Naamah Aesham
Redemption is the path, not the destination
NAME: Naamah Aesham
FACTION: N/A
RANK: Dark Jedi Master
SPECIES: Clawdite
AGE: 28
SEX: Female.
HEIGHT: 1.60 m (variable)
WEIGHT: 53 kg (variable)
EYES: Common human form has brown eyes, variable
HAIR: Common human form has dark brown hair, variable
SKIN: Pale. Natural Clawdite form has reptilian green skin
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
Strengths:
- Spook training: Naamah is a former member of the Atrisian Inquisition. She was trained to be a spy, an assassin and an interrogator. Combined with her shapeshifting skills, she is good at appearing undetected and blending in with her surroundings. She also has shady skills such as slicing, lockpicking and so on.
- Cold Sniper: She's a crack shot with a sniper rifle, favouring an Atrisian IIB-designed shadow rifle or a Verpine sniper rifle. It's useful for assassinating people while remaining undetected. She can use the Force to enhance her precision, steady her aim and so on.
- Magic Markswoman: As elaborated above, Naamah is very good with guns. She has acquired some Grey Paladin level skills that allow her to shoot blaster bolts out of the air and perform similar tricks. This also helps her dual-wield pistols while still maintaining accuracy.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Due to being a Clawdite, Naamah is able to change her appearance and morph into the shape of similarly-shaped beings, such as humans and several humanoid aliens. Her abilities are comparable to those of Zam Wessel, whose skill at self-alteration allowed her to mimic an exact replica of an individual and maintain the mimicry for an extended period of time. Her forms' gender is flexible.
- Combat Monkey: Combat is her speciality since she's a trained killer. Thus she's proficient in a variety of weapons from blasters, to knives, to bolters to anything that holds an edge, shoots plasma or a slug bullet.
- Combat Pragmatist: She's willing to do anything to win a fight. As far as she's concerned, there aren't any rules in combat, especially since she's not a particularly powerful Force-user. She'll use gas and explosives, jab people's eyes, bite them, strike their solar plexus or kidneys and so on. In her opinion, honour is a fancy word to excuse stupidity.
- Hide/Obscure Force Signature: This was one of the first skills the Inquisition ensured its more or less willing recruits learned in order to protect them on missions against other Force-users, both light and dark.
- Determinator: Very, very much. Naamah does not believe that any good deeds will wipe her slate clean or give her jail-free card. She believes she's hellbound and deserves punishment in the fiery pit, but that never stops her. Redemption is the road, not the destination.
- Tranquil Fury: Tying in with nerves of steel. Naamah doesn't fly into sudden rages or fits of temper. When she encounters an obstable, she attempts to remove it in a calm and methodical manner.
- Too Kinky To Torture: Does this really need elaboration? "I do kind of enjoy this sort of thing."
Weaknesses:
- Self-destructive: Naamah is wracked with guilt and tormented by the wrongs she committed. To put it plainly, she was a monster who did terrible things until she went to hell during the Netherworld event. Her self-destructive attitue manifests in instability and a rather nihilistic outlook on life. She has a very low sense of self-worth and believes she's hellbound. Thus, she does not care much about her own survival and is rather traumatised.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Tying in with the above, Naamah throws herself into causes to help people with little thought of her own survival. From running into a burning building to save someone to joining insurgents fighting an oppressive government. Perhaps this can be considered noble, but a part of her might be trying to run away from her sins straight into a blaze of glory of dramatic self-immolation.
- Monstrous Potential: Her past self was cruel, untrustworthy and a sadist. Naamah feels remorse for her sins...but she also still has the same dark urges. They aren't gone, just deeply buried. She may be trying to redirect them in a productive way by hurting bad guys, but they're not banished. On a certain level, part of her still enjoys killing. She's a rather disturbing interrogator.
- Drowning my Sorrows: Naamah is lonely, broody and drinks too much. When she has a moment to breathe, the loneliness tends to become too much and she finds solace in a nice glass of whiskey. Oftentimes more than one.
- Ice Queen: Unless she's playing a role that requires her to be personable, she's rather antisocial, sarcastic and blunt. She doesn't do emotions well and has been conditioned to accept horror. This can manifest in a lack of empathy.
- Force Drain addiction: Her evil self was...rather fond of sucking out people's life force. The Netherworld forced her to go cold turkey and as a result Naamah largely kicked her addiction, but it resurfaced during a mission on Jabiim when she was cornered by fascist soldiers and lost control, consuming most of them and gourging on their life force. The event scarred and shocked her a lot.
- Moral Myopia: Naamah feels bad about turning into a deviant psychopath who enjoyed torturing people, unleashing Reavers on innocents and consorting with evil spirits. That's good. However, her problem-solving methods still tend to be rather ruthless and violent. In addition, she seems to firmly distinguish between the time when she really went off the rails and her time as an Inquisitor, disregarding the fact that the Inquisition had a hand in her becoming a monster. Not to mention the fact that she was already doing bad things then. In a way, this is probably a coping device to keep her somewhat stable.
- Not a Titan: Naamah is a Master but no powerhouse. She has to rely more on finesse than raw Force strength.
Appearance:
In her natural form, Naamah has the appearance of a typical Clawdite: Reptilian humanoid, sunken cheeks, narrow nose and small mouth. Her skin is a rough, scaly green and her eyes are yellow. Her preferred human form is that of a dark-haired woman with dark brown hair and brown eyes, though this is variable. She switches names and faces as required. Her body is marred by several vicious scars. Being a practical person, she generally wears clothes that don't expose her much.
Personality:
Cynical, jaded, repentant and very, very broody. Seriously, there's a lot of brooding. Masochistic personality type. Despite having embarked on the road of atonement, Naamah is still capable of great ruthlessness. In addition, her experience in Chaos has made her rather religious. She's returned to the faith of her parents, who believed in a deity called the Maker, who isn't a particularly compassionate or nice god. It is said that the Maker created the universe, but turned away from it because creation was flawed, allowing the Gulag Virus to be unleashed. Her sense of humour is rather dark and morbid.
Force Abilities:
Naamah has a working knowledge of Sith Alchemy and Poison from the old days, but that's more theoretical and she lacks her old Dark Side purity.
- Telekinesis (Choke, Push, Grip etc.)
- Tutaminis
- Doppelgänger
- Drain Knowledge
- Force Scream
- Force Speed
- Force Reflex
- Force Concealment
- Force Clouding
- Force Cloak
- Force-Enhanced Aim/Grey Paladin gun-fu
- Force Drain (recovering addict, will only use in extreme circumstances, lacks control).
- Memory Rub
- Shadow Vision
- Nightsister Blood Trail
Gear of note:
- Mirage Personal Cloaking Device
- Geist Stealth Armour
- Tensor rifle
- Carbonite gun
- Racket's Bite
- Shatterpistol
- Hold-out bolter
- Semiautomatic Shattergun Rifle
- Cylix bolt pistol
- Gorgon web rifle
- Holographic disguise matrix
Biography:
The Force is a pathway to many abilities. Some are unnatural, others mind-boggling and frightening. As the old adage goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Naamah's story is a sad one about an innocent turning into a monster, though this does not excuse her sins. Today, Naamah is a wanderer, an itinerant mercenary and vigilante, travelling across the stars in a tramp freighter held together by spit and duct tape. Grim, broody and cynical, she is not an easy person to get along with. Though she tries to stay on the road of atonement, her own dark urges and desires have not been banished.
Her story is tied strongly to the Atrisian Inquisition, for she grew up in the Atrisian Empire. Her Force-sensitivity was discovered at a young age during a schoolyard brawl when she suddenly manifested a power so frightening to many Atrisians. The average Atrisian saw Force-users as deviant witches, certainly as dangerous. To the Imperial State, they were dangerous weapons that had to be controlled, given the destruction both Jedi and Sith were capable of. Her family, despite following the traditional Atrisian religion, tried to hide their daughter, but her younger sister, fearful of what her sibling could do and concerned for the sanctity of her soul, informed the police. Naamah ended up running away from home and landed in the criminal underworld, using powers she barely understood to get by.
She might have gotten a taste for blood there and embraced the gifts she used to fear. Her experiences among the Reeki certainly scarred the young woman. It is likely that she was sexually assaulted at one point. Eventually, fate caught up with her and after being betrayed by a gang she was working with, she ended up being nabbed by the Inquisition following a bloody fight. She was brought to the Citadel and met the Grand Inquisitor. There she was told in no uncertain terms that she would serve or perish. The Inquisition operated in the shadows, protecting the Empire from threats within and without. This included maintaining control over Atrisia's Force-using population, but also fighting outside ones and eliminating anyone the Emperor considered a threat.
Naamah was rebellious, but eventually came to identify herself with it after being broken in, latching on to Mirien Valdier as a surrogate mother. Her darker talents were encouraged here, and she found an outlet for her aggression. She served as an assassin, spy and torturer, falling to the Dark Side in the process and acquiring a penchant for sadism that was only kept in check by the Inquisition's strict discipline. She and Sumiko Tanaka were fellow Inquisitors and rivals for their boss' favour. Then came the Purge. After Atrisia had been absorbed by the Fringe Confederation, Emperor Akio Kahoshi was seemingly assassinated. Naamah had never cared about who sat on the throne, but his successor Madeline ordered an Anti-Force-User Purge.
Archangel's HRDs were her execution squads and primary enforcers. A number of Inquisitors managed to escape thanks to a warning from Valdier, who was sent into exile, but many didn't. Naamah was captured, taken to one of the Empress' concentration camps and bad things happened: Torture, experiments and so on. It seems to have further damaged her already unstable psyche. Though never a patriot, she'd been loyal to the Inquisition, seeing it as a family. Now it was gone, she was helpless and at the mercy of an ungrateful Empire she'd served for so long.
Eventually, she managed to escape and tracked down her former boss, Mirien Valdier. After an awkward reunion, both hatched a plan to assassinate the Empress. Against all odds, the suicide mission succeeded. Madeline was mortally wounded, though it later turned out that her associate Moira Skaldi, director of Archangel, had used the chance to transform her into an HRD.
Much to Naamah's disappointment, she and Mirien parted ways due to incompatible alignments. Freed from all restraints, Naamah went on a Chaotic Evil killing spree, indulging in vice and slaughter. Consorting with Bando Gora remnants after securing some of their artefacts at Gehenna, she used her twisted abilities like a predator, which often manifested in a cruel sexual deviancy, humiliating her victims to gain power over them. She might have gathered a small Bando Gora cult around her, but fate had other plans, for she was one of those teleported into the Netherworld when Akala made her grand return.
At first, Naamah thrived in the hellish wastelands of Chaos but then things...changed. The predator became prey and was forced to feel how her victims had suffered. Whatever transpired in Chaos changed her profoundly. Or rather it gave her a shock therapy that forced her to grow a conscience. When she finally emerged from the Netherworld at the end of the Second Akala Crisis, she was changed. Moreover, her Force power had been reduced to a sliver of what it had once been. Naamah was forced to realise she'd become nothing but a monster.
For a time, she wandered, lacking a purpose in life, before she took up the blade again. This time in the name of atonement. She fought wild beasts on Felucia that were ravaging local communities, blew up crime lords on Kessel and helped anti-government rebels on Jabiim fight an oppressive fascist regime. Her quest for redemption hit a roadblock on Jabiim, for a battle with government soldiers reawakened her Force Drain addiction. The event shook her, but she made good on her vow to avenge the rebels who'd died by assassinating the corrupt president of Handooine, whose administration had collaborated with Jabiim's oppressive overlords and using slave labourers.
She continued her private crusade against Archangel, teaming up with the fugitive Force Clone [member="Amara Zarides"] to hijack one of their prize ships, one of the few Maladis still in circulation. The mission turned out to be a success, but they were confronted by a brainwashed Enyo Typhos, who'd been turned into a grotesque machine-human hybride. Naamah engaged her, but was defeated. Luckily, Amara was able to get through to Enyo and convince her to rebel against her masters, though not before enduring a heavy beating herself. However, Naamah was driven by hatred for the genocidal machines and believed that it was only a matter of time until Enyo followed in their footsteps. So her partnership with Amara came to an end and both parted ways. Renaming her new ship the Judgement, Namaah continued her quest. She is loosely affiliated with the Shadow Knights, a faction of Eldorai rebels, but pursues her own causes. Despite her dislike of megacorporations, she occasionally trades information with Firemane's intelligence service.
