Kybo Ren
Pirate of the Stars, Knight of Ren
Born Sao Long-Cha, the future Knight of Ren spent his early life as a thief and a pickpocket in one of the shanty towns of Tarnooga, preying on the seaborne pirates that themselves preyed on the kraken hunters and shipping lanes that crisscrossed the ocean world. The most powerful of these pirate syndicates owned off-world transport to sell their misbegotten gains, and it was one of these syndicates that eventually recruited the gutter thief. His greed and love of violence was not unnoticed, and his ruthless and competent piracy allowed Long-Cha to gain growing influence in the syndicate over several years, elevated to a position of importance in the 'brotherhood'. A jovial and generous friend to his allies and a spiteful and cruel foe of his enemies, Long-Cha was always cognizant of his unstable position and worked to engender true loyalty amongst his subordinates, as well as knowing when to push and when to cut his losses.
After several well-placed duels and hostile acquisitions of other syndicates, Long-Cha's power increased exponentially, becoming a significant factor on Tarnooga. But it was never enough, and Long-Cha was always yearning for more. He shifted focus to interstellar operations, quickly learning the ropes. Strategically allying or seizing control of the few groups that could afford the lucrative off-world trade, Long-Cha de facto controlled the entire planet's economy even though he never commanded more than a fraction of the pirates on the planet. He plyed the Triellus Trade Route encircling The Slice, raiding, extorting and pillaging from the many world along this area, even cutting deals with the Hutts that made some use of this Route. Despite his relatively young age, Long-Cha was well on his way to becoming a true pirate lord.
However, this meteoric rise would soon be halted around 856. On the insignificant world of Tammuz-An, Long-Cha was on a routine tributary extraction mission when jealous subordinates turned on him. While he managed to fight off their ships in orbit, agents of local governments in the region made their way to Tammuz-An after they received word of the engagement. Through a series of unfortunate events, several mercenaries and state-backed agents managed to destroy Long-Cha's damaged ship, forcing it aground, and he and his crew were imprisoned by the local native tribes. Breaking out of prison, Long-Cha and a cadre of loyalists who had not yet abandoned him fled into the jungle. This would be where a fateful meeting would occur.
In the aftermath of the fall of the First Order, the Knights of Ren had been scattered. One of its masters, known only by the others as the Apostate Master, had voyaged into the Outer Rim to escape, and set up a camp on the remote world of Tammuz-An, striking out at the native inhabitants in lightning-fast raids as offerings to the Shadow while he meditated on the nature of the way of the Ren. Not for nothing was he known as the Apostate, for he held controversial views. Among these views was the belief that Sieger Ren had not gone far enough in implanting the philosophy of the Ren in the entire First Order, and that an approach much like the Sith Empires of history should have been taken, where Sith hierarchy, relations and politics would take precedence over and supplant the 'official' 'civilian' structure of the state. Most heretical of all was the Apostate's view that the Len-Vul-Ren (the Supreme Embodiment of Ren) was himself, and all the other surviving "impure" Masters were to be destroyed.
Thus it was that when Long-Cha was defeated, his ship destroyed, and he was forced to survive in the jungle for months, the Master tracked him silently, evaluating this unusual castaway carefully. He saw in Long-Cha's leadership of the surviving pirates the determination and ruthlessness that would be a a fine clay from which to mold the philosophy of the Ren, if only he were to be refined and sharpened. And so, the Master approached Long-Cha in the dead of night on a moonlit plateau and offered the pirate power and strength, and to show him the way of the Shadow. Long-Cha, driven half-delirious by exhaustion, hate, and desperation, agreed, but the Apostate first demanded that the pirate offer a good death. The pirate quickly understood what that entailed, and by the time dawn shone on the plateau, the last of Long-Cha's loyalists lay slain in their camp, their hearts and throats torn open.
In the subsequent years of training, Long-Cha was immersed in the mysteries and rituals of the Knights. He learnt the philosophy of the Ren, the nature of the Shadow, and the mystical powers of the Knights. He accompanied his Master as they roamed across the Outer Rim, pillaging and destroying as they went. In this way, Long-Cha gathered a new band of marauders and pirates, but ones that were much more ruthless and bloodthirsty than his old fleet. While his Master intended this new group of outlaws to be his personal army to hunt down other Knights of Ren that had disagreed with his views, it was soon clear that Long-Cha's charisma and leadership bound them to him and not the Master. Long-Cha himself had been transformed by his time: while he remained the same man, the Shadow and the way of Ren had deeply embedded themselves in his psyche.
Then came the day of reckoning. In approximately 860, the Apostate had gathered sufficient Force-imbued relics from across the Galaxy and returned to Tammuz-An. He prepared a ritual on the same plateau he had met Long-Cha, while calling the other exiled Masters of the Ren to his location to discuss the future of their order. Knowing that the Apostate held ill-will, but knowing this was the best chance to remove this rogue element, the Masters of Ren journeyed to that planet.
The Apostate planned to trick Long-Cha to the plateau to "join the meeting" before killing the apprentice and stealing his body and soul. The Apostate believed that such a ritual, with the combination of eldritch artifacts in a place of spiritual importance to Long-Cha, would allow the Apostate to create an arcane reaction that would suck the life of those most attuned to the Force on the planet, namely, the arriving Masters of Ren. Long-Cha, however, saw through the ploy, and slew his Master before he the older man could make his move. However, the resonance of the artifacts brought into such close proximity threatened a runaway reaction even after the death of the Apostate. With little other way to preserve himself, Long-Cha entered the ritual circle himself in an attempt to stop it. How and why he succeeded is unknown, even to himself, but when the Masters touched down on Tammuz-An ready for a confrontation they found a slain Apostate and Long-Cha barely alive, his soul somehow tied to the now ritually-imbued plateau.
In the eyes of the other Masters, this was the good death they wanted to see from Long-Cha, and on that bloodied plateau they dubbed him Kybo Ren, a fully-fledged Knight of the Order. His first act was to seek out the tribes that had caused his misfortune years ago and annihilated every one of them. He cajoled and intimidated the rest into becoming his army, bolstering his marauder crews. Kybo cut a path of destruction across Tammuz-An, finally slaying all of his enemies and crowning himself "Lord Protector" of the tribes.
Hardened, sharpened and empowered by the last few years, Kybo continued his revenge quest. He returned to his old haunts with a vengeance. He scoured the Triellus route with his crew, blazing through the Outer Rim in a swathe of destruction, his fleet growing fat with the spoils of plunder and seizing as many capital ships as they could. He fought his way through the Outer Rim back to Tarnooga, where bargains, threats and entreaties from his old colleagues fell on deaf ears: in an act of piratical spite and devotion to the Shadow, Kybo entered the atmosphere with his capital ships and bombarded the seas, just enough to set it to boil in key locations. Instead of outright obliteration, the islands of Tarnooga were wracked by months of tsunamis, hurricanes and mass marine life extinction. Tarnooga became a living hell, and when the Judgement ended, the survivors bent the knee without any terms, surrendering their fates and lives to the new Commodore of Tarnooga.
Thus began Kybo's reign as the Terror of the Triellus. Apart from his duties to the Knights of Ren, Kybo returned regularly to the Outer Rim to reap his just due, all the while expanding a fanatically loyal armada. He also spent his time tracking down the individuals that had attacked him on Tammuz-An and, with the help of a turncoat, destroyed them by various means including open warfare as well as subterfuge through agents of his own. Unbeknownst to most, the Knight-Raider's returns to the region was to regenerate his body and soul through regular contact with the Dead Man's Plateau. While he could survive without it, contact with the Plateau allowed him to regenerate and reinvigorate his body, all of his wounds, and even reverse some aging, all of which are concerns for a hard-fighting, hard-drinking tyrant of a pirate. Fragments of the Plateau could be removed as portable 'batteries' of restoration, but only in small pieces at a time, and with limited effect.
This period would come to a sudden end around 869-70. A combination of the Mandalorian Enclave forming and seizing control of the Triellus (and almost wiping out his entire fleet in a single year) and the Knights of Ren formally allying with and contributing to the Maw (who were in turn focused on war with the growing Imperial Order and Alliance) forced Kybo to spend more and more time far away from the Triellus in the Unknown Regions and the Core with the Mawites. He was, however, very careful in choosing his engagements, as he now essentially only had a limited supply of Plateau Fragments with his supply cut off. While Kybo worked with the other Knights of Ren, he spent more and more time trying to find a way to access the Plateau again or divest himself from it once and for all. In the aftermath of Tython, Kybo is now forced to focus on the precarious situation of the Maw, though the question of Tammuz-An and a return to Tarnooga is never far from his mind.
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