The Merchant's Association: A faction for all three periods.

[mech798]

Normally, organizations are either allies or enemies to the good guys— not both. I decided to try my hand at making a third party that could be both.

Introduction:

The Merchants Association was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Rain of Death—while most of humanity died, more than a few wealthy businessmen escaped—they had forewarning, due to their connections, enough to realize that living in a major city was a bad idea. While the rest of humanity was blissfully unaware, they were stocking shelters far away from the centers of population—long before the rest of mankind looked up into the sudden shadow cast by over four million warships and realized that the UEG had been rather less than honest about their enemies.

Many of these men died— nobody had expected what was coming, but others survived, along with many of their employees and hangers-on, and they retained a great distrust for the UEG. Still, they had to work with them if the world was to survive, and so they did, but as they did, they also secured their own security and plotted to ensure that they would never be in such a position again.

And to do that, they had to assist in rebuilding humanity. They did not have robotechnology, or protoculture, (at first), but they knew how to organize and had supplies of medicine, food, and other materials. Within a few months, small settlements had grown up around their refuges, people filtering in as they heard that there was help here.

But these leaders (the nucleus of what would become the Council) knew that much more could be—had to be— done. Simply helping those who came to them was not enough, and building a empire would merely lead to them becoming just one more warlord. Eventually, they reached out to their compatriots, and one year after the Rain of Death, met in the Ruins of Las Vegas.

Here, over the course of a week, the group, now calling themselves the Council, reached several conclusions.

1. The UEG had failed and was continuing to fail to provide effective relief activities, with vast numbers of refugees existing as barely more than destitute nomads. Macross city might look like a shining example of recovery, but twenty miles outside of the city borders there were people living in caves.

2. The UEG was focused on battling the zentraedi and preparing for potential invasions, leaving many regions more or less on their own. Most importantly, the best and the brightest in the UEG were generally sucked up by the military components, leaving most civil officers to be chosen from what might optimistically be called the less skilled.

3. The groups represented here, could, if they pooled their knowledge and resources, start to rebuild many communities far quicker than the UEG could, while not openly challenging the UEG.

4. Such was not simply a moral demand—everyone here enjoyed the finer things in life, and living the lifestyle of a bandit king, or a military functionary, was not what they desired. For fine entertainment and wine and the better things that wealth could obtain to exist, there had to be a civilization that support such wealth.

5. The destruction of the zentreadi had proven that any tightly organized group was vulnerable— the UEG’s leadership had been in what they thought was the safest part of the planet. In addition, were the UEG to ever take action, a highly centralized organization would be vulnerable. The Council would coordinate, but the Merchant’s Association would be decentralized as much as possible, with subordinates given great authority within certain limits. In that way, losses could be mitigated and flexibility enhanced.

6. The Merchants Association would not directly challenge the UEG, nor would it act as a direct ally to enemies of the UEG. However, neither would it refuse to deal with such groups, although the meeting agreed that certain items, such as WMD’s, whether biological, chemical or nuclear in nature, would not be stockpiled, sold or used, in order to avoid a potential conflict.

After the meeting, the Council broke up, each group working out it’s part of the long-range plan. Well equipped (and armed) scavenger teams were sent out to ruined cities and zentraedi wrecks, obtaining everything from clothes to mecha. Workshops and small factories were built, using this salvage, and soon the first products were provided—the wedge in the door that the Merchants’ Association hoped would make them great.

The Containerized Farm:

One of the great problems many settlements faced was farming— even in those regions not poisoned by nuclear radiation, dust clouds from the bombardment could smother new crops. In other places, the destruction of poisoning of local waterways made farming difficult or impossible. Even in those regions where zentraedi ships had led to a resurgence of local life (see below), it could be difficult to run a farm in the face of pests and predators.

The Merchants Association provided a system of high-intensity lighting, tied to a solar power cell system, that would power a hydroponic farm that would be able to grow a large number of plants, ranging from lettuce to potatoes, in an enclosed, water efficient chamber. For those who already had buildings or mine shafts handy, the Association provided the “Fixings” for these indoor farms that they could later set up.

AS a first product, it was brilliant— every settlements that had been subsisting on UEG rations (generally given other, unprintable names), immediately became a fan of the Association when the first newly grown lettuce touched their lips. As for the UEG, it provided the Association (when it could) with transport, due to the benefits of the farms and the obviously inoffensive nature of the association.

That confidence would not last.

The next invention of the Association was the road train and Venturer model ground vehicles. Large, powered by salvaged protoculture generators from the zentraedi wrecks, these big vehicles could negotiate much of the wasteland, bringing food, water and spares to isolated settlements. Less expensive (and capable of carrying more cargo) than most aircraft, the Association’s ground fleet, both those directly affiliated with them and those that had been sold to other groups, started to knit the far-flung settlements together, while becoming a target for bandits and rogue zentraedi alike.\

During this period, until 2014, the Merchant’s Association spread, with its major leaders each choosing a central location from which to establish their own networks or businesses. Usually, this was co-located with a crashed zentraedi warhsp, as the Association was a major salvager of zentreadi warships. Much of that material was transferred to the UEG, however, the best was kept with the Association. In addition to providing resources, the vast spaces within the buried ships provided a secure space for settlements and even entire factories.

Most importantly, the factories were hidden from casual eyes— the UEG would have been surprised to note how many engineers that Association had managed to hire away from them, and while not directly striking at the UEG, the Association was completely willing to work supply other groups, such as the EBSIS and anti-unification rebels, in addition to the various warlords that were staking their claim. Suspiciously well engineered “technicals” started to appear, such as old tanks refitted with better armor, and modified zentraedi weapons in place of obsolete human weapons.

The Association did not directly sell to zentraedi malcontents— after all, the giant warriors were just as hostile to the Association as they were anyone else, but they did sell to groups that were hostile to the UEG. The appearance of glaug units refitted for micronian control led to the UEG demanding that the Association cease any such work and turn over all “illegal” technology to the UEG.

But, the Association had two defenses against this.

The first was legal. The UEG in many cases was asserting the right to control lands that were not a part of the UEG, and were not defended by the UEG— surely, it was not demanding that humans be rendered defenseless? As for the claim that the UEG represented all of the earth, the Association’s lawyers (and more importantly, paid reporters) pointed out that many regions had not seen a voting booth since the rain of death—although they had seen taxation and demands for resources. Macross city might be a gleaming structure, but it was fueled by extorting goods and resources from people who were still living in shattered buildings and wrecked ships.

If the Association overstated its point, there was enough truth in it to provide them with allies, some of them in the UEG government itself. The Nascent Army of the Southern Cross, for example, had more than a few officers who remembered just how little assistance they received during the desperate conflicts with the zentraedi, while more than a few communities looked to their containerized farms. Some UEG PR officials grumbled that those farms had been designed as much for their PR value as their ability to feed the hungry.

Even so, the UEG could have crushed the Association— to be blunt, more than a few officers were quite willing to prove the Association’s claims of lawlessness correct, reasoning that legal documents weren’t effective against veritechs. But The Association was spread out and decentralized, with no single HQ that could be taken down, and an attempt to destroy the Association as a group would not only likely be fruitless, but would also drive even more settlements and nations into the arms of the anti-unification groups and the EBSIS. With much grumbling, and threats of what might happen, the UEG pulled its horns in, while the Association continued to provide the people what they needed to defend themselves…and some warlords or leaders what they needed to secure their position. After which, if they found themselves indebted to the Association—well, that would only be natural.

Towards the end of the malcontent uprising, the Association revealed its first purpose built mecha, the M1 infantry unit and the M2 command unit. The two designs were clearly related to the zentreadi regult and glaug, though somewhat smaller and their simple, effective design became very popular among wealthier nations and the EBSIS and its allies. If the UEG had not been fully involved with preparing for the Pioneer expedition, there likely would have been a serious move against the Association, although the Association helped calm matters by only selling to groups that were unlikely to “lose” their mecha to renegade groups. On the other hand, various “commerce protection units” that had been established to protect the Association started accumulating these units, replacing older RDF cast offs or salvaged zentraedi kit (with the exception of some modified female powered armor and Gnerl units). The fact that many of the soldiers of these units were zentraedi, and curiously reticent about their origins was politely ignored. If they were former malcontents, at least now they were behaving, and nobody wanted to risk sparking off another major conflict. The UEEF was fully occupied with the “minor disputes” over the Pioneer Mission, and neither group had any political capital to expend on a bunch of businessmen who were as involved in trading luxuries as they were mecha. For that matter, Association contracts had helped to supply some of Leonard’s forces while the rest of the UEG claimed they could not assist him.

[taalismn]

Kinda reminds me of a more globalized version of the old 1st ed. Mercantile Republic.

[mech798]

To some extent, though I don't hae any of the original material for it. (Where was its write up put?).

But the main difference is I wanted to aovid the "This is team evil." Parts of the Association sell mecha to enemies of the UEG--who may or may not be bad guys, but other parts of it sell farms, medical tools, etc, which may mean that the PC's can't just fly in and blow things up.

[Chris0013]

All I can remember about the Mercantile Republic (or was it Merchant Republic) were some references that were never fully fleshed out.

[mech798]

The Southern Cross Era.

The Southern Cross era was both a golden time and a time of shrinking authority for the Association. On the one hand, unlike the UEG under the leadership of Gloval and the Hunters, the Southern Cross and new UEG was content to accept the Association as a legitimate “non-geographic domain.” Put simply, even though it didn’t have a single nation or physical location, the Southern Cross treated it as a nation. On the other hand, this required the Association to make certain that it did not do anything that would seem a threat— and with growing peace and prosperity, there were more competing powers than ever before.
The Association continued its work in stripping and discovering old zentreadi hulks, but fewer people were willing to live there and so the Association started to hold some hulks in suspension, locating them but not stripping them, in order to keep a “soft” market from collapsing—and, it was said, waiting for a time when they could dispose of the equipment to independent baronies and nations without the Southern Cross noticing. The M1 and M2 mechas were now one of the Association’s main military products, with the EBSIS a major customer for many items.
It was during this time that the Association’s industrial might competed with other companies for a slice of the Southern Cross’s need for combat units. The VA-3 CAS veritech and the heavy combat hover bike were the first two transformable mecha offered by non-UEG companies (save for some rumored veritechs built by anti-UEF rebels before the arrival of the zentraedi). However, the Southern Cross turned both models down, the VA 3 because of its size and the combat bike because it was seen as being too similar to the hover tanks that were coming into service and thus redundant. As a condition of being allowed to participate in the design competition, the Association had agreed to not market these units to any other group, and they held to this, though some of their commerce protection units made use of these units.

The New Generation Era

The Association was smashed, like nearly every other large force, during the Invid Invasion. Many of their central factories were destroyed (or had been destroyed in the second Robotech War), and those units that joined in fighting the Invid were obliterated. However, the decentralized nature of the Assocation aided it. Many abandoned zentraedi ships were used as shelters for civilians, while those that had been taken over by the association as factories and storage points were, in many cases, missed by the Invid, protected by dozens or hundreds of meters of earth, and immune even to the Invid’s sensors. While they no longer were able to contact each other, the various sub divisions of the Association were capable of operating on their own.
In many cases, they did not directly oppose the Invid. With access to stores of protoculture, repair equipment and in some cases, manufacturing systems, the scattered installations of the Association worked to support freedom fighters, providing them with assistance, while also aiding local human settlements. In some cases, they played a dangerous game, cooperating with the Invid while covertly providing resistance forces with aid—while in other places a thankfully small number of Association organizations actively worked with the Invid, tricking resistance groups into traps.
With the ultimate defeat of the Invid, the Association once again could come out into the open—but what little unity it had enjoyed was forever gone, as the various groups started to stake out their claims to the new Earth, a quest that would keep them busy, sometimes opposing and sometimes working with the UEEF for the next 20 years.