Company
The Company
A band of merry miscreants, the Company is essentially an Awakened conspiracy devoted to utter dominion over the New England criminal community — from the most esteemed of made men to the lowliest pusher pedaling crack in the vestibule of an abandoned tenement. Slowly but surely, the willworker calling himself Vision, the driving force behind the Company and the cabal’s founder, has built the groundwork of this invisible empire. While it will take years at least to cement his hold (if indeed such a thing ever happens), he has certainly come closer to making it happen than any before or since. An especially impressive feat is that 19 out of 20 of his operatives don’t even know who they work for and the other one can’t point to any criminal activities in which Vision himself is directly involved.
The Company functions as a squad of Awakened mercenaries, dealing in favors, connections, illegal activities and “exotic commodities” in exchange for access to libraries, tass and such. No one likes the mages of the Company, but few can utterly dismiss the Company’s potential usefulness. Vision is always careful to never allow “his” people to become beholden to any one interest, and also maintains a strict policy of neutrality in matters involving rival cabals, as he has no wish to be a casualty in the struggles of the Wise.
Sanctum: Shangri-La
Sanctum Size ••; Hallow •• The Company’s shared sanctum, Shangri-La, is tucked away near the Ruggles stop on the MBTA’s Orange Line, just next door to Northeastern University in Roxbury. Located in a rundown but otherwise unremarkable tenement building, the sanctum also serves the cabal as living space. The heat and plumbing work intermittently and the place is rather hot during the summer, so Vision spends as little time there as possible, but the other members of the cabal are sufficiently strapped for cash and/or lazy that they’re permanent residents.
In the darkest recesses of the building’s basement lay the skeletons of hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of rats. Each day, one of the willworkers of the cabal gathers up two fistfuls of these bones and grinds them into powder, in a process that yields up tass (a 2-point shared Hallow). No Library is to be found in Shangri-La. Vision is the only member of the cabal with any appreciable access to any useful lore, and he hoards such knowledge for himself. Two Sleepwalker Retainers serve as permanent staff, acting both as security and as a buffer between the cabal and its customers.
