Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Magos Dominus Prannan duPree==
{{Topquote|Faster, Tech-rate! Faster, you fool! Praise the Omnissiah, I’ll take this Hulk or I’ll kill you all for not taking it for me!|Prannan duPree}}

The Imperial Navy looks on in private awe at the ships in the Basilikon Astra. The Adeptus Mechanicus keeps the very best ship models for themselves. It’s easy for them to justify as needing the best ships to enact their Quest for Knowledge, of course, and even the Astartes would be slow to deny the fairness of the shipbuilders getting the best ships, but the Mechanicus’s warships are for more than war. They are engines of faith and glory. The fleets of Cognomen and Solstice ultimately answer to one man: Prannan duPree, and he commands his ships ever onward.

duPree is the Magos Dominus of the Basilikon Astra Cloudburst, and commands the Basilikon from the Oberon battleship ''Lucubrate'', a nine-kilometer monster. His roots in the fleet run deep; he has been serving aboard one Basilikon ship or another since the age of twelve.

Prannan duPree began life on Cognomen as the seventh of twenty-four vat-grown offspring of two Magi he never met. He chose his name from a list, as is usually the case for the title-obsessed Cognomen culture, and promptly entered the seminary. duPree displayed natural aptitude for the traits that an officer of the Basilikon Astra would need, including three-dimensional maneuvering, and quickly shunted into that program in the seminary’s instruction.

duPree was able to climb the ranks in the crew of the cruiser ''Ekpliktikos'', thanks to his drive and determination to find the lost treasures of the Omnissiah. However, when the chance came to select which branch of the Basilikon he would enter, he chose the military wing of the Basilikon Astra instead of the Explorators. He sees the possibility that the many annoying aliens of the Exo-zone, Halo Stars, Circuit, and other non-Imperial regions of the galaxy might find and loot valuables that rightly belong to the Mechanicus as an insult, and he sees the Basilikon Astra Dominus Cloudburst as the best way to prevent that from happening.

No sooner had he eventually arisen to command his own ship than he applied for the status of Magos in the Priesthood. Awarding that status is traditionally earned by an individual and bestowed from above, and asking for it is rarely something one would do unless that particular person had very good reason to think their contributions to the Quest have been overlooked. duPree was understandably given a very high threshold for success, but managed to clear it. He gathered the fleet leaders of Cognomen (at the time, Solstice did not have a fleet to speak of) and explained in great detail his plan to slowly push the Oldlight Exo-zone back by establishing Mechanicus and Adeptus Astra Telepathica communication points along the trailing edge of the Rampart Subsector. He demonstrated the feasibility of the plan with a series of well-rationed plans, graphs, and explanations, and included both a cost and a benefit analysis with his presentation. Of course, all the plans of the Mechanicus can come to nothing if the proper work isn’t applied, and so as soon as he left, duPree took his one ship and its three Escorts, and flattened a small pirate base on the outer fringe of Imperial territory. As his men combed the rubble for valuable raw or processed materials, he planted the flag of Mars, and installed the first of over two hundred fifty telescopes that now scan the Exo-zone for trouble.

Eventually, he was granted the status of Magos he desired, and has since commanded ever larger ships and missions on behalf of the Basilikon. Technically, he has to forego his personal allegiance to Cognomen like a Skitarii does, as he now represents Mars in the fleet, not his homeworld. So far from Mars, of course, and so often scorned as Cognomen is, he does still feel pangs of loyalty to Cognomen, and has had to balance that with his orders to provide extra safety to Solstice until the little Forge Moon is able to stand on its own.

Of course, duPree has many tools at his disposal. Unlike the Imperial Navy, which also keeps track of their fighters and warships in a Sector down to the last rivet, the Cloudburst Basilikon Astra is in constant flux. All of its ships are accounted for, of course, as to not do so would be an offense to the Omnissiah and the Machine God, but their ships are eternally rotating in and out of the Sector proper. duPree is one of the most fervent advocates for the unrestrained expansion of the Cloudburst Sector into the Cloudburst Circuit and Exo-zone, and his vessels are constantly testing the borders of nearby dark spaces on the map, even as the Explorators do the same. While some Explorators are somewhat less than pleased by duPree’s generous understanding and interpretation of his remit to protect the Imperium and Mechanicus, duPree rationalizes the dispatching of his ships outside Mechanicus-controlled territory by pointing out that the entire history of Cloudburst is one of people not noticing things right under their noses. How long had Septiim sat within non-Navigated flight of Cognomen? How long had Dawn-break, Gorum’s Folly, and Fathon Prime sat unexploited and unknown, within sight of Hapster? Would the Imperium have a working [[STC]] if Maskos, Nauphry, Oglith, Triune, and Coriolis had been discovered during the Crusade or Heresy, or even the Scouring?

This is difficult for the Explorators to dispute, and certainly duPree doesn’t treat the presence of offensive warships and Explorator vessels in the same place as being a competition – quite the opposite. He has so far directed his vessels to come at once to the response of any legitimate distress call of any Imperial or Martian ship within their range, even if they are perhaps somewhat afield of their normal jurisdiction, and every scrap of archaeotech he has ever found has gone straight to Lord Fabricator Beraxos.

The largest ship in the Cloudburst Sector is presently the fourteen-kilometer Ark Mechanicus ''Comprehension'', which is technically not under duPree’s authority. It, and other vessels of its fleet, are actually Explorator vessels, which use their combination of absurdly heavy armor and weapons to protect themselves when they fly beyond the range of the guns of the Navy and Basilikon Astra Dominus. Thus, duPree has used a Battleship as his command vessel, custom-built to lead the fleet in the region, thanks to the massive yards of Cognomen. He has routinely flown the ship to Syracuse and Fabique to exchange knowledge and sensitive reports with his counterparts in Drumnos and Naxos.

Pursuant to his drive to find every scrap and sample of archaeotech he can while also vigorously defending what little he has, duPree has done everything he can think of to stay in the good graces of the Council of Magi of Cognomen and Solstice. He and Magos Lethicos of the Explorators are more than colleagues and peers, they are personal friends, and he and Lord Fabricator Beraxos are thick as thieves when it comes to the planning of their radically-expanded Mechanicus. As the man ultimately responsible for securing [[Setting:Cloudburst/ABX2|ABX202020]] and Solstice until their own defenses are complete, he takes his job to keep the secrets of House Matraxia confident and ensure the survival of Solstice with utmost seriousness. Of course, to visit ABX202020 more often than would be needed for a simple logging colony would give away the game, and so he visits only rarely and never without a secondary purpose. Likewise, the fact that so many of his ships are needed to protect Dawn-break and Forender (and Foraldshold) during the Glasian Migrations means that he has had to entrust Lord Ranult Arden and Overlord Neverember with the defense of Solstice, which burns him. Solstice is his ward, and both Syracuse and Fabique have entrusted him – not Beraxos, him – with the survival of their investments there. Of course, Cognomen lay clergy have the unfortunate tendency to look down on Solstice clergy, but until Solstice has enough manufacturing capability to make their own ships, duPree is maintaining security for both.

duPree is not a great boss, as his immediate staff can attest, but as a natural result of his drive, connections, charisma, success rate, and experience, many of the junior officers of the Basilikon Astra have attached themselves to his coattails in the hopes that they will be carried with him to power and glory. Of course, the consequence of so many of the Sector’s best and brightest all crewing one ship cuts both ways. The Lucubrate may be a mighty and powerful warship, thanks to its dizzyingly large array of upgrades and elite crew, but its loss would instantly cripple the Basilikon Astra for hundreds of years, just as it was after the destruction of the ''Archetype''.

In personal battle, which he carefully avoids, duPree carries a Refractor Field and several five-slug magnum revolvers he custom-built with sealable chambers so they can be virtually silent, a truly odd collection of arms for a Magos.