Media Cover

Media Cover is the Checquy department charged with managing the public account of supernatural incidents. In the Liverpool crisis, its work is presented not as a way to prevent media from existing, but as an effort to monitor what reporters capture and shape what the public can learn. The department’s response helps contain the exposure of an event in which ectoplasm formed animals that chased people.

Role and Methods

When a television crew was reported wandering through downtown Liverpool, Myfanwy Thomas contacted Media Cover to ask why it was there. The department’s head, Caspar Dragoslevic, dryly pointed out that Media Cover could not influence where television stations established their facilities. Instead, it had placed someone inside the station who could report what footage the crew obtained, after which the department might be able to alter it.

Myfanwy referred to the department’s personnel as “Liars,” a label Dragoslevic objected to. He identified them by their formal name, the Tactical Deception Communications Section. The exchange reveals a tension between the blunt purpose of the work—deception—and the official language used to describe it. Media Cover’s remit is to manage information around supernatural events, not to exercise supernatural control over ordinary media infrastructure.

The Liverpool Crisis

The stakes were unusually clear: Myfanwy warned that an Argentine woman was coughing up ectoplasm that became animals and chased people, precisely the kind of phenomenon the Checquy was supposed to prevent the public from discovering. She doubted that witnesses or a television crew would casually surrender compromising footage, making the department’s ability to monitor and intervene important to the crisis response.

Media Cover’s later report brought better news. The power failure and the number of people trying to leave the city had kept media crews away from the event’s epicenter; they had reached only the outskirts. More decisively, the ectoplasmic constructs did not register on either film or digital cameras. The department therefore did not have to rely solely on altering or withholding recorded evidence: the cameras had failed to capture the supernatural creatures in the first place.

Cover Story and Significance

After learning that the footage posed less danger, Myfanwy asked whether Media Cover had devised a plausible account. Dragoslevic offered a deliberately nonspecific explanation involving animals escaped from a cargo ship, the power outage, and the looting that followed. Myfanwy considered the account convoluted and remained concerned about reports of herds of ghost animals, but the exchange establishes the department’s practical approach: combine real surrounding circumstances with an ordinary explanation that obscures the supernatural cause.

Media Cover’s work shows how the Checquy’s secrecy depends on both institutional monitoring and the contingencies of an incident. The department can cultivate sources and prepare explanations, but it cannot command the location of a station or guarantee what a crew will record. In Liverpool, the crisis of exposure was eased by conditions beyond its control—the blackout, the evacuating crowds, and the creatures’ invisibility to cameras—while Media Cover supplied a story that could absorb what remained.