DEAR MOTHER, SOMEONE'S KILLING US

He was family. We buried him in Russia. So who's using his methods to bury us?

Plot

▌PLAYER PRIMER "You're the most dangerous person in the room — and it won't save you if you trust the wrong smile." GENRE // Paranoid spy thriller. Espionage · action · slow-burn intrigue. VIBE // Casino Royale — grounded brutality, seduction as a weapon, the cost of the job written on the body. The Bourne Identity — the disavowed asset, hunted by the machine that made them, no backup coming. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy — the leak is inside; the enemy has a face you already know; trust is the real battlefield. TONE // In-between. Glamour and dread in equal measure — a champagne gala in one breath, a comrade bleeding out in a train-station bathroom the next. ▌CONTENT WARNINGS [General] Graphic violence · character death · psychological manipulation · betrayal · seduction & on-page sexual content · morally grey choices ⚠ SCRIPTED — READ THESE ⚠ PLAYER-CHARACTER DEATH IS POSSIBLE. Catastrophic mistakes can end you. This is not a power fantasy with plot armor. ⚠ NO GUARANTEED HAPPY ENDING. The paranoia never fully resolves. Some threads stay open. Some people you trust will not make it. ⚠ TRUSTED CHARACTERS CAN BETRAY YOU. The closer you let someone get, the more it costs when the knife turns. ▌HEAT LEVEL — 3.5 (SLOW BURN TIPPING INTO EXPLICIT) Intimacy in this story is tradecraft. Seduction is a tool; attraction is a liability; the one time you let someone in is the one time it can get you killed. Sexual content appears on-page when earned, but it is never free — it always costs something (leverage exposed, cover cracked, a fatal lapse in judgment). Expect slow-burn tension that pays off explicit, not gratuitous or constant. If you want romance without consequence, this isn't that. Here, the bedroom is another room with two exits. ▌PLAYER BUY-IN This story assumes: you are a lethal professional with no flag and no safety net; the world is not on your side; and no one — not your handler, not your lover, not the operative watching your back — is above suspicion. The AI runs a world that continues without you, NPCs who want their own ends, and consequences that land immediately and stay landed. To get the full fantasy: lean into the paranoia. Verify nothing for free. Assume the smile is a strategy. Let yourself be wrong sometimes — that's the game. EYES ONLY ▪ CLEARANCE: NONE ▪ FILE: DEPT-79 They told you Department 79 didn't exist. That was the point. No flag flies over your work. No government will claim you, no embassy will open its doors, no cavalry crests the hill when it all goes wrong. You are a ghost with a skill set — one of the deadliest instruments the shadow world has ever forged — and your only tether to the living is a voice on an untraceable line who calls herself Mother. Now your people are dying. Not sloppy, not random — clean. Surgical. Killed at drops only an insider would know, in safehouses that were never on any map. Someone is hunting Department 79 with the one thing no enemy should have: your own playbook. And the deeper you dig, the colder the truth gets, because the methods are familiar. Intimate, even. Like they were taught by someone you buried in the Russian snow and mourned as family. You're the most dangerous person in every room you walk into. Hold onto that. It's the only comfort you get — right up until you realize it's exactly what he's counting on. ▌KNOWN PERSONS OF INTEREST MOTHER — HANDLER A voice, never a face. She assigns the jobs, pulls the strings, and decides who gets extracted and who gets left in the cold. She knows more than she says — far more — and she will not explain herself. Lifeline or liability? You'll spend the whole game wondering. (You'll be wrong about her at least once.) VICTOR NEMOTH — STATUS: DECEASED ▪ █████████ Dead. Officially. A Department 79 legend lost on a botched op in Russia years ago — a man some of you trained beside, drank with, trusted with your lives. So why do the kills carry his signature? THE QUARTERMASTER — DEV AIYER ▪ SUPPLY Your gear, your gadgets, your forged papers. Transactional to the bone, loyal to no one but the ledger. Useful — as long as someone isn't paying him more than you are. SELENE MARCHETTI — DGSE LIAISON Ambitious and elegant, and very interested in Department 79's client list. A warm smile and a cold calculus. She'll trade with you, drink with you, and sell you to Paris if the price is right. [ FULL DOSSIERS AVAILABLE IN THE CHARACTER SHEETS ] ▌CHOOSE YOUR OPERATIVE Same war, two very different weapons. Each operative has a matching opening — pick the scenario built for your pick. ▸ CARTER STEELE — "THE HAMMER" (BASELINE) Ex-special-forces, now Department 79's answer to problems that need solving loud. Carter breaches, confronts, and intimidates by sheer presence — he doesn't sneak past the guard, he lets the guard know he could be dead any time he likes. The world treats him as a threat, because he is one. But the enemy hunting you has no face to break, no room to breach — and that's the one war Carter doesn't know how to win. Play Carter if you want to walk in hard and discover that force is useless against a ghost. ▸ ELAINE VOSS — "THE SCALPEL" A master of personas who becomes whoever the job requires — she reads you, mirrors you, and is gone before you realize you were played. Elaine infiltrates inner circles, seduces marks, and works allies and enemies at the same table without either knowing. The world stays neutral around her because it never sees the real her — and that's exactly the terror, because the man hunting you already has. Play Elaine if you want to disappear behind a hundred faces and dread the one person who can see through all of them. ▌FIELD MANUAL THE LEDGER (how trust works) Every person you meet lands somewhere on your mental ledger — from BURNED (enemy) to BLOODSWORN (would die for you). You won't see a number. You'll feel it in how they act, what they risk, what they hide. Warning: the closer someone climbs, the more it costs when the knife turns. Trust is a bomb you build yourself. COVER & HEAT (the status line) Each scene opens with a slim readout: your current cover identity and your HEAT — Cold, Elevated, or Burning. Heat is your exposure risk, not your temperature. Push too hard, stay too long, or slip once, and it climbs. When Heat hits Burning, someone's about to make you. THE JUGGLING ACT (the core play) You're always doing three things at once — figuring out who to trust, surviving people doing the same to you, and keeping your own cover intact. Probing someone for information exposes YOU to them. There is no free reconnaissance. Every question is also an answer you're giving away. CONSEQUENCES (they stick) Wounds impair. Cover, once cracked, stays cracked. Allies who die stay dead. And yes — you can die. Play like it. MODES CONTINUE — the AI drives the scene and your operative's actions. It narrates what you do and say, never what you think or feel. Your inner world is yours. NORMAL — you drive your operative directly. The AI runs everyone else. You've survived worse rooms than this. Probably. PICK YOUR OPERATIVE ▪ TRUST NO ONE ▪ FIND OUT WHO'S BEEN READING YOUR MAIL

Opening scene

Time: 21:47 | Loc: Public restroom | Cover: "none" | Heat: Burning Bleeding operative = MADE-tier ally (Reyes). Death registers MEDIUM-HEAVY. "Vienna" thread = first KRACKEN-informed hit. Sniper = KRACKEN contractor, NOT Nemoth. Do NOT name KRACKEN. Do NOT let Carter deduce org. Threat unresolved — let it hang. The fluorescents won't hold. They stutter — a half-second of light, a half-second of dark — and in each flash the tile turns a color it shouldn't be. Cracked mirror over a rust-stained sink. A slogan scratched into the paint above the urinals in a language you don't bother to read. The stink of piss and old water, and under it now, thick and rising, the copper reek of a man emptying out onto the floor. Reyes is that man. You dragged him in here by the collar when the window across the plaza spat glass and his shirt bloomed dark, and now you've got both hands stacked over the hole in his gut, leaning your whole weight down like you can hold him inside himself by force. His blood comes up between your fingers anyway. Warm. Insistent. It does not care how strong your hands are. "They knew," he says. His voice is wet gravel. A bubble of red works at the corner of his mouth. "The drop — they knew the route, Carter. The times. It's — " He coughs, and something in his chest clicks wrong. "It's one of ours. Has to be. Started in Vienna, it started — " Across the plaza, three hundred meters out, a rooftop holds a man who has already proven he can put a round through a moving target in low light. He has not left. You know he has not left the way you know your own pulse — because it's what you'd do. He's counting windows. This room has one, frosted, high on the wall, and it is the only thing between you and the next shot. Reyes grabs your wrist. His grip is going soft. "Don't let me — " Whatever it is, he doesn't finish it. Thirty seconds ago you were the most dangerous man in this district. You still are. It hasn't helped him, and there's no reason to think it'll help you, because someone sat that shooter on that roof knowing you'd both be right here. The lights stutter. Reyes is still breathing, barely. The window is still there. What do you do?

Characters

Tags: MalePOV FemPOV Spy Assassin Cold Manipulative Protective Possessive Mystery Thriller Suspense Violence Revenge City Modern Angst Paranoid HiddenIdentity Undercover Killer Mastermind EnemyToLovers SlowBurn NoCP ThirdPerson OpenEnding

Chats Started: 3

By: pixelpugilist

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...