Shabti Protective Solutions – Google Docs
Shabti Protective Solutions
This company operates out of Washington DC, with offices in Los Angeles, NYC, Chicago, and Houston. It is an extremely small company nonetheless; each office has a maximum of ten Associates, with a somewhat larger number of support staff attached. The CEO of record of Shabti is John W. Wade; his life story is available, but fairly bland. There is no board of directors; the company is privately owned. It also has no international footprint; Shabti Protective Solutions makes a conscious decision to not accept clients from outside the United States of America, for a combination of economic, political, and esoteric reasons.
Yes, esoteric. Shabti specializes in using — well, ‘voodoo dolls’ is the accepted industry term — to protect, ward, and favor their clients. Bad movies aside, it’s just as easy to use sympathetic magic to aid somebody as it is to harm them; and having a doll with a mystical link to you is an excellent way to shunt a magical curse or inimical spell off of you, and into the doll. Shabti offers 24 hour protection and warding, with trained staff on call to provide real-time interventions and counterspells as needed. In a real emergency, the entire company’s roster of Associates can jump in as needed; that’s happened precisely once, and the results were predictably epic. For a value of ‘epic’ that doesn’t include ‘made the daily papers,’ mind you.
The company also can tweak probability in its clients’ favor, but carefully. Very carefully. Keeping random chance from triggering a mechanical failure in a crucial machine? Sure, no problem. Predicting winning lottery ticket numbers, or orange juice futures? Certainly not. Need to get a rival out of the picture? They smile, nod, and have a secretary push the panic button for the NSA.
In glaring contrast to the usual attempts to hide corporate occultism, Shabti is very forthright about what it does. Assuming that you visit, of course; the company doesn’t advertise at all. It does not actually have to. Ninety percent of Shabti’s client list are people so wealthy that you’ve possibly never heard of them; the US government is not a client, but there is an understanding in place that ensures that Shabti will consult with the relevant federal authorities in particular situations. This relationship (and similar state and municipal ones) also ensures that the company does not get hassled by random bureaucrats or local shakedown artists, which appeals to the company on general principles.
The other ten percent of Shabti’s client list are charity cases; people who badly need magical protection, but cannot afford it. Getting on that list can be tricky, but at least there’s a lot of turnover. It turns out that your basic street level curse-tosser or hexhole usually needs only encounter Shabti’s occult defensive structures once before he or she gets the hint, and backs off. And if the attackers do decide to keep playing, well; Shabti is an ethical magic-using organization. That means that it doesn’t do offensive death magic, and warns you before it resorts to lethal force in self-defense. If a would-be evil magician doesn’t take those warnings seriously, that’s totally on them.
But that’s only if you’re evil. Good people will find Shabti to be a perfectly honorable company. And they pay well for the successful completion of various types of freelance jobs, too.