Darian Corvalis

Raised in a Steimz orphanage run by the Gamma Gambala Fraternity, Darian Corvalis was clearly a special case among his peers. The orphanages were run by mobs to give homes to children who had lost parents to the precarious life of being a career criminal in a mob fraternity. The children were very useful assets, and while they were well schooled, they were also apprentices for the frats.

The orphans were used for low-level street-crime, and for monitoring the activities of rival frats, operating as spies, enforcers and protectors of fraternity turf, acting as an early early warning system for hostile moves and turf encroachments.

Darian Corvalis showed a gift for organising and retaliating on his own initiative from the age of 10. As time went by he built a network of young enforcers, and while some warned the Gambala family that this young boy could become a threat, his fierce loyalty to the family, and the loyalty his crews had to him, made him an incredible asset to the fraternity.

As soon as he turned 18 he was given an exalted place in the frat, organising the security for the casinos, gambling dens, brothels, and coordinating street enforcement. He effectively became a chief of security for the business side of the fraternity. Corvalis remained loyal, but the murmurings against him as an ambitious threat to the family did not go away, and some of the younger family members were starting to listen, jealous of his status and his abilities, they considered him a personal threat to their own ambitions.

While his reputation was solid with the family that mattered, Corvalis was still very young, and knew eventually the fraternity elders would step aside for a younger generation, and that generation was showing outward signs that Corvalis talents would be hard to replace, but it would be a price worth paying to keep business in the family.

After the eldest son, Carlo Gambala, left the fraternity due to a bad relationship with his father that had festered for many years, the fraternity was in disarray. Shock and confusion reigned as Carlo fled off-world to take over one of the fraternity's sponsored pirate junks.

Being in control of most of the fraternity's security and enforcement crews, the family's private protection team were ill-matched to what came next. At a mass family gathering to decide how to deal with the loss of Carlo, Darian Corvalis arranged to have a fast-acting lethal gas pumped through the air conditioning system, killing the entire family in a matter of seconds. He felt he owed them too much to indulge in a violent massacre.

Beyond the family, Corvalis had identified all of the whisperers who had been undermining him and working to have the family eliminate him from their arrangements. These people he felt he owed nothing, and they were dispatched in a more classical manner, gunned down without mercy, stabbed to death, drowned in toilets, or finding their way into complex industrial equipment and dribbling their way out the other end.

Such was the quality of Corvalis' organisation skills the entire city-wide operation took less than 15 minute, leaving no time for warnings or a counter-strike. Corvalis took over Gamma Gambala fraternity, which he immediately renamed, simply, "Gamma."

Seeking to take advantage of what they expected to be an upheaval in the organisation, many of the larger fraternities attempted to seize turf and rackets from Gamma frat, but Corvalis had anticipated this, allowing as illusion of weakness in certain areas to bait others into attacking, finding a devastating level of resistance waiting for rival frats who took the bait. These attempts were costly to his rivals, and seeking a peaceful new agreement with Corvalis, these weakened frats found there was to be no peace. Corvalis went to war with all those who had attacked him, taking turf, buildings, and employees as he pleased. Some of the smaller frats were wiped out entirely.

Frightened and impressed with the reach and effectiveness of Corvalis' operations throughout the city, the remaining frats knew that even together they couldn't hope to beat Gamma, and a *"Pax Fratelli"* was agreed where Corvalis and Gamma would control their own turf, seize no other turf if not threatened, and be given control and patronage of the city's march southward into the ocean.

Corvalis was dubbed the *Fratello di tutti Fratelli*, brother of all brothers, the de facto leader of the city. Although bitter resentments continued to boil, Gamma clearly had a genius leader, a brutally effective ground-team, and an armoury of greatly superior weaponry at their disposal, with none of the other fraternities able to understand where the weapons came from, or where they might get hold of some for themselves.

Darian Corvalis' grip on the city was uninterrupted until a mysterious event saw his new headquarters, the Glass Fortress, suffer a massive structural failure and collapse into the ocean, killing himself, his bodyguards, Dione and Fione Fortier, and his personal chief of security, Milton "Milt" Gallagher.

His death led to a city-wide mob war which lasted for months, and led to Marshal Osterman, the Police marshal in charge of containing and suppressing the violent conflict, pushing for a greater militarisation of the Police evidenced by the inception of the Police "Prowler" program.