Casting Shadows

The entry this week for Serial Setting 1 for Ubiquity details a quiet project of potentially destabilizing importance globally in the powder-keg environment of the late 30s, engineered in secret on the beautiful and deadly Windlet Islands. The Serial Settings series of posts is intended to provide usable setting material for busy GMs. Series 1 is for those looking to run Daring Tales of Adventure or Hollow Earth Expedition.

47) The Wright Project, Main Compound, Greater Windlet Island

Whatever else may be said about the Gast family, and Gast Procurement, waste and frivolous endeavors are not on the list of things for which they have been accused… which is why the grand experiment of the settlements and facilities in the Windlet Island chain draw such scrutiny by those magnates and potentates in the know.

The Wright Project is ostensibly known only to members of the unlisted division within Gast Procurement and Natural Resources which oversees it, but it is just large enough, and initial recruitment in the late 20s is not believed to have been discreet enough to allow the absolute level of secrecy the Administrator insists on for most of his personal projects. Named for the famous brothers, but also thought to be some kind of word play by John Gast, the project is concerned primarily with liberating natural helium from underground pockets on the main island and Lysette Isle and storing the noble gas for purposes which have not yet been disclosed to anyone within the division. Assumptions have been made that the stockpile is for future business use, and relates in some way to the Administrator’s penchant for Airships, but at this stage, that is all guesswork. The US stance on refusing to sell Helium, and the hunger of German firms and governmental sources to obtain it, casts a very serious pall over this project.

Great care is being taken to preserve and obtain every possible amount of helium to be found in the region, and at present, no expense is being spared on equipment, training and vetting staff, and maintaining secrecy.

What will happen with the stockpile, and the Administrator’s goals for the division, remain to be seen.

Usual Suspects: Rickman Sturgeon

Sturgeon is officially a mid-level administrator within the accounting department of Gast Procurement & Natural Resources, but is actually the project coordinator for the Wright Project. He is a Canadian in his mid-forties, with an eclectic background in various Earth Sciences, an advanced degree in Economics, and a terribly disturbing glass eye.

Athletic, and quite an outdoorsman, he does not remind anyone of an accountant. He seems more like professional wrestler, or big game hunter. Conversation with him, even in short snippets, will leave an irrevocable sense of a boring, and meticulous man, gifted with and obsessed by numbers.

Sturgeon has a solid build on a large frame, and is known to have entered college on a sports scholarship. His brown hair has been receding since then, and has almost made a complete tactical withdrawal to the back of his head. Its next move is anyone’s guess. Lately, his hair has begun to grey, which serves to enhance his looks rather than age him.

His most identifiable trait is to regularly and routinely check his pocket watch, an overlarge, metal affair before doing anything, and every 30 minutes on the dot. Locals quip that it checks with him for the correct time.

Rumours: Heard among Company staff mainly

None.