• Philomena dodged.
• Vicky’s attack failed; the lamp’s cord yanked it from her hand on the backswing before it connected.

After the failed attack, Frank physically restrained Vicky.

• Frank used his unarmed combat skill to manhandle Vicky and bring her back to her children.
• Vicky’s daughters were screaming and crying.
• Vicky collapsed on the ground after Frank released her.
• She pulled away from him.
• Her children piled on top of her, and the three huddled together.

Luke clarified Vicky King’s mental state.

• Vicky was at zero SAN.
• She had spent a decade living in a reality built out of her worst fears and anxieties.
• From her perspective, the people hunting her children had just knocked down her door shortly after she had recovered her daughters, whom she believed she had lost forever.
• The situation explained why Vicky could not be meaningfully reasoned with in the moment.

Matthew McCarter made a SAN roll in response to the pathetic, helpless state of Vicky and her children.

• McCarter rolled a critical success.
• He did not lose SAN from that moment.

The team discussed searching the house further.

• The house in the current reality was mostly uncared for, not violently torn apart like the other version.
• Justin had already searched the basement and found a cell phone charger with no cell phone, along with a generator.
• The team remembered that they had never searched the basement of the other version of the house.
• They considered that Vicky’s Picky Eater data center may have been in the other basement.

Justin asked the alternate McCarter what caused Picky Eater to spread.

• Justin specifically asked whether the vector was people linked to Picky Eater or the active chips themselves.
• He wanted to know whether buying a new phone away from any active Picky Eater chip would prevent reinfection.
• McCarter explained that, in his world’s experiments, it seemed to be tied to the hardware itself.
• However, McCarter’s world did not know whether the rules changed between realities.
• All they had to work from originally was George Avery, who did not understand how Picky Eater worked.
• The working answer was that in McCarter’s world it was connected to hardware, but that might not be universally true.

Justin reasoned that he could buy new phones and laptops as spares.

• He planned to keep most of them powered off.
• He would use active devices until they became reinfected, then switch to clean spares.
• Luke allowed this, noting that Justin had enough money and worked in technology.
• The team also had access to Frank’s operational funding.

The team discussed what to do with Vicky and her children.

• Philomena suggested finding a Delta Green safe house or some other secure location where they could be handed off.
• The concern was not simply putting Vicky somewhere, but keeping her there.
• Justin considered that Vicky might be a liability and that killing her might be the merciful or operationally secure option.
• Frank argued against killing her immediately because she was close to the source of the Picky Eater problem and might still have useful information.
• The children were also valuable sources of information because they had built a Picky Eater device themselves.

Justin asked McCarter whether he had the same unnatural sensing ability as the previous McCarter.

• Justin explained that the original McCarter had been able to smell unnatural things or physically detect wrongness in reality.
• Frank added that Delta Green had been cultivating that ability in McCarter.
• The alternate McCarter did not have that ability and was alarmed by the idea.
• McCarter also discussed differences in his world’s Delta Green, including greater public empowerment and access to strange technology such as his lightning rifle.

Frank attempted to determine whether he knew of any accessible Delta Green resources for Vicky.

• He made a Bureaucracy roll and failed.
• He did not know of any easy-to-access Delta Green safe house nearby.
• The team concluded they would need to call Pitzerelli and arrange something.

Frank called Antonia Pitzerelli from a new phone.

• Luke ruled that Frank had memorized the number due to his years as a field agent.
• Pitzerelli answered and asked how Pennsylvania was.
• Frank told her they had someone who had been trapped in her own reality and was too mentally unstable to leave loose.
• He explained that Vicky likely had useful information but could not be safely brought along to Massachusetts.
• He asked for a place to drop Vicky and the children on the way.

Pitzerelli asked whether Vicky was a liability to be eliminated.

• Frank said the only reason they had not done that was because Vicky seemed very close to the source of the Picky Eater situation.
• He said they needed her kept in safekeeping and possibly calmed down enough to recover information.
• Pitzerelli noted that the team was operating as an FBI task force and could use FBI resources.
• She also said she could arrange something more discreet, but it would take a couple of hours.

The team warned Pitzerelli about Picky Eater.

• Frank asked whether she had checked her phone and apps recently.
• He explained that Picky Eater seemed to work like a worm.
• The team had powered down and removed batteries from their devices.
• Pitzerelli checked her phone and laptop while on the call.
• She reported that she did not see Picky Eater on either device.
• Frank told her their theory was that infection was proximity-based, though they were not certain.
• Pitzerelli said she would call back with instructions.

The team waited in a motel room or similar location while Pitzerelli made arrangements.

• Pitzerelli called back and instructed them to drive Vicky and the children to Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
• She gave them an address, a time of 6 p.m., and the license plates of a black SUV.
• She instructed them not to exchange names with the people taking custody.
• She said they should simply hand Vicky and the children over.
• Pitzerelli also said she would know where Vicky and the children were after the handoff.

Frank also asked Pitzerelli about Kim Boyer and Cooper.

• Pitzerelli said she had been working on arranging an interview.
• Since the team would be near D.C., she could provide a time and place.
• Frank said Boyer might be connected because so much pointed back to MIT.
• Justin asked whether Pitzerelli could check whether Boyer or Cooper had Picky Eater on their phones before the team met them.
• Pitzerelli had very little information on them and could only arrange the meeting through existing channels.

The team prepared to drive Vicky and her daughters to Virginia.

• They kept Vicky away from the driver’s seat.
• Vicky asked leading questions about whether the team was part of a secret government conspiracy fighting another secret agency that stole children.
• Frank answered yes and leaned into Vicky’s delusional framework because it kept her calmer.
• Vicky accepted that the team was taking her to a safe place shielded by another shadowy organization.
• The ride was stressful, but Vicky remained manageable as long as the team fit themselves into her existing narrative.

The team arrived at the designated parking lot.

• The location was a nondescript government building parking lot.
• Frank and Justin got out with Vicky and her children.
• Philomena remained behind the wheel of the team’s SUV.
• Matthew McCarter was seated in the back.
• Frank checked the license plate of the waiting SUV.
• It matched the plate Pitzerelli had given him.

The men in the other SUV got out.

• They looked like classic “men in black.”
• Frank judged them as military or ex-military.
• They opened the back doors of their SUV.
• Vicky and the children climbed inside.
• Frank told Vicky that these men would take her to safety.
• There was no meaningful conversation.
• The SUV drove away with Vicky and her children.

Justin set a watch timer to remind himself to check for Picky Eater every hour.

• He wanted to regularly inspect his phone for signs of reinfection.
• The team continued treating Picky Eater contamination as a major threat.

After the handoff, Philomena and Matthew McCarter made SAN rolls.

• Philomena lost 1 SAN.
• Matthew lost 2 SAN and reached his breaking point.
• The cause was a reality-slip event.
• From Philomena and McCarter’s perspective, Frank and Justin appeared in the parking lot about fifty feet away.
• They had been gone, and then they were suddenly there again.
• Philomena and McCarter had a hazy, slippery memory of why they were there.
• They seemed to remember being there to drop someone off or pick someone up, but the exact purpose was difficult to hold onto.

Philomena got out of the car and confronted Frank and Justin.

• She asked where they had just appeared from.
• Frank and Justin did not understand the question because, from their perspective, nothing unusual had happened.
• They remembered getting out of the SUV, walking over, completing the handoff, and coming back.
• They had not experienced a gap.

McCarter got out of the car and drew his gun.

• He did not point it at anyone, but he held it openly.
• He wanted Frank and Justin to see that he was armed.
• This reflected his alarm at seeing them appear from nowhere.

Frank realized that this matched a previous pattern.

• He told Philomena that when people disappear, those left behind forget what happened to them.
• He said that he and Justin must have left reality.
• Philomena understood and remembered the prior phenomenon.
• Frank concluded that the handoff SUV must have been involved.
• His working theory was that he and Justin crossed into another reality when they handed Vicky and the children over.

Frank and Justin made SAN rolls or were asked to consider the SAN impact of what had happened.

• Frank made his roll.
• Luke considered whether losing Vicky and the girls into another dimension would cost SAN.
• Frank’s primary concern was that they had lost a resource and potential source of information.
• Because Frank was more focused on the operational loss than the horror of Vicky’s fate, Luke ruled that this did not cost him SAN.

The team reasoned through what had happened during the handoff.

• The other SUV’s plates matched Pitzerelli’s instructions.
• The men appeared normal enough not to raise alarm.
• Frank had not checked their palms for mouths.
• Philomena argued that the reality Frank and Justin entered must have been close enough to their own that it did not immediately seem wrong.
• The team did not know whether they had returned to their original reality or whether all of them were now in another nearby variant.

The team checked their devices.

• Picky Eater appeared on all of their new phones.
• This included phones that had only recently been purchased.
• Justin immediately removed his phone battery.
• Frank asked whether the whole handoff event had infected them.
• The team considered that their proximity to the SUV, or to an active Picky Eater system in the SUV, might have caused it.

Frank searched the internet on a phone to see whether the current reality had obvious differences.

• He searched for Delta Green.
• He also considered checking major historical facts such as the president and World War II.
• He failed his Search roll.
• Nothing obvious looked different or concerning.
• The group joked in-character and out-of-character about how hard it would be to identify a subtle reality shift.

The team powered down infected phones and discussed containment.

• Known infected devices were to have their batteries removed.
• Justin had bought backup phones and laptops.
• The group discussed using a Faraday bag or Faraday box to isolate contaminated devices.
• Luke allowed Justin to have a hardened box or container suitable for isolating electronics, given the availability of consumer Faraday containers.

McCarter destroyed one of his own phones.

• He removed the battery, threw the phone on the ground, and stomped on it.
• His special hardware was not a normal phone.
• Luke described McCarter’s device as a hardened piece of military field technology, like a reality-anchor “hockey puck” with a high-capacity battery.
• McCarter had been told that this device was what kept him anchored in the current reality.
• He did not want to turn it off because he feared it might sever his link to this world.

The team considered whether McCarter’s device might be spreading Picky Eater.

• Philomena raised the possibility that McCarter’s special hardware had broken containment.
• The team noted that Justin had been checking devices during the drive and had not seen Picky Eater before the handoff, depending on when the checking began.
• Luke clarified that Picky Eater had installed earlier but hid itself under another name or in a less obvious form before revealing itself.
• It may not have called itself Picky Eater initially.
• It was only after the handoff that the icon clearly appeared.

The group debated whether phones could be used at all.

• Philomena argued that they should stop using phones entirely.
• Frank wondered whether the team themselves had become the vector.
• The team considered that even if phones were off, Picky Eater might still appear once powered on.
• They also considered whether the car’s electronics could be infected.

The team decided to perform an experiment.

• Frank took one powered-off phone and separated himself from the group.
• The others drove away down the street.
• Frank powered on the phone while away from the others and away from their devices.
• Within a minute or two, Picky Eater appeared on the phone anyway.
• This suggested that proximity to the rest of the group was not required for reinfection, or at least that proximity alone did not explain what was happening.

Frank tried to call Pitzerelli from a payphone.

• The call rang several times and went to voicemail.
• Frank did not leave a message.
• He powered down the phone and removed its battery, then tried again.
• The second call also rang and went to voicemail.
• Luke noted that Pitzerelli had probably answered Frank earlier because she had recognized the burner phone number.
• Frank realized that the earlier call had involved a new phone and a new number, yet Pitzerelli had answered and seemed to know it was him.
• This became another sign that the prior call may not have happened in the team’s original reality.

The team considered whether they could trust Pitzerelli or Delta Green.

• Frank said Pitzerelli had known he was calling before he called, or at least had answered a call she should not have recognized.
• He said they were isolated, could not trust backup, and could not trust Delta Green.
• He argued that they needed to go directly to the source of the Picky Eater problem.
• The source appeared to be MIT.
• Philomena agreed to drive north toward MIT.

The team discussed whether the altered realities might reflect someone’s worldview or fears.

• McCarter recalled being told that Picky Eater initially pulled information from realities corresponding to what the user seemed to believe.
• Frank asked whose worst fear their current situation represented.
• The group considered that Vicky’s reality had been formed from her fears.
• They also noted that Charles Bauer’s reality seemed to have suited his desires rather than his fears.

Justin discussed the Hush Father.

• Justin explained that he feels a connection to his god when he is nonverbal.
• His medication can induce that state.
• He first felt that connection as a child before he learned language.
• His parents had neglected his language development, and he later lost that connection as he learned to speak.
• He rediscovered it by medically inducing nonverbal states.
• Justin also had a gut feeling about people his god wanted him to help.
• The group considered whether Justin would notice if that connection changed across realities, but it was not a constant sense unless he took his medication.

The group regrouped after Frank’s test.

• The others returned to pick Frank up.
• Frank was relieved that they came back and had not forgotten him.
• He concluded that whether the phones were on or off might not matter anymore.
• Picky Eater had appeared on a fresh phone even when he was separated from the group.

The team continued toward Massachusetts.

• Luke noted that the drive from the D.C. area to MIT would be a little over seven hours by car.
• A train-and-bus trip would also take about seven hours.
• A flight would only take about an hour and twenty minutes.
• The team rejected flying.
• Philomena worried that if they shifted realities during a flight, they could suddenly find themselves falling or otherwise displaced.
• McCarter also had too many weapons, including his lightning rifle, to easily take a plane.
• The group preferred the highway because it seemed more survivable than a plane if reality shifted.

The team ran another experiment using one of Justin’s fresh laptops.

• Philomena suggested physically disabling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth before powering on the laptop.
• Luke said Justin had the necessary technical skill and toolkit to physically disconnect the laptop’s antennas.
• Justin opened the laptop, disconnected the antennas, and powered it on while the team drove.
• Justin made a Computer Science roll and succeeded.

Justin found that Picky Eater was still present on the laptop.

• It was not immediately visible.
• He had to search deeply through the system.
• He eventually found that Picky Eater had insinuated itself into a system service.
• This showed that Picky Eater was present even without normal wireless antennas.

Justin tested whether the antenna-disabled laptop still had internet access through Picky Eater.

• It did.
• This indicated that Picky Eater was communicating by some means other than normal Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
• Luke prompted Justin to think through what that implied.

Justin made an INT × 5 roll and succeeded.

• He considered the idea that he himself might be a transmitter, then rejected it as crazy.
• Acting on a hunch, he opened the laptop again.
• He knew the component had not been there before.
• He found that a Picky Eater chip had appeared attached to the laptop’s motherboard.

The newly appeared chip looked factory-manufactured.

• It was not a crude soldering or hacked-on addition.
• It appeared integrated into the board cleanly.
• It looked as though the motherboard had been manufactured with the chip already included.
• Justin inspected it with a pocket microscope.
• Inscribed in small letters on the chip casing was the word “Hush.”

The appearance of the “Hush” inscription suggested a direct connection to Justin and the Hush Father.

• The session ended on that reveal.
• Afterward, the group considered that other infected devices might also contain personalized Picky Eater chips, but they had not yet disassembled those devices.
• The team had seen Picky Eater apps on phones but had not previously checked whether chips had physically appeared inside them.

Luke clarified the broader chronology of the Picky Eater investigation.

• The oldest known Picky Eater-related case was the FBI investigation into Charles Bauer from MIT.
• Bauer seemed to have found Picky Eater in 2016.
• He used it for a couple of years.
• By late 2017, he emerged into a reality where marrying children was legal and socially acceptable.
• Bauer was picked up by the FBI and killed himself in custody.
• The FBI had his phone, which had Picky Eater on it.

Luke also clarified how NSA and Delta Green had learned about Picky Eater.

• Diving Bell at the NSA had independently picked up dark web chatter about Picky Eater.
• They found references and some source code.
• They did not have the chip design or a physical chip.
• Narnia was a Delta Green working group operating under a counterterrorism cover, like the current team.
• Narnia was activated in response to the Friday Night Massacre, a high school football shooting in Texas involving two young Muslim men with AK-style rifles.
• The Friday Night Massacre occurred about a week before Bradley McKay’s shooting.
• The current team was pulled in about a week after McKay’s shooting.

Luke clarified the CIA contact connected to Narnia.

• The CIA contact the team had previously met was intended to be Narnia’s Delta Green handler.
• That handler had been assessing whether to put the team in contact with Narnia.
• This explained why the team was stonewalled and why the connection to the researcher who provided information eventually mattered.

The team discussed a possible next step involving Pitzerelli.

• Justin wanted to talk to Pitzerelli and ask whether she knew about the Vicky handoff.
• If Pitzerelli was fuzzy about the details, that might indicate Frank and Justin had disappeared from reality and that she was affected like the others who forgot them.
• If Pitzerelli remembered the handoff clearly and said it went well, that could indicate either that she was involved or that the reality situation was even more complicated.
• Philomena was uncertain whether asking that question was wise, because the team was already spiraling into dangerous uncertainty.
• The session ended before the team pulled that thread further.