The Diversified Refurbished Equipment Acquisition / Distribution Corporation
(DREAD)
Everybody knows that DREAD is in the supernatural equipment recycling business. Well, everybody who knows that there’s a lot of supernaturally-contaminated equipment in the world, which sometimes needs to be recycled. The rest of humanity largely muddles through, without anybody telling them anything about all the necessary infrastructure companies making a living out of the metaphysical. Such as DREAD.
The problem is that, once something’s been used in a magic ritual, averted apocalypse event, metaphysical energy grounding, or anything else organized and supernatural it’s far too dangerous to use for anything mundane. And that matters, because construction equipment can be extremely expensive. Bulldozers can run up to a couple hundred grand; some cranes have price tags in the millions. It doesn’t matter how deep the pockets are; even the Secret Masters can’t afford to throw away a perfectly good front-end loader after they’re done building their latest Secret Lair.
Thus, DREAD. They can decontaminate contaminated equipment, encourage beneficial occult resonances and correspondences, subtly tune particular pieces of equipment to be ever more supernaturally attuned to a particular type of project — and, of course, when a particular machine finally develops malevolent sentience and attempts to kill everybody, DREAD is there to remove the spark plugs and rip out the alternator, as it were. Or shut it down long enough to sell it to somebody who wants a murderous cement mixer, of course. DREAD is not exactly a beacon of innocence and virtue in an uncaring world.
DREAD is, in fact, cheerfully amoral — as long as everything’s kept inside the family, as it were. They don’t work with cults that want to destroy the world (taking it over is fine) or groups that want to reveal the truth to the Masses (DREAD’s Board of Directors suspects that the Masses themselves subconsciously prefer to remain blissfully ignorant). Other than that, DREAD is pretty happy to work with anybody who can pay in advance, or at least on time. They don’t take sides.
But they do take notes. And keep amazingly good records. Anybody who managed to get into DREAD’s archives (kept at their main annex, right outside of Salem, Massachusetts) would quickly discover all sorts of fascinating things and blueprints. Of course, the trouble there is that getting out of DREAD’s archives is typically a more difficult affair than getting in.