It was a boring day, in retrospect. Grey skies hung over a place that was simultaneously too big and too small. People were bored out of their minds. The tapping of microphones and the shuffling of paper drowned out the groans, but they were heard anyway.
People from all corners of the anomalous world were gathered in that assembly hall, watching three old men give an empty speech about love and compassion. They weren't doing it to spite the attendees. They knew full well how much they were hated, but they saw it fit to make their peace with all of them.
Right at the end of the speech, the men began to give out their gifts to the various groups present. Nobody noticed when the door creaked. They were too bored, too tired. It was a profoundly human reaction.
What came next was even more human.
A single shot. Right below the jaw, a clean, practiced hit was followed by a wet pop and the banging of footsteps.
It happened right when Adnan Glaros was about to hand a small gift box to a worker from Wilson's Wildlife Solutions. It was his last gift either way. He had motioned for this conference on a whim, his last act as a member of the Holy Tribunal.
A body hit the floor, and then the world screamed. Everyone scrambled to keep the man alive. It was a desperate effort to keep things under control, but it was inevitably meaningless. People pointed fingers, made posters and reports, and poured money into the search. Finally, just two days later, they got their answer.
"A lone terrorist representing a SAPPHIRE militia group." An expected answer, as it wasn't the first time they attacked the Initiative. But it was definitely the last.
It didn't take long to find the killer. He was no mastermind, especially not in the face of the political desperation of a hundred anomalous groups. He was killed and disposed of quickly. It was the least to be expected, yet this was just the beginning.
Rummaging through a mountain of gift cards, empty platitudes, and official announcements, General Raymond Baskerville spat out his gum on a nearby ashtray before hanging up a phone. The border guards were annoying as always, the hungry dogs that they were. He wasn't sure of anything, let alone if he wanted to feed them. But he couldn't blame them. Everyone was on edge after that day, waiting on what the Initiative would do, if they cared about the Initiative at all. Most didn't.
CLICK, CLICK, CLICK.
He erased the last paragraph. "Too short," he thought to himself, as he continued to stare daggers into the monitor before him. The blue light of the Initiative terminal was the only thing to illuminate his small and dirty office. He thought of the ramifications of this, whether or not it was worth it, and whether or not he had the right to decide. He thought of the Initiative, in its cowardly state, and his duties as a man of God. He thought of the late general and what he would have done. So he looked down at a charm dangling from his pocket to see a small smiling humanoid with wings and a halo, holding a scroll that read, “Don’t drive faster than your guardian angel can fly.”
Raymond clicked on his keyboard for the last time and made a decision nobody could back out of.
One moment, the beautiful silence of the French night permeated the air. The next moment, the city lights began to flicker.
The following is a message composed via consensus of the Holy Tribunal.
For those who are not currently aware of our existence, we represent the organization known as the Horizon Initiative. Our previous mission was bringing unity among the three Abrahamic faiths, spreading the word of god to all forces of the paranormal, which have plagued our world for millennia.
Recently, a heretical terrorist organization has attacked one of our leaders during a charity conference.
Due to this act of pure malice, along with various others they have committed, we henceforth declare Occult War on The Society of the Atheist Partisans of Progress for the Halt of the Irrational and Religious Enemy.
You are encouraged to evacuate the country of France posthaste.
Further communication is pending.
To call this broadcast the most polarizing in France's history would be an understatement. Everybody had an opinion about it. Even though nobody knew anything about it. Some pretended, obviously, and used it as a springboard for whatever prophetic scams they could make up. "It's a terrorist!" the government cried, unable to explain how this terrorist single-handedly managed to activate every electronic device in the entire country simultaneously. "It's a psyop!" the people said, a good guess in theory, but that helped no one. "It's fake!" the hopeful cheered, turning their eyes away from the clear scope of this operation. "They want us to leave to bring more immigrants!" the angered shouted, spinning a disaster into a tool for an uprising that would never come.
A week or so later, people started leaving the country. It wasn't a completely unexpected outcome, but it was a small group. No arrests were made, no additional knowledge was gained, so life moved on. People returned to their jobs and forgot. The anomalous community wasn't so lucky. Besides the brazen declaration of the first open Occult War in all of history, no group really knew how to deal with what was going on, so they contacted the Initiative. They wouldn't answer. Do they use amnestics to return to the status quo? Not worth the resource, especially when cover stories did the job perfectly. Do they deal with SAPPHIRE themselves? No, that's too hasty and won't look good and might escalate the conflict. All in all, considering the minimal damage to the Veil at the time, most groups just ignored the Initiative's message.
Like they always did.
<Begin log>
Dr. Jonah: This is interview 01 with Lieutenant Levit of MTF Sigma-66 “Sixteen Tons”, the date is March third, 2030, 02:32 AM.
Levit: What do you want?
Dr. Jonah: You worked for the Horizon Initiative for 7 years, correct? We want to get your perspective on things.
Levit: On France? Not much to say, it's never been the same since the old general kicked the bucket. There's just trying to follow his dirt trail at this point.
Dr. Jonah: I'm sure there's a lot you can tell us, Lieutenant.
Levit: Well, I was surprised to see how far we've come.
Dr. Jonah: "We?" Do you still consider yourself part of the Initiative?
Levit: As if anyone in this damn task force considers themselves a jailor.
Dr. Jonah: Fair enough. What do you think drove the Initiative to declare occult war on an entire country?
Levit: You know damn well why we don't mince our words, it's exactly what it looks like.
Dr. Jonah: To me, it looks like a child having a tantrum for their mom not getting them candy and lashing out at the store clerks.
Levit: You can think what you'd like; this was inevitable, not to mention just the start.
Dr. Jonah: How so?
Levit: Well, what's left of France is free game now, along with the cults the tribunal was too scared to actually fight against. I mean, it's not like we'll hand any territory to you.
Dr. Jonah: Is that so? Why would the Initiative expressly avoid all Foundation sites in France then?
Levit: We don't punish the innocent for the crimes of a few.
Dr. Jonah: Except for the French civilians, you mean?
Levit: If there's anything I know about the Initiative, it's that we don't attack civilians.
Dr. Jonah: Then it seems you don't know that much about the Initiative as you'd think.
Levit: If this is your idea of team-building, then you can kindly fuck off.
<End log>
Then the men in armor came. Those who knew assumed the Initiative had already started cracking down on SAPPHIRE, but sending in soldiers to France itself was a bold move, to say the least. The soldiers didn't come empty-handed. As it turns out, they were the "further communication," not to the people, but to the government itself. Negotiators and representatives rushed to fill the conference halls, eager to see what the actual hell this random religious group was planning. Thankfully for them, the Foundation had already secured the meeting area and informed the French government of both the Initiative and SAPPHIRE. A few site directors in disguise acted as mediators. The "negotiations" were obviously tense. Anyone who wasn't part of an anomalous group looked like they were sweating bullets, and the ones who were hid the exponentially higher amount of terror they had at the situation behind cold bureaucracy.
The Initiative had demands, of course. All parties working together to weed out SAPPHIRE from the source was a simple demand in theory, but the details were hard to parse. SAPPHIRE had become rather decentralized after its excision from the Council of 108, so it was difficult to pinpoint exactly where they should start. The solution was to start picking off all their fifty lodges in quick succession, but the Initiative's announcement would obviously stir those lodges into hiding, which might result in a waste of time and resources.
With the rather unproductive meeting behind them, the Initiative had to take matters into its own hands and come up with a more concrete solution.
Unauthorized access is forbidden.
ASSET REQUEST TO INTERNAL DEPARTMENT OF LOGISTICS #SZU-345528326678
REQUESTING SITES: SITE-19/SITE-17/SITE-⌘/SITE-01
REQUESTED ASSETS: 900 liters of compound ENUI-5/ 300 liters of CLASS-A amnestics/ 700 liters of military grade agnostics scheduled for MTF NU-7 deployment/ 500 liters of SCP-5993-1/ 2000 Akivian sinks./ Deployment of SCP-5514 in Paris, France.
REQUEST MOTIVE: Immediate threat of SK-Class "Broken Masquerade" scenario/ emergency usage of ENNUI PROTOCOL.
PREFFERED DATE OF ARRIVAL: EMERGENCY ARRIVAL ORDERED BY OVERWATCH COMMAND
They had to get creative. They had a military advantage, so just going up to bomb them would work well enough, but the Initiative, while rather engaged, were not monsters. They needed to separate civilians from eventual corpses.
They knew the Foundation had the best anomaly tracking tech. It was a clear inference, but not wanting to communicate with them beyond necessity, as well as not arouse excessive suspicion, the Initiative went to their scribes and scrolls, and struck gold.
The Scales of Judgement, they called it. It was a small, unassuming artefact with an overblown name found in Palestine just six months before Adnan's death. All you had to do was be within its 500-inch radius, then the usually perfectly equal scales tilted depending on the average faith total of the people around it.
Right for high and left for low.
They kept the thing in a prison to gauge the rate of rehabilitation the inmates had, and to make sure it was effective. But they didn't really need it for much until now. The choice was obvious and unanimous. The Foundation already had a tool that could help. All they needed was to pull a few strings they had in The Wanderers Library, along with some shady blacksmiths, and poof! Warehouses full of small decorative scales with tripwires that sent signals depending on how they dropped would be placed in all borders and important locations in France. With approval from the French government, as well as a mountain's worth of logistical detail, the plan was set into motion.
And it succeeded. It succeeded too well, in fact.
Every time the signal came, gunmen followed. The Initiative had more sensitive tools used to gauge Akiva, so there was no trouble knowing friend from foe. The problem was that there were too many foes. The signal rang and rang so much that some of the soldiers triple-checked the scales for false positives. But the Scales of Judgement did not produce false positives. They were objective, and that was a fact the Initiative decided to accept in full, so the wolves did what they did best.
And burned down France in a single night.
It was frankly a massacre of speed and scale never before seen. Giant automatons ripped apart buildings and hideouts like paper. The Eiffel Tower was turned to salt and collapsed upon a silent bomb of pure blinding white. A mushroom cloud resembling a cross was the only thing letting the insects down below know of their fates. Blazing blades’ slices tore through RUBIES and EMERALDS. Soldiers with hardlight hearts literally rained down silver bullets on the battlefield. Only the numbers on their visors were left to determine who lived or died.
No Lodge nor ZIRCON stood a chance. Some disintegrated in their sleep; others were not so lucky. The Foundation, eager to take control of the situation, secretly swooped in, dumped an ocean's worth of amnestics and agnostics down everyone's throats. They shut off the media, sent in evacuation ships, and sent a mech to slow the Initiative down, but its limbs were severed, and its head was speared upon a government building. If the pilots had not been believers, their lives may have been lost that day. Were it not for the hasty decision of the most important voices in the anomalous community, the Veil might have been too.
That day, the Initiative gambled a stockpile of weapons and technology they had been building up for a decade, brought down everything they had to send a message that would reverberate from Esterberg to Three Portlands. Even with the Akiva sinks preventing them from drowning the landmass itself, they hit an undeniable jackpot that would go down in unveiled history as the shortest yet second-most destructive military operation.
Unofficially referred to by some as the Ninith occult war.
Three Portlands News
⁂TPNOfficial
#Francegenocide becomes number 1 on trending after the results from last night's occult war settle. The Horizon Initiative & the French government have yet to issue any official statements regarding the event. Stay tuned for any updates & on the ground coverage in a week.
- ECHOES 780k
- HUMS 900k
05:11 AM · Jan 07, 2034
EMERGENCY BULLETIN
ARRIVED: 7.21.2034 6:35 PM Paris, France
We won't bore you with long-winded condemnation; I'm sure you're getting more than enough of that from both your enemies & allies (if there are any left.) But we must say, when we swore an oath to heal the world and its denizens at the first new dawn summit, we really thought you could uphold it.
- Mission watch external, Oceanian Headquarters
NOT COOL AT ALL
-The Critic
ENNUI PROTOCOL ENACTMENT FR-7900 STATUS REPORT
REPORT FROM: INTERNAL LOGISTICS DEPARTMENT
REPORT RECIPIENT: OVERWATCH COMMAND
Enactment deemed successful, amnestisization efforts fully halted. Due to major losses in Foundation resources in this enactment1 and the Horizon Initiative's preservation of Foundation sites stationed in LOI-17892, it is suggested that relations with the Horizon Initiative remain amicable for the time being.
LOI-1789 has been officially declared a joint containment/Experimental R&D site with the Horizon Initiative in order to bolster the image of this relationship.
87% of previous citizens of LOI-1789 have been distributed to neighboring European countries. 55% of Uncompromised LOI-1789 landmass has been given to the Horizon Initiative for general operations as per agreement with its previous government.
All entry into LOI-1789 must be performed with appropriate radiation safety precautions.
