The Talbot Group is a compact of hunters that first appear in the book Spirit Slayers. Along with working with emotionally troubled youths, they also seek to track down and perform therapies and treatments on family members who have become supernatural creatures.
History
In the early 1980's a group of eight Seattle-area teenagers underwent psychotic rages, killing forty-eight people over three days. Becoming known as the Harvest Moon Massacres, the teens disappeared without a trace. One of them was Andrew Talbot, son of two prominent doctors, Paul and Isabelle Talbot. Believing his son's breakdown could have been prevented, the two of them relentlessly campaigned for improved screening and counseling services in schools. In addition, Isabelle knew her son was still alive, and began tracking sightings of him, hoping for a reunion and explanation.
In 1989, she apparently succeeded; a sighting lead her to Santa Fe, New Mexico. However, when Paul failed to hear from her and she did not return, he notified the police, who found her severely injured in a hotel room and her two informants torn to pieces. Isabelle claimed her attacker was both Andrew, and a horrific monster. From there, she and her husband took different paths to deal with their issues. While Paul continued to work with modern psychology to find cures for similarly violent individuals, she turned to Native American spiritualism and shamanism, looking for spiritual influences on their behavior. She also investigated cases similar to Andrew's, and gathered enough evidence to convince Paul of the truth.
Paul had founded the Talbot Group in 1992 with the assistance of another psychologist, Dr. Robert Courtland. Convinced that his wife was not mad with grief, he agreed to incorporate her ideas and theories into therapies for the Group's patients. Since then, the Talbots and their associates have become specialists at caring for teenage "wolf-people" and at eliminating spiritual pressures that might cause more.
Purpose
The Talbots hope to help others avoid what they went through with their own son; to that end, they work to understand what makes wolf-people come into being, and try to figure out ways to help them contain their rage and urges. Other members track down spiritual "hot-spots" that seem to trigger these issues and eliminate them to keep the population at large safe.
Organization
The Talbots and Dr. Courtland remain in charge of the organization, hiring other hunters who may be able to help them. Hunters under their employ are strictly limited in the resources they are allowed to access to, mostly to make sure that they are there when they are truly needed. The group also maintains a level of security and secrecy, especially regarding the wolf-children, so that misguided kin will not be tempted to "rescue" them from the Talbots' influence. There are several branches of the Talbot Group throughout the West Coast of the United States. Most of them only deal with normal mentally disturbed children, but a few have managed to find the wolf-touched among their numbers.
The Talbot Group members work under three different philosophies of treatment: the Exorcists treat the wolf-people as if they were inflicted with some terrible disease that must be cured, the Redactors believe that the proper treatment is to keep spirits from attaching themselves to the patients, and the Conciliators wish to harness the power of the spirits and those they influence to fight a much larger darkness that covers the world.
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