Grey
Dialectical Hermeticist
Need a hacker to fill in for a lost player. Will accept multiple submissions, not necessarily all hackers, since the cast is on a per-job basis.
"Sans Arcanists uses the latest in bonework technology in order to improve the standard of living for soldiers, survivors, and disadvantaged people the world over. Using a proprietary neural interface offering the best reaction time and strongest security, Sans Arcanists augmentations don't just give you your life back - they make it better.
Sans Arcanists - Because loss doesn't have to be the end."
- Billboard, Downtown Califresco.
The First Empire was a time of glory and ignorance, and now it is fallen we know so little, lost to the violence of history.
During the Second Empire, Magi ruled as the Parliament of Owls, treating mundane folk as an underclass.
But in the year 880, younger Magi working with industrious mundanes discovered the value of steam power. A few simple enchantments, and enough fire and water could be made to power nigh-unbreakable machines. Creating magical devices being so costly, this was a boon to the Empire.
Until it put more power in the hands of mortals, and through the course of their greater freedom, discovered gunpowder.
Better able to fight the powerful Magi and resentful of their treatment, the Empire was torn down into mundane nations, and remaining Magi hunted almost to destruction.
When the smoke cleared, some new rules were in place everywhere - Magi cannot hold governmental power.
So the Magi, the old and canny especially, moved from their gilded thrones and halls of gold to a new seat of power - office chairs and boardrooms.
Steampower was good, but the discovery of means by which to harness electricity were better. New industries sprang up, greater mundane technologies - but there was always a demand for magical devices, too, though they commanded a higher price due to the craftsmanlike construction. To power all of this, Stormlords built spires to harness lightning storms. So factories sprung up around them, then homes, and more businesses. More power was needed. The storms became a fixture. Apartments above the clouds became prestigious.
Magi couldn't be politicians, but they could run a company. Cities became sprawling and hard to manage.
The problem was worsened by Magi bribing politicians, weakening the powers of government and increasing the sway of corporations. One of the last straws was the Redline, a small manatech implant that acts as birth certificate, ID, bank card, GPS, and legal record. In this way, Magi could be tracked and monitored - the downside being ordinary citizens were also monitored.
An underclass of Blackline citizens sprung up - criminals, anti-parliamentarians, activist Magi, kidnap victims and slaves. Desperate people.
People invisible to Redline sensors. People with nothing to lose. People for hire.
If you have a Redline, you get taxed, but you also get medical insurance, transport insurance, limited unemployment benefits, the protection of the police, and access to better homes and services. The downside is that the Corporation owns you. Your company Redline can be rescinded at any time, cutting you off from money, from support, even locking you out of your own home.
Blackline citizens are free - to die in squalor. They live invisibly in slums, the targets of researchers with no ethics oversight, the victims of police brutality, the key demographic for drugs held to far lower safety standards than those sold uptown. Smaller corps buy contracts to provide services in the slums, paid in cash, hard to trace.
It began with the so-called Neural Spike. A carefully machined bioplastic implant containing violet dye and a ruby chip. Communers, with their consummate surgical skill, are able to implant and link the Spike with minimal scarring and extremely low odds of rejection. With that, the biggest barrier to manatechnical augmentation was lifted. The Spike provides an interface hub for artificial nervous connections, usually carried on subdermal or even submuscular violet 'thread' to the various augmentations.
While 'wireless' connections are possible, they were rapidly found to be less secure. Still, at the cost of other functions and vast sums of cash, augmentation corporations continue to refine and offer wireless Spikes.
Initially, the Spikes were just used to provide that interface, but with the inclusion of larger ruby nodes it became possible to add other features. Primarily, those features are multitasking and communication based, allowing remote access to the Mindsea and parallel processing functions that have led to the informal term 'submind' for such Spikes.
Augmentation is serious business. In addition to the lower-priced prosthetics for victims of illness, accident, or violence, many corps offer additional functions based on their talent pool. Sans Arcanists specializes in stylish, custom-made bonework limbs with low maintenance costs. Allfire Industries has a lot of military contracts and specializes in integrated defense systems. Titanite boasts robust, functional, and nigh unhackable subsystems. The list goes on, and most of these corporations also produce the usual manatechnologies employed around the world, and frequently own a stake in mundane technology companies (for example, Samasonic Entertainment is a subsidiary of Dreamscape Corporation, who also own Dreamscape Interface Solutions)
While licensed and registered Magi mostly work in all the big mantech corporations, you can still find back-alley augmentations. Some gangs sport violet tattoos that serve as an obvious and low-budget carrier for their signals, for example.
Prime Locale for Play: Califresco
Califresco was founded a little over two centuries ago, straddling the Nightvale Sound at the edge of the Eastern Sea. Established by a Magus named Malachi Gardiner - who styled himself as King Gardiner - it was inducted into the Federal Union of Imeria within ten years when Malachi's null-born son Lawrence sold his father out to the Ordinary Rule Party then controlling the nascent FUI.
Young Lawrence was fascinated by technology and the promise it held for the ordinary man. While his police force - at the time not Federally subsidized - were notably hard on Magus residents, he still invited some pioneers in the fields of Manatech and engineering into the city.
Shortly before Lawrence's death by heart failure (he always stubbornly resisted offers of magical healing), Union Spire was completed and began powering the city. Governorship passed, by democratic vote, to Micheala Walsh. The Gardiners have not since held office, but the family is still a vital part of the city, having invested in many local businesses and donating to public works projects.
The city has still gone from strength to strength. It is currently the beating heart of the augmentation business, and the old munitions factories remain in business in spite of a trend for artisan-crafted manatechnical firearms. However, the docklands have fallen into disrepair and criminality - the shipwrights are silent and empty, the steel mills under rust, warehouses fallow. Slums spread around the edges of the city, and most neighbourhoods under the cloud level are considered little better.
The current Mayor is Angus Winchell.
Major corporations in power here include:
Morgan Polytech - Currently led by CEO Faye Morgan, this company owns Union Spire and the subsidiary companies Integrated Security Solutions, Nightwatch, Inc. and Morgan Motors (Moving You).
The Gardiner Trust - Less a real corp, and more a public interest group, the Trust deals in architecture, transportation, and waste management. But these things cost money, so inevitably they've registered as a corp.
Jormungandr Group - Has very little presence in the city at the moment, but they run the intercity rail network.
Sans Arcanists - Premier augmentation company, but facing stiff competition from other aug corps. Sans is an independant company, but to survive they either need an absolute coup, or to sell to a big corp soon.
Torchlight - While primarily an electronics and Mindweb maintenance company, Torchlight also owns interests in real estate (in particular, they collect rents on a lot of downside tenements).
"Sans Arcanists uses the latest in bonework technology in order to improve the standard of living for soldiers, survivors, and disadvantaged people the world over. Using a proprietary neural interface offering the best reaction time and strongest security, Sans Arcanists augmentations don't just give you your life back - they make it better.
Sans Arcanists - Because loss doesn't have to be the end."
- Billboard, Downtown Califresco.
The First Empire was a time of glory and ignorance, and now it is fallen we know so little, lost to the violence of history.
During the Second Empire, Magi ruled as the Parliament of Owls, treating mundane folk as an underclass.
But in the year 880, younger Magi working with industrious mundanes discovered the value of steam power. A few simple enchantments, and enough fire and water could be made to power nigh-unbreakable machines. Creating magical devices being so costly, this was a boon to the Empire.
Until it put more power in the hands of mortals, and through the course of their greater freedom, discovered gunpowder.
Better able to fight the powerful Magi and resentful of their treatment, the Empire was torn down into mundane nations, and remaining Magi hunted almost to destruction.
When the smoke cleared, some new rules were in place everywhere - Magi cannot hold governmental power.
So the Magi, the old and canny especially, moved from their gilded thrones and halls of gold to a new seat of power - office chairs and boardrooms.
Steampower was good, but the discovery of means by which to harness electricity were better. New industries sprang up, greater mundane technologies - but there was always a demand for magical devices, too, though they commanded a higher price due to the craftsmanlike construction. To power all of this, Stormlords built spires to harness lightning storms. So factories sprung up around them, then homes, and more businesses. More power was needed. The storms became a fixture. Apartments above the clouds became prestigious.
Magi couldn't be politicians, but they could run a company. Cities became sprawling and hard to manage.
The problem was worsened by Magi bribing politicians, weakening the powers of government and increasing the sway of corporations. One of the last straws was the Redline, a small manatech implant that acts as birth certificate, ID, bank card, GPS, and legal record. In this way, Magi could be tracked and monitored - the downside being ordinary citizens were also monitored.
An underclass of Blackline citizens sprung up - criminals, anti-parliamentarians, activist Magi, kidnap victims and slaves. Desperate people.
People invisible to Redline sensors. People with nothing to lose. People for hire.
If you have a Redline, you get taxed, but you also get medical insurance, transport insurance, limited unemployment benefits, the protection of the police, and access to better homes and services. The downside is that the Corporation owns you. Your company Redline can be rescinded at any time, cutting you off from money, from support, even locking you out of your own home.
Blackline citizens are free - to die in squalor. They live invisibly in slums, the targets of researchers with no ethics oversight, the victims of police brutality, the key demographic for drugs held to far lower safety standards than those sold uptown. Smaller corps buy contracts to provide services in the slums, paid in cash, hard to trace.
It began with the so-called Neural Spike. A carefully machined bioplastic implant containing violet dye and a ruby chip. Communers, with their consummate surgical skill, are able to implant and link the Spike with minimal scarring and extremely low odds of rejection. With that, the biggest barrier to manatechnical augmentation was lifted. The Spike provides an interface hub for artificial nervous connections, usually carried on subdermal or even submuscular violet 'thread' to the various augmentations.
While 'wireless' connections are possible, they were rapidly found to be less secure. Still, at the cost of other functions and vast sums of cash, augmentation corporations continue to refine and offer wireless Spikes.
Initially, the Spikes were just used to provide that interface, but with the inclusion of larger ruby nodes it became possible to add other features. Primarily, those features are multitasking and communication based, allowing remote access to the Mindsea and parallel processing functions that have led to the informal term 'submind' for such Spikes.
Augmentation is serious business. In addition to the lower-priced prosthetics for victims of illness, accident, or violence, many corps offer additional functions based on their talent pool. Sans Arcanists specializes in stylish, custom-made bonework limbs with low maintenance costs. Allfire Industries has a lot of military contracts and specializes in integrated defense systems. Titanite boasts robust, functional, and nigh unhackable subsystems. The list goes on, and most of these corporations also produce the usual manatechnologies employed around the world, and frequently own a stake in mundane technology companies (for example, Samasonic Entertainment is a subsidiary of Dreamscape Corporation, who also own Dreamscape Interface Solutions)
While licensed and registered Magi mostly work in all the big mantech corporations, you can still find back-alley augmentations. Some gangs sport violet tattoos that serve as an obvious and low-budget carrier for their signals, for example.
Prime Locale for Play: Califresco
Califresco was founded a little over two centuries ago, straddling the Nightvale Sound at the edge of the Eastern Sea. Established by a Magus named Malachi Gardiner - who styled himself as King Gardiner - it was inducted into the Federal Union of Imeria within ten years when Malachi's null-born son Lawrence sold his father out to the Ordinary Rule Party then controlling the nascent FUI.
Young Lawrence was fascinated by technology and the promise it held for the ordinary man. While his police force - at the time not Federally subsidized - were notably hard on Magus residents, he still invited some pioneers in the fields of Manatech and engineering into the city.
Shortly before Lawrence's death by heart failure (he always stubbornly resisted offers of magical healing), Union Spire was completed and began powering the city. Governorship passed, by democratic vote, to Micheala Walsh. The Gardiners have not since held office, but the family is still a vital part of the city, having invested in many local businesses and donating to public works projects.
The city has still gone from strength to strength. It is currently the beating heart of the augmentation business, and the old munitions factories remain in business in spite of a trend for artisan-crafted manatechnical firearms. However, the docklands have fallen into disrepair and criminality - the shipwrights are silent and empty, the steel mills under rust, warehouses fallow. Slums spread around the edges of the city, and most neighbourhoods under the cloud level are considered little better.
The current Mayor is Angus Winchell.
Major corporations in power here include:
Morgan Polytech - Currently led by CEO Faye Morgan, this company owns Union Spire and the subsidiary companies Integrated Security Solutions, Nightwatch, Inc. and Morgan Motors (Moving You).
The Gardiner Trust - Less a real corp, and more a public interest group, the Trust deals in architecture, transportation, and waste management. But these things cost money, so inevitably they've registered as a corp.
Jormungandr Group - Has very little presence in the city at the moment, but they run the intercity rail network.
Sans Arcanists - Premier augmentation company, but facing stiff competition from other aug corps. Sans is an independant company, but to survive they either need an absolute coup, or to sell to a big corp soon.
Torchlight - While primarily an electronics and Mindweb maintenance company, Torchlight also owns interests in real estate (in particular, they collect rents on a lot of downside tenements).
