Group Seed: Lonely Potato Quartet.

Lonely Potato Quartet

Description: the band Lonely Potato Quartet (‘LPQ’ is their usual use-name) consists of lead guitarist ‘Hairy’ Harry Martin (dob 05/03/1995), backup guitarist/lead singer Jeannie Mancini  (dob 05/03/1995), base guitarist/backup singer Carmelita Mancini (dob 05/03/1995), and drummer Shirley Walker (dob 05/03/1995). All four were born in the town of Westmorton, Pennsylvania, and have been performing together since their early teens.  None are married or have children; their credit is excellent for people in their early twenties and none of them have criminal records.

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Group Seed: The Huxley Families.

Huxley Families

  • Town: Windham, Indiana
  • Location: Blackford County, Indiana
  • Number of households: 300
    • Married, With Children: 100
  • Population: 800
  • Adult Population: 600
    • With BA or higher degree: 600
  • Race: Huxleys, 100%
  • Median Household income, 2018: $80,000
  • Poverty Rate: 0%
  • Annual Unemployment Rate, 2018: 0%
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Group Seed: The Lakeside Book Club.

Lakeside Book Club

Membership: 30

Meeting Place: the basement of Lakeside Gently Used Books (the owners of the business and the building are both cultists).  The bookstore has an amazing lawn, by the way.

Goal: to efficiently murder people for mild personal gain.

Damned Book That Started It All: a twenty page unbound essay that disjointedly argues that it is the duty and responsibility of all self-awakened members of the world community to harvest the ‘vital spark of those who cannot grow it within themselves,’ and so forth. It must be admitted that the general tone of the essay has a simultaneously self-satisfied and self-accusatory feel to it that is common with the more tedious and intolerant parts of early 21st century social media; which is impressive, since the essay appears to have been typed out on a mechanical typewriter at least a century ago.

Continue reading Group Seed: The Lakeside Book Club.

Group Seed: AGAPE.

AGAPE

The Anti-Good Alliance for Professional Evildoers (or AGAPE) is a carefully-calibrated bane of the superheroic community’s life.  Too much villainy, and they get shut down, hard. Too little, and people won’t take them very seriously. And that’s the problem, right there; it’s hard enough to take AGAPE too seriously, thanks (as usual) to bad branding.

The concept was sound, on paper.  Pink! Fluffy! Liberal use of heart and rose motifs!  Nobody else was doing it, which made the look unique; and the mix of Hallmark aesthetics with grand larceny would make people shocked and appalled!  Villainous groups like it when civilians are shocked and appalled. They’re more likely to run away, which means that you get fewer hostage situations, and professional super-crook groups hate hostage situations. A lot of superheroes think that the gloves get to come off just a little when they’re facing a criminal menacing a nice old lady or something, and society tends to agree with them.  It’s different when the heroes are facing crooks by themselves, somehow. Some kind of psychology thing.

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Group Seed: Factio Eximiae Ululae.

Factio Eximiae Ululae

Symbol: an owl, in flight and pouncing, superimposed over a stylized thunderbolt.

(Blame this.)

Well, it’s sort of a cult.  That is, the Factio Eximiae Ululae (“Society of the Superb Owl”) shows many superficial signs of being a High Fantasy cult (hidden rituals, secret lore, a certain obsessive focus common to its members, robes, chanting) while at the same time avoiding the more alarming personality flaws often showed by more unsavory cults (aggressive nihilism, apocalyptic goals, human sacrifice, dress codes that handily obscure cultists’ faces).  Members of the Factio only hide their identities because they like to go after the aforementioned unsavory cults, usually while carrying very heavy weapons and a quite remarkable amount of accelerants. The Factio Eximiae Ululae is apparently one of those cults that gives great weight to the supposed cleansing properties of flame.

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Group Seed: Consensus.

Consensus – Google Docs

Consensus

 

Every world-spanning conspiracy has to start somewhere.

 

Meet Michael J. Brown.  Mike is twenty-two years old, and about to graduate, top of his class, with a double major in engineering and history from a top-shelf school.  Quietly rich, but not very vocal about it. Well-liked, friendly, athletic in an almost-professional level but not in any sport where he’d be expected to pursue a professional career.  Engaged to be married, to a very nice girl. Mike is, in fact a marvelous specimen of man — except for that one little personality quirk of his.

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Group Seed: Shabti Protective Solutions.

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.

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Group Seed: The Mundane Council.

Mundane Council – Google Docs

The Mundane Council

 

People automatically assume that something called ‘the Mundane Council’ is, well, ‘mundane’ as we understand the term now: boring, unexceptional, not unusual at all.  Which is why the Council keeps the name; it’s helpful to be underestimated. Particularly when you’re a member of a self-selected group dedicated to keep everything, well, operational.

 

The Mundane Council is one of those groups that claims a history that stretches back over a thousand years.  It’s also — much more rarely — one of those groups that can do so credibly. The Council was founded by Gallo-Roman nobles seeking to regain power after the Frankish conquest in the fifth century AD; by the eighth century their group was secretly ruled by Charlemagne himself, which leads to an interesting question as to whether or not they ultimately succeeded, or failed.  Certainly the Council has had a lot of fingers in a lot of European pies since then.

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Group Seed: Zubi Maritime Security.

Zubi Maritime Security – Google Docs

Zubi Maritime Security

 

Insignia: an eight-pointed star with a red square in the center

 

This security company is based out of Burgas, Bulgaria: it has satellite offices in Muscat, Ratnagiri, Irem, Aden, and Rotterdam.  Zubi specializes in providing security for ships traveling in the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea, and has been doing so for at least thirty years.  The company currently shows no signs of expanding into different markets.

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Group Seed: Klacz Nocy Energy Distributors.

Klacz Nocy Energy Distributors – Google Docs

Klacz Nocy Energy Distributors

 

Despite the name, it’s an energy brokerage company operating out of Bangkok.  Klacz Nocy specializes in brokering deals between the smaller Thai natural gas drilling companies and the ravenous maw of Chinese industry; the company arranges between one and three LNG shipments via cargo boat per year, and has a quietly excellent reputation for providing shipments on time, of good quality, and without much in the way of expensive complications.  Recent troubles in the Thai natural gas market seem to have no effect on Klacz Nocy, either. If anything, the company has increased shipments slightly to match the demand.

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