Intelligence spending, which nobody gets to see except every decade or so when they reveal how much overall the spending is, has risen to something like 50 billion dollars.

Who the hell knows how many black projects are being funded by that money.

Eh, your best bet would be decentralization.

Sure you could con a bunch of money from a singular department, but eventually someone is going to notice that dam isn't built, or something.

The key would be to have shadow agents in all areas of government and private business that could collectively nudge funding and policy towards things that would be useful during the upcoming apocalypse.

Given, the distribution of funds would depend entirely on what KIND of apocalypse we're talking about here, but the reasoning would be fairly strait forward.

Half of all US government money is spent on defense. That's black box, through and through. Hide some shit in there and no one'll see it ever.

Unless someone files a declassification request, then it'll only be like 10 years.

>>12743245
>shadow government organization for the purposes of maintaining order in a post-apocalyptic America
>Department of Homeland Security
Duh.

The DOI's budget is tiny compared to the DHS, DOJ, or (especially) the DOD. Not to mention small "nonessential" bureaus like the DOI are more apt to be scrutinized down to the individual program by Congress because they're the best places to pinch pennies in order to shunt more money into, say, defense spending.

1 or 2 million dollars in the DOI is going to be noticed and accounted for, greedily. Go with the DOD, where that amount of money is a fucking drop in the bucket.

>>12743245
I've thought about a modern game where the US Geological Survey has a secret department devoted to finding and dealing with dimensional fuckery. Naturally occuring portals, repeating causal loops and shifting landmarks (why do all roads try to lead *around* this town?).

They try to deal with this stuff. If shit gets too serious, you'll have to call in the Big Guns, courtesy of the armed forces' own secret group. Nobody likes to talk about the Incident of 2003 when 36 square miles of northeastern Nebraska ceased to exist.

I'd hide it in plain sight with something like the "Federal Department of the Secondary Executive" or something. We say its a old Cold War holdover for managing the transition of power in the US should most of the government get killed in a soviet first strike, and we're only keeping it around for 'reasons of national preparedness'. If anyone asks where it was in the past we'll just say that it was classified and no one asked. We'd keep all the budget hidden away in the massive defense spending black box, but the core kernel of the shadow government we'd keep nice and out in the open.

>>12743378
Oh god. It's like the next Scifi channel original series and I think I love it.

I'd fund it via the Federal Reserve.

Gin up worthless assets from a shell corporation and have the Fed buy them up for real money, or just have the shell corp act as a bank and open the Fed discount window so they can borrow at O% from the fed, and lend that money at interest. Between the two you should have billions of dollars available for whatever without any oversight needed.

>>12743317

What this man said. Hide the funding somewhere in the defense budget and you'll be as good as invisible.

Just look at the Swedes: they've got a division dedicated entirely to hunting trolls and nobody's the wiser!

>>12743426
>Oh god. It's like the next Scifi channel original series and I think I love it.

Imagine a clusterfuck of different agencies and departments each having their own group (no matter how large/small) dealing with shit like that. Imagine USGS agents get into a shootout with CIA agents who're waiting for a Visitor to come through a gap because they heard He's Totally Benign and Not At All Going To Fuck Us Up.

>>12743298
>Who the hell knows how many black projects are being funded by that money.

And who knows how many of those are weird things like trying to build a "gay bomb."

>>12743472
>>12743426
>>12743378
I would watch this show for the half season it would be on a broadcast network, or the 4 seasons it might be on 'syfy', and even while i complained to people that "season 4 was kinda bleh, that whole extraplanar river thing was too silly" i would still rush home to watch it And have a a torrent as soon as possible that night.

>>12743317
Half of all discretionary spending, iirc, not total spending.
IE, money they apportion to departments saying, "Do what you think is best with this money."
A huge portion of the DoD funding is spent on support services: medical, legal, logistical, financial, etc.

>People believing that just because its "black box" to the public means that people don't keep track

You bet your ass the private contractors that actually get the money to do these jobs know who's getting paid how much and for what. Corporate espionage is almost as big a business as... well most businesses.
Throwing a few million in to see what the other guy is up to is nothing when the contract bid is in the billions.

Never-mind all the internal checks and balances.

>>12743509
That's why you kill anyone who works on the projects. Built a doomsday bunker? Convenient car crash tomorrow!
Designed an evacuation plan for Congress and the White House? Oh no you turned out to have a burning need to hang yourself!
Did anything useful for the shadow government? Dead, dead dead!

Dead men tell no tales. It's a foolproof scheme!

>>12743524
Until people notice all the dead guys around that seemed to work for the same companies on the same projects.

>>12743524
> Deaths at Department of the Interior skyrocket after mysterious new "SG group" wins bid for construction contracts

Yep nothing odd here, move along.

>>12743524

no offense dude but you should probably head back to /x/

>>12743550
>>12743561
People die all the time, I don't see why it would seem suspicious. And if anyone starts getting nosy, kill them too!

>>12743472
Hell, that's an excellent RPG setting right there as well. "You're all secret government agents of the U.S. Department of Education. What's your mission? Same as the mission of all the other secret government agencies. Problem is, *you* don't get the funding they do."

>>12743550
Just have a friend delete their social security number.
Poof.
The easiest method to track their job history is now gone.
If you can work it out, put their financial records into a secure FBI tagged folder marked "Bin Laden/Bush Connection". Not even the DHS would touch that with a stolen 10' pole.

>>12743576
Also, thanks to Byzantine agreements with the other Agencies, you're only supposed to operate in the following areas: Schools, Public Libraries, Libraries on Public University Property, National Parks less than 1 square mile and residential areas within 1000ft of a public school.

>>12743576
There's an image.
Having a bake sale so you can afford to get quicklime and rent a backhoe to get rid of a bunch of nosy bastards.

>>12743580
Or we could just kill them.

>>12743596
What the fuck does the DOE have to do with the NPS?

>>12743574
>People die all the time, I don't see why it would seem suspicious. And if anyone starts getting nosy, kill them too!

Once is a fluke, twice is coincidence, three times means something's up. People scrutinize the government for "black helicopter" stuff on a continual basis, and you think a 100% mortality rate for work done through something that openly calls itself a "shadow government" cold-war holdover isn't going to raise huge red flags?

Hell, you can kill the progenitors but you won't be able to kill the information once it starts spreading without becoming so open and obvious in your activities that you might as well have never been "secret" in the first place.

>>12743580
>Hmmm, all these dead people recently seem to not have a social security number AND hold degrees / have work experience in the high-tech construction / advanced engineering

Yeah still nothing odd here folks, keep walking.

>>12743606
That is assuming you kill them, of course. This prevents people from having an easy time making the connection.

>>12743509
bury it in a totally legit, but boring, corporate shell.

Some big slow corp that provides some kind of warehousing and shipping solutions. A few questionably written codes in the fifties combined with a combo of bureaucratic inertia and favorable deals locked in place by long-dead secretaries.

You now have a corporation with a hidden compartment. Around the outside edges they operate, they ship around crates of G.I. toilets or bound paperwork that no one will ever read. And Sometimes they take delivery on a ten thousand new rifles that are "combat lossed" off of anyone else's paperwork. Or they build a hundred thousand square foot underground facility to store "surplus machineparts" and manage to forget registering the construction with anyone at all. They might have a few well paid "contractors" in various upper branches to help these transactions take place, running themselves like a black market rather then a gov org.

break a lotta laws, but when the bombs fall they have the distributed facilities, they have the gear, they have the preplanning to be ready to climb out of the rubble and say "Mr President, what are your orders?"


The only problem would be if they were addressing Mr Guthram Lockwhaite, President and CEO of Lockwhaite Transportion in that, rather then.. you know, The POTUS

>>12743597
see "Distraction" by Sterling.

>>12743614
>This corpse appears well-educated and judging by his footwear, someone has erased his social security number.
Good work, Columbo.

>>12743610
It was part of a tradeoff. The NPS gets limited jurisdiction in charter schools and several Christian schools. The DOE got to legally operate in the aforementioned National Parks less than 1 square mile in size and several hundred thousand dollars extra in the budget.

>>12743472
>>12743576
>>12743596
>>12743631
never change, /tg/

>>12743631

Somewhere there's a committee where the high-ups of each departments secret police hash this out.

They all work together, but have to use bureaucracy to hide the fact that they do. Or else the DoD'll get all up in their shit again.

>>12743631
That makes no sense.

You honestly think the NPS would EVER give up the ability to police Ellis Island to another agency for any reason whatsoever? Or the individual monument units at the National Mall? Or the White House?

Pfft, you know nothing about the NPS.

>>12743627
>Person goes missing
>Corpse matching description found

If you're going to just kill them and get rid of the body, that's cool, w/e.
But suggesting you "get rid of the guys social" doesn't make any sense if there's going to be ANY attention payed to him. All that would accomplish is deflecting a very casual background check, or auto-mated search.

>>12743665
It's all a sham anyways and that's how it somehow works. Sure if a DOE agent is on the scene first at Ellis Island he technically is in charge, but the NPS has a dozen different ways of shoving him out of the way. Just like how at those charter schools the DOE can take over despite not being supposed to. And then the Department of Health can swoop in for either case and find some reason to snatch the whole case from both departments.

New agents lose a lot of sleep trying to figure out all the angles.

>>12743681
Kill anyone who's looking to close at the bodies. Make it an example to tell people to step off or else.
Duuuuh.

>>12743655
This most often happens in a public school somewhere convenient. Early evening, hidden by parent-teacher night.

Those people in the classroom at the end of the hall are Not having a heated discussion about a child being held back a grade due to bad testing scores.

Something is being held back alright, and those idiots want to let TXDOT run a tunnel right through the whole complex without even warning them.. I don't care that Parks Service said it was dead, they don't know anything about these fault lines *unroll map*


anyhow. yeah, remember folks with kids, go to those PTA meetings and parent-teacher nights.. keep an eye out just in case.

>>12743655
>Somewhere there's a committee where the high-ups of each departments secret police hash this out.

And depending upon how each has performed its mission objectives and/or screwed the pooch, influence and funding are appropriated. Each agency wants to "gerrymander" its sphere of influence to center around handling the easy stuff, while pawning the universe-killing death-beasts and impossible-to-stop extraterrestrial visitations off on somebody else. The FBI is the king of this, and so for the last twenty-five years they've had to deal with nothing that isn't mortal and/or human. The Department of Agriculture, on the other hand, has been stuck cleaning up crop circles and blaming increasingly-ludicrous "pranksters" and "weather balloons" due to poor politics.

>>12743723
Not all departments want an easy time. What they really want is easy prestige.

>>12743694
I can tell you for a fact that these guys are not going to be pushed around by anyone.

National Mall is US Park Police territory. They're about as intractable as the FBI/ATF when it comes to jurisdiction issues.

There's no reason why a conversationalist service would ever be interested in policing education. The NPS is barely interested in policing to begin with. If you're going to muck around in the DOI, the BIA makes a lot more sense. At least then you're talking about communities.

>>12743723
Meanwhile, nobody's quite sure how those geeks with the Smithsonian Institution joined the club, let alone made off with 4% of last year's budget.

>>12743758
Okay, what you're doing is injecting reality and logic into this fun little conversation about crazy hypotheticals. You're being lame. Stop it.

>>12743786
Your original proposition is so fundamentally retarded and based upon ignorance of the departments you've implicated that it gets in the way of my ability to enjoy this hypothetical which I will concede is cool were it not for the derp "I don't understand federal policing" issues.

All budgeting goes through the NRO who routinely get and then spend money on projects they don't even know the names of. A flick of the pen could authorize the purchase of 4 SUVs for staff use at a black project in Montana, or the purchase of 4 nuclear-powered tunnel boring machines.

>>12743806
Sorry that I don't have a Political Science degree or whatever it is you need to over-analyze and not have fun.

>>12743770
>Meanwhile, nobody's quite sure how those geeks with the Smithsonian Institution joined the club, let alone made off with 4% of last year's budget.

Might have something to do with the "mummy incident" that Health and Human Services so botched. And DoI's "Indian Affairs" branch hasn't even *touched* the wendigo outbreak in North Dakota. SOMEBODY with knowledge on how these "prior civilizations" contained their bogeys needed to be brought on board.

>>12743833

The Wendigo Affair was handled by Education. Those fuckers had to talk out of their ass to convince people they were supposed to be there, though.

Word is, they were the ones who brought in Smithsonian.

>>12743833
Okay, explain how the CIA's the one doing the yearly culling of the Bigfoot population. Which, by the way, spends several months in Canada.

I saw this documentary about some west African hellhole where the street gangs who rule with brutal violence legitimize themselves by being members of the union of transportation workers.

They flash those membership cards like badges. And collect 'street taxes' from anybody working in their sector.

>>12743854

Bullshit. CIA's never done a thing for us.

No idea who keeps the Sasquatches down. Probably Forestry, they do everything else out west.

>>12743870
Around Foresters, never relax.

>>12743825
Look, what you're saying is base-one wrong. Like, saying you want to have mounted knights wielding daggers because you don't understand how weapons work.

Don't get upset with me because I'm trying to bring reason into it. Rework your setting so that it's actually feasible, or at least not offensive to someone who knows anything about the way federal jurisdictions work. Feasibility is what separates COSMIC RAYS LOL from gene-splicing.

>>12743854
>Okay, explain how the CIA's the one doing the yearly culling of the Bigfoot population. Which, by the way, spends several months in Canada.

It's *because* it spends several months in Canada, strangely enough - some weird restriction about which agencies can and can't act outside national borders. They've been trying to ditch that duty for years, but the "big boys" at NSA/DoD aren't about to accept that shitpile job and nobody else has the clout to clear activity with the Canucks... and, of course, NOBODY is about to let the Mounties in the club. Enough hands in the pie within the border without letting everybody on the goddamned planet call a piece.

>>12743806
the important jurisdiction problems here might be a bit beyond day to day problems.

Does the Parks Service allow BLM Agents in pursuit of a grendelkin to chase it to Ellis Island in the dead of night, or is there some mandatory paperwork? Do they say 'we will take it from here' and turn away the best grendelkin hunt team in the north-east just to maintain their pride?


These are the kinds of troubles to figure out.

>>12743879
And so far you seem to be the only one going "THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS GUYS YOU'RE BEING STUPID ABOUT THIS STOP IT."

Also, shitty example with the knights there. Guess I'm not the only one who's retarded.

>>12743899

Besides have you SEEN the mounties deal with shit? Not exactly the stereotypical calm canucks those guys

>>12743833
Hell, I'm just glad we've got all those "black ops conspiracy" nutters keeping eyes out on that old Roswell place - long as they think eveything happens in one spot, they quit trying to look elsewhere. Do we even use that place for anything anymore? Last I heard, the bossman was using it to hold surplus ofice supplies.

>>12743921
So, then, knights . . . fighting from horses . . . with daggers - completely reasonable to you?

As far as me being the only person whining, it's because I'm likely the only person with any actual familiarity with this shit. If you'd made a stupid mistake about who does what in 40k, you'd have so much angry fa/tg/uy on your hands.

>>12743950
Sounds like somebody never gets invited to the New Year's party out there.

>>12743972
New Ye-- aw, dammit! Why doesn't anybody TELL me these things?!

>>12743966
>So, then, knights . . . fighting from horses . . . with daggers - completely reasonable to you?

Completely. Or at least it sounds like an interesting idea to work with and expand. On the other hand, I've proven myself in this thread to be so pants-shittingly retarded it's a miracle I can form complete sentences.

The year is 1950. Five men in well-tailored but otherwise nondescript suits bring Dr. Malcom Harridan "into the loop." Choose ten associates, they say. You're being drafted, sir, but you will never see the front line. And when the government says "you're working for us," you don't say no.

Twenty-five million dollars and three hundred initial personnel. Two facilities: One in Nevada, one in New York. A meteorological research station and a collection of warehouses. The job: Develop a survival plan. If worse comes to worst, the government of the United States of America must remain intact and functional, through the apocalypse itself if necessary.

"The Secretary of Defense hand-picked you for this, Dr. Harridan. You have one year to prove his assumption right."

One year passes. Two. Three. Administrations come and go. Harridan's department grows. From 300 men to a thousand, two facilities to ten. Infrastructure is laid down. Connections are made. Palms are greased, and, where necessary, throats are cut. Washington smiles upon his efforts, a bright point in the middle of a collapsing world. The shadow government becomes a reality. An entire secondary Washington, based far from any military targets and kept secret even at the highest levels. Conflicts burn halfway across the world. Men cast themselves from the shores of Democracy to defeat the Communist threat. Harridan labors on.

1989. It's time. The live-fire test. The moment of truth. Missiles are launched. Bombers streak from all corners of the globe. The world goes mad, suicidal with self-hatred. But Harridan's folks are all right. Safe, secure, prepared. They knew it would come, just like he did, but by God they will not let it be the end of America. From the fiery sands they will come forth, when the great vaults unseal, to rebuild and to take command. For liberty and for justice, to make the world anew.

Harridan's Wall, the foundation of all.

>>12743966
Stop critiquing and correct, then. Instead of just blowing bluster about how HORRIBLY WRONG we've gotten it, provide interesting counter-possibilities about how the concept of "every department has a secret squad" might work to fit within your conceptualization of "makes sense."

In other words, don't just go "YOU'RE WRONG." That sucks. Make it right, make it cool, make it fit the awesome.

>>12744044
Now you've done it. He's going to copy and paste whole pages of some document outlining the functions of each department, along with exact explanations of why what we're talking about could never happen.

>>12743966
hey, i dig it man.
mellow.

we are trying to address, on the fly, the random ideas here while building on them. So steer clear of "that is wrong and stupid" and give us all something else. Take that familiarity and just tell that that Parks (secret)Service agents are real jerks about right-of-way situations and anything that might damage one of their precious monuments, things like that.

I mean, hey.. when there was that problem with the cursed stone mixed into the concrete and brickwork surrounding the base of the Washington Monument, Parks asked for help. And got it. What is so wrong about that? sure, sure, there was some collateral damage, but the "renovation" schedule was easy enough to backdate and slip into place.

always worrying too much.

NERV style, publicly owned corporation where the vast majority of the shares are owned by people in on the secret. They work subsidized jobs for the government and receive supplemental funding through the college financial aid system. Did you really think Haliburton was making roads in Iraq?

Alternatively file them under Federal Groundskeeping. Sure, all the vetting is to make sure they aren't Mexicans. No one ever suspects the gardeners.

>>12744008
No, no no. I get your point. No need to get sarcastic and passive-aggressive about it.

You're not interested in enriching your hypothetical by involving the actual governing principles of the pre-existing structures you're using. Rather, you're just interested in a bunch of token names, badges, and forces that are basically interchangeable, but familiar and distinct enough to serve as tropes that inform the "motivations" and "jurisdictions" of the actors so that there's an edge of sexy, "Oh yeah, that could happen - you never know what the government is up to" conspiracy to the narrative.

What you've done is taken something that could have been Delta Green and made Department of X-tan and Bureau of Y-chan and their wacky highschool adventures.

I got you.

By all means, carry on. Horses in your world can shit ice cream, too you know - if you want. Whatever floats your boat.

>>12744040
>In Harridan We Trust

>>12744114
>accuses people of being sarcastic and passive-aggressive
>is sarcastic and passive-aggressive while doing it

thanks for the help.

>>12744103
>>12744044
Well, it's too late now. I already made an ass of myself.

I'd love to help, honestly, but I went and raeged and now the milk is shit.

I'll take this time to apologize for being an ass.

>>12744114
>Delta Green

Hey, you're right. There's a metric fuckton of info in those books about the various government departments and how they can finangle themselves into jurisdiction.

ITT: Anonymous unknowingly attempts to recreate The Morrow Project but as a federal group instead of a private org headed by a time traveler.

>>12744137
>Implying implications

But I deserved that.

>>12744114
And you're angry we don't all love the minutiae of the US government's inter-departmental relations as much as you do. I got it.

>>12744179
Every fa/tg/uy loves minutiae. Just not the same stuff, all the time. Which is apparently how this whole argument got started.

>>12744151
Fuck you anon.

If you make an ass out of yourself, take a deep breath and keep going.

99% of the time, we can't tell it's the same fucking person across more than a couple posts.

That said, if you're sorry FUCKING CONTRIBUTE. Jesus Christ man, it would go a lot further towards out good graces than a half-hearted apology.

>>12744119
Of course, he'd be dead by then.

>>12744201

Good point.

Yo! Anal-retentive guy, if you know this much shit about it, help us refine and improve what we've got.

All you really have to do is take our silly premise and swap some acronyms around to make it fit.

If nothing else, we could take the best of both and when someone asks why it's this way instead of that "internal politics".

Multi-National Corporations

/thread

>>12744217
>>12744119
Wait, this works. Of course they'd look up to him, he's the whole reason everything worked out in the end. Him and the ten. The founders, the builders of the wall. Just like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and all the men we remember for "building America," you have Harridan and his fellows venerated by the populous of post-1989. Thank you, sir or madam, this is awesome.

>>12743923

Dude they take Sasquatch hunting like the brits do fox hunts. Except they're riding bears. (semi-intelligent bearlike creatures from another dimension to be precise). And they go all out, not like the bleeding hearts that say the Sasquatches are sentient

>>12744201
It wasn't half-hearted.

Anyway. Here's what I'm saying: The NPS wouldn't give up the White House for anything. Especially not to the DOE.

Conversationalist orgs are, by in large, less concerned with glory-hounding than law enforcement or defense orgs.

For example, feds in Fish and Wildlife Service are likely to have masters and doctorate degrees in biology (no fucking joke) and are generally more inclined towards scientific endeavors.

Meanwhile, your FBI agents are going to be your "typical" black-fatigue federal agents. Everybody is college educated, but these are guys who wanted to be feds from highschool. This is their dream.

DOI, DOE, etc, etc - much more likely to have "fallen into" federal policing, especially during economic downturns.

>>12744248
>implying the agencies involved trust the private sector

>>12744267
Following on that: you know who has scary-ass abilities?

Game wardens. Their burden for probable cause for search and seizure is VERY VERY low. All it takes is a single raptor bird feather. I mean one. You have any eagle feathers in your house? Even ones you found on the ground? Don't piss off a game warden. Fish and Wildlife Service guys are liable to be really good infiltrators.

>>12744267
F&WS are fucking bro-tier. Need to know the details on whatever gribbly you've encountered in the area? More than likely they've got a file on it somewhere.

>>12744272
that's why they are the enemy.

Always trying to open doors we have been closing, always eager to make a deal that we know will doom everyone.

Of course, since we can never publish "The Big Book Of Things Not To Do" with any success everything is last-minute patches to causality or quiet sabotage while not daring to come out of the shadows enough to flash a badge much less cart anyone off to jail.

Sure, sometimes people end up dead. But that generates so much paperwork for Us, for Them, for The Other Guys, not to mention "daylight" bureaus that it is severe last resort.

Its hard enough covering up the people who get themselves sucked into an alternate dimension because they tried to dig a nice solid foundation for their gazebo.

>>12744272
>Implying there are not agencies that exist only to pretend to be private sector in order to serve as banks.

>>12744272
>implying the private sector and government aren't linked.

>>12744334
>implying that is at all relevant
>implying

We live in a post 9/11 dystopia. The dirty jobs go to private contractors.

>SHADOW GOVERNMENT BUMP.
>We appreciate Your Assistance, Citizen

>>12744960
Citizen, state your clearance level.

Hey, what should we call this setting?

>>12745032
hmm. competing secret groups from different agencies (even the ones no one would suspect) trying to survive without being drowned in a sea of paperwork or, you know, killed in some other way?

Badges.

>>12744314
Many such positions predate the US. They have privileges and powers beyond the scope of other enforcement organizations and sometimes ignoring the constitution.

Game Wardens, don't fuck with them, always buy them a drink.

>>12745032
The Department

Just that. When people ask "The Department of what?" you just smile.

>>12745060
My counter offer

Official Report
Spin the story, or die trying
An inter-agency SNAFU RPG

>>12745109
that tagline is damn good.

>>12745109
Official Report
Spin the story or face the consequences
An inter-agency conspiracy mystery

G-Men.

I remember the first time I heard that word used. We weren't even out on hard business. No, some chucklefuck had decided to use the address of one of our offices as his home to keep his parents from finding out he was delinquent on his bills and had been reported to a collections agency. Oh the many trials of kidulthood. Symptomatic of a bad economy, they say. I say it's a lack of initiative.

Regardless, we had a violation of federal postal regulations on our hands, and we intended to rectify the situation.

. . . And maybe throw our weight around a little.

"Ma? There's some G-men out here in a big black truck."

That was no compliment. But you know, I have to admit I liked it.

is the government asking for advice on how to fuck the populace on 4chan?

>>12745311
I think FEMA has it covered.

From the FCC down to every standards and practices suit out there, secret agents, all of them. Petty report writing, broadcasts re-editing, webserver vandalizing spooks.

>>12745197
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-men_%28magazine%29
WUT!?

Ranger Borman checked his watch again. His contact was late. He motioned for the girl who ran the diner to refill his coffee. A ghastly brew. But this diner was a good place, approved by NPS guideline appendix 73b, right on the border of ranger land, a small preserve along the interstate where few picnickers ever roamed away from the strategically placed hiking paths. And ranger Borman had his eye on those kinds.

Truson was never late. It was against his nature. He was IRS to the grain, perfection to a fault. He had placed the usual request for a meeting, driving his car through a meadow by the rest area and placing a vandalism report on the anonymous tip line. But they had just met last month, it had to be a pressing matter that coaxed the old paper pusher out of his office down at Federal Plaza.

Of course Truson wasn't his real name. Neither was Borman's. Standard employment procedure, a bit like working in witness protection. But the thought of federal marshals stirred the bile in Borman. Those smug SOBs, always pulling out the criminal pursuit card when they want to trespass on NPS territory.

He took another sip of coffee-water and looked out in the rain. The upper dam might flood over if this kept up. A car pulled into the parking area between the diner and the pharmacy. It wasn't Truson's. But it had plates that matched the secret federal agency code. Borman got nervous. This could be a setup.

He got up, left a fiver on the counter, and withdrew toward the back door, concealed in the darkness of the corridor with the broken light bulb (his work) between the bathrooms. He watched the entrance intently while he felt the adrenaline rush into his veins. Which agency had sent its minions for him?

But then the back door flung open from a noisy kick and Borman spun around. He felt his knees buckle. Department of Veteran Affairs, Office of Employment Discrimination Complaint Adjudication! This was turning into a worst case scenario quickly.

>>12750343

Go on...

>>12750343

Actually a damn fine read, even if 'fiver' suggests you're British/Australian your American stylings are sound enough.

>>12750380
That's it. The rest is classified.
I could send you the report, but it's all blacked out.

>>12750399
English is my second language. How would you call a $5 bill in New England?

>>12750410

Oh come on, it's not like anyone would ever kn

I'd split mine between Wildlife and fisheries (control and access to 'hunting' firearms and extensive wilderness mapping/experience), Motor Vehicles (nobody pays attention to the DMV or their budgets), and the ATF (hint:95% of all the alchohol, drugs, weapons, ammo, and contraband they seize gets stored in hidden weapon caches. They enjoy massive budgets and minimal oversight thanks to 'wars on terror' and 'wars on drugs'.) Between them and the 'park rangers' of WLnF, they can set up the kind of broad, hidden communication network needed to command the continent. The DMVs can map out an monitor all urban areas, thanks to street cams, stop light cams, speed monitoring checkpoints, etc. By splitting the shadow infrastructure between the three, we can more easily hide the budget skimming to support our efforts. All three are generally ignored by both the legislature and the general public. They make the ideal hiding places.

>>12750434
Alright, but you owe me one.

>>12750425
a "Five", short for a "five dollar bill"

>>12750559
Much obliged kind Sir.

You guys are forgetting NOAA and the NWS.

NOAA is going to be the ones with their fingers on the pulse of any disturbances that originates from the atmosphere or oceans, like the Bermuda triangle.

Not to mention they have a lot of surveillance planes, satellites, research vessels floating in international waters . . .

I think if there's going to be a degree of cooperation between the research-oriented conversationalist bureaus because the agents have similar mindsets, NOAA is going to be a big player.

Boring choices, but Homeland Security have a massive remit, poor legislation and massive issues with keeping their shit under control (not to mention are overbudgeted), and NEST may not have jurisdiction, but if a bunch of men in HASMATs holding geiger counters tell you to get the fuck out of a building, you will.

The entire Department of Energy has it's fingers in some sticky pies, actually.

>>12744314
yeah somthing like that here in Texas where the Game Wardens hold the most 'power' of enforcement. Call me crazy but im pretty sure they dont need probable cause and their word is law kinda thing

The NPS has the government's best paranormal investigation unit.

Departmental historians pinpoint our first forays into PI back to Teddy Roosevelt and the Antiquities Act. Right about then we started acquiring Native American burial grounds and all of the problems one would expect with that sort of thing.

Of course, this was also the heyday of the Spiritualism movement, so in retrospect, you get the feeling no one really thought much of it.

No, the proverbial shit didn't hit the fan until we picked up the War Department's Civil-War battlefields. Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania, Gettysburg, Petersburg, Shiloh, Antietam . . . Right around that point, things started to get weird. Levitating cannon, 40-foot high obelisk-shaped monuments balancing on-end . . . and the suicides. There was a good half-year where you couldn't patrol within 5-feet of a sizable hill, observation tower, or body of water in a National Military Park of National Battlefield without finding at least one person's mortal remains. Emergency dispatch even came up with a word for it. "War casualties". That was Cheryl's idea. But I never liked her. She had a tinny voice that sounded like nails on a chalkboard over the radio.

We don't let ghost tours operate on our parks. We deny the existence of the supernatural to visitors. Why? Because we still can't explain what happened to the last gaggle of cameraflash-toting "ghostie" amateurs who all decided to hang themselves from equestrian statues. The great generals don't deserve that kind of decoration, and it was all we could do to get the bodies down before the visitors started filing in.

Besides, we've got our own team. And we actually know what we're doing.

>knock knock
>this thread
>whats that, a delivery from writefriends?

>image related

>>12750869
I like this... we know some of what's going on, outsiders keep out. Keep the uninformed public involved as a cover and... test subject source?

I'm liking many of the ideas in this thread, especially the less... eldritch horrors from beyond brainsucking of Delta Green, and more of the 'interdepartmental territory marking'.

Especially like the setup for Harridans Wall. Believable, recent enough setting and scenario that it would be relatable for many newer players, old enough that you can take artistic license with timeline and tech divergence. Especially since it gives a scenario that generates an environment of forgotten bureaucratic units laboring away at compartmentalized goals, all tracked in some great black book register. At least until the rise of the Wall. Who knows which members are sleepers for some forgotten agenda, and which are mundane?

>>12751757
Kalaupapa National Historical Park is the secluded former site of a leper colony. A few survivors of the disease and their families still live there. It's considered an "active settlement." The locals don't like to be bothered - but who does?

Access is completely restricted save for people who have the fortitude of patience to apply and wait for permits from the Hawaiian State Department and then prearrange four tours run by a single outlet. Even then, the tours stick to the main roads.

They'll show you the sights . . . tell you about Father Damien - the founder of the colony. How he was a well-loved priest who succumbed to the dreaded disease after sixteen years of tending to it victims. A real-life martyr.

He was canonized in 2009.

But that's the just white-page interpretive stuff, for civilians. What really goes down in Hawaii is another story entirely.

>>12752151

Forgot my picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_agencies

All doing it wrong.
What you have to do is make a public stock company with the most horrible business concept ever. Have the worst visible employees, worst products, worst everything. Nobody will be the wiser when the company is hemorrhaging money. Nobody buys stock except people who know it's related to the shadow government, and all money is sent to the embarrassingly shitty company which functions as the SG's treasury.

>>12752151
What, the blood sacrifice, the cannibalism, the ritual scarification? The coverups, the importation and maintaining of the Hawaiian tourist trade. Simply to keep the transient population numbers high enough to raise the background ambient psychic energy high enough to manipulate. All to keep the undead leper priests of the outer barrier going for another year. Or month. Or week.

>>12755592
hmm.

staging an event with NOAA and a bare handful of other organizations to create a "tsunami warning" with the dual reward of allowing a rather interesting number of people (and remains) to be shifted without scrutiny while At The Same Time creating an energetic storm of fear and apprehension across the islands.

Turned out that making the wave, the work of minutes coupled with a few phone calls, was nothing compared with the followups, the seismograph data to redraw, the video footage to doctor.. and the paperwork. oh gods. the paperwork.

Edward didn't need to check his pocket watch, he knew the exact time. The habit of timing one's actions precisely was a decades old leftover from his service days. But he pulled the old heirloom out of his jacket by its heavy chain anyway. It gave him comfort, a relic from a simpler age.

He slid it into his palm, sprang it open, and scanned the city park behind him in the reflection over the clock face. The dog walker had moved away, replaced by an orange vested sanitation service employee with a blue plastic bag and a three foot waste grabber. These covers were expensive. Not impeccable, but part of a professional routine. How had those VA bastards secured an FBI inter-agency-cooperation for this? It wasn't DHS, but it still complicated things.

They had been on him since he had left his 'home' this morning. They were good, short interval chase car swaps, decent distance unlike undercover cops. He suspected they might have a drone on him as well. Those guys had budgets that would make the pope blush.

After trying to shake them had not worked Edward had decided to sit them out. He stayed in public places and did suspicious things, pretended to be waiting for somebody, asked strangers complicated questions so the ensuing conversations would be long enough to make his observers nervous. His real meeting had been this afternoon, and it had been important. Too bad he had had to ditch it, he would have to get word out to his Park Ranger contact somehow. If they weren't on to him already. If they had been watching the last few days they would know he placed that call to the tip line to set up the meet. They would be watching whose desks it crossed.

But how had they found him in the first place? His budget reassignment scheme was impossible to trace. It had taken him 15 years to set it up, and it gave the IRS considerable leverage on a few unofficial coordination boards. No one inside would have any reason to jeopardize it. It was all funneled through NPS and provided slush funds for countless off the books operations all over the world. How had those veterans figured it out? And to send their equal opportunity outfit, those were the big guns.

He would have to get out of here soon. It was starting to get dark and the number of plausible places to be in a crowd was diminishing rapidly. He got up and waved for a cab, then sent the first one that stopped away and ran across the street to stop another. Probably a futile exercise. But he had to keep them guessing. Another day of this and he would have to drop this Truson identity and get to a safe house to wait for extraction.

>>12757673
>Edward
Bracing for catspanking.

>>12757705
Edward Truson does not exist. I would tell yo his real name, but then I'd have to discredit your sanity publicly so that no one would ever believe you.

>>12753942
So, Vault-Tec?

>>12757727
Did you just say GURPS?
I think I just heard you saying GURPS.

This needs to be archived...

captcha: san shered

>>12757891
It has been archived for a while now. Time to vote it up so it stays that way.

Eurofag here. Do you have state-owned companies out there ? Cause they would do the job awesomely. Think about it : who would ever question the spendings for security in a nuclear power-plant ? Besides, being well-known for your incompetence and lack of efficiency, will anyone wonder why you loose billions every year ? They rage at you, for sure, ask for budget cuts, but ask why ? Never. They know why : it's because the company is full of loosers and dimwits...

Really, state owned company facade is best facade...

>>12758122
You'd have to bribe all of the opposition prying through your quangos to dig up dirt on how you're wasting the money, or at easy their investigators. It's still doable, but there's more oversights than at first appears.

>>12758151

They get a little more technical, state-owned companies in Europe tend to be somewhat monolithic, with budget rules so complicated that no one, from either side of the political spectrum or any private contractor or shareholder will ever take a look. Any one knowing his way in this maze is now either mad or long dead, and many rules exist only because they "always have". At least, it is like this in my company, which is probably the biggest state owned in Europe, and arguably the most succesful. No one, form the inside or outside, ever question our spendings. Sure, there are safeguards, but with enough people in the know, you can easily bypass them. For example, the only person who will ever know any detail about how I spent the tens-of-million euros budget allocated to my activity is my (direct) boss. The guy's office is next to mine, and we both know he can't be bothered to control what I do. Too much work, not enough time. And for everybody else, my budget is just a line on a spread sheet, or a list of contractors at most. Nobody could know if I told the truth when I wrote that we paid for renovating this dam secondary landslide protection system (which never worked anyway), or if I diverted the funds for an all new (and working) system for an underground warehouse. And I am not even high-ranking.

So, this example may be really appropriate, but take a few dozen guys like me, and you suddenly ave a billion-euros funding. You don't even need to tell them : most of the time, I don't know what I work on. So really, it wouldn't be that hard. Complicated and elaborate, but not hard or difficult.

>>12758230
The myth of the accountability of bureaucracies is just that.