Post by Sinister on May 14, 2020 23:13:51 GMT -5
Lord Skal Full Name • Raephar Hesaad Nickname • Skal Race • Human Birthplace • Mygeeto Age • 58 Gender • Male Sexuality • Heterosexual Faction • Sith Concept • A Sith Lord who's become a pariah due to his difficulties curbing his insatiable appetite for violence against the Light. Languages • Galactic Basic, Binary Assets • Lightsaber- A bright hot red, unstable and sparking blade flows forth from the menacing hilt. It's far heavier than most such weapons, and has been designed with jagged spikes thrusting out that ensure there is no comfortable way to grasp it. When ignited, it feels as if it's trying to rip about in any direction, flying from the user's hand. It was specially crafted so that it might always be an opponent for Lord Skal to defeat and dominate. (Flavor differences only) The Purifier- Lord Skal's Corvette, a seized trophy from a slain Republic battalion, it has been altered and fused together with other pieces of technology in an almost maddening fashion since then. It looks like a scorched and vulgar craft of twisted metal barely held together but for the crew of droids that desperately maintain it. These pitiful machines are themselves frightening amalgamations who have hewn their own bodies into working chasis after the damage from their master's frequent rampages. The craft is more formidable than it appears. Much of it's grotesque frame has resulted from the fusing of redundant weapons systems into it by the droids. Appearance Face Claim • Dave Bautista Height & Weight • 6'6", 289 lb. Overall Looks • Skal is nearly sixty years of age, and yet remains a towering, imposing opponent. His weathered and beaten flesh courses with dark veins of concentrated force corruption, and his eyes glow a dim yellow-red shimmer in low light. That unnatural gaze has often done the work of cowering and unnerving his opponents for him. He has black hair, which is thinning, and a closely cropped beard. His frame is massive, forged in a nightmarish life under the surface of Mygeeto hauling loads of rock, and maintained though obsessive, feverish training. His wardrobe is sparse, and he has no armor. To rely on such a thing would be to allow himself some degree of comfort. A respite from even a tiny degree of fear and pain. Instead, he wears many of the same robes he has for years, some still scorched with tears and burns from battle. He only gives them to his droids to repair if they won't serve as covering any longer. Some have slashes that reveal scars upon his person, of which there are any number, many of which predate his time as a Sith. His body language is what one might imagine from a gundark of uncommon grace, hunching, leering, and lurching in aggressive postures from moment to moment. Appraising others as if he might manage to do so by scent. Personality Profile Lord Skal is the sort of Sith older brothers and sisters have scared their younger siblings with tales of, and don't entirely believe exists. He is monstrous, in a pure sense. He is brutal, swift, and merciless. As much an animal as a man. A ruthless killer who's entire identity has been taken over by the urges he feels to surrender entirely to the Dark Side in all things, at all moments. He fits in poorly with the aristocracy of the Sith, preferring at all times to solve his problems directly, and with overwhelming power rather than any matter of subtlety. After all, if the Dark Side truly only favors the powerful, it would only be a service to the universe that the weaker between his opponent and himself perish. Still, he manages to keep himself under control when dealing with those he knows he cannot destroy yet. His bloodlust is as great and hearty as his infinite capacity for violence. While fully gaining his loyalty would be quite the task, clever leaders have previously used his passions by offering him the opportunity to test his abilities or slaking his need for battle, and merely pointing him in the proper direction. Problems have mostly arisen when he's been told there were no battles for him to fight. He believes himself to be a sort of "chosen one". Even in the greatest of Sith who have reached heights far beyond his station, Skal sees what he views as pitiful and foolish respect for tradition, hierarchy, or rules. He is repulsed by this attitude, viewing such things as more chains to be broken through the power of victory. As he has grown more powerful and survived brush after brush with death, he has decided it is his destiny to be the one to blot out the scourge of the Light from the universe for all time, bringing purity at last to all things. He views himself as an avatar of the will of the Dark Side of the force, and believes he carries its purpose with him always. Background Father • Azghar Atem, 65 (Age of Death), AristocratMother • Kaeryn Hesaad, 34 (Age of Death), Prostitute Other Important Connections • V-N25, 36 years since activation, Pilot and Lead Technician of the Purifier, The droid tasked with the running and maintenance of Skal's vessel Overall History • Peace is a lie... This was an intuitive conclusion for Raephar before anyone had told him it was the beginning of the Sith Code. Even in the most quiet moments of his life, there was a lurking violence roiling beneath the surface. He was born to Kaeryn Hesaad when she was seventeen years of age, after she had been forced to sell her body in order to make the money necessary to survive in the work camps of Mygeeto's crystal laden mines. She never told the boy of her life before she found herself in such squalor, nor had he ever thought to ask her. He merely knew that their home was out deep in the frigid landscape of that cursed world, and that their lives hung on how many scraps of food they could scavenge. While he was too young to fully grasp the consequences of what his mother went through to support them, he was fully aware the miners and overseers who came to her were often cruel and dismissive. Despite everything, Kaeryn was kind and open and cheerful, not just with her son, but with everyone. The fact that she dared smile when she had nothing, and could give nothing to him would later serve as one of the greatest focusing points of his rage. How dare she feel peace when she was treated like filth? He had been scrounging, begging, and stealing whatever food he could manage since he was old enough to walk, but his mother had always made him promise he wouldn't go down into the mines. He broke that promise the day after he found her dead from some illness that had gone undetected and mistaken for a more common ailment. He wanted to never move again. To never walk from where he was when he found her, but that would have been to court death, and he feared to end up her. To be gone and to have mattered to no one but a tear-stained child with no way to care for itself. He needed money, and so he descended down into the pits that would change him forever. He had known it would be ugly, cruel, and difficult, but he was not entirely prepared for how truly cheap life was there. The blood of miners ran deeper into the grounds than the clear stones they so desperately hunted. Desperate men and women were plentiful, and jobs were scarce, so there was never any shortage of new fodder to throw down there. Anyone who lasted for long had stories to tell of gutting greedy new blood who had tried to take precious crystals from them for bonuses. Years passed quickly when there was no sun to count the passing of days by, and soon enough, Raephar was among the old timers himself. His skin turned pale from lack of exposure, his body hunched, but grew large and powerful from constant bone-crushing labor, and his temper was always quick to turn from a simmer to a boil. It was then, as a grizzled veteran of that black abyss that he began to hear his "song". He could never be quite sure how or when, but sometimes, he knew there would be crystals beyond a wall of earth. Sometimes, he knew when the overseers were watching. And often, he could feel the jealousy of the other miners. Their hunger and malice for his success and apparent dumb luck. But it didn't feel dumb or random to him. He could hear something. Or smell it. It was like a choir of foul screaming from deep underneath, or just behind him. It troubled him at first, but soon he found that the little whispers it spoke to him would press him in the right direction for what he needed. Always just enough of a nudge. And when he was angry? If he was in pain? It grew far louder than a whisper. Once, when he was wounded after a laser drill malfunctioned and bit through a solid chunk of his leg, he felt it draw him to his storage area, where two men were using their equipment to slice into his locker. He committed his first as second murders that day. And the song turned into a lullaby. Raephar wasn't well-read, and his understanding of the Force was small. Only half-remembered whispers among the other miners. He knew it was possible that his song was the power of the Force calling to him, but he had no way to be certain. Soon, he learned to sing back. To let it seep into his arms and legs as he pressed forward down further towards the core of Mygeeto. Let his mind fill with the warmth of the blood of betrayers splashing across his face, when he brought his fists down upon them, and flow upon the great river of power that washed over him. He knew that it grew louder as he dug deeper and deeper. And one day, he found the source of the song. Deep, deep within the caverns, as he was trudging forward, Raephar found a crystal unlike any other he had encountered. He'd heard of it before. It was called Skal. Typcially considered by the Jedi and other interested parties to be too unpredictable and unstable for use in lightsaber construction, this searing red crystal would still fetch more than he earned in a year if he found an interested party. Enough to get him off this rock. And what's more, it was calling to him. Begging him to seize it. To let it free. It felt attuned to him. Like a place where his song echoed. And now it was his. Unfortunately, his find did not go unnoticed. The owner of the mine, a man named Atem, was made aware of the find by one of the other miners who had escaped Raephar's senses while he was too enthralled by the crystal. And even while he owned a massive portion of the wealth of the world already, Atem could not afford to ignore this development. With a pair of bodyguards at his side, he had the powerful miner brought into his office and produced bylaw after bylaw that supported the fact that the stone in Raephar's pocket belonged to him. Atem was correct of course. Everything of value down there belonged to him. Down to Raephar's blood and bones. After the third time his employer asked him to remove the stone and place it on the table in front of him, he did pull it out of his pocket, and he hadn't realized he'd been clutching it so hard it had dug deep into his palms. The pain focused him. Heightened his awareness. It made him angry, and it narrowed his hatred of everyone he had ever had to bow to, grovel for, or beg for nothing more than bread...onto this man. Atem. He would take from him everything. He didn't understand how he knew, but he was fully aware of how little effort it would take to reach out across the space between them and throw him against a wall. Raephar did not have to use his body. Atem flew through the air as if he been launched and smashed into the support beam behind him, his spine colliding with a sickening crack. The guards were stunned for a moment. Their lack of belief in what had just occurred had killed them. He bashed the stone against one of their heads and grabbed the man's blaster, firing two rounds into the other, and then another round into Atem's knee as he cried out in agony, more from shock than anything else. Because Raephar realized the blaster bolt was unnecessary. He had crippled the man with his initial assault. He was not moving but for his blubbering mouth. Raephar sneered and began to move quickly. From this office, the overseers and the businessmen had total control over the machinery. It was an insult. That they could have so much power and obedience over him when they couldn't even bare one single strike in turn. He began to set them all to activate and begin drilling at once. He set all their explosive charges nearest the support beams to blow within minutes, and closed off all other exits. He walked away from the mine for the last time hoping that the man who had shown him the final revelation this place could teach him would suffer a slow death of gradual suffocation instead of dying in the blast. It is impossible to say whether or not his actions might have changed had he known the pitiful creature writhing on the ground was his own father. Of course, he had planned to get away before anyone could make sense of the chaos at the mine, but the Force had other intentions. His attack on Atem had been like a beacon to those trained in the mysteries of the Dark Side on the planet Mygeeto, and there more of such people there than anyone could have known at the time. The Sith were still hiding, but this was an important world to them, and they had sent emissaries to make sure things went smoothly. The destruction of a mining facility by a burgeoning Force sensitive did not qualify as smoothly. It would take ages to begin pulling crystals that they might use from the ground there once again. That said, they had other mines, but rarely found the opportunity to recruit individuals who seemed to have powerful connections to the Force and were already so totally given over to the Dark Side. It was a woman named Knight Ios who tracked him down as he was attempting to flee the planet, encased him in carbonite, and dragged him to Korriban. Upon being thawed, Raephar learned of the hidden Empire rising beneath the feet of the Republic, ready to rip and tear at all those who dared to try and enforce their will upon the truly powerful. That these people who had taken him were those who mastered the Dark Side. His "song". He also learned he had interfered in their plans when he had destroyed the mining facility, and the only way he could hope to survive such a miscalculation was to prove worthy of their time. He would study at their academy, and either excel, or be burned to cinder with all of the other rubbish. He breathed hot air in the open for the first time in his life, and smiled a wicked grin as Ios spoke. He was older than any of the others who entered the Academy with him, but what disadvantage that afforded him was more than made up for with raw physical power, a deep connection to the Force, and sheer enthusiasm for the work. He felt alive constantly dancing on the edge of a knife during his training, courting danger and gleefully laying waste to those who might dare openly oppose him. He also found out his how easy it truly was to dispose of his loathsome counterparts when they were far enough away from the academy grounds. He was at one with himself. With the glorious and magnificent pursuit of power and life. It was his destiny to master this power. He knew that with every fiber of him. It was also here he began the task of crafting a lightsaber for himself. He had kept his Skal crystal throughout all of this, but he had known for some time that they were notoriously unstable, creating weapons that sought to escape the grasp of their wielder. And yet, he knew there was no other option. This stone had called to him. Sung to him. It had lead him here, to the very heart of the Dark Side in the universe, and he would hold its power in his very hand. He also had never forgotten the aspect that his pain had played in unlocking power his power. The razor focus it had granted for his fury. He fashioned a hilt which would never let him escape from it. It was a vicious, ugly, and frightening weapon. Perfect for Raephar. Though it, he clarified his own method of dueling, using various maneuvers that he preferred from all seven forms combined with ugly brawling tricks and reliance on the Force to fuel his physical strength and simply batter through a foe's defenses. Ios herself took an eager interest in seeing the man grow into his full potential, as she had some degree of prestige to gain for unearthing him if he proved an asset. Though this never became a full apprenticeship, his training was accelerated by her and other prospective teachers who looked to profit from his talent. As he became deeper enmeshed with this aspect of the Sith however, he began to believe their commitment to the Dark Side was half hearted. He wanted the power they had to offer him, but there were leeches everywhere, looking to claw away what was rightfully his. Just like back in the mines. It would have been foolish to make his thoughts known, but he could not help both loathe them and their parasitic hypocrisy. But they offered power. And through power, he would have his victory. When the Sith at last allowed their intent to be known across the galaxy, Raephar was among the more talented of the acolytes the Sith Academy on Korriban had to offer. When at last he was given the opportunity to take to the field of battle in the Outer Rim territories, Raephar proved a terror. His thirst for carnage, manic fighting style, and striking appearance made him a subject of discussion for those that survived such encounters. After two months of wildly successful sorties, raids, and assaults, he was at last given his knighthood. The day Raephar Hesaad died, Skal rose from his ashes. There was no deliberation over what his new name might've been. Before anything else, when he thought about how he had risen out of the mines, he thought of the crystal, blood, and freedom. He was inducted in the Cult of Strife, of course. No other would suit him. At the earliest available opportunity, Skal began striking targets that he could effectively manage in solo operations. He disliked the concept of relying on other Sith who would dare to claim his glory as their own. Disgusting. Instead, he targeted any Jedi he could find. As much as some other Sith might have drawn his ire, the Jedi were a putrid and false perversion of the ways of the Force. He had been told of their ways before he had even got out of the mines, and knew their code. It was filth and lies. It was not merely that their path was wrong, it was that the destination they sought didn't exist. Life was suffering. Every experience he ever had taught him this. They tried to spread hope, and he murdered them for it at each possible opportunity. His skill at tracking down leads on lone servants of the Light Side grew as the work went on, with Skal mostly lurking at its fringes until called back for major engagements. While he was away, he managed to secure a few of his signature trophies. The vessel now known as The Purifier, along with its mechanic and pilot V-N25 came into his possession when he dispatched the captain and crew one by one after boarding them and engaging them in the narrow halls of the vessel. A poor tactical setting for soldiers with blasters, and an exceptional one for a close range assault. The droid had a strangely self-preserving attitude among his kind that worked to Skal's advantage, and has many times since. This was a great victory, but he cherished nothing more than the chance for lone combat against the Jedi where he could try to draw the terror out of their eyes as they realized the futility of their fight. It galled him when they kept their precious peace to the end. Near the end of the war, his accomplishments could no longer be ignored, and he was lifted once again to still greater heights when he was given the title of Lord of the Sith. He was among the greatest duelists and warriors that the Order had to field at the time, and had collected the lightsabers of several fallen Jedi, along with multiple strategic outposts. His effectiveness was well-documented in the great clashes of the war as well. Still, the fit was odd. Skal saw this as a natural ascension, but he disliked the political maneuvering of the Convocation. He did not speak out against the Empress, nor his Praetor. He was not blind to the power they wielded. But he felt the pettiness of some of the so-called Lords and their followers was a plague upon their crusade. That they mistook mere battlefields and cities as the goal instead of the truth: that the Sith would only rule when the Dark Side of the Force was all that remained. When the pitiful and gangrenous cancer of the Jedi was gone, then they could see to the business of politics, or who might succeed their Empress. All other concerns dwarfed this. If his council was ever requested, he sought direct confrontation. The maximum application of raw firepower, and a path of devastation straight to Coruscant. And when they at last arrive at the seat of Republic power...they proved unequal to the task. It was an blasphemous to Skal. To be within striking distance of the Jedi Temple itself and lose the chance to go down to the planet's surface and blot out the Light. To seize his destiny! It drove him to apoplectic rage. When the retreat was sounded, he ordered those under his command to comply with orders, but if they needed to regroup for a second push, he would stay behind the lines and raid and disrupt wherever he could, bringing chaos and death to any poor soul of the Republic he could find the opportunity to catch off guard. The Purifier had managed to have some stealth modifications done to it, and for the last days of the war, he was hiding in the dark places and scars that had been left in the Core worlds and their moons by his allies' march, striking out at unlucky patrols. But one fateful day, he heard the call that at last broke his faith in the Empire as it then existed. A ceasefire. After how close they had been, they made peace. Peace! The lie! It tore at him! That however much the Republic might have had them on the run, that the Empire would allow itself to embrace the tactics of the mundane fools of the universe to preserve itself! If it fell, it deserved to fall! Instead, they stagnated. Polluted the galaxy. Made talks with the Jedi and their pawns. Out alone in space but for the company of his droids, Skal seethed in the shadows. He would not lie to himself. He would not allow politics to override the will of the Dark Side. There was only passion. There was also only one way to continue his fight without being hounded by both sides. He sent a transmission to Dromund Kass, and his Praetor. He was no longer of the Sith. He told them why. That he would fight without bringing reigniting their war until they chose to join him. Four years passed. Four years of meditation on the truth of hatred and agony. Of his song singing louder than ever. Telling him of the bloodshed to come. Of the truth of his destiny. Four years of the signs of the dark side making their mark on his very flesh. He would be the one to burn out the Light. He knew this. Maintenance could not be done to the Purifier in dock, so captured ships were torn apart and scrapped by his droids to augment his vessel until it became a nightmarish amalgam of different classes of vehicle. Soon enough, the same happened with his servants. Only V-N25 was still pristine. His cannibalization of the droids beneath him was immaculate. Skal became a shadow and a wordless fear for lone vessels out too far on their own bearing Republic standards. Very few survived in escape pods, and those rarely had anything more than rumors of a ghost ship and a phantom Sith to spread. He was cautious as he continued his war, and avoided any trace of the Acheri like the plague they were. Still, he never lost sight of his true opponent. Jedi were rare to catch unattended, but one was like nectar to him. And then, when at last the Acheri were beaten, he intercepted communications that filled him with a fire he had not known in ages. The Republic had turned on them. Had fired the first shot. War was not yet declared, but the Empire was so lethargic that they managed to get caught sleeping. They should have been the ones to begin it. But whether or not it would be open, three was once again war on the horizon. He began plotting his flight back to Sith space. Lord Skal hungered for war. |