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Decameron is one of the biggest advertisers for one of the TV stations.
C Lennart knows it, as does the newscaster for that station. Sie is going to use that to manipulate the news, if possible
KILLED: sadly, this plot no longer makes sense, now that Decameron's mainly a defense contractor these days.
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(
Jamie Rickie,
C Lennart,
R Archie,
B Truman,
Employee with Stock Options,
F Ronit,
Ainsley Cameron,
Millicent Cameron,
Investor,
Family Friends,
H Derren,
I Zubin)
In the wake of the shooting, the members of the Board have been called together, to figure out the right strategy to follow, but most importantly to figure out who will be the interim CEO.
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All of the media in town are swarming all over this story, which is the biggest thing to happen locally in months, maybe years. The TV news supposedly have all the resources, but
Blogger has the inside track.
Everyone involved in this plot should have personal notes on how far they are willing to go for a story, how they feel about privacy, and basically whether they have any shame at all. (And political leanings are critical.)
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After the shooting was done, someone (maybe
PR flack) realized that Seamus having committed the killing using the Sureshot prototype is a potential PR disaster. So while everyone else was running around, they quietly went down to
CEO's office, got one of his guns from the wall, and switched it in for the Sureshot, which he put back in the lab.
This was cleverly done, and he was careful not to get any prints on the planted gun. But the
CSI might notice, if they check, that the only prints
on the planted gun are from CEO -- there are none from Seamus, which is very strange. Seamus should have a few of the weird Sureshot bullets in his pocket, which don't at all match the gun -- they also look like tiny rockets, with a grid of holes at the bottom. Some of the witnesses should be clear that Seamus was carrying a rather high-tech looking gun. And some should have notes about seeing the culprit near the office and the lab after the shooting.
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Before his death, Seamus wrote a scathing letter to
CEO, warning him about how evil the project was and threatening dire consequences. That email is in both his account and the CEO's. Things should be set up so that
CSI can find it.
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V Leonard destroyed
Tagh O'Malley's life by accusing him of being an active IRA member in the 70s. There were never any details, so no charges were pressed, but it was enough to get him drummed out of the force.
Sie never quite let go of that case -- not quite obsessing, but always feeling like the crusading hero and trying to prove that Tagh was more actively involved. A couple of months ago, sie found the police report about the bombing that drove Tagh out of Ireland, and that he was a person of interest there. Sie has been thinking about reviving the story -- and now this has happened...
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A Fiorenzo is the company mechanical engineer, and got a memo back from testing the other day that the trigger for the Sureshot prototype was
way too loose. Since it isn't quite a real gun, it doesn't need the mechanical action a real gun would: it just activates the bullet, really. So sie had built an arbitrary trigger, which is more like a toy laser gun's, very much a hair-trigger, without thinking about the implications.
None of which was a problem until Seamus was passing through the breakroom during his rampage. At that point,
E Martin's daughter jumped up to protect her parent, Seamus swung around, startled, and fired totally by accident. Sureshot being Sureshot, he killed her, and after a moment of horror ran down the hallway screaming, "Nononono..."
A Fiorenzo should not have put this cause and effect together in hir character sheet, but all of the pieces should be relatively available.
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The Signoretti Mob has controlled most of Vermillion's illegal activity -- rackets, drugs, prostitution, etc -- for much of the 20th century. From his immense villa in the mountains outside Violet City, Marco Signoretti (Mr. Not Appearing in This Film) rules over all of this. It is highly profitable, and still goes fairly well, but he has been facing a growing problem in recent years: modern banking regulations make it harder and harder to manage his money.
So he's taken a new and innovative approach, to go with the times: venture capital. He essentially owns Brian Truman, who is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story -- he made a fortune building up a company 20 years ago, then blew it on a succession of gold-digger wives and gambling. In the end, he was sufficiently in hock to the mob that his life was in danger, at which point Don Signoretti made him a deal: Signoretti would back him and make him appear rich, but most of the money would go where the Don wanted it to.
That was the beginning of Greyrock Investments. Since then, it has acquired several more "partners", all with similar stories: they are owned by the Mob, and invest the Don's money. They've done pretty well, but are acutely conscious of the (lethal) price of making a big mistake. This is why they have a very short-term viewpoint, and will often pull out of a company at the first hint of trouble.
Bjorn Ari works for the Don, among others. Most of the time he is decently honest, but he receives instructions now and then -- hiding evidence that a company is Mob-controlled, or doing something to hurt a competing company. He is well-paid for this. He leaked information about a robbery at a company a couple of months ago on the Don's orders -- the company was competing with one of his, and he is trying to sink it before it becomes a problem.
Regan Archie represents the Don's legal interests, brushing aside problems and using her position as a top lawyer in Violet City to sway things in the right direction. It was her idea to match Greyrock up with Decameron, about three years ago -- right up to his death, Roger Cameron had no idea that his company had become a Mob money-laundering (and profit-making) front. Fred Ronit has been starting to get very slightly suspicious, though. The one person at Decameron who roughly does know what is going on is of course Jamie Rickie (who is meticulous about understanding money flows), but he isn't stupid enough to do anything about it.
Senator Newbold has been under the thumb of the Don for pretty much his entire career. Back when he was an eager pup, in need of funds for his first Senate campaign, the Don backed him through intermediaries, only telling him about it afterwards. The Don is too smart to abuse him too much -- having someone in Washington is simply too useful. The Modern American Freedom PAC, which is paying for most of his current campaign, was set up by the Don and his friends, who care a lot about this election. The Don hates Jeri Ferdinand with a burning passion: not only has she been a pain in the ass in fighting organized crime, she's been bringing in lots of Latinos, who are now competing for his drug trade. And Fred Ronit is simply too unpredictable, and apparently uncorruptible -- a potential enemy, instead of the tool that Newbold has been.
Rhona Finlay spent a while seconded to an FBI investigation early this year: she was mostly an errand-runner, but knows the key take-away, that the FBI suspects a connection between Signoretti and Regan Archie, and that there is a lot of money being laundered through Violet City.
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Project Sureshot is an innovative system, and involves half a dozen patents. These are owned by the company, of course, but at least one or two of the inventors are resentful of that, and especially resentful of the fact that they have been sucked into the military, and aren't available for civilian use as far as sie can tell.
At least one key patent is still being written, and has not yet been submitted. The original inventor is very tempted to send the company down the tubes, simply to throw a monkey wrench in the works of that patent, and hopefully get it into the public domain instead.
Investor basically wants as many patents as possible to be passed successfully. That way, even if the company is wrecked by this incident, there will still be enough value to sell.
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As the primaries draw near, every special interest group is pouring money into Vermillion, to try and swing the Senate race. The money is itself beginning to become a story. In particular, some major backers include:
- The NRA is backing Fred Ronit, whose second-amendment credentials are impeccable. He has been bragging for months about how he and Roger still go down to the range for practice every Saturday, and have been doing so for decades. (This is introducing some tension between N Stanimir and R Newbold, who had assumed that the NRA money was all locked up due to their association.) He also has the full-throated backing of several Tea Party PACs, and does nothing to hide that.
- Jeri Ferdinand has received the support of a bunch of Internet firms, which like her recent initiative to build a tech hub in Violet City, and who has become an outspoken advocate of rules to level the Internet playing field. F Ronit is slamming her as favoring Internet regulation, which will slow down innovation.
- Meanwhile, Senator Newbold is facing a mini-scandal over receiving an enormous amount of advertising and support from the Modern American Freedom PAC, and nobody actually knows where that money is really coming from. There have been frequent allegations that it is all big-oil and big-pharma, and shows that he is in the pocket of Corporatism. He is saying consistently that he doesn't actually know who is behind the PAC, and that's true, but he isn't willing to disclaim the donations.
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The company's big current project is being developed for the military, but everyone is clear that the biggest use will be police, and the civilian market is huge.
The Sureshot is a new type of ammo, with its own gun. The ammo has a tiny Heatseeker and chip in it, and a bit of extra internal rocket so that it can always hit the center of mass.
The mass shooting was done with one of the Sureshot prototypes. All of the victims should have suspiciously precise wounds, especially given that Seamus had very little practice with guns. He was trying to make a statement about how dangerous this weapon is, and succeeded far too well.
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Quite a number of years ago now (probably during the nuclear winter around 2000), Decameron Enterprises was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Roger had made some over-ambitious decisions and stretched the company too thin, and it looked like it might be on the verge of layoffs at best, most likely a downspiral into bankruptcy.
At this point, one of the founders (possibly
F Ronit) came up with the idea of arson. Several of the founders argued about that for a month, but nobody could think of anything better. For the company to survive, it needed to find a new direction, and that could only happen with an infusion of cash. The markets were locked up, so venture money wasn't going to happen, but they
did have a warehouse full of old model rocket parts. Arson would be almost trivially easy: since the materials themselves were so flammable, it wouldn't even have to be sophisticated. So they got
L Amilcar to set it off, claimed a large insurance settlement, and the company reinvented itself as a tech firm.
Of course, there were inquiries, but
R Archie did a good job of shutting the objections down.
The one loose thread was that they had originally reached out to the recently-disgraced
Tagh O'Malley to do the job; they were vague about the details, but he could smell that they were looking for dirty work, and when the warehouse blew up he was quite clear about what had happened. He initially mentioned to the inquiry that he might have some information, but recanted when they began to pay him some (fairly modest) blackmail. He originally used this connection to help get Seamus hired in the first place, and to arrange for Seamus to get a generous options package; he has laid off the company ever since, now that he has a vested interest in seeing it be successful. Now, his main interest in making sure that his son get exonerated, since he is sure that it's all a stitch-up. And he has a secret in his back pocket.
S Mercer has, meanwhile, been looking for dirt on the competing candidates, and has long suspected that Decameron has to hold
some secrets sie can use against
F Ronit. Sie found the accident in hir research, and has been trying to find some dirt there. Sie had been thinking about looking into Tagh anyway, and when things happened this morning, sie began wondering if there was a connection there...
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Around six years ago, there was a break-in at the Democratic party's headquarters during the last election run for Senator Newbold. (At this time,
S Mercer was working as his campaign manager.) The Democrats made a big deal about it, claiming that Senator Newbold's campaign was playing dirty tricks and trying to steal campaign information.
What they didn't know was that the campaign had nothing
directly to do with it -- instead, the break-in was orchestrated by
N Stanimir, who hired a few loyal supporters to do it, specifically looking for dirt on the Democratic candidate, who was passionately anti-gun. What they did find was some internal backgrounders, which revealed that the candidate had an aunt who was an illegal immigrant. They leaked this to
V Leonard, who blew it up into a lovely scandal, sinking the Democratic campaign and letting
R Newbold sail through to victory.
That said, the intruders weren't exactly professionals: they had made it look like a simply robbery for computer equipment, but a laundry receipt had fallen out of one of their pockets. Fortunately, the Senator had asked his friend the Police Chief to give
B Ari a chance at a big case, and Bjorn found the receipt. He looked into that personally on his off hours, tracked down the culprit, and figured out the connection. He quietly went to the Senator and explained what he had found; Reagan went to Simon about it, and Simon chewed Nika out over it.
That caused a little friction for a little while, but the truth is that the Senator was impressed by Stanimir's gumption, and was more annoyed at the fact that the whole thing was sloppy than that it had been done. After the election was over, they got to know each other better, which eventually led to Stanimir becoming Newbold's campaign manager this time around -- Reagan was somewhat turned off by having someone quite so cynical as
S Mercer as campaign manager, and wanted someone more sincere next time.
There is only one tiny snag:
R Finlay was a beat cop during that investigation, and was helping guard the scene while the investigators looked into it. She was sure she saw Bjorn pick something up, look at it, and stuff it into his pocket. Rhona confronted Bjorn about it back at the station house, and Bjorn claimed (unconvincingly) that nothing had happened and that she was imagining things. That was the beginning of tensions between the two of them, which continue to this day. Rhona mentioned the whole thing to
M Caoilinn a few years ago; by that point it was largely water under the bridge, but it has turned into vague rumor ever since.
And of course, the whole thing is sitting in
S Mercer's Database of Doom. He feels a little more willing to talk about this particular piece of political stupid, having been uninvolved with the planning, and it seems like a potential way to embarrass the Senator.
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About thirty years ago,
J Ferdinand,
V Leonard and
N Stanimir were members of a fairly radical left-wing student group at Violet City University named Violet Justice. The school administration mostly mocked them as leftovers who didn't realize that the 70s were over, but they were quite sincere.
One day in mid-1990, President Bush was planning to visit campus to give a speech. The group was protesting vigorously, claiming that Bush should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In a burst of excessive enthusiasm one night (and more than a little high), Stanimir set fire to the campus administration building as a protest. When sie went back to the dorm and told the rest of the group, they were shocked -- they might be radical, but they'd never been violent. Ferdinand, in particular, convinced hir to not claim any credit for this, and that they should all just clam up; they did so.
The school investigated, but couldn't prove anything -- the fire wasn't terribly large, and while police labeled it "suspicious", it clearly wasn't a professional job and arson could not be clearly demonstrated. The school didn't want a scandal before the Presidential visit, so they basically hushed it all up: the members of the group all got reprimands on their records for the suspicion of being involved, but it went no further than that, and everyone kind of put it in the past. The student group quietly fell apart shortly thereafter.
However,
S Antonino had been working as a junior administrator at the school at the time, and hir office got burned out in the fire. Sie was pretty angry about the rumors that a bunch of students had been responsible, and nursed a grudge for many years. Sie didn't put the dots together when Ferdinand ran for Mayor, but realized sie was one of the members of the group a year or two ago. Sie leaked this to the Ronit campaign a few months ago, and they have been hammering Ferdinand with it, using
R Forrester to prosecute Ferdinand in the press. As a result, Ferdinand's approval rating has slumped from over 60% a year ago to only 35% today. (Vasily is
not getting involved in this story, and has rather deliberately steered the Fox team away from it, since he is quite nervous about possible blowback if his involvement were to become known. The Newbold campaign has stayed away for the same reasons.)
Ferdinand is very torn about what to do about this. There is a non-trivial temptation to throw Stanimir under the bus, but sie prefers to be more loyal than that, especially since they have remained friends despite Stanimir's conversion to the dark side. (Somehow, Ferdinand wasn't surprised that Stanimir started shilling for the weapons-mongers of the NRA.)
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When
R Gervasio started hanging around Decameron around nine months ago,
S Antonino told everyone to help him out in any way they could.
S Kiran had hurt him back a couple of months before, and had briefly been on oxycontin to alleviate the pain. Kiran still had most of that scrip, and knew it was valuable, so offered it to Gervasio to sell. Gervasio was reluctant -- this didn't fit him self-image -- but needed the money, and sold it on to a dealer in the park for a fair amount of money. So Kiran has gotten a couple more scrips since then, keeping up the pretense of having a hurt back, and passing them on to Gervasio for the cost of the co-pay.
They both think of this as a basically victimless crime; unfortunately,
R Finlay, who is one of the local beat cops, observed Gervasio apparently doing a deal last week.
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Jonathan Sheena has been involved with Seamus for the past month, finally helping him to recognize that he is gay. That seemed to be going great, until today; now, Jonathan is all broken up about it.
C Lennart has been stringing
S Antonino along for years; Samuel has had a crush on her pretty much forever, and kind of deep down knows that he doesn't stand a chance with someone quite so classy and powerful, but Carla has been consistently nice to him, and kind of flirty, and so hope has remained alive.
C Lennart has
actually been grooming
P Vasilios for the past year, originally as a sort of protege but has begun to make moves on her in the past few months. That's gotten kind of hot recently, and has resulted in Paula kind of puppy-dogging around her. Carla hasn't decided whether this is just a fling or something more serious, but is very conscious of the ten-year age difference between them. Meanwhile, Seamus and Jonathan have both been a little concerned: neither of them quite trust Carla, and both have been cautioning Paula to be careful with her. Nobody knows about this particular romance yet.
Millie was involved with
I Zubin back in college, and originally introduced him to Robert Cameron back when he was first setting up Decamron; that's how Isaiah wound up as the first engineer at the company. (Albeit technically not a founder, which he has always been slightly bitter about.) Isaiah has had a torch for Millie for all these years, but since she seemed happy with Robert, he has never done anything about it. Millie, for her part, loves him as a dear friend, and has occasionally wondered (especially when fighting with Robert or Ainsley) what her life might have been like if she had stuck with him.
