Alle Laufen
Sam Rodarch
NAME: Samantha 'Sam' Rodarch
SPECIES: Human, Mandalorian (by birth, exiled clan)
AGE: 34
SEX: Female
HEIGHT: 5'11”
WEIGHT: 155lbs
EYES: Brown, red-rimmed
HAIR: Dark Brown, shaved to the skin
SKIN: Fair
FORCE SENSITIVE: No
LEGAL STATUS: Fugitive. Multiple life sentences outstanding for the Gloss Massacre. Escaped the Cairn.
AFFILIATION: Rade's crew, aboard the Sundry.
NAME: Samantha 'Sam' Rodarch
SPECIES: Human, Mandalorian (by birth, exiled clan)
AGE: 34
SEX: Female
HEIGHT: 5'11”
WEIGHT: 155lbs
EYES: Brown, red-rimmed
HAIR: Dark Brown, shaved to the skin
SKIN: Fair
FORCE SENSITIVE: No
LEGAL STATUS: Fugitive. Multiple life sentences outstanding for the Gloss Massacre. Escaped the Cairn.
AFFILIATION: Rade's crew, aboard the Sundry.
APPEARANCE
Sam Rodarch is tall and broad through the shoulders. She is exactly what it says on the tin, a fighter who's spent twenty-odd years taking and giving punishment in cages with no rules. The face can't hide that; there's a litany of scars, both old and new, that decorate the woman's face: a nose that sets slightly left where it was broken and never straightened, a cauliflower left ear, left thickened and malformed. She has never had a pretty face, but it has never been a priority. Under it all, she looks tired in a way sleep can't and doesn't fix.
She went into prison at her lowest, gaunt, malnourished, a withdrawn alcoholic wasted down to a figure reserved for condescending glances. She came out hard, not big, because nobody in prison is eating enough protein to work on their mass, but dense. Lean corded muscle wound tightly over a lean frame, the physique of someone who rebuilt herself with nothing but bodyweight, shitty rations, and a refusal to stay weak. Wiry and frightening rather than heavy.
Her head is shaved now on the advice of her cellmate, Rade, who noted that her hair was getting grabbed in prison skirmishes. Where she once kept her hair haphazardly short and shaggy, only getting buzzed when it was getting in her eyes, she now takes it to the skin.
Sam's right arm is cybernetic from just above the elbow. Her flesh went to Vella Forte's lightsaber; the replacement went to Mercy, who tore it off with her bare hands and left it to be reattached on the cheap, and the join never sat right since. In prison, the slicer Mox stripped out the arm's safety governor and strengthened the frame, turning a compromised scrapheap prosthetic into a blunt weapon that hits far harder than it was ever built to. The catch is on-brand for Sam; at full force it punishes the flesh-and-bone socket it's bolted to. Every punch thrown hurts, and every punch thrown is usually worth it.
Her throat carries the newest mark and the one that isn't like the others: a ring of ruined, cauterised tissue where the prison collar was torn off her in the breakout, skin and all. She wears it bare, uncovered, the same as every other scar. It screams, 'this is what I fucking survived', not 'look what was done to me'.
PERSONALITY
Surly was always the word, and it still is, but where the old Sam was bitter and angry with a conscience stapled on, the new Sam has been hollowed out. The transformation in prison wasn't her becoming vicious; she had always been vicious. It was a quiet loss. Prison stripped out the part of her that used to be sick about what her violence could do. She is not smarter, nor happier; she is emptier, and Sam calls the emptiness strength because the emptiness is what earned her freedom.
Sam is private to the point of it being armour. She does not willingly share anything. Not her past, her parents, her mistakes, not the drinking, not her feelings and especially not the illiteracy. She learned from the very start through her own parents that people close to you let you down in the end, and her two years in prison confirmed it: everyone in that place used her as a means to their own end, up to and including the woman who rebuilt her arm and the woman she thought she loved. She came out trusting exactly one person, and only because that one saw her at the very bottom, helped, and saved her life without expecting anything in return.
All the physical damage that Sam has accumulated over the years, the scars, and the cybernetic arm she does not treat as a point of shame. A point of pride might be too strong a definition, but it is something of a personal display; a record of everything she survived standing up, and she wears it that way, nothing hidden. The collar-scar is the one mark that doesn't honestly belong to the list. Every single other wound she took while fighting, an active, willing party to reciprocal violence, but the prison collar was not. It was fastened on, something she couldn't refuse, that dosed her and owned her for years. It is not the same; it is a scar that marks Sam as being former property.
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
[+] Ring-Taught - Nearly two decades of shockboxing in the galaxy's shittiest backrooms. Genuinely dangerous in hand-to-hand. There's no glass jaw, no wasted motion, and a right hook you would not want to meet.
[+] Built to Take It - Enormous pain tolerance and endurance. She sat through a contraband cybernetics job with no anaesthetic without making a sound. Pain is her oldest and most familiar bedfellow in the galaxy to her, and the threat of being hurt does not slow her down at all.
[+] Undeterrable - The dog that bites and doesn't let go. You can hurt her as much as you like; you cannot make her stop coming. In a three-on-one, she does not defend, does not turn to face the threat, does not try to win. No, she fixates on her target and keeps crawling toward it through everything they do to her. There is nothing more frightening than something that won't quit.
[+] The Arm - Scrapheap cybernetic right arm, upgraded in prison, Mox's handiwork. Percussive, brutal, and the thing she'll use to dish out violence first. Pure Sam: no finesse, all impact.
[+] Reads the Room... - She can't read a word, so she learned to read people, physically. Posture tells, the shift before a strike. Sharp, animal, close-range perception.
[+/-] The Half-Second - In a fight, most people hesitate a fraction before shit hits the fan. Sam doesn't. She isn't a better fighter than her peers; she just wins because she'll do, without a second thought, the carnage they still baulk at. Great for solving simple problems, less great for situations that require hesitation.
[-] Dry, Not Clean - Sam doesn't drink anymore, but it was a forced sobriety and not recovery in any meaningful sense; drink was simply unavailable in prison, and her addiction was never addressed. She's brittle about it, one bad night from the bottle, and she swapped the vice rather than beating it. Grit is not a preferable substitute for alcohol; therapy is.
[-] ...Not the Page - Sam is fully illiterate, a feature of a childhood of poverty and exclusion. She cannot read or write at all and still hides it fiercely, because being caught not understanding the con, the contract, or the sign is how she gets played. It's a sore subject.
[-] Everything's a Nail - Sam's answer to a problem is, and has always been, violence. Dialogue isn't in her wheelhouse, and thinking it over isn't an instinct she has in the bag. The old temper used to be hot, and Sam was prone to being easily goaded, getting into an ill-advised scrap or breaking the furniture. That rage has now gone cold. It didn't leave; it changed temperature and learned to aim. She looks controlled, but it's still a problem.
[-] The Ankle - Her right ankle was badly broken in the ring years ago and was never given the chance to heal properly. She walks with a limp, favours the left, and it pains her daily. She went into prison limping and came out no better. It nags in the cold.
[-] The Head - Sam has chronic concussion damage from a lifetime of getting hit. This includes headaches, light sensitivity, ringing in the ears and poor concentration and memory. It's an accumulated cost of a career built on taking punches. Mercy beating her half to death with her own heavy, metal arm only exacerbated matters.
HISTORY
Samantha Rodarch was born on Mandalore to Jaspar and Dalla Rodarch, into an ordinary, tradition-steeped Mandalorian household. Her formative memories were her fondest, and now seem like fantasy. When she was five, a respected Clan Rodarch figure declared himself a false Mandalore under the Primeval cult and dragged half the clan into treachery; the name was ruined and the clan exiled. Her father Jaspar, humiliated and cast out, gave up the hunts for the bottle. Her mother Dalla eventually gave up on him, and went off-world for good, leaving a teenage Sam to mind an alcoholic wreck of a father. Sam hates them both: her mother for leaving, her father for dissolving, and both for passing down their respective weaknesses in their blood.
At sixteen, Sam followed her mother's example and left for Nar Shaddaa. She found shockboxing, not in any honourable circuit but in grimy backrooms, where the only two currencies were credits and blood. The years were a violent maelstrom of losses, scars, and rough living, but she found something in it. The fights were catharsis, a release, and the first pleasure she'd felt in a long time. She got by. However, accumulating injuries required fast solutions, namely cheap battle-stims, which came with the free entanglement with a predatory dealer who hooked the desperate and trafficked them into debt. Sam avoided the consequences and was granted a narrow escape when a passing mercenary gunned the man down.
The lesson didn't take.
Through the underworld, she reunited with Elliot Locke, an old acquaintance who'd once shown her a scrap of decency, now sharing his skull with a vicious persona, Archibald Sult. They partnered up, each with their own machinations for the other. On a job, she crossed the Sith, Vella Forte, who grew bored of a well-matched brawl and used the Force to end it. Sam left her right arm on the floor and had her torso perforated by a barrage of glass shards. Bleeding out, Sult carried her to Zazil, a Verpine cyberneticist, who rebuilt what was broken, providing a cybernetic right arm and new lungs. As payment, the pair were sent to deal with a nosy journalist looking into the Verpine's organ harvesting operation. Not accustomed to the strength and feel of the new arm, Sam crushed the man's throat by accident and killed him.
She was sick in the immediate aftermath, quite literally and figuratively. Sult couldn't comprehend the guilt of killing; Sam could comprehend too much.
Then came Mercy, a second Sith, no relation to Forte, and the only name Sam ever had for her. They first met in the shockboxing ring, and when Sam faltered mid-fight, paralysed by the fear she'd killed again, Mercy seized the opening and battered Sam half to death with her own heavy metal arm, tearing it clean off. It was reattached cheaply sans one finger taken as a trophy, and had never been right since.
In the long recovery that followed, grim roach-infested motels and, with Sult at her side, Sam finally started drinking properly. Concussion headaches, no fight left in her, no reason to care. She stopped fighting. She kept drinking. She wasted away into a scrawny, withdrawn alcoholic on a shithole rock, hassled and tormented by low-rent gangsters.
Mercy came back.
Ascended, as force users are wont to do, and was magnitudes more powerful. Sam, in a desperate attempt to claw back some semblance of the person she used to be, tried to jump her in an alley, and it was pitiful; Mercy swatted her vibroknife aside and, amused, made an afternoon of her, namely lunch, and then a strip club, for a spot of murder. Mercy cut down the owner Benee's bouncers herself, then closed her hand physically over Sam's on the knife and drove it into Benee.
In the aftermath, Mercy left, with a parting gift of poison wisdom. Sam could find her strength again if she simply embraced what she is: a killer. The local authorities found it neatest to pin every death in the club on Sam. She went down for all of it. They dubbed it the Gloss Massacre.
She arrived at a station prison, off-world, malnourished, tragic, in alcohol withdrawal, and was fitted with a standard high-risk collar that provided sedation, shock, and restraint in one well-maintained device. With no available booze on hand, Sam was forced to detox the hard way. She hit bottom hard in a shared cell. Shakes, seizures, and hallucinations. The whole nasty business. Her cellmate, the veteran contract killer, Rade, watched her through the worst of it and didn't let her die. She didn't want anything in return other than Sam to aim better when she spewed.
Then she climbed.
She got her body back into action. Press-ups, bed dips, wall sits, whatever could be done in a cell with no equipment, in a shithole without a gym. It didn't build the old bulk back; it built something new. Lean, corded and ready. Mox the slicer reforged the ruined arm into a weapon for the love of the game and a favour Sam paid back as muscle.
When Benee's cousin got herself incarcerated to settle the blood debt, Sam resorted to picking up a prison stim habit to fight the collar's administered sedation and stay alert. They called it grit, and nobody asked what it was, what it was cut with, or what the long-term effects were. She bought from the Zeltron dealer Solene, who became her supply and her "girlfriend," though Sam was only ever one of many drifting in and out of the Zeltron's cell.
Over the course of the two years, between the violent hierarchy of prison, Rade's guidance, waiting for Greeva to strike, and the grit, Sam changed. Her rage, which had been a feral creature of heat and violence, died, and what wore its carcass still called itself rage, but it was colder, more focused, and no longer hesitated when it came to the unforgivable.
A killer.
Sult ran the escape from outside. He owed her one, and he collected the debt by clearing it. He was the man who put the bottle in her hand and helped ruin her, and he was also the man who got her out, but they were done. She was a liability, and liabilities were not Archibald Sult's style.
Rade was vital during the escape because Sam couldn't do her half of the job without the veteran's wits and ability to formulate a plan which went beyond blunt-force violence, and the two hardened women broke out together.
However, in the confusion caused by their escape, Sam met Greeva face-to-face at last, with the latter picking her time and place. The Rodian was the better fighter, faster, quicker and smarter. Sam went in with the arm, blunt force that couldn't quite finish a real hunter, while Greeva stuck her with a shiv and used Sam's own collar to choke her. What Greeva hadn't anticipated was that Sam was willing to tear off the device around her neck, along with her own flesh, cauterised as the power cell burned out. It ended with the blade in Sam's hand, close, deliberate and cold.
She went out marked, addicted, ruthless, and with exactly one friend in the entire galaxy, and that friend was pragmatic. As cellmates, they filled each other's blind spots, and so with no ceremony, Rade invited Sam to join her mercenary crew aboard the Sundry.
Sam had no reason to say no.
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