Rykard Drost

**Rykard Drost** was the Director of the Serene Duchy of Aeldrum's Office of National Intelligence beginning in 530 A.U.

## History

### Early Life

Rykard Drost was a human born in 476 A.U. to a working class family in Aeldrum's Galthad Spire. From a young age, Drost worked in the spire's factories alongside mostly migrant workers of myriad races and cultures, including Kirvans, Celestials, Orcs, and various elven ethnicities. This exposed him to multiple cultures and languages, proficiency with which he honed on his lunch breaks—one had to be able to tell the half-orc manning the smelter to stop if someone fell in. Drost managed to earn a scholarship to study further at one of Aeldrum's new, though unprestigious, public universities.

As a young adult, Drost applied to the Office of National Intelligence entirely due to its dramatized, action-packed exploits in an Aeldman propaganda film released for recruitment purposes during ONI's post-Solaire cycle of professionalization (and following significant resignations in the generation after Doge Orvhim's assassination.) Though Drost's application revealed this relative naiveté and lack of polish, recruiters were impressed by his apparent strong grasp on numerous languages due to his upbringing and accepted him into training. However, once inside, his High Elf instructors and chiefs coldly and openly averred that due to his humanity, Drost would neither have the longevity of age to work the most intricate counterintelligence cases, nor the grace and charm needed to run the most important moles. Instead, despite his language skills, Drost was thrown into the environment where he would blend in best—and the most distasteful and dead-end of the ONI's directorates—counterterrorism in Aeldrum's "devolved" colonial worlds, working alongside Constabulary forces to help friendly governments (client states) quell insurgencies in the popular republics.

### Early Career

Drost served as a counterterrorism officer in the Republic of Telrion in 500 A.U. during an ongoing insurgency against the Aeldrum-backed popular government. Drost was chiefly responsible for locating hidden terror cells and their leaders, and providing the strike instructions for airstrikes or raids by local authorities and the Constabulary. (Despite this being the bottom of the barrel of possible intelligence assignments, Drost was thrilled, as the experience at many times resembled his inspirational propaganda film: Hero Dark Thirty, about a dashing Aeldman half-elf ONI agent who foils a terrorist plot with gratuitous violence.)

Drost was nearing the end of his assignment in 505 A.U. when then-Industrialist parliamentarian Garry LaPaix visited the Republic of Telrion on a diplomatic mission to declare Aeldrum's support for the state against terrorism. LaPaix and Drost met when Drost briefed him on local counterterrorism activities. Drost already appreciated LaPaix as a politician due to his racially inclusive platform, and privately told him some of his difficulties working as a human in ONI. LaPaix was apparently very taken with Drost's exploits and openness, thanking him for his service, and the two exchanged contact information and photos together. When LaPaix returned to Aeldrum, his subsequent stump speeches on support to national security funding prominently featured his stories and photographs with Drost as an emblem of what kind of Aeldman the funding would serve. Overnight, Drost attained significant political attention.

### Later Career

Unfortunately, this attention had the added impact (unconsidered by LaPaix, due to his novelty to intelligence) of publicly blowing Drost's cover, and he was withdrawn from Telrion as well as precluded from future undercover work—ordinarily a career's death sentence. However, Drost's accidental positive media attention put pressure on ONI not to fire him but to slot him instead into a visible, high-profile position where he wouldn't need cover or be able to hurt operations too much. Drost received what was once again the least-exciting position that someone with his cachet could have received: chief of external relations with Bishant.

For nearly a decade, Drost was ONI's overt representative to Shantine intelligence, handling joint operations planning and training exchanges. Drost came to see Shantine partnership as ONI's most important, and spent a particularly long time building collaborative lethal measures with the Knights of Adarnum, and helped to socialize the comparatively new Knights of Leandra to working with external powers. Drost and his Knight “coworkers” had such a positive, if allegedly blood-soaked, partnership, that by the end of Drost's repeatedly-extended tour the Shantine ambassador sent a lavishly praiseful note verbale back to Aeldrum. Once again, political considerations overruled Drost's handlers' initially low expectations, and Drost was promoted to Director of all ONI foreign partnerships and joint operations.

Drost became responsible for openly administrating all joint intelligence operations and training exchanges with Aeldrum's allies. Over the next 15 years, Drost moved from planet to planet, integrating into local intelligence services and sharing tradecraft while affirming Aeldman security guarantees and collaborating on regional intelligence operations planning. Drost's overt cooperative postings ranged from former colonial worlds; to Imperial powers including Alusia and the Orcish Directorate; and even locations as far-flung as the Grand Celestial Confederacy.

On an assignment to the Academy of Saldan post-coup attempt, while guest lecturing for the School of Combat Arts, Drost met his future wife Antonina Tanith, a Saldanese academic whose department is still not publicly known; they married by the end of his tour and she departed to travel with him on extended sabbatical. (At present, Antonina's work in Aeldrum is based on an apparent temporary remote research contract with the Academy funded by the Aeldman government.)

### Grand Strategy 2

Drost stayed in contact with LaPaix, thankful for the strange shift in career that LaPaix's friendship had brought him. Throughout Drost's ever-growing visibility in the defense communities of Imperial and Celestial Space, LaPaix relied on Drost's assessments of cosmic security and relations on the ground with other powers to inform his foreign policy and national security voting. When LaPaix finally became Doge, Drost's years of alliance made him a natural choice to elevate in status, and his human background suited LaPaix's message and platform of racial enfranchisement. In 530 A.U., Rykard Drost was appointed Director of ONI.