[LITERATURE] Court Blocks Attempt To Withdraw Ex-Cerberus Biopic
via Westerlund News The years-long legal saga between Lima-based Leyendos Books and a former ghost writer has finally been put to rest by a final judgment in the UNAS Superior Court of Lima, awarding control of the manuscript and all concerned rights to the publishing house. The award has been made with the caveat that any further developments of the material must be named something else, to create a distinction between the owned work and the ghost writer’s manuscript. Originally published under the title Hellhounds: The Cerberus Conspiracy, the book was the work of xenobiologist Dr. Rochelle Adams, a former employee of the Cerberus shell corporation Cord-Hislop Aerospace. In the book, Adams, through a ghostwriter and scanned documents, illustrates her experiences starting out in the legitimate side of Cord-Hislop before being inducted into human supremacist circles within the company, later detailing her work on various “skunkworks” projects in the Advanced Life Sciences Division. She charges the Advanced Life Sciences Division with developing “Project Pendragon,” a prototype nerve agent meant to target dextro-rotatory chirality life exclusively. She further accuses that the Alliance Intelligence Service sanctioned the development of it for a future war with the Turian Hierarchy, dispersing samples through xenophobic groups affiliated with the Terra Firma party for ‘field testing’. Other accusations Adams has leveled at Cord-Hislop and Cerberus include assassination attempts on Dalatrass Konpelai via an ‘embolism gun’ to replace her with a more pliable trade partner, thus and gaining access to proprietary techniques on the refinement of element zero, plans for storming the Thallonakis Convent to capture maidens suffering from Ardat-Yakshi Syndrome for study, and attempts to re-engineer Kepral’s Syndrome to affect krogan. The book remained a perennial underperformer for the six months it was available for distribution. Two weeks later, Adams was found dead, the result of gunshots to the head in what Toronto Metropolitan Police describe as a suicide attempt. The ghostwriter, identified as one Adrian Rycart, subsequently came forward, filing an injunction against Leyendos Publishing to stop distribution of Hellhounds. At time of filing, Rycart stated that he believed the documents Adams provided for source material were authentic, not counterfeits or hoaxes. In his petition for injunction, however, he cited a later belief Adams had manufactured the existence of “Pendragon” and several other Cerberus operations to enhance the otherwise dry reading of her biopic. Leyendos’ spokesperson, Iris MacDonald-Ruiz, minced no words in the publisher’s statement on the matter: “We at Leyendos are satisfied with the judgment. While we regret the title did not perform better, Mr. Rycart’s cynical attempts to drum up interest in the book are contrary to Leyendos’ core principles, and we are at work republishing the work under the new name ‘Hair Of The Dog’.” Hair Of The Dog is expected to release sometime in [November 2197]
