[ WP ] It is December 27th . Two days ago Santa did not deliver gifts for the first time in 600 years . Santa 's Workshop has gone dark . You are the leader of the SEAL Team tasked with finding out why . This is your story .

In the dead of night, our helicopters flew low over the eerily dark complex. Dorms, factories, and office buildings stood in ruin, illuminated only by the crescent moon. Our six helicopters touched down in a perimeter around the city; my fellow soldiers and I leapt out into the freezing air. There was a scent of burning garbage in the air. Bits of snow were falling from the perfectly clear sky... or was it ash? 
 
 *'' Team Bravo, take the two workshops and move in through the dorm towards the center tower. Over. `` * 
 
 The radio clicked off and the helicopters left. We were on our own. 
 
 Six of us circled the back door of the lifeless workshop and Sergeant Stravinsky breached it. We scanned the inside with the flashlights at the end of our rifles. There was no evidence of life; only death. Chunks of frozen visceral matter covered the floor and walls. Elves and pieces of elves were everywhere, frozen stiff: trapped in machines, halfway through lathes, mechanically extruded, etc. It was a truly horrendous sight. 
 
 We began to take notice of how terrible the working conditions here must have been. Tiny 4x4x6 boxes were the working space for one worker, with no guaranteed breaks and a 12-hour workday minimum. There were piles of frozen fecal matter and what appeared to be urine, and although we could n't be sure how old they were, the lack of bathrooms in the building assured us that they probably outdated the corpses. 
 
 We left the workshop and headed into the two-story elf dorm, sweeping the lower hallway before going room to room. Many were empty. I broke the flimsy wooden door to one room and bent down to enter, finding to my horror a male and female elf that had apparently stripped and killed themselves in some sort of sadistic ritual. Scanning upstairs we found something far different; here the floor of the dark hallway was covered with dead elves, who appeared to have been lined up and systematically shot with a single bullet to the head. At the end of the hallway we found one elf barely recognizable; we assumed he had tried to run away. 
 
 As we left the dorm and approached the center of town, a heavy black smoke filled the air, smelling this time of burning flesh. We met up with the six other teams outside the massive red and white tower in the center of the city, where the smoke was coming from. Our goal was to get to the penthouse, grab the target, and wait on the roof for extraction. 
 
 Surrounding the tower were elf bodies, thousands of them. Many were still clutching protest signs. Rabid reindeer were feasting on their bodies, some still warm. I sniffed. 
 
 `` You smell that?'' I asked. 
 
 `` What? You mean the smoke?'' the Sergeant replied. 
 
 `` No, it smells almost like...'' I trailed off as we all noticed the subtle scent of cyanide gas. 
 
 `` Gas masks on, boys,'' the Sergeant ordered. 
 
 I reached into my pack and put the mask over my face, then wrapped the rest of my head back up in the scarf it had been in before. We waded through the knee-deep carnage as we approached the building. Suddenly, there was an explosion from about halfway up. I ran; some froze. Huge chunks of sheet metal and glass fell and crushed at least a dozen men. Sergeant Stravinsky was trapped under a large metal sheet. 
 
 `` Get'im out! Get'im out!'' 
 
 Everyone rushed to the scene, but it did n't look good. Everything from his stomach down had been crushed; his blood was already beginning to freeze his lower ribs to the metal. He screamed for a bit. His friend, Sergeant Holst, ran to his side. 
 
 `` Igor! Igor, we're going to get you out of here, okay? Just stay with us,'' he said. 
 
 `` No you're not. It's sixty below and I'm trapped under ten tons of steel surrounded by dead elves. It's not a conventional way to go, but I'll take it,'' the Sergeant replied. 
 
 He reached down to his utility belt, pulled up his combat knife, and cut his own throat. Nobody stopped him; nobody really tried to stop him. The ground commander radioed back to command. 
 
 `` We're taking heavy casualties, over? Heavy casualties!'' 
 
 `` Say again, over?'' 
 
 `` HEAVY CASUALTIES. We've got ten guys dead, a dozen or so wounded. There is active combat surrounding the tower, over.'' 
 
 `` We can not extract you right now. Black hawks under heavy turbulence from incoming blizzard. You'll have to wait it out, over.'' 
 
 The CO was about to reply when he was interrupted by another soldier. 
 
 `` Sir, target spotted!'' 
 
 We all turned our eyes to the skies, where the massive sleigh had just taken off from the roof of the tower. It flew around the city, dropping gift-shaped bombs on the buildings and headed our way. 
 
 `` Shoot it down.'' 
 
 Our three specialists raised their RPGs to the sky and fired. One missed, one hit a reindeer, and one struck the bottom of the sleigh, setting off some of the bombs and sending the whole thing into a tailspin, crashing into the tower several stories up with a Hollywood-style explosion. 
 
 `` Into the tower! Go, go!'' 
 
 We all rushed the tower, tripping over frozen and not-so-frozen elves as we ran up eight flights of stairs. Up here the cyanide was mixed with chlorine and smoke. The outside of my armor began to peel as we headed towards the crash site, but we were n't the first ones there. I was one of the first around the corner to find a detachment of about eighty elves, mostly armed, waiting there. They saw me first and began shooting. I jumped back around the corner, waited for some others to join me, and turned around shooting blindly into the crowd. I used my final ten bullets on this one elf, who was really persistent. 
 
 All was said and done within forty-five seconds, and I found myself with a bullet wound on my left arm that I had n't even noticed. It was n't too bad, just a graze, but I was bleeding profusely. I grabbed a frozen light fixture off the wall and stuck it in my wound; it stuck instantly, sealing the blood inside. We approached the crash site and found nothing short of some twisted metal and a burned Christmas hat. Our work here was done. 
 
 The helicopters were able to come in quickly before the blizzard hit; one went down during the escape and was quickly captured by a swarm of over two thousand elves. I took the starboard gun and opened fire on the swarm, taking down a whole bunch but still hardly making a dent in the population. We did n't have the resources to rescue our men. 
 
 Of course, we could n't let word of this stand, so planes on standby flew in from Greenland and nuked the whole village. It was a beautiful site from the Qaanaq base, with the colors and the clouds... absolutely beautiful. The soldiers officially died when a helicopter went missing over the North Pole, a helicopter which would never be found despite a media-hyped search. The heat spike was to be blamed on global warming; the radiation on a North Korean nuclear test that would be announced the following morning. 
 
 As for Santa, we got this old guy from Vermont to take his place.
