Founder and History[]
There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!
- --Kay, Men in Black
Help Me! is a small, technically illegal department of the American FBI. FBI Senior Director of Information Services Ryan Fleming has a life-long fascination with and belief in the occult. He firmly believes in monsters and has misdirected department funds to allow a small team of monster hunters to work outside the system. Officially, Help Me! is part of the 7Gen Total Shared Information Initiative, a project that has been overbudget and behind schedule for several years.
Business Model[]
The Help Me! field team is headed largely without oversight by Nicholas Massri. Massri was recruited to the group in 2005, and took over as head in 2010 following the untimely death of his predecessor at the hands of a master vampire. They do not file paperwork; they do not respect lines of jurisdiction; their mandate is to keep people safe from monsters, and to ensure that The Secret doesn't get out to the public at large. It's not widely known among the Hunter community that Help Me! is even associated with the FBI; most who know of them think of them as a for-hire group of mercenaries.
Official inquiries into Massri himself or into Help Me!'s doings tend to get lost in a sea of red tape, top secret classifications, and buzzwords like 'need to know'. Help Me! recruits almost exclusively from outside the Bureau, as most agents don't have the skill-set needed to hunt monsters. While the group's official base is on the outskirts of Denver, they generally travel for work; they have even been known to operate outside US borders.
Agents[]
- Amilastet - Displaced mummy tomb guardian seeking the American dream?
- EJ - If there's a problem, shoot it. If it's still there, shoot it some more.
- Johnny - Escaped experiment with a nanotech sword
- David Kaplan - Specialist in finding information via investigation, reconnaissance, or social engineering.
- Nicholas Massri - Millionaire magic-user, applying his family's fortune to the extermination of monsters.
- Clay Patterson - Psionic Scientist/Doctor/Investigator
Reserve Support[]
While not full agents, there are a number of supporting members that Help Me! has under contract that would otherwise thin their ranks.
- Todd - Paraphysicist and self-styled "ghost buster"
Assignments[]
Although Cryptids are the most common type of supernatural threat in the world, the staff of Help Me! doesn't deal with them very often. Modern firepower has tipped the balance away from tooth and claw, and a half-dozen hillbillies with rifles and some idea of what they're up against can exterminate a Chupacabra pack most of the time. From the perspective of Help Me!, that's both a blessing and a bane: assignments against Cryptids are rare, but the Cryptids they do face tend to be extremely dangerous.
The bulk of Help Me!'s assignments deal with fae and other free-willed spirits, demons, lycanthropes, and vampires. There's also a profitable side-line in ghost-hunting, since the expensive and specialized equipment isn't a good investment for most local guardians. Mummies, outcast angels, elder demons, and rogues are rare operations that truly demonstrate Help Me!'s value: a bunch of amateur hunters that are proficient in killing lesser cryptids will be lucky to survive an encounter with a mummy, much less drive it off long enough to call for support from Help Me!.
Sadly for the Help Me! staff, there's no larger or better equipped organization for them to call on when they get in over their heads. They are not acknowledged by the FBI aside from a few bureaucratic channels and the resources the FBI can provide in a pinch (ie, uninformed mundanes with guns) generally add nothing to an emergency aside from more potential victims.