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[SIZE=14.6667px]There’s a reckoning a-coming, and it burns beyond the grave[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It’s lead inside my belly ‘cause my soul has lost its way[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Name:[/SIZE] Kallan Donnash Cridu
[SIZE=14.6667px]Faction:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] Unaligned[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Occupation: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Smuggler[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Species: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Human[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Gender: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Cis Male[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Age: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]23 GSY[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Height: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]1.8m[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Weight: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]75kg[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Skin: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Pale[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Hair: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Dirty Blond[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Eyes: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Pale Blue[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Force-Sensitive: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]No[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Oh Lazarus, how did your debts get paid?[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Oh Lazarus, were you so afraid?[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]A slim but wiry young human, Kallan looks somewhat older than he really is. His pale skin is weathered, tanned, and often dirty. A mop of slightly wavy blond hair hangs in an even curtain around his head, his bangs extending down to just above eye level. Teal cybernetic lenses cover his half-ruined eyes, surrounded by the dark metal that anchors them in place. The implants made his gaze eerie and inscrutable, though they seem only slightly more mechanical than the rest of his face - he seldom smiles or frowns, almost never raises his low voice, just quietly strokes his chin and chews a toothpick between carefully-chosen words. His arms, legs, chest, and back each bear a collection of scrapes and scars earned through hard living and intermittent violence, though few other than Kallan himself have seen them. He tends to dress in loose, bulky clothing, all the better for concealing weapons and smuggled goods. He moves quickly and quietly, always rapidly scanning his surroundings; his reflexes are astoundingly good, and he reacts very quickly.[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]When the fires, when the fires have surrounded you, with the hounds of hell coming after you[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]I’ve got blood, I’ve got blood on my name[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Kallan is focused, driven, and determined, living in the moment and taking very little time to plan beyond the immediate situation. He is skilled at improvisation and holds up well under pressure, but his lack of foresight can land him in more trouble than he started in as he reacts in the way that brings the most immediate benefit. Hard living, serious responsibilities, and crippling debt have taught him to be pragmatic, and he has grown skilled at looking out for number one. As a result, he often appears callous and cold, displaying very little emotion and revealing very little about himself. This is a front, however, that he deliberately forces himself to project. At heart he is deeply empathetic, and his first instinct when he sees someone unjustly in trouble is to get involved and try to help - an instinct that tends to get him [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]in trouble, which is why he tries to suppress it. Torn between the heavy burdens of the responsibility to look out for his own and the responsibility to pay forward the kindness strangers have shown him, he struggles with guilt.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]When the fires, when the fires are consuming you, and your sacred stars won’t be guiding you[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]I’ve got blood, I’ve got blood on my name[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]-Born Scrapper: [/SIZE]Kallan has been fighting for most of his life, and he’s good at it. Brawling, shooting, knives, batons, mugs and barstools, the young smuggler has wielded a wide variety of weapons and techniques against his enemies, and he has learned to fight dirty while he’s at it. His ability to improvise and think on his feet during a fight, coupled with his experience and muscle memory, often allows him to triumph over much bigger and stronger opponents.
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Underworld Knowledge: Kallan has been to prison, worked for a dozen crime lords, and seen black markets from the Core to Wild Space. For someone so young, he has an impressive knowledge of illegal business. He has smuggled just about everything there is to smuggle, and he knows how and when to haggle. He can tell when a client is holding something back, he knows who might get offended if you operate on a given planet, and he uses it all effectively.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Stealthy: From the time he could walk, Kallan has been taught how to move unseen, staying out of the way of bigger and stronger opponents. Accustomed to the dark and aware of how to move silently in a wide variety of garments over a wide variety of types of terrain, he is very difficult to detect when he doesn’t want to be found. This allows him to escape bad situations, eavesdrop on important conversations, and launch very effective sneak attacks.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Never Say Die: It’s almost impossible to get Kallan to back down from anything he’s determined to do. He is equally capable of focusing in on a given moment, tuning out all distractions to focus entirely on the effort at hand, and of tuning out a painful moment by focusing on memories of the past, enabling him to push through incredible hardship. Between the two extremes, Kallan can force his way through just about any situation through sheer bullheadedness.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Flyboy: Ever since gaining the ocular implants that allow him to see well enough to fly, Kallan has focused heavily on learning the skill of piloting. He has flown a wide range of airspeeders and starships, gaining familiarity with many different control schemes and engine capabilities. He is also an experience astrogator, having plotted successful courses all over the galaxy. He’s not a dogfight ace, but he’s good at getting where he needs to go quickly.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Not a spell gonna be broken with a potion or a priest[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]When you’re cursed you’re always hoping that a prophet will be grieved[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]-Haunted: [/SIZE]Kallan hasn’t been around all that long yet, but his life has already been tough. He has seen bad things happen to a lot of good people, and experienced more than his fair share of bad things himself. In daily life he is torn between the knowledge that he needs to look out for himself and his remaining family and the knowledge that the galaxy will always be awful unless someone stands up for the little guy. The stress and guilt of all that haunt him daily.
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Damaged: Kallan’s mother was repeatedly drugged while he was in-utero, leading to severe prenatal damage to his optic nerve. As a result, without his implants he can barely see; everything is a blur of indistinct shapes and washed-out colors. If the implants were to be disabled, power to the lenses would be cut and he would be completely blind. While he does have experience getting around without being able to see, he’s not good enough to shoot or fly blind.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Indebted: After his desperate search for his mother and the hard bargain he was forced to accept to keep her safe, Kallan owes money to everybody, his uncle, and the uncle’s pet monkey lizard. He is so heavily in the red that he has to prioritize who gets paid on time versus who has the less severe penalties for missing a payment, and that kind of long-term planning has never been his strong suit. As a result, he tends to have a lot of angry loan sharks after him.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Addicted: Kallan deals with stress and guilt by drinking, a habit he picked up not far into his smuggling career. He has a pretty high tolerance and a pretty abused liver by now, which bodes poorly given how young he still is. Although he holds his liquor well, he drinks to get drunk, and when he does he’s no more reasonable or coordinated than the next drunkard. He is at his most vulnerable in this state, and he can rarely - if ever - afford to be vulnerable.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Electrified: Kallan’s ocular implants are wired directly into his nervous system very near his brain, allowing them to focus and restore his eyesight. As a result, he is particularly vulnerable to ion shock, suffering headaches and even blackouts if the circuits of his implants are disabled by an ion weapon. Other power fluctuations, such as those caused by solar flares, magnetic fields, or high amounts of radiation, can cause much the same dismal effect.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Can’t you see I’m sorry? I will make it worth your while[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Made a dead man’s money, you can see it in my smile[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]-Empathy: [/SIZE]Beneath the cold veneer he deems necessary for his success and survival, Kallan likes people, and is very capable of getting along well with them. He makes friends easily when he allows himself to do so. On the other hand, he feels the pain and problems of others very deeply, and this often gets him mixed up in situations that are very dangerous and, strictly speaking, none of his business. He’s trying to do less of this. So far, it’s not really working.
[SIZE=14.6667px]-Light, Mobile, Fragile: Kallan is a scrapper, but he’s the kind that dodges hits, not the kind that can take them. He doesn’t wear much in the way of armor because it restricts his range of motion, and he relies far more on mobility than toughness to keep himself alive and well. If and when he does get hit, he has the mental stamina to keep going, but physical stamina is another matter; a few good blows or a well-placed blaster bolt will take him out of a fight.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]-School of Hard Knocks: Kallan is a bright young man, keenly observant and quick to pick up information. In another life, he might have been an excellent professor or trivia contestant. As it is, he lacks any formal schooling, making him more than a little rough around the edges. He knows the practical realities of the galaxy and how to get around in it, but not always the niceties and very rarely the more erudite topics such as history, literature, or science.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]It won’t be long ‘till I’m dead and gone; watch the fires rise[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Under my skin, down to the bone, scorching my soul, nowhere to run[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Part One: Child of the Lost[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]You want to know who you are? Huh? Huh? You don't, I do...[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]You're the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]At age fourteen, Erys Cridu was one of the people who found herself scooped up. She came from the little-known backwater world of Ranroon, near the Tion Cluster, where she might one day have become a matriarch of her people. Always xenophobic and fiercely independent, the people of Ranroon had only grown more introverted since the Gulag Plague had struck, and Erys knew very little of what lay beyond home. The following years were a brutal education for her. Tasked with work that was either backbreaking, demeaning, or both, she saw the galaxy at a terrible cost. By age fifteen she was physically scarred, mentally broken, and pregnant. That was when the visions began, the only thing that saved her unborn child’s life. While scrubbing the galley floor she fell into a seizure, and when she awoke she had dreamed of a coming attack by a rival warlord. When her vision came true, down to the composition of ships in the enemy fleet and the tactics they used, the pirates who had laughed at her changed their tune and brought her before Seicma.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]The pirate lord was deeply impressed by the vision’s accuracy, and kept Erys close by. Random manifestations of her talent, a powerful but unfocused sensitivity to the Living Force, provided Seicma with otherwise impossible foreknowledge of his enemies’ movements. He became known as the Golden Nightmare, his shining fleet always appearing at the worst possible moment for his targets, as swift and elusive as a dream. For her part, Erys was rewarded; she was marked with the facial tattoo known as the Brand of Seicma, denoting her a full crewmember of the pirate fleet rather than a slave. Yet at the same time she suffered new punishments. Seicma was impatient with the randomness of her visions, and attempted to chemically induce them with various drugs. Though he was never successful, the harm was done, and Erys’s newborn son Kallan came into the galaxy with severe damage to his optic nerves due to the prenatal trauma. Practically blind, he would be useless to Seicma, but Erys was important enough that his life was spared - for now.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Part Two: One Nightmare to Another[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]I know of sin by the things momma prayed[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]And I know of heaven by the line at its gate[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]There are a thousand legends surrounding the death of Imdac Seicma. Many still refused to believe that the Golden Nightmare could actually be dead even twenty years later; rumors circulated that he had signed a retirement deal with the Republic, or the Sith, or the Hutts, and was living in extravagant, debauched retirement on some isolated moon. Among those who accepted that he perished in 833 ABY, two years before the Republic retook Coruscant as its capital and scattered what remained of his skyscraper squatters, no two agree for certain on the cause of his demise. Some say that he drunkenly plotted faulty hyperspace coordinates during the celebrations after he sacked Tanaab, incinerating his command ship when it passed through a star. Others hold that he overdosed on neutron pixie, liquefying his internal organs. Still others claim that he was faced with an overwhelming mutiny and, rather than surrender his command, activated the self-destruct sequence. Whatever the truth, in 833 ABY his fleet was scattered.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It was all the chance Erys needed. She and her six-year-old son fled in a stolen shuttle, seeking a new life far from the madness of the warlord’s court. But there was a problem: beings out for revenge. As the 400-Year Darkness faded and systems began to reestablish contact with one another, word spread of Seicma’s crimes between the planets he had victimized. Soon, a hefty bounty - dead or alive - was offered on the heads of anyone bearing the Brand of Seicma, as it was known that this mark was placed on the faces of the pirate king’s crewmen. It was a mark, unfortunately, that Erys bore, however unwillingly. She knew that it meant death or imprisonment for her, whether at the hands of a bounty hunter or an angry mob, and she did not dare to imagine what would happen to her son if the met such a fate. So she made the most difficult choice of her life. In a squalid sublevel of Coruscant, there was an orphanage. Kallan would be cared for well enough there, if not well. No one would know where he had come from. He would be safe.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Part Three: The Angel’s Shadow[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]If there is a dark, within and without[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]And there is a light, don’t let it go out[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Then the Jedi came and took her away. They had come to Coruscant with the Republic, and they were seeking younglings to train once again. They said that Lucia was special, though Kallan could have told them that, and that she would go to be with others like her. That was excellent news for Madame Vlasta; Luce’s departure would remove the one child who dared stand up to her regularly. It filled Kallan with a mixture of wonder and sorrow. He tried to imagine what the Jedi must be like if all of them were like Luce, and concluded that the angels had descended to recover one of their own. At the same time he raged against heaven, because he knew that he would once again be alone. But he was bigger then, and he had seen powerful new examples of how to make one’s way in the world. He did his best to fill the role that Lucia had left vacant, and for the first time in his young life he stepped out of the comfortable darkness to take a stand for something. It earned him disapproval, discomfort, pain. It earned him hope and satisfaction, too.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It was not to last. An arrest for petty crime - he’d been stealing food for the others from a market stall - gave Madam Vlasta the excuse she needed to get rid of him. Her falsified report of Kallan’s violent behavior - how he had supposedly terrorized her and the other children - all but ensured his transfer to juvenile prison, where he remained until Coruscant suddenly changed hands. But Lucia had not given up when she was hit or starved or locked in a cupboard, and he had learned well from her example. Where once he had looked out for fellow orphans, now he watched over the weaker inmates, standing against rival gang members and abusive guards alike to defend them. He did it because he believed that it was right, and even that it was his purpose, not to earn anything. But he did earn something: connections. Kallan made friends in prison, friends he defended and supported, and through them he learned about the underworld. He learned tricks of the trade, memorized secret routes and signals, and was introduced to pleased crime bosses.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Part Four: Beneath An Iron Fist[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]But my dreams, they aren’t as empty[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]As my conscience seems to be[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]The curious truth about prisons is that people often come out of them as much more effective criminals than they were when they went in. Such was certainly true of Kallan Cridu. Armed with a powerful knowledge of the Coruscant underworld and presented with half a dozen job offers, the young man found himself free to make his own choices about the path his life would take. Using what he had learned in prison, his honed gift for stealth, and his hard-earned skill in a fight, he wrangled himself a position as a smuggler. At first it was a job he did on foot, moving illegal packages through crowds or little-known maintenance tunnels. Then one grateful gang boss rewarded him with the gift of sight - a set of ocular implants that turned the world from indistinct blobs into sharp, vibrant swatches of color. Already perceptive and well-coordinated, he began to develop a new skill - piloting. He soon graduated to speeders, then finally to a starship. And in that starship he found the freedom he’d always been seeking - to go where he pleased, like the wind.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Beyond Coruscant, the work for smugglers was less morally easy. The profits were in spice, guns, things Kallan knew would hurt people who had done him no harm. But with the One Sith locking down the Core Worlds and spreading ever outward, it was virtually impossible to make a living as a legitimate free trader, not without going corporate and giving up his independence. So the young man let the daily grind of the criminal life erode the idealism Lucia had taught him. It was a painful process, no matter how much he told himself it was necessary, and pangs of conscience tortured him until he finally managed to drink them away. But even at his most callous and mercenary, he held on to some of what she’d taught him. He had lines he wouldn’t cross - no slaves, no contract killings, no working with terrorists, though in One Sith space the line between a terrorist and a freedom fighter was often terribly blurry. And he tried to stick up for people still, to watch out for those who couldn’t watch out for themselves, a habit that perpetually got him into trouble.[/SIZE]
Part Five: Search Through the Dark
[SIZE=14.6667px]Where are you now? Was it all in my fantasy?[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Where are you now? Were you only imaginary?[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]To Kallan, it was more than worthwhile - it was necessary. For the next year he chased down every lead he could find on Imdac Seicma’s former crew, following each one with the dogged persistence of a cash-starved bounty hunter. He followed rumors from the Deep Core to Wild Space and back again, searching tirelessly for any sign of the seer whose visions were behind the Golden Nightmare’s terrifying reputation. Just as he had suspected, it took everything he’d saved - and more. Soon he was deep in debt, taking runs he would never have considered a year prior in order to keep his ship flying, tracking the next possibility. In his heart he knew how unlikely, how borderline impossible even, it was that he could track one person who did not want to be found in a galaxy of untold trillions. But he was committed - the search was what gave his life purpose and meaning, and giving up on it would only leave him adrift with impossible debts. It all had to pay off, or all of the struggle and strife that he’d somehow built a life out of would become hollow.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]He found her serving a life sentence in some backwater private prison in Hutt Space. Erys had given everyone the slip for nearly seven years after leaving her son behind; her visions made her nearly impossible to surprise. But in the end she was alone and broken, with nothing she could think of to live for. So she’d stopped running, and they’d caught her and put her through their charade of justice so that Imdac Seicma’s victims could conceivably sleep a little easier. She was more than half-mad, barely responsive to anything, but she feebly recognized her son when he came to her cell. Kallan had nothing left to trade or bargain with, and breaking open a prison was beyond his ability to accomplish single handedly. So he borrowed once again, a deal with his own future as payment. It was a deal he made with the Coruscani slumlord known as Shayde, and the terms were simple. Shayde’s men would break open the prison, rescue Erys, and hide her somewhere that no one would see the Brand of Seicma and think to kill her or cage her again.[/SIZE]
Part Six: Dawn of Desperation
I try to protect you, I can’t let you fade
But I feel you slipping, I feel you slipping away
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[SIZE=14.6667px]Before, he had been playing at responsibility; the consequences of protecting others or not in the past were only dim shadows of the weight he would have to bear going forward. Briefly he wondered if this - or worse - was how the Jedi always felt, peacekeepers taking the weight of the whole galaxy on their shoulders. But he remembered what he had learned in the brutal, uncertain bulkheads of Imdac Seicma’s fleet: when the whole picture is too much to bear, focus on the moments that bring joy. Live in the happy times, and treasure them when they end. So he sat in the hidden apartment Shayde had arranged for his mother and he read to her, just as she had once read to him. And for a little while he could forget that she was not yet forty but broken beyond repair. He could forget the debts that hung over his head. He could bring back, and even build upon, the times that had made life seem worth living even when everything around him was hell. When he left the apartment, he knew he would be back. He would do whatever it took.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It was a harder, leaner version of Kallan Cridu that took to the spacelanes then. Outwardly jaded and callous for one so young, he buried the kindness and goodness that others had taught him deep beneath a heavy mantle of necessity. He lied, cheated, stole, and smuggled. When it was called for, he fought and killed. He roamed the whole wide galaxy in search of the next quick credit to put toward his impossible debts, seldom planning beyond the next big score because the hopeless weight of it all would crush him like a beetle if he let it. Aboard the Six of Sabres[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px], his half-reliable junkpile of a starship, he hauled cargo for causes good and bad. Through it all, he found that he could never quite squelch his conscience entirely. He remembered the kindness others had shown him when they had no incentive to do so, the warmth and safety and support he’d been given unearned, and sometimes he couldn’t hold himself back from getting mixed up in bad business because his heart led him there, held his face to up it, and just wouldn’t let go.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]When the fires, when the fires have surrounded you, with the whole wide world coming after you[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]I’ve got blood, I’ve got blood on my name[/SIZE]
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Special thanks to [member="Artemis Vahl'Nyx"] for inspiration - your bio is beautiful!
