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Mörkai Consortium
~ Freedom is your worst enemy ~
Mörkai Consortium is a slaving organization, founded by Vaenom Mörkai and lead by Executive Commander, Blood Red Rose. MorCon, for short, is a very business-oriented organization, dealing primarily in slaves. The Consortium has some strict guidelines on the trading of slaves, which includes, but is not limited to, the buying, selling, or otherwise acquiring of slaves.
The Consortium is based at the MorCon Estate, a large estate consisting of a mansion, where most of the Consortium members reside, rolling hills, strong perimeter defense, and a large mountain in the rear-most portion of the Estate. The mountain is where the primary stronghold of the Black Ops is located.
The Consortium's purpose is to provide a service to all of RhyDin, including the Netherworld. We are a business and are run in such a manner. Your rank amongst us will depend on your work for the Consortium, as is standard among similar corporations. Members of the Black Ops team are not required to do any slaving whatsoever, but are required to follow any and all orders from its commander. The rest of the Consortium is responsible, under the orders of the Head of Brokering, for slaving. As stated before, there is a very strict system consisting of the awarding of SPs (Slave Points) which will determine your rank amongst the Consortium slavers.
If these terms are acceptable, reply promptly and you will be added to our ranks.
"Come to buy, sell, or be fitted for your collar, but bring your spine, for we grant no mercy..."
~ Church Rhino
(official description, from the RDI Surveyor's Office)
As the day slips quietly into dusk, the last burning fingers of light are extinguished along the horizon, and the chirping and cawing of night's creatures' awakening begins to thunder across the surrounding wood, trading activity springs to life from somewhere behind the shadow-veiled walls of the Morkai Consortium estate.
The sprawling estate, home to the finest slavers in Rhy'Din and a posh shelter for hundreds of transient slave properties over the years, is already equipped with virtually every luxury money could provide. The stone structure is flanked on one side by an impressive garden that includes a cobbled path lined with stone benches, surrounded by rows of marbled pillars, the whole of the garden ever-brimming with a cacaphony of startling red opium poppies, royal morning glories, roses of every variety, elegant craning lilies, and the rarest of orchids.
To the rear of the estate lies the sinuous black path of a racing track, its blacktop twisting in every direction and stretching towards the perimeter of the grounds, butting up against a line of evergreens and oaks that marks the property's end.
Visible only from the back of the building, one end of the Estate is a floor higher, this added level encompassing the Lair. A tropical garden stretches over the entire rooftop, opening from the Lair and spilling its lush jungle foliage over the roof's edges.
On the other side of the building a hedge clings to ivied walls, and between that manicured shrubbery and the wrought-iron fence is a circular patch of flattened earth, covered with sand and fifty feet in diameter, fenced with electrified barbed wire and adjacent to a small grandstand on the south side. Slaves can be brought to the paddock, leashed and harnessed, for morning runs to display them to prospective buyers; the open area of the arena can also be used as an auction floor.
At the front of the property, wrought iron railings curve around from behind to embrace it there, completing the circle with an ornate gate that is left ajar the better part of the time to welcome visitors ... or the unwary.
A short circular drive leads up to the piazza, a sixty-foot square paved in rouge griotte, a marble of the deepest blood red hue. Visitors to the estate grounds, either on horseback or by carriage, may pull up alongside the courtyard on a cobbled path that ends near a secondary door just at the side of the main building.
The plaza is surrounded on three sides by a catwalk lined with marble colonnades and shaded by another walkway overhead, accessible from the upper floor of the main building and overlooking the center of the courtyard.
On the fourth side - on the building's face - is the broad, shallow staircase that sweeps out to the sides like the curved splay of a scallop shell. There are precisely five steps leading up to the front door, each one more narrow across than the last. The steps are carved from charcoal granite, and curving up each side are a set of ornamental banisters, og black jasper buffed to a high sheen. At the top of the stairs is a narrow front terrace, a space just three feet deep that provides a platform from which to view the courtyard.
The steep front wall of the Georgian mansion rises up like an open palm braced against the outside world. An ornamental arch marks the doorway, a band of bricks cut from the same dark grey granite as the steps, its ribbed surface curling around from the top and ending in a fluted drum base at each side. Perched at the top of the archway is the keystone - a carved grotesque in the image of a chimera , with gaping maw baring finely pointed teeth and a forked tongue, pointed ears and flaring nostrils upraised in a cry of rage captured in time in the frozen stone. Only the head and shoulders of the creature are visible, but around the thick neck, just below its bulging jaw, is a collar, a wide band with protruding spikes not unlike that of a bulldog's harness, and extending from the hunched shoulders of the fiendish little gargoyle are a pair of wings, spanning just three feet at most, their ribbing curling outward as though the guardian of the MorCon doors is just about to take flight, to swoop down on unsuspecting prey at a moment's notice.
At night, an eerie glow is cast on the front terrace by a peculiar set of lanterns, hanging one at each side of the door. At first glance, the light might appear warm, inviting, a charming touch in startling contrast to its hard surroundings. But a closer inspection reveals the true nature of these lanterns. They are miniature cages of a sort, in a cut tin lattice modeled after an 18th-century Colonial style, with pointed caps at the top by which they are hooked into the wall and left to dangle. Fluttering restlessly inside each cage? Not the flickering of candles, not the buzz of electric lights, but pixies. Their tiny winged bodies radiate with the iridiscent magic that only pixies can produce, and the brightness intensifies as their diminutive forms strain against their bonds. Watch, and they will clatter around in a panic, then settle to the bottom of the cage only to stir into another frantic uprising moments later, their delicate wings pinging against the tin. The wiggling tease of a finger poked through the tracery will cause them to shrink back against the opposite side of the cage, and elicits a chorus of whimpering and shrieking from the captive pixies that acts as a sort of a door chime.
The terrace provides the best vantage point for looking back across the courtyard, to the grand spectacle - the auction block. This square has been quarried locally, from a site along a nearby river, its bulk mined out of the same pits from which a large part of the estate's main building itself originated. The entire block measures some twenty feet across on all sides, but is only three feet high - a simple enough step up for any free man, an easy lift for the slave properties to be displayed there.
Sunk into the center of the stone, at approximately five feet apart, are two tethering posts. Presumably, they are to hold a slave fixed in a spread-eagle stance as they stand in the unenviable position of being on display for sale. Attached to the rings at the top of each cast-iron post are several lengths of steel chain fitted with iron hooks and cuffs. When not in use, the chains rest draped across the space between the two poles, leaving them laying in wait for the first unsuspecting ... customer.
In place just behind the tethering posts is a raised platform of the same dusky limestone, a rectangle three feet wide by four feet long - just the right size for positioning a slave to kneel, or crouch on all fours, for inspection by potential buyers.
Turning back to the building, beyond the doorway is an expansive front foyer with a vaulted ceiling, and a set of stocks in the center to serve as both useful tool and careful warning. Several hallways branch out from this chamber, leading back into the labrynth of corridors housing offices, private chambers, and slave quarters - even a fully stocked laboratory, home to the resident liche.
The second story echoes the floor plan of the first, with the added feature of an occasional mullioned window casting a view on the grounds and the forest beyond, and the building is floored throughout with marble tiles of rich Italian serpentine.
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