Syric Vahrel
The Voice of MARA
Surveillance Footage: Suspected Dissident Syric Vahrel
Name: Syric Tovaras Vahrel (Sire-ick Vuh-rell)
Homeworld: Manda
Faction: MARA (Militant Alliance to Resist Annexation)
Rank: Cell Leader
Species: Human
Skin Tone: Caucasian
Age: 24 GSY (b. 826 ABY)
Sex: Male, Heterosexual
Height: 1.81m
Weight: 77.5kg
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Brown
Appearance: Syric Vahrel seems painfully young for one bearing so much responsibility, but his shadowed eyes tell a different story, one of hard-won experience beyond his years. He stands ramrod straight, every muscle from his wiry legs to his broad shoulders to his thin lips wound tight as a durasteel cable, ready to bear any strain - or perhaps finally, messily snap. He keeps his chestnut hair short, and wears his beard closely cropped along his jawline. His irises are a pale aquamarine color, soft and thoughtful, but surrounded by deep bags. His voice is an iron murmur, soft but strong. He favors loose, mobile clothing in dark colors, the better for stealth operations and quick exits. Though he seldom appears to be armed, he always is, whether with nigh-undetectable plasteel knives, miniature holdout blasters, or heavier weapons for direct combat.
Personality: In public, Syric is a fountain of energy and determination. He carries the weight and builds the hope of his entire organization, and he takes this responsibility very seriously. No one ever sees him looking beaten; he always strives to inspire, no matter the situation. Privately, however, Syric has little hope of his own. He knows that he and his organization are, at best, a small speedbump to growing oppression across the galaxy. Governments, in his view, are far more concerned with perpetuating their own power than caring for their people, and he puts no faith in any of them in this age of a dozen empires. If the Force has a will, he believes, it must be perverse and twisted to allow so much suffering. He cares deeply for the galaxy and the people within it, and he'll fight for them, but he secretly fears that it's a losing battle.
Strengths and Weaknesses:
- Force of Will: Syric is fearless, charismatic, and determined. Difficult to manipulate and impossible to frighten or dissuade, he pursues his goals with a single-minded devotion few can match. Whatever his inner doubts, he projects an aura of hope and confidence that is nothing short of inspirational. An experienced leader who knows how to make the tough calls, he is excellent at recruitment and logistics, drawing people to his side and bringing out their strengths. As a result of years of activism and business connections, he has contacts all over the Outer Rim and beyond who are prepared to help his cause.
- Guerrilla Fighter: Syric is not at heart a violent person, but he has adopted the tool of violence and taken to it with frightening efficiency. An expert at concealment and ambush tactics in half a dozen different types of environment, capable both of strong forward planning and rapid improvisation, he is more slippery than a greased dianoga when he doesn't want to be found. He is a master of disguise and forged identities, his skills practically unsurpassed outside of special forces units and powerful crime syndicates. He has learned to make due with substandard supplies, smuggling and salvaging to keep his forces running.
- Unseen Scars: Syric's experiences as an activist and later as an anti-Sith guerrilla left their mark on his psyche. Every being he felt powerless to help was left etched in his memory, and the faces of dead comrades dance on the insides of his eyelids. He's been through a lot more than most people his age could stand, and it has left him scrabbling at hope in the face of the overwhelming darkness of the galaxy. As leader of a movement built on hope, he can't ever show his doubts, and that wears on him just as surely as his memories. Bearing this tremendous weight alone may well be the early death of him, if his enemies don't get him first.
- Slow to Trust: Leading an underground movement that will be brutally destroyed if discovered has made Syric cautious, sometimes overly so. He relies heavily on himself, seldom trusting even his own subordinates with any more details than he believes are absolutely necessary - a precaution against both possible treachery and the very real threat of interrogation and torture. This in turn puts more strain on him, as his reluctance to delegate means that many operations depend entirely on the plans only he knows. Killing or capturing him would be a blow from which the movement would struggle to recover, if indeed it could at all.
Biography: Born to wealth and privilege as a member of the merchant clans of Manda, the young Syric Vahrel escaped the decadence and complacency common to people in such a position through the mentoring of his parents, who taught him from an early age not to take his advantages for granted. He traveled widely as a child, picking up business and politics through a combination of rigorous study and direct inclusion in his family's dealings. It was a good time to begin making connections - with the threat of the Gulag Plague fading and trade routes reopening across the galaxy, he had the opportunity to watch as his family helped to rebuild his planet's fortunes by trading along the Manda Merchant Route and the Mara Corridor. Precocious and intelligent, he studied hard and worked harder, achieving an uncommon level of education and maturity at a young age.
The Sith returned when he was nine. Though he lived far from the Core Worlds, where much of the upheaval was taking place, the shockwaves of war shattered his perception of the galaxy. Where once he had been so sure of the order of things, he was now bombarded by reports of genocides, cultural devastation, and other war crimes which the governments of the galaxy seemed powerless to stop. Participating in relief missions alongside his parents, he saw firsthand the horrors of war and oppression, with entire species being wiped out and lost to the galaxy as once-beautiful worlds burned. Those images seared their way into his mind, and as more and more all-devouring warlords rose across the galaxy he began to wonder if one day all that destruction would come to his own home and burn down everything he had ever loved and worked for.
Syric was perpetually at the top of his class at the Baobab Merchant Marine Academy, which was surprising given the amount of time he took off for political lobbying and grassroots relief efforts. His parents, although immensely proud of his social consciousness and tremendous work ethic, began to worry that he was driving himself too hard at too young an age. He seemed to want to save the galaxy all by himself, and he took each new piece of devastating news from the war as a personal blow. He helped found and lead a student organization that stretched across a dozen Outer Rim worlds, campaigned for legislation with a dozen different planetary governments, and never found any of it to be anywhere near enough. People in the Rim felt powerless to change anything in the Core; they looked out for themselves, to his eternal frustration.
And so, finally, he went to war. Shortly after his graduation, Syric and a group of close friends formed a resistance cell that infiltrated the Core Worlds to fight the One Sith. It was 848 ABY, and the vast empire was already beginning to show cracks even as it dealt the Republic a deathblow. Infighting among the Dark Lords exacerbated the difficulty of controlling so much territory, beginning the process of disintegration just in time for the Mandalorians and the Galactic Alliance to strike. But such empires do not fall in a day, and that year was one of heavy, brutal fighting. Of all his friends, Syric was the only one to return home when the One Sith fell. He had buried the others, and that was not all. He had killed. He had bled. He had tasted what it felt like to fight an overwhelming foe. On the pitiful planet where he'd made his stand, there had been no one coming to help.
His cell hadn't beaten the Sith, not by a long shot. They'd fought and bled and died for precious little impact until finally the Sith Lord in command had pulled out his forces and made a tactical withdrawal as the Alliance advanced, hardly even noticing the damage that had been inflicted. Those that Syric had fought to save were largely dead, killed as an afterthought to deny the GA the glory of releasing them - and because they were considered a lesser species, unworthy of life. To be truly face to face with such evil, to fight it directly and still be largely unable to stop it, left its mark on Syric's well-intentioned soul. But he had learned other things, as well. He had learned to build bombs and kill men and evade detection. He had learned to lead in combat, to plan and improvise as the situation demanded, and to make the sacrifices needed to survive.
These were not skills the young man hoped to ever need again, but the galaxy can be cold and cruel. As the One Sith faded away, an age of a dozen empires dawned, with countless warlords rising in an effort to fill the power vacuum. One of the most powerful was a breakaway force from the First Order, an organization calling itself the Imperial Remnant and drawing direct parallels back to Palpatine's New Order. And they had set up directly on Syric's doorstep. From their new capital on Kamino they began to control local trade and round up supposed dissidents, gradually stretching out their iron hand across the sector. Syric found himself terribly tired for such a young man, tired of blood and death and powerlessness. But he didn't have it in him to let this go, to keep his eyes down rather than hate the banner above him.
His old nightmares were coming true, and he knew he would have to fight them. No matter what it took, and no matter what it cost him, he would fight back.