Post by skyfire on Jul 5, 2009 8:04:55 GMT -5
No actual police or federal agents then? No books by actual police or federal agents? Please do more research, because honestly, your dialogue examples sound very made up and seem to be based more on the "what would be coolest to me" mentality that you are trying to make fun of than actual, well researched, true to life accounts. It's just that you have a different idea of what's cool than Hollywood does.
Again - I'm doing what little research that time permits, given my real world obligations.
I do have a few books on-hand, but I've not gotten to read most of them yet.
And the few I have read indicate that cops don't always go by-the-book.
This line in particular sounds like nothing more than an attempt to project your political views on your characters. If you are going for realism and making fun of made up Hollywood fakery, putting political views in your characters' mouths without even talking to any to find out whether those views are realistic in that character is not the way to go. Hollywood does that shit all the time. See: Jack Bower.
The basic setting for the series is that it's a modern-day world wherein magic exists. #1 is a sage, #2 & #3 are mages in training. Their task is to deal with other mages that commit crimes. The presence of magic in the world has made some rather radical changes to the Earth's time line, something that slowly comes out over each volume. Keep this in mind.
Near the end of his military career, #1 was one of several "oddballs" that got "deployed" to a UN peacekeeping effort simply because their unit commanders didn't know what to do with them. In his case, his commander was scared shitless of him (psych warfare background + physical dominance) and so wanted him gone.
The commander of the American element didn't know what to do with them either, and so put them together as their own unit. #1 was in charge by virtue of time-in-grade (he made 1LT a few weeks before #3).
Owing to their status as "irregulars" and the fact that they were technically outside the chain of command (a result of some serious snafus), they had the ability to call bullshit on what the UN force commander was doing. The big thing was that the commander wanted no patrols outside the encampments after dark even though it was common knowledge that the period after dark was when the rebels they were after did most of their activity. He and his team deliberately began to patrol after dark, and in doing so racked up such an extensive body count that both sides dubbed them the "Night Hunters" and came to regard them as ghouls.
During one patrol, they got some captured rebel officers to squeal and divulge the location of the rebel headquarters. After sending a coded message back, they took the place down all by themselves. The rebel commander decided to save his ass by naming names, and in the process revealed that the UN commander and several soldiers with the peacekeeping force were in on it; they were taking kickbacks and bribes in order to let the rebels go. All hell promptly broke loose when they got back to base and the US commander and some fellow trustworthy officers began to confront everyone with the evidence.
The UN Secretary General, not wanting to have to go through another scandal, leaned on a few political allies. These allies did such a good job of trying to suppress everything that all the "Night Hunters" actually saw their military careers ruined despite single-handedly liberating a third-world country and shutting down the criminal operations that the rebels had going on in order to fund themselves. The "Night Hunters" were promptly disbanded and flung to the corners of the globe.
The FBI was doing a lot of bitching & moaning at the time about how the Department of Defense was getting all of the good mages, and so a political deal took place wherein each branch of service agreed to give up one mage. Since #1's career had already been ruined by the politicians, he was the one the Army offered up; he spent the last six months of his term working as the aide to the commander of a backwater facility in Germany and then got shipped straight to his new FBI duty posting (Port Manteau, Texas). By the time the series begins, he's pretty well taken the place over; given that he's basically a 30-year-old Gandolf, has an impressive record, and is on a first-name basis with the other sages in town, no one wants to fuck with him.
Given what he went through, I think you can understand why it is he hates politicians. It's actually going to be a main plot for a subsequent novel that the commander over the US peacekeeping force has gotten out and is looking to run for Congress because he knows that everyone got screwed over and he wants to force the nation to admit what happened.
