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Character Sheet:

Name: Skull/Familiar/Gun-Skull. (Known as Zael Merikk in life.)

Homeworld: Fabricated on Terra. (Zael Merikk's homeworld is Cadia.)

Age: 270 total age. (58 at date of death.)

Gender: Formerly male. 

Height and weight: Skull height is eight inches, width is seven and one half. Fully-equipped, the gun-skull weighs six kilograms.

Alignment: Slaved to Inquisitor Aemillius.
 
Speciality: Reconnaisance/information gathering/personal defense.

Appearance: As one would expect from an Inquisitor's servo-skull, the crown and forehead are carved with the symbol of the Holy Inquisition. A glowing, haphazardly-hewn ruby lens is fitted in the skull's left eye socket, in honour of Zael Merikk's original bionic eye. Wires festoon from the anti-grav generator stored inside the brainpan of the skull, dangling like tentacles. The bone itself is yellowed with age, and jagged growths remain from the disease which claimed the life of the skull's owner.

Uniform: N/A

Armament: Upon the right side of the skull's surface, just above the upper jawbone, is a modular magna-seal mount for attaching various pistol-sized weapons. Two mandibular arms emerge from below and behind the remaining upper teeth, one of which ends in a combination melta-cutter and power-stiletto for welding and cutting purposes. The skull is also equipped with a vox-corder and the ruby lens functions as a video recorder/projector.

Personality/Demeanour: As a servo-skull, there is very little that can be detected in the way of personality, though the relative eagerness with which the skull's logic engine handles combat-related directives is oddly reminiscent of Zael Merikk's own attitude.

Biography: Zael Merikk was an Imperial General in service to the Cadian Shock Troops, the famed and oft-praised as the best of His Guardsmen. It was not always so, and despite being born on Cadia, Zael spent very little of his youth upon the planet. He was arrested in his teenage years and sentenced to penal labour upon Forge World Kathiss VI in an unimportant quadrant of Sector Secundus, shackled to a manufactoring line of lasguns. After six gruelling years of labour, Zael's original crime of grand larceny was virtually forgotten, he was but another soul lost in the immutable cogs of the Imperium. 

During his seventh year upon Kathiss VI, an opportunity for a second chance presented itself, when a minor rebellion flared in the hab-units set aside for the Forge World's menial workers. Between the guns of the Kathiss PDF and the questionably righteous fury of the workers, Zael masqueraded as an ally of the rebellion. In truth, he was feeding precious information back to the PDF regiment in his sector, risking his life to prove his loyalty to the Imperium of Man. For while slaving away, Zael had plenty of time to outgrow his childish entitlement and to learn the nature of life in the 41st Millenium. Awoken to the true worth of the Holy Emperor and the Imperium, idealistically infused, Zael willingly helped quash the rebellion. For his efforts, Zael's sentence was stricken to a paltry additional month. Upon the thirtieth and last day of his confinement, Zael was conscripted by a Cadian recruitment detachment that was passing by Sub-Sector Kathiss en route to combat a small Ork assault on Kathiss Primus, the system capital. 

This was the last crucible that burned and assembled Zael Merikk into a Guardsman beyond peer in his regiment. Constant, unremitting warfare for an entire four years saw the ex-convict and labourer become a Staff Sergeant, leading his men from the front with lasgun shining a bloody red light upon the hated green tide. Springboarding on the success of this quelling campaign, Zael cris-crossed the galaxy bringing a tangible mark of the Holy Emperor to all and sundry, defying death time and again and even standing tall beside an Adeptus Astartes of the Salamanders Chapter to lay low a Chaos Sorceror. 

Zael Merikk was a lauded hero of the Imperium. But death comes to all, and to General Merikk it came in the form of a horrific mutagenic disease, foul gases exhumed from a Tyranid plague spore that warped the heroic human's bones into jagged implements of pure pain. It was not a swift death, nor one worthy of song. 

Now all that remains of Zael Merikk is a skull engraved with the seal of the Holy Inquisition, bound to eternally uphold the vow sworn over two hundred years before. This particular gun-skull has served Inquisitor Aemillius since before the loss of his hand, observing and assisting in many of the Inquisitor's escapades.
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