The Mission Is Never Over—First Things First

Rex

The lights flipped on in Rex's lab. The team started out cleaning a dead agent's home of evidence. This time the dead agent was one of their own.

A spider sadly watched from a terrarium as Wren and Malachi bagged up Rex's souvenirs from his nights at the opera. Clyde Baughman's spray bottle of colorless fluid; Marlene Baughman's severed finger, the nerve endings grown and branching out to the walls of its jar; multiple vials of ai-apa's gray sludge; and Audrey III, the marijuana plant recovered from Dakota Knight's apartment.

Malachi spoke first, suggesting they burn all of it. He flicked a lighter open and shut while he said it, but he didn't seem to know he was doing it. Wren, concerned, thanked him for saving her life right before Doug found them.

Doug resisted understanding what they tried to tell him. They must be wrong; Rex couldn't possibly be dead. He tried to prove it by calling Rex's phone... which Malachi held out to him, the screen cracked and bloody as it rang. Doug angrily (or as angrily as they'd ever seen him do anything, anyway) told them to leave; they couldn't be there without Rex or they'd disturb his experiments. Malachi insisted on giving him a stack of cash he'd swiped from Dakota Knight's truck, wanting to help with his education now that he'd lost his mentor. Doug deflated. If he took it, that meant he'd be accepting Rex really was gone (but hustler that he was, he still tried to push for a second stack of cash). Rex never made plans for his death, never treated it as a serious possibility; he'd only considered what might happen to Doug because of his actions. Wren talked Malachi into leaving him with Audrey III.

And then they left Doug behind.

Wren

Wren invited Malachi to join her on a road trip to Arizona. It was a long drive from Denver, but neither of them would be returning to work for a while. And she needed time to explain why she was making the trip.

 

The Izaldo was a classic movie theater in Mustang, AZ. Asking around town, Wren learned it had closed for renovations, but the money needed to finish them had run out, and a local effort to get it named a historic site had failed. The property was now owned by Ancile, Inc., a defense contractor with a focus on chemical engineering. Ancile had bought up multiple buildings around town and already opened a lab there. And who was the lab manager but Dr. Hope Schlafly, the assumed identity of Dr. Joy Shusterman?

Wren didn't tell anyone the FBI had suspended her. She let them think she was still going to work; suspension just meant more time for her own investigations. Her hours became erratic once she got home from Arizona: tracking Joy all day, showering past midnight, and sleeping in a nest of t-shirts on the floor (where had this one come from, the black one with the stylized eye on its front? She couldn't remember buying it) when she was too tired to cross from her desk to her bed. Then she'd get up at noon, grab a breakfast bar from one of the many boxes lining her kitchen counter, and walk out to chase a new lead.

 

Robin wasn't fooled. Wren's twin knew her obsession didn't come from working a case, but from working their case.

Malachi

Malachi had learned something from Avalon Gardens: fire is the only truth. It showed him another world, a better world, where all its nightmares were fucking ashes. He'd developed a habit of setting brush fires to deal with the stress at work, and he put in for a sabbatical before he could face disciplinary action for it.

The stress at home was getting to him too. Ash had become even more of a shit than usual. He acted scared when Malachi came back, like he hadn't cursed his dad out after every "work trip" before. When he tried to start a game of catch, Malachi was so alienated he didn't even make an excuse to blow him off. He just left the house to go to a gun range.

Gilberto

In the months after facing the Glenridge Chiropractor, Lt. Gilberto Smith started seeing a military therapist. In his latest session, he talked about putting weight on himself to do everything, to protect everyone. His therapist encouraged him to find strength in others: being part of a unit meant he could draw on them so as not to overwhelm himself, a lesson he could take to other relationships and connections. Gilberto was reassured, thinking of Wren and Malachi, but noted it was hard to make new connections. The therapist sympathized with the need to keep secret Gilberto's work on special operations but, without any knowledge of Delta Green, couldn't offer anything more helpful.

Art by Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire for the comic series Injection.

Joy

Nearly six months after Glenridge, Gilberto got called into Dr. Thornhill's office on base. She offered him a bourbon and a grim congratulations: another round of background checks had been conducted, a new set of security clearances had been issued, and he was approved to be read into the Program, the poor bastard.

The Program's real name was Coral Nomad. Its mission was to recover and study alien technology for the enrichment of all humanity: every computer in the world had components derived form the Program's work, and—she couldn't help sniping at him—who knew what new advancements he had cost them by destroying the Chiropractor's remains. Gilberto refused to budge; he'd done the right thing by his men. Thornhill told him he'd stay with the unit, but he would never fly out with them on the Program's business again. From now on, he'd be attached to the team he met in Glenridge, where his skepticism for hypergeometric research would be given a use.

In 2006, the Program suffered a massive security breach. A member of its core leadership team, the CIA's head of counterintelligence, had vanished into the night with years' of documents relating to hypergeometric technology. Despite 20 years of searching, they were no closer to finding Gavin Ross now than they'd been the day he fled, and in that time he had formed a network of underground labs working to reverse-engineer the Program's discoveries. The best they'd been able to do was play whack-a-mole, taking out his scientists as they identified them.

In 2008, they'd tried and failed to bring one in for interrogation. Joy Shusterman had been a psychologist with a specialty in social dynamics among prison populations, working as a consultant for the DOJ. The Program took notice of her when agents with the US Postal Inspection Service tipped them off to an unusual package Shusterman had received. In investigating, they learned the package contained a text with hypergeometric properties; that as part of some cruel experiment, Shusterman had been holding a teenage girl prisoner in her basement for years; and that Shusterman had deliberately exposed the girl to the text.

The Program scrambled its agents to go in using the cover of an FBI hostage rescue team. Their objectives were clear: bring Shusterman in alive. Whatever else happened, they needed to make Shusterman talk. But when they came through the door, she injected the girl with something that triggered a massive heart attack. In the chaos, the FBI's point man had to make a split-second choice whether to save the hostage or pursue the suspect.

The girl lived. Shusterman escaped. Gilberto and Thornhill disagreed on whether the point man had made the right call.

Agent Harris of the Glenridge FBI team was pursuing Shusterman off the books. The Program believed wherever Shusterman was now, she had re-established contact with Ross, and moving against her directly would be slow and obvious; she'd go to ground again if the FBI showed up on her doorstep, but not if Harris did. Gilberto's job now was to support Harris and capture Shusterman, whatever that required.

Before he was dismissed, Gilberto asked what happened to the girl. Thornhill snickered. The next time he chased her down to ask her out for a drink, he should try asking her about herself.

Art by Dennis Detwiller for Delta Green: The Labyrinth.

Joe

It was October 3, 2025, a year since the team's first mission, and they were back in a parking garage. But this one was the below Clermont Hotel in Atlanta, GA, and Agent MARCUS was there to brief them in person. He'd been contacted by Joe Dawant, a cold case specialist with the Center for the Missing Child, about an odd pattern of disappearing children in an Atlanta suburb. Dawant had friends in federal law enforcement and a reputation of listening more than he spoke and no time for bullshit; he had worked on the periphery of Program operations before (he'd helped keep Wren's case alive following her kidnapping), but he was in the dark regarding the supernatural; he asked for a meeting about setting up a legitimate FBI task force to investigate the missing children. And since Wren was suspended, MARCUS had arranged for Gilberto to be sheepdipped as lead FBI agent.

 

Before they went up to the bar, MARCUS told them not to react if Joe referred to a "Dr. Bloom," confusing Gilberto and enraging Malachi.

 

Joe warmly greeted MARCUS (calling him "Dr. Bloom") and Wren, then introduced himself to Malachi and Gilberto. He explained to them while doing research for another case, he'd found a pattern of dozens of kids disappearing from the rich white Druid Hills neighborhood over the last 75 years... and the records he had access to only went as far back as 75 years. These kids were enrolled in the public Druid Hills Middle School and private Virtuos Academy but were pulled out between 6th and 8th grade; they never re-enrolled in other schools, never got employed anywhere, never paid taxes or joined the military or had death certificates filed for them; they never had missing persons reports filed for them with the cops; and they were universally the second children in their families.

 

Joe noted the latest disappearance, 12-year-old Henry Venable, had happened in the last month over his parents had died in a car accident over the summer. Whatever happened to the other kids was happening to Henry *right now*, which meant they still had time to help him. The team asked about surviving relatives (only his older sister Abigail, 19 years old and now his legal guardian) and churches in the area (Joe realized he hadn't seen any churches in Druid Hills and resolved to look into it). Joe made clear he didn't plan to walk away while they sought answers; he would be part of the team on this one. Meanwhile, Malachi took to the internet for anything on local history and found a Wikipedia article on the Venables,

The team began to strategize. Gilberto would try to get his hands on the police report for the deaths of Henry's parents; Wren would check out Virtuos Academy; Malachi would visit Stone Mountain; and Joe would get looking into local churches.