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Post by DreadPirateMike on Jun 12, 2018 0:53:52 GMT -5
 Kesprit Shaidar Full Name • Kesprit Shaidar Nickname • Kes, “Wild Child”, “Gundark”, “Engine Block” Race • Human Birthplace • Onderon Age • 42 Gender • Female Sexuality • Hetero Faction • Republic. More recently, specifically the people of Onderon. Concept • Rank 3 former Senate Commando. Beast Rider, indomitable freedom fighter. Languages • Basic (Standard and Onderonian dialects), Mando'a Assets • Kesprit pretty much lives a hand to mouth existence. While she theoretically has access to a discretionary spending account courtesy of her friends in the SIS, in addition to her savings from her previous life, she has no access to and frankly little use for either on Onderon itself. As such, she must either steal from the Mandalorians or rely on discreet aid for anything that her people can't easily hunt, forage or craft themselves. Luckily, the jungles of Onderon are bountiful. She has, however, established countless hidden sanctuaries over the years, all well-stocked in gear and provisions. This includes her old Senate Commando armor, diligently maintained and donned whenever it's time to mount any major raid. She also makes frequent use of a captured Mandalorian jetpack. Appearance Face Claim • Katheryn Winnick Height & Weight • 6'0; 180 lbs Overall Looks • Aside from a gentle smile, there isn’t a whole lot that one would call soft about Kesprit Shaidar. She does have some natural curves which a strenuous lifestyle has never entirely eradicated, and while there’s not a ton of it, she’s not quite devoid of any body fat. It turns out a perfectly sculpted figure isn’t all that useful in a harsh survival situation. However, she towers well above average height, and the majority of her undeniably sturdy frame is dominated by impressive and hard-earned muscle. She also carries more than her share of scars, some more recently from combat, and some dating as far back as the long one down her outer thigh that a larval drexl gave her for failing to secure it properly when she was 12. Body art has long been something of an outlet for her, and so tattoos are also in abundance, most frequently visible being the vibrant sleeve that extends from her right shoulder almost to the wrist. A fairly eclectic range of colors and themes are thus presented, but every one of the personal mounts she has had over the years are commemorated somewhere on her skin. Clear blue eyes are offset by long, platinum blonde hair. While this was once kept back by a neat and somewhat severe regulation ponytail, she’s let it go somewhat wild over the years, relying on a myriad of clasps and braids to keep it out of her face...though she somehow still manages to stuff it all back into her helmet when the need arises. Personality Profile Kesprit is, to use her chosen term, driven, although some have been known to prefer the word stubborn. And by her own admission, it’s fair. That’s not to say that she’s bull-headed; she’s actually quite patient, and capable of impressive self-control, virtues she’s had to cultivate over the past seven years enduring the affront of an enemy in her home that she knows she can’t yet defeat head on. She can be prideful at times and she has a fierce temper when pushed, but she’s more than capable of putting both aside when she knows they’d distract from an important objective. That all said, she’s just as likely to regard those faults as an asset. She’ll always get angry when the alternative is feeling helpless, and doing nothing is almost never an acceptable answer to a problem. Once she’s decided a goal is important to her, she’s relentless and utterly scornful of anyone trying to tell her it’s impossible. Some things may not always come as easily to her as for others, and she might have to attack a problem several ways before something works, but it’ll get done or she’ll die trying. In her less dire moments, when not constrained by other considerations, she has little use for subtlety, and isn’t remotely self-conscious. She’ll sing or dance for all she’s worth in the name of a good time without the slightest care for whether she’s doing it well (For the record, she’s neither brilliant, nor terrible at either.), she’ll eat or drink her fill whenever she has the chance while putting her elbows wherever she damn well pleases, and she’ll laugh herself dizzy at a really good joke. What she DOES hold dear is a strong, in some cases even rigid sense of honor. Even now, she still remembers the and tries her best to exemplify the ideals of decency, courage and selflessness that the Republic military insisted on. Even her Mandalorian enemies are not entirely removed from such consideration; while she will kill a Mandalorian warrior and strip their gear at every opportunity, for instance, she is aware of the emotional and cultural significance of their beskar’gam and will always leave that for later recovery. A bit of an adrenaline junky and tending toward restless when confronted with any sort of downtime, she usually “relaxes” in a way that burns off a lot of energy, like sports or a good workout. Background Father • Haliat Shaidar, Beast Lord, deceased Mother • Valenya Shaidar, honored elder and advisor, 65 Siblings • Mikum, Warrior, 38, Brother Parak, Smithy/Machinist, 34, Brother Other Important Connections • Sahael Ganya, scout and occasional lover, 32 Fanyen Manalik, rival lord and pain in her ass, 68 Jenek Gant, Primary SIS contact, 30 Overall History • While born and raised in the Onderonian wilds, Kesprit Shaidar was nevertheless what some condescendingly chose to call one of the “civilized” Beast Riders. Her father’s domain was one of the nearer to Iziz itself, in other words, so while she could climb, track, shoot, and eventually indeed ride as well as the next “savage” (A good deal better, in most cases.), she and her kin did visit the great city with some frequency. Some of them came to trade, others to find work, sometimes just to sate their curiosity. It was that last one which mainly drew Kes, and yet after awhile, she found the city itself could no longer do that for her. Iziz was also, with its starport and visitors, a window to the larger Republic and galaxy beyond Onderon. Out there, she would learn, there were cities even greater than Iziz. Cities that covered entire worlds, they said! And more wonders, too. Massive ships. People who could walk and talk, in more tongues and greater variation of appearance than even the wild creatures of her home. Much as she loved the world she’d been born to, she found herself more and more eager to see some of this amazing universe. She’d go as no useless wandering tourist, of course. There was a Republic recruitment office in Iziz, and when she’d reached the legal age, she strode confidently in to announce she’d fight for them. Evidently they didn’t get too many Beast Riders coming through their doors, as the recruiting officer politely tried to explain that military life might represent a harsher transition for her than most. He needn’t have bothered being diplomatic, as she was well used to this particular prejudice; he meant that she was an ignorant hick, and that despite being able to dismantle and maintain a blaster from the time she was six, she’d be utterly out of her depth and at loss for how to contribute to a technological galaxy. She thanked him for the consideration and then promised him that if the day ever came when the Republic REALLY needed its armed forces, it would be grateful there was more to it than a galaxy full up soft city folk. In fairness to the recruiter, he wasn’t wrong to warn her of a jarring transition. She probably looked like an idiot, a woman of 18 staring out her transport’s viewport like a wide eyed child as she looked upon hyperspace for the first time. And the first time she saw Coruscant...well, she’d heard about this, but being there for real, she had to fight down an atavistic desire to start breaking things. That a city had just kept growing up until it entirely swallowed up the entire planet...was this Onderon’s fate as well, ages from now? She came to see Galactic City’s charm in time, but the thought initially made her blood run cold. And through it all, there were countless smaller struggles to work through. Having no idea who that popular holo actor was, for instance, or being caught off guard by some offworld cuisine exotic only to her. And oh, her fellow recruits missed none of this, and few opportunities to have some fun at her expense for it. But all her life, she’d been impossible to deter from a goal she’d put her mind to, and this proved no exception. That which was strange and disturbing to her, she simply dealt with. That which it was critical for her to know, her training taught her. And as for the ribbing and affectionately demeaning nicknames she picked up over the years, she had an answer for that too: she brushed it all aside, and put her energy into excelling over and above those around her. She was consistently the best shot in her company, a terror with a combat knife, and she more than earned her personal favorite nickname of “Engine Block” as a regular contender in the fleet’s shock boxing circuit, where she never allowed her record to be sullied with a single knockout. Special Forces were a no brainer of a match for her, and she was soon assigned to an elite forward recon and assault unit, trained in the use of a personal jump pack to execute quick high altitude drops behind enemy lines and make a general nuisance of herself. She looks back fondly on those years, for both the camaraderie and the lessons learned. That was before the great war, of course, and most of her actual combat deployments were against pirates and other such riff raft, but the experience she picked up with effective small unit tactics have unquestionably helped keep her and her people alive against the far more serious opposition of recent years. She’d likely have made a career in the military, were it not for meeting a Togruta Navy lawyer named Koshti. The attraction was certainly helped along by her feeling than a Togruta was probably the most beautiful creature she’d discovered since leaving Onderon, but he was also funny, forthright, and unabashedly idealistic in the same way she strived to be herself. They were married shortly after Kes had mustered out of the service, and despite her initial wariness of the place, they settled down upon his birthplace of Coruscant, where he joined a local legal practice and she found work with the tactical response division of the Galactic City police force. They were happy for awhile, but sadly it didn’t last. On an urban planet with a trillion inhabitants, never mind the headquarters of the Black Sun syndicate, she was under fire on a far more regular basis than she’d ever been as an active duty marine, and she needed to be patched up on a few occasions. She took these close calls in stride, but for her husband, it was a constant source of worry that she refused to remove. Kes frankly felt as though she’d already made more than her fair share of compromises for the sake of the marriage, settling in a place so different and far from her home, and having found important and satisfying work, she had no intention of stifling herself further by giving it up. Furthermore, as Koshti grew older, he came into a yearning to be a father, a dream that his human wife could never help him realize. Kesprit would love to be able to say she took it with grace, wisdom and understanding when Koshti finally asked for a divorce. But in reality, there was a good deal of broken furniture, and the two did not part on speaking terms, one regret of hers among many. And for the next several years, Kesprit was instead married to her job, having little in the way of a personal life but amassing a nice little collection of awards and citations until she was rewarded with a chance to serve with the best of the best. Joining the Senate Guard meant there was no further doubt; she was one of the Republic’s finest, and while any talk of “humble beginnings” was as risky around her as ever, she now commanded the utmost respect by default. And she had to admit that while she’d never thought of herself as one to put on airs, it was a hell of a feeling when first she donned that brilliant blue armor to become part of the ancient legacy it stood for. She even loved the somewhat archaic ceremonial weapons she carried, reminded of the tools she was taught to as a child fashion from the jungle around her, and she trained relentlessly until she was satisfied she could use a shield as effectively as any other weapon she’d ever held. She wasn’t out of goals of course, not remotely. Within two years, she’d been elevated still further into the ranks of the elite Senate Commandos. Two years after that, she was a Commander. She was also an active participant in the war, a war that never ended for her. As the conflict intensified after Taris, and the Republic sought to throw all the capable bodies it could against the Sith advance, the Senate Commandos were too capable a force to simply leave sitting idle. Technically, even in a war zone, their job was still security, the protection of high value government property and personnel. But as a Commander, Kesprit had a good deal of leeway in deciding how best to ensure that security, and she often as not preferred to work with the regular troops on the scene to seek and destroy the threat before it could endanger their charge. Such was her decision when it finally came time to return home. As the hated Mandalorians and their Sith allies massed for a new invasion of her homeworld, she specifically requested the assignment, and was sent along with her men to safeguard queen Sali and her retinue, ensuring their safe evacuation if need be. Leaving the majority of her man stationed at the palace to do just that, she took a select few of her best and steadiest marksman to join that the first line of defense over the skies of Iziz. And for a while, despite the slaughter that followed, it all felt right. Endless green in every direction, open sky all around her, and reins in her hands. Fighting alongside her proud father. Completion. She couldn’t have been prouder than she was on that day to be a Beast Rider. The courage of her people was literally suicidal, refusing to break or turn tail even as those accursed droids came screaming down from orbit, spitting hate and fire all the way. Nor was their stand impotent; she never knew the proper tallies, but they made the thieving bastards pay for what they took. Nevertheless, the losses they sustained trying to fight the basilisks in open battle became unsustainable. Only after watching in horror as her father’s drexl plummeted lifeless to the city below, spilling its riders in the fall, did she swallow her shame and make use of her authority as his eldest child to sound a retreat. And so, at the conclusion of its defiant struggle, Iziz fell, and the Mandalorians could begin celebrating that Onderon was theirs once more. Except Onderon was not theirs. Whatever their self-serving propaganda claimed, they had never been anything more than intruders in her home, and she swore then that was all they would ever be. To that end, she set about re-acquainting herself with her home, knowing that her knowledge of the terrain would be one of her few real advantages going forward. She began training her Beast Rider brethren in the organized military tactics she’d learned so long ago, and set about building a proper resistance. It was an unequal struggle, but over time, she discovered allies. Even among those still living in Iziz under the Mandalorian heel, there were those eager to strike back however they could. And while the damned Armistice had tied the Republic’s hands, the SIS eventually managed to make contact with pledges of aid and assure her they’d not forgotten Onderon. And there she remains, taking every day as a new opportunity to fulfill her vow and ensure the interlopers never know a peaceful day on Onderonian soil. Regular raids and ambushes conceal further preparations in the deep jungle, where the freedom fighters of Onderon stockpile weapons and recover their strength in waiting for the day they can finally mount the all out assault that will drive the enemy from their home. |
