Imperial Sceptre

Staff of Eden #2, commonly known as the Russian Imperial Scepte, is a Piece of Eden, a piece of ancient and technologically advanced equipment created by the First Civilization to control humankind, their workforce. The Staves embodied sovereignty and dominion.

Owners

 * Isu (? – ?)
 * Alexander III of Russia (c. 1880s – 1894)
 * Rodrigo Borgia (1894 – 1908)
 * Grigori Rasputin (1908)
 * Templars (1908)

History
By 1888, this Staff had been entrusted to Tsar Alexander III, and was used as the Imperial Sceptre to maintain the monarch's power over the Russian Empire.

On 29 October, 1888, while returning home to Petrograd, the Tsar was attacked by the Russian Assassin Nikolai Orelov. After the Russian Imperial Train was derailed, Alexander threw the Staff to Nikolai, challenging his assailant to attack him with it.

The Tsar subsequently repelled the assassination attempt, leaving with the Piece of Eden still in his possession. After his death, it was passed on to his son Tsarevich Nicholas II.

However, the Staff was secretly stolen and replaced with a replica by Grigori Rasputin, who had infiltrated the Russian Royal House, and brought the Staff to a Templar research station in Tunguska.

In the summer of 1908, members of the Assassin Order contacted Nikola Tesla and offered him a chance for retribution on the Templars, for his dis-accreditation by the Templar Thomas Edison. Using his mastery of electricity and the, Tesla broadcast destruction into the facility, creating one of the largest explosions in history, which was estimated to have a force of more than 30 megatons of TNT, and flattened more than 2,000 kilometers of forest. The explosion also obliterated the research facility and the Staff within.

The event was a complete Assassin victory, though Nikolai Orelov was the only one to survive the event. Nikolai later returned to his partner Anna, bloodied and barely alive, muttering that the Staff had finally been destroyed.

However, Nikolai's statement proved to be untrue, as there was at least one shard that remained. This shard somehow came into the possession of Rasputin, who used it to manipulate Nicholas' wife and psychologically scar one of his disciples, a woman named Khioniya Guseva, after her failed attempt to kill him.

In 1916, Rasputin was assassinated by the Assassin Brotherhood, and he took the shard with him to his grave. In 1917, Nikolai, having learned of the shard's existence from the Tsarevich and concluding that even a fragment of the Staff would be a threat, exhumed Rasputin's body and retrieved the shard from his corpse. As of October 2002, the shard was in possession of Nadya Orelov.

Powers
The Staff was designed to control men's minds and bodies. When Nikolai Orelov approached the Staff in 1908, he heard several voices of the past emanating from it, playing almost like recordings, and projecting things such as "Always the fighter," "Adam, I have it," "Just like your father," and "Eve."