Zero Parades: For Dead Spies

Setting

Zero Parades: For Dead Spies takes place in a world with three dominant factions: the Superbloc (formally the Supreme Union of Proletarian Republics), a federation of communist states; the Developed World, a loose association of post-industrial capitalist states under the aegis of the powerful investment bank EMTERR (l'Empire sans Territoire); and La Luz (the Illuminated Empire), an authoritarian monarchy guided by an eschatological ideology it calls techno-fascism. The current date is the year 96 of an era named the End of History. This era commenced with the signing of the Latour-Woolgar Treaty, which created an international legal framework to reduce wars between countries. While the Superbloc and the Developed World remain in opposition, they have grown complacent over decades of relative peace, and La Luz now exploits loopholes and its rivals' aversion to conflict to forcefully reassert control over its many former colonies around the world.

The events of the game occur entirely in Portofiro, an island city-state fallen on hard times that was once a Luzian penal colony. Portofiro is now nominally part of the Developed World due to taking on multiple EMTERR loans, but the Superbloc maintains an interest in it and the threat of Luzian re-annexation looms on the horizon. Five years ago, the Superbloc's network of assets in Portofiro was leaked to the Weeping Eye, the secret police of La Luz. The operant Hershel Wilk headed the network and was the only member who escaped Portofiro before the Weeping Eye closed in. As punishment for her failure Hershel's superiors at the Superbloc's Operant Bureau have re-assigned her to a desk job at a filing complex known as The Freezer for the past five years. In the present, Hershel is released and sent back to Portofiro on a new assignment.

Plot

Operant Hershel Wilk, alias CASCADE, arrives at an Operant Bureau safehouse in Portofiro and finds that her partner, PSEUDOPOD, has been incapacitated and cannot brief her on their joint assignment. Seeking to avoid being sent back to the Freezer, Hershel retraces PSEUDOPOD's last steps across Portofiro's Quisach district. She learns one of her old assets, the crime boss Tempo del Sur, had important intel pertaining to La Luz that he wanted to trade to the Superbloc. The Operant Bureau sent PSEUDOPOD to make contact, but Tempo refused to speak to anyone other than Hershel. The reason Hershel was let out of the Freezer was to vouch for PSEUDOPOD so he could take over as Tempo's handler. Upon discovering signs that Tempo was recently killed by the Weeping Eye, Hershel shifts her investigation to figuring out what Tempo's intel was.

Eventually, Hershel pieces together that La Luz and EMTERR were preparing to hold secret, high-level treaty negotiations in Portofiro. Luzian Minister of Mass Culture Facundo Reyes, one the Superbloc's most reviled foes, had reached out to EMTERR and offered to end La Luz's re-annexation campaigns in exchange for EMTERR lifting its Culture Blockade on La Luz, which was preventing Luzian media and consumer products from being imported by the Developed World. Simultaneously, Minister Reyes' assistant, Dante Augustino, sought to defect to the Superbloc. Dante made a deal with Tempo to trade sensitive Luzian technology for travel documents he could not otherwise obtain, but by coincidence Dante was abducted and imprisoned by EMTERR operants for unrelated reasons before he could leave Portofiro.

Hershel is ordered by the Operant Bureau to assassinate Minister Reyes, which would involve ambushing him when he makes a private visit to a Luzian monument site before the negotiations start. Unexpectedly, the man whom Hershel encounters at the monument identifies himself as Dante Augustino, and claims he is the body double of the real minister. In truth, the real Facundo had assumed his body double's identity to defect, and he was the man whom EMTERR unwittingly took captive, while the real Dante was brought to Portofiro by the head of the Weeping Eye, Tesoro Buendia, to stage Facundo's assassination at the monument and thereby provide a casus belli for a Luzian invasion of Portofiro.

Tesoro and a team of Weeping Eye operants round up Hershel and her allies. As the group returns to the city by tram, from where Hershel will be transported to La Luz for a show trial and public execution, Hershel turns the tables with her allies' help. Tesoro and his henchmen are eliminated, and Hershel once again flees Portofiro ahead of the fallout. Hershel calls her handler, Melita, who evaluates the assignment based on the outcomes of various choices she made, with the most important factor being whether the real Facundo Reyes is alive and still in EMTERR's possession, alive and walking free, or dead. Regardless of Hershel's final evaluation score, it is indicated that the events in Portofiro will have global ramifications, and the Superbloc, EMTERR, and La Luz are each preparing for a possible war.