Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Professor Merrick Unarvu==
{{Topquote|Do you know what I want, more than anything? I want everybody’s life to be as much fun as mine.|Merrick Unarvu}}

The whispers of Slaanesh drift through the minds of the bored and lustful, twisting them to sin. So claims the Ecclesiarchy, at least. Many of those who devote themselves to the Prince of Pleasure are happy to abandon the Emperor for somebody who at least feigns affection.

The stultifying life of the peasantry ensures that many of those who serve Slaanesh are those who couldn’t find luxury any other way. Worlds that are more cosmopolitan have a middle class, full of burgeoning ideas with no place in the rigid Imperium. Aristocracy offers wealth and boredom: fertile ground for the seeds of Slaanesh.

Slaaneshi ''teachers'', however, are rare indeed.

Professor Merrick Unarvu is a wholly devoted servant of Slaanesh, and a dark thrall of the Lord of Excess. Nobody would think it to look at him. He wears tweedy robes and shirts with Imperial skulls on the lapel, and smiles patiently at students who try to bribe or flatter their way past his strict grading. His colleagues, or most of them, think him a charming and clever old sort, the kind that make a school better for having him. Indeed, when he lectures the students about how Terran art changed as the populace fled Old Earth in the Long March colony waves, he seems both harmless and well-informed.

Then, he goes home, puts on his true working clothes, and descends through his hologram basement wall to sink barbed hooks into the flesh of screaming vagrants and catatonic children, and his smile doesn’t change at all.

Thus it is, Professor Merrick Unarvu is both wholly aware of what he is doing and completely unable to call it wrong or cruel. He loves to spread knowledge, whether of the minutiae of the artistic themes of Post-Diaspora sculpture or what it feels like to swallow fishhooks coated in honey. He loves to spend time with people, whether bright young students who want to know how the blending of light colors can draw out the inner beauty of a bust or the brainwashed murderers he instructs in the way of Excess.

Unarvu is insane, incurably and happily mad. He sold his soul to Slaanesh in exchange for power that he outright refuses to use; he finds it so much more delightful to twist a person’s mind until serving the Prince is the exactly right thing to do. He can call down towers of lightning and blast a person’s soul out through their mouth, but that’s both far more visible and much easier than seducing a failing student and turning them to the Warp.

Oh, but he has fun, him and his hundreds of friends, as they slowly spread their influence through the academic and civil institutions of mighty Coriolis. He has had no success subverting the Supreme Marshal’s office, and with only a few hundred people on his side, knows better than to try his luck. However, he has been able to keep the local Ministorum clergy off his back through the careful application of booze and women.

Unarvu is a beguiling and calculating man. He knows that the only way the Imperium can survive its thousand-fold enemies is by giving itself to the Warp. He was not born psychic, but after a night of indulging himself on nameless victims in the gutters of the great city in which he lives, whispers soothed his mind as he dreamed. He dreamed of a new future, one where the great Prince ruled over all, and everything was better.

Merrick Unarvu is no fool. He knows full well now what he has pacted himself to. He has stopped caring. The Imperium is dead, stagnant, and collapsing, and now he sees the way forward. If the Ecclesiarchal texts call him a monster, who cares? He serves the true power in the universe.

Unarvu is crafty, and he prefers to bait his allies and future victims in with different methods. To his victims, he is a patient benefactor, who offers his home and knowledge to those who need it. To his allies, he is a coconspirator, and a font of hidden power that becomes more delicious every time.

One thing about which he does not deceive is his combat skill. He does not carry weapons, and if ever he were forced to fight without weapons, he would fall at once to any skilled foe. However, his dark pacts grant him control over lightning and a powerful glamour, which he can use to surprise his foes.