Third Eye Borg: Sublevel 9

A facility that exceeded its quota. A director who will not be buried. A chair that cannot be empty.A scenario scaffold for THIRD EYE BORG. Drop it into any Borg. Supply your own dying world.

THE FRAME

The world is not ending by prophecy. It is ending because too many minds have opened at once, and the only institution equipped to notice has spent six months pretending otherwise.

The Annex is a rest facility. A sanatorium. A place for tired workers to recover, says the brass plate by the door, which is newer than the building. It has nine sublevels. The lift panel shows four.

Six months ago the Director died. Nobody decided what to do about this, because deciding was not anyone's function — and a facility without a Director cannot issue orders, and a facility that cannot issue orders has failed its quota, and failing the quota was unthinkable. So the orders kept coming. The handwriting is the Director's. It has never been steadier. The orders have grown strange, then ambitious, then visionary. This quarter the Annex exceeded its awakening quota by forty percent. There is a certificate. It is signed.

The apparatus did not route around the empty chair out of cruelty. It simply could not tolerate the vacancy, so it found the nearest open mind and seated it. The new Director is asleep in Sublevel 9 under enough sedative to still a congregation, and is doing an excellent job.

THE REGISTER

This is not a place of secrets. It is a place of revisions. Nothing here is hidden behind a black bar — it is replaced with something more confident and less true. Every record has been amended in the same tired hand: old figures struck through, better figures written above. The dread is not what is under the redaction. The dread is that every document is sure of itself and wrong, and the surety is the threat.

Keep it absurd as well as grim. The terror here runs on the same engine as the comedy: people performing a confidence no one feels, terrified of contradicting a corpse, holding committee meetings about a man they are afraid to bury. Nobody is the villain. That is the worst part.

THE ANNEX

1. The Reception. A wall newspaper, freshly posted, congratulates the staff on a record quarter. The duty clerk has not blinked since Tuesday and stamps your intake form RECEIVED with today's date, which is wrong, and a six-month-old date, which is the day the Director died, which the clerk does not know and the stamp does.
2. The Hydrotherapy Floor. Suppressant in the pipes; the showers run cold dampener. All psi here is tough, and any power used triggers the system: everyone present takes a nosebleed's worth of DR for an hour. The tile is scored with fingernail marks. The marks have been buffed and re-buffed. The floor is, per the logbook, spotless.
3. The Records Office. Filing cabinets of amended documents. Reading any file aloud, you find your own voice correcting it to the falsified version mid-sentence. One folder has been re-typed so many times the paper is translucent. It has a worker's name on it. The worker is one of the PCs, and the file says they're doing very well.
4. The Workers' Dormitory. Forty staff in their bunks, asleep six weeks, faces serene. They cannot be woken and cannot be killed without every sleeper screaming the same word in unison. They are dreaming the night patrol, and the patrol is thorough, and it is making its quota.
5. The Director's Office. The Director at his desk, six months dead, hand still moving, signature flawless. The outbox overflows with orders. A committee of three department heads stands outside the door, none willing to be the one who opens it, each having drafted a memo recommending the others do so.
6. Sublevel 9. The new Director, a child, in a hospital bed beneath machinery that monitors nothing medical. The air pressure here is dream pressure. Everyone who enters tests Toughness DR12 or sleeps standing up. The child is, by every metric the Annex tracks, performing exceptionally.

THE QUOTA (the Leak engine)

The Annex has a target. The target is consensus — every mind in range dreaming the same dream — and the facility is ahead of schedule. Track this as a number starting at d4. It is not a containment meter. It is a production figure, and it only goes up.

It rises by 1 whenever:

• a PC gains a nosebleed inside the Annex,
• anyone dies inside the Annex,
• anyone touches the new Director,
• the dead Director's orders are disobeyed out loud.

Each time it rises, roll once on WHEN EVERYONE DREAMS THE SAME THING. At 10, the quota is met. Every sleeping mind within d20 miles wakes awakened, three nosebleeds deep, dreaming in unison. Somewhere a certificate prints itself. The frame stops being a frame.

WHEN EVERYONE DREAMS THE SAME THING (d8)

1. Everyone in the Annex wakes with the same nosebleed. One each. It counts toward your three. Management considers this acceptable wastage.
2. Every clock shows the moment of the Director's death and continues from there as though that were zero.
3. For d6 minutes everyone hears everyone else's inner monologue. Morale checks all round. The wall newspaper updates to congratulate the survivors.
4. A door from your childhood appears in a wall it was never in and opens onto Sublevel 9.
5. Every mundane within d6 miles dreams a PC's face and wakes afraid of it. Reactions at −4 until dawn.
6. The dead Director issues a new order and everyone present — PCs included — simply knows it. Toughness DR12 or comply for one hour.
7. One room (GM's choice) forgets gravity for d6 rounds. The incident is logged as a maintenance success.
8. Someone awakens. A random mundane NPC gains a random power, three nosebleeds, and a countdown. The quota ticks up. Good news, on paper.

THE STAFF

1. WARD SUPERVISOR KÖST — HP 12, Morale 8, baton d4, PUPPET STRINGS. Wears a cracked null collar he loosened himself, just enough. Believes the child must stay asleep and the quota must be met, in that order, and cannot say why the second matters more than the first. Speaks of his own body in the third person now.
2. THE THIRD SHIFT — HP 5 each ×3, Morale 9 shared, MIND SPIKE d4✱ in unison. Three orderlies who share one mind and finish each other's screams. When one explodes a die, all three roll again. They are owed a great deal of overtime.
3. THE PERMANENT PATIENT — HP 6, Morale 12, FUTURE ECHO. Has been in Reception longer than Reception has existed. No admission record, or rather every admission record, all amended. Has already seen how everyone here dies and will rate yours, kindly, if asked.
4. AUDITOR VESS — HP 8, Morale 7, DREAM STAB. Arrived from a Ministry that may not exist to verify the quarter's figures, carrying consent forms that countersign themselves. Wants the new Director's signature. The child's, not the corpse's. Is increasingly unsure these are different.
5. ORDERLY ASH — HP 10, Morale 10, censer-flail d6. Aggressively, proudly mundane in a foil-lined cap (psi against him is always tough; everyone involved looks ridiculous). Wants to burn the Annex down as a mercy and has filed the appropriate requisition. Honestly, hear him out.
6. THE NEW DIRECTOR — HP 1, Morale —, all seven powers. Asleep. Every die explodes. Every explosion is someone else's nosebleed, never the child's. Performing exceptionally. Do not wake the Director.

WHAT THE DIRECTORATE WANTS

• Officially: the Annex is a rest facility, the quarter was a triumph, and the Director is well.
• The orders say: keep the new Director sedated. Maintain the figures. Exceed the figures. Transfer the old Director's body to a facility that does not appear in the records, because it is not a place.
• The staff want: to make the quota. To be transferred. To wake the child and ask it one question. To be relieved of duty before the dreams get worse. To not be the one who opens the office door.
• The dead Director wants: unclear. He has been dead six months and the work has never been better.

SUBLEVEL 9 is an independent production by The Grey Ledger Society and is not affiliated with Ockult Örtmästare Games or Stockholm Kartell. It is published under the MÖRK BORG Third Party License.

MÖRK BORG is copyright Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell.