DUST Protocol // INTERNAL ARCHIVE

HISTORY

ORIGINS (CIRCA 1982)

Branch-6 Incident
In 1982, a secret government laboratory known as Branch-6 operated deep in the Arizona desert. Officially, the facility did not exist. Behind its fences, a small team of scientists was conducting classified research into geophysical resonance and the strange ways energy moved through matter, gravity, and space.

The researchers believed that spacetime itself might possess a hidden resonant structure, much like a bell or crystal has a natural frequency. If those vibrations could be detected and measured, the technology promised revolutionary advances in underground imaging, long-range communications, gravity research, and seismic prediction.

During a routine calibration, the prototype detected a persistent resonance unlike anything the team had ever recorded. Believing they had discovered a previously unknown property of spacetime, the researchers tuned the machine to match the mysterious frequency and increased its power.

Instead of merely observing the resonance, the experiment amplified it. The surrounding land buckled and distorted as the resonance rippled outward, twisting distance, terrain, and physical law as though the world itself had been struck like a bell. Whether the machine created the phenomenon or merely awakened something that had always existed remains unknown. Whatever happened beneath Branch-6 that day, the first anomaly zone was born.
First Anomaly Bubble
Within hours, strange crystalline formations began spreading through the bedrock beneath the laboratory. Later dubbed living quartz, the formations emitted a faint, almost inaudible hum and appeared to grow without any recognizable geological process. Radio transmissions dissolved into static, lab animals became violently disoriented, and several technicians vanished without explanation. Military personnel quickly sealed the facility, establishing a roughly one-square-mile quarantine around the affected area.

CONTAINMENT & QUIET GROWTH (1983–1989)

Static Stalemate
Over the next several years, military officials formally classified the anomaly as Designated Unstable Spatial Terrain — or, simply, DUST. It remained largely contained. Scientists at Branch-6, joined by a small military detachment, monitored it around the clock, documenting recurring anomalies including bursts of static radio interference, levitating stones, localized spatial distortions, and other increasingly impossible phenomena. Though the DUST appeared stable, no one could explain why it continued to change.
"Protocol" Coined
In their field reports, the original lab team began referring to their containment measures as DUST Protocol. It was never an official project name, just shorthand in inter-office memos. But it stuck.

EXPLOSIVE EXPANSION (1990)

Trigger Event
In the spring of 1990, with the Cold War drawing to a close and Branch-6 slated for decommissioning, personnel began shutting down and dismantling the dormant resonance equipment beneath the facility. After nearly eight years of apparent stability, the anomaly was believed to be contained. During the final shutdown procedure, however, the mysterious resonance abruptly reawakened. Within minutes, the DUST boundary blistered outward for the first time, consuming miles of desert in a matter of hours. Trees were left half-burned, animals fused with sand, and radio transmissions dissolved into gibberish across half the spectrum.
First "Keep Out" Signs
The tiny desert town of Moon Lantern (pop. 412) woke one morning to a pink-hued sky and bizarre tumbleweeds of crackling light rolling past their porches. Overnight, the "Keep Out" markers around their town became as real as the dust in their lungs.

THE ABANDONMENT (1990–1992)

Project JANUS
Following the 1990 boundary expansion, federal jurisdiction was briefly asserted over the affected desert region. Roads were closed, utilities cut, and a "temporary evacuation" ordered without relocation plans or meaningful enforcement. Behind the scenes, responsibility for the DUST was consolidated under a classified emergency initiative known as Project JANUS, established to coordinate military, scientific, and civilian agencies responding to the crisis.

As the boundary continued to destabilize, Project JANUS gradually evolved from an emergency response into a permanent classified program. Responsibility for overseeing the initiative became increasingly centralized within an interagency authority that would eventually become known as The Directorate. By 1992, the Directorate's focus had shifted away from physical containment entirely.
The Erasure
Military checkpoints were withdrawn, research stations dismantled, and visible government operations quietly disappeared. Rather than attempting to contain an ever-shifting, potentially ever-expanding frontier, Project JANUS redirected its efforts toward controlling information. Towns vanished from census records, roads fell from maintenance schedules, property records became increasingly difficult to trace, and official explanations attributed unusual events to mining accidents, military exercises, or natural disasters.

By 1992, the region no longer appeared on most federal planning documents — neither restricted nor condemned, simply absent. Officially, nothing remained to manage. Unofficially, The Directorate had entered a new phase, one that sought to contain the DUST not through walls or soldiers, but through bureaucracy, secrecy, and forgetting.

THE SURVIVORS REMAIN (1992–)

Those Who Stayed
Despite evacuation orders, many residents never left. Others quietly returned after military patrols withdrew, finding abandoned homes, shuttered businesses, and little remaining government presence. Ranchers, mechanics, truckers, miners, and isolated families learned to survive alongside the expanding anomaly rather than flee from it.

As roads disappeared from official maps and public attention drifted elsewhere, these scattered communities became increasingly self-reliant. Information, fuel, medicine, and reliable maps often proved more valuable than money, while rumors spread of scavengers, smugglers, and wanderers venturing deeper into the DUST in search of abandoned government equipment and anomalous artifacts.

THE NETWORK FORMS (1993)

Loose Alliance
A handful of local townsfolk, joined by several former Branch-6 employees — including a physicist and a discharged military guard — began pooling field journals, radio scans, photographs, and sealed vials of anomalous material. Their loose alliance eventually became known simply as The Network, preserving the surviving records, fieldcraft, and institutional memory of the original DUST Protocol long after the government had abandoned it.

United by a shared purpose, they ranged deeper into the DUST, mapping unstable territory, documenting anomalies, and aiding isolated communities — trading bullets and biology notes in equal measure. Sometimes that meant carrying supplies. Other times it meant putting down something that wandered too close to town.

As repeated expeditions proved that digital equipment inevitably failed in the DUST's static, the Network gradually embraced analog tools instead: cassette tapes, radio broadcasts, film cameras, dot-matrix printouts, and handwritten logs. Their mission wasn't just survival — it was proof. Against every cover-up and every operation carried out under Project JANUS, their records stood as evidence that the DUST was real and that someone had to fight it.

A FRONTIER EMERGES (1994–)

Drawn to the DUST
Rumors of abandoned government sites, valuable artifacts, and impossible discoveries began spreading beyond Arizona. Scavengers, fortune seekers, cultists, journalists, and drifters slowly filtered into the forgotten region, transforming the DUST from an abandoned disaster zone into a lawless frontier.

INTO THE PRESENT (1997–)

The Network Endures
By the late 1990s, the Network had spread across the Southwest as a loose collection of independent cells connected by journals, radio traffic, and trusted couriers. No headquarters existed, nor any central authority. Some cells maintained settlements, others operated safehouses or repeater stations, but all contributed to the same growing body of knowledge about the DUST.
A Hidden War
To the public, the DUST remained nothing more than a patchwork of mining accidents, abandoned communities, military restrictions, and environmental hazards. While Project JANUS quietly erased evidence through bureaucracy, the Network preserved it through journals, maps, photographs, and cassette recordings. Neither organization expects to eliminate the DUST. Their conflict centers on a single question: should humanity remember, or should it forget?
Life Inside the DUST
The Network is not the only human presence within the DUST. Scattered towns, ranches, roadside businesses, and isolated homesteads still dot the region, their inhabitants accustomed to living alongside the impossible. Artifact hunters and scavengers venture into unstable territory in search of valuable discoveries. Religious sects regard the transformed landscape as sacred, while smugglers use forgotten highways beyond ordinary law enforcement. Among them, Directorate teams and Network Operatives move quietly through the same landscape, each pursuing incompatible visions of how the impossible should be confronted.

KEY FIGURES WITHIN THE NETWORK

ANALOG SUBCULTURE

By 1995 the Network’s archives and field recordings depended entirely on analog equipment.
Digital devices fell prey to the DUST’s static: Hard drives scrambled, LCDs darkened, and solid-state memory corrupted in seconds. Out of necessity, a low-tech subculture of sorts took hold: cassette tapes, VHS, reel-to-reel decks, CB radios, and film cameras became the standard tools for preserving evidence and coordinating cell-to-cell transmissions.

DUST Tapes
Field teams dub every patrol onto cassette: voice-recorded logs, motor-tape clicks, and clipped radio scans from the repeater towers. These “DUST Tapes” are duplicated and carried between cells in metal ammo containers.
Spoolwave Broadcasts
Every midnight, a handful of vacuum-tube rigs on the outskirts of town key their mics for the clandestine “Spoolwave” net: a 40-meter ham frequency patched through ferrite coils and crystal filters. Operators identify themselves by call-signs (“Echo-7,” “Hex-2”, etc.) and swap location reports, warning of fresh anomalies and sharing new field-journal excerpts.
Zines & Xerography
Nothing captures the DUST’s texture like dot-matrix printouts and hand-drawn maps. Sister Agnes’s “Hex Library” produces the quarterly pamphlet “Static Echo” photocopied on yellowing stock, stuffed with field sketches, circuit diagrams, and coded glyph translations. These zines circulate by hand, passed off in sleepy bars or slipped under motel doors.
Film & Photographic Logs
Film cameras (35 mm, Polaroid packs) are sacred. Each frame is bracketed for underexposure, then archived in acid-free envelopes. When development chemicals fail, archivists wheel out darkroom setups in improvised tents, bathing slides under red safelights to preserve every speck of an anomaly bloom.

Together, these analog methods form the Network’s core. In a world where digital dies in the DUST, the hiss of tape, the click of a film advance, and the whirr of a dot-matrix printer stand as the last reliable witnesses to what waits beyond the “Keep Out” signs.

TOOLS

FIELD NOTE EXCERPTS

INTERNAL MEMO: !!! DO NOT OPERATE ALONE AFTER ANY THIRD INCIDENT !!!

ARTIFACT REPLICATOR

Inside the DUST, many objects no longer behave as they should. Some are ordinary items warped by years of anomalous exposure. A pair of scissors that refuses to open until midnight. A cassette tape that records conversations before they happen. Others appear deliberately manufactured, though by whom, when, or for what purpose remains unknown.

Artifacts are unpredictable, often dangerous, and occasionally invaluable. Some hum when anomalies are nearby. Others bleed when exposed to sunlight. Many simply ignore the normal laws of physics, biology, or human perception.

An artifact's power is not available to just anyone. To unlock its anomalous properties, an Operative must first attune to it. Attunement is established by willingly spending Willpower while handling the artifact. The process is rarely comfortable. Some artifacts accept the attunement silently. Others leave behind strange sensations, fleeting hallucinations, or other anomalous side effects.

Once attuned, an Operative can intentionally invoke the artifact's abilities whenever its description allows. The attunement persists indefinitely, even if the artifact is lost, hidden, or left unused for years. It ends only when another individual willingly attunes to the artifact, replacing its previous bearer.

The first time an Operative invokes a newly attuned artifact, they must make a Grip test as their mind struggles to accommodate its impossible nature. Thereafter, each use requires only a minor Grip test as the artifact becomes an accepted, though never truly normal, part of their reality.

FAMILIAR FORM, UNFAMILIAR FUNCTION

Most artifacts resemble things you've seen before: a spoon, a pair of boots, a TV remote. But the DUST has rewritten their rules. They might emit cold instead of light, cause memory loops, or physically relocate when unobserved.