Tehkyram
Character
TEHKYRAM, KNIGHT OF THE SITH
(Image Link)
NAME: Tehkyram
FACTION: Sith Empire
RANK: Acolyte of the Sith
SPECIES: Karkarodon
AGE: Unknown, roughly somewhere in his 20's
SEX: Male
HEIGHT: 7'2"
WEIGHT: 300-ish lbs
EYES: Like a shark's eyes, black and blue
HAIR: None
SKIN: Pale and Grey, with white Sith tattoos along his head, neck, back and arms
ADDITIONAL APPEARANCE NOTES: Tehkyram is considerably large even by Karkarodon standards. Also, he was raised in a very hot and humid environment and was also in squalid conditions. As a result, he's not terribly attached to clothing. He's no exhibitionist, the question of modesty never crosses his mind at all. He merely sees clothing as somewhat restrictive. In particular he doesn't wear any sort of top unless specifically asked to, or if he has to don armor of some sort. For the most part he prefers to wear loose-fitting simple pants and boots. When it comes to choice of armor, ease of motion is his top priority.
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes
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STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
+ Predator's physique: Tehkyram is perhaps the adonis of Karkarodons, with imposing muscles seemingly sculpted by the gods of the sea. And those muscles aren't for show, either. Tehkyram is a physical powerhouse, with impressive speed, strength, and endurance even before his skills with the Force come into play. Indeed, in another life Tehkyram could have been a gifted athlete.
+ You can't kill the Boogeyman: Tehkyram isn't immortal, but he isn't fragile either. His connection to the dark side of the force and his indomitable willpower has given him truly fearsome, supernatural endurance akin to that of a movie monster. It will take more than a few blaster shots or bullets or even lightsaber blows to kill Tehkyram, and even then, you're still only making him madder by slowing him down. And you better hope you do kill him, because he will recover. And he will remember what you did to him.
+ I have endured worse: Part of the reason Tehkyram is so hard to kill is the aforementioned iron will. Tehkyram has a remarkably high pain threshold, in part due to his stoic nature. Whether it's a blaster bolt on the battlefield or a harsh insult from a peer, Tehkyram endures. He bears the pain and stores it and compartmentalizes it for later. And likewise, few situations are truly hopeless for Tehkyram either. After all, if he can survive worse, he can survive this.
+ Rip and tear: Tehkyram is a killer. Even during his slave days he found himself consistently fighting and killing jungle predators with everything from farm tools to his bare hands. He knows violence, and has made his greatest ally. Even when he is executing more precise and skillfull techniques, he does it with a notable killing ferocity. Even his poetry readings have a furious element to them.
+/- Extreme omnivore: Tehkyram has eaten the flesh of sentient beings, some still living, to survive. He has no compulsions about doing it again if necessary, which is a line that some of the most depraved Sith still wouldn't cross. He may be protected from starvation, but certainly not stigmatization.
+/- The devil's eyes: Tehkyram's brutal upbringing and his stoic, unfettered embrace of the Dark Side's call is quite noticeable, even from people who aren't Force-sensitive. There's just something uncanny about his placid, detached demeanor, as if the darkness that is constantly bubbling up inside of him and his capacity for atrocity gives off a certain aura, a darkness that is particularly visible in his eyes. It's a certainly terrifying, intimidating aura that is perfect for striking fear and/or nausea into people, but it makes good-faith diplomacy quite difficult, and a skilled Force user could easily sense him.
- To the last man: Tehkyram has a determined sense about him that crosses into being downright stubborn. If given an order, he will try to fulfill it at any cost. He will not retreat or cease fighting unless explicitly commanded to (assuming he even hears it) even in a situation that means certain death. If you point him at a group of enemies, you better not have planned on taking any prisoners.
- Fish out of water: That's not an idiom or anything, Tehkyram is just an extremely poor swimmer. To adapt to manual labor his hands and feet were dewebbed, and he never really got an opportunity to learn how to swim. While he can breathe underwater, he's very clumsy and off his balance. Also, as an aquatic creature by nature, Tehkyram prefers moist, damp environments. Stale, dry climates make him antsy and itchy. He's also not terribly fond of cold climates either though. Cold tends to slow him down. Also, in a more abstract sense, he has no real connection at all to Karkarodons or their culture. For all intents and purposes, he's perfectly atomized.
- A ticking time bomb: Tehkyram internalizes and compartimentalizes everything that he hates, storing that rage and spite deep inside him, letting it stew and boil until there's an appropriate time to let it out. That would be fine, except Tehkyram hates a lot of things. So without an outlet, that rage will just keep building and building and building. And as stoic as he is, it will become more and more noticeable how restless, antsy, and overall less pleasant that Tehkyram is becoming...
- What hell can create: Tehkyram has mostly put his greatest ordeal behind him. But the reality is that the mental scars of what happened will likely never heal. Prolonged periods of darkness, isolation, starvation, or incapacitation weigh heavily on Tehkyram's psyche, and the longer he remains in that state, the further he returns to that dark time of primordial gibbering madness and hysteria.
BIOGRAPHY
The precise origins of Tehkyram are likely never to be known. He was born on a slave vessel en route to the Onderon system, to two enslaved Karkarodon parents. The first record of Tehkyram's existance at all is a bill of sale from the ship to a noble of Onderon who owned a logging company on the planet's jungle moon of Dxun. The Karkarodon was named "FL-8662" and assigned to a logging colony where he was raised by a combination of childcare droids (who "adjusted" his hands and feet to be more suitable for terrestrial labor) and other slaves. As a child, FL-8662 was surprisingly obedient and receptive most of the time, but when there were outbursts of undesirable behavior, they were remarkable in how sustained and violent they were, and how much force was needed to suppress the child. Still, in spite of the incursions, FL-8662 grew by leaps and bounds, maturing into a remarkably strong, robust young slave. His master was all too eager to put a child of his budding physique to work. As a result, FL-8662 found himself working with tools that were far too large for him to normally use, hacking trees down with equipment far too large for someone of his age. And when the predators of Dxun descended upon the loggers, Tehkyram always fought back, even if he had to use his bare hands. And indeed, despite the many scars, FL-8662 never once lost. Even if he didn't win, he still survived.
FL-8662 didn't seem to mind his enslavement or the terrible working conditions on the Demon Moon. Indeed, he adapted quite well. He could fell a tree entirely on his own, doing so with cutting materials that sometimes required entire crews. He didn't even have to fight and kill every beast that threatened his camp, as the smaller predators learned to respect his might. Of the nobleman's many slaves, FL-8662 was his clear favorite. He was a lucrative, valuable asset, worth every single credit spent to purchase and raise him. Other slaves respected him too. He never started trouble, and even the Wookie slaves knew better than to start a fight with FL-8662 after he gauged out the eyes of one their number who dared try and extort his lunch ration.
To many, it seemed that FL-8662 had mastered Dxun.
This was an incorrect assessment. Dxun has never been mastered, and never will.
The Demon Moon fought back against its would-be colonizers this time in the form of a lethal form of tropical fever, a contagious plague that could kill within days. A cure was easy to develop but expensive to produce, meaning that any slave who caught it was written off as already dead. Indeed, a large, intricate cave system, perhaps once an ancient mine, was further excavated and turned into a massive quarantine facility, a series of endless tunnels where sick slaves were sealed off to die. And much to his owner's disappointment, FL-8662 was one of the condemned, having returned to camp with intense fatigue and awaking the next morning with the familiar jaundice of infection. His master sadly consigned him to the darkness of the quarantine cave alongside the thousands of slaves who were dying or already dead. And so, lost to the darkness, he found himself confronted with death.
And yet, he refused to die. FL-8662 wandered the tunnels, stricken with delirium from his own illness and the miasma around him. There was a great darkness in that cave, perhaps drawn there by the presence of death and despair, or perhaps having been there all along. And FL-8662 did not turn away from that darkness. Instead, in his great madness, he embraced it. For sustenance he had to consume the withered and rotting bodies of fallen slaves, sometimes having to finish off the ones that weren't dead yet. If he was too weak from hunger to walk, he would crawl until he found something to eat. If he injured himself in the darkness, he did his best to either heal the wound or ignore it. And so while traversing the perpetual night of the underground, he somehow managed to survive, perhaps through sheer force of will. He clung to life firmly and resolutely, refusing to succumb to his illness or starvation. He was far too mad to give in to his pain, far too wrapped up in the embrace of the darkness of those caves.
And some time later, almost certainly over a month, a medical team returned to drop off more sick slaves, they came across a living FL-8662. He was a withered husk of what he once was, but still very much alive and animated. The owner was notified at once. He was astonished to see that his slave had survived for a month, and even more surprised when a medical droid accompanying had confirmed that there was no trace of the disease anywhere on the slave's withered body. Somehow, during that whole ordeal, FL-8662 didn't just survive his disease, he defeated it. He was nothing less of a medical miracle.
Of course, a mad, famished slave was of no use to the owner, but he found that his astonishing resilience could interest other buyers. His owner sold him off to the Mandalorians, assuming they would find some use of such endurance. Perhaps FL-8662's true calling was on the battlefield. But his new Mandalorian owner, familiar with the evils of Dxun, could recognize the aura of the Dark Side surrounding the slave. He couldn't sense it directly, but he was old enough to recognize the Dark Side's taint when he saw it. And he saw the abyss of the Dark Side for sure in FL-8662's eyes. Cognizant of the whole ordeal, he decided to give FL-8662 a name: Tehkyr'am, Mando'a for "From Death". A suitable name for how he had clawed his way back from the brink. But the Mandalorian had no use for Tehkyr'am. It would take too long to rehabilite his body and mind, and even then, such overwhelming darkness was dangerous to have on the battlefield. So instead, the Mandalorian resold his new acquisition directly to the Sith (for a much greater price than he paid for, of course). His new master, not terribly fluent in Mando'a, shortened his acquisition's new name to Tehkyram.
Despite his new owner sensing the potential in him quite strongly, Tehkyram was still in no condition for physical training or hardship. And so, as a cruelty disguised as mercy, his master took Tehkyram, whose mind had hardly recovered from the ordeal in the quarantine caves, and put him to work doing menial administrative work. His large but still emaciated frame was almost always hunched over a desk keeping the books for his master's estate, only sometimes doing menial physical tasks as a means of recovering his strength. The other acolytes jeered him and taunted him for his frailty, and while he stoically endured, he still felt the resentment grow. No longer could he respond to transgression with violence as he once did before as a slave. Indeed, as he returned to mental coherency and physical fitness, he could feel a sort of raw anger burning in him. It was a deep, boiling sort of anger he had never felt before. Not just anger at his supposed peers or his inability to punish their trespasses, but a more existential rage at his lot in life. Fate had inflicted cruelty after cruelty upon him, and he wanted nothing more than to repay it tenfold.
As he was educated by his master, Tehkyram found himself drawn to the humanities. Being finally literate for the first time, he learned to love poetry. Words became magical and mystical to him. But more importantly, history seemed to spell out a sort of message to Tehkyram. Life in the galaxy had once been strong and abundant, powerful and enduring. But then, centuries ago, there was a devastating sickness, then centuries of darkness, madness, and death. And yet, life in the galaxy recovered, much in the same way it did before. And as his studies into history progressed further, a cycle began to form. Life thrived, then was driven into near exile, then recovered with a roaring, bloody vengeance. Empires and Republics, Jedi and Sith, there was a consistent unending cycle of near-death and rebirth. And so finally, he understood his place in life. He had taken on a lifetime of indignity and pain specifically so he could become an instrument of bloody destruction. His rebirth meant embracing hostility to life itself. Life nurtured him and wounded him, so now he must wound it in return.
With this revelation, Tehkyram's recovery took off. Whenever he wasn't working, he meditated intently, letting his hate flow through him and empower him. Using the power of the Dark Side, perhaps the same darkness he encountered back in the Quarantine cave, he began to restore his body through sheer force of will. His master, impressed, reassigned him to more physical labor, often times under the supervision of other acolytes. And while at first the Acolytes loved to abuse their lesser peer as he toiled away, they soon found that provoking him was a bad idea. His hateful glare resulted in crushed windpipes, then ribcages, and finally skulls and more sensitive organs. He was a beast to spar with, and even if he didn't technically win, his opponents found themselves leaving with at first bruises, then broken bones, and then some not even leaving alive. When Tehkyram assembled his lightsaber, a massive greatsword much like the cutting tools he worked with as a child, one of his peers made a crude joke about compensation. The next morning that acolyte was found hacked to pieces in his own bed. As the days went on, Tehkyram began to take every opportunity to slowly but steadily pick off his peers until finally, he had proven himself to be the only acolyte left.
KILLS
Watch this space!
BOUNTIES COLLECTED
Watch this space!
ROLE-PLAYS
Not Everything is Black and White [TSE Dominion of Cadomai Hex]
Your Faith in Your Friends is Yours [TSE Invasion of TRA-held Gree Hex]
The Less You Know The Better [TSE Dominion of Zygerria]
The Siege of Commenor [TSE/CSA]
Be Vewwy, Vewwy Quiet... We're Hunting Rancors! [Private RP]
It is unaVOIDable, it is your destiny. [TSE Dom of Nathema Hex - AN,21]
