"Far as I'm concerned, the mission never ends."
Salvator Rasch
Age: 77
Species: Voidhanger
Appearance:Stands at 6’2”. Lean, athletic build. Blue skin and luminescent green eyes mark him as a voidhanger rather than just another human. Head is shaved bald, but wears his facial hair in a full beard. For a voidhanger reaching his species’ middle age, Salvator is surprisingly free of mutation, thanks to the gene mods he’d received from the Liberation Front military decades ago. His equipment bears old OSLF patches: remnants of a military and units long since destroyed.
Background: For the man born as Salvator Rasch, the Long War against all who sought to consume the OSLF defined his life from his youth. Born into a voidhanger flotilla settled within Liberation Front space in 4160, Salvator spent the first two decades of his life more than aware of the sword looming over the collective heads of everyone and everything he'd ever known. Thus, he left his flotilla to enlist in his local branch of the OSLF military the moment he became of age, descending from the fleet to the Black City below as he sought to defend his home the only way he knew how. It was during his first deployment on the Front's borders that Corporal Rasch's superiors found he had a budding aptitude for asymmetrical warfare, and encouraged him to try out for special forces. He passed with flying colors, and finished his training just as the Helios Subjugation was beginning in 4180.
Over the next decade, Rasch and his fellow operators were deployed across OSLF space, putting out bush fires and proxy incidents as best they could. But it was never enough. As the years passed and Rasch flew up the ranks until he was given command of his own team, the amount of information he was authorized to access grew, and the picture became clearer. But it wasn't until his Black City was caught in the crossfire between NATO and the Conglomerate that Major Rasch understood. But understanding didn't help as Rasch and his team found themselves fighting a desperate boarding action against the NATO flagship of the invasion to try to cut the head off the snake and stop at least half of the shooting. They succeeded, and the ship went up in flames, but at the cost of the entire squadron, minus Salvator himself.
When he emerged from the wreckage of his escape pod, Salvator was greeted with the sight of Conglomerate ships descending upon his home city, his people capitulating soon after. In disgust that everything he'd fought for amounted to nothing, Salvator fled the city and into the reaches of space. Across nearly three decades of the Veiled War, he fought as a mercenary and assassin, not caring for what banner he served as long as he hurt another. The only mission he had left in his life was to avenge the Liberation Front, by any means necessary. It was near the end of this shadow conflict that Salvator found himself headhunted and recruited by Intransigence elements. Former OSLF personnel that hadn’t been happy with the new order sought him out, and he eagerly joined up with them just in time for the Reckoning of Empires to begin.
Over the next four years, he fell back into his old role, serving with black ops elements to defend Intransigence space and strike against its enemies. The demands of the war ensured that the roster of those he worked with was ever changing and shifting due to casualties and logistics, but he remained. Salvator Rasch would fight this Long War so long as both he and his enemies drew breath, no matter the cost.
Character Evaluation: A bitter veteran of the Long War, Salvator has known little but soldiering for most of his life. He is caustic and cynical, but views himself as one of the only ones left carrying on the OSLF’s ideals and legacy. In a group, Salvator will bite his tongue and keep his opinions to himself should he feel they go against the grain, but something always slips out eventually.
As a remnant of the OSLF that bought heavily into the party line, Salvator despises galactic imperialism, believing strongly in the right to planet or system-wide self determination. Large political unions invite skepticism from him, with even the Intransigence not being completely safe from his distrust. His worst-case but still alarmingly-plausible scenario is that the Intransigence becomes no better than the systems it fights against, its leaders abusing their power and authority for their own benefit. From there, he'd be back at square one.
Skills: - Veteran soldier
- Infiltration
- Demolitions
- Close-quarters combat, both unarmed and with knives
- Small unit tactics
- Anti-ethereal combat
Etherealism: Trained since youth to master his people’s innate predilection towards the ether, Salvator manifests his ethereal abilities through specializing in support and augmentation. He favors physical enhancements, stealth fields, and jacketing ammunition in sheathes of ethereal power. Salvator is skilled enough with support etherealism that he is capable of enhancing those around him as well, though at equivalent cost to his qillatu resistance. Outside of his specialty, the demands of his role also led him to grasp both blink jumps and void-signature jamming, both of which aided greatly in black operations.
Loadout: - Semi-powered armor: Modified armor built to Intransigence specifications, following the same design principles as the majority of its military. Provides a measure of physical enhancement and is built to amplify Rasch’s ethereal augmentations.
- OM-27 Carbine SOPMOD: Heavily modifiable ballistic carbine. Possesses a number of possible accessories in the kit for customization, but Rasch tends to prefer sound suppression and light weight above all.
- Marshall Industries Magnum: Semi-automatic heavy ballistic pistol fitted with a built-in suppressor to minimize its profile.
- Ammo: Salvator primarily makes use of armor-piercing explosive rounds for both of his guns, but carries backup magazines of EMP and anti-ethereal rounds for situations that AP-EX and ethereal jacketing can’t handle. Also carries a variety of grenades.
- Monofilament knives: Carries multiple combat-grade blades on his person, with most balanced for throwing. Keeps a larger one sheathed at his side for CQC purposes and wielded alongside his pistol.
- Adaptive camouflage cloak: Cloak and hood woven with refractive chemical substances that blend their coloration with the surrounding environment when a targeted electrical charge is run through to activate them. Aids with concealment for covert ops.
- Cliasadh Solidified Light Manipulation Device: Gealtirocht tribesfolk mastered hardening light completley independent of other species and among the Intransigence, such devices often find themselves in civilian roles such as engineering or geological surveys. Yet more than a few carried these into battle and while not necessarily standardized, competence is often prized far more than showmanship and the so called "burning cradles" are a common sight on both militia skirmishers and frontline units alike. While typically used for generating tools for everyday use, they are quite frequently used to turn those tools into weapons.
Manipulating energy into luminiescent quasi-matter, these earned their name due to the ability to transform a simple wrist blade into a high heat arm-sword capable of slicing into the armor of scielto infantry-mecha, overloading their shields and melting their complex internal workings alike. The manifested weapons (up to 25 feet in length) can be set to an overdrive mode where they are essentially lit on fire which greatly improves their cutting capability but will cause the weapon to enter an emergency shutdown mode after prolonged usage. Even without this it can be used to form wrist shields, cutting tools, grasping prongs, and various other mundane tools yet all of these can be strengthened with increased power output, with some versions capable of absorbing ethereal power or connecting to external power sources. The tool itself is easy to modify and can rapidly turn into a runaway project eating time, resources, and quite a few batteries, power modulators, uploaded data modules and so on.
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