Lukor
Emperor Lukor, of the 17th generation of the House of Detola, was the ruler of the Seven Systems in the pocket universe known as Ecto-Space in the Year of the Mange Beast. He courted the Mistress for some time until she learned about obscene experiments that he was carrying out.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Like most of the Jokastarnan nobility, Lukor never learned to read, believing it to be a trait of low-status scholars and scribes.
Lukor was paranoid about a return of the plague which had killed his illustrious ancestor, Empress Helena. To prepare for such a contingency, he had his scientists organise a gruesome, decades-long experiment, populating the Inner Kingdom of caves that existed below the surface of Jokastarna with genetically-engineered short-lived, blind humans known as "caveys" who had no knowledge of the outside world, save that they worshipped the people of the palace as distant gods. Every generation, a new man-made strain of the plague was induced in the cavey population, and a selection were harvested to be dissected to extract antibodies and other evolved forms of immunity. Lukor kept his experiments a secret from the rest of the court.
In the Year of the Mange Beast, Lukor's court paid host to the Mistress and K9, who sought protection from the intergalactic warlord Kebek. Cultured and mannered, Lukor played the part of the perfect host, and slowly attempted to woo the Mistress as he believed it would be politically useful for him to take on such a celebrated hero as his Empress. When he proposed in public with no prior warning, the Mistress ran off in her ramshackle space-time ship and ended up discovering the truth about the caveys, although she temporarily believed that what she was witnessing had occurred many centuries in the past, under Helena, rather than being Lukor's doing.
After returning to the palace, however, she figured out the truth. She played the part of a bedridden amnesiac for a week, and Lukor took the opportunity to have K9 thrown in a dungeon. With his scientists having extracted a new and permanent antidote (developed by K9) from the Mistress's bloodstream, he also ordered the Inner Kingdom's cavey population wiped out, as they were no longer necessary. When the Mistress "regained consciousness" after the week had elapsed, gave no hint of her knowledge that the caveys were a thing of the present. Falling for the act, Lukor attempted to gaslight the Mistress into believing that she had, during that week she had spent struggling with the illness, accepted his proposal at K9's suggestion.
As part of her plan to bring down Lukor, she claimed to actually be in love with him, flattering his ego, and agreed to go through with the wedding. However, at the ceremony held the next day, she interrupted her wedding vows for a speech, exposing Lukor's crimes to the assembled court. As he was beset by the crowd while she made her escape, however, Lukor sardonically revealed to her that he had killed all the caveys and her revolution was coming too late. (AUDIO: The Choice) He attempted to stab her, but she dodged and punched him instead. He was subsequently arrested and deposed, and a parliamentary democracy was established, although Lukor loyalists continued to remain a threat to surviving caveys over the following years. (PROSE: The Choice)
