Editing Setting:Cloudburst/Maskos (section)

====History====

All that changed when Rogue Trader and Missionary Lad’inbel Atongwë, accompanied by over two hundred thousand Ecclesiarchy preachers, Militia, Sisters, and Missionaries on a mission to convert the barbarians of the Oldlight Proximate Circuit arrived in orbit over the world.  Drolorium was in poor shape.  Pollution, sin, and ignorance ruled the day, and Atongwë immediately recognized that this was a world that needed the God-Emperor’s light.  The problem was that the warlords had amassed enormous armies, and several were well fortified in abandoned Dark Age cities and factories that he very much wanted to take intact.  He asked the huge Adeptus Ministorum delegation present to assist him in bringing the world to Terra’s Glory, and one Missionary stepped forth with a cunning plan.

The Missionary, a charismatic and insightful lad named Maskos, proposed that the world be brought to worship of the Emperor through subtle means.  He proposed that the fleet drop pre-fabricated buildings of faith to the world below, in a place where the local warlords had no technological means to reach.  Then, Missionaries and lay folk of the clergy could go to the main populations and begin subtle re-education.  Maskos proposed that high-tech, productive, and beautiful vegetable farms, environmental cleaning sites, flower gardens, pastoral getaways, and other places of serene and idyllic beauty surround the pre-fab buildings.  Then, when the people in the main populations started showing interest in the words the Ministorum had sown in secret, the Ministorum could ferry those faithful ones to the retreat, and let them stay there for a set term.  Then, the Missionaries could promise them they could live there forever if they spent the next few years preaching the gospel to the miserable barbarians of the world, overseen by Atongwë’s Missionaries, of course.  Eventually, as the population of the safe zone grew large enough, the descendants of the first wave of pilgrims could be trained to use the same technology.  The Drolorians, Maskos said, would trip over each other to serve the Ecclesiarchy.<br>
Atongwë thought the plan over, and found the obvious flaw.  What, he asked, of the warlords?  Surely, they would not tolerate the best and brightest of their population disappearing to some holy land beyond their control.

Maskos smiled.  “Promote them,” he said.  “Who wouldn’t want to rule paradise?”

Atongwë gave approval to the plan, and great pre-fab buildings were dropped to a remote island.  Detoxifying and environmental repair operations began at once, and by the time Atongwë had left to continue his campaign of soul-saving, the farms were seeded, the Missionaries briefed and language-trained, and the discreet security militia ready to deploy.

Maskos led the first wave of Missionaries in person.  For years, living as a barbarian in the hollow remains of a long-dead hive at the world’s equator, he preached in the dark and quiet, bringing a few thousand interested souls to the word of the Throne.  When he gauged his stay in the Hive had gone on long enough to annoy the local barbarian warlord with his proselytizing, he signaled for pickup.  To the shock and terror of the other barbarians, a great troopship of the Frateris Militia soared in from the heavens, deploying flares and firing lasers for maximum effect.  Maskos led his eager pilgrims into the ship and took off.

Shepherding the new converts to the paradisiacal monastery he had created, Maskos told the flock that they would live there for two local years.  There, they would have the very best of healthcare, the best food, clothes, education.  They would live like the warlords themselves, and want for nothing.  When two years were done, they would return to their homes, and they would preach the Emperor’s word far and wide.  If they did so, they could return at the end of their careers, and retire to the monastery with their families.

Needless to say, the pilgrims took to the pledge work with gusto.  While the first group relaxed and enjoyed the paradise Maskos had ordered built, he returned to another city, and repeated the process, while over two hundred Missionaries did the same, around the globe.  Within five years, Maskos’s planned monastery had grown from a mere six hundred pilgrims and local workers to over twenty thousand.

Inevitably, the warlords took notice.  Most regarded the charismatic young clergyman as a clear and present danger to their rule.  They restrained their armies and assassins solely because they had heard of warrior women with great chainsaw swords attacking warlord troops who had waylaid other preachers, and levelling their holdings with fire.  Finally, Maskos personally approached the most powerful warlord of the world, and told him the truth.  The world was going to become part of the great congregation of the stars, he said, and a piece of the Emperor’s Imperium.  The warlord, the Missionary said simply, could rule the whole planet from the monastery in the Emperor’s name, or he could wake up one morning with no ribcage, and a more pliant inferior in the world’s throne.

Understandably, the warlord took the offer, and only ten more years of hard work and preaching followed.  When Adeptus Administratum and Adeptus Arbites vessels arrived with Atongwë, forty-five Terran years to the day after Maskos opened the door to the monastery in person, they found an orderly, rapidly cleaning, pious world, ready to become loyally Imperial.

Maskos was made the world’s Archbishop and Deacon Extraordinary, and refused juvenat treatments to allow him to repeat the trick on another world – the vast force of eager pilgrims and preachers he had trained were more than capable of undertaking their own efforts in the Circuit.  He lived long enough to see the Mechanicus finish Terraforming the small world Grendel, at the outskirts of the system, then died peacefully.

By unanimous assent of the world’s thousands of Sub-Prelates, the world was renamed in his honor.  Great factories, cathedrals, offices, and residence towers rose from the ashes of twelve thousand years of internecine wars, Grendel began churning out food by the teraton for Cognomen, and all seemed well.