Draco Foundation
The leaders of the world’s greatest treasure hunt, now in its third decade! So Dunkelzahn died—you probably heard about it. Like all great dragons, he had a considerable hoard when he died, and unlike all great dragons, he developed a plan to share it with others before he died. His will is a bewildering array of straight-out bequests, weird chal- lenges, and odd puzzles. “To Aden, I leave the Shroud of Shadows.” Sure, we get that one. Direct and to the point. “To Aithne Oakforest, I leave the Rose Crystal, in hopes of soothing old wounds and healing the rifts they have caused.” Wait, hold up. Which old wounds? What rifts? And how will the Rose Crystal soothe them? “To the first party to create a perpetual motion machine without the aid of magic, I leave the heretofore undiscovered notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.” That has to be a joke—right? You don’t just go breaking the laws of physics, and Dunkelzahn knew it. So no one will ever win the notebooks. So do they exist? Did Dunkelzahn look at them? And wasn’t perpetual motion one of da Vinci’s interests? What’s in these notebooks? What goes on here? “To Robert J. Hemedes, I leave a small token of my esteem, to be distributed by the Draco Foundation.” Who? What is the token? And what, pray tell, is the Draco Foundation? That gets us to the heart of the matter. The will contains 213 such bequests. Some, like the transfer of the Shroud of Shadows to item, are one-time, easily fulfilled matters. Others, like the perpetual motion quest, or the search for the ancient Russian crown jewels, are impossible, or close to it. Still others are ongoing—a pledge of cooperation to the great dragon Arleesh, a 1 million nuyen on blood mages. All of this requires someone to oversee the work. That someone is the Draco Foundation. Headquartered in DeeCee, the Foundation has considerable assets at its disposal. How considerable? Hell if I know. The Foundation got whatever was left of Dunkie’s hoard after everything was given out, and if you consider a dragon’s hoard to be nearly infinite, then subtracting billions of nuyen from near-infinity leaves … near-infinity. So just assume they can afford what they need, including high-powered runners from Assets Inc. The Foundation looks into any odd magical phe- nomenon that catches their attention, and even though they’re only open to the public once a month, they are surprisingly adept at uncovering information very few people know about. They’ll often work hand-in-glove with the Dunkelzahn Institute for Magical Research in investigating these phenomena, and the two of them were said to be jointly working on some sort of research base in Antarctica, though the purposes of this and the reasons for the location were well hidden. Nadja Daviar, Dunkelzahn’s former voice, is board chair. She does not involve herself much in the day-to- day operations, but she keeps plugged in enough to know of the Foundation’s major work and get especially involved in the things that catch her attention. Rex Coll is the executive director; he helped clean house after Daviar’s return from her mysterious absence and was expected to be a short-timer, but he seems to have found a place he likes, so he is looking into sustaining an organization rather than stripping it for parts. It’s always easier, of course, when you have the interest from a huge pile of nuyen to sustain you in perpetuity.
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