[UA] Seven Invisible Chairs

[Chris Cooper]

The Seven Invisible Chairs

The Seven Invisible Chairs have a magnificent history
of success. From humble beginnings, this corporate
cabal had an hidden but illustrious career as the
source of scummy activities and dirty tricks for the
VOC, the Dutch East India Company. 

The VOC established itself in Holland, 1602, with big
ambitions and solid political connections. With money,
this corporate business plan would achieve greatness.
The VOC was a maritime merchant fleet with iron-fisted
backing from the Dutch government. 

They organized themselves into six Kamers or chambers
from all around Holland. They were Amsterdam, Delft,
Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Rotterdam, and Zeeland. The central,
steering committee was the Heeren XVII or the Lords
Seventeen. The Heeren XVII was made of the seventeen
appointed delegates from the six Chambers. 

To generate venture capital the six Chambers sold
Bonds, they were shares with promises of future shares
and dividends. This was the first time a company had
ever issued bonds. 

The VOC raised over six million guilders with three
hundred and eighty seven venture capitalists.

By building their own fleet and instructing their
navigators to extensively explore and catalogue the
routes wherever the VOC ships went. With government
backing, the VOC enjoyed a two-year start-up monopoly
on trading and continued help of its navies and
military forces.

Of course, anything this big spreads ripples and any
attempt at a truly multinational company requires some
fixing. You know the sort, deniable people who do
dirty deeds in the dark. The best people to get would
be those whose activities are untraceable to the law.

Someone somewhere knew the right people and tapped
into a slush fund. Recruiting was strict and
secretive. Strange characters moved countries, where
paid in cash, bonds, and shares, and agreed upon
unsigned contracts. Elaborate false identities flew
fast and thick paper trails, and the families of old
enemies and acquaintances were both threatened and
bought off.

This is where the Zeven Verborgen Stoelen, or the
Seven Invisible Chairs were born, one for each of the
Chambers and the Lords XVII. The Seven Invisible
Chairs where unified by forming seven independent
companies, whose unspecific and nebulous trading
businesses would pay all the agents on their bankroll.
Everyone who was a member of the Seven Invisible
Chairs received their pay through one of these
companies. This was a safety precaution for the VOC,
who could cut loose any company, which overstepped its
mark and could feed the wolves.

Of course, some inside were criminals, very clever
criminals who had dealings with another sort of
deviant, the Occult Underground.

Within ten years of starting, the Occult Underground
had infiltrated the Seven Invisible Chairs and had
unified them as a single company, a mirror of the VOC.
An ambitious and forward thinking occultist, Izaak
Veerust, spearheaded this drive and succeeded.

He assembled crews of his former allies and trusted
comrades and inserted them into key positions. He
instituted a drive to share information with all the
Seven Chairs. Part of this initiative was to
infiltrate the VOC and allow a certain amount of back
channel chatter.

Veerust would assist the VOC with concurrent
operations, underwriting special services and tasks as
very special corporate fixers. The only benefits the
Seven Invisible Chairs would need were regular
payments for services rendered, insider trading,
occasional looting privileges, and government
assistance in denying the Seven Invisible Chairs to
the public.

With the right, or perhaps greedy executives, the SIC
was a fully independent subsidiary and proxy of the
VOC. It worked. Veerust kept his word as Chief
Operator of this corporate secret service. The SIC did
dirty deeds, used sorcery to give the VOC unfair
protection and privileges and even though there was a
rumour going around the Lords XVII about VOC getting
supernatural assistance from the Devil, but they were
raking in a huge, huge profit, and that, in the end,
was all that mattered.

By 1700, the VOC was the world’s first multinational
monopoly and fingers in the Dutch Colonies slices of
the pie of the world. As with any big business, it was
in bed with big politics. Cannon fire and stationed
garrisons took care of any obstruction in the flow of
commerce and the VOC took control thereafter. Raw
sorcery handled any other peccadilloes: ships were
enchanted, agitators killed, competition had bad luck:
sensitive information transmitted; a thunderhead of a
pall hung over the VOC and lightning struck those that
dare utter its name in vain.

The successful and increasingly wealthy SIC kept up
its side of the bargain but became its own corporation
that hovered in the twilight of industrial sabotage
and political plumbing. Perhaps no cabal has ever been
so successful, so wide spread, exceedingly even Alex
Abel’s gigantic slush-fund abomination, the New
Inquisition. The SIC actually turned a profit.

No one gets away with abject criminality for long.
Some bright and enterprising character discovers
something suspicious about those plodding companies
that have scores of employees and very little
practical business. It did not matter who it was, they
would receive a nasty visit and they would keep shut.
Well, you would if your reflection in the mirror
threatened your children. If you were smart about it,
you could earn a generous salary working for them.
After all, twenty percent of their fifty thousand
employees was a standing private army there was a lot
of room to hide some nebulous expenses and a new
monthly salary plus benefits.  

The Seven Invisible Chairs was the esprit de corps of
the occult Europe, the sorcery elite. With
supernatural misdirection and deflection, they
continued to sail into wealth and success.

When, in 1798, the lumbering, exhausted monster, the
VOC, finally collapsed like the fat, overgrown
dinosaur it became, the SIC cut ties and steamed on
without them. Well, they had to do a selective
restructuring but what they left behind was just debt
around the neck of the sinking VOC beast.

By this time, it was easy, the SIC had become an
invisible department so integrated within the VOC,
that none noticed their presence and none noticed
their disappearance. This successful transition was
largely successful to the undead head of the SIC, a
demon mundanely named Gerhardt van Malers. He was the
third and longest lasting chief operator of SIC. Under
van Malers guidance, SIC kept growing in strength
before and after the separation.

Van Malers was lost near the turn of the twentieth
century. The company started investing more in private
companies and playing stock markets and doing less
magick. This was to create reliable future income for
the SIC and to hide in the shadows without government
protection.  

In doing so, the SICs multitude of companies all
branching into the new industry of chemicals,
munitions, and medical production hit a boom in the
First World War. Seeing no change, the kept investing
only to hit more profits in the Second. Only with a
sour taste as many of their companies produced
chemicals and munitions for the Nazi war machine. It
only really hit home when the Nazi’s invaded Holland.

Seeing, little recourse, the SIC covertly started up
shop again, recruiting sorcerers and arming them to
slip behind the enemy and curse their officers with
syphilis, shoot Nazi sympathizers, and recruit other
occultists hiding in Germany and smuggle them out to
the SIC.

Under the cover of war and the SICs centuries of dirty
tricks tactics did not so much as throw spanners into
the works but unscrewed a bolt at the worst possible
weak point. While it did not actively stop the War, it
bogged down progress in crucial areas.

After the war, the SIC was distraught at being taken
by complete surprise and drafted a manifesto that made
it a priority to prevent any further acts of
occupation. Of course, after the war, it was communism
and the USSR.

The SIC drafted a large portion of its resources to
play in the Cold War and played a crafty game in a
dangerous minefield spying against the USSR.  They
engineered and orchestrated their own theatre within
the power plays, filtering its secrets to the West
anonymously through a series of real and fake agents.

Not just secretly infiltrating the enemy with double
agents, they bound demons in servile chains and spoke
through undetectable scrying charms. Avatars
manipulated instincts and theories and magicians sent
revenants to decoy and confuse the crap out of the
secret police. They constructed intricate plans and
sent them to the communists in bits and pieces to
throw them off. 

Most important was to discredit or cripple
collaborating sorcerers. Essentially the SIC ran an
independent counter-sorcery service for the West. 

Unfortunately, they also decided that they were the
only ones who could use magick, so any suspicious
sorcerer was fair game.

Then in 1991, the USSR gave up its fight and resigned
to restructure its country. The SIC was unable to stop
and tipped over fighting a silent war, trying to
avenge grudges, and complete missions too far gone to
stop.

In 1999, an annual council meeting of the Lords
Seventeen voted to stop all operations into the former
USSR and reconfigure the one-tracked mess the SIC had
become. It had functioned so well and had become so
obfuscated that no one was sure of what actually the
SIC actually was.

After a lengthy, yearlong audit the SIC rebuilt its
core business structure with new designs in new
enterprises. String-alone companies, ghost accounts,
and cutouts where left to drift off, while any
remaining freewheeling equities and assets where
brought back to fold.

There big splash was to get into the computer market
twenty years behind everyone else. While not dying,
they have eventually ended up with a chain of
computer-related retail stores and Microsoft utility
vendors. Not the sort of dazzling market share they
wanted, they putter along in the black. In fairness,
they are rich, probably richer than Alex Abel just not
nearly as flush.

The Seven Invisible Chairs have thrown away their
cards for a bad refresh hand and although, they are a
magickal cabal, they have a hard time vacillating
between the world of business and the murky land of
the Occult Underground. The Cold War has left an
indelible mark of the Byzantine on the society. It is
more like a Masonic Lodge for paranoid schizophrenics.
There are heroic legacies and devious histories, which
forgotten, are waiting under mounds of duplicity. Even
most of the SIC’s members are completely clueless to
what it is actually about. The SIC is drowning under
its own successful obscurity.

There has been much attempt to reclaim what has been
lost and to renew the Seven Invisible Chairs. There is
a widening split in the two camps. One wants the SIC
to wake and plug into the European Union and its new
Euro economy. The other camp wants the SIC to do what
the SIC does best, make shady deals and cause shit
with the Left-Handed Path, mainly with the War on
Terror and the Coalition occupation of Iraq. They have
started doing both and the two concepts are not mixing
well with the accountants. 

To downsize sorcery and go full steam into business or
to recover the treasures they lost. In either
direction, they will make a success, but which one.
They could easily became the secret market leaders of
the world or re-establish themselves as the truly
global occult cabal they once were.

These are the Seven Invisible Chairs. Damned if they
do, damned if they do not but either way, they are
moving into an unfamiliar Brave New World.






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