Two arbites, a general, and a traitor

Lord Marshal Persinius Oolan – Chief of Arbites
“In theory, Law serves Justice, and the Arbites serve both.  In practice, this Sector is full of hopeful idiots, each of whom think they know the law better than me.  I don’t mind.  It keeps the mind sharp, and the truncheon swinging.”

The Adeptus Arbites recruit the very best of the very best from Schola Progenia across the galaxy, and from local Enforcer departments in a pinch.  Persinius Oolan hails from the former, and had been slated to serve the Arbites since the age of nine.  He was born to two Imperial Navy officers on leave on the planet Cassie’s World, and returned to the ship with them after their leave ended.  The first seven years of his life, he grew up with the other children in the bowels of the frigate Hallowed Ether, but after that ship was captured by a gang of Orks, his parents shoved him into a savior pod to be rescued by a passing freighter.
Young Persinius was taken to Septiim Secundus, and eventually entered the Scholam there.  He quickly excelled in academic fields, even as a young child, with his stellar memory and comprehension skills beyond his years.  By the time he graduated at eighteen, he was already a Junior Arbitrator in honrored standing, and led his graduating class in truncheon scores.

He settled in on Septiim Primus and joined a Precinct there as a Street Patrol Trooper.  Given the size of the cities on Septiim Primus, and the need for the delicate maintainance of the vast forests there, Arbites play a secondary role after the planetary Civil Police.  Thus, it was and remains seen as a sae early posting for Arbitrators.  After only a few years as a Trooper, Oolan was promoted to Arbitrator, and eventually transferred to the system capital.  Oolan had a knack for the historical interpretations of the Lex Imperialis, and he applied it judiciously.  He was often able to cite precedents that his counterparts forgot.  It was obvious that his eventual career path would take him to the bench of Magistrates, and by the time he was forty, he was already the highest-ranked Judge Marshal in the Septiim system.

Oolan’s career took a sharp right turn at that point.  He benefitted from a variety of genetic alterations to extend his life and increase his health as it was, and as soon as he became the Judge Marshal of Septiim, he attracted the eye of Lord Inquisitor Palmer, one of the two most experienced Lords Inquisitor in the Sector.  Palmer was a member of the Ordo Hereticus and had been since the day he received his Rosette.  His investigations took him deep into the hearts of heretic cults that worshipped dead gods of humanity’s primordial past, about a third of which turned out to be the Powers of Ruin in one of their ancient disguises.  Oolan occasionally joined Palmer’s retinue as a font of knowledge about Imperial law that eclipsed even Palmer’s.

Here, Oolan had the pleasure of working with the crack team of Battle Sisters and Mutant-Hunter Ecclesiarchial clergy Palmer had assembled.  Like most Arbites, Oolan had started his career resenting how much the Ecclesiarchy interfered with the purely procedural application of law in the Imperium, but as he worked for Palmer, his view shifted.  He came to witness the sheer power of oratory in the sermons of vicious hate the Sisters and Priests espoused.  He watched with jaw agape as the speaking skills of the Inquisitor and his collection of preachers turned hostile crowds into adoring, eager militia.
Oolan realized that there was a function for the faith in law after all.  After Palmer was killed in action and his retinue dispersed, Oolan returned to Septiim a changed man.  He became a Judge Chaplain, to date the only Judge Marshal to become a Judge Chaplain in the history of the Sector and one of fewer than four dozen in Ultima history.  Oolan served in the Chaplaincy for nine years of non-stop work, maintaining the faith and morale of the Arbites of Septiim.  Eventually, Lord Blanchard Quintus, the current Lord Sector’s father, recognized Oolan’s unique combination of experience, knowledge, and faith.  He put Oolan’s name forward to succeed Lord Marshal Sarah Creill after her retirement, and Oolan was eventually offered the job by the Senate of the High Lords.

Oolan has never forgotten his religious turn, but it no longer dominates every aspect of his position.  On the contrary, ever since moving to Cloudburst and setting up in the warren of tunnels down the street from Lord Quintus’ mansion, he has had barely a moment to rest.  He has taken as many of the extraneous tasks of the Arbites senior leadership on himsef as possible, intending to free up as much time for his subordinates to prosecute the lawbreakers of the moon as he can.  In this, he has inarguably succeeded.  The Cloudburst crime rate has slowly dropped away to almost nothing after his seventy three years of work.  He still attends services in the same black robes as he has the whole time, and still sits in silent judgment of the Sector Council, in the chair under the dimmest bulb.  He still attends monthly dinners with Lord Remortho Quintus to discuss work, and even struck up an odd friendship with his colleague.
However, although he projects an air of being the ineffable, wise old lawman, Oolan has had some uncomfortable misses in his career.  He is no closer to solving the Hapster problem than any of his predecessors.  He is totally unaware of both ABX202020 and Merrick Unarvu’s evil plots.  He is so distracted by Cardinal Lamarr’s potentially illegal military buildup that he has no inlking of the danger posed by the genestealer infestation of the wreck of the Predator, nor has he nor his men noticed the size of the Circle of Whispers, nor their true ambitions.  Oolan is also helpless to do anything more than he has about the Free Corsair Coalition, no matter how much he wants to see Admiral Reith hang.

If Oolan were to learn of ABX202020 and House Matraxia, he would no doubt be astonished and disgusted, but would leave the matter to the Inquisition and Mechanicus to resolve, rather than try to involve himself in the internal affairs of another Adeptus.  However, if he learned of the scale and horrible threat of The Unbound Good lead by Unarvu, he would not wait for permission from the Astra Militarum to rally every Arbites in the Subsector and crash down on Unarvu’s head like a lightning bolt.
Oolan is on good working terms with most of the senior Adepts of the Sector, save the Synod Cloudburst.  Drake dislikes Oolan, thinking him pretentious with his religious background.  Oolan was only a Chaplain late in his career, whereas Drake has served for three hundred years.  For his part, Oolan can’t wait for Drake to die.  Cardinal Lamarr is so openly flouting the intent of the Decree Passive that Oolan is rapidly losing his patience.  All of Lamarr’s talk of Eldar has come to nothing, and the rest of the Sector needs mercenaries, too.

The Lady High Inquisitrix Cloudburst, Lerica, regards Oolan as a distant ally in the struggle against those who would undo the Imperium, and has often called upon him to aid her subordinates in their own investigations.  Of course, very few Inquisitors actually work directly for even an Inquisitor of her august rank; most work on their own and only come to the Conclave to seek out new talent or leads.  Many of them have brought Arbites into their employ, temporarily or permanently, just as Palmer did to Oolan, so long ago.

To avoid any temptation to abuse his position, Oolan does not carry any non-standard equipment.  His only weapons are his standard multi-ammo pistol and a Shock Maul, as well as a fine suit of carapace armor.

Marshal C. (Chrysanthemum) Lumina Copperlain – Chief Arbitrator of Hapster
“I can arrest lawbreakers until the cell walls buckle, but I can’t plug a hole in the sea.”

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 liquour bottle.
The strange and complex traditions of Hapster do not mesh well with the stratified Imperium.  This is part of the problem than Copperlain struggles with so much; it doesn’t look like Hapster has a civil problem at all, on the surface.  However, at some 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 Scholam 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 impaertiality 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’ 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 syetem, 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 tthat 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.

Lord General Howard Lannis Halwart
“Orks?  It’ll be a fight, then.  Lots of Orks?  It’ll be a good fight.  They landed on Oglith?  Then it’ll be a LONG fight!  Strap up, gentlemen, there’s business afoot for His Finest Men!”

It is a well-practiced and easily verified maxim of the Imperial military that the higher one’s rank, the easier one’s job becomes.  Lord General Halwart is the second in command of the Cloudburst Sector Imperial Guard, and presently the overall commander of the Imperial defense on Oglith, and he loves every second of it.  Halwart is an optimist, a foolishly vainglorious one, and is probably the last line standing between the Glasian and Ork menace and the loss of a Subsector Capital.

Born on Nauphry IV, Howard Lannis Halwart was a scion of the Halwart Transit Services corporation, and the great-grandson of its Chief Executive.  There was no chance that he would inherit his distant sire’s vast wealth and corporate power, and so his family passed him off to the military in the hope that he would make something of himself.  To his own surprise, he loved it.  The military lifestyle fitted him like a glove.  He paid his own way through a token degree and returned to the military as a commissioned officer.  Eventually, Halwart mustered to the Nauphry Guard as a Lieutenant, and he began the climb up the ranks.  He saw combat alongside the Oglith Jaegers and Warriors and the Septiim Guard in the battle against the rebelling PDF army of Delving in M41.890, and found a true thrill in leading troops into the fray.  He wasn’t especially good at it, but his combination of foolhardy courage and genuine, chest-pounding patriotic braggadocio at least kept morale above acceptable threshholds.
In his time with the Guard, Halwart engaged in battle with rebel soldiers with zeal, gusto, and a batman with a twin heavy shotgun protecting him from the immediate consequences of his exuberance.  He ended the war with a few comfirmed kills and a chest full of medals.

Lixivim Dill, real name unknown – rogue Vanus Assassin in employ of FCC, official kill count 1667
“I can kill with a whisper.  I do kill with a whisper.  The best kills are the ones I read about in the news a week later.”

Exactly why Dill snapped is open to debate.  Her superiors suspect a data daemon, her peers suspect her hypno-condition broke
The Inquisition is increasingly worried about Dill falling to Tzeentch.