The Menagerie (T.P Hu, 1982)
A Texas based exotic animal collector, ex-carnie and zoomaniac designed to push players into the swing of not gunning down every monster they meet, lest poor Chantelle gets upset and leaves them in the lurch.
This one collected the most number of votes at the 3rd annual Night at the Opera contest and won Top Unreliable Ally. I'm a little surprised (far moreso grateful) for people's support; I felt there was potential in there but a lot of stuff got left by the wayside in banging it out. So here's the proper one.
Parris took a drag on the blunt, passed it to McCallister. His breath coiled like gunsmoke into the night air, the stars above still visible despite the thick of the trees and the arc-lamps' glare. Both men were leaning against a black SUV, one of the convoy parked at the side of the woodland road, and they watched the other agents and technicians milling about, moving equipment, checking manifests. On the hillside, one of the search dogs howled. McCallister put his head back and replied. Someone told him to knock it off. He gave them the finger.
"Capture-team to me!" shouted the case officer. He'd been sitting in one of the jeeps, talking on the phone, but now he was out, arms swinging, limbering up like readying to run a marathon. McCallister offered the roach back to Parris, but the other man stubbed it out on the car's wheel-arch. It left an ugly black circle on the shiny paint. The rest of the capture-team were already forming a semi-circle around the case officer, listening. Shaking the cold and the tiredness out, the two men rose and joined them.
This was really just a formality. They'd heard it all already, what they were to do, what reconnaisance had gathered, what to be ready for - or rather, what the March boys told them to be ready for. Local law-enforcement had been pushed out to a three-mile cordon on the main roads, turning back cars. "Federal meth cookhouse hunt" was the official story, and everyone was wearing their DEA raid-jackets. Everyone except Parris, who'd stuck with his ATF duster. The
suits in Pasadena had made it plain after the shootout that he was getting the push, any excuse they had - zip, gone, no pension, no goodbye. He had another piss-test tomorrow, if he survived tonight. This would probably be the last time he'd get to wear his jacket. As far as he was concerned, twenty-two years meant he deserved it, no matter what some pencil-pusher in Pasadena might think. If they wanted it back, they could keep the bloodstains.
The case officer was talking and Parris hadn't heard what he'd been saying. Over the way a women stepped down from the command bus; pale and boney and stoney-expressioned. Her face was sharp as an axe, red hair forming an enormous bushel of unteased knots above her head. Under her federal windbreaker she was wearing a pair of dungarees - steel-toed boots crunching through the gravel and leaves. Blinking in the glare, face blank, her lips curved in a resting-bitch-face that made Parris uncomfortable.
"Team, meet Doolittle -" continued the case officer. He reached out to point at her with his clipboard and she flinched, involuntarily stepping back. Without a word she snatched the clipboard from his hands and began poring over it. "- Our xenobiologist," he finished. On the hillside the dogs rose again in chorus - a long, drawn out series of howls that went on and on, ululating in primitive warning or fear.
"What are the doggies for?" asked Doolittle, without looking up.
"They'll be acting as scouts," said the case officer. "We'll send them in first with cameras to map the tunnels - we've noticed they undergo an interesting psychological reaction when-"
"Oh no. No, no," said Doolittle. She shook her head, frizz of hair flapping like a hairy halo."Oh no. Those things eat dogs. Call the dogs back. I'm not having anything needlessly killed tonight."
Parris heard Odelle curse behind him. Doolittle evidently did too.
"Are these the best people you have?" she asked. Her eyes moved across the capture-team, taking in their faces with all the emotion of surveying a side of beef in a supermarket. Her bottom lip moved noiselessly for a moment as if she was pondering a complex math problem, and then she took a pair of spectacles from her pocket. They sat upon her upturned, freckled nose. The lenses did not reflect the light. The frames, in fact, had no lenses at all.
"This isn't my first Opera," said Odelle. Her combat-vest creaked ominiously as she brushed her hand over her freshly shaved head. The last of the stubble made a scratching noise beneath her fingerless gloves. "Even shaved my head for it. Unlike some people." Her eyes burned themselves at Doolittle's flowing locks. "You ever seen what happens when something gets its claws in your hair and pulls..."
"That's not going to happen," said Doolittle icily. "We're not going to threaten or hurt it so it's not going to hurt us unless we do something stupid. I won't be threatening it or doing something stupid, so I'm in no danger."
She slapped the clipboard into the case officer's chest. "Let's go."
"Uh..." he said. "Well, OK. You heard her: load-up - move out in five."
Grumbling, Parris and the rest stocked up at the weapon-buffet the techs had laid out for them on a couple tables. He slid two Glocks into his cross-holsters, grabbed an AR-15 and spare ammo. Gas-mask too. Out the corner of his eye he saw Doolittle beside him, bending over the table, scouring the objects on offer. He was going to ask if she needed help when she picked up a SIG, racked the slide to check the chamber was clear. Two spare magazines, a couple of tear-gas grenades. She must have seen him staring, because she looked him square in the eye, as if willing him to say something.
"Just didn't think you'd be needing a gun," he said. "Seeing as you were saying there was no chance you were going to make those things living up there ornery at you."
She looked away. "I also said that no one's going to get needlessly killed tonight. So if one of those things does decide to go for me..."
She dry-fired the pistol.
Parris grinned and turned to Odelle: "Y'know, this one might not be so bad after all."
Compared to the rather bland Google Doc, the link above is to a color PDF with pictures, semi-judicious - if probably imperfect - proofreading, a few new bits and pieces here and there (including how her skills work in-game and a possible campaign arc), plus some new gubbins for capturing and transporting critters. Everyone loves gubbins.
Brass-tacks wise, the genesis of Barrow lay in the question: "if the Program collect monsters, who do they use?" She subsequently crawled out of the imagination, near fully-formed. I've always liked the idea of someone who came at the Mythos from the other end of the drainpipe; rather than hunting them or wanting to use them for some sordid purpose, Barrow just wants to hug them and squeeze them and love them forever and forever.
Oddly, considering lot of "traditional" Lovecraftian horror (such as Margaret St. Clair's Horrer Howce and Lumley's The Fairground Horror) focuses on circuses as vectors for the unnatural - not necessarily in stereotypical racial or othering terms - few modern stories have dabbled in that. In the older stories at least, circuses and zoos were places Mythos animals/creatures often hid out without human interference. Barrow doesn't fulfil the tropes required for that - she is a collector, certainly not an ally hiding monstrosities from interlopers, a la The Shape of Water - though there's no reason you couldn't push her into full xeno-collaborator mode. If you did want to do that, I'd make her zoo something closer to Clive Barker's Midian - the "semi-mythical underground city that offers sanctuary to monsters and miscreants" in his novella Cabal and its movie "adaptation" Night Breed. She surrenders a few to Delta Green, but in recompense she's building her ark right under their noses. All very saccharine.
I am particularly pleased with Barrow's ability to offer bonuses or clues through skill-rolling. Far too often players have relied upon shonky Unnatural rolls to work out a beastie's potential. Now they can rely on a zoomaniac who will probably shoot them in order to save the monster. How fitting.
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