Ossuary

<infobox>

 <title source="name">
   <default>Ossuary</default>
 </title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <header>Information</header> <label>Alignment</label> <label>Leader(s)</label> <label>Leader(s)</label> <label>Allies</label> <label>Allies</label> <label>Status</label> <label>Location</label> <label>First Appearance</label> <header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label> </infobox> Ossuary, previously known as Elephant Graveyard, is a constantly shifting group of environmentally-conscious 'villains'.

Modus operandi

Ossuary were originally an animal rights group that called themselves Elephant Graveyard, they expanded their purview to include stewardship of the entire biosphere.<ref name="II1.8 e1">He didn’t respond to that. He picked up a file, paging through it.

“Which one is that?”

“Ossuary. Why leave it out?”

“They’re back, or they will be soon,” I said. “Activist villains with a heavy focus on environment. They wouldn’t call themselves villains, I don’t think. Long list of really messy executions, longer list of leaders with very short tenures, who try to pull a very disparate group together, fail, and abdicate.”

“Were they the ones who used to call themselves Elephant Graveyard?”

“That’s the one. One of the early leaders pushed the name change along with a shift away from focusing on animals and animal welfare,” I said. “I liked Elephant Graveyard more, I think. Clunky, but clunky in a way that stands out, and it made for really good imagery, when they left a spray painted calling card.” - Excerpt from Daybreak 1.8</ref> They dealt with an apathetic world more concerned with Civilization eating calamities then this stewardship.<ref name=DP3/>

When they were Elephant Graveyard they used to leave cards spray tagged with their initials.<ref name="II1.8 e1" />

Structure

Leadership had a high turnover rate, given the need to get multiple disparate capes, from different backgrounds,<ref name=DP3>“I haven’t fought alongside them. That’s part of it. The other part is that Recycler and Retouch are from Dryad Project 3. [...] sponsored, not corporate, so they had someone paying the bills and all they had to do was hero. And they were pretty good at that. The sponsors? They started it off on the entire wrong foot. Way too much promotion and way too much money pushed into a team with self-imposed mission of saving the planet.”

“Not a bad mission, considering how we ended up.”

“That’s the issue. It wasn’t saving the planet from Endbringers or other threats. It was saving us from ourselves. Pollution, deforestation, ecology all things that have their validity… on Earth Aleph. People didn’t buy it. And if people aren’t buying, how do the sponsors get the money they invested back? [...] Hired a bunch of bright, genuinely cool heroes, diverse, all good, but few of those heroes cared about the mission before they joined the team, some didn’t care after, and the ones who were really gung-ho got sidelined-”
[...] “The lack of care from sponsors and the hired-on heroes seemed pretty obvious to most. Then the team got on the wrong side of the Youth Guard, broke or toed the line of just about every damn rule in the book when it came to costumes, school, friendships, throwing kids into violent situations… Two pairs of parents were saying they hadn’t seen their kid in weeks.”

“That was the part I heard about.”

I smiled. “Yeah. And the shitty thing is they had some good heroes. Recycler and Retouch weren’t hip in a way that worked for Dryad Project Three, but they’re strong, they’re pretty capable with potential to place themselves in the public eye, and they’re earnest, which is really important.”
[...]
My mom had talked and had drinks with a woman from a costume company at one point a while back, not long before Leviathan. Tipsy, the woman had confided things that weren’t hers to share, and my mother had told me, because she’d thought I needed to know what to watch out for.
[...]
Two members of the other serious or semi-serious members joined a villain eco-terrorist group. - Excerpt from Polarize 10.12</ref> working together.<ref name="II1.8 e1"/> This possibly meant that the group had rapidly mutating agendas and tactics, along with its eclectic membership.

PRT Response

While Ossuary would not strictly call themselves villains they were labeled as such by the authorities. With the groups history of executing their targets the authorities would see this label as justified.<ref name="II1.8 e1" />

History

Background

A group of empowered environmental activists that banded together.<ref name="Sv1">It's worth stating that one of the underling ideas driving the formation of groups and ideological factions in the Wormverse is the notion that some people get a voice where they otherwise wouldn't. Give an immense amount of power to a (relatively) random section of the population and you'll see certain shifts in the overlying sentiments.

All the more so when you think that a parahuman with aspirations might latch on to an idea, concept, or group to get reputation, resources, and contacts. - Comment by Wildbow on Sufficient Velocity</ref><ref name="R1">In Worm, minority groups get empowered due to, well, members get actual powers. - Comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref>

Story Start

Two heroes, late of the failed sponsored team Dryad Project Three, likely joined ossuary,<ref name=DP3/> sometime around 2011.

Post-Gold Morning

Two years after the multiverse was devastated the group was reforming in some way, shape, or description.<ref name="II1.8 e1" />

Trivia

• Ossuary is any container, be it object or building, where bones are kept.
• Hard Green organizations do actually exist. Well known examples include the Animal Liberation Front and Greenpeace. However a large amount of their activities are overblown such as a supposed rash of spiking trees.

References

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