Blame this.
Ust-Kuyga Anomaly – Google Docs
The Ust-Kuyga Anomaly
Roughly 12 hours ago, a party of illegal mammoth ivory miners came stumbling into the desolate Siberian settlement of Ust-Kuyga with an unbelievable tale. Well, unbelievable to anybody who wasn’t looking for certain keywords in babbled reports, not to say access to certain satellites that continually passively scan for spikes of certain forms of radiation. One of those satellites was in place to do a deeper scan, which turned up sufficiently positive to justify this on-the-fly briefing. It’s a long way to Vladivostok, even with military transport.
From Vladivostok you’ll be making your way under civilian cover to Yakutsk, and from there you’ll be able to catch a flight to Ust-Kuyga itself. From there you’ll hopefully be able to interrogate whatever’s left of the mining party, at that point. Preliminary reports suggest that at least one of them is severely ill, so be prepared for anything, up to and including a full field containment of the town. For what it’s worth, this is considered to be a low-probability scenario, but low-probability scenarios always are until they go ahead and happen.
Assuming that there’s anybody left to field interview, you will acquire what information there is to acquire and investigate the source of the anomalous radiation spikes. This radiation is consistent with revenant activity, which would imply a tomb or underground structure of some kind. This is consistent with initial reports from the miners, one of whom (the sick one) referred to “mud-slick stone rooms in the black depths” and “the burning tusks of the Mammoth King” (see appendix for original report and translation) before falling unconscious. However, and as always: assumptions get people killed. Or worse. Assess the situation and contain / propriate, as necessary. As usual, propriation via deliberate human sacrifice is strictly forbidden.
Your team is operating under semi-sanction: the appropriate Russian agencies have been informed of your coming, have given the necessary permissions to allow us to operate, armed, on Siberian soil, and will be sending in their own team to “assess and assist.” All requests for Special Escalation and Containment (SPEC) services must be routed through the Russian team, who will also have full authority to call in direct intervention services from the Russian military. Discretion is expected from your team. It is not likely that this event is Category Omega — although we obviously need to check that first, to our own satisfaction — so respect the Russian team’s instructions, and ignore their inevitable attempts to harness the Ust-Kuyga Anomaly for their own purposes. They’ll learn better soon enough.
Good luck, and good hunting.