Chad Richards, CEO

Chad Richards isCEO of the Byfrost Group of Companies, an incredibly skilled businessman, and Wall Street's darling. An absolute financial genius, he used his investing knack to help launch several major internet companies back in the 90s through Byfrost Investment. He survived both the Dot Com Bubble and the Great Recession largely unscathed, and came out the other end one of the world's richest, and most powerful, capitalists. He's also not all that bad of a programmer, given how he got his start, but his real knack is in management and psychology--he knows how to read not only people, but society, and can stay one step ahead of the curve.

He is also a waker, or a mundane mortal with no supernatural abilities, but who knows of the supernatural world. During his teenage years, he went to an house party that was crashed by a demonic cult, that killed most of the party goers. Richard survived, and though the Men in Black did revise his memory of the event after they came in and cleaned the swept event under the rug, Richard was so addled with drugs and alcohol that the memory revisions didn't work. He caught glimpses of the truth beyond the Veil, and he tried to deal with it through more drugs and drinking. His rich family sent him to rehab, because they couldn't send him off to school when he was babbling about demons and wizards and magic. It's unknown exactly what happened in his rehab, but he came out clean, and with a realization that he wasn't actually crazy, he wasn't seeing thing. It was everyone else who was blind to the reality of the world.

But as his parents taught him, knowledge is power, and power is something you have to keep close to your chest, or everyone will try to take it from you. Richards now new the secret truth of the world, but he wasn't going to shout it from the rooftops. No, he was going to use it to his advantage. The supernatural world made him feel small, weak, and helpless. Nobody makes Chad Richards feel small, weak and helpless. No dragon, no archmage, no demon. Nobody.

That is one of the reasons Richards built up massive amounts of wealth and power. He might not have magic or supernatural allies to draw upon, but he has a brilliant mind, and cutting edge technology at his disposal. He has used his companies to fund monster hunters, and to produce technologies that help to balance the battlefield between the mundane and the supernatural. He has even become a major supplier to Occult Intelligence groups, like Majority-12, Department-7, MI18, and the DGSX. His Byfrost Group now has significant holdings in pharmaceutical labs (Pandora Life Sciences), technology startups (Basilisk Capital Partners), agribusinesses (Pomegranate Agricultural Technologies), petrochemnicals (Vulkan Chemicals), new media (Ziz Media), virtual reality (Otherworld Digital), aerospace engineering (Northern Crown Aerospace), and weapons manufacturing (Mjolnir Arms Factory), as well as its own series of off-the-book labs scattered throughout the United States and Western Europe.

The Byfrost Group is one of the newest players in the supernatural world, and it is playing to win. Byfrost research teams, armed with magic-dampening shields and occult weaponry, have raided supernatural ruins, magical laboratories, and arcane vaults across the world. Rumours persist of even shadier actives, such as blackmail, assassination, and even the abduction of supernatural individuals for experiments. Richards pushes for results from his employees, regardless of the costs, and fully endorses of his researchers' less savoury actions. Sure, they don't always come up with the results he wants, but when they do, it's by and far worth it. And there's millions of supes out there, so it's not like killing a few hundred in the course of research is really all that noticeable. He's not a genocidal maniac, and, in his mind at least, the inventions created by Byfrost could actually save more lives!

Take for example the ability to create a suit that dampens magic around it when a current is run through it. Yeah, it will slowly kill the wearer, but he's already paying those PMCs a lot, and having them die from lack of anima after a year or two is preferable to them dying from some wizard's fireball or fey's charms.

Another product he himself enjoys is a specific serum derived from draining fey of their anima, literally starving them to death. Doing so gives one a few precious drops from the the Well of Life, also known as the Fountain of Youth. Despite being in mid 40s, Richards doesn't look, or feel, a day over 30.

He doesn't command a lot of loyalty from his followers, but then again, he doesn't really have followers. He's got a few close confidants, but many, many, many, employees. A lot of whom don't even know that they're dealing with the supernatural. That is, after all, information that is a bit beyond their pay grade.

After all, he is the consummate man behind the man, pulling all the strings. For the good of humanity... or so he claims.