A-5809-X
Name: None known. The pirates were calling him 'the Brute'
Gender: Male
Species: Human. Quite obviously gene-edited and enhanced.
Age: Appears about 30.
Physical Description: A beast of a man, absolutely colossal in his proportions, looming somewhere closer to seven feet than six and weighing well north of 300 lbs. Somehow all that cutting-edge genetic engineering has created a prehistoric relic: unrefined and brutish, with a primitive brow, coarse bones and heavy muscling. A prowling hulk, he shakes the ground when he walks, grunts when he talks, growls when he breathes. While the pirates had him his hair and beard were allowed to grow wild, but he prefers to keeps both buzzed down to a bare shadow. Looks like military standard-issue, for those in the know.
Personality: Marked by ferocity, tenacity and remorselessness; hampered by emotional instability and poor impulse control. Besides that, his personality is rudimentary at best. There seems to be a certain set of behaviors and reactions hardwired into his psyche. Beyond those limits, he seems little more than a wild animal, vicious, wounded and cornered; chiefly concerned about surviving another day, and brutally reactive against any perceived threats to his life or liberty.
Known Character History: Minimal. He was kept in a heavily reinforced cryostasis chamber under three separate sets of failsafe locks on the pirate vessel. There's some sort of explosive device implanted at the base of his skull. And the controller to that device was kept near his cryochamber - but well out of reach, as though even heavily sedated and frozen into near-total stasis he was still somehow a threat.
Full character writeup follows - don't read if you want to find out IC!
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Name: None known. The pirates were calling him 'the Brute'
Gender: Male
Species: Human, lab-grown, genetically enhanced
Age: Appears about 30. Finished AGD just a few months ago, fully matured and ready for indoctrination.
Religion: Religion was not part of his indoctrination
Sexuality: Sexuality was not part of his indoctrination
Homeworld: He has no affiliation to any particular planet, asteroid or station. However, he underwent AGD in an artificial satellite station orbiting the 3rd moon of the 4th planet of the Novus Prime system
Occupation: Rejected Ascendant Legionary; captive of intergalactic pirates; fugitive from the Novus Collective
Physical Description: A beast of a man, absolutely colossal in his proportions, looming somewhere closer to seven feet than six and weighing well north of 300 lbs. Somehow all that cutting-edge genetic engineering has created a prehistoric relic: unrefined and brutish, with a primitive brow, coarse bones and heavy muscling. A prowling hulk, he shakes the ground when he walks, grunts when he talks, growls when he breathes. While the pirates had him his hair and beard were allowed to grow wild, but he prefers to keeps both buzzed down to a bare shadow in accordance with Ascendant Legion dress code, which he follows because he knows no other way.
Personality: Like all those intended for the Legion, A-5809 was bred, engineered and conditioned for ferocity, tenacity and remorselessness. Unlike those who made it into the Legion, A-5809 demonstrated an unacceptable tendency for emotional instability, which chiefly manifested as insubordination, vindictiveness, and poor impulse control. Other than that, A-5809's personality is rudimentary at best. Having undergone an accelerated development process and an 'education' consisting mostly of Legionary indoctrination, he's had almost no time or opportunity to experience the world and develop as a person. What little he has experienced of life has been brutal and traumatic. When and where he can, he defaults to Legion standards of behavior and reaction tattooed deep into his psyche. Faced with new situations, he is in effect little more than a wild animal, vicious, wounded and cornered; chiefly concerned about surviving another day, and brutally reactive against any perceived threats to his life or liberty.
Character History:
There's a saying that Legionaries are made, not born. It's certainly true of A-5809. As part of the A-5800 batch of Ascendant Legionaries, he was the product of ex ovum genetic synthesis, his genes were assembled out of a library of traits, ruthlessly edited and spliced to maximize future utility to the Novus Collective. He wasn't born; he was developed in an incubation chamber. He didn't grow up; he was subjected to AGD - Acccelerated Growth and Development. He didn't have an education. He had an indoctrination.
78% of the A-5800s cohort were successfully integrated into the Ascendant Legion - one of the highest yields ever. Yet even in such tightly managed, artificial environments, even with every conceivable variable of genetic makeup and psychophysical development manipulated, compensated and controlled, life finds a way to be imperfect. And A-5809 was imperfect.
Something must have gone wrong somewhere along the way. The indoctrination didn't work, or the genes just didn't have the right balance. Physically, he was a perfect Legionary - large, strong, fast, brutal. But mentally, or emotionally, or psychologically, something was off. He just couldn't cohere with the rest of his cohort. They were cold, calculated, logical. He was unstable, prone to outbursts, unable to control his temper.
As the rest of his cohort moved on and were distributed across the Novus Collective, he was remediated again and again until at last they gave up on him. An R was appended to his designation, signifying his status as a rejected Legionary. He was reclassified as unskilled labor, relegated to mindless jobs requiring little more than brute strength and the ability to obey unquestioningly. Yet even in such situations he struggled. Something in him refused to conform, insisted on rebellion. Again and again he was insubordinate, volatile, threatening, until finally one day he cornered his supervisor over some trivial thing and, with a single vicious grasp and a single hard shake, broke the man's arm and pulled it out of its socket.
That was the last straw. Law enforcement arrived. A-5809-R was shocked to the ground. An electroexplosive was field-implanted at the base of his skull, euphemistically termed a Discontinuer. He was remanded to a holding cell awaiting neocortical reformulation - a thin euphemism for what amounts to a form of lobotomy. Afterwards, he would truly be a mindless drone, shuffling dazedly from site to site, doing whatever was required of him.
Such was the plan, anyway. But A-5809-R escaped that night, leaving behind a trail of slaughter. Security footage pieced it together afterwards: a careless guard who leaned a little too close as he bend to slop food into A-5809-R's tray. The huge fist that shot out, the hand closing around the neck, the guard yanked forward and smashed face-first into the bars again and again until he stopped twitching. The keycard swiped, the bars opened, A-5809-R running full-tilt through halls blaring with sirens and lights.
He was redesignated again. A-5809-X. The X indicated escapee. And it indicated terminate-on-sight.
Even so, an entire peacekeeper detachment couldn't catch him before he made it to the nearest spaceport, where he stowed aboard a small transporter vessel and left the station. Twenty-four hours later he'd killed the five-man crew, dumped their bodies out the airlock, and hijacked the vessel. With the basic piloting skills imparted by his training, he headed for the outer reaches of Perseus Arm - but the vessel was underranged and incapable of such a traversal, and soon ran out of fuel off the Cygnus Loop.
For days he somehow survived on a freezing, dark ship, living off sips of air and droplets of water, until passing pirates stopped to loot what they presumed to be a derelict vessel. When they found him, he was nearly comatose - but he still managed to kill two of them before they put him down.
When he regained consciousness he was in a modified cargo container, a prisoner aboard the pirate vessel. They didn't know who he was, where he came from. They had a few guesses. They had some cute names for him, but the Brute was the one that stuck. And they had plans for him. He'd bring a high price at any of the black markets scattered around the rim where sentient beings were as much a commodity as anything else. Or perhaps they could even sell him to the illegal gladitorial rings in the Centaurus Arm. Of course, uncontrollable merchandise was no good for anyone, but the pirates were a clever, resourceful bunch. They'd managed to jack into his Discontinuer and transferred control to a small handheld unit that could control and modulate the charge.
They were good enough to explain how it worked now: low levels cause discomfort and pain, higher levels cause agony and unconsciousness, and the highest level would kill him instantly. After an experiencing an unpleasant in-person demonstration of the effects, he learned to behave.
Or rather, he learned to bide his time. Sooner or later his captors would let their guard down. Sooner or later he'd have his chance. Thoughts of escape and vengeance fuel his every waking moment. And when the pirate vessel ran across the Plowhorse and all hell broke loose, the Brute sensed opportunity was at hand.
Skills, Traits, Details
Brute: genetically and pharmacologically enhanced from conception, the Brute is enormously strong, startlingly quick. His reaction times are in the low double-digits of milliseconds. He seems to shrug off most damage, though this has more to do with conditioning than any real immunity to pain.
Boot Camp: the Brute was subjected to a basic military conditioning and training package, which includes the rudimentaries of spaceflight, navigation, hostile-environment survival, and the like. In addition, he has fairly extensive training in weaponry and tactics.
Raised by Wolves: one might not think it of a product of Novus military science, but the Brute is ignorant and unsophisticated, new to the world outside the close, controlled confines of his narrow and unpleasant experiences.
Discontinued: the Brute is implanted with an electroexplosive, euphemistically called a Discontinuer, which is currently jackwired to a handheld controller. Although the device cannot compel him in any way nor change his thoughts or emotions, it is capable of delivering escalating impulses directly into his nervous system. Low levels cause pain, high levels cause agony, and the highest levels take him to unconsciousness or - at maximum - immediate death. It is unknown if this device can be removed... or if anyone would want to remove it, as it may be the only thing holding the Brute in check at any given moment.