Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Watch Captain Paris of the Blue Daggers==
{{Topquote|Why do I bother? Isn’t it obvious? We’re wasting time and resources fighting these bastards the old-fashioned way! The Glasians are crafty sons of bitches, and we can learn from their leavings. It’s not unprecedented. If the Officio Assassinorum can use alien weapons, who’s to say the Deathwatch can’t learn from aliens, too?|Paris}}

Watch Captain Paris is a former Tactical Marine Sergeant from the Blue Daggers Chapter. The Blue Daggers have a long-standing presence in the Deathwatch, as is to be expected in a Sector defined by periodic alien invasions. The particular circumstances of the Deathwatch render them all but useless in fighting off the Glasians, however, in contrast to nearly every other form of alien life. The obvious solution to the lack of adaptability among Deathwatch to the threats of the Glasians is to find their weaknesses, and the best way to exploit those weaknesses. Glasian forces lack hierarchy, or an obvious synaptic coordinator like Tyranids have. Therefore, typical Deathwatch tactics of assassination simply do not work against Glasians. Watch Captain Paris is convinced that there is another way to fight them, and reverse engineering is the way to find it.

The Deathwatch does not answer directly to the Inquisition in the field. However, when the Inquisition gives an order to Astartes outside all but the most banal circumstances, Astartes are generally expected to follow it.

That is a line that Watch Captain Paris toes with exceptional care. The standing order from the Ordo Xenos in the region is to destroy all corrupted Glasian artifacts. However, High Inquisitrix Lerica has no standing order for the destruction of mundane and uncorrupted artifacts.

Thus, Watch Captain Paris is undertaking a risky study. He has ordered the construction of a large network of tunnels, bunkers, and laboratories on the planet Lorelei. Within, he intends to begin the reverse-engineering of multiple Glasian artifacts that have survived the deaths of their owners. He is not in any great rush to inform High Inquisitrix Lerica, but he is confident she will see the wisdom of his order.

Paris began his career as a member of the Blue Daggers over a century before, and had an unremarkable history in the Scouts and Devastators before moving into the Eighth Reserve. There, he had average or slightly higher marks in most fields, and excelled in commanding a Predator tank. It was only after another four years in the Eighth, fighting pirates and Orks in the circuit, that he discovered that he had a significant talent for recognizing tactical opportunities in enemy technological use. For Orks, it was their clunky vehicles, which he was able to outmaneuver by banking his tank on angled surfaces by slowing one tread. He further demonstrated his idea to derive vulnerabilities from enemy technology by drawing an Ork company into a desert area to cause the sand to foul their primitive firearms.

Afterward, he was put on the short list for Deathwatch Service by Lord Arden, and when an opportunity arose, he accepted the Vigil. Paris felt at home in the Deathwatch, more than he had in his own Chapter, and accepted every opportunity for extra training and responsibilities he was offered.

He got along famously with Forgemaster Shokunin, but had no interest in learning the secrets of the Machine himself. He served briefly as the leader of a single Kill-Team before the team was assigned to the Watch Station Discus.

On Discus, his Kill-team served as the primary team, which responded to sightings of unknown aliens in the Oldlight Exo-zone. He worked alongside Rogue Traders with his Kill-team over forty times in twelve years, usually the same few Traders over and over. On one notable occasion, his team worked with Lord Inquisitor Stoldst to track down what he still believes to be a shapeshifting alien, and not the human mutant who had eaten a Callidus Assassin.

While working with these explorers and merchants in the unknown regions of space, Paris earned a reputation for ambition and creativity that he had not had many chances to show off in his own Chapter. The Deathwatch encourages greater lateral thinking and improvisation than the regular Astartes, and Paris excelled at using conventional technology in unconventional ways. Some of these ways would have earned him a disciplinary lashing in the Imperial Guard, or a dirty look from his own Techmarines back on the ''Gargantuan''.

After many years commanding the Kill-team, and eventually transferring to Watch Station Redshield, Sergeant Paris reached his thirtieth year serving in Cloudburst’s Deathwatch. When his superior, Watch Captain Lawrence of the Knights of Terra, retired to his own Chapter, Paris was chosen by Domack to replace him. Paris immediately used his new position to advocate for the creation of a new Watch Station. He chose Lorelei for the new site – more or less arbitrarily, not that he would admit that – and dubbed it Watch Station Peacekeeper. Watch Commander Domack and Forgemaster Shokunin debated privately, and eventually came about to Paris’s idea.

Paris proposed that Glasian relics that had no Warp element or Chaos taint be collected and studied carefully. He posited that there are psychological or technotheological ideas to be found even in the leavings of aliens. The Glasians were the first extragalactic intelligence ever detected; surely, they had something to their technology if it was enough to get them across the dark space between galaxies.

The loudest advocate of Paris’s idea is not in the Inquisition at all. Lord Fabricator Beraxos of Cognomen strongly advocates for the project. Paris is willing to take Beraxos’s help at face value for now, since Beraxos’s ambition and expansionistic ideas are well-known to the Deathwatch, ever since he entrusted them with the secrets of ABX202020 when building Redshield. So far, since Paris hasn’t actually led any Techpriests to perform any research, their partnership has borne little fruit. As soon as the facility comes online, however, both Beraxos and Paris expect the plan to continue at once.

Outside of his technological dealings, however, Paris is very much an archetypal Deathwatch Captain. He has an unflinching demeanor, a sense of patience and personnel management, and remarkable combat experience. His gear of choice is an assault pack and Mark 6 armor Corvus set, with a Kraken-loaded bolter. In his experience, the combination of supreme mobility, near-silent movement, and anti-armor capability is perfect for provoking aliens to break formation and pursue him into traps.

He likes taking to the field, and has led Kill-teams or even entire Kill-companies into battle against alien slavers and marauders in the Circuit and Exo-zone before. He prefers to avoid the mixing of Chapters that have traditional rivalries that al-Hasat does, dismissively calling them ‘social experiments.’ He prefers to use Marines from Chapters he knows will work well together.