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Overview

Obsidian Solutions

AX.GM.07.09

Obsidian Solutions is a private security and threat response firm operating in the hidden world's commercial sector. It provides services that government agencies either cannot or will not offer on the open market: threat assessment for clients managing supernatural risk, containment operations for phenomena that require expertise beyond standard security capacity, artifact brokerage for organizations needing to acquire or divest materials with supernatural provenance, and personal security for clients whose risk profile extends into the hidden world.

Obsidian is explicitly commercial. It does not have a mission beyond its contracts, does not maintain institutional positions on the ethics of the hidden world's various conflicts, and does not turn down clients based on what they want to do with the services they're purchasing, within limits that are defined by what Obsidian's principals consider operationally sustainable rather than morally necessary. This posture makes it useful to a wide range of clients and trusted by almost none of them.

Within the hidden world, Obsidian has a reputation for professional competence and predictable self-interest. It does what it's contracted to do, holds client confidence as tightly as a commercial entity that could be sued can hold anything, and has been known to decline renewals with clients whose operations created complications that weren't worth the revenue. The predictability is a form of trustworthiness. It is not the same thing as trustworthiness.

History

Obsidian Solutions was incorporated eleven years ago by a small group with backgrounds in private military contracting, financial security, and, less officially, operational experience with hidden-world phenomena that had produced the kind of specific expertise the private security market rewards. The founding group recognized that the hidden world's organizational landscape had a gap: there were government agencies, religious orders, hunter networks, and academic institutions, but no professional services firm offering containment, assessment, and security on a fee-for-service basis to clients who couldn't access or didn't want those alternatives.

The early client base was primarily corporate, companies whose facilities or operations had produced supernatural incidents and who needed discrete resolution without government involvement. Obsidian's early reputation was built on effective resolution and effective silence. Clients who had problems that went away and never appeared in any record told other clients with problems.

Obsidian's current operations are significantly larger and more varied than the founding group anticipated. The artifact brokerage division, which started as a sideline for managing materials recovered during containment operations, has become a substantial revenue stream. The personal security practice serves clients whose need for Obsidian specifically rather than conventional security reflects how much of the hidden world has money and wants professional protection. The principal group has expanded; the founding culture of operational pragmatism and commercial discretion has held.

Structure

Obsidian operates as a professional services firm with functional divisions.

Operations Division:

  • Containment Teams, field teams managing active supernatural phenomena; the firm's primary field capacity
  • Assessment Teams, investigation and evaluation; pre-engagement intelligence and post-incident analysis
  • Personal Security, protection detail work for high-value clients with hidden-world risk profiles

Commercial Division:

  • Client Services, contract management and client relationship management
  • Artifact Brokerage, acquisition, valuation, and placement of supernaturally significant materials
  • Intelligence Services, threat intelligence subscriptions for clients managing ongoing hidden-world risk

Leadership:

  • Principal Group, four partners with operational and commercial portfolios; governance by consensus
  • Operations Director, manages field division deployment and personnel
  • Commercial Director, manages client relationships and commercial division

Operations

Containment: Obsidian's field containment operations are the firm's most operationally demanding function. Containment teams are equipped and trained for a range of threat categories and have access to materials and protocols comparable to the Vanguard's doctrine, in some specific areas, superior, because Obsidian has no institutional constraints on who it learns from. Containment operations produce after-action reports for clients that are professional, thorough, and written to protect both client and firm from subsequent complications.

Assessment: Pre-engagement threat assessment and post-incident analysis. Obsidian's assessment teams produce client-ready intelligence on supernatural risk: what the threat is, what it can do, what approach will resolve it, and what the resolution will require. Assessment work often precedes containment contracts and sometimes concludes that containment is unnecessary, a finding that Obsidian delivers accurately because inaccurate assessments generate liabilities.

Artifact brokerage: The acquisition and placement of supernaturally significant materials. Obsidian's brokerage practice operates in a grey area that the firm's legal team manages carefully. The materials are real, the buyers and sellers are real, and the legal frameworks available for these transactions require creative interpretation. Obsidian brokers for legitimate parties, organizations acquiring defensive materials, lineage communities managing succession of significant objects, collectors with resources and discretion. It also, occasionally, brokers for parties whose purposes it has assessed as commercially manageable rather than clearly appropriate.

Personal security: Protection detail services for clients whose hidden-world exposure creates risk that conventional security can't address. Obsidian personal security personnel are selected for lineage capacity as well as conventional skills, a Skinchanger operative on a protection detail brings situational awareness that human security cannot replicate.

Relations

Vanguard Unit: A working relationship maintained carefully from both sides. The Vanguard uses Obsidian for intelligence and logistics in operations where federal infrastructure is impractical. Obsidian values the relationship for the access it provides to threat intelligence that wouldn't otherwise be available commercially. Both parties are aware that their institutional interests overlap imperfectly, the Vanguard's mandate and Obsidian's commercial posture create specific situations where the relationship becomes complicated, and both parties manage those situations by not surfacing them unnecessarily.

Bureau of Unusual Affairs: The BUA has contracted with Obsidian for specific containment operations where the Bureau lacked direct field capacity. The relationship is transactional and the BUA maintains more distance from Obsidian than from Aldersham, the BUA's institutional culture is more comfortable with academic research services than with commercial threat response. The BUA is aware of Obsidian's artifact brokerage practice and has chosen not to make it a priority issue.

Aldersham Institute: A working relationship with mutual benefit and mutual caution. Aldersham provides Obsidian with analytical assessments; Obsidian provides Aldersham with access to phenomena and subjects the Institute's field capacity couldn't reach independently. Both organizations are careful about what they share and what they assume about the other's purposes.

The Bloodline Courts: A complicated relationship that Obsidian manages as a significant business development priority. The Courts represent a client pool with resources, ongoing hidden-world risk, and a need for services that government agencies cannot provide to nonhuman community structures. Obsidian has made several attempts to develop a stable service relationship with the Courts. The Courts' position is that a commercial firm's predictable self-interest is not the same thing as a reliable partner relationship, and they have not been persuaded otherwise.

The Hollow Market: Obsidian and the Hollow Market operate in overlapping commercial space and are aware of each other in the way that two commercial entities with compatible but not identical product lines are aware of each other. There is no formal relationship. There have been transactions. Both parties consider the other to be operating in ways that are commercially understandable and not entirely comfortable.

The Compact of Lines: Obsidian's personal security practice recruits Skinchanger operatives for roles where their physical and sensory capacities are directly commercially relevant. The Compact is the governance structure those operatives nominally answer to in community terms. Obsidian has made preliminary contact about formalized recruitment channels. The Compact's response was that individual members' employment decisions are their own business, which is accurate, and which functions as a non-answer to what Obsidian was actually asking.

The Threshold Society: The Society's arbitration mandate occasionally intersects with Obsidian's containment and brokerage work, Veil incidents that Obsidian has resolved become arbitration matters if they involved inter-faction liability. The Society has requested documentation from Obsidian on at least one significant containment operation. Obsidian's response was that after-action documentation belongs to the client. The Society noted this position. Both parties are maintaining the relationship as a future working asset.

Secrets

Obsidian's artifact brokerage practice has, on three occasions, facilitated the acquisition of materials by parties whose purposes the brokering principal assessed as probably problematic and commercially manageable. One of these transactions is directly relevant to a current hidden-world situation. The principal involved knows this and is managing the information as a commercial liability rather than as a moral obligation.

The firm's intelligence division maintains a database of hidden-world organizational activity that is significantly more comprehensive than what Obsidian's clients know it has. The database is a commercial asset, the intelligence subscription service is priced to reflect access to a general threat landscape, not to a comprehensive organizational surveillance picture. Several parties who appear in the database at a level of detail that would concern them are current clients.

One member of the principal group has a lineage that is not reflected in the firm's official personnel documentation. The lineage affects their professional capacity in ways that clients have benefited from without knowing the source. The other principals know. It has not been a problem. It is a potential problem in several foreseeable circumstances.

Plot Hooks

  • A containment contract has produced a finding that the client specifically requested not appear in the after-action report. The operative is deciding what to do with that instruction.
  • An artifact the brokerage division placed eighteen months ago has surfaced in connection with a current incident. The broker knows who the buyer was. The buyer was a current client.
  • Obsidian's intelligence database contains information about a hidden-world actor that would be directly useful to the party, and that the firm has not shared with any client, suggesting either that no client has paid for it or that someone at the firm has decided it shouldn't move. The broker or operative has access to the database and has to decide what to do with what they find.
  • A personal security client has disclosed, in the course of a threat assessment, information about their own activities that changes the firm's risk calculus for the engagement. The Operations Director wants to continue; the operative on the detail is not certain that's the right call.