NeuSec ("New-Seck")
Written by: Ripshot
Let's talk home-security, omae. Don't matter who you are, you're probably paying off someone to make sure your stuff stays where it is and the junky on the corner think twice before stealing your wallet and/or kneecaps. For the well-off, this is usually a securicorp like Lone Star or Dragoon, but if you're on here, the odds are you're either brave/dumb enough to watch your own back or you're paying tribute to a gang instead (and if you live in the Juno, you're probably paying my gang, in which case you're welcome). If you step into the bad parts of Neuse and you start seeing chromed-up dudes in kevlar, riding branded milsurp jeeps and carrying gats bigger than your torso, then that neighbourhood's probably thrown its lot in with NeuSec, currently headed by a smarmy rigger going by the name of Blackbird. Don't let the name and fancy branding on their rides fool you chummer, these guys are a gang through 'n through, running protection rackets, gunrunning and hired-muscle gigs to keep themselves well-funded to put the hurt down on any idiot that tries to muscle in on their territory. So what makes these breeders any different from the other musclehead gangers running their own rackets in Neuse? Two things: The first is that their head-honcho, one Troll by the name of 'Commander' Denzel Falin, used to be a big name in the corpsec business, and a lot of his subordinates are also former servicemen from military and security gigs, with the training and cyberware to show for it. All of this has bled down into the rest of the gang by way of heavy discipline, heavier chrome and a whole assload of milsurp gear from their former connections. The second thing NeuSec has going for them is that as shameless as they are about their illicit ops, they're pretty fuckin serious about actually protecting the people who pay their fees. A dozen small-time gangs along with a couple bigger ones got wiped off the map completely after making the mistake of leaving a corpse or five after knocking down a convenience-store under NeuSec's watch, and the rank-and-file guys actually go to the trouble of chasing down small-time hoods when someone's stall gets spraypainted.Makes sense, all things considering. Falin grew up in the worse parts of Neuse and a lot of his old-guard are community leaders getting sick of having their shit robbed and shot up by other gangs. Falin himself also fancied himself as a community guy and preferred having people sign up for his protection willingly, it was only when he got jailed and Blackbird substituted for the day-to-day stuff that they got more aggressive in getting new signees.Now, you'd think a tightly-knit community clique like this would mean they'd think twice before associating with the likes of other criminals and runners like us, especially now that they're trying to go legit and PR-conscious on us, but you'd be wrong: The wiser guys in NeuSec know that they're spending more than they're earning legitimately, and that there's dirty work that needs doing but that they can't associate themselves with. The money's so-so, but they like to pay in part with choice picks from their gats and cyberware, so if you're looking to get some military-grade gear, it might be worth your time to do 'em some favors. Hell, I got my favourite spurs from 'em!
Just 'cause they're willing to tolerate us long enough doesn't mean they actually like shadowrunners, mind you. Sure, they'll put on airs of being friendly community-leader types, but every word's just oozing with condescension, and as soon as business is concluded they'll kick you out the back door and go back to treating you like criminal drek until they need you again...
Cracker's not wrong, but you can at least trust NeuSec to be good to their word and not burn your ass afterwards, so long as you don't spectacularly fuck up. Helping 'em out will also mean they put in a good word to their neighbourhoods if you help them out with the bigger stuff. For the most part this means being able to shortcut through NeuSec turf without getting pulled over, but it's also scored me a few back entrances into some restricted places because the janitor's son owed a favor.
Structure
As part of their whole faux military/corpsec schtick, NeuSec likes to play with organised military jargon and hierarchies, with 'recruit' prospects promoting into made-men 'privates' and so on until you get to the Commander's seat and his war-room of deputy-commanders. The only guys who don't fit into the usual ranking system are 'liasons'; NeuSec's fixers and Johnsons, and 'troubleshooters'; the heavily chromed-up ersatz-street samurai that get dropped into the worst of it and carve a way back out.
Identifiers
Whether it's their guns, their clothes or their implants, NeuSec likes their 'high-speed/low-drag' aesthetics: No fancy embellishments, no fancy paintjobs 'sides a handwritten motto or some urban camo, just barebones gunmetal-grey and high-durability construction for that utilitarian military vibe. Even the way they tag their turf is made to look like sterile corpsec marketting drek, all bold lines and eye-catching logos.You can make fun of the military-LARP look all you want, but they're still one of the only gangs out there openly walking around in armored plate-carriers and kevlar helmets. They might not be as vicious as their competitors, but they tend to have better survival-rates when Drek hits the fan.
Culture
NeuSec's internal culture is kind of weird to pin down. The militarised aspect is obvious, bringing to mind Ares with their armed-forces jargon slipped into officework, and NeuSec likes to put on airs of being stoic 'sheepdogs' looking after their communities. But with most of their gunners preferring to watch over the streets they live in, a lot of street-level subcultures get mixed into NeuSec's kevlar-'n-cammies regime, so you got places like the Raven Ridge road guarded by redneck-chic guys in armored pickups, but then you go across a block into Southwalk, and all of a sudden it's nothin' but Trolls listening to neoclassical tunes on two-grand boomboxes.
Assets
NeuSec might not have the same number of guys as other gangs with their sphere of influence, but what they do have are the connections to get military-surplus gear on the cheap: Assault-rifles by the crate, armored vans with turret-hardpoints and even high-grade cyberware with the sort of built-in stuff that you won't ever find in a legal clinic.
Their equipment is a few leagues above the usual ganger drek, don't get me wrong, but outside of corporate kickbacks and 'field-procurement' (read: ripping parts from unlucky gangers), most of their cyberware is a good couple of decades behind the newest stuff. Still hits as hard as you'd expect military-grade chrome to, but they're also missing out on a few years of improvements in holistic cyberware-intergration and MMI-breakthroughs, which has led to numerous issues with implant-rejection and cyberpsychosis in their ranks.
What NeuSec likes above all else is the word 'military-grade': Most people with common-sense know this just means 'made as cheap as possible while still passing basic stress-tests', but nothing puts a smile on a Noose's face like being able to brag their chrome was used in the Desert Wars back in '74, or that they learned their new stupid way of holding a knife from Special Forces Colonel Jackoff who totally killed a hundred trolls in hand-to-hand with his arms missing. Stupid, but it does mean that their gear is a little more reliable than what other gangers can scrounge.Unsurprisingly, considering both the first and current acting head-honchos of NeuSec were combat-deckers, their matrix presence and electronic warfare systems are no joke: Last he did a favor for them, our own Decker pinged at least four mid-to-high end cyberdecks operating across their networks, and everyone involved in an op have all their gear slaved to some pretty mighty firewalls and ICE.
History
For those who don't know, a lot of Neuse's streets are the kind that the law just sort of tries to ignore as much as possible. It ain't a Z-zone or the Concrete Forest, but patrols are infrequent and the only way your emergency call is gonna get a timely response is if whatever's happening has a chance of spilling into the 'important' areas or making headlines on the news, and so the only safe bet is to keep an iron loaded and pay off whatever gang is in your neighbourhood in the hopes they'll leave you alone.
Then comes a guy named Denzel Falin. Falin was one of those 'rags to riches' stories of a guy growing up in the bad part of town, snagging a job as a Lone Star rentacop and clawing his way up the ranks until he was an HTR big-shot and Neuse was a spec on the horizon. Then the guy caved a chiphead's skull in while the evening news watched, and Lone Star dropped him quicker than a bad facelift.
Doesn't sound like the Lone Star I know, usually that sort of stuff gets you, at worst, a slap on the wrist and paid time off. What gives?
The chiphead in question wasn't some SINless nobody, but a Tasha Stokes, a daughter of then-deputy mayor Juan Stokes. While the rest of the dead chipheads got swept under the rug, she became the poster-girl of 'innocent victim who just fell into the wrong crowd' even though she fired just as many bullets at Falin and his squad. The fallout from that was bad enough that it gave Dragoon room to muscle in on some of Lone Star's law-enforcement contracts, so it's no wonder they threw Falin to the wolves.So Falin was jobless, burned by the corpsec industry and eventually forced to move back into his old neighbourhood in Neuse for lack of better options, where he found that as bad as things were in his old neighbourhood, they'd gotten worse. Gangs warfare and unchecked crime were a simple fact of life for the unfortunate locals. The only apartment-complex that would take him in was a hangout for the Dahlgreen Rippers, a small-time gang of cyberpsychos with a penchant for mugging people of their cyberware to sell or keep for themselves. The Rippers saw a destitute loner with some wizz-looking chrome and thought he was gonna be easy pickings, figuring that numbers give 'em the upper-hand over a cyber'd up troll with decades of HTR experience. The poor idiots...
Wait, they let Falin keep his chrome? I thought corps liked to take that stuff back when you leave...
Lone Star worried that the media-spotlight would stay on Falin after he was fired, so they didn't want to make the PR fallout worse by leaving a former employee a double-amputee. Because of that and Falin still having a few friends in the right places, the compromise was that he'd get to keep his 'ware but all of the restricted corpsec-only gadgets would be removed.This being Neuse, nobody gave much of a care that the Rippers got killed to a man by a single angry guy, nobody except the people unfortunate enough to have had to live in that same apartment building with the Rippers. Just like that, Falin was no longer a sell-out who got fired for police-brutality, but a defector from the decadent corpo-life who was now fighting for the little guy, or something like that. And Falin himself? He'd found a new calling. Moving into the late Rippers' old hideout and snagging all the gats and chrome they'd left behind, Falin started recruiting from the apartment's tenants and staff get his new idea off the ground, showing them the basics of threat-assessment and combat drills, calling themselves the Dahlgreen Watch. As it turned out, Falin wasn't the only former serviceman in Neuse: A couple of dozen discharged and retired vets who had been burned and left to hang by their old employers found their way to Falin, looking for a new purpose on top of wanting their neighbourhood to no longer be a 24-hour shooting gallery. Combine that with a drekton of connections they still had with their old co-workers, and every gang that went looking to fill the vacuum left by the Rippers were being pushed right the fuck back out in short time. Now even back then, Falin wasn't naive enough to think he'd be keeping this up on the goodwill of his neighbours and selling whatever he didn't keep from wiping out the other small-time gangs in Neuse. It weren't long until he started being a little more forceful with requesting 'donations' from his protectees and doing some odd-jobs on the side - mostly legbreaking, bouncer/security gigs and the occasional bit of gunrunning - but they swear up and down that it's different than when other gangs because it's totally for a good cause.
For what it's worth, at least when you pay them they actually show up to help when shit hits the fan. Hell, I heard they even reimbursed a guy when his shop got ventilated in the crossfire of a shootout outside.So where's Falin now, what with his gang holding a big chunk of Neuse to themselves? Short answer, he's in the big house. Long answer: Lone Star finally caught wind of what Falin was doing and tried to set up an arms-dealing sting to cut off a long loose-end, things got violent and Falin was walked out of his own home by like fifty SWAT guys. Thing is, with all the witnesses and evidence in the apartment-building being 'mysteriously' unaccounted for, Falin's in legal limbo while his legal-team and Lone Star's keep negotiating what if anything he's gonna be charged with. Falin's still running things on the sly from his cell for the time being, but the day-to-day stuff's currently being looked over by a human named Blackbird, former Dragoon and Falin's second-in-command. Blackbird had the bright idea of renaming the Dahlgreen Watch to the corp-sounding 'NeuSec' to try and legitimise themselves as a security provider, but he's also been pushing them to be more aggressive against the other gangs in Neuse, even going so far as to pick a couple of really stupid fights with a couple of the big-league gangs to make a show of force and getting pushed back for the first few times since they started.
Ripshot's definitely holding back her opinion on this: A few months back, NeuSec started setting up shop in the Juno's ground-floor, intending to take over the building one floor at a time. The first couple of floors were smooth sailing and they even had a couple of victorious skirmishes against the Pack, thanks to having a couple of insider boy-toys feeding them info. But once the Pack started giving their full attention, NeuSec weren't able to hold their ground and left the Juno alone. Turns that out for all their training and gear, spending most of the past decade fighting small-time gangs didn't prepare them for a fight with a legitimate cartel full of kamikaze-huffing ork and troll razorgirls on their home-turf.
Thing is, it wasn't just that the Pack had the gear and experience to keep up with NeuSec; they were also less concerned with PR and much more willing to go that extra mile in brutality. Really took the wind out of Neusec's sails when they started getting simsense recordings of prospects getting flayed alive along with photos of the inside of their homes...
Unbreakable Vigil.
Founding Date
2069
Type
Illicit, Gang
Alternative Names
Dahlgreen Watch
Demonym
NuSec, Noose
Notable Members
Peace
Having a sizeable monopoly on smuggling through most of Raleigh, NeuSec regularly call upon the Corsairs to ensure their 'front lines' are well stocked in military-surplus gear, in exchange for monetary payment and use of their turf as smuggling-routesand - so long as care is taken - racing lines, an agreement the Corsairs are more than happy with.
Unfriendly
The Aoyama-Gumi previously acted as middlemen for NeuSec's arms-procurement, but a few soured deals and NeuSec's growing threat as a competitor in organised crime led to relaitonships souring. Deals are still made under the table, but any semblance of politeness or courtesy are merely a pretense for the time being.
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