Friends, Rivals and Enemies, Part 3

The peers of the Immortal Champions

The Athanasius Kircher Society of Natural Philosophy

The Kircher Society was founded in Bavaria in the mid 18th century and named after the imaginative German priest and polymath. From the beginning, it has consisted of eager seekers into the paranormal, preternatural and supernatural. The founding branch of the Society was based in the Jesuit College of Ingolstadt (with numerous chapters soon sprouting up from France to Poland) and was eventually relocated to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Today it is a Catholic group of paranormal investigators, mostly college students and academics. The Society is derided as “Scooby Doo with rosaries” by many of their counterparts (including the Conclave, the Vatican's elite global force of monster hunters). For all that, the Society has amassed a great quantity of data, most of it sadly locked away on dusty hard drives owing to the wider community's disregard for it. Despite its German origins, the Society is largely rooted in English speaking countries — specifically the UK, Canada and America.

Vizier of Night Activities

Long before the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, they had been dealing with the predations and plots of the night people, and were well-versed in fighting back. One of the less well-known viziers of the Turkish government was the Vizier of Night Activities, who was responsible for astronomy, astrology and all interactions with the night people, especially protecting the Sultan from them. The Night Vizier, as he was commonly known, commanded a small but very well trained force of warriors and scholars. As the Turks expanded into Europe, the night warriors were often called upon to put to rest the unholy spawn of Vlad Dracula and destroy the latest incarnation of the Scholomance, the school of the šayāṭīn located somewhere in their vast Balkan domains. The Night Vizier and his warriors generally had a less than perfect relationship with the underground hunters of the Christian and Jewish minorities of the Empire, but to be fair, it was no worse than those groups' interactions with each other. The last Vizier was imprisoned and then exiled by order of Atatürk in 1923, but the group's archives and treasury were (allegedly) spirited away to an unknown location somewhere in the mountains of Anatolia.

Forbidden Books Department

The Forbidden Books Department dated back to the very origin of the Chinese state under Qin Shi Huang. It was established by the First Emperor as part of his vast censorship program. It focused on occult and mystical tomes which – like most of the books banned by Qin — were kept in the emperor's private library. As time passed and dynasties rose and fell, the Forbidden Books Department remained and, by the time of the Tang Dynasty, was responsible for policing the empire against the threats posed by such things described in the Forbidden Books. These 'night censors' were regarded with a mix of admiration for protecting the common people from creatures and cults and fear for their vast powers of arrest and torture in the service of their duties. By the time of the late Qing Dynasty, the Forbidden Books Department was a shell of its former self, consisting mainly of elderly Confucian scholars assigned to it as a reward for loyalty to the Emperor. It was swiftly abolished after the revolution that overthrew the Manchus, although a vestige of it lasted through the Nanjing Decade and in Taiwan to this day as a small, poorly funded branch of the National Police Agency.

Steakley Ectomagnetic Laboratory 

Founded in the 1970s during the brief days when the 'paranormal science' movement was taken relatively seriously by the mainstream, Kemp Ectomagnetic Laboratory is the pride and joy of aging Dallas real estate billionaire Leonard "Medium" Steakley. It is lavishly funded in its search for breakthroughs on the fringes (or frontiers, as they put it) of science. Telekinesis, telepathy, remote cognition, alternate energy, interdimensional phenomena, deep space and/or dark energy telemetry, and a dozen other ideas. Most scientists regard Kemp Ectomagnetic as a joke and a waste of money, but it has a large and devoted following in the paranormal community (and on social media). Over the past twenty years or so, Steakley has developed close ties with the military-intelligence community, eager to engage in research of interest to them in order to get funds to bankroll projects closer to his own heart. There are rumors that Kemp has worked with DARPA to establish a second, top secret facility somewhere in Utah, one which conducts research of a more pragmatic – and dangerous – sort.

Zorzi Clan

(art by Romina Jones: https://linktr.ee/RomyJones)

This faction of the Venetian mob is especially violent (even by organized crime standards), which may be explained by the fact that they are mired in a decades-long war with the ancient and vicious vampires who lair in the dark, muddy depths of the lagoon and emerge only to feed. The war has been going on since the turn of the century, and most Zorzi soldiers don't even know what started it – the clan leaders don't talk about it and the gap has been filled with all kinds of rumors (most along the line of 'the don's beautiful young daughter was eaten by a vampire'). The Zorzis are allegedly connected to the Catholic Church, far-right movements, like-minded counterparts in other Italian criminal organizations, and the Italian military. It's certainly possible, because while the Zorzis are ruthless, experienced and well-armed, their chief enemies are undead godlings dating back to the ancient Veneti people. That the Zorzi are still around at all, let alone able to continue their mundane crimes at a profit, is nothing less than astonishing. Italy's Champion is watching warily, hoping the war doesn't explode into the public eye...

One special peculiarity of the Zorzi Clan is that, unlike Italy's many other mob groups, it has kept it in the family –not a single member of the Clan isn't a direct blood relative. This, too, troubles the Champion, who remembers well the Roman gens Sorcius and their dreadful downfall. 

Cheongjeong Campus

The Campus is an Evangelical Christian group in South Korea which has its roots in, though is not wholly of, the Wesleyan tradition. It was founded in the 1960s under its original name, the Busan Ministry of Christ, and was initially only a church group at the Busan Wesleyan College. After the founding members had a violent encounter with a kumiho fox-spirit, they devoted themselves to seeking out and destroying all such malevolent entities. The Ministry changed its name following a move from Busan to Seoul in 1993, but its mission has remained the same – zealously eradicating any supernatural threats to the God-fearing (and Godless) people of Korea. There are few foes of the night people more dedicated to the hidden war, and the fox-spirits, leaping vampires and corrupted sorcerers of Korea delight in preying on them — much to the shock of the majority of Campus members who are utterly unaware of their secret mission. Survivors of such incidents are among the most devoted followers of the night war. The Cheongjeong Campus has gained political allies in recent decades, though often by courting more traditionalist and reactionary elements of South Korean politics. They have also had a decades long spat with the Unification Church, although both sides blame the other for it.

MI18

During the Victorian era, Whitehall began to consolidate the various traditional groups that dealt with uncanny crimes and problems - the Royal Phantasmagorical Society, the Noble Bellwether Guild, the London Subterranean Company, and so on. A particularly adroit but quite sedentary government official known only as H became the spider at the center of a vast and deadly web. The official name of H's web was the Public Inspection Branch, but it would eventually become known as MI18 during the Great War. The name stuck, as did the organization. To this day, MI18 deals with 'peculiar' threats to Britain's security, be they external (such as what the Americans call UAPs) or internal (anteglacial reptilian megafauna popularly named dragons). MI18 suffers from both a limited budget and a limited imagination — it has no greater understanding of the truth than the Soviets did 40 years ago — as well as something of a redundancy problem. Britain already has a defender against such threats, one who is far better informed and far more potent than any Oxbridge student of the preternatural. And yet the agency persists. To be fair, they win more often than they lose. (To be less fair, they pick at the Champion's table scraps and laud themselves afterwards.)