THE CARETAKERS

an excerpt from OPERATIONAL HISTORY follows:

The Argus, 1930 

AMERICAN ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION LOST?

Miskatonic university expedition missing on the last continent

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(Copyright. Australian Radio News.)

The Pabodie expedition, late of Boston, Massachusetts, set steam for the expanse of Antarctica in early September on the ships Arkham and Miskatonic, loaded to bear with speciality cold-weather aircraft and transports, as well as various experts in the physical sciences, and nearly four tons of consumables to sustain them. Their goal: nothing short of the revelation of the interior of that most terrible white expanse.

For weeks, contact via radiogram to Ushuaia, Argentina had been on the regular, but since January 12, not a single word has come over the radio indicating their fate-

DISINFORMATION: 1930s-THE HIDDEN HORRORS OF ANTARCTICA

In 1930, a wholly novel approach to the exploration of Antarctica was undertaken by an well-funded and staffed American expedition: the Miskatonic University Pabodie expedition. The oddity of the samples returned from the expanses of Antarctica by the survivors were impossible to deny. Various contacts within the university — already specialists in the outré and bizarre previously consulted by the Black Chamber — soon brought them and their other discoveries to the attention of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

A few tight-lipped expedition survivors spoke to authorities of giant, intelligent non-human beings, and of discovering a pyramidal mountain range of artificial black structures higher than the Himalayas in the center of the continent. These beings and structures, it was claimed, pre-dated man by millions of years, and their science was far beyond even the most advanced human technologies.

Stunned by this revelation and the samples, P4 opened a wholly secret department at Miskatonic called the Dyer desk. In secret, the University was to continue its research of the strange beings in Antarctica and their "science," and, in exchange, large sums of money were granted to the university by the Department of the Navy. The understanding, of course, was that the findings of the Pabodie expedition (and other expeditions that uncovered such things) would be hidden from the public. The official line (which the survivors had already arrived at) was that a terrible storm had subsumed the expedition, killing various members and wrecking any chance they had of discovering anything and that they had barely made it back alive.

Dr. William Dyer, one of the more sane surviving members of the expedition, was more than willing to comply. No doubt, he envisioned access to ships, aircraft, and the safety of the Navy if he was to set upon another expedition of Antarctica, or at least, as a bulwark against the monsters he claimed were still hidden there in the ice.

In 1932, the first threat assessment by P4 of the "Antarctic creatures" (often called the pentamembrum excogitatoris or "five-limbed thinkers", and later, merely as the "caretakers") concluded that those beings awoken by the expedition almost certainly re-entered the stasis they had previously slumbered in. Still, the Navy was nervous.

Alerts to American Naval vessels operating in the southern hemisphere were told to report any strange traffic, movement, or lights in the Southern Ocean, and Naval intelligence had a hand in the finance or in personnel in all international Antarctic expeditions from that point on.

Later, in the 1939-1941, the Navy would return to Antarctica in force during the United States Antarctic Service Expedition, but for the time being, the Deep Ones remained the primary focus of P4.

IN THE FIELD: INTRODUCING THE CARETAKERS OF ANTARCTICA

The Elder Things woken from their eons-long stasis by the Pabodie expedition in 1930, quickly ascertained the nature of the life that had risen in the interim, including mankind. Nearly everything living on the planet was descended from their ancient biological experiments to create the shoggoths, now run amok for eons.

In the modern era, the shoggoths appeared to have dwindled in number and retreated into the darker recesses of the globe. But the Earth was also awash in their genetics — in nearly every plant and animal — and in each, the possibility of a new and calamitous uprising on a scale even larger than the fall of the Elder Thing empire. Such a threat was too enormous to directly confront, so, instead, the Elder Things shifted their "city", a giant range of black basalt mountains, out of phase with our physical reality. There, hidden and untouchable, the Elder Things consider the problem that is the shoggoth-polluted genetics of Earthly life, searching for a way to cleanse it without waking their greatest enemy.