ALIEN - CONTRACTED: Weyland-Yutani Loss Prevention Division

 

This is an entry into ALIEN - CONTRACTED, a partial re-write and expansion of the ALIEN RPG world building. Weyland-Yutani Loss Prevention is meant to be a background operator for player characters. LP can work in may ways. Characters could be hired by Passive Assets. Or they could find themselves on the wrong end of LP's scrutiny. Introducing the division gives W-Y a bit more color, and introduces another quite alien entity to the playing board.

 

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The Company's Loss Prevention division is the most influential, best funded, and most ruthless intelligence organization among the known worlds. Legally, Loss Prevention is a separate entity from the company. Thus, Weyland-Yutani can not be held accountable for Loss Prevention's actions. Loss Prevention is in many ways however the id of the Company. Loss Prevention is financed through back-channels of the Peter Weyland Foundation, an independent legal financial entity. Unbeknown to the company, LP itself also engages in methods of raising money, mainly through weapons deals and drug sales in the Sol system. Through these means, LP can operate on its own budget, without costing the Company - but also without the Company having any incriminating knowledge of the division's activities. The prime goal of the division is, as its title implies, to prevent that Weyland-Yutani incurs material losses. To achieve this goal, the division will often go to extreme lengths, including direct assassinations, torture, and even incite genocides when those would benefit the Company's bottom line. The division does the Company's most dirty work, and in return the Weyland-Yutani Legal backs all of LP's operations with full force and very little discrimination.

 

Loss Prevention cannot be influenced by internal WY politics. When CFO Jackson Leiter tried to reign the division in in 2146, LP Passive Assets first had his youngest child gruesomely murdered. When Leiter then refused to budge, the Assets hired mercenaries who abducted him and his family, and forced his resignation at gunpoint. Leiter died in a shuttle accident on Luna a month later.

 

Loss Prevention also cannot be influenced by external political actors. When the Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve Bank refused to accede to Company demands on lowering interest rates, his family home suffered what the news media described as the largest gas leak explosion in American history.

 

The bottomless coffers of W-Y Legal, as well as the tremendous connections of W-Y Public Relations ensures that necessary acts of Loss Prevention have usually no consequences for either the division or the company as a whole.

 

Loss Prevention ensures that W-Y can operate unmolested by political actors. If necessary, LP will bring in the support of the United States Colonial Marines through W-Y's partnership with the United Americas military.

 

The division is made up of several intersecting layers. The biggest three partitions are Active Assets, Passive Assets, and Sleeper Assets.

 

Active Assets are commonly referred to as Operators. These are highly skilled commandos and paramilitaries that frequently train together with both Three World Empire Royal Marines and Royal Special Space Services, as well as with United States Colonial Marines Force Recon and other special forces units. Other Active Asset Operators are the planners and schemers, pencil and paper pushers, data analysts and upper level managers.

 

Passive Assets are undercover agents, spies, and intelligence gathering specialists. Many Passive Assets are deeply embedded in competitor companies, as well as in political organizations, and nation-state governments across the galaxy. The term "Passive Assets" is a bit of a misnomer. Passive Assets can and will take action when prompted, or when they see the necessity. Passive Asset actions include political engineering, sabotage, and assassinations, as well as acts of corporate and national-security breaching acts of espionage.

 

Passive Assets will also sometime hire expandable operatives from the outside - from hired guns, to transportation, to really anything a division operation could require.

Sleeper Assets are any retired Active and Passive Asset Operators that can be recalled into service at a moment's notice, as well as small, specialized cells of operators who can be activated whenever the need arises to enact LP's most clandestine actions. Sleepers are LP's most insidious assets.

 

Weyland-Yutani itself has, without knowledge of the company's own leadership, a sizable amount of Passive and Sleeper Assets among its ranks.

 

Through acts of sabotage, assassinations, abductions, torture, and political engineering, Loss Prevention ensures that Weyland-Yutani can maintain its position as the most lucrative company in the galaxy. Loss Prevention's existence is the reason that W-Y properties have not experienced any attempts at labor organization in the past fifty years. The last labor drive ended with every single signatory flushed out of an airlock in a freak explosive decompression accident. The message was clear.  The division also ensures that the company never pays any taxes to any nation-state, and that company operations will only ever receive the most superficial of scrutiny by the Interstellar Commerce Commission. Corporate competitors of W-Y usually consider their options before engaging in hostilities against the company very, very carefully, since any such activities would bring LP into play.

 

Loss Prevention is a cold, calculating, entirely dispassionate operation with only one, singular goal. Like a synthetic, Loss Prevention lacks any and all empathy, has not a single shred of ethical consideration that could possibly override its mission. Loss Prevention is not political. The organization has no other agenda than making sure Weyland-Yutani does not incur significant material loss. All other considerations are secondary.

 

Everyone, including every single operative of Loss Prevention, is completely and utterly expandable to Loss Prevention.