Black Diamond Billions Hub

To properly criticize the rich, one must not look to the individual as the cause of their own behavior, nor just the systems they perpetuate of which their wealth roots from; one must instead consider both and then the sum of all history, of the cycles of heinousness and rot perpetuated throughout generations of names—they must be willing to see the wealthy as people, as people anyone is capable of becoming. Not by class ascendancy, as we all know by now the American Dream has long since left us—this is speaking to the innate corruption wealth has on the human mind, in all of the flavors of culture that capitalism has touched.

To properly criticize the rich, therefore, is to remind them that they are no more different or special than the rest of us, as violently and unflinchingly as possible, as grotesquely and ostentatiously as possible, but in a way which seeks not to satirize, but utterly realize the mundane truths of this world.

It is good to remind them that they bleed as easily as we do. It is good to remind ourselves we are capable of the same callousness, of the same cruelty. When the writer cannot deprive the rich of their money, they should instead seek to deprive them of their status as idols in society.

The educated masses will be more powerful than them.

- Anonymous

General Summary

Black Diamond Billions follows the Group of Interest known as Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. It follows the stories of those who have given their lives to the company, their inner selves, their rise to power, along with all of the people, supernatural entities, and spheres of influence they interact(ed) with, however distant or long ago it was.

This is a wide net, wider than you might imagine at first—it encompasses people as important as former Foundation Overseers to fairy kingdoms and continental dragons, all the way to those like you, a random nobody off the streets. Here, Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. control the playing board as they always have; they’re heavily interested in the new ways of maintaining the status quo as the modern world develops and paratechnology evolves, just as they’re interested in keeping capitalism the dominant economic force on Earth such that they can maintain their power.

They’re also getting into some fresh changes of management. For the first time in nearly 150 years of the company’s partnered history, a new Darke has taken up the mantle at the same time as a new Marshall and Carter. It’s time for new blood to flow and for the old to scab out; it’s time for mindsets molded by the new millennium to take Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. to new heights and horizons. These juniors are eager to surpass the the legacies of their seniors—and who’s to say they can’t do it?

It’s a high bar to rule the world and keep the gears of capitalism running, after all. There’s bodies left behind that perhaps aren’t as dead as they should have been, skeletons that have reanimated in light of extenuating circumstances and prophecies that probably need to not be fulfilled lest the company finally have to pay their taxes.

Some say Marshall, Carter and Dark Ltd. view the rich as unto ants—but what does that make them then, so high up in their ivory towers?

Select a file…

SCP-255 - To Kill An Advertiser by xexnoncores

How does one deal with unskippable ads?

SCP-6629 - A Mother’s Love Can Destroy Us All by xexnoncores

Mother knows best how to provide.

SCP-7469 - Memories Frozen in Time by xexnoncores

The snow can make us feel many things.

SCP-8525 - Santa Baby by xexnoncores and newfangler

Some people just want to go home for Christmas.

SCP-7847 - Creation Of A Tool by xexnoncores and JackalRelated

Some things are created to die.

SCP-7190 - Fresh From The Deep. by Nickthebrick1

Delicious sushi. Nothing suspicious here.

SCP-8987 - THE BROOK RUNS RED by Dino--Draws

The documentation you have selected is of historical significance to the DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY.

The six most powerful executives within Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd.

◆ Percival Atherolis Darke ◆

◇ Percival Atherolis Darke ◇

Born June 12th, 1400. Founder of MC&D Ltd., formerly Darke Trading Co. Current CEO, and (transgender) mother to Iris. Forged a contract with a “Sarkic” entity in 1416 in exchange for universe-bending thaumic power and a millennium-stretching¹ lifespan. Business-mindedly malicious, lurid europhile, and pretends to not eat people in proper company.

As enigmatic as she is cruel, Percival Darke is the businesswoman to end all businesswomen, someone who carries herself like snobbish Victorian royalty. With an eye for trade, diplomacy, capital trends, and the arcane, most would say she lacks morals, and indeed that’s true for those caught in her supply lines and on the other end of her bad moods.

But the more complicated truth is that she cares for the few she’s taken under her direct wing; she sees the flow of commerce as a gift to both her daughter and the Marshall and Carter branch of MC&D. And, as far as she’s concerned, money was invented to serve everything she’s ever created, to codify her (and Iris’s) existence at a higher level than the rest of the human race.

That isn’t to say she has a “soft side”…it’s more that there are only a few people in the world she considers either her equal or someone worth listening to, and pretty much all of them exist within her company. There’s nothing she won’t allow herself to have, the only question is whether she wants it at that particular moment.

There’s been a substantial change to her ruthless personality in the last thirty years, however. Taking care of Iris has opened up vulnerabilities Percival wants to keep buried from others, ones which she does quite well, but to say that’s a good thing…is definitely not true. Contrary to what most see her as, Percival is an unconditionally loving but extremely unrestrained mother, and this means giving Iris everything she wants (within reason when it comes to the business) out of the fear her lacking anything will bring about ruin. This means neither she nor her daughter know how to properly handle tragedy or unavoidable traumatic events…and oh boy, there’s going to be some of those. Hey, Percival, how’s your mid-life crisis going?

◆ Iris Corax Darke ◆

▬ Amos Hershell Marshall ▬

▬ Chrysophilius Scooter Marshall aka “Skitter”▬

★ Ruprecht Sidereal Carter ★

★ Robert Shahid Carter ★

Anderson Robotics

One of MC&D’s most loyal suppliers, Anderson Robotics enjoys the highest level of protection from them that any anomalous manufacturer could ever hope to achieve. What makes the partnership all the more beneficial is how loose MC&D is with approving funding for their projects; there’s rarely any oversight so long as the promise of profit has been fully conceptualized.
Though, as Anderson Robotics has grown, Chrysophilius and Iris have been more and more insistent that their products become more exclusive, their contracts signing bigger and bigger portions of control over to MC&D. This has pushed away much of their previous regular clientele, such as the G.O.C and Valravn, not just because of monetary reasons but political ones as well. Who would have guessed that selling your soul to a corporation as merciless as MC&D would have some people unhappy to work with you…

Are We Cool Yet?

Though without a centralized structure, many AWCY? splinters maintain a working relationship with MC&D, either as service providers of the arts or customers of their esoteric merchandise for their own creations. Though, who is the buyer and who is the bought is, as it is within the non-anomalous world, often split along those with means and those without. Because of the massive web of bureaucracy surrounding MC&D contractors, hired artists apart of the AWCY? movement might find themselves in more trouble than they bargained for, impoverished further than they perhaps already were if things go south. MC&D takes no responsibility for contractor safety, after all—make sure to read your contracts, kids.

Church of the Broken God

Historically, MC&D and all major sects of the Church of the Broken God have not had many face-to-face interactions, but what little exists suggests that the groups are on amicable terms, provided that they do not interfere with each other’s goals or beliefs. MC&D is content to help the Church’s practitioners slip under the nose of the G.O.C and the Foundation in exchange for intel, technology, and their members being put to work in various labs and posts around the world. The Church, meanwhile, appreciates the contributions MC&D makes to paranatural industry as a whole, with many viewing their creations as fulfillments of their beliefs. Though, there is a growing number of their constituents (mostly left-leaning Maxwellists) decrying their ethics and the methods they use to get what they want.

Dr. Wondertainment

Wondertainment's supply is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.
How the corporation remains profitable despite its eclectic and unpredictable stock is beyond even MC&D, but that doesn't keep them from taking advantage of the consistent flow of wholesale anomalies. It helps that Wondertainment Inc. enjoys the status of dealing with a higher caliber of merchant than their usual customers, although it’s obvious sometimes that MC&D doesn’t entirely understand how to work with such youthful products, and that often makes business deals more awkward than they should.
Oh well, that’s what outsourcing firms are for. And hey—everyone deserves a childhood. It's just that some can afford a better childhood than others.

PENTAGRAM

Though initially hostile towards PENTAGRAM because of its unpredictability on the world stage and volatile internal politics, MC&D has since transitioned from a complete invisibility policy to seeing them as just another client. They are, despite everything, one of the company’s more ordinary clients; a few demons for liquidation there, some radioactive fairy dust there. MC&D still prefers to be hands-off with much of their operations involving them, though, often outsourcing much of their involvement to shells and other middlemen—surprisingly, the company has a lot to lose from being directly involved with weapons manufacturing. Tenuous relationships with normalcy orgs count for one reason, the other their paranatural clientele, who often find themselves and their resources displaced in the aftermath of human conflicts and thus would become unprofitable to bargain with should MC&D seriously stick their fingers in that pie.

The Various Types of Hellspawn

It’s easier than ever to scam people into signing bad contracts. People use to seriously read, you know—now, the average person is fully willing to sign their soul away in a too-long-to-parse TOS in exchange for a phone that can curse all of their ex-partners.
For real, though—the demons within the nine circles of Hell are one of MC&D’s oldest contacts, with some working relationships that span back to the first years of Percival’s tutelage by Silas. They’re always happy to benefit physically from the sin and fear MC&D influences in humanity, whether that be from global warming, modern informational overload, or simply the fact regular CEOs seem to be making life hell for the folks who have trouble affording rent.
Within the last few decades there’s also been a new group of demonic cohorts looking to work with MC&D—the shaitan.² Empowered by the runaway sin and wealth of Dubai, they’ve since been finding themselves outgrowing their usual methods of temptation, and want more. A lot more. It helps that Robert speeds this process along, understanding of their needs and their general natures. Shaitan, after all, rarely cause the same kind of mayhem that Christian-named demons do; they are more content with owning bars, strip clubs, and casinos over trying to corrupt the world through fire and brimstone.

Complicated Investments

These can either return gains or losses…

The SCP Foundation

Despite what it may seem on the outset, MC&D considers the Foundation to be one of their greatest assets. Not only do they acquire new anomalies at a rate unprecedented to other organizations, but they also store anything they steal from the company away in clean, climate-controlled facilities for easy access later, and have the good sense to keep all of those world-altering monstrosities under the tightest lock and key one doesn’t need to spend any money on. How considerate of them!
In all seriousness, though the Foundation considers MC&D to be an organization of considerable enough resources to easily cause an XK-class scenario if they wanted to, they do not know how to entirely respond to its existence because of the secrecy of its operations and the extremely inconsistent flirtation MC&D has with their definition of the Veil. MC&D is also very unpredictable in their treatment of the Foundation and their systems of power and bureaucracy; while they are known to infiltrate facilities and bribe personnel, they have also paid large sums through shell companies and sham charities to ensure that the Foundation keeps specific anomalies and groups under control.
Because of this, there exists a strange symbiosis that blossoms between the two groups within times of crisis. The Foundation uses MC&D as their canary in the coal mine regarding phenomena affecting financial and worldly matters, seeing a significant, visible response from them as a sign something has gone horribly wrong. On the other hand, MC&D treats the Foundation like a clean-up crew when they can’t recover the losses on specific projects, such as when their lack of ethics unearths some otherworldly force they cannot bargain with, or if they accidentally create some kind of exploding clone farm that goes rogue and starts eating people.

Sarkic Cults

Although Percival and Iris are modified via “Sarkic” contracts, MC&D usually avoids dealing with neo-Sarkites due to the potential threat their practices pose to the Veil, their employees, and the stability of their supply chains. Many neo-Sarkites are also politically motivated to the point of extremism, which creates another risk to the many puppet regimes and paid-off politicians that MC&D maintains in West Asia and Eastern Europe.
Proto-Sarkites on the other hand, for as few and far-between as they are in the modern age, are seen as an asset and a resource by the company when they cooperate. Many enjoy protection from MC&D to practice their beliefs without interference either through PMCs or thaumicly established boundaries in exchange for their knowledge and occasional help with developing new products.
Percival also has a sense of nostalgia for them.

Valravn Corporation

What a sticky lot these guys are. The Valravn Corporation is much of an ally of MC&D as often as they are its enemy—if they have no loyalty except to money, of which MC&D would always be their highest bidder, why the tension?
The answer lies amidst a complicated web of political and personal reasons: MC&D more often than not wants to keep themselves hidden from many of the smaller GoIs Valravn has dealt with in the past, often due to their religious and fanatical extremism. There’s also the issue of the High Table and Percival having egos so bloated that they often find themselves succumbing to petty spats over matters of taste, culture, and general worldviews, and so far neither side has issued an apology to the other over anything they’ve said. It’s unlikely Percival ever will, either—she knows how fake their posturing is, having lived for as long as she has, and she’s not going to let a bunch of Norse-wannabe LARPers pretend they know more about Europe’s history than she does.
Oh well, at least they’re always dependable at blowing up things in Russia.

Mabian Kingdoms

Descended from the various unions of Queen Mab after she escaped that name-bound gathering of trees, the Mabian Kingdoms of Europe prove more often than not to be highly mercurial points of contact for access to the Eurasia’s various anomalous planes and locales. Their willingness to work with Percival has waned over the centuries, particularly after the 1800s when MC&D began to take on the more modern business model it knows today, mostly due to conflicts with the company’s bookkeeping practices. Being moneyless societies that operate on perpetually changing barter systems, they have so far resisted (and resented) all attempts by MC&D to introduce standardized currencies into their exchanges to make their processes more streamlined. There are numerous reasons for such rejections, from the belief in the inherent corruption of the metric system (most prefer to use British imperial measurements or local units) to numerical allergies (particularly to the numbers 0 and 8).
Despite these difficulties, they remain one of MC&D’s most valuable information brokers—in this age of technology, more and more humans are seeking out the magical and the oracle to divine meaning from the noise of their lives. That, and Percival hitching up all of their queens (long story) with suitors in time to leave the moon-bound Oberon all by his lonesome (even longer story) is a favor they’ve still not forgotten.

Great Dragons

The five Great Dragons are a group of beings whose power stems from aspects of the earth, having been alive and migrating across the continents for eons before humanity was born. Known simply by their identifiers as the Saffron, Light, Ivory, Typhoon and Void Dragons, they are massive, temperamental creatures who have become largely displaced from their original routines with the rise of mankind, even though their existence has inspired much of human folklore.
MC&D’s relationship with the Great Dragons therefore, is touch-and-go—sometimes the dragons are willing to lend their powers of blessings, other times they would rather raze down their questioner for asking. There is a large element of deception at play when dealing with them—because MC&D in the modern age sells to largely human clientele, they take great precautions to keep the dragons in the dark, and when that fails, the results are often explosive, and the losses catastrophic.
Good thing they’re quick to forgive with a good duel though.

Adversarial Liabilities

Consider it fortunate to exist.

Global Occult Coalition

MC&D and the G.O.C are diametrically opposed to one another. The former has always historically stonewalled the latter, keeping them from putting their last crucial chess pieces into play, whether it be on the world stage or in democratic policy-making. The G.O.C operates at 80% of its optimal efficiency and potential because of MC&D, and there is no sign that will let up in the near future.
Another way to describe the opposition between these two groups is that the G.O.C in are a bunch of human-supremacist conservative militarists, while MC&D operates within a wide net of liberal moralistic principles and anarchocapitalist financial philosophies. Though the groups’ material goals (normalcy, maintaining societal status quo, etc) often align, it is never intentional, and they keep an extremely unsteady relationship with each other that borders on overt hostility (most obvious in the 1990s), but occasionally slips into uneasy and short-lived alliances.
The major reason the G.O.C has been allowed to exist at the level it currently does is because of its proximity to the Foundation’s anomaly capture efforts, along with its suppression of more hostile military threats that MC&D does not consider profitable to deal with themselves, such as the Chaos Insurgency.

Serpent’s Hand

The Serpent’s Hand holds deep, ideological grudges against MC&D, both ethically and systematically. The progressive leftist ideals of many of its members and the damage MC&D has done to anomalous communities in the pursuit of both profit and the maintenance of the Veil has left the two in a perpetual war, with many Hand members considering them to be either as bad or worse than the G.O.C. This goes double because of how many view Percival, Iris and Robert to be hypocrites for their continual benefit of normalcy despite their parahuman status, while countless others less fortunate than them suffer under the crushing oppression of other normalcy organizations.
Dubbing MC&D “the merchants”, the Serpent’s Hand has made it one of their primary goals to eliminate the company for good. How successful these efforts can be called, though, largely depends on who you ask, and what time period you’re looking at, but one thing is for sure: it’s the stalemate to end all stalemates, and it’s not ending any time soon.

The Chaos Insurgency

MC&D has an extremely negative relationship with the Chaos Insurgency because of how it views the Foundation. At best, the organization is seen as an annoyance due to its meddling in Western European politics with continual attempts to promote authoritarian communist ideologies, and at worst, MC&D actively considers them a hostile threat to their operations, and treats them accordingly.
Because of the Chaos Insurgency’s lack of centralization in its leadership, MC&D rarely, if ever, deals with them head on—this means that confrontations between the groups are often messy, violent, and more complicated than they would be otherwise.

Just Girly Things

Surprisingly, MC&D and JGT have interacted before. And it sucked utterly for both. Percival finds Keelee’s status as an omnipotent, electronically-bound entity to be frustrating, while Keelee considers her to have thrown away all of the potential she ever had to be the “most handsome man in the world” by transitioning and allowing Iris to present as masculinely as she does.
However, despite being annoying and insulting the most prominent and dangerous members of MC&D to their face on multiple occasions, JGT does not pose a serious threat to them or their operations at any level. They are interested in a cultural war, not an economic one, and many of its members simply cannot compete with the intellectual resources that MC&D has at their disposal because of how narrow-minded their goals are.
Due to this, they are allowed to operate unimpeded, except where their mortal members find themselves saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

The Factory

An unknowable, unstoppable force that came into being around the time of the Industrial Revolution from the hearts of men witnessing the great power of mechanization, the Factory was once MC&D’s greatest asset, but that remains true no longer. Percival lost the ability to control and bend it to her will after WW2 ended, and with the advent of the Cold War on the horizon, she found it had subsumed too much machinery, blood, and fear from all planes of existence to be useful. It is now an abomination of technological malice that exists only to perpetuate itself and all that pollution, ruin, and rust stand for, to the shrill screech of an assembly line.
As a result, the Factory has been locked up deep within the Earth’s core behind seven hundred and seventy-seven extremely complicated sets of thaumaturgical locks, although pieces of its body still exist outside of its prison, held within MC&D’s archives for both preservation and experimentation.

Goldbaker-Reinz Ltd.

There are many reasons for Goldbaker-Reinz Ltd. to dislike MC&D. One is that Percival and Iris delight in corporate espionage, the former of whom has engaged in numerous insurance fraud schemes after learning Goldbaker-Reinz has deceptively deep pockets. Goldbaker’s animosity runs further than that, though: there is something primal, more disconcerting about the existence of MC&D that seems to threaten the concept of risk transfer all together. Percival, after all, would be content with eliminating such a thing except for where it concerns her company. And what’s worse is that her and Iris’s capabilities are always pushing models of possible and similar losses to their new extremes every day, in ways that maybe someone besides Goldbaker should be concerned about…
Goldbaker-Reinz Ltd. is also the most common group for in-house³ MC&D employees to defect to, albeit they do so with the knowledge their new insurance contracts contain a two-year period in which they must survive their former employer’s extremely aggressive assassination attempts in order to see any payout or benefits.

Those Woods Where Names Hold Power

Though the birthplace of Silas and the illustrious Queen Mab, MC&D steers heavily away from that forested clearing due to the unpredictability of its residents and the danger they pose to their less magically gifted employees. For some reason however , those who reside within where the trees grow taller than mountains seem to be more scared of Percival and Iris than they are of them…

The Wanderer’s Library

Under no circumstances are employees⁴ of MC&D ever allowed access into the Wanderer’s Library. All attempts to do so will produce violent results. The Serpent will continue to forbid their entry so long as Percival or her descendants are alive, so long as what it lost continues to be used to foot a bill of bottomless avarice.

So you wanna write for this? Great! I, xexnoncores would absolutely love that! Hit me up on the discord linked up top and we can talk about what you want to do.

Keep in mind there are five things that are crucial to writing a story for this setting.

First: characters must be written as humans first, always. Yes, we are critical of capitalism here, but writing billionaires to be mustache-twirling villains isn’t true to real life, nor is it true to the systems they mold and are a part of. Money is an invention of humans, and the way it affects humans is distinct but infinitely variable and in keeping with their personalities. Corporate structures and entities are designed to be human, after all. They’re literally, legally, in many cases referred to as such. I believe it is more natural to explain and depict capitalism as a machine made of fucked up bodies piloting an even more fucked up body than as some ruthless and unfeeling machine.
This means that you must write whatever characters in your articles with a sense of tact, and genuine characterization. You must give them likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, happy moments, and even love, maybe a little affection. Not so that they are sympathetic, but so that their money can infect them fully and truly worm its way into their minds. You must write your characters being people so that they are fully affected by the abuse that goes because of their ivory towers, the crushing of morals and souls as people are killed in an advancement up the social ladder, along with the many, many hedonistic ways the rich lie to themselves. One can only know the true depths of darkness when they understand how its light justifies itself.⁵

Second: the Veil. Black Diamond Billions is not interested in the Veil breaking, nor is it interested in a world where “normalcy” is drastically changed. Normalcy can be challenged, and it can be bent, tempted, and nearly shattered, but it is a force upon itself that insists upon itself. To have normalcy broken would be to take away the biggest factor driving MC&D’s profits through the roof, and they would rather destroy the world than let that happen.

Third: scope. Black Diamond Billion’s “scope” is that of a world which MC&D created and influences, which means you are free to depict anything you want, provided that in some way it links back to the company. Though the predominant pathos is of the corruption of wealth, it is not the only one you have to write for. There is worldbuilding, magic, and a little bit of sci-fi here, along with stories that feature only tangential links to the company. This is done on purpose to portray both the big and small ways upon which institutions like this affect people in their day-to-day lives, the interactions they have both spoken and unspoken, and the influences they hold both visible and invisible in the moment.
So do not feel like you just have to write MC&D, as in them actually doing business all the time—you are free to be as creative as you want. Just understand the world they’ve built, and how that might look, and you’re all good to go.

Fourth: time. Black Diamond Billions is not connected by a large, overarching plot the way some other series may be, but it maintains a continuity within itself that is meant to be consistent. This timeline is the primary driver of events, of both character development and world progressions, and is what to consider the most when writing a character or something for this. You must give it a time period.
Only tales and GoI formats have times attached to them, though, largely by the nature of their smaller scopes. SCPs are more loosely collected since their contents usually cover larger spans of time which cannot be easily aggregated. If a tale/GoI format features some sort of split/changing sense of time, it will be slotted into the year most appropriate for its inclusion. (If you have any questions about this, ask me.)

Fifth: business model. The Marshall, Carter and Dark of Black Diamond Billions is a small company at its core, with rarely more than 100 in-house employees at any given moment. These employees are divided into groups based on who they report to in the Designated Sextet, with each of the three pairs having different specialties in how they make their money and run the day-to-day operations of the company. There are no “departments”—everyone shares information with each other and communicates freely, though they are beholden to specific, individual requirements, and employees with similar specialties often work together regardless of who they report to. Percival has the final say on any matter involving anyone and anything.

The number of contractors and sub-contractors these in-house employees oversee through shell companies, PMCs, and supply chain bureaucracies, however, is astronomical. These efforts are helped along by the massively expansive .aic helpers⁶ the company has built to help funnel and manage this enormous volume of data, .persephone and .merlin.
The main reason the company maintains such secrecy within its operations is because almost everyone who works for or with them does not know who they are getting paid by. Many of their scouting/prospecting employees also use fake identities when dealing with clients as well, just to complicate the paper trails and hearsay testimony further.

What this means is that MC&D does not adhere to just one way of doing business. They are not just an auction house, but also a wholesaler, a contract broker, a manufacturer, a service provider, a software developer, an asset manager, an investment firm, and anything else you could possibly think of. There is no limit on what kinds of anomalies they are capable of producing and selling, no holds barred on who they offer them to and why. This multi-pronged approach may seem like it could stretch the employees thin, but on the contrary—they are never everything all at once, only what they see fit to be for whatever financial climate/clientele they are working with. This flexibility is one of the many keys to their domination, and it means that whatever you can imagine someone paying for, MC&D will do it, or they’ll find you someone under their massive umbrella who can.