Vayna Akhara
SWRP Writer
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NAME: Taia Vaan.
FACTION: Imperial (Stormtrooper Commando)
DESIGNATION: VA-2771-FF
RANK: Stormtrooper Sergeant
UNIT AFFILIATION: 501st Legion
SPECIES: Human
AGE: Twenty one
GENDER: Female
HEIGHT: 5 feet 10 inches
WEIGHT: 130 pounds
EYES: Blue
HAIR: Blonde
SKIN: Pale
CREDITS: 1000
DISTINGUISHING MARKS:The palms of her hands bear the tattoos awarded to her by the Tribal Elders.
FORCE SENSITIVE: Not known to be - though she has demonstrated a 'sixth sense' warning her of danger, and she also seems to have more than her fair share of luck ...
STRENGTH: Taia is considerably stronger than her slender build would suggest, due to her hard upbringing. (6/10)
DEXTERITY: As a scout, Taia had to be fast to survive - and she was the best in the clan. Her speed and agility is exceptional. (9/10)
CONSTITUTION: No-one survives for long on Avactaris Delta III unless they are of hardy stock. Taia survived. (7/10)
INTELLIGENCE: Taia is a reasonably fast learner, but has gaps in her education. (Education 4/10, Learning 6/10)
WISDOM: Taia has a lot of hard-earned cunning and a very strong will (9/10) but not much experience of people outside of fellow stormtroopers and the sort of people she lived with on Avactaris Delta III (Life Experience 5/10)
CHARISMA: Taia is a leader - she led patrols through the swamps of her homeworld, successfully leading people much older than her. (8/10)
FORCE POWERS: None
SKILLS:
Taia is a soldier born and bred, a tracker and scout par excellence. She is an exceptional shot with personal weapons, invisible in any sort of cover, a hawk-eyed tracker, and lethal up close and personal. She is a skilled pilot of jetpacks, skimmers and hover bikes, and knowledgeable with explosives. The overwhelmingly dangerous foes she faced on a daily basis meant that, through hard experience, she has taught herself to be ambidextrous.
LIGHTSABER/SWORD FORMS: None
STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES:
Weaknesses: Taia knows little of the Galaxy she now finds herself in. She is a soldier through and through, and reacts like a combat veteran when non-confrontational approaches might work better. She is a tactical commander, not a strategist, and concentrates on her own tasks rather than the big picture.
Strengths: A superlative fighter with any weapon to hand, a tracker, hunter and scout with few equals, fanatically loyal to the Empire and unafraid of death. She seems to have a 'sixth sense' when it comes to danger, something which she cannot explain but has kept her alive against some of the deadliest foes around.
GEAR: Apart from the Stormtrooper equipment assigned to her upon her joining the Corps, she has a modified E-11 blaster rifle (modified by Clan armourers on Avactaris Delta III, it has had recoil reduced and a silencer added), and a CR-24 flame rifle, both of which she used on her homeworld and has kept them. She also has a unique weapon nicknamed The Tenderiser'. Similar to a bec de corbin, though made entirely of metal alloys, it has a much heavier head off-set by a counterweight at the other end, the 'pick' is eighteen inches long, and the haft five feet in length. The pick has enormous armour-piercing properties due to its weight and leverage, and the length of the spike allows hits to reach vital parts of even huge foes. The spike has channels along the side to prevent suction from causing the weapon to stick in an enemy.
SHIP: None
DROIDS: None
PETS: None
PERSONALITY:
First Impressions: Upon meeting Taia out of armour, it's easy to underestimate her as a fighter; she's quite slender in build and not particularly powerful-looking. Study her, however, and discerning eyes might detect the air of restrained violence that hangs around her, an aura of a hunter waiting to strike. She is normally quiet, both in her movements and her speech, listening rather than talking. It's difficult to reconcile that image with that of Taia in battle; fanatically brave, shouting orders to her troops, leading from the front, merciless to the Empire's enemies. To understand her, one must know the foundations of her personal code, one drummed into her throughout her years on Avactaris Delta III:
Loyalty. The central driving force behind Taia is loyalty. Loyalty to her companions and loyalty to the Empire. For those, she would lay down her life without hesitation, or kill without mercy. The concept of betraying those to whom she has given her loyalty does not even cross her mind.
Sacrifice. The Good of the Many outweighs the Good of the Few. It is Right and Fitting to Die for one's Lord. These are the tenets of her duty, the central beliefs that drive her to place her life at the disposal of the Empire. Just as she put her life at the service of her clan on Avactaris Delta III so that the clan might prosper, so she places herself at the disposal of the Stormtrooper Corps, the Imperial Army, and the Emperor. Her death is nothing if it preserves the Empire.
Violence. Taia has spent almost all her life fighting for survival in an extremely inhospitable world, one where she has had to kill from an early age, and a world where her ability to fight and slay the enemies and threats to her people have been honed to a fine edge. For years she was not seen as a person, but as a living weapon - and one that is now at the disposal of the Empire's military might.
Passion. 'Live fast and die young' was the unofficial motto of scouts on Avactaris Delta III, and thus they took whatever opportunities life sent their way without hesitation. For Taia, those passions, outside of combat, are physical pursuits such as extreme sports, hunting, bike racing and so on; team-centred activities, such as sports, drinking, and competitions; and occasional no-strings sex, male or female, she doesn't discriminate.
BIOGRAPHY:
There are some worlds which, when visitors come upon them and find them to be inhabited, give rise to the question 'why would anyone want to live here?' Avactaris Delta III is such a world; a place of almost nothing but shallow lagoons and thick, dense, overpoweringly dark swamps, dangerous and deadly. Plants poison, insects bite and spread disease, and huge predators eat anything unwary enough to cross their path. Yet, even here, may be found civilisation - of a sort.
The swamps of Avactaris Delta III, you see, are not entirely devoid of wealth, though extracting it is another matter. Deep in the swamps lie deposits of a substance referred to by Imperial scientists as Avacsaurianic Coprolithic Crystalline Salts, or ACC Salts for short. Their name gives away their true nature - coming from the great reptilian predators of Avactaris, the salts are excreted in the dung of the giant hunters. Their properties make them a subject of much study in the Empire, especially their ability to increase the effectiveness of ion weapons, by causing their shots to hold together better when the salts are introduced into the firing chamber. Attempts to remove young swamp reptiles and set up breeding colonies on other planets failed miserably; they can thrive only on their desolate homeworld. As a result, a refinery has been set up to process whatever ACCSS deposits are discovered.
The factory requires a workforce, and more than that, it needs people willing to go into the swamps and brave the dangers to find ACCS deposist; being the natural byproducts of excretion, there are no ACCS veins to be mined, only scraped-out middens to raid. To obtain the rare salts, someone must enter the swamp, find the great beats' latrines, and dig them out, bringing back sacks of the foul-smelling ordure.
Enter the Avactarian Clans. A grand name for what are, on the whole, little more than ragtag gangs of criminals, fortune-seekers, hermits, runaways, military deserters, and similar desperate people. Some gangs, however, are more than that, semi-permanent settlements deep in the heart of the darkest, most deadly swamps, where the massive reptilian overlords of the marshes grow large enough to destroy entire villages, and where smaller hunters strike from ambush to bring down any solitary prey.
It was in this world or hunters and ever-present danger that Taia Vaan was born. Her parents were both clanspeople, eking out a living hunting for ACCS, or trading the hides of the beasts they slew. One parent was a hard-drinking, loud-voiced, aggressive, short-tempered brawler, scarred by a hundred knife fights - and her father was worse.
When her mother was killed by one of the hunters of the swamps, her father began teaching Taia what she would need to know to survive and prosper as part of her parents' Clan, even as an elite scout and hunter. By the age of four she was shooting blasters and cutting with knives; by six, she knew a dozen ways to kill a man with her hands alone. By eight, she had made her first kill, a member of another clan who'd tried to steal from her Clan's stores.
It was during those early years that she learnt the ways of the Clan, and how they survived the deadly swamplands that they dwelt in. The first was violence; only through fighting that which threatened them could the Clan survive. The second was willingness to sacrifice oneself for the good of the clan; each and every one of them had to be ready to die if it meant the Clan's survival. Alone, they would all die; together, they could prosper.
Even at eight years old, Taia was expected to stand guard duty and to take part in the patrols that kept the perimeter of the village secure from threats. Dangerous beasts would be killed when encountered, poisonous flora burnt off, insect hives torched. The massive palisade that surrounded the village was patrolled day and night by armed guards, and watchtowers at the corners held repeating blasters on tripod mounts manned at all times. The blonde girl took her turn at all of them, but it soon became apparent that it was patrols at which she excelled; her ability to sense danger well in advance of anyone else, her marksmanship and her stealth were obvious even at such a tender age, and some of the Clan's veterans took her under their wing, honing her skills in between combat patrols.
Amongst the rusted junk that had accumulated over the years, Taia found a working jumppack, and improvised heat baffles for the lower legs that would allow the pack to be used to travel around - or to go after the hunters that lived up in the enormous trees of the planet's dank and dark marshes. The blonde girl taught herself to use the pack, and to shoot whilst airborne, and hunted the nightmare creatures of the swamp's upper canopy until they were driven from the vicinity of the Clan dwellings.
For this action, her left hand was tattooed with the Clan symbol for a Master Hunter and given the responsibility to start leading patrols through the surrounding swamps, to eliminate threats to the Clan. She was ten years old.
She both led the men and women of the patrols, and hunted alone. When leading, she always took point, and when it was necessary for someone to act as 'bait' to lure out a dangerous creature, she never asked for volunteers, but took the role herself. She persuaded mechanically skilled members of the Clan to help get the small number of hover bikes and skimmers that had been left to rot around the village, or that they could retrieve from the swamps or take from the refinery's scrapheap, and so begin aerial patrols. These did not render foot patrols unnecessary, but they did enable the patrols to cover a greater area more quickly. Foot patrols, however, remained vital close to the village, as any predator overlooked by the scouts would be a threat to the people of the Clan.
Taia would often go into the swamp alone, trusting to her stealth skills to move unobserved until she was in the ideal place to attack whatever threat she'd encountered. Sometimes she would lave mines for them to stumble across, other she would slay them with well-aimed blaster shots. She would even kill the great predators with The Tenderiser, having no qualms about engaging even the mightiest predators in close combat.
Occasionally, during these long-range airborne patrols, they would come across one of the truly terrifying denizens of the swamps, known as a Swamp Dragon. Capable of living for centuries, perhaps millennia, these monstrous creatures could grow large enough to dwarf a Greater Krayt Dragon. Such behemoths were all but immune to blaster fire, being vulnerable only to explosives. Such devices also proved useful against some of the lesser dwellers in the marshes. Predatory hunters known as Tachvyathyn, semi-intelligent creatures known as 'Butcher-Beasts' for their habit of hanging food up to 'ripen' - including human prey - were becoming more common, and a greater threat than before. Taia led a campaign to reduce their numbers, killing more than a score of them with flamethrowers, blasters and explosive charges such as mines and thermal detonators.
No-one knew why their numbers were rising, however; all the clansfolk could do was to eliminate the threat to their village whenever the breasts were discovered. Small Tachvyathyn were never encountered - either they kept away from human habitation, being small, or the species' breeding grounds were far enough away that no young would make it close to the village without being killed by other hunters of the swamplands.
By the time she reached her teens, Taia had grown into a beautiful but deadly girl, able to outfight almost every adult in the Clan in close combat, a stealthier hunter than any other, a marksman, ordnance expert, and hover bike and jumppack master. She'd killed hundreds of Tachvyathyn and other larger, deadlier beasts, and more than forty men and women from other clans, enemies who'd tried to raid her Clan, or whom they had themselves raided. Now she was being called upon to teach the younger children how to hunt, though none became as skilled as she had been at their age.
If any danger threatened, she was the Clan's first line of defence. If other scouts came back with reports of some threat to the village, she would be tasked with its destruction. She was also their biggest earner, showing a flair for tracking down ACCS deposits that none other could match, as well as bringing in plenty of scaly hides for trade or barter with other clans or the refinery personnel. Her life was one of almost constant combat, training for combat, or planning for combat. And Taia, the slim blonde with the bright blue eyes, was the deadliest predator in the swamp.
Until the day one of the great Swamp Dragons came to the area. A flood of Tachvyathyn, Quardilan, Eshdenathas and other mighty and powerful monsters came flooding through the Clan's area, and the scouts were hard-pressed to stop them from attacking the village. Taia was out every day, and every evening she came home with yet more kills, All able-bodied adults and children who could fight were called on to defend the village, whilst the hunters thinned the numbers of the dangerous newcomers.
As the flood slowed to a trickle, the Clan breathed a sigh of relief, but Taia wasn't satisfied; something had caused the creatures to migrate, something big enough to terrify the other swamp-monsters - and she had a good idea what. Taking her jumppack, she set off tracking the migration route of the beasts. What she found was her beyond her worst nightmare; a Swamp Dragon far larger than the largest seen in living memory.
This was the terror that had driven everything before it - and now it was heading directly for the Clan village. The blonde returned to the village to inform the rest of the Clan. Horrorstruck, some advocated fleeing, others shouted that they should stand and fight ... somehow. Meanwhile, without a word to anyone else, Taia went to one of the hover bikes and stripped it of anything not essential to keeping it in the air, then loaded it with every explosive she could fit in it - frag mines, plasma grenades, even half a dozen thermal detonators. Without informing anyone, unaccompanied, she rigged up an impact-fused blasting cap and set off back to where she'd spotted the Dragon.
The massive beast was heading straight for the village when she tracked it down in an opening in the trees, where a shallow though wide lake had formed. From the drowned vegetation bubbled up methane and other, even more flammable gases; where the mighty Dragon stirred up the sediment with its clawed feet, the gases rose in such quantities as to cause the water to froth. As Taia flew across the water towards the titanic beast, it bellowed a challenge that could be heard thirty miles away. But the blonde girl would not be turned away. She flew on, straight at the Dragon, and ,as it opened its massive jaws to devour her and the bike, she aimed the bike straight for its gaping maw, gunned its engine as hard as she could - and dived off the bike just before it flew into the open mouth of the Dragon. As its huge jaws closed, the explosives detonated, setting fire to the swamp gases that the beast's huge bulk had stirred up from the bottom.
The swamp erupted in flames, bathing the mortally wounded Dragon in orange and scarlet fire. Roaring in agony, the beast writhed in its death throes, then slowly uncoiled and sank into the black, stinking water. Over two minutes later, a filthy figure pulled itself from the water away from the edge of the flames and sat on a fallen tree-trunk, watching the flames burn down. As the rest of the Clan's scouts flew into view on their remaining hover bikes and skimmers, Taia watched the dead Dragon's smoking corpse, unblinking.
When the Clan heard of her exploits, they were stunned and awed. She was granted the second of her tattoos, this time on the palm of her right hand, to indicate that she had been granted a special privilege, one not given for over a century; the title of 'Undying One', and the authority to go anywhere, use anything and give orders to anyone, even the Clan Elders, if the safety of the Clan required it. She could overrule whoever she wished if there was danger to the Clan or its members, and even kill another Clan member if that person was endangering the rest of the Clan. She had, as far as the security of the Clan was concerned, the absolute authority to do whatever was needed.
The death of the behemoth reverberated around Avactaris Delta III. No-one had singlehandedly killed a Swamp Dragon before, and no-one had ever heard of one as large as the one whose scaly hide was presented to the refinery's owner for trade. Word spread - and reached curious ears. An officer of Imperial Intelligence came to visit the swamp planet, saw the blackened but otherwise intact hide, and demanded to meet the hero responsible for such a daring act. He met a seventeen year old girl. Refusing to believe it, he demanded that she prove she was the one who'd done the deed. After she'd defeated his two bodyguards in hand-to-hand combat, shot targets the guards could barely even see without vision enhancers such as telescopic sights, and walked across a tightrope fifty feet up with full backpack on her shoulders, he finally accepted she was the one after all. And he had a demand to make.
Avactaris Delta III was an Imperial world; as such Taia was an Imperial citizen. It was therefore her duty to serve the Empire as she had served her Clan. The Clan would, of course, be paid for her service to the Emperor. It took little time for the Clan to make a decision; just as each person served the Clan, so the Clan served the Empire. Just as Taia had fought for the Clan, putting her life on the line day after day, not she must fight for the Emperor. That day was the last time she would set foot on her homeworld; now it was time for her to serve the Emperor, as one of His Stormtroopers.
Most Stormtroopers are former military personnel, already having served in the Military, and older than normal recruits; Taia was the youngest in her class. But the other trooper cadets had not been training with live weapons for over twelve years; had not been fighting deadly foes almost every day for over ten years; had not killed as many human enemies, let alone the far more dangerous non-human beasts and vicious predators of Avactaris Delta III. Even amongst the veterans who made up her classmates, she stood out ...
For many of the Stormtrooper trainees, experienced soldiers though they were, the six month training regime was brutal; to Taia, it was a refreshingly relaxing exercise class. Carrying heavy packs on night marches in hostile terrain? Done it before. Live-firing assault drills? Been in battles like that for over a decade. Unarmed combat against two instructors? Try going hand-to-hand with a Tachvyathyn in a swamp. Marksmanship on the move? Hit a head-sized target at three hundred metres from a hover bike, like I can. Not that it was all smooth going; she was lectured about her brutality during sparring - she'd treated her opponents the way she'd treat a real-life enemy in close combat, and nearly killed them. To the blonde, all combat was for real, and she never held back. Eventually, her instructors took to wearing armour when they sparred with her.
She learnt new skills during training, and enhanced others, such as demolitions. Many of the skills the new troopers were to work on, however, she'd already honed to perfection in the swamps of Avactaris Delta III, over more than a decade of hunting and killing. Her instructors found it difficult to assign her a speciality -she already seemed to know the full range of skills that a Stormtrooper might be expected to know. Perhaps ...
KILLS:
BOUNTIES COLLECTED:
Forgotten Messenger of Doubles, Izzy - Closed
DUELING RING MATCHES:
GRAND TOURNAMENT MATCHES:
ROLE-PLAYS:
D12 Ground Combat
Seeds of Rebellion
Ash-Teared Doctor, Crocodile
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