Editing Setting:Cloudburst/People (section)

==Marshal C. (Chrysanthemum) Lumina Copperlain==
{{Topquote|I can arrest lawbreakers until the cell walls buckle, but I can’t plug a hole in the sea.|Chrysanthemum Lumina Copperlain}}

Hapster can drive an Arbitrator to drink. Marshal Copperlain is getting close. Her job frustrates her so much that she is perhaps one bad day from taking it out on a hapless liquor bottle.

The strange and complex traditions of Hapster do not mesh well with the stratified Imperium. This is part of the problem that Copperlain struggles with so much; it doesn’t look like Hapster has a civil problem at all, on the surface. However, at some deeper level, the caste system that Hapster employs, its precarious workforce supply, and the Lex Imperialis are simply not able to mesh. Copperlain chooses to respect the Lex Imperialis, as an Arbitrator should, and so she will be no more able to fix the problem than any other Arbitrator.

Copperlain was the daughter of two Imperial Administratum officials on Maskos who heroically sacrificed their lives fighting an out of control fire in the archive building in which they worked. Technically, however, their deaths did not quite qualify the four-year-old Chrysanthemum for Schola Progenum admittance. Eventually, the Schola which she attended begrudgingly allowed her in after her new guardians pointed out that she had nowhere else to go, and they couldn’t afford to keep her.

Chrysanthemum quickly learned to keep herself distant from the other students, who mocked her youth, her name, her appearance, and her relatively low scores in several classes. She applied herself relentlessly and alone, and she was able to scrape by the passing grades of the programs in which she enlisted. She quickly shunted towards the Arbites program, after her tutors noticed that she gravitated towards the impartial presentation of it all. Chrysanthemum started going by her middle name before long, both because it was easier for people to spell, and because it made for a convenient callsign.

In training, Lumina took to the physical training and the enforced practice of impartiality that the Arbites need. She got along well with her teachers even while she wasn’t scoring well in their tests, and was among the last in her class to pass the final grades. Some of her peers muttered that she did so only because of favors she did for the instructors, which are almost certainly not true, not that she deigns to comment on it.

Lumina rose quickly through the ranks of the Arbites on Hapster, though it was more because of high turnover than any outstanding effort on her part. As with most Arbites, she was assigned to a planet to which she had never been and on which she had no living relatives. On Hapster, this may actually be a liability more often than not. The complexities of the Hapster culture and attitude towards authority means that the Arbites’s jackboot-first legal style simply doesn’t work well; a native might know better. In her responsibility, Lumina presides over the affairs of the highest echelon of the Arbites in the Hapster system, and must appoint the heads of each Precinct. She also must occasionally take to the field. When she does so, she fields against the very worst of the worst, the criminals and heretics so foul that to not employ lethal force would be a crucial mistake. She does so with an autorifle with a custom stun gun mounted under the barrel.

Part of the problem Lumina faces with making the Hapster system more law-abiding is that her subordinates are simply done with it. Most, perhaps all of the Judges and Marshals in her precinct-fortress have been so jaded by exposure to the hostility that Hapsterites have for them that they’ve simply stopped trying to understand and combat it. Technically, Copperlain and her subordinates can ignore the local resentment entirely and still do their job, and so many do. Naturally, Copperlain’s time is taken up with the other problems of running a planetary Arbites force, like making budget requests, overseeing recruitment, appointing senior officers, and prosecuting heretical recidivists, leaving her little time for reflection and contemplation.

Lumina has responsibility over those Arbites forces that mobilize in response to threats against the rule of the Imperium over the Hapster system, as well, including Suppressor forces and Marshals.