<div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Character's Backstory</div><div class="spoiler_body">"I'm Jaster Burren and this is <em>Fringer</em>, the only show on the Galactic News Network that brings you the truth from the Outer Rim!  Up now is an interview* with Zarva Kaskis, captain of the the <em>Bacchante</em>, a free trader most commonly plying its trade in Hutt space."<br/><br/>JB: "Capatin Kaskis, your reputation and that of your crew precedes you all.  Perhaps you could talk us through how you came to put what at first glance can only be called a...ahhh...disparate collection of crew members?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Well, firstly, I'd say that the crew put itself together rather than me.  Ahhh, I guess it all started with the massacre of Republican forces on Selfebara at the end of the Clone Wars.  I had flown in some supplies to the republican troops but my ship had suffered serious damage from Separatist droid fighters.  The city of Gamos had recently fallen to the Separatists and while my ship was repaired I helped round up Republican stragglers, that's when I first encountered Stromm Husk."<br/><br/>JB: "So were part of the Republican military?"<br/><br/>ZK: "No, not at all.  Just a freelancer making a living.  The Republic needed every ship it could lay its hands on and were willing to pay good credits for services rendered."<br/><br/>JB: "Right.  So Stromm Husk?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Yeah, Husk.  He'd been leading one of the battalions that had been defending Gamos, but as he was moving to a new position, his small command convoy had been ambushed.  The patrol I was with found the convoy strung along the main route north of Gamos.  His command unit had obviously been small, twenty-five, maybe thirty men, spread over five A5-RX recon vehicles.  It was like a plague of Jawas had been through the place, everything had been stripped, helments, armour, weapons, boots, hell they'd even drained the coolant from the repulsor engines!  It must have been a hell of a firefight and short to boot.  That they'd been ambushed was clear, caught out in the open by heavy blaster fire from at least three different spots among some nearby woods."<br/><br/>JB: "Hmmm, terrible...terrible."<br/><br/>ZK:"They hadn't stood a chance.  Five had been captured.  We found them in an untidy pile at the edge of the woods, where they'd all suffered a single blaster shot to the back of the head.  Figuring the whole unit had  been killed, we were preparing to move out, when we heard a moan from deeper in the woods.  Husk had been badly wounded, but the shot to the back of his head hadn't been direct and he'd managed to crawl away.  As we shifted him to our vehicle, he kept muttering through his delirium about someone called Cuthus and how he was the betrayer.  During the trip back Husk had a moment of clarity and after a brief discussion I decided to take him to my ship..."<br/><br/>JB: "Surely the Republican forces would have been able to care for him?"<br/><br/>ZK: "I didn't think so, given that the Republican forces were scattered and in disarray, I thought he'd be safer onboard.  So once the <em>Bacchante</em> was repaired we got the hell off Selfebara.  Husk decided to come with me, claiming his oath to the Army of the Republic was invalidated the day he was betrayed...Husk doesn't talk much about what went down on Selfebara and I've learnt its not wise to ask."<br/><br/>JB: "Interesting...so a renegade army colonel and a ships captain up to her eyeballs in debt...where to next?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Well, maybe my navel in debt...we started taking commissions from various 'merchants' on the Rimma Trade Route, mostly running illegal bioware from the Kathol Sector or misappropriated weapons shipments from the Sluis Van system through to the core worlds.  Made some tidy profit...but it was when we did our first run of people smuggling that things got interesting."<br/><br/>JB: "People smuggling! But..but..."<br/><br/>ZK: "Don't worry, it was the good kind.  There was a group of Devaronians on Yag'Dhul that were going to be sold as slaves to some Hutt, whose name I forget, and so Husk and I 'liberated' them from the Hutt's minions and dropped them back on Devaron with a slice of the profits from selling the same Hutt's shipment of Bacta.  The one who'd put us for the job decided to stay with us, Darion was a welcome addition because as well as being consistently happy no matter what was happening, he's a damn good scout and expert tracker.  If it wasn't for him we'd never have tracked down the Neimodian pirate lord, Dool Pundar out near Mytus VII."<br/><br/>JB: "At this point you seemed to disappear.  Common rumour had it that your ship had been destroyed and the entire crew killed.  But this wasn't the case was it?"<br/><br/>ZK: "We'll clearly not, because I'm sitting in front of you and the <em>Bacchante</em> is parked out there...no what happened was we were chasing a bounty, some crazy-assed bitch in the pit fighting circuit who'd killed her Hutt boss and the Hutt's cartel wanted her head on a platter.  With Darion's help we tacked her..."<br/><br/>JB: "Her?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Tyrnia Masak.  We had tracked her to Thule.  She had taken refuge in a city that had been fought over a dozen times, by Jedi, Sith, Republicans, Separatists, you name it they'd been there.  We discovered that a renegade group of Separatists from the Techno Union had set themselves up as warlords, demanding fealty from the small groups of locals who were trying to scratch out a living.  One of the key resistance organisers was Eufaula, a bounty hunter of some repute.  She was determined to bring in the leader of the Separatists who had a plump bounty courtesy of the Imperial Security Bureau."<br/><br/>JB: "Sounds dangerous."<br/><br/>ZK: "Everything in our line of work is.  Anyway, we ended up organising and training the locals into a little freedom force, smuggled in weapons, ambushed the Techno's convoys, hunting forgaging parties, and generally made their life complete shit.  We even managed to get the shattered elements of a Clone Trooper company to assist us.  The Techno's eventually had enough and launched an all out assault on the local encampments.  So while we're neck deep in Bantha shit, Eufaula takes a small force of Clones and hits the Techno's from behind.  She gets her man and when news of the command post being fragged spreads, the Renegade Techno's soon loose the will to die for nothing and disperse."<br/><br/>ZK: "We spent another couple of months on Thule, helping the locals put things kinda back together.  Turns out the Techno's were there for the large stores of Therlinium-3 that had been stashed prior to the assault on Coruscant.  The locals were willing to trade their minerals for supplies of every sort....we made an absolute killing.  Eufaula decided she liked our style and while she did the odd lone wolf job, she was more or less a permanent member of the crew."<br/><br/>JB: "I've been reading the scream sheets from a couple of years ago that talk about the horrid events in Lidoo on Trosamin in the Kegan system...can you tell us about that?"<br/><br/>ZK: *shudders*.  "That was ugly.  Really ugly.  We really should have stayed in bed that day.  I remember when the ISB Captain handed me a stack of holoprints.  No comment, just stuck 'em in my hands and sat down.  The first print was a nice looking girl, maybe 16, 18.  The second print wasn't anywhere near as pretty.  It had to have been taken maybe 24 hours after she had been dead.  Not pretty.  Not pretty at all.  The third one was worse...it showed what had been done to her back.  I remember that right then I made a promise to a dead girl in a picture that I'd avenge her..."<br/><br/>ZK: "I remember looking at the crew and saying that if they came with on this job they would probably have an opportunity to die, swift or slow wouldn't be their's to choose.  That if captured, they'd probably be tortured for something they didn't even really understand.  That they could end up dead in a thousand anonymous ways, nameless and alone, screaming into the void where nobody can hear them.  I told them they could turn their back on me right now and live to a ripe old age, surrounded by their adoring grandchildren and hating themselves for being a coward who slunk away when you honour was called for."<br/><br/>JB: *chuckles* "Nothing like a little emotional blackmail..."<br/><br/>ZK: "Maybe, but the whole crew was there when we lifted off the following morning.  I remember one of my tribal elders telling me that sacrifice makes character, but I know now that sacrifice reveals character.  The ISB captain didn't want anything else of us but to extract a certain Fanya Lika.  But when has a simple extraction ever been just that, ay?  We arrived in Lidoo shortly after the mad fuckers had begun the slaughter, supposedly some Hutt had joined this Noonday Eclipse outfit and was in the process of exterminating his rivals after some 'revelation' or some such mumbo jumbo.  We located the mark and we're in the process of moving her and her family to the ship, when we came across one of the NE's 'cleansings'."<br/><br/>ZK: "I'm not sure what goes on in Col. Husk's mind, since he doesn't let anyone in, but all of sudden he lost it.  Never seen a blood fury like that before.  He literally tore the NE freaks apart with his bare hands.  That started a shit storm where every loony in the city was on us, hundreds of the fuckers coming at us from all sides.  Lost two good crew that night, Bragga my Dug co-pilot and Wess a merc who had been with the <em>Bacchante</em> for nearly a year.  As we lifted off, we sent an encrypted message to our ISB contact advising that we'd lost the mark in the firefight, shortly thereafter, the two Star Destroyers in orbit began to bombard Lidoo into oblivion."<br/><br/>ZK: "I'm still not sure what transpired on Trosamin, but the Empire certainly wanted whatever "it" was suppressed.  I never told them that the mark's daughter had survived.  She tried to run with a couple of other crews but after a few months we met up again on Toydaria and she opted to join us, been with us ever since."<br/><br/>JB: *refers to datapad on lap* "And then we come to Vialiah? So we're about a year ago now?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Yeah, 13 months to be exact.  We'd done some pretty crazy stuff between Lidoo and when Vialiah came on board.  We we comissioned by the...um...imperial opposition to retrieve some datacapsules from a satellite that had crashed on some out of the way planet called Ambria in the Steness Node.  Apparently this satellite had been orbiting Ambria since Darth Vader was a lad and had been tracking the weather patterns of the planet for decades and for some people that was valuable information.  Anyways, we ended up attending this weird auction organised by a group of pre-tech natives that had secured the satellite.  No sooner was bidding under way than the party was crashed by a group of mercs hired by whose knows."<br/><br/>JB: "How did that play out?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Well my crew did what they do best, which is to kill pretty much everything that walked, crawled and slithered.  Vialiah was a member of the merc team, but for whatever reason they intentionally left her behind when it was clear that they weren't going to be able to secure the datacapsules.  After the fight we were able to secure the datacapsules through diplomacy and some hard credits.  The natives had captured Vialiah and where going to sacrifice her to some god or the other...but my team convinced them not to..."<br/><br/>JB: "Why would you do that?"<br/><br/>ZK: "Have you seen her? Why wouldn't I? Not only is she deadly and highly skilled...she's Zeltronian to boot.  My crew didn't take much convincing to take her on and they'd all seen how she'd been dumped by her former crew so they wanted in on a little payback.  Nothing like a revenge trip to get the juice going."<br/><br/>JB: "So one minute she's trying to kill you and the next you're taking her into your bossom?" <br/><br/>ZK: "No to the first part and...well you'll have to wait for my memoir holodisk for an answer to the second..." <br/><br/>JB: "What...no...wait, I meant..." <br/><br/>ZK: "That's okay, I know what you meant.  She never actually tried to kill either me or any of the crew as that's not Vialiah's style...and I know what's its like to be dumped in the Rancor drek by people you trust...so I offered her place on the crew...afterall, finding an honourable person who will do what they say they will do is hard these days...however, finding a rabid, merciless dog to hunt someone down and kill them for breaking oath...hell those people are a credit a dozen...after talking to her a bit she struck as one of the former.  Haven't looked back since."<br/><br/>JB:  So thirteen months later you haven't had any additions or deletions from the crew roster?"<br/><br/>ZK: "No thankfully.  We've been on some interesting jobs, some crazy jobs and some plain milk runs.  But the crew has melded very well.  Everybody has a job to do and knows how to do it.  We've smuggled, kidnapped, stolen, negotiated, and sweet-talked our way around the galaxy making all the credits we need as we go."<br/><br/>JB: "So where to from here for the <em>Bacchante</em> and her diverse crew?"<br/><br/>ZK: "We'll some of the crew have talked about retirement and I can say that I'm finding that proposition quite attractive, but there's still plenty of work out there for competent freelancers, so maybe I'll have one last job or maybe I'll sell up and find a nice planet to call my own..."<br/><br/>JB: "Captian Kaskis, thankyou for your candor and good luck.  This is Jaster Burren and you're with the Galactic News Network.  Next up this evening on <em>Fringer</em>, the Hutts.  Are they really the criminal masterminds we are led to believe?  We'll be right back after these messages!"</div></div>