Lionfist

Lionfist Corporation was established in 2020 as an aerospace major and rapidly became one of the wealthiest corporations in what was then China. At the height of its power it ruled a territory from the Ural mountains in the west to the Red Basin in the east. until the end of the hanyo era. The northern limits of its territory were unclear and remained in dispute with Imprimatur. Coastal China was bought by Ramdhun in 2029 after Lionfist lost a bidding war.

Early history

Lionfist began its hegemony by setting up Satellite City in the Quaidam Basin, Northern Tibet. It forced thousands of Tibetans to work to their deaths on the building of this massive launch site. In 2030 three members of the last order of Tibetan monks set themselves ablaze in front of Lionfist's Red basin headquarters in protest against the building of Satellite City, an event that made a deep impression on the seven-year-old Basil Quan.

By the end of the 2030s Lionfist had begun sending small private space residences into orbit for the most powerful of its executives. These were test runs for the massive space hotels they built on contract after the Sweep. In the early 2030s, they also briefly challenged Ramdhun's monopoly of technologies to save the hanyo babies, but Boris Bogdanov was quickly outcompeted by Pradip Shankar.

After the Helios Fail, Lionfist also made money from the other corporations by allowing them to drill for oil in the Tarim Basin. This was a bit of a mixed blessing, since the gain in revenue was somewhat outweighed by the costs of keeping the peace between fifteen antagonistic players. Basil Quan, by then Head of Human Resources for Lionfist, attempted to solve this problem by searching for the powers displayed by the Tibetan monks he remembered from his childhood, with a view to weaponising them. This is what leads him to test Zigsa.

After the Sweep

Territory-wise, Lionfist was one of the poorest of the corporations. It was forced to buy food from Ramdhun which controlled the rice fields of the fertile south, and most of its holdings were mineral-poor desert. However, Lionfist invested heavily in technology and innovation, and was moreover very expert at negotiating with other corporations to get what they wanted. They maintained a large army of Dark Hacks and their cyberterrorism was justly feared by all other corps.

In 2078 when Ramdhun acquired Japan from Shigenobu corporation, Lionfist readied itself for impending invasion from Ramdhun. However, Ramdhun's failure to subdue Tokyo, and its nuking of that city in 2079 took the heat off Lionfist. Throughout the 2080s Lionfist slowly lost control of the northern reaches of their territory, which also became increasingly hostile to life as the securibugs and famine weeds released by Lionfist to discourage invasion began to spread. In the 2090s when the corporate world began to turn its attention to the building of robot armies, Lionfist was the first to steal Ramdhun's data and the second corp to build a viable machine battleforce. When the hanyos went underground in the early 2100s, Lionfist built its corporate bunkers in the Issyk Kul region of hot lakes. However, this made the hanyo bunkers vulnerable to rupture and flooding by volcanically heated waters, which happened post the Comet Strike of 2123.