Overview

Special Assignment 139 was put together to perform a technically illegal act, the robbing of a bank. The bank in question was run to process criminal transactions, but there was no completely legal way to raid it, nor more than base suspicions as to exactly what it contained. Even Kane's World’s most noted extralegal crimefighter, the Batman, was unable to rationalize that kind of break-in. Thus, the International Police Organization took a former criminal in their ranks, gave him a group of people to work with as an experiment, and sent them to raid the datasystems of the bank and get the information.

The experiment was deemed a success and the team formalized as Special Assignment 139 (Infiltration/Countercriminal) - snarkily dubbed, due to the number of apparently-young women on the team, the “After-School Special Mission Force”. (None of the members actually attend school, except where needed for cover.)

The main members of the After-School Special Mission Force are:

Geoff Depew – formerly an assassin for Big Fire under the codename Hellbringer, he broke his loyalty programming (with the unwitting help of other members of Big Fire preparing him for a power grab within the organization) and turned on the organization, killing an estimated 380 Big Fire agents at various levels. His final assault on the Big Fire Group brought him to New Avalon, where he was brought in to the International Police. After a psychic scan by no less a personage than Charles Xavier himself, he was deemed cleared of psychic interference. He was then turned over to Logan, who began the process of his re-education and rehabilitation.

In between leaving Big Fire and taking up his mission against them, he spent time on Barsaan, learning the beginnings of the combat arts of the Order of St. Ignatius.

Between his training by Big Fire as an assassin intended to face Experts of Justice, the combat arts of the Ignatines, his own field experience and work to bring them together, and his constant self-training and seeking education from anyone with something to teach him, Depew is a top-level combatant. He is also pursuing a degree in criminalistics from New Avalon University, with field experience credits from Gil Grissom. In addition to all of this, he has one of the broadest ranges of weapon and infiltration skills to be found among International Police personnel, coupled with a fanatical dedication to being prepared for almost anything.

Finally, he has a black-project Zardon military implant called a daodan, a bioengineered symbiote within his chest that improves his strength, stamina, reflexes, and healing speed, a improvement that increases even more with a standard medpac’s drugs in his system. The daodan, when "supercharged" in this manner, temporarily gives him superhuman physical prowess and increases his regeneration to that of a stage 1 Detian. (A massive overdose of Miraculon, administered under direct medical supervision, gave him even greater healing, but that was done in an extreme situation to save his life. The only visible side effect was that it apparently caused part of his metabolism to increase, so that his hair grows when it takes effect. Finding the exact reason for this would require more tests than anyone really is interested in.)

Add in his recent Lensing and promotion to Special Assignment 1, and you have a nigh-unstoppable force for justice – a place he never thought he’d be, and one he finds himself relishing. Getting the Lens has even gotten him to lighten up a little.

Saya Otonashi – As far as anyone can tell, Saya is the last survivor of the first-generation vampires directly created by the Lord of Blood, the late Duke of Hell who originated the vampire curse in the first place. Little is known of her background, even by her, after the events of June 14, 2410, when the Chief of the International Police and his apprentice encountered her in the Otonashi mountains of Tomodachi. Critically injured in a fight against a chiropteran, she lost control of her vampiric nature and tried to save herself by feeding on the Chief. His Omega-2-altered blood interacted with her blood curse, regressing her in physical age and putting her in a coma. She awoke on January 19, 2411, in a hibernation chamber at BPRD headquarters. Thankfully, Count Orlock was present and able to calm her down.

Saya proved to be significantly amnesiac upon emerging from her coma. Though she seems to retain the skills and basic knowledge she had before the Otonashi incident, she remembers almost none of her actual life history, not even her real surname. The experience has left a core of dark cynicism running through her personality - which is still oddly upbeat and friendly for a vampire - ever since.

Saya appears to be a fourteen-year-old girl. She tends to wear school uniforms, and carries a sword with her most of the time. As a first-generation vampire, she is immune to the corrosive effects of sunlight, but it does lower her physical abilities from terrifyingly superhuman to merely exceptional human; she is also immune to most of the traditional vulnerabilities that vampires are thought to have (having gone so far to eat a clove of garlic just to prove her immunity), except perhaps a stake through the heart. Her martial arts skills, including a significant kenjutsu ability, are exceptional enough that getting a stake through her heart is nearly impossible unless she is overwhelmed or knocked unconscious first.

In team communications traffic, Saya is referred to as Codename V (or simply V).

Lain Iwakura – Lain has been seconded to the International Police from GENOM, of all groups, putting to an end the rumors of lingering hostility between the two groups. Her father, Yasuo Iwakura, is a top-level researcher in GENOM’s advanced technologies department, and is believed to be one of the team heads on the next-gen STACIS AI protocol.

Lain herself has a remarkable amount of cybernetic augmentation for her age, including the ability to hack into wireless networks, top-grade cybernetic interface jacks, and a boosted left lung – the right having been removed in order to fit computing and processing devices, including huge amounts of memory, in the space where the right would be. A wireless antenna array is embedded in her shoulder blades in order to increase her reception range. Finally, portions of her nervous system have been replaced with specialized optic biofibers to increase her mental processing speed and link the memory in her digital componentry to her neural net. Add into that her GENOM Cyber-Spectre training, and she is a frightening force in cyberspace. She also has had the notable experience of being inside an organic computer during a full crash status (a.k.a. death) without going completely insane.

She tends to be withdrawn around people who she does not know, but shows a sharp-edged, almost sly sense of humor when she becomes comfortable around people. She's also better with strangers in large groups and/or in remote interactions, having worked off and on as a rave deejay and pirate radio personality.

Lain's operational comm codename is Cipher.

Penance – A skraeling of Muspelheim, she was sent to Midgard to deliver a message. Unfortunately, the poor skraeling arrived an hour after the person she was sent to give the message to had left, not to return for nearly a month. The skraeling waited patiently, because it wasn’t that cold out, and no one was kicking her, and in general it was quiet and peaceful and there was a much lower chance of dying in Midgard, as opposed to returning to Hell and reporting failure.

When the message was finally delivered to its recipient, it was completely useless, as the event it was meant to warn about had already passed. After some careful work, the skraeling learned some Standard Sign Language, and began to pick up information at a very rapid clip. Upon learning that she was not being kept as a slave – as she’d expected – she found herself with no idea what to do with herself. It was about this time she was dubbed 'Penance'.

When Special Assignment 139 was being assembled, she was placed with it in the hopes she would acclimate socially. The experiment seems to have worked exceptionally well, as she has become friends with her teammates, and appears to have something of a crush on Mike Sounders.

As a skraeling, she possesses exceptional strength, speed and stamina. Her body reacts to stress by becoming hard as steel, and all edges of the body becoming sharp enough to cut stone. She is of considerably greater intelligence than the average of her kind, most of whom are just barely sentient. Geoff and Saya are teaching her combat skills, as well. She cannot speak, but is fluent in Standard Sign Language, and can read at least four languages.

Penance is already a perfectly acceptable comm codename. Her friends sometimes call her Penny.

Mike Sounders – Mike started as a simple Stark Industries Omnimech Cosmodroid. He achieved sentience and passed his Turing test in 2408, at which point he went back to working for the International Police as an organizational specialist – a sort of roving aide-de-camp for any member of the IPO who needed a "servant" droid that they could trust to not screw things up. Despite his sometimes excessively emotional personality – designed to make his line seem "more harmless and socially acceptable" – Mike is a capable mechanoid, able to schmooze through a lot of red tape and get things done.

During the first mission of Special Assignment 139, Mike’s original shell was almost completely wrecked when he used it as a circuit bridge to restart a shuttlecraft’s engines. His core was removed and a new body constructed for him by no less a personage than Skuld Ravenhair, Chief Technologist of the International Police.

He continues to have his database of how, where, and from whom to get almost anything. The new body, however, has the ability to transform into a more humanoid form whose full abilities are not completely known at this time.

For reasons not immediately obvious to this compiler, Mike Sounders's operational codename is Boom Robo.