Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Lord Subsector Oglith Darren Atongwë==
{{Topquote|The green tide threatens to drown us all. How many generations of my family have utterly failed to fix this problem? I fear that before this is over, the Atongwë family will have a new martyr in its holy ranks.|Darren Atongwë}}

The blood and sweat of the Atongwë family has brought hundreds of millions of souls to the light. So the family claims, anyway. The ancient Rogue Trader branch of the family established two worlds that eventually became Subsector Capital worlds, and now rule one of them by dint of ancient right of discovery.

In truth, however, it was partly because of the failures of ancient generations of the Atongwë family that the Rogue Trader house has seen its fortunes decline so severely in the last few centuries. The House Atongwë once reigned as the wealthiest in the Sector and much of those adjacent, but the sheer cost of the Oglith problem has drained their coffers ruinously fast.

Today, Darren Atongwë sits the throne of Rampart, as its Subsector Overlord. The Planetary Governorship has long passed to another family, but the Subsector still counts Atongwë as its leader.

Darren suffers no illusions nor delusions of the future. The time of the Atongwë family’s political supremacy is over. He knows that the Administratum and Astra Militarum have no reason whatsoever to allow his family to continue to rule over the Rampart Subsector, not after thousands of years of unaddressed failures.

First there was the initial failure to address the subterranean Orks on Oglith itself. Then there was a different ancestor’s throwing in with a privateer group that was a mere few months from being declared Perdita by the Segmentum Command Office. Then there were the centuries of dithering and denialism over the continuing Ork problem, then the rising pollution and gang problems on Soak, then the massive and possibly illegal buildup of mercenaries on Jodhclan’s Paradise.

Darren Atongwë knows of the two Officio Assassinorum agents that are now active on his planet. He suspects, with morbid certainty in his heart, that the Vanus Assassin is on Oglith to kill him. Why else would a knowledge manipulator be accompanying the master sharpshooter codenamed Mimic? Orks don’t care about human information services or agitprop. The only targets that merit a Vanus’s attention are human ones, as far as he believes.

Only the Senate of the High Lords of Terra can commission an Assassin to field within the Imperium’s borders, let alone two. Surely, Darren thinks, this means the Senate has lost all patience with him, and means to put him in the ground. Perhaps in the final days of the war, a pack of his own subordinates will descend on him and rip him apart, or undetected Ork sympathizers in the populace shall suddenly gain widespread access to his personal aircars. Or maybe the Officio will wait until the Glasians have landed and kill him in the chaos of Chaos?

However, Darren Atongwë is a fatalist, but not a pessimist. He is a profoundly spiritual and pious man, and he has not allowed his suspicion of his imminent doom to delay him from doing his work. He has focused his every waking hour into preparation for the arrival of the aliens; first the Glasians, then the sudden arrival of Big Chief Squiggothrider. Atongwë actually knows very little about Orks and Glasians, despite the obvious risks. He has a highly compartmentalized mind and little room for knowledge of heretical aliens. Were he better at facing reality, he might have made a decent Bishop. Alas, he is a politician through and through, replete with the frailties of mind and spirit that entails.

He is not a poor politician, but he relies on public image work and messaging to get his point across to the proles, not actions. Oglith is – or was – a world rising fast in the estimation of the Imperium. Their exceptional Scions and potent fleet made them a lynchpin of local defense on the very outermost edges of Imperial space. The natural increase in economic power for the nobles and standards of living for the general populace ensured a relatively low level of crime, and Atongwë managed to convince himself, even in the face of contrasting evidence, that all could be well, even if the Glasians were coming.
He should have known better, and now he sees this.

As a child, Darren was groomed for leadership from the age of six. By the time he was twenty, he had already enrolled in the ranks of the local commissioned officers’ corps of the Oglith Warriors, and never once took to the field. He thought it was because he was too valuable to risk, when in fact he was simply connected too highly for his COs to survive the damage to their careers if they got him killed.

After leaving the Guard with desultory honors and participation trophies, Atongwë took to study of the family business. The House Atongwë family merchant business was far less robust or expansionistic than it once had been, and Darren proved an unexceptional scion of the family at most. However, by right of age, Darren became the new Subsector Overlord after a token vote by his peers. As the Subsector Overlord, he was unable to direct his control over individual planetary governments at the level of granularity he would have liked, but as time went by, he found himself less and less interested in the day-to-day minutiae of governance anyway.

Of course, when the Orks came, all that changed. Suddenly, every armchair general and actual general in the Sector was screaming for his head, the Inquisition was suddenly asking him some very uncomfortable questions, and two strange people, who never smiled, and wore tight black clothing, arrived on his doorstep.

Antongwë never bothers carrying arms, even when outdoors. In his mind, if the aliens or the Inquisition truly decide to kill him, nothing he could carry on his person could make a difference. He’s not wrong. Darren is unaware of this, but the Vindicare Assassin codenamed Mimic is already planning his execution.