Brexton-Rax Cat Food Consortium

The Brexton-Rax Cat Food Consortium is a former corporate military junta that has since returned to simpler goals of feline food processing. Records of its history are scattered at best. And although Mr. Erasumus Brexton III (founder of Brexton Food Refinery and still president of Brexton-Rax) remains alive today thanks to his brain's relocation into effervescent tonic jar, we still can only piece together much of the company's history from ancient records, a stark reminder that immortality is not immune to senility.



Early History
The company was founded in 1663 when the Brexton Food Refinery (which produced processed foods), merged with Rax Innovations Unlimited (which produced cats). The merger has been considered one of the least fortuitous in economic history, despite its multi-generational survival.

Much of Brexton-Rax's early financial success came from its signature cat food line "Dr. Whiskers' Royal Snack-'Ums Gold Label". While mediocre at best according to ancient cat food reviews, it was the only food consistently digestible by virtually all rare and outlawed galactic cat breeds owned by the rich & influential.

After gaining a virtual lock on the market, President Brexton reluctantly began upping the price on the company's product at the behest of his corporate vizier (and co-founder), Mr. Theodorian Van Rax, further inflating the company's stock value and social influence. If reports of Mr. Van Rax's activities are to be believed, the vizier in question also began giving bulk discounts to influential business and political figures in exchange for favors and sway (without President Brexton's knowledge or consent).

Transition to Galactic Cat-Food-Based Junta
According to a diary belonging to Mr. Van Rax's chief underling,the decision to branch into private military came about when the corporate vizier overheard employees talking about the combat prowess of their delivery drivers. Using his unscurpulously obtained surplus of capital, Mr. Van Rax created the "Brexton-Rax Military Solutions" department, whose name was later changed by the well-intentioned Mr. Brexton to the "Brexton-Rax Purrrfect Military Solutions" department before the president would sign off on it.

When asked in an interview why he would approve of branching into the private military sector, Brexton replied thusly:

"I shouldn't like to stifle the man's creativity, would I? I'm sure he'll move onto something more interesting in a month. Besides, if it sells more food for the little kitties, I'm willing to see how it all goes, eh?"

I attempted an interview with Mr. Brexton to gauge his opinion of that decision, centuries after the fact. Unfortunately, in his dementia the company president believed me to be his third wife, and kept requesting me to "just do it once, Dear. Just to see how it feels, and if you don't like it, we'll never speak of it again."

Interactions With The Galaxy
Despite enjoying such perks as a private army and even a considerable term of office as the governing political party on Terra, Brexton-Rax was not immune to bad press. Its habit of creating military blockades around oceanic worlds to force virtually all fish to be brokered through them was the topic of much angered contention amongst human-rights activists and environmentalists.

While the Consortium's armed forces were fairly effective against militaries of indigenous populations, they were found to be severely lacking when pitted against certain guerilla combatants. The most notable example was detailed by one of Vizier Van Rax's many underlings. According to the chief underling's diary, Mr. Van Rax was attending a business dinner when the legend of the infamous Asashi Rosa was brought up by a colleague in hushed tones. Van Rax, scoffing at the absurdity of it, was purported to have made a wager that he could build his own stable of contract killers that "had no need for lipstick or liederhosen" within the month. He further claimed that these troops would be "easily accessible by those of means, without whispering and looking for fairy tales".

Two weeks into an extensive program of rigorous training for the aforementioned assassin's stable, all participants were found quite brutally dead, the only other evidence of any intrusion being several X's and O's scrawled on a mirror in what the chief underling described as "a shade of the pinkest of bubble gums."

Involvement with Harrican Syldanade and Resulting Bankruptcy
No force, group, or cosmic event has ever affected the company more than the great explorer Harrican Syldanade. From what I gathered from Mr. Van Rax's mostly destroyed personal letters, he seems to have equated Harrican to a personification of pure adversariality, created strictly to torment the vizier.

While Van Rax seemed to paint Mr. Syldanade as some kind of interstellar blaggard of the vilest sort, detailed historical reports suggest that most, if not all, of Harrican's encounters with the company may have been the result of pure chance. Sifting through numerous stacks of such instances, I have settled on detailing three distinct events, and leave the rest to be detailed by my fellow scholars.

The first devastating encounter was in 1671, on a canning facility located on one of Terra's moons. With the military division in early expansion, construction facilities had to be shared, and while still canning cat food, the facility was also constructing a battle-suit prototype to be presented at an interstellar weaponry convention later that year.

A moppish eight year-old Harrican Syldanade was touring the facility on a field trip with the rest of his 2nd Grade class when he brushed past the tour guide, proclaimed "What does this do?" and began to enthusiastically manipulate a master control panel with what his school-teacher referred to in her police statement as "child-like glee". A large explosion resulted, due to Harrican accidentally forcing a coolant leak in the battle-suit's power core. Luckily the company's safety fields remained intact around the visitor's area, but everything else in the labs was destroyed. Some months later, the Syldanade family successfully sued Brexton-Rax for child-endagerment.

A second encounter came in 1726, when Brexton-Rax military encountered Syldanade as he attempted to breach their blockade on the oceanic world of R'tbon. At the time, Brexton-Rax was preventing food and water-filtration shipments to R'tbon, in an attempt to force the colonists to sign over total fishing rights for the planet. Protestors and blockade runners were met with constant resistance from the Consortium's military, and found no success until Syldanade arrived. After a brief transmission between the Argos and the Brexton-Rax flagship "Officer Low-Belly", Harrican slammed his baneship through the bridge of the Officer Low-Belly and flew out the other side, thus destroying the ship and allowing a gap in the military line for relief workers to pile through.

Although his actions were believed by many to be the sort of reckless bravado consistent with Harrican throughout his career, the recent recovery of the Officer Low-Belly wreckage from R'tbon's ocean has yielded the transmission log from this encounter. Its contents cast a less-than-heroic light on Harrican's actions:

Pelesius Ipswitch, Yeoman of the Officer Low-Belly: Unidentified vessel, you are currently violating the airspace of a Brexton-Rax Yum-Yum-level military blockade. Desist immediately. Harrican Syldanade: (Bouts of giggling in background, shouting off mic) Oi, knock it off! Act casual. (Into mic) Hello? PI: Desist your approach now. HS: No, we don't need any of that nonsense, thank you. I should think a........uhhhhhhh..... number....six? The spicy kind. And four number eights, with none of that sauce you lot throw on 'em. (Urgent whispering, indistinct.) Yes, alright, ALRIGHT, I'm telling him, aren't I? And one of those cherry fizzes you've got on special. PI: Turn around or we WILL open fire. HS: (loudly) Look, I can't hear you, mate. (slightly off mic) Oh, bollocks, he's got my order wrong. I'll go inside and give it to 'em meself.

When asked in an interview about the incident some decades later, Mr. Syldanade professed no memory of the incident or indeed most of that week, having been enjoying a vacation with friends in the Fevorssian Cluster. He was quick to remark that he & his contingent were engaged in an "experiment at increasing the mind-enlightening effects of Byzant, by mixing in gronga berries and a substance the locals refer to as 'tobacco, but moreso'".

Harrican also claimed that his first conscious memory after the drug-mixing was from three weeks after the R'tbon encounter, when he woke up two systems over missing certain valuables, articles of clothing, and large swatches of time. Mr. Syldanade later successfully sued Brexton-Rax for "reckless endangerment of a starship while that starship is being piloted by someone on non-prescription medication".

The last recorded, and perhaps most devastating, encounter Mr. Syldanade had with the company came in 1752, when Harrican and friendly rival Antonio Beta, Robot Explorer, Super Spy and Cat Burglar of a Thousand Faces, decided to jointly survey the unexplored rogue planetoid HarBeta-5.

This incredible expedition is too long to fully recount here, but one event is worth mentioning. On day four of the exploration, the pair found a Brexton-Rax emergency probe deep within the jungle, overgrown with two years worth of moss and creepers. The probe had apparently launched itself due to an error in its click-algorythmic drive, believing the corporate building it had originated from to be under siege. As per protocol, it had copied all documents designated as "of a sensitive nature" (internal memos, blueprints, full outlines of current and future projects, etc.) before launching itself into space, most likely clipping its recovery transmitter on partially closed launch-bay doors.

Harrican displayed the contents of the probe's memory to his fellows and members of the press during the Brotherhood's yearly symposium, along with his findings on HarBeta-5. The radiocasting of Brexton-Rax's secret activities caused galactic outrage and plummeting stock prices.

A day after the symposium was radiocast (as well as an announcement that the military wing of the company was being scaled back by necessity), Brexton-Rax suffered the untimely loss of co-founder and vizier Mr. Van Rax, who took a swan dive off the roof of the head offices and belly-flopped onto the pavement many stories below. Witness accounts are spotty, but several employees with offices on that side of the building recounted hearing the word "freedom" being screamed in a pitch and tone similar to the Vizier's as he dropped past.

When asked by the press if the company was planning any special services for Mr. Van Rax, Talon Maldoni (former chief underling to Mr. Van Rax and newly-turban'd Corporate Vizier, who at the time of the interview was hard at work converting the Military departments into a a series of offices for himself), had this to say:

"Oh, I'm sure Mr. Van Rax wouldn't have wanted a big fuss. We'll probably just use what's left in his corporate trust to give the employees a nice bit of time off at a company retreat in his name. A man of his integrity deserves nothing less."

Mr. Syldanade later settled out of court with Brexton-Rax over Mr. Van Rax's defamation of his image, as the vizier's post-drop blood spatter obscured a poster for a grooming product Harrican was promoting at the time.