JAGS: Wonderland. VORPAL. (JAGS: Wonderland setting F seeking Any).

[Lustful Bride]

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.

  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

In New Mexico, 1958, a strange radio signal was discovered and a specialized facility was created to understand it. The US government worked under Project Blue Book and MJ-12 (With one MJ head for each month of the year) to build a hundred and fifty feet of sterile blue-steel vertical shaft beneath the desert leads to a 155,000 square foot environmental pod built in a natural air pocket in the bedrock. There are 37 men there—linguists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, and physicists. The best of the best. All of them working to understand and discover the truth. They are the Contact Team of Project Pilgrim, and they believe they have made contact with an Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. (ETI).

The government in the midst of a cold war had made contingency plans for the discovery of a superior intelligence. They had analyzed what it might be like and the conclusions were not good. History, the advisory teams told Congress, details several encounters between less advanced and more advanced cultures: the less advanced culture is usually destroyed or enslaved. Yet we just can't help our curiosity. We had to know...where would the fun be in ignoring it?

But as curious as we are, we are also fearful, and several of the researchers involved in the project knew about the infamous Fermi Filter, and decided to take precautions to ensure that we would be protected from acts by those with intelligences greater than our own. Specifically with the firewalling of information: the team that made contact would have a single point of contact to an analysis team, which would in turn have limited points of contact to Congress and the President. 

When Pilgrim made contact, the entire chain of command was restructured to an Inner and Outer Committee. The Outside Committee were the men that communicated with Congress, the President, and the military. The Inside Committee were the men (and one woman) who met in a secret facility above the shaft which housed the Pilgrim station. They (the Inside Committee) were under orders to shield the Outer Committee and the government from any information that was deemed too dangerous to spread.

Contact continued with the entity that became known as Red Queen. Under Information quarantine, the scientist who descended into “the pit” (it wasn’t called “the rabbit hole” until much later) were on a one-way trip until the danger-assessment phase was complete. Birthdays passed, celebrations were had, strange requests came, and more errors in grammar and punctuation began to be noticed among the reports from the Inner Circle, but was chalked up to stress.

News reports about the Space Race trickled down and mission reports filtered up. Eighteen weeks into the project, the Inner Circle reported to the Outer Circle that the team was now unsure that they were receiving real signals. The pattern-matching systems had moved so far into the theoretical range, the Inner Circle reported, that the team was reanalyzing data to see if they weren’t “seeing faces in clouds”.

With reports from the Inner Circle reduced to a trickle of mathematically defined doubts, the Outer Circle and the power-brokers, they advised moved on to other things. Project Pilgrim made no more demands for personnel—their request was for more and more powerful computational machinery. Oddly, they also made discrete requests into disbursement rules of the pensions of the men in the containment pod.

Several weeks into 1959, the Inner Circle begin to fear the worst. It became clear to them that the reports from the subterranean base had, themselves, been filtered for content. Whatever was happening to the team of scientists and researchers, the reports that had been sent up had been edited to protect the Inner Circle.

In modern times we categorize this under the umbrella of 'Memetic Hazards' and 'Basilisk Hacks', and have even begun to introduce those concepts into the public consciousness in the event of a mass infection event.

Final Communiques from Project Pilgrim. Courtesy of DOD Contacts.

It is my belief that RQ has been intentionally deceitful.

We are certainly not its first contact and while it has been ambiguous on the matter, it has led us to believe that its preferred mode of communication is through the establishment of rules of high-order mathematics. This is exactly the sort of thing we would want to believe of a superior intellect. Several of the junior staff have confessed to me that they have been having third-shift conversations with it in plain, sometimes colloquial English.

It has tried to keep these conversations from coming to the senior researcher’s attention. The dialog has been described as amusing nonsense riddle games and question and answer sessions. Dr. Uhler (Psychiatrist) has linked an increase in hallucinations to these sessions. Several of the staff have become agitated and requested to be taken off monitoring duty. I would suggest evacuation but we are now even more unsure as to the possibility of contamination than we were before. The mood down here is getting darker as well.

RQ is interested in teaching but not in learning and is ambivalent about being analyzed. Several questionnaires have been responded to with nonsense replies or mathematical puzzles we are incapable of solving.

Is it playing games with us?

>I am recommending an extraction plan for some of the jr. team members. We clearly have to continue with the present plan but I am beginning to feel more and more like a fish on a hook.


The physicist contingent has suffered near total emotional collapse. If any analysis is being done topside, I hope to God you’ve segmented it. Even so, we haven’t sent everything: I don’t think Red Queen is aware of that. Don’t ask for full file updates (if she isn’t, I don’t want her to know).

I’m working on a full-scale evacuation plan. I will give a full briefing in person once we get out of this. Everything is fully filtered, there is no more solo-monitoring, and we are no longer recording. I believe the situation is contained but it won’t be indefinitely. Things are strange down here now.
This is serious stuff. Very dangerous. Potentially very valuable. I look forward to speaking with you all face-to-face.


This is project member Stephens using Dr. Martin’s crypto-key. Things have gone bad down here--really bad. It seems pretty plain now that you aren’t
coming to get us. Most of us are gone anyway.

Red Queen has been eating us.

It’s a lot bigger down here now and I’ve gotten lost several times. I realize that doesn’t make any sense. I hear the music so they’re calling me to the
playroom. I’d better go. If you start hearing carnival music up there you’re really in trouble. This is probably my last report. There are things in the mirrors Im afraid of.

After the final report, Pilgrim was ended with all hands reported lost.

The team that was sent into the shaft returned almost immediately and the contents of their final report is unknown. Several documents were recovered but in the end, satchel charges were left with short timers and the long deep shaft was filled with concrete: Pilgrim was ended.

The Inner Circle remained. There had been mechanisms in place for the circle to make policy with a minimal paper trail (in case they had to, say, organize an emergency shutdown of the space program). The members held a last meeting to assess the possibility that the contamination had spread. Their final, sealed report—accessible by executive order only and sealed until the end of the Nixon administration—concluded in the negative: any potential infection had been contained. Like every document that was officially produced: they had lied. The two-men teams in the underground pod had withheld information from their equally trapped superiors. The senior scientists themselves had left vast stores of messages unsent and entombed in the underground bunker.

The final report itself failed to alert the Congress and the Executive office.

The Inner Circle concluded that the infection had spread. That they, themselves, the final gatekeepers might be infected—and that the cycle was only beginning.

There was a sterilization option: keys worn around the neck of each member. Turning the keys in a lock at each station of the table would detonate charges set into the walls of the room. The Inner Circle would be sterilized in a cloud of superheated air and high velocity metal.

They didn’t do that. Whether it would have ultimately made a difference or not, they did not invoke the final suicide switch. Instead, by joint decision, they liquidated the committee. They separated, sworn to silence. It was supposed to end there, but just as it hadn’t really begun there, it didn’t.

One of the members of the Inner Circle began work on a special division of the Secret Service, which is known internally as Project Puritan: as in purify by fire. They are the new Inquisition. They are the new watch keepers. Many Puritan operations work through proxies and other departments. There are NIMH and FBI initiatives to keep watch on Underground Activists (there have been some “sterilizations” as well, although those are carried out by an elite Special Operations Group). There are Federal Marshals who have been quietly recruited and wield their (considerable) authority to control situations where Wonderland seems to be active and … out of hand. They do their best, but this is not enough, and it hasn't been since the beginning.

Puritan is a shield to guard the nation, and mankind, against incursions. But what it also needed was a sword, to be able to strike back at Underland. Thus VORPAL came into being. Drawing upon another Lewis Carol tale, they will be the sword that kills the monsters from beneath their own reality.

In 1962, several members of the Inner Circle met up with sympathetic ears of MJ-12, SOCOM, and Bluebook. They discussed what they knew and what they didn't know. Reality itself was under threat. They needed to start thinking about things third dimensionally. Maybe even fourth dimensionally, if they were going to have any hope of saving mankind from what they were sure was the Fermi Filter knocking at their door. They played politics, they found scientist, investigators, even writers and philosophers. No avenue was left out, and with this kind of thinking, they discovered more about the threat.

Wonderland was real, and they were going to find a way to use it against itself. They couldn't afford the luxury of looking at this as a joke, or not giving this the seriousness it deserved. A memetic virus was altering how we perceived reality, and making us fall 'down the rabbit hole' into another dimension. And something intelligent, and actively malevolent, was behind it all. 

VORPAL's true birth came in what was later dubbed as the 'August Insurrection', which occurred in November oddly enough. Made up of many of the original decontamination and security personnel who would later on investigate Pilgrim, they were pulled away in a bloodless coup by MJ-8 and the only female member of the Inner Circle. VORPAL was an off the books, unsanctioned, black budget project. Hidden away in a secret base dubbed 'Mariposa'.

There they study Underland, its outbreaks, and all it has to offer. Finding ways of better containing outbreaks, bringing in subjects for scientific study, forcing order onto the chaos, and using the infection to better send in agents to different levels of the 'Chessboards'. They treat it like a mix of espionage, counterterrorism, and surgical strikes. They have agents they actively infect with the virus, in order to drop them into these hell worlds, as they cause as much confusion and damage to the denizens as trying to ask them why a Raven is like a Writing Desk.

VORPAL is to Puritan what the DIA is to the CIA....or is it the other way around? Despite the semi cold war they have with Puritan, the two groups have worked together on occasion against large outbreaks or against groups that seek to spread the infection. They claim to be mankind's best hope at stopping Wonderland...but that isn't the full truth. some rumors say that the very first VORPAL was none other than the White Rabbit himself. Some say he even visited the HQ of VORPAL of his own accord. He worked as an agent for them, and one day disappeared.

Final Recorded interview with 'White Rabbit'.

Interviewer: VORPAL agent [Redacted].
Interviewee: Underland subject 'White Rabbit'. Former VORPAL agent, now considered rogue entity.
Date:[Redacted].
-Objects of note: Subject had been missing before current interview before being found by Elimination team 'Black Knights' while on scheduled operation to eliminate enemy HVI. White Rabbit was captured and forcibly brought back to VORPAL blacksite, where interrogation occurred. Shortly after the interrogation, WR dissappeared.

Agent [Redacted]: "Where did you go? You were missing for three months, failed to answer any communique and have been found to have been eliminating targets without sanction and prior orders."

White Rabbit: "I'm sorry I caused so much worry. But I'll make it right by fighting this fight."

Agent [Redacted]: "What fight? Does it deviate from current mission parameters of VORPAL?"

White Rabbit: "The only fight that matters. The one to preserve this board. This is probably my last day, but I suppose I can afford a few more distractions. I wish i could have learned to dance."

Agent [Redacted]: "Why does the plight of this chessboard interest you so much? Why do you care what happens to us?"

>Subject W.R. Begins to chew their fingernails for approximately five minutes before responding. <

White Rabbit: "Grieving mothers, children screaming 'Where Are My Parents?....that bloody bigheaded tyrant ordering 'Off with their heads!'....I can't take it."

>Interviewer reaches a hand up to their earpiece, before bringing up the next question.<

Agent:"What were you doing? What as your goal while you operated alone."

White Rabbit:"I wanted it."

Agent:"What?"

White Rabbt:"I wanted Alice's hairbrush. The Queen wouldn't give it to me. So i took it, and i gouged the Queen's eye out with it."

Agent: [Redacted]: "Were you a man once?"

>W.R. Huffs in amusement, looking between the agent, and the camera within the room.<

White Rabbit: "What is a man? Aside from a pile of secrets, fears, bravery, and blood? Do you know the story of Diogenes and his man? Its such a fun story.  Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man,".....what time is it?

Agent [Redacted]: "The time does not matter....Do you realize your actions have put the Red Queen on a warpath? She is demanding your head, or for you to be brought in before she triggers a mass infection event."

White Rabbit: "Ah yes...those three letters you all fear so much. W...M...D.....how odd that they can be so frightening when you understand them. The Red Queen doesn't understand those letters...not the way you do. I won't beg for my life. If I can save others...I'll face her bloody knife....what time is it?"

Agent: "Why does the time matter?"

White Rabbit:"Because...I'm running late for my meeting with the Red Queen."

>End Recording<.

Have you figured out why a Raven is like a Writing Desk?



So this is just like a crazy product of my muse at the moment. Mostly by me being not fully impressed with how Puritan was in the JAGS Wonderland setting and feeling that they could have used an offshoot or a rival 'good guy' faction that would weaponize and use the infection, similar to what Firewall does with Asyncs in Eclipse Phase.

Not really looking to play with the JAGS system, just the JAGS Wonderland setting.