St. Louis

As a border city stuck between the CAS and UCAS, St. Louis is an always-busy port city, crucial to intercontinental commerce. But now, Saint Louis is reeling from the collapse of NeoNET in ways other cities aren’t. It was poised to replace Boston as the home of an AAA corp, but Villiers’ fall means they’re stuck in runner-up status with lots of nuyen thrown away on corporate subsidies for a powerful-but-not-AAA-level corp in Novatech. They spent an awful lot on what was supposed to be NeoNET’s ARCHology, but now they are stuck with an incredibly large, indecently expensive state-of-the-art corporate enclave, with no corporation to fill it. As a result, St. Louis is in the process of out- sourcing more municipal services as it struggles to pay off its debt, and Novatech is bidding on a lot of the contracts. Samantha Villiers has every bit as much ice in her veins as her father, and word on the street is that she is hiring runners to improve Novatech’s odds. The big- gest pushback is from native corps who see Novatech as an interloper who isn’t big enough to muscle them out anymore. Both Ares and Spinrad looked like they could make a play for the ARCHology and make a move to St. Louis in order to have both the CAS and UCAS at their feet, but Ares seems more interested in Atlanta now, and Spinrad, while still interested, is now in the driver’s seat with no competition. Look for St. Louis to reinvent itself soon to try to save itself from selling its soul to pay for its poor bets