Pentex Group

Pentex Group
Other names	PenteX Group (formerly)
Type	Holding company
Status	Active
Allegiance	Shareholders
Patron	Fly
Leader	Board of Directors

The Pentex Group, often colloquialized as just Pentex, is a multinational holding company with subsidiaries in innumerable industries around the world. Although mostly just as banally exploitative as all megacorporations are in the Era of Apocalypse, the Pentex Group is of particular interest to the Garou due to its knowledge of spirits and its semi-frequent use of Banes and fomori to enhance and protect its operations.

(For its counterpart in older editions, see Pentex.)

Overview

Of all the enemies the Garou face, perhaps the most insidious is Pentex Group, because it combines all of the assets that conventional exploitative multinationals possesses, but it also commands the same sort of spiritual awareness and puissance as the Garou. Its combination of spiritual defilement and mundane corrosion of the community and environment makes for an exceptionally powerful (if subtle) opposition for the Garou, in that it has their advantages, but also has enough of what the human world considers indispensable to be influential there.

Critically, the average person has no idea that Pentex Group exists. It’s not an overtly flashy organization that seeks attention for itself; quite the opposite. Pentex itself doesn’t make anything. Pentex is a holding company devoted entirely to the extraction of value from the world and the various business holdings under its ownership. It’s privately owned, so it’s not listed on any of the public stock exchanges, nor is it beholden to even the most basic legislation in places that allow for lobbying, regulatory capture, or simple bribery. The company does what it wants, and if there are fines, bribes or campaign contributions to be made, all that lands in the cost-of-goods-sold column (and often is tax deductible).

Pentex is also, for the vast majority of its operations, absolutely, unremarkably mundane in its affairs. Ninety-eight percent of what it does doesn’t involve supernatural creatures or malevolent spiritual entities, just toxic runoff and banal worker exploitation. It’s that remaining two percent, though, that has clued in the Garou to the fact that they’re not dealing with occult coincidences or lucky mystical dilettantes. Pentex’s forays into the physical-spiritual axes that werewolves occupy is wholly intentional, and the company is increasingly adept at its business. To the Garou, Pentex is the tip of the spear that threatens, perhaps more than any other agent of the Wyrm, mundane or otherwise, to end Gaia's life once and for all. To Pentex, the Garou are a sometimes-inconvenient blip on the radar who occasionally get brought up in risk-assessment meetings in the same breath as human protestors.

History

At some point between the early 1970s and the Era of Apocalypse, the PenteX Group (as it was then named) went officially defunct, only to transfer all of its assets into a legally new business with the only change being the X in its name now being lowercase. If their modern logo is any indication, they didn't even bother to change that. This was likely done to deflect public attention away from it by 'faking its own death', so to speak, as well as to refresh its corporate debt and evade legal action. Most of the public, up to and including notably thorough journalists such as Nomi Paskalis, continue to believe that the Pentex Group has been dead for decades, a misconception that the elusive and subtle corporation has no interest in debunking.

Fronts and Subsidiaries

Pentex Group does very little directly and by itself — it prefers simply to own things and collect the revenues those things generate. As such, it’s unlikely for a Garou pack to encounter Pentex itself. There’s no following the shady-looking guy in a Pentex jumpsuit or staking out the weird warehouse where all of the delivery vans with Pentex logos convene at night. Pentex is a mastermind organization, a corporate entity that operates through fronts. Many Garou can dedicate years of their careers to fighting Bane-wielding companies without ever learning about the existence of the parent company that unites all the disparate threads.

Operating through any number of subsidiary companies, Pentex keeps its own identity out of the spotlight. In fact, most Pentex fronts don’t themselves earn much spotlight, and the holding company prefers it that way. High-profile enterprises and multinational businesses garner attention, and the less attention directed toward Pentex proper, the less it has to do to manage messaging or liquidate persistently nosy foes. Any number of local companies might operate as Pentex fronts, whether permanently or temporarily. Pentex has several favorite categories of fronts — regional or local energy companies, for-profit pharmaceuticals, tech and hardware, “gig” services, for-profit education — but just about anything can end up in its asset portfolio.

At any time, Pentex may choose to divest itself of a subsidiary, and for any number of reasons. Because all Pentex cares about is extracting value, it has no sentimental attachments to any of its companies. And once the last dollar has been squeezed out of active operations, Pentex subjects the husk of the company to the private equity treatment: Leverage what’s left to extract value from the debt and then sell the moribund company carcass to another company that has to figure out how to manage the strip-mined assets.

List of known Pentex Group subsidiaries

• Albion Petroleum: Operates off the Irish coasts with drilling leases that never seem to expire, despite local sentiment being 80 percent against their renewal.
• Biblios: A consumer data aggregator formerly known as Chi, and known before that as Xenophon Security.
• Chemikon: A scandal-plagued international chemical company and decades-long rival of the Broad Brook Sept.
  • Magadon, Incorporated: A pharmaceutical company and scourge of the Garou of New Jersey throughout the mid-20th century.
  • Chemikon-Constantilos: A banking firm that has been forcibly shut down multiple times over its lifetime.
• Dawn Lake CAFO: A factory farm secretly dedicated to the Fly Mother, an avatar of Fly. Riddled with fomori and led by Executive Director Munroe.
• Endron International: A major oil drilling company with a skeevy reputation for flouting safety guidelines, transporting crude oil in leaking, aged supertankers and drilling illegally.
• Everlite Gas & Electric: A New England-based power company that served as one of the foremost assets of Eater-of-Names during the two times he was alive.
• Omniscient: Provides AI-based surveillance solutions to the military-industrial complex in several countries. Run by the Glass Walker theurge Oba Makinde.
• Polyphemus Security Solutions: Also known as Noctis Security Solutions. Serves as a private armed security company that contracts with businesses to provide patrols and surveillance.
• Scheldes Pharmaceuticals: Runs clinical trials across North America, moving operations state to state and territory to territory when local legal burdens make relocation prudent.
• Union Bromide Corporation: A chemical company known to have previously operated in Nagpur, India. Formerly run by Lance Trevors before his death at the hands of Ross the She-Wolf.
• Val-MOR: A big box store franchise. Has become the heart of many small towns in the past few decades, usually by undercutting local merchants, paying off local officials, and hiding behind corporate lawyers.

Pentex Group-funded projects

Pentex has also participated in many side projects that are occasionally supernatural in nature. Most of these projects are overseen by Harold Zettler and his Brotherhood of the Fly, a Wyrm cult within Pentex's executive roster that supplies many of the actual resources that the rest of the corporation uses to facilitate its vilest acts.

• Biosphere Zero
• Project Iliad
• Project Odyssey
• A Pentex-owned for-profit prison chain's collaboration with one of its pharmaceutical fronts (possibly Magadon) is also the number-one (though still unlikely) suspect for the parties responsible for the creation of the Eye Thief.

Gallery

The Umbral landscape of a Pentex facility

References

• WTA: 5th Edition Core Book