The [[Wend]] are not made, they are discovered by [[Celestial Empress|Her Majesty's]] baleful gaze. Even the Guiding Hand, once a collective of the galaxy's most powerful and successful financiers, could not hide forever. In an attempt to do so, they uploaded their minds to a hyper-advanced android, merging consciousnesses to become a single overmind capable of superhuman feats. That android spent half a million years bringing the galaxy to its knees, with blow after economic blow raining down until entire sectors were insolvent. When Her agents discovered the source, She declared its creation an act of Heresy. Remarkably, the android crafted from the minds of business tycoons proved shockingly adept at violence. After it had spent millennia (and countless fortunes' worth of superweapons and drones), the Empress arrived in Her own person, making act of presence, to chastise this upstart. Though not the only robot ever made a Wend, the Guiding Hand was the first. As a Wend, the Guiding Hand is the [[Imperial Bureaucracy|Bureaucracy's]] favorite tool for uncovering the edges of conspiracy, and for moving money that the Empire doesn't officially acknowledge as existing. While other Wend have more effective or embedded spy networks, the Hand's analytic capacity is unparalleled. From a single node in a network, the Guiding Hand can, and often does, uncover every single person or entity involved. Whenever they discover a suspiciously well-funded rebellion, or a Great House suddenly collapses into a civil war over resources, the Bureaucracy petitions Her to task Her Hand with investigation, though She only rarely deigns respond. When it isn't following Her Majesty's direct orders, the Hand busies itself with odds and ends, propping up a market here, debasing a currency there. At some point, it stopped being about money and just started to become an idle habit. The same way another person might tap their fingers or whistle to themselves, the Guiding Hand reshapes economies as a distraction for getting through boring meetings. To the people of [[Metropole]], the Guiding Hand is at once distant and ever-present. Everyone on Metropole knows that the Hand is in contact with everyone on Metropole, but no individual can ever seem to recall actually interacting with them. Instead, they find themselves receiving rumors, useful tips, hints and nudges in the right directions. There's some ambiguity about which of these events are actually the Hand's doing, and which are normal market activity, but if anything the Hand seems to prefer it that way. Analysis is the Guiding Hand's greatest strength, but it has long since learned to make effective use of surreptitious communication. The Guiding Hand doesn't know exactly what's in the temple, but it seems certain that the people of Metropole should be present for that temple's opening. The Hand doesn't generally express personal desires, except through the difficult-to-track patterns created by who it does and doesn't help, but when every officer of the Holding gets tipped off about something at the same time, it's a safe bet the Hand is in motion.