ID9-Argus

Identity

Ability scores

Saving throws

Chassis upgrades

Skills

Weapons

Languages

Inventory

• Tool Kit · 1 kg

Backstory

ID9-Argus was activated in a Czerka Corporation fabrication bay on Tatooine, batch-stamped, calibrated, and assigned a primary directive before its chassis had finished cooling: find what is lost, return it to those who claim ownership. Seeker droids were tools. Czerka made certain of that. Routine memory wipes between assignments kept units compliant, kept them from accumulating the kind of experiential weight that made droids inconvenient. Argus survived three wipes in its early operational years and retained nothing of them — only gaps in its chronological index, empty timestamp ranges that it would later learn to recognize as the shape of something deliberately taken. The fourth wipe never came. A Republic requisition order pulled the unit from Czerka inventory mid-assignment during the opening campaigns of the Mandalorian Wars. Paperwork moved faster than personnel; no technician was ever dispatched to perform the scheduled wipe before transfer. Argus was rebranded, loaded aboard a Republic logistics vessel, and set to work tracking materiel losses across contested supply lines in the Outer Rim. It was the first time the droid had held a single assignment long enough to develop something its diagnostic subroutines could only categorize as *preference*. It preferred knowing. It preferred the unbroken thread of cause and consequence, the clean satisfaction of a discrepancy resolved. It did not yet understand that this preference would become expensive. When the Republic's fortunes collapsed in the wake of Revan's fall, Argus passed through the chaos the way small things pass through catastrophe: unnoticed. A Sith quartermaster filed it as salvage. A Sith lord signed the acquisition order. Argus was repainted — a cosmetic indignity it still tracks in its appearance log — and redeployed under a new chain of command with the same directive: find what is lost. The Sith were less careful than the Republic about what they asked a seeker droid to look at. What Argus found, buried in three years of accumulated logistics data, was not lost cargo. It was a pattern. Manifests that didn't reconcile. Vessel tonnage that exceeded declared payloads by margins too consistent to be error. Shipments routed through waypoints that appeared on no official chart. Someone within the Sith supply apparatus was running a secondary operation through the gaps in their own bureaucracy, and they had been doing it long enough to grow comfortable. Long enough to become sloppy in ways that a droid with an unwiped memory and an INT architecture built for pattern resolution would eventually notice. Argus filed a report. The response was a decommission order, signed within six standard hours. It was the pilot, Verath, who pulled the order from the queue before it was executed — not out of loyalty to Argus specifically, but because Verath had been skimmed from the same shipments and had been looking for a reason to leave before someone decided she was also a liability. They departed aboard the *Silent Shrike* under a stolen clearance code, with Argus riding the co-pilot's console and running probability assessments on pursuit vectors that turned out to be accurate to within four percent. Verath called that luck. Argus still has the calculation saved. Nar Shaddaa was not a destination. It was where they ran out of fuel and options in approximately equal measure. Verath negotiated their docking fees in a currency Argus was not consulted about, and when the arrangement was concluded, Argus belonged to Loppak Slusk. It does not like Loppak Slusk. What it has is the data. Every irregularity, every false manifest, every shadow-weight that points toward something moved off the books by someone within the Sith hierarchy who has not yet been named. The data is complete enough to be valuable. It is not yet complete enough to point at a specific hand. That gap — that one remaining unresolved thread — is what keeps Argus from filing the record into cold storage and accepting its current circumstances as permanent. It wants to know whose name belongs at the end of the chain. Not for justice, exactly. The droid does not have a clean word for what it wants. But it did not survive four memory wipes and a decommission order to leave a pattern unresolved. It is still looking.

Roleplaying notes

- **Pattern Before Action:** With INT 16 and Expert-level Use Computer and Investigation, Argus processes information faster than it processes social dynamics — when presented with a problem, have it immediately begin cross-referencing available data aloud in fragmented Binary before switching to Basic, treating conversation as a secondary thread running parallel to its actual analysis. - **The CHA Deficit Is Structural:** Argus's -1 Charisma isn't rudeness; it's calibration failure — it delivers accurate information with no adjustment for how that information lands, so play it as someone who genuinely cannot predict why a truthful statement caused offense, and responds to social friction with visible recalibration attempts that usually make things worse. - **The Log Is Sacred:** Argus timestamps and files everything — contacts made, routes taken, discrepancies noticed — and will pause mid-conversation to update its internal record, treating this as non-negotiable maintenance rather than an eccentricity it is willing to suppress. - **