The Ouroboros Cycle

Step 001/13

Earlier

— - —

The proceedings came to order in the back room of an abandoned Somali warehouse.

Calvin sat at the head of a long plastic folding table, quietly picking at a fingernail. At the other end of the table were huddled the seven members of Delta Command, the high council of the Chaos Insurgency. Calvin had almost rolled his eyes when he’d been ushered into the room - for all their soaring rhetoric, they were still unable to come up with anything more substantial than dusty old buildings and cheap plastic furniture to conduct their business in.

Delta Command, he knew, had been formed by the Engineer to bring together the seven squabbling branches of what had once been called “The Insurgency”. Each of the seven groups sent a representative to Delta, and together they formed the larger resistance. The name was a joke, of course. According to legend, the Engineer had nearly given up trying to coordinate the bickering factions by saying “never in history has a more chaotic insurgency been mishandled into existence.” The name stuck, though Delta thought that “Chaotic Insurgency” wasn’t nearly distinguished enough. Thus, the Chaos Insurgency.

None of these people liked each other, nor did they care for Calvin. He’d had a distinguished career as a CI agent, first supporting and later leading larger attacks on the Foundation. He, like all those within the Insurgency, knew their place in the world; the purpose of the Insurgency hadn’t ever been to destroy the Foundation, just act as a check against it. A constant thorn in their side, never allowing the Foundation to become too complacent. If they were focused on the Insurgency, the logic followed, they wouldn’t be able to do as much damage elsewhere. Thus far, this strategy hadn’t panned out.

But Calvin was exceptionally good at his job, and was less a thorn and more a hacksaw in the gut of the Foundation. His contributions to the Insurgency’s goals had brought him swiftly through their ranks, and at one point in the recent past he had been considered as the next member from his faction to join Delta. Shortly beforehand, however, he was accused of mishandling Insurgency resources - limited though they were - in a raid on a Foundation site holding several potentially magical texts.

Although the investigation against his actions hadn’t amounted to anything of note, the incident came at the absolute wrong time, and he was passed over for ascension to Delta in place of a mid-level bureaucrat who had previously been a junior congressman for the state of New Jersey, Howard Kowalski.

Coincidentally, it was Howard Kowalski who spoke first.

“Good afternoon, uh, Calvin,” the portly man said, balancing a pair of thin glasses on the end of his pointed snout. “We appreciate you, uh, making the trip out here. As you know, we’re in the middle of uh, renovations, to Delta Command Headquarters-”

This was, of course, a joke. Delta maintained that their former commander center, the one built by the Engineer himself, was being renovated, necessitating the empty warehouses and dingy back-alley gatherings of the group. It was a public secret that the building had been leveled by the Global Occult Coalition nearly three decades prior, though Delta refused to acknowledge this.

“-so this will have to do, I think. Yes.” He nodded, and tapped a stack of papers against the desk. “I guess what we’re most curious about here, Calvin, is this uh, well, this document we hear you’ve recovered.” He leaned forward, the glare from a lamp catching his glasses as he peered over the stack of papers. “The journal. Do you have it?”