Dangerous to Know

    Coming to the Board's attention is a dubious honour, implying as it does that something seriously warped, wrong, or just downright weird has occurred. The roster of people Speculation check on daily is a relatively short and almost nonsensical one, but all of them have "made the list" of the severely odd some way or other, by madness, mutation, or even just muttering interesting things in their sleep. Others are on the list by virtue of family connections, poor choice of friends, or simply constantly turning up on the spy satellite photos.

Some are on the roster simply because everyone taking the slightest interest in them has a tendency to die.

Oh yes. Dangerous to know, indeed...

Attempting to unscramble Miss Browning's family history is an "amusing" exercise in reading accident reports, criminal records, disaster accounts...and lots and lots of death certificates. In fact, with trademark black humour, Boardies have begun to refer to files on her as "The Morgue". It has a worryingly high equipment failure rate, and much of the original data was lost when Infernal forces burned down the old Archive building at Mohaborad – the inference, that the largest and most comprehensive set of records pertaining to her life was destroyed on orders from Dis, has not been lost on Speculation.

Margaret was born at some point during the early 80s, at the height of the dire portents wracking the globe at that time. The only hospital with birth records in her name was burned down in 1984, following a lightning strike. None of the maternity staff survived. Her first appearance in public records is her entitlement to a state pension after the apparent loss of her father during the Gulf War. No mention of her mother has been located to date. Her father's service records remain missing. Agents sent to recover them tend to find only the remains of their predecessors, before disappearing themselves.

Violent tendencies, an aggressive personality, and being blamed for the string of accidents that followed her saw Margaret bounced from orphanages to foster families...and back again...over the course of an unhappy childhood. Worried psychologists noted the deaths of many of her real friends was making her seek refuge in imaginary ones. Speculation theorize, in their darker moments, that the Adversary made His presence known to her via such methods.

The child support agency responsible for her, notorious for corruption at the time, lost all it's records (and her case officer) in a catastrophic fire shortly after she enrolled in high school. Attempting to trace families she was placed with will provide a researcher with a wealth of imaginative methods of dying, ranging from car accidents to serial killings. Not to put too fine a point on it, people die around this girl. Large numbers of people.

Despite such turbulence, Margaret excelled academically – her tutors (the surviving ones the Board could reach) considered her an intensely driven, if somewhat sullen, child with an aptitude for mechanical skills and problem-solving. She developed a fascination for firearms and WW2 memorabilia, much to the terror of her psychiatrists, but their fears of schooltop sniping never materialized. It was apparently around this time that her prophetic dreams began.

Graduating top of her class (followed, physically as well as academically, by a young man in the same class with a crush on her...) Margaret packed off to university, where her career started with a bang. A very large one, as a mere accident of a few minutes on a lecture timetable was all that saved the occupants of her dorm building from losing their lives in a massive gas explosion that demolished it utterly. Shortly afterwards, Margaret finally noticed she had a hanger-on in the form of her new neighbour and classmate, David Jones. His long-term survival remains, frankly, a miracle.

Wherever Margaret went, "accidents" followed. Although her new apartment building survived, a fire swept through it shortly afterwards. An apparently motiveless bombing of the original, under-repair, dorms has delayed reconstruction for the foreseeable future, and Speculation are still probing the bizarre circumstances surrounding this. Multiple chemical leaks have badly mutated several of her campus friends, and some form of hallucinogenic gas explosion recently managed to take out an entire FBI/ATF raid. Taking note, the Board are advising their personnel to keep their distance as much as possible. Even the Greens have fallen afoul of Margaret's "mobile curse", losing several of the teams sent to keep an eye on Michael.

The only light shed on this aura of disaster comes from the woman herself, and the Board's sources for this remain worryingly second-hand. Margaret apparently believes herself a potential vessel for the antichrist spoken of in the Book of Revelations, her fate revealed to her by the Adversary in recurring dreams thought her life. Internal debate over the content of these dreams rages. While potentially valuable intelligence, Mission Planning feel "it might be simpler to just toss our men into a meatmincer and be done with it, it'd be quicker." rather than attempt to discover their contents via scrying or onieromancy. Efforts to laser-bug her bedroom window were vetoed by High Command as too dangerous. Less subtle measures have been universally banned – the Board feels that at least knowing who the Adversary is sizing up is better than "solving the problem" short-term and potentially losing their only lead on His actives. After all, there are plenty more orphaned young women out there.

FLEET tentatively agree, despite maintaining she is too dangerous to just be left to her own devices. In the meantime, Intelligence's belief that anything Hell deems annoying should be encouraged has led to the "amusing" sight of a battlefleet planning ways to support David's relationship skills.

In many ways, Margaret's life is a microcosm of the whole dark, dirty supernatural crisis facing the world right now. Its history is her history, and however the tale ends...the Board suspect she will feature prominently in it.

If Mister Jones has a claim to weirdness, even before one considers his "interesting" eyes, it has to be the way he is the longest surviving person to have ever entered Margaret Browning's life. Of apparently mundane parentage, and struggling family background, he has nonetheless survived for over 5 years of school and college in her presence.

To put this "achievement" in context, it must be noted that the average lifespan of her acquaintances is just under 16 months. His (apparently brief, to the detriment of many of his Board sympathisers) relationship with her bumps him into a category with a past average lifespan of 6 weeks. If Spec's suspicions concerning the degree of intimacy during the Adversary Incident are correct, then frankly the kid has shattered all records and should be given some kind of lifetime achievement award in the field of Occult Survival.

This is not to imply that David is immune to infernal forces, who appear to be trying to erase such an annoying blip on their record with considerable effort. What is worthy of note is that every effort to date has apparently failed, some quite spectacularly, and that the Board as a whole was apparently dragged into the current conflict after attempting to ascertain why. Just to add further to the growing body of "Dave lore", he managed to recover after a personal encounter with the Adversary Himself in an incident that got him a cat, the undying love of DC, and proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that Someone Up There smiles on this kid. The only representative of Up There available...doesn't discuss matters. But She is very, very interested in the young man, authorising Board activity around him that stops only just short of protective custody.

Then, there's the matter of David's eyes. While the incident with a highly virulent mutagen that apparently caused them to form has been well-documented, to quote Spec Alpha's formal report..."It must have been quite a mutagen to turn two normal eyeballs into a pair of solid-state gas lasers with their own handy grav beamer and energy supply!". While using them is apparently intensely draining for him, the fact remains that no human tissue should be capable of conducting such an energy output, comparable to the thrust from a pair of ramjets.

The eyes themselves have received a thorough medical examination during one of his interminable hospital stays. Weird Science have formally stated they don't have a clue as to the principles at work. They are considering offering the young man a quite staggering sum of money to donate one of them to science (SCIENCE!), but High Command have blocked the proposal, stating the boy needs all the help in life he can get.

Lately, David has begun to move away from Margaret and pursue a relationship with Blue Green. Much as the phrase "out of the frying pan, into the fire" springs to mind, he appears to be surviving that as well, despite severe disapproval from Hazel Green (and mild disapproval from FLEET, who would prefer he remained with Margaret and threw a spanner in the Adversary's plans for her). Given what else Dave has had thrown at him, the Board doubt a mere billionare mastermind can do much to stop the young man.

Young, in cat terms, male (and abundantly so), and born to unknown parents in an unknown litter, Chester would be considered uninteresting even by cat standards and condemned to not even rate a historical footnote if he hadn't, one day, stopped to swipe at a twitching, suspiciously-rubber mouse.

The mouse was being used as bait by Waldo Adams, as ever doing the dirty work in his despicable partnership with Stephen Archer, the two most unlikely (and yet most successful) occultists of the current generation. They needed a black cat as a sacrifice in their ongoing quest to summon Satan.

It worked. The ritual worked. And if David Jones and a posse of his friends hadn't barged in, Chester would've ended his short life on a cheap slab of fake marble bought from a home improvements centre and used, until then, as an ashtray for cigarettes a step removed from tobacco. Exactly what happened afterwards is beyond Speculation's ken, but within minutes David was apparently dead and Roger was attempting to fend off the Dark Lord with an unloaded shotgun.

That worked too, making the shotgun a holy relic and apparently proving the Adversary is a bit of a butterfingers when hit by both barrels. This fact alone would've earned Chester a place of honour (from FLEET, for providing the immense propaganda coup of proving He's fallible), but the little cat wasn't done yet. Proving that perhaps nature abhors a spiritual vacuum as much as a physical one, somehow enough of David's detached soul leaked back into the feline and kick-started him back to life.

The result is apparently a bizarre gestalt – not quite a split personality, but both cat and human share feedback from the other's mental state, and Chester seems to be a lot more intelligent (even extending to borrowing Dave's mannerisms – he's been observed blowing raspberries more than once, which is quite a feat with feline lips). The occult nature of black cats is known - M Division postulate that the colour means the fur absorbs other energies as well as visible light – but just how much Chester had to do with David's revival remains unknown. Ironically, this means Waldo and Steve have redoubled their efforts to capture and sacrifice the animal...a regular battle of mystically-enhanced wits that Boardies regularly cheer on and occasionally interfere in.

For all he inspires cries of "AWWWW!" from them, Chester unnerves the Board. Just how much of the original soul is in there? What IS the nature of his link to Dave? And, most worrying of all, what happens when Chester's feline lifespan reaches its natural end? Will David survive?

Michael is the son and apparently preferred heir of Hazel Green, current matriarch of the whole rotten Green organisation. He has clearly "inherited" (but see below) her penchant for manipulation, love of mental dominance games, and iron willpower...if not shared in her dreams for his future career.

Despite the controversy over the Green children's parentage, obvious physiological resemblance and apparently inherited traits mean Speculation continue in the belief that he is Hazel's biological son (this would also explain why he is heir apparent rather than Jay, his older brother), but they'd kill for a reliable DNA sample.

One of a large family, Michael grew up under constant scrutiny from his mother, his mother's agents, and his denunciation-happy siblings. His father left ("escaped" might be a better word) not long after his birth. To make matters worse, his mother appeared to eschew more conventional parental practice in favour of her mind-control research. Early childhood, in the depths of the Green mental research labs, must have been horrific.

None of this apparently curtailed "Mike"'s independence and determination – he ran away from home four times between 1990 and 1999, requiring more and more of his mother's resources to locate and recover, and developed astonishing mental and physical endurance surviving her "discipline" techniques. It also cultivated his apparent hatred of her in favour of near-fanatical devotion to his younger sister, Blue.

University marked Michael's last and greatest rebellion against his mother – namely, his refusal of places bought and sold at Ivy League institutions in favour of one of his own choice. He further enraged Hazel by ignoring her total cutoff of financial support in favour of his own resources. He considers his friends at college, for all his efforts to manipulate them, one of his finest personal achievements – people he has won over alone, without his mother's money or reputation.

Michael's rebellion has not come without its price, mostly in Hazel's efforts to recover him. Seeing his obvious stubbornness and evident skill as a barrier to overt efforts, she has instead concentrated on targeting his friends and roommates. Ironically, here she has run across even harder targets while arousing her son's resentment even further. In fact, Speculation harbor the quiet hope that Mike's resources and skill will keep his friends' run of luck going.

That luck may have run out. Michael's apparent recovery after nearly drowning in the Caribbean may look miraculous, but he was dead in the water for a good ten minutes. As far as the Board are concerned, His fingerprints are all over it. It would be a darkly ironic shame if the young man with such an unbroken string of defiant refusals in the face of authority had fallen afoul of an even bigger rebel than he is.

Marsha Hart shouldn't, normally, rate much of a mention in the Board's files. Okay, there's her unfortunate birth with what she calls "Snow White Syndrome", a form of low-level animal empathy – but frankly, in this weird and wonderful world it's hardly going to make headlines. A curiosity to Weird Science specialists, but nothing more. Her other claims to "fame" – several stalking and assault convictions, and a lack of skill in cooking that borders on deliberate sabotage – would barely rate a margin note, if it wasn't for the people she hung out with. She also boasts a degree of skill in electronics, which is partly why she has the aforementioned criminal record.

Marsha's past is murky – not "occult murky", just murky. Her failure to inherit her family's cooking talents (her father's restaurant chain proudly rate a full set of Michelin stars, and her mother suspended a lucrative career as a celebrity TV chef to raise her), while apparently not an issue for her parents, deeply upset Marsha as a child. Her obsessive efforts to duplicate her father's skill appear to have warped her personality towards obsessiveness in general. This tendency got her into trouble when her high school boyfriend attempted to leave her – by all accounts, the relationship was messy anyway, but Marsha responded with a calculated campaign of stalking using dubiously-acquired industrial espionage equipment (she may well have built the devices herself, suggesting considerable talent). A five-month campaign of terror culminated in a bloody assault on her ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend with a fire extinguisher. By the time the police had arrived, an enraged Marsha had resorted to teeth, fingernails, and (tellingly) kitchen utensils.

Skilled lawyers managed to avoid jail time for the traumatised young woman, but she still underwent months of psychiatric counseling. Her family's efforts to cover up the debacle failed to keep the matter out of the papers, but suppressed it far enough to be little more than a blip on Marsha's life. She was packed off to university as quickly as possible...where she met her on-off boyfriend, Michael Green. Unsurprisingly, the pair's shared interest in controlling others means their relationship, for all its occasional flareups, has remained generally stable to date.

Board interest in Marsha was mostly as a route to Michael and his friends – she remains a moderating influence on her near-explosive roommates, something to be thankful for, and has remained surprisingly calm despite April's provocations. Marsha also possesses a genuinely practical streak which, unlike Margaret, does not equate "preparation" with "stocking up on high explosives". Her "syndrome" appears to be under control, a fact which arouses not inconsiderable interest from M-Division and Weird Science. If she can influence the behaviour of small animals to a considerable degree, could this perhaps be...upgraded?

All this went straight out the window when she suddenly developed wings, of course.

Best-case theories say this stemmed from an incident involving mutated batlike potatoes shortly after the second blue mushroom outbreak. And when a sentence like that is the best case, you know things are going to go downhill rapidly. It seems the weirdness just caught up to Marsha, and now...the Goddess only knows.

To put it succinctly, Roger is a weirdness magnet. In fact, he's more of a weirdness tractor beam, or possibly a weirdness singularity. The bizarre and unnatural swarm about him like a hive of friendly bees, and he merrily surfs the metaphorical wave of insanity with a cheery smile and enough skill at riding it to ensure it comfortably sees him through life.

See the above sentence? That's the product of highly-trained Speculation experts who wouldn't normally even consider using such sentences...but Roger's weirdness is all-pervasive. He talks to his favorite stuffed toy, Pepe (who apparently talks back). He has a pet rock, who is apparently a respected scholar. A pair of eyes drawn on his hand was enough to see "Mr Hand" recover from his last defeat at the hands of Nuns With Big Rulers and seek world domination. In quieter moments, the rock, plushie, and hand occasionally have three-way philosophical debates.

Roger would be a remarkable example of just how weird it can get here, even if it wasn't for the unfortunate matter of his family curse.

The sad truth is, Roger's weirdness is a shield, erected by himself to hide the unpleasant fact that he is cursed to turn into a coyote at full moon, in the process slowly and inexorably losing his mind to the predatory urge of his animal aspect. The curse has been passed down his mother's side of the family for generations, and the shock of discovering his mother "abandoned" him as a desperate measure to protect him from her rages has damaged his mental stability even further. Little remains of the mother he knew – she is now almost entirely animal, hunting tourists and hunters in the rolling woodland surrounding the university town Roger has spent all his life in. Speculation draw parallels with the Jersey Devil and Beast of Bodmin, grimly noting that no other branches of his family appear to have solved the problem either.

Despite his fear, Roger is surrounded by surprisingly stable, calming influences. His long-term relationship with Diana appears to have survived the revelations of his true nature, and his twin sister Lily appears to coping surprisingly well with their shared condition. Curious phenomena surround Roger and his sister – identical-twin-telepathy is not unheard of, and these two appear to show all the classic signs.

Frankly, something as "normal" as mere psionics would be welcome. Speculation fear the Adversary seeks to use Roger's near-psychotic were-form as a potential vessel. Trying to banish Him without harming a host would be a near-hopeless task, certain to end in Roger's death. Probably right up His alley, in other words.

April is possibly the only member of this list who couldn't get picked out of a lineup as obviously weird. Medium height, medium build, and abundantly blonde, until recently April's main claim to "fame" was usually either getting caught up in events, or helping clean up after them. Her level-headed, no-nonsense attitude was refreshing, in light of the general chaos surrounding her...odd...choice of friends. However, new data coming to light is beginning to cast doubt on such happy hypotheses.

For all her facade of normality, April had a decidedly bizarre childhood. Born into the close-knit community of a travelling carnival in the American Midwest, her early years were spent in the inevitable training regimen, building her dexterity and motor co-ordination as early as possible. It appears both state law and her parents encouraged her to gain as much conventional schooling as possible, but April was never happy with the mundane world, understandably preferring the community of her birth.

It was as her career as a performer began that the first serious question-mark was raised over April's life – an incident during a magic trick. Fleeing the aftermath, and apparently enraged by the unquestioning nature of her family and friends, April abandoned as much of her heritage as possible and enrolled at college. Although the rift has apparently healed over time, she still distrusts her parents and former colleagues.

Despite her past, April's academic life has continued apace – she was swept up in the Tokyo Incident (but then so was the entire global population), walked out of the Adversary Disaster relatively unscathed, and her apparent abduction as a would-be sacrifice for Fin Groot Taboo seems to have had no ulterior motive beyond her unfortunately meeting the requirements for the spell. Of minor note have been apparent attraction to Paul, brother of Diana, and an interesting incident where a car wash apparently waxed her hair into near-divine beauty. Weird Science have reverse-engineered the wash cycle and her follicle chemistry, and are considering requesting her signature on a patent for it.

However, ever since the still-unexplained hallucinogenic gas outbreak at a campus chemistry lab, April's mental state has begun to decline. She has begun to exhibit the highly uncharacteristic traits of jealousy, furtiveness, and near-outright sadism, apparently linked to unrequited love for Michael Green, her roommate's boyfriend. This has already cost her Marsha's friendship and Margaret's trust, the latter, ever paranoid and seeing the hand of her dark patron in all things, convinced she has been possessed.

Speculation remain unconvinced, but still wish a number of questions answered – firstly, what exactly was the nature of the Incident that ended her career? Secondly, are her current mood shifts merely the outbursts of a broken heart or something more sinister? And finally, was her family's carnival connected to the one Dave took Margaret to on his ill-fated date, in which case would she prefer nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads?

Diana is, thankfully, one of the few people in this warped saga whose background is open to scrutiny. In fact, she is more than open and helpful regarding inquiries, something Speculation encounter maybe once every blue moon, if they're lucky.

Diana's mother died in childbirth – her upbringing was frugal. Long periods of time alone with her brother led Diana to develop strong independent and self-sufficient tendencies, ones that helped her survive barely above the poverty line for most of her life. One of her main assets was her striking beauty and the classic allure of red hair – keeping a horde of high school suitors happy (and buying her "presents", all of which were swiftly converted into cash) apparently taught her the finer points of using one's body as a tool. It sustained her long enough to secure a minor scholarship and a place at college...whence the money ran out.

Mortgaged to the hilt, Diana was already struggling to pay her tuition when her father was diagnosed with leukaemia shortly after she enrolled. Bone marrow transplants were available – but the only way of dodging the horrendously long waiting list was to resort to private practice, and the immense bills this involved. The family's savings vanished like ice in a volcano, and Diana found herself stuck with a seven-figure bill. With massive determination, and not inconsiderable courage, Diana and her brother borrowed as much as they could, sold as much as possible...and then held their metaphorical noses and took up prostitution to make the shortfall.

Ironically, after several months of this activity, their income is now considerable – the pair are well on the way to reaching their goal. Despite being a pariah among her peers, Diana appears unfazed by both the taunts and the requests of her customers, and has managed to remain surprisingly stable. Security (and a degree of secrecy towards her classmates) is understandably her main concern, but she apparently felt secure enough to have a brief fling with Michael Green before settling on his shorter, blond friend...literally. They met when he stumbled into her after losing his glasses, and the relationship blossomed during her recovery from a nasty traffic accident. Speculation remain quietly suspicious of this, considering it either fallout from Margaret or an effort to ensure Roger remained alone and mentally unbalanced. Either way, the incident was highly likely to be of infernal origin.

Even after paying her own medical bills, the Board's financial experts assume Diana must be well on the way to repaying her debts by now. However, Speculation suspect that her "career" by now has moved beyond fundraising and into something of a fashion statement. Certainly Roger tolerates it with (relatively) few qualms, and her brother has thrown himself into his work with considerable enthusiasm.

With all this in mind, the Board would ordinarily chalk Diana up as a remarkable specimen of humanity with a commendable compassionate streak, and walk on by...but she still worries them. The parallels to the Biblical Whore of Babylon (not to mention the Adversary's current love of incarnating Himself as a bull) cannot be ignored...although if Diana is atop seven hills, she hides it well. Needless to say, if she ever plans to holiday in Rome several divisions of Boardies will be mobilised very quickly...

By and large, the Board consider themselves a pretty cosmopolitan, sympathetic lot. They see a great many terrible things, and a great many motives for doing them, and still manage to maintain a degree of optimism concerning the rightness of their cause and the general worth of humanity.

And yet nobody likes Waldo and Steve.

In fact, one of the "bonding rituals" beloved of Board armour battalions is the Blackadder-esque "Ceremony of Desecration", where the entire unit take it in turns to spit or otherwise discharge bodily fluids on portraits of the two.

Nobody likes Waldo and Steve.

Waldo and Steve are probably, in terms of success rate, the most powerful Evil Sorcerers of the 20th and 21st centuries. And they achieved this by basically having a room in the right place. For when the Adversary shuffled off the potential mortal host for His seed to an obscure college, He needed greedy, ambitious mortals to keep an eye on His investment.

He found Waldo and Steve. A pair of pathetic "Dark Sorcerers" who essentially got into occultism (cheap occultism, with enough tacky ornaments to make even the most preppy goths blanch) because they thought it was easier than exam revision or hoped it would attract girls.

All in all, the Board have to concede He made a good choice here. For His patronage has given Waldo and Steve more power than they could ever possibly have dreamt of - in small doses. Occasionally, when it would further His plans, they suddenly find their every dark dream of themselves and their powers fulfilled.

The effect on the poor souls nearby tends to be comparable to giving a pyromaniac the keys to a nuclear silo – he doesn't have a clue how to actually launch any nukes, but he can certainly push people down the stairs or start fires with the fuel. So it is with Waldo and Steve, who haven't got a clue what they're doing but do it because it looks cool. In the process, they have managed to cause untold devastation, earn the massive envy of serious dark magicians, and actually be the only people on the planet to kill Dave. Which is quite an achievement, all things considered.

Of the two, Stephen seems to have the most ambition and initiative. His motives appear to be the classic ones, namely wealth, power, and sex, but he'll settle for visiting as much destruction on the outside world as he can, for "mocking" him. Waldo is cruder, less intelligent, and prone to simply trying to kill things with demented glee - his primary motive seems merely to be upsetting his strongly religious parents. Board efforts to discover their "true names", the ones they use for conjuration and can thus be magically attacked through, have so far failed. M-Division harbour a nasty suspicion that they don't even have any – such little sacrifices to the ego being too much to expect.

Both of them are grotesquely fawning and obedient whenever their master shows up, of course, which He does via their fridge. FLEET have had to be forcibly restrained from launching ortillery strikes at this fridge, and even now work on ways to cut it out of the apartment structure without incinerating the rest of the building – or even just waiting for everyone valuable to be out for the afternoon. No-one doubts that a full armoured assault would successfully terminate them, but few are willing to risk the potentially disastrous collateral damage.

Still, they have to be somewhere alone someday. And when they do, the Board will be waiting...