Shayde, Lord of the Below
Name: Birth Name Unknown
Aliases: Shayde, The Freak
Faction: Criminal Underworld
Rank: Crime Lord
Species: Harch
Sex: Male
Age: 45
Height: 1.9m
Weight: 118kg
Eyes: Red
Hair: Grey
Force-Sensitive: No
Appearance: At nearly two meters tall, Shayde towers over the average being. His alien bulk further reinforces the impression of a hulking brute, but a vicious cunning gleams in his arachnid eyes. He is entirely covered in grey-white hair in strange, shifting patterns across his body, though these patterns are often interrupted by brutal burn marks and blade scars. His voice is low, his breathing a heavy chittering. He speaks slowly, moves sluggishly, in almost every situation. It keeps his enemies off guard; they don't realize how quickly he can move until it's too late.
Shayde travels armed at all times, strapped with a variable assortment of vibroblades and heavy blaster pistols. He favors thick, flowing jackets that insulate him from the chill of the underlevels and conceal the many gadgets at his disposal. Aware that many would kill the king to seize his crown, he is never without armor beneath that jacket, and always keeps a personal shield generator active. Cautious and perceptive, he is always scanning his surroundings with his heightened senses. The intensity of his crimson insectoid gaze seems to burn right through any attempt at a lie.
+ Shayde is extremely deadly in close combat. Wielding six different weapons at once, he easily moves around defenses and attacks with a speed, viciousness, and unpredictability that few can match.
+ Shayde's exoskeleton and simple internal organs allow him to survive terrible injuries, making him extremely difficult to kill. He recovers quickly from even the most grievous of wounds.
- While capable of using a blaster, Shayde is a poor shot at long range. His many arachnid eyes are well-suited for sensing movement but ill-suited for great depth perception.
- Because of his arachnid physiology, Shayde is at his physical peak. No amount of training or conditioning will improve his strength or stamina, and age will eventually rob him of both.
Personality: Shayde is cunning, ruthless, and without any shred of empathy or pity. His experience of life has been that only those who seize something and manage to hold onto it are worthy of it, and that most beings are useless cattle without the courage or strength to change their station. On the other hand, any being that is capable of doing so is a threat to be managed or eliminated. This dark worldview has left Shayde bereft of friends or confidants, but he would have it no other way. He trusts and respects nothing and no one save himself; all others are rivals or commodities.
For Shayde, everything in the galaxy can be explained by greed. Greed for credits, for attention, for power, for companionship - every decision happens because someone somewhere is hungry for it. Shayde prides himself on reading what beings want and then using it against them. For himself, his goals are simple: to wring whatever personal pleasure he can out of the galaxy's filth before he finally dies and everything is silent forever. He is a hedonist, a plutocrat, and a petty tyrant, seeking ways to amuse himself and expand his personal power in the pursuit of amusement.
+ Shayde has an excellent head for business and for organization in general. He knows how to create efficiency through fear and desire, and he applies that knowledge ruthlessly.
+ Shayde is good at reading people. Lying to him is almost impossible. He can look at the way people act and determine what it is they want - and how to use it against them.
- Shayde rules through fear, and as such he has no allies to speak of. While this doesn't bother him, he is aware that it puts him in a vulnerable position. He must always be careful.
- Shayde is more than a little paranoid. A single plot he allows to slip by could undo all that he has worked for. Better to be safe than sorry; rumors are enough to make him homicidal.
Biography: Long before he was called Shayde, the young Harch was abandoned on Nar Shaddaa is the closing years of the Gulag Plague. None could say who his parents were or why they had left him, only that he was a helpless baby on a vicious world. The only one to take him in was a man who had a use planned for him. His name was Kovarri, of Kovarri's Grand Carnival, a traveling circus act. The ringmaster saw him as a strange, ugly thing, and believed that others would pay to gawk at The Freak. Unfortunately, the galaxy is often ugly itself, and he was right.
The Freak traveled with the Grand Carnival for the entirety of his young life. At first it was enough for him to gaze out from the bars of his cage, sending human children shrieking back from his alien face. As he grew older, however, Kovarri thought of new ways to put him to use. He learned to juggle, his progress speeded by the promise of a red-hot brand on his skin every time he dropped a ball. He learned to dance around the ring as he did, flailing his many arms in wide arcs as he kept twelve balls in the air at a time and the crowd yelled and jeered.
And deep behind his arachnoid eyes, he hated them. He hated them all with all his heart.
Between shows, Kovarri sent him to work the crowd from the shadows, stealing credit chips and jewelry from the spectators. Sometimes instead he would be the distraction, dancing around on a raised stage and trying to dodge the rotten fruit sold to the audience to throw at him while other carnies robbed them. Always he returned to his cage, humiliated, malnourished, seething with the only emotion he had ever known how to feel. No one suspected his keen intelligence. No one expected him to be learning so fast and so much. It proved to be a fatal mistake.
They did a show on Coruscant not long after the Republic first began restoring the plague-ravaged city world. Kovarri was old then; The Freak had lived thirty-one years in the ringmaster's "care". He did not have the strength to fend off the spidery limbs that wrapped around his throat after the final show, crushing his windpipe in seconds. He did not know that The Freak had been keeping back the things he stole, learning who the local criminals were and selling to them directly. The Coruscani Police expected a feral, unthinking creature, and he easily escaped them.
The fourteen years that followed were difficult ones for the city-planet, still crippled by the plague. Sacked and brutally ruled by the One Sith Empire, with half its inhabitants snatched away by the strange Netherworld disturbances, it was left with a significant population of desperate beings. It was during this time that the legend of Shayde emerged, the first name the Harch had chosen for himself. Shayde, the stories went, was the being that could get you whatever you needed. It knew every corner of the labyrinthine sublevels. It was the master of smuggling, theft, and extortion.
No matter how much changed for Coruscant, for better or for worse, the legend of Shayde endured... and even grew.
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