PERFECT PATRIOT

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While most are born into their species, the Sanguine can take others and make them into what they are. The Sanguine have criteria for this written in their internal book, "The Prayer of Blood".

Among the more unusual relics of this is the term 'Perfect Patriot', a phrase describing a non-Sanguine who fights for the individual estate - rather than for the tribe or clan or species to which they belong or identify. Such "Perfect Patriot" is not selfless or idealistic, but characteristic with an ability to already feel and understand what the Sanguine can via the blood - the emotion and memory of others in an very objective and separate nature from their own self-identity and distinct feelings and values.

This ability to distinguish between self-and others, without losing self, and to value the role of others based on their individual nature rather than utility or capacity, is essential to surviving the change.

It does not mean the person is of like mind or beliefs, and in fact the term is often used to refer to esteemed enemies of the Sanguine who continue to fight even when it is clear the technology and capabilities of the Sanguine force are overwhelming and impossible to counter.

A Sanguine will pause in battle to challenge an enemy that continues in this way, let them answer, and then seize them and read them. If the answer and the memories and emotions are true to each other, the Sanguine will set aside that soldier and in releasing their hand mark them so that all other forces with them leave them alive and unharmed. The forces may still restrain and disarm them, but they will do so with as much care as they would a fellow soldier.

These "Perfect Patriots" are often unable to explain their survival, and their presence the sole reason entire ships are not burned - to preserve even one.

In later life, some of them recount seeing the Sanguine again - and many simply vanish. It is thought this is how the Sanguine restore their ranks despite losses against weapons that are capable of destroying them outright; and a reason to find in Kai'Gi and other societies a sinister and dark connotation implying danger and ill-will of mind and spirit in the very word - "patriot". Because to those cultures that are forged of the ignorance of the industrial slave, the very word is a rebellion against the collective and its presumed welfare in subordination and service to the architect of that factory or planet.

The use of these "Perfect Patriots", to fight against worlds and oligarchies of Rhocropolis authority over less sophisticated people and hybrids, machines, and artificial life, grant the Sanguine a personal foothold in the culture, values, and traditions of the worlds they invade and overthrow. A bond between the very old Sanguine who guide such wars, and the people who live beneath the boot of the industrial utility and socialist slavery on those collective labor camps.

Because the Sanguine can reach into the soldier's mind, read his very feelings, and study the subject for so long, trying to place a double-agent as a "Perfect Patriot" is very difficult. This has not stopped some planets from trying, and the limited powers newly made Sanguine have are perhaps a safeguard against this threat.

Controls which leave newly made Sanguine barely more than human, and far from the terrifying god-like war machines that they can become in time. Rebellion and war among the Sanguine is also not impossible, and at such time the competition for viable candidates is reportedly the sole purpose of long protracted and pointless wars among Sanguine kingdoms. To 'provoke' a better man (or woman) to be produced in chaos and suffering than could be made or found in peace.

Whatever the practice, the term is similar to a Knight Errant (probationary knight) in Middle English Law, and often such "Perfect Patriots" remain human for years in the service of peaceful or stable Sanguine militaries - proving themselves to be candidates for conversion to full Sanguine soldiers.

The ability to understand the rules made, governing courtesy and use of such power, and the will to break those rules where the candidate sees fit or necessary and justified - objectively - appear central to these tests. Even if individual Sanguine ignore the rules in making other Sanguine.