Scythe is a roleplaying plot created October 30, 2016 by gallant and CadetNewb.

Status: This plot is closed.

RPG Rating: Our RPG Rating for this plot is 3/3/3, and there are a lot of sexual hijinks that feed into the plot's overall theme of Nepleslian crime.

The year is YE 38, and the planet Francia, settled in YE 30, has developed nicely. As the result of its hardy citizens, brave marines, and plucky industries, the population of the planet has grown and the planet has become largely self supporting.

Previously loaded with strange mutagenic viruses, the soil now yields to those who ply it; one such farmer, Johnathan Izgimmer, has enjoyed several years as the planet's Senator, representing the system and the Imperium with pride and distinction. Now he has returned to his planet to find that he has several new neighbors, and not all of them are living happily together.

Over the last several years, pushed by several cartels and organizations who have discovered hallucinogenic properties in wheat modified by the planet's mutagens, the economy of the planet has slowly become dependent upon this new export–“Muties”, or semi-synthetic drugs, have become not only commonplace, but is spreading virulently. Addicts fill the hospitals, and violent crime associated is on the rise. Colonials, settlers from other systems and planets, have vastly outnumbered the native Franks since '33, but it is not the Colonials that pose the problem; it's the corporations.

Called “Corpies” by the locals, they created new colonies which barely deserve the name. Run more like corporate outposts, with their own law, security, and forms of corporate currency, they have slowly overtaken the wildlands, pushing their projects further and further away from the Planet's temperate equator into the cold in search of more of the planet's natural resources. Here, they are their own masters, and the experiments they do upon their willing addicts may be within the law, but they rankle common decency.

And with each influx of new Corpies, they gain power. The power to do whatever they want, on Izgimmer's home.

Election Year is coming up, and with the local government powerless to stop the rapid corporation of his precious homeworld, he finds both his position and his planet in jeopardy. Desperate, John turns outside the Imperium to a woman he barely knows - the Yamataian Taisho, Morioka Bhelith. Willing to work “pro bono”, if only for her own amusement, the former elf suggests her own cutthroat tactics. Under the Senator's limited authority, he appoints an extra-police strike group, “Scythe”, to investigate the malpractice of the corporations upon the planet - and to quietly combat their predatory behavior against his people, and his position.

But will it be too little, too late?

Formed in the middle of YE 38, on the Nepleslian planet Francia, Planetary Section Seven, nicknamed Scythe, was formed by Chief Bhelith Blackspear and then-Senator Johnathan Izgimmer as a extra-legal police unit. Stocked by personal and secretive specially-tailored orders from NAM and Origin, ‘Scythe’ was commissioned to keep the planet of Francia with a secondary mission of keeping the planet under the Senate’s control instead of the rising power of Corporations beginning to form alliances to exploit the populace and maintain their in-the-shadows operations such as illegal cloning, weapons-stockpiling, and human trafficking.

Scythe’s first operation occurred in the late fall of YE 38. Operation Fall Harvest used the newly christened Harvest Squad, which contained approximately twenty ‘Rayleigh’ Androids and one regular officer to assault a blacksite to liberate illegally cloned slaves forced to work in the fields of the blacksite plantation. Upon assaulting the plantation and subsequently triggering a corporate alarm, a detachment of the planetary defense forces was ordered to counterattack the Scythe Squad by some corporate order. Taking who they could, the Scythe forces exited the area as quick as possibly through airlift and were out of the area when the PDF arrived.

After the operation, Scythe focused on tracing the blacksite’s operators and their aligned corporations. The corporation that had been operating the blacksite had gone on the guise of EvaUni Enterprises, and had seemed to cease to exist overnight. Following more digging throughout the sources they could find, Scythe found traces of a Corporation calling itself Aeon Gene Tools. To increase it’s effectiveness the section would need to expand its operations to gain more leverage, so it began a silent recruitment pattern. After around a month of silent operations, Scythe gained the employment of Oswald Tyson, Hashimoto Nenna, Zoia Nar’Sivaro, and Sutauto Kunio. The latter two were ex-students from Yamatai which had been cast about after the first had been kicked out and the second had graduated.

These enlistments and hiring made for expansions of the section, the Chief opened up her personal house retainers into the organization, taking in Zoia and Kunio as retainers. Scythe’s rosters now numbered out at twenty-four on-call units.

The second operation came in the form of Operation Cull. There had been traces of Aeon Gene Tools involvement in a sexual trafficking group in the slums of Francia City, and using a full police insert would expose the section’s investigations. Therefor, Operation Cull would be an undercover operation. Scythe did not have the location of any operations, but they did receive a rough lead for the leader, who went by the guise of ‘Maller’ through a long and drawn out pornography hook-scheme. Maller was later identified as a Police Chief of a small precinct located near where the Aeon Gene Tools’ factory was located.

Operation Cull involved Sergeant Dallas McClosky acting as a newly-hired mercenary who was destined to arrive at a corporate-aligned hotel that was presumably acting as a front. Retainer Zoia Nar’Sivaro, now going by Zoia ‘Morioka by her customs, was to be acting as a ‘catch’ that the incognito Dallas was escorting in to Maller for a private showing. After successfully executing the guard capture and beginning the infiltration, things began to go wrong.

Maller, whom was thought to be only guarded by a few men and acting alone soon was found out to be working with a ring instead of a group, suddenly exposing itself to be much larger than one location. After a bad call of continuing the operation made by McClosky, Zoia was captured by the ring and Dallas called for backup upon reaching an exit.

Chief Blackspear arrived on scene, her and McClosky quickly made a rough chase of the shuttle carrying the captured Zoia towards the northern mountains but lost them after a while. Returning to Maller’s building, the two Scythe members quickly assaulted and entered Maller’s penthouse, capturing him quickly. After making a field interrogation, Scythe found that the ring was not only a sexual trafficking ring, but also a child sex-trafficking ring. Maller was shot by McClosky in a blinded rage, and Maller was killed. Scythe had the information it needed, and they had Aeon Gene Tools’ method of involvement. All that was left was to formulate a rescue. This rescue operation was quickly mustered and formed through the name of Operation Harvest Recovery.

Harvest Recovery involved an assault and capture of the Aeon Gene Tools’ northern factory. The assault was done through air assault inside the perimeter of the factory’s defenses, which from above seemed minimal. The insertion went smoothly, and the assault began. Bhelith and her retainers made tracks for the facility’s command center while Dallas and Harvest attempted to find the holding area for the victims.

As Bhelith’s team moved towards the command center, Dallas’ team reached the main floor of factory. Upon blowing the doors to the floor, they found the thing that they needed to incriminate Aeon Gene Tools, the facility’s cloning floor was being used to clone children, and with the corporation’s attachment to the child sex trafficking ring, it was now impossible to deny that Aeon Gene Tools’ wasn’t anything but a name plastered on a building.

Upon capturing the cloning floor, Bhelith’s team captured the command center. After neutralizing any resistance and declaring the facility under the Section’s command, the holding cells were located through the facility’s security console. Dallas’ team recovered an injured Zoia and departed on Chief Blackspear’s personal vessel, the Sigil. The remaining units stayed in the area to secure the facility and contact local police forces and hospitals to recover the cloned children and begin the process of documenting them and all the remainders.

Following the Aeon Gene Tools operation, Scythe entered a small lull period in operations. In this lull, it was decided that the Aeon Case was to be delivered to the Francian House in two months as a part of the method of increasing the House’s power over the growing corporations. Also in this period, Razor Squad was formed under Sergeant Dallas McClosky, bringing the number of on-call assets to fifty.

The last major operation conducted by Section Seven, Operation Liberation, was a sting on a Nekovalkyra sex trafficking ring in an attempt to destabilize the remaining links of the Aeon Gene Tools ring. Retainer Sutauto Kunio and Officer Hashimoto Nenna infiltrated the ring under the guise of a rich landowner’s sun and personal escort. The Scythe operatives liberated one Neko, Kelda, and ex-filtrated the area. Shortly after, the ring’s operation was reported to the local precincts and was shut down. Most of the Neko slaves were freed, with only a handful escaping with the ring’s masters.

With data in hand about the Aeon Ring and the details needed to incriminate the officials running it, Scythe prepared to take the fight to the House and bring out the Corporate involvement. A convoy containing forty of the fifty assets left the Scythe bunker early in the morning of the House meeting. After traveling down the main highway and entering the junction to head for the House of Francia, Corporate mercenaries created several roadblocks and engaged the Section Seven officers and officials.

At one point during the ensuing firefights and chases, the Francian Planetary Defense Forces were given orders to attack and terminate the Section Seven convoy, all of its members, and the Senator and to leave no survivors. The Scythe bunker was also targeted, and was destroyed. Section Seven escaped with ten members remaining, the rest were killed by the PDF.

A bounty was placed on each remaining member of Section Seven, number in the millions each. After disappearing from Francia, the Planetary Section Seven ceased to exist, its members listed as traitors and criminals.

Months after the Francian Escape, members of Scythe were found with another band of Nepleslian traitors, defectors from the NSS Interregnum, in a firefight with bounty hunters in a hotel on Dawn Station. Rough reports make mention of five deaths from the Scythe/Deserter side with a near total casualties for the bounty hunters.

After that altercation, the remaining Scythe members disappeared once again.