Setting:Cloudburst/People

Lord Sector Cloudburst, Rhemortho Quintus

"Hate is a fine shield, but don’t mistake it for armor. It can strengthen your arm, but if you wear it around you at all times, there will be nobody nearby when you need them but enemies. I have so, so many enemies."

The burden of shielding worlds from the encroaching darkness of the void is a hard one to bear. The leaders of Imperial Sectors vary widely, but by the time a politician has ascended to such high rank that they command a large portion of the Imperium, harsh reality has generally weeded out the lazy and the overambitious. Rhemortho Quintus serves as the Lord Sector Cloudburst, and at least nominally leads the Administratum delegates to Cloudburst Circuit outposts.

Quintus is the second of his family to ascend to the position of Sector Overlord after his father. He is a ruthless but pragmatic man, as he must be to survive the overwhelming political pressure exerted on him by his subordinates for resources to fight the Glasians.

Politically, Quintus is a Celeste animal through and through. He has a taste for luxury, a taste for fine women and food, and is actually a passable target shooter, by the standards of Cloudburst nobility. His responsibilities weigh on him more and more as the strategic situation in the greater Imperium deteriorates. He has taken to spending long days away from the noise of Cloudburst’s maze of tunnels in the resort towns of Celeste, trying to destress. This has not helped his popularity, especially in the face of the mounting threat of the Seventh Glasian Migration. The dozens of worlds that depend on his leadership often find themselves fending off unrest without direction from him.

This is not to portray him as incompetent. He is simply not prepared for the absolute turmoil in which the Imperium finds itself in these dark times, with Chaos, Orks, and far more pressing at the walls. Quintus is a capable and experienced administrator and bureaucrat, and has excellent human resources instincts. One thing he is not is a military leader. He has some logistical skill, but when the time comes to undertake any consequential military action in the Sector, he leaves nearly all of the work to Lord Admiral Maynard and Lord General Senioris Xoss.

Quintus does not have any sway in the Inquisitorial Palace of Cloudburst, despite his position. This is, of course, a reality all Sector Overlords must someday come to accept, but Quintus has even less control over the Inquisition than most, thanks to the fact that the Inquisitorial Palace is in another Subsector entirely from his own palace on Cloudburst. When he does need to interact with Inquisitors, the Maskos Palace sends somebody to find him, and they have developed an unnerving habit of simply appearing in his personal quarters or starship.

Quintus does have his own ship, but rarely uses it for more than travel from Cloudburst to Celeste. The vessel is a Magnifico Star Yacht, which he bought from the Grand Anchor after their breakers prized it from a Space Hulk captured by House Crusher. It is not rated to fly with a Navigator as it has no Throne for them. If ever he needed to evacuate the system, he would need to do so aboard another ship. The yacht, which he has named Moon Glitter for some reason, serves as a convenient meeting place for visiting dignitaries, especially those who may not pass the strict background checks needed to land in the sealed tunnel network of Cloudburst.

Despite his cool interactions with the Inquisition, the other institutions of the Cloudburst Sector receive him more gladly. He gets along cordially with the Blue Daggers’ Chapter Master, Lord Ranult Arden, and is at least somewhat friendly with Lord Fabricator Beraxos. He does not see eye-to-eye with Cardinal Drake, whom he sees as being profligate with the Ministorum’s wealth, and who sees him in turn as being stingy and aesthete. The two men are cordial in public, however. Ironically, the only other Adeptus leader in the Sector with whom he gets along quite well is Lord Marshal Oolan, in whom he sees an overworked kindred spirit.

Quintus lacks military experience, but he has worked extensively with Navigators in the past as they are assigned to vessels in the rapidly expanding Battlefleet Cloudburst. Because of the paucity of Navigators and Astropaths in his Sector, Quintus has gotten to know several new arrivals well, and he privately agrees with the Adeptus Astra Telepathica that the sector needs more, quickly. The Tyranids have bypassed his Sector so far, but there is no real chance of that staying the case indefinitely, and psykers are the only ones who can get out warnings of imminent Tyranid movements quickly enough to respond.

So far, Quintus has had few direct challenges from the Glasian Migrations. Their invasion of Celeste occurred before his parents met, and the aliens have not returned to challenge his home system’s defenses head-on. He is one of the Sector’s loudest proponents of a radically expanded Battlefleet and support network, and his control of the Sector’s purse strings has ensured that their flow of new ships and men has gone uninterrupted. However, there are logistical and monetary concerns that his position can’t address, such as how nearly every shipyard in the entire Sector is already making ships as fast as it can be done without errors. Throwing more money at the problem can’t make servitors and serfs craft faster. However, it can buy new shipyards, and Quintus has seriously considered buying pre-fabricated ship cradles from Fabique in Naxos to expand Celeste’s orbital yards.

The Quintus family has only ruled the Sector for eighty years. His place on the throne came about as the result of an arranged marriage by the Ordo Famulous between his parents. The Quintus family was one of the top three landowning families in the entire Celeste Subsector, so their name was well known in the Sector even before his ascension. However, the previous Cloudburst Sector ruling family had fallen from grace after several well-publicized abuses of Ecclesiarchal resources and the monumental mistake of ordering the Blue Daggers to suppress a rival family, which neither the Ministorum nor Astartes tolerated. The Colliard family promptly shrunk to insignificance as their economic ties evaporated overnight. Rhemortho’s father, Blanchard Lumierre Quintus, assumed the throne, but died seven years later of a heart defect.

In appearance, Quintus is every inch the Imperial politician. Like many high nobles in the Sector, Quintus dresses to impress, regardless of cost. Every stitch he wears, day in and day out, comes from the prestigious Flaxweave Foundry on Thimble, as befits a man of his station. His clothing of office integrates a small Conversion Field, just in case. He carries with him his master-crafted dueling pistol, even though he has not had to draw it in defense for over a century. The threats to a person in his position are numerous, and it pays to be prepared. He also carries a heavy stave of office, decorated with Thimble silver and Nauphry gold.

Emilie Rastimos, Chief Inquisitorial Astropath and Adept Choirmaster

“The Warp talks. Did you know that? Not the things that live there, no, the Warp itself. It hisses when we fly through it. It laughs when we curse it. It opens its arms and its mouth and its legs when we die. Oh, don’t be so dramatic, it’s the literal truth. Don’t believe me? Go look at the faces of Navigators after a day of hard work and tell me nobody’s been talking to them.”

The whispered secrets of the Inquisition are entrusted to as few people outside the holy Ordos as possible. Lightspeed is a cruel mistress, however, and the Inquisition needs to send messages as much as the next branch of the Imperium. When a message needs to be sent from the Maskos Inquisitorial Palace, Chief Inquisitorial Astropath Emilie Rastimos orders her seven subordinates to do it, if she doesn’t do it herself. Rastimos is a cold, eerie woman, with the lack of eyes that characterize most of her order. She never leaves her spire in the Palace, although with an apartment as luxurious and well-appointed as hers, few would. She oversees the conclave of seven Astropaths in the Palace, each of whom has the highest levels of security clearance a psychic can have in the modern Imperium. When the need arises for her to weigh in on matters psionic or the Inquisition needs her expertise on a task, they come to her. This is her own arrangement, and it allows her a specter of control over her fate that she knows to be illusory, but finds comforting nonetheless.

Rastimos is not happy with her position. Like most psykers in the Imperium, she finds a gram of self-loathing coloring her decisions, especially under stress. The Imperium is a horrible place to live, and a worse place for psykers. As an Astropath, her final sight was the Emperor, cracked and withered on his Golden Throne, shivering with power and agony as he took her eyes away.

Something about that, and growing up in the psyker-fearing populace of Cloudburst, broke her spirit. Whatever she saw as the Emperor gilded her soul, it instilled in her a sense of utterly immutable loyalty, and a depressed sense of resignation. She, moreso than even the most Radical Inquisitor in the Palace beneath her feet, thinks Mankind can’t win its millions of wars, not unless a miracle comes.

She is only forty-five years of age, but her responsibilities and hideously painful Sanctioning have rendered her seemingly older. She dresses in a smart black robe of office with a powerful psy-crystal staff of office, a focal artifact imparted to her as a gift from fellow psychic High Inquisitor Lerica. She and Lerica have the closest thing to a friendship that their positions allow. Conversations between them would give the opposite impression, though, as they are silent, and consist of Lerica staring at the metal plate Rastimos has affixed over her eyes while Rastimos stares back.

Lord Fabricator Lister Beraxos, Lord of Cognomen and Liege of ABX202020

“The Machine God inspires us. The Omnissiah directs us. The Motive Force propels us. There is power in knowledge. We’ve all heard the words. How many people stop to think about them? I mean really think about them? What they mean, why they’re so important? Nobody. Nobody but those of us who will get everybody we know killed if we misinterpret them.”

The Lord Fabricator of Cognomen, the Archmagos Executor of the Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and Northern Oldlight Exo-zone, the Liege of ABX202020, and the Fief-Lord of Foraldshold, Lord Lister Beraxos could make a fair claim to being the most powerful man in the Sector. From his indestructible archaeotech labyrinth in the darkest dungeon of the Castle of the Forges, Beraxos sits at the center of the spider’s web of Techpriests and Tech-adepts that are all that keep the Sector from sliding into anarchy.

He does not give this impression. Unlike Lerica, Quintus, Drake, Maynard, or even Arden, Beraxos is a believer in the lack of need for ostentation. Beraxos eschews any flashy garb or raiment. For an average citizen on the streets of any planet he doesn’t rule, Beraxos looks incongruously like an ordinary Techpriest, albeit an old one. He wears his face unadorned by gadgetry, his robes are oil-stained and loose, and he only has four visible mechadendrites.

Beneath this unremarkable exterior lies the mind of a genius. Lister Beraxos is one of the most intelligent, ambitious, and dangerous men in Cloudburst history. He does not look like a tank because he does not want to. He does not dress like a fop because he likes it when Drake underestimates him. He has so few visible augmentations because his augmentations are designed specifically to look like human flesh, and he has the bare-skinned face of a junior Techpriest because the pseudoflesh mounted on his state-of-the-art facial augmetics is a work of art itself.

Beraxos is more than an administrator, a director, or a priest. He is a master manipulator, and has more connections in random places across the Sector than most of its resident Inquisitors. His responsibilities are heavy and getting heavier, but he would rather die than let his stress show visibly. He is determined to shoulder the burdens of ruling over the Cloudburst network of Forge Satraps and outposts, by himself if at all possible.

Somewhat similar to Quintus, Beraxos is the first man in his family to ascend to a position of high rank. Unlike Quintus, Beraxos loves it. Lister Beraxos is a name that history shall have etched into its metal pages, he confidently believes. He is loyal to Mars, unshakably so, but to his subordinates, that looks more changeable than it really is. He likes to keep his options open, or appear to, and that makes him hard to predict.

In these times of Ending, when the Imperium teeters on the brink of wholesale societal collapse, the Mechanicus benefits from men like him whether it can bear admitting that or not. Beraxos has done more to preserve and expand Cognomen than any Lord Fabricator it has had since the day it was founded. By his order, whole fleets of Explorator vessels ply the hot gas of the Circuit, collecting knowledge and power for his hoard. The laboratories of Cognomen churn daily, producing data and results. Even if some are retreading ground that Mars laid down millennia ago, that does not discourage or redirect him.

Mars rarely reflects the loyalty of its subjects. This is a sad but true state of affairs that has persisted across the breadth of post-Isstvan history, when trust in the Imperium died forever. Even the most loyal and pious Forge Worlds, Lucius and Voss Prime, rarely enjoy the full support of the entire Martian catalogue of ancient blueprints and STC data.

Of course, Mars doesn’t have all of the ancient blueprints and STC data, but even that which it does possess is rarely doled out generously. Some Forge Worlds older than the Unification Wars don’t have the means to build the Baneblade, a twenty-one thousand-year-old tank. Time and again, Beraxos and his predecessors and subordinates have begged for blueprints, designs, artifacts, anything to alleviate the burdens of defending and providing for the people of Cloudburst, and with the notable exception of their permission to make the Legion Congelatio, silence has been their reply.

Beraxos has had enough of silence. By his order, the Forge World has begun building a Knight World satrap, ABX202020, in the nearby system of ABX2. Beraxos has authorized the creation of weapons based on recovered archaeodata from the Cloudburst Circuit without waiting for a reply from Mars, and has even begun ordering his Explorators to begin conquering pirate bases in the Cloudburst Circuit and the dense nebulae between Cloudburst and Drumnos, in anticipation of needing more defenses in the region later.

The acquisition of knowledge, firepower, and bases is hardly in opposition to Martian doctrine, naturally, so there is little question as to whether Mars or the Inquisition would complain too much if he were in contact with his superiors, but Beraxos knows full well, as all Techpriests do, about the importance of ritual and protocol. He is simply not going to wait any more for a yea or nay on building a force of Knights, he is not going to wait for approval to enslave the pirates he captures and work them to death in his mines, and he has stopped caring to pause for a Solar response before producing non-standard Dreadnought designs for the Blue Daggers.

Will there come a reckoning for Lister Beraxos? Maybe. Until then, he holds his head high, knowing that he is doing more for Cloudburst than Mars ever has. Privately, Beraxos knows he is crossing lines. He does not allow his subordinates, even his planned replacement Archmagos Lucana, know how much he hates defying the letter of the law. His belief in Mars and the Machine are not purely doctrinal; Beraxos is a philosophical man, and he knows how easy it is to allow justification for acts to become excuses for acts. He confides in nobody, but he can feel the weight of his silent defiance pressing on his mind as he sits alone in the Cogitation Chamber of his Castle. It may also be, he has admitted to himself, that Mars has far bigger problems. Perhaps their silence stems from severe distraction, not rudeness.

His other responsibilities sometimes blessedly intrude on his moody introspection. As Lord Fabricator, the process of transforming Cognomen from the isolated patch of grass it used to be to the unthinkable powerhouse of a true Forge World falls under his purview. Beraxos spends fully half of his waking hours on the task of overseeing the expansion of the shipbuilding capacity of the Sector, and much of the rest directing the millions of laborers and Tech-adepts under his authority to improve and multiply the manufactorae and forges of Cloudburst’s few industrialized worlds. Beraxos himself hates fighting, and would rather run and live to run another day than risk himself in battle. He hasn’t been to a world that isn’t Cognomen or Celeste in eighty-four years, and doesn’t intend to unless Solstice needs him to fill in for its leadership in an emergency.

If the Techpriesthood of Stygies were to learn of the secret lab that he and Paris are building to study Glasian technology, they would scramble to aid him, and he has pondered telling them, perhaps in exchange for the Leman Russ Vanquisher cannon blueprints they have hoarded. The problem there is that he would never be able to start building them without other Forge Worlds noticing and asking questions, and he is simply not as enthusiastic about the potential of Glasian tech as Paris is or the Stygies Techpriests would be. He is fully prepared for Watch Station Peacekeeper to be a complete write-off.

Beraxos believes in maintaining positive relations with the subordinate groups of the various Mechanicus military forces. Among the forces of Cognomen Subsector alone, he counts PDF, Guard, Navy, Basilikon Astra, Explorators, Skitarii, Secutarii, Knights, Electro-Priests, Titans, and his own personal bodyguards. The full count of Sector-wide Mechanicus martial assets includes Legio Cybernetica Imperial Robots and the Ordo Reductor, as well. On paper, the conventional Astra Militarum forces answer to the Subsector Overlord, but since the Subsector Overlord essentially answers to him regarding the disposition of his forces’ equipment and transport, Beraxos could quite possibly give them orders. He isn’t stupid enough to try, of course, as that would shake Mars from their distraction faster than anything else could, and if they didn’t kill him, the Inquisition would.

Still, he treats his colleagues in the autonomous or Martian branches of the military with respect and distance. Thanks to the extensive reforms instituted after the Schism of Mars, he can directly command very few forces himself. Ultimately, the future of his interactions with Mars comes down to their reception to the revelation of the existence of House Matraxia. If he were to create his Knights House on Cognomen itself, he could point to Mars and say, correctly, that Mars already has a Knight House – Taranis – so he would hardly be breaking precedent. He chose to put the House on ABX202020 because he can exert control over who comes and goes to the system, and so that they have room to grow and flourish. However, to anybody who sees this, it would look like a guilty party covering up knowing misconduct. Beraxos is between a rock and a hard place, and he lives with it every single day.

Beraxos does not share the distaste that most of Cognomen feels for Robots. On the contrary, he would like for Cognomen to gain a Cybernetic Legion, just as Fabique, Syracuse, and Solstice already have. However, he knows that Cognomen’s rise from a provincial parking lot to the powerhouse of the Galactic North is already moving too quickly for some of his neighbors. There are also a lot of demands on the time and resources of Cognomen, not the least of which being building a Titan Legion and Knight World more or less from scratch. Building a Cybernetica Legion at the same time might require more sanctified Techpriests than he can actually devote to so many tasks concurrently without diminishing his all-important industrial output. Once ABX202020 is up to its full power and the many thousands of factories, hab blocks, seminaries, and nutrient recyclers he is presently ordering built on Cognomen are online, then the number of people the Techpriesthood will induct shall be large enough to focus on Robots. Until then, House Matraxia’s Knights and Legion Congelatio’s Titans will have to be enough.

Beraxos eschews battle and carries no visible armaments, although his augmetic left arm has a hidden Needler inside it, and can split open to disgorge two daggers that are made of a special polymer and do not show up on radar or metal scans.

Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Cassandra Lerica

“Hope is a medicine. If you take it when you need it, and you take the right amount, it can save your life. It can make you stronger. It can help you survive. If you take too much, or from the wrong place, or when you don’t need it, it kills you. Never forget that.”

The Inquisitorial presence in Cloudburst is as old as Imperial colonization, but its current footprint is new. Inquisitors visited Hapster and a few of the smaller border worlds that Cloudburst absorbed after its creation, but there was rarely much reason for the Inquisition to linger when their work was done.

Now, things are different. Now, the Inquisition holds court over all manner of dangers and distractions to the mighty Imperium, and they do so from the Palace of Maskos, under the watchful eyes of Cassandra Lerica.

Lerica butchered her way up through the ranks of the Ordo Xenos. Her ferocious cruelty towards practitioners of the Cold Trade in xeno artifacts in the Cloudburst Circuit was the stuff of legends two hundred years before she became the leader of the Ordo Xenos in the Cloudburst Sector, or the Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst one hundred years later. In her time before sitting on the Black Bench at the Court of Precedent in the Maskos Palace, Lerica reveled in taking to the field, alongside the Deathwatch or not, and bringing the electric agony gauntlets she wore to the faces of smugglers and heretics across the breadth of the Circuit. Now that she is Lady High Inquisitrix Cloudburst, she is unable to pursue the Cold Trade as she once did. She has a few random items of xenotech under lock and key on Dascomb, in the hopes of studying them for a sign of having been reverse-engineered from pre-Age of Strife human cultures, but generally eschews all xenotech beyond this.

As her responsibilities grew, Lerica grew more and more disillusioned with her hands-on approach to punishing violators of the Emperor’s laws. Luckily, she found herself interested in the mechanics of running large-scale infiltration and coordination missions, and her natural psychic power helped her considerably. She used her powers and her rank to direct covert actions personnel from her retinue and the Officio Assassinorum to bring down Cold Trade and proselytization groups that dealt in alien lies.

Finally, after her two hundredth year in the field, the death of her superior allowed her to rise to Lady Inquisitrix of the Ordo Xenos in Cloudburst. Along with this responsibility came the role of Inquisitor of the Chamber in the Watch Fortress Dascomb. Her extensive experience in the field, battling those who salvage the debris of the alien empires the Deathwatch destroys, lent her some credibility in the eyes of the Watch Commander, and she has served as the Inquisitor of the Chamber ever since, even after becoming Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst.

In adjudication, Lerica strives to present a face of reason and temperance, even given the vigorous disputes among branches of the Holy Ordos in the Cloudburst Sector over how best to distribute resources to endure the Glasian and Ork menaces. The most obvious distraction for the Cloudburst Inquisition is the fact that each Glasian Migration leaves behind gigatons of material from their ships, corpses, and vehicles. While most Imperial citizens follow the edict not to tamper with or collect such things, Imperial Guard troops sometimes take relics as trophies, which has led to more than one death. The competing interests and cabals within the sector conclave also spar for limited resources for their own projects. In this regard, Lerica definitely shows favor to the Ordos Xenos and Malleus, despite her best intentions. The lesser Ordos and the Hereticus grumble about this at times, but they would be hard-pressed to find greater consistent threats to Cloudburst than the Glasians and Orks, and the personal attention of Tzeentch.

Lerica does not like Rhemortho Quintus. She sees the Sector Overlord as being unprepared for the dangers of his job, and possibly unable to make the call to abandon a world if there is a chance that the Glasians will take it. Her suspicion has never been tested. She has never hidden her contempt, but she also does not act on it; she understands the need for unity in the face of the Glasian and Ork menaces. She has a bit more patience for Lord Fabricator Beraxos, since he shares her disgust for the corrupted Glasian technology that each Migration leaves strewn about their home Sector, and has so far obeyed her standing order to dispose of it to the letter.

Lerica has considerable psychic skill. Like most Inquisitors with psychic power, she has never needed Sanctioning before the Throne. She stabilizes her psychic power with psybernetic implants in her cheeks and neck, which allows her a wide assortment of extra-sensory perception abilities. Her weapons of choice are a digital melta and two master-crafted hotshot laspistols, which she can charge from the feeds in her artificer power armor, or with independent power cells she carries on her carapace armor. When aboard Dascomb, she prefers a silver robe over silver noble’s attire, replete with hidden Teleport Homer/Recaller.

Lord Inquisitor Oscar Havermann, Ordo Hereticus

“So many people haven’t a clue what heresy is. Heresy isn’t having thoughts, beliefs, ideas. It’s about refusing to change thoughts, beliefs, and ideas. Change them to the correct way of thinking. That way is the way of the Emperor. What else could possibly matter?”

Oscar Havermann scares the living daylights out of his own colleagues. As the former Chief of Witch Hunters for the Ordo before his promotion out of the role, Havermann is the most experienced and decorated psychic-tracker in the entire Cloudburst region, and his own psychic power aids him immensely in this regard. Given how low the psyker birthrate in Cloudburst is, any sign of non-Sanctioned psionic activity in the Sector is fairly easy to detect. Before his promotion, Havermann used his Fast Clipper Banelight to skip from system to system, capturing hedge sorcerers and killing out-of-control psyker youths.

Since his promotion, Havermann oversees the efforts of the whole cadres of Ordo Hereticus personnel in the Cloudburst Sector. His second, Jerome Paltmitier, fields far more often than Havermann does, now, and Havermann is just slightly too professional to resent that. Havermann does not like having to spend so much time in the Palace in Maskos. He would greatly prefer being in the field, doing what he does best. Instead, he must spend time in meetings with Lerica, Heung, and Kimihira, arguing about precedence and money.

One task he does relish is interrogation. Havermann is a relentless and penetrating interrogator, able to ferret the slightest heresy out from the most misleading of lies. The fact that so many worlds in Cloudburst are primitive, and have only the vaguest idea of what the Emperor actually is makes this challenging. Is somebody collected from a primitive world’s population actually a heretic, or simply poorly educated?

This is where his psychic power comes into the fore. Havermann is superhumanly skilled at detecting lies. He can read minds and body language like a book, except for when faced by the most skilled dissemblers. Havermann has caught Imperial Navy officers, a Mechanicus Magos, and even members of the Adeptus Arbites in heretical thoughts, and has sent them all to the stake.

There is no person in the galaxy that troubles Professor Unarvu more than Havermann. The two have never met, but Unarvu is a realist when it comes to the odds of his meticulous planning surviving contact with Havermann’s power and cruelty.

Havermann is whip-thin and tall, with long black hair and cybernetic eyes he can cause to glow on command. He dresses in a black overcoat with a black waistcoat over a red business outfit from Thimble, which lends him a darkly, even theatrically threatening mien that only somebody with his appearance could pull off. He has no outward signs of his psychic gifts, which makes it all the more surprising when he uses them. In battle, he employs concealed armor to its fullest advantage, wearing it under his clothing, and prefers the use of a Power Sword and Hellpistol.

Lady Inquisitrix Mizuki Kimihira, Ordo Malleus

“You know what I’ve noticed about aristos that consort with daemons? They all regret it eventually. Not the peasants, not the middle classes, just the nobles. Even if it takes a while, even if it kills them, they all regret it. I used to wonder why, but I think I know now. They fear egalitarianism. In the Warp, after I kill them, they’re no more powerful or important than any other dead soul. They’re just food or sex toys for the next hungry spirit to pass by. They regret losing the power they had in life.”

Among the daemon-worshippers of the Cloudburst Sector who actually make a study of their opponents in the Imperial government, there are none they fear more than Mizuki Kimihira. She has been a quiet, contemplative, thoughtful, and unavoidable force of order and law in the Sector for over two hundred years. She uses a variety of technologies and psionics to maintain her aging flesh, and has essentially trapped it at the age of forty, but even if she allowed more of her age to show, it would change nothing about her capability. Kimihira is, without question or doubt, the single most powerful psyker in the Sector. She is at least a mid-Beta on the Imperial Assignment Scale of Psionics.

Conventional human science does not hold a place for a being of her combination of self-control and psychic power in its present evolutionary model of humans. This is not to say she is wholly unprecedented, even among Inquisitors, but the relative lack of psychic humans in Cloudburst does make her power’s presence all the more conspicuous. She is an outlier, of the sort that the changing times have made ever more common of late. Imperial medicae suspect that humanity is becoming more psionically-active, and people like her may be the proof. No academic paper would reference her directly, however, as no person in Cloudburst outside the Adeptus Arbites, Astartes, and Inquisition is aware of her power, save Chief Rastimos. However, files on her have been made available to both the Segmentum Conclave and the Adeptus Custodes.

Kimihira is more than a potent psyker, however. She is an experienced and capable hunter of daemons. Clad in her silver-plated Terminator armor, armed with Power Halberd and Blessed Rotary Cannon, and outfitted with enough explosives to level a building, she often does not need her retinue of psykers, sharpshooters, and priests to assist her in purging a daemonic cult from the spires of Thimble or the rolling forests of Celeste. When she does bring her retinue with her, she usually relies on her combat bodysuit and collection of psi-reactive knives and pistols instead. In addition, she is a master telekine, easily able to flick a truck onto its back with a single wave of psychic power. Her subordinates have orders to knock her out or even kill her if she ever loses all control of her power. Her custom Terminator armor also contains a concealed needle system built into the neck guard, which can slip a sedative into her bloodstream in the incident that she loses control.

Kimihira hates having to lord over the Ordo Malleus, especially since she has so few chances to slip away and fight the good fight. She and Havermann get along well, although her relationship with Hueng is more acrimonious. She respects Lerica’s centuries of experience, but ultimately would prefer to return to the battle. To the profound annoyance of Herman Rothschilde, she has never bought into his worldview that Cloudburst is doomed and on the verge of total collapse. While she readily admits that the Sector’s aristocracy is entirely too concerned with appearance – and so is the Ministorum, for that matter – she thinks his gloomy worldview is just pure laziness. Every time she has ever brought the glowing tip of her psychic-enriched Force Halberd down on the heart of a sinner or deviant, they have promptly disintegrated, after all. If Rothschilde would just shut up and get back to work, she has told him bluntly, some of the problems he insists can’t be solved would evaporate.

Some of her own subordinates whisper that she is in some degree of denial about the extent of the problems facing the greater Imperium. Kimihira herself would insist that she is aware of them, probably better than most, and prefers attacking them head-on to letting them fester. This has not served her well in her role as the Lady Inquisitrix of the Ordo Malleus Cloudburst. Some of the younger, more politically-minded Inquisitors of her Ordo think her to be too easily distracted to serve as their leader. None have yet acted on this, but if she continues her blithe disregard for the political realities of the Conclave, the status quo may change. As it stands, she rejects the various factional labels of the Inquisition, saying they provoke disunity in the ranks when unity is the only thing that can provide a means of finding defense against the sheer volume of foes Humanity must now overcome.

Given her distaste for the political and philosophical factionalism of the Inquisition, one could be forgiven for thinking that she rejects philosophy in general. That would be an unfair characterization of her mindset. She is a profoundly philosophical person, but her philosophical mindset directs towards the understanding of the presence and extent of the Emperor’s vision in the lives of His citizens, not the balance of power of its government. Fully one third of the daemon cults she has encountered in her centuries of service have arisen from the ranks of nobles of Celeste, Maskos, and most especially Thimble. She has seen over and over how often the idleness of the philosophically dead Imperial nobility leads itself to thoughts of a better life in the Warp’s thrall, and how often those responsible have tricked themselves into thinking they will somehow escape the fates of the billions of other humans around them.

Kimihira is not of noble birth herself, but she does not oppose the feudal system of the Imperium to such an extent that she would ever try to take action against the system itself. Overall, she simply finds it too susceptible to corruption. She and Paltmitier have taken down entire witch covens by themselves, all of them founded from the lesser scions of Noble families and Rogue Trader houses. She has worked with the Grey Knights on only two occasions, simply because they are so rarely called to the isolated Cloudburst Sector.

Lord Inquisitor Xi Gian Heung, Ordo Xenos

“Cost? You ugly shitter, you think you know about cost? Throw a ship the size of a moon into a star without touching it! Then we’ll talk about cost! Bring me my Throne-damned gun!”

Xi Gian Hueng holds the distinct honor of knowing more about Glasian biology and technology than any other person alive knows. The relentless, coarse-tongued cyborg warrior has been physically present for three Glasian invasions, more than any other person outside the Blue Daggers. He is the only one of the four senior Inquisitors of the Conclave Cloudburst with no psychic talent, but he doesn’t need it. His custom Power Armor and collection of esoteric human and alien weapons are more than enough to bring him victory. He has worked with the Deathwatch and the Blue Daggers dozens of times, usually in pursuit of alien forces in the Cloudburst Circuit, but sometimes in the harder-to-navigate Exo-zone to trailing. Hueng is a practical man, and unlike several of his peers in the higher Inquisition, does not mind his relegation to more directorial positions as he grows older. He still takes to the field at times, and usually does so at the personal behest of his superior, High Inquisitrix Lerica.

Hueng has somewhat more time available for his own research and investigations than he might normally. The position of Inquisitor of the Chamber for the Deathwatch of Watch Fortress Dascomb is traditionally held by the highest-ranking member of the Ordo Xenos in Cloudburst, and two times out of three that makes the Lord Inquisitor Xenos the Inquisitor of the Chamber. However, Lerica did not forfeit her position when the Senate of the High Lords offered her elevation to Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst. This leaves Hueng time to oversee his subordinates more directly.

His coterie of acolytes, Throne Agents, and Interrogators are the bane of the Cold Trade, the moving of alien artifacts through Cloudburst. Thanks to the unfortunate proclivities of the nobility of Thimble, he has stationed a team of his acolytes there permanently, where they make their services available to the Arbites.

Hueng’s hate for the Cold Trade seems hypocritical to those who encounter him, given that nearly fifteen percent of his augmetics and weapons are alien in origin. Indeed, both his favored wrist-mounted las-lances and his thyroid-replacing augmetic are Jokaero products. However, Hueng is also a man of limitless willpower and self-restraint when it comes to the actual use of alien technology, whereas the Highborn of Thimble have levelled buildings in their overzealous use of alien weapons in their sporting duels.

This is less of a distinction than any Arbitrator would admit in a court of law, but Hueng is long past caring about the contradiction in his worldview. He has brought entire alien pocket kingdoms and small-scale Ork incursions to heel by himself, and has fought shoulder to shoulder with the Deathwatch against the Glasians before. As is the case with so many Inquisitors, he ignores contradictions in his own personal conduct if the result is a demonstrable improvement in the Imperium. Of course, as a hard-bitten old cynic, what constitutes ‘improvement’ may consist of a return to order, even if the order is just the quiet of the grave, or a terrified silence.

Hueng isn’t without compassion, but hundreds of years of hard work have burned it out of his demeanor. Hueng made the call to destroy the Space Hulk Inescapable Approach rather than attempt to salvage it, despite over two hundred Imperial Navy sailors still being trapped aboard. Hueng also led the purge of the freighter Calliope after a passenger smuggled out a transmission that there were Genestealers aboard. Thanks to the invasions and Migrations of the Glasians, he has had to send entire cities to the pyres after they were exposed to the Warp energies of destroyed Glasian ships.

He is also the loudest opponent of Watch Captain Paris’ plan to build a bunker for Glasian tech on Lorelei, deeming it to be too large a risk. Paris counters with his own argument that the Glasian tech is too potentially valuable to destroy if parts of it are provably uncorrupted. Ultimately, although the Deathwatch is the Chamber Militant for the Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos, individual Inquisitors do not have the authority to override a Watch Captain’s decisions without a substantial body of evidence, which Hueng cannot produce.

Still, Paris isn’t blind to Hueng’s centuries of experience. He has acceded to the gravity of the circumstance, and added additional automated defenses and failsafes to the facility, which has neither made the locals feel better nor assuaged Hueng’s worry.

Of all of the Lords Inquisitor in the Sector, Hueng thinks he has the hardest job, and has occasionally even given voice to this opinion. He may even be right, but the rest of the Conclave has little patience for such an attitude. Hueng is less popular than Lerica outside his Ordo, not that he cares.