CoC - Delta Green - I Have Seen the Yellow Sign.pdf

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Have Seen

the Yellow Sign

Secret History of the King in Yellow

and Delta Green

The infection of thought called

the

King in Yellow

predates the Delta Green organiza-

tion. Since it came to the Delta Green’s attention in 1951, it has been a particularly

sore point in the group’s mandate. While forces of the unnatural remain difficult to

contain, most entities are confined or bound to some concept of physics.

The King in

Yellow

exists and thrives in the mind.

A Note About

Access

Many of the facts presented here exist only in the minds of survivors of operations

against the horrors of the King in Yellow. They do not speak lightly about what they

saw. Their survival was predicated on not letting such insanity settle in their minds—on

not letting it use them to transport the “infection”.

Official records on the subject were purged at various times in the group’s histo-

ry, leaving behind only ashes and fragments. Of course there is always the possibility

that a war record, a box of papers, or even an entire file cabinet was overlooked and

lost in the shuffle of Delta Green leadership; which, once discovered and investigat-

ed, might start the chain of exposure once more.

The First Known Outbreak (1895)

The first documented identification of the concepts associated with the

King in Yellow

occurred in France in the summer of 1895. Over two hundred people were mur-

dered, committed suicide, or vanished during this time, including two members of

the government who fell under its influence.

In Paris it rose like a blight in the form of a short, three-act play,

The King in Yel-

low,

bound in a small black book that was passed from artist to artist. It infected those

who read it with madness and death until the government launched a crackdown.

Copies of the book were collected and burned. In that time the work was given

special scrutiny by the

Deuxième Bureau,

a French intelligence group which investi-

gated the martial maneuvers of France’s enemies. They discovered the work did not,

as is widely believed, originate in France at all.

Actual Origins

American soldiers found

Deuxième Bureau

records of the Paris crackdown in July

1944 in a looted villa called the

Mansion des

Portes.

Delta Green confiscated them

from the U.S. general war records in 1951.

The records say the play was “translated” into French, indicating it had come from

somewhere

before.

There is no mention of the language it was translated from, or the

name of the country or city of origin. A single typewritten copy of the play itself was in

this file.

There are no confirmed records of earlier outbreaks or of the actual source of the

play. The author of the book is always referred to as “X” or “the Author” and his or her

country of origin is never indicated. Where the play was before 1895 Paris, no one

knows. But parallels between the play and ancient human legends which were no-

ticed by Delta Green over the following years.

Themes in Anthropology

The Mohegan Indians have tales of a

Hobomack,

an evil creature which can “replace”

a shaman by tearing off his face and putting it on as a mask to assume his appear-

ance. When the

Hobomack

arrives, it is to announce the end of the tribe and its lead-

ership in a great story, and to bring about chaos, death and destruction in as subtle a

way as possible by spreading lies and turning one against another. When confronted

or revealed, this entity claims to “wear no mask”. All these elements (the story, the

mask) mimic the King In Yellow legend.

That was only the first. Delta Green found

hundreds

of such stories from all

around the world that conformed with these elements and seemed to follow the skein

of the play

The King in Yellow.

Delta Green is not certain of the relationship between the play and those ancient

legends. Perhaps the play reflects deep-seated human truths which arise no matter

the culture, over and over again, like a cancer of thought. It remains there, forever on

the edge of erupting into the world from many different cultures, times and ideas. It is

never truly gone.

Scattered copies of

The King

Yellow

still exist, hidden throughout the world.

Each represents a potential outbreak of murder and suicide.

Since the 1890s

The King in Yellow

has appeared in twenty languages in random,

small-print-run limited editions.

In 1952 it appeared in English for the first time in the so-called

Red Book,

a thin,

red leather book marked with an odd, undulating symbol that was known, despite the

book’s coloring, as the Yellow Sign. The

Red Book’s

existence was not noticed by the

group until 1953.

These outbreaks led to the STATIC protocol, with which Delta Green attempted

to destroy the work wholesale.

Since that general order, which persisted until the dissolution and decentraliza-

tion of Delta Green in 1970 (and continued in isolated cells of the conspiracy), many

copies of

The King in Yellow

have been located and destroyed. But it seems the work

is never done.

After all, it is difficult to truly kill a nightmare.

The Secret of

The

Red Book

It did not go unnoticed that the first known appearance of the

Red Book

in America

occurred nine months after Delta Green came into possession of the files of the

Deuxième Bureau.

A secret internal investigation failed to find an agent responsible,

though a new level of paranoia settled into the group’s leadership. That led directly

to the STATIC protocol.

STATIC (1955)

In 1955, Delta Green was involved in an incident in New York City called Operation

BRISTOL. It was a disaster with a body count similar to the 1895 Paris outbreak, fo-

cused around a failed off-Broadway play called

Her Grey Song.

Nearly nothing re-

mains on the record, though some survivors linger.

From the ruins of this operation, Delta Green’s leaders established the STATIC

protocol.

The STATIC protocol says:

1. Works referencing the Yellow Sign, the King in Yellow, Hali, Carcosa, Hastur,

Yhtill, Cassilda, Camilla, the Pallid Mask, etc., are

TO BE DESTROYED.

2. Those who produce such works are to be eliminated. Those who seem

influ-

enced

by the work are to be contained or eliminated at the agent’s discretion.

3. An agent’s exposure must be reported to the group, who will then decide up-

on a response.

4. Agents not exposed to such elements on these ops become the point of con-

tact with the group. They must remain separate from the main investigative

arm, acting in a supporting role.

5. Agents violating any of these protocols are to be assumed active threats and

are to be dealt with appropriately.

The second, more secret portion of the STATIC protocol is the so-called “shadow

team”. Upon activation of the STATIC protocol, a second group of experienced

agents were activated to covertly observe the first Delta Green team. If things got out

of hand, the shadow team was there to remove the threat through any means possi-

CoC - Delta Green - I Have Seen the Yellow Sign.pdf

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