Here goes.
Name: Boris Mundus, the Scavenger King of Strenger
Nickname:
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Age: 92
Profession: Scavenger/Engineer
Description:
A lean, wiry man with a back bent by age and a face lined by time and loss, the exiled King of Strenger carries himself with an unrelenting pride and intensity that makes others wary. Mundus is heavily, even grotesquely augmented: it is hard to see where the man ends and the machine begins, heavy-duty mechanics seeming to grow out of his spine and limbs. Careful study might reveal it was once a cheap mining exoskeleton, but time and endless modifications have changed it into something rather unique. Mundus' rig allows him mobility and strength that his age might otherwise forbid. What parts of him aren't pierced by machinery and caged in metal reveal leathery sun-baked skin and long, wild hair ever-dancing on the edge of grey and white, with a face of hard, aquiline features. His eyes are a deep, intense blue.
Background:
To understand the King, one must first understand his Kingdom. Strenger is a starship graveyard of immense size and ancient history, littered by the remains of no fewer than seven hundred and nine battles across the centuries. It has been the possession of empires from time to time, but at the time of Boris's birth, it was an anarchic no-neo's-land, home to endless warring scavenger clans, raider bands and Mercy crews looking to salvage something of worth. The last century had been good to Strenger, with a wealth of prime- and even apex-level tech left for the void by wars passing through.
Boris was born to a salvage crew of middling status, quite at the mercy of more powerful clans and scavengers in the complicated inter-faction politics of the system. Life was brutal and short for much of his family, but Boris proved to be the lucky one. Captured by a group with ties to the neocrow Nestmake Mining Conglomerate, he was crudely grafted with a mining rig and sent into the rad-soaked core sector of the ancient warship A Blossom of Blood Now Forgotten with no expectation of surviving past a few hauls. To his surprise, he found within the ship not only rare tech, but a society of outcasts who'd learned to counter the deadly radiation of the volatile reactor systems. After proving his worth and tech-savvy, he was allowed to stay - the raiders who'd captured him assumed he'd died and soon gave up the effort.
The next five years of Boris' life took place in the ancient corridors and hidden places of the decaying warship, but he quickly rose above his peers. Where they were content to live in secret, feeding on fungi and mutated crops that grew in the ship's broken agri-bays, Boris had no intention of staying within the Blossom forever. He spent his time scavenging, reusing, repairing and creating - and talking, persuading, intimidating the others to follow his lead. By his fourth year he had supplanted the tribe's original leadership - by the fifth, he'd convinced them to leave their broken home, and for good.
At the end of the year, the man now known as Boris Mundus stepped out into the void outside the Blossom and saw a world much wounded and fragmented by conflict, greed and short-sightedness. Clans and groups fought over scraps, scuttling the wrecks they lived in to sell onwards, ignorant of their true potential. He knew then he was destined to unite the many factions of Strenger; to make himself King and sovereign over the graveyard of empires.
It was not a rapid process. In his time aboard the Blossom, Boris had been able to restore some of the great ship's weapon systems. Many of his early successes came about with the threat of force or the successful use of it. Boris knew those systems as well as his own self, and knew not to rely on them - by the time the old guns finally imploded from stress and disrepair and took most of the ship with them, Boris had already transcended need of them. Starting with only the men and women from his adopted home, Boris convinced other clans to join his or forced them to bend knee, amassing more and more power and support until he stood equal to the greatest factions of the system. The wars that followed were not grand on the scale of empires, but they were hard and demanding nevertheless. Boris' strength always lay in tech, in its repair and reinvention, and he thrived where others saw only garbage.
There were defeats, of course. Boris lost as many as he came to care about as the years rolled on. It took a good decade before Boris emerged as the unquestioned supreme power in Strenger, and many years after until the last pockets of resistance were cleared out and the new Kingdom's foundation stabilized.
But he had won. Boris Mundus, the Scavenger King of Strenger, surveyed his realm and found himself pleased. New, better habitats were being thrown together, more stations for power and food built in the void between hulks, a code of law written and put into practice - even a fleet was beginning to form, his greatest triumph, cobbled together from the ruins of older ships. Strenger prospered, the King of Rust ruling an empire of several million.
There were still some who sought to undermine and resist him, of course. The most dangerous of these hailed from outside Strenger. He had cast out the very conglomerates and foreign interests that had first enslaved him and given him his augmentations from the system, and in doing so had planted the seeds of his own downfall. Strenger had been of little interest to the local empires until then, but the exiles petitioned the great powers they served, and the prospect of an united, presumptous would-be little empire in their backyard turned the eyes of the locals to Strenger for the first time in centuries.
The King was not afraid. He had a fleet, he had bits of technology that bordered on the apex. He would face whatever hosts these corrupt old empires would send against him and pick their corpses clean for more materials for his growing realm. The Scavenger King of Strenger would prove he was the equal of any other sovereign.
He was wrong.
The 'rust fleet' of the King had many potent weapons, true, but they stood no chance against a true fleet of war. The new Strenger burned and died, the work of a decade destroyed in a matter of hours. The King's new family was lost with it, but still Boris Mundus found himself to be the 'lucky one'. He survived, cast out into the void, a malfunctioning Bore drive sending him sectors away from his prized Kingdom at the time it needed him most.
The fall of the Kingdom weighed heavily on his mind - it broke him, just a little, and many say it is the gleam of madness that now shines in the King's eyes. Lost, adrift, Boris wandered the stars for years until he became, quite by chance, a Mercy in the service of a Captain Cetacine, who did not mind humoring the obvious madman's claims of being a King given his skills of engineering. She would be one of many in Boris' new career. It has been decades since the Fall of Strenger and the loss of his Kingdom, but Boris has, if anything, only become more intent on reclaiming his realm and exacting his revenge on the powers of the galaxy... one day.
The throneless King's skill with technology and particular creativity in reusing and reshaping old systems has made sought-after in many crews, though his pride and 'kingly manner' do not sit well with all his fellow mercenaries. Even if eccentric, the Rust King has made himself a name where it matters. Soon, he says, soon he will reclaim his Kingdom.
Notable Quotes:
'What is an empire, but salvage waiting to happen? Let them send their fleets and armies. They will not be the first to die here.' (Said before the Fall of Strenger)
'Hrnh. Too shiny, too specialized, too safe - useless, useless! All of it, useless!' (Common opinion of modern ship engineering.)
'You can tell the worth of an engine by the rads leaking off it. Oh, this one? You're already poisoned, fin. Don't blame me, I told you to keep your distance!' (Common manner of dealing with underlings.)
'Oh, you may laugh, fools. Once I have reclaimed what is mine, you will be the first to die.'
Traits: Scavenger Genius, Rad-Resistant, Charismatic, Driving Goal, Stubborn, Arrogant
This is more-or-less done, but might still tweak it somewhat (and think of some Nicknames). Comments, thoughts? My second idea was a hedonistic neojaguar in it for the thrills.
Author
Topic: Small Mercies (OOC) | Mercenary Menageries in Space (6/[6]) [WARNING: TEXT] (Read 108997 times)