Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Lady Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Ordo Xenos High Inquisitor Cassandra Lerica==
{{Topquote|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.|Cassandra Lerica}}

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.