Name: Damon Kade Age: 34 Gender: Male Species: Human Appearance: [hider][img]https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/17/d9/78/17d9788c87182bba6314626354097fb4.jpg[/img][/hider] Personality: Damon is quiet, dry-humored, and difficult to impress. He is not openly hostile, but years in the Imperial Army left him with a strong sense of discipline and routine, but very little faith in causes, officers, flags, or speeches. He is not proud of deserting, but he is also past the point of pretending that staying would have been honorable. Damon carries a great deal of bitterness toward the Empire, he has seen what Imperial order looks like when it arrives in a poor system with hungry and frightened civilians that are constantly pressured by resource quotas that matter more than them. Despite that, he does not know what he wants out of the galaxy yet. Survival, maybe his own little peace or perhaps enough money to never have to take orders from another polished bastard with a clean uniform but for now, room, board, and a captain willing to look the other way are enough. Backstory: Damon was born in an Imperial-administered mining settlement in the Kepler sector, one of the many Imperials territories whose value was measured less in people and more in what could be dragged out of the ground and shipped along the leylines. Like many young men without money, magic, or family influence, Damon’s path narrowed early. The Army offered pay, food, travel, and a way off from the backwater he grew up in. His service took him across several Imperial holdings, but most of his years were spent around Kepler’s contested moons and extraction colonies, putting down labor uprisings, escorting resource convoys, raiding suspected rebel safehouses, and patrolling cities that looked at him and his brothers in arms with disdain. He learned quickly that Imperial pacification was a clean word for ugly work and most of the people he fought were not pirates or separatist fanatics, they were miners, farmers, dockworkers, and angry young people with rifles older than their fathers. The final break came during a campaign on one of Kepler’s outer worlds, where an Imperial Administrator ordered the Army to secure a refinery district after a strike turned violent. Damon’s unit was told they were facing armed insurgents and yet all they found was a half-starved settlement, barricaded with sheets of scrap plating, and manned by civilians who had not seen a proper meal in weeks. By the time the operation ended, the refinery was back in Imperial hands and the official report called it a restoration of order. Damon called it what it was, a massacre. After that, he stopped believing there was some better version of the Empire hidden behind the paperwork. There was only the quotas, the transport schedules to keep up with, and the next poor bastard told to kneel or die. When the chance came to disappear, Damon took it. He abandoned his post during a transfer through a freight hub, traded his sidearm and half his pay for forged transit papers, and slipped aboard a commercial hauler bound away from Kepler space. From there, he drifted between ports, taking security work where he could and avoiding Imperial patrols as best as he could. Eventually, he crossed paths with captain Laurentia . Damon still does not know why an Earth-born woman with magic in her blood and debts on her heels would need a worn-out Imperial deserter aboard her ship. Maybe she needed muscle or maybe she needed someone who knew how Imperial soldiers thought. Maybe she just saw another person with nowhere else to go. Whatever the reason, she offered him a place on the crew. The terms were not glamorous; Room, board, work when there was work, and the lingering possibility of dying somewhere outside the clean borders of Imperial concern. Damon accepted. The Emperor’s death has made things worse, of course. Succession always does, officers get ambitious, governors get nervous and the fringe gets louder. The Empire starts looking for traitors under every loose deck plate and Damon would prefer if none of that became his problem. His only hope is to stay away from it as much as he can. Equipment: Damon keeps much of his old Imperial kit, though he has stripped away or defaced anything that might identify his former unit. His main weapon is a battered [url=https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/e8/c1/2f/e8c12ffc8ea4cc46d69fec5607451ab8.jpg]Imperial X1 service rifle[/url] with the serial number filed down, it still works and it being progressively phased out of services helps in keeping it relatively low-profile. He also carries a more advanced [url=https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d8/69/b8/d869b8195547711db0e5a0eaf2f36b69.jpg]Jaeager CC sidearm[/url] popular for its modularity, his combat knife, and a few pieces of his old body armor that have seen better years. He owns a small field pack containing ration tabs, water filters, a med-kit, spare charge cells, lock clamps, ammunition, and a cracked Imperial-issue data slate loaded with outdated maps, maintenance manuals, and a few files he probably should have destroyed. He has no formal magical training and very little talent for it. He does, however, own a handful of caster rounds picked up during his flight from Kepler space. He dislikes using them, partly because they draw hard on the shooter and partly because magic always feels like someone else’s world intruding into his. Skills: Damon is a trained Imperial infantryman with experience in boarding actions, convoy security, urban fighting, desert survival, riot suppression, and small-unit tactics. He knows how Imperial patrols move, how their officers think, how their checkpoints are arranged, and how to look just official enough to pass unnoticed in the right uniform. He is a good shot, and favors controlled fire, cover, and practical positioning over bravado. He can maintain common military weapons, patch damaged armor, read battlefield terrain, and keep calm when things turn ugly. His time in the Kepler domains also left him familiar with mining settlements, refinery stations, labor camps, military logistics, and the sort of desperate black-market economy that grows wherever Imperial law is present but keeping the peace also means tolerating such businesses.