Post by Meira on Mar 7, 2011 17:28:35 GMT -5
Note: Massimo is technically my 11th character, but I am deactivating Dalibor Antero indefinitely to keep myself within the 10 character limit for which I already have full permission.
Faction: Formerly Sith, turning to Republic
Department: Navy
Rank: Lieutenant
Name: Massimo Germano Vescovi
Race: Human
Age: 28
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 160
Birth place: Carannia, Serenno
Appearance:
Massimo has black hair and well tanned skin. His green/brown eyes sit under thick eyebrows and above a fairly squared jaw. Though throughout most of his adult life, thus far, Massimo has kept his hair cropped short and his face clean shaven, recent events have seen the hair grow out to a more shaggy length and the occasional stubble shadow his jaw line.
He is not imposing, height or weight wise, but his military training and lifestyle has left him with a slim figure and notable muscle tone. When lucid, he is crisp, clean, and sharp. When he has fallen into psychosis, his clothing is likely to be as disheveled as his thoughts. No matter the status of his lucidity, however, his eyes always seem to have a piecing sharpness to them.
Personality:
Massimo is neat and meticulous, few details escape his observations. His preoccupation with neatness and cleanliness borders on obsessive, but within a military setting, remains functional. He is submissive around others and socially awkward. He often has trouble following the nuances of conversation. He is exceptionally intelligent and possesses an eidetic memory. This level of intelligence coincides with his social short-comings, as it often sets him apart from those around him.
Massimo is most affected, however, by his degenerating psychosis. Though not formally diagnosed, Massimo has over the years displayed many characteristics of paranoid schizophrenia. His delusions of persecution have led him to believe that the Sith Military has come under the control of extra-galactic beings. He also possesses visual, tactile, and auditory hallucinations. Over time, these symptoms have degraded his sense of reality and affect his ability to work and function normally.
Lucid moments come and go and can last as short as mere moments or as long as days and weeks. When in times of severe psychosis, Massimo's behavior can be frantic, his affect changing wildly and without warning. It is during times like this that Massimo is capable of violent behavior, toward others as well as himself, and should be approached with extreme caution.
Main hallucinations:
Skills:
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 5
Intelligence: 8
Speed: 5
Leadership: Formerly 6, currently 2
Unarmed: 3
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 3
Alignment: 0
Bio:
Carannia: Home to the most powerful families of Serenno's aristocracy. Home to Vincento and Gaia Vescovi. The two were wed more for political prospects than love. Indeed, the two rarely shared company. Gaia was, in many ways, an embarrassment.
Though beautiful, in her own right, Gaia was hardly capable of social graces. She had little patience for the vapid women that shared her social circles. She was prone to prolonged bouts of depression, with occasional, erratic bursts of mania. Bipolar disorder was the diagnosis, though such information was kept very private. Her condition was closely controlled by medication. But such things have their side effects. Gaia, while medicated, presented a flat affect, showing little interest in the world around her.
This fact meant very little to Vincento. The Vescovi family was far more interested in the monetary assets that would be acquired through the marriage. Vincento, a military man in his youth, was twice Gaia's age when they married. Rigid and cold, Gaia suited his distaste for personal connections. He did, however, ensure that Gaia would produce for him an heir. He was successful.
Gaia gave birth to not one, but two strong sons. Vincento named them Massimo and Camilo. The boys shared a middle name in Germano. Though they were twins, Massimo and Camilo were not identical. Where Massimo struck an immediate resemblance to Vincento, Camilo possessed more of his mother's traits. If there was anything that could stir the heart of Gaia, it was her sons. They became her world, her reason for life. They also became her destruction.
Though she knew she loved her sons deeply, the strong medications she took made interacting with them difficult. She could not muster the motivation to play and cuddle with them. Their embraces felt cold. In an act of pure sacrifice, Gaia stopped taking her medication. She kept this fact secret, which was not hard. Vincento took little notice of his family aside from periodically checking to ensure his sons were developing at an acceptable pace.
The initial results were positive. Gaia found joy in the first steps of her sons, their first words, and in their kisses. She reveled in their play as they grew and held them in her arms at every opportunity. But there was a shadow to the radiance that was their life. The love, the joy, the happiness returned to Gaia's life, but with it came the inevitable return of anguish and despair. She would lock herself away, denying her sons, who could not understand, the love and affection she sought to provide them. The guilt fed the sadness, and the sadness fed the guilt; an endless, dark cycle that would slowly rot away her soul.
Over time, Gaia came to fear that her madness, as she thought it to be, would infect her children, that it already had. The idea that she had doomed her children to her own fate ate away at her like a parasite. She had no escape, and worse, THEY had no escape. The solution terrified her, but it had to be done. For the sake of her children, it had to be done.
Gaia took the boys, now four years old, to their summer home. Nestled on a lakeside, the cottage was worlds away from the noise and speed of the capital. Here, time moved slower, and Gaia could enjoy their last days.
Long walks through the wild flowers, picnics on the lake shore; Gaia watched and laughed as her beautiful, radiant boys splashed and wrestled in the water. She cried as she watched them sleep, tucked together in the bed beside her. She read them stories and they captured insects in jars as trophies for her bookshelf. Their laughter echoed into her dreams at night, but always faded into the darkness that she knew would come.
Their final morning dawned bright and warm, the sun creating in the lake a blanket of crystal. Gaia woke her precious children gently, kissing their sleepy eyes. She dressed them in their finest clothes, dawned her best gown and combed her hair to a radiant shine. They ate, the boys declaring their mighty plans of conquest around mouthfuls of bread and fruit. She was silent, smiling, yet teary eyed.
They walked out to the lake, each beautiful boy clutching her hands. At the water's edge, she removed their shoes, kissing their toes to elicit wild squeals. She led them out into the water until they were waist deep. Kneeling, she took their hands in hers, kissing their fingers as she began to weep. The boy tried to comfort their mother, embracing her and whispering happy words. Her arms wrapped around them, holding them tightly. Then, before she could lose her resolve, she plunged them into the water, pushing them hard into the mud. The children writhed, but they were small and weak, and she was determined to save them.
Massimo emerged, spitting and hacking up water and mud, to the sounds of screams. His vision blurred by the tangle of wet hair that fell over his eyes. He cried, reaching out blindly for comfort, but finding none. Voices shrieked and bellowed. He saw his father's face, contorted by blood and anger. He saw his mother, hair wild, with Camilo draped across her arms. A blast ripped the air and his mother fell, her beautiful white dress transforming to red. She did not cry any more.
The next few weeks of Massimo's life was a blur of black clothing and sad faces. He watched, confused and scared as his mother and brother were sealed in a tomb. He fought when the people came to take away Camilo's things, biting and scratching at the servants' arms and legs. His world, which had always been full of his brother, was now suddenly empty.
He would find no comfort in his father. Vincento was aging, but he was as stern and rigid as he had ever been. When Massimo cried, his father would strike him. He was a nobleman of Serenno, self-reliance was the most important lesson he could ever learn. Vincento would make sure he did learn it.
Without so much as a good-bye from his father, Massimo was sent away to a prep school outside of Carannia. This school, the most prestigious on the planet, catered to the offspring of the highest houses of the aristocracy. His first nights saw his pillow soaked by tears. The five year old boy, forced to process so much on his own, turned inward. In his classes, he learned the basics of education. His teachers would describe him as an obedient, sad child. None mentioned his past, of course. Though rumors had spread about the manner of Gaia and Camilo's deaths, the official story was of a tragic accident. Massimo's memories of them would fade into the recesses of his mind, where they only ventured forth to haunt him in his dreams.
As he aged, young Massimo began to display the signs of a brilliant mind. His schoolwork was without flaw, causing him to be moved up a level to accommodate his intellect. His skills truly shined in areas of mathematics. When asked by a teacher how he could solve problems so quickly, Massimo had stated that he could see the numbers in his mind, that it was like a puzzle. He liked puzzles.
The school ordered for some tests to be done on Massimo, a standard intelligence quotient test indicated his IQ to be more than two standard deviations above the norm. A series of memory tests revealed Massimo's eidetic memory. While these findings amazed his teachers, Massimo found himself estranged from his peers.
By the age of ten, Massimo was on level with students half again his age. Though he'd never really made friends in the school, his acceleration separated him more from those his own age. The students at his intellectual level looked down on him, both figuratively and literally, and those his own age didn't know how to relate to him, nor him to them.
He tried. At the urgings of his teachers, Massimo attempted to relate to the other boys, but he never knew what to talk about with them. Something brought up at a conversation at a lunch table would remind him of an article he was reading for his lessons and he'd begin to ramble, unaware of the awkward silence he'd cast over the others. Other times, a joke would be told behind a teacher's back and Massimo, desperate to fit in, would laugh too loudly. It seemed that no matter what he did, he failed. This would drive him back to his books.
Massimo would graduate early from his prep school, with honors at that. His father attended the graduation ceremony, but Massimo would distinctly remember seeing him, motionless in the audience, as he received his diploma. Not a nod, not a smile, nothing would move the old man.
Now sixteen, Massimo returned home with his father. His stays in the Vescovi home were limited to the summers while he was at the prep school, but little, if anything, had changed over the years. Massimo did find, however, that his room had been transformed from the one he knew as a child. Gone were the toys and other indicators of youth; replaced by the spartan furnishings of a soldier. This was, after all, what he was to become.
During Massimo's final years at the prep school, old Vincento had been hard at work securing his son's place in an elite military school. Serenno, part of the Sith Empire, often funded such works. With the monetary donations of House Vescovi, along with Vincento's own sterling military record, it was only a matter of time before Massimo's place was secured. It would have to wait, however, until Massimo had turned 18.
Until that day, Vincento made certain that Massimo did not lack for work. A private tutor was hired to continue Massimo's studies, and Vincento took time out of his own day to instruct his son. Within a week of returning from school, Massimo had found himself in the company of his father longer than he could ever remember in his life. Vincento brought him along to meetings with other noble houses where the politics of Serenno were discussed. Vincento was aging and he had to ensure that Massimo would be prepared to take his place when the time came. And though they spent more time in each other's company, Massimo never did see any more affection than Vincento would show his own boots.
When his eighteenth birthday arrived, Massimo's father was away on business. A transport came for him and took him to the spaceport. Once again, Massimo found himself shipped off without even so much as a good-bye.
He was inducted into the Sith Naval Officer's Academy on Serpindal and placed within the Intelligence program. Here, his studies continued, with a focus on intelligence gathering and code breaking. Once again, Massimo found himself accelerating in his courses, and once again, his ability to interact with his peers seemed to stagnate. Though, unlike at his prep school, Massimo was in the company of some of the brightest men and women entering the Sith Military. His interactions, though still awkward and rare, were more positive than they'd been before. In fact, Massimo soon met a man whom he could claim to be a friend.
They met in the library, quite late into the evening. Massimo had been pouring over old code texts, his mind absorbing and storing it all as if taking holos. The other man seemed to appear out of nowhere, suddenly sitting across from him at the table. When Massimo looked up, he was struck by a strong sense of familiarity, but could not identify where that feeling came from. The man introduced himself as Camilo. Again, Massimo was surprised. When he told the man he'd had a brother named Camilo, the other had joked that perhaps he was Massimo's brother.
Over the next few weeks, Massimo found in Camilo the comradery he'd never experienced growing up. Though Camilo was part of a different program that caused their schedules to be nearly impossible to coordinate, the two found ways of getting together. Mostly, they met in the library late at night to study or blow off steam.
Camilo was far more social than Massimo and regaled him with his dramatic stories of wooing female classmates and wreaking havoc on his professors. The two were soon very close friends, confiding everything in each other. Massimo even told Camilo of his memories, and sometimes nightmares, of his mother and brother. He'd never uttered such things to anyone in his life.
Massimo, through the nerve rending insistence of his friend, would try over the coming years to break out of the shell that had grown around him. They would occasionally find themselves in possession of leave passes from the base. They would, as any pair of genius young men would do, seek out the nearest cantina and blow whatever money they'd managed to scrounge up on overpriced alcoholic drinks. With such liquid courage coursing through them, Camilo would guide Massimo toward women at the cantinas, then sit back and watch as Massimo would fail gloriously to win their favor. They tried spice in the alleys, but Massimo would begin to hear his mother's voice and it scared him away from the drugs.
With his studies full of the techniques for breaking codes and intercepting transmissions, Massimo found himself in a flow of work and creativity. He lived and breathed his assignments, completing them in record time and amazing his superiors. But in other areas, Massimo lacked skill.
Because they were still technically military, Massimo and his classmates were submitted to regular military drill exercises and training. He failed twice on an exam that involved cleaning and assembling a weapon. He only passed because he spent a number of nights assembling and disassembling a pistol while Camilo barked orders at him and timed his efforts. Shooting the pistol, Massimo was slightly below the average skill level, but managed to remain within the acceptable standards.
As the final exams for their programs approached, Massimo and Camilo found themselves swamped with work and study. Their whole beings poured over the texts and holos that they often fell asleep on during their all night study sessions. Their placements within the military depended on their success. Not surprisingly, Massimo graduated, yet again, with honors.
At his graduation ceremony, Vincento posed with his son for a customary picture. In their pose, the two were shaking hands, their faces rigid and emotionless as their eyes stared into the camera. Later, when looking at the photo, Massimo would wonder if the slightly upturned corner of his father's mouth was a genuine smile, or simply an imperfection of the photo itself. He would never know for sure. His father would die before Massimo ever saw him again.
After his graduation at 22, the years would see Massimo connected to different ships within the Sith Navy. His skills were utilized throughout the Empire's sphere of influence making it hard for him to become comfortable in any one place for long. This seemed to suit the young officer fine. The constant transfers meant new work that always kept him sharp and focused, and the lack of time to spend around others meant he never had to try to be sociable.
It also meant, however, that he would go quite a long time without seeing his friend Camilo. From what Massimo could gather, after graduation, Camilo had been stationed on Sernpindal and stayed relatively static. Massimo would receive a message from Camilo from time to time, but the place his friend occupied in his heart seemed to feel empty.
Soon enough, however, that void would be filled. While working alone in a computer bay on a ship that was transferring him to a new post, Massimo was approached by a woman who introduced herself as Eliana. Her informal nature, at first, lead Massimo to assume the woman was a civilian, but she would tell him otherwise.
Eliana, a beautiful Serenno woman in Massimo's eyes, began to divulge her true reasons for approaching him. She was a deep cover operative who had been given license to work independently of the chain of command. With this freedom, she had the ability to infiltrate the enemy in a way unobstructed by the bureaucratic red tape. What she needed from Massimo was someone who could take the intelligence she collected, analyze it, and brief her on the nature of what she'd found. This, she could then take to her other contact, who would decide how to implement the knowledge. Massimo would be her analyst.
He was not to speak of her work to anyone, not even his own superiors. He had no way of contacting Eliana, nor did he know anything more about her than her name and what she wanted from him. He would continue his normal assignments as usual, and work on whatever Eliana brought him, when she brought it to him, then return it all to her. There would be no evidence that she even existed to him at all. She was a ghost.
And so began Massimo's secret secondary objective. He found himself looking forward to the times when Eliana would appear and present him with a challenge. Her mystery enticed him, more so because he never knew when to expect her, and because she always seemed to have a certain way of looking at him as he worked. Her smiles and praise for a job well done awoke in him a yearning for a deeper relationship. But Eliana never seemed to return that desire... not at first.
As time would pass and the Empire became more active, Massimo found himself with more and more work to bog him down. At times, the stress of his worked would awaken voices in his mind. Massimo told himself he was only imagining things, that it was the stress. This was true, of course, but he did not know the depths and dangers of his own imagination.
His work would suffer; be turned in late or less organized than his norm. His appearance too seemed to deteriorate. Massimo's superiors noticed this and wondered if the man was being pushed too hard. He was encouraged to take a short leave to regain his composure. It wasn't entirely a rebuke, but Massimo understood the point. He had to pull himself together.
His leave was granted for him to return to his home on Serenno. At first, Massimo found the empty mansion horrifying rather than relaxing. But that was before Camilo showed up at his door. it seemed his old friend had also been granted a short, two week leave and had come looking for him. Massimo couldn't have been more overjoyed. Camilo was welcomed and given the grand tour before Massimo insisted he stay the two weeks in the mansion with him. It didn't take much convincing.
The first week of their leave was spent lounging around the mansion and its grounds, with the occasional (and embarrassing, on Massimo's part) foray into the city's cantinas. Aside from the fact that Massimo was still woefully terrible with women, he couldn't look at any of them without imagining Eliana's face. Of course, he couldn't discuss the mysterious beauty with Camilo, much as he wanted to.
That topic, however, would be rendered moot in the second week of their leave. Eliana appeared in Massimo's room in the dead of night, frantic for him to crack a coded message for her. As always, he was mesmerized by her beauty, and enticed by the challenge she brought him. The work he did for Eliana never failed to be the most difficult he ever had.
It took a few hours, and soon the sun was rising when Massimo finally cracked the code. Eliana, this time, seemed more relieved and grateful that Massimo could ever remember her. She even embraced him and kissed his cheek. Massimo fell back into bed after she left, though he was unable to sleep the remaining two hours before it was time to wake for breakfast.
As Massimo sat down at the breakfast table across from Camilo, the dark circles under his eyes and his yawns gave something away. When Camilo inquired, Massimo tried to deflect and evade. But Camilo pressed the issue, irritating Massimo to the point that he shouted at his friend. The lack of sleep and the irritation from Camilo brought back a worrisome buzzing in Massimo's mind and he excused himself from the table.
Camilo allowed Massimo his space for the next few hours. When Massimo had calmed down, Camilo didn't raise the issue again, but his demeanor showed a concern that he didn't have to voice.
The day came for the two to part once again and venture back into their respective areas of military service. They said their goodbyes and Camilo made Massimo promise to contact him if he ever needed someone to talk to. Massimo made the promise, knowing it was an empty one.
When the Sith Empire began to move aggressively against the Republic, Massimo found himself stretched to his capacity. His assignments became a blur of ships and bases as he struggled to maintain a sense of where he was and what he was doing. He was not, now, afforded the luxury of recovery time and was pressed to perform through fatigue and exertion. He managed, but he was slowly losing touch with time and the world around him.
Eliana's appearances became less of a thrill during this hectic time. She did what she could to encourage him, even seemed to show him genuine affection, and he did what he could to help her. But the stress was getting to him. The voices had returned, more insistent this time. Massimo wanted to reach out to Camilo, but he seemed so far away. Instead, he confided in Eliana. Her responses were deflective, as if she didn't want to acknowledge his worries, as if the voices were completely natural. When he brought them up, she would laugh and call him silly.
One day, while working on a crowded ship, Massimo hit his limit. The voices had kept him up for days, and his work only seemed to pile on heavier as he plowed through it. He stood up at the terminal where he'd been working, shouting for the voices to stop. His hands had gripped his head at the temples and he breathed heavily. Other hands took hold of his arms. He could remember trying to fight them off before everything went black.
Massimo would awake strapped to a hospital bed, blurry-eyes and confused. Beings stood around him, dressed in white and looking down over him like some kind of lab rat. He tried to move, tried to speak, but he couldn't seem to do either of these things. He watched, helpless and scared as he was scanned, prodded, drugged, and scanned again. Time had no meaning in the spaces between the blackness of sleep.
In reality, Massimo had been committed to a military hospital ship where his psychosis was being analyzed. He was kept heavily sedated during the first part of this analysis, but slowly weened off of sedation in order to determine his cognitive abilities after their tests had been run.
Massimo saw a number of doctors who asked countless questions and put him to a number of tests and tasks. He did his best to go along as instructed, but his confusion often made him angry and frustrated. For all the questions the doctors asked, none answered the ones he himself imposed. Where was he? How long would they keep him there?
One doctor in particular seemed keen on getting Massimo to reveal some secret. Massimo knew he was trying to gain information on his work for Eliana, but he would not give in. He knew the work he was doing with Eliana was more important than anything that might happen to him.
Somehow, Eliana had found him one night as he sat alone in his room. She came to him panicked, saying that she had feared the worst for him. She could not stay long, for fear of detection, but warned him against the doctors. She told him that they were spies and liars that would stop at nothing to drain him of everything he knew. Before disappearing, she promised she would come back for him soon.
He tried to hold out, but the doctors persisted with increasing vigor. Their tests turned into treatments which seemed more like torture. Massimo resisted, but every man has their breaking point. The doctors eventually found his. He told them everything. That night, he was given a medication to ease the pain and help him sleep.
As Massimo drifted in the limbo of unconsciousness, the hospital ship fell under attack. He and many other patients were moved to shuttles which tried to escape to a nearby moon. Massimo's ship was shot down as it tried to land. Secured as he was, he was the only survivor. He would not wake, lucidly, however, for many hours.
When Massimo did wake, he found himself in some kind of cave, a hard packed dirt floor under the chair he was tied to, and water trickling down the stone walls around him. The only light was from a lantern sitting on a metal table. His eyes struggled to adjust to the dimness around to pool of light, but he could see nothing beyond the lantern's reach. It didn't matter, she came to him.
Eliana was the same beautiful woman Massimo had always known him to be, but somehow in this light, in this cave, she was transformed. Her anger and her disdain morphed her features, making her an entirely new and dangerous creature. She berated him for failing, for giving her up. She beat him and starved him of food and water. He had no means of measuring how long he had endure, or would have to continue to endure.
As she held him captive, Eliana slowly gave flesh to a fear that Massimo had been holding secret. The work he'd done for her over the years had caused the seeds of suspicion to be planted, take root, and slowly grow in the back of his mind. Who her superiors were, why she was given license to work outside of the chain of command, the extreme secrecy of that work; Massimo had begun to suspect she was not working for the Sith at all.
At first, he had thought she was a spy for the Republic, but in that cave, Massimo came to a much more fearful realization. Eliana was an agent for a race of extragalactic beings who were preparing to take over their galaxy. These beings had powers of mind control that no living soul could resist, not even those who wielded the Force. They had their hooks so deep in Eliana's mind, she had no means of escape. She could not be blamed for what she did. She did not know the truth.
After twenty days underground, Massimo was sure he would soon die. The beings were beginning to realize that his mind was broken. Their attempts to invade it had ruined him. He was not strong enough to be a host and they therefor had no more use for him.
He told himself that she was fighting their influence as she held the gun to his head, that though her face showed no mercy, she fought a battle within. Were it not for Camilo's arrival, that battle would have been lost and Massimo would be dead.
But Camilo had arrived. He'd heard of the attack on the hospital ship and had come with a detachment to look for survivors. Eliana had turned her rage on Camilo and Massimo watched, helpless, as the two struggled in the dim light of the cave. Camilo managed to incapacitate Eliana and untied his friend from the chair. As the two made their way toward the cave's exit, however, Eliana came to and attacked Camilo once again. Camilo was pulled back into the cave's darkness, shouting for Massimo to go, to run. Massimo refused to leave. Then a blaster shot echoed from the cave. After a long silence, Eliana emerged.
He ran. His first thought was to find one of the patrols that Camilo had mentioned, but he could find none. Though he seemed to have lost Eliana, Massimo spent his days and nights vigilant should she find him.
After three days and no sign of any Sith patrols, Massimo began to fear he was looking for the wrong people. Eliana was a tool of the beings, and if her ramblings could be trusted, more and more minds were being taken within the Sith Empire. He would not be safe among them, they would know him and know that he must be killed. His only hope was to seek those the beings had not yet infiltrated: the Republic.
After many more days struggling to survive in the forests of the moon, Massimo stumbled upon a small trading ship which had landed on the moon to make some small repairs. The traders were kind folk and cared for him after he collapsed at the edge of their camp. They promised that they would take him as far as their next trade stop, where he was sure to find transport to wherever he needed to go.
Password: Bylgia
RP Sample:
"There there, stranger.... Nev, c'mere. He's waking up."
Massimo's eyes fluttered open. It was dark, but there were lanterns hung around the area. He feared, at first, that he was back in the cave. But as his eyes turned upward, he could see the stars. Massimo had never seen anything so beautiful.
A face suddenly obstructed his view, and Massimo's eyes had to once again adjust to focus. It was a woman's face, old but kind. The crows feet at the outer edges of her eyes became more prominent when she smiled. Her teeth were slightly yellow, but straight. All together, she had a comforting face.
"You sure gave us a start, young man." she said, he tone both soothing and chastising. "Can you sit up?"
Massimo blinked at the woman a few times, then nodded his head and moved to push himself off the ground. Wincing, his hand reached up to his head where he felt a bandage along the right side.
"You knocked yourself something fierce on our camp table" said a voice that was approaching on his left. Massimo turned to see a man of a similar age to the lady next to him approaching with a bowl. "Here," he said, "some nice warm soup should set you right."
Massimo accepted the bowl and tore into the soup, ignoring the burn on his tongue in his hunger. The old couple chuckled to themselves as they watched him. Within minutes, the bowl was empty and the woman hurried to fetch him more.
"Where am I?" Massimo asked the man.
"On one of Maridun's moons. I don't know its name. My wife and I had some trouble with our ship's engines as we were coming in on the system. We couldn't make it to the planet proper, so we touched down here and sent a message for help and supplies. What about you, son? How did you get here?"
"I... I don't remember." he lied. "I know I was on a ship that crashed, but I can't remember anything else."
"You hit your head pretty hard, dear." the woman said as she returned with his bowl refilled. "I'm sure it'll come back to you as you recover."
"You can come with us tomorrow. We're expecting to get the parts and be on our way. I'm sure you can find transport or whatever you need at the port on Maridun." The man had left it at that, as if the matter were settled.
As Massimo finished his second bowl of soup, the couple prepared him a place to in the hold of their ship. He thanked them a number of times, but did not dare sleep. He remained awake through the night, fearful that Eliana would find him. If she did, he imagined she would kill the kindly couple.
He nodded off a few times, but as the morning light came, so did the transport from Maridun. Massimo left the damnable moon behind, along with Eliana and Camilo.
Quote Credits:
(1) Mal - Character in the movie "Inception"
(2) Ralph Waldo Emerson
(3) Allen Ginsberg - "Howl"
(4) Albert Einstein
(5) Gandhi
Faction: Formerly Sith, turning to Republic
Department: Navy
Rank: Lieutenant
Name: Massimo Germano Vescovi
Race: Human
Age: 28
Height: 5'10"
Weight: 160
Birth place: Carannia, Serenno
Appearance:
Massimo has black hair and well tanned skin. His green/brown eyes sit under thick eyebrows and above a fairly squared jaw. Though throughout most of his adult life, thus far, Massimo has kept his hair cropped short and his face clean shaven, recent events have seen the hair grow out to a more shaggy length and the occasional stubble shadow his jaw line.
He is not imposing, height or weight wise, but his military training and lifestyle has left him with a slim figure and notable muscle tone. When lucid, he is crisp, clean, and sharp. When he has fallen into psychosis, his clothing is likely to be as disheveled as his thoughts. No matter the status of his lucidity, however, his eyes always seem to have a piecing sharpness to them.
Personality:
Massimo is neat and meticulous, few details escape his observations. His preoccupation with neatness and cleanliness borders on obsessive, but within a military setting, remains functional. He is submissive around others and socially awkward. He often has trouble following the nuances of conversation. He is exceptionally intelligent and possesses an eidetic memory. This level of intelligence coincides with his social short-comings, as it often sets him apart from those around him.
Massimo is most affected, however, by his degenerating psychosis. Though not formally diagnosed, Massimo has over the years displayed many characteristics of paranoid schizophrenia. His delusions of persecution have led him to believe that the Sith Military has come under the control of extra-galactic beings. He also possesses visual, tactile, and auditory hallucinations. Over time, these symptoms have degraded his sense of reality and affect his ability to work and function normally.
Lucid moments come and go and can last as short as mere moments or as long as days and weeks. When in times of severe psychosis, Massimo's behavior can be frantic, his affect changing wildly and without warning. It is during times like this that Massimo is capable of violent behavior, toward others as well as himself, and should be approached with extreme caution.
Main hallucinations:
- Camilo: A man who always appears a similar age as Massimo. Camilo is something of a visualization of what Massimo's lost brother might look like as an adult. He is laid back, humorous, and cares deeply for Massimo. He "works" for a related branch to Naval Intelligence, allowing the two to spend time together when not overly busy.
- Eliana: As Camilo, Eliana appears of an age with Massimo. She is beautiful, brave, and dangerous. Massimo feels as though a relationship between himself and Eliana has grown, but that something keeps them apart. Before his split from the Sith Navy, Eliana was an "opperative" within the Intelligence department and Massimo was her "handler". All record of their meetings and her "activity in the field" were kept secret, even from Massimo's superiors.
Massimo has not seen Camilo or Eliana since the cave incident (explained in the bio) - Disembodied voices: These voices, mostly whispers, can arise at any time, but most often when Massimo is overly stressed. They voice his insecurities and his fears. Eventually, Massimo believes these voices to be coming from the extra-galactic beings that he believes are using the Sith as puppets. He fights against their influence, but being as they come from his own mind, this is an extremely hard task. When Massimo is hearing the voices, he cannot concentrate and may suddenly become very agitated and possibly violent.
Skills:
- Code breaking
- Security
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 5
Intelligence: 8
Speed: 5
Leadership: Formerly 6, currently 2
Unarmed: 3
Melee Weapons: 2
Ranged Weapons: 3
Alignment: 0
Bio:
"You're waiting for a train..." 1
Carannia: Home to the most powerful families of Serenno's aristocracy. Home to Vincento and Gaia Vescovi. The two were wed more for political prospects than love. Indeed, the two rarely shared company. Gaia was, in many ways, an embarrassment.
Though beautiful, in her own right, Gaia was hardly capable of social graces. She had little patience for the vapid women that shared her social circles. She was prone to prolonged bouts of depression, with occasional, erratic bursts of mania. Bipolar disorder was the diagnosis, though such information was kept very private. Her condition was closely controlled by medication. But such things have their side effects. Gaia, while medicated, presented a flat affect, showing little interest in the world around her.
This fact meant very little to Vincento. The Vescovi family was far more interested in the monetary assets that would be acquired through the marriage. Vincento, a military man in his youth, was twice Gaia's age when they married. Rigid and cold, Gaia suited his distaste for personal connections. He did, however, ensure that Gaia would produce for him an heir. He was successful.
Gaia gave birth to not one, but two strong sons. Vincento named them Massimo and Camilo. The boys shared a middle name in Germano. Though they were twins, Massimo and Camilo were not identical. Where Massimo struck an immediate resemblance to Vincento, Camilo possessed more of his mother's traits. If there was anything that could stir the heart of Gaia, it was her sons. They became her world, her reason for life. They also became her destruction.
Though she knew she loved her sons deeply, the strong medications she took made interacting with them difficult. She could not muster the motivation to play and cuddle with them. Their embraces felt cold. In an act of pure sacrifice, Gaia stopped taking her medication. She kept this fact secret, which was not hard. Vincento took little notice of his family aside from periodically checking to ensure his sons were developing at an acceptable pace.
The initial results were positive. Gaia found joy in the first steps of her sons, their first words, and in their kisses. She reveled in their play as they grew and held them in her arms at every opportunity. But there was a shadow to the radiance that was their life. The love, the joy, the happiness returned to Gaia's life, but with it came the inevitable return of anguish and despair. She would lock herself away, denying her sons, who could not understand, the love and affection she sought to provide them. The guilt fed the sadness, and the sadness fed the guilt; an endless, dark cycle that would slowly rot away her soul.
Over time, Gaia came to fear that her madness, as she thought it to be, would infect her children, that it already had. The idea that she had doomed her children to her own fate ate away at her like a parasite. She had no escape, and worse, THEY had no escape. The solution terrified her, but it had to be done. For the sake of her children, it had to be done.
Gaia took the boys, now four years old, to their summer home. Nestled on a lakeside, the cottage was worlds away from the noise and speed of the capital. Here, time moved slower, and Gaia could enjoy their last days.
Long walks through the wild flowers, picnics on the lake shore; Gaia watched and laughed as her beautiful, radiant boys splashed and wrestled in the water. She cried as she watched them sleep, tucked together in the bed beside her. She read them stories and they captured insects in jars as trophies for her bookshelf. Their laughter echoed into her dreams at night, but always faded into the darkness that she knew would come.
Their final morning dawned bright and warm, the sun creating in the lake a blanket of crystal. Gaia woke her precious children gently, kissing their sleepy eyes. She dressed them in their finest clothes, dawned her best gown and combed her hair to a radiant shine. They ate, the boys declaring their mighty plans of conquest around mouthfuls of bread and fruit. She was silent, smiling, yet teary eyed.
They walked out to the lake, each beautiful boy clutching her hands. At the water's edge, she removed their shoes, kissing their toes to elicit wild squeals. She led them out into the water until they were waist deep. Kneeling, she took their hands in hers, kissing their fingers as she began to weep. The boy tried to comfort their mother, embracing her and whispering happy words. Her arms wrapped around them, holding them tightly. Then, before she could lose her resolve, she plunged them into the water, pushing them hard into the mud. The children writhed, but they were small and weak, and she was determined to save them.
Massimo emerged, spitting and hacking up water and mud, to the sounds of screams. His vision blurred by the tangle of wet hair that fell over his eyes. He cried, reaching out blindly for comfort, but finding none. Voices shrieked and bellowed. He saw his father's face, contorted by blood and anger. He saw his mother, hair wild, with Camilo draped across her arms. A blast ripped the air and his mother fell, her beautiful white dress transforming to red. She did not cry any more.
The next few weeks of Massimo's life was a blur of black clothing and sad faces. He watched, confused and scared as his mother and brother were sealed in a tomb. He fought when the people came to take away Camilo's things, biting and scratching at the servants' arms and legs. His world, which had always been full of his brother, was now suddenly empty.
"The years teach much which the days never knew." 2
He would find no comfort in his father. Vincento was aging, but he was as stern and rigid as he had ever been. When Massimo cried, his father would strike him. He was a nobleman of Serenno, self-reliance was the most important lesson he could ever learn. Vincento would make sure he did learn it.
Without so much as a good-bye from his father, Massimo was sent away to a prep school outside of Carannia. This school, the most prestigious on the planet, catered to the offspring of the highest houses of the aristocracy. His first nights saw his pillow soaked by tears. The five year old boy, forced to process so much on his own, turned inward. In his classes, he learned the basics of education. His teachers would describe him as an obedient, sad child. None mentioned his past, of course. Though rumors had spread about the manner of Gaia and Camilo's deaths, the official story was of a tragic accident. Massimo's memories of them would fade into the recesses of his mind, where they only ventured forth to haunt him in his dreams.
As he aged, young Massimo began to display the signs of a brilliant mind. His schoolwork was without flaw, causing him to be moved up a level to accommodate his intellect. His skills truly shined in areas of mathematics. When asked by a teacher how he could solve problems so quickly, Massimo had stated that he could see the numbers in his mind, that it was like a puzzle. He liked puzzles.
The school ordered for some tests to be done on Massimo, a standard intelligence quotient test indicated his IQ to be more than two standard deviations above the norm. A series of memory tests revealed Massimo's eidetic memory. While these findings amazed his teachers, Massimo found himself estranged from his peers.
By the age of ten, Massimo was on level with students half again his age. Though he'd never really made friends in the school, his acceleration separated him more from those his own age. The students at his intellectual level looked down on him, both figuratively and literally, and those his own age didn't know how to relate to him, nor him to them.
He tried. At the urgings of his teachers, Massimo attempted to relate to the other boys, but he never knew what to talk about with them. Something brought up at a conversation at a lunch table would remind him of an article he was reading for his lessons and he'd begin to ramble, unaware of the awkward silence he'd cast over the others. Other times, a joke would be told behind a teacher's back and Massimo, desperate to fit in, would laugh too loudly. It seemed that no matter what he did, he failed. This would drive him back to his books.
Massimo would graduate early from his prep school, with honors at that. His father attended the graduation ceremony, but Massimo would distinctly remember seeing him, motionless in the audience, as he received his diploma. Not a nod, not a smile, nothing would move the old man.
Now sixteen, Massimo returned home with his father. His stays in the Vescovi home were limited to the summers while he was at the prep school, but little, if anything, had changed over the years. Massimo did find, however, that his room had been transformed from the one he knew as a child. Gone were the toys and other indicators of youth; replaced by the spartan furnishings of a soldier. This was, after all, what he was to become.
During Massimo's final years at the prep school, old Vincento had been hard at work securing his son's place in an elite military school. Serenno, part of the Sith Empire, often funded such works. With the monetary donations of House Vescovi, along with Vincento's own sterling military record, it was only a matter of time before Massimo's place was secured. It would have to wait, however, until Massimo had turned 18.
Until that day, Vincento made certain that Massimo did not lack for work. A private tutor was hired to continue Massimo's studies, and Vincento took time out of his own day to instruct his son. Within a week of returning from school, Massimo had found himself in the company of his father longer than he could ever remember in his life. Vincento brought him along to meetings with other noble houses where the politics of Serenno were discussed. Vincento was aging and he had to ensure that Massimo would be prepared to take his place when the time came. And though they spent more time in each other's company, Massimo never did see any more affection than Vincento would show his own boots.
When his eighteenth birthday arrived, Massimo's father was away on business. A transport came for him and took him to the spaceport. Once again, Massimo found himself shipped off without even so much as a good-bye.
He was inducted into the Sith Naval Officer's Academy on Serpindal and placed within the Intelligence program. Here, his studies continued, with a focus on intelligence gathering and code breaking. Once again, Massimo found himself accelerating in his courses, and once again, his ability to interact with his peers seemed to stagnate. Though, unlike at his prep school, Massimo was in the company of some of the brightest men and women entering the Sith Military. His interactions, though still awkward and rare, were more positive than they'd been before. In fact, Massimo soon met a man whom he could claim to be a friend.
“With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares…” 3
They met in the library, quite late into the evening. Massimo had been pouring over old code texts, his mind absorbing and storing it all as if taking holos. The other man seemed to appear out of nowhere, suddenly sitting across from him at the table. When Massimo looked up, he was struck by a strong sense of familiarity, but could not identify where that feeling came from. The man introduced himself as Camilo. Again, Massimo was surprised. When he told the man he'd had a brother named Camilo, the other had joked that perhaps he was Massimo's brother.
Over the next few weeks, Massimo found in Camilo the comradery he'd never experienced growing up. Though Camilo was part of a different program that caused their schedules to be nearly impossible to coordinate, the two found ways of getting together. Mostly, they met in the library late at night to study or blow off steam.
Camilo was far more social than Massimo and regaled him with his dramatic stories of wooing female classmates and wreaking havoc on his professors. The two were soon very close friends, confiding everything in each other. Massimo even told Camilo of his memories, and sometimes nightmares, of his mother and brother. He'd never uttered such things to anyone in his life.
Massimo, through the nerve rending insistence of his friend, would try over the coming years to break out of the shell that had grown around him. They would occasionally find themselves in possession of leave passes from the base. They would, as any pair of genius young men would do, seek out the nearest cantina and blow whatever money they'd managed to scrounge up on overpriced alcoholic drinks. With such liquid courage coursing through them, Camilo would guide Massimo toward women at the cantinas, then sit back and watch as Massimo would fail gloriously to win their favor. They tried spice in the alleys, but Massimo would begin to hear his mother's voice and it scared him away from the drugs.
With his studies full of the techniques for breaking codes and intercepting transmissions, Massimo found himself in a flow of work and creativity. He lived and breathed his assignments, completing them in record time and amazing his superiors. But in other areas, Massimo lacked skill.
Because they were still technically military, Massimo and his classmates were submitted to regular military drill exercises and training. He failed twice on an exam that involved cleaning and assembling a weapon. He only passed because he spent a number of nights assembling and disassembling a pistol while Camilo barked orders at him and timed his efforts. Shooting the pistol, Massimo was slightly below the average skill level, but managed to remain within the acceptable standards.
As the final exams for their programs approached, Massimo and Camilo found themselves swamped with work and study. Their whole beings poured over the texts and holos that they often fell asleep on during their all night study sessions. Their placements within the military depended on their success. Not surprisingly, Massimo graduated, yet again, with honors.
At his graduation ceremony, Vincento posed with his son for a customary picture. In their pose, the two were shaking hands, their faces rigid and emotionless as their eyes stared into the camera. Later, when looking at the photo, Massimo would wonder if the slightly upturned corner of his father's mouth was a genuine smile, or simply an imperfection of the photo itself. He would never know for sure. His father would die before Massimo ever saw him again.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."4
After his graduation at 22, the years would see Massimo connected to different ships within the Sith Navy. His skills were utilized throughout the Empire's sphere of influence making it hard for him to become comfortable in any one place for long. This seemed to suit the young officer fine. The constant transfers meant new work that always kept him sharp and focused, and the lack of time to spend around others meant he never had to try to be sociable.
It also meant, however, that he would go quite a long time without seeing his friend Camilo. From what Massimo could gather, after graduation, Camilo had been stationed on Sernpindal and stayed relatively static. Massimo would receive a message from Camilo from time to time, but the place his friend occupied in his heart seemed to feel empty.
Soon enough, however, that void would be filled. While working alone in a computer bay on a ship that was transferring him to a new post, Massimo was approached by a woman who introduced herself as Eliana. Her informal nature, at first, lead Massimo to assume the woman was a civilian, but she would tell him otherwise.
Eliana, a beautiful Serenno woman in Massimo's eyes, began to divulge her true reasons for approaching him. She was a deep cover operative who had been given license to work independently of the chain of command. With this freedom, she had the ability to infiltrate the enemy in a way unobstructed by the bureaucratic red tape. What she needed from Massimo was someone who could take the intelligence she collected, analyze it, and brief her on the nature of what she'd found. This, she could then take to her other contact, who would decide how to implement the knowledge. Massimo would be her analyst.
He was not to speak of her work to anyone, not even his own superiors. He had no way of contacting Eliana, nor did he know anything more about her than her name and what she wanted from him. He would continue his normal assignments as usual, and work on whatever Eliana brought him, when she brought it to him, then return it all to her. There would be no evidence that she even existed to him at all. She was a ghost.
And so began Massimo's secret secondary objective. He found himself looking forward to the times when Eliana would appear and present him with a challenge. Her mystery enticed him, more so because he never knew when to expect her, and because she always seemed to have a certain way of looking at him as he worked. Her smiles and praise for a job well done awoke in him a yearning for a deeper relationship. But Eliana never seemed to return that desire... not at first.
As time would pass and the Empire became more active, Massimo found himself with more and more work to bog him down. At times, the stress of his worked would awaken voices in his mind. Massimo told himself he was only imagining things, that it was the stress. This was true, of course, but he did not know the depths and dangers of his own imagination.
His work would suffer; be turned in late or less organized than his norm. His appearance too seemed to deteriorate. Massimo's superiors noticed this and wondered if the man was being pushed too hard. He was encouraged to take a short leave to regain his composure. It wasn't entirely a rebuke, but Massimo understood the point. He had to pull himself together.
His leave was granted for him to return to his home on Serenno. At first, Massimo found the empty mansion horrifying rather than relaxing. But that was before Camilo showed up at his door. it seemed his old friend had also been granted a short, two week leave and had come looking for him. Massimo couldn't have been more overjoyed. Camilo was welcomed and given the grand tour before Massimo insisted he stay the two weeks in the mansion with him. It didn't take much convincing.
The first week of their leave was spent lounging around the mansion and its grounds, with the occasional (and embarrassing, on Massimo's part) foray into the city's cantinas. Aside from the fact that Massimo was still woefully terrible with women, he couldn't look at any of them without imagining Eliana's face. Of course, he couldn't discuss the mysterious beauty with Camilo, much as he wanted to.
That topic, however, would be rendered moot in the second week of their leave. Eliana appeared in Massimo's room in the dead of night, frantic for him to crack a coded message for her. As always, he was mesmerized by her beauty, and enticed by the challenge she brought him. The work he did for Eliana never failed to be the most difficult he ever had.
It took a few hours, and soon the sun was rising when Massimo finally cracked the code. Eliana, this time, seemed more relieved and grateful that Massimo could ever remember her. She even embraced him and kissed his cheek. Massimo fell back into bed after she left, though he was unable to sleep the remaining two hours before it was time to wake for breakfast.
As Massimo sat down at the breakfast table across from Camilo, the dark circles under his eyes and his yawns gave something away. When Camilo inquired, Massimo tried to deflect and evade. But Camilo pressed the issue, irritating Massimo to the point that he shouted at his friend. The lack of sleep and the irritation from Camilo brought back a worrisome buzzing in Massimo's mind and he excused himself from the table.
Camilo allowed Massimo his space for the next few hours. When Massimo had calmed down, Camilo didn't raise the issue again, but his demeanor showed a concern that he didn't have to voice.
The day came for the two to part once again and venture back into their respective areas of military service. They said their goodbyes and Camilo made Massimo promise to contact him if he ever needed someone to talk to. Massimo made the promise, knowing it was an empty one.
"A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."5
When the Sith Empire began to move aggressively against the Republic, Massimo found himself stretched to his capacity. His assignments became a blur of ships and bases as he struggled to maintain a sense of where he was and what he was doing. He was not, now, afforded the luxury of recovery time and was pressed to perform through fatigue and exertion. He managed, but he was slowly losing touch with time and the world around him.
Eliana's appearances became less of a thrill during this hectic time. She did what she could to encourage him, even seemed to show him genuine affection, and he did what he could to help her. But the stress was getting to him. The voices had returned, more insistent this time. Massimo wanted to reach out to Camilo, but he seemed so far away. Instead, he confided in Eliana. Her responses were deflective, as if she didn't want to acknowledge his worries, as if the voices were completely natural. When he brought them up, she would laugh and call him silly.
One day, while working on a crowded ship, Massimo hit his limit. The voices had kept him up for days, and his work only seemed to pile on heavier as he plowed through it. He stood up at the terminal where he'd been working, shouting for the voices to stop. His hands had gripped his head at the temples and he breathed heavily. Other hands took hold of his arms. He could remember trying to fight them off before everything went black.
Massimo would awake strapped to a hospital bed, blurry-eyes and confused. Beings stood around him, dressed in white and looking down over him like some kind of lab rat. He tried to move, tried to speak, but he couldn't seem to do either of these things. He watched, helpless and scared as he was scanned, prodded, drugged, and scanned again. Time had no meaning in the spaces between the blackness of sleep.
In reality, Massimo had been committed to a military hospital ship where his psychosis was being analyzed. He was kept heavily sedated during the first part of this analysis, but slowly weened off of sedation in order to determine his cognitive abilities after their tests had been run.
Massimo saw a number of doctors who asked countless questions and put him to a number of tests and tasks. He did his best to go along as instructed, but his confusion often made him angry and frustrated. For all the questions the doctors asked, none answered the ones he himself imposed. Where was he? How long would they keep him there?
One doctor in particular seemed keen on getting Massimo to reveal some secret. Massimo knew he was trying to gain information on his work for Eliana, but he would not give in. He knew the work he was doing with Eliana was more important than anything that might happen to him.
Somehow, Eliana had found him one night as he sat alone in his room. She came to him panicked, saying that she had feared the worst for him. She could not stay long, for fear of detection, but warned him against the doctors. She told him that they were spies and liars that would stop at nothing to drain him of everything he knew. Before disappearing, she promised she would come back for him soon.
He tried to hold out, but the doctors persisted with increasing vigor. Their tests turned into treatments which seemed more like torture. Massimo resisted, but every man has their breaking point. The doctors eventually found his. He told them everything. That night, he was given a medication to ease the pain and help him sleep.
As Massimo drifted in the limbo of unconsciousness, the hospital ship fell under attack. He and many other patients were moved to shuttles which tried to escape to a nearby moon. Massimo's ship was shot down as it tried to land. Secured as he was, he was the only survivor. He would not wake, lucidly, however, for many hours.
When Massimo did wake, he found himself in some kind of cave, a hard packed dirt floor under the chair he was tied to, and water trickling down the stone walls around him. The only light was from a lantern sitting on a metal table. His eyes struggled to adjust to the dimness around to pool of light, but he could see nothing beyond the lantern's reach. It didn't matter, she came to him.
Eliana was the same beautiful woman Massimo had always known him to be, but somehow in this light, in this cave, she was transformed. Her anger and her disdain morphed her features, making her an entirely new and dangerous creature. She berated him for failing, for giving her up. She beat him and starved him of food and water. He had no means of measuring how long he had endure, or would have to continue to endure.
As she held him captive, Eliana slowly gave flesh to a fear that Massimo had been holding secret. The work he'd done for her over the years had caused the seeds of suspicion to be planted, take root, and slowly grow in the back of his mind. Who her superiors were, why she was given license to work outside of the chain of command, the extreme secrecy of that work; Massimo had begun to suspect she was not working for the Sith at all.
At first, he had thought she was a spy for the Republic, but in that cave, Massimo came to a much more fearful realization. Eliana was an agent for a race of extragalactic beings who were preparing to take over their galaxy. These beings had powers of mind control that no living soul could resist, not even those who wielded the Force. They had their hooks so deep in Eliana's mind, she had no means of escape. She could not be blamed for what she did. She did not know the truth.
After twenty days underground, Massimo was sure he would soon die. The beings were beginning to realize that his mind was broken. Their attempts to invade it had ruined him. He was not strong enough to be a host and they therefor had no more use for him.
He told himself that she was fighting their influence as she held the gun to his head, that though her face showed no mercy, she fought a battle within. Were it not for Camilo's arrival, that battle would have been lost and Massimo would be dead.
But Camilo had arrived. He'd heard of the attack on the hospital ship and had come with a detachment to look for survivors. Eliana had turned her rage on Camilo and Massimo watched, helpless, as the two struggled in the dim light of the cave. Camilo managed to incapacitate Eliana and untied his friend from the chair. As the two made their way toward the cave's exit, however, Eliana came to and attacked Camilo once again. Camilo was pulled back into the cave's darkness, shouting for Massimo to go, to run. Massimo refused to leave. Then a blaster shot echoed from the cave. After a long silence, Eliana emerged.
He ran. His first thought was to find one of the patrols that Camilo had mentioned, but he could find none. Though he seemed to have lost Eliana, Massimo spent his days and nights vigilant should she find him.
After three days and no sign of any Sith patrols, Massimo began to fear he was looking for the wrong people. Eliana was a tool of the beings, and if her ramblings could be trusted, more and more minds were being taken within the Sith Empire. He would not be safe among them, they would know him and know that he must be killed. His only hope was to seek those the beings had not yet infiltrated: the Republic.
After many more days struggling to survive in the forests of the moon, Massimo stumbled upon a small trading ship which had landed on the moon to make some small repairs. The traders were kind folk and cared for him after he collapsed at the edge of their camp. They promised that they would take him as far as their next trade stop, where he was sure to find transport to wherever he needed to go.
Password: Bylgia
RP Sample:
"There there, stranger.... Nev, c'mere. He's waking up."
Massimo's eyes fluttered open. It was dark, but there were lanterns hung around the area. He feared, at first, that he was back in the cave. But as his eyes turned upward, he could see the stars. Massimo had never seen anything so beautiful.
A face suddenly obstructed his view, and Massimo's eyes had to once again adjust to focus. It was a woman's face, old but kind. The crows feet at the outer edges of her eyes became more prominent when she smiled. Her teeth were slightly yellow, but straight. All together, she had a comforting face.
"You sure gave us a start, young man." she said, he tone both soothing and chastising. "Can you sit up?"
Massimo blinked at the woman a few times, then nodded his head and moved to push himself off the ground. Wincing, his hand reached up to his head where he felt a bandage along the right side.
"You knocked yourself something fierce on our camp table" said a voice that was approaching on his left. Massimo turned to see a man of a similar age to the lady next to him approaching with a bowl. "Here," he said, "some nice warm soup should set you right."
Massimo accepted the bowl and tore into the soup, ignoring the burn on his tongue in his hunger. The old couple chuckled to themselves as they watched him. Within minutes, the bowl was empty and the woman hurried to fetch him more.
"Where am I?" Massimo asked the man.
"On one of Maridun's moons. I don't know its name. My wife and I had some trouble with our ship's engines as we were coming in on the system. We couldn't make it to the planet proper, so we touched down here and sent a message for help and supplies. What about you, son? How did you get here?"
"I... I don't remember." he lied. "I know I was on a ship that crashed, but I can't remember anything else."
"You hit your head pretty hard, dear." the woman said as she returned with his bowl refilled. "I'm sure it'll come back to you as you recover."
"You can come with us tomorrow. We're expecting to get the parts and be on our way. I'm sure you can find transport or whatever you need at the port on Maridun." The man had left it at that, as if the matter were settled.
As Massimo finished his second bowl of soup, the couple prepared him a place to in the hold of their ship. He thanked them a number of times, but did not dare sleep. He remained awake through the night, fearful that Eliana would find him. If she did, he imagined she would kill the kindly couple.
He nodded off a few times, but as the morning light came, so did the transport from Maridun. Massimo left the damnable moon behind, along with Eliana and Camilo.
Quote Credits:
(1) Mal - Character in the movie "Inception"
(2) Ralph Waldo Emerson
(3) Allen Ginsberg - "Howl"
(4) Albert Einstein
(5) Gandhi
