JEFF SEATS
This is the unofficial unit insignia for the Center for Specter Control's Action Team. Unofficial, because the entire agency is a black-budget secret that legally doesn't exist. To cope with playing prison guard to anomalies and things that go bump in the night, the personnel share a grim, tongue-in-cheek nickname for themselves: the "Monster Keepers." After all, if you don't laugh at the horrors, they win.
The design is a shield featuring a hybrid werewolf/bat beast with blood-red eyes and a red tongue. Beneath it are crossed keys over a sword. The symbolism is explicit: the keys represent the team’s primary duty to keep monsters separated from humans; the sword represents using force only when necessary to preserve that peace.
Across the top is MONSTER KEEPERS, deliberately styled like the classic Army Ranger tab. At the bottom is the Latin joke OBSERVETIS DENTES, supposed to be Latin for “watch out for the teeth.”
The patch is essentially saying:
We keep the monsters contained. We fight when containment fails. And, yeah . . . the teeth are bad.
Center for Specter Control — CSC
The Center for Specter Control is a clandestine agency of the United States government created to deal with a truth the public cannot be allowed to know: monsters are real. Its job is not simply to hunt them, but to identify, monitor, contain, and when necessary control them, while keeping their existence secret.
Its origins go back to Theodore Roosevelt. Before the CSC formally existed, Roosevelt created an unofficial detective unit in New York to hunt the so-called Night Stalker. The investigation revealed that the killer/killers weren't merely human—they were vampires. That unit became the government's first organized vampire-hunting operation.
Later, Roosevelt encountered Alexei Rurik, Khan of the vampire race. Rurik negotiated an extraordinary bargain: the government would provide vampires with protected territory and a supply of blood; in return, vampires would stop feeding on innocent humans.
After Roosevelt became president, he persuaded Congress to formally establish the Center for Specter Control to administer that agreement. The CSC was concealed inside the Department of the Interior, originally under the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Its first vampire reservation was Site-Alpha.
But the CSC didn't remain merely a vampire-management agency. As it discovered that vampires were only one part of a much larger hidden world, its mission expanded to encompass all manner of “specters” — essentially the creatures humanity calls monsters.
The CSC operates reservations, surveillance and technical operations, field agents, Action Teams, analysts and support personnel. It is extremely secretive—even its recruits don't learn what organization they've joined until their indoctrination.