Post by Catsmate on Mar 11, 2024 10:50:33 GMT
A scenario idea for UNIT, though it could be modified for time travellers. Eminently suited to the Wrecking Crew. Intended for a US setting due to the gambling elements.
The Golden Oasis.
UNIT's ever churning information gathering systems have spat out an oddity. Actually they spat it out last year but, well, it didn't seem important and no-one got around to checking it out. Then a change of management meant that someone had to be found to investigate a haunted casino.
The computer has compiled a dossier for the agents, but it's full of fairly insubstantial incidents. However overall they suggest something odd is happening in a US hotel and casino called The Golden Oasis.
History.
The Golden Oasis, a relatively small casino was constructed on the site of a far better known casino, the Sapphire Orb, which burned down in 1996 following a police raid.
The Sapphire Orb was widely believed, in law enforcement circles, to be a Mafia front for payoffs and money laundering (it was) and was raided by a multi-agency team in 1996. There was an incident on the sixth floor and a mysterious fire started (police claim it was set by criminals as a diversion, others are less sure and blame police pyrotechnics) and engulfed the building (poor fire safety). In the end nine employees, two guests and five police died.
The legal action took two decades but the Golden Oasis opened four year ago.
Some investigation, which could be as simple as finding the names of the LE personnel involved in the investigation and phoning them, yields another fact: the casino was strongly believed to act as a front for a large-scale jewel smuggling and fencing operation. The raid was planned when police, and Federal agencies, finally got a reliable tip that a shipment of stolen gems was due to pass through the hotel. The police acted on the tip and raised the casino in force. When the smugglers found themselves surrounded by police they panicked and tried to escape, setting the fire as a diversion (or it started accidentally through indiscriminate use of flash/bangs and 'burning' gas grenades).
A team of ten operatives was sent to the sixth floor to storm the stronghold where the gems were being kept, there was extensive gunfire exchanged (police claim at least fifteen people fired on them) and only five agents emerged alive, three with gunshot injuries.
Interestingly two of the agents suffered serious shock from unknown causes and were medically retired after the raid.
Gossip on the 'net, from employees, guests and locals, states very definitely that the hotel is haunted.
Since the Oasis was built there have been scores of reports of "supernatural" activity in the hotel, including:
Careful checking by UNIT will show that at least four people have checked in to the Golden Oasis and then never been seen again.
On-site investigation.
The team are briefed, and then briefed by a bean-counter about UNIT's expenses policy. Then they're left to device their cover stories and identities and sent to <CITY> to check things out.
The Golden Oasis is a modest ten story building. The three lower floors a casino, three restaurants, a gym and spa (with an Olympic sized pool) and the usual facilities.
The upper seven floors contain 100 rooms (twenty on floors 3-7), eight larger suites on the 9th floor, and four very large suites on the top floor. There are three underground levsl for plant and parking.
The hotel is owned by Golden Oasis Ventures Limited, a Delaware company owned by a Canadian company. Then ownership records gets complicated....
Once they're ensconced in the hotel and have checked in with UNIT they can discover the following:
1. 'Monkey man' sightings are commonplace. Most long serving staff have seen him/her/them. Descriptions vary but (overall) they appear to resemble bipedal orang-utans with mid-brown fur, distinctly human style scalp hair and large eyes. They are blamed for disappearing room service orders and various thefts. Hotel security have responded to the sightings but seem unenthusiastic about confronting the creatures.
Some guests have also seem him/her/them and seem to believe it is a publicity stunt by the casino management. This is a cover story.
2. [Optional] One of the UNIT agents will, at some point in the investigation, spot two 'Persons of Interest' leaving the hotel and travelling across the road to the Lucky Clover casino.
If the agents investigate the sighting, they can find (by hacking the hotel's insecure computer system or asking/bribing staff) that the people they spotted are staying in the hotel, booked in for two weeks, under assumed named.
The rooms were paid for in advance, but the record of how the rooms were paid for seems to be missing....
3. The UNIT personnel are not the only people looking for clues and asking questions about the events of '96, and especially the 'monkey man'.
A well dressed man in his forties with an upper-class English accent, wearing various old-fashioned tweed suits and booked in under the name of 'George Tudor' is prowling the hotel, interviewing the staff and guests asking about dates, times and locations of sightings.
He claims to be an author writing a book about the history of the 1976 incident.
4. 'George' also has a tail; staying always just within sight of Mr. Tudor is another person or team (men and women have been seen). Several hours of examination of the CCTV shows three women and two men, in various outfits (business suits, sundress, staff uniform, waitress' uniform, security uniform et cetera). They shadow George at all times, seemingly making clothing changes in seconds to keep up.
What Is Going On?
It's complicated.....
Some of the gems from the 1996 incident were chronos crystals and they were 'energised' during the fire. This has led to the hotel developing a number of temporal 'weak points'.
The crystals have combined with the psionic echoes of those killed to create "ghosts" in the form of insubstantial temporal echoes. So the hotel is actually haunted, four of the smuggler and a police officer still roam the building, mostly repeating their actions, but sometimes they accumulate enough 'psychic energy' to interact with others.
The gems are actually still in the hotel, hidden in a compartment in large red crystal orb that was saved from the fire. It was to be installed in the new casino, but was forgotten about and is in storage.
But there are a couple more layers.
'George Tudor' is actually Herbert George Wells. Yes that Wells.
He's responsible for the 'monkey man' which is actually a juvenile creature from Earth's future, one of the beings Wells called Morlocks.
Wells brought back some chronos crystals from his sojourn on Karfel, large, synthetic ones. Being a curiously-minded Victorian of a scientific bent, he experimented with them before passing them on to a friend of his named Ashleigh Sinclair.
She became 'The Time Traveller' and demonstrated her device to Wells. He ended up 'borrowing' it from her suburban London house and (after a number of escapades) accidentally brought a Morlock from the distant future back to nineteenth-century London century.
The creature attacked him in transit and they struggled until the Morlock was pushed out the time machine's field.
Since then he has been hopping forwards and backwards in time searching for the beast in order to return it to its rightful time. Preferably without Sinclair finding out.
The crystals stolen in 1996 and brought to the hotel were created from one of those that Wells gave to Sinclair and carry a sort of temporal link. Hence the Morlock arrived in the hotel when an accident in the casino's electrical system 'energised' them again.
The Morlock's natural agility and dark fur have allowed it to escape detection most of the time, while it raids food from the kitchen and leftovers from hotel room service trays.
On a couple of occasions (one only a week before the UNIT team arrive) it had slipped into a room when the door was not closed properly and proceeded to "raid the fridge" until the occupant returned. Cornered and scared, the Morlock howled a challenge at the occupant (one Mr. Terrance Johnson) and charged. Johnson fainted from fear and the Morlock escaped.
The Morlock is hiding in the service elevator shafts and vents during the day and foraging at night.
George's shadows are actually one person. A Time Agent (not yet a renegade) who uses the codename 'Michael'. They're actually a woman from the late 22nd century (post-Dalek invasion) named Nurul Mercado who was recruited by the Agency and is considered an elite agent.
Her mission is to follow George whenever he goes, protect him, and clean up after him.
The Time Agency believes its whole system of travel is based upon the work of Wells and Sinclair and want him safe. They will do nothing, and Mercado/Michael will intervene to protect George, no matter what he does.
Mercado/Michael is equipped with an excellent 60th century shimmer, using textured force fields, and can switch appearances in less than a second. She’s also got an excellent sensor-mask and a number of other gadgets.
Have fun!
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?
The Golden Oasis.
UNIT's ever churning information gathering systems have spat out an oddity. Actually they spat it out last year but, well, it didn't seem important and no-one got around to checking it out. Then a change of management meant that someone had to be found to investigate a haunted casino.
The computer has compiled a dossier for the agents, but it's full of fairly insubstantial incidents. However overall they suggest something odd is happening in a US hotel and casino called The Golden Oasis.
History.
The Golden Oasis, a relatively small casino was constructed on the site of a far better known casino, the Sapphire Orb, which burned down in 1996 following a police raid.
- The location for the casino is unspecified, presumably Louisiana, Nevada (though not Los Vagas, maybe Reno?), Atlantic City or Deadwood.
The Sapphire Orb was widely believed, in law enforcement circles, to be a Mafia front for payoffs and money laundering (it was) and was raided by a multi-agency team in 1996. There was an incident on the sixth floor and a mysterious fire started (police claim it was set by criminals as a diversion, others are less sure and blame police pyrotechnics) and engulfed the building (poor fire safety). In the end nine employees, two guests and five police died.
The legal action took two decades but the Golden Oasis opened four year ago.
Some investigation, which could be as simple as finding the names of the LE personnel involved in the investigation and phoning them, yields another fact: the casino was strongly believed to act as a front for a large-scale jewel smuggling and fencing operation. The raid was planned when police, and Federal agencies, finally got a reliable tip that a shipment of stolen gems was due to pass through the hotel. The police acted on the tip and raised the casino in force. When the smugglers found themselves surrounded by police they panicked and tried to escape, setting the fire as a diversion (or it started accidentally through indiscriminate use of flash/bangs and 'burning' gas grenades).
- The Federal agencies involved disconnected themselves from responsibility as quickly as they could manage.
A team of ten operatives was sent to the sixth floor to storm the stronghold where the gems were being kept, there was extensive gunfire exchanged (police claim at least fifteen people fired on them) and only five agents emerged alive, three with gunshot injuries.
Interestingly two of the agents suffered serious shock from unknown causes and were medically retired after the raid.
Gossip on the 'net, from employees, guests and locals, states very definitely that the hotel is haunted.
Since the Oasis was built there have been scores of reports of "supernatural" activity in the hotel, including:
- loud arguments and fights heard coming from empty rooms
- reports of corpses found in hallways that vanish when security is called (there are some blurry camera pics of possible bodies)
- customers "losing" hours of time
- jewellery disappearing from locked rooms
- claims of guests being attacked by "giant ape creatures" in their rooms
- people meeting friends who later show no memory of the meeting
- sightings of a 'monkey man' in quiet corridors and service passages
Careful checking by UNIT will show that at least four people have checked in to the Golden Oasis and then never been seen again.
- The management is rather eager to to attract attention by having guests disappear and has covered up these incidents.
On-site investigation.
The team are briefed, and then briefed by a bean-counter about UNIT's expenses policy. Then they're left to device their cover stories and identities and sent to <CITY> to check things out.
The Golden Oasis is a modest ten story building. The three lower floors a casino, three restaurants, a gym and spa (with an Olympic sized pool) and the usual facilities.
The upper seven floors contain 100 rooms (twenty on floors 3-7), eight larger suites on the 9th floor, and four very large suites on the top floor. There are three underground levsl for plant and parking.
The hotel is owned by Golden Oasis Ventures Limited, a Delaware company owned by a Canadian company. Then ownership records gets complicated....
Once they're ensconced in the hotel and have checked in with UNIT they can discover the following:
1. 'Monkey man' sightings are commonplace. Most long serving staff have seen him/her/them. Descriptions vary but (overall) they appear to resemble bipedal orang-utans with mid-brown fur, distinctly human style scalp hair and large eyes. They are blamed for disappearing room service orders and various thefts. Hotel security have responded to the sightings but seem unenthusiastic about confronting the creatures.
Some guests have also seem him/her/them and seem to believe it is a publicity stunt by the casino management. This is a cover story.
2. [Optional] One of the UNIT agents will, at some point in the investigation, spot two 'Persons of Interest' leaving the hotel and travelling across the road to the Lucky Clover casino.
If the agents investigate the sighting, they can find (by hacking the hotel's insecure computer system or asking/bribing staff) that the people they spotted are staying in the hotel, booked in for two weeks, under assumed named.
The rooms were paid for in advance, but the record of how the rooms were paid for seems to be missing....
- This is a red herring. The operatives are on holiday but were told not to gamble in the Golden Oasis, it's owned (through a complex network of shell corporations) by their boss.
3. The UNIT personnel are not the only people looking for clues and asking questions about the events of '96, and especially the 'monkey man'.
A well dressed man in his forties with an upper-class English accent, wearing various old-fashioned tweed suits and booked in under the name of 'George Tudor' is prowling the hotel, interviewing the staff and guests asking about dates, times and locations of sightings.
He claims to be an author writing a book about the history of the 1976 incident.
- Th passport (if checked) is genuine though if UNIT-UK search very carefully they'll find the application has been faked, with great care, twenty years ago and renewed since then.
4. 'George' also has a tail; staying always just within sight of Mr. Tudor is another person or team (men and women have been seen). Several hours of examination of the CCTV shows three women and two men, in various outfits (business suits, sundress, staff uniform, waitress' uniform, security uniform et cetera). They shadow George at all times, seemingly making clothing changes in seconds to keep up.
What Is Going On?
It's complicated.....
Some of the gems from the 1996 incident were chronos crystals and they were 'energised' during the fire. This has led to the hotel developing a number of temporal 'weak points'.
The crystals have combined with the psionic echoes of those killed to create "ghosts" in the form of insubstantial temporal echoes. So the hotel is actually haunted, four of the smuggler and a police officer still roam the building, mostly repeating their actions, but sometimes they accumulate enough 'psychic energy' to interact with others.
- It's noticeable that they walk a few centimetres about the floor, the old building was constructed differently
The gems are actually still in the hotel, hidden in a compartment in large red crystal orb that was saved from the fire. It was to be installed in the new casino, but was forgotten about and is in storage.
But there are a couple more layers.
'George Tudor' is actually Herbert George Wells. Yes that Wells.
He's responsible for the 'monkey man' which is actually a juvenile creature from Earth's future, one of the beings Wells called Morlocks.
Wells brought back some chronos crystals from his sojourn on Karfel, large, synthetic ones. Being a curiously-minded Victorian of a scientific bent, he experimented with them before passing them on to a friend of his named Ashleigh Sinclair.
- Once this detail comes out any time traveller will be very interested and worried. Sinclair was the inventor (well, sort-of) of the Sinclair Field, one of the most common time travel techniques. Messing with her could be more disruptive than changing Wells' life.
She became 'The Time Traveller' and demonstrated her device to Wells. He ended up 'borrowing' it from her suburban London house and (after a number of escapades) accidentally brought a Morlock from the distant future back to nineteenth-century London century.
The creature attacked him in transit and they struggled until the Morlock was pushed out the time machine's field.
Since then he has been hopping forwards and backwards in time searching for the beast in order to return it to its rightful time. Preferably without Sinclair finding out.
- It would not do for her to think time travel too dangerous and destroy the machine. She has a destiny.
The crystals stolen in 1996 and brought to the hotel were created from one of those that Wells gave to Sinclair and carry a sort of temporal link. Hence the Morlock arrived in the hotel when an accident in the casino's electrical system 'energised' them again.
The Morlock's natural agility and dark fur have allowed it to escape detection most of the time, while it raids food from the kitchen and leftovers from hotel room service trays.
On a couple of occasions (one only a week before the UNIT team arrive) it had slipped into a room when the door was not closed properly and proceeded to "raid the fridge" until the occupant returned. Cornered and scared, the Morlock howled a challenge at the occupant (one Mr. Terrance Johnson) and charged. Johnson fainted from fear and the Morlock escaped.
The Morlock is hiding in the service elevator shafts and vents during the day and foraging at night.
George's shadows are actually one person. A Time Agent (not yet a renegade) who uses the codename 'Michael'. They're actually a woman from the late 22nd century (post-Dalek invasion) named Nurul Mercado who was recruited by the Agency and is considered an elite agent.
Her mission is to follow George whenever he goes, protect him, and clean up after him.
The Time Agency believes its whole system of travel is based upon the work of Wells and Sinclair and want him safe. They will do nothing, and Mercado/Michael will intervene to protect George, no matter what he does.
Mercado/Michael is equipped with an excellent 60th century shimmer, using textured force fields, and can switch appearances in less than a second. She’s also got an excellent sensor-mask and a number of other gadgets.
Have fun!
Comments? Ideas? Suggestions?