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
Monarch Stellar Industries (MSI)
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In General
"I don't think I realized how far they'd stoop. Everything we did was legal and aboveboard — we followed their rules! And yet they still found reasons to declare us outlaws."
Once a loyal Board-owned corporation, MSI split off to become their own private entity espousing democratic ideals and workers' rights. This did not make them popular with The Board, who proceeded to blockade them and stop legitimate business between them and the other Board corporations.
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: As a board-adjacent company, they still have a number of the same issues that your average Halcyon colony has, but unlike a lot of them they make a point to protect their worker's rights, and have vending machines that hand out MSI gear in many non-corporation owned settlements that they do re-stock and unlike other places, don't seem to have vending machines that jam. Granted, sometimes they're also in places that are run by outlaws.
- Batman Gambit: Attempted to become the sole ruler of Terra-1 (Monarch).
- Being Good Sucks: Prior to the events of the story, Monarch Stellar Industries got fed up with the Board's corrupt, incompetent methods and split into a private entity that espouses democracy and worker rights. It's made them popular with the little people, but has also led to them getting hit with sanctions and blockades from the insulted Board that's disrupted their businesses.
- The Cavalry: In the Anti-Board route, provided that you complete the Monarch questline to the benefit of MSI Sanjar sends a platoon of soldiers to help you out.
- Closest Thing We Got: The only corporation in the system that isn't evil or incompetent. It's also not quite a corporation anymore.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Bright primary blue, with dark red as a secondary and yellow tertiary.
- Enlightened Self-Interest: Sanjar points out that it's in their best interests that workers don't work themselves to death and live like slaves since they're more productive otherwise. Also it realizes they're not just employees but their customers. Parvati will point out she'd hope he'd do it whether it was productive or not but Sanjar points out that talk gets him nowhere with the Board. Mind you, neither did raw data.
- The Exile: The Board has blockaded their world and attempted to make them Unperson.
- Genocide Backfire: The death of all of its executives in the Amber Heights massacre was meant to reform the company, and did, but also helped result in its collapse as a business.
- Ironic Name: The most democratic corporation in the system is named Monarch.
- Only Sane Man: Only sane company. Running down the place you live doesn't really benefit you.
- Pyrrhic Victory: As a result of their Batman Gambit. They are rulers of a Death World that is blockaded by the Board. They have also lost their position on the Board and are considered outlaws.
- Sealed Badass in a Can: MSI's ownership of an entire terraformed planet actually makes them the richest and most potentially powerful corporation in Halcyon, but because they've been diplomatically isolated by the Board there's not much they can do with that power. Hiram Blythe suggests that the real reason MSI was kicked off the Board was because Rockwell was afraid they'd be a threat to UDL's control of it.
- Start My Own: MSI got sick of the Board's bureaucratic nonsense, and they went rogue to become their own private entity.
- Unperson: One of the original ten companies that has since been turned into a single company.
Stellar Bay
In General
The MSI headquarters on Monarch. They've seen better days due to the blockade.
- Bittersweet Ending: If you side with the Board and choose MSI, then MSI's program of worker freedoms will end and the independent towns will disappear, but Sanjar will be able to save Stellar Bay from Lifetime Employment by providing saltuna to the elite.
- Bloodsport: Everyone here is obsessed with Tossball.
- Company Town: Owned and operated by MSI. However, it is a much nicer place to work than Edgewater and functioning due to the softer touch of Sanjar. Unfortunately, it's under embargo by the Board so it has to rely on smugglers to get resources.
- Crapsack Only by Comparison: Stellar Bay is cut off from all contact with the rest of the system via a gunship blockade, under embargo from the Board, and on a Death World. It's also probably the nicest place to live in the system if you're not a Byzantine or on the Groundbreaker. Sanjar, for all of his Butt-Monkey status, has run the place surprisingly well.
- Dramatic Irony: Despite its Dying Town status, Stellar Bay is one of the few cities that might actually weather The Famine as it's a place where they have actual fish to farm and apparently in large enough amounts to feed everyone as well as export. This is in addition to being around other food sources like Boarst Wurst that is similarly satisfying if you don't ask where it came from. It is one of the few that can survive events on its own.
- Dying Town: Wouldn't be a Halcyon colony without it. For starters, they're the only corporate entity besides the heavily isolated C&P still active on Monarch, are blockaded by the Board who want them to either shut their pie holes or fold back in with them, and the only other colony still active after the pull-out is Amber Heights, which is run by the Iconoclasts and has about half the amount of available people that are hearty and able to work towards survival on-planet...and both sides hate each other thanks to their leaders falling out. And as a final kick in the nads, Stellar Bay is directly downwind of the sulfur pools, so the place smells to high heaven all the time.
- Foil: To Edgewater. Both of them are Company Town One Nation Under Copyright but it is far nicer with a Benevolent Boss leadership.
- Happy Ending: If you make peace, then Monarch gets a happy ending whether you side with Phineas or the Board, as MSI spread their model of civil liberties and workers' rights to the other townships. If you side with Phineas, then so long as you don't wipe the place out, Monarch will thrive.
- Lighter and Softer: Like the Groundbreaker, it is not a complete hellhole.
- One Nation Under Copyright: Is it's own independent nation due to the fact that MSI has been abandoned by the rest of the Board.
Sanjar Nandi
I gave MSI everything - my work, my youth, my left kidney - and for years, I was a joke to them.
"The world isn't changed with guns and speeches — much as Graham and his followers would like to think — but rather with meticulous documentation."
Voiced by: Andrew Morgado
The CEO of MSI. He has a plan to get his company back on the board, provided the Unplanned Variable can help.
- Authority in Name Only: A strange example as he's ruler of one of Terra-1's (Monarch's) only cities but Monarch Industries is what he's really head of and that is a company only on paper.
- Bad Liar: He's just too earnest (and pedantic) to lie convincingly.Sanjar: (pouting) But I was keeping my tone flat and maintaining eye contact! You weren't supposed to notice I was avoiding the subject.
- Badass Bureaucrat: Plans to get MSI back on the board by filing the right forms. Made badass by the fact the forms are so complicated, the last person to try had a stroke from attempting. He also helps things along by making full use of blackmail material he gets on Universal Defense Logistics, the paramilitary strong arm of the Board, because of technicalities of ownership of the planet Monarch. He's especially giddy that he has the blackmail on them, of all corporations.
- Benevolent Boss: Sanjar has a firm grasp on fair treatment of workers - one email he'd sent to an employee has him encouraging the worker to take some time off, as they hadn't done so for a good while.
- Big Good: For Monarch, somewhat surprisingly: he, Junlei, and Phineas Welles are probably the only people working to make things better for everyone. The Iconoclasts are ultimately too focused on appearances and bringing down the Board at all costs to even consider how they're going to solve the food shortage crisis.
- Buffy Speak: His Rousing Speech to the MSI soldiers who provide back up to the Unplanned Variable during the Tartarus endgame devolves into this.
- Butt-Monkey: Was one while working for Monarch Industries and isn't much better now.
- Closest Thing We Got: Was the only real executive left after the Amber Heights massacre and thus was the leader of Monarch Industries.
- Enlightened Self-Interest: He does care about his employees' welfare, but he's fully aware that genuinely happy workers are more productive.
- Foil: To Graham Bryant. Both are/were MSI executives, both had grievance with the way things were done, both still have some corporate executive foibles from before their disillusionment. But while Sanjar's is that he's still a stuffy bureaucrat, Graham's is that he still treats underlings as things instead of people.
- Hidden Disdain Reveal: Push him hard enough during the conflict over the targeting module and he'll let slip that he's somewhat resentful that most of the people who could fight on Monarch either turned into Marauders or joined the Iconoclasts, leaving behind only a few substandard soldiers for him to work with.
- Honest Corporate Executive: Sanjar really believes the Board can be reformed from within, even if this belief is what got MSI blacklisted by the Board. He also genuinely cares about his employees, instituting wage increases, limiting overtime, and letting his assistant Celia take multiple advances on her paycheck.
- Ignored Expert: He has the hard data showing that tired, emaciated, and disenfranchised workers are less effective workers... and the Board dismiss his proposals for solutions.
- Internal Reformist: Planned to do this for the Board but he has to be on the Board first.
- My Greatest Failure: Considers his negative performance review from The Board as this, with his assistant Celia clearly having memorised several methods to calm him when it is brought up. He also deeply regrets the deterioration of his relationship with Graham due to competing ideologies regarding Monarch's independence, but realizes they are both too set in their ways to come to terms at this point.
- No Social Skills: Downplayed. He's always quite polite and affable, and generally well-liked. But he doesn't understand why other people don't get as excited about properly-filed paperwork and positively-trending statistics as he does, and lacks the kind of charisma that a true leader needs.
- Non-Action Guy: On the Death World of Monarch, he's a bureaucrat, not a soldier.
- Non-Idle Rich: A key aspect of his negative performance review is that he actually does his work himself instead of shoving it off onto underlings, which the Board felt made him "unsuited for a management position."
- Noodle Incident: He donated his kidney to an executive to improve his chances at a promotion. It didn't work out.
- Only Sane Man: On the corporate side of things. Sanjar is the only corporate executive in the game that realizes how the Board runs things is completely messed up and can't be allowed to continue, in addition to having genuinely sane beliefs on how to treat employees. The main difference between him and characters like Graham is that Sanjar fully believes he can fix the board from the inside.
- The Peter Principle: Ironically it's the one case the corporations actually noticed, though that's due to their skewed sense of values. It can't be denied however that while Sanjar is an excellent economist and statistician, he's a somewhat poor leader who would rather worry about font sizes than deal with criminals within his own walls. This is one of the ways you can frame working with Zora, and after a little fuming over the implication even he reluctantly agrees that he's better suited for working out the details rather than leading from the front.
- Planet Baron: He's the effective ruler of an entire terraformed planet, which makes him one of the most powerful individuals of the colony
- Pragmatic Villainy: Somewhere between this and Pragmatic Hero. MSI's treatment of the workers is leagues better than anywhere else in the colony — because happy, well-fed, well-rested workers are more productive. He wants to rejoin the Board and rebuild MSI's good name — because fighting them for principle alone is a waste of resources neither side can afford and reform serves the greater good in a way that smashing the system does not. Amusingly, this makes him the closest thing to a Big Good the Monarch arc has, based purely on practical effects. Pragmatic is the key word.The Unplanned Variable: Seems to me anything's better than the corporate yoke.
Sanjar: I fear the MSI citizens who've been dissolved into raptidon cud would disagree with you. - Reasonable Authority Figure: He seems to be the only active executive in the colony that understands that people work best when they're regarded as people by their superiors instead of things. He's also willing to work with Zora to unite Stellar Bay and the Iconoclasts, and all it really takes to convince him is proof that Zora is a competent leader, and reassurance that doing so won't deprive Stellar Bay of the resources its residents need.
- Shout-Out: It may or may not be intentional, but he has a lot of similarities to Nico Sanjrani from The Expanse — besides having similar initials (NS, SN) and similar-sounding names (Sanjar, Sanjrani). Both are brilliant economists with firm grips on the sanity ball, with a tendency towards Pragmatic Villainy as they try to solve a gradually worsening food crisis while being Ignored Experts. The main difference, however, is that unlike Sanjrani, Sanjar is fighting a war on two fronts thanks to the Board and Iconoclasts.
- Skewed Priorities: Wants to know what Zora's performance review was before he'll think of working with her. Places a lot of importance on his. His was very mediocre, while hers was much more glowing.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: To Reed Tobson as the hapless but not necessarily malevolent leader of a more Board-centric faction in a corporate vs. anti-corporate conflict.
- Sole Survivor: One of the few survivors of the Amber Heights massacre. It's why he's the head of Monarch Industries.
- We Used to Be Friends: He was friends with Graham and Hiram. Graham became the leader of Iconoclast and dedicated to taking out the Board and Corporations. He also did not know Graham arranged the Pirate attack on Amber Heights, and is disgusted when he learns of it.
Celia Robbins
"Oh, Mr. Nandi's doing that thing where he breathes through his nose real slowly. I better get back to work."
Voiced by: Kathleen Stavert
Sanjar's right-hand woman.
- Cannot Spit It Out: Requests the player help her set up a date with local big game hunter Sebastian. It's implied her feelings for him are the only reason he's still in business because she keeps buying his useless inventory as an excuse to chat him up.
- Girl Friday: Pretty much the only reason Sanjar gets anything done.
- Hypercompetent Sidekick: Is brisk and efficient where Sanjar is overeager and detail-obsessed, reining him in and keeping him focused.
- Number Two: Is pretty much the only other executive in Monarch Industries at present. The rest are workers and guards. Which makes a certain amount of sense given their small population and lack of any outside buyers — the left-over corporate hierarchy is something of a formality at this point.
- Right Through the Wall: Once she starts dating Sebastian, her neighbors can be heard complaining about the noise the two of them make.
- Servile Snarker: Is cheerful in disposition but doesn't let her boss' ideals get in the way of the occasional barb.
