“The glory of antiquity, at the height of modernity.”
The latest addition to New York City’s skyline is an architectural feat like no other. Until 2020, the Hawksmoor Building was simply another nondescript skyscraper, housing the offices of the multinational holding conglomerate Nexus on its top ten floors, along with hundreds of other businesses, large and small. However, the chief shareholder of Nexus, Dante Auberon Leonis IV, who inherited his controlling stake in the conglomerate in 2018, made the unprecedented move of buying the entire building outright, some four years ago. Since then, he has bought out every individual tenant, slowly but surely replacing them all with subsidiaries of Nexus, at a cost rumored to be nothing short of astronomical- although the details of these deals are, and will remain, confidential.
At present, the building is the corporate headquarters of Nexus, along with a vast suite of subsidiary corporations which Nexus either owns outright, or has a controlling stake in. These include the military R&D corporation MARS ULTOR, aerospace contractor Aeolus, and shipping group Magellan Ltd. However, the building’s most notable feature by far, is the fact that it houses the personal residence of Leonis himself- Hawksmoor Keep, the castle in the sky.
Constructed atop the Hawksmoor Building, the castle known as Hawksmoor Keep is the most expensive home in New York City, with its owner intimating that it cost upwards of twenty million dollars to build. The castle’s exterior design is not recognizable as mirroring the style of any one era, but rather drawing the best architectural elements from all of history, ranging from Greco-Roman columns, to the turrets of a Medieval European castle, and tiled murals designed in the Ottoman style. The single unifying element is opulence, an unmistakable display of wealth and power designed to engender envy in those who look up at the castle from eighty stories below.
As Hawksmoor Keep has rapidly become the premier venue for New York’s most elite events, pains were taken to make it accessible to those with invitations. As such, a dedicated elevator was installed which links the underground parking garage to the rooftop castle, allowing guests to park their vehicles in the open-air courtyard area before disembarking to enter the hall.
Beyond the first gate is a courtyard area adorned with statuary, fountains and carefully maintained topiary constructions. This area is meant for mingling, as well as funneling guests toward the castle’s main entrance. Guests are also invited to walk the walls and the observation towers, which provide the best view of the city available, bar none.
The castle itself is primarily an event venue, displaying a significant portion of the Leonis family’s art collection, which is the fifth-largest private art collection on the planet, and the largest which does not belong to the royal family of any nation. A dedicated on-site staff of some 150 individuals live in the castle full-time, including a full kitchen staff, three Michelin star-grade chefs, four sommeliers, a mechanic crew devoted to maintaining Leonis’ personal vehicles, and a master-of-arms which maintains the castle’s collection of weaponry, the largest single private collection of modern and historical armaments in the United States. Hawksmoor Keep also boasts New York’s largest collection of wine, much of which is sourced from the top-grade Argentinian vineyard owned by the Leonis family. The castle’s house staff also includes dozens of maids and butlers tasked with keeping every inch of Hawksmoor Keep immaculate, as well as Dante’s personal executive staff, which handle the day-to-day maintenance of his personal holdings. In addition, an on-call group of personal trainers, massage therapists, and medical personnel are employed at Hawksmoor Keep to attend to any guests, although Leonis does not personally make use of these services.
Hawksmoor Keep’s interior amenities include a massive dining hall, with a table that seats two hundred, as well as fifteen guest bedrooms, each of which includes an en suite bathroom and lounge. Each of these rooms is adorned with a unique collection of sculptures, busts, and paintings from the Leonis family collection, with the rooms in the left wing of the castle favoring modern pieces, and the right wing trending more towards the classical. Leonis frequently offers these rooms to his friends, acquaintances, political allies and business partners, both as a gesture of magnanimity, and as a way to keep track of important individuals while they move through his sphere of influence. While staying within the castle, guests are free to avail themselves of any of the available services at their leisure.
Among the various rooms within Hawksmoor Keep proper is a fully stocked Olympic-grade gymnasium with indoor lap pool, a firing range, and even a full surgical center, where the castle’s on-site medical team performs everything from covert cosmetic alterations on Dante’s celebrity friends, to lifesaving operations that can’t be trusted to public hospitals.
The Lord Leonis does not personally dwell within the castle, but rather within a private penthouse situated upon a false rock face overlooking Hawksmoor Keep. This lavish apartment is closed to all guests except by personal invitation, and access is gated by a DNA-coded lock. No staff are permitted to enter Dante’s private apartments, only the select group known as the Envoys, who accompany the Lord Leonis at all times. This group of idiosyncratic individuals act as bodyguards, personal assistants, and advisors, although it’s rare to see them speak to anyone other than their master.
Dante’s penthouse is equipped with a full suite of amenities, including a helipad, which the young billionaire uses almost exclusively to enter and exit Hawksmoor Keep, preferring not to rub shoulders with ordinary New Yorkers on the street whenever it can be avoided. Most notably, the penthouse is home to Leonis’ personal computer system, an HPE Frontier supercomputer boasting 591,872 CPU cores, with full access to Nexus’s extensive digital archive.
Thanks to a unique arrangement with the city and state government of New York, the Hawksmoor Building- and Hawksmoor Keep in particular -boast a highly robust defense system intended to deter or destroy threats both subtle and overt. The most notable are the anti-air emplacements surrounding the castle and penthouse, a proprietary MARS ULTOR design capable of shooting down both missiles, suicide drones, and aircraft with laserlike precision. The consequences of doing so in New York City’s airspace would doubtless be catastrophic for the surrounding buildings, to say nothing of those on the ground, but these concerns were considered irrelevant, as Hawksmoor Keep’s security is paramount.
The building itself has thousands of internal gate mechanisms, locked by a combination of DNA, retinal and vocal recognition scans, which allow only authorized individuals to progress through the building, virtually impossible to fool except by the most talented disguise artists alive- or the most skillful hackers. For example, despite working in the same building, an Aeolus engineer couldn’t enter the MARS ULTOR offices without explicit authorization from a supervisor or security personnel.
Each floor of the Hawksmoor Building is equipped with over a dozen autonomous gun emplacements, equipped with MARS ULTOR DNA-targeting which allows them to selectively eliminate unauthorized intruders while leaving employees unscathed. Every hallway and door is equipped with titanium blast shielding, which is designed to prevent an assault team from ‘brute-forcing’ their way through the building. In an emergency scenario, the building itself can even be flooded from top to bottom with any number of substances, from vision-impairing smoke, to tear gas, to lethal nerve agents.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of corporate subsidiaries of Nexus, all of which have their main offices located in the Hawksmoor Building.
MARS ULTOR: A leading military R&D/defense contractor, MARS ULTOR has supplied bleeding-edge weaponry to governments and non-state actors across the globe for nearly thirty years. Founded by Dante Auberon Leonis III, who was the first of his lineage to take the family fortune overseas and invest in corporate America, it has attracted the ire of many ‘do-gooder’ groups, from NGOs to watchdog organizations, which criticize MARS ULTOR for indiscriminately arming any entity which can afford their weaponry. However, the company remains in good standing with most Western governments, which have incorporated its products into their own militaries just as much as their enemies have. MARS ULTOR’s weapons are most notable for their precision, particularly through their proprietary DNA-based targeting systems, which allow a drone or helicopter to open fire on a crowd, yet only kill a single designated target, by screening the genetic profile of every individual within the kill zone.
Aeolus Aerospace: Named for the Greek deity governing the winds, Aeolus is considered a small fish in the vast pond that is the aeronautics industry. However, what it may lack in market share compared to giants like Boeing or Virgin, it makes up for in terms of quality. The small number of vehicles produced under the Aeolus umbrella are hallmarks of quality, adopted by many nations as personal transport for their heads of state, as well as billionaire CEOs- the two groups who can reliably afford an Aeolus plane, helicopter, or VTOL. The Lord Leonis travels almost exclusively by Aeolus ‘KuroiKaze’ VTOL, a custom-designed model equipped with MARS ULTOR armaments fitted to the vehicle’s highly aerodynamic frame.
Magellan Ltd.: Operating a fleet of more than five hundred cargo ships, planes, and trains, Magellan Ltd. is a shipping and transportation company that mainly services various other Nexus subsidiaries, transporting Aeolus vehicles, MARS ULTOR armaments, and much more. The company has a reputation for efficiency, speed, and discretion- when it takes an external client, it gets their cargo where it needs to go on time, and without asking unnecessary questions, without fail.
Mithridates LLC: Though it’s not a name known to the average man or woman, even those who consider themselves well-informed on matters political, Mithridates LLC is a highly influential political lobbying group, which quietly wields vast power in Western circles, effectively dictating policy in a number of areas which Nexus- and its owner -consider important. This largely involves deregulating certain cutting-edge technological industries, including ones which Nexus subsidiaries are at the forefront of, in the service of dragging human society toward its future, no matter the ethical or moral concerns that some might have with their methods. Mithridates also pours vast sums into controlling the governments of smaller nations, where Nexus’s more morally dubious holdings can conduct their business without international scrutiny.
Katalyst GeneTech: Holding great personal interest to Nexus’s owner, Katalyst GeneTech is a bleeding-edge bioengineering firm, on the forefront of transhuman science. Their research into cloning, gene-editing, DNA tailoring, and body-sculpting has led many to hypothesize that the next generation of posthuman development will come out of a Katalyst lab. However, they have taken pains to avoid being noticed by the wider world, preferring to conduct their experiments in nations with friendly governments and no shortage of test subjects who won’t be missed, should an experiment end badly for them.
Polaris Metals: One of the few Nexus holdings which consistently operates at a loss, Polaris Metals has survived only due to the personal intervention of the Lord Leonis himself, who has forbidden the closure of a number of unprofitable mining operations around the world. Dedicated accountants work to squeeze every last dollar out of these holdings, but the conglomerate’s owner is not concerned with profit- only the extraction of the invaluable Psitanium, which Leonis has established a virtual monopoly on through this company.
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