Framing Peyton Pickett

The Wind-up

Pover, plus her planner/mastermind (Zayna Szell) and a couple of heavies for protection and security (Ridgeway and Dagget) invite Cerys Leo to meet up with her at Parallax, “since that seems to be a favorite hang-out for you and yours.” She requests that Cerys do some digging before the meeting into Peyton Pickett, the Chief of Shipyard Contracts at the H.I. shipyards on Ceres. She also encourages Cerys to bring both an open mind, and whatever security she thinks is appropriate — Pover will too.

Sent as a self-deleting message to Cerys a day or two before the in-game date of the next session. These messages cannot be usefully opened/read without agreeing to a timed deletion of it, and there are other security protocols that prevent it from being copied or displayed to more than the receiving PDU's screen:

Dear Ms. Leo:

I am writing on behalf of my employer, Anastasia Pover, to invite you to a business conversation at the Parallax bar on [the date the next session starts], at your earliest convenience after the evening rush there is over.

She would like to present you, and any partners that you might want to involve, with a business opportunity, since word has gotten out that you and your partners are looking for opportunities. Understanding that there are some limitations to the sorts of employment that you are willing to undertake, rest assured that the offer is not, to the best of her awareness, anything that you would find questionable or disagreeable.

Please bring an open mind, ready for discussion. Also, please feel free to make whatever reasonable security arrangements you see fit in discussing business with someone of her reputation. She will be accompanied by myself and two of her own security personnel.

Since you may want to do some research of your own prior to the discussion, she would invite you to take a close, but careful, look into the Chief of Shipyard Contracts for Hephæstus Interplanetary's Ceres shipyard facilities — Peyton Pickett — and his ties to the Ludlow movement, particularly those here on Psyche.

Zayna Szell

Once Cerys did at least some basic investigation in to all the various names in the message, she found out, without too much difficulty, that:

• Pover is an older woman, who took over a fair chunk of the crime-families on Psyche that originally came from Russia. That sounds quite a bit more formidable than it might actually be, though — Psyche’s population is fair, but not so large as to support a lot of criminal activity, and there’s enough H.I. security that violent crime, for the most part, is unusual at any significant organized scale. She is fairly easily recognizable as a woman in her late 60s or early 70s with no hair whatsoever.

• Szell is Pover's "right hand woman," a highly intelligent (and reputedly cold-hearted) woman who is believed to be the mastermind behind a lot of Pover's current success as a criminal leader. She's not violent, herself, but can almost certainly turn a blind eye towards violence in the name of "business."

• Pover has a handful of "security personnel," of various temperaments and backgrounds. There's no knowing which of them will show up to this meeting, but it's a good bet that they will be capable, generally speaking, and willing to crack skulls if the need arises.

• Peyton Pickett, the H.I. shipyard-chief mentioned, is a career company bureaucrat on the surface. Some basic digging around about him through your contacts, though, would lead you to believe that he's probably a Ludlow-movement sympathizer, to the point where he may well have smuggled materials or equipment (that he has administrative access to) to someone in the Ludlow hierarchy here on Psyche.

The Pitch

Pover is interested in hiring the Diligent’s crew — in part because they have an independent ship, and can actually get to Ceres if the need arises — to expose Pickett’s Ludlow-related activities. Pover herself is not particularly for or against either Hephæstus or the Ludlows. She recognizes that there is more than a little imbalance between what the Company does and is capable of. At the same time, she believes that the Ludlow movement is probably ineffectual on a long-term basis. For better or worse, the Company provides infrastructure and services that keep the majority of the human race living in the Belt alive, healthy, and productive. The Ludlow movement, for all that it protests the corporate control over the lives of everyone in the Belt, hasn’t really shown any indication that there’s a better option.

Pover’s gotten hold of a misappropriated environmental support system, probably intended for one of the ships in the Ceres yard, that was going to be delivered to Riley Atkinson — who the PCs already know is suspected of being high in the local Ludlow command-structure. Along with the actual equipment itself, she has the shipping Provenance Chain for it, that shows that it was, in fact, misappropriated. It should’ve stayed on Ceres, in repairs stores there, and was released by Pickett before being shipped to Psyche on the Packrat, a Guild freighter (captained by Fisher Jones) as part of an otherwise fairly typical freight-run between the two.

What’s in it for the Diligent’s crew?

Payment, first off. A chance to do some small harm to the Company as well. Perhaps a favor owed, but at least a friendly relationship with Pover and her… enterprises.

What are the Risks?

Getting too much Company attention is probably the big one. Alienating the local Ludlow folks is a possibility too, if they accept the mission and don’t cover their tracks well enough.

What’s in it for Pover?

She explains it in a fishes-and-sharks metaphor: She’s a pretty big shark, one of a few, in a very small sea. There’s only room for so many sharks in the sea, given the number of fish in it already. The local Ludlow movement, whether they realize it or not, are trying to grow into another shark, and there’s not enough room.

Since one of the other “sharks” is the Company, and it’s a much bigger shark, to boot, she needs to keep some distance from the problem too. But if she can do that and poke a useful hole in the supply-chain and logistics of the Company’s efforts in the process, that would be advantageous for her ends.

Why isn’t Pover taking Direct Action?

She’s not opposed to doing business with the Ludlow folks here on Psyche, and will continue to do so if and when it’s useful and profitable to do so. That relationship would be jeopardized if she were to go in “guns blazing,” and that’s not her style anyway. Plus, that would attract unwanted attention, both from HI security and the other “sharks,” and that could well turn into violence that’d be bad for business. And “fishes.”

The Play

There are options available to the characters:

• Pover has the equipment in question, and having it show up on Ceres again, especially if it was “legitimately returned” (including the shipping Provenance Chain) would probably do the trick.

• This would almost certainly require making a stink about it on Ceres; enough so to draw security’s attention, and prompt an investigation into how it got to Psyche in the first place.

• It’d be safer, in fact, if this route was taken, to go as formally as possible every step along the way, starting with it being “found” by someone in the Psyche cargo-chain. That’d have to be staged, and staged reasonably well to avoid both Ludlow and too-much Company attention.

• It might be a double-dipping payment too, this way — More resources/money, all the better!

• It could be “lost” somewhere else — Porthos can always use additional equipment, and since they’re usually stuck with surplus and the like, a new environmental system would be amazingly useful for them.

• That’d involve shifting it off-rock first, then waiting for the midden to hit the windmill back on Psyche, and the characters working their way into directing any investigation-efforts in the right direction.

• There might not be any need to actually go to Ceres that way, which some characters might be hesitant about.

• Or the characters could come up with their own plan!

Uh… I think we need to pull a Panama! No! No Panama!

What Happened

The characters spent a lot of time working out at least some basic details before arriving on at least a high-level plan:

• They would retrieve the Shipping Provenance Chain (SPC) from the container(s) that the misappropriated systems were shipped in, leaving the system(s) themselves for later transfer to the Hybrid colony on Porthos. That transfer is still being worked out as they depart, but Pover’s organization was willing to act as a middleman in the deal.

• With that acquired, they're planning to take the SPC hardware cut from the container to Ceres, and work their way through a still-to-be-determined path through Hephæstus’ security to get Pickett implicated for the misappropriation.