Cardinal Holdings

A Home to Art on the Edge of the Old World

Table of Contents

History

Administration

Commerce

Races

Culture

Special Locations

Organizations

Settlements

People

Timeline

Known for its bizarre Holy Roman Empire-style arrangement of comparatively tiny city-states, each with their own CEO, led by an imperial council of the most profitable corporations of the region, Cardinal Holdings claims the title for the most vicious in-fighting of corporate entities in the New World. Subterfuge, espionage and assassination are all part and parcel for business in the region. This constant corporate in-fighting has unwittingly created a huge undercity society, with vast smuggling networks, sizable Wukong conclaves and an expansive Gobbo population drunkenly sunbathing on the streets and landing pads of the megacities. The ever-growing undercity society coupled with the bickering corporate population makes Cardinal Holdings the home city for a huge majority of adventurers.

History of Cardinal Holdings

The origins of Cardinal Holdings is strongly based on what came before the great relocation. The European Continent invested heavily into the bunker network, given the extensive underground systems already existing in their own nations, but could not build them from scratch as their north american counterparts, and so had to build on older designs, closer to the surface and less stable in their construction. They also couldn't build for as many, and so many of the millions meant to go into shelter below ground found themselves forced above it, and quickly resortedto corporate servitude as an alternative to death by the changing climate during the great relocation. The multitude of cultures and companies all condensed in the northern regions of the continent, around the baltic sea, abandoning those who lived beneath. When the bezosphere launches began, as well as the vast starting constructions of Nazzdack, the corporations of the former european continent found themselves in the uncomfortable position of lagging behind the rest of their competitors.

Cardinal Holdings began life as a desperate attempt by various smaller corporations from finding themselves being bought up by the more aggressive and established conglomerates. The Cardinal Holdings Company was a single holding entity responsible for the collective stock of several thousand individual corporations, utilizing them on various levels of the various megacity sites that were going up. The structure was intended to keep any one CEO or Director from assuming direct control, and in turn, insure every corporation could succeed in a very free and competitive environment, avoiding the stagnation other territories were sure to experience in the buying frenzies that consumed them. In practice, while full mergers were difficult to orchestrate, buying companies and turning them into subsidiaries wasn't. Soon a corporate hierarchy began to emerge, the great wide sweeping field of Cardinal Holding's enormous board losing direct ownership over individual companies as the various buyouts occurred.

During all of this Cardinal Holdings iterated strongly on the original prototype mega cities. Where other territories out and out abandoned theirs, Cardinal Holdings has a long tradition of constant construction. When a new spire goes up, operations are moved to it from one of the older ones, and the old one torn down or upgraded. This gives the Cardinal Holding megacities a much larger appearance than they actually have, as the older megacity spires, uninhabited except for automated construction workers and security crews, crowd the skyline. In this way, Cardinal Holdings has maintained most of its oldest cities, their names changing with time and rebranding initiatives, though they are utterly unrecognizable from what they once were. The undercities and datacenters quickly found themselves breaching into the expanded networks of the bunkers, and unleashing the horrors from within. Adventurers from the rest of the world flocked to them, ready to pillage and take the largest concentration of media caches available anywhere in the world. In return, the executive population of Cardinal Holdings saw a sudden uptick in ELF treatments, as ELFs from Nazzdack with more of a mind towards 'high art' and 'ancient culture' began to migrate to Cardinal Holdings, trading their knowledge of the treatment and stolen Nazzdack secrets for shares in the best companies. In short order almost all of Cardinal Holdings executive class were ELFs.

Together, the corporate bylaws of the holding company, the constant flux of renovation and change of the cities, the access to the bunker networks, and the ancient grudges of their elven leadership all pull together in a morass that has changed Cardinal Holdings from a chance to avoid the stagnation of other corporate territories into a constant whirlwind of corporate intrigue and backstabbing, low key warfare, gang violence, unscrupulous adventurers, all painted under the guise of high culture, evocative art, and changing fashions. This has prevented them from expressing a focused global effort to secure market share, and almost all of their economic force, until recently, has been focused on internal trade and manufacturing, with the diverse industrial base being leveraged to fill in gaps in the global supply chain at need.

Since the rise of the netsucker matriarch Mama Rei, this has begun to steadily shift. Her aggressive tactics, genius for corporate politics, and her highly selective conversion of key brain-trust figures and researchers to her netsucker dynasty has lead to the corporate constellation she controls steadily adding new stars to itself, and gaining more and more market share. Already her companies oversee more floors in more megaspires than any other corporation in Cardinal Holdings, and show no sign of slowing down. Where they take control, industries are shifted, market goals focused, and Cardinal Holdings finds itself more and more focused on the world of high fashion, art, cosmetics, and fashionable genetic and cybernetic operations, sacrificing flexibility of market for greater niche penetration.

Administration and Structure of Cardinal Holdings

Cardinal Holdings corporate bylaws and structure follow a strict hierarchy on the best Nazzdacking and shareholder approved practices. With one single, solitary, exception. The process of approving mergers is so incredibly intensive, prolonged, and labyrinthine that even ELFen lifespans are hard pressed to see it through if everyone plays by the book. It is often easier to force another company into becoming a subsidiary than in engaging in a full blown corporate merger, making acquisition of smaller companies tenuous and allowing them to often trade hands easily. The only way to effect a merger in truth is, effectively, to not only kill literally every single rival manager in the corporation after making them sell their shares and positions to your own board, or to bankrupt them so thoroughly that those people have no choice but to do so.

Each corporation has it's own board, with a director who sits upon the board of the company that owns the smaller company. In theory, they also sit on the Cardinal Holding's board of directors as well, but in practice their 'votes' are instead held by the overarching owner of the largest corporations owned by a single particular constellation. Attempts to circumvent this process are inevitably met with hardline intra-corporate warfare and downsizing. The votes on the cardinal holding's main board are weighted based on market share, and until recently, no single board member of Cardinal Holding's main board has ever possessed enough market share to take the vaunted president of the board position of the entire company, instead, a series of ineffectual, limp-wristed fools and toadies has held the position, picked not because they were favored for their skill, but for their inability to reign in the others. This situation is swiftly changing, as Mama Rei's market share grows ever more potent, and all attempts to assassinate her fail with the assassins often turned into bimbofied milk maniacs for their trouble.

Commerce of Cardinal Holdings

The chief benefit of Cardinal Holding's location is easy access to the most built up and wide spread portion of pre-relocation industrial society still readily available to land access that has not been impacted by sea level rise or made inaccessible by hyperdesertification and intense heats. These ruins of the far western side of the All-Gobi have been picked clean over the last 400 years, but new ones are still found quite frequently among the various peaks and dunes of the territory. Adventurers from all over come here, and the place is by and large considered the adventuring capital of the Atlantic half of the new world. This meme-granted wealth is part of what has allowed it to remain such a fractious and disorganized territory without a specific market niche to dominate, a situation that Mama Rei is swiftly changing.

Their major income sources are as follows:

Cardinal Holdings has special trade relations with the following Territories:

The diverse industrial economy of Cardinal Holdings is being shifted to a much more narrowly focused set of industries. This allows it to finally, after 400 years, begin to make inroads into actual global market share. The board of directors is terrified, because this market share almost exclusively pours into the companies operated by Mama Rei and her cronies, but the shareholders who possess the stocks to Cardinal Holdings are ecstatic, and more than willing to remain outside the situation since for the first time they might have a chance at snagging a spot on the long queue to the Bezosphere.

Prominent Races of Cardinal Holdings

Culture of Cardinal Holdings

The culture of Cardinal Holdings is hard to nail down. It shifts with the tides of fashions and fads, and from spire to spire and floor to floor even you have radically different subcultures, cliques, clubes, and fashion trends. Self expression, even if only to the degree of wearing a colorful tie or some interesting hair clips to work, is the norm in Cardinal Holdings. Others find their ways of expressing themselves through their online avatars, fanfiction writing, art, music, or tagging structures. All of this creates a chaotic mishmash of people jumping bandwagons and hopping back and forth on what interests them and how they show it off.

What is consistent in Cardinal Holdings, and always has been, is the importance of appearances. Everything comes down to how hot you are, how nice your clothing is, whether you're in the newest trends or bucking them deliberately. In the professional and executive floors, this comes down to brand clothing, how you present yourself, the designs of what you make and presentations you show to the higher ups, in the lower floors, it can be far more varied, from picking your own wardrobe to look amazing, to the types of cybertats you've got flowing across your skin today rather than yesterday. Different groups place different levels of importance on different ways of looking, and it creates a riot of color and appearances that is hard to find anywhere else in the world.

This creative and looks focused culture also leads to vast levels of consumerism and media consumption. You have to know what the hot new look is, who's not in on it, who is, and what you're gonna have to buy to get into the new trends, or what you'll have to change about yourself to do so. This in turn leads to a gossip atmosphere second to none anywhere in the world, with the various highly competitive corporations eagerly using the media system to lambast their rivals, to make them, and by association, their products look like yesterday's news and out of touch with the latest trends and fashions.

Interestingly, while Cardinal Holdings Executive class are up there with Nazzdack in how dedicated to the games of corporate politics, wealth acquisition, and exploitation of the working class, the undercities are unusually rebellious and fractious, perhaps influenced by the proximity of Calico Redistribution and the lack of overall control Cardinal Holdings can exert upon the undercity population given how utterly dedicated to opposing one another the management is. This doesn't stop them from exploiting the undercity populations, but it does mean they have to be sneaky about it, focusing on finding things that the undercity populations would gladly do for free, and think they're winning just by being paid the pittance of scrip they are afforded in the first place. Creative types in all sorts of industries make up the widest base of such workers.

Special Locations of Cardinal Holdings

Cardinal Holdings has been held by too diverse interests, with too many competing types of businesses, without a central market share focus for it to have developed many types of locations that aren't common in other territories, at least, on a territory wide scale as opposed to each individual megacity

Organizations of Cardinal Holdings

Cardinal Holdings is filled with a diverse number of organizations, the constant flux of byzantine corporate politics, migrations between spires, and fads of fashion leading to a constant churn of groups ascending, falling, and adapting.

Settlements of Cardinal Holdings

The settlements of cardinal holdings are never static, all of them in a constant state of rebuilding, renovation, and reconstruction, giving them an unfinished, constantly developed look, and ensuring that only megaruins have anything that looks more than a century out of date. Every inhabited spire of Cardinal Holdings is less than a century old, even if it's foundations date back to the original great relocation.

People of Cardinal Holdings

The people of Cardinal Holdings are varied and colorful, with a vareity of motives and drives, from high to low. The only thing that's for certain is that you'll never forget a Cardinalian after you meet them.

Historic Events of Cardinal Holdings

List of Historic Events

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