Hub City Blues

Broken Glass debuts Clifford Engram, a harried agent of the Paranormal Investigative Unit, commonly called The Agency. More secretive than the FBI, more informed than the CIA, more dangerous than the KGB or the Mossad, the Agency is the front line to a secret most governments can still scarcely believe. Earth had been resisting invasion for almost two thousand years. Many of our wars, both covert and overt were often covers for repelling invasions from alternate realities.

Every tale of magic, every story of super-science, every horrifying monster, every legendary hero, were all interactions with quantum-dimensional mirror realms called Shards. These parallel worlds are often filled with diverse life-forms, alien technologies, and in many of them, that technology is indistinguishable from magic. Some of these aliens have taken up residence on Prime Earth and are too entrenched to remove. Compacts have been made with these species to keep them under control.

With offices all over the world, The Agency hides the fact that our Earth is only one of many parallel realities and ‘When the Stars are Right,’ it is possible to move between those realities. But its mandate goes one step further than hiding this knowledge. Its operatives remove anyone whose knowledge of those realms could potentially threaten life on Earth.

But not everyone is in agreement about the dimensional realms called Shards. Some see them as the dawn of a New Age. Others see them as a chance to learn from denizens of other Earths who may have newer ideas or better technologies.

But the Agency has been policing this for over two thousand years and their history says no matter what may happen on another Earth, most of the time, when it migrates to our Earth, people die. Sometimes by the millions.

The Agency is conservative, its agents well-trained and knowledgeable, as much scholars as they are assassins, some utilizing the very proscribed technologies or magics they fight against.

Clifford Engram is a man of singular qualities. Born the son of two of the Agency’s greatest operatives in the fifties he later became one of the Agency’s cautionary tales finding himself one of the Accursed early in his career. Bound to two unknown Powers, he is now a living weapon, unable to stay for long in one place, constantly being tested, and fighting against the most dangerous enemies of Prime Earth.

Engram lives fast, drives fast, eats well, has excellent manners and is always impeccably well dressed. He knows one day, he will lose the battle to contain the monsters bound within his skin so he lives life to the fullest. Should his will falter he (and possibly everyone around him) will die in a blaze of cleansing fire from his own internal spiritual guardian, a bound Phoenix!

Being one of the Accursed, the most powerful of the Agency’s operatives, keeps his friend count low, but the ones he has are fantastically loyal, incredibly diverse and often just a little bit crazed. Each is willing to do their part to keep Humanity ticking along blissfully unaware of the monsters hiding among them.

In the mean time, Engram, cursed agent of the Paranormal Investigations Unit spends his days destroying zombies or managing the sentient undead, deporting extra-dimensional aliens, or putting near-dead gods out of their misery. He hates his job, but nobody does it better…

His latest case deals with a serial killer able to enter and leave homes without opening a door or window and without leaving any traces of how their murders were performed. Forced to resort to a cold case from Louisiana, Engram finds himself in a dilapidated mall looking at a unique prison for an even more unusual inmate.