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#Omnissiah grant me the strength to just get done with something
adozentothedawn · 3 months
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Carolus' children have names!
Porcelain von Valancius, called Penny (or sometimes Porky by her brother), her oldest child. Conceived during her time as a guard for merchant ships, after she was exiled from her position as a battle psyker in the military, with a Drukhari soldier who she met and fought during multiple assignments. Coincidence (and skill at survival) had them meet again and again and develop a personal rather than general hatred for each other, which then culminated in an extremely angry and prejudiced one-night stand. About two weeks later she finally managed to kill him. Carolus was in a very bad mental state during that time, so when she noticed she was pregnant she couldn't really bring herself to care. She didn't expect the fetus to be viable anyway, so she decided that either it would kill her and solve her problems that way, or the resulting miscarriage would be of scientific interest to someone. Except that against her expectations when the baby was born she was entirely healthy, if odd looking. Put on the spot Carolus made the decision to be a mother. She built herself up again as best as she could, pretended her daughter was a low level mutant and found a somewhat peaceful colony of mutants in a corner of her sector where she could trust someone to take care of the child while she went off to earn money to send back. When Theodora called her to the expanse she took her daughter with her and found her a safe place on Janus before going on board.
Porcelain is a highly energetic child, easily excitable, and due to her heritage drawn to strong emotions. This can manifest both in temper tantrums to provoke the people around her into anger or things like long monologues of compliments or singalongs to incite excitement or happiness. She is not cruel but oftentimes callous about the feelings of others, since she gets as much out of people's anger or grief as out of their joy. That does not however mean that she doesn't like people, quite the opposite. She easily connects with people, regardless of their opinion of her, leading her to occasionally declare people her friends who deeply despise her, precisely because of their strong reaction. This includes Marazhai, who only got survive his terrible decisions because Carolus is concerned about her daughter's safety without at least rudementary knowledge about the other half of her legacy. He gets brought onboard specifically as Porcelain's babysitter and tutor. He absolutely despises it and Penny, but knows that she is the only reason he's alive and thus cannot just kill her without consequences. She loves him. Absolutely adores him and everything he does end up teaching her. Her mother's influence does remain strong she does not fall into indiscrimenate murder and torture but she does highly enjoy the tussles she has with Marazhai and the occasional hunt he takes her on. He also tendency to just grab her by the scruff of the neck and carry her around like a handbag. She thinks it's hilarious. She also calls him "Uncle Marzipan" and is absolutely gleeful about how much he hates it. He in return calls her "Pentakill" because he decided that her name is terrible and not to be tolerated. The Mon-keigh should be glad he didn't choose a drukhari name.
Leopold von Valancius van Calox is Carolus' son with Heinrix. (Yes there is a whole situation going on my brain how he deals with Penny's existance but that's for later.) He is born sometime during the game, though I have not exactly figured out when yet. When Carolus learnt she was pregnant again she gave Heinrix a decision: he could either claim the child as his or they sweep their prior relationship under the rug and she would never mention the child's parentage. Either way she would not stand his way. She certainly would have been sad if he had decided to deny it, but she would have respected his decision, and it had to be just his choice to make. Some of the officer's would have certainly known, but no one would go against a Rogue Tradr's orders to shut up about her private life. It took him the entire duration of the pregnancy to finally make a choice and only when Carolus went into labour did he break and made his decision to be a father, with the thought that he would come up with a way to deal with Calcazar's judgement some time later. Of course it turned out that said dealing would be both a lot easier and a lot harder than expected. He never did say anything about it, but he went to her chambers, was let in and stayed for the duration of the birth, which was as good as admission. Abelard judged him greatly, for many reasons.
Leopold is a calm child, curious but by far not as exciteble as his sister (who was absolutely extatic about getting a sibling and had to be forcibly kept from the birth so as to not be distracting). Later in his life he showed Psyker abilities, something that concerned but not surprised his Psyker parents. The reveal was thankfully not nearly as dramatic as both his parents' . His sister felt it coming and refused to play with him because of it, feeling unsettled by the weird energies around him. This persisted until he eventually threw a temper tantrum and set a rug on fire, thus confirming both Carolus' and Heinrix' concerns. Although they both he agreed he would have to be sanctioned, they also agreed to never under any circumstances put their son on a Black Ship. Eventually it was decided that Heinrix himself would bring him to Terra, monitor any and all procedures and eventually take him home again. They both leveraged all of their political powers to make sure they could take him back, calling in many, many favours and issuing equally as many threats and bribes. They succeeded. Leopold himself only learnt multiple years after that trip what had actually happened. (I do have notes on a short one-shot about the trip maybe) (How does this work with the whole Warp storm situation? I don't know and frankly I don't much care, both the warp and the god-emperor will bow to my will to ignore canon)
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