Jean Claude Farandole

## Inspector Jean Claude Farandole

***State Corruption***"*In the inevitable event that you encounter a corrupt ATC officer on your travels, the following things should be in your possession:

1) An amount of cash able to pay approximately 250% of your standard bail price (at a minimum) or commensurate with any desired item of the transaction.

2) Written assurances of your safety by an Aeldrum official, the more powerful the better.

3) Several pieces of fine stationary on which to record the transaction (in case you are audited).*" —  The Intrepid Guide to the Cosmos
**Jean Claude Farandole**, a native to the elvish enclaves, was an elvish member of the Aeldrum Trade Company, retained as part of its colonial law enforcement apparatus in Dalcia, Russia.

## Personality

Farandole was notorious both for his corruption and his insistence on framing the various bribes he exacted as reimbursement for various overly complicated administrative procedures and the special personnel, paper and ink they required.

## History

During the ATC's last year in Dalcia, Inspector Farandole derived a substantial share of his bribe income from the Knights Mercantile. He used his connections with the KM to briefly and very lucratively corner the local opium market. The Inspector fled Dalcia with many other ATC officials at the first outbreak of the Shambler Virus.

After paying off several internal affairs officers who had been on his trail, the Inspector bought into a cotton farming venture on another ATC colony, claiming that he had lost all taste for the silk business. In very short order, however, the Inspector was running an illicit drug farming operation. Still one step ahead of a growing crackdown on corruption within the ATC, he retired to an estate in Ireland, where he resided until the Kildare Uprising, when several other elvish landlords were hanged by Irish militants who overwhelmed a company of Aeldrum Dragoons whose weapons inexplicably malfunctioned. Fearing for his life, Farandole returned to Aeldrum proper, where he was contacted by the Count of Lidenia, who helped the former inspector to rejoin the ATC and reach the rank of High Governor. Farandole would serve as Mimir's agent with the Aeldrum Trade Company, helping him to orchestrate the events of The Black Pyramid Campaign.

Farandole's success in securing black sites for Lidenia, his own extensive network of ATC connections and his legendary "Black Book" of blackmail material all made him a cornerstone of the emerging Lidenia Network in the mid-4th century AU. By the 370s, Farandole was a member of the ATC board of directors, where he helped Lidenia protect and expand his vast secret portfolio: publicly, Farandole was an apolitical workhorse, the very model of an able Aeldman administrator. As a client but not a puppet of Lidenia, he was a useful ally but a source of constant wariness for the paranoid Count Homer. When the political turmoil of Aeldrum during the Coalition War made it necessary to dispense ATC appointments as bribes for the cooperation of major Conservative party figures, Lidenia saw an opportunity to buy out Farandole's ATC directorship: Farandole accepted, for an asset swap against the spoils of the broken Guilds of the Aeldrum core. Farandole retired once again from the ATC, ultimately accepting a handsome price from the Aeldman government for a controlling state interest in his newfound industrial holdings. Compared with his patron the Count of Lidenia, Farandole fared exceedingly well, dying peacefully in his sleep in his palatial Aeldrum manse at the age of 259, twelve years after the end of the Coalition War.