Group seed: Her Majesty’s Special Egyptian Antiquities Squadron

There’s a character in The Secret World that would fit in with this crowd fairly well. Although he absolutely would not move.  Why should he, when the occult world comes to him?

Her Majesty’s Special Egyptian Antiquities Squadron

Because back then apparently the British Empire thought that it was funny to call its in-house cadre of Ancient Egyptian mummy-sorcerers ‘Antiquities,’ that’s why.  World War II was a time of great eccentricities.  Or at least it was a time when the British didn’t worry much about anything that wasn’t directly impacting their ability to survive as a nation and as an organized political entity.

So… yes, the British had mummies working for them. Why wouldn’t they? The Undead community in Egypt has had a long history of making deals with a succession of conquering peoples, and the English were certainly not the worst of the bunch.  Better, in fact, than the home-grown regimes that followed them – at least from the mummies’ point of view, which is one reason why a few of them decided to take advantage of the End of Empire to relocate to London and take up shop as a semi-detached unit answerable to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and those few people in the civilian government that still remember that the Antiquities Squadron even exist.  After all, for most mortals World War II was a lifetime ago.

The Antiquities Squadron serves the MoD mostly in their capacity as powerful, if fairly limited, sorcerers: they have limited control over weather, some mesmerization powers, the ability to throw down a curse of bad luck or mundane sickness… and several thousand years’ worth each of experience in applied political science. This is less problematical to the powers that be than you might suppose: the mummification/revival process tends to encourage megalomania, yes – but the megalomaniacs invariably achieved the True Death almost immediately.  The mummies that survived were the mummies that worked out how to be… not-stupid.  Part of being not-stupid is to giving the British government their aid and assistance in various matters, particularly the arcane ones.

So now former Pharaohs and priests mostly live in London, and have accounts at all the nice shops, and live in the nice apartments and townhouses, and can freely indulge in whatever pleasures that they still can want or experience, and everything is very, very cozy.  But may all the gods of Egypt have mercy on anybody that goes after a member of the Antiquities Squadron, because the Squadron itself has none to spare.  And Her Majesty’s government will have precious little, themselves.