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Music
“You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.”
- R. Scott Bakker, Prince of Nothing
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Tsurumah is a physically imposing specimen of her species, towering over most humanoids and, even in a galaxy as far-reaching as this one, she proves a very alien sight among terrestrial peoples. Fourteen head-tresses fall nearly to her waist, fitted with gold rings on which she has written the story of her disgrace in flowing Nautilan script. Her expression is difficult to read beneath the featureless lids which protect her eyes. Her body language is more suited to life underwater, but even then is subdued after long years spent in exile - oftentimes, her complete and utter stillness can prove unnerving. [/TD][TD]
Her face is covered in ritual tattoos belonging to the Cult of the Mother, a sect of religious extremists prophesying the return of an ancient goddess, destined to drag all civilization on Glee Anselm into darkness. They were Tsurumah's birthright long before she was known by that name, and though they mark her clearly as an outcast and a pariah among her people, she wears them with the pride of a predator flaunting its fangs before prey.
When among the Sith, she wears the monastic robes standard for her rank, with another, more voluminous set which hangs loosely off her body. Off-world, she has a wardrobe of a few outfits that she uses, all lacking ornamentation and focused towards function and practicality.
When Tsurumah speaks Basic, her voice is whisper-quiet, a sound forced through the throat of a reed. No matter the circumstance, she never raises her tone above this low volume. This changes when she speaks in her native Anselmian: to the casual human listener even Tsurumah is melodious and songlike. The truth, however, is that Tsurumah's tone is dead, devoid of any inflection, though Anselmian favors her biology. The same is true of her Nautoli: a highly expressive language underwater, Tsurumah manages to stunt its communicative power.
She is more than capable of sketching out a map as she experiences any given location. It is similar to the ability early cosmonauts acquire to navigate in zero gravity, only developed through millions of years of evolution. Her skill at sensing oncoming danger is borderline precognitive.
However, Tsurumah is a highly atypical specimen of her kind. Among Nautolans, communication is greatly enhanced by the presence of the fourteen head-tresses (fourteen is, accordingly, one of their sacred numbers) which aid in the detection of pheromones, a key element of Nautolan sociality, playing an important role in mutual empathy between individuals. As a result of a physiological aberration in a structure roughly corresponding to the human hypophysis in Tsurumah's brain, the gland charged with regulating her production of pheromones fails to function correctly.
This presents a compound problem: both a sensory deprivation akin to the loss of sight and a profound difficulty to experience basic empathy with other individuals. Even from an early age, Tsurumah was resistant to the idea of "treating" this neurological disorder, understanding that it would transform her, alter her perception in a way unfathomable to her.
Nonetheless, the problems of her bravery are manifold. She fails to understand vital elements of her own culture. Nautolan music consists of sustained notes and intermittent pauses; these pauses are sacred moments of communion between individuals, but to Tsurumah they are mere patches of silence. What can a computer do but produce unintelligible results when the data packets it receives are incomplete? Doubtless this aspect of her life is key to unraveling the riddle of her soul, and the mystery of why she joined the Sith. From a position of total powerlessness, she learned that power is the great mover of men. The alternatives to this immutable truth are invisible to her by her very nature. Where does one often turn in search of power?
To the darkness.
But while it is important to understand this in order to understand her, it is equally important to understand how she is the same, merely different. How knowing, but not understanding, this difference was a heavy weight for an otherwise normal young Nautolan girl in the heavily traditional society surrounding her. How she was fragile in the same, natural way in which all life is fragile. Given outlets for feelings she is otherwise unable to express, perhaps Tsurumah would overcome these differences and blossom into a whole and healthy individual.
Instead it has swallowed her, growing from a fraction into the rule by which she measures herself... Coupled with the stress of exile, she had no recourse but to break, to lose an even greater part of herself to madness. The Force is drawn to these extremities, to those above and below, light and shadow at the top and at the bottom, and the Force found Tsurumah in the deepest crevices of Glee Anselm, watching her world be born in the darkness at its very heart...
And it led her to the Sith.
Senseless brutality accompanied her even in the beginning of life. The first to hatch from the clutch of fertilized eggs floating around the vicinity of her sires' dwelling in the Sabilon region of Glee Anselm, among Tsurumah's first stimuli were the scarcity of food, the gnaw of hunger and the imminent threat of death. Acting on basic instinct, she devoured the unhatched eggs of her would-be siblings while she waited for an adult to attend to her in her helpless, larval state. There was no monstrous suggestion in this act: it is common enough among the unluckier newborn Nautolans who enter the world while their parents hunt. It did, however, mean that Tsurumah's first lesson was one of survival and self-preservation.
Among the highly ritualistic Nautolans, many groups exist that yet worship the old gods that once demanded their devotion. For most this faith is no longer a central aspect of life, but merely a token word or prayer. The head of this pantheon is the goddess of light, Anakatilira, who showed their bygone ancestors that not only did a whole world exist above the light which trickled down into their underwater cities, but an entire galaxy.
Tsurumah's household instead venerated the Mother of Waves, a spirit inhabiting the very deepest reaches of Glee Anselm. She is said to manifest in the roar of creation that occurs on the very substrate of the sea, where Glee Anselm's tectonic plates crash together and open the fissures to the planet's core core and life first appeared, eons ago. Her first offspring are the monsters lurking in the cold, abyssal darkness there. Those who worship her are those discontent with the contemporary state of Nautolan society, and who yearn for a return to the primeval darkness that they say awaits them when Cetinjira awakens and emerges from her sleep in the womb she makes of the world.
Even from an early age, it would have required a secure and healthy mind to deal with the social stigma of the life chosen for her. To bear the marks of the Mother on Glee Anselm is to condemn oneself to a caste reserved for pariahs and exiles: lives that Tsurumah's creators willingly chose, burdens they knowingly shouldered, but no such choice existed for her.
Traditionalists in every sense of the word, nor was it any coincidence that Tsurumah awoke and alone and untended; this return to their primitive birthing rituals could be counted among their beliefs. After a minimal upbringing so that their young can carry on their traditions, permanently branding them with symbolic tattoos, they release their children to fend for themselves. The Mother of Wave's followers generally go unappreciated, as the superstitious Nautolans fear that their rituals may lure in the monsters they worship as angels that inhabit the deep. So it was that Tsurumah was left to make her own way.
At first her efforts were a success. She roamed the reef with the other juveniles of her generation, conducting their own education by exploring their environment. However, her abnormalities were quickly detected when she failed to accompany the others in resonating with the Nautolan ballad-songs said to help in their early development. Efforts to reach out to her by sharing her feelings, attempting to integrate her through compassion, failed to achieve any meaningful connection. She was able to express herself through the age-old tradition of landscape-sculpting, making a den for herself among breathtaking arrangements of coral, anemones and other wildlife.
She excelled at learning Nautila and was quickly able to write, read and even master the sister language of Anselmian before moving on to Galactic Basic, though a fundamental understanding of the words she learned continued to elude her. Quickly she learned their cultural epics and devoured the stories of their gods and goddesses, and through this began to understand the incredible difference between those and the others around her. Imitating the style of their oldest creation myths, she etched her own story into the gold cuffs binding her head-tresses.
Others perceived this delicate beauty which surrounded her, but suspected it meant that her spirit was trapped in a shell of the Mother. Those closest to her in society began to despise her, began to call her an abomination, a defective soul. It was this way that she received her essence name, the way she would be referred to her by others for what she is - Tsurumah. Fearing the repercussions of this hatred, she fled from Sabilon, to deeper water and to the Mother of Waves, hoping that at least her love might reach her.
And it did... in the fissures that split the rock at the bottom of the world, within the crevasses where none of Anakatilira's light could reach, into a place where she drifted ever deeper, to a place untouched by sunlight... a place so far down that entire parts of the brain go dark for want of input, and consciousness melds in uncertain ways. Time passed strangely there. Though her body was unchanged save for its maturity, her mind became twisted into a shape more appropriate for a child of the Mother of Waves... and occasionally in her wandering she drifted across the abyssal light that is not Anakatilira's to dole out, light from Cetinjira's womb, from which all life had emerged and into which it would return.
Even that far down, she heard the call when it came, too deep for whale-song, drowning out even the low roar of the Mother's work. At first she ignored it, afraid of what it could mean, but eventually her curiosity outgrew the fear she felt. She was slow to ascend, out from between the vents at the bottom of the sea, past the black and lightless fields where monsters dwell, beyond the lights of Sabilon into a shallower place. Her first breaths of air outside the ocean were gasps as her inexperienced lungs struggled to recollect the taste of oxygen.
The island she'd emerged to was abandoned - not uncommon on Glee Anselm, where the surface-dwelling Anselmians have been depleted nearly to extinction as a result of their ancient warfare with the Nautolans who ruled the sea. Nonetheless, the sensation Tsurumah felt guided her, and her instinct taught her to forage and hunt even the strange animals she found among the trees and high grasses. Days past in which Tsurumah grew more and more comfortable on land, and even enjoyed the warming heat of the sun. Eventually she found the source of the song which had drawn her out of exile - it was the first music whose beauty she could ever understand.
A starship waited for an owner that had never returned. Even from a perspective of total ignorance Tsurumah could tell that it had spent many centuries there, hidden in a grove of trees near a tall hill Tsurumah had been combing for sustenance. When she approached, she felt something scrutinize her at a level deeper than flesh... she fled at the groan of millennia old metal, but returned to find that the ship had opened itself to her. Entering, she discovered that though it had been swallowed by the undergrowth outside, its innards remained as pristine as they had been left, so long ago.
Eventually she found herself in an isolated room - a meditation chamber installed by the Sith that had used the vessel thousands of years prior. Accessing the ship's historical record, Tsurumah began to indulge her mind on information about the rest of the galaxy. She learned what the Force was, and how it had led her there; who the Sith and the Jedi were and about the war they'd waged against one another since the days they had been called Bogan and Ashla; what the Republic was, and about the multitude of other planets that spun around suns not unlike her own.
She spent days into weeks and months and seasons in quiet meditation, assimilating the data the ship could offer her, plundering its records for insight into what she had found and the opportunities it offered. She learned, over the course of more than a year where her only moments outside the ship were spent procuring water and sustenance, how to program the navicomputer for a destination she had read much of, and which the Force had guided her towards. Lifting off her homeworld of Glee Anselm, she programmed a jump into waters deeper and darker than any she had ever known.
Pulling free of the planet's atmosphere and spilling out into the interstellar night, Tsurumah thought that the galaxy was a place of remarkable beauty for the first time in her short, brutal life. When the pinpoint pricks of stars were pulled back into the lines of hyperspace, she wondered what beauty there would be on the world where she hoped to find power enough to finally wrest control of her own destiny from the fate laid out for her.
She wondered what beauty there would be on Korriban, and what darkness awaited her in the Sith.
“You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.”
- R. Scott Bakker, Prince of Nothing
TSURUMAH iloi CETINJIRA
NAME: Tsurumah Cetinjira
FACTION: Sith
RANK: ---
Tsurumah is the Hated One in Nautila. Most would revile the name, but after years spent wandering in the freezing trenches at the bottom of Glee Anselm, Tsurumah welcomes the chance to be called anything at all.
Cetinjira makes reference to the legendary Mother of Waves, a violent goddess associated with abyssal spaces, the end of Nautolan civilization and the darker aspects of the feminine psyche.
FACTION: Sith
RANK: ---
Tsurumah is the Hated One in Nautila. Most would revile the name, but after years spent wandering in the freezing trenches at the bottom of Glee Anselm, Tsurumah welcomes the chance to be called anything at all.
Cetinjira makes reference to the legendary Mother of Waves, a violent goddess associated with abyssal spaces, the end of Nautolan civilization and the darker aspects of the feminine psyche.
BREAKDOWN
| SPECIES | HEIGHT | WEIGHT | EYE COLOR | HAIR STYLE | AGE | |
| nautolan | 211cm* | c.100kg | reddish black | intertwined tentacles | ? | |
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Her face is covered in ritual tattoos belonging to the Cult of the Mother, a sect of religious extremists prophesying the return of an ancient goddess, destined to drag all civilization on Glee Anselm into darkness. They were Tsurumah's birthright long before she was known by that name, and though they mark her clearly as an outcast and a pariah among her people, she wears them with the pride of a predator flaunting its fangs before prey.
When among the Sith, she wears the monastic robes standard for her rank, with another, more voluminous set which hangs loosely off her body. Off-world, she has a wardrobe of a few outfits that she uses, all lacking ornamentation and focused towards function and practicality.
When Tsurumah speaks Basic, her voice is whisper-quiet, a sound forced through the throat of a reed. No matter the circumstance, she never raises her tone above this low volume. This changes when she speaks in her native Anselmian: to the casual human listener even Tsurumah is melodious and songlike. The truth, however, is that Tsurumah's tone is dead, devoid of any inflection, though Anselmian favors her biology. The same is true of her Nautoli: a highly expressive language underwater, Tsurumah manages to stunt its communicative power.
PERSONALITY
All lifeforms are complex beings, elusive when tried to describe with words. Tsurumah's psychology cannot be understood perfectly in humanocentric terms. A species descended from cephalopods, the Nautolans possess an incredible predatory instinct. This, Tsurumah has honed to a knife edge; she sees weakness on the skin of others, but most acutely within herself. Her spatial intelligence is easily savant-like from a human perspective: to exist in a three-dimensional space underwater requires the capacity to calculate and retain a multitude of factors, sharpened even further when considered alongside her instinct so that Tsurumah is an expert navigator, be it in space or on land.
She is more than capable of sketching out a map as she experiences any given location. It is similar to the ability early cosmonauts acquire to navigate in zero gravity, only developed through millions of years of evolution. Her skill at sensing oncoming danger is borderline precognitive.
However, Tsurumah is a highly atypical specimen of her kind. Among Nautolans, communication is greatly enhanced by the presence of the fourteen head-tresses (fourteen is, accordingly, one of their sacred numbers) which aid in the detection of pheromones, a key element of Nautolan sociality, playing an important role in mutual empathy between individuals. As a result of a physiological aberration in a structure roughly corresponding to the human hypophysis in Tsurumah's brain, the gland charged with regulating her production of pheromones fails to function correctly.
This presents a compound problem: both a sensory deprivation akin to the loss of sight and a profound difficulty to experience basic empathy with other individuals. Even from an early age, Tsurumah was resistant to the idea of "treating" this neurological disorder, understanding that it would transform her, alter her perception in a way unfathomable to her.
Nonetheless, the problems of her bravery are manifold. She fails to understand vital elements of her own culture. Nautolan music consists of sustained notes and intermittent pauses; these pauses are sacred moments of communion between individuals, but to Tsurumah they are mere patches of silence. What can a computer do but produce unintelligible results when the data packets it receives are incomplete? Doubtless this aspect of her life is key to unraveling the riddle of her soul, and the mystery of why she joined the Sith. From a position of total powerlessness, she learned that power is the great mover of men. The alternatives to this immutable truth are invisible to her by her very nature. Where does one often turn in search of power?
To the darkness.
But while it is important to understand this in order to understand her, it is equally important to understand how she is the same, merely different. How knowing, but not understanding, this difference was a heavy weight for an otherwise normal young Nautolan girl in the heavily traditional society surrounding her. How she was fragile in the same, natural way in which all life is fragile. Given outlets for feelings she is otherwise unable to express, perhaps Tsurumah would overcome these differences and blossom into a whole and healthy individual.
Instead it has swallowed her, growing from a fraction into the rule by which she measures herself... Coupled with the stress of exile, she had no recourse but to break, to lose an even greater part of herself to madness. The Force is drawn to these extremities, to those above and below, light and shadow at the top and at the bottom, and the Force found Tsurumah in the deepest crevices of Glee Anselm, watching her world be born in the darkness at its very heart...
And it led her to the Sith.
HISTORY
Among the highly ritualistic Nautolans, many groups exist that yet worship the old gods that once demanded their devotion. For most this faith is no longer a central aspect of life, but merely a token word or prayer. The head of this pantheon is the goddess of light, Anakatilira, who showed their bygone ancestors that not only did a whole world exist above the light which trickled down into their underwater cities, but an entire galaxy.
Tsurumah's household instead venerated the Mother of Waves, a spirit inhabiting the very deepest reaches of Glee Anselm. She is said to manifest in the roar of creation that occurs on the very substrate of the sea, where Glee Anselm's tectonic plates crash together and open the fissures to the planet's core core and life first appeared, eons ago. Her first offspring are the monsters lurking in the cold, abyssal darkness there. Those who worship her are those discontent with the contemporary state of Nautolan society, and who yearn for a return to the primeval darkness that they say awaits them when Cetinjira awakens and emerges from her sleep in the womb she makes of the world.
Even from an early age, it would have required a secure and healthy mind to deal with the social stigma of the life chosen for her. To bear the marks of the Mother on Glee Anselm is to condemn oneself to a caste reserved for pariahs and exiles: lives that Tsurumah's creators willingly chose, burdens they knowingly shouldered, but no such choice existed for her.
Traditionalists in every sense of the word, nor was it any coincidence that Tsurumah awoke and alone and untended; this return to their primitive birthing rituals could be counted among their beliefs. After a minimal upbringing so that their young can carry on their traditions, permanently branding them with symbolic tattoos, they release their children to fend for themselves. The Mother of Wave's followers generally go unappreciated, as the superstitious Nautolans fear that their rituals may lure in the monsters they worship as angels that inhabit the deep. So it was that Tsurumah was left to make her own way.
At first her efforts were a success. She roamed the reef with the other juveniles of her generation, conducting their own education by exploring their environment. However, her abnormalities were quickly detected when she failed to accompany the others in resonating with the Nautolan ballad-songs said to help in their early development. Efforts to reach out to her by sharing her feelings, attempting to integrate her through compassion, failed to achieve any meaningful connection. She was able to express herself through the age-old tradition of landscape-sculpting, making a den for herself among breathtaking arrangements of coral, anemones and other wildlife.
She excelled at learning Nautila and was quickly able to write, read and even master the sister language of Anselmian before moving on to Galactic Basic, though a fundamental understanding of the words she learned continued to elude her. Quickly she learned their cultural epics and devoured the stories of their gods and goddesses, and through this began to understand the incredible difference between those and the others around her. Imitating the style of their oldest creation myths, she etched her own story into the gold cuffs binding her head-tresses.
Others perceived this delicate beauty which surrounded her, but suspected it meant that her spirit was trapped in a shell of the Mother. Those closest to her in society began to despise her, began to call her an abomination, a defective soul. It was this way that she received her essence name, the way she would be referred to her by others for what she is - Tsurumah. Fearing the repercussions of this hatred, she fled from Sabilon, to deeper water and to the Mother of Waves, hoping that at least her love might reach her.
And it did... in the fissures that split the rock at the bottom of the world, within the crevasses where none of Anakatilira's light could reach, into a place where she drifted ever deeper, to a place untouched by sunlight... a place so far down that entire parts of the brain go dark for want of input, and consciousness melds in uncertain ways. Time passed strangely there. Though her body was unchanged save for its maturity, her mind became twisted into a shape more appropriate for a child of the Mother of Waves... and occasionally in her wandering she drifted across the abyssal light that is not Anakatilira's to dole out, light from Cetinjira's womb, from which all life had emerged and into which it would return.
Even that far down, she heard the call when it came, too deep for whale-song, drowning out even the low roar of the Mother's work. At first she ignored it, afraid of what it could mean, but eventually her curiosity outgrew the fear she felt. She was slow to ascend, out from between the vents at the bottom of the sea, past the black and lightless fields where monsters dwell, beyond the lights of Sabilon into a shallower place. Her first breaths of air outside the ocean were gasps as her inexperienced lungs struggled to recollect the taste of oxygen. The island she'd emerged to was abandoned - not uncommon on Glee Anselm, where the surface-dwelling Anselmians have been depleted nearly to extinction as a result of their ancient warfare with the Nautolans who ruled the sea. Nonetheless, the sensation Tsurumah felt guided her, and her instinct taught her to forage and hunt even the strange animals she found among the trees and high grasses. Days past in which Tsurumah grew more and more comfortable on land, and even enjoyed the warming heat of the sun. Eventually she found the source of the song which had drawn her out of exile - it was the first music whose beauty she could ever understand.
A starship waited for an owner that had never returned. Even from a perspective of total ignorance Tsurumah could tell that it had spent many centuries there, hidden in a grove of trees near a tall hill Tsurumah had been combing for sustenance. When she approached, she felt something scrutinize her at a level deeper than flesh... she fled at the groan of millennia old metal, but returned to find that the ship had opened itself to her. Entering, she discovered that though it had been swallowed by the undergrowth outside, its innards remained as pristine as they had been left, so long ago.
Eventually she found herself in an isolated room - a meditation chamber installed by the Sith that had used the vessel thousands of years prior. Accessing the ship's historical record, Tsurumah began to indulge her mind on information about the rest of the galaxy. She learned what the Force was, and how it had led her there; who the Sith and the Jedi were and about the war they'd waged against one another since the days they had been called Bogan and Ashla; what the Republic was, and about the multitude of other planets that spun around suns not unlike her own.
She spent days into weeks and months and seasons in quiet meditation, assimilating the data the ship could offer her, plundering its records for insight into what she had found and the opportunities it offered. She learned, over the course of more than a year where her only moments outside the ship were spent procuring water and sustenance, how to program the navicomputer for a destination she had read much of, and which the Force had guided her towards. Lifting off her homeworld of Glee Anselm, she programmed a jump into waters deeper and darker than any she had ever known.
Pulling free of the planet's atmosphere and spilling out into the interstellar night, Tsurumah thought that the galaxy was a place of remarkable beauty for the first time in her short, brutal life. When the pinpoint pricks of stars were pulled back into the lines of hyperspace, she wondered what beauty there would be on the world where she hoped to find power enough to finally wrest control of her own destiny from the fate laid out for her.
She wondered what beauty there would be on Korriban, and what darkness awaited her in the Sith.
All credit goes to the appropriate artists. Hydrothermal vents image copyright belongs to Carpet-Crawler at deviantart and is for a kickstarter project called Deepwars.
* Tsurumah's incredible height can be reasonably extrapolated I feel, and I'm only going to change it if it's particularly necessary. Kit Fisto was nearly two meters tall and our world seems to indicate that the sexual dimorphism of cephalopods leans towards larger females. There aren't really any cases of female Nautolans for us to verify with in canon, so this is pretty much just an artistic touch of my own and because I find it interesting to play a 7 foot squid headed queen of terrors.
* Tsurumah's incredible height can be reasonably extrapolated I feel, and I'm only going to change it if it's particularly necessary. Kit Fisto was nearly two meters tall and our world seems to indicate that the sexual dimorphism of cephalopods leans towards larger females. There aren't really any cases of female Nautolans for us to verify with in canon, so this is pretty much just an artistic touch of my own and because I find it interesting to play a 7 foot squid headed queen of terrors.
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