Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==High Queen, First Princeps Remilia Matraxia==
{{Topquote|I used to shuffle papers. Now I rule a planet, when they let me. Soon, there won’t be an alien alive in the Sector who isn’t terrified of me.|Remilia Matraxia}}

From the ashes of total mediocrity rose the phoenix of Remilia Matraxia. Once, she was a mere stylus-pusher for the Adeptus Administratum. Now, she is arguably the most dangerous resident of the sector whose existence is not common knowledge, after perhaps Mimic.

Remilia Alenhoff was born to an unremarkable household on Forender, where she capably served as an Adept in the Mechanicus’s internal organizational structure. Her work was mind-numbingly boring, and held no real room for improvement. She was engaged to another Adept of lower standing, in whom she saw little more than comfort and perhaps solidarity. In her free time, she practiced a variety of combat sims and educational games, and sometimes dreamed of something better. She had always had a natural touch for machines and codes, and her superiors had noted she had an uncanny ability to find the solutions to the technical problems that cropped up in their office.

One night, she awoke to find her bed emptied of her fiancé, who she saw unconscious on the floor beside the bed, and four men in the robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus standing beside her. She listened, first terrified and later intrigued, as the Techpriests made her an offer. The Cognomen Priests informed her that they had been surveilling her for over two years, and that she had great untapped potential. They explained that there was a great and holy undertaking, made in secret and executed far away, to which she could be an integral part.

Remilia looked down at her fiancé, out the window at her planet, back at the Priests, and asked when she started.

Six hours later, Laramie Gunli and ‘Remilia Alenhoff’ died in a bizarrely unlikely propane fire, Remilia Matraxia was being fitted her for new Queenly robes, and the planet ABX202020 had a new leader. Since then, Remilia has ruled her new planet with an iron fist and combination of pragmatism, cold logic, fiery impatience, and intellectual curiosity that drives Lister Beraxos alternately to heights of pride or deep annoyance.

Remilia is no mere figurehead, although even Beraxos didn’t want her to just be one. She is a fiercely independent and disturbingly insightful woman that no Magos has made the mistake of underestimating twice. Her combination of utterly flawless genes and untapped brilliance at strategic affairs have actually allowed her to accept life-extending DNA treatments and Mechanicus edicts that would have crippled any other Adept in Beraxos’s employ. Privately, he’s not sure even he could have done a better job turning ABX202020 from a forest grove into a ringing hall of chivalry and Mechanicus piety. At least, not so covertly.

Since she has received the bone-curdlingly invasive and agonizing treatments needed to prolong her natural life, Remilia has overcome their side effects completely. She looks thirty, despite being over sixty, and will not need traditional juvenat treatments for at least another eighty years. She has put her old life firmly out of mind, and has since wed another man, Cobus Dallde, who decided to take her name. She has borne him four children, each of whom has completed the Ritual of Becoming and assumed the mantles of Noble Knights themselves, as has Cobus. Now quite done with such child rearing, she has instead devoted herself fully to the cause of the newly minted House Matraxia. She spends her every waking day training, reading, working, and preparing for the day when the House banners shall rise over the blood-soaked soil of worlds far away, and her Knights will roar their defiance from a dozen guns and engines.

Of course, she needs actual Knights first. So far, Cognomen has only been able to keep their manufacturing of Knights at a snail’s pace. Because Cognomen’s resource and product manufacturing protocols must account for a rapidly-growing Sector population – and six Feudal and Feral Worlds that shall someday join it properly – they are increasing their industrial output as fast as they logistically can. That means that there are few opportunities for Cognomen to devote entire factory complexes to the hard work of manufacturing new Knights or Thrones. Of course, the chance does arise once in a rare while, and when the chance comes, Beraxos has taken it. The supply of Thrones and Knight suits to ABX202020 has been inconsistent, but Matraxia almost has enough suits to supply her first Banner of Knights.

Remilia’s Ritual of Becoming was a strange experience, for both herself and the Mechanicus personnel overseeing it. There were no spirits of data trapped in the memory matrix of her Throne Mechanicum, as it was fresh-built for her instead of being handed down from ancient bloodlines. Inside, there was nothing but darkness, silence, and the throb of a new machine spirit, hungry for knowledge and power. She imparted as much of herself to it as possible, and it did not find her wanting.

Outside of her work, Remilia shows a side the planet at large doesn’t get to see: her exhausted one. Her firebrand politics, energetic style, and ferocious support of her planet (even if it doesn’t seem to improve the lot of the people much) has left her bone-weary. She hasn’t yet faltered in her physical and piloting training, but even her own children are beginning to question how much longer Remilia can maintain such a pace.

Of course, where people who aren’t her immediate relatives can see her, Remilia maintains absolute control. Everything from her martial style of dress – modeled after the off-duty uniforms of the Sanguine Soul Celestials – to her severe tone of speech to her rather spartan house flag suggests total authority. Of course, the Sacristans of her house know who really calls the shots, but Remilia doesn’t let that stop her.

She has a somewhat rocky relationship with her nominal superior, Magos Ermincrole. He is as strong a proponent of a more powerful House Matraxia as she is, but he finds her personnel management style annoying and confusing. Remilia has chosen to disregard the fact that her subordinates on the planet are technically her slaves. She treats them as peasantry, but not bonded thralls. She has no court to hear complaints, but her children sometimes adjudicate legal disputes on her behalf. She and her husband spend hours poring over ancient records of other Knight houses that have no pertinence to their own, and sometimes pull the maddest ideas from them about chivalry and independence. Ultimately, Matraxia knows she has to dance to Ermincrole’s tune for now, so she does, but she has made it quite clear that one day, she will be his equal, not his servant.

She carries a bewildering variety of weapons depending on the circumstances, but at the moment, Remilia prefers a pair of silvered dueling daggers.