Andreas Bombardone

Andreas Bombardone
Portrait of Bombardone, 2021
Chief of State of Ridnez
Incumbent
In office
2001 - 2023
Preceded by	Ophelia Drakos
Succeeded by	Vincenzo Borrelli
Incumbent
In office
-
Preceded by
Succeeded by
Incumbent
In office
-
Preceded by
Succeeded by
Incumbent
In office
-
Preceded by
Succeeded by
Born	January 1 1964 Magnifico, Ridnez
Died	January 3 2023 Vocryae, Jocospor
Resting place
Education	Conti University, Magnifico (BS, PhD, MBA)
Political party	ISV
Spouse
Children
Signature

The son of controversial philosopher Federico Bombardone, whose oeuvre was best known for its support of the great man theory of history, Andreas Bombardone gravitated towards science and engineering as a young man, graduating from the Conti University School of Engineering at the age of 21. During that time, Bombardone entered into a friendship with Vincenzo Borrelli, an anxious MBA student from an upper-class family; the two young professionals only grew closer as the years passed by.

Obtaining employment with General Ridnez Petrochemical Company as a chemical engineer, Bombardone used his free time to work out the bulk synthesis process for a cellulose-derived biofuel. At the age of 24, Bombardone left his job with General Ridnez Petrochemical, patented his biofuel under the name VerdiCal, and founded Quattro Elementi Chemical Co. with government-subsidized small business loans. Pulling strings with Borrelli, who acquired an executive position with General Ridnez Petrochemical through his family's connections, Bombardone partnered with his former employer to acquire the capacity for large-scale production of VerdiCal, agreeing to a 25-75 split of the revenues.

However, Bombardone's efforts to market VerdiCal as an eco-friendly petroleum alternative were frustrated by the opposition of The Troika, a well-organized petroleum industry cartel which held sway over the Ridnezite politics and military of the 1980s. The need to circumnavigate this barrier forced Bombardone to confront the world of corrupt, pay-for-play politics in the capital city of Il Sole, as he made connections with Arturo Gerloni, the parliamentary leader of the Popular Progressive Rally. It was during his exploration of the halls of power that Bombardone came to fully appreciate the immensity of the impact that even trivial policy changes had on the lives of millions of ordinary people... and the lack of foresight possessed by the elected politicians in making such decisions.

In 1985, a war between Ridnez and Shah broke out, engineered by the Troika to acquire an exclusive monopoly over Shahi oil fields. The Fifth Ridnez-Shah War was intended to be a low-burn conflict, puppeteered by the petroleum oligarchs to suit their own ends, but the situation rapidly escalated out of control, as a fanatical Shahi ultranationalist leader, General Fira Babar, ordered a nuclear strike on the north of Ridnez. While further Shahi attacks were pre-empted by Shah's mysterious financial backer, the self-proclaimed "King" Maximus Powers, an impromptu alliance was discreetly organized by Bombardone from the shadows to investigate the circumstances behind the start of the war. This covert group consisted of Gerloni, Borrelli, investigative reporter Matteo Arcangelo, and South Usean mercenary Ifedayo Olatunji, better known in certain circles as The Ocelot.

Bombardone and his circle of allies succeeded in exposing the Troika's extensive corruption of the country's civilian and military leadership, bringing about a series of mass arrests and a political realignment that saw Arturo Gerloni's election to the seat of the presidency in 1989. For the next 3 years, Andreas Bombardone was nothing less than a national celebrity; Quattro Elementi received the explicit support of the Ridnezite government under the banner of green energy initiatives. All of Bombardone's enemies were defeated; he and his allies were ascendant. In his own mind, Bombardone consummated his famous father's prediction that a great man would come to force change in the paradigm of the times. Unfortunately, delayed effects of years of untrammeled business expansion driven by inflated money, as well as ruin wrought on Northern Ridnez by the Shahi warhead, took hold in 1992.

Thousands of Ridnezite businesses went bankrupt over the following years, triggering a surge of unemployment and unrest followed by a wave of crime and chaos. Quattro Elementi was not spared, and Bombardone's last-ditch effort to appeal the National Assembly for support went unheeded, as Gerloni's PPR were since out of power. In a matter of weeks, Bombardone lost practically everything: his reputation, his home, and his expectations of what his future was to hold. All of Bombardone's personal and corporate assets -- as well as those of thousands of other Ridnezites -- were foreclosed on by largely Heisenian investment banks. In another world, this would have been the end of Andreas Bombardone's story: a cautionary tale about the futile lust for power.

After several months of living amidst desperate violence and squalor in the cluttered back-alleys of Il Sole, Bombardone emerged a changed man... or so he seemed to be. Bombardone was now actively hostile towards the government and constitutional form of the Ridnez Republic, accusing the system of having been hijacked by selfish parasites only loyal to foreign interests. The "new" Bombardone outwardly condemned liberal democracy as a fraud in the most vituperating terms and declared war against the incumbent administration of President Maury Napolitano for opening Ridnez to foreign investment, allowing Heisenian corporations to increase their stake of ownership of Ridnez's productive assets. He furthermore blamed the government for allegedly allowing the Ziconean mafia to run rampant and turn Ridnez into a place of addiction and depravity.

The undercurrents of this "new" Bombardone's rhetoric were fascist, racist, totalitarian, and to some degree, anti-capitalist. This did not prevent Vincenzo Borrelli from continuing to covertly fund Bombardone's burgeoning movement, the "Integral Social Vanguard" or Zendirists, though an exposé by young reporter Beatrice Caruso caused Borrelli to be ousted from General Ridnez Petrochemical by its board of directors. Bombardone's claims were seemingly validated when President Napolitano absconded from Ridnez after having bankrupted the social security system through embezzlement. Furthermore, Napolitano's former VP, Ophelia Drakos, a Ziconean by extraction, took the presidency, creating a convenient image of a "foreigner" in charge of Ridnez for Bombardone to attack.

A grisly insurgency, referred to by the Zendirists as a "Second Revolution" for the nation, was waged from 1997 to 2001. Ultimately, with the passive complicity of the senior military command and StateSec leadership, Bombardone's Zendirists occupied Il Sole and lynched President Drakos and her spouse; only her 6-year-old daughter escaped the bloodbath. Over the next twenty years, Bombardone remade Ridnez in his own image, giving rise to the regime known as the New State. Bombardone's disfavored ethnic groups, chiefly the Heisenians and the Ziconeans, were condemned to a hellish existence in the Outer Sector, which was once the northern strip of land desolated by the Shahi warhead decades ago. Elsewhere, the Ridnezite majority inhabited a technological utopia free from material want, though one deprived of individuality and all freedom.

A resistance formed to oppose Bombardone's sterile vision of the future, originally having no name but financially backed by E.I. Albertson, the enigmatic Heisenian refugee from Ridnez, based in the Shah. However, Ifedayo Olatunji, the Ocelot, became increasingly associated with the resistance, having been hired by Albertson for limited objectives. Ocelot developed a sentimental attachment towards the anti-Zendirist cause, despite having once taken money from Bombardone many years ago, and so the resistance became known as "Ocelotists". A turning point was reached when Albertson hired Ocelot to arm and support Heisenian and Ziconean rebels in the Magnifico Ghetto, resulting in a brutal repression by StateSec forces and a failure of the mission. After this, Bombardone attempted to assassinate Albertson, and while he reportedly survived, he never appeared in public again.

More decisive actions were taken by Bombardone to push towards a genocidal conclusion of his racist campaign, even as he allied with Andrew II Hazelwood, the monarch of Golden Imperial Utopia, and The Xaviet Empire. In 2012, the Ocelot was killed in a Zendirist ambush due to betrayal from an ally, eliminating the major threat to Bombardone's ambitions. In 2015, a new Ocelot emerged to wage a terroristic guerilla war on Bombardone and his allies; this was none other than Bianca Drakos, the daughter of the deceased former President, who was previously trained by Olatunji as a mercenary under the callsign "Lynx". She quickly became the symbolic figurehead leader of the Ocelotist underground network, which continued to oppose the New State and sabotage its operations.

In 2020, Ridnez joined a confederation of other dictatorial nations, and Bombardone became an eminent personality in a congress of their leaders. Less than one year later, Bombardone and his fellow dictators were held hostage by a West Heisenian communist paramilitary group; Bombardone bribed his way to survival. During these events, Bombardone learned that the country of Halus Ayer, which had historical and ethnic ties to Ridnez, had not been destroyed in the meltdown of its experimental esoteric particle reactor, but rather its population had been transformed into powerful post-human entities whose existence was obscured from the world by conspiratorial forces. Jax Arcanic, the leader of "Hellslayer", demonstrated powers and abilities beyond the ken of mortal men, leading Bombardone to wonder why the secret of the esoteric particle could not be incorporated into his eugenic designs.

By mutual agreement, Bombardone and Arcanic co-founded Project: Nyx -- a secretive and ambitious project to exploit the Nyx Effector, source of esoteric particles, for its mutative potential. Sometime later, Arcanic was seemingly executed in a coup by another powerful "demon", Balthazar Sturm, who had no interest in the project and gave total control over to Bombardone's government. Bombardone, in turn, made Project: Nyx into a branch of the Temple of Umbra: the cultlike Zendirist eugenics society, also charged with research and development related to preternatural "anomalies". Bombardone supervised the integration of Project: Nyx into Project Canaan, an overarching plan for complete Ridnezite domination of the Usean continent, and accelerated the timetable of the latter, while developing "supersoldier" drugs (Ouroboros B) and highly lethal bioweapons (K1N3, the Neo Uthuan Terror) by abusing the power of the esoteric particle.

A few months after the initial development of Project: Nyx, an attempt was made on Bombardone's life in a neutral country. The perpetrator was the Ziconean "Queen" Theodora Aritidoukas, who sought to take revenge for the mistreatment of her people within the Ridnezite camps. Despite Theodora's best efforts, Bombardone survived, though his incapacitation provoked a severe reaction in the capital of Centro Nuovo (the former Il Sole). StateSec Director Gianfranco Del Tuono issued orders for the camps in the Outer Sector to be converted into facilities of mass slaughter for Ziconeans. Motivated publicly by human charity and privately by greed, a five-man group of corporate leaders, self-declared the "Committee for Democracy and Entrepreneurial Freedom", declared an open rebellion and hired a mercenary army from the NEI South Usean Raj (formerly Shah) to liberate the Outer Sector.

In the aftermath of the civil war, a rival, CDEF-led Ridnezite government was established in Magnifico, claiming legal continuity and constitutional legitimacy from the Republic overthrown by Bombardone twenty years ago. This rival government, the "Restored First Ridnez Republic", achieved widespread recognition and quickly joined the League of Prosperous Nations, taking out a large development loan from Tertania to tie Tertania's interests with the RFRR's survival. The New State delayed its retribution for some months, though an attempt to take over Magnifico through subterfuge in 2022 was defeated by ObertoSec security forces and Ocelotist wild-cards. At this time, the government of Golden Imperial Utopia abandoned its territory to an onslaught of foreign marauders and warlords; Bombardone ordered the Ridnezite military to establish a presence for the protection of Utopian lives.

The West Noskyavia Special Mandate's purpose expanded to include geostrategic considerations; a control tower named the Areopagus was erected and connected to the launch sequences of hundreds of ICBMs. In late 2022, Operation Infernal Paroxysm of Project Canaan was launched on Bombardone's orders, while he personally witnessed the launch from the Areopagus. An ICBM was fired at the Central Talgerrian Aquifer whose warhead was replaced by a viral K1N3 payload; this infected the largest source of groundwater in all of Central-South Usea with the "demonic" plague and provoked a massive international humanitarian crisis. When the Tertanian military prepared to intervene in Talgerria, Bombardone commandeered a platoon of Xaviet soldiers and besieged a public building in a neutral country, seeking to assassinate the Tertanian ambassador and kidnap Maximus Powers, both of whom were located inside. A security force led by Loreauan commander Assam Elne defused the situation and arrested Bombardone as a common criminal.

Bombardone believed that his strong relations with the dictatorial leader of this neutral country would spare him from punishment, but he had miscalculated. Instead, he was sentenced to death for his attempts on the lives of foreign diplomats and executed via lethal injection in a land where none would mourn him.

The terroristic schemes which Bombardone had begun continued on without him, and while Project Canaan was ultimately thwarted and the New State was destroyed, there remain those loyal to Bombardone's legacy, eternally eager to finish what their Hierarch had started.