Name: Kalasan Iovar
Personality: Kal has always been ambitious, never quite satisfied with what she's been given. Perhaps it comes from her Darilum upbringing, that desire to
be more,
have more. She has never been afraid of going for what she wants, whether that is pouring hours into study or days into social engineering, or doing what she wants. She doesn't let rules get in her way, figuring rules were made for those that need their hand held through life, and she solidly does not. In fact, she doesn't let much stop her from being
her. Being an individual is core to her; she's unafraid to be different, contrarian, and is in general rather unfiltered, saying what she thinks and portraying a devil-may-care attitude toward what others think.
Reason For Accepting: Kal expected to play in the big leagues ever since she was young, and even after her birthright was ripped from her, that expectation never left. She has always been on the lookout for that piece of glory, that one act that will put her down in
all the history books, not just a quarter of them, and will make hers a name remembered for generations to come.
Appearance:
Kal takes after a stingray in appearance, with wide wings and two tails, and in movement, practically swimming through space. Her top side is smooth and heavily armored while her bottom side provides the weaponry. It's easy enough, though, to curl her wings around herself in either direction to provide 360 assault or defense.
Communication Method: If any physical part of Kal remains, it's her voice. Within range of the ship, she can speak to a select individual such that only they can hear (even if others are nearby), a group of individuals, a targeted area, or in a broadcast format for all to hear in any language. She'll sometimes make use of a robotic avatar that carries her voice, usually in the form of a little flying stingray, a 6" wingspan and a foot in length, which she refers to as Lan. Most often, she'll send Lan to accompany someone she trusts, acting as a sort of familiar. She can also project a hologram (a favored form [spoili]
[/spoili]) to those aboard or from the mini-ray as a visual aid to go with the voice if she feels a particular need to be a little less obtuse and a little more approachable. It's convincing enough visually to believe she's there (even if she's mentally somewhere else entirely) up until you try to touch her.
Doomsday Weapon: Kal's twin tails can burrow into a planet, disintegrate and siphon off the very atoms that it's made of. When doing this at speed, it's common for a plasmic cloud of raw atoms to gather around herself if she's unable to consume it fast enough. Kal is capable of transferring planet materials into stored resources, such as fuel or as building materials for new components or armor repairs (while she does have a back room of guns, she finds that creating things on the fly is more space efficient and gives her more flexibility). Generally, though, a planet is composed of way more than she can carry. The lazy way of dealing with this is to just leave the cloud where it is, acting as an area hazard. A little extra energy (which she'll draw from the cloud itself) and she can bring it along with her to be consumed afterwards or just to be annoying to smaller ships. If she wants to be rid of it, though, she can either dissipate the cloud into a fine mist that doesn't hinder visibility, often then mined by dedicated friendlies for the rarer elements, dump it onto a nearby asteroid (or planet or moon or any other space-rock), or she can focus and hone the material into a particle beam, allowing her to act as a planet killer and shipwrecker all at once.
As far as disintegration techniques, her particular favorite is an act of finesse, where she'll just barely touch a skyscraper or other notable building, and vent it little by little, giving the effect of evaporating a building, but it takes time and attention. Another favorite trick she likes to play is to submerge herself in a body of water, raising just the tip of her horn out. Time it right, and she can have an entire ocean gone practically before anyone notices. That is all to say, Kal is capable of destroying a planet piecemeal, leaving behind half a planet or with extra time and patience, works of art.
Equipment:
Offense
- Particle Pulse Cannon: Shoots high-energy directed pulses of subatomic particles.
- EM Beam: This beam can be tuned to any frequency to achieve maximal resonance and destruction.
- Seeking Missiles: Missiles that, once launched, seek out a target. She can fire hundreds at once. These also work as a missile defense system, capable of seeking out incoming missiles, and exploding them a safe distance away.
- Venom: She has two venomous gasses that she can pump out. One causes hallucinations that last up to an hour. The other causes people to experience nausea, vomit, and muscle cramping, lasting up to 2 days, though the worst is often over in the first 30-60 minutes. She can either use her tail as an injection point for a more targeted area attack, or just vent the gas into an entire city as she flies over. Neither is considered lethal to a healthy human being.
Defense
- Neographene Composite Armor: Most projectiles just won't piece her hull, underside or topside. Her armor is one smooth flexible sheet, only opening up where sensors and weaponry need to stick out. The top side is triple the thickness with no openings for weaponry (though a couple small ones for sensors), making it even harder to penetrate.
- Plasmic Pulse: She pulses out plasmic cloud around herself, capable of pulling apart beam weapons before it reaches her hull. It also wreaks havoc on sensors and can ionize fuel lines of propulsion engines via the exhaust, causing them to malfunction. If somehow a ship detects it coming in time, the best chance of surviving it is to shut down the engine.
- Reflector shield: When charged, she can put up a reflector shield, capable of reflecting back lasers and energy based weapons toward her enemies.
Auxiliary
- Jaw: There's really no reason for her to have a mouth-hole except that she really enjoys using it as a mechanism with which to guide her beam. More than one enemy has thought it a docking bay, excited to board and infiltrate only to smashed to bits in her powerful jaw. There's just something really satisfying about eating ships. Rather inefficient, though, as far as effort per damage goes.
- Stinger: Her stinger is essentially a weapon on its own. She can use it to smack small ships out of the air, grapple, or as a piercing weapon to penetrate large structures.
- Medical Laboratory: Onboard Kal is one of the most sophisticated robotic medic wings.
- Ray Fleet: Kal can launch a fleet of about a hundred rays (about the size of a one-man ship). They're equipped with really dinky guns (well, compared to the ones on Kal anyway), and likewise have articulate stingers, capable of spreading venom and minor grappling. They're mostly autonomous (Kal can focus on and control perhaps a dozen at a time to perform a singular task, though there's usually better issues to be focusing on) and dumb (which is to say predictable, and not terribly good against adaptive enemies). Their primary purpose is to just add confusion to battles (especially if one lands on your windshield and you're not comfortable piloting by instrument, but who even manually flies anymore anyway?). They can also be used as rescue vehicles, snatching ejected emergency pods, or coordinated together to shepard back stranded ships. They can be used as a one-person transport, providing a way to get on and off the ship. Since she's not particularly in-tune with them, if one were stolen, she probably wouldn't notice, but she can sound the call for all rays to return via MBR communication.
Techniques
- 360: She can flip her fins up or down to provide more surface area from which to shoot or protect herself.
- Agility: She can twist and turn at a speed not common amongst battleships, especially of her size. At her highest speeds, she can kill those who board her, but also causes structural damage, especially along the outside edge of her fins. There are several gyroscopic rooms along her center axis, allowing those aboard to survive these tricks. She can, though, lock them in place so they are no longer free-spinning and providing this protection, but there is still a higher chance of survival in these rooms.
Alien Touch: Surprisingly, none. Yet. She's waiting for it, though.
Brief History: Kal was born into the rat race that is Darilum as an only child by the name of Lan Qhir. Her parents moved in the highest circles, her mother leading a premier mercenary group and her father situated rather well within the corporation. Everyone expected she'd fall into the same pattern. That was likely why she rebelled against it. If it was already a guarantee, what was the point of trying? She was, in short, the sort of trouble that no parent wanted to deal with, squandering their money like nothing else, throwing it around to cover up her misdeeds -- drugs, underage drinking, illegal races, theft... It had not occurred to her that her family was not infallible.
At fifteen, her parents were assassinated. She, perhaps luckily, had slipped her bodyguards (they had never really tried hard to keep track of her anyway seeing as they never got along, not with her throwing her family legacy to the wind) and had snuck out for the night, busy dancing up a storm under the pseudonym Kalasan Iovar and a faked ID. It wasn't until she had stepped off the dance floor and back to the bar that she found out what had happened, catching their dead faces on the breaking news. It had gone on to report how the Qhir child was missing with active speculations of kidnapping
or worse. The assassins wasted no time publicizing their claims, detailing her family's wrongdoings against a great number of people and groups, attributing them for deeds that would have taken entire organizations years to pull off. But she understood the underlying message. Show her face, and they would carry out their full vengeance against her, too.
This wasn't her first death threat. Bodyguards were a constant in her life. But for the most part, such threats were beneath her attention. This one, though, was a little more real. Not so real she left the club early, but enough that she didn't go home afterwards, and instead burned anything that identified her as Lan Qhir. She had on her a couple of cash sticks, the usual backup pool of bribe money (which unbeknownst to her at the time, was on the order of an average citizen's annual salary). It was more than enough to thrift herself some clothes (which was a terrible experience she vowed never to repeat (but did numerous times)), and get her hair chopped off. What remained she hoped was enough to get her
somewhere.
Somewhere and several years later ended up being Liberty Station, Kal having heard of it as a nexus for those displaced from their societies. But the journey was a rough one. For the first time, she had to use more than just her name and money to get things to go her way. Where others used to grovel, attempting to curry favor with her and thus her parents, she found herself ignored, shoved aside for her rudeness. And money, it turned out, was not endless. Instead of flying in a private suite, she'd work for free passage to wherever the ship was going. On the side, she also would gather scrap materials, turning them into pieces of art or engineering, though she found trying to sell them was another matter altogether. Not everyone wanted a quirky crystal tree or hacked together air scooter (well, until she realized there was a market for racer bikes that could push speeds higher than the legal limits). The art most often went to those she met, other shipmates or travelers, who took pity on her and would buy them. (She hated the pity, but needed the money.) And in time, she mourned, though it was uncertain if she mourned her parents or the life she had been promised (there was a period of time when everything she made was a commentary with varying degrees of subtlety on how messed up society was).
By the time she reached Liberty Station, she had remade herself, or at least had developed a sense of work ethics. But she was no one, and that was unacceptable. While she had given up the notion the galaxy would just fall into her lap, Kal had never given up the idea that she still was owed it. In her new home, it was the scientists who made a name for themselves, so that was the path she pursued. Everyone doubted her resolve, but that only served to motivate her further. It took a while to catch up on education, but she put in her time, and joined the ranks of the scientists, making key contributions in the march toward Heralds during her many years in the lab.
Kal was the first to become a Titan, a procedure she helped design. Her friends, those that were also her colleagues, anyway, tried to stop her, citing that it was her job to
create Heralds, that she of all people ought to know what horrors awaited. But just as she hadn't let what people said get in the way of her becoming a scientist, she likewise didn't let them stop her from starting the next phase of her life. There was no way she'd make a name for herself working within the leagues of scientists in the background of the upcoming battles, but she could see the path to glory on the frontlines. In doing so, she probably estranged quite a few people, but it was worth it. There would always be new people, but this was Kalasan's chance to once again become invincible.
