Shiobhan

Shiobhan is a Homyn scientist and wealthy heiress who helped Alyn Arkades invent the Cloudheads on Nimbus. In a misguided effort to help her Moku friends, she stole a powerful Cloudhead from the Homyn Kingdom and ended up trapping her intended beneficiaries on an island besot with lightning when she failed to control its volatile storm cycle.
When the Homyn found her again, she was being worshipped as a goddess by the Moku survivors on the island. With the help of her fiancée, Justain, the Party managed to dissipate the stolen Cloudhead and rescue the Moku survivors by infiltrating her base, Cirrus Castle, and convincing her to surrender to Homyn authorities.
While Shiobhan is no longer worshipped as a goddess, her legacy continues in an unexpected fashion thanks to the Party fastening a stone statue carved in her likeness to the Nomad's prow. Her visage now lives on as the iconic Lady's Rebuff, although in recent weeks her face has been covered by Anh's mask in honor of the fallen Corsair.

Building Clouds

As a kindhearted and curious girl with a penchant for alchemy, working with Professor Arkades to use alchemy to protect the Moku from sunlight exposure that would cause their Helioschosis bacteria to petrify them was a dream come true. When the first opportunity arose, she moved to The Weathervane with her fiancée, Justain. Her knowledge and funding was instrumental toward Cloudheads' creation, drawing from her personal fortune to push the project to completion as funding wavered.
Over the course of her research, she befriended the local Moku laborers who had been brought to The Weathervane to serve as test subjects and assist in construction projects related to their experiments. After the project's completion, Shiobhan and Alyn Arkades went to deliver the first Cloudhead to the Moku capitol, Hopaku City. En route, they were attacked by pirates from the Salamanders seeking to steal the Cloudhead. Justain's Lunar Brigade unit, lulled into complacency by their lackadaisical island lifestyle, proved ineffectual at protecting them from seasoned pirates. However, the Moku laborers travelling with them valiantly took up arms for their defense. While they were not trained with the use of the ship's rifles or cannons, their bravery and determination. Thanks to their efforts Shiobhan and her research was saved from the pirates' clutches.

A Stormy Departure

After their adventures on the sea, Shiobhan expected her Moku saviors to be greeted with a hero's welcome upon their return. However, their high priest greeted their heroics with an order to place them on the pyre for execution. In using metallurgical weapons, the Moku laborers had broken ancient taboos in the Moku religion, and with the tribe's return to their holy site with the help of the Cloudhead, the priesthood had once again gained control of the village.
Incensed, Shiobhan refused to sit idly by while her saviors were punished for their heroic deeds. However, with their Helioschosis bacteria making exposure to sunlight a constant danger, few Moku could survive outside the shelter offered by their tribes. Resolving to do the right thing, Shiobhan stole one of the Cloudheads from The Weathervane and set off to provide the doomed Moku a new home. The plan presented several complications, as the only Cloudhead available was Cirrus--an experimental thundercloud prototype designed for warfare. Nevertheless, Shiobhan reasoned that she could modify it to create suitable shade and establish a refuge of sorts for apostate Moku who had fallen victim to the tribe's strict religious policies. Of course, her actions would make her an enemy of the Homyn Kingdom and break off her upcoming nuptials, but Shiobhan's sense of justice and morals guided her to act anyway. She wouldn't stand by and let her friends die to injustice, and she'd paid for the Cloudheads anyway, so it could hardly be considered stealing in a moral sense.
With her decision made, Shiobhan took the Moku and the Cloudhead to a deserted island to start their new life. She drained her substantial personal funds to provide them resources to build shelters and food from black market providers. The early days of their settlement were still brutal and deadly. Shiobhan's attempts to modify the Cloudhead met with disastrous results. She inadvertently accelerated its storm cycle so that it constantly rained lightning down on their island. Almost half of her Moku friends perished to lightning strikes while they scrambled to put up shelter from the cloud that was supposed to protect them.
Nevertheless, Shiobhan persevered and adapted to their harsh confines. She hired black market laborers and engineers at exorbitant prices that would work under dangerous conditions to construct a castle lined with lightning rods that would not only shield them from the harsh weather, but could use the lightning to power its defenses. Christening her new fortress, Cirrus Castle, the lightning that once decimated her new settlement now protected them--as she could block off or grant access to the settlement at will by raising or lowering the lightning rods near the gate.

The Lightning Goddess

While Shiobhan managed to save at least some of the Moku, she failed to appreciate the impact their ordeals would have on both of their psychology. As a civilization that relied on clouds for survival, lightning carried substantial religious significance for the Moku. They saw it as a form of judgment from their Goddess to punish those who strayed to far from the proper path. When Shiobhan sheltered them from the storm and molded the lightning to her will, she transformed from a mere benefactor to a divine savior in their eyes. She was a patron of forgiveness to a people marked for death by their old Goddess.
For Shiobhan's part, she was ill-equipped to handle her peoples' newfound admiration for her. Many native races of Io's moons have mistaken the comparatively advanced Homyn for gods, and in their hubris many Homyn have deluded themselves into accepting that characterization. The phenomena was so common amidst the Lunar Brigade that the diagnosis even had a name, Turner's Syndrome, and all brigadiers sent to moons in the early stages of Homyn contact are given training to prevent it. Shiobhan, as a scientist whose interaction with the Moku was supposed to have been limited to only indirect communications, never received such training and her comfortable upbringing as an heiress lent her narcissistic traits that made her susceptible to Turner's Syndrome. To found her new settlement, she had to give up all the creature comforts of her station in life. However, in exchange she found a group of people who both adored her and relied on her and would never hesitate to cater to her every desire. She had given up so much to help them, after all, wasn't it only right that they should revere her for her brilliance and kindness. In time, Shiobhan accepted her Moku's worship, and possibly even came to share their belief in her own divinity. They carved her likeness in a stone statue and built an altar throne for her to sit upon at the roof of the castle.
Becoming increasingly cloistered with her people, Shiobhan hired black market mercenaries to guard Cirrus Castle, paying them exorbitant hazard pay rates to contend with its dangerous lightning. It wasn't long before word got back to the Homyn Kingdom about where there missing Cloudhead ended up, and the rumors of Shiobhan's strange relationship with the Moku she harbored reached other ears as well. Once the Lunar Brigade located Cirrus Castle, they planned an assault to retake the Cloudhead and bring Shiobhan in. However, their forces proved inadequate to fend off Shiobhan's mercenaries amidst the lightning storm. Their unit was defeated shortly after breaching the castle walls. Those that didn't die in battle were taken prisoner within the castle to interrogate and use as hostages in order to discourage further attacks.

Defeat and Arrest

While Shiobhan continued to change for the worse living isolated in her cult, the Moku tribe had changed for the better. In the intervening years, they had thrown off the shackles of Homyn rule and adopted a new high priest, Tempi. This regime was more accepting than the one Shiobhan had previously encountered, with Moku free to decide whether they would walk the path of the Goddess. Alyn Arkades had also developed a cure for Helioschosis, meaning that anyone was free to leave the tribe and could easily take root elsewhere on Nimbus. However, Shiobhan dismissed this news as the propaganda of her enemies.
With a dangerous weapon and several Lunar Brigade prisoners in the hands of an unstable criminal, The Homyn Kingdom escalated the situation by seeking the help of the Corsairs. The Party agreed to help and infiltrated Cirrus Castle, freeing the imprisoned brigadiers, and making their way up to Shiobhan's throne room. The encounter saw Shiobhan reunite with her discarded fiancée, Justain, and with his help the Corsairs managed to convince her to surrender peacefully in exchange for providing her Moku with a cure and having Tempi accept them back into the tribe if they so chose. The Lunar Brigade promised to consider Shiobhan's cooperation in determining her punishment, but as their records are kept largely secret, her fate in the wake of her crimes still remains a mystery.