# The Buyer - a Dark Marauder storyline > Design and lore document for the black market event announced on the > Empire / summary page (`f_com_empire.cfm`, `.gc-blackmarket*` in `theme.css`). > > Everything in **Part 1** is recovered canon, cited. Everything in **Part 2** > is new, and is built so that it only ever *joins up* existing canon rather > than overwriting it. Nothing here contradicts a published line. --- ## Part 1 - What the archive already establishes Source: `B:\Normal Backups\Coding\…\Docs`, doc sets `00-Start-Here`, `01-Galactic-Conquest`, `02-Unification-Wars`. ### They are not pirates. They are the power behind the Kal-Zul. | Fact | Source | |---|---| | Race 8, **Dark Marauder**, "Hard" - never selectable in normal play | `01-GC/02-Races.md`; `01-GC/09-Missions.md` (`selectflag = 0` → "Special") | | **"The Kalzul's masters."** The Kal-Zul are "ancient; Dark Marauder soldiers" | `00-Start-Here/03-Glossary.md` | | A **Hidden Faction** with real territory: `d. Rims`, `d. Base`, `d. Home` - a homeworld on the map | `02-UW/01-Story-And-Setting.md`, `04-Systems-And-Planets.md` | | The Kal-Zul are **"'cannon fodders' or the front liners for the Dark Marauders** in regards to launching a large scale invasion" | Overmind Project Ending Story, via `01-GC/10-Projects-And-Ultimate-Weapon.md` | | The Overmind is a Kal-Zul **suicide weapon**, built "to be used in the event that the Kalzul is unable to sufficiently weaken the enemy **prior to the coming of the Dark Marauder**" | *ibid.* | | Live event, **2006-04-18 → 04-24: "Destroy all Dark Marauders invaders"** | `01-GC/10-Projects-And-Ultimate-Weapon.md` | ### They have done this before - and their method is *giving ships away* > *"**Fueled by hate and rage, the distant Dark Marauder survivors dedicated all > their research into a class of ships that would enact their revenge.** Before > the Dark Marauders were able to fully recover and strengthen, they sent ahead > **three of the D class ships for the scattered Marauder empires to utilize**."* > > - `02-UW/03-Ships.md` This is the single most useful line in the archive for this event. The Dark Marauders' established behavior is **handing hardware to strangers they do not command**, at distance, while they are still too weak to come themselves. An approach from a Dark Marauder ship offering a trade is not a new invention. It is the thing they are already documented as doing. ### What their ships are, and what that says about them `D.` line - named for **sharks and the angelic hierarchy**, which is the whole character of the faction in one naming scheme: predator and judgement. | Seeded to the Marauders | The real fleet | |---|---| | D.Hammerhead (frigate), D.Bullhead (cruiser), D.Thresher, D.Angel | D.ArchAngel (dreadnought), D.Principalities (juggernaught), D.Dominions (starbase) | Kinetic and missile only, built to defend against missiles, **80% resistance across the board**, and the real line costs into the **billions** - "not player-buildable in normal play" (`02-UW/03-Ships.md`). Their signature is **Bastille missile launcher technology**, which propagates all the way down the setting: **Bastille → Dark Marauders → Marauder D class → Terran research → Tiger**. So a D-class silhouette on a scanner is identifiable, and a player who has ever researched a Tiger is looking at the ancestor of their own missiles. --- ## Part 2 - The storyline ### The premise, in one line **The buyer is not smuggling. The buyer is counting.** ### Why buying ships *is* the invasion The Overmind's stated purpose is to weaken a galaxy *prior to the coming of the Dark Marauder*. That is canon, and it is the seam this whole story is built into: the Dark Marauders do not open with a fleet. They open by **softening**. The Overmind was one way to do that and it failed - lost in the Milky Way during the Eijin Wormhole incident, and latterly turned by players into "a minerals producer and also some free border supplier" (`01-GC/10-…`). The galaxy beat it, and beat it so thoroughly it became a utility. So they are trying the patient method instead. A buyer, with good prices and no questions, does three things at once, and does them without firing: 1. **It inventories the galaxy.** Every sale is a line in a ledger: who flies what, how much of it, and what they were willing to give up. 2. **It thins the fleets.** Every ship sold is one fewer ship pointed at them when the fleet does arrive. 3. **It makes the seller complicit.** You cannot report a buyer you took credits from. An empire that sells is not betraying the galaxy in any way it can be prosecuted for. It is taking a good price on ships it did not need. That is the point - the event should never feel like a trap being sprung, only like a deal that keeps being slightly too good. ### The tell The Kal-Zul escort. It is on screen in the very first notice, and it is the one detail that does not fit a smuggler: > *two Kal-Zul escorts hold station off its flanks, and the Kal-Zul do not > escort smugglers* Kal-Zul are the Dark Marauders' **soldiers**. A trader with a soldier escort is not a trader who slipped through - it is a trader who was **sent**, with the masters' authority. Any player who reads the manual can work out what that means before the game ever tells them. The players who do not will find out later, and that asymmetry is the event's whole flavor. ### The arc | Phase | What players see | What is actually happening | |---|---|---| | **I - The Hail** | A ship drops out of the dark near your sector under Kal-Zul escort. It buys ships. Prices are good. It sells nothing. | First contact and first ledger entries. | | **II - The Ledger** | Prices *improve* as the galaxy sells more. A server-wide total is visible: tonnage sold, empires trading. | The census is filling in. Rising prices are not generosity, they are urgency. | | **III - The Gift** | The buyer starts *offering* - D-class hardware, Bastille missile technology, to its best sellers. | Exactly what canon says they do: seed D-class ships to scattered empires they do not command. The galaxy arms itself with their tech, on their terms. | | **IV - The Reckoning** | *"Destroy all Dark Marauders invaders."* | The 2006 event, earned. The fleet arrives against a galaxy that sold off its own ships and re-armed with weapons whose counters the enemy designed. | Phase IV is a **re-run of a real 2006 live event**, which is the strongest reason to build the story this way: the ending already exists and is already canon. This storyline is the missing first three acts of it. ### The sting Ships sold in Phase I-II should come back in Phase IV - flying for the other side, with the seller's own empire name still on the registry. Not as a mechanical penalty severe enough to punish trading, but visibly, by name, so the lesson is legible: **you sold them the fleet.** ### Tone rules - **The buyer is never threatening.** It is courteous, patient and slightly too well informed. It knows what you fly before you tell it. - **It never lies.** Everything it says is true; it simply does not volunteer what the ledger is for. When players later work it out, they should be able to re-read every line and find no deception - which is far more unsettling than a reveal that it was lying. - **It never explains itself.** No monologue, no villain speech. The Kal-Zul escort is the only thing that ever hints, and it is there from the first screen. - **The galaxy is not warned.** No NPC tells players this is a bad idea. The manual already contains everything needed to work it out. ### Names and voice Anything new should stay inside the two schemes canon already set: **sharks** and **the angelic hierarchy**. The buyer's ship wants to be recognisably D-class without being one of the four documented ones - a courier, not a warship, because a warship would end the conversation. Suggested: **D.Remora** - a shark-adjacent name that literally means *the thing that swims alongside something much larger and feeds on what it leaves*. It tells the entire story to anyone who looks it up, and tells nothing to anyone who does not. --- ## Part 3 - Build notes Current state: the **notice only**, on `f_com_empire.cfm`, styled in `theme.css` under `.gc-blackmarket*`. The button is parked on `#` - nothing behind it yet. When the destination is built: - The event pages should follow the **Convergence pattern**, since that is the precedent in this codebase for an event with a UI: a project-hosted page (`f_com_project2.cfm` → `text/p/e.cfm` → a shared include), with the contribution/ledger state in its own table the way `faction_contribution` works for Convergence. - Any SQL belongs in `app/Admin/sql/`, with an explicit `USE` line. - Keep the notice and the destination in agreement about the fiction: the intercept header, the Kal-Zul escort and the "channel that should not exist" are the three details players will remember.