Character
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Caius Arden is a human male of medium-to-tall height, lean and straight-backed in the way of any aristocratic veteran. He is fifty-one years old and looks it, though not unflatteringly. His hair is dark with grey coming in at the temples and along the sides, kept short and without affectation. His face is angular and composed, with dark eyes that tend toward stillness rather than expression. A faint burn scar runs across the knuckles of his right hand from an incident with a plasma conduit during his years as a systems engineer at the Rendili yards. He has never had it treated. He tends to dress almost exclusively in uniform. The cut is Rendili naval in origin, deep navy and gunmetal grey, high-collared and close-fitted, though the version he wears in the Senate has been tailored to civilian standards and carries no active rank insignia. In place of rank markings he wears the sigil of House Arden at his collar, a small and unornamented pin. The overall impression is of a man who finds the question of what to wear each morning to have been settled long ago and sees no reason to revisit it. On formal Senate occasions he adds a long outer coat in the same navy, unembellished. He does not wear jewelry. He does not carry a weapon visibly, though it can be presumed he probably carries something.
INVENTORY
Please list all relevant possessions, factory submissions, and codex submissions here.
PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS
How does your character act? How do they think? Do they have any deeply held beliefs or phobias?
STRENGTHS
A minimum of 2 strengths are required
WEAKNESSES
A minimum of 2 weaknesses are required
HISTORY
Caius Arden was born in 853 ABY on Rendili, the second child and only son of the Arden family's secondary line. Rendili does not have formal nobility in the traditional sense. There are no lords, no hereditary titles conferred by a crown, no feudal obligations written into law. What Rendili has instead are the First Families, a constellation of dynasties whose lineages trace without interruption back to the original sleeper ship colonists who made landfall sometime after 27,500 BBY. The distinction matters to them enormously and to no one else, which is precisely the kind of distinction the First Families have always found most worth defending.
The Ardens are one of these families. They hold a baronetcy, a largely ceremonial title granted by the Rendili government millennia ago and renewed by tradition rather than statute, which gives them the right to style themselves a House and to be received accordingly at formal functions. Other First Families do the same. Whether this constitutes genuine nobility or an elaborate and well-funded collective affectation is a question Rendili's considerable middle class has opinions about, and the First Families have learned to ignore. What is not in dispute is that House Arden, alongside the other First Families, holds a significant and interlocking ownership stake in Rendili StarDrive, seats in the Sejm, Rendili's upper legislative chamber, and consistent representation on the Council of Provosts, the collective executive body that serves as Rendili's head of state and government under the leadership of the Arch-Provost. The First Families do not run Rendili. They simply tend to be present wherever Rendili's most consequential decisions are made.
Caius grew up aware of all of this in the way that children of such families are aware of it, as background radiation rather than explicit instruction. The Ardens were not the wealthiest of the First Families, nor the most politically prominent in his childhood. His uncle Davan held the patriarchship and managed the family's affairs with competence and little ambition. Caius's father served in a directorial role at Rendili StarDrive and died when Caius was seventeen, leaving him to complete his education under his uncle's household.
At twenty, in accordance with the expectation held for all heirs of the First Families, he entered service with the Rendili Home Defense Fleet. The expectation was one term, enough to satisfy tradition and accumulate the kind of institutional credibility that made a young man of good family more credible in boardrooms and council chambers later. Caius served three. He found he was good at it. He held command of a frigate by his final tour and left the fleet at twenty-nine with a service record that was noted, though not celebrated, and a thorough working understanding of what Rendili ships could and could not do under sustained operational conditions.
He joined Rendili StarDrive as a systems engineer the following year, which raised some eyebrows among his family's peers. The First Families owned Rendili StarDrive. Their heirs were not generally expected to work on the technical side of it. Caius considered this attitude a reasonable explanation for several of the company's recurring design inefficiencies and said so, once, at a Sejm reception, to a man who turned out to be a senior vice president. He was assigned to a deep orbital yard three weeks later. He considered this an acceptable outcome. He stayed in that yard for four years and learned more about structural load tolerances and drive system integration than most engineers who had never left it.
He married Sera Voss in 884 ABY. She was the daughter of a diplomatic family with no particular connection to Rendili's industrial apparatus, which made her unusual in his circle and which he had found, initially, refreshing. They had one daughter, Mira, born in 885 ABY. Sera died in 893 ABY of a degenerative neurological condition that Rendili medicine could slow but not arrest. Caius did not discuss this publicly then and does not now. Mira is currently thirty years old and works as a structural engineer at the Rendili orbital yards, having declined several times to leverage her family name into a more administrative role.
His uncle Davan died in 902 ABY, and the patriarchship of House Arden passed to Caius as the senior male of the primary line. With it came the baronetcy, the family's seat in the Sejm, and the full weight of the Arden stake in Rendili StarDrive's directorial structure. He had been present at the edges of these institutions for most of his adult life. He stepped into the center of them with less difficulty than some had expected and more appetite than he had advertised.
The Arch-Provost appointed him to the Council of Provosts in 903 ABY, serving as Minister of Foreign Affairs. As such, he serves as Senator for Rendili in the assembly of the High Republic and is one of two figures on the planet with the authority to speak and advocate on the government's behalf.
He is, by most accounts, good at it.