Editing Setting:Nutopia/Locations (section)

===Novaya Sibir, The Heart of Darkness===
The event that many consider to have sparked The Fall was the infamous Central Park incident. A corporate sponsored event was hijacked by a network of Crackers, and a film of a secret corporate facility broadcast across the globe.

That facility was in Russia, the penultimate house of Illium's horrors known as Novaya Sibir. Illium made its fortune in the biotech industry, and it continued to do so even after the effective takeover of the largest nation on earth. Russia's resources, once organized by a business-like mind and bolstered by the wonders of advanced pesticides, livestock enhancements and cutting edge pharmaceuticals, became an economic force to be reckoned with, and made the landowner farmer community of Russia a wealthy and influential class. The American heartland felt the strain most keenly, struggling to keep up with the well organized, cheap Russian gencrops. Soon enough the flood forced an economic shift in the US, no longer the world's major breadbasket it was forced to look into other sectors such as arms production and transportation technologies in order to compete. All this economic upheaval abroad meant two things. One, corporate interests were on the rise, soon countries were allowing various entities larger and larger stakes in hopes of replicating russia's success, or even in hopes of simply surviving. Two, the international eye was off the frozen northern expanses of Siberia, an Illium was well aware of the blind spot.

The most obvious atrocities were the re-opened soviet mines. Nuclear sources around the world had long ago switched to Thorium as a catalyst, a cleaner and far more abundant alternative to the more infamous actinides. Illium's management, seeking to consolidate their place on the world stage and diversify corporate assets, initiated wide-scale Thorium mining operations, and set upon Russia's vast oil and rare earth mineral reserves. They began strip mining the tundra, huge pits spread like the sores of some flesh devouring plague across the snow and scrub, choked with heavy metals and radioactive dust. In the interest of keeping the profit margin high, safety efforts were minimal, and the workers taken from the destitute underclass of prisoners, illegal immigrants and human trafficking victims supplied by mafia organizations. The death toll was  unacceptably high, even for Illium. It was in searching for a way to improve the lifespan of its miners, and eventually that of the effective slave class across the country, that the Novaya Sibir facility was created. 

A medical complex was erected around the famous Lake Baikal, already a trade hub for the region. Ostensibly in place for treating the frequent radiation sickness cases, the facility was in fact designated as the headquarters for the "Biological and Commercial Synergy Research Task Force". The group was comprised of the best scientists and medical personnel Illium could lay hands on. They searched for the best minds with the least ethical qualms the world could offer. The company feverishly protected its brain trust, RRZAC-funded industrial espionage, headhunting and the occasional assassination being a constant concern. As such Illium assigned a number of its best in house contractors as well as a few appropriated Russian military units to work security for the task force. 

The result of this effort was an always brilliant, often obscenely inhumane medical research unit with its own paramilitary detachment. The BCSRTF, more commonly referred to as simply "Black Masks" (referring to the gasmasks frequently worn by its operatives) or "Plague Doctors" (since the task force was given access to all archived Russian and Soviet research on biological weapons, including the black plague and anthrax) became the most feared boogeymen in the whole of Russia. They were fed a steady diet of experimental stock from the hospitals of the country, but eventually they hungered for healthier stock, found in ample supply in Illium's prisons. The Black Masks made deals with underground criminal organizations and even anti-Ilium movements, "disappearing" dissidents and purchasing humans from slave traders. It was open season on anyone with an "interesting" genetic abnormality, but even seemingly normal, baseline Russians were used as sacrifices on the altar of profit and patent; Ilium had the human genemod market cornered, and more and more monstrosities were being bred, shaped and molded in the Siberian wilderness.

The center of operations for the group was an utterly secret facility constructed deep beneath the waters of Lake Baikal. Resting at the bottom of those frigid waters were a network of habitats and laboratories, connected to the surface by a tram line linked to the old Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope facility. Access was gained by a submersible down to the telescope, and then tram to the facility proper. It was in that inner sanctum that the most extreme of the Plague Doctor's experiments were conducted.

Given the atrocities committed at their hands one might expect that the Black Masks were pretty high on the planet's collective hit list when the revolution came, and one would be right. An organized effort was mounted to hunt down its personnel, and especially the chief researcher, brilliant but completely insane Dr. Priya Lal, but little headway was made. Common consensus is that the Black Masks saw the writing on the wall and evaporated into prearranged hiding places before things really got going. They left behind them the horrifying relics of their machinations, whole worker populations genmodded into almost unrecognizable things suited only for their designated tasks, the monstrosities of the Russian military and a trail of vivisected corpses, left like grisly breadcrumbs in their wake. 

About a year after the general end of full scale hostilities known collectively as the Fall a signal emerged from the Novaya Sibir facility. There was an SOS, played on a loop, seeping from a floating communication buoy on the lake. It begged for rescue, life support in the submerged habitats was allegedly failing, and those that arrived to help would be rewarded with biotech far in advance of anything currently available. Several attempts have been made to make good a rescue, but none have succeeded. Environmental factors make even getting down to the base nearly impossible. The lake is covered by ice for much of the year, meters thick in places, limiting the window of opportunity for expedition to a few summer months. Most attempts abort before even making it into the docking station at the Telescope, hazardous conditions and strangely hostile wildlife forcing away would be visitors. The few who have actually docked with the facility either turned back due to the apparent damage to the station or were never heard from again. The popular theory is that the life support in the habitats did in fact fail, and anyone who actually makes it down the tram lime is greeted with a wall of water and bone crushing pressure. That hasn't stopped people from trying however, while the number of expeditions has dwindled, the promise of treasure is simply to great a pull for the place to be completely ignored. There's also the fact that the voice heard in the SOS message appears to belong to Dr. Priya Lal, "the Lady of Nightmares" herself...