Sameki is a two-hundred-fifty year old Callistan businessman and a long-time resident of Titan Garden. He's held a number of leadership positions throughout the decades, at present he is the chief executive officer of Eclipse Holdings, a business enterprise connected to many facets of the various interplanetary starshipping industries. Sameki has an outsized personality; he's energetic and enthusiastic, always encouraging of those he works with and always first to celebrate their successes. That kind of big energy can be infectious, and an energized body of affiliates are motivated to go out and land the biggest contracts. Conversely, that same outsized personality can manifest as a terrifying rage; when things go wrong, Sameki does not take the news gracefully, and given his towering Callistan physique, that's a harrowing prospect for any member of his boardroom to face when someone needs to break some unfortunate news to him. The fear of Sameki's temper is also a strong motivating factor, albeit for reasons different from those mentioned above. In spite of, or in part because of these extreme emotional swings, very few people in his organization know that he is an old and powerful vampire.
Callistan vampires are very large, very fast and can be very frightening to be on the wrong side of, but they tend to have a tell unique to their species. Non-Callistans are forgiven for not noticing, but a large part of Callistan culture involves choosing generational names based on the ascendant constellations seen in Callisto's sky. There is a rotation of constellations said to depict old heroes and old legends, and when the sky is honored by a particular constellation, Callistans will often name their children in that legend's honor. It isn't a universal practice, but it is rooted deep enough that meeting an exception would be a rarity. The elder generation bear names that begin with an A, to honor Arij, the philosopher; the current adult generation carry K names in honor of Karin, the warrior princess; the constellation Zenaq sits high in the Callistan sky so you'll find many kids bearing a Z-name in tribute to the legendary beast-hunter. Sameki's name is a notable exception- it's easy enough to write off as the rare outlier, but the truth is that vampiric immortality has allowed him to exceed his natural lifespan considerably, having been born beneath the constellation of Seneka, the great mariner. Callistan starfarers know that era was a very, very long time ago. It's easy to write off as the rare outlier, it's even better if Sameki doesn't notice you making that connection.
It's been about two centuries since the creation of Titan Garden, a landmark serving as the dawn of the interplanetary age. Different worlds ascended to space at different times- with Martians and Neptunians notably taking the first bold steps, and Mercurians following shortly after- but the shifting vastness of the Sol system made any sort of real trade between worlds difficult and somewhat rare. The development of a hub colony on a Saturnian moon allowed for a kind of mid-way between Sol and Pluto to be established, a central point that the most distant worlds can use to more easily connect to each other; it's an anchor that allowed the spread of service, communication, refueling and repair sites throughout the vastness of the Outer Belt and thus paved the way for the many worlds of Sol to develop strong trade and transit routes, laying the foundation for the interconnected system we enjoy today. Two hundred years ago starships began to traverse a mapped and plotted Sol system, putting their lives on the line with every voyage- unforseeable calamity meant certain death for these starfarers, but it also meant financial ruin for their people back home, losing a captain, a crew and an expensive star-worthy ship all at once. In the wake of the interplanetary age, a new insurance industry began to flourish, and there on the ground floor, midway between the ends of the Sol system, was Sameki.
Starship insurance is a good racket if you can get your foot in the door at the right time. Interplanetary megacorps own armadas of ships transporting trillions of credits worth of goods from one world to another, there's a lot invested in these voyages, investing a little more into an insurance policy is a drop in the bucket for them. On the other end of the scale you have whole worlds of small businesses who operate one ship, one crew and a home office somewhere, and if something happens to any piece of that formula the whole business would grind to a halt- for small-scale starfarers, insuring your one and only ship can make or break whatever comes next for you. Any business with business in space needs to do business with insurance to protect themselves from the barely-evitable, and business has boomed in the past two hundred years. By the standards of his own era Sameki would have made a modest fortune off his work building partnerships with every facet of the starfaring industry, but it was also his ill-fortune to have been frozen in time by vampiric affliction- he would no longer die naturally, but he also didn't need to pass on his fortune to a younger generation. Sameki would follow the growth of a system-wide industrial boom, and he'd get to enjoy the fullness of his fortune the whole time.
It might be surprising to learn that Sameki's ascent into a position of wealth and influence did not materialize out of some well-meaning compassion for the budding starfaring age. A tremendous amount of money began flowing into Sameki's businesses by virtue of the scale of cost he was insuring against, so it didn't take him long to figure out that if he could maintain his input and limit his output even a little bit, he could keep a princely sum of his earnings for his own substantial salary. Sameki had two primary means of achieving this: the first was to use his influence in the cradle years of an interplanetary transit network to promote people and voices who pushed for safety over speed in starship standards. Companies like Delta Astronautics and Quasar Galactic were encouraged by leaders in their industries to improve warp current research and star charting technologies, to work towards fuel-efficient engines and to invest in the development of communication systems between far-flung starports. If you're in the starship insurance racket you don't want ships getting lost or blowing up, the safer they are the less often they'll need to make a substantial claim on their insurance policies. Safety is in everyone's interest, Sameki just happened to be there at the beginning to give the right people a little push to get that particular ball rolling.
The other means of building wealth as a starship insurance leader is to make sure you have a clear and legal excuse not to issue a payment to whatever claims you can avoid. While Sameki helped push voices for safety and science into positions of prominence, he also encouraged the adoption of regulations designed, as he phrases it, to combat insurance fraud. Space is a big place and it's trivially easy to hide a ship and its cargo and then claim it was lost; thanks to Sameki's other investments, strict rules about proper documentation of damage and loss in filing a space-related incident report were established early on, requiring insurance claims to be paired with tangible proof in order to secure a payout. For the bigger fleets of megacorp ships this was no problem, they document everything coming in and going out down to the smallest bolt and washer, and for Sameki that was proof enough for him, these were accounts he didn't want to lose- the real money was to be made from the many smaller outfits zipping from world to world in tiny, individual starships. In order for someone to produce proof of a lost ship, the wreck of that ship would need to be found and verified by a licensed salvage company. Not everyone can just buy a boat and go looking for shipwrecks, a salvage captain needs to be properly certified and a salvage claim needs to have all the paperwork done, attempting in good faith to connect with relevant parties who can then file a claim with their insurance company in order to be compensated for their loss. On the surface it makes sense, you want to codify in law that starfarers can't simply hide a ship in the Asteroids and claim it was "lost," they need proof of their loss in order to collect a payout. The trick of it is, there's a lot of space up there, and a small-time policyholder is left to prove an absence without the use of the thing they lost. There's a lot of ships adrift in the celestial sea whose last living policyholders may have been dead for decades before a salvage company ever finds them. No ship, no salvage; no salvage, no proof; no proof, no claim. Large fleets can keep up with this documentation, but for many people their ship and its crew were their entire livelihood, it was everything they had. If it disembarks and never arrives at another starport, well... sorry! We can't issue a payment without proof of loss, that's the law. Sameki's twin investments have paid substantial dividends over the centuries. No one alive would even think to guess that he had a hand in setting it up that way in the first place.
One of the drawbacks to immortal wealth is the need to spackle over the gaps between your lifetimes, in case someone pays too much attention and notices how long you've been kicking around for. The upside is that most other species live for a century-and-a-half or less, so the living memory of who a given person is can be somewhat short- even world-reknowned celebrities from a generation prior tend to fade behind the haze of whoever the current rising stars happen to be. All the same, Sameki has an undying quality that he believes would draw undue attenton towards himself, should his perpetual existence attract unwelcome notice. In order to maintain an active hand in his business interests without putting himself in too much of a limelight, Sameki tends to create new holding companies and purchase his insurance businesses from himself about once every two-thirds of a lifetime. He doesn't just own a company, he owns the company that owns his companies and uses some amount of deck-shuffling to keep himself from being in one position for too long, while also maintaining direct control over the insurance empire he'd built. As an added layer of personal protection, Sameki's businesses have a tendency to elevate Terran and Zephyleer Neptunian executives to the top positions in his boardrooms- these species in particular have the shortest average lifespans of all the Sol system, so the churn of aging executives is faster, and the living memory of someone like Sameki is a lot easier to forget. There isn't a single Ganymedean sitting on any board Sameki holds a stake in.
Eclipse Holdings has worn a few faces and owned a variety of companies over the years, and managing that empire can be a lot of work for one vampire to handle. Should a board member impress Sameki with their cunning, their insight or their business acumen, and should that board member never have found themselves the target of Sameki's rage, he might see fit to keep the short-lived species around beyond their mortal limits. Over the centuries Sameki has cultivated a hand-picked inner circle of like-minded ascendants to embrace and share his cursed affliction with, ensuring their valuable contributions to his businesses are not lost to the sands of time. Sameki's chosen will have to leave their boardrooms behind, and another short-lived executive will take their place. Once they've been afflicted with his vampirism, they'll join him in his inner circle. Most of them find the offer appealing, no one has ever declined Sameki's morbid gift. In this way, Sameki isn't alone in his vampiric affliction, he's built himself a handsome little court of cunning dependants to help keep the kingdom under control. There is always Martian blood to be had among their numbers, to maintain a flush face when they press flesh with the public. They don't make any moves without great care and consideration.
Today, Sameki and his inner circle live in the exclusive high-rises of Titan Garden's F-District, playing an active role in managing his insurance empire. He still finds people who push for legislative policies that favor his businesses and invests in their ascent to positions of power, working through layers of proxies wherever he needs to. He prefers to work hands-on with his holding companies, his enthusiastic encouragement and jovial demeanor carry down the chain to his agents, making an account with an Eclipse Holdings insurance company feel a lot less cold and stiff than his competitors. That is the trick that makes the whole thing work, that personable and energetic attitude that makes a financial contract feel like a meeting between friends. Insuring your business against the dangers of space is exhausting and complicated, if you make people feel at ease around your agents, it's much easier to persuade them to pay into one of your policies, as opposed to someone else's. There are a lot of choices a starfarer can go with, to find a policy that matches the needs and the scale of their business- Sameki owns a stake in most of those choices, but no one has to know that. It's preferable that they don't.
Things have been going smoothly on Titan Garden, but recently there has been some problems emerging for Sameki and his interests. He trusts his inner circle of hand-made vampires to help scout candidates who support his interests and guide them towards success, and they have performed this delicate work admirably for a very, very long time. Just this year, however, something's been happening to his associates. It started with one of them disappearing, an anomaly to be sure, but then, months later, another disappeared, with a third reportedly vanishing into thin air not long afterwards. Someone on Titan had begun to take notice of Sameki, and for all his wealth and all his influence, he could not figure out who that is. It's becoming a problem, and that problem is having an impact on Sameki's presence within his companies, interacting with his boardrooms. He has that temper, and when it turns sour it becomes frightening, fast. His good nature sows good fortune, but his outbursts tend to cause talented associates to find work elsewhere. The loss of Sameki's vampiric associates is irreplaceable, the awareness of this unwanted attention is unavoidable, and the impact his temper tantrums are having on his businesses- built carefully over centuries- will be irreversible. For the first time in two hundred years, Sameki found himself on the backfoot.
Having very little to work with but piles of ash and a few brass casings, Sameki knows he needs to take drastic measures to bring his situation under control. His network of resources aren't sufficient to the moment- he's going to have to make an appeal to something older and more powerful than himself. He's going to have to confess to the Priest.