Terrel & Squib is a pharmaceutical company that has recently added the ability of projection to their list of accomplishments. They are prominently featured in Orpheus. Terrel and Squib is sometimes abbreviated to T&S.
Overview[]
Started by John Terrel, a genius with stocks and finance, and Dr. Lionel Squib, an accomplished biochemist with over 100 drug patents to his name, Terrel and Squib has recently embarked on a major venture: becoming a projection firm. For large fees, a client can hire their services to rid themselves of troublesome spirits, no questions asked.
Terrel and Squib’s biggest competitors are the Orpheus Group, the current market leader, and NextWorld.
The Methods of Terrel and Squib[]
Despite their clean and professional façade, Terrel and Squib hides any number of dark secrets. Foremost is the fact that Squib is not really Squib anymore, but his body is controlled by a malevolent Spectre. This Spectre, a servant of the all-powerful Grandmother, controls and manipulates the company on her behalf; he also used Squib to give the company access to the highly-addictive projection drug pigment.
Indeed, Terrel and Squib is the sole manufacturer of the drug, distributing it through street gangs, pigment cults (such as the Missionary Works of the Holy Ghost) and other conventional methods. They are extremely careful to hide their connections to the drug, lest they destroy their public image, their profits, and, most importantly, Grandmother’s plans.
The company, despite their polished and professional image, tend to poorly train their agents and rush into jobs without fully investigating beforehand. Sometimes this leads to false alarms, which Terrel & Squib use to bilk gullible clients out of money by claiming supernatural sources where there were actually none. But sometimes this practice backfires in a more spectacular fashion. The most famous is the Forest Hills incident, in which an ill-prepared group of agents accidentally angered a Spectre, who proceeded to possess the client and became a Jason. Several agents were killed, and the Jason escaped and still roams the nearby area, picking off innocent victims one at a time.
The reason for such sloppy field work is that Terrel and Squib sees agents as expendable. Many of their living agents use pigment to project, and are addicts as a result. They work for their next fix more than any salary, and some, it is said, work for the drug alone. Therefore, when agents die, in Terrel and Squib's view, there is always another desperate druggie to replace them. Some agents have become suspicious of this and have since left the company or defected to Orpheus or NextWorld. Most prominent among them is Grace Ishida, a former agent who seeks to reveal all of Terrel & Squib’s dark secrets with help from Radio Free Death.
Spirit Technology[]
Terrel and Squib also make use of advanced spirit technology. The most notable of their tools include:
- Ghostshot ammo: Affects the gauze of spirits like real bullets would flesh. Developed in Terrel & Squib’s labs.
- Kirlian cameras and goggles: Reads high-frequency electric fields, revealing ghosts to those without the ability to see into the world of the dead.
- Labyrinth Cages: Specially-constructed containers that have walls that are solid to ghosts; they are used to imprison hostile ghosts. Some spirits hint that these cages are used as part of elaborate tortures to break any spirit or hue in Terrel and Squib’s employ, but several dismiss this as nonsense.
References[]
- Orpheus Haunting the Dead, p. 118, 129, 130, 135