Mirror, Next Set Out, It Became Lost in The Empyrean For 4 Years, Though Only Months Passed Onboard

Nero de Ulanti was born of Zolla Fairre, a beautiful if erratic young woman in the service of one of
House de Ulanti's many business partners, who caught the eye of <Aurelian de Ulanti>, the young heirapparent to the House's Warrant of Trade at the time. When his mother's ship, the frigate Occam's
Mirror, next set out, it became lost in the Empyrean for 4 years, though only months passed onboard.
It would be years before the connection between Nero and his father's House was made, though Zolla
rattled off the story of her son's true lineage to any within earshot. Zolla was known to be a little off,
even for one born to the void, and her tales were dismissed as simple fantasies. When the Black Ships
took her, even Nero doubted her story.
He was 10 years old.
Disillusioned with life on following in the footsteps of his mother into a life surrounded by those who
whispered darkly whenever her back was turned, the boy jumped ship. After briefly running with the
scavenger-kids on a space station, Nero stowed away on a freebooter ship named Goliath's Toe. There
he was discovered by the ship's void-master, <McNamara's Character>, who showed mercy on the boy
rather than spacing him, he handed the boy a pistol.
Nero spent the next 8 years as a merc, until a literal run-in with an Ork Fighta-Bomba crippled the Toe
during a battle above Necromunda. Severely injured, <Namaan al'Bashmet>, representative of the
Navis Nobilite House he'd been working for, paid for young Nero to be treated in a Necromundan
triage-unit. While there, his bloodwork came back flagged for special consideration as that of the local
nobility. The House patriarch himself, Marcus Claudius de Ulanti, welcomed Nero into the House; in
its sorry decline, any aid at all was welcomed, even in the form of a bastard (and after his upbringing of
self-reliance sprung from abandonment, distrust, and violence, Nero was a bastard in more than blood).
For 2 years, Nero learned the ways of the Rogue Trader from Marcus Claudius, until his fateful
rendezvous with his father's vessel. Tensions ran high at the celebratory feast thrown in honor of
Aurelian's last voyage as the captain of a charter frigate; Aurelian's first impression of his son was that
of an ill-omened young man without much in the way of social grace.* <McNamara's Senescal> was
the innocent bystander present at a dinner that degenerated into acrimony and recriminations (though
the seneschal did give them credit for becoming a real family much more quickly than he'd expected).
And when the frigate's Gellar field dropped as it was en route to the Cerulean Avarice, the family
celebration did the unthinkable: it got worse.
Nero's memories of that time are small, fractured things that skitter away when dwelled upon too long.
He thinks he saw a disconcertingly jovial monstrosity of pinkish limbs, hands, and face shatter and
bloat into a pair of bickering blue duplicates when Marcus Claudius struck it down, but he was too
busy being reprimanded by his ephemeral mother to pay much heed.
The next clear memory he has is of waking up in the wreckage of the dining hall to discover that
Marcus Claudis was missing. And with that, Aurelian was the Rogue Trader, with a bastard for an
apprentice.
For the next two years, Nero was sent on special assignment as long-range chartist frigate captain,
running shipments from the House's new contracts on the fringes of Imperium space to the core,
working with the same Navigator who had employed him as a merc, until word came down that an
incident with the Cerulean Avarice's primary Astropath had rendered both the psyker and the First
Navigator ...unfit for duty. As the chartist frigate's Astropath, <Colin's Astropath>, was the most
experienced that the Ulanti lineage had, as was true of the Navigator as well, Nero was ordered to bring
them to the Rogue Trader's flagship.
Nero sold the frigate and obeyed, which prompted an argument with his superior over the benefits of
having a Navigator- and Astropath-less frigate on standby versus sold an argument of pros and cons
that starkly identify the styles of each's respective commands. Nero favors risking everything in order
to have a better initial chance of success, while the more experienced Aurelian is willing to hedge his
bets so as to have a position to fall back to.
As to which is the wiser, it's impossible to know just yet. (But it's Nero.)
*His eye contact, for example, was a problem; Marcus Claudius had told Nero that he seemed too
shifty, because he never met the eyes of the person to whom he was speaking, a common trait amongst
the low-born. As a Rogue Trader, especially one from a mercantile tradition, he would need to
establish a rapport with those he sought to do business with, and they had to believe they could trust
him.
Nero took his advice, as he was a very apt pupil, but he took it to the other extreme. Marcus Claudius
would have corrected him, but the old man found that it unsettled his opponents at negotiations when
they had to see his protege on the other side of the table unblinking, staring at them like a snake at a
mouse.

Mirror, Next Set Out, It Became Lost in The Empyrean For 4 Years, Though Only Months Passed Onboard

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Nero de Ulanti was born of Zolla Fairre, a beautiful if erratic young woman in the service of one of

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