Orion Office History

The Shadow on the Hill.

The Malibu Personnel Support Facility has been cloaked in an almost eerie fog of secrecy since its inception in the late 60s. Personnel and information are quietly swallowed by the lush college campus, sometimes not to be heard of again for years.

Some of this mystery may stem from the origins of the Malibu office. Established by a secret executive order rumored to have been signed by the legendary Orion National Office mastermind, Pavel Grothoff, the first team was able to quickly recruit a large portion of the staff of the still-young George Pepperdine College. However, this rosy beginning was a honeymoon that quickly descended into a stormy marriage indeed.

On December 17, 1972, an Orion assassination team tracked a known Web "honey agent" (a woman operative who gets male targets into compromising positions while other operatives secretly take photographs for use in blackmail) to Malibu. Whether by design or accident, the Web agent drove onto the George Pepperdine Campus. The assassination team took the agent down in broad daylight. A student was killed and three others injured in the crossfire.

When the bullets stopped flying, the real battle began in earnest. The Orion Los Angeles office, which had fielded the hit team, accused the new Orion Malibu office of gross lack of security at best, and Web sympathies at worst. The Orion Malibu office fired back, accusing the assassination team of gross incompetence or even attempting to blow the cover of the Malibu office in order to lessen office competition in the area. Ironically, the man who signed the Malibu office into existence, Pavel Grothoff, was one of the office’s harshest critics. The war was fought in the Orion bureaucracy for three years, before it was brought back to earth by more gunfire.

In a spectacular two-hour firefight that drew SWAT teams from Los Angeles, police from five communities, and the attention of the National Guard, several small college buildings at Pepperdine College were totaled. The police, held off by heavy machine gun fire, finally stormed the campus by helicopter and APCs, only to find that all of the gunmen had mysteriously disappeared. Nearly two dozen faculty at the tiny college were found executed in the wreckage, along with a dozen other victims, an inexplicable tragedy that rocked the West Coast. Only Orion knew what had happened that day: the Web had caught wind of the new facility as a result of the inter-office bickering, and launched an assault that wiped out the entire Orion Malibu staff.

Orion was quick to return to the facility, arranging for all of the new Pepperdine College staff to be Orion operatives. Pepperdine College rebuilt rapidly, taking advantage of its huge endowment, added several graduate schools to become Pepperdine University, and has now grown to a billion-dollar campus with several thousand students. However, the Orion Malibu office was not re-established; instead, a training facility was developed at the campus, and later at the nearby Zuma Beach. While the Personnel Support Facility has grown to become one of the most advanced Orion training depots in the world, all of the area’s operations and missions are performed by the Orion Los Angeles office.

The MPSF has become a haven at one time or another for nearly all of Orion’s most elite agents, who spend sometimes months at a time at the beautiful, ocean-side facility on recreational or medical leave. However, the cloud of tragedy has never left the office. Visiting agents sometimes joke that the shadows seem darker, the secret caves deeper, the instructors more bitter, the classrooms themselves haunted by the ghosts of an Orion Office that died in the rubble of its birthplace.

Go directly to the Pepperdine facility by clicking on the Environment icon.

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