Malfi. Hive World. Cesspool of Corruption. Jewel of the Calixis Sector. World of Many Doors and Endless Vice. The world into which Agent Maximilian Elazar Dante was born and then subsequently abandoned upon the stairs of local orphanage. The only clues as to his parentage was the suspensor-crib he was left in and the tiny bioplas thermo-glove covering his infant body, both items expensive enough to mark him as someone special. The glove marked with the initials MED, and stenciled upon the crib his full name – as if he was one of but many, and marking was needed to tell them apart. Greedy hands absconded with said items of course, leaving Maximilian as naked as he had been when he came into the galaxy, and taking with them those last clues as to his heritage.

Malfi is a semitropical, gloomy world of overbuilt hives and habitations ledges, lying some eight hundred days standard rim- and spinward from Scintilla. Malfi is by far the most heavily populated of Calixis' Hive Worlds, with a population approaching the five-hundred-billion level, and is the main manpower and manufacturing pool of the rimward territories of the sector. Despite its efforts, Malfi remains a border world, located at the very edge of Imperial space. It satisfies itself with commanding the Malfian subsector, ruling the territories rimward and spinward of Scintilla. The subsector governor answers only to the Lord Sector. Malfi is a seat of the Adeptus Administratum and several chief banking houses.

Malfi has a grudge; it believes it should be the sector capital world and venomously protests the supremacy of Scintilla. Certainly, with its super-continental hives and eradication of natural landscape, Malfi resembles a Segmentum Solar Hive World far more than any of the other worlds in the sector and its claim for capital eminence seems reasonable. However, politics and demographics are fickle mistresses. Early regimes, following the Lord Angevin’s crusade, made their headquarters on Malfi, but moved on as Scintilla was better placed to provide a center of effective governance for the sector.

Malfi is – and this may be the real reason the sector rulers passed it over – a place of the most infernal intrigue. It is impossible to count the courtly factions vying for power and the ear of the Matriarch. Every act and motion of Malfian life is about dissemblance and intrigue. Been seen with the wrong crowd or say something inappropriate, and you may be damned to years of squabbling diplomacy and sudden duels. Entering Malfian society, even the lower levels of society, one enters a world of complexity and deceit from which few emerge alive and unscathed.