Author Topic: The Vesuvian Syndicate  (Read 448 times)

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Forrest

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The Vesuvian Syndicate
« on: December 09, 2016, 06:04:25 am »
Company Name: The Vesuvian Syndicate

Intent: It varies from executive to executive, but money, power, and hedonism are common themes.

Location: Gomorr, an enormous world of frigid temperatures and toxic, barren landscapes. The ground is almost solely made up of gray clay, and there's no water to freeze in the cold. However, a sizable spot on the planet is occupied by a massive city residing within an artificial atmosphere. Within, dizzyingly gargantuan skyscrapers and office buildings house multiple armies' worth of the Syndicate's employees and underbosses, constantly at work to get ahead in business. At the center of Gomorr City, surrounded by colossal walls always manned by a sizable force of the Syndicate's best soldiers, is another, smaller settlement, composed of Utopian gardens, elegant Victorian mansions, and sickening pleasure dens. Golgoth, home to the Inner Circle, is a place ripped straight from twisted power fantasies everywhere.

Affiliation: Everybody deals with the Vesuvian Syndicate at one point or another, and nobody enjoys it.

Worth: 600 trillion credits yearly from legal business ventures the universe over, and a truly incalculable, mind-bendingly colossal amount of generated wealth from the Syndicate's illegal and morally questionable, off-the-record business dealings.

Description and History:
Money talks, bullshit walks, friend. And if the boys and girls within the Vesuvian Syndicate have one thing, it's money.

Now, you don't become one of the richest organizations in the known universe by playing softball and making friends. The Syndicate's not a business; they're an intergalactic mafia, a soulless, despicable grouping of the worst humanity has to offer given free reign of the stars. They're everywhere, and they deal in everything. Pharmaceuticals, weaponry, starships, military hardware, personal devices. Narcotics, human trafficking, blackmail, political espionage, wholesale murder, and economized genocide, in a few past situations. If you want something, they have it, and they're selling, as long as you can pay.

The Syndicate itself was founded back on Terra, around when this whole "intergalactic colonization" thing started up and humanity began meeting races and peoples besides themselves. Nobody knows who founded it; the policy of record-burning and memory-wiping oh-so popular within the organization's seen to that. At first, things started innocently enough. Military equipment, some satisfactory cosmic exploration vessels, the works. But pretty soon, people could tell what kind of business it was growing up into. Opium dens, popping up on moons. Imported miners, drugged and shanghaied away to colonial worlds. Military prototype mechs and experimental weaponry showing up and being tested on both sides in backwater conflicts. Things only ramped up from there, and with the passage of time and the expansion of humanity, the Syndicate grew up into the big, bad, evil-doing organization it is today.

The Vesuvian Syndicate is evil, but so far, nobody can stop it. They play rough, and they don't stop until you couldn't possibly start again. They'll buy your home planet and turn it into an industrial wasteland. They'll jettison your family into the sun of a solar system you haven't even heard of, even the cousins. They'll ruin you, they'll ruin everyone who's ever glanced at you, and they'll ruin everything that's ever had a conscious thought concerning everyone who's ever glanced at you.

They don't move pieces on the chess board, they bulldoze the building you're playing chess in. Better wear a hard hat.


Okay, got the basics down! I'll be writing up products, planets, and people related to this little business once I get some more time.
Area Record 1782:
Date: 08/29/██

Event: An elderly human feeding itself to a group of kakapo. Did not express pain, appeared ambivalent.

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Forrest

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Re: The Vesuvian Syndicate
« Reply #1 on: January 17, 2017, 12:13:49 am »
Products
A short list for an almost inconceivably large amount of items. The Syndicate deals in everything, but this'll help others to understand the flavor of their products when it comes to writing them.

Multhokian Oil-Snake Secretions
The indigenous serpent-like reptiles of the decidedly isolated planet known as Multhok are just one of the many strange life forms found there. A world of savage, all-encompassing jungles and rainforest bristling with all manner of vicious predators and toxic flora and fauna, it's not a land for the faint of heart, but certainly a place for those who wish to make a quick cred. The oil-snake, as it's come to be known by Terran explorers, is one such example of insidious economization.

The ten-foot-long, five-inch-in-diameter reptiles are normally found in the enormous mud-pools of the northernmost jungles, in which they breed and hunt for their preferred prey, the luminous, unnamed crustaceans known to frequent the deeper reaches of the pools. The close-set, smooth scales of the oil-snakes are completely devoid of color, as the canopies of the forest above are too thick to allow any of the planet's sunlight through to their muck-filled home.

But enough about the damned things' eating habits and habitat. The real reason they've been noticed is for their natural defense mechanisms, and the utilities that these provide. The Multhokian oil-snake defends itself from the predators of its locale by secreting a thick, oil-like venom from small pores between their close-set scales. These venoms actually differ somewhat as the mud-pools get further apart and the snakes are somewhat separated, but disturbing hallucinations, extreme panic and unease, and, in rarer strains, mild to extreme pain and severe difficulty breathing are noted.

Now, the thinkers over at the Vesuvian Syndicate saw an opportunity in this natural weapon. They've got a few medium-scale breeding and raising facilities dotted around Multhok, made to raise oil-snakes in captivity and harvest their secretions for use in certain places. The milder venoms, those that cause hallucinations and fear, are processed into a fine vapor and put into use on mining and farming worlds the universe over as crowd deterrents. Hordes of determined protesters and riotous workers are transformed into terrified, shivering piles of human wrecks that scream and sob at the slightest movement in their peripheral vision, making it much easier to get a force of guards with proper breathing equipment to stem the riots.

The increasingly powerful venoms of the isolated oil-snake strains are used even more insidiously, as the stronger oil's combination of hallucinations and terror, pain, and shortness of breath make it a valuable method of interrogation for any government or corporation that's not squeamish about suffering. In some cases, the Syndicate ships the strongest of the secretions for use as chemical weapons; an enemy force collapsing into a suffocating pile of panic and agony is a deal some sides find too good to pass up, no matter the price.

« Last Edit: January 17, 2017, 12:16:35 am by Forrest »
Area Record 1782:
Date: 08/29/██

Event: An elderly human feeding itself to a group of kakapo. Did not express pain, appeared ambivalent.

ApatheticExcuse

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Re: The Vesuvian Syndicate
« Reply #2 on: January 18, 2017, 02:27:30 am »
Evil corporations and weaponized animal poisons are both things IRL, and should be in the UMEU as well. I'll throw approval at this.

From what I'm getting from the snake oil, it's intended more to incapacitate than kill, but is there some kind of antidote for it? If so, how quickly does it need to  be administered to work?
« Last Edit: January 18, 2017, 02:31:14 am by Discord »
Gone. Cheers guys.

RedVulnus

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Re: The Vesuvian Syndicate
« Reply #3 on: January 18, 2017, 01:34:03 pm »
approved

Forrest

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Re: The Vesuvian Syndicate
« Reply #4 on: January 23, 2017, 01:52:09 am »
Evil corporations and weaponized animal poisons are both things IRL, and should be in the UMEU as well. I'll throw approval at this.

From what I'm getting from the snake oil, it's intended more to incapacitate than kill, but is there some kind of antidote for it? If so, how quickly does it need to  be administered to work?
I'd say there're some herbs and salves native to Multhok that'd do some good, but they're not exactly in widespread circulation or anything. At best, you'd find a good few containers in the medical centers of working worlds that use the venom as a protest-deterrent. Maybe one or two in the hands of interrogators, just in case their charge almost dies.
Area Record 1782:
Date: 08/29/██

Event: An elderly human feeding itself to a group of kakapo. Did not express pain, appeared ambivalent.

 

NOCTIFER IS A FAGGOT