Adventure seed: Operation Schatten Rache.

Blame this:

Operation Schatten Rache

By 1943, of course, the writing was on the wall for the Third Reich. As in, literally: on September 19th, 1943, a glowing message in an unknown alphabet appeared on the interior walls of every occult research center in Nazi Germany. A formal translation of that message was never successfully done; but, given that staring at said message for any length of time by a member of the Nazi party caused the cerebral cortex of said Nazi to explode (again, literally)… the ultimate meaning seemed fairly clear in context.

This, fortunately, managed to convince the remaining occult strength of the Third Reich to concentrate their efforts in one last, preferably vicious, great strike against the Allies. ‘Fortunately’ is used in this case because the alternative – a long, drawn out magical guerrilla war – probably would have worked out better for the Nazis; but that would have not been nearly dramatic enough for their purposes. Besides, better to end it all at once, rather than slowly perish through attrition, yes?

Thus, Operation Schatten Rache (“Shadow Vengeance”). The plan was deceptively simple: the Nazi occult had access to a prototype Arado AR E.555 long-range jet bomber (mundane history reports that none were ever built, but mundane history doesn’t know everything), and they had a variety of highly dangerous thaumatological artifacts that, if not handled carefully, could devastate a countryside. So the Nazis rigged all of them to explode, put them on the Arado, and sent it to England. To ensure that the bomber got through, the occultists also used a ritual that would turn the plane intangible to radar: it was assumed that between that, the bomber’s speed, and the willingness of its crew to die for the Occult Reich, the mission had a good chance of success.

And, to be fair, it probably would have worked… if it wasn’t for the minor detail that Nazis were actually not very good at occultism. It’s the standard problem for researchers in a totalitarian regime: to wit, when your research needs to come up with the ‘acceptable’ answer, not the ‘correct’ one – and when failure to do that will probably earn you a bullet in the back of the head – you end up with bad science. Or, in this case, bad magic. The ritual worked perfectly well to make the plane intangible to radar. It also made it intangible to everything else. And the ritual did not have any provision for making the plane tangible again, either. In fact, the plane is still up there.

The good news for the crew of the plane is that their dimensional shift keeps them from feeling the effects of age and is somehow keeping their bodies alive, if that actually means anything in this context. The bad news for the crew is they’ve been stuck in a spatial loop over England since the spring of 1944, in full awareness of what’s going on – and with no hope for release. Madness would be a blessing, really – except that their sanity stubbornly remains. They’re not even visible unless the plane happens to be in the vicinity of an electrical strike. And, of course, no-one in the three-man crew knows enough about magic to figure out how to end the loop.

Needless to say, the British occult government agencies do know how to end the loop at this point. When you have the magical equivalent of several dirty atomic warheads floating up there in the sky, you quickly work out how it happened, and why. What the British are unsure about is whether it’s a good idea to end the loop just yet. After all, there’s a faint chance that they can’t immediately and safely destroy the plane, once it’s been made tangible again. The plane is obviously not going anywhere, so best to line up a perfect shot first, yes?

What’s that? ‘Shouldn’t they save the crew?’ How droll.