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Bill was a bit unclear about how the Office of Special Investigations was organized.  I could leave it at this flowchart… yes, it’s a flowchart.  Whenever anything in the government gets a flowchart, you know it’s serious. 

The OSI has four component branches.  In theory the OSI Director controls each of these.  In theory..

A few details about the branches…

Human Resources

• Agent Orange was kicked upstairs to head HR to prevent him from destroying property a bit too wantonly. 
  • Agent Orange does not maintain a secret identity, but he does pretend to be a mutant alligator rather than an alien.  (Everyone knows that extraterrestrials haven’t made contact with Earth.  Don’t be silly).
  • No one knows what’s in his briefcase.  Prominent theories include Jimmy Hoffa’s body, a nuclear weapon or evidence proving that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald…  and his own time-travelling grandson, who then disappeared because he couldn’t actually exist.  Whenever bomb-sniffing dogs go near the case, they cower away.  We can only safely say that it’s probably not paperwork.
• HR handles employee recruiting, training, preventing a “hostile work environment” and handling other “personnel issues,” a category that Agent Orange extends as far as getting back in the field requires.  How can he guarantee that the field work environment isn’t hostile if he isn’t in the field?
• HR also handles human intelligence, keeping tabs on Leaguers and other personnel of note.

Retroactive Continuity (RETCON)

• Ever wonder why New York’s steam pipes and gas mains (supposedly) explode in New York City? RETCON makes sure that the news doesn’t unduly terrify the public.  Face it: you don’t really want to know what’s ripping up the sewers.
• RETCON also handles public relations (damage control, usually) and protects government secrets, particularly alien-related ones.  Don’t you know what a mutant alligator looks like?
• Mike heads RETCON, the only division that doesn’t face budgetary catastrophe.  Each year, the oversight committee forgets to oversee his budget.  Whoops.  It happens.
• Mike has neither a secret identity nor, as far as anyone can tell, a last name.  He doesn’t need either.
• Mike and RETCON don’t exist.  The idea that the government would underplay the terror threat we face is preposterous– if the public believes there is no threat, how will the government get the funds and authority it needs to handle the situation? You have already forgotten Mike.

Operations

• When people think OSI– masked g-men tearing after supercriminals– that’s Operations.
• OSI-Operations has five branches: New York City, Surf City, Washington DC, the rest of the United States and finally overseas (and Canada, theoretically, but everyone knows that a Canadian “supercrime” is probably someone robbing a Edmonton* Timmy Horton’s with a sharpened spoon).  For reasons that have puzzled sociologists and urban planners for generations, the three American cities feature at least 80% of the world’s supernatural activity (or 75%, depending on the classification of Everton and White Sox victories).
• Operations is headed by Captain Carnage, whose combat-to-Congressional-hearings ratio is surprisingly high for a ranking government official.
• Those in the know have always revered Carnage’s commitment to his secret identity.  The “Texan” revels in rodeo, grappling, NASCAR and down-home idioms loaded with animals and oil wells.  CBS has no idea it plays into his hands whenever it re-airs the clip of him claiming that Texas is the smartest place in South America, giving supercriminals wildly false cues.  By day he runs a Massachusetts psychiatric practice.  He has a Ph.  D.  in neurobiology and speaks eight languages (including Mexican, obviously).
• Observers have asked how it’s possible for a highly visible Homeland Security official to make Congressional hearings, work in the field and maintain a dual life as a psychiatrist.  But that question misses the point.  He’s Captain freaking Carnage.  Of course it’s possible.

Logistics

• Oh yeah, them.  When you think of comic book stories, Logistics handles all of the details that didn’t make the page.  How does Captain Carnage get from one city to another? Who ensures that Agent Black has enough ammo clips? When a superpowered being (government or otherwise) gets in a fight, the glass panes get shattered for miles around.  Check your insurance policies– they explicitly do not cover terrorism, acts of war, nuclear accidents/attacks and supercrime.  Yeah, those panes of glass…  a LOT of paperwork.  A lot of logistics.  So think about THAT the next time you see a strip that just shows glass shattering everywhere.  That’s my freaking WEEKEND, dammit.
• If there were any soldier as stupid as the one depicted in Transformers– “hey, let’s take this hotly disputed, mystical artifact into a densely occupied US city!”– I’d make Captain Carnage cap him in the face.  That, or he’s going to be booking his own goddamned plane tickets.

*I just had to work in the Edmonton reference.  See an above posting on my most hard-core readers for more details.

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