Shapers of flesh and the last custodians of the condemned before the loss of sentience that always accompanies lobotomisation, House Gelex has held the Adeptus Mechanicus concession for servitor creation for centuries. It is perhaps to no one's surprise that the number of offences that can lead to life as a servitors have tripled since it was first awarded.
Philosophies and main duties
The House's expertise extends to the creation of a bewildering variety of vat grown constructs, from bloated flesh chassies on which to mount hundreds of kilos of heavy machinery, to delicate beauties destined for Barquentine's own harem.
During the Tempering, the period of every genator's career when they must demonstrate the value of the changes they have wrought upon their own flesh, the majority choose to pass as hulks weighed down with what appears to be vat-grown muscle, the better to conceal, sustain and house the biological machinery that once aroused the greed of the weapon from the Dark Age of Technology that chose to pass itself off as the so-called Emperor of Mankind. In the heat of combat their much celebrated intellects are drowned by waves of kill-stimms, frenzon and other compounds of less... wholesome origins.
It is often said the quickest way to get a Gelex to stop talking to you is ask them about their womenfolk, for none have been seen by any soul outside their brotherhood, leading many to speculate that they are either all maidens of incredible beauty or withered deformed crones.
The truth is far more terrible - to House Gelex, the female form is nothing more than a biological factory, prevented from fulfilling its true purpose by its pointlessly well developed frontal lobes.
In the depths of its vast lab-thanes, countless rows of swollen women shudder and twitch in autonomic response to the gargantuan levels of nutrients that enter their bodies through invasive peristaltic feeding tubes, their empty eyes twitching as their grotesquely enlarged wombs birth Gelex's creations and squirt countless litres of precious secretions into receiving vats.
Suspicion of House Gelex among its peers rose to an all time high several decades ago, in the wake of the Crimson Flux, a plague that devastated many of its rivals and came at a time when the problem of rampant overpopulation had reached the point where many of the hive's leading nobles were forced to spend entire hours grappling with the problem.
The genesmiths of Gelex have nothing but contempt for their inferiors or 'birthers'. They know nothing of the mysteries, of the House's origins on distant, fabled Luna, nor its desperate flight from the grasp of the golden Abomination that now sits on the throne of Terra. Nor do they know of existence as a blank slate, or what it is like to forge one's own body on the anvil of forbidden science and long proscribed gene-craft, before testing it almost to destruction in the bowels of the undergone.
Despite their contempt for the Master of Mankind, the gene-smiths do their best to appear pieous to their peers, but such is the vast and all-consuming nature of the Imperial Creed and its endlessly multiplying variations, that this illusion has a tendency to wither and fade under long observation. It is perhaps fortunate then that so much of the nobility relies upon Gelex's craft for their enhanced lifespans, their fertility and for their many... diversions.
There is a faction that is not so beholden and uses Gelex's impity and the the threat of its revelation as leverage. We speak here not of any human institution, but of the dread Slaugth, the maggot men, whose unceasing hunger for human cranial matter has led to deaths beyond counting and the extermination of entire cultures. It was a relatively simple matter for their human agents to strike a mutually beneficial arrangement - regular shipments of freshly harvested frontal lobes in exchange for their silence and enough of the Slaugth's own nightmarish science to secure House Gelex's contract with the Mechanicus in perpetuity.
As a general rule, House Gelex's mien and activities sit poorly with the pieous members of House Nur-Memmot. Aside from Gelexians' strange demeanour and questionable piety, on a world largely sustained by the fine tradition of industrialised cannibalism, the creation of so many servitors deprives the poor of their sustenance and creates more mouths to feed. To make matters worse, servitor productivity is so high that the Industrotech Clans often prioritise the care and feeding of their servitors over that of their human workforce.
However, while this source of tension often leads to power-plays and the covert sponsorship of repressed factions such as the Breakers and Corbinn's Comrades, there is little in the way of direct conflict between the two houses.
The same cannot be said for House Gelex and the Lambda Tech-Guild, for Gelex suspects the guild's secret and desires the source of the latter's blighted but unquestionably potent technology for its own ends.
The Synthetic Sisterhood
The Synthetic Sisterhood may be hunted outcasts and unable to draw on the house-level resources of other gangs but their savage fury - born from the abuse they've suffered at the hands of their former masters - makes up for any disadvantage in material.Everyone of the sisters began her existence as a nucleus of genetic material in one of House Gelex's birthing pods - brought into existence to embody the sordid flesh fantasies of whatever Spire Noble commissioned their creation.
Gene-sculpted and trained from unnatural birth to be the ultimate consorts, every sister spent decades serving as their lord's lover, confidant and in some cases, bodyguard. However, at some point, whether it be one indignity too far or an act of imaginable callousness on their part of their employer, they chose to break all ties of loyalty and make the long descent into the Hive.
As they make their way, long dormant poisons make their presence felt, no longer suprressed by the anti- venoms that were previously in their food, air and water. In their toxin-induced delirium, they see many strange and wondrous portents, but the most vivid are the glyphs sprayed onto walls and scratched onto bulkhead by the sisters that have gone before them.
Eventually, they arrive at their destination, close to organ failure and unable to distinguish their new-found sisters from the angels and daemons that dance across their vision.
It is only when they drink from a cup furred with countless antidote crystals can they see their new surroundings as they appear to others and start to learn the harsh truths of their new existence.
Their new-found life is once of savage necessity for the drugs they need to prolong their artificially curtailed life-spans are obscenely valuable and tightly controlled. Even their raw ingredients are painfully rare, often forcing the sisters into situations every bit as degrading as the ones that prompted their escape.
However, step by agonising step they have slowly accumulated their own chem-craft - their enhanced minds making cognitive leaps that would otherwise require centuries of unceasing toil. With this and whatever gene-tech the sisters have been able to steal from their creators, they have been able to carve their own small niche in the Golgothian economy, trading combat drugs, narcotics and a psy-active drug of their own creation called Sight, with gangers from other houses.
This is backed up by the sisters' considerable prowess, which is further enhanced by their own use of combat stimulants and their constant training which emphasises speed and agility above all other martial virtues. After all, is it not more efficient, is it not more elegant, than to start and end a fight with the single thrust of an envenomed blade than spending tedious and precious minutes trading blows with their genetic inferiors?
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