The Sanitation Bureau:Zachary Graves
Zachary Graves, The Hardboiled[edit]
Obsession: Getting Revenge (on the supernatural forces that wiped out his unit)
Look: practical clothes, hard eyes
Stats: Intense 2, Cool 1, Sharp 0, Humble -1
Factions: Spies 1 (My faction), Criminals 1, Tinfoil Hats 1, Civilians -1
Debts Owned: Criminals
Debts Owed: Tinfoil Hats, Civilians
Moves: You’re In My Way; Stone Cold; A Little Motivation
Relationships: My Faction: Spies. Main contact is Elena (no last name). Apparently a big shot of some kind in the Sanitation Bureau. It can be hard to tell, with all the secrets and clearance levels and whatnot floating around, actual ranks and chains of command can be pretty opaque. Elena recruited Graves into the Bureau. She apparently has some pull in the US intelligence community and definitely in the mysterious MDIS. Elena is Graves' mentor and sponsor in the Bureau but like most spooks, she is often frustratingly vague and tends to keep secrets just out of habit.
Criminals: Main contact is Amos "Red" Redding. Like Graves, Red is a former Green Beret, but Red's war was Desert Storm; he is about 45 now. Red also spent some time with the CIA doing anti-narco work in Central and South America. Ironically enough, some of that anti-narco work was actually being a narco - partly undercover, and partly selling drugs for the CIA to fund black ops. Red is mostly independent now, and still moving drugs and weapons for criminal cartels, and sometimes black ops. Red owes Graves a favor for helping to get the FBI off his back that one time, using his ursprache ID.
Tinfoil Hats: Main contact is Dr. Zhou, a researcher of some kind in the Bureau. What his area of research is, exactly, is a little unclear. For a mysterious doctor of something that can't be discussed, Zhou is friendly and helpful. Zhou was the one who mentioned the word "Shoggoth" to Graves and pointed him in the right direction to research. Graves owes Zhou a favor for that, since he wasn't supposed to mention it at all.
Civilians: Graves has neglected his family in the throes of his obsession with tracking down the mysterious people. His father Jim, a Vietnam vet, is 65 and in poor health. He has an older brother, Harold, and an older sister, Jennifer, who both have families of their own and problems that Graves could have (and should have) helped them with, but didn't. He owes them a debt.
A former US Army Green Beret. Graves was wounded in Afghanistan in a battle that wiped out his unit; he was the only survivor. He claimed that supernatural forces (some kind of crazy shapechanging amorphous blob) killed his squad mates. The Army determined that the unit had been attacked and eliminated by the Taliban, and when Graves refused to alter his outlandish claims, he was subsequently discharged for medical reasons. He was recruited by the Sanitation Bureau the same day. (Random note: As part of his training Graves was required to become fluent in at least one other language. He speaks Dari Persian and Farsi passably well, and has a smattering of Arabic. In case we run across any Necronomicon original manuscripts.)
After Graves' unit was wiped out by that thing, the investigation was taken over by something called the Military Diplomatic Information Service, which, on paper, is a group which serves as a liaison between the US Military and Diplomatic Corps, as well as being a clearinghouse for information on local customs and taboos, in order to help train members of the military to achieve their goals in foreign locals without offending the locals.
How on earth they were put in charge of an official investigation of an attack on a Green Beret unit is not at all clear.
After that experience, google searches for "head-eating blob" led to H.P. Lovecraft, and from there to the sources he used, especially the Necronomicon, An English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a now-lost Arabic original, the version held at Miskatonic University didn't have any brain-melting secrets, but it was almost complete gibberish, which maybe explains why it's never been published and you had to jump through a ton of hoops to actually look at the centuries old manuscript. A handful of scholarly articles (E.G. "The Shoggoth as 'Fakelore': H.P. Lovecraft and the Occult") indicate that the occult books which claim to teach how to summon or bind Shoggoths mostly all draw on Lovecraft's fictional embellishments rather than the obscure passages of the assorted surviving Necronomicon translations.
All in all, it's like finding out that people you loved were murdered by Paul Bunyan.
Inside the Bureau, the questions "Do Shoggoths exist?" and "What is the MDIS, really?" have been met with frustrating evasiveness.
