Background

Agents of FEAR
The Federal Emergency Arcane Response

“They have tried to teach us fear, but we have met fear before, and found ourselves its master. It is our enemies who are strangers to it, thinking they alone they are its dispensers. But we know much of fear, and we shall teach our enemies its true meaning.”
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt,, Private Correspondence, October 1939


When Roosevelt was nickel-and-diming Churchill over the Lend-Lease Act, he was actually holding out for a bigger prize: access to the British Intelligence’s archives on the supernatural. With that in hand (and some liberated from the Nazis), a separate branch of the DIA was founded under the codename PROJECT CROPDUST. To this day, agents in Department 13 are still referred to as ‘dusters’. The allusion was deserved: for the majority of its history, CROPDUST worked on the R-I-D protocol towards all preternatural phenomena: Recruit, Imprison or Destroy. After the end of the Cold War, however, this protocol was softened somewhat, and the I is now informally interpreted as Isolate. As long as supernatural phenomena remain invisible to the US government and its agencies, they will be left alone – or recruited for a decent salary and guaranteed safety.

Most of D13’s work is intelligence analysis and storage, but after the Three Mile Island incident in 1979, DoD officials realized that a field team was necessary to deal with large-scale, time-critical or high-risk exigent situations. A group much like FEMA was set up, staffed by the more indestructible recruits and dubbed FEAR. As a quasi-autonomous group, FEAR could be commandeered by other agencies and funded by external sources – and blame could be apportioned into oblivion. After 9-11, the Department of Homeland Security supersumed the roles of many smaller agencies, and human enemies became by far the priority of the entire government. FEAR was left to languish with an ever-diminishing budget and even less prestige.

But there are still rocks that are turned over and found crawling with grubs that nobody else wants to deal with, even if they knew how. Such jobs go to the Agents of FEAR. Armed with a gun, a phone and an inhuman nature, they go where they are sent, do the job they are told, and clean up the mess afterwards. For that, they get $28K a year plus dental, a bit of privacy and some kind of life.

The first trade paperback, Agents of FEAR: Some Kind Of Life goes on sale this June. Issue One is Until the Sea Gives Back Its Dead.