The Order of Armistice seemed like an early casualty of the Whisperer War. With any allies in the larger cabals busy with their own problems, more and more Warriors began pushing back against the Order, eventually leading to a three-way standoff between the Order, a white supremacist Warrior Duke working with local law enforcement, and a cell of the Sleepers trying to keep the conflict out of the eyes of the public. Nobody won that fight. The rogue fascist duke was killed, but not after destroying the Order’s base of operations and slaughtering most of the Sleepers. The cops, trying to save face, arrested the surviving Sleepers and Rebecca. What remained of the Order’s resources was spent breaking her out of police custody before an ‘accident’ happened, and the group went to ground. The three leaders – Denese, Rebecca and David – all continued to fight against bigotry in their own way under their cover identities, but as far as they were concerned, it was too risky to operate as a team again.

And then Joshua Covitz came back. Or at least, someone claiming to be him.

In 2017, a series of letters brought the three back together – Denese from a managerial position in Florida, Rebecca from a stint as a traveling carnival psychic, and David from his IT job in Palo Alto. When they and Covitz met in Chicago, Covitz gave little explanation for his absence, but he did give them a hundred thousand dollars, a new base of operations, and cover identities with clean criminal records. They could rebuild the Order as an official non-profit organization, dedicated to fighting human rights abuses at home and abroad, so long as they keep their dirty work under wraps. Given the choice to resume their true passions as a nazi-punching team, the three jumped at the chance – even if the intervening time and the shifts in their individual ideologies have distorted how, exactly, a nazi should be punched.

GOALS:

While literal nazi-punching is still on the menu, the new Order of Armistice focuses more on engaging bigots on the cultural and social battlefield than the physical one. After the explosive end of the original order, the goal is to do as much damage to bigots as possible without opening the organization up for reprisals. This shift in focus has largely been led by David, who claimed the position of executive director for the Order’s public face. Rebecca and Denese would prefer to get back to good old fashioned Nazi hunting, but they’re tolerating David’s vision for now, at least until they’ve built up enough stability and resources to get back to the real work. The goal of usurping the Warrior’s seat in the Invisible Clergy is still held as the group’s ultimate end-point, but Covitz struggles to get the rest of the organization to prioritize it.

OPERATIONS:

Under David’s new structure, there’s a core group of about two hundred volunteers/employees that handles the Order’s covert anti-bigot activities, while the nonprofit human rights organization side has around two thousand employees and far more volunteers. The latter are, for the most part, unaware of the former. 

The human rights organization has a home office in New York and a series of independent chapters across the country, each one with a membership between 30 and 200 people. While the chapters aren’t as A chapter usually has at least one member from the home office in New York familiar with the group’s true purpose, and they usually help set the tone for the chapter’s activities: nonviolent political action with just a hint of civil obedience when they can get away with it. Around 5% of any given chapter is familiar with the occult, and 2% are proper checkers or chargers, ensuring that the group’s resources can be aimed at abusive structures in their local underground. And members who distinguish themselves in this regard might be given a chance to move to the home office and learn how to really punch some Nazis.

The Order’s less than legal activities are based out of a handful of rooms at the home office, operations split up between three teams. There’s David’s team, an assortment of hacktivists and infiltrators, who expose any secret ties between powerful figures and bigotry and anonymously pass them on to journalists and other human rights organizations. David mostly lets this team operate independently, as he’s also responsible for leading the public face of the group, but he does take the time to discredit, dox and dethrone bigots when he can. This team also identifies targets and passes them off to Rebecca and her team of adepts and occultists, who go down the list and inflict a series of curses, hexes, jinxes and hoodoos on them. You might have the clout to shrug off an article about your $200,000 donation to a noted transphobe, but good luck dealing with your tie strangling you when you try to support gender essentialism, or suddenly being unable to identify anybody’s gender for five minutes at a time. If any adept or avatar tries to intervene in the name of ‘states’ rights’ or some other dog whistle, Denese’s Correction Team politely convinces them to take their efforts elsewhere. Everybody on the Correction Team is prepared to risk death or legal retribution; they’re nazi punchers through and through.

Covitz doesn’t have a dedicated team, but Rebecca and her team occasionally assist him as he doggedly pursues the group’s ascension goals. Since his return, Covitz has focused the majority of his research on land – old battlegrounds, fiercely contested gangland turf, cities where law enforcement and organized crime fight over the fate of the drug trade. Every few months, he and a few adept volunteers go out to meddle. Seventeen Confederate monuments have disappeared, or exploded, or melted into sludge, or retroactively never existed in the first place. Lobbying efforts in several cities led to ‘free zones’ being established where the War on Drugs would not be fought; some of them even survived after the election cycle. Those outside the Order suspect that they’re trying to tamper with the Warrior’s paragon places, but no one knows what their final goal is just yet.

They sure are making a lot of Abel’s Brands though. Lots and lots of them. Hundreds, kept in storage, waiting for the right time.

RESOURCES:

The Order’s home office has all the resources you could imagine for a medium-sized nonprofit organization. Legal resources, a PR team, company laptops, a small arsenal of assorted weapons and infiltration gear. Y’know, standard stuff. Each chapter gets a stipend from the home office, along with some equipment on request; in return, the chapter sends a portion of its donations back to the home office. The home office’s off-the-books operations has its own stipend (listed in the accounts as ‘security services’) that’s supplemented by variable sources of funding, ranging from fencing valuables ‘acquired’ by the Corrections Team during their operations to whatever Denese’s gambling winnings are this week.

The strongest and weakest asset the new Order has is raw manpower. The Order has gotten and continues to get a wide array of volunteers across all chapters: young middle-class center-leftists, new to political discourse and mad at the 2016-2020 presidential administration; experienced activists who’ve faced riot guns before and will face them again; academics who’ll talk your ear off about Foucault; academics who’ll make dumb jokes about Foucault to help keep morale up; and a couple of trust fund kids who like the way the Order’s name sounds on their resume. The chapters keep in touch with each other as well as the home office, and are willing to support chapters in need. Need a lot of protestors at an upcoming event, or bail money after being caught defacing a Confederate statue, or access to some of James Baldwin’s letters at a museum? Ask around and someone will probably be able to hook you up – so long as you return the favor at some point. That said, the majority of members have a limited understanding of the Occult Underground, meaning that they won’t be as much help when it comes to curses and rogue checkers, and the decentralized, volunteer nature of the chapters means that help might not arrive as quickly as you’d like, or be organized enough to be truly useful. Even the home office struggles to coordinate major actions with the chapters.

THE FUTURE:

The public side of the Order seems set to grow on its own, with or without the support of the main core. David has alienated a number of the chapters recently through attempts to exert more control over their actions, leading to representatives from the home office losing ground to local leadership. Ambrose, the new head of the Atlanta chapter, is considering breaking off from the core organization and forming Armistice South; his leadership is competent and his passion is undeniable, but he also thinks the Occult Underground is a band and is clearly leveraging his engagement with the Order for political reasons. David is deeply concerned about a form of Armistice that isn’t prepared to handle the fascist sides of the Occult Underground – one of the few things that the rest of the founders wholeheartedly agree with him about – but is hesitant to introduce Ambrose to the occult, not trusting how he’ll react, how that’ll affect the chapters he has influence over or the political clout he seeks to gain. Cooperation between chapters has grown a bit strained given the struggle for leadership, but overall the work continues. At the end of the day, there’s still injustice that needs to be fought, people who need help, and that shared desire to provide that help allows camaraderie among and within the chapters to flourish.

Said camaraderie is wearing thin amidst the four founders. David has grown more erratic and paranoid as time’s gone by, alternating between a need to control everything and a reluctance to engage with anything. It’s clear to everyone that it’s affecting his ability to lead, but his control over the organization’s finances stifles attempts to oust him. Rebecca in particular is losing her patience. Her time between the old and new order was spent on the outskirts of society, as her unusual upbringing meant that she didn’t have the skills, experience or paper trail to feign normalcy like the other two. She hasn’t felt safe since that cop said off-hand that people like her should be shot, since she spent a week on the streets after she got evicted, since her mother was gunned down in Chicago over a decade ago. She doesn’t understand why David’s scrambling for a false safety now. The truth is that David left a family back in Palo Alto – a wife and a child who have no idea what the Occult Underground is, let alone his past as a Nazi Puncher. He’s afraid that they’ll become targets if he starts going up against real threats again; he’s afraid that he’ll die and his daughter will never know why; he’s afraid that the family won’t survive learning the truth about the world, and he’s not sure which of the three he fears the most. It’s only a matter of time before Rebecca figures it out, and the future of the organization will depend on whether Rebecca can convince David to accept that risk again – or force him out without causing the Order to collapse legally. If she can, the group’s going back to regular nazi punching (and probably some cop arson, some landlord defenestration, you know how it is). Rebecca’s well-suited to take the role of leadership; she’s started to channel the Firebrand without even realizing it, and if she learns how to harness it, the group will become an unstoppable force…and also a lightning rod for all sorts of trouble. 

Denese sympathizes with Rebecca, but she’s been occupied with a different problem. Denese knows that the Joshua Covitz who left the Order isn’t the same one who came back. Joshua was a calculating, aloof man who could stare down a gun in his face. Now he’s an inspired philosopher who treats every confrontation with reluctance. The others didn’t know him in his prime, and have passed off his personality shift to old age, but Denese sees the way he flinches when she gets a charge off putting herself in danger and knows something’s not right. Denese has kept an eye on him since he arrived, looking for any sign of treason or betrayal; she’s even tried some magical ways of testing someone’s loyalty; and she’s increasingly worried every time he seems to be legit. If anything, the new Joshua is as committed and loyal to the cause as the old one, and far more personable on top of that. She’s willing to work with ‘Covitz’ for now, as long as he keeps the Order together. She’s never been afraid of gambling, even with strangers wearing the faces of old friends. But she really wishes she knew what the odds were at this table.

Joshua, or rather, Leopold Valko, had two orders from the real Joshua Covitz: take on his identity, and use his accumulated resources and connections to keep the Order going. Considering that Leopold has never even been to the US before, he’s doing surprisingly well, but he’s still struggling with the adjustments. He’s not used to being so fragile and fleshy. He’s not used to working alongside people who carry knives and guns, to being expected to fight people with his life at risk. And he’s certainly not used to telling lies all the time. Covitz swore him to secrecy, claiming that nobody could know where he was or what he was doing, not even his closest friends and family, but Valko is more and more tempted to be honest. He’d like to tell of his immortal travels. He’d like to talk about his worries, about how Covitz acquired the resources to restart the Order. He’d also, perhaps, like to get dinner with the stunning one-armed woman who’s always glancing in his direction.