The Department of Retroactive Mythology.

Needs some more work, but there’s something here. I think.

The Department of Retroactive Mythology
“Working together to build a better yesterday.”

Well, that would be the motto on the Department of Retroactive Mythology’s (DRM) stationary, if it had a motto. Or stationary. Or an officially official existence. Fortunately, it needs none of these things in order to do its job.

And what is its job? Support services for Heroes, mostly. The capitalization of ‘Hero’ is deliberate: it’s a cross between a job description and a supernatural condition. It turns out that there have always been people with the ability to tap into a culture’s myths and beliefs (called ‘Mythology’ with a capital letter, because you had to call it something) in order to produce larger-than-life effects. Unfortunately, and rather counter-intuitively, this ability did not grow stronger as more people believed in those myths. Quite the contrary, in fact: large-population cultures and nations seemed to produce only attenuated and unreliable Mythology for its Heroes to latch onto. By the end of the 19th Century, it seemed likely that the Ages of Heroes were over.

Enter groups like the DRM. It started off, as did so much of America’s Secret History, in one of Edison and Tesla’s off-the-books laboratories. Researchers there had worked out how to isolate and concentrate the metaphorical and nigh-intangible essence of Mythology into a form that Heroes could effectively use. The problem? …Well, making a splash when ,aking the concentrated Mythology public would then quickly attenuate that Mythology, too. The trick was to create Mythology, and then more or less sneak it into the rest of the culture while nobody was looking. It would then retain its power long enough for Heroes to activate it, thus solving the problem.

At this point, a government agency was probably inevitable. The DRM was set up officially-but-secretly in 1903 by Theodore Roosevelt (whose own ability to tap into Mythology was never unconfirmed, but widely suspected) in order to, well, improve the public record for the greater good of the American people. The DRM’s officials work to this day to create local celebrities that nobody actually remembers, commemorate events that didn’t in fact happen, recount disasters that never were, and generally spice up United States history to the point where a passing Hero can reach into the American Jungian group consciousness or whatever and scoop out enough Mythology to smack around the Screaming Ant-Men of the Hollow Earth, or whatever the Danger Of The Week is indeed this week.

What’s that? You never hear of that sort of thing happening? Well, yeah, there’s more than one Shadow Government department out there.