Approved NPC Val Drutin

[Salamander]

OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION

• Intent: To save one of my first Chaos PCs as an NPC.
• Image Credit: Phill-Art, commissioned by me
• Role: Val Drutin is a professional dancer and starship pilot who was once the apprentice of a Sith Lord. A skilled swordsman who developed his own style of lightsaber fencing, he pops up in my posts mainly as a teacher of my other characters.
• Permissions:
• Links:
  • God of the Dance
  • Journey's Rest
  • The Stardust
  • A Visit to the Madhouse
  • A Night at the Opera
  • The Dancer and the Assassin
  • Buried Beneath
  • The Ties That Bind
  • For Sentimental Reasons
  • Dragons of Atrisia
  • Dragons of Ashla
  • Revenge of the Club II
  • Nobody's Fool
  • Trial of Sand
  • Blood Gulch
  • An Arrest, Or Understanding?
• Previous Bios: Val Drutin | Val Drutin 2.0

PHYSICAL INFORMATION

• Age: 26
• Force Sensitivity: Rogue Knight
• Species: Half Human (Corellian), Half Hapan
• Appearance: Standing at just five feet four inches, Val is very short for a human male. His face is fairly ordinary, with slanting dark eyes and longish dark 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 a long neck topped by a small head, a slender torso, and extremely muscular, powerful legs, particularly at his overdeveloped thighs. His strange proclivity toward attiring himself in dancer's costumes even when not dancing tends to accentuate his unusual figure.

SOCIAL INFORMATION

• Name: Valentin Drutin
• Loyalties: Himself
• Wealth: Upper middle class by Coruscanti standards
• Notable Possessions:
  • 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
• Skills: Trained since childhood in the ways of the Dark Side, Val is a practitioner of that particular branch of the Force. He can be quite powerful when angry or otherwise under stress. In addition, he is a professional dancer (read: an athlete), a practicing duelist, a pilot for hire, and much smarter than many are willing to give him credit for.
• Personality: Insane, Mischievous, Mercurial, Broken
• Tropes: Eccentric Artist, Dancing Royalty, This Is Your Brain On Evil, Crouching Moron Hidden Badass
• Connections:
  • Sinead Drutin - mother
  • Rhett Valentino - father
  • Amos Drutin - stepfather (deceased)
  • Alyosha Drutin - half-brother (deceased)
  • Jolene Drutin - half-sister
  • Riley Reese - half-sister
  • Zana Rukh | "Darth Mithra" - master (deceased)
  • Tamara - HRD companion/co-pilot
  • Anesha Astapova - love interest
  • Starlin Rand - student

COMBAT INFORMATION

• Weapon of Choice: Lightsaber
• Combat Function: Val is a duelist who invented his own form of lightsaber combat. He relies heavily on his lightsaber, but can also use the Force, usually for offense. He has a particular fondness for lightning and screaming.

Strengths:

• 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 certainly above average. His style primarily incorporates elements of classical fencing, in addition to Makashi and Vaapad.
• 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.
• 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.

Weaknesses:

• Insane: Childhood 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. His behavior is difficult to predict, 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.
• 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.
• Night Blind: Due to his Hapan ancestry, he cannot see in the dark at all and is virtually blind 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... provided he still has access to the Force.

HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Valentin “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.

Val’s natural father was a Hapan pirate named Rhett Valentino 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. Hoping to lure Alyosha into a trap, 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. They had yet to reconcile themselves to their mercurial Force bond, but after a misguided attempt at severing the connection that led to them briefly exchanging places, signs of healing and acceptance began to slowly manifest. Their relationship was the strongest it had ever been, and for the first time in years, Val felt a true sense of family and belonging.

That is, until Sarka. Alyosha, motivated by a desire to help his friend Laertia Io fight the Bryn'adul, agreed to help defend the planet from the Bryn invaders. Val tagged along in order to support his brother. The two became separated in the tunnels beneath the city of Salyrini; Alyosha was wounded, and Val was prevented from reaching him in time. Alyosha was killed when the tunnel collapsed on top of him. Their bond was severed, leaving Val aimless once again.

Ah, but something happened along the way - it seems a beautiful young noblewoman from Samovar has hoisted Val up and determined she would "tame" him, or at least get him to grow up. Don't act so surprised. This sort of thing has happened before, you know.

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.

 

[Judah Lesan]

Salamander

Making a PC an NPC... looks good to me!

[APPROVED]