>>5381320After filing a meeting request with Father Gregori and catching a quick meal, you receive an urgent briefing notification.
It was a bad sign. Well-planned operations would have their meetings scheduled weeks ahead of time. Urgent, off-the-cuff operations would still leave a day or two. This meeting was arranged two hours in advance. Evidently, command was spooked.
You enter a small, soundproofed meeting room packed with several dozens operatives and support staff seated behind an old-fashioned projector board. The air is dense with the smell of dust and cigarette smoke.
RD - the person largely responsible for the latter - slaps the table. Her dry voice cuts through the pre-mission chatter. "Attention everyone. ATTENTION. Thank you."
"The rest of OPS is busy analyzing data, so I'll be running the briefing today. I'm not going to mince words. The situation we're dealing with isn't good. A week ago, a cluster of logging towns in rural Montana dropped off the net. Since we don't have any assets nearby, this discrepancy escaped our notice."
A rakish operative raises her hand. "Several towns? How could something like that escape your notice?
RD pinches the bridge of her nose. "Because it's rural Montana, in a place with no containment facilities or known cult activity. Contrary to what you seem to believe, most utility outages there aren't caused by evil spirits."
"Anyways, it escaped our notice at first. When local police failed to check-in, we sent recon squad delta-nine to the westernmost settlement."
She advances to a contour map. "The team observed a persistent fog as they crossed the outer perimeter of the area. Visibility was poor; tracking them through high-altitude ISR was nearly impossible. Comms were spotty ten miles past the perimeter; they went completely out once they entered the town itself."
Lighting another cigarette, she continues. "Last check in was 46 hours ago; we haven't from delta-nine since. But they managed to rig up a memory card to their quad-drone to return some intel. Some of the pictures we recovered were quite...concerning"
"Now, optimistically, we might be dealing with something that can alter digital memory. That would be the best-case scenario, and it would also explain why we have such a severe comm drop-off." She pauses. "But this possibility no longer seems likely. After we established a perimeter, we sent a few more scouting groups into the occluded area. Our routes were more conservative this time, but they documented at least a few anomalous entities through direct visual observation. Oh, and the perimeter is also expanding. Look at these traces here."
