Dred Jotano

NAME: Dred Jotano
SPECIES: Unknown (Sith pureblood)
HOMEWORLD: Korriban, raised on Geonosis and Tatooine
AGE: 26
GENDER: Male
HEIGHT: 6'4" / 193 cm
WEIGHT: 237 lb / 113 kg
EYES: Glowing yellow
HAIR: Black
SKIN: Red-Brown
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes

• Battlemind - Dred can give himself over to the Force to transcend normal mortal limitations in a fight and become faster, stronger, and more skillful. Doing so takes a singular focus and letting go of his conscious self, not exactly an easy feat.
  
• Force Barrier - Dred can call on the Force to protect himself from attack, though the barrier is more effective against kinetic and particle attacks (such as slugthrowers and blasters) than it is against purely energy weapons (such as lasers).
  
• Force Stealth - A technique Dred learned from Virage, he is adept both at concealing himself from the Force senses of others and at convincing them to simply not notice him even when they see or hear him. He practiced this skill a lot in the Dune Sea, particularly on raids against enemy tribes and settlers. While so concealed, Dred is practically invisible - though he is decidedly less practiced at using this power against electronic sensors.
  
• Force Sense - Dred can use the Force to expand his perceptions, supernaturally augmenting his already-keen senses. He has low-grade empathic powers, though not nearly so pervasive as a Zeltron's, and is particularly adept at detecting when others are lying.
  
• Telekinesis - Dred is an adept at Force telekinesis, skilled though not particularly practiced or powerful at it. He won't be lifting any starfighters out of swamps, but he can certainly move things about and use the Force to boost his leaps.
  
• Telepathy - Dred has learned the art of mental communication from his blue bantha partner, Rhallaemnes, though he is not particularly fond of employing it.

• Dred knows the desert like few others. While he specializes in the wastelands of Tatooine, he is quite at home in any hot, arid environment. He can easily survive where others would perish, a skill he learned among the Sand People.
  
• Dred is a good shot and well-versed in the art of war. While he's best at desert war, particularly in hit-and-run tactics, he's also good at mountain, urban, and night combat. Dred's best operating with a small team; solo ops are for people who watch too many bad movies. He excels at teamwork and cooperation.
  
• Dred has excellent mechanical and technical skills, especially considering his background. He knows his way around a repulsor-craft or walker and can tinker with a blaster, but once a technology starts getting heavily computerized it's a bit beyond him. He can attend to the mechanical issues a droid might have, but software is largely outside his realm of expertise. An artisan and artist at heart, he customizes and tinkers with practically everything he gets his hands on.
  
• Dred speaks Basic, Huttese, Mando'a, Jawa Trade Language, and the language of the Tusken Raiders. Tusken has no written form, but he is literate in the other languages. He actually reads Mando'a better than he speaks it, having had little practice with the language since his childhood on Geonosis.

Dred often wears his armor, something stylistically similar to the traditional battle gear of a Mandalorian warrior coupled with the wrappings of a Tusken Raider. The helmet has a T-shaped visor, but it is more form-fitting and slimmer in profile than the norm for a classical Mandalorian's bucket helmet, something along the lines of a scout trooper's helmet bearing a short bill over the face-plate and a pair of air filters to either side of the lower extension of the visor. Dred painted dove-grey jaig eyes over the visor. The armor plates are a dark blue-black trimmed with dove grey, while the wrappings are shades of tan and brown and the body glove hidden beneath the cloth is dark brown.

Dred has dusky skin somewhere between brick red and a dark olive, close-cropped spiky black hair, and glowing yellow eyes with apparently neither pupil nor white. He has sharp, angular facial features with horn ridges in place of eyebrows, a hooked nose, and a thin-lipped mouth with the fangs of a large mammalian predator. He is handsome, in an exotic and predatory sort of way. Dred has the chin tendrils typical of his father's species with one to either side of his mouth, and his ears are long and pointed. He seems to have inherited his mother's Sephi longevity, though it's difficult to tell given his relatively young age. Courtesy his Sith and Sephi heritage, Dred has very keen senses that his time in the Dune Sea have only sharpened. Dred's voice is quiet and rough, almost soft-spoken, pitched somewhere between a baritone and a tenor. He speaks with an exotic accent, faint though noticeable. Particularly knowledgeable people might recognize it as similar to the Tusken accent with influences from Tatooine's lower classes.

Dred is tall and stocky, with a well-defined musculature due to a lifetime of heavy work and a rangy figure from a lifetime of privation; he would have grown much larger had he adequate nutrition as a child, but his genetics still show in his abundance of physical power. He has bone spurs on his forearms that lengthen into spikes along his elbows, with similar smaller spurs on his shins, wrists, and knuckles, with a jagged spinal crest rather like that of a Falleen. Unlike most Purebloods, he has five digits rather than the more common three or four. Like most Purebloods, Dred is left-handed. Though his mother was a Sephi, his biology tends much more towards Sith. Should Dred fall into a DNA scan, his genome would show his mother provided only about four percent of his genetic material; the bulk is Red Sith (roughly two-thirds, predominantly Massassi castes), with the rest being selected from Umbaran, Epicanthix, and Human stock. That raises some interesting questions about his background and who was pursuing his mother. It's worth noting that Dred doesn't know what species he is, precisely, only that he's not a purebred Sephi.

Dred wears a headband to help keep sweat out of his eyes, a dark brown shirt under a short-sleeved tan tunic, a pistol belt with a holstered Renegade heavy blaster pistol strapped to his left thigh, tan leggings tucked into knee-high black boots, and black shooting gloves. The outfit bears a passing resemblance to that of a Tusken Raider, particularly if Dred wears goggles and a hood. Dred has a small, concealable laser gauntlet hidden under his left glove. He wears a hooded desert camouflage poncho when he goes outdoors, both in armor and out, and has a pair of goggles that protect his eyes from blowing sand and dust. The poncho covers much of the colored plates of his armor, negating the effects of the color on his efforts at concealment. While he once went in the full wrappings of a Tusken Raider, Dred largely abandoned them when he left the desert for civilization; the Sand People do not have a good reputation amongst Tatooine's other settlers.



Dred is wry and cynical, with a black sense of humor and little patience for the weak and the whiny; conversely, he has less patience for those who flaunt strength. A life hunted and on the run left him suspicious and a bit paranoid; he does not trust readily and is nearly always vigilant for attack. He holds no illusions about being able to operate independently of others; several times growing up he survived only because of others' generosity. Despite what others might think of his background, Dred does not think his was a rough childhood; he was lucky enough to have several in his life who were willing to do a great deal for a complete stranger. He took the lesson to heart, and while he's certainly not a particularly nice person, Dred is a compassionate and generous man. He's proud of his perfect record - everyone Dred has gone out to recover has come back alive, whether they be a missing person or an escaped convict. He refuses to fetch someone when he knows they're going to be tortured or murdered.

Dred is very much a stoic, largely indifferent to both the good and the bad in his life. Displays of emotion from him are very rare, and he can seem heard-hearted despite his caring nature. Dred is proud, even arrogant, though surprisingly polite for someone unfamiliar with the ways of the Sand People. He values reason and hard facts over emotion and intuition, something that put him at odds with the Tuskens at times. Despite that, there is a deep-rooted rage in Dred, a powerful anger that gnaws at the core of his being and keeps him from really knowing peace. A part is unresolved issues regarding his family and growing up constantly hunted, and part of that is his natural inclination towards the dark side. Whether he like it or not, know it or not, Dred is a Sith - perhaps the last true descendent of the ancient Massassi warriors.



The story of Dred Jotano begins before his birth, deep in time long before the galaxy had ever heard the names Palpatine or Skywalker. His history traces back to the darkest days of the galaxy, of the days when the Sith reigned supreme and long before the extinction of the Red Sith and their mongrel 'Pureblood' descendants. The ancient Dark Lords of the Sith entombed their brethren in conditions nearly perfect for preservation on their dark homeworld of Korriban, and the arid planet is littered with tombs containing their mummified corpses. The ancient Sith were worshipped, and many still recall their devotion to the ancient Dark Lords.

Many more recall their power.

A secretive project sought their genetic resurrection beginning in about 480 ABY, drawing genetic samples from many of the tombs on Korriban, Yavin IV, Ziost, and Dromund Kaas. The first attempts were unviable, too much time having passed to create embryos from the ancient DNA. Realizing they would have to splice in genes to fill in gaps, the project directors decided to select the finest, most potent near-Human genes as being the only ones worthy of the mighty Sith. With Epicanthix mutations they sought to create a creature whose will could not be broken, with Umbaran genes they sought to imbue it with extraordinary perceptions, with Sephi genes they sought to provide it an extended lifespan, and with the genes of some of the most potent Force-wielders they sought to enhance the power of the reborn Dark Lords.

Unfortunately for their project, one of the women hired to bear the first generations, a dar'manda Mandalorian named Catra Jotano, began to have doubts about handing over the child growing in her womb. She fled while three months pregnant, over halfway through the abbreviated term, escaping to the Outer Rim in an attempt to ensure her child never fell under the yoke of the Sith Order.

Dred doesn't know what planet he was born on, but he does know he was born about two-three years before the return of the Sith (and is thus twenty-six years old). His earliest memories are of life under the Geonosians, as ill fortune had his mother escape her Mandalorian enemies only to wind up enslaved in the petrayanki arenas of Geonosis. She was a Force-sensitive ex-Mandalorian, a warrior of no small skill. Dred's mother was pregnant with him at the time, but as a former Mandalorian ramikad Catra Jotano remained fit enough to fight well into the later stages of her pregnancy. Catra never spoke of why her fellow Mandos turned on her, nor did Dred ask. Dred doesn't know much at all about his father, not even his father's species, as his mother never spoke of the man.

Catra saw the way the Geonosians noted her son's unusual nature and redoubled her efforts to spirit him away for his own safety. She convinced a Human gladiator to protect them from the other fighting slaves, and gave birth to his daughter when Dred was six. When Dred was eight years old, she seized an opportunity and stole a ship. Though they tried to bring Dred's stepfather and half-sister, the Geonosians cut off their escape. Catra was mortally wounded in their escape, but managed to get him to the nearby planet of Tatooine before she died of her wounds.

Taking the name Shalonjo Krail (a friend of his who'd died in bondage to the insectoids) to escape the Geonosians hunting him, Dred lived as an orphan urchin on the streets of Mos Espa. A shopkeep caught the starving boy stealing from him only a few weeks in, but instead of beating him or turning the kid over to the police took him into his home. Virage Sab'Athon, a Jensaarai-turned-trader who had married a Tatooinian woman named Corey, adopted 'Shalonjo' and raised him alongside their daughter, Cadrienne. He could tell the boy was powerful in the Force and clearly of Sith Pureblood heritage, and thus began to instruct him in the ways of the Jensaarai so that he might be able to resist the darkness within himself. Dred did not take well to learning of the Force, preferring instead the more physical world, but he picked up much of what Virage tried to teach him and reflected on it later in life. When Dred saw a pair of armored warriors shortly after his ninth birthday, though, he disappeared rather than put the Sab'Athons at risk. The boy didn't know that they were simply Mandalorians on a completely unrelated errand; he thought they were hunting him.

Dred came to live among the Sand People after he happened across what he thought was a lost bantha calf and the animal brought him back to a local tribe that was only unfriendly rather than murderous towards offworlders. He lived as one of them for a time, learning the ways of the deep desert under the tutelage of a harsh yet fair Tusken couple that the chieftain assigned to take care of Dred. Unbeknownst to Dred, the couple's own son had perished in a raid on moisture farmers just a few weeks before. Though the Tuskens were not a sentimental people, the fact remained the couple were in a better position to take care of the young refugee - and Dred seemed a fitting substitute for their lost child. The two were A'ArRRk'Ket and his wife, Tr'Triask'Ka. Dred, hampered by his physiology and inability to produce sufficient phlegm, called them Ar'Ket and Triask'Ka. Ar'Ket took the boy under his wing, and in the rough, callous way of the Tuskens taught him to survive the Dune Sea and the Jundland Wastes.

After Dred lived with them for a year, the bantha calf his adopted parents provided him died of a wasting disease. Dred was thus exiled into the deep desert in accordance with tradition, and he was traveling to Mos Espa when he watched a ship hurtle down in a streak of fire to crash nearby. Dred went towards the wreck, thinking it would attract Jawas and he'd be able to hitch a ride with the scavengers, but he discovered a strange white-furred, blue-horned bantha barely alive in the wreckage. Mystified, Dred thought it might just have been the spirit of his dead bantha companion who guided him to the wreck rather than have a second partner die. He tended to the wounded bantha, drawing on his desert lore to provide the creature sustenance while it recovered. The two became fast friends, and together they returned to Dred's tribe after the bantha recovered enough to travel.

Dred found that his tribe, far from being unhappy to see him, was jubilant at his rebirth. They had given him up for dead, but not only did he return with a new bantha his mount was clearly a spirit-beast, a rare white bantha that was a sacred and powerful beast descended from the heavens. With his newfound prestige - and the fact that the bantha could actually back it up being sapient and a Force-wielder itself - Dred swiftly rose to prominence in the tribe with Rhallaemnes as his partner. The chieftain, Rru'Rru'rr'O, was grooming Dred as his successor at the advice of the tribe's storyteller. Ar'Ket and Rrurr'O were Dred's strongest supporters in the tribe, but Dred soon developed a vice intolerable to the Sand People: He began visiting one of the local moisture farmers. The farmer's daughter Sera, to be more specific; he was enchanted by her beauty and intelligence, and she by his exotic worldliness.

Had one of his friends discovered Dred's indiscretion, they might have been able to keep it a secret. He, after all, was far from the first of the People to fall for a settler's charms and it was all but expected of someone who was not a Raider by blood. Unfortunately, it was one of Dred's rivals in the tribe who discovered him in a compromising situation with the girl. Though Dred managed to fend off his rival's attack, he'd been exposed; not only did the rival announce Dred's liaison to the whole tribe, he fought Dred a second time and managed to tear off Dred's wrappings in front of all of them before using his gaffi stick to shatter his right arm, preventing him from ever again wielding a gaffi stick. Thus shamed and crippled, Dred's tribe had little choice but to abandon him to the desert. Rhallaemnes did not abandon his friend, but instead tended to his injuries as best he could while the moisture farmer helped. They made it barely a week before a tribe of Sand People attacked the farm, killing all save Dred and Rhallaemnes. Wounded and one-armed, Dred gave himself over to the Force in the vain effort to defend the farmers. Astonishingly, Ar'Ket and a handful of the Tuskens Dred had befriended or particularly impressed joined him and fought against the other members of the tribe. Together they defeated or slew all of them, and when it was over Dred climbed onto Rhallaemnes's back and returned to Mos Espa where he partially recovered while eking out a living on the streets. He used his actual name, not the alias he used while he lived with the Sab'Athons; by then Dred had figured out that the Mandalorians weren't remotely interested in him. Ar'Ket and the other four survivors of the battle departed for the Dune Sea, convinced their young friend was the great war-leader A'Sharad Hett born again and fanatically devoted to him. Ar'Ket knew Dred had to leave the desert on a pilgrimage of sorts to set his soul in order before he could return to lead the Sand People in cleansing Tatooine of the machine taint and the offworlder infestation.

Dred had left civilization a boy of nine, and returned a man of sixteen. His seven years in the desert had hardened him in many ways, and he found himself proud and contemptuous around the soft settlers. As he had left the Tuskens, he began acquiring more modern gear; though Dred had picked up some of their taboos, he'd never learned their distrust and hatred of technology. Dred looked up the Sab'Athons, but was unable to find them. They had left Tatooine three years prior to his return, and none who remained in Mos Espa knew where they had gone.

Given his talents, he found himself working as a guide and mercenary, which eventually led to him taking up bounty hunting. With his flippant disregard for laws, Dred found himself working for the criminal elements more often than not, though the Mos Espa police kept him on retainer for missing persons cases after he rescued a lost child from the Xelric Draw after the little boy had been missing for two days and given up for dead. The rescue brought Dred some degree of local notoriety, much more than hiring himself out as muscle or tracking down bounties had. The boy's parents were wealthy, retired smugglers who ran a space station in the Tatoo system selling water from the rings of Adriana and were in Mos Espa visiting friends. Out of gratitude, they paid for the treatments to repair his arm and put him in contact with some of their friends to help him with better job opportunities.

When he was nineteen, Dred did a mission working with a team of five Mandalorians, warriors of the Bralor and Fett clans. He was hesitant to do the job, but the pay was exceptional and the Mandos had practically no idea who he was beyond that he was a skilled guide and tracker. Far from wanting him dead as he'd thought, they came to respect the young man and his skills. They were seeking a runaway, a dar'manda criminal who'd fled their garrison on Tatooine rather than face justice for killing a fellow Mandalorian in a fit of rage. Dred normally didn't take jobs that included a kill order, but for a murderer he made an exception. The hunt was long and arduous, as the renegade was quite skillful and crafty. The Mandos had been seeking their renegade for three weeks by the time they contacted Dred, and they thought the trail dead cold. Dred found the renegade in just under a week. The Mandos and Dred fought and killed the renegade, and in payment the warriors gave Dred the renegade's armor. It was simultaneously the ultimate insult to the criminal and the ultimate compliment to an outsider.

Unfortunately, like his mother before him, Dred remained an outsider. He was simply too stiff-necked and proud to bow before the Mandalorians, finding them in the main to be little more than well-armed bullies with a crude and self-serving philosophy that essentially boiled down to "might makes right". Their intolerance and xenophobia prevented him from being welcomed among their ranks, and after accidentally letting slip that his mother was dar'manda Dred found it only grew worse. Dred slipped away, returning to his homeworld after realizing he would never truly fit in among the clans.

[/URL] A versatile rocket launcher, this system can deliver a variety of payloads according to the needs and pocketbook of the user. Extremely popular with bounty hunters - and equally unpopular with more legitimate law enforcement - this miniature rocket launcher attaches to the arm just behind the wrist and overhangs the back of the hand, alleviating the user's worry about accidentally shooting his hand off. This system fires 20mm homing rockets, guided into place via a coaxial targeting laser. The wearer is thus able to adjust his aim point on the fly, tracking a moving target in ways unguided munitions can't.
The rocket has an internal payload of six rockets, all mounted on a rotating drum around the wearer's forearm. The wearer can select a particular rocket using a control panel on the back of the launcher, the same control panel used to fire the rocket. The Manticora-4, unlike the Manticora-3 and previous models, has the ability to interface directly with most suit HUDs for both munitions selection and aimpoint adjustment. There is also a secondary trigger that the wearer can place in the palm of the firing hand. Dred wears the Manticora-4 on his right arm when in armor, and is inordinately fond of the weapon.
Dred owns a total of sixteen rockets - ten of them are high-explosive incendiary/armor-piercing (HEIAP) rockets useful against both armored vehicles and armored personnel alike (kill radius 5m, wound radius 25m), four of them are HE rockets (kill radius 5m, wound radius 25m), one is a concussive stun (effective radius 13m), and the last is a DEMP ion blast (catastrophic kill radius 5m, mobility kill radius 30m). The anti-personnel rockets function mostly through shrapnel and a burst of fire. The HEIAP rockets are shaped charges coupled with incendiaries that deliver a high-velocity explosive penetrator into the target. The incendiaries ignite with temperatures hot enough to boil steel, the shaped charge blasts a path for the penetrator, and the penetrator itself is an armor-piercing round with an explosive core that detonates inside the target itself. They are actually less effective against soft targets; armored targets trigger the explosives and incendiaries, while they simply fragment and explode inside organic targets much like very large frangible explosive bullets. The stun and DEMP rockets are both recoverable and reusable, needing only a fresh charge. The explosive rockets are, quite naturally, not. Dred normally loads six of them into the magazine (a typical payload being the stun, the DEMP, two HE, two HEIAP), and then stows the remaining ten either on a bandolier slung across his chest or someplace safe. The rockets are not dangerous or explosive until they are armed, which requires them to actually launch and clear more than fifteen meters. Within that range, they're simply 20mm bullets.

[/li][li]Fabritech PAC40+ visual wrist com: The PAC40+ is a comlink popular with smugglers and soldiers who frequently need to see who they're dealing with and who want to do so in a hands-free manner. A small, flat rectangle that Dred mounted on the inside of the left forearm, the PAC40+ can send and receive visual images as well as standard audio signals, and can even display holoimage data (either as a hologram or as a two-dimensional image). It has a good range - 75 km overland and out to most standard planetary orbits - but requires a new energy cell after 10 days of operation.
The PAC40+ is also a datapad, able to store, display, and receive data from droids, com signals, and direct computer links as well as data cards.

[/li][li]Stun Cuffs: Dred owns four pairs of binder cuffs with electronic magnalocks that can secure the wrists or ankles (or equivalent appendage) of nearly any common species. The magnalocks open to a seven-digit code and are difficult to slice, delivering a stunning electrical jolt if they're tampered with or the wearer strains too hard against them. The binder cuffs recharge on standard power supplies, and are designed to transport a very recalcitrant prisoner for three days before the jolting part of the battery runs dry. Dred is not fond of using the cuffs, but admits they're sometimes necessary for keeping a live bounty alive.[/li][/ul][/spoiler]