This one I had to edit a little.
Pentacostco.com
The computer revolution (particularly the Internet) has not been a completely positive development, from the point of view of Heaven. On the one hand, it allows all sorts of people to come together in new and interesting ways, to accomplish things that they never could by themselves; on the other hand, well, it allows all sorts of people to come together in new and interesting ways, to accomplish things that they never could by themselves. Free will can be maddening at times, especially when you have only an empirical understanding of it. This might partially explain why the relevant section of the Heavenly Host immediately targeted Pentacostco.com from Day One, and will continue to target it until somebody gets the hint; it may not be all that important, but it’s something that they can actually strike at, by God.
It should be understood that there are perfectly good tactical reasons to go after this site. It’s fairly involved with Sorcery: the website’s mission statement promises “to provide uniform-quality occult and esoteric raw materials at low cost and high volume.”
Note ‘raw materials.’ Pentacostco.com does not offer Hands of Glory, ‘magic wands’, ‘love potions,’ or even occult textbooks. But if you’re looking for a bag of wheat gathered at dawn with a silver sickle, or the tears of a clown, or five pounds of rowan wood that have soaked up moonlight for an entire lunar year, the company keeps it in stock, as well as all the other (legal) stuff that’s normally at least either moderately time-consuming or mildly inconvenient for occultists to make or keep on their own. And they offer bulk discounts.
This would be only of mild interest if it weren’t for the fact that mixed in with all the materials for rituals that don’t work are the most common materials for rituals that do. In the past, tracking a Sorcerer via his purchases was a common activity; if you knew that a particular Summon Ethereal ritual required, say, the first combs of honey from the hives of a mayor, you could keep an eye on the appropriate locales. But should that ingredient also become vital for a luck potion that doesn’t actually do anything (but is popular anyway), that’s a whole new problem. In other words, Pentacostco.com has significantly decayed the signal-to-noise ratio in an area where the Host has been used to hearing relatively clear tones.
Handling this is a bit of a problem. As was mentioned earlier, Pentacostco.com does not sell anything that could be seen as an inherently occult item; it merely sells raw materials, all of which are perfectly legal and harmless to own. Also, the owners of the company (brother and sister) are not demons, Hellsworn, aware of the War, or even bad people. Hell went to some trouble to find two ethical neo-pagans with sufficient business sense that they could be counted on to maintain the business, once it was constructed for them behind the scenes. In certain campaigns, this may not matter when it comes time for the knives to come out, but any game universe where Heaven is prepared to blow up inconvenient business owners is probably going to be one where Hell is prepared to quite selfishly act to stop that. Lastly, of course, is the minor detail that Heaven’s resources are not infinite: Sorcery is annoying, yes, but usually not as much as the creation of new Infernal Tethers or active Diabolical incursions are. If it gets too troublesome, it will be dealt with. Until then, well. One does what one can.
All of this means that celestials take an indirect approach in the conflict over Pentacostco.com. Those elements of Heaven and Hell who are assigned to the fight are the sorts that generally prefer to use spoilers and DOS attacks over armed assaults, which also keeps things low key. And naturally, Servitors of Marc (Archangel of Trade) have started up a lawsuit for copyright violation (the name, you see). This is not likely to have much of an effect in the long run, but is still good practice.
Doesn’t that lawsuit invoke Asmodeous?
Yeah, but the Archangel of Trade’s able to deal with that. Over on Earth-3 or -4 they accepted my proposal to do the extended writeup of Archangel Marc for In Nomine (here they never had anybody do it), and you can be darn sure that I wouldn’t have permitted any shenanigans. 🙂
I was reading it as Pentecost Co. and wondering why Pentecostals would form a business named after their beliefs. D’oh.
That’s what it was called, in its first incarnation.