Keth
From Toosigma
| Title | Keth |
|---|---|
| Author | Philip Mann |
| Campaign | Starwars (D6) |
| Session | Character Background |
| Posted | April 7, 2007 |
| Game Date |
At best, Keth recalls his life growing up in the industrial wasteland of Bonadan as painful. As primitives living on an industrial planet in the corporate sector, his whole family was out of their element and held as slave labor in areas that were not suitable for more intelligent species. Most of their time was spent in the mountains northwest of Bonadan Spaceport Southeast II, at the weather control facility. Many of the antennas and emitter arrays for the facility were located on the highest peaks in the barren mountains and the Ebranites were perfectly adapted to the arduous task of replacing failed equipment.
Even with the meager supplies, heavy equipment, and vast expanses of rugged terrain to cover through a veritable “no man’s land”, Keth enjoyed the time alone, away from the built-up areas of the cities. He was able to move freely and he soon discovered some of the uncharted shortcuts to many of the remote facilities, through areas thought impassible by the humans who ran the stations. He used these shortcuts to buy time to explore the myriad of canyons and caves along his routes through the most remote areas of the heavily industrialized planet. From time to time he would detect signs that some of the caves had been occupied recently.
Just over five years ago, Keth was taking shelter from a particularly violent storm in a large cave. High altitude static discharges illuminated the sky and he almost failed to notice the scream of turbines maneuvering up the canyon. He quickly stashed the heavy emitter equipment, discarding anything that was would slow him down and threaten his immediate survival. He then prepared to move out into the storm, but he could see the small transport just a few hundred yards away and he felt that they must have seen him, so he crept into the darkest recesses of the cavern where he hoped that he would not be discovered.
He watched the first group rush into the cavern with a degree of precision that he had only seen when elite corporate security was on alert. When they found the emitter equipment that Keth had dropped behind some rocks next to the entrance, they performed a quick search through the main cave area. Evidently they were either pressed for time or perceived him as a negligible threat because two of them took up positions at the mouth of the cave and the others went back outside. He then heard the turbines spool down in the wind outside and then nothing aside from the wind and lightning.
Several small groups entered the cavern and began placing large marks on the walls with some form of spray that reflected infrared light, but was otherwise invisible. Curious, Keth shifted slightly to get a better view of the next team that came in with a strange device in several hardened shipping boxes. The team assembled a large tripod in the center of the cave and then attached a cylindrical device to the top. Except for one individual, a technician perhaps, all other personnel vacated the cavern. With a burst of intense infrared energy, the cylinder outlined all of the marks around the cavern and then the room filled with thunderous energy as the marks disappeared under waves of concussive force. Keth was forced to take cover as debris erupted from the walls and peppered the farthest reaches of the cavern. When the noise stopped, he again peered from his hiding area and saw more than a dozen recesses that had been exposed by the device. He guessed that the stone that had been blasted away was actually a very clever façade used to conceal smuggled materials hidden in the cavern. Perhaps, he thought, some of the other caves that he had been to concealed similar caches.
Within seconds, the device was dismantled and teams of people began flooding the cave. Each group moved directly to one of the newly revealed recesses and began removing the contents. Crate after crate rushed from the edges of the cave and out the mouth, moved by a flood of people. The two guards at the mouth of the cavern were conspicuous in that they were the only individuals not rushing about Keth’s perception.
After several hours, the flurry of activity around the entrance to the cavern died down. Outside, the storm had passed and he heard the transport’s turbines come back to life. Everyone exited the cave in an orderly fashion, always keeping an eye on the recesses that they could not see. He knew that they knew he was there, but they just wanted to do what they came to do and leave. Shortly after the last humanoid left and the whine of the engines slowly moved away, Keth crept toward the entrance to see if they were actually gone; this proved to be a tactical mistake on his part. All that he remembers is several bright flashes from the blasters that dropped him immediately into unconsciousness.
The strangers from the transport were smugglers working for the Puerto Nuevo Syndicate, as he found out later, that had several huge caches of illegal weapons hidden throughout the caves and canyons in the high mountains of Bonadan. The web of weapon detectors around the corporate planet were keyed to look in areas were people worked and lived, and were not set to look for weapons where nobody was every supposed to be. The syndicate had a person on the inside that worked at the weather control facility that was able to tweak some high altitude lightning into the system. The consequent highly-ionized storm helped to mask the stealthy transport from planetary sensors during arrival and departure. The smugglers captured the Ebranite to sell as slave labor on their next stop; just an added bonus to this trip. They chained him into the hold next to the weapons that they had retrieved from the cave and the transport was prepared to depart the planet. All they needed to do was wait for the appointed hour when the storms would be ramped back up again to cover their departure.
A full day passed and even the Ebranite could sense the tension among the ship’s crew; something had them all worried. Nearing the second afternoon aboard the transport, a young human female came to feed him. She was tall and slender, with soft features that had not been abraded by exposure to the hazards of living. Her gentle, yet carefree demeanor was that of a girl who was not yet prepared to grow into womanhood, but could feel the hands of time pushing her along. In every way, this girl appeared as a stark contrast to the short and powerful Ebranite. Keth, more concerned with his own survival than admiring his captor, asked the girl what they planned to do with him. She smiled a coy little smile that betrayed her youth and relative innocence and she whispered that she is not supposed to talk to the cargo. He did not like being referred to as “cargo” and told her, “It’s ‘Keth’, not ‘cargo’.” The girl seemed almost shocked that the squat creature had a name, as though the idea that he had his own identity was strange to her. She stared for a moment and then asked him where he had gotten a name. Again, a long silence as the two attempted to negotiate this expanse of unfamiliarity between them.
When they found their voices again, the two conversed quietly for more than an hour in which the Ebranite and the human built a small bridge between them. The girl introduced herself as Druanna, and she shared the briefest glimpse of her life with this strange creature. He learned that she had never met a slave race that was not simply a step above domestication. Since Keth obviously had a strong sense of who he was, she could not understand how he could be a slave. Keth explained that he and those like him had been slaves virtually from birth, so he was used to the way that humans looked at everyone else. He told her how his people, at least on Bonadan, lived at the whim of the humanist corporation that looked upon his primitive race in the same way that she apparently did; Druanna immediately felt self-conscious about her assumptions.
Still thinking of his own survival, Keth asked why the ship had not left the planet yet. Druanna seemed very reluctant to answer the Ebranite, but he pressed and finally she admitted that they were waiting for a lightning storm that should have happened by now. She mentioned that, if they did not need to all be aboard to depart as quickly as possible when the storm started, she would be out lying in the warm sun. They both heard a hatch open and Druanna quickly busied herself with other things in the cargo bay.
Keth thought for a few minutes about the weather he had become used to in the high mountains. The high winds and electric discharges assisted air exchange in the terraforming process, so the weather was always challenging to the crews that operated in the area, and potentially deadly to the unprepared caught in the storms. He remembered that the only times when the storms had completely subsided were when the corporate security teams were conducting exercises or looking for someone important who was lost in the mountains. The only reasonable explanation now would mean that they suspected something in no man’s land.
He knew that he would lose his freedom to explore if these smugglers were found. That is, presuming that he was not killed along with them to keep the paperwork to a minimum. Keth called to the Druanna and told her that the whole crew would be captured or killed if they could not hide in the mountains. She turned around quickly and Keth explained his experience with the weather and why he thought that they were not safe. The girl nodded briefly and ran to the front of the ship, quickly returning with the captain (who Keth later learned was her father) and two armed guards. A brief series of threats from the captain and, seeing that these threats had no affect on the Ebranite, a discussion, interrupted by proximity warnings from the ship’s passive sensors, convinced the captain to bargain with the Ebranite. If he could keep them from being caught in the mountains and help them get to a port where they could leave the planet, they would ensure that he was able to leave with them.
With that, the crew of twelve humans gathered what they could and abandoned their ship and all it contained to the chiming voice of the autopilot beginning a final countdown for liftoff. The captain had programmed the ship to fly back along the route that they had arrived on as fast as possible, and then climb straight into the atmosphere. The ship was certain to be destroyed, but the hope was that the corporate security forces would believe they had also eliminated the trespassers. The tables were now turned on the smugglers as their very survival was in the hands of a being that had every reason in the world to ensure that they did not make it out of the mountains alive.
Keth ushered the fugitives into a narrow draw that led toward a steep ascent. He explained that they would know if the security teams had left when the weather returned to normal. For the time being, the steep walls of the draw would aid to conceal the movements of a group so large. Druanna’s father told her to stay close to him and, until the transport began to accelerate away from them, kept a blaster at the ready. The Ebranite knew how difficult the climb ahead would be so he barely scoffed the captain’s attempt to display control of the situation.
Several minutes after the ship departed, the wind began to blow and the sky quickly returned to its electrically-charged darkness. Within minutes after the weather had returned no-man’s land to its namesake, three of the crewmembers could no longer be located. The captain signaled for the procession to stop and tried to call to the missing personnel over his comlink. Keth could barely restrain a snicker when he told the captain that his “high-tech gizmos” would not work in this wasteland of electrical storms and rockslides. When the captain said that they needed to search for the missing crewmen, Keth informed him that it would be suicidal to randomly climb about the mountainside looking for anyone. He told the captain that, if the winds did not blow the missing personnel down the mountain, the lightning or rockslides would most likely kill the search party that goes looking for them. All the missing personnel have to do is continue to follow the draw and they would catch up to the rest of the group when they stop for the night.
Just then, lightning struck the ground ahead of them, somewhere near the top of the draw and everyone was pelted with a shower of tiny rocks. Keth listened intently for signs of an oncoming rockslide and was relieved to hear nothing other than the wind and nervous shifting of his companions. He told the captain that everyone must to stay together and that anyone who fell behind would need to catch up with the group on their own. He also mentioned that the group would need to seek shelter within the next few hours because it was not safe to be out at night; a temperature would drop rapidly and the winds would pick up in velocity until it would be impossible to move without crawling.
Keth then continued his ascent up the draw at a pace that was far too fast for the others to maintain. The incline rapidly increased and, though extremely taxing to the smugglers, the climb became easier for the Ebranite. Several times over the next four hours he had to stop and wait for everyone to reach his position before continuing on. More than once he contemplated leaving them all to rot in the mountains, but he knew that this may be the only chance that he has to leave Bonadan.
By the time the group arrived at the first good shelter, their number had reduced by two more. Keth had gotten too far ahead to hear the noise, but one of the humans evidently decided to stray from the trail to look over the edge of the draw and, being the tallest object in the landscape, was promptly struck by lightning. When the crewman fell, they struck another climber and they both fell back down the draw.
Nearly two years later...
