Her public-access abstract reads as follows:
“Z” or “Zip”, as her friends call her, is scouting this galaxy as part of a mapping campaign. She spends most of her time studying, trying out new ships, and enjoying life as a social butterfly. What has she found all the way out there on the edges of colonized Space?
Z’s father is what the Amarr call a Holder, and she grew up around successful landowners like him who were talented at managing their slaves without incident. She learned about the Amarr beliefs from some of them, even though the center of that empire was fairly far from her family home. While she might mention him and the others who raised her, Z keeps her family and friends private.
Traveling with a slaver to help her when transporting new and recovered slaves, those who don’t know her or this might assume the man with her is a bodyguard or capable-looking friend. They tend to speak casually to each other, giving nothing away, sometimes even in local accents, blending right in. You might only ever see her or him become stern and intimidating when a new-capture aboard their ship gets out of hand, though Z, at least, does her best to be clever, eloquent, and graceful, disarming such people with her charm and empathy instead.
While she has many passions, interests, and hobbies, reuniting kidnapped slaves with the Masters they miss is one of her favorites. Not all slaves long to be freed. Some were not liberated, but ripped from their families, destinies, and callings, denied their submissive nature, which she, when she can, restores.
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Sounds innocent enough for an Amarr Holder, right?
Kingdom Khanid is in its namesake region of a dozen constellations. Dozens of solar systems and hundreds of planets and moons there play host to hundreds of billions of people. There is a lot going on.
The Dark Amarr there, as they are called, sometimes earn that moniker many times over. Most were simply there when the heir who separated from the rest of the Amarr empire triggered much of this, so the majority of the people living in the dozens of solar systems of this region of the galaxy are normal and innocent. Then there are those who ‘steered into the skid’, those who figured, ‘Well, if they are already thinking of us that way, why not give them more of a reason?’
One of the large families that manages various businesses, including one for human trafficking, in this part of New Eden goes by the surname Prime. The Primes are comfortably in that category; they are those who don’t mind having the kind of reputation which attracts all the clients more willing to pay ‘under the table’ for whatever can be arranged beyond the detection of any law enforcement or taxation agencies. If there’s something you want that others don’t want you to want, and if the Primes can’t directly get it for you, they probably know someone who can.
Their latest family members include a one Zedicon. While she dresses well and minds her manners, always appearing proper and professional, quiet and perfectly inconspicuous, Zedicon is a professional and seasoned slave hunter, a smuggler, and much more. She is the pride of her generation of the Prime family, and has begun to fall into favor with the Khanid royals, having been such a reliable ‘getter of things’ in their territory for half a decade and counting, carrying on the proverbial torch from her father who used to be such a person for them.
Zed’ is well known in a growing number of taboo places across New Eden, as her tastes are about as eclectic and shameless as it gets. You name it, she has probably tried it. On almost every flight, even into Amarr territory, she makes time to indulge and sample even more.
Coming from the fringes of Amarr Space, she is afforded some measure of leniency when it comes to deviancy from what the True Amarr consider to be sacrosanct and mandatory for life; as long as she follows their rules and behaves in accordance with their social norms while she is around them, what they don’t know about her doesn’t hurt them. If she had been born and raised on Amarr Prime, this would have been different. Zed’, however, grew up with slavers and pirates mixed in with all her normal friends and family, so she is able to be a living bridge between both those demographics, ‘dark’ and ‘light’, civilized and barbaric, thus both of them often contract with her when they cannot be seen going directly to each other.
Most of the time she travels by humble shuttle, and those shuttles pass any EDENCOM scans. Every once in a while, though, and entirely randomly, she’ll be hauling billions of ISK worth of blueprints or other valuables, and/or a variety of slaves, beasts, and illegal drugs. Sometimes she picks them up just to add to her family’s collection of novelties back home, deep in Khanid Space, far enough from the empire that no one will ever really care or be able to stop her.
It has been said that the Primes likely now have at least one of every illicit substance and enslaved race there is in New Eden. They also have a growing collection of ships, one of their goals being to eventually have at least one of every class and model. This includes one known luxury yacht, upon which they have thrown parties so wild that some people, no matter how rich and connected they are, just don’t dare accept the invitations.
While the slaves owned and traded by the Primes will tell you how well they are treated by them, it would not be far-fetched to consider the possibility that the Primes dabble in everything ‘dark’ there is, genuinely kind and protective of their living property along with all the rest, but equally openminded and experimental without the slightest shred of second-guessing or shame. If there was any advanced science bordering on magic or the shadow arts, and completely controversial in every colonized world, the Primes would be looking into it, seeing if there was any truth or usefulness they might profit from.
If you meet any of the Primes, it will likely be on one of their modest shuttles, or at any of their normal-looking ranches. You will likely be waited on by one of their slaves serving as a waiter or waitress, then treated to a luxurious suite all to yourself for as long as you choose to stay. Unless you ask specifically for any of their secret stuff, it would be virtually impossible to deduce, let alone detect; they never offer it on their own, and only to people they trust –and have run beyond-government background-checks on.
Nervous about them? Don’t be; they will treat you like royalty or even a deity when you arrive, and wouldn’t dream of harming a hair on your head –unless you tried to harm one of them or theirs first. This is a big part of how they are able to get away with so much; they are nice to everyone, honoring their word and contracts, doing everything they can to make their friends and customers happy, and happy neighbors and partners almost invariably trust them… and look the other way.
What started off as just one small household on an arguably no-name backwater garden world… has, over the decades and generations, been built up into a miniature business empire spanning much of the Khanid region and far beyond. The only thing the Primes haven’t amassed yet are Titans of their own –and, believe me, they have looked into it. You might never have heard of any of them or those ventures, as the Primes avoid all patrolled routes and wars, but they are out there… and you have probably benefitted from one of their trades or operations without even realizing.
To the Amarr, they arrive and appear to be devout members of the faith. To the Caldari, they are enjoyable negotiators of deals big and small. The Gallente think they are wholehearted supporters of their utopian federation of inclusiveness and hedonism. Minmatar have routinely been helped by the Primes to establish more self-sustaining farms and homesteads, so they would never believe that they also use these visits and charity projects in Minmatar territory to find and recover slaves that did not wish to be ‘liberated’ and evacuated to there. All of these families and others know them by different names, fashions, accents, and ships, and each would describe the Primes differently if ever asked, making them very difficult to track or anticipate.
In total today, there are a few hundred Prime family members, and they employ a few thousand free people, altogether owning perhaps a million slaves spread out across dozens of the worlds they do business on and between. It comes out to about 21,000 slaves per world, that then subdivided across the ranches and other facilities of those worlds, always proportionately with the work needing to be completed at them. Some of the Prime facilities have a thousand slaves working there, while others have only a hundred or even fewer, and each Prime house or homestead typically has about a dozen.
Impressively, they have never had any of their slaves try to escape, and none would report any feelings of fear or hopelessness; they stay because the work isn’t that bad, and their living quarters are comfortable. They also aren’t split apart from their loved ones –at least until or if they are traded or sold. You might not even realize you are encountering one; they are not kept in cages or fenced areas, nor are they chained together, and their collars and other identifiers are very tastefully subtle, sometimes fully concealed under normal attire, or made to look like a fashionable accessory –and many of the wearers are proud of having earned them, as the Primes do not accept anything but impressive people into their fold.
One secret goal of the Primes is to own at least one person from every planet and moon in New Eden which has people on it (even the worlds in Jove Space, if ever anyone could get to them), and from every Space station (including those in worm-hole Space), so long as they can find the ones who wish to be that submissive; enslaved. You might be surprised how many people are into that sort of subculture. It has been bred into the masses since the dawn of time, you know… (You also might be surprised that some of their slaves are allowed to continue living and working abroad, perhaps staying on the Space stations they were found within, not unlike a ‘mole’ or ‘sleeper cell’, though the Primes are not involved in espionage.) Food for thought.
You’ll find Zed’ just shuttling about between the couple hundred or so systems she has now been to, checking out their most interesting specialties whenever she isn’t recovering (re-liberating or un-liberating, as she calls it) any of her family’s ‘lost’/’stolen’ slaves. She isn’t one of the former military service members of her family or its business partners who are working toward that secret goal of theirs, though. If you see anyone boarding or inside one of her shuttles, that’s because they already knew and worked for the Primes –whether as property or not.
Is it so difficult to believe that a gentle girl who grew up on a farm and went to a normal city school turned out to be like this? And, since she has, how many other normal-acting people out there are perfectly concealing secret free-time activities comparable to hers? I guess we’ll never know.
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