Sensible Operations Executive

In this World War Cthulhu session, no non-player characters were tied to chairs and strangled, no elderly drunks were beaten into unconsciousness, no German soldiers were shot in the eye, and no one smashed up a wine cellar looking for secret tunnels. That's not to say that there weren't a couple of moments during which I wondered what the heck the players were, er, playing at, but on the whole they were being quite sedate and sensible.

Leon Ferrand was dead but his eager sidekick Pierre Toulon was still alive -- tied to a chair, of course -- and something needed to be done about him. After a brief discussion, the agents decided that Toulon was none too bright and was more or less Ferrand's puppet so with the -- alleged -- spy out of the picture, they felt it was safe enough to return young Pierre to the partisans. They decided to set off early in the morning to avoid being seen but forgot that Saint Cerneuf was in part a farming community; Pierre did not and tried to call for help from a passing farmer but was silenced by a threat from the volatile Fergus O'Brien.

The group arrived at the Martin farm where they handed Toulon over to the Martins and told them all about Leon being a spy for an unknown agency, and what they had done to end any potential threat from him. Helena and Jacques were shocked but seemed to accept the story and promised to deal with Toulon. The agents then took the opportunity to follow a couple of leads they'd picked up from Ferrand and asked the Martins about Giscard Bressan; it was clear that the subject made Jacques Martin uncomfortable and like hungry lions surrounding a wounded gazelle, the players focussed their attentions on him.

The agents decided to separate the Martins and see if they could break Jacques but then something interesting happened; the original plan was to leave dodgy scientist Kirby Tinkerton with Helena and Pierre -- who was still tied up -- while the rest went for a walk with Jacques, but Pierre-Yves Bertrand was overcome by a sudden wave of anxiety and refused to leave the Englishman alone. It seemed that the French pilot had a bad feeling about Helena Martin and was convinced that Kirby would be in significant danger if left alone with her.

With Bertrand and Tinkerton enjoying Helena's hospitality, Tidelina, O'Brien, and Mike McVeigh took Jacques for a morning walk around the fields and interrogated him about his relationship with Bressan and why he was keeping it from his wife. They all thought that Jacques and Giscard were secret lovers so were surprised -- and I think disappointed -- when Jacques revealed that they were nothing more than drinking buddies; unsatisfied, they pressed him for more and he confessed to having a criminal past and that it was possible that Bressan knew about it, but Jacques had been able to deflect his attention away from the topic whenever it had come up in conversation.

Upon their return to the farmhouse they discovered that not only had Bressan himself turned up but Albert Toulon had arrived and, surprised to see his nephew Pierre there and somewhat worse for wear, taken the boy home. The agents decided to go for another lap around the farm, this time with Bressan; he was a bit more forthcoming than Jacques and admitted that he was a black marketeer and smuggler man who could get things, so McVeigh made a tentative deal with him.

Then, after making sure Bressan was going to be at the Martin farm for the rest of the day, the agents broke into his house and stumbled upon some guns in a hidden cache; unable to help themselves they, er, helped themselves to the firearms. Now they had machine guns. Ho ho ho.

Although it was still early on Saturday the 19th of April, the agents decided to rest for the remainder of the day, and contacted London later that evening. They reported their activities and Bertrand made the bold claim that they had secured a potential landing site on the so-called Devil's Field; although the Decharette mansion overlooked the field, the pilot assured his superiors back in Britain that the agents controlled the building. In turn, London asked the agents to give the partisan group a task to test their loyalty and reliability, and told them to check in again on the 22nd.

How does one test the loyalty and reliability of partisans? Simple! By filling a suitcase with books that have had random words marked by an expert cryptographer so as to look like a secret message, then getting the partisans to deliver the suitcase to a priest in Cahors, a priest who has no idea that the suitcase is coming or what is contained within.

Okay.

With the plan in place, the agents retired for the evening. The next day they decided to go to church, in part to integrate themselves into the community and in part to see who didn't turn up, because non-attendance was a sure sign of cultist tendencies. If the tally of the villages led to any significant suspicions -- aside from those concerning poor Father Beaumarais, whose constant nervousness was a red flag to the paranoid players -- the agents did not act upon them.

Walking through the village after the service the agents spotted a couple of German vehicles parked outside the restaurant and a great deal of activity within. Sneaking over for a look, Bertrand and McVeigh saw a number of German soldiers moving furniture around at the direction of Oberstleutnant Klier, the officer in charge of operations at the former Decharette copper mine. It seemed that the Germans were getting ready for a party of some sort. It was O'Brien who first made the connection. It was the 20th of April. Adolf Hitler's birthday.