STATUS Deceased – murdered in his own apartment
SECTION Formerly Section 18 patrol; partnered occasionally with Agent Dew
FIRST ON RECORD Session 1 – the Karnath protestor riot

Branson was, by every account before the riot that ended his career, an unremarkable patrol officer – competent, a little short-tempered, the kind of Agent nobody wrote home about. What changed that wasn’t cowardice or corruption. It was Twitch: a habit picked up somewhere along the way that turned a routine crowd-control shift into the moment everyone at Section 18 started watching him differently.

At the Karnath protestor riot, Branson cracked a knife-wielder’s skull with his baton a beat before the man could stab anyone – reflexes sharp enough to look like heroism, until Hawk noticed the pale skin, the twitching, and the spearmint reek underneath the sweat. Dismissed for a couple of days to clean himself up, Branson took his Kemercannon home with him against every regulation on the books, agitated and unwilling to go anywhere unarmed.

FILE NOTES

The habit had already cost him his marriage. He and his wife Jess had split some time before, Branson moving out to a girlfriend’s place, Jess keeping custody of their daughter, Tilly. What was left of his life outside the badge didn’t survive much longer than what was left of his career.

The Agents found him at his own flat, 16/2 Fisher Row – face down on the bed in a pool of blood, a Kemercannon bolt lodged in the back of his own skull. Bite marks and lacerations covered his face and neck, too small to belong to an adult. A single bare footprint, small and bloodied, was found at the edge of the bed. Three North Side Crew men turned up at the door not long after, looking to collect on an unpaid Twitch debt, unaware they were about to be the second unpleasant surprise of the night.

The weapon that killed him was his own, confiscated and never properly returned. The bite marks matched nothing human. Tilly, his own daughter, was seen afterward carrying that same Kemercannon – changed into something Section 18 has since catalogued among Dr Griffiths’ ‘paired’ children, the telepathic-bonding experiments run out of Get Stuffed. Branson’s death was filed, eventually, as the opening note in a much larger, much darker case that had nothing to do with him personally at all.

“Why on the twitch? Keeps me alert, why not, we need it with all the bangarang going on. It’s not safe. This stuff gives me the edge, you know? So I can protect myself.”

Agent Branson, shortly before his dismissal

STATUS: Filed under The Good, if only because nothing in his file suggests he deserved what he got. An addiction that cost him his marriage, his badge, and eventually his life – and a daughter who, whatever she has become, killed him for reasons that were never really hers to choose either.