Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Monica Lanbrie, Canoness Superior of Celeste==
{{Topquote|So you still have no desire to repent? Truly? I am saddened. No, not for you, but the Exsanguination Harness takes so long to clean after each use. I shall have to get one of the Initiates to do it. No, it’s too late now, you had your chance.|Monica Lanbrie}}

All congregations need a leader. While the Cardinals of the Cloudburst Diocese, all two of them, could claim credit for that feat easily enough, the lay members of the flock of the Emperor in Cloudburst know the true exemplar of the Emperor’s divine will is Monica Lanbrie. She could make an honest claim to being the most overworked Sororitas in Cloudburst. Lanbrie’s own Sisters are among the best disciplined and most loyal people in the Sector, of course, but the Sisterhood in Cloudburst contains all of the Orders of the Sororitas at once. The Hospitaller, the Famulous, and the Dialogous are eternally busy, advising noble families and assisting Missionaries in the Circuit. Because of the lack of technological base and millennia-spanning tradition in her Order, Lanbrie must oversee all Sororitas activities in most of the Sector and the entire Circuit. Of course, there is another Convent in the Sector, so she is not without aid in this task, but it is still taxing.

This is made worse by the fact that her superiors throw away money like it’s going out of style. The Convent in which Lanbrie bases her operations is a magnificent piece of Imperial architecture, to be sure, and the overall state of the Sisterhood in Sector doesn’t suffer much, but the Ecclesiarchy in Cloudburst is almost shockingly profligate. Lanbrie feels genuine disgust for the sheer volume of wealth the Ecclesiarchy squanders on looking good. She is notably not taking action to rectify this, however.

Lanbrie has another obstacle most of her kin in other Convents does not. The Chamber Militant, her Battle Sisters, are somewhat underequipped. As much as Lanbrie would like to be able to blame this issue on Drake and Lamarr’s overspending, however, she can’t. This is instead the fault of the Cognomen armories, which have only barely been keeping up with the immense demand of Cloudburst’s rapidly expanding population. The fact that the Ecclesiarchy is quite stingy with the blueprints for their arms is not helping matters.

As the Canoness Extraordinary of the capital system of the Sector, Lanbrie nominally has authority over all Canonesses of equal or lesser rank in the Sector. In practice, her Sisterhood, like most, is as self-sufficient as possible, so this rarely comes up. Rarely, her Convent will play host to the leaders of Sisterhoods elsewhere in the Segmentum Ultima, and on those cases, she tries to be the best hostess she can, despite the circumstances.

Her Sisterhood is a potent force in battle despite their less than perfect weaponry stocks, and as part of her policy to never allow the forces of Doubt and Disbelief to creep into the sparse and hard-to-patrol Cloudburst Sector, Lanbrie simply does not allow her Battle Sisters to enter the fray without at least company-strength numbers, ever. This is expensive, of course, and when lone Sisters accompany Rogue Traders and such into the Circuit it may not be possible, but it does ensure that their casualties are low and their reputation terrifying. This is aided by the High Gothic plaque on the arch over Lanbrie’s office door, which reads “Redemption is not Forgiveness.”

Not all deployments of the Sisters go as planned, but so far, Lanbrie has a sterling success rate against the enemies of the Imperium at the edges of its territory. Her Elder Celestian units, codenamed Pike and Javelin, are without question the deadliest short-range combatants in the Sector outside the Blue Daggers (and Inquisitrix Kimihira’s bodyguards). Their record has no defeats, not since Lanbrie took over as their leader seventeen years before, and not one Elder Celestian squad has suffered a casualty in nine years. They make use of the rare Mars-built weapons which the Sanguine Soul has access to, including its master-crafted combi-bolters, which each Sister is allowed to customize however they wish (silver plating and custom grips are popular). On rare occasions, Lanbrie even leads them into battle herself, armed with a pair of master-crafted and heavily artificed Power Gladii, gifts from Oscar Havermann’s predecessor as the Lord Inquisitor Hereticus Cloudburst. For ranged battle, she instead makes use of a combi-bolter from the same pool as Pike and Javelin.

On rarer occasions, members of the Ordo Hereticus will come to her with secret missions. Usually this merely involves imprisoning individuals the Inquisition has already taken alive, which Lanbrie readily does in her secret prison, but sometimes it involves inserting specific Sororitas into the retinues of other Inquisitors or Rogue Traders. Lanbrie rarely refuses, because these requests serve two major purposes. Firstly, they allow her Sisterhood to improve their connections to organizations across the Sector, and gain prestige, wealth, converts, and equipment in exchange. Second and more importantly, they allow for the sight of the Emperor to reach incredibly powerful people, who might otherwise convince themselves that they are beyond it.

Lanbrie is a grandmother, which is a trait that few other Canonesses hold. Her grandchildren are both students in the Canon Academy of the Imperial Sacrosanct, a prestigious private school on Celeste. Lanbrie was a terrible mother, but age has shown her that family is something you can’t get back when you lose it, and so she has done her absolute best to make a place for her grandkids in her life.