Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Aria Jenneth]

(rough draft)

Tarquin Alveis Markel

DOB: 1/23/70
Nationality: Caldari State
Bloodline: Deteis
Homeworld: New Caldari
Political affiliation: unaligned mercenary
Prior military rank: Captain

Tarquin Markel is, first and foremost, a career soldier, having served with distinction as a marine attached to the Caldari Navy and later in the special forces. He was decorated for valor several times over. His reputation for ruthlessness and steadfast loyalty got him selected for the Caldari military's enhanced soldier project. That honor, however, led to his involvement in the "514" incident, in which he and many of his enhanced cohorts fell prey to psychological subversion through their implants.

Installation of cleansed implants restored Markel to sanity, if not precisely stability. His abilities and sense of self eroded through mental trauma, his faith in the integrity and basic worth of the Caldari State broken, he wanders from one mercenary contract to the next, finding stability and meaning in the familiar routines of conflict, regardless of the flag he fights under.

Personally, the Deteis comes across more as soldier than diplomat. His demeanor is stoic, bordering on grim, and he has very little patience with people he considers frivolous or foolish. He is most sensitive on matters of family: his are still alive and well, and he is acutely aware of the consequences any perceived treasons on his part could bring them. That he cannot bring himself to return to the State fold, even for their sake, is his greatest single shame.

Politically, Tarquin looks on democracy as a pipe dream. Human beings, in his mind, need strong leaders; it's stupid to let the mob do as it pleases. Once, he thought that the State represented the apex of civilization in New Eden (his family were closely tied in to the corporate aristocracy, so this wasn't exactly an objective view). The rebellion that swept Tibus Heth into power shook his worldview badly, but he reluctantly accepted its necessity and ultimately embraced Heth as a savior.

That faith was more than shaken by the 514 incident. His mind infiltrated by a slithering, insinuating something, Tarquin needed a fortress to shelter in, walls to protect his integrity. He reached for his faith in the State, and found that it just wasn't there anymore. It was all the little things: the xenophobia, the petty brutalities witnessed, the demagoguery (Tarquin is SUCH an elitist at heart)-- the Heth regime was a shallow and vicious thing. The old regime was no better, a corrupt and self-serving plutocracy; he knew that by then. Family was a distant memory, a warm but fading dream, pleasant but insubstantial. Parents, siblings, cousins-- they could no more understand what he was going through than they could touch the twisting, formless intruder in his mind.

So he threw up the only bulwark he had left: a soldier's discipline. It was enough.

Only now, even that great, inchoate enemy is no more, and discipline is still all Tarquin can see that he has. That, and his useless, unending life. His purpose, his honor, and his faith are all nothing but memories of another existence.

All he can do is keep on with what he knows. So, that is what he does: he fights, he kills, he dies, he does it all again.

Only, he begins to think, perhaps there is, or at least should be, something more. Exactly what, he doesn't know. Perhaps it will come to him if he looks around a little.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Any inspiration from Grand Moff Tarkin?

[Aria Jenneth]

Ha! Not so much. More the last Roman king.

No, not emperor. King. They did have them. When you hear Brutus and Cassius going on about how Caesar wanted to make himself a tyrant, it's Tarquin the Proud and his predecessors that they have in mind.

Funnily, though, Tarquin Markel is a legacy brought over from an old Star Wars (West End, not d20) tabletop RPG game-- the resident shade of gray in a very "good versus evil" campaign, as Star Wars tends to be. He was a former Imperial Special Forces trooper (not the ones from the video games, the ones from the West End pen and paper game who got a nifty all-black variant of the biker scout armor from Return of the Jedi) who had kind of defected: he always insisted that the evils of the Empire did not originate with the Emperor, but with the corrupt Imperial bureaucracy and the moffs.

That game ended prematurely, and I've been waiting for literally a decade to resurrect the character. Naturally, New Eden seemed like a place where he'd fit right in.

Not as a pilot, though. I've been waiting for DUST 514 to come out since it was announced, just for this.

[Lyn Farel]

Haha it made me think of the Tarquin of Clear Skies actually. But only the name ofc.

Good work.

[Saikoyu]

Honestly the name Tarquin makes me think of British hares, but that's what growing up reading Redwall books will do to you.

Interesting character, are you going to actually RP in Dust then? 

[Aria Jenneth]

RP in DUST might be more common than you'd think. If the setting and setup are handled correctly, first-person games are a sight more immersive than Eve has ever been, and it's not like there isn't a pre-existing FPS/RPG genre. Think "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." or, on the more RPG side, Fallout and the Elder Scrolls games.

DUST won't quite be like any of those. Can't give any details for now (NDA, signed in digital blood), but if it all plays out right it'll be very much a part of the Eve universe. And we won't even have to justify a 3rd person perspective with some malarkey about camera drones.