The Crew | Factions (Corporations: The Board, Auntie Cleo's, Spacer's Choice, C&P Boarst Factory, MSI), SubLight Salvaging & Shipping, Iconoclasts, Other Groups: Groundbreaker, Deserters, Gorgon, Eridanos, Marauders, Outlaws | Other Characters
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Auntie Cleo's
In General
Better Than Nature!
A subsidiary of Kolway Pharmaceuticals, one of the major corporations operating in Halcyon. Auntie Cleo's specializes in providing food and pharmaceuticals.
- 100% Completion: Given the extremely narrow narrative window the player has to interact with this faction, the opportunities to cozy up to Auntie Cleo's are aggravatingly slim. It can be outright impossible to max out reputation with them if the player either steals any of their research to pawn off to Gladys, or even if they just explore Roseway thoroughly without interacting with Crane first to get the context of the place since he'll be the one to tell you that killing the raptidons in their research facilities will not endear you to his employers.
- Animal Testing: The Auntie Cleo's research lab at Roseway has a fortified lab where they're experimenting on a pack of raptidons... in order to perfect a new line of dental gel. Which is to say toothpaste. Diet toothpaste.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Auntie Cleo's takes Green and bright red as her colors, and all her guards and scientists wear some version of it on their gear.
- Evil, Inc.: They're a unique example of this. Most of the corporate evil in the system is largely explainable by Hanlon's Razor, with a mix of idiocy and short-sighted greed. Auntie Cleo's are not idiots. They've come to the rational conclusion that their workers are going to starve to death anyway, and intend to make as much profit off of their deaths as possible. In the meantime, they don't kill their employees randomly or out of incompetence; they murder under-performing divisions to encourage the survivors.
- Evil Plan: They're manufacturing diet toothpaste with an appetite suppressant so they don't have to feed their workers.
- Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Most of their employees have one of these.
- Mad Scientist: Subverted. It's mentioned earlier that crops imported from Earth do exist in the system, so it would appear that their insistence on trying to mine some utility out of the hostile and uncooperative flora and fauna of Halcyon is the company either being filled with these or corner-cutting cheapskates. The endgame reveals that this is done out of desperation rather than decadence, as not only are the Earth crops warped by Halcyon soil, but humans can barely ingest any nutrition from the system's plantlife.
- My Beloved Smother: The insane advertising version of one. All of their ads have this cloying guilt built of a mother into their medication ads, to the point of it being so blatant that one of their slogans is straight up "Auntie Knows Best!"
- Obviously Evil: While Roseway isn't regularly visited by non-employees you would think a massive conglomerate wouldn't conduct their illicit research in a building prominently labelled "secret lab" on its entrance.Keep Auntie's secrets secret!
- The Rival: Supposedly to Spacer's Choice, but it's rather one-sided on the latter's part as Auntie Cleo's is a respected brand whose mascot, despite her advanced age, doesn't creep potential customers out.
- Skewed Priorities: They used to make antibiotics on Roseway but they shifted to making diet toothpaste because it was apparently more profitable. Except their priorities make sense when you know the whole story. They know they're in a famine, and their workers are likely to starve to death anyways.
- You Have Failed Me: Their "pink slip" policy, where under-performing divisions are killed by their own security robots to scare other employees into working harder lest they meet the same fate.
Roseway
Dr. Anton Crane
"There's... there's viscera and death! Everywhere! Gunfire, gnashing teeth... the unemployed!"
Auntie Cleo's lead scientist on Roseway. He's ambitious, but also indirectly responsible for the state Roseway is in when you show up.
- All for Nothing: If you keep his research then he will have a Heel Realization over all the lives lost because of his actions.
- Ambiguously Evil: Has let his ambition blind him to the consequences of his actions but is capable of a Heel Realization.
- Ambition Is Evil: All of his ambition is in service of coming up with a competing Diet Toothpaste product for Auntie Cleo's that ends up killing dozens of people and inviting marauders into a top-secret development site for the company. There is a ton of dialog options dedicated towards telling this numbskull off.
- Animal Testing: Uses highly dangerous predators in his experiments.
- Driven to Suicide: What happens after he goes through his My God, What Have I Done? moment.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Will be horrified if you put 2+2 together to reveal the diet toothpaste is so they can starve their workers to death.
- Heel Realization: Surprisingly, if you steal his research then he will realize he's been a monster.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: Subverted. His emergency transmission looks like this happened to him, but it turns out he survived the raptidon attack that caused him to send his message in the first place.
- Mad Scientist: Has been doing Animal Testing to create a Diet Toothpaste.
- Milkman Conspiracy: Anton is initially positioned as a conceited twit who is disproportionally proud of his inane invention. It transpires that he and his research provided a brief stopgap solution for the system's food crisis, which provides the Board a smidge more time for their last resort.
- Moral Myopia: Justifies everything with the discovery of his revolutionary toothpaste.
- My God, What Have I Done?: He's caused a lot of suffering and death but none of it is actually his fault beyond using dangerous predators in his Animal Testing. He kills himself if you reveal just how horrible he's been and what his research will be used for.
- Never My Fault: Is in denial about how much of the disaster is his doing.
- Pet the Dog: Evidently he kept trying to work the ‘blindness’ side-effect out of the new diet-toothpaste formula even when corporate was telling him he had different priorities. If the player warns him that suppressing the appetites of workers who do hard manual labor can be potentially life-threatening, he seems genuinely mortified this hadn’t dawned on him.
- Anton's journal also reveals that he was pushing Jameson so hard because he wanted him to succeed. He is genuinely upset when he finds out Jameson thinks he's just using everyone for his own ends.
- Skewed Priorities: Is more concerned about his research than his lab assistant or the deaths involved. In a subversion...the deaths ARE a genuine priority. He just doesn't show it.
Chief Reuben Porter
"I'm in charge of 'Site Safety Engineering.' Most days that means making sure folks don't run in the halls."
Porter is the "Chief Site Safety Engineer" for Roseway, in charge of Cleo's security in the Auntie-Biotics Lab.
- Bald of Authority: The leader of the security forces on Roseway.
- The Dragon: Anton thinks Porter is this. Porter disagrees.
- Hollywood Tactics: Completely averted, shockingly for any corporate trooper. He isolated the marauders behind lockdown protocols and has kept the Outlaws occupied and minimized his troopers casualties by having a sniper gradually pop the locks on the Raptidon pens. The one area that he overlooked, that his offices lock might not be enough to keep the Outlaws out, can be very easily pointed out to him.
- In Spite of a Nail: No matter if the player guarantees them safe passage out of the secret lab or not, muffled shouting and gunfire can still be heard once Porter exits the facility, because whether it be outlaws or the raptidons, he and his men find something to fight.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Porter is one of the least evil, sanest employees of the Board you'll meet. Perhaps most impressively is his willingness to sacrifice corporate property (Raptidons) instead of his own troops, even though he acknowledges that the former will cost him a lot more than the latter.
- Revenge Before Reason: Wants to kill the Outlaws for, understandably, killing a bunch of his friends and coworkers. They're about evenly matched, though. Subverted if you talk them down, though.
- Scary Black Man: Subverted as he's one of the few corporate employees who isn't an asshole.
- Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: He notes that the monetary cost of all the dead Rapts from his sniper opening their cages on the outlaws is going to be higher than what it would be to directly rush them, but recognizes that human lives are far more important than corporate profits (a rare sentiment in this system). Convince him that letting the outlaws run for it is better than getting more of his own men killed, and he'll tender his resignation directly to Anton Crane's face, right after the man tells him how much it will personally cost him.
- Sunk Cost Fallacy: You can argue that he's falling prey to this and his desire to get revenge on the Outlaws will get more of his men killed.
- What the Hell, Hero?: If you help Cassandra O'Malley escape.
