((Hello.  Have a barbaric, traitorous and xeno filled polity for the reactionaries to wage genocidal war on.))

Name: The Consortium (To those that read the app, give me some creative monikers your factions use for them)

Faction Type: LIBERATOR/INVADER

Faction leader(s): The Auditor and the Seven Composers.  

System(s)/Territory: TBA

Planet(s)/Holdings: TBA 

Faction/Government Desc: 
The Auditor has no name; only their title for the Auditor is more like a president than an emperor.  Yet, the Composers insist the Auditor to be the true successors of the imperial line, completely perverting the whole system of secession the Empire had.  They don’t even call their leader an Emperor.  But they insist that the Auditor is the voice of the Emperor crying out in forms shattered across time and space, among countless species in the galaxy and that the empire crumbles now in their failure to find the true emperor.
  
Auditors are not Emperors.  They are disposable autocrats who are chosen by the Composers due to having aspects of the TRUE Emperor.  The Emperor here being a metaphysical concept more than any physical status, a sovereign of existence itself.  All life bending to its will in absolute obedience.  The Composers believe that the Aucturians once had the one true emperor, and through that Emperor they conquered far and wide.  But that was so, so long ago.  The Aucturians in their extreme humanism and favoritism of bloodlines picked illegitimate successors since none of those successors were truly Emperors, simply children picked to rule from nepotism who had no right to ever come to power.
  
Heredity is not how they define a true emperor, which means there is no actual legitimacy to their Auditors.  The Composers in effect hold all the true power, with the Auditors being who they listen to and follow obediently and directly unless said Auditor acts in forms and ways unbecoming of the one and true emperor.  Despite the immaterial outlook on legitimacy, the common Consortium human has been described as “materialistic and worthless in their character” by xenohistorian Valerius in Book of Treachery.
 
The ideals of the one and true emperor being that the one and true emperor rules with outmost effectiveness and outmost relentlessness.  The One and True Emperor does not hold themselves to tribalism; for there is only one sovereign and all are within it.  The One and True Emperor is all conquering, all consuming.  And most importantly, unrelenting in their pursuit of harmony.  In practice, despite the lofty trappings held to the One and True Emperor, the Consortium behaves far more like an oligarchy than an autocracy with the Composers holding all the actual power.  The Composers are a very mysterious in nature, being powerful space craft of high end engineering whose pilots are never seen.  Their origins are presumed to be a produce of the lost fleet.  What is known, is that the Composers are capable of single handedly bombing entire worlds into oblivion if they deem in a necessity and are direct leaders.

There is seven Composers, each of which having a personal sub-faction they have total control over.  The Composers seem to be immortal, and may well have ruled for centuries.  Those subordinate to the Composers have quite free reign in how they run things on a planetary basis, but only if they swear unwavering obedience to the Auditor’s word.  Those who go against the Auditor, or indeed, the Composers tend to be replaced.  So often people end up disappearing in the Consortium that there is a secret police force known as the “White Guard” that roams the Consortium made of specially chosen individuals whose sole task is to make unwanted individuals disappear.  More often than not, ending up being the subject of weapon testing or synthesis tests.  Those who turn out to have something useful about them, be in expertise in certain fields or psychic power are granted a reprieve into special units.

Multiple species are part of the Consortium and are treated all too egalitarian without any real caste system.  Open discrimination is punishable by death in many parts of the Consortium, but this has not prevented grassroots hostilities between species from being a frequent trouble.
   
Of those part of the Consortium, the most notable the Ccrypcp.  The Ccrypcp are unique in that while many species perceive themselves as one body with a single soul or many souls that represent different aspects of themselves, the Ccrypcp are a composite of multiple bodies that view themselves as a single individual/spirit/soul.  Ccrypcp consist of three different species, the head of a Ccrypcp being a parasite for the body.  Their prehensile limbs are not connected at all, being like snakes that wind around the highly vertical hump of the quadruped the head feeds from and manipulates.  The Clattering of ccrypcp in the comms fills many with disgust, as they know it is a particularly deviant xeno they are about to communicate with.  It was Ccrypcp as a whole who were conquered by the lost fleet, a upstart interstellar civilization whose infighting made them all too easy to take over.  The Ccrypcp were a distant species from the Aucturian Empire, and were unknown to the Aucturians at the time of the lost fleet’s discovery and subsequent conquests.  Ccrypcp are widespread as a species now, be it as citizens of the glorious consortium or as slaves in other anthropocentric empires.  The Ccrypcp are a complicated kind, culturally diverse due to their diaspora and surprising adaptability.  They likely may show up in other factions as well.

The Voliff are the other major species.  Voliff are gas bags through and through, uplifted by the Consortium and experimented on until they achieved the status of citizen.  The Voliff you see, are very adaptable.  It is very common to find Voliff floating about around the corridors of zero gravity corridors or on space stations, usually modified heavily like organic machines.  Despite that, the Voliff are viewed as not tools, but as citizens.  Who make for great tools in every sense of the word.

History:  (Since this is early world building, this is history subject to change)

The origins of the Harmony are nebulous, but what is certain is that the Harmony is a product of the Composers, of whom are unclear in nature (as it’s uncertain if they are spirits of selected individuals infused into powerful vessels or if they are simply machines) from a historical war of secession.  They were lost in distant space, where the lost fleet conquered the Crrycpcp (xenos), who at the time were an upstart space faring society easily outmatched by the lost fleet.  The lost fleet however, instead of trying to reestablish contact with the empire went rogue and destroyed any scouters from the Empire on sight.  Such manuver carried out because at the time deserters were to be executed and those in power were corrupt and sitting on a goldmine of riches they wanted only for themselves.  So instead of thinking for the greater good of the Empire or their fellow man they bribed their men into loyalty and held a false meeting to find and executed those opposed to their defection. As early as this point, the foundations of the White Guard were forming. For a time it seemed the lost fleet would just develop to be another pretender polity the Aucturian Empire would have to conquer as humans assumed their natural state as dominant over the Ccrypcp, who in a pragmatic maneuver were treated as second class citizens who could become full on citizens through their loyalty instead of as slaves.   
 
Over their centuries of isolation around multiple alien species they uplifted, they rapidly drifted from Imperial orthodoxy, to the point where eventually the military overlords of the lost fleet were culturally intertwined with the Ccrypcp elite.  Eventually the Composers came to power, whatever they may be and revelations of the Emperor became all too clear to every citizen of the Consortium.  The military dictators in their de facto imperium were overthrown in a silent coup by none other than the Composers who forced the military elite of humans into subordination.  It remains unclear if the composers are human made or Xeno, what is known as that the Composers appear only a two centuries after the lost fleet made their glorious conquest of the Ccrypcp. Shame the lost fleet than decided to betray mankind.

Due to their distance and policy of destroying any outside scouts, knowledge of the Consortium was sparse for centuries.  By 2700-3100 IE however, the Empire became all too aware of the Consortium's existence.  The Consortium began raids on the Empire involving regular abductions of imperial citizens and implanting doppelgangers in various parts of the Empire.  The Consortium was violently pushed back in a war that was notoriously taxing on the Imperial Treasury. However, Imperial conquest of the Consortium was halted by the Tucanae Massacre (Think Arminius type massacring here).  

Since then, the Consortium has been engaged by Imperial forces in border conflicts and kept at bay.  However, no major efforts since the Tucanae Massacre by any generals or emperors for that matter were put into crushing the Consortium for good due to a million other conflicts and troubles across Imperial Space, the Harmony believed to for all intents and purposes be kept at bay and something to systemically wipe out and perhaps erase from history in a later, ideally more stable time.
That time never came, for the civil wars and the twilight of the empire came sooner than ever thought.

(May need some more history here when I get a better idea what the last century was like since I figure the consortium may have been able to achieve military buildup and spread influence as the Empire wanes)

Now the Consortium finds an opportunity to expand their influence in a time of chaos, without any Empire to get in their way.

(The name Consortium is a product of how the human elite in the early years managed their faction, through the use of proxy organizations backed by blunt military force.)

Relations with the Empire and Other Factions: 

-They’re seen as a barbaric force to the Empire, the more gruesome aspects of the Consortium being used in propaganda to great effect.  There is quite a few black books on the atrocities the Consortium has committed.  Their dehumanizing treatment of individual and the blatant xeno influences being all too easy pickings for those writers.  The Empire is aware of the Consortium’s origins as “rogue fleet”, but the Consortium is treated as a foreign, alien menace regardless.  The only reason the Empire didn’t crush the Consortium was because the Consortium was viewed as a lesser danger compared to the hordes of xenos they faced on other fronts that proved far more immediate threats.  This is in no small part to being able to push them back centuries ago at a well-guarded border zone and not wanting to risk another Tucanae Massacre like event against the Consortium.  Fear (of which is perhaps well justified) of Consortium infiltrators remained common regardless.

(I’ll need to speak with other players before figuring out Consortium relations with the other barbarians, no doubt that Pretenders will be disgusted by the Consortium)

Military Capabilities: TBA, a common theme of melding and fusing.  Composers hit above the norm in tech level, I should note, but their other forces are much more balanced.  There’s Seven Composers, which means there’s seven fleets/chapters which I will elaborate on later.  Exact numbers I have no clue, whatever works best with the setting is what I give.  Either way, their overall power/influence is at the level implied in their imperial relations; there is things out there more immediate a threat than the Consortium even if the consortium is not something the Empire was able to roll over like they hoped to.