Government type:
Company (de jure), Crime Syndicate (de facto)
Official Language:
n/a
Religions:
Various pantheons all devoted to technically the same Gods
Calendar:
Gregorian (referred to in-universe as the Human Calendar)
National Holidays:
n/a
Capital:
Sir Will of Cole's mansion (in the Black Market on Awal Kabab)
Head of State:
Sir Will of Cole
Constitution:
n/a
National Animals:
n/a
Military:
-Unknown number of low-level employees and other mobsters (armed with various weapons)
-Around 15,000 smugglers scattered around the galaxy (armed with various weapons)
-Around 15,000 illegally-acquired ships scattered around the galaxy (mostly corvettes, transports, and cruisers of various origin)
-Unknown number of mobsters, smugglers, and ships from allied crime families and drug/weapon cartels
THE STORY OF UNISYN
Over the course of only about 35 years, the Tatian conspiracy changed the galaxy forever. Ishga lost its massive empire and learned to work with other planets, Planet Lard was completely destroyed, the entire galaxy industrialized practically overnight, the Man of Light and Shadow was reinstated after a 4,500-year hiatus, millions of Squidians were sold into slavery, and the planets of Eaglypt, Aztlan, Caput Tatiium, Vigam, and others experienced genocides. But through all this, one question remains: how did the Tatian Conspiracy fund itself? Where were they getting the quadrillions of galactic credits and octillions of tons of resources needed to take over the galaxy? The answer is: UniSyn.
What is UniSyn and where did it come from?
UniSyn had its origins as the brainchild of Tate himself and Sir Will of Cole, a disenchanted noble-turned-smuggler who Tate met while in jail on Ishga for contempt of court. While he was the weakest of Tate’s recruits magically speaking, he had access to one thing Tate needed desperately: money. Sir Will of Cole had access to the Black Market, a secret hideout located in the middle of the desert on the planet Awal Kabab, and is where the galaxy’s best criminals meet and sell their illegal wares for high prices.
After inducting Will into the Cabal, Tate made a deal with him: if Tate gave Will what money the Cabal had left, Will would use it to restart his drug-selling operation at the Black Market and give Tate half of his profits. While this seems like an extremely risky move on the surface, Tate knew Will would follow through because they shared one thing: hatred of the Ishga Empire and its tyrannical government. Within a month or so, Will caught the eye of Ali Baboon, a master thief who controlled several dozen of Awal Kabab’s gangs. The two met in a cantina on the planet, where they discussed a possible merger. Ali Baboon, as stated above, already controlled several dozen gangs, and had a team of 40 of the most skilled thieves in the entire galaxy at his disposal. However, Will had access to thousands of smugglers and illegally-acquired ships. As a result, the two decided to merge their criminal enterprises, and thus UniSyn was born. Ali Baboon and his gangs and thieves would focus on illegally procuring the goods from their sources, while Will and his smugglers would distribute them.
When Tate learned about this, he immediately called for a meeting between himself, Will, and Ali. The three met in that same cantina later that week, where the group had a realization: such a huge criminal enterprise would catch Ishga attention very quickly and would soon be shut down as a result. To prevent this, the group came up with the idea of registering UniSyn as a business name and then figuring something out to disguise this crime empire as a legitimate company. However, the group had extreme difficulty coming up with something for this fake company to sell.
Eventually, however, Tate realized he could kill two birds with one stone. There were hundreds of uninhabited star systems all across the galaxy that he wanted to settle, and he needed a way to disguise UniSyn. Now, he had come up with one of the most genius plans in galactic history: UniSyn would be a company that sold land on uninhabited planets. However, it would not just be any company: it would be a company that encouraged its customers to recruit more people to buy land.
The Façade
UniSyn’s business model first relied on this one fact: this land was not sold in a traditional way. The land in this case was more like the poker chips in a casino: it was simply the way money changed hands. This way, UniSyn could say it was providing a good/service to its customers, while the customers were really just people working for them. The way this whole thing worked was that everyone who bought land from Tate was told to recruit more people to buy land and then they would supposedly get rich off of the people who they recruited when they bought in. One of the reasons why this plan worked so well is because land on literally uninhabited planets had a profit margin of 100% since there was literally no cost to produ`ce the land or buy it since nobody even owned it (despite Tate’s propaganda claims that the Ishga Government owned the land).
However, to sustain itself this business model had to rely on two things: keeping the profits going to Tate and the Cabal at the top while keeping the lemmings at the bottom feeling like they have a real shot to strike it rich colonizing faraway planets. As Tate’s financial advisor, a Bisoux Chief named Standing Buffalo, once said, “the key to success is when recruits feel like striking it rich is only a month or two away and they’ve felt like that for ten years.”
Another asset Tate had to encourage this operation, especially later on in the war, is his propaganda department. Conservative estimates claim that even at the height of the war, 20% of Tatian propaganda was dedicating to marketing UniSyn. The propaganda repeatedly told new recruits that they were not customers, but they were “pioneers” and “small business owners” selling land to help the colonization effort. This both minimized UniSyn’s legal liability in the eyes of the Ishga Government it was exploiting, and increased the believability of this whole thing. It is also worth noting that Sir Will of Cole was officially in charge of UniSyn since he was an Ishga citizen, but Tate was the one who really made all the decisions and kept all the profit. UniSyn kept its advertising and propaganda focus on young people and the poor, since younger and poorer people were naïve, gullible, and likely to buy into the massive scam, while as Standing Buffalo once said, “Rich people don’t buy into pyramid schemes. They start them.”
Poorer areas like Aurea’s rural areas, lower-class Ishga neighborhoods, Planet Squid, Caput Tatiium, and Ryu 108 were virtually bombarded with advertising, while richer areas such as Rinascita or Ishga’s upper echelons had barely heard of UniSyn at all.
In order to help perpetuate the scam, Tate made sure to keep tabs on the very, very few people who had actually gotten rich off of colonizing planets. Tate and his agents bribed these people to give massive speeches to other UniSyn recruits, encouraging them to stay in and keep getting other people to buy in, because they were proof that “anyone could make it”. As Standing Buffalo once said, “Get the winners, prop them up on stage in front of a bunch of lemmings, and let the survivorship bias do the talking.” After these people had given their speeches, Tate would usually bribe them to go somewhere and do some random thing, and then set a trap wherever he told them to go so his agents could kill the winners and take all their money back into UniSyn. To avoid suspicion, the winners’ deaths were either made to look like accidents or they were replaced with doppelgänger androids.
Before long, however, the Ishga media began giving UniSyn terrible press, attempting to expose it as the sham that it was. In response (thanks in no small part to the brilliant Standing Buffalo), UniSyn adopted a way of dealing with this called, “Accept, misdirect, and discredit.” For example, UniSyn ran ads saying things like, “Long ago, people thought Ishga was flat. Sounds ridiculous, right? But at the time, nobody knew any better. The same can be said for direct-selling and multilevel marketing businesses like UniSyn. Comparing direct-selling companies to pyramid schemes or any other type of scam will seem as ridiculous as Ishga being flat.”
The Criminal Empire Under the Surface
Before long, UniSyn and its massive pyramid scheme disguised as a legitimate business was making far more money than the criminal enterprise it was covering for. However, Tate still allowed UniSyn’s criminal departments to exist. These criminal departments would meet and conduct business in restricted rooms of UniSyn offices, marked with “Biohazard” or other warning signs to keep laypeople from stumbling in. To avoid Ishga inspectors discovering these criminal enterprises, the UniSyn secretaries simply kept calendars and timed the clandestine meetings away from inspections.
At the company’s peak, UniSyn employed millions of smugglers, thieves, and their ships, with Ali Baboon and his forces forming the nexus of the operation. This criminal enterprise trafficked in everything from slavery to political assassinations to weapons to drugs to insider trading to money laundering, with half the profits going directly to Tate. In fact, many of UniSyn’s own assassins in its Criminal Department were tasked with “taking out” scam winners who had outlived their usefulness. This Criminal Department was codenamed the “Sanitation Department”.
Decline and Fall of UniSyn
However, this business model had one weakness: its exponential growth made it inherently unsustainable in the long-term, no matter what Tate did, new recruits found themselves having to recruit more and more people in order to advance, and before long, the colonized planets found themselves running out of unsettled land. Soon, people found themselves being given tiny plots of land in inhospitable locations, such as deserts or the middle of the ocean. These people were driven into poverty and began giving UniSyn bad press. While UniSyn’s propaganda department was able to deal with this bad press at first, so many people found themselves being given useless land that the wave of negative press began to drown out UniSyn’s propaganda. The Tatian Empire as a result had to devote more and more of its propaganda to keep UniSyn going, meaning less and less of it was going towards exerting its control over the South Galaxy. This is in part what led to the revolts in the north that formed the Aurean Alliance. While this increase in propaganda saturation was able to stem UniSyn’s collapse for a few years, it was only a matter of time before some of the new planets began filling up completely.
Once planets began filling up, this was the beginning of the end for UniSyn. However, it did not instantly collapse, since it had a backup plan in mind: instead of selling land on uninhabited planets, UniSyn changed its business model and started selling various amenities to people already on those planets to help flesh out the colonization. While this solved UniSyn’s immediate problem of running out of land, it was simply never the same. These new amenities and resources cost money to produce, drastically lowering the profit margins. As such, millions of recruits stopped convincing new recruits to join UniSyn. For the next 15 or so years, UniSyn remained alive but in a slow, continuous decline.
In order to make enough money to keep UniSyn going, Tate resorted to ramping up the activities of UniSyn’s Criminal Department drastically. Smugglers found their slave quotas rising, as well as their quotas for everything else. This increase in the slave quota led to severe depopulation in certain regions of Planet Squid, as people from the jungle kingdoms were especially targeted in slaving raids. This led to many of its higher-ups making mistakes, such as a smuggling episode that landed Ali Baboon in Ishga prison until Tate had to personally break him out.
Once the Aurean Alliance retook Aurea, everything changed. Sir Will of Cole had been killed during the attack on Vigam, meaning his shoes had to be filled by Lord Etbo. His status as one of the two remaining Eaglyptians drew far too much attention and scrutiny to UniSyn, and the Ishgas, who were now far more removed from the front lines and had more time to spend on such things, began cracking down on this suspicious company. They began doing inspections on UniSyn offices without warning, which inevitably resulting in them catching a clandestine “Sanitation Department” meeting red-handed. The meeting was a low-level affair between two smugglers, but the damage had been done: UniSyn’s Criminal Department had been discovered.
UniSyn was immediately shut down by the Ishga Government, and all of its leaders and executives were arrested (except for Lord Etbo and Tate, who escaped). This event, more so than even the capture of Aurea, is viewed as responsible for Tate losing the war.
Despite UniSyn being dismembered suddenly and swiftly, its thousands of tentacles and remnants would take decades for the Ishga Government to clean up, and even today, clandestine traces still remain, although deep in the shadows.
Although UniSyn itself is gone, the thousands of star systems it helped colonize are not. While many of these decided to join the Galactic Treaty Union after the war, many of them were occupied by Rahasian forces, leading to the standoff between Rahasy and the Ishga-Aurea-Arturia-Paxica axis that defines the galaxy today.