" My words are the wind."
" My sentences are the chirps of the sand striders."
" My screams are silent."
//SELF
Name: Samtim Xan Vivoce
Age: 42
Ancestry: True Kin
Appearance: Slabs of thick sand-pitted plas-alloy wrap around a thin figure, more bone than muscle with skin taut over flesh like borrowed clothes. Palladium diodes peek out of the skull and scar a visage that harkens back to the fierce countenance of the great Autarchs. A speckle of whorled tattoos, a facsimile of the clouds that once dwelled in the sky, covers his left shoulder. Yet, his body is not whole for a great gaping pit of pale mottled flesh is what remains of his throat and sprouting from it like a weed, a tongue of quicksilver. Can a man be still called a man without a voice?
//SOUL
PERSONAL GOAL: To find and kill the Last Titan of Fárahad
LIKES:
A’lasish smoking
Reading manuscripts
Stellar cryptography
Deciphering languages
DISLIKES:
Deciphering languages
Violence
Cacogen, particularly of the Cacklemaw persuasion.
Mad technomancers
Experimentation
PERSONALITY QUIRKS:- Throwing obscene gestures behind people’s backs, combined with rapid passionate Occian poetic verse in signage.
- Whistling in inaudible frequencies
- Brushing hands with sand for hygiene.
//SPIRIT
MAJOR SKILLS: Serving as a reliquary armitate in the Occian Legios, Samtim knows exactly eleven ways to kill a man or mutant and is a neophyte in the art of the Faa Wander, an ancient Vaarnish martial art used by the Faa Clans that takes advantage of their desert surroundings. Samtim is also an accomplished linguist and a scribe, knowing a thousand and one tongues but is cursed with being unable to speak any of them with the exception of one.
MINOR SKILLS: Bone carving
Sandsoothing
Cryo-surgery
Holo-rhetoric
GIFT: Many call it a gift. Samtim views it as a gilded cage wrapped around his throat. Samtim is one of the very few who can manage to understand and speak TitanCreed without being self-afflicted with the various mimetic viruses and language plagues that inhabit every syllable of the archaic language.
SOURCE OF GIFT: To resurrect and craft a key means reforging a lock. For Samtim, it meant losing his voice to decipher the key of the past. His brain and pharyngeal organs were permanently altered through mysterious cybernetic augmentation by the works of an insane technomancer. The scars still swell red to this day after the forced procedure he was drafted into.
//STORY
The night is never young in Vaarn. It is old and tired, the black of the sky faded like old paint. Pollo shudders as he unclasps his gas mask, jets of hydraulic pressure releasing as he releases a valve on the right side of his cheek. He takes a deep breath of the frigid desert air and takes a look at the surroundings. They have camped in the middle of dune, sand kraken territory all around them. The plains are bare and somewhat resemble the look of the sea he heard so much in tales from his ancestors. His hydrae coil and shrivel unto themselves in the cold. He huddles towards the campfire and sits on a piece of chrome artifice that his other companion is sitting on. The True Kin shifts away from him slightly when he sits near him but Pollo makes no mind of it. If he were to rage at every slight injustice, then, he’d have suffered an aneurysm at this point.
For a while, they stand silent and then, Pollo attempts to make parley with the mute.
“ We’re going to be here a long while, my friend.”
No response.
“ Where are you from?”
The mute True Kin pauses before pointing upwards towards the star-studded ceiling of space. His bony finger directs Pollo’s attention downwards on the sky, towards a series of stars that are shaped like a serpent. Pollo nods sympathetically.
“ Brumag, then. Terrible place. How’d a surface dweller like you end up as a mercenary. Could have been a pretty cushy life in the Hegemony for you. Better than Vaarn.
The True Kin locks both of his palms together and waggles his fingers in a skittish motion before pressing both hands towards his mouth. He then points towards an old faded badge on his chest, the iconography of an ivory spire on blue yarn. Pollo knows that it’s New Hegemonic but he can barely read it, much less understand the damn language.
“ You learnt on the streets, from a rat newbeast?”The True Kin turns his head slowly. “ No, sorry, you ate the rats. It must have been hard, living life out there on your own.” He then coughs before continuing. “ And how did you get all the way out here in this little sahra?”
Pollo watches as the True Kin places two fingers on the palm of his left and moves them both slowly like a drawing compass before then, pointing south-east to a place that Pollo knows all to well. Gnomon. He can still see the tall peaks of its salt-scrapers, shaped like a sun dial, glow bright in the night sky.
“ Why are you here now?”
The mute southlander froze, looking away from Pollo towards the fire, the contours of his face illuminated by the flickering embers. His index thumb then flicked upwards towards the sky before clapping both of his hands together in a praying stance that Pollo once saw a ornery cultist of ATLAS use.
To kill a god.
//SUPPLIES
EQUIPMENT:Calcichette Cannon - A white, ooblong tube intricately etched with profane images of slumbering giants. The barrel of the gun stinks of cordite and the pull of its triggers sounds like cracked knuckles.
Aerovest Suit - A Autarch suit from a bygone age that was used to explore the outer limits of Urth. Preserves the wearer’s moisture and nutrition whilst limiting their exposure to the elements.
Low Spectrum Nanotector - A miniature handheld metallic screen mounted onto a woolen stick that displays a broad spectrum of high and low frequency signals.
TRINKETS:
A bio-luminscent izurite necklace from an Occian fishmonger.
A pressed dried desert rose
A plas-bound journal inserted with palm papyrus
A syringe ring from a Faa Nomad assassin. Its toxic payload is now empty.
An ink-scrawl print of his days as a novice armitate in the Legio 5th.
