Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Cardinal Lamarr==
{{Topquote|NOOO!... Oh, Page. No, thank you… just the nightmares again. Do me a favor, my lad, order another patrol of the walls, would you kindly? The knife-ears almost got me that time.|Lamarr}}

Cardinal Lamarr is the second of the two Cardinals of the Archdiocese Cloudburst and rules from the planet Jodhclan’s Paradise. Unlike his superior, Cardinal Drake, Lamarr concerns himself somewhat less with the aesthetics of the Ministorum, and more with its defense. More specifically, his personal defense first, and that of his homeworld second.

Lamarr began his life in the Ecclesiarchy in the Imperial Navy, as a member of the crew of the warship Titanclad. After hearing the Chaplain of the vessel administrate to the souls of two crewers who died in a munitions loader accident, he found himself moved to join the Ministorum, and partake of such a holy calling. He was a natural: an orator, a confidant, and a genuinely pious leader of men.

In no time, he had risen through the clergy of Jodhclan and entered a highly public position: that of the primary Confessor of the planetary administrators. While a man of lesser moral caliber or fewer ethics might have been tempted to use such a position and the abundant blackmail opportunities it presented, Lamarr did no such thing. With connections to the rich and powerful of his homeworld, a sterling record of discretion, a dazzling rise in personal power, successful military service, and a public sense of right and wrong, Lamarr seemed destined for greatness.

When the Cardinal of Jodhclan died, Lamarr’s superior, Serano Schneider, rose to fill the position. Lamarr rose from Confessor to the capital city to serve as Schneider’s underling, the Bishop of Durantsberg. After seventeen years, Schneider died, and to the surprise of roughly half the Bishops of the Sector and the weary acceptance of the other half, Schneider’s testament named Lamarr as the new Cardinal. With only one other Cardinal in the Sector, Drake rubber-stamped Lamarr’s ascension to the position, which he has held loyally ever since.

Unlike Cardinal Drake, Lamarr understands that wealth is not a perfect indicator of the level of piety. However, he has not actually taken any significant steps away from the use of the same garish, overwhelmingly decorated art styles for the buildings under his control. He has far bigger problems, in his mind. It is not unfair to claim that his job is far harder than Drake’s; Drake needs merely tend to the leaders of the Sector and represent Cloudburst on Terra, but Lamarr rules a world. Jodhclan’s Paradise’s name may be apt, but the planet still has billions of residents that need both spiritual and administrative leadership. In fact, Lamarr spends over eighty percent of his time at work performing leadership functions for the planetary government. The rest of the time, he is either recording sermons or performing them live.

However, he has also spent several hours per week of late indulging in a personal fear. Cardinal Lamarr is utterly terrified of the Eldar race. He is convinced, beyond logic or hope, that they will come for his world, and they will do so any day now. The work he has done to lead the people of Jodhclan is quickly shrinking in significance in his mind, compared to the overwhelming threat of the Eldar hordes.

So he imagines, because of Jodhclan’s Paradise. The planet is a place of magnificent natural resources, bursting with picturesque views, abundant food and minerals, huge energy generation and residential potential, and habitable neighbors in-system. The world fits all the criteria he can think of to fit the pattern of planet-thieving the Eldar have iterated hundreds of times in history.

Many tens of thousands of years ago, the Eldar Empire instituted mass terraforming (or Xenoforming, more accurately) of thousands of planets around the galaxy with abundant frozen water but no biosphere. Using their technosorcery to reshape the planets’ atmospheres and water to forms that resembled the tropical worlds on which their people’s empire was built, the Eldar named these slow-acting crustal rebuilding projects the Maiden Worlds. Since the collapse of the Eldar pantheon, the Eldar, especially the Exodites and Harlequins, have had far more pressing concerns, but the Craftworlders occasionally find the need for a habitable planet for some reason. Periodically, humans and other species that have taken up residence on these tropical paradises find themselves evicted at gunpoint from their homes, some of which humanity has been occupying since before the end of the Age of Strife.

Cardinal Lamarr is convinced that Jodhclan’s Paradise is one of these. He is convinced enough that a Council of Farseers probably couldn’t dissuade him at this point. To the end of protecting himself and his demesne from the xenos, he has decided to harden the defenses of the world as much as humanly possible.

The problem with that idea is that the Ecclesiarchy, of which he is a senior and public member, is expressly forbidden from collecting and employing ‘men under arms.’ Of course, the Adeptus Sororitas is an exception to the rules, since even Sebastian Thor understood that a defenseless Ecclesiarchy benefits nobody. However, Sororitas require decades of training, highly expensive equipment, and space-consuming vehicles. Likewise, Sororitas answer to the Inquisition over the Ecclesiarchy despite being under the Ministorum’s nominal control.

Mercenaries do not have that problem. Cardinal Lamarr has gotten around his lack of legal grounds to raise an army by buying one instead. He has sent out contacts and invitations to nearly every mercenary organization in the entire Cloudburst Sector, Cloudburst Circuit, and even Naxos Sector, recruiting hundreds of thousands of men to Jodhclan. Technically, the Decree Passive does not prohibit members of the Adeptus Ministorum from hiring bodyguards or emergency security in the case of alien invasions, but it does prohibit the indefinite hiring of hundreds of battalions of men and artillery units to protect an entire planet from aliens who may not even know it exists. Lamarr has been stockpiling guns, troops, and pre-fabricated buildings for over eleven years. The only reason his hiring is stopping now is that he is running out of mercenaries. There are still mercenary groups that exist in Cloudburst, but they are either anti-Imperial or too small to bother with.

Lamarr is under investigation from the Ordo Militarum, a specialized Ordo Minoris of the Inquisition. However, he is unaware of this, and is still desperately hiring military assets from across the Sector and beyond to shore up his defenses. The people of Jodhclan are unsettled by this, although he has so far refused to deploy his troops against the citizens, so most give him the benefit of the doubt.

His paranoia manifests in other ways. Lamarr has collected a small circle of administrators, doctors, bodyguards, deacons, and subaldermen to himself that he feels he can trust absolutely. He has not informed all of them of his secret plans, but they are gradually taking over his responsibilities for running the planet, leaving him more time to plot the world’s defense. However, even a coterie of Imperial elites would have trouble securing a star system from an Eldar invasion, so Lamarr is spending more and more time learning Imperial history and military strategy, which is not helping the case for his loyalty in the eyes of his Ordo Militarum observers. Aside from his preparations, Lamarr is also now troubled by dreams. He has dreamed of the Eldar coming to take everything away from him, to the point that it is now costing him sleep.

Other officials of the Sector generally do not hold Lamarr in high regard. Oscar Havermann is a few months from acting openly at most, given that Lamarr’s authoritarian traits are worsening, and Lord General Xoss loathes him for drawing useful mercenaries away from systems that actually need them.

When not pursuing his obsession, Lamarr is a far better leader than Drake. Unlike Drake, he doesn’t mind getting his hands on the controls of the operation of his diocese. He has personally appointed dozens of the clergy in the Jodhclan command structure. When he needs to, he can be just as personable and kind as he was when he began his rise to power. He has never raised his hands in anger, and he has strictly pursued justice against those who have used their position to bring harm to the parishioners of Jodhclan. He wears a Rosary, but never bears a weapon.