World On Fire: Shadow Ops [a Fantasy WWII Quest]

[><] Send Team Baker sans Weronika

"Abigail," you say, turning to the tanker mage.

"Take most of your team down with the Marines, but leave me Weronika. Weronika, Affirm, we're taking out the rest of the guards," you say as you turn to face the island's front, motioning Affirm to follow. "I want to get this done before the Marines start shooting, so I want to do it quietly if we can - but if you notice the hatches are shut, don't worry too much about noise."

You move quietly as a group, splitting up about halfway to the guardposts, and approach in near-total silence, with only hand signals to direct each other. You take Indra and Doris to the southern one, with Simon, Liselot, and Marian taking the northern one. Knife in hand, you sneak up on one of the bigger-looking ones.

To your surprise, these guards are all Italian, despite wearing German uniforms. To your (slightly lesser) surprise, they all surrender the moment your knife touches the big man's throat. Under threat of several guns pointed at their backs, you gather them all halfway between the two hatches.

You pat them down for weapons, taking first the obvious - an MP40. The armory has a few, of course, but it's always nice to have more. Especially since they're never available when you (or most other SHADOCOM agents) want them. A bit odd for an Italian to have one, but this is a German base. The others have a Carcano carbine and a Beretta 38. You toss it aside, gently, and continue checking for weapons. One turns out to be a jackpot - a Beretta M1935. The rest have the less valuable 1934. Something about one of them feels distinctly unpleasant, but you put it down to poor maintenance and add it to the pile. A little aways from the other one.

Once the prisoners are dealt with with, you turn to Doris. "Bring these guys back to where Weronika is," you say, handing her your Merlin SMG. Doris takes it, but looks a little confused.

"Are you sure you'll be fine with just a pistol?"

You gesture to the flat, hard surface of the island, and the empty sea beyond it. "Calm wind, open skies, no trees or other terrain for miles? This is the perfect place for using wind magic to blow someone off a cliff." You point back towards one of the hatches. "Or down a hole. And I still have my pistol, plus a few grenades."

She doesn't seem entirely sure, but takes the gun anyway and heads off, prisoners in tow.

"Now that the prisoners are taken care of," you say, "we'll split up again to cover the other hatches. Once the Marines are all down, we need to make sure nobody tries to sneak past them. The Royal Navy can handle anyone escaping by sea, we'll make sure nobody tries to take the top of the island from us."

You split up into three groups. Indra and Liselot go to one of the hatches, Simon and Marian to the other, while you return to the one you captured the Italians from. The din of battle begins as soon as you reach it, sitting on a crate near enough to the edge to toss shouts, bullets, or grenades down.


It doesn't take long for your first visitors to arrive. Cursing up a storm in German, they make not even a passing attempt at being quiet as they charge up the ladder. The sound of bullets ricocheting off the metal sides of the well provide ample argument as to why.

You push yourself up into a standing position, drawing your own pistol - the M1935 is nice, but you have more magazines for your own. "Halt," you call down the hole. The response you get is a storm of pistol and SMG fire, before you can even get a chance to demand their surrender.

You tsk-tsk, shaking your head at their rudeness, and toss a live grenade down the hatch. You hear a choked gasp, and the grenade is thrown back up, so naturally you blast it back down with a gust of air. The Germans are dispatched with a semi-muffled krump, and what follows is a small cloud of smoke and the sound of limbs and metal clanking against a ladder.

After a few seconds, you creep to the edge of the square platform the hatch is on and look down for an instant before pulling your head back. Your face has the same amount of holes in it as before, so you lean forward again and look down properly. There are a few new blood spatters and scratches where the paint was chipped away, but the ladderwell is otherwise empty again. It takes nearly half an hour before anyone tries again, and this group is much more easily convinced of the benefits of surrender.

You are briefly Indra Gurung, and you and Liselot are sharing a semi-companionable moment together, sitting near each other on a set of crates near the hatch you have been assigned to. For a moment, the situation strikes you as rather odd - Gurkhas, respected as they are in England, aren't always seen in the best light in South Africa unless they're in uniform, and even then only by English colonists - and Liselot is a Boer. And in your country... well, Nepal was closed to foreigners. Officially, anyway.

And you barely even talked to each other, when you first joined the supernatural branch of SOE that would become SHADOCOM. In some minor ways, you didn't expect to get along with her at all.

And yet here you are, sitting together as friends, cleaning your blades with a small pile of German corpses shot, hacked, or bashed to death off to the side. Off to the other are a handful of rather soundly subdued prisoners.

"A strange world we live in," you say, examining your kukri in the washed-out grey of predawn light. Deeming it sufficiently clean, you slide it back into its sheath with a silent snikt.

"It is strange," Liselot says as she sheaths her own blade, "but I think I much prefer it to hiding in the shadows."

Your eyebrow raises. "Do we not work in the shadows, even now?"

Liselot snorts, standing up. "We won't when we win."

You are briefly Simon Bonheur. You dab your face with a handkerchief, carefully wiping the blood off it while ensuring that none gets on your uniform - still as immaculate as possible, though even you couldn't avoid getting your boots dirty on the entryway. C'est la vie - times change, weapons change, but soldiers never bother to check the nasty parts of the base for intruders. 'Surely, no one would hide here,' they think, 'it is too filthy for even a rat.'

You look to the east, where the sun is but minutes from rising. Conditions are good enough to spot a lovely green flash, but the island blocks the horizon in that direction. All in all, it has been a fulfilling (and filling) night. Rare indeed is it when you have the chance to feed to satiation during battle. In these days of rapid-fire and motorized vehicles, combat moves much too fast for that to be safe, even for the unliving.

You toss the German corpse into a pile with the other one, then turn around. Marian is staring at you with muted shock, and the other German who attempted to force his way up (before the Georgian esper simply yanked him off the ladder) with unchecked horror.

And nausea, as he bends over and retches over his boots. The few other prisoners you managed to obtain are facing away, but their body language tells you they heard everything.

"Your rifle, freund," you say patiently. He tosses the carbine like it's on fire, and quickly puts his hands out for Marian to restrain him. She continues to stare at you, even as she leads him to the other prisoners and turns him around. Finally, she retrieves her own gun and walks back to watching the open hatch, where you join her.

"I thought old rich men being bloodsuckers was just an expression," she says at length.

You can't help yourself. It's not like the Germans can hear your laughter over the sound of guns, anyway.

You are once again Shizuko Satou-Williams. The hours pass, and ultimately, your splitting up proves a tad pointless. The Marines meet a fair amount of resistance by the sound of the fighting below, but very few people manage to slip past them. And the ones that do are neither physically nor mentally capable (or willing) to put up much resistance. The rest of your team had more trouble, but never anything they couldn't handle. And nothing that wouldn't have taken more than a few minutes to deal with had you not split up. You gather a few more prisoners, only have to use one grenade, and by the time the last bullets fly you haven't even finished the magazine in your 1911.

All in all, a very smooth operation.

Kind of anticlimactic, I suppose, but even if it wasn't a natural 20 you did get double 4s for Accuracy. Chapter break won't be as long as last time, partly because I want to keep up the roll I'm on, and partly because I don't expect the next chapter to be as long, or require near as much work to plan out.

June 1, 1942, RAF Debden
10:32 AM

It is a beautiful early summer's day in Essex and you are frankly thankful for your San Francisco upbringing, otherwise you might be tempted to call it chilly instead. It is, and substantially chillier than the less urban home in Roseville you lived in as a teenager, but you're used to it. Used enough to it to lounge on a deckchair on base, wearing a somewhat (but far from scandalous) revealing two-piece bathing suit and working on your tan.

It's the perfect weather for it, or as close as it can possibly get this early in what the English consider summer. The sky is clear, your squadron is on standby instead of alert - to give the Spitfires much-needed repairs, and everyone much-needed breaks. You have a nice, cool bottle of sarsparilla - the closest thing you can find in England to your beloved root beer, and a pack of

[ ] Lucky Strikes (Toasted, Means Fine Tobacco, and the most popular by a wide margin - thus hard to find)
[ ] Camels (Second-most popular, second-highest quality)
[ ] Pall Malls (The best of the rest, common and cheap)
[X] Old Golds (Another popular brand, though nowhere near on the level of the ones above)
[ ] Craven As (A British brand, but fairly popular even with non-British troops. Cork-tipped, to 'prevent sore throats'.)
[ ] Kools (One of the first menthol cigarettes.)
[ ] Raleighs (Common but somewhat subpar. Filtered.)
[ ] Chesterfields (Universally reviled, but in a somewhat joking way - they aren't much worse than Pall Malls)
[ ] Woodbines (British. Cheap, strong, and exceptionally harsh.)

in your lap, with a lit one in your mouth as you read the latest Stars and Stripes. Until fairly recently, the PX on base refused to give any copies to you directly, since you weren't officially part of the US Army Air Corps yet - even though there wasn't really anything stopping him from doing so except himself. That has since changed, and the look on his face when you proved that left a smile on your face that has yet to leave.

Truly, the only thing that could improve this day is if all the Axis nations surrendered at once. Perhaps you could even have Goering's train take you on a tour of Europe...

You are shaken from your thoughts by the sound of approaching feet. They aren't running, so it isn't important, but they are clearly approaching you in particular. You look up from your newspaper to see a PFC with a large bag approaching. Thomas... something-or-other. He's Polish, that much you know, but even years of working with Polish squadrons has made you no better at pronouncing a name as complex as his.

"Mail call?" you ask, turning your head towards him.

He nods, pulling out a thin stack of envelopes, plus a catalogue wrapped in brown paper - not the Sears one, but one of many imitators of the retail supergiant. Two of the letters are from your family, now addressed from Manzanar.

You wait for him to leave, then, looking over both of your shoulders, you hold it spine-up above your lap, waggling it back and forth. You feel something shift between the pages. You turn the catalog over and lay it in your lap, letting it flop open. It opens to page 394, wherein a small, thin piece of cardboard paper sticks out at an angle.

To the average observer, it looks just like the little papers they sometimes put in magazines to encourage people to buy subscriptions. That's because it is, but SHADOCOM has come up with some ingenious ways of delivering messages to its agents. A bit of magical energy pumped into it, and words reveal themselves on the lines.


You let the magic run out of the card, and the letters soon fade. 1630, that's not for several hours. Debden is a bit of a train ride from Baker Street, but a train would let you read at your leisure - you highly doubt anyone would just let an officer miss their stop on a train, no matter how many officers there are moving about England. True, the RASC would no doubt be happy to drive you there yourself, but reading anything on a car makes you wildly nauseous. Odd how the same effect doesn't occur with a broom.

[ ] Read the letters now (Take a car)
[X] Read them on the way (Take a train)