Page 120 - Hunter - The Vigil

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Everything has a rational explanation: it’s just that scientists haven’t got around to explaining
some things yet. The paranormal and the supernatural are just phantoms — all just normal, natural
phenomena that haven’t yet been observed enough for anyone to make sense of them.
Agree with that? You’re on the same page as Null Mysteriis. The organization’s been diligently
working on explaining anomalies since the day Jean-Pierre Brattel walked out of a Parisian Theo-
sophical Society meeting in 1893. The Theosophists’ original intent had been to apply the most
rigorous standards of Victorian science to the claims of religion; Brattel found this fascinating, only
to discover that in practice, the Theosophists were really just another new religious movement,
one of dozens. After a few meetings full of messianic prophecies, hidden brotherhoods of
Ancient Ascended Masters and suspect tales of rather convenient reincarnations, Brat-
tel decided he had enough. It just wasn’t scientifi c enough. On the other hand, he felt
the rationalists discounted out of hand the possibility that there might be things yet
unexplained, and that science had not yet found every law of creation. He saw a
need for a group to scientifically examine things that are as yet, beyond science.

He wasn’t alone. By the beginning of the Great War, his brainchild, Null Mys-
teriis (an abbreviation of the Latin Nullum Mysteriis Processit: very loosely “out
of the unexplained comes nothing”), had several hundred members across

Europe and North America. The tragic turn taken by the first half of the
20 century wiped out whole groups, and although Null Mysteriis, the self-
th
styled Organization for the Rational Assessment of the Supernatural, sur-
vives into the present day, it’s only since the 1970s that its membership has
been anything like that of its turn-of-the-century heyday.

They’re hobbyists. Apart from a few paid office staff in Null Mysteriis’
world headquarters, situated in London since 1941, hardly anyone in the compact gets
any money out of it. Anyone can join, but the pittance requested for membership every
year pays for the admin staff’s salaries, a monthly newsletter, a yearbook and mainte-
nance on the organization’s various clubhouses. A “hunter” attached to Null Mysteriis

usually has a day job, often a fairly well qualified and academically adept day job. Null
Mysteriis’ members include zoologists, physicists, psychologists, psychiatrists, con-
sultant doctors, chemists, sociologists and anthropologists, all of whom have minds
open enough to use methods that conventional science holds in suspicion to inves-
tigate things it won’t even consider.

They look at anything that qualifies as anomalous: UFO sightings and cases
of reincarnation, cases of the Stigmata and cryptozoological anomalies. And more
often than not, they investigate monsters. An alleged werewolf rampages across a
shopping center and hardly anyone admits to having seen it: see that conserva-
tively dressed woman who’s collecting blood and hair samples from the tiles and
depositing them in test tubes? She’s with Null Mysteriis.
A case of alleged demon possession ends in murder and suicide. That man in
the tweed jacket taking pictures of the house where it all happened with a Kirlian
camera? Null Mysteriis.
A serial killer takes each victim in an impossible fashion. Who’s that quiet
young man with the oddly shaped meter and the tape measure, who goes to
each murder site after the police have cleaned up? He’s from Null Mysteriis.

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a t h e o r y .
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