HeroTerminal Network isn't a startup born in a garage. It’s the result of a twenty-year cold war between two siblings. It ended only by a family crisis that left them no choice but to weaponize their differences.
Everything goes back to January 12, 2000. That was the day Detective Inspector Jean Paul Vernier of the Police Nationale in Lyon vanished. His car was found near the docks; his body was not. He left behind a reputation for incorruptible integrity, a beat-up Peugeot 504, and a shattered family.
His children dealt with the void in opposite ways. Claire Vernier fled to Paris. She traded the messy streets of Lyon for the sterilized boardrooms of La Défense, determined to build the kind of power and security her father never had. Luc Vernier stayed behind, inheriting the Peugeot, the cynicism, and the obsession with finding the truth in the cracks the system ignored.
Luc remembers when cases came in physical folders smelling of cheap police ink. Witness statements you could hold, blueprints you could roll out on a table. Now, they send emails. Fifty-page reports, high-resolution scans of old newspapers, and digital photos that take forever to open.
His cramped apartment in Croix-Rousse doesn't have the space to print out mountains of digital attachments just to compare a modern statement against a 1998 clipping. He built Lens out of sheer annoyance. It’s a digital corkboard. A bridge built from necessity that lets him pin up messy documents, scanned photos, and notes side-by-side without drowning in paper. It’s the only program he trusts because it doesn't try to be smart; it just holds the mess so he can look at it.
Claire became a ruthless corporate fixer, married to Julien Delacroix, a slick M&A lawyer whose moral compass was highly flexible. Together, they cleaned up expensive messes for global banks. Claire saw the world as a market to capture. Luc saw it as a crime scene to process. They barely spoke for a decade.
For years, the only bridge between Luc and Claire was Luc’s teenage daughter, Élise. While Luc tried to teach her frugal integrity in Lyon, Élise adored her glamorous Aunt Claire in Paris, calling her "La Marquise." Claire spoiled her niece with gifts and a vision of a world far bigger than Luc's cramped apartment. Luc hated their connection, but he tolerated it for Élise's sake.
But the tension of living with a father obsessed with dead things took its toll. Luc was physically present in Lyon, but mentally, he was always chasing ghosts in cold case files. Élise, suffocating in his cramped apartment and starved for attention, began acting out. The rebellion started small—skipping school, hanging with the wrong crowd—but it escalated fast.
That fragile peace broke the night Élise was arrested.
A shoplifting incident at Galeries Lafayette went wrong, and suddenly Luc Vernier, the man who catches criminals, was looking at his own daughter facing serious charges that would ruin her future. His street-level integrity couldn't fix it. He was helpless.
Claire didn’t offer Luc sympathy; she sent Julien to apply pressure. The lawyer made three phone calls to high-level prosecutors, pulling political favors that made Luc sick. The charges vanished. The record was wiped clean.
But while Luc sat in his dim apartment stewing in guilt, Claire arrived in Lyon. She didn't lecture. She simply picked up a shaken Élise and whisked her away to the Delacroix chalet in Chamonix for a week of luxury and skiing to "cool off."
It was a masterstroke. Claire proved she could fix the unfixable and provide the comfort Luc couldn't. Luc Vernier now owed his soul to the corporate machine he hated, not just for saving his daughter's record, but for being the hero he failed to be.
Two years later, Luc was drowning in casework, unable to scale his one-man operation. Claire called in the debt.
She realized Luc’s instinct-driven methodology, the "Lens" approach, was the only thing working against modern fraud, but it needed a distribution network. The deal was brutal but simple: Luc would license his life's work to Claire's new network. In exchange, Claire and Julien would lock away a secure financial future for Élise in an untouchable trust fund.
HeroTerminal Network is that uneasy truce. Claire runs the business and sells the "HeroCerts" branding to clients in Paris. Luc stays in Lyon, hating the corporate gloss, but ensuring the engine, Lens, never lies.
It’s not a partnership based on trust. It’s an alliance based on necessity and family blood. And now, they need you to help carry the load.
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