White Wolf Online

The Men in Black
Task Force: Valkyrie Preview
Posted: 2008-07-23

Fact: in December 1927, the US Army raided a number of towns in Massachusetts. The towns no longer exist. Their inhabitants vanished. Fact: in 1947, an unidentified object crashed near a USAF base in Roswell, New Mexico. Government agents waded in to clear things up. Fact: in November 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated. The US Government's investigation seemed reluctant. Fact: in the 1960s and 70s, the Zodiac killer stalked of Northern California. No one ever caught him. Still, the killings ended. Fact: in August 1997, Princess Diana's car crashed under mysterious circumstances, killing Diana, its driver and the industrialist she was dating at the time. Was the People's Princess really the intended victim? You could go back further. Who shot Abraham Lincoln?

Conspiracy theorists would have you believe that there is a great agency behind all of these events. They don't know for sure, of course. Task Force: VALKYRIE knows. They know the truth about Diana and the precise location of the Roswell pilot's grave. They know who didn't shoot Kennedy. And they know about vampires, werewolves, demons and ghosts.

It began in 1865, when a hastily organized unit of government men failed to rescue Abraham Lincoln from the clutches of a creature from outside any human frame of reference. Realizing that for the good of the Union, they had to cover up the President's death, they enlisted a look-alike, and without the hapless man's knowledge, hired John Wilkes Booth to follow him to the theater and do the deed before anyone noticed the difference. Ever since then, they've been protecting the US against supernatural agencies and hiding the evidence. They've always operated outside the usual structures of the US government.

They were reformed as Task Force: VALKYRIE in 1944 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, without the President's knowledge, when it became apparent that some prominent Nazis had been driven to allying themselves with paranormal entities. Between June 1944 and April 1945, TFV joined US and British forces in the invasion of Europe. Armed with little more than their wits, their fists and their guns, the newly-minted task force defeated and captured a cadre of bizarre hermaphrodite Nazi magicians, two packs of man-eating werewolves, dozens of walking dead men of various kinds and more vampires than they suspected could have existed. Half the time, these “Extra-Normal Entities” (ENEs), weren't fighting for anyone but themselves, but it didn't matter. They were a threat, and the men of TFV were far too interested in such things to let them go just because they weren't fighting the allies.

Things kicked off then. After the Roswell incident (an early triumph for VALKYRIE's disinformation policy), TFV managed effectively to disappear. Their mission is to protect the USA from extra-normal forces. A handful of people at the top level of government know they exist. The President isn't one of them.

Every story of sinister Men in Black who cover up paranormal events, every account of black-clad heavily-armed Special Forces operatives who descend from black helicopters and make people vanish, every supernatural or UFO conspiracy theory, comes right back to TFV. They really are the conspiracy that keeps the people blissful in ignorance.

Or they'd really like to think they are. The fact is, they're still a government agency, and just like every other government agency, the Task Force suffers from nepotism and incompetence. Sometimes it's at a level that endangers the men and women in the field. Intelligence gatherers are often as lazy as those foreign-posted CIA men who get their intel from watching the news.

They've got a wide base of information about any number of ENEs, and a mountain of red tape and clearances to get through before it's readable. They've got amazing facilities and then there's the budget. Obviously, TFV is a black budget agency, but that only leads to certain irregularities. Like: TFV has a budget a fraction of the size of ATF, let alone the FBI. So how can they afford the black helicopters, or that enormous underground facility in Arizona (the one you think you know about in New Mexico is as flimsy as a movie set) and the astoundingly well-funded R&D department?

And if TFV's remit is to protect the US people from ENEs, how come so much field work involves observation and kidnap rather than straight fighting? Why have they got so many ENEs stored away in that underground prison? Why do field agents who get close to certain secrets find their assignments changed without warning?

Maybe there's something else going on. TFV has a shadowy history, but what if that's just a fabrication? What if none of this is true? What if it's all really just a cover for something else entirely? Perhaps TFV's masters have a more comprehensive plan that their agents don't need to know. On the other hand, perhaps the agency is compromised. Perhaps TFV is working for the very monsters its agents seek to defeat.

But then, that's just paranoia.