Vass

Identity

Ability scores

Saving throws

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Weapons

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Inventory

• Half-Vest · 2 kg
• Blaster Pistol · 1 kg
• Tool Kit · 1 kg

Backstory

The Roche Asteroids were not a place that produced dreamers. They produced workers — meticulous, tireless, and precise. Vass had been all three since the moment they could hold a calibration tool, apprenticed at eleven to a maintenance crew servicing the long-haul freighters that stopped to resupply at the Roche hive-docks. Most Verpine were content with that life. The collective hummed along, and the collective was enough. Vass wanted the thing that hummed *underneath* it — the deeper architecture of how systems failed, why they failed, and what a careful mind could do about it before they did. That distinction, between fixing what broke and understanding what *could* break, was the only kind of ambition Vass had ever felt. It was quiet and technical and entirely their own. Their first real ship assignment came at fifteen, aboard a mid-tonnage bulk freighter running hyperlane routes through the Outer Rim — the kind of vessel that the Galactic Republic barely noticed and independent merchants couldn't do without. Vass had earned the berth honestly, scoring high enough on a Republic technical certification to draw the attention of the ship's chief engineer, a gruff Duros named Kel Veth who collected promising young specialists the way other people collected debts. Six months in, a coolant relay in the main drive shaft began cycling erratically. The ship's diagnostic computer flagged nothing. Vass noticed — in the way Verpine noticed things, through the subtle wrongness of a vibration frequency picked up through the deck plating and processed without conscious thought. They brought it to Kel Veth. Kel Veth told them to log it and move on. Three weeks later, the relay ruptured mid-transit. Vass reached the shaft access before anyone else. What they did in the next four minutes was not heroic in any shape they recognized. It was a sequence of correct decisions under time pressure, each one costing something. The last decision cost them their right arm, sheared away at the shoulder when a secondary burst caught them mid-repair. The coolant sealed. The ship survived. Vass woke up in the medical bay twenty hours later with a CON score that the trauma had permanently degraded and a body that no longer matched the space it needed to occupy. Kel Veth called them brave. Vass thought that was a way of not saying *sorry*. They were repatriated to Roche with a written commendation, a prosthetic fitting referral, and no arm. The prosthetic never came — Republic aid allocation to hive-worlds ran slow in this century, slower than most official records admitted. So, Vass adapted. They built a new one from spare parts, restructured every tool-grip and interface habit they'd built over years, and grew quieter in ways people sometimes mistook for peace. What they actually grew was a question they couldn't stop turning over: the diagnostic system had failed. Not catastrophically, not obviously — it had failed in exactly the kind of subtle, compounding way that killed people on ships too small for the Republic to worry about. Vass wanted to understand that failure well enough to build something better. Not for recognition. Not even, precisely, for the arm they hadn't gotten back and had to rebuild themself. For the version of themselves that had stood in that shaft knowing the computer had already told everyone it was fine. They were sixteen now, back on Roche, one good arm, a borrowed tool kit, and a head full of things the galaxy's existing systems had not yet caught up to.

Roleplaying notes

- **High INT, Expert Mechanics:** When a device, system, or vehicle is introduced, Vass has almost certainly already catalogued its probable failure points — ask the GM quietly what they notice without being prompted, rather than waiting for a skill check to be called. - **Low CON, Missing Arm:** Vass tires faster than their competence suggests they should and cannot always catch themselves when they slip — lean into physical vulnerability in tense moments; their body is the honest record of what their mind cost them. - **Behavioral Habit:** Before touching any piece of unfamiliar equipment, Vass pauses for exactly two or three seconds and runs their remaining hand along the casing — a remnant reflex from when two hands did the same job, now half a ritual and half a diagnostic. - **Relationship Style:** Vass does not perform warmth but offers something more durable — they remember precise details about allies (what tool someone prefers, how they like problems explained) and deploy that knowledge practically, which is their version of care; strangers get patience, not friendliness. - **Speech Pattern:** Vass speaks in short declarative sentences, uses technical vocabulary without apology, and rarely asks questions that are actually questions — "That relay is misaligned" where someone else would say "Did you check the relay?" Their affect is flat, but they are almost never actually indifferent.