Speaker Meron Liopolt

Speaker of the Senate of Mastropa
Mastropan Ambassador to Hardeen
Mastropan Ambassador to Daurne
Mastropan Ambassador to Cabun
Mastropan Ambassador to Teloor
Mastropan Ambassador to Adaani
Admiral of the Fleets of Mastropa

MERON LIOPOLT (born 1204, Tsoulio, Mastropa, United Republic) is the current Speaker of the Senate of Mastropa, and the founder and current leader of an informal political entity centered on that planet. A former admiral in the United Republic Navy, Liopolt saw considerable action against the Chiss Empire in the First Civil War of 1247, and served numerous tours in nearby Wild Space to preemptively defend Republican worlds and the lives of Mactabeni both within and outside of the United Republic. Upon the United Republic’s collapse later in the same year, Admiral Liopolt took up Senator Crenten Yamo’s cause and usurped command of two battle fleets bound for Muunilist in the days before the Fall of Mim. With the capital’s destruction, however, Liopolt lost hope in the Republic’s remaining leadership, including Senator Yamo, and grew increasingly concerned with the fate of his own homeworld in the midst of the escalating chaos. Acting on the advice of his friends and confidants, many of whom were sympathetic to the Alliance to Ascend Humanity, Liopolt abandoned the exodus to Tuak with the two battle fleets he had suborned personally and a third made up of vessels taken by other admirals and commanders prior to meeting up with him; Liopolt, his friends, and their more secretive backers ensured that everyone more loyal to Senator Yamo and his fellow politicians than to Liopolt himself had been transferred or otherwise removed from under Liopolt’s command. The admiral took these assets to his homeworld of Mastropa and declared his intention to protect it against any threat. With both sincere and sycophantic political support from the senators and electorate of the planet, Liopolt easily entered the Planetary Senate of Mastropa in the next election cycle and immediately attained the position of Speaker of the Senate with the acclamation of his fellow senators. By that time, the admiral’s ‘Mastropan’ fleets had already imposed Liopolt’s will over many other systems with historical ties to and rivalries with Mastropa, establishing a small, unofficial ‘empire’ with now-Speaker Meron Liopolt at its head.

Life and Career in the United Republic

Mastropan by birth, Meron Liopolt’s early political ideals were shaped by his agricultural homeworld’s subordinate and hostile relationship with Hardeen, an ancient Cerean colony in the system of the same name that had long been the commercial and industrial heart of that region of space. Mastropa’s largely-Mimbourn population had learned to accept Cerean domination of their economic future long before Liopolt’s birth in 1204 GSY, but Mastropa experienced periodic flares of resentment as a matter of course. Nonetheless, matters on Mastropa remained peaceful throughout Liopolt’s early life, and it was not until Liopolt departed for Mim on a naval scholarship that he seriously questioned the exploitative nature of Hardeen’s relationship with Mastropa, in light of his direct interaction with the ideals espoused by the people of the United Republic’s capital—led, he came to believe, by the capital’s native sentients, Mimbourn like himself.

Liopolt rose through the ranks of the United Republic Navy at a steady pace, serving commendably in many shipboard roles during multiple cruises through Wild Space when he was not living on Mim. He was in command of his own vessel by 1238; by 1245, he was a senior captain in command of a small supply fleet operating to the north of the United Republic’s Outer Rim. Liopolt’s career, as with every officer of his age or older, coincided with drastic changes to the galactic political map as a result of rapid colonization from the world of Ingos Tenum in the Risolas System, and Liopolt was not the only Republican officer to feel disappointment that the peoples of that world, including a large number of Mimbourn-like humans, were radically different in temperament and political ideology from the United Republic. That disappointment had not prevented the United Republic Senate from agreeing to participate in an Ingosi alliance, the Combine, which Liopolt and many other Republican officers and politicians hoped would allow the United Republic to influence its new partners toward more democratic and egalitarian policies. Instead, the year 1245 saw the Alkarzi assault on Mim itself under Supreme Commander Uhlek in the Combine-Imperium War. Liopolt’s fleet was recalled from its patrol schedule in an effort to defend the capital, suffering grave losses in the counterattack that eventually forced Uhlek to retreat from Republican space. Senators on Mim began to take an interest in many military leaders who had done their part to save the capital world, and the newly-promoted Admiral Liopolt soon had patrons in the political class who had previously ignored a merely-competent officer from an Outer Rim backwater. The nationalist political atmosphere that pervaded Mim in the aftermath of the Combine-Imperium War amplified Liopolt’s own vague sentiments, and he made a special effort to maintain his new connections with politicians of that same opinion.

With the destruction of the Alkarzi Imperium and a new awareness of the consequences of taking part in Ingosi politics, the Senate’s decision to end the United Republic’s participation in the Combine was only a matter of time. Even before the United Republic parted from the organization completely in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on United Midgard perpetrated by the Alliance to Ascend Humanity, the United Republic Navy had been reorganized to take the new political situation into account. Admiral Liopolt’s new command, now a battle fleet intended to defend the United Republic against its foreign rivals, was assigned to patrol the western reaches of the galaxy in the vicinity of the Ingosi interstellar empires from the end of the war until the early months of 1247. During that time, Liopolt expanded his contacts among the political class on Mim, gaining the attention of both newly-elected Speaker Loran Y’shool and Senator Crenten Yamo. Liopolt’s infrequent returns to Mastropa during this time also took on added significance, as he began to translate his nationalist paradigm into a local context for the first time: As the United Republic existed for the Mactabeni, Mastropa existed for the Mastropans—Mimbourn.

In mid-1247, Admiral Liopolt’s fleet was abruptly recalled from its patrol schedule and ordered to warp eastward at all speed. The Admiralty Board hardly needed to explain its new orders when the Chiss forces of Emperor Thrawn appeared in the eastern Outer Rim and began their devastating campaign of conquest. Liopolt’s fleet was still too distant to take part in the initial fighting of what would be known to the wider galaxy as the First United Republic Civil War, but the admiral’s ships showed their valor in the failed defense of Parnack, Csilla, and Breech. By the time the United Republic Navy was capable of launching a counterattack at Breech, Liopolt’s fleet had lost more than half of its vessels and was disbanded to obtain reinforcements for two fleets headed by higher ranking officers. With Mastropa in Chiss hands until the end of the war, Liopolt was relegated to Mim, where his politician contacts noted and further fueled his frustration with the Admiralty Board’s failure to keep the Outer Rim safe, as well as the lackluster response from the United Republic’s supposed allies abroad. Thrawn’s death and the scattering of his fleet brought relief to the United Republic as a whole, but Liopolt was outraged to learn that the victory had come through the Admiralty Board’s collusion with the so-called ‘Lord’ Malum, a senior commander of the Chiss military. Liopolt shared his anger with many senior officers, and the backlash was serious enough to prompt a spate of resignations from the Admiralty Board. Speaker Y’shool quickly replaced the departing admirals with men loyal to his vision, which led to a cascade of similar promotions down the chain of command. Despite benefiting from these promotions, however, Liopolt’s frustration with the conduct of the war extended to Y’shool himself; by the time the Order of the Infinite Sun deposed and attempted to arrest the Speaker for treason, Liopolt had ceased to communicate with him.

While Admiral Liopolt did maintain his former connections with Senator Yamo, his own ideology became decidedly more radical at the conclusion of the First Civil War, in large part due to his first visit to his homeworld of Mastropa after its liberation from Chiss forces. The agricultural world was on the verge of famine as a result of the Ascendancy’s forced export policies, several areas of the planet had been irreparably damaged by strip mining, and the population had been both actively culled of its ‘extraneous’ members and further depleted by forced emigration to more economically-useful worlds such as Hardeen. But Liopolt’s anger grew upon observing how business leaders on Hardeen took advantage of individual and collective tragedies on Mastropa to acquire still more profits for themselves, while simultaneously reinforcing the planet’s dependency on Hardeen’s generosity and business. Mastropa’s own economic center, Poutalia, was quickly returning to life, but its surviving and reopening businesses were all in the hands of Cerean business leaders from Hardeen. Tsoulio, the planetary capital, had suffered the most from Chiss-led culls and resettlement programs to take its people abroad; Mactabeni of all kinds arrived after the liberation to fill those homes, a large number of whom were not Mimbourn, and all of whom were considered unwelcome by those who had been displaced and wanted to return. Planetary senators were nowhere to be found, having either died at Chiss hands or fled to the Core before their arrival, and no one could legally replace them until the next elections could be called, resulting in a transitional government approved by Mim whose members were largely interested observers from other Republic worlds—including, as ever, Hardeen. Non-Mastropans controlled the planet’s fate more completely than they had ever done before, and it burned Liopolt, a reasonably-powerful admiral in one of the greatest space armadas in the galaxy, that he could not do more to save his people or his planet from this blatant and unavoidable exploitation.

Admiral Liopolt returned to Mim and his new fleet command in bitterness, and his irritation with the Republic’s political future only grew as the newly-elected Speaker Leonus Nestor was revealed to have entered yet another partnership with foreign nations that had, only weeks prior, expressed scorn and derision toward the United Republic, its mission, and its influence on the galaxy as a whole. To make matters worse, while the United Republic and the Center Pact shared an enemy in the Ka’lu’umil, it appeared that the two parties had wildly different ideas about how to confront the Ingosi power, stemming from the divergence between the Republic’s long-standing rivalry with a near-equal state and the Pact’s reactionary hostility toward a threat that its members insisted was existential. Liopolt was disgusted that Speaker Nestor continued to defend the United Republic’s inclusion in an alliance designed to defend the opposite side of the galaxy, even after the Techno-Union, the Pact’s largest overall military power and a threat against which the Republic had previously threatened military action, revealed that it had completed work on a stealth warship using technology provided by the United Republic with the understanding that the Techno-Union only intended to learn how to defend itself against such technology. Once again, Liopolt gave his political support to Senator Yamo, who established himself as a leader of opposition against Speaker Nestor and his stance on cooperating with, rather than overawing and threatening, the international community.

Liopolt’s friends on Mim began to change as his opinions on the political situation shifted away from the mainstream. The admiral was certainly not the only Republican officer to object to the United Republic’s new associations, and the Mactabeni in general viewed the Center Pact with reservations after the disastrous Nafplio Conference and the attack on the Trans-System Federation, but few on Mim knew or cared about the exploitation of backwater worlds in the Outer Rim by fellow member worlds of the United Republic. The escalating tensions throughout the galaxy took the Senate’s time, including Senator Yamo’s, and the few domestic concerns worthy of Mim’s attention revolved around the location and fate of Lord Malum and the remaining Chiss military forces. As a result, Liopolt looked for support and sympathy from other quarters. He found it in junior officers, military and political staffers, and lesser-known politicians from both Mim and other Core worlds who saw the United Republic on a path to disaster and professed their powerlessness to stop it without help. Some of these new friends had ‘help’ in mind: the Alliance to Ascend Humanity. While Liopolt was wary of associating himself with the organization that had once brought the United Republic and the rest of the galaxy to the brink of war, the admiral couldn’t help but notice how his vision of the Republic’s failures aligned with the Alliance’s, and how the alien Mactabeni leading the Senate in the previous few years had done little more than enflame the Republic’s existing problems or seek out new ones. Admiral Liopolt was intrigued about what the Alliance could accomplish for the United Republic in the current circumstances, but in the end he was not convinced that their means were capable of achieving their goals, and while he readily took advantage of the ready ear and the advice provided by the Alliance’s adherents among his friends, Liopolt never became a member of the organization himself. In the end, the Alliance to Ascend Humanity intended to reform the entire United Republic, but, with his experiences on Mim guiding his opinion, Liopolt knew that the Republic—no matter who ruled it—would never care about his beloved homeworld. From that point on, the admiral’s primary focus fell on Mastropa’s status and wellbeing.

Vaasasund and the Collapse

In an effort to keep galactic tensions to a minimum, and to demonstrate the United Republic’s devotion to justice, Speaker Leonus Nestor’s government embarked on a cooperative mission with several Ingosi empires and the newly-formed paramilitary force of Absolution to put down the rogue Ingosi nation of Jernheim. Assembling over the Jern capital world of Vaasasund to begin their assault, the invaders were met with stout resistance, and suffered horrendous casualties. In particular, the United Republic’s contribution to the fleet was all but erased.

Domestically, the losses incurred at Vaasasund all but eliminated popular support for Speaker Nestor’s government. Between the devastation in the wake of the Chiss conquests, the theft of lucrative trade routes by the Ka’lu’umil during the long months of war, and the terrible loss of life and equipment among both civilians and soldiers caught on the wrong side of the shifting battlefronts in the Outer and Mid Rims, the United Republic’s economy had been teetering on the brink of failure. The additional losses over Vaasasund, and what they implied about Republican battle strength in relation to the rest of the galaxy, seemed to tip the economy the whole way over. On Mim, protests became riots as the angry public was confronted with military units still in shock over the Civil War and ready to use force to bring peace back to the capital world. Ships and whole fleets commanded by newly-promoted officers in the wake of the Admiralty Board’s resignations soon turned on one another as conflicting orders from ambitious warlords sowed confusion in the military hierarchy. Senators and their staffers fled Mim in droves; the more ambitious politicians, such as Senator Yamo, called on loyal officers in the United Republic Navy to join their cause in the name of the Republic, or even in just their own name. Agents of chaos and the occasional organized faction turned their guns on the planet and the people of Mim, ostensibly to save everything. In the end, there was nothing left to save.

Admiral Meron Liopolt had been as furious as anyone else to learn that another large fleet of the United Republic had been sacrificed to the last ship for the sake of foreign cooperation. The swiftness with which the political crisis had descended into madness shocked him, however, and the admiral was barely able to escape the planet in time to save himself. With few other useful options available to him, Liopolt departed for Tuak in Senator Yamo’s wake, gathering as many ships as would listen to his entreaties along the way. The nationalist who had long warned about the consequences of letting foreigners dictate the United Republic’s path seemed to be one of the very few notables worth following.

Yet, even as he made his way toward Tuak, Liopolt began to recognize the opportunity that the disaster had afforded him—not with Senator Yamo, but for himself, and for Mastropa above all. The admiral had long ago begun to think that the United Republic could never be put right; now, it seemed, it was being put down. And in the chaos, there were soldiers looking for direction, ships without clear masters, and fleets bearing down on one another whose commanders were looking for any reasonable excuse to turn their guns away. Those vessels that had followed Liopolt from Mim were filled with men that had once served under his command, and were more willing to follow their admiral than they were a senator whose name they’d only heard from the news reports. Other vessels on the journey to Tuak were riddled with Alliance personnel, and Liopolt was gratified to hear from survivors among his old friends that that organization still valued Liopolt’s friendship, and would work with him to defend even a sliver of Mactabeni territory against the incursions of aliens both foreign and domestic. Between Liopolt and his allies in the Alliance to Ascend Humanity, the officers of the admiral’s gathered fleets were either agreed or replaced: There was no future for the United Republic as a whole, but there could be a future for a piece of it, if they were willing to stand outside of the chaotic wars that would inevitably arise from Yamo’s plans and instead follow Liopolt to his homeworld in the Outer Rim.

Return to Mastropa; Terms of Hardeen

Meron Liopolt brought his new fleets into the eastern Outer Rim less than a month after the Fall of Mim. In that short space of time, the worlds previously suffering under the Chiss Ascendancy had once again fallen prey to various forces of pirates, Chiss remnants, and warlord opportunists. Mastropa’s lack of trade goods and commodities became a favorable boon in this case, as these violent forces had little reason to target the planet when a far wealthier target, the regional economic center of Hardeen, was so close by. While Liopolt was pleased that Hardeen would attract the hostile attentions of any potential adversaries, however, the former admiral also knew that Hardeen was the only planet in the area with the infrastructure and resources to maintain any warships at all, let alone Liopolt’s three fleets. Thus, despite his eagerness to return to his homeworld, Liopolt made his way first to Hardeen to secure the resources that would keep his fleets intact for Mastropa’s benefit.

Upon arriving in the Hardeen System, Liopolt’s fleet commanders quickly determined that the planet of Hardeen had been subject to periodic, low-intensity raiding over the course of several weeks, but that its infrastructure was largely intact and its logistical needs were still being met. A small collection of bandits captured in-system at a hastily-built temporary outpost quickly confirmed the officers’ analysis, and further explained that Hardeen had yet to be targeted by any party capable of fielding more than two warships at a time, at least until Liopolt’s arrival. The former admiral quickly established a defensive formation around Hardeen to prevent any further raiding, before demanding and receiving an audience with the Speaker of the Planetary Senate and other notable officials of Hardeen. In this meeting, Liopolt identified himself as a representative of Mastropa, and described his forces as Mastropan fleets; he made it clear to Hardeen’s leadership that the balance of power in that region of space was changing in Mastropa’s favor, and that Hardeen would be expected to fulfill a supporting role for the planet that its people had once treated with disdain or smug superiority.

The result of this meeting was the document known as the Terms of Hardeen, in which the Planetary Senate of Hardeen was dissolved pending a new election at the earliest possible opportunity, and the new Senate that replaced it—filled with candidates explicitly endorsed by the man wielding three battle fleets in Hardeen’s orbit, of course—legally subordinated itself to the Planetary Senate of Mastropa and its ambassador to Hardeen. Meron Liopolt, having claimed to be that ambassador despite the position’s nonexistence prior to his arrival, therefore assumed legal authority over Hardeen for as long as the Mastropan Senate allowed him to retain it. As the Mastropan Senate was thus far unaware of Liopolt’s activities at all, the newly-minted ambassador’s homeworld could not object to his assumption of power over Hardeen.

Now-Ambassador Liopolt and his fleets spent three weeks on Hardeen, during which time the ‘Mastropan’ forces prevented another seven raiding attempts and captured or killed at least one hundred twenty would-be raiders and pirates. Liopolt turned over the captured raiders to Hardeen’s local law enforcement agencies before departing from the system, leaving two of his fleets behind so as to prevent anyone taking advantage of his absence. He arrived later in the same day over Mastropa, to the planet’s general surprise and fanfare: Having feared to travel in the chaotic wake of the United Republic’s collapse, and knowing just what fate awaited an economic hub such as Hardeen, no one from Mastropa had ever learned that matters on Hardeen had changed completely. Liopolt quickly informed the Mastropan Planetary Senate that the Senate of Hardeen had submitted to Mastropa’s authority, and that, as a former admiral and the current commander of various warships, Liopolt himself was the most likely candidate to enforce Mastropa’s will over its neighboring system. With some trepidation, the Mastropan Senate agreed with Liopolt’s analysis, and confirmed both his self-imposed appointment as the planet’s ambassador to Hardeen and his military credentials as an admiral under Mastropa’s authority. Liopolt considered himself content with this status for the moment, and returned to his fleets for the time being.

Speaker of the Mastropan Senate; Acquisition of Daurne and Other Territories

While Ambassador Liopolt was content for both himself and his homeworld throughout the rest of 1247, he knew that his subordinates within the fleets and his allies in the Alliance to Ascend Humanity would require greater rewards than those that were allowed to them under the Terms of Hardeen. The Mastropan Senate remained largely unchanged during the Collapse, and its policies, while necessarily more insular than they had been as part of the United Republic, nonetheless reflected the same values and paradigms that had served Mastropa well as a minor world dominated by others. Liopolt set out to change this, while at the same time rewarding his loyal followers within the fleets, by taking part in the 1248 election cycle as a candidate for one of the seven open Senate seats for Tsoulio, the planetary capital and Liopolt’s birth city. He won not only the election, but was also immediately selected to be Speaker of the Mastropan Senate to replace the previous incumbent, who had resigned from that position upon confirmation of the senatorial election results. As Speaker, Meron Liopolt altered the Mastropan Senate’s traditional policy goals, focusing on military matters, refugees from the rest of the former United Republic, and ending Mastropa’s historical economic dependence on other worlds. Liopolt also appointed some of his fleet officers to bureaucratic offices formed under Liopolt’s own authority. Importantly, Speaker Liopolt remained the Mastropan ambassador to Hardeen, as the Mastropan Senate had failed to legislate the terms and restrictions of the new office after Liopolt had created it.

Due in part to the mass migration of Mactabeni throughout the former United Republic, Speaker Liopolt turned his attention toward acquiring more territory on which to place the new arrivals, most especially the aliens whose presence on Mastropa was unwelcome. Initially, Liopolt had intended to ship all such aliens to Hardeen, but he had been persuaded by Hardeen’s leaders that the economic drain of such an influx of refugees would make Hardeen entirely unprofitable and therefore useless to Mastropa and its fleets. Therefore, as Speaker of the Mastropan Senate, Liopolt sent word to the Planetary Senate of Daurne, another agricultural world that had been under Hardeen’s economic umbrella prior to the Collapse, that he formally requested their ratification of the Terms of Hardeen and their submission to Mastropan authority, in return for which Mastropa’s Admiral Meron Liopolt could guarantee Daurne’s security against most pirates and raiders that might threaten such a small and unimportant world. Like Mastropa, Daurne had had no real problems with piracy even during the Collapse, though such activity grew more noticeable once Hardeen was no longer a viable raiding target. Nonetheless, the Planetary Senate of Daurne understood the underlying threat and acquiesced to ratifying the Terms of Hardeen with minimal adjustments, which exempted Daurne from certain economic burdens in support of Mastropa that had been written with the larger economy of Hardeen in mind.

Although the Terms of Hardeen required Daurne to submit to Mastropan authority, however, it did not prevent the Senate of Daurne from expressing dismay and requesting a redress of grievances to the Senate of Mastropa upon hearing the plans to relocate a large number of alien refugees from Mastropa and Hardeen to Daurne. Daurnese representatives spoke with Speaker Liopolt, who had made himself Mastropa’s ambassador to Daurne as well, in the presence of the Senate of Mastropa, and explained that such a large influx of new people, refugees or otherwise, would be impossible to support with Daurne’s limited resources. The Senate agreed, and authorized Speaker Liopolt to find another method of alleviating Mastropa’s similar economic burden without troubling a friendly neighbor in the process.

Speaker Liopolt recognized that his magnanimity in promulgating the Terms of Hardeen was to blame for his failure to establish a convenient location to dispose of unwanted aliens in Daurne, but he also recognized that the resulting authorization from the Mastropan Senate was intended to avoid unnecessary conflicts with any local worlds, thereby protecting Mastropa’s other populated neighbors from unsavory diplomatic incidents. In principle, Liopolt agreed that Mastropa had nothing to gain from creating new enemies; as a result, he determined that the room needed to move the unwanted alien populations of Mastropa and Hardeen would have to be gained on worlds with no existing population. While originally the Speaker intended to deposit the alien populations onto their new homes and leave them to their own devices, agitation from his fleet officers caused him to reconsider this abandonment plan, and instead establish these worlds as fully-fledged colonies under the protection of the Mastropan fleets, and, importantly, governed by officials appointed from among those same fleets to appease Liopolt’s supporters in the military. By 1251, the new colony worlds of Cabun, Teloor, and Adaani had their own fully-established governments led by Admiral Liopolt’s personal appointees, which were staffed both by competent fleet officers and crews and by ambitious Mastropans who sought to advance their careers and were willing to leave their homeworld to do so. The appointed nature of these governments and their leaders ensured that the colony worlds remained firmly under Admiral Liopolt’s personal control, but, as with the other planets guarded by the Mastropan fleets, their relationship with Mastropa was governed by the Terms of Hardeen, amended to suit their unique economic situations. Once again, Liopolt appointed himself as Mastropa’s ambassador to the fleet’s newest protectorates.

Personal Life

Meron Liopolt has been twice married. His first wife, Kenda Stark, was a native of Mim; her father was a bookkeeper for the menswear firm Jasper F. Banke, while her mother was an unknown actress. Meron and Kenda Liopolt were married in 1232, and had one son, Prescott, in 1235. Both Kenda and Prescott Liopolt were killed in Supreme Commander Uhlek’s assault on Mim in late 1245.

Liopolt married Mastropan-born Divan Teller in 1248. Divan’s father is a prominent planetary senator from Poutalia, Mastropa’s largest population center, while her mother is a noted socialite and philanthropist. Meron and Divan Liopolt have no children.

While Liopolt’s cultivated friendships with Mim’s political class have all but disappeared in the wake of Speaker Loran Y’shool’s deposition, the Fall of Mim, and Senator Crenten Yamo’s flight to Tuak, some of those friends have remained with Liopolt on Mastropa. The most important of these are Odessa Mak’ri and Nedrick Morse, former financiers on Mim who revealed to Liopolt that they were agents for the Alliance to Ascend Humanity after the United Republic joined the Center Pact in 1247. While Liopolt relies on Mak’ri and Morse for their political insights about the wants and needs of his backers at Alpha Station, the admiral continues to treasure their friendship, as well.