The four executives, shrouded in mystery.
Cradle Pharmaceutical, also known as Cradle Pharmaceuticals, is a corporation involved in medicine and pharmaceuticals located somewhere in the United States. It was once a failing business, but became successful.
It is run by its CEO, Gentarou Hongou, and is secretly influenced and funded by the religious cult Free the Soul. The corporation was responsible for picking up the legacy of Dashiell Gordain and creating the modern day incarnation of the Nonary Games.
Cradle Pharmaceutical is a pharmaceutical company that is affiliated with several hospitals, and also sells various types of medicine, its most notable being Soporil, a highly reliable and potent anesthetic drug (also used as knockout gas).
Its CEO is Gentarou Hongou, whose right-hand man is Nagisa Nijisaki. Teruaki Kubota is its executive technical supervisor and Kagechika Musashidou is its majority stockholder. These four men were the key executives.
First Nonary Game[]
Origins[]
The mandrake root in the coffin.
Hongou managed to win a Nonary Game he was kidnapped and forced to partake in, orchestrated by the successor of Dashiell Gordain. Hongou offered to improve the Nonary Game, and for this reason, he purchased the Gigantic ship from the successor. Hongou, listening to legend, knew that "All-ice sleeps through the forest of knowledge" in the ship. Investigating, he did not discover the supposed Egyptian mummy, but he did discover a mandrake root that formed the basis for the Soporil drug. Soporil was a high-power, high-reliability anesthetic that could humanely and safely render people unconscious. In a variety of fields, including medicine and crowd control, Soporil was widely affected and became Cradle's most lucrative product.
Execution[]
Children being kidnapped by Cradle in 2018.
Interested in improving the Nonary Game, Hongou had Cradle orchestrate the First Nonary Game that took place in 2018. The people who organized the whole experiment of the First Nonary Game were Hongou, Nijisaki, Kubota, and Musashidou. Although Hongou created it to cure his prosopagnosia, his pretext was creating an experiment to research the theory of controlling a human mind through sheer will, using morphogenetic fields. They called it the Nonary Project, and executed it with 18 kidnapped children; each child had a sibling. The game ended with a detective, Seven, saving the children, but Hongou and the others all escaped any punishment.
Seven's case[]
Seven pursued a personal case against Cradle Pharmaceutical -- not as part of his organization, but due to pressure from higher-ups, he was told, "don't get involved in this case." This shows the influence Free the Soul and Cradle had over society and the police force. Unfortunately, a lot of the evidence of the Nonary Game was covered up. Hazuki Kashiwabara also attempted an investigation but found nothing.
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors[]
Cradle was publicly traded on the stock market. Aoi Kurashiki was one of the investors, since during 999, young Akane Kurashiki saw the future through the eyes of Junpei, and when her consciousness returned to the prior time, she knew then that she and Aoi had to invest in Cradle, get rich and become millionaires, and prepare to recreate the Second Nonary Game with Crash Keys.
In the Second Nonary Game, which was an almost exact reconstruction of the first, all four of the Cradle Pharmaceutical executives are kidnapped by the masterminds of the game (Aoi and Akane). The purpose of the game was to get revenge on the executives, and more importantly, save the life of one of the second game's masterminds.
Among the executives, Hongou is the only survivor, because he kills Kubota, Nijisaki and Musashidou as part of Zero's scheme. Afterwards, Hongou is put in jail for kidnapping the children in the First Nonary Game.
With three of its executives dead and its CEO imprisoned, the corporation presumably collapsed.
Virtue's Last Reward[]
Although Cradle Pharmaceutical is not directly mentioned in this game, Alice says that Gentarou Hongou's company was influenced by Free the Soul and that it was devoted to spreading their beliefs. They apparently also were funded by Free the Soul to create the First Nonary Game.
Zero Time Dilemma[]
Junpei remarks that Ace is in jail, though his wording subtly implies Ace might've escaped.