Name: Armsman Telaci Vast
Age: Even Telaci doesn't know his true age in Terran years, but most would assume him to be around his mid-twenties.
Gender: Male
Approximate Height & Weight: 5'8" and 65kgs
Former Regiment: Armsman aboard the (now destroyed) frigate
Graced Blade.
Speciality: Disciplinarian, CQC
Appearance: Telaci is a relatively short and compact man, with a small, wiry frame and a face perpetually smeared with soot and grease. His true hair colour is impossible to guess, so ingrained with the soot and dirt of a voidship's interior that it has yet to shed its black, and is pulled back into rough dreadlocks. He is clean shaven, with deep-set dark blue eyes and a squat nose.
Dark-skinned and with a perpetual hunch to him, he is, in fact,
very easy to miss whenever it's dark or when surrounded by other people. This, of course, is actually very handy as an armsman, as nothing discourages malcontent than the knowledge that a shotgun-toting guard may be just behind you at any point in time.
Uniform: Armsmen don't
have a uniform to speak of, and Telaci's 'outfit' is just that- an outfit he threw together to fit in now that he's been press-ganged into the guard. With navy jacket, white bandanna and black trousers, it would not be difficult to draw comparisons to second millennium Terran 'marines,' something which Telaci is entirely unfamiliar with. His flak armour- rather ramshackle as it's still in the form of his armsman armour, rather than a uniform guardsman breastplate, is strapped onto him, providing adequate protection despite its less-than-fantastic appearance.
Armament:
- Naval Boarding Shotgun: One of the nearly endless variants that can be found in the hands of armsmen across the galaxy, almost every part of this gun can be removed until it is little more than a trigger attached directly to the barrel depending on how close quarters fighting is expected to be in. When modded to a more reasonable size it can fire six shots semi-automatically before requiring a fresh magazine.
- 'FUBAR' Utility Tool: No chains, no power field, just a rough, brutal, forged metal for crunching through flesh and bone. Unfortunately, not so good against orks, whose choppas could probably cut through it and Telaci's arm in one go. He carries it around as a useful tool- among other things, the tool can be used as a hammer, wrench, crowbar and a dozen other things beside.
- Trench Knife: Not really a 'trench' knife, as Telaci has never been in a trench, it would nonetheless be intimately familiar to any Krieger. A four-inch-long, overly heavy blade attached to a pair of knuckledusters, designed to punch through armour and gut the poor fool it gets stuck into.
- Autopistol & Laspistol: Having redundant weapons is always useful when the potential to be disarmed is near-constant. Despite the differences between them (the autopistol is fully automatic, and holds a measly twenty rounds before needing to be reloaded) their function is the same- an easy to reach backup weapon. One is kept strapped to the small of his back, the other to his hip.
It is quite likely that Telaci will have a lasgun foisted into his arms at some point. It is also quite likely he will hate it.
Personality/Demeanour: Telaci is, despite everything, actually a fairly quiet man down on the surface. He feels unease when alone and could be said to have a not insignificant amount of agoraphobia, triggered by wide-open spaces (Telaci having spent most of his life in ships where space was a pricey commodity.) Although armsmen are an important part in keeping discipline aboard Imperial vessels, Telaci's way of doing this has always been through his presence- the man has a stare like a commissar, and on a bad day it's said that he could wilt flowers with his eyes.
In combat, Telaci is focused and flighty at the same time. His eyes instinctively jump about, looking for the next foe to leap out at him, and he has an extremely twitchy trigger finger. This attitude, earned from fighting in horrifically cramped conditions where any shadow could be someone jumping at you with a chainsword are fantastic when fighting boarding parties, but are dangerous indeed when it comes to cohesively functioning with a squad of guardsmen.
Greatest Ambition: To get back into space. Telaci's been on a planet for about a week and a half in his life, and they've without a doubt been the worst, most miserable days of his life. All he wants is to get back on a starship and get the
fuck off this rock.
Greatest Hatred: Being planetside, orks. The latter one is a new addition stemming entirely from the fact that they are the exact reason he has ended up on a planet.
Skills: Armsmen are all drawn from voidsmen- trained staff aboard Imperial starships. Although not an educated man in any sense of the word, Telaci's had a fairly good education when it comes to repairing the many,
many subsystems that go into ensuring that a frigate doesn't simply implode on itself. This experience is surprisingly relevant on the ground, and if something is broken there's a not-insignificant chance that he might be able to get it working, at least for another hour or two.
In addition, Telaci is
incredibly proficient at fighting in close quarters. Life aboard a spaceship is life perpetually lived with a person a foot away from you at all times, and fights are nasty, brutal quick affairs decided in flashes of light and how much power you can get out of half an inch.
History: Telaci was born, and hoped to one day die, aboard a spaceship. With no home planet and parents perpetually working, the young boy was left mostly in the care of a 'creche' aboard the ship, which was, in reality, little more than a priest keeping the children occupied and hopefully indoctrinating them with the Imperial doctrine so they didn't crawl off and get torn in half by some machine. As the young man grew up he would learn mechanics under his father, and a childhood friend's father- an armsman, would often come and talk to him when he was otherwise unoccupied.
It was this connection that eventually earned him his armsman stripes. Serving aboard the frigate
Graced Blade, he's undertaken boarding actions, put down riots and stopped more brawls than he could count, splattering blood against bulkheads and cracking skulls in crawlspaces even as the frigate escorted larger ships across the galaxy. The campaign in the Vernum system however would spell the end for the ship.
Frigates are, at their core, escort craft, and are therefore anticipated to take plenty of enemy fire. In fact, they are designed for this. What they are
not designed for is having multiple large, gun-and-rokkit filled asteroids ploughed into them at high speeds. Three such 'roks' would crash into the ship, crew scrambling for escape pods or being cut down by the orks that unloaded out even as the beleaguered vessel began to break apart.
Telaci's training served him well in the mad dash to get aboard an escape ship. With two ork skulls pulped by his shotgun, he would manage to slip aboard one of the last to fire off, the small craft almost immediately being caught by the gravity well of Vernum Prime. After what felt like a year of nerve-wracking shaking, the roar and heat of re-entry and the final slow descent inside of the planet's atmosphere, the door would burst off and Telaci would breathe in his first breath of fresh air in his life.
Air that was filled with lasfire. Incredibly, despite the size and variation of the planet of Vernum, not only had Telaci landed in an inhabitable area, he had also landed in the middle of an active warzone, as well as a good quarter of the escape pods that had ejected. Whilst most of the people inside of these escape craft were ill-prepared for a fight, Telaci and the not-insignificant number of armsmen that had landed down
were.Banding together into little more than an armed, Imperial-aligned mob, they would stand their ground amidst the legions of the militarum, simultaneously marvelling at the wide-open spaces they had never experienced whilst also fighting for their lives. It was during this fight that the refugees and armsmen would be slowly absorbed into various squads and militarum teams, civilians directed back towards camps whilst those that could fight being practically thrown into whichever understaffed squad happened to be nearby.
Fighting alongside a Hirsit squad, Telaci would find himself doing what he did best- close quarters brutality. By the time the fighting was over, his squad, already understaffed by the time that he had been placed in it consisted of himself, a 17-year-old voxcaster and the sergeant, and was promptly folded into a reconstructed regiment, much to his chagrin.
Miscellaneous: Telaci has never actually written anything in his life. Not a word. In fact, Telaci is barely literate at all- the fact that he understands the written form even slightly is that it was needed for disseminating orders.
