Shadow Wars

The ‘Shadow Wars’ as they have come to be known, now that details of them have reached the surface, is the accepted term for the clandestine military use of magically-talented people during World War III. It is also theorized that there was a similar conflict during and before World War II, but no documentation or first-hand accounts have been located to prove this. These conflicts crossed the boundaries of the faction lines during the War.

In one sense, the Shadow Wars was merely another theater in the ongoing conflict, but in another sense it was a conflict among the Allied Forces to determine who would come out as the new global superpower after the war was over. Russia was secretly at war with the EU, the EU was secretly at war with Africa, and China and Japan were at each others’ throats. Meanwhile, the USA was harried by Russia, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean Confederation – not to mention the NSA (and later the ESA) and other states that seceded from the USA during the war.

Many of the veterans of these clandestine conflicts still find themselves troubled by their actions during the war. Some of them have come forward publicly with reports of what they did, but for the most part the identities of these warriors remain closely-guarded secrets of the Supernatural Defense Agency and their home nations.

Author's Note: Anything listed with this is intended for player knowledge, but not character knowledge. The only way your character would know about these entries is if they participated in them, or have a high enough rank to submit a successful request for information on them. As a further note, any information included below may not be entirely truthful, as I (User:Marty) do like to keep a lid on some things until they are discovered in-game if they are plot-relevant.

Project Brightlight and Operation Dark Extraction

Project Brightlight was a series of covert NSA (and later ESA) operations to rescue POWs from around the globe via teleportation. Originally just a concept study written by a mage nobody had ever heard of and buried in the Grand Lodge of Theurgy’s archives, Brightlight was originally conceived of as a way for mages to covertly use their abilities to aid humanity. Nobody is quite sure who in the NSA first initiated this program, but what is known is that it grew out of the NSA’s efforts to end the illegal detainment of some of it’s officials who had been inside the rest of the USA when the NSA seceded. Brightlight was the first Shadow War operation to be revealed to the public in the post-war environment. Though Project Brightlight in its official incarnation ended once all the detained officials were recovered, it did essentially last throughout the war in the form of Operation Dark Extraction, which was a series of POW rescue operations that the NSA and ESA ran which functioned the same way.

Project Darklight

Project Darklight was a NSA/ESA operation that grew out of the successes of Project Brightlight. With the pre-war success of Brightlight, the program was rebuilt as Darklight in the second half of the War as a means to covertly make preparations inside the USA before the inevitable Allied forces invasion.

E bola Outbreak

A mysterious disease, later determined to be a strain of E bola, erupts in the US, which is declared to be a biological attack. The US Government declares martial law and begins to quarantine infected cities. Spain was blamed (by the USA) for releasing the disease in the USA after it is traced to a Spanish Research Lab. Spain denied the allegations and insisted that the disease release was intentionally released by the USA on its own people.

While this was indeed a biowarfare attack on the US, the allegations that the US government released the pathogen on it’s own people are false. The truth of the matter is that nobody really knows who released this pathogen – but it did indeed originate from a Spanish research lab. Numerous groups have been blamed for this incident, and several madmen have claimed responsibility for it since then. The most likely culprits are: EU Special Forces (in a black op which has no surviving records), any one of several doomsday cults, or someone acting independently in an attempt to push President Abraham to invade Europe. This incident is classified under the Shadow Wars not only because of the unknown nature of the perpetrator, but post-war analysis of surviving samples of the E bola strain used in the attacks indicated that they had been altered to be unable to infect people with innate magical talent. A new theory that has arisen is that this attack was actually the first wave of what would later be classified as spirit beast attacks, and that it was angry spirits attempting to wreak havoc upon humanity.