Ten :: (Read-Only) - Myth-Weavers

Star Wars Saga Edition Character Record Sheet
Character Name	Player	Class	Character Level	Current XP	Next Level XP

Ability	Score	Mod	Temp Score	Temp Mod
STR
DEX
CON
INT
WIS
CHA

				Destiny
Speed		BAB
INIT		Darkside
	Modifier		Points Tracker	Force Pts.	Destiny Pts.

CONDITION
	Normal	-1	-2	-5	-10	Helpless

FORTITUDE

REFLEX

WILL

	Total		BAB		Str		Size		Misc		Temp
MELEE		=		+		+		+		+
RANGED		=		+		+		+		+
	Total		BAB		Dex		Size		Misc		Temp

Weapon	Total Attack Bonus	Damage	Critical	Range

Special Properties	Ammunition	Weight	Size	Type

Weapon	Total Attack Bonus	Damage	Critical	Range

Special Properties	Ammunition	Weight	Size	Type

Weapon	Total Attack Bonus	Damage	Critical	Range

Special Properties	Ammunition	Weight	Size	Type

Weapon	Total Attack Bonus	Damage	Critical	Range

Special Properties	Ammunition	Weight	Size	Type

Armor/Protective Item	Type	Bonus	Check Pen	Max Dex

Special Properties		Weight	Misc	Speed

Credits

Special Combat Actions

Languages

Other Possessions
Item	Weight (kgs)	Loc
































Total Weight:	0
Heavy Load:	0 kg +
Max Load:	0 kg
Max Lift:	0 kg

Campaign		Size	Species
Age	Birth Date	Height	Weight
Gender	Eyes	Skin	Handedness

Personality

Ten's lived alone for a long time, and it shows. When she has something to say she's direct and to the point, and when she doesn't she's doesn't speak at all. It's not that she has anything against idle conversation, it's just that she's no good at it. 

Ten feels safest when dealing with people at a distance of 300 meters through a sniper scope. Any closer than that and she gets a little uneasy, especially when dealing with people who are less than friendly. Just getting close enough to talk is a potentially lethal mistake if it turns into a fight. Walking into Tun Banadu feels like walking straight into a sandviper breeding pit. 

Trust for Ten is a matter of instinct. You can't live your whole life without trusting anyone else even a little bit, so she goes with her gut.

Description:

Ten resembles one of Scroth's native plants, which is to say she's short, wiry, sunblistered and tough. She's young and looks it, despite her best efforts to come across as a seasoned desert-dweller; she can't be much past 20.

Character Traits

Terse
Honest
Shy
Lonely

Character Flaws

Suspicious
Harsh

Contacts / Friends

Tyros Sha-Lerrik (father, presumed dead)
Nerissa Sha-Lerrik (mother, presumed dead or enslaved)
Dusha Noi
Mirabelle Dustholme

Enemies

Various swoop gangs

Encumbrance
Size Multiplier:		Misc Multiplier:

Feats, Talents, and Force Powers

Statistic Block

Persistent Conditions and Active Effects	Additional Information

Equipment:
Rifle (options: slugthrower 300, blaster rifle 1000, DLT 20A blaster rifle 1300)
-Bipod (100)
-Double trigger (800)
-Targeting scope (100 or 1000)
Camouflage poncho (125)
Field kit (1000)
Electrobinoculars (1000)


Backstory: 

The nameless sun above beat down dry and hot, as it did every day. The soil was dry and withered, a hundred tiny cracks crisscrossing every meter of it. The way the patchy surface curled up near the edge told you that it had once been wet, but it looked like that had been a very long time ago. Plants dotted the landscape anyway, brown and wiry and tough enough to slice apart the gums of anything foolish enough to try taking a bite. A line of low sloping mountains dotted the horizon, somehow contriving to suggest that they were supposed to tower over the landscape, but couldn't muster the effort to do it properly. 

There was a single cloud in the sky, Tyros Sha-Lerrik noted distantly. Funny how the mind noticed that sort of thing at times like this. 

He looked back over his shoulder, at the guttering remains of the house. It hadn't burned properly; the roof had fallen in when the support beams gave, but the mudbrick walls were still standing. Black and scorched, but standing. He could rebuild it, he supposed, if he could make the three-day trip to the Sovan homestead out east. They were good people; they'd put him and his girl up for a little while, maybe lend him some supplies until he could get back on his feet. If the raiders hadn't hit them, too. 

He didn't know. He didn't even know why they'd bothered to hit his house. He and Nerissa had never given anybody any trouble, and they certainly didn't have anything of real value. Just two settlers out from Jaimyan Mine, newly married and looking to start a home. The swoop gang had roared early that morning, catching him completely by surprise. They didn't make demands, they'd just come in with engines roaring and scattered the relkflocks with a few shots. A couple of them had burst inside the house and taken everything of value: the food synthesizer, the little portable generator, the slugthrower rifle he'd used to keep predators away from the flock. One of them had fired a shot into the cooker on his way out and set the thing ablaze, and he'd scrambled to get his two-year-old daughter out of the house before the dry wooden roof beams went up. 

It wasn't until afterwards that he realized his wife was gone, too. Of course she was. She'd been the most valuable thing there. 

He should go to the Sovan homestead, he knew. For Tenalle's sake, if nothing else. But he couldn't bring himself to leave just yet, couldn't quite believe that Nerissa was really gone. It had been so quick. There had to be some way to get her back. There had to. 

But he couldn't think of one. He stood like that for three hours, blankly refusing to accept what had happened, until a low resonating call shook him from his stupor. 

[i][center]~Six years later~[/center][/i]

The low thrumming reverberated across the rocky hillside, rising and falling in irregular but rhythmic intervals. 

"But I don't wanna go back in!"

Ten knew it was useless to complain. If they could hear her, then maybe, maybe the Anx would listen and let her stay out a little longer. But that was a pretty big maybe, and anyway they couldn't hear her. The Anx calling her home wasn't here. That was why they were better nomads than anyone else, Father had explained once. (She made sure to remember everything Father said to her, because he hardly ever talked. When he did it was usually just about chores and stuff.) Anx voices were so loud, you could hear them kilometers away. That meant the Anx tending the herd-beasts could go farther away from each other without losing track of one another, and that meant the herd-beasts got to forage more. 

Ten knew how to listen to the Anx-calls. She liked that, because it sort of made her one of the best nomads, too. But never in a million years could she talk back the same way. Her voice just wasn't the right shape. 

Not fair, the girl thought mutinously, and kicked a rock into the hole she'd been digging. There was a vim-bug nest under the dirt here, she was sure of it. If she dug it up and brought the grubs home they'd have plenty to eat tonight! But she'd spotted it too late in the day, and she wasn't a fast digger. If they'd only trust her to stay out a little later she could bring lots of food in. Not fair. 

The Anx-call thrummed across the twilight sky again: come home, come home, night is falling. This time she heard her name in the rising and falling hum, her Anx name, and grinned despite herself. Ten was a silly nickname, because it was a number too. She liked being able to say I'm Ten when really she was only six. The Anx never laughed, but she knew they got the joke because the name they called her was the Anx word for ten. 

Well, she could tell someone about the vim-bug nest. Maybe they'd let her stay out here tomorrow to finish digging it up! She turned to the elderly female dewback that she'd been entrusted with, and found her already curled up on the slope. That made it easier to climb up on her back. 

"Come on, Dewie," she said, the bugs already forgotten. It was a big thing to be entrusted with one of the caravan's herd-beasts, and Ten knew she had to do a good job. "You're getting sleepy, huh? But we need to go back to the others before we can go to bed. Don't worry, I won't let you get lost."

The big lizard slowly lurched upright and started back towards the caravan, her six-year-old rider in tow. She'd done it again! Maybe they'd let her go foraging again tomorrow. Maybe they'd even let her go hunting soon! She bet she'd make a good hunter. 

[i][center]~Four years later~[/center][/i]

"No, don't hold down the trigger."

The girl blinked. "It's a lot easier to aim that way," she pointed out. 

Her father shook his head. "Yes. And it teaches you to rely on it. Do you think a swoop rider is going to hold still while you find it with the targeting laser?" She shook her head. "No. Practice aiming without it. Learn how the gun points until you can tell what you'll hit before you fire."

Ten nodded, and adjusted her grip on the cannon. It creaked in protest, and she quickly checked to make sure it wasn't coming off the rails. This was the first time her father and the Anx had let her try using one of the caravan's mounted guns, and she didn't want to risk breaking it. 

She took aim at a distant rock, sighting manually down the barrel of the gun before pressing the button that turned on the targeting laser. The resulting splash of red light told her how good her guess had been. Her first few tries were� disappointing. Her father's silence as he loomed at her shoulder felt like a reproach. But after a few minutes she landed a lucky "shot", and decided that for starters she could aim for something closer. That worked a little better, and she dared a question.

"Won't firing the real gun be different than the laser?"

"Yes." Her father nodded. The cannon shot would fly slightly differently from the laser, and if she was used to aiming for the laser, then all her shots would be a little off when she had to use the gun for real. 

"Should I practice with the real gun too, then?"

"No," Tyros said curtly, and she could tell that she'd done something wrong. The abrupt shift in tone warned her that the lesson was over an instant before he turned and stalked away. Ten watched him go with a sinking feeling. It had taken her weeks to work up the courage to ask if she could learn how to shoot the caravan guns, another week while she figured out how to ask the question so he'd say yes, and yet another spent waiting to catch her father in the right mood. His temper was bad now. He never hit her, he never hurt anybody in the caravan, but he'd go off alone to brood. It might be days before he talked to anybody again.

"We don't have enough ammunition to waste it in practice."

The Anx's deep rumbling noise caught her by surprise. She turned to find Noi�Dusha Noi, she corrected herself, master trader and honored leader of the caravan, but to her he'd always be Noi, precious as her father and infinitely less capricious�standing behind her. 

She knew what he meant. Noi said that every shot fired was a failure on the caravan's part. They were traders, not warriors. They slipped beneath the local rulers' notice when they could, bribed them when they couldn't. When that failed, and only then, the rickety old guns and scrap-metal armor bolted onto the caravan saw use. The rest of the time, they were nothing more than a sort of negotiating tool: the tougher they looked, the more likely that the local raiders would settle for tribute instead of just taking everything. 

That was what Noi said, and Ten normally thought the world of Noi's opinions. But she didn't much like this one.

"Doesn't do us much good to have guns if we don't know how to use them." 

The Anx's crest rippled darker for a moment: agreement. "Yes. No good if we don't have shots for them, either. Practice with the laser, Ten. Get good. Then you can try out the real thing. Easier to learn the second time around."

Ten nodded, barely able to restrain a smile. With or without her father's approval, she'd be able to keep learning. She turned back to the mounted gun and took up the controls in both hands, taking aim at a patch of scrub brush and imagining it was a swoop rider rocketing across her sights�

[i][center]~Three years later~[/center][/i]

A shot rang out across the desert, followed by the whush-whush of something heavy taking flight and a curse. 

"Fierfek!"

Ten watched the paravian flap away through the twilight sky, knowing even as she jammed another shell in her rifle that she'd lost this one. If she couldn't hit it while it was perched on the ground, she wasn't going to hit it in flight. The big scavengers looked awkward, but they had a fair turn of speed. 

And that meant, most likely, that she'd be rejoining the caravan tonight with nothing to show for the day's efforts. Ten hated that. She wasn't a bad hunter, though three years of learning to shoot had disabused her of the childhood notion that she'd turn out to be an expert shot just as soon as the grown-ups let her get ahold of the gun. Like every other job in the caravan, shooting took a lot of work to get good at it. But Ten was persevering, and she thought she was at least a decent shot now. She knew there wasn't any shame in returning empty-handed; life out on Scroth was hard to find and harder to catch. But it galled her all the same to lose another chance to prove herself.

Nothing to be done about it now, though. The sky was darkening quickly now that the sun had crossed the horizon, a few stars emerging already to twinkle in the deep blue. Some of Scorth's animals came out at night, but in the darkness it would be hard to find them, and many were dangerous. Night was no time to roam the badlands if you weren't nocturnal.

But as she turned to go, she saw a twisting column of smoke to the south, almost but not quite invisible against the dusk sky. The stars to either side of it shone fitfully, as wisps of smoke drifted away from the main pillar and then dissipated on the wind. 

South, and a bit east. The direction of the caravan. 

The mournful thrum reached her a minute later, confirming the fear that the pillar of smoke had sparked: [i]flee, do not return, unsafe. Home is lost. Do not return.[/i]

[i][center]~One day later~[/center][/i]

The remains of the once-impressive caravan were pathetic in the morning light. The train of boxy grav-carts and old speeders that had made up the caravan's body was almost entirely gone. Three or four remained, but two were scorched and melted so badly by blaster fire that they weren't even worth salvaging, and the others sat heavily on the ground, their repulsors stripped out or destroyed. Ten supposed they were too cumbersome for the attackers to carry off. Scavengers were already picking at the corpses of the two giant rontos that had pulled the caravan. 

There were other bodies scattered around the site of the battle, too, both beast and Anx. But fewer then there could have been. Ten made herself look at the bodies (all people she knew), and count them up. Just over half the Anx had died here. 

She took a look at the ground next. The battlefield itself was an unreadable mess, but the tracks leading away were clear. Anx and dewback footprints scattered in all directions, spaced so that she could tell they were running. The faint but distinctive trails of repulsorlift engines close to the ground all led off in one direction. Some were the familiar markings left by the grav-carts. Others, narrower and deeper, could only be swoops. 

Not that she'd needed this evidence to know who was behind this attack. 

Ten had often thought that what had truly driven her father mad was lack of closure. He never saw his wife after she was taken, didn't know whether she was dead or enslaved or even escaped and living happily in a settlement somewhere. He didn't even know who'd taken her. Ten had little doubt that he would have thrown his life away in a futile attempt at rescue or revenge, if he had. Instead he'd been trapped in a limbo of grief, unable to move past Nerissa while her fate was so uncertain, but equally unable to reclaim her. In the end, he'd walked out into the desert and never come back. 

Ten didn't share her father's madness, but she could understand his aching desire for revenge. The swoop gangs had stolen two homes from her now, taken away two parents. 

She looked down at the trail the gang had left as they took the spoils of the caravan back to their lair, and set out to follow. 

[i][center]~One year later~[/center][/i]

A faint shot rang out across the hills, echoing between them for a second before dying. 

In the distance, a man fell lifeless from his swoop. His two companions didn't notice until his now-directionless vehicle nosed downwards and hit with the ground, wrenching itself into a thirty-meter bouncing crash that ended in an explosion. [i]That[/i] they noticed, instantly curving around to either side, ready to gun down whatever had attacked them� and saw only empty desert. 

From half a kilometer away, concealed beneath a large grey-and-brown cloak that blended seamlessly into the surrounding scree, Ten watched. She tracked one with her rifle, zooming out a touch so that their speed didn't take them out of the scope's narrow field of vision, and tried to decide whether to risk a second shot. 

They were getting warier. Ten had found that in the early days of a hunt, she could afford to be aggressive, setting up camp close to a gang's hideout and taking out multiple swoopers in a single ambush before going to ground. But even the dumbest swoop jockeys quickly caught on to the fact that they were being attacked, and took steps to protect themselves, traveling in larger groups. Ten had sworn early on in this hunt to place survival above revenge. That meant never getting too predictable, never pushing her luck. As long as she kept herself alive, there would be another day to see her prey dead. 

Most swoop gangs realized that going out in small groups was asking to be picked off, and stayed in large groups whenever outside their lairs and safezones. This one didn't strike Ten as particularly stupid. The presence of these three, out all alone, made her suspicious. 

Three was an iffy number, anyway. The first one died before they even knew they were under attack, the second before they'd figured out where she was, but the third� the third might see where the second shot came from, and then it was just a question of who was quicker to shoot. Ten didn't care for those odds.

And these two smelled wrong to her. Wouldn't be the first time a swoop gang tried to lay a trap for her. 

Ten eased her finger off the trigger, and settled in to wait. It might be a while before the swoop jockeys gave up searching for her.