Moe Lane's Blog, page 699
August 16, 2021
08/16/21 Snippet, RESCUE.
Real hard to get work done today.
Patreon!This fucking rain, Ted thought. This fucking rain, this fucking wind, and these fucking tarps.
He didn’t know why they were even bothering with tarps; it wasn’t like the crates were gonna get any more or any less rusty than they already were. But on they had to go, so the first mate (his name was Rahi, the others said he was from Yemen or one of those places, and he mostly communicated via grunts) had told Ted to go and help fix the tarps. Or, rather, he grunted at Ted, jerked his head at the other poor bastards going out on tarp duty, and threw a duct-tape patched slicker at him.
That was enough to get Ted moving; he could take a hint, and at least outside he’d be away from everybody else’s smell. Besides, it wasn’t like Rahi had even thrown it at his head. It was practically a lob.
Of course, the smell on the deck wasn’t really better, just different. Less weird food-farts, more rust and bad seasfood. Although Ted had always thought old fish smell would be more like actual fish, instead of this weird nasty-sweet iron and copper reek permeating the cargo crates. This close up, it was pretty foul.
If you hate it so much, he told himself, then get the damn tarps on. Then you can go somewhere that doesn’t smell like this.
In Nomine Revisited: The Cabal of Procurers.
One of the nastier groups I created for In Nomine. Not least because I had to consciously keep myself from winding them up for self-destruction. I usually do, for the awful ones. But player-characters have got to work for their wins sometimes…
The Cabal of Procurers
Just who sponsors this group is one of Hell’s more impenetrable secrets: it must have a protector, but no Prince has formally admitted it. On the other hand, no Prince has ever seriously tried to destroy or take over the group, either (the Procurers’ cozy relationship with the Game discourages attempts by lesser entities, usually via midnight arrests and summary executions). The actual identity of their patron is far less important than the demonstrated fact that they have one.
The Cabal of Procurers is a slaver’s guild; they specialize in interesting and unusual damned souls and demons, for a wide range of budgets and tastes. And if their clients’ tastes require a type of slave not readily available, they’ll be happy to construct a reasonable facsimile. The only limiting factor is the price.
This is the primary reason why most demons assume that the Cabal has Prince-level patronage.
Purpose and Goals
To acquire a reasonable level of power and an unreasonable level of wealth.
Organization and Leadership
Procurers can be of any Word or Band, but tend to be Balseraphs, Habbalah, and Lilim, ranging from 10 to 12 Force. Very few Procurers have Distinctions, and none are Word-Bound. Every Principality except Abaddon has a ‘field office’ of the Cabal, but the largest are in Hades and Shal-Mari. The former is the main ‘industrial’ area; the latter has the best showrooms.
The Cabal is a cross between a ‘secret’ society, and a franchise. Demons who can manage enough free time who work for a Prince at least neutral towards the Cabal (Saminga and Mammon are the two Princes most actively hostile) either join an existing organization, or (more rarely) start one of their own. If accepted, the demon will advance in rank through the usual methods of bribery, bootlicking, and betrayal. Particularly successful demons end up running their particular Principality’s franchises: there is neither an official nor unofficial head of the organization as a whole. The offices operating out of Hades have extra influence, due to both their easy access to the Soul Yards and their special manufactories, but neither office is in charge.
Since all of this is taking place in Hell, the constant maneuvering and plotting is not for the timid. Procurers also assume they’ve been thoroughly infiltrated by the Game (except for the Gamesters, who instead assume they’ve been thoroughly infiltrated by Fate), which would be more concerning if only it wasn’t already so distressingly common.
Abilities and Resources
The Procurers are both vendors, and esoteric manufacturers. The Cabal keeps in stock extensive numbers of slaves, of all sorts and varieties — and readily available to any demon with jaded tastes, demanding bosses, or tight deadlines. Procurers can guarantee the most common types, in whatever number that you might need or afford; they offer both purchase and rental plans, and provide free delivery. Somewhat more baroque items take longer, and probably involve a call to another Principality (no individual office owns its own stock; all slaves are collectively owned by the Cabal), which will naturally raise the fee. There’s also a return-for-credit plan. Finally, the Cabal will always be happy to purchase whatever odd damned souls that a demon might happen to possess, provided of course that a fair market value can be determined.
Damned souls make up the bulk of their business; Cabalists in Perdition and Beleth’s side of the Marches have a profitable sideline in ethereal slaves, and there’s always the odd unlucky demon or two in their clutches, but human souls are the Procurers’ mainstay.
What makes the Procurers special, and explains the name, is their ability to create what their customers require. For damned souls, this can be something as simple as a thorough training/brainwashing regimen, or as complex as the judicious addition and removal of Forces; for demons, it apparently involves the capture of ‘wild’ demonlings before they fledge, then beginning the brainwashing and Force-manipulation. Their only limitation there is that they cannot create Lilim.
The exact method of how the Procurers do what they do is both a closely guarded secret, and the subject of a nigh-infinite variety of rumors. What is known is that they can provide facsimiles of just about anyone, for the right price. This includes duplicates of specific people. In fact, the Procurers do a lot of work for the Game and Fate in this regard. Oddly, the bulk of these sorts of jobs involve people who are not famous: demons on Earth duty have discovered that video of someone’s Aunt Edna screaming in agony while being tormented by fiery whips is very useful in the fields of blackmail, espionage, and general sadism. Unfortunately, the Host realizes this, too, so the favored targets are those who cannot simply call an angel and ask him or her to double-check on what really happened to Aunt Edna after she died. So it’s useful when dealing with Hellsworn and/or normal people, and often cheaper than tracking down any specific damned soul.
Duplication of famous people… well, that’s where the Cabal starts keeping its mouth firmly shut. It’s fairly clear that they do it, but admitting to it would be pointless. There’s no point in ordering the public display of a ‘Mahatma Ghandi’ or ‘Abraham Lincoln’ to demoralize damned souls if everybody knows that they’re really only copies. Sensible demons note this (and the oddity that every Principality seems to have its own Adolf Hitler) and quietly draw their own conclusions. Nobody with an ounce of sense is really sure how many famous people actually are in Hell, and the Procurers derive much of their mystique from that. They’re really that good.
Celestial Relations
Hell
The two Princes most openly hostile towards the Procurers are Saminga and Mammon, for ideological and practical reasons, respectively. Saminga thinks that trading in souls like this is wasteful; the Forces are much better off being harvested for his Undead legions, and he certainly does not allow his Servitors to make their own deals. Mammon is simply incensed that he is not milking such a lucrative cash cow, as any and all business deals are so obviously supposed to be under his purview. Alas, neither has sufficient influence to negate the influence of the Cabal’s unseen patron.
The rest of Hell finds the Procurers to be fairly useful in a variety of ways, and of course few sensible demons want to bother unduly any group that does regular business with the Game.
Heaven
This is one of those groups that annoys the corporeal members of the Host more than the celestial ones; from an angelic perspective, this is just one more bunch of demons dedicated to interfering with Earth, and it’s not like their particular perversion gives them any added resistance to being shot, stabbed, ripped limb from limb, dropped into a quantum black hole, or blown up. Blessed souls and Saints – especially the ones who have been ‘honored’ by the Cabal’s unique form of copyright violation – have a somewhat less detached view of things.
Ethereals
Nobody likes slave-takers. Especially ones that have sufficient connections to get away with ‘minor’ violations of what few guarantees exist between Hell and certain pantheons. It doesn’t happen all that often, but it does happen.
History
The Procurers have existed for about six hundred years or so, and have been extremely stable during most of that time period. This is noteworthy, for Hell; certainly, individual Procurers are subject to the usual purges and assassinations, but the group as a whole has never suffered from a major suppression. This underscores the likelihood of Prince-level patronage, especially since the Prince of Greed had constantly been attempting to control their organization.
The modern period has been quite exciting for the Cabal, however. The chaos engendered by the run on Mammon’s Bank in 1929 allowed them to expand their franchise network; by the time that the Prince of Greed was in a position to worry about comparatively minor irritants, the Procurers had developed a presence throughout Hell. Since then, Mammon’s efforts to control the Procurers have been even less successful than before.
This material is not official and is not endorsed by Steve Jackson Games. In Nomine is a registered trademark of Steve Jackson Games. All rights are reserved by SJ Games. This material is used here in accordance with the SJ Games online policy .
The WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS Season 3 trailer.
Fun, as always.
It’s a game of…throne. Watch the official Season 3 trailer for #ShadowsFX, returning Thursday, Sept. 2nd on FX. Next Day #FXonHulu pic.twitter.com/cRRJLEXaLq
— What We Do In The Shadows (@theshadowsfx) August 13, 2021
And starts up on September 2nd. Which means I should probably finish Season 2… well, you know how it is. There’s always something to do.
Quote of the Day, Submitted Without Comment edition.
We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, the Enemy permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. – C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.
August 15, 2021
Time to get back to getting MORGAN BAROD out.
Not all the chapter edits are done; but then, I haven’t quite finished the revisions on the ones I have, so there’s that. In the meantime, I have a good enough idea of the page count that I can arrange for the cover. For this I am getting the cover professionally laid out:
Having done it myself, I now recognize the skill set involved. Anyway, time to get back onto this! A week of recovery should be plenty.
Moe Lane
PS: It’d be lovely if you passed this link around, honestly. The more books I sell, the more flexibility I have.
08/15/21 Snippet, RESCUE.
Back to it.
Patreon!They say you can smell trouble on the wind, but I was too green to have the nose for it. Too green to ask why the crew kept watching the horizon, too. Or too full of myself: even I could tell there was a storm coming, out there on the Arabian Sea, and I thought me quite the sailor for feeling it ahead of time.
Ha. Any damned fool could have felt that bastard of a blow coming. It rolled in from the south, the black clouds reaching out above us to shoo away the sun, and with it came the howling rains. Smacked the ship like whips, they did, and from every direction. That storm tried to scour us from the water, and it came damn close to succeeding.
It almost scoured me. The Captain called “all hands on deck,” and when I saw where we had to go out into — that Hell of screaming spray and bastard waves, towering over the Paulie Girl — I almost pissed my pants. Or maybe I did. Five minutes out there on the deck, any piss would be sluiced away, and maybe us, too. The work had still to be done, so we did it. Oh, I had my line clipped to my belt, sure enough, and I always kept one hand for the task, and one hand for the ship. I was green and I was dumb, but I wasn’t stupid.
I was unlucky, though. A snapped cable: a single crate busting free and shredding its way down the deck; and a metal splinter as thick as my thumb, neatly slicing through my line and almost my belly. And almost me, lost to the sea.
The LOKI Honest Trailer.
I am, like, so behind on stuff.
Having had some time to digest it, I think I like LOKI the best of the Disney+ shows so far. Mostly because Tom Hiddleston loves playing this character more than any other MCU actor, with the possible exception of Chris Hemsworth. I’m definitely looking forward to the second season.
Moe Lane
PS: MOAR GATOR LOKI.
Patreon Microfiction: ‘Getting Used To It, The Other Side.’
This is a companion piece to “Getting Used To It.” How fancy of me! Maybe I should write this out further…
