Benedict Jacka

A few of the most notable non-British and non-American corporations operating within the UK.  Due to the sheer number of such corporations (the list of drucraft companies with an office in London alone would run to pages) this should be viewed as more of a random sample than any kind of comprehensive guide.

Maar Group a.k.a Maar Gruppe

A German group that specialises in the use of Matter drucraft in heavy industry, particularly in products utilising steel and other metals.  They produce engines, parts for the automotive sector, and factory machinery.

Maar Group is very large, on a scale with Sinocorp or the US giants, and owns a vast network of Wells spread out across the world, including a Matter S Well in the UK.  It prospered in the late twentieth century, swallowing up many smaller drucraft companies and extending its reach wider and wider.  However, in recent years it has started to falter due to conflicts with the German government, which has repeatedly penalised Maar for regulatory noncompliance, especially with environmental impact laws.  As a result, Maar’s growth has stalled, and now that its international sales have started falling as well, it’s widely believed that its finances are looking a lot shakier than they once were.

Sinogroup a.k.a. Sinocorp

The Chinese state-owned drucraft company.  Its official name is the China International Mineralogical Support Company, but most non-Chinese just call it Sinocorp.

Sinocorp is the entity designated by the PRC to govern the sale, purchase and leasing of Wells and aurum outside of China.  It doesn’t quite have a monopoly on all Chinese overseas drucraft, but it has enough advantages that it’s hard for most private Chinese companies to (legally) compete.  As such, most don’t try, and the result is that Sinocorp is absolutely enormous.  They buy up essentia and Wells in vast quantities and ship the aurum back to China.  This is not always viewed positively by the countries in question, and Sinocorp gets a lot of bad press, not to mention frequently having its permits denied.  Still, given who owns Sinocorp, governments are reluctant to oppose them too openly.

Sinocorp has no particular speciality as regards drucraft and will buy Wells of all branches.

Alopex

A drucraft company based in Taiwan, Alopex competes with Sinocorp around the world, but especially in South-East Asia.  They’re banned from operating in the PRC, but can act freely outside it, and frequently come into conflict with Sinocorp in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.  Despite being a fraction of the size of Sinocorp, their greater agility has often allowed them to take Wells that Sinocorp has been too slow to acquire.

Alopex specialises in the use of drucraft in the electronics sector, and are generally considered to be on the cutting edge of research as regards the applications of drucraft to semiconductors, integrated circuits, and robotics.

Mitsukuri

A Japanese company highly focused on Dimension drucraft.  While they use Wells of all branches, they’ve always been extremely focused on the Dimension branch, to the point of aggressively buying up Dimension Wells and recruiting any drucrafters with a talent for using them.  Their goal is to acquire a monopoly on Dimension sigl production within all the countries they operate in, and, while they’ve never fully achieved this, they’re still the UK’s most prominent provider – most people buying a Dimension sigl in the UK are going to think of Mitsukuri first before looking at other options.

Although Mitsukuri is a multinational corporation, its upper management is all Japanese, and many ex-employees have claimed that it’s impossible to be promoted above a certain level in Mitsukuri if you aren’t a Japanese national.   

Blanchet

A French multinational that specialises in buying up essentia in countries where it’s abundant and reselling it where it’s in higher demand – buy low, sell high.  It’s a simple business model, but one they’ve perfected over a long time.

Within the UK they tend to focus on Primal Wells, for the simple reason that it’s the branch other corporations and Houses are least interested in.  Their operations are thought to be highly profitable, but despite their wealth they’re notoriously tight-fisted and have a reputation for paying their employees as little as they can possibly get away with.

A brief overview of drucraft corporations that supply the US military.  While the continental USA has strong essentia resources, the US military’s demand for sigls is enormous, and US defence contractors have to go outside North America to meet its needs.  Due to its historical links and the strength of its Wells, the UK has traditionally been a popular place for them to look.

Schumann-Kraus Heavy Industries

The largest drucraft corporation in the world, Schumann-Kraus Heavy Industries was formed via a series of mergers in the twentieth century.  They specialise in Matter drucraft and use it for metal fabrication, oil production, chemical engineering, and many other purposes, spread out across their dozens of subsidiary companies.  Their military division focuses on weapons and systems for the US military’s armoured vehicles.  It’s a relatively small part of the Schumann-Kraus conglomerate, but SK is so big that a ‘relatively small part’ is still enough to make them one of the US military’s top three suppliers.

Within the UK, Schumann-Kraus focuses on Matter and Motion Wells.  They hold an S-class Motion Well in England under a contract by which they agree to supply the sigls it produces solely to the UK and US armed forces, though in practice the US gets the lion’s share.

Lumen Group

A defence contractor with roots in the US North-East.  Unlike Schumann-Kraus, Lumen Group are exclusively a military supplier.  They specialise in Light essentia and its applications in missiles, missile defence, stealth systems, and sensors.  Since the continental US is relatively poor on Light essentia, Lumen Group has had to source their Light Wells overseas, and as a result has become a very international corporation with extensive regional offices around the globe.

Lumen Group hold a permanent Light S Well within the UK, which they use to produce Light sigls for their various secret projects.  They dislike publicity and refuse to disclose where their sigls are used, but it’s generally understood that they’re one of the main suppliers of the US special forces and nuclear weapons divisions.

Tyr Aerospace & Defense

As their name suggests, Tyr’s background is in aerospace, though they’ve since diversified and now produce sigls for all branches of the US military, not just the air force.  For some years now, their biggest profits have come from Light sigls sold to the US Army;  this has brought them into competition with Lumen Group, and the two companies now regularly bid against one another for contracts.  For the most part, Lumen Group has held the edge in this rivalry due to the larger amount of Light Wells under their control – they can supply far more Light aurum than Tyr can, making it hard for Tyr to compete.  In response, Tyr has launched a drive to expand their Light holdings, and they’ve been aggressively buying up Wells across Western Europe.

Although Tyr is primarily a defence contractor, they do sell to private clients, and they also supply the US space program via contracts with NASA.

LX Systems

A company that exclusively sells to the US Navy.  They focus on using Matter, Motion, and Light essentia in the construction, maintenance, and repair of naval vessels.  They’re less international than the Big Three and are concentrated on the US East and West Coast, but they do have some longstanding links with British shipbuilding firms and have an old regional office in Liverpool, where they’ve been quietly sourcing essentia for their US operations for many years.

Harcourt Neuman

An extremely secretive company who are involved with the NATO establishment in some way, but who refuse to say what they do or how they do it, apart from vague statements about applying drucraft in the realm of ‘security’.  It’s generally believed that they primarily work for the NATO countries’ intelligence agencies, especially the American CIA and NSA, the British MI5 and MI6, and the French DGSE.  They run a small locating service in the UK and seem to be especially interested in Light and Life Wells, though what they use them for is unknown – they don’t sell on the Exchange and seem to bring in their own shapers to handle them.

A brief overview of non-military U.S. corporations that trade in the UK.

Atlantic

A corporation based in New York.  Unlike most drucraft companies, they do not have a shaping department at all and their business is entirely financial.  They buy and sell the rights to Wells without ever leaving their offices or touching a sigl with their own hands.

Although a US corporation, Atlantic employs a lot of British traders and their London office has been running for longer than most UK companies have existed.  Due to this and their long-standing relationship with the Board, they’ve been able to get away with buying up more UK Wells than most foreign companies would be allowed to hold.  At the moment they hold one of the UK’s S-class Matter Wells.

Asmart

A subsidiary of a US retail giant.  They made headlines in the drucraft world in 2009 when they bought House Egmont’s Light S Well through one of their subsidiaries, becoming the first corporation in decades to displace a Great House.

Asmart is the dominant player on the UK drucraft scene – they sell about as many sigls by volume as their two nearest rivals combined.  For the most part they do this via quantity, not quality – they don’t sell many high-grade sigls, but they dominate the C- and D-class sigl markets by sheer volume.  They’re able to do this by undercutting virtually everyone else on price.  If you want any kind of basic low-rank sigl, the Asmart version is almost always going to be the cheapest one available.  Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and Asmart sigls are notorious for poor quality and short lifespans.  Still, if you really need a particular sigl, and you’re working on a budget, Asmart can hook you up for less money than pretty much anyone else.  As a result, even people who hate them still buy their stuff.

As mentioned, Asmart hold a Light S Well, though if they sell S-rank sigls, they don’t advertise it.

YouHealth

The UK trade name of a US healthcare giant that specialises in medical drucraft.  If you live in the UK and want a Life sigl, there’s a pretty good chance that YouHealth will be the ones to supply it.  YouHealth are the dominant player in all areas of Life drucraft in the UK – locating Life Wells, shaping sigls from them, and supplying them to medical drucrafters.

YouHealth have a bad reputation in the drucraft world.  There are persistent rumours that they’ve built much of their medical expertise via highly unethical experiments in parts of the world where you can do medical trials without much regulation or oversight.  YouHealth are also notoriously trigger-happy with libel suits, however, so few people are willing to go on the record with such rumours.

Gladeshire McKeon

Another US financial company, Gladeshire McKeon work through intermediaries, subcontracting various drucraft operations and then packaging them under the Gladeshire McKeon brand.  They compete with the British Houses for the upper end of the sigl market – their sigls are typically somewhat more affordable, although despite their best efforts, they’ve never managed to build quite as good a reputation for quality.  Their reputation isn’t helped by their high turnover of upper management – Gladeshire McKeon executives usually only last a few years before being replaced, often in a very acrimonious way.

Voyager

A Silicon Valley startup that began in software and pivoted into drucraft.  They specialise in locating, and pioneered many of the features that are now standard in Well registration apps.  Other corporations were quick to copy Voyager’s innovations, so they were never able to dominate the market as thoroughly as they’d hoped, but Voyager were able to make a sizeable amount of money along the way.  Nowadays Voyager have taken a step back from locating and spend most of their efforts selling their technology and expertise to other drucraft corporations, playing off their rivals against one another for their own profit.

A brief overview of some of the more important drucraft corporations currently active within the UK.  This section will cover British companies.

Cambridge Group a.k.a. Camlink

Camlink is the only British corporation (and one of the only corporations in the world) to own an S+ Well.  The Light Well is in the Cambridge area, and, though Camlink’s primary headquarters is still in London, its shaping department and many of its offices are based in Cambridge.

For a long time Camlink had a reputation for having some of the best shapers in the world.  This, along with some clever business practices, led to them becoming the largest and wealthiest of the UK drucraft corporations.  In recent years, however, they’ve been struggling, and their wealth has drawn heavy government oversight;  significant fractions of Camlink’s stock are held by foreign investors, and factions in the Board have been arguing for years that none of the UK’s S+ Wells should be owned (even partially owned) by any foreign companies for national security reasons.  As such, Camlink’s management decisions are closely scrutinised by the Board, and they’re frequently forced to make decisions for political rather than commercial reasons.  Their stock has fallen as a result and some believe that a corporate split-up might be on the cards.

British Essentia Services

A very old family-owned company dating back to the 1800s, BES has a long history of selling sigls to the British public.  Unlike most drucraft companies, they’ve never diversified or financialised;  their business is sigls, and they’ve stayed in their lane.

Many of the BES sigl designs are decades old.  Even their ‘newer’ sigls are typically based on designs from the last century, and some of the sigls that they provide through the Exchange are based on templates that haven’t substantially changed for over a hundred years.  Many consider their sigls dated as a result, and they do tend to be slow to incorporate new developments, but the positive side to this is a reputation for reliability – if you buy a BES sigl, you typically know that it’s a design that’s been thoroughly tested over a very long time.  BES sigls tend to last longer than their counterparts, though this does typically come with the tradeoff of a higher price.  As such, BES’s main competitors tend to be the Drucraft Houses, since they’re targeting the same sort of market.

Plastron

An energy company that started out in oil and gas with a small drucraft department as an offshoot;  over time, the drucraft department came to provide more and more of their business until nowadays they’re almost entirely a drucraft company with a vestigal energy department.  Plastron focuses on the ‘prospecting’ side of drucraft and does most of its business outside the UK.  They specialise in finding and exploiting Wells on other continents, particularly in high-conflict areas where most companies aren’t willing to go.  Their corporate headquarters is in London but they have many tiny regional offices dotted all around the world.

Linford’s

A London firm with a history as insurance brokers.  During the 20th century they became a major shaping company and had several famous sigl lines – as late as the 1980s and 1990s Linford’s sigls were still quite well-known.  However, a series of market reverses forced them to pull back, and over the 21st century they came to produce fewer and fewer sigls until in the 2010s they stopped selling to the Exchange entirely.  Nowadays Linford’s are primarily a locating company, and while they still have a small shaping department, this is mostly a relic of the past – they’ve shifted into more of a ‘middle man’ role where they make their money supplying information and Well locations rather than anything tangible.  Despite this, they’re quite active on the UK scene, and consistently rate as one of the Top 10 companies in terms of Wells logged with the Registry.

Lancaster Security

As the name suggests, Lancaster Security specialise in sigls in the military and security field.  They mostly sell to the British armed forces but also supply other NATO militaries and private clients.  Nowadays their sigls are considered somewhat dated, but they can typically trade off their long history and contacts with the UK armed forces to land contracts with the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

Unlike most corporations, Lancaster Security does very little locating, preferring to keep their holdings in permanent Wells and make their sigls with the essentia they supply.  It makes them relatively unwieldy and unable to adapt to shifts in demand, but on the positive side it’s also largely insulated them from market fluctuations and has allowed Lancaster Security to keep plodding along as other companies have gone bankrupt.

The previous entry discussed the theory of essentia capacity;  what it is and what it means.  This entry will focus more on how it works in practice.

When Essentia Capacity Matters . . .

A higher essentia capacity allows a drucrafter to use more sigls at once.  Technically it would also allow a drucrafter to use sigls with higher Lorenz ratings, but since these are so rare, the main use for a high essentia capacity is to allow the drucrafter to use multiple sigls with Lorenz ratings of 1 or lower.

Using multiple sigls at once is difficult.  Using two is more than twice as hard as using one, and using three is more than twice as hard as using two.  New channellers quickly find that even if they might have enough essentia capacity to operate two or three sigls at the same time, they don’t actually have the skill to do so effectively.  The usual way to compensate for this is by using continuous sigls – since these require no concentration, a drucrafter can use one triggered sigl (and focus all their attention on that) while the continuous sigls do their own thing.

However, there’s a much simpler way to get around this problem – use one sigl at a time.

. . . And When It Doesn’t

The simple fact is that very few sigls have to be used simultaneously.   If you have a medical sigl that stops bleeding, a levitation sigl that floats you up in the air, and a torch sigl that floods an area with light, then with enough time and practice you could build up enough skill to use all three of them effectively at once.  But realistically, if you’re using a sigl to stem someone’s bleeding or levitating yourself off the ground, then you probably want to be focusing on that.  Yes, you could end up in a situation where you have to provide emergency first aid in pitch darkness while hanging off the side of a building, but it’s not all that likely.

And, indeed, this is what generally happens.  Medical sigls are used in hospitals, slowly and individually.  Industrial sigls are used in factories – again, individually.  The same applies to invisibility, flight, and so on.  Even if you want to use two sigls at once, in most situations, you can probably figure out a way to use first one and then the other.  And if either of those uses are important, you probably want to use them one at a time, so that you can concentrate on each.

So why does essentia capacity matter?

Environmental Differences

Essentia capacity matters very little if you’re somewhere safe.  If you’re not being threatened or rushed or pressured, then there’s very little reason ever to need to use two sigls at once.  But if you’re somewhere dangerous, then being able to use two sigls at once can be very important indeed.

However, the real reason essentia capacity is so valued is only partly related to ‘safe’ versus ‘dangerous’.  It’s that in a one-on-one duel between drucrafters, having a higher essentia capacity is a huge advantage.  If one of the two drucrafters can use two full-power sigls while the other can use three, then, all else being equal, the one who can use three will almost always win.  They can use two sigls to counter their opponent’s two sigls, while using a third to attack unopposed.

This, more than any other other reason, is why people care about essentia capacity.  It’s the playground question of “who would win in a fight”.  Lots of people argue that it shouldn’t matter – and indeed, much of the time it doesn’t – but “who would win in a fight” is something people do pay attention to, even if they may not admit it.  It’s roughly equivalent to height and physical prowess in adult men.  Very few will say out loud that they judge based on these qualities, yet men who are tall, strong, and fit still tend to get preferential treatment over those who are short, weak, and flabby.

The Working Range

Most people’s essentia capacity falls in between 2 and 3.  As a very rough guide, for men, 3 and above is high, between 2.5 and 3 is average, between 2 and 2.5 is low, and below 2 is very low (the term ‘essentia cripple’ is sometimes used, though this is considered insulting).  For women, the brackets are roughly the same, but about 0.3 to 0.5 points lower (so ‘high’ would be 2.6 and up).  These figures vary from country to country.