Turn 51 - Life is Old There
You look over the reports from Jane and Michelle and resist the urge to start screaming and breaking things.
The situation is, to put it bluntly, ugly. And there is almost nothing you can do right now, lawfully at least, to resolve it without breaking out your great-grandfather’s toolbox.
There is, simply put, no solid proof that would be admissible in any court.
But you
know who is guilty.
Michelle had been the one to notice the discrepancy, the money embezzled out of the CPS budget didn’t add up, there was missing funds that were going somewhere else. However, when she went to the jail to re-interview the only two people who would have been in a position to make such a diversion she arrived to find that they’d ‘committed suicide’ in their jail cells, with nobody having seen anything.
The scene had started being ‘sanitized’ before any external forensics could arrive, but the Griffsport medical examiner had already filed the ‘official’ finding of suicide, after supposedly examining both bodies. But Michelle had realized very quickly that there simply wasn’t enough time for any such examination to occur. Then by the time she had gotten a court order to reopen the examination, the medical examiner's office had regrettably informed her that the bodies had been released to the families who had had them immediately cremated.
Which was funny, because neither of the individuals involved had actual ‘next of kin’.
At that point Michelle had invoked her authority as Special Branch and shut down the entire medical examiner’s office, bringing in the squad to engage in a thorough audit and investigation.
The medical examiner himself, who’d issued all the reports and orders, had been at home when the order was given. It took less than five minutes for Special Branch to arrive at the residence where they’d promptly found themselves in a gunfight with a pair of supposed Griffsport PD officers who were caught red-handed murdering the medical examiner. Neither had been taken alive, and further investigation showed that their IDs were forged and their fingerprints had been burned off with chemicals to prevent discovering their actual identity.
This was when Michelle started getting… creative. The Special Branch collated every scrap of records and material related to anything even vaguely related to CPS. And a pattern started to emerge. Beginning a decade ago records suddenly became… sterile. Most of the experienced case workers in the department started getting promoted to work on Castor and Pollux due to the ongoing issues there but in most cases they weren’t actually replaced. A small cadre of barely qualified replacements, about a tenth of the usual staffing, were brought on board, background checks for new caregivers was shifted to an apparently non-existent new team within the department and the rot took full hold.
And then more patterns start to emerge. On at least three dozen occasions officials within the planetary government had started to look into CPS. Each time, within hours of the first hints of such an investigation, scandals had exploded in every single major media outlet, generally involving claims of official corruption and chicanery, and all just incidentally scuttling the CPS investigations in favor of ‘bigger problems’. Several investigators who persisted had ‘committed suicide’ shortly afterwards, with the suicide findings being issued by the medical examiner who’d been killed by those ersatz cops.
Investigating his finances revealed regular cash deposits being made concurrent with these findings.
Diligent work on the Special Branch’s part dug up some surveillance video which caught the former medical examiner receiving a briefcase from an individual dressed in a rather anonymous suit and tie. Facial recognition on the individual linked him to one of the largest law firms in Griffsport, but when Michelle discretely checked she found that no such individual appeared to exist. The law firm in question is closely linked to the opposition parties in Parliament as well as every single one of the major media conglomerates on Griffin’s Roost itself.
More digging found that on several previous occasions independent media sources had also started investigating CPS, usually after tips from disgruntled caseworkers who had been seeing their complaints vanishing into the aether. In each case the hosting providers for those media companies had suddenly taken them offline following legal complaints… issued by the law firm in question on behalf of non-existent clients. In each case ‘mistakes’ and ‘bugs’ had resulted in said providers not only deleting the sites, along with all of the content on them, but also all backups. In two cases where the independent journalists had continued to pursue their investigations they’d turned up dead… of suicide.
Special Branch is able to get a subpoena and warrant to seize all records of that law firm, only for the building housing it to catch fire within, Michelle timed it, seconds of the warrant being issued. Special Branch promptly audited the IT systems of the courthouse and found a computer worm embedded in the network which had already been in the process of deleting itself. They got enough data off of it, however, to show that it was in communication with computers located in the law offices. Computers which were now so much slag.
And, totally coincidently you are sure, all of the major media sources on Griffin’s Roost are now howling about the Special Branch being supposedly used as a gestapo and secret police against the Empresses political opponents and critics as a sign that she is indeed acting like a tyrant. It would be more impressive if they weren’t all reading from the exact same script in a blatantly coordinated manner.
Michelle has a plan, with Janet’s agreement. There is absolutely no sign whatsoever of the military being compromised. Have the Imperial Guard seize all of the assets of not just the media conglomerates, but all of their boards, senior executives, and major stakeholders. Arrest every single person associated in any way with the law firm in question, even if they technically have Parliamentary immunity.
Janet suspects that ultimately there are only a half-dozen or so actual ringleaders involved, none of them in Parliament, her suspicion rests directly on the moguls who control the media empires in question. All of them are incredibly wealthy, all of them have long been of the self-entitled type that Janet is always suspicious of… and all of them are, in her words, the sort of creeps she’d never trust within a mile of any child. She suspects, based on the fact that they haven’t been targeting anything related to the military or R&D that ultimately this is a group of self-entitled perverts who decided that they should be able to indulge in their slightest whims, no matter who was hurt by it, and had gone about it in a ruthlessly foul way, corrupting everything their loathsome desires required to get what they wanted. They were also very adept at covering their tracks.
[] | Crush them mercilessly |
- -50 Imperial Approval
- +10 Approval Change
- +5 Politics
- For 2 turns lose ‘the Just’ effect
- After 2 turns regain ‘the Just’ and add ‘Defender of the Weak’
- Gain an additional reroll on negative meta-event rolls
- On a ‘neutral’ meta-event roll, gain +1 Imperial Approval
- -1 Influence Chamber of Delegates
- -1 Influence Imperial Senate
- -25 support Chamber of Delegates
- -25 support Imperial Senate
- Prevents all further events on this event tree
|
[] | Continue to try and do it within the legal system |
- -10 Politics
- -20 Approval Change
- Gain ‘Weak’ effect
- Reroll any positive meta-event rolls
- Event tree continues
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