Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Grand Master Princeps Adrian Phillip Ilnus==
{{Topquote|By my word do gods reap the souls of sinners. Tread lightly, Ermincrole. Your toy Knights are so very breakable.|Adrian Phillip Ilnus}}

Riding a thirty-meter death machine breeds hubris. Whomever designed the great Interface Units that allow a Princeps to embody their Titans must have understood this. Few are the Princeps who can come away from interfacing with their God-Engines without a profound sense of awe. For Adrian Ilnus, the sense fades quickly. Every time he disengages his mind from the Titan, he is left gasping from the experience, but within the day, he is the same arrogant, stubborn, grouchy old man as he was before the MIU turned on.

Those with the mental stability to become Princeps, especially those who command the mighty Warlords, are staggeringly rare in the Imperium. This is not helped by the bureaucratic incompetence and inertia that prevents some qualified candidates from entering the Mechanicus’s eye. Those who do, however, can come from pasts as disparate as street-sweepers to nobles. The Ilnus family were primary school teachers on Thimble when young Adrian’s exceptional mind came to the attention of the Techpriests who maintained the firing range at the school. He passed every single test they could throw at him, with bored and contemptuous ease. They took him from his family with their awed consent, and he was off to Cognomen to become one with the Machine.

After nine years of brutal training and eventually a year of ride-alongs with Princeps Clomach of the Reaver ''Scoured Alloys'', he passed his final test and became an Arms Moderatii of the Warhound Titan ''Stellar Gifts''. The Princeps of the ''Stellar Gifts'', Anya Heulter, commanded Ilnus as her Moderatii Gunner for many more years. He eventually passed the arcane standards needed for him to rise to command of his own engine. He was given command of the Warhound Scout ''Incarnate Brilliance'', which he commanded for two more years. He later earned command of a Warlord after the death of its Princeps. That Warlord was the ''Gold Blood'', which he remains with to this day.

He earned his place after the Princeps of the ''Gold Blood'' died fighting a pair of Nurglite Ravagers, the ''Gleeful Molder'' and the ''Death of Denial''. The ''Gold Blood'' had outpaced her escorts and moved in range of the Ravagers, which managed an impossibly lucky coring shot on the Warlord. Ilnus stepped up, crippled the heels of the ''Molder'', and slowed it to a crawl. While the ''Death of Denial'' tried to catch up to and pin down the ''Incarnate Brilliance'', the Titanshields of the Corpus Secutarii Congelatio unloaded a wall of melta and missile shots into it, dropping its Void Shields. Ilnus maneuvered to put the ''Molder'' between himself and the ''Death of Denial'', then fired both of his Plasma Blastguns into the ''Molder'' at maximum range. The ''Molder'' dropped, stricken and overheating, and as the ''Death of Denial'' scrambled out of range, it stepped out of the path of the rapidly-maneuvering Warhound and into range of the ''Stellar Gifts'', which sniped the unshielded Ravager with a precision Volcano shot.

As a gesture of acknowledgment for Ilnus’s success, he was given command of the ''Gold Blood'' once it was repaired. After twenty-five years of merging his mind with the Warlord, he looks ten years older than he should, and the ''Gold Blood'' is a mere two hundred years old; hardly the ancients of the Martian Legions. The ''Gold Blood'' mounts two Reaver Melta Cannons on its shoulder carapace points and a pair of Volcano Cannons on the arms by default, although it can also switch out any of those weapons as needed. The Cognomen forges do not yet have the blueprints for the Quake Cannon, but all other variants of Titan guns are in production. The ''Gold Blood'' usually partners with the Reaver Titan ''The Hatred of the Long-Sighted'' in the field, commanded by Princeps Pietro Ivans, one of Ilnus’s few actual friends.

Because of the rarity and value of Princeps, they live like kings among the more spartan and unaesthetic Techpriesthood. Ilnus is no exception. His private suite on Cognomen and on his Titan Transport, the ''Nebular Hammer'', are identical, down the carpeting, and packed with the incredible luxuries that the only Forge World for a Sector’s distance can produce. Like most Princeps, he has no spouse or children. What satisfaction can merging one’s life with another mortal bring after becoming one with a god? Regardless, his life is as comfortable as the life of a person who regularly fuses with a machine can be. He performs the absolute minimum of work himself, preferring to stay alone in his chambers, drinking expensive tea and grumbling about how things were better in his youth.

As can perhaps be expected, he does not have cordial and friendly relations with most of the Cloudburst major players. He and Ranult Arden have a speck of professional respect for each other, and he is slightly intimidated by Lister Beraxos and Cassandra Lerica, but he looks down on nearly all other people in the Sector, even Magos Sneth. He is not so far up his own asshole that he believes that he is a god, like the machine he commands, but that is not the impression one would get from a brief exposure to his attitude. Ilnus is quite well-educated, but actually keeps his mouth shut in most meetings of Legio Congelatio Princeps. The younger Princeps think this to be intimidating in the extreme, and that he is perhaps judging them all in stormy silence, but in reality, he is usually just stewing over some minor issue or another that he focuses on to the exclusion of all others. Older Princeps generally do not bother directing questions to him unless they really need his input. He has a disciplinarian streak to him that younger Titan crews have learned to fear. While he has never quite arisen to having disobedient Princeps or Moderatii whipped, there is no question in the minds of his subordinates that he could muster the bile to do it, if he had to.

There is one point on which there is no discussion or contention, anyway. He is in charge because he damn well earned it, as he rarely has to remind people. Of the two dozen active Titans in the Legion, his has the most kills, and that was not the case when he took it over. The tanks of Nurglite Warbands, the rickety contraptions of Ork Meks in the Circuit, even the Necron Monolith that had been raiding the Imperial border defenses in the Rampart Subsector in M41.989: there is no foe he has yet faced he has not yet killed. Even the massive Supa-Gargant ''Bloodcrunch'', which killed a previous Grand Master of the Legion, died when he trained his massive lasers on it twelve years later. He is simply unmatched in Titan combat, at least among the Congelatio. If the Legion had an Imperator, he would insist on piloting it.

Some of Ilnus’s kills and glorious career stem from his affinity for machines and innate understanding of how much more damage a wounded Titan can bear, both his own and his enemies’. The man doesn’t even look at the vehicle damage sensors when he’s connected to his mount. He keeps his eyes trained on the visuals of his Titan at all times, seeing through its optics and its augurs, and that can make the difference. Another contributing factor is his reflexes. Although the huge, lumbering Titans may not seem like they are fast enough to gain an appreciable advantage from having a pilot with sharp reflexes, as a Lightning or Avenger might, they in fact can benefit greatly from a quick pilot. Princeps Ilnus has superb reflexes, especially for a man of his advanced age. His Warlord may be big and slow, but having a reaction time near nil can still be very helpful in avoiding artillery.

Ilnus is a staunch traditionalist, as many Princeps are. He believes in the purity of the Machine, albeit without much public display. He is a strong supporter of the expansion of the Legion, but rarely rouses himself to get overly involved in that expansion. There is one way in which he finds himself drifting away from the general Cognomen Techpriesthood, however, and that is in regards to the creation of the Knight World ABX202020. He finds it to be a blasphemy and a crime. The Knight Worlds, he loudly insists, are the relics of another age and should stay that way, growing no more numerous nor larger. He says this with the conviction of a zealot, and has done so to Ermincrole’s face more than once.

However, now, Ilnus curses fate. He knows that no matter how strong his reservations, no matter how harsh his critique, he can no longer do anything to stop House Matraxia from someday becoming a full part of Cognomen’s armies. This is, he has finally admitted, because Ermincrole and Beraxos are damnably, inarguably, bitterly ''right''. The Imperium is on the ropes and swooning. Cognomen does need more defenses; Cloudburst does need more heroes; Mars is giving them the cold shoulder.

This has not helped his attitude. The Legio Congelatio is the most powerful force under arms in the entire Cloudburst Sector. Ilnus has led them into battle alongside the Titanshields, the Skitarii, and dozens of other forces of Naxos and Cloudburst. In these Times of Ending, as the darkness closes in and the Astronomican shrinks, the Legion will quite possibly have to bear much of the burden, and Ilnus knows it.

So far, the Legion has had few direct deployments against the Glasians. At first, this was because the Legion was too small, but now that it can field several maniples against the beasts, they have begun to field more and more. Ilnus is too young to have been present for the battle against the Glasians who attacked Cognomen directly many centuries ago. Ilnus’s next battle will be against the Glasians on Dawn-break. The Mechanicus will be basing a large force there to protect the Heliopolis.

Ilnus carries a ceremonial Cognomen Hotshot Laspistol, but has never needed to use it.