Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Ortam Lesarien==
{{Topquote|Gold is for idiots and the easily distracted. Give me sport! Give me challenge! Give me power! That is treasure, oh yes, true treasure. What can gold bring me that personal satisfaction and the terror of my enemies can’t?|Ortam Lesarien}}

Even the pirates who work in the FCC are a bit leery of Ortam Lesarien. He’s an alien, for starters, and over eight hundred years old. He is also a psyker, albeit one who never uses his powers except in self-defense. Above all other factors, though, he is a pirate too, and has killed thousands of humans, both with his Wraithstave and his pistol, as well as the heavy cannons of his ships.

To everybody except Lesarien and Reith, his joining the FCC is a complete mystery. He has no stated motive, he detests most of the FCC’s officers, and he doesn’t give a damn about money. He and Reith know, however, that Lesarien is a creature of spite, thrill-chasing, and vengeance. Reith prefers this in his senior officers; he knows Lesarien has no interest in displacing him as the supreme commander of the Coalition. He also knows that the best Lesarien can offer to his organization is his own service. Lesarien’s exile from his own Craftworld precludes any chance of a takeover or reinforcement from Lugganath.

Lesarien’s childhood was as unremarkable as an Eldar’s can be, but his progress down the Paths of the Craftworld came to a screeching halt at once. He had been a member of the Striking Scorpions Aspect Warriors for only seven years before stealing a small ship and fleeing into the Webway after a battle against human raiders assaulting an Exodite world. He turned up four years later, clad in a strange mix of human and Eldar armor, and cutting a swathe through Imperial border shipping. As the Imperial defenses of the Drumnos Sector again hardened against pirates like him, after softening in the aftermath of the destruction of the Dark Winds, he found himself being pushed into the Cloudburst Sector. He had gathered a small crew of a few dozen Eldar Corsairs to his side by this point, but he burned through them quickly with his reckless disregard for the survival of his men, and ever-greater pursuit of thrills.

Eventually, the problems with such a lifestyle caught up to him. After a while, his name was mud with other pirates, who outright refused to work with him. His own refusal to take on crew from the ships he robbed and lack of overall direction meant that his crew dwindled below the number needed to maintain his ship. When the Imperial frigate Bloodhound cracked the superstructure of his ship in a skirmish near the Oldlight Exo-zone, it was the end of Ortam Lesarien’s career as a pirate captain. He managed to limp to the nearest habitable planet, where he put his ship in stationary orbit while he and his remaining crew considered their options.

Salvation came in the form of the pirate destroyer She’s One Of Ours, Sir, which stumbled across the Eldar ship while evading an Imperial Navy patrol. Lesarien boarded the ship with his surviving warriors and captured it, then escaped into the Warp, leaving the wreck of their ship behind to distract the Imperial patrol. Eventually, the She’s One Of Ours, Sir made port at one of the dozens of nameless pirate dens that pop up every so often in the Cloudburst Circuit. There, Lesarien abandoned the ship with the surviving Eldar crew. However, Eldar disembarking from a human pirate ship do not go unnoticed, and a representative of the FCC observed it. He contacted Lesarien and extended an offer of recruitment, and to the surprise of his own crew, Lesarien accepted.

Since then, Lesarien has learned to accept his limitations as a leader. His Eldar warriors, whom he is unable to replenish, form an elite corps of boarding specialists, with the psykers among them acting as force multipliers of immense potency in the largely low-psyker Cloudburst Sector. However, he is also stubborn, rude, callous, and greedy, and these are traits that are harder for him to accept. His subordinates among the humans of the FCC find him nearly impossible to talk to, since he likes to retreat into the linguistic complexity of Eldar compared to Low Gothic to escape conversations he doesn’t like. His Eldar subordinates are happier working for a human than they were for him, however, which has deflated his ego somewhat.

Lesarien has a level of trust in Reith that would shock his family on Lugganath. Not once in the decades that both men have been working together has Reith ever misled or lied to Lesarien, and always gives him a generous cut of the spoils of raids even if Lesarien has no use for it and usually gives it back to him. Ironically, the human Admiral is one of the few people for whom Lesarien has ever felt even the vaguest nugget of admiration. By contrast, Reith barely cares about Lesarien, and only keeps him on retainer despite his behavior because of his superhuman skill. However, Reith is also a skilled dissembler and hides his contempt well.

To keep potential foes from guessing his intent, he never carries the same combination of weapons twice.