Mentior Temple

The Eversor Temple specializes in brutality, the Vindicare Temple has its snipers, Culexus Temple its nulls, and  the Callidus Temple its shape shifting agents but none is more insidious than the minor Mentior Temple. While others temples of the Officio Assassinorum specialize in their blood games, the Mentior assassin's are powerful political chess masters who warp the minds of the foes of the Imperium to serving their own ends. They may covertly influence a Genestealer cult to attack a nearby group of renegade guardsman or influence a den of heretics that their primary foe is the Eldar craftworld nearby.
Mentior assassin build and maintain several powerful and detailed personas that they can adopt and they regularly exploit. They move in circles so high and so low that its impossible for anyone outside their temple to truly know if any given Navigator Scion, 2nd Lieutenant, or ganger boss is actually a Mentior assassin’s false cover until its too late. They do not often appear themselves, prefering to use puppeted mind-slaves to act as their personas when meet in person.
Their work is far from bloodless, Mentior assassins are depraved manipulators with minds not unlike some kind of perverse Lexmechanic. They are famous for their grotesque torture and mental reprograming capacities; it’s a wonder what an ungodly amount of chemicals, neuro linguistic programing, and twisted psychological domination can do. Within their relatively human looking form they are more machine than man; Mentior assassins are believed to have been particularly conceived by the renegade members of the Adeptus Mechanicus initially.
The act of making one is a cruel process; the subject must be broken down completely and reprogramed mentally from the ground up by the more warped minds the Imperium has produced (other Mentior assassin). Candidates for the Temple are all serial killers who signs of cunning, long term planning, and sociopathy. It generally takes a batch of about a thousand to get a good candidate who survived the mental destruction and reconstruction that they must endure. Once reprogramed they are trained and augmented extensively with cybernetics to the point where they are hardly human anymore.
Mentior assassin lurk, prowl, and conive from the shadows; only appearing when necessary for the plan to progress. They do, however, like to stay close to their missions so they can get a better sense of the subtle shifts in political and social climates. Their schemes are plans within plans within plans; some spanning years or even a decade before they come to fruition. Mentior assassins are the unseen bastards that play the long game in a way only their twisted minds can.
== Imperial Guard Red Teams ==
Each Mentior assassin indirectly manages a “red team”. This is a unwitting Imperial Guard unit (often a regiment) or Tempestus Scion division that is actually under their control through intermediaries. They use this asset to stage false attacks, frame enemies, force hands, and generally create scenarios where their prey dances to the Mentior assassin’s tune. These red teams are never aware of their true purpose and, at worse, are believed to be being used as the pawns of some Inquisitor or higher up in the Imperium bureaucracy.
Category:Officio Assassinorum
Category:Imperium of Man
Category:Imperial Guard