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- Dec 8, 2015
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Roth Khalifi
"Every truth hurts to some extents.
Me, I'd rather be howling in pain than be blind."
Appearance"Every truth hurts to some extents.
Me, I'd rather be howling in pain than be blind."
Human, fourteen years of age, with dark wavy hair, black-hole eyes and deeply tanned skin, the young Roth is probably as common a sight to the streets on any planet as rats are to the sewers. He appreciates the anonymity. His whole life has been a constant war with his brothers and sisters who take pain to remind Roth that he's the smallest and the weakest of them, and loathe as he is to admit it, Roth knows they are right. Wiry of frame rather than muscular, and shorter than average even for his age -- to the point where he's often mistaken as twelve or even eleven rather than fourteen -- Roth's main tactic for dealing with difficulties is to run away as fast as possible.
Roth is a follower of the creeds of practicality. His wiry, fit body nearly swims in a dusty, once-white shirt and a knee-length black coat he's pilfered from somewhere. His trousers are black, plain, and cover skinny short legs. The ends vanish into the safety of fitted traveling boots -- probably the most valuable piece of clothing on Roth's body, save perhaps a depressing disc containing a holo-message from a long-dead Jedi-in-exile to prove his allegiance and ties to an Order he never knew. A backpack is slung over one slim shoulder, containing everything he owns after he left his home planet behind to travel in search of the Jedi.
PersonalityRoth is a follower of the creeds of practicality. His wiry, fit body nearly swims in a dusty, once-white shirt and a knee-length black coat he's pilfered from somewhere. His trousers are black, plain, and cover skinny short legs. The ends vanish into the safety of fitted traveling boots -- probably the most valuable piece of clothing on Roth's body, save perhaps a depressing disc containing a holo-message from a long-dead Jedi-in-exile to prove his allegiance and ties to an Order he never knew. A backpack is slung over one slim shoulder, containing everything he owns after he left his home planet behind to travel in search of the Jedi.
It is much easier for Roth to say nothing than to lie. Honesty is less like an ingrained habit for him and more like his nature; his capacity for deceit is remarkably small, and while survival necessitates that he resorts to questionable actions from time to time -- especially now that he's one hundred percent out on his own with no help from anyone and with no one knowing where he even is -- Roth hates having to let it get to that point. In an ideal world, he gets to go about his business without having to worry about where he's going to get his next meal and how he's going to get the credits necessary to keep going.
But the world around him is not ideal; the universe in general isn't, and Roth is growing more and more used to the fact. His practicality is deprived from simple parents and a simple life, and with it comes a degree of awareness that's worked well to compensate for his lack of real experience thus far. Few details go by him without his notice, from the twitch of a lekku to the twitch of a hand, hovering too close to a holstered blaster. Intentions and warnings arrive to him by the use of his normal senses as well as the Force, and Roth has learned to process these impressions -- figure out their implications -- speedily. Reactions...not so much, but so far "run away" has worked for him. He knows it won't forever, but that's why he's trying to find a proper Jedi master, isn't he?
That, and because Roth is afraid. There is little resentment to be found in him, who possesses a natural empathy towards others that forbids hatred even as it comprehends pain, but he can't evade terror. He can't evade the feeling of being overwhelmed, which is exactly the drive behind his reckless actions since he turned fourteen so many months ago. "Safety" is a foreign concept for Roth, who grew up in a tense family and had few friends in his home world, and the flimsy, fleeting notion of it he was able to enjoy while in the company of the exiled Jedi-in-hiding died with her when the bounty hunters came calling. Now that he lost it, he finds that he craves it, and since it can't be found with his family -- it never will be, this he knew, the thought leaving a bitter taste in his mouth -- he is determined to seek it elsewhere. So he flees, away from his home world which lays on the Outer Rim, towards the center where he hopes, hopes there will be an answer. Safety.
In all the ways that matter, Roth is a fugitive. And if he's not so used to being alone, the loneliness would have crushed him long ago. But that he hasn't...might well indicate a building innate strength.
But the world around him is not ideal; the universe in general isn't, and Roth is growing more and more used to the fact. His practicality is deprived from simple parents and a simple life, and with it comes a degree of awareness that's worked well to compensate for his lack of real experience thus far. Few details go by him without his notice, from the twitch of a lekku to the twitch of a hand, hovering too close to a holstered blaster. Intentions and warnings arrive to him by the use of his normal senses as well as the Force, and Roth has learned to process these impressions -- figure out their implications -- speedily. Reactions...not so much, but so far "run away" has worked for him. He knows it won't forever, but that's why he's trying to find a proper Jedi master, isn't he?
That, and because Roth is afraid. There is little resentment to be found in him, who possesses a natural empathy towards others that forbids hatred even as it comprehends pain, but he can't evade terror. He can't evade the feeling of being overwhelmed, which is exactly the drive behind his reckless actions since he turned fourteen so many months ago. "Safety" is a foreign concept for Roth, who grew up in a tense family and had few friends in his home world, and the flimsy, fleeting notion of it he was able to enjoy while in the company of the exiled Jedi-in-hiding died with her when the bounty hunters came calling. Now that he lost it, he finds that he craves it, and since it can't be found with his family -- it never will be, this he knew, the thought leaving a bitter taste in his mouth -- he is determined to seek it elsewhere. So he flees, away from his home world which lays on the Outer Rim, towards the center where he hopes, hopes there will be an answer. Safety.
In all the ways that matter, Roth is a fugitive. And if he's not so used to being alone, the loneliness would have crushed him long ago. But that he hasn't...might well indicate a building innate strength.
Skills and Force Abilities
COMMUNICATION/LINGUISTICS:
COMBAT:
TRADE SKILLS:
- Basic: Fluent in both reading/writing and speaking.
- Firearms: At some point during his, uh, adventuring, Roth's picked up a very small, very basic pistol. It sits all wrong in his hands and he hides it in the pocket of his coat, but he can use it. If he has to. He'd rather not. Really. Really-really.
- Hand-to-Hand: He can...struggle? Relatively well?
- Medical Knowledge: Roth's friendship with the exiled Jedi-in-hiding, who was a Force Healer, has facilitated his learning about humanoids' anatomy and physiology, first-aid, and other useful tidbits that can save a life in some dire emergency. Roth can also operate most of the widely-used medical equipment, assuming he can get over his fears of accidentally killing someone with a mistake.
- Medicines: Deprived from the same source as his medical knowledge, Roth knows the effects and identities of a large amount of the most common medications used in the galaxy. Anything less influential than that, though, and he's relatively blind. But he can put two and two together if he sees the ingredient list...or read the label on the bottle, so he likes to think he does just fine in this aspect. So, ha.
- Force Sense: The most basic skill any Jedi should know is the one and only skill the Jedi-in-exile Roth spent six years with agreed to teach him. And he's gotten pretty good with it, if he can say so himself. Roth can heighten one or two senses to a superhuman level for up to ninety seconds at a time, with several minutes of break in between, and with the proper focus he can get a fairly accurate impression of an individual or a group of people. The latter is easier, since singling out one target takes effort, but Roth can accomplish both with relative ease.
- Danger Sense: Unsurprisingly, this sense is finely-honed. Roth doesn't take long to notice something's going to happen, though he might read the sign wrong and pick the wrong reaction all the same. At least he knows something is coming...right?
- Aaaaand that's it. Roth had never handled an active lightsaber in his life, and he doesn't even know that he can do anything with the Force outside of reading the people and the atmosphere around him.
Biography
Roth was born on a planet that prized itself on its quiet solitude and lack of remarkability. If there was a name for it on the map, its inhabitants -- aside from the odd folks who went off-planet for one tangle or another with the universe, and those were only spoken of in local legends -- the people, subsistence farmers and lumberjacks, were glad to keep to themselves. For a millennium, they had claimed, the shadows of the galaxy had never reached their tiny, unimportant backwater speck of space-dust, and honestly it was all for the best. The less hoo-hah they had to deal with on top of a constant worry about the climate's sometimes unpredictable weather patterns, the better. It was hard enough work to just feed themselves.
And perhaps they were right to be proud. Grateful, even, that they knew nothing of the world beyond the stars visible to their eyes. Roth certainly appreciated the solitude, and his world ended at a certain tree in the forest he knew he should never go past. His first few years were spent learning his place in the family -- third-oldest, smack dab in the middle of a squad of five children, runty and tiny and useless unless the work involved details like cooking or some womanly things his brothers, big and little, scoffed at. His sisters found him annoying, weak, and he felt their relief that the bad blood was always on him like it was a thrum in the air.
Which was true enough, given that he was Force-sensitive. The first one in his father's blood for nearly three generations; passed down from more fortuitous ancestors that no longer stayed on this backwater piece of space-dust. Not that Roth knew about them, or even knew enough to ask. He had enough work playing run-away with his siblings whenever they wanted to "accidentally" chuck him down cliffs, and he lived with them without being anything but annoyed. There was always a tension, and it grew as the siblings realized Roth was getting more and more skilled at disappearing whenever Pa was on a drunken rampage or Ma needed somewhere to unload her Feelings with the flat end of her cane. He always seemed to know when they were in a bad mood, even though he never poked around at home beforehand, and wasn't that just weird?
If they hated him any more than before, Roth could not find it in his heart to care. He spent more time in the small settlement a good two hours' walk away, where the folks were friendlier and did not know his upsetting family business quite so intimately, and the children could be convinced to play Hide and Seek with him sometimes because they didn't know he always knew where they were no matter how far they decided to run. It was there, during one of those very games, that Roth accidentally made himself known to an old, haggard Mirialan doctor who had come to their backwater planet from the Core Worlds, as a Force-sensitive.
To say that Sufri Arissee "took him in" was too much of an exaggeration. The connection was accidental, the exiled Jedi as startled as Roth himself when they recognized something familiar in each other, and it was perhaps nothing more than nostalgia that made Sufri invite the young boy into her bare house for a cup of tea and some talking. She asked questions he did not have answers to, and answered questions he had never even thought to ask. She gave him a name to call his "little tricks", she called it the Living Force, and even as strangers Roth knew Sufri loved that Force with her everything, just as thoroughly as she loathed having to use it. Whatever had driven the woman here, it had not been happy, and she bore the scars of her encounters all too heavily. Roth, eight years old at the time, felt the crevices in her very being even as he sat across from her.
Empathy took hold of him fast. In its wake, compassion, childish and insistent. He kept Sufri talking, and he kept coming back. She was receptive to his questions whenever he had them as long as he phrased them in a way that did not drag the details of her previous life from her, and so Roth learned to do just that. They did not talk much about the Force, either of them, and it was with great, great reluctance that Sufri taught Roth how to better hone what she called his "Force Senses" -- and only after she had to drag him out of the woods when he had to flee from his farm with his father throwing glass bottles after him and strained his ankle in the dangerous dark of the forest while trying to make it to her.
So no, Sufri was not Roth's master. She was an old relic from an age of bygones, some broken shards of a scary corner of the galaxy Roth could only imagine. But he knew his company kept her distracted, eased her pains somewhat, and that was enough. Sufri taught him things, and even paid him some credits after helping her out with a thing or two, and her tea tasted really nice. With her, he could forget the farm and the siblings and the parents who had little love for him. With her, he could...forget.
And then he was fourteen and he woke up with a scream, feeling a blade dragged across his throat even though there was no blood, no burn, when he clutched at it. Pa roared for him to shut up or die, Ma screamed even louder, the baby out-screamed them both, and Roth ignored everything around him, stumbling out of his bed and into the night. He ran into the woods, out of it, towards the town. He didn't even realize he didn't trip and didn't have to see the myriads of trees and roots in order to make his way safely to Sufri's home. It was so dark, so quiet. Roth reached out, terrified...and felt nothing.
The men who emerged from her door wore helmets to conceal their faces. They saw Roth, and Roth saw them. Whoever or whatever they were, he had no idea. But he knew what they had done. He knew what the box under one of the hunters' arms contained. He could see it in his mind's eye; Sufri's headless body laying dead and bleeding in the hut.
"The apprentice," he heard one of them say, saw the man raise a blaster, and decided all at once where the rest of his life was going to go.
It was the first and only Force Push Roth had ever managed in his life, and the only reason it worked was because the men were taken by surprise. He knocked them back, back into the hut, and yanked the door shut -- blocked it with the tools and crates he saw around. Why he was even doing something so futilely, Roth had no idea, but he was motivated for the task. That done, he became lost. What then? What now?
Hands landed on his shoulders. He looked up into the face of the town's mayor, and it was both grim and knowing. "Come with me," the old man had said, and without waiting for Roth's answer hauled him off by the scruff of his neck. He took the trembling boy to the back of the settlement, where a hovercraft was waiting with a cargo of fruits and vegetable, and tossed him on it. Him and a disc. It had coordinates in it, his kidnapper told him. It would lead Roth to someone who knew what to do with him. Which was ridiculous but also a little reassuring because Roth had no idea what to do, himself, and assuming that it was a coordinate somewhere on the planet, Roth only nodded mutely as the hovercraft took him away.
He woke up the next "morning" on a spaceship. In space. The Rodian who had been in charge of taking care of both vehicles informed him, oh so calmly, that Roth was being taken into the Inner Rim.
And why, by the holy tits of the Harvest Goddess, were they going there?
The Rodian only blinked at him. "Well, the coordinates Mayor Tannor gave you will take you to the Mid Rim anyhow. I was only doing you a favor."
That was six months ago. The disk was still with Roth ever since, tucked into a safe pocket of his pilfered coat, containing the damnable coordinates and Sufri's final message -- her revelation that she was once a Jedi until she fell to the Dark Side and recovered without all her pieces, until she came to his planet, how happy she was to have met him, and that her end was drawing near. She wished him well, explained that if, no...once...the hunters came for her he could no longer be safe, living so close. She wished for him to find a master. A real, real Jedi Master, to train him in the ways of the Force she could not bring herself to. It was nine minutes long, and Sufri spent a full minute at the end saying how Roth would have made troublesome, but lovely Padawan. Whatever that word meant.
She spared none to tell him that she had wanted for the hunters to come and end her. She didn't have to. Roth couldn't sleep at night if he thought too much about it. He couldn't sleep at night if he thought about how he could have known but didn't and the pain followed him like a cloud of poison. But he learned to live with it. He had to live. He had to.
Role-PlaysAnd perhaps they were right to be proud. Grateful, even, that they knew nothing of the world beyond the stars visible to their eyes. Roth certainly appreciated the solitude, and his world ended at a certain tree in the forest he knew he should never go past. His first few years were spent learning his place in the family -- third-oldest, smack dab in the middle of a squad of five children, runty and tiny and useless unless the work involved details like cooking or some womanly things his brothers, big and little, scoffed at. His sisters found him annoying, weak, and he felt their relief that the bad blood was always on him like it was a thrum in the air.
Which was true enough, given that he was Force-sensitive. The first one in his father's blood for nearly three generations; passed down from more fortuitous ancestors that no longer stayed on this backwater piece of space-dust. Not that Roth knew about them, or even knew enough to ask. He had enough work playing run-away with his siblings whenever they wanted to "accidentally" chuck him down cliffs, and he lived with them without being anything but annoyed. There was always a tension, and it grew as the siblings realized Roth was getting more and more skilled at disappearing whenever Pa was on a drunken rampage or Ma needed somewhere to unload her Feelings with the flat end of her cane. He always seemed to know when they were in a bad mood, even though he never poked around at home beforehand, and wasn't that just weird?
If they hated him any more than before, Roth could not find it in his heart to care. He spent more time in the small settlement a good two hours' walk away, where the folks were friendlier and did not know his upsetting family business quite so intimately, and the children could be convinced to play Hide and Seek with him sometimes because they didn't know he always knew where they were no matter how far they decided to run. It was there, during one of those very games, that Roth accidentally made himself known to an old, haggard Mirialan doctor who had come to their backwater planet from the Core Worlds, as a Force-sensitive.
To say that Sufri Arissee "took him in" was too much of an exaggeration. The connection was accidental, the exiled Jedi as startled as Roth himself when they recognized something familiar in each other, and it was perhaps nothing more than nostalgia that made Sufri invite the young boy into her bare house for a cup of tea and some talking. She asked questions he did not have answers to, and answered questions he had never even thought to ask. She gave him a name to call his "little tricks", she called it the Living Force, and even as strangers Roth knew Sufri loved that Force with her everything, just as thoroughly as she loathed having to use it. Whatever had driven the woman here, it had not been happy, and she bore the scars of her encounters all too heavily. Roth, eight years old at the time, felt the crevices in her very being even as he sat across from her.
Empathy took hold of him fast. In its wake, compassion, childish and insistent. He kept Sufri talking, and he kept coming back. She was receptive to his questions whenever he had them as long as he phrased them in a way that did not drag the details of her previous life from her, and so Roth learned to do just that. They did not talk much about the Force, either of them, and it was with great, great reluctance that Sufri taught Roth how to better hone what she called his "Force Senses" -- and only after she had to drag him out of the woods when he had to flee from his farm with his father throwing glass bottles after him and strained his ankle in the dangerous dark of the forest while trying to make it to her.
So no, Sufri was not Roth's master. She was an old relic from an age of bygones, some broken shards of a scary corner of the galaxy Roth could only imagine. But he knew his company kept her distracted, eased her pains somewhat, and that was enough. Sufri taught him things, and even paid him some credits after helping her out with a thing or two, and her tea tasted really nice. With her, he could forget the farm and the siblings and the parents who had little love for him. With her, he could...forget.
And then he was fourteen and he woke up with a scream, feeling a blade dragged across his throat even though there was no blood, no burn, when he clutched at it. Pa roared for him to shut up or die, Ma screamed even louder, the baby out-screamed them both, and Roth ignored everything around him, stumbling out of his bed and into the night. He ran into the woods, out of it, towards the town. He didn't even realize he didn't trip and didn't have to see the myriads of trees and roots in order to make his way safely to Sufri's home. It was so dark, so quiet. Roth reached out, terrified...and felt nothing.
The men who emerged from her door wore helmets to conceal their faces. They saw Roth, and Roth saw them. Whoever or whatever they were, he had no idea. But he knew what they had done. He knew what the box under one of the hunters' arms contained. He could see it in his mind's eye; Sufri's headless body laying dead and bleeding in the hut.
"The apprentice," he heard one of them say, saw the man raise a blaster, and decided all at once where the rest of his life was going to go.
It was the first and only Force Push Roth had ever managed in his life, and the only reason it worked was because the men were taken by surprise. He knocked them back, back into the hut, and yanked the door shut -- blocked it with the tools and crates he saw around. Why he was even doing something so futilely, Roth had no idea, but he was motivated for the task. That done, he became lost. What then? What now?
Hands landed on his shoulders. He looked up into the face of the town's mayor, and it was both grim and knowing. "Come with me," the old man had said, and without waiting for Roth's answer hauled him off by the scruff of his neck. He took the trembling boy to the back of the settlement, where a hovercraft was waiting with a cargo of fruits and vegetable, and tossed him on it. Him and a disc. It had coordinates in it, his kidnapper told him. It would lead Roth to someone who knew what to do with him. Which was ridiculous but also a little reassuring because Roth had no idea what to do, himself, and assuming that it was a coordinate somewhere on the planet, Roth only nodded mutely as the hovercraft took him away.
He woke up the next "morning" on a spaceship. In space. The Rodian who had been in charge of taking care of both vehicles informed him, oh so calmly, that Roth was being taken into the Inner Rim.
And why, by the holy tits of the Harvest Goddess, were they going there?
The Rodian only blinked at him. "Well, the coordinates Mayor Tannor gave you will take you to the Mid Rim anyhow. I was only doing you a favor."
That was six months ago. The disk was still with Roth ever since, tucked into a safe pocket of his pilfered coat, containing the damnable coordinates and Sufri's final message -- her revelation that she was once a Jedi until she fell to the Dark Side and recovered without all her pieces, until she came to his planet, how happy she was to have met him, and that her end was drawing near. She wished him well, explained that if, no...once...the hunters came for her he could no longer be safe, living so close. She wished for him to find a master. A real, real Jedi Master, to train him in the ways of the Force she could not bring herself to. It was nine minutes long, and Sufri spent a full minute at the end saying how Roth would have made troublesome, but lovely Padawan. Whatever that word meant.
She spared none to tell him that she had wanted for the hunters to come and end her. She didn't have to. Roth couldn't sleep at night if he thought too much about it. He couldn't sleep at night if he thought about how he could have known but didn't and the pain followed him like a cloud of poison. But he learned to live with it. He had to live. He had to.
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