Quva Home-Automation
Written by: Coupe
So with any corp or subsidiary, there's always one thing they're gonna be known for over everything else. Ares makes guns, Horizon manages your online social-life, Universal Omnitech sells you eyes, so on and so forth. Now, Quva Home-Automation would love for their thing to be Home Management Software Suites, or smart-appliances, or their latest line of handy domestic drones that'll button your shirt up for you. Instead, when you bring up Quva most people will ask:"Aren't those the guys who made sex-bots?"
So let's get this out the way: Quva HA did produce very modular anthroform drones which coincidentally is also compatible with some 'massage assistants' made by a formerly partnered company, and this is something the company would prefer to be forgotten, tragically. Once you get past that though, they're a pretty legit corp on their way to hitting that coveted A-tier, and they're one of the more metahuman friendly corps outside of Evo in their product diversity.
Hell, some ways they're better than Evo. High-pressure showerheads that can clean gunk out of dermal deposits? Luxury, chummer...
I'm gonna have to ask Null Kit if he can delete that comment, because hueueghh...But this isn't a company brochure, so I'll skip to the juicy parts: Quva's been getting into the business of hiring 'third-party contractors' to deal with some of their problems in public relations. In other words, the company's legal team hired shadowrunners to clean up a mess before it goes public and decided it was a pretty good way of dealinig with their problems, to the point that they've allegedly allocated some of their budget specifically for more runs. Not bad for a local mom-'n-pop corp, eh? Just don't let that make you think they go easy on Shadowrunners, far from it. Quva might make use of us, but they've done their research on how to retaliate when we're running against 'em. Take 'em just as serious as any big corp chummer, or you'll have a Bad Day for sure.
They also like to throw in top-end smarthome electronics in with their pay. Seems cute at first, 'till you learn how much surveilence drek is in your average modern coffeemaker. Not to mention all the subscription costs...
Structure
Quva's structure holds a kind of rudimentary representative not-democracy in its otherwise boilerplate corporate structure, where business in each city is represented by a Regional Director who reports directly to the Board of Directors, and is in turn reported to by the managers of individual buildings.
You can tell that Quva really wants to push the whole 'chill and hip' vibe with this sort of hierarchy that almost seems like everyone has a say and the way that offices outside of R&D are set up: No cubicles, lots of beanbags, astroturf and 'fun' things like pinball machines and Azzie brand make-your-own-candy dispensers. In other words, you've got even less privacy than in a cubicle farm and more ways for the corp to take your paycheck right back...
Public Agenda
Quva's product line is centered entirely around automating and connecting every appliance in a salaryman's home, designing and selling a wide range of appliances ranging from soycaf makers and commlink docks to smart-freezers and showers. Their price range generally targets the 'budget conscious' demographic, with surprisingly high compatability with appliances from manufacturers and 'install it yourself' systems that theoretically make hiring electricians an 'optional luxury'.
Theoretically. Grid's full of vids of the technologically illiterate getting second-degree burns from trying to plug in a new ceiling-fan...
Assets
Quva's got a reasonably big presence across the northwest CAS, utilising a very decentralized network where each city has its own manufacturing and storage facility along with one 'superstore' and multiple smaller distribution-kiosks (basically a manned stall with a few catalogues). Raleigh operates with the same structure, with the added caveat that their corporate headquarters is also located within the city's commercial district. Kurabokko Metahuman Technologies currently holds an ongoing contract with Quva to handle storage and delivery within Raleigh, and Lone Star Security Services have an indefinite security contract across the corporation's properties.
History
Quva's founding started as a clique of like-minded designers and architects from a small handful of corporations large and small, conversing with oneanother over a 'hidden' matrix host called QubaKun, mostly talking about their respective hang-ups with their jobs. Most corporations knew of Cubawatch and the conversations inside, but those that had any power to do anything about it chose to keep that knowledge to themselves and let their employees vent, so long as nothing confidential was blabbed and the data could be used to the corp's advantage.
This tolerance began to wane as designers began to use the host as a sandbox to spitball their personal ideas for new appliances and electronics, sharing advice and bouncing ideas off of eachother until they had a cute little corner full of pet-projects. Since these designs were influenced and worked on by multiple people, there was an unspoken agreement that they wouldn't be brought to the attention of their corps, out of a sense of fairness to whoever else participated in it being prohibited by corporate relations from recieving their fair share of credit or profit. Naturally, this ticked the corps off and some of them began making subtle nudges towards the monitored employees reminding them who's paying their cheques and where those designs should be going to.
Surprisingly, the smaller companies came down harder on the forumgoers than the AAA megas. Anschutz actually called a big staff meeting just so there'd be an audience to the humiliating reprimandment they gave to the two guys from their building for giving tips on structural design. Last I heard, one of them went off the grid completely afterwards.So things weren't great on Quba-Kun. The moment everyone was aware their little haven was being monitored, they all got tight-lipped and reluctant to share anything they wouldn't say around their boss, their 'safe' haven, and nothing would be the same anymore. Most members of the designer clique resigned themselves to their fate, but one of the forumgoers, a dwarf by the name of David Pineda, had other plans. See, David was a kid from one of the very wealthy families in Aztechnology's upper hierarchy, and as is typical of trust-fund heirs his age, he had that magic combination of obscene wealth and a complete inability to comprehend the concept of not getting what he wants. So when one of David's favourite online hangouts was getting bullied, he had none of it. One phone-call to dearest mom and a few handshakes later, Pineda messaged his friends with a proposition: "Come work for me instead of those other chodes, we'll start our own company!" Now there were some initial doubts, especially from those with corporate citizenship who were hesitant to throw their lot in with what would effectively be an Aztechnology owned subsidiary. But surprisingly enough, the simple act of having their social getaway ruined by corporate oversight left enough people disgruntled that David Pineda's startup started off with a decent base of knowledgeable (or at least enthusiastic) supporters, and after a mostly succesful extraction job to get everyone in Pineda's hometown of Raleigh, the company was started and named Quba Electronic Solutions, in honor of the forum where it all started.
For those wondering about why the extractions were only 'mostly' succesful: Nina Chim was supposed to have her death faked to make her extraction from Wuxing easier, but a miscommunication led to Nina getting killed and her unknowing body-double getting kidnapped instead. For what it's worth, Weici ended up liking her new job overseas.Despite a temporary mishandling of funding owing to a lack of experienced financial experts in the initial roster, Quba began making a small name for themselves designing a pretty wide variety of electronic appliances. Of course, their variety was a little too wide at the begining since they didn't really nail down the direction they wanted to take their business in. Industrial machinery, hospital beds, and even automatic doors, they ended up stretching themselves thin with only a vague target-demographic of commercial businesses, but with Pineda and thus by proxy Aztechnology funding them, they managed to make it work until the day their product diversity got a little too far out of hand. Around June '71 one of the founding members of the company, a gal named Ida Schultz, was doing work on a new anthroform drone platform, designed with modularity in mind: The idea behind it was that you'd buy the base frame along with a couple of free options for a specific line of work (cleaning, cooking, fire-safety, customer service, etc...), and if you wanted to optimise it for a different task or even give it a new appearance, you could buy from an aftermarket catalogue of parts and program files. Schultz had the novel idea of arranging the slots and ports for the add-ons to be compatible with products from other companies, thinking it would save money on developing compatible mods in-house and make them some new friends in other corps. Pineda gave the idea his blessing, and later that year the Mark-01 Jerri drone was released to the public. Despite being a budget model from the days when some of the kinks were still being worked out from anthroforms, the Jerri sold spectacularly well and Raleigh had a short-lived fad around the things, with all sorts of drone-shops selling designer parts for so-called 'tuner' models of hyper-customised Jerri drones. Pineda was content in letting Ida Schultz and her cohorts continue their work on the Mark-02 model mostly independently, including giving her free-reign on what third-party products the new Jerri was made to be compatible with. The Mark-02 was released in 2073 to pretty big fanfare, considering the company was still pretty small, and their stocks were emptied almost immediately, it sold so well. In fact, it sold suspiciously well for a budget homemaking drone, and Pineda himself began actually looking into what made the drone so popular: Turns out, one of the companies that signed up for a full parts-compatability program was Syno-Leisure, whose most popular products were... well, they were officially sold as 'novelty massagers', but let's be honest, they were adult toys, and the 'demo programs' sold with those toys made their real intentions pretty dang clear. The new Jerri drones were selling spectacularly well, but it in fact came at the cost of the rest of Quba's product-line, as well as its reputation in the public and worst of all, its standing in the eye of its parent company Aztechnology, whose legal experts made it very clear what they thought of David Pineda's Azzie-funded project at the time. Pineda had to implement damage-control, and he started on an impusive note by terminating Ida Schultz's employment contract on the spot, to the shock of his friends in the company. Quba began an aggressive astroturfing campaign to try and undo some of the damage it suffered to its reputation. Its target demographic quickly switched from professional to personal use with a focus on home-appliance systems, and the business was for reasons unknown renamed Quva Home-Automation. Great lengths and a hell of a lot of money was put into giving themselfs a new, squeaky-clean image and convincing the public that the debacle with the Mark-02 Jerri was the result of a single 'aberrant employee' going behind the company's back, but one very apparent flaw existed in this narrative: Ida Schultz herself, who didn't take kindly to the idea of being the company's scapegoat and intended to go public with the truth. Now the folk at Quva liked Ida, and legitimately regretted what had happened to her, but self-preservation is a hard instinct to fight, and the company was unlikely to survive if all their PR work was undone. But Pineda reasurred his co-workers he'd sort the situation out, and wouldn't you know it, before 2076 was over Ida publically corroborated Quva's story, admitting the whole thing was her fault and that she colaborated with Syno-Leisure against the wishes of her superiors, before dissapearing into anonymity. A happy ending, right? Of course, this was all complete horseapples. In actuality, a panicking David Pineda was so desperate to keep his beloved company going that he told his PR consultants to convince Ida to stick with the given story by any means necesarry, and one of those consultants happened to be have a friend who could get into contact with another friend who happened to know some guys in the shadows who could help Pineda. That's right, Ida was the victim of Quva's first shadowrun, and whatever means they used to get her to uphold Quva's narrative worked.
It was blackmail, if you really wanna know. Shame what happened to the woman afterwards, really.Since then, Quva's regained its momentum and continued expanding its business, slowly solidifying itself as a retailer of choice for home-management electronics. Pineda himself has not only accepted that his beloved corp now has a skeleton in its foundation, but apparently has taken a real shine to it, as rumors leak into Raleigh's underworld that more Mr. Johnsons have contracted jobs on the corp's behalf to deter any further complications. Time'll tell what the other founding members, the old clique from QubaKun, will do when they find out...
"Making a house into a home!"
Ongoing contract
Kurabokko's monopolising of local shipping and storage systems was universally agreed upon by the higher-ups in Quva, but the workers in Quva's old warehouses were left disgruntled after being dealt a far worse hand: Some of them were restructured into acting as liasons between the two corporations or pitrogjt made reduntant.
Those that lost their careers hold an arguably justified grudge, which occasionally spilled over into incidents of vandalism and physical altercations towards Kurabokko-related property and employees. Even in 2080, a lot of petty criminals looking to get into the mercenary/shadowrunner game will find an abundance of jobs to inconvenience one or both of the corps, paid via the pooled money of the disgruntled former employees.
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