Continue reading Group Seed: Sawila Foods.Sawila Foods, Inc.
HQ: Manila, with regional field offices in Kathmandu, Chittagong, Muscat, Varna, Belem, and Inverness, and local offices worldwide. Sawila studiously avoids North American operations.
Employment: roughly ten thousand worldwide (two thousand in Manila). Each regional office has about six hundred or so staffers; field offices can range from ten to several hundred staff.
Purpose of company: Exotic foodstuffs. Sawila looks worldwide for unique and unusual foods, marketing them to those with a discerning palate. Quality and reliability are the company’s watchwords.
Tag: group seed
Group Seed: The Assiduous Watchbreed.
The Assiduous Watchbreed
Goals: these days? Organized crime, both mundane and occult. Members of the Assiduous Watchbreed will do anything illegal, if the money’s right; they specialize in drugs, the most unsavory forms of human trafficking, and magical assassinations. The Watchbreed have learned from painful experience that the art of assassinations is best practiced solely against other criminals; there are too many public officials or law enforcement personnel who have secret wards and occult tripwires attached to them, and the Assiduous Watchbreed have no friends.
Group Seed: ‘Fleet Fluoride and the Corsairs of the Carbonated Sea.’
I was originally gonna do something else but then I got distracted.
Fleet Fluoride and the Corsairs of the Carbonated Sea
So. Candyland is real. And terrifying. The people who know don’t talk about it much, and they definitely don’t talk at all about how to get there, because then some idiot might actually decide to go; and you don’t visit Candyland without an understanding in place with the local warlords, and armed guards at your back. Candylander species like meat as much as we like sweets, you see. Worse, far too many of the creatures there have not yet learned to forswear human flesh (some of those creatures wear clothes and have the power of speech).
Group Seed: The Authentic Human Mystic Fortune Cookie Sodality.
Authentic Human Mystic Fortune Cookie Sodality
Location: Bayonne, New Jersey, United States of North America, Terra
Purpose: Fortune cookie manufacture for the interstellar trade, with a sideline in guaranteed human arcane hokum and pseudoscience.
…Well, they’re not hurting anybody.
That’s the argument and/or rationalization usually made by the Terran branch of the Authentic Human Mystic Fortune Cookie Sodality (the AHMFCS does not represent itself as a religious organization under Terran law, is not associated with any Terran or offworld religious or metaphysical organization [particularly including the Roman Catholic Church], and should be considered a for-profit business corporation under Terran law. Monetary contributions or other considerations made to the AHMFCS are not considered tax deductible under Terran law). They just make the cookies. And, yes, the company has a variety of pamphlets and other media materials in a variety of standard Galactic languages that can be purchased for entertainment purposes only.
Group Seed: Those Who Serve the Laughing Madness.
Those Who Serve the Laughing Madness
Description: Remarkably civilized cult worshiping a cosmic horror whose mere sight drives men mad.
On paper, this cult should be prettily straightforwardly awful. Those Who Serve the Laughing Madness are devotees of, well, the Laughing Madness, which is a fairly standard Elder God from another reality whose presence sends mere mortals down the spiral of madness, etc etc, and he will surely come at the End Times, yadda yadda, there is no defense against his majestic insanity, blah blah blah. All of that previous sentence was literally taken from a fairly famous sermon done by a high priest of the cult itself, complete with various mildly obscene hand gestures at appropriate points to indicate particularly self-indulgent passages.
Group Seed: Mizra Computing.
Mizra Computing
HQ: Poughkeepsie, New York; satellite offices in NYC, San Francisco, Oak Ridge
Staff: 500
Ostensible purpose: high-end computer repair
Actual purpose: permanent interdimensional refuge
While the company was founded in 1967, Mizra Computing actually came into existence in April of 2006 as part of an interdimensional… something. Not exactly a planar shift, not really a temporal alteration; more like the universe itself temporarily flickered into a new, distinctly more unpleasant, form. In that one endless moment of the Flicker, the individuals who would go on to have always been Mizra Computing’s management and staff attempted to somehow anchor themselves so that when the Flicker was over, they would remain in our ‘reality.’ And it worked, to the point where the universe itself created new identities and histories for its new immigrants.
Group Seed: Conglominatti.
Conglominatti
If the field of alternate timeline sociology teaches us anything, it teaches that there are three paths to big-c Conspiracies. There is the accretion path, in which one shadowy group takes over more and more other groups until it discovers, one day, that they’re the Secret Masters now, hooray!; there is the reorganizational path, where a shadowy group attempting accretion discovers that their Conspiracy has been taken over from the inside and/or parceled off into a number of half-independent factions inside the main structure, which then contest amongst themselves for power; and there is the amalgamation path, where various independent shadowy groups deliberately combine efforts to create a Conspiracy built up of sovereign, autonomous entities. That last sort is called a ‘Conglominatti’ by the more vulgar, and is discussed below.
Group seed: The Department of Destandardization.
Department of Destandardization
Purpose: the neutralization of dangerous metaphysical concepts, procedures, and paradigms via the process of imposing collective cognitive decoherence.
Scope: possibly worldwide. No permanent offices.
Personnel: unclear, but probably less than 500 total. It is unclear how many members of the Department of Destandardization are fully human, in more than the strictest legal sense.
The great secret of our world is that there is no actual unified, universal system of rules and physical laws that define ‘reality.’ It’s ad hoc consensus all the way down; and pretty much anything can be added to the mix, given enough willpower and force. Unfortunately, just because something can be jammed into reality’s operating system doesn’t mean it’s going to stay there. Most of the really esoteric stuff can’t, in fact. That’s why magic and psionics and super-powers and Mad Science and the rest of it aren’t universally practiced; it just takes too much energy to make all of those things work everywhere, so Those Who Handle These Sorts Of Situations keep the usefully weird stuff bubbled off away from the rest of ‘reality’ so as to still get what benefits can be gotten.
Group Seed: US Space Defense Command.
US Space Defense Command
(Grissom Air Reserve Base, Indiana)
Staffing: 6 US Army personnel. 2 officer (Captain and 1st Lt), 1 NCO, 3 enlisted.
US Space Defense Command did not have enough staffers to justify a contraction of the title on its own; it’s usually now shortened to USD-COM, now that there’s departmental oversight and so forth. Internal records show that USD-COM has occupied the same small, nondescript office building at Grissom Air Reserve Base in Indiana (just north of Kokomo) since some time in 1948. This is impressive, because at the time the base was Naval Air Station Bunker Hill, and decommissioned to boot.
Group Seed: Gunnison Publishing.
Gunnison Publishing
Headquarters: Edison, NJ
Staff: 40
Specializes in: science fiction, fantasy, pastiches
Gunnison Publishing has been in business since 1998. It’s a privately-owned, medium-sized publisher that specializes in alternate history titles and literary pastiches; Gunnison is probably best known for its Sherlock Reborn and Lovecraft Unleashed series of uncannily true-to-tone pastiches (Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu Mythos, respectively). Gunnison also has a profitable sideline in Osprey-like picture books (called Simurgh Press) of military forces and conflicts, only the titles are all things like “The Second Mexican-American War” or “Napoleon VI’s Soldiers.” Altogether, Gunnison produces about forty or so new titles a year, and maintains an extensive e-library (including a remarkable number of unique works).