Clan of Anais

The clan of Anaïs is the collective term for the matriarchal family which ruled New Endralon starting in 2788, and continuing well over a century beyond.

The first Anaïs ruler of New Endralon was Sora Anaïs Kuzaki, known simply as Anaïs Kuzaki, or (in retrospect) Anaïs the First. Anaïs Kuzaki was a political leader of the Alianţa Anaïs, which helped overthrow the earlier House of Utesom in the mid 2700s, along side the Revolutionary Party. Kuzaki served as Prime Minister under Utesom, late in the elder self-styled Pharoah's reign, and continued her activity under the unity government that replaced the Utesom regime.

Anaïs Kuzaki has been viewed as many things, but her rule was famous for its relative sanity, coming as it did between those of her predessors, and her decendants. Kuzaki was an economic conservative, with socially liberal views towards most issues, and her reign was marked by significant economic and infrastructure growth. Unfortunately for New Endralon, her reign was also relatively short.

In early 2791, Anaïs Kuzaki was assassinated by poisoning, by her younger brother, Koran. In the chaos that followed, Anaïs' ten year old daughter, Jade, was installed into the ceremonial duties of the Presidency, while the Prime Minister handled the actual workings of government. Koran attempted to use the young Jade to maneouver himself into power, as he had effectively been raising (and spoiling) the girl since she was six, while her mother was busy with the governance of the nation. To achieve his aims, he secretly founded, and tried to control, the Cult of Jade, which argued that Jade should be her mother's heir in all things, and proclaimed quasi-divinity on the young child.

Meanwhile, two rival factions of the former Anais Alliance warred in the "Little Civil War" - as military factions loyal to General Chousheau warred with those loyal to the Prime Minister Rin Shizuka for several months. The chaos of the factions made conditions ripe for a pair of underlings to both warring leaders to seize control of the nation, by taking over and installing Jade as President. Jade was sworn into office on her eleventh birthday, in 2792.

Jade essentially grew up believing in her own divinity, and insulated from the consequences of her whims, as the Cult grew in power, ultimately controlling every aspect of daily life within the nation. Titled the Zeita (Goddess) of the nation, her word was law until her death in 2858, at the age of 77.

Those few who actually met her and were not hardcore members of the cult relate stories of abysmal abuses and shocking idiocy at the head of the nation; the Zeita herself was never particularly bright, and was entirely uneducated, and during her reign was seldom seen sober. Her medical issues are the best documented portion of her life - she had during her life two kidney, three liver, five lung, and two heart transplants; most of these were necessitated due to her extremely heavy use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs - she was notably seen smoking while giving a government sponsored lecture about the dangers of tobacco, at the age of ten, before her reign technically began, and was believed to be a five pack a day smoker for most of her life.

In her middle life, in an attempt to create a "pantheon" of descendants, she gave birth to twins; a daughter, Sora and a son, Toma; the children were concieved by in vitro fertilization, but we now know that the father was Jade's uncle. Sora and Toma were 'married' to each other on their first birthday, and Sora was pumped full of fertility drugs in her late pre-teen years, leading to upwards of twenty grandchildren, apparently including a daughter named Ai. Each child was named for an aspect of life or the world which that child supposedly was the god or goddess of - famously, the one named for fire was burned to death, in an attempt to actually bestow the element upon him. Shortly after this incident, Ai went missing, believed kidnapped by a palace guard.

Upon Jade's death in 2858, the Communist Party of New Endralon swept in, and, with an Anaïs, the missing Ai, as its figurehead, was able to assume effective control of the nation. It was revealed that, unlike Ai's siblings, Ai's father was an attendant of Sora, who had not been castrated despite specific orders that all of the children's servants were to be eunuchs. While this left Ai's family tree a bit less ingrown than the rest of the clan's, Ai's position in the former pantheon (representing the aspect of "love") left her a bitter, homicidal, lunatic. Shortly after taking over as Supreme Leader of the newly declared Communist State, Ai's insanity came to light, when she ordered the Vice Chairman of the Communist Party killed on the spot, and took his assistant, the mousy Rerrin Hitomi, as her lesbian lover - of her husband, he was rumored to have been eaten alive.

While Ai claimed to have nothing in common with her grandmother, she actually shared a good many negative traits, including complete irregard for human life, a heavy tobacco habit (her prefered toxin was Keymonese Cigars), and fits of murderous rampage. Unlike Jade, however, Ai "knew better," at least in theory - having been educated somewhat, and raised at least partially outside of the Cult.

Ai's cruelty to political prisoners, in particular, became legendary - she would often personally execute the prisoners, after personally torturing them, in various ways; rumors had her variously raping, cannibalizing, dismembering, and disembowling her victims.

In 2890, with failing health, Ai left the nation to her fifteen year old daughter, Ren, and named Ren's twin sister Soria, to be her protector. If anything, Ren and Soria were even more twisted than their mother, as they shared her interests, but were more intelligent and viscious, as evidenced by their first act - burying former Prime Minister Rerrin Hitomi alive with her paramour. It is rumored that Hitomi, rather than Ai, was the biological mother of the twins, but the twins were named and raised as Ai's own children, and are considered the heirs of the twisted family legacy.