The drug runs deep in the central part of Sirius. In it's purest form, it can build and destroy empires at the drop of a hat. Satiate any appetite and starve that individual into blissful darkness. But what it can't touch is a fire in one's soul that engulfs all of life's petty tribulations and quarrels.
Dedric DeFranko was born in the Colorado system as a poor son of a broken father, his mother died in childbirth. The boy hated his father for all the time he spent working to keep them alive. Never, not once, did the boy think that his father was making a sacrifice. Over and over his father would explain this, and every time the boy, Dedric, would argue over and over "We could move! We can move away from this hell hole!"
"I'm sorry son, but this is our home. This is where our roots are, we can not run away from that." His father would snap back.
One day after his 18th birthday, Dedric simply left, very unceremoniously. The boy and the father would never be reunited again, even at the father's funeral. Dedric DeFranko would keep his name, but nothing else. A wild card was cast in the game of Liberty, dangerous and unpredictable.
This boy cared for nothing, respected nothing save power. His riding philosophy would become his own fire emanating from his heart. He would grow from a small transport captain to the captain of a Universal Advance Train. Dedric loved the excitement of the profits, the pride of the kill.
But, the more the boy turned into a man, the more depressed he seemed to be. The man's guiding principle had morphed into a product of unchecked Liberty and Capitalism. His soul wasn't gold, it was platinum, and he expected his peers to see things that way. Slowly, one by one, he realized how alone he really was in the universe. No amount of Cardamine or slave parties could put his mood right. DeFranko now had a choice, he could either commit suicide and curse his race into oblivion; into the white hot stars they circled, or strike out on his own and seek out those that thought like him.
It was then that he birthed his greatest single investment and legacy: "Platinum ex Animus"
"The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there."
