[IC] Task Force: Sentinel - Occult Covert Operations

Task Force: Sentinel
Chapter I - Dread Harvest

Very few good things ever happen at 3am. It’s that weird dimension where all the dark thoughts that creep and crawl hatch in the human skull. The darkest and most dead time of night, where you wake from a dream full of adrenaline at a threat half-remembered, but deep embedded. The Witching Hour that stirs the darkness at the back of the mind, letting all manner of vileness bubble to the surface.

Nothing good ever happened in that unholy hour, and the scene laid out on the wooded side of a rural Wisconsin road. The sun was just barely rising, the foreboding red light casting long shadows through the trees. Overhead, tangled boughs hushed and groaned in the faintest sigh of a breeze. Withered leaves tumbled downward as the autumn chill turned breath into fog and gnawed to the bone.

The sparsely traveled road had more activity that morning that it likely ever saw in a normal year; a single sheriff’s cruiser, silent but for the grumble of the engine. Beside it was a pair of matte-black Land Rovers, the beams of their headlights casting a banal clarity over the scene at the edge of the gravel road.

A luxury SUV stuck in a road-side ditch; the hood crumpled like an aluminum can as it wrapped around a tree.

A collision wasn’t something that the Division, let along their elite team, the Sentinels, were called in to investigate, but the local Police Chief had their number, and he was terribly insistent. Chief Millar was a quirky, pigeon-chested man of late-middle age and diminutive height, but he was reliable as an oak. Clint hated that Millar was right. Again. If he kept this up, he’d get offered a job that he couldn’t quite refuse, retirement and pension be damned.

The car was indeed a nice one, strange for the rural roads, even those with old money. The tinted windows were all smashed, the airbags deployed, and not a soul to be found in or around the vehicle when their OnStar made the automated call to emergency services. Millar knew strange when he saw it, calling in the number on the nameless black business card he’d received after the first Wendigo incident.

“What do you think?” Millar asked, his greying mustache twitching nervously as he approached the darkly clad figure by lip of the ditch, passing a paper cup of coffee. There was a pause as the Sentinel agent regarded Millar with cold blue eyes, then nodded in appreciation for the burnt roast as he accepted with black-gloved hands.

“You know better than to ask, Bill,” said the operative, peeling back the tab and sucking down a long pull of coffee, to hell with letting it cool.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit, Clint. Your crew has come in on all manner of nasty business, and I need to know if this is another… skin-something-rather.” There was a moment of silence as Clinton scanned the scene, watching his teammates get to work, doing what they did best in their own ways.

“Mm-mmh,” Clint finally grunted in the negative. “A skin-dancer or wendigo would have made a mess. Claws marks, blood, body parts. This…” he paused, clicking his tongue in thought. “This is downright sterile by our standards. I could eat off this crime scene.” The chief nodded slowly, his gloved hands clasping his own coffee for warmth, and probably just to have something to do with his hands. Once again, silence reigned but for the shuffle of the Sentinels at work and the eerie call of a whippoorwill through the trees.

“So, what do you think it is?” Millar finally said after a pregnant pause. Clint, in no rush, finished the gulp from his cup.

“Chief Millar, I appreciate your faith in our abilities, but we need a chance to actually investigate the scene,” Clint said evenly, turning away from the ditch to round on the lead Rover’s trunk. Stacks of hard shell cases in various shapes and sizes were all neatly stacked, and a life-long Wisconsinite like Millar didn’t need to wonder how many of them housed firearms. Shoving a stack aside, Clinton grabbed his molle field bag and slung it over his shoulder. It was an unspoken, expected thing for every Sentinel to have a duty bag, but it wasn’t terribly enforced. After all, when some of their number could effectively command the “source-code of the universe”, something so mundane as a go-bag might seem silly. Alas, Clinton was not one of that esteemed group, but he was as unnatural as the rest.

“Chief, we’re going to need you to close off this road while my team does their investigation.” Clint thrust his scarred chin at the puzzle before them. Between divination, enhanced senses, and good old-fashioned forensics, they should be able to figure out something. If they couldn't... well, that was something to tackle after the fact.

[Klumsykrow357]

The Wendigo surveyed the scene from the treeline, hidden from all but the keenest of eyes. The Guardian had instructed them to find any clues as to what had caused the collision. Her dark, unreadable pools took in the smashed SUV and the thrashed road dispassionately. Though she had gotten used to cars as a mode of transport, they stank and left a metallic taste in her mouth. Besides, the crunched metal vehicle and skids in the earth made little sense to her, so she left her companions to examine that area of the scene. Her eyes lingered briefly on The Guardian before fixing on The Human; the other reason she was keeping her distance. She could feel his nervousness from where she stood amongst the trees. She suspected he would be even more uncomfortable at the sight of her and his fear stink would be a distraction.

She turned and started making her way carefully through the brush to look for any signs or traces of the creatures that lived here, both natural and supernatural. Her movements were silent, causing minimal disturbance in the surrounding shrubbery. She paused every few paces to examine the area and take a long, slow inhales to check for any unfamiliar scents; anything that didn't belong in a forest or seemed out of place. Her intent was to make her way a half mile down the road before crossing it and coming up the other way, passed the wreck. After a half a mile that way she would cross again and continue until she was back in the place she started.

[The Harbinger of Ferocity]

From the way the weight of the rifle sat in the hand that held it, gripped around its neck between forestock and magazine well, it was less a roughly eight pound weapon and more like a toy; as if it weighed nothing and was casually nothing to be worried about. It contrasted the disquieting scene that said something, somehow, someway, had gone wrong, illuminated only by the lights of the vehicles in the area and the rumble of their idling motors. Had it been back to the dead of night here, all of this would rightfully have been more uneasy than mysterious as it now was. Yet, none of that seemed to play into the handling of the weapon or how it came along with its bearer back and away from the resting place of the disabled vehicle.

November's feet carried the rest of him up the incline of the trench, boots wandering the final path the truck took before it landed where it was now; tire marks were where the search would begin from then work backward. This was by no means a special talent of the one following them, rather it only was a reasonable place to start. It was obvious the "accident" occurred somewhere prior to this place, with the where likely providing a clue to the what.

Passing by both humans, the judgmental look November provided was perhaps unnoticed as they kept busy with their angle - whatever it was. Should they have caught it, it would have been that same experience of being watched by something that merely did as it was told, even if its desires laid elsewhere. Which was true in this circumstance, as November was by no means thrilled. If this is what the Division of Occult Global Security deemed priority enough, either this war was soon to be lost or there was substantially more they were not sharing; November only prayed the latter held true. This could be lived with, accepted, expected, the alternatives could not be.

Faintly puffing, steam rising from his nose, attention shifted back again to the roadway and its pavement. Despite the darkness, some amount of evidence was still here in the bit of scattered light from the vehicles, and while vision was not as acute as it truly could be, that opportunity was denied for the time being. Again, another expectation simply accounted for - November had ways around this. Paying no mind to the conversation drifting in on the still air in between the odd breeze, the words "... close off this road while my team does their investigation", the tracker made the way further and further apart from the ditch. Suitably far enough away that it was becoming increasingly dark to more mundane eyes, a knee fell to painted lines on the pavement and a hand caressed the gritty surface. It would take some time, nothing substantial, but November intended to read the rough approximation of what caused these tracks in the first place.

Psychometry was a supernatural talent through and through but it was hardly foreign.

[Naril]

Samara stretched, her arms rising over her head, the movement accompanied by a jaw-popping yawn. Her hair was tousled even a little more than usual, and if she looked bleary, well, it was three in the thrice-cursed morning. She rolled a shoulder, still sore from that fight with that plant thing with all the mouths last month, and realized what had been bothering her the whole ride out here. Sam looked down at her shirt and sighed - yes, this was already going to be one of those kinds of nights. The fabric was right, and the cut was right - which actually was rather the problem, because the shirt itself was about a size smaller than Sam usually wore. She let out a curse in five-hundred-year-old Persian, and tried to pull the seams into something a little more comfortable. That was the problem with being woken up in the middle of the night; you could never be entirely sure whose shirt you were grabbing off the floor. Or the nightstand. Or, if she was being honest, from the living room couch - waiting to get to the bedroom had, at the time, seemed like an awful idea.

Zipping up her jacket, Sam made her way from the truck to look closer at the...well, the whatever-this-was. Millar and Clint were right, the place was, for something the Sentinels got themselves involved in, spic-and-span. Hardly anything that might make the average person even think of the heebie-jeebies, and certainly nothing like the last time they'd been out this way. Still, Millar hadn't seemed like a fool, and if he'd made the call, she'd doubted their time was going to waste - but at the same time, there certainly didn't seem to be much here.

With another yawn, Sam made her way to the crashed SUV. She leaned in through a shattered side window, careful not to disturb anything she didn't have to. Glass pebbles crunched under her boots while she pulled a flashlight from a pocket, playing the beam across the inside of the vehicle. She looked at the headliner, the seats, checked if the seat belt had been cut or if it had been released manually. Leaning a little further forward, she tried to get a look at the driver's side footwell, in case there were anything nefarious there - the vehicle may as well have been remote controlled, given how empty it seemed. Maybe it had been. Not likely, but there was likely no harm in seeing which primrose path to be led down.

The smell of coffee wafted past her nose, and Sam breathed in, her brain sizzling at the scent. She stood up, making sure not to touch anything, and turned to face Clint and Millar.

"Tell me you've got more of that," Sam said, her lips curled into a smirk while she pointed the beam of her flashlight at the cup. She sniffed again, "...Wait, this time of day, out here..." She shook her head, "Never mind. That's cop coffee, right? Worse for you than the rest of this job put together."

Sam nodded to Clint, watching the older man pick up his go-back from the rover, and made her way a little further down the road, following the SUV's tracks before the truck had lost its fight with physics. Not out of any real idea that she'd find anything, but she needed a moment of comparative quiet.

Away from the growing bustle of equipment and people, Sam took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let the breath out. She felt something in her chest, almost like the fluttering of anticipation before a kiss, almost like an electric shock. This never got any less strange, but then again, perhaps that really was the point. The Sentinels lived beyond the veil, in the world of magic and monsters, but seeing past even that layer of reality and into the one beneath, well. That held its own special take on the strange and wondrous. Sam finished letting her breath out and with air filling her lungs again, she turned, her attention now on that liminal space between this world and the next, searching for spirits, ghosts, or evidence of the recently departed.

[WaywardK]

Jason was a bit out of sorts when he arrived on scene. He wasn't exactly the most sober. To most 3 AM was a Witching Hour, to Jason, despite being a witch himself, saw it as his bitchin' hour. The horrific things he saw on the job drove him to drink, and being the kind of person who makes friends with everyone at a bar sort of exacerbates that. He had been for sure he was going to have the following day off, but the supernatural hated being ignored it seemed. Some of those on the scene gave him side eyes as they smelled the alcohol on him. Used to such reactions by "professionals" he largely ignored it and just focused on being as sober as possible when he arrived.

The wreck itself was a sobering sight itself, whether that was a good or bad thing for him. The way it seemed ripped apart gave him some reservations, but he HAD seen worse. Bloodied dens of cultist with entrails stapled to walls, flesh literally melting off some shapeshifters, and roaming spirits from the underworld; often appearing how they died; that often carried messages from Hades when the god cared to pay attention to Jason. Whatever gore was at the end of this road wasn't going to be that terrible to him. Jason had gotten sidetracked with this thought, but it did lead to a decent avenue of investigation, one he was sure Sam was going to pursue in her own way.

Psychopomps of all kinds will be hanging around or leaving traces behind at scenes like these if someone died, and Jason wanted to be aware of their presence if they were here. Jason walked from the road to the wreckage, waving a hand and a smile at Clint on his way and taking inventory of how the other Sentinels were behaving. He walked up to the driver's side just after Sam had left it, nodding at her in case she noticed him. The driver's side was the best place to start if they had died, so Jason made sure nobody was paying too much attention and started his work.

Jason reached his left hand into a messenger bag that he had slung over his shoulder, a large brown-leather piece that every Sentinel knew to be curious about. He pulled out a small vial of some greyish paste made with a blend of mushrooms and laurel (bay) leaves and uncorked the archaicly-bottled concoction. He brought it to his lips and closed his eyes, blowing ever so quietly over the bottle before dumping part of the salve in his left palm before returning the salve to his bag. Jason then rubbed the salve into his fingers and then underneath is eyes, nose, and behind his ears. While the magic wouldn't give him the same specialty Sam had when it came to the dead and dying, it would allow him to become aware of the astral plane without having to necessarily enter it, which also meant he couldn't directly interact with it unless he used more magic. The purpose to this, of course, was that psychopomps travelled in the astral. Once the salve was applied correctly Jason let his chi reach out into the world around him, aided by his salve.

Meanwhile, overhead in the sky, dark as the knight sky and flying by the light of the moon, was Astra. Along with cats and dogs, crows were well known natural psychopomps. Since she noticed what Jason was doing, and be known she was very aware of what exactly he was doing, she had every intention on helping.