NAME: Valerian “Val” Drutin
FACTION: Unaffiliated
OCCUPATION: Dancer (seasonal), Pilot (seasonal),
SPECIES: Human (Half Corellian, Half Hapan)
AGE: 22
SEX: Male
HEIGHT: 5’4” (1.63 m)
BUILD: Tiny dancer; small but strong
EYES: Dark brown
HAIR: Dark
SKIN: Caucasian
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes
FORCE BOND: Alyosha Drutin
VOICE: Sample
CHARACTER PLAYLIST
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+ Dark Side Force User: While his training under the Sith master Zana Rukh was limited in scope, he possesses many Force abilities associated with the Dark Side (Force Lightning being a particular favorite) and is quite powerful when angry or afraid, as his negative emotions feed his power.
+ Duelist: "On your feet, be not afraid; you're the greatest with a blade!"... Well, not exactly. He's not equal to Count Dooku or any of the other big names in the swordsman department. But he is quite good, if prone to foolishness - in fact, he plays the fool in order to distract his opponents.
+ Dancer’s Grace: Having inherited his mother’s natural grace and fluidity of movement, he can dance very well. This ability also lends itself to other purposes, particularly dueling.
+ Creative: His tattered mind is a fount of unusual ideas, many of which are actually pretty good. Listening to him ramble, while a chore, may offer something useful.
+ Insightful: Whether it’s the Force or just his natural instincts, he seems to have a peculiar knowledge of others’ motives, personalities, and backgrounds. His acute observational skills allow him to see through the lies of others.
+ Fast Learner: He excels at whatever he sets his mind to, grasping key concepts with ease and minimal practice.
+ Flyboy: It's in his Corellian blood. He is a good pilot, although prone to taking risks. Should you find yourself aboard a ship where he is in control, expect a lot of unnecessary spins and hairpin turns.
+ Scavenger: Picking through other people’s trash is a hobby of his. He’s amassed quite a collection of odd objects, much of which he doesn’t have any use for. Some of this “junk” may be valuable.
QUIRKS
+/- Force Bond With a Normie: He possesses a Force bond with his (completely sane) brother Alyosha, who can be a real drag sometimes. On one hand, he can draw on his brother for strength when weakened, and the two of them working together make for a formidable opponent; on the other, there are the "episodes", wherein their bond causes all of Val’s emotions to drain into Alyosha, rendering Val dangerously apathetic. When in this state, he is far more lucid than usual and can still be communicated with; anything he says should be taken seriously. The frequency of these episodes increases the closer his proximity to Alyosha.
+/- Unpredictable: His behavior is difficult to foresee, and many of his actions are seemingly without motive. He is driven by his whims and moods in the moment rather than any particular goals. This quirk randomizes whether he is timid or bold, passive or aggressive, reckless or reluctant, etc, in any given situation.
+/- Animal Lover: At some point during his childhood, he snuck a Corellian slice hound puppy onto the Stardust... but his master took it away from him. He hasn't had any pets since, but he generally likes animals, especially the cute and cuddly ones. This includes sentient creatures with animal characteristics, such as Felacatians and Nezumi.
+/- Drama Queen: He is easily moved to tears, provoked to anger, or made happy and content. He will laugh at things which don’t appear funny to others, and may be regarded as melodramatic. This trait is largely harmless and just serves to affect his social interactions.
WEAKNESSES
- Insane: Years of trauma and a genetic predisposition to mental illness have left Val quite unstable. He is prone to drastic mood swings and impulsive behavior, along with infrequent hallucinations.
- Impressionable: If someone he trusts makes a suggestion, he may very well follow it, no matter how strange or detrimental it proves to be.
- Force Dependent: He has few skills beyond what his master taught him. If deprived of the Force, he is virtually helpless, unable even to wield a blaster.
- Prudish: He is uncomfortable with the concept of sex and will avoid the subject in conversation. Expect him to become offended and upset with any attempts at flirtation.
- Night Blind: Confirming his alleged Hapan ancestry to be true, he cannot see in the dark at all and is nearly blind even in dim lighting. His master was quick to teach him how to overcome this handicap using Force sight, so it doesn't present too much of a problem... usually.
APPEARANCE:
The first thing most will notice about Val is how short he is for a human male, standing at just five feet four inches. His face is fairly ordinary, with slanting dark eyes and longish black hair. He has a slight overbite and a dimpled chin, two innocuous flaws. His physique, on the other hand, is disproportionate and almost androgynous. He has an unusually long, thick neck, a slender torso, and extremely muscular, powerful legs, particularly at his overdeveloped thighs.
His strange proclivity toward attiring himself in outlandish costumes on a whim tends to accentuate his unusual figure. He comes across as very eccentric, albeit in a charming, innocently childlike way.
BIOGRAPHY:
Valerian “Val” Drutin came into the galaxy while his mother Sinead was riding on a shuttle. Sinead already had two children by two very different men, though she never wanted children and hated being a mother. Val was the third and last one to tumble out of her before she finally put an end to the whole obnoxious business.
Supposedly, Val’s natural father was a Hapan pirate with whom Sinead had a spice-fueled fling. At the time, she was still married to the Corellian circus acrobat Amos Drutin, although she had left him and her two other children, Alyosha and Jolene, roughly a year before Val was born.
Despite her distaste for motherhood (especially of the single variety), Sinead initially resisted returning to Corellia. Instead, she became involved with various smugglers, pirates, and other less savory sorts in an attempt to prolong the inevitable for as long as possible. Little Val was frequently left alone, either by himself or with strangers, and while his memory is a little hazy, he seems to recall that Mommy’s “friends” did things to him which are unmentionable in polite conversation.
Eventually, Sinead’s luck with rogues ran out and she had no choice but to crawl over to Amos and beg him to take her back. To this end, she passed Val off as his long-lost son, claiming he had been conceived shortly before she abandoned her husband to live the life of a spice-huffing space-slut. Poor Amos wanted to believe her, so he accepted the boy into the family without further questions.
Val was just seven years old when he received his first taste of having a real family, but even at that age he was already beginning to show signs of mental instability. He would throw tantrums over petty situations, his mood would swing like a pendulum between extremes, and he was painfully, irksomely impulsive. His two half-siblings weren’t sure what to make of his behavior; his sister Jolene saw him as an annoying pest, while his brother Alyosha pitied him. Val latched onto that pity, craving love and attention, and despite his unpredictable behavior the two brothers became close, although neither realized the depths of this forged bond at the time.
Ah, but it wasn’t long before Amos was killed in a freak accident, leaving Mommy without a man to support her yet again. So she dragged her kids across the galaxy in search of a sugar daddy, finally discovering a crime lord named Tosh Rylance who didn’t care who or what she was as long as she did what he said.
Tosh wasn’t overly fond of children either; in fact, he found the presence of Sinead’s three brats quite a nuisance. But like any crime lord worth his credits, he had a smart solution to this problem. He convinced Sinead (who didn’t really need convincing, since she was even more tired of lugging the rugrats around the galaxy than he was) to let him mold the ones he could use, and dispose of the rest.
You see, Tosh was much like any other run of the mill career criminal, save for his true passion: training an elite class of assassins, which he then rented out to fellow crime lords and politicians for a hefty sum. To find out which children were worth spending the time, credits, and effort on training and educating in the ways of the assassin, he had each child participate in a series of tests meant to gauge their strength, speed, reflexes, and intelligence. Fourteen year old Alyosha passed with flying colors; twelve year old Jolene got an even higher score, because she was perfect and good at everything.
And then it was little Val’s turn… well, let’s just say he’s not the brightest light in the fuel-station ‘fresher. He completely flunked the tests. If he couldn’t be trained, what was he good for? Slavery, apparently. Tosh at least had the decency to run the suggestion by Sinead first, although she was busy watching a holovid at the time and just waved her hand in dismissal.
Val kicked and screamed and fought the men who came to take him away, unknowingly pouring all his panic, fear, and anger into the Force. Alyosha felt it through their bond, but he didn’t understand, didn’t realize how powerful they could be together. If they had only known how to use it! Ah, well, hindsight is 20/20. Val was just a child screaming into the void.
He was promptly shipped off to work in the mines, a factory, or some other such dreary, dismal place where only misery and death would await him. But fate—or perhaps the Force—had other plans. The ship meant to carry him never arrived at its intended destination, having been attacked by a mysterious vessel with a single occupant: Zana Rukh. She killed everyone onboard (save little Val, who was chained up in the brig) without firing a single shot, leaving the freighter undamaged and adrift in space. She found little Val and set him free.
Why had she bothered to annihilate everyone aboard except him? The primitive, primal echoes in the Force which Val had generated through his emotional meltdown were so strong, she had sensed them all the way from another system. His power was such that it needed to be contained, if not controlled. This required years of training and teaching, and she had already decided she was the one for the job.
She became his master, although he never really thought of her that way. To his broken mind, Zana Rukh seemed almost grandmotherly. She saved his life, let him live with her on her ship, eat as much as he wanted and sleep in a real bed. With all that she had given him, listening to her drone on and on about the Dark Side and the Sith and destiny seemed an even trade. He even got to build his own purple lightsaber.
Along with his raw power, she eventually noticed the Force bond still stretching in a long thin astral cord from Val to Alyosha. According to her, it was either “an obstacle he must overcome” or “a tool he could exploit”. He didn’t really want to overcome it or turn it into a tool—it was too much fun for that. He delighted in pulling on the cord when Alyosha wasn’t looking, relishing his brother’s ensuing bewilderment. Sometimes it was nice to dump all his misshapen, complicated feelings onto someone else for a while, although he didn’t enjoy how it felt afterwards. It was as if a gaping hole had been carved out inside him, leaving him hollow and shriveled. Was this how Alyosha felt most of the time? How could he possibly cope with this vast emptiness? Val wasn't sure he wanted to know.
Not long after Val’s eighteenth birthday, Zana Rukh started talking about something called a “Rule of Two”, and how there could be only a master and an apprentice when it came to the Sith. Some day Val would surpass her, and he would have to kill her and take a new apprentice to pass on all his knowledge. Over the next three years, she would bring up the topic every now and then with a growing sense of urgency. It dawned on Val that she might be hinting it was time for him to get on with the whole murdering-and-replacing cycle, but then Val wasn’t very good at guessing games. Anyway, her hinting eventually became violent, and Val was left with no choice but to defend himself. Once Zana Rukh was dead, he took ownership of her luxury yacht, the Stardust, and commenced wandering aimlessly around the galaxy.
The flight of Alyosha, who became a fugitive on the run after an assassination attempt gone wrong, resulted in a rapid shift in fortunes for both brothers. Out of desperation to attract Alyosha, Tosh placed a bounty on Val's head, resulting in the dancer being chased across Coruscant, captured, and shipped back to the crime lord's yacht. Alyosha mounted a rescue operation, intending to kill Tosh once and for all - but it was ultimately Val who delivered the killing blow. The brothers' reunion was bittersweet, and they have yet to reconcile themselves to their mercurial Force bond, but after a misguided attempt at severing their bond that led to them briefly changing places, signs of healing and acceptance have begun to slowly manifest.
CURRENT WHEREABOUTS:
Currently, Val has a seasonal job as a dancer on Coruscant. But he’s not some sleazy bump-and-grinder in a seedy cantina, mind you—he is a professional performer in a respectable theater. What he does is art, requiring grace and finesse, not to mention skills as an actor and mime. Within the context of the performing arts, his madness and volatility can be conveniently passed off as creative genius and diva-like petulance.
When the theater isn't in season, he provides affordable transport off-world in his ship, the Stardust. The ship is very old and badly in need of repairs, but don't let that scare you. His fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants approach to piloting is more likely to result in injury than a technical malfunction.
He is also an avid junk collector, although he doesn't have the faculties to distinguish between trash and items of genuine value. If you happen to stop by, ask him about his collection, and he may be willing to part with something worth much more than he realizes. Just don't mention the actual price to him.
PERSONAL BELONGINGS:
- Val Drutin's lightsaber
- Albrecht Costume (armored)
- Zana Rukh’s red lightsaber, claimed upon her death.
- Numerous random mechanical parts and gear collected from discarded trash on Coruscant, of varying quality and value.
SHIP:
The Stardust is an out-of-date luxury yacht equipped with a few turbolasers and a tractor beam, as well as a couple of shuttles and a starfighter badly in need of repairs. It’s not particularly formidable, but suited to his seasonal job as a pilot ferrying passengers across the galaxy. The ship was repaired by
Chkhoz Pikeyy
in the thread "The Stardust", but it's still not at 100%.KILLS:
N/A.
BOUNTIES COLLECTED:
N/A.
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