Rhallaemnes the Bantha

NAME: Rhallaemnes
SPECIES: Blue Bantha
HOMEWORLD: Entooine
AGE: 25 standard years
GENDER: Male
HEIGHT: 10'1" / 310 cm
WEIGHT: 9,460 lb / 4,300 kg
EYES: Black
FUR: Snowy white
HORNS: Pale blue
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes

FORCE POWERS:

• Telepathy: Rhallaemnes is an adept telepath, having had a lot of practice over the eleven years since he left his home-world.
  
• Telekinesis: Though Rhallaemnes's telekinetic powers are not very strong, he is adept at using them for fine manipulation.
  
• Force shield: Though it requires great exertion for him, Rhallaemnes can generate a protective bubble of telekinetic energy around himself and his rider.

SKILLS:

• As befits someone who spent much of his childhood learning an oral history, Rhallaemnes has an excellent memory. While it's not quite true that a bantha never forgets, he remembers quite clearly nearly everything that he cares to.

Rhallaemnes is just over three meters tall at the shoulder, a fairly large bantha with snow-white fur and pale blue horns. Rhallaemnes is able to move over one thousand pounds without significant encumbrance or effort. He can dead-lift over four thousand pounds, and drag twenty-five hundred pounds. Even for a bantha, he's pretty strong - though the only prehensile appendage he has is his tongue. His tongue is not quite so strong as the rest of him, being able to only move about a hundred and fifty pounds without significant effort.

Weighing in at just over eight and a half tons, there's not a lot that fazes Rhallaemnes. Even for his size, he's hearty and tough with a tolerance for a wide variety of climates and conditions. Rhallaemnes has phenomenal endurance, able to keep working for hours and hours, though he's not quite so sturdy as a domesticated bantha bred for work.



Rhallaemnes is quiet, patient, and reserved. The blue bantha is wise and contemplative. He says little, preferring to keep to himself, but dispenses advice and bantha wisdom when asked. Rhallaemnes is quite gentle, in line with a big herbivore, and is reluctant to engage in violence rather than peaceful solutions. Despite his initial bad experiences with humanoids he has come to respect and like most of them. Rhallaemnes has found bipeds to be quite useful to have around, what with their hands and opposable thumbs and all.

Rhallaemnes's reticence and gentle nature should not be mistaken for weakness of character. He is a deeply moral person, strong-willed and fiercely independent. While gentle almost to the point of being passive, he adamantly refuses to compromise his integrity.



Rhallaemnes was studying to be his herd's historian when a group of smugglers seeking exotics from the untapped world happened upon the herd of white-furred, blue-horned banthas on the cold world of Entooine. The blue banthas, so named for the color of their horns, remembering what had happened the last time off-worlders came to Entooine, fled in fear to avoid the poachers. The blue banthas were unable to escape the spacecraft, and the smugglers abducted several of the herd's youngsters. They selected banthas old enough to survive without their mothers, but young enough to still be malleable - were they ordinary banthas.

The smuggler captain had the idea to sell the teams of blue banthas as carriage-beasts for a client with a taste for the exotic, unaware that they were sapient creatures. Rhallaemnes watched as his fellow banthas give in and submit to the training, learning to become nothing more than slaves who bent their backs to their new masters' will. The smuggler captain was pleased with how four of the five banthas took to their training, but irritated at how stubborn and defiant the fifth was. He was not a cruel man, however, and knew that the harsher techniques at breaking a beast in for training generally left an animal scarred - physically and mentally. The smugglers simply refrained from giving the defiant Rhallaemnes any food.

What surprised the smugglers was that Rhallaemnes's fellows began sneaking him food. More surprisingly, Rhallaemnes showed uncanny - even supernatural - cleverness in working his way around their locks and getting into the bantha fodder. The smugglers began to get suspicious of them until finally one of the smugglers caught Rhallaemnes levitating bricks of fodder out of the hopper and towards his enclosure in the cargo hold. Rhallaemnes pushed the puny human aside, returning to his enclosure with his meal and telekinetically slamming the door shut behind him. The smugglers weren't stupid - they knew the Force when they saw it. The smuggler captain realized the creatures he'd abducted might not have been simple animals, as examining in hindsight several curious incidents during the banthas' captivity, their surprisingly rapid learning, and now the evident Force sensitivity of at least one of them led him to the conclusion they were probably at least semi-sentient. He was just starting to figure out what to do with them when the ship put in to its home system.

Unfortunately, pirates ambushed the smuggler ship as it entered orbit around a world Rhallaemnes would come to know as Tatooine. The ship plummeted through the atmosphere to a crash-landing on the surface, one that killed or mortally wounded all aboard the ship save Rhallaemnes. The blue bantha protected himself with the Force, and though he tried he was unable to protect his fellow banthas. The fall nearly killed Rhallaemnes, and he would have died had he not had an uncommon stroke of fortune. A lone Tusken Raider happened upon the crash site, an exile whose bantha had perished from a wasting disease. The youth helped the young bantha, tending to his injuries and unwittingly bonding to Rhallaemnes through the Force. The bond helped Rhallaemnes recover despite the incredibly harsh environment, and the went with his new Tusken friend to the Raider's tribe.