In 1991, an event called "The Economical Purge" was first dated to begin around September with an up-and-coming million dollar company called Rosenfire Robotics. The founders, Stephen Rosenfield, Willow Rosenfield, and their six year old daughter Fabianne Rosenfield were thought missing a week after they announced leave to a cruise around Puerto Rico. Since then a pattern formed.
Weathly families, particularly business families, would either go missing or die in an accident for the next three months. Million, billion, trillion dollar companies would fall overnight with no command; destabilized. There were occassionally survivors in the families, always following a pattern. The founders were sure to die. Any adult who could inherit the company would die. Relatives with any company asset would die. Children were the only possible survivors. Suspected to have survived that is since they would always go missing. If there were siblings, the eldest would go missing and the younger would be found dead within a week.
The press loved to speculate. Some claimed it was retribution. A misguided vigilante group attempting to topple the untouchable One Percent. Others said it was terrorist group performing Total Warfare and throwing the world into an economic crash for their nefarious uses. Of course no one actually believed the deaths were accidents, however the anonymity of it stroke a chord with the public as something they couldn’t hope to stop. Not that the average Joe particularly cared at the time. After all, what’s a rich CEO or spoiled child to a working honest family. Money ran the world and a dead man can’t pay for his own justice where no one else wanted to.
In the first month everyone thought it was a coincidence, scary sure, but people die all the time. As horrific as that mentality may seem, it’s true. Majorly it was ignored until the headcount reached about seven in terms of beheaded companies, a total of 32 "victims". Kicked off by an economics major doing a paper on the relationship between a self-sustaining company and its founder. A family business with no family shuts down because of power imbalances and stocks drop when people die apparently.
The papers struck a chord with the remaining One Percent, the college kid got rich, and they began to take some percautions. No one knew how to defend against accidents but they damn well tried. The smart ones didn’t bother with body guards and such and instead paid forensic investigators and detectives to find what’s going on. They didn’t never got very far. All the evidence pointed to exactly what it posed to be: An Accident.
Two months in and seventeen international companies short did the public gain an active interest. Many of the companies were ground to a halt with major owners and asset holders suddenly gone. Corporations that ran on one-of-a-kind intellect and experience suddenly had to find a replacement. With the "attacks" so rapid fire, the deaths took a toll on the average citizen. In simple terms, the economy went to shit. Prices rose, items were taken off shelves, and people were getting laid off for no other reason than that corporations couldn’t afford to keep their employees.
Three months in and the victims were becoming more and more high-profile. Tech giants, celebrities, and business tycoons gone or dead overnight. Hammer Industries, Einstein Yeilds, Fillimer Tech, Stark Industries, Yeflhiem International, Gilburg Company, etc.
Four months and the economy was ground to a halt worldwide.
14 years later began the return of the missing children. Beginning with Howardson General’s heir Kennedy Howardson, a boy who had gone missing at the age of twelve in the November wave. At 26, the man with no identification, a walking ghost really, simply went to his family lawyer and requested access to the family fortune including the position of CEO to a company working its way to the top again on only their command board. After multiple government investigations and DNA tests, the man was granted his due. All the while refusing to say what had happened in his absense. Simply that he "had found a home until he was ready to be himself again."
Afterwards marked the beginning of the return of the missing children. People ranging from 21 to 30 began appearing with powerful names and nothing but the blood in their vains to prove it; demanding their dues. A few came back incomplete with ethereal limbs far beyond any technology ever seen. Alien almost. As the cases grew in number conspiracists naturally flocked and coined the people to be Angels, humans brought back to earth after untimely deaths. Agents of some higher-being that brought them back to life so that they may serve through a system in their favor. Aliens there for but one divine purpose.
It really is unsettling how right and wrong they can be. They say the angels of god were eager to serve but to whom they did not know.