Adventure Seed: Snakes on a Plane.

There are days when the Conspiracy really has to earn its corn, and yesterday was one of them.  Short version: yesterday morning three aliens suddenly materialized out of nowhere in the middle of a red-eye airline flight from London to Washington, DC.  The aliens then reacted in time-honored fashion by looking around frantically, screaming in terror, and then two of them locking themselves in the bathroom (not as tight a fit as you might think: see below).  The third apparently instead simply had a cardiac event and died.

Needless to say, agents from the Shadow Government was on hand by the time the plane landed for cleanup. A digression, here: it is actually quite rare these days that somebody Who Saw Too Much ends up getting ‘disappeared.’  Money works quite well as an incentive, particularly when it’s matched to a job offer (a surprising number of people wouldn’t mind working for the Bavarian Illuminati, as long as the dental’s good*). So is trading silence for a favor (your nephew Timmy needs a scholarship, huh?).  And then there’s the quote-unquote ‘memory eraser.’  Thanks to those movies, people ask these days if they can have the last four hours of their lives removed. It’s trusted technology to the masses, even though the memory eraser doesn’t even officially exist! And they wondered why the MiB let that movie series get greenlit…

Digression over.  The aliens in question are – well, they basically look like big snakes.  No venom, head is longer to accommodate a bigger brain, tail has some extremely funky things on the end of it that allows the aliens to manipulate their environment… but if you look at one, you’re going to think ‘Yup. That’s a giant snake.’ They’re not aggressive, per se: but even though nobody can speak their language yet it’s fairly clear that they’re terrified out of their minds. Fortunately, a hasty autopsy of the dead snake-man (there were glares when the name ‘Reptoid’ was tentatively suggested at the Ad Hoc Working Group meeting. Glares) indicated that they could digest our food, at least.  

Of course, it took a couple of tries before the aliens made it clear that they like meat and vegetables cooked, which hopefully gives people an idea of just how scrambling and improvisational the Shadow Government is being, here.  This isn’t the first time that aliens have shown up on Earth, and it isn’t even the first time that aliens have shown up unexpectedly.  It is, however, rare that aliens show up unexpectedly to everybody, including the aliens themselves.

As you might have gathered already, in this scenario the Conspiracy is not particularly awful, ethically speaking: but it likes things to be tidy. Or at least not inexplicable. So it’s going to devote some resources to figuring out this mess, and hopefully figure out how to get the aliens back home and talking about all those nice humans who tried to be helpful so maybe you shouldn’t send a planet-buster bomb through the portal because of the autopsy because they didn’t kill our friend, after all.  …Not that the Conspiracy knows that there’s a planet-buster bomb and a society that can use it on the other side of said (hypothetical) portal, of course. But what if there is?

And that’s where the party comes in.  Their job is to figure out what happened, how it happened, and how to make it happen/not happen at will. Maybe the Neo-Ophidian (the Working Group finally got a preliminary report done) incursion was linked to the plane, maybe it’s linked to a particular spot high above the Atlantic Ocean, maybe it’s irrelevant. Either way, it’s now the party’s obligation to figure out how those snakes got on that plane…

*The dental is amazing.