History of SLA Industries

The Big Picture:
“What is SLA Industries? The World of Progress? Well, that all depends on what I say and what I’m allowed to say. If you’ve been an operative as long as I have then you’d have seen a lot of horrible and questionable things in your time. When you join SLA, you are naive, you’ve watched the television and you think it’s all gonna be great. That’s right, it’s all gonna be fine, you’ll just do your job, get paid, get rich then retire. That’s what I thought all those years ago. I was so wrong, 1 didn’t know what I’d bargained for. You’ve gotta work hard in SLA Industries, believe it or not you’ve gotta risk your life if you want to get ahead. When you’re working for SLA Industries, you’re in with the monsters, all kinds of humans, Stormers, you name it, you’re working with it and just sometimes you’re killin’ it. Well, that’s the way I see it. I wouldn’t really advise anyone to join SLA Industries, but they still do, by the thousands.
“Listen, the World of Progress is a ruthless place and everyone’s poor and expendable. I’ve been workin’ for SLA Industries for 30 years and I still haven’t enough credit to retire.
“I love this job.”
Cobalt Ebon Investigator (Cloak Division), S.C.L. 2A, Age 52.

SLA Industries is all and everything the people living in 900sd (Standard Date) have ever known. It and it's million subsidiaries and licensed subcontractors provide the massed populations of the World of Progress with everything they could ever need, from food to entertainment to the latest fashions to military grade weapons and bioengineering and power armours. But before SLA Industries was the galaxy-spanning mega-corporation it is today, it was only one of the many competing corporations arming and profiting from the Conflict Era of the Known Universe.

But unlike every other company out there building weapons and renting out guns-for-hire, SLA Industries and it's singular ruler, Mr. Slayer had much bigger plans. They initially made their profits by the sale of superior armour and weapons to the variety of factions and alien races bent on annihilation on a galactic scale until finally, they were ready for the next stage of their plan. Overnight, the warfare of the Conflict Era changed as SLA Industries introduced to the warring factions their latest product, Stormer-313, or "Malice", a monstrous, bioengineered super soldier, vastly superior to any gene-enhanced warriors that other factions could field, and the company sold them in the millions to the highest bidders. And war in the Known Universe would never be the same, as instead of relying on each Conflict Aliens innate ferocity or technological savvy, battles were now decided on who had the most Stormer-313's armed to the teeth with the latest SLA-weaponry and gear to throw into the meatgrinders.

However, it was not the end goal of Mr. Slayer to simply elevate the level of destruction of the Conflict Era, instead he waited until there were no factions remaining that did not employ his Stormers as the mainstay warriors of their armies and finally triggered the final stage of his grand plan, the purge. What followed was a massacre of untold numbers when in a single moment, every piece of equipment, weapon or armour provided by SLA Industries ceased to function, all except the ones in Stormer-hands which were quickly turned against their masters and in a shockingly short span of time, practically every race and world involved in the galaxy-wide war was annihilated and subjugated, leaving only the bloodied armies of SLA-super soldiers standing, victorious over the crushed ruins of countless civilizations.

Thus ended the Conflict Era and in it's place, the Known Universe was rebranded as the World of Progress with SLA Industries as it's singular ruler. The surviving civilizations and worlds that had either remained neutral or had managed to survive against the myriad Conflict-aliens were offered a simple solution to accept their place in Mr. Slayer's new Big Picture, submit or die.

Mort:

Throughout the course of the Conflict Era, SLA Industries had been little more than a weapons and technology manufacturer, but after The Big Picture a whole new picture began to form. This was a business plan that would cover all aspects of life and commerce. SLA was going to take over governments, star systems and buy out and rebrand every conceivable item in the
Known Universe over a century-long mission. For a singular corporate entity to rule over all of the newly minted World of Progress, it needed a headquarters to rival, and surpass any of it's like before. And so began the construction of the Capital city-state of Mort on the jungle planet of Jeth on the first year of the now established Standard Date.

Jeth had already held the manufacturing facilities and bases of SLA Industries, hidden deep within it's endless jungles, but the new plan was to create a massive city to fuel the needs of the millions of workers SLA Industries would need to rule over their new gains and to manufacture and market their products for all of the new customers beneath it's wings. The vast forests and jungles of Jetha stood no chance against the rapacious hunger of the newly expanding company for raw building materials, first the biomass of the planet, then the minerals and oil beneath it's crust. What remained of it's seas quickly turned to bile under the exhausts and pollution of the fastest growing commercialism any planet had ever had to suffer. The air itself grew thick with dust and exhales of the planet's population, blooming from mere thousands into millions and with staggering speed, into billions as the masses flocked to the city that was dubbed, fittingly, Mort, to make new lives under the banner of SLA Industries. To power the factories reaching from horizon to horizon the company built a ring of nuclear power plants around the planet's equator.

Progress was as inevitable as the rapid climate change and string of natural disasters. The planet Jeth soon became synonymous
with its main city, the headquarters of SLA Industries. The planet Jeth became the planet Mort, like so many other things in the World of Progress, the name Jeth was lost to the aeons of time, to be forgotten by all but a few scholars and librarians.

The company stained the skies with toxic fumes and black smoke, forever damaging the upper atmosphere. In the centuries that followed, northern tundra transformed into a polluted wasteland and it would simply be known as the No-Go Zone. The pillaging was planet-wide and within six years, SLA Industries had bled the planet dry; all botanical life on the planet had been utilised until nothing remained. Jeth’s natural fauna suffered a similar fate with only a meager list of the most aggressive and adaptive species left alive. Mort would come to consider them as nothing more than mere vermin.

The Fission Belt, a gargantuan ring of nuclear reactors encompassing Mort’s equatorial line erupted to life in 80sd. The Belt’s positioning was strategic, far enough away from Mort City to mitigate radiation spill, but close enough to power Mort City and the new emerging city states across the entire globe. In 87sd, just one year after the last nuclear reactors were completed, a catastrophic meltdown occurred. A lethal gulf stream of radioactive winds encircled the planet.

In 295sd, SLA had finally destroyed the upper atmosphere of Mort and the rains began to fall. They would never cease. The
endless downpour marked the end of the Boom Times and the advent of a much darker period.

The Fall of Salvation Tower:

By this point, SLA Industries began to move much of it's production off Mort, setting up Franchise Worlds, planets that had attempted to resist the initial offer of the company at the dawn of the World of Progress only to be left out in the cold, to be freely picked apart by any number of surviving Conflict Aliens and the budding Soft Companies, competitors to SLA's rule until finally they would have to come crawling back to SLA for salvation, to be then turned into a singular purpose of manufacturing some SLA Industry- or it's many subsidiary-product. With the move of much of the heavy industry off Mort, this stranded millions of citizens with no jobs, hopefuls that had come to Mort for a place in the most powerful company in the world, only to now be left with nothing. Thus began an era of increasing crime, subversion and murder that SLA Industries finally decided to fix after realizing that their private police force, Shivers, could not control the entire monstrous city state.

The city planners chose to construct an enormous social services building in the Outskirts that would work tirelessly to improve the lives of those inhabiting these slums during the Great Downturn. The building was called Salvation Tower and it took 6 years to complete. It was the great hope of all civilians living in Central Outskirts, but almost as soon as work was completed on Mort’s second largest building, it fell, causing one of the greatest catastrophes in SLA’s history. The disaster took place on 12th November, 300sd and whilst ‘The Fall of Salvation Tower’ suggests the building toppled over completely, it simply sank several building stories into the ground beneath it, destroying many of the surrounding buildings and the substations which powered the region and provided by all manner of service such as drainage, public transport and more.

The result was a power blackout across the entirety of Central Outskirts. This was not merely a temporary obstruction but
a shut down from which the region would never recover. The event was called the Big Black. Once the Big Black lurched into being, what followed was city wide panic and rioting, as the frightened citizens of the crumbling Outskirts fled toward the safety of Mort City, but were forced back into the chaos by the Shivers rapidly cordoning off the area from the still serviced regions.

The rioting and panic in the decimated sector began to formalize and organize as even SLA Operatives stuck behind the cordon were not allowed to pass back into the larger city and fearing a subversive element being born right at their doorstep, SLA higher ups decided to fight fire with fire, and activated the long struggling Manchine-program that was to mass produce semi-autonomous robots for the rising number of War Worlds. These synthetic flesh-clad humanoid robots were sent into the sector in their thousands to cull any agitators and to crush any organized resistance. The project rapidly went off the rails when the Manchines ignored the recall orders and reports began to filter that to cover any injuries to their artificial outer skin, the machines had began skinning their victims and wearing their flesh as horrifying attempt of blending in with their victims. The Manchine-project was rapidly and quietly buried, but not before the seminal product had been activated and sent into the region, a massive, grotesque version of the normal Manchines that were only somewhat larger in normal, non-combat configuration than human males. The towering machine was over 20 feet tall and weighed several tons. The final Manchine quickly waded into the ruins to enact some secret objective and would, several hundred years later, emerge as one of the most notorious terrors of Mort, the Digger.

It was acknowledged, within days of the The Fall, that Central Outskirts would never recover from its catastrophe and what began as a makeshift defence would mark the beginning of a fortified wall which would encircle the entirety of Mort City. It was the birth of what became the Sector Wall - an enormous structure whose boundary runs for 352km and took 47 years to complete. Most Shivers in the present day contest this number, citing that it has never fully been completed, as it is always undergoing repair and modifications to bolster its defenses.

By 345sd studies of Central Outskirts concluded that the ruins were now completely devoid of human civilization; what now was scratching out a living in the remains were utterly savage and bereft of their former propriety. The once-people had now taken to eating each other in order to survive. They were now simply to be classed as exactly what they’d become: Cannibals, with the Central Outskirts becoming known as the Cannibal Sector. Years later and a variety of similar disasters later, it was renamed as Cannibal Sector 1 as further sectors were cordoned off by their own walls to fend off what ever industrial mishap or outbreak of a disease had taken place, each such region earning further numbers as the regions began to be referred to Cannibal Sectors.

Media Era Begins:

In the wake of the fall of Salvation Tower and the looming threat that the SLA executives suddenly saw in the by that point 75% of the population being unemployed, a new approach was pushed through. This was to provide every household with a television set, no charge. This new take on the problem emerged from a small study by the marketing people that showed a significant drop on violent crime and subversive activity during times when particularly popular shows were on. This lead to the rise of the Media Era as the number of channels feeding those free tv's exploded, each of them offering more and more outragous shows to compete on the attention of the consumers. Many of the shows were naturally barely more than SLA propaganda, portraying heroic SLA Operatives defeating the new wave of serial killers and the rising corporate threat of the Soft Companies, a term coined to differentiate any company other than SLA Industries that was competing for the same consumers. This lead to many of said companies to take advantage of that same media attention and to begin fighting back even more ferociously to show off their wares and services to the hordes of viewers. Some, especially Dark Night, a Soft Company previously known for flooding the civilian markets with cheap guns and their own special brand of terrorism, even began to broadcast their own programming laced thick with anti-SLA propaganda by pirating official broadcast signals.

This all allowed SLA Industries to gradually cut the levels of aid offered to the massed unemployed as many of them became practically enslaved by the television set and by now the endless stream of media that became quickly a mandated part of life within SLA Industries, new television sets not even coming with an off-switch and armoured screens and their own built-in fission batteries that could last years even if the power cord was tampered with.

Another side-effect of the new media interest was to the SLA Operatives as they became the media darlings, many of the most successful ones being permanently followed by teams of camera crew and staff to stream every moment of their investigations live. As annoyed as most Operatives were with the new incessant media presence, the mood for many was turned the moment SLA-subsidiaries began to sponsor successful or interesting Operatives. This in turn lead to more and more new Operatives that had been raised on the mandatory television presence to yearn that spotlight, to try and become famous and successful. Finally SLA Industries realized that this was beginning to hamper the investigative successes of their Operatives and yet eager to monetize on the most fascinating ones and began the Contract Circuit, allowing the most media-beloved Operatives to stop directly serving the needs of the company and instead dedicate their lives fully to become as outrageous and lethal as they could and fight each other in televised and wildly popular bouts or taking on Hunter Sheets, a new scale of missions specific to the Contract Circuit to take down the most notorious serial killers or the most dangerous Cannibal Sector monsters found too difficult for normal SLA Operatives to handle. When even this was not enough for the ravenous fans, Contract Killers were joined by Contract Hunters that would bring new and exotic dangers to Mort for the sole purpose of being murdered by the garish former operatives. SLA Industries even relented and began to allow popular members of Soft Companies to participate in the Contract Circuit.