Deanna was born in 1947 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, while her family played the theater there. By the time she was eight she was warming up crowds in the Moulin Rouge. Here, she met Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. When the entertainers discovered the Autumnal Swarm in 1955, she needed protection; they provided it. Fourteen years later she is one of the Summit’s best agents. Deanna wears a gold watch of the Summit. It keeps perfect time and negates the slo-time field within a two-yard radius of the wearer. The watch is psychically empowered.
This character sheet is Deanna in 1969, with a black beret, rainbow slacks, and a rifle slung over her shoulder. As a non-player character she will not take the lead. Deanna will look up to the player characters as heroes, and follow their lead. She remembers them with a seven-year-old’s eye, as the great heroes who came out of nowhere to save the day—even if that isn’t exactly what did/will happen in 1955. You’ll probably want the characters to see Deanna use her matchbook at least once.
“It no longer exists. Chained and locked 14 years ago. But that’s where the Summit began.”
“The crossroads? You mean the symbol of the insects? It’s how they get into a human.”
“We don’t want to keep the insects secret. But if we start talking about them, we’ll get locked into the loony bin. Think about it—we’re killing these people because they have bugs inside them, bugs as big as a human. How far do you think that’ll get you in court?”
“The bodies melt. Yeah, they do photograph. We’ve leaked a few just to see the reaction. No one believes them. Those who do are treated as nut-jobs; mostly they are.”
Deanna and youth politics
Deanna recognizes that the Summit has been more successful in the street than the back rooms. She’s not sure Nixon is going to keep his promises about ending the war, and she’s not sure it makes sense for the Summit to back Ronald Reagan (who is governor of California in 1969 and will be until 1975). He’s an especially sore subject between Deanna and the Chairman after Reagan called out the National Guard to end rioting during a Berkeley anti-war protest on May 15. However, she doesn’t see an alternative. In 1969 the Democrats are not a reasonable second choice for youth activists. Democrat Lyndon Johnson escalated in Vietnam. The last election alternatives were Democrat Hubert Humphrey with once-and-future-Democrat George Wallace making a strong showing.
While youth activists repudiated Wallace’s platform, they could agree with him that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democrat and Republican Parties.” When Eugene McCarthy looked likely to turn the Democrats around in 1968, Robert Kennedy entered the race, a betrayal in the eyes of many youth activists. Kennedy might have been able to redeem himself in the eyes of anti-war activists, if he had not been assassinated. The Democratic Party wouldn’t fully differentiate itself in the eyes of youth until George McGovern in 1972.
Will Nixon make a difference? I don’t know. The chairman thinks so. But the chairman thought Kennedy would make a difference, and Kennedy kicked us out and started the war. When he was killed LBJ escalated it. Nixon says he’ll end it, but we’ll see. I’m not sure the chairman chooses well. He thinks the governor will make a difference, and he speaks a good line overseas but here in California he instigates riots and then uses it as an excuse to call out the National Guard to cover Berkeley in barbed wire and tear gas. I can’t understand that that’s a difference we want.
Deanna and the Summit
While she disagrees with the Chairman and Father sometimes, she is extremely loyal and trusts them both implicitly. She has seen the swarm and she knows what it has in store for the world. The summit is a family, and Deanna is friends with Nancy Sinatra and other second generation rat packers. She helped write and produce Nancy Sinatra’s 1967 Movin’ with Nancy, specifically the music video of a San Francisco filled with mannequins, in which Dean Martin restored the mannequins to humanity with a magic wand. She’s been in Vietnam, in 1966 and 1967, as part of Nancy’s entourage, in order to undertake missions for the Summit.
What does she know about the Swarm?
The Summit is certain that Wallace’s near-successful bid to throw the election into the House was backed by the swarm. At first they thought it backfired, as it split the Democrats and threw the election to Nixon, but Nixon continued to escalate tensions in Southeast Asia despite campaign promises to end the war. Because the Kennedys distanced themselves from the Summit, no one in the Summit knows if the swarm killed RFK or if his death was a side benefit of swarm-inspired violence in the Middle East. Deanna suspects the former.
Her world is falling. She knows the swarm is responsible. They are outnumbered, outgunned, and confused. They win small battles, but lose the big ones. Failure seems inevitable. But if she doesn’t try, who will?
“It is as if an invisible rope were giving way; ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; the center cannot hold.’ As if the rope of the world were snapping thread by thread. I don’t even know what the rope is tied to, let alone how to keep it from breaking. All I can do is tie some strands back together while the rope continues to slip.”
