Overview
The Red Corporation is the private commercial holding founded by Edward Redcliffe in New Terranova during the middle period of Landfall-530 - Noble Blood. Outwardly it is a hospitality and entertainment concern built around the prestige of the Red Diamond Casino; in practice it functions as a personal vehicle for its owner’s interests across Caldora, with subsidiary operations that range from the openly luxurious to the deliberately unaccountable.
Ownership of the Corporation passed in stages from Edward to Vetis Veltol over the latter half of the epoch, and was held in full by Vetis by the time of Edward’s death in Old Yotem.
Holdings
Red Diamond Casino
The flagship venue and Edward’s longtime residence in New Terranova. The Casino served as the Corporation’s public face and was the source of most of its declared revenue. See Red Diamond Casino for the venue’s own history, its slot-machine partnership with DaemonWare Labs, and its role in introducing the Veltol brothers to Edward.
Rat Co.
A subordinate brand nominally operating under the Red Diamond claim. Officially Rat Co. existed to house overflow ventures of the Casino group; in practice it was the cover Edward and Vetis used to acquire properties for private scientific work.
The first Rat Co. site was a riverside home outside New Terranova that the partnership converted into a single, modest laboratory. The model proved durable enough to repeat. A second site followed, then a third, and within a few years Rat Co. held laboratory and outpost properties scattered across Caldora. Some operated beneath occupied residences whose tenants were never told what sat under their floors; others kept employed staff who attended the surface buildings without any access to or knowledge of the lower levels.
The labs had no declared programme during the Edward-era expansion. Edward floated the idea, repeatedly, that the network would make a fitting permanent home for the dragon egg that Nordvik Alvaldi had gifted Vetis upon completing his training under Amlooi Alvaldi. Vetis demurred and the suggestion went nowhere during Edward’s lifetime. Only after the transfer of ownership did the Rat Co. network see its first active research use, when Vetis converted the primary site into his personal laboratory and put the secondary sites to use as cover, staging, and overflow.
Transfer to Vetis Veltol
The transition began when the Ehrengard Empire pushed Edward south, transferring him to Old Yotem as part of its broader developmental programme there. Edward’s younger ward, Veltic Veltol, followed him out of New Terranova rather than remain behind.
From Old Yotem, Edward began handing the Red Corporation across to Vetis in pieces. Ownership of the Red Diamond Casino itself was the first formal transfer; further assets followed over the months that came after. By the time of Edward’s death the entire Corporation, including the Rat Co. network and the operational labs already standing within it, belonged to Vetis outright.
Under Vetis
Vetis retained the public-facing operations of the Corporation largely unchanged. The Casino continued under its established management; the legitimate hospitality side of the holding was not visibly altered. The change was internal: Rat Co. ceased to be a paper subsidiary and became the operational shell within which Vetis conducted the bulk of his scientific research through the remainder of the epoch.
Several of the Rat Co. labs were lent to associates from Cuidense, who held them under their own names while Vetis worked in the deeper levels of the primary site. This arrangement provided plausible local ownership for sites whose true purpose Vetis preferred not to advertise.