Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Inquisitor-Captain Lord Gwiddon Thomas Walsh, Rogue Trader and Lord Inquisitor, Ordo Hereticus==
{{Topquote|Who says power corrupts? I’ve been fighting for the Emperor for three hundred years, and nobody could call me corrupt.|Gwiddon Thomas Walsh}}

If Lord Cloudburst Quintus and Lord Fabricator Beraxos are the two most powerful men in the Cloudburst Sector, the third must be Walsh. Holding the position of both a Lord Inquisitor Hereticus and a Lord Rogue Trader with a Greater Warrant of Trade, Walsh can travel anywhere he pleases and do almost anything he wants in the pursuit of the defense of the Imperium. He has the arrogance to match his station, and wealth beyond the reckoning of most humans. Walsh is one of only five individuals in Cloudburst history to ever level the command of Exterminatus towards a world, specifically the alien hellhole of AHG131 in the Circuit, for the crime of using planetary-scale brain networking technology looted from ancient human ruins.

Walsh has been a Rogue Trader longer than an Inquisitor. His parents and older sister died in the catastrophic reactor failure of their vessel. Luckily, the family’s original Warrant of Trade was in the family vault on Celeste at the time, and so he was able to prove his ownership of the Walsh ancestral business.

Naturally, some whispers of suspicion fell on the young Thomas Walsh that he was responsible for the loss of his family, but those faded away after four decades of meteoric shifts in the family’s fortune. Walsh made himself absurdly rich, by staking claim after claim on routes between the Sector and the Circuit, and by finding staggeringly rare archaeotech treasures for the Adeptus Mechanicus out in the Oldlight Exo-zone. Even before he caught the eye of Inquisitor Gorli and she subtly added him to her network of informants, he had laid two small alien kingdoms to waste and begun the process of adding a new world to the Imperium.

Walsh would sometimes disappear into the darkness of the Circuit with no more than a single Frigate packed with as many supplies as it could carry, stay off the grid for a year or more, and then return with vast riches and tales of adventure. It was his ship, the Gilded Nobility, which sunk the notorious pirate Redbar Skullswipe and halted his Ork fleet in its tracks. Walsh was there on the day that Inquisitor Lerica condemned the entire Hivrekk species to extinction and threw their asteroid hive into a black hole.

With such a record of working with the Imperium’s many institutions, it was no real surprise that the young Captain Walsh would fall into the orbit of the Inquisition. Hundreds of thousands of Inquisitors have worked with Rogue Traders in the past, to find lost human worlds, destroy dangerous aliens, navigate treacherous Warp Shoals and Gravity Tides, and even prosecute wars against the Emperor’s foes.

However, Walsh is in the rare position of being both an actively-serving Rogue Trader and an actual Inquisitor. This is not unprecedented, but it is highly uncommon. Most Inquisitors find themselves hunting down their fellow man to kill them for crimes against the species, while Rogue Traders spend most of their time flying about beyond the reach of Imperial law. Likewise, Rogue Traders’ tasks are to collect obscene wealth for themselves and bolster the Imperial economy by killing its enemies, looting its neighboring space, and retrieving lost technological relics, while Inquisitors are encouraged to avoid becoming distracted by personal wealth. Finally, Inquisitors have a limited remit to ignore certain Imperial laws, while Rogue Traders have been put to death – sometimes by Inquisitors – for ignoring those same laws.

However, Inquisitor Gorli saw potential in the Rogue Trader. Time and again, when he sent her snippets of information describing un-Imperial conduct amongst his peers in the Rogue Traders of the northern Segmentum Ultima, Gorli saw a distinct contempt for the members of the Houses that ply their work near the Circuit. Conversely, when he encountered other Traders who held themselves to a standard, Walsh’s tone was neutral, and strictly reported the facts, leaving his speculation and opinion aside.

That was the sort of behavior Gorli expected from a peasant, not a noble. In her experience, the higher the rank of a person in the hierarchy of the Imperium, the more likely they would be to think Imperial law no longer held to them. Gorli was intrigued enough to place him as a successor for herself if ever she perished on the job.

When she did so, rooting out the Cult of Blessed Whispers on Nauphry IV seven years later, Walsh assumed her Inquisitorial Rosette. Other Inquisitors, especially those who knew Gorli personally, reacted with disgust, especially when Walsh added Gorli’s ship and Throne Agents to his own assets. Walsh then disappeared into the Cloudburst Circuit, where he spends most of his time. Unlike many Rogue Traders, Walsh has no interest in having children, intending instead to leave his Warrant and title to his niece, and thus spends as little time in Imperial space as needed. Now, with a coterie of his own Agents and his network of Trader ships, Walsh plies the stars, looking for worlds to add to the Imperium, by word or by torch.

Ideally, at least in the minds of his Rogue Trader peers, Walsh would stay the hell away from the Imperium anyway. His colleagues and competitors mutter that no one man should have that much power, and that nobody who has come to his title by so many coincidental deaths should be able to act with near-total legal impunity. Regardless, Walsh now sees most of them as far beneath his station. While his council of master economists and marketers keep most of his financial assets churning without his personal oversight, Walsh has gradually redirected more of his attention towards hunting down heretics in the Houses of other Rogue Traders, which has shriveled up his support among his peers completely.

His largest foil among the Rogue Trader houses is a former Imperial Navy Captain named Madeline Prinz. She is the only Trader in the Sector with a pedigree shorter than Walsh’s but a larger fleet, and she has made it her mission to irritate the more powerful Trader whenever she can do it without attracting the ire of other Inquisitors.

Walsh’s personal philosophy commands him to pursue those whose thinking is too deviant to benefit the Imperium, and about the only organization in the Imperium with which he has positive ties with no acrimony is the Ministorum. He has brought Missionaries on every trip he has taken into the Circuit after the first, and makes sure to include the highest-ranking Ecclesiarchal personnel on his ship in most of his decision-making. Nobody knows whether this is an affectation or honest faith.

Walsh routinely enters battle alongside the mercenaries and soldiers in his service, even at the head of a full battalion at times. His preferred combat regalia is a suit of artificed Carapace armor, with a full set of Digital Needlers on each hand and a Storm Bolter custom-tuned for his physique. Walsh looks like a holo star and knows it, and he has gone so far as to make posters for his recruitment centers with his own face and dashing profile on it, which just irritates other Imperial officials even more.

Ultimately, Walsh is a confusing figure for the rest of the Imperium. He has lived through a life that most people would have killed for, but he apparently hasn’t. He has made enemies and rivals in the most powerful institutions in the Cloudburst Sector, even while employed by them. He pursues wealth and power with zeal, but no more zeal than he uses to hunt down his own colleagues when they disappoint him or betray his principles. He has pursued his colleagues and other human heretics and criminals with terrifying vigor, yet never raises a hand against his own rival.

He is an odd man, and a powerful one. Most other beings in the Cloudburst Sector and Circuit avoid him assiduously.