[hider=Jean-Luc Bauta de la Mare (Arch-Militant)] [hr] [b]Name:[/b] Jean-Luc Bauta de la Mare [b]Age:[/b] 42 [b]Gender:[/b] Male [b]Race:[/b] Human [b]Appearance:[/b] La Mare is a moderately tall man of a build both lean and hard, his posture good and his poise impeccable. His homeworld bequeathed him pale, almost waxy skin, with a long, aquiline face and shoulder length black hair topped by a sharp widow's peak, eyes a wan and distant shade of blue-grey. For a man so drenched in warfare, he has surprisingly few blemishes, and as yet no visible bionic prosthetics. His hair is partially shaved on the left side, showing a penal legion number and insignia tattooed onto the side of his skull. He is most often seen clad in an armored bodysuit under a heavy longcoat, armored cavalier boots and gauntlets completing the ensemble, his elegantly customized power sword sheathed to one side. Two mismatched bolt pistols remain holstered behind his back, and various other glints of weaponry can be glimpsed concealed beneath his apparel -- as can a muted glimmer of light from some luminous amulet he wears on a chain around his neck, close to his chest. [b]Personality:[/b] If Jean-Luc's disposition could be summarized in a single word, it would be a long, heavy sigh. Nothing excites him. Nothing seems to bring him pleasure. Though the very image of a perfect gentleman and possessed of a laconic sense of humor, he regards everything and everyone with jaded indifference, a cultured, courteous nihilist, and one can frequently find him by the viewing ports; his dead, bored eyes regarding the majesty of space with fathomless ennui. Jean-Luc is known to have a taste for the finer things -- exotic teas, Imperial opera and fine wines -- but even these proclivities merely serve to pass the intervening time. Even in combat he remains detached and composed, like some murderous butler. Only in the most extreme theaters of overwhelming violence does the listless disinterest seem to disappear. Today. Tomorrow. None of it matters. At the beginning and end of it all, there is only war. [b]History:[/b] Jean-Luc is a native of the Death World Samara, a predominantly oceanic world in the grip of a permanent, planet-spanning typhoon. It is a place of nightmares, wracked with electrical storms and infested with murderous plant and animal life, criss-crossed with a coral-studded network of cliffs and canals that provide the only shelter from the perpetual hurricane. Hideous things lurk in even the shallowest pools, and surging tidal waves, lethal enough in themselves, dump frenzied aquatic killers onto dry land with little to no notice, often in locations that seem almost calculated to spill the most blood. Having survived to what passes for adulthood on a death world, a young La Mare was tithed into the 13th Samaran Tempest corps of the Imperial Guard, a semi-mechanized company of terror squads, specializing in hostile conditions and fast, brutal assaults. Despite the violence of their work and homeworld, the men of Samara had a code of tradition and courtesy which endured in the face of any and all adversary. By virtue of exemplary service (body count) Jean-Luc grew to Captain of his platoon in fair time, only lacking the necessary zeal for the higher echelons of command. It was for this reason that the eye of the Inquisition first passed over him, mercifully finding no disloyalty despite a moderate degree of torture and psychic intrusion. Though not presiding, the examination was attended by one Inquisitor Vonn of the Ordo Xenos, a grey and ageless man who took unsettlingly careful notes. Undiminished, Jean-Luc went back to killing. He killed orks. He killed Tau. He put down traitor squads and rebellious populations. He fought the spearhead of hive fleet Kraken at Babel's Dock, where his company was decimated. And then he put a las round through the head of a planetary governer's nephew and was sent to the penal legions, spared a more conventional execution by a shadow of ambiguity about the act. In his new, less civilized unit, La Mare remained alive through experience, determination, and ensuring his less competant fellow conscripts soaked up the more [i]problematic[/i] enemy fire. Really, charging through muddy craters into the face of an Alpha Legion gun emplacement wasn't so different to living on Samara. You simply had less interesting company, and nothing worthwhile to drink. He was eventually plucked from this blizzard of hellish warfare by the intervention of Inquisitor Vonn, who requisitioned him for his personal retinue during an investigation of some difficulty: A quest that required, nay, [i]demanded[/i] a born and fated killer. La Mare's combination of lethal efficiency and understated good manners suited the Inquistor perfectly, and his survival of the punitive gauntlet only confirmed his practical worth. In addition to his duties as bodyguard and executioner, he now dealt with a different sort of battleground -- Imperial nobility, underworld labyrinths, hive kingpins and -- Emperor forefend -- non-hostile aliens (though mostly hostile ones). Long journeys with the Imperial Navy and an operation both of and above the law were now [i]de rigueur[/i]. Though the long pursuit was finally successful and the threat destroyed, the squad was obliterated, Vonn himself critically wounded at the hands of the Eldar, only La Mare remaining alive to drag his crippled body out of the wreckage. With his handler spending months recovering and his duties, perhaps, [i]technically[/i] discharged, if one neglects to recall that to be an Inquisitor's servant is to serve for life, he has an opportunity to leave the unpleasantness of his debt to Imperial society behind him, and he intends to take it. He has left a polite note for the good Inquisitor explaining that he intends to 'take a spell of leave', and now seeks to earn his way out of the system. [b]Skills: [/b] De la Mare is a killer. It is his raison d'être and his ne plus ultra. Beneath his bored exterior and underlying his numb, jaded soul is a perpetual tension, a man constantly listening, evaluating, bracing for the next surprise attack, calculating the most efficient way to murder every last living thing in sight. Any weapon is lethal in his hands, and anything in his hands becomes a weapon -- his gift for martial improvisation perhaps best demonstrated when he put down a Genestealer with a broken wine bottle during an official-function-cum-deathtrap he has since referred to as 'the second worst Imperial dinner I have ever attended'. He is patient and precise, disdainful of wasted ammunition or needlessly exerted energy, with no use for motion predictors or targetting aids. There is only, as he puts it, the man, the means, and the outcome. Though most comfortable operating alone or in small groups, he has long experience with the Imperial Guard, an understanding of logistics, squad command and small-scale tactics, as well as the operation of heavy weapons and some Imperial war machines. Further, his time in the service of the Ordo Xenos has granted him some small knowledge of alien anatomical weaknesses and behavior in excess of what one can find on the Imperial battlefield. [b]Equipment: [/b] Ceres-pattern bolt pistol Garm-pattern bolt pistol (borrowed) Power sword, custom Flintlock, loaded with silver shot Krakentooth dagger (Samaran) A small assortment of grenades, crude, but sometimes necessary. Armored body, Flak coat Micro-bead [/hider]