One of the nastier groups I created for In Nomine. Not least because I had to consciously keep myself from winding them up for self-destruction. I usually do, for the awful ones. But player-characters have got to work for their wins sometimes…
The Cabal of Procurers
Just who sponsors this group is one of Hell’s more impenetrable secrets: it must have a protector, but no Prince has formally admitted it. On the other hand, no Prince has ever seriously tried to destroy or take over the group, either (the Procurers’ cozy relationship with the Game discourages attempts by lesser entities, usually via midnight arrests and summary executions). The actual identity of their patron is far less important than the demonstrated fact that they have one.
The Cabal of Procurers is a slaver’s guild; they specialize in interesting and unusual damned souls and demons, for a wide range of budgets and tastes. And if their clients’ tastes require a type of slave not readily available, they’ll be happy to construct a reasonable facsimile. The only limiting factor is the price.
This is the primary reason why most demons assume that the Cabal has Prince-level patronage.
Purpose and Goals
To acquire a reasonable level of power and an unreasonable level of wealth.
Organization and Leadership
Procurers can be of any Word or Band, but tend to be Balseraphs, Habbalah, and Lilim, ranging from 10 to 12 Force. Very few Procurers have Distinctions, and none are Word-Bound. Every Principality except Abaddon has a ‘field office’ of the Cabal, but the largest are in Hades and Shal-Mari. The former is the main ‘industrial’ area; the latter has the best showrooms.
The Cabal is a cross between a ‘secret’ society, and a franchise. Demons who can manage enough free time who work for a Prince at least neutral towards the Cabal (Saminga and Mammon are the two Princes most actively hostile) either join an existing organization, or (more rarely) start one of their own. If accepted, the demon will advance in rank through the usual methods of bribery, bootlicking, and betrayal. Particularly successful demons end up running their particular Principality’s franchises: there is neither an official nor unofficial head of the organization as a whole. The offices operating out of Hades have extra influence, due to both their easy access to the Soul Yards and their special manufactories, but neither office is in charge.
Since all of this is taking place in Hell, the constant maneuvering and plotting is not for the timid. Procurers also assume they’ve been thoroughly infiltrated by the Game (except for the Gamesters, who instead assume they’ve been thoroughly infiltrated by Fate), which would be more concerning if only it wasn’t already so distressingly common.
Abilities and Resources
The Procurers are both vendors, and esoteric manufacturers. The Cabal keeps in stock extensive numbers of slaves, of all sorts and varieties — and readily available to any demon with jaded tastes, demanding bosses, or tight deadlines. Procurers can guarantee the most common types, in whatever number that you might need or afford; they offer both purchase and rental plans, and provide free delivery. Somewhat more baroque items take longer, and probably involve a call to another Principality (no individual office owns its own stock; all slaves are collectively owned by the Cabal), which will naturally raise the fee. There’s also a return-for-credit plan. Finally, the Cabal will always be happy to purchase whatever odd damned souls that a demon might happen to possess, provided of course that a fair market value can be determined.
Damned souls make up the bulk of their business; Cabalists in Perdition and Beleth’s side of the Marches have a profitable sideline in ethereal slaves, and there’s always the odd unlucky demon or two in their clutches, but human souls are the Procurers’ mainstay.
What makes the Procurers special, and explains the name, is their ability to create what their customers require. For damned souls, this can be something as simple as a thorough training/brainwashing regimen, or as complex as the judicious addition and removal of Forces; for demons, it apparently involves the capture of ‘wild’ demonlings before they fledge, then beginning the brainwashing and Force-manipulation. Their only limitation there is that they cannot create Lilim.
The exact method of how the Procurers do what they do is both a closely guarded secret, and the subject of a nigh-infinite variety of rumors. What is known is that they can provide facsimiles of just about anyone, for the right price. This includes duplicates of specific people. In fact, the Procurers do a lot of work for the Game and Fate in this regard. Oddly, the bulk of these sorts of jobs involve people who are not famous: demons on Earth duty have discovered that video of someone’s Aunt Edna screaming in agony while being tormented by fiery whips is very useful in the fields of blackmail, espionage, and general sadism. Unfortunately, the Host realizes this, too, so the favored targets are those who cannot simply call an angel and ask him or her to double-check on what really happened to Aunt Edna after she died. So it’s useful when dealing with Hellsworn and/or normal people, and often cheaper than tracking down any specific damned soul.
Duplication of famous people… well, that’s where the Cabal starts keeping its mouth firmly shut. It’s fairly clear that they do it, but admitting to it would be pointless. There’s no point in ordering the public display of a ‘Mahatma Ghandi’ or ‘Abraham Lincoln’ to demoralize damned souls if everybody knows that they’re really only copies. Sensible demons note this (and the oddity that every Principality seems to have its own Adolf Hitler) and quietly draw their own conclusions. Nobody with an ounce of sense is really sure how many famous people actually are in Hell, and the Procurers derive much of their mystique from that. They’re really that good.
Celestial Relations
Hell
The two Princes most openly hostile towards the Procurers are Saminga and Mammon, for ideological and practical reasons, respectively. Saminga thinks that trading in souls like this is wasteful; the Forces are much better off being harvested for his Undead legions, and he certainly does not allow his Servitors to make their own deals. Mammon is simply incensed that he is not milking such a lucrative cash cow, as any and all business deals are so obviously supposed to be under his purview. Alas, neither has sufficient influence to negate the influence of the Cabal’s unseen patron.
The rest of Hell finds the Procurers to be fairly useful in a variety of ways, and of course few sensible demons want to bother unduly any group that does regular business with the Game.
Heaven
This is one of those groups that annoys the corporeal members of the Host more than the celestial ones; from an angelic perspective, this is just one more bunch of demons dedicated to interfering with Earth, and it’s not like their particular perversion gives them any added resistance to being shot, stabbed, ripped limb from limb, dropped into a quantum black hole, or blown up. Blessed souls and Saints – especially the ones who have been ‘honored’ by the Cabal’s unique form of copyright violation – have a somewhat less detached view of things.
Ethereals
Nobody likes slave-takers. Especially ones that have sufficient connections to get away with ‘minor’ violations of what few guarantees exist between Hell and certain pantheons. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it does happen.
History
The Procurers have existed for about six hundred years or so, and have been extremely stable during most of that time period. This is noteworthy, for Hell; certainly, individual Procurers are subject to the usual purges and assassinations, but the group as a whole has never suffered from a major suppression. This underscores the likelihood of Prince-level patronage, especially since the Prince of Greed had constantly been attempting to control their organization.
The modern period has been quite exciting for the Cabal, however. The chaos engendered by the run on Mammon’s Bank in 1929 allowed them to expand their franchise network; by the time that the Prince of Greed was in a position to worry about comparatively minor irritants, the Procurers had developed a presence throughout Hell. Since then, Mammon’s efforts to control the Procurers have been even less successful than before.
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