Brigadier Luther Pennington
The Brigadier was another of the Yellow Sign Penningtons, the first of
whom was responsible for my first character's imprisonment in Carcosa.
Bastard.
Luther, by contrast, was nothing to do with the occult factions;
instead, he was simply caught up in the machinations of another former
military man who intended to perform a ritual to bring himself fully
into the Dreamlands.
As one of the earliest members of the experimental commando unit
'King's Kittens', Luther was instrumental in a number of actions during
the Second World War. However, actions such as the Dresden and Coventry
bombings and of course the nuclear catastrophe in Japan turned his
stomach; he believed very strongly that these had changed the face of
war; indeed, he felt that now the commando team was the optimum form of
warfare, eliminating trouble before it had time to explode into a
serious confrontation that threatened civilian life. He spent the next
five years or so training a new generation of commandos; by the early
fifties he had become strongly involved in the Malayan conflict. In
1956 he was recalled to Whitehall; back in the country in time for the
coming of age of the Manning daughters, the twin descendants of the
Manning family (a dynasty he had known well since before the war), he
travelled to Lancaster to attend their birthday celebrations before
taking up his desk post.
This was, sadly, not to be; finding themselves transposed by a botched
ritual to Lanith in the Dreamlands, the birthday party began
investigating ways out.
The Brigadier, after a disagreement over the worth of man, elected to
stay behind - both to prove that a man could make a difference even to
more than one world, and to buy the resources needed to return much of
the rest of the group.
Then other factors came into play; the godmother of the twins, it
turned out, had indoctrinated them into the worship of Shub-Niggurath,
and the Brigadier found himself part of the group aiming to prevent a
mass sacrifice and the birth of a divine avatar.
At the end of it he came out successfully, even twenty camels up from a
spate of gambling. It seems the mess hall practice is worthwhile no
matter the situation.