House Ruttyer

The Rat House

House Ruttyer does not come from Noble stock. Created in 430.M41, it is one of the youngest Houses of the Prosperitas Sector, a position it clawed its way into literally from amongst the muck of the Sector. House Ruttyer are Pickers and Dustfolk waste salvagers and recyclers who, united under the current head of the family, Gaedrun Ruttyer, found wealth in the waste of others. Sometimes called the King of the ‘Rat House’, Gaedren Ruttyer, built his empire on the back of other people’s garbage, and is a self-made man of considerable power and social standing with a wide-reaching hand across the sector despite his filthy origins.

Because it represents a powerful alliance of Corpseguilds, Recyc Guilds and others who have signed to Ruttyer's Charters of waste management, the House has managed to secure a valuable exclusive charter. The House charter grants it dominion over the interstellar trade and transport of specifically fissionable materials and waste — making it both considerably wealthy and incredibly essential to running the Hive and Imperial Worlds. How the House secured such a monopoly and a Noble Charter to go with it is something of a mystery, but many suspect that some of the debts owed by House Durovera not claimed by House Globex were an extensive line of credit offered by House Ruttyer who then used them to strongarm their current Charter.

In addition to its monopoly, the House's ability to cease to tend to the waste of a world as a threat gives it a powerful bargaining tool. Ruttyer can, and has in the past threatened to, paralyse waste recycling and disposal facilities across the Sector — a not insignificant threat, given how much waste the average Imperial world produces in a day.

Though the House is powerful it is not socially liked and its scions are considered to be rough-cast ‘new money’ by the other Nobles of the Prosperitas Sector. Their love of gaudy, tasteless expressions of wealth compared to the more refined look of the Nobility of the other Houses drives a wedge between them and other Nobles. Worse still, there are persistent rumours that the House has numerous illegal and semi-legal operations that are hidden beneath the guise of what is otherwise presented as a legal haulage business. Some would cast Gaedrun Ruttyer as a Crime Baron who has carved out legitimacy with a Noble title - but those that insult him do not last long, for the Rat King of House Ruttyer suffers no slight lightly.

The House has always publicly disavowed any of its Chartist Captains accused of or even caught involved in such operations. Investigations into the activities of the House are almost-always ongoing and almost-always never resolved. This is never helped by many Planetary Governors being unwilling to threaten their relationship with the House by aiding Arbites investigations of its assets, otherwise risking being left with their cities drowning in overflowing waste.

The House has stayed studiously neutral though the House Conflicts that ended in 595.M41, choosing not to get involved in the bickering.

The center of the House's power is its fleet, but it also controls the planetary rulership of the toxic Hive World of Letifer Secundus, an arrangement achieved by a marriage-alliance with the now-gone minor house of House Bratix and the absorption of the family into the Ruttyer bloodline. Ruttyer has made a great deal out of its dominion of Letifer; the planet's toxic chemicals are mined for a number of uses in waste disposal and the vast wastelands between the hives make more than adequate landfill for waste deposits.