The Empress

First Impression:

An alabaster pale woman with shoulder-length black hair, and dark eyes picked out with Egyptian-style eyeliner and shadow. Her demeanor is distant and cold, like a vampiress sitting on her throne and languidly waiting for something to excite or thrill her. Her chest is technically bare, save for the immense and obscene broad collar of precious jewels and stones worn around her neck, and she wears a sheer red silk wrap around her waist and gold sandals laced around her legs. 

Double-Take:

The Empress is a paradox, she has the feminine allure and appeal of a young nubile woman, and the sort of audacity only possessed by the young. Under the necklace her breasts are bare, and beneath the silk wrap, there is naught but a flash of pubic hair. But her mannerisms are polished and refined, no effort is wasted, no frivolous movement, every action clean and economical, speaking of tremendous competence and experience. Her eyes are likewise seemingly ancient and knowing, having an almost laser-like intensity.

Her voice is a bit deeper than one would expect, not quite in the range of the vocal fry, but her laughter certainly is. There is a smokey quality to it, and on top of that, the Empress is a polyglot and speaks an unknown number of languages. This linguistic fluidity has allowed her to easily move into the lingo of modern youth, being as conversant in online and text shorthand as she is in languages of antiquity. 

Getting to Know the Empress

The Empress is the secret power behind the scenes and all of the Houses of the Forsaken beckon to her call.

Why does this matter? In the Cosmic Era/House of the Forsaken setting, the Houses of the Forsaken replace the Anunnaki Cabals and embrace more Gnosticism, mysticism, and hermetic tradition unpinning arcanotechnology and in many instances, the technology is more magic than science. The secrets of the Houses of the Forsaken belong to the Empress. She knows all the skeletons, all the lore, all the keys, and all of the power.

She gets to keep all of these things for two reasons, the first being that she can leverage almost anyone against anyone else, and with the gesture of a hand turn a powerful person into a cur dog to be hunted by all the powers of the Cosmic Era. The other is that with all of this power, she doesn't use it. Most of the leadership of the various Houses are content with the Empress and her laissez-faire approach to leadership. The status quo is maintained, and stability is the rule of the day, regardless of international war, natural disaster, or dimensional fatigue events. The elite of the houses all have their wealth, their power, their dark appetites, and heinous desires slaked.

To the Houses, the Empress is the symbolic figurehead of the organization, a mysterious powerful woman who is more interested in her own affairs, allowing others to take their leads as they desire, and most importantly, she hosts fabulous soirees where the elite gather to not just indulge in their blackest fantasies, they are bacchanals of excess, depravity, and criminal indulges.

And they wouldn't have it any other way.

She is also esteemed as a judge and arbiter of disputes.

A holder of favors and debts

A benefactor of billionaires. 

Getting to Know All About the Empress

The Empress created an internal currency system for the Houses of the Forsaken. As their portfolios measure in the trillions, and they have the power of nations, armies, fleets, and millions of unknowing humans at their beck and call, money just isn't a good indicator of value any longer. Thus, the Empress created the Prestation system. This system created a physical medium to represent a favor. A favor is a debt that can be bought, sold, traded, cashed in, cashed out, or held as ransom over someone else. In many ways this is a sort of cryptocurrency, as the tokens are not just representative of the favor owed, but of to whom, when, and how, the token was accrued.

The Esbat

The Esbat is the annual meeting of the Houses of the Forsaken and it is a feast, an orgy, and a show and tell for the various members to demonstrate what they're cooking. While secrecy might be better in the long run, this program has ensured, for several centuries, that the various plans of the differing houses don't conflict with each other. The Empress is the final decision when it comes to conflicting goals and while she is within her power to simply declare which house or project she supports, she has become quite popular for arranging games and contests between vying houses through less conventional means. This can be as mundane as games of chance, to gaming entire wars like sporting events, to presenting champions for great and terrible contests, sometimes even produced to the point they become entertainment for the unknowing masses.

Regnancy

Owning a poor person is slavery, owning a wealthy or powerful person is Regnancy. The Houses of the Forsaken have long practiced blackmail and coercion, but with the exotic devices, psychotronics, and parapsychics available to the Empress, she has the ability to own people through non-conventional means. Some members of the Houses are so indebted to the Empress that the only way they can hope to remain solvent is to accept her as their Regnant, and then after that, she is their owner, and they become her property.

Lextalionis

Or an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, this is the justice of the Empress. Aggrieved parties who ask her to judge their cases can find her justice harsh and bloody, but fair. Many have learned that the best way to settle their differences is to simply do so, because if the Empress does, it will be done, and it will serve as a warning to others. Some gladly accept her justice, and those she holds in favor. 

Autarky

Much of the Cosmic Era relies on the continuous flow of the Daily Discourse and other CogNet apparatii. Autarky is the Empress approved position of being allowed to go against the Discourse and not be targeted by it for removal, aka, getting to play 'the heel'. The Autark is a member of the House of Forsaken, or one of their preeminent pawns who is allowed to go against the flow, mix things up, and attract others to their banner. This can be a function of business as usual, a correction of the Discourse, or even a major change in things, for reasons only known behind the scenes.

Justicar

The Justicar are the enforcers of the will of the Empress. Few in number, they are functionally non-people. They have no ID, no name, no money, no power, nothing. Many of their disguises are of the extremely poor and disenfranchised. But their power as an adjudicator of the Empress gives them to power to make presidents and kings kneel, holy leaders kiss their rings, and other displays of fealty and obeisance. 

What's in the Closet:

Aikaterina Suocera was born in 1937 Italy to a Russian mother and an Italian father. This is quite surprising considering the current year in the Cosmic Era/House of the Forsaken is something like 2412 AD. She has early memories of WWII, the horror of the Allied bombing campaigns against her Italian homeland, and the cruelty of the Nazis and Mussolini's fascists. She took a man as her husband sometime in the 1950s, had children, and immigrated to the United States. Somehow, the connections have long since been erased, she was involved in the US Space Program, and the Apollo missions.

Missions 18-21 discovered the ruins of an advanced alien civilization in the Mare Imbrium, which ended up being named the Imbrian Culture. Follow-up efforts would result in the Spitzkoppe Excavations in Namibia, and more but limited exploration on the Moon. All of this was quickly classified into a new tier of secrecy. Elected officials were kept out of this inner circle, and only an elite cadre of technologists, linguists, industrialists, and intelligence officials were allowed to learn of the things discovered, and Aikaterian was among them.

As early efforts into reverse engineering Imbrian tech were underway, she had access to the relicts and artifacts recovered from the different expeditions, in a sort of museum curator fashion, assuming said curators were immensely wealthy people of privacy and discrection. The boon was that Aikaterian had access to an Imbrian Phoenix Engine, and she used it, functionally blessing herself with the immortality of the Imbrian Dynasts, and allowing her to, having been there from the beginning, place herself as the most important person in all the important organizations: Glassenheim, the Anunnaki, and various shadowy government agencies.

Putting it All Together

Aikaterina Suocera