Name: Apollyas Req'sus
Species: Human
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Appearance: Apollyas is a character I made in preparation for Bioware's TOR MMO. I never got to use him because I never really played the game once it came out, but he translates well enough to this game anyways, so I'm double-dipping. Instead of merely linking an actual image of my character (as in, that’s actual art I had done of him), I'll do a real description.
Apollyas is a male Human Jedi who stands at roughly 5'11". He keeps his hair short and maintains a bit of fairly groomed stubble on his face at all times. He isn’t vain, but he does appreciate a good set of facial hair, at least within Jedi standards. He has green eyes, flecked with a small amount of yellow pigmentation. He has a scar on his back-left thigh from an explosion he barely escaped while on business for his former Master. Along with his groomed stubbly beard, Apollyas keeps his robes well-maintained. On the surface, they appear to be traditional Jedi robes worn by the Knights of the Old Republic, but within the brown and white folds are pockets carrying micro-tools and other sundry items the young Knight wishes to carry with him. He outfits himself for whatever jobs the Order asks him to complete, from fixing a broken lock on a door in the Dantooine Enclave he currently calls home to subtly ending a small crime wave in a neighboring system. He also carries within his robes a mixed bag of nuts at all times, “Just in case.”
He also wears a tough, water-tight pair of boots with a number of buckles on either shoe, allowing the Jedi to keep his feet dry in most instances. He also wears a white belt that features its own pockets. It isn’t on the level of a utility belt, but it does allow Apollyas to keep more sundry items he finds while away from the Enclave.
Lightsaber: The first incarnation of Apollyas’ Lightsaber is extremely similar to
its second, current incarnation. In its first incarnation, Apollyas’ blade was made for unconventional length, allowing him to fight at a greater distance from his opponent while still maintaining his physical edge. The hilt itself is intentionally longer than the average Jedi’s, allowing it to be gripped wholly with both hands. The blade was also able to be “tuned”, allowing Apollyas to shorten it in combat. This caused a strain on the crystal. While the blade was more powerful, without proper control, the hilt was at risk of exploding. To counter this flaw, Apollyas added vents to the tip of the hilt’s emitter, hoping to reduce the strain. The switch on the first incarnation sits within saber’s lower grip, a poor design choice despite the benefit it gives in tuning the blade rather easily.
The second incarnation of Apollyas’ Lightsaber does not forgo the ability to “tune” the blade, but it does not focus as heavily on it. The hilt is still longer than average, allowing it to be gripped in two hands just as with the first incarnation, but this is more for Apollyas’ comfort in battle than it is for wielding a longer blade. The hilt also moves the switch so that it is between the two grips. Because of this, Apollyas is forced in battle to make a more conscious decision to tune his blade, preventing him from doing it as often as he had predicted he would have.
The blade itself remains more or less the same between incarnations. It is yellow with a deep-white core, signifying Apollyas as a Sentinel, as befits his special mix of Force talents and physical skills.
History: Apollyas grew up in the rough underbelly of Coruscant with his twin brother Reswyn and their father, Eventine. He did not know his mother, for she had gone missing after he and his brother were born. Apollyas' father did his best to raise his two sons, though it never seemed enough to him with his wife gone. He was not able to hold a steady job, nor was he able to kick any of his dirty habits he had picked up after leaving the Republic military. As the years rolled by, Apollyas and Reswyn fended for themselves as much as possible.
Shortly before being found by the Jedi Order, Apollyas and Reswyn attempted to steal credits from a local crime lord. As smart as the idea seemed in Apollyas' mind, nothing short of failure was waiting for him and his brother. Though the plan seemed to have work, a small fortune in credits having been stolen for the Req'sus family, nothing went by the crime lord unnoticed. Apollyas and Reswyn were quickly attacked and beaten within an inch of their lives. Had their father not stepped in and stopped the crime lord's thugs, the two young boys would have surely been killed. Though Eventine had prevented the boys' deaths, he was unable to stop the crime lord from seeking total vengeance. He decided to force the two young children, along with their father, into slavery.
Before the crime lord was able to sell the family,
Jedi Master Grithok Kel’n intervened. A seasoned Jedi, Kel’n had taken few pupils in her life, serving the Order more through her skills and combat abilities than any untapped ability to teach. Upon seeing the injustice of the local crime lord’s attempts at slavery, Master Kel’n snatched the family away from their captors and sent word of the boys to the Jedi Council, having felt their Force sensitivity already. Though he loved his children, Eventine agreed that being with the Order would be better for them. He simply couldn’t take care of them as well as they needed. While their sensitivity was strong individually, Master Kel’n could not deny that the two boys were even stronger together, most likely due to the nature of their birth. They could have been gifted Consulars, but it was Reswyn’s reluctance to leave his father that prevented this path for the boys.
Not willing to leave a Force sensitive boy in the hands of a “less-than-capable” father, Master Kel’n proposed a simple plan to the Council. She would deliver Apollyas into their care and Eventine would take Reswyn to Dantooine. The enclave needed mechanics and there was time yet for Reswyn to turn to the Force, should he choose to. Keeping Reswyn with his father was not normal, but the Council agreed to the plan on the condition that Apollyas cut contact with his family. In the end, Apollyas agreed and took his first steps to becoming a true Jedi.
Trial: As the years past, it was clear that Apollyas’ connection to the Force had waned after being separated from his brother. He was not weaker for having lost this connection, but something did feel missing to the young Jedi all the same. It was this lack of connection that Master Kel’n had chosen to test.
The twi’lek had kept an eye on the boy as he trained, interested in his “lessened” Force abilities. The Council did not assign the boy to be her Padawan. In fact, she had asked for him herself, curious to figure out the boy’s problem. He was not a special case, Force sensitive twins had been discovered by the order before, but Apollyas’ “disconnect” prevented him from using the full breadth of his abilities. Kel’n believed it to be merely psychological, something the Jedi could work through if forced to. She did not announce that Apollyas’ Trials had begun, but merely began giving the boy tougher and tougher tasks, after gaining permission from the Council to begin.
At first, Kel’n left Apollyas in a room with spare parts of various types. Some for starships, others for speeder bikes, but curiously, the young man had also found Lightsaber parts. He knew he was not meant to attempt to build a Lightsaber until his Trials, but like his Master, Apollyas was naturally curious. The room he was in was tucked away without any camera to record his breaking of tradition. He did not wish to defy the Order, but getting to tinker with Lightsaber parts before the Trials was not something that happened to every Padawan.
In his combat training, Apollyas found that he was never satisfied with any particular length of his training blade. He intentionally switched between bouts, attempting to find the “right” length for him. He had learned that he appreciated longer blades, but was still effective with shorter ones as well. This prompted Apollyas to experiment as he created what would become the first incarnation of his Lightsaber. The hilt was a hodge podge of parts and lacked its crystals and power sources, but his skills as a mechanic kept it from falling apart in his hands. Hiding the unfinished hilt in his Padawan robes, Apollyas returned to Kel’n, hoping she would not sense what he considered to be his deception of her. The twi’lek went along with the ruse, intentionally leading the boy to the other parts he needed, as if she did not know she was doing so. The boy grabbed the power cell from a discarded blaster he found as he and his Master visited the barracks for the Temple’s guards; he took a crystal from a training saber when his Master left to gather their supplies for a routine journey into the nearby mountains. They had trained there many times.
When Apollyas found a moment alone, planned by his Master, he put his saber together. Inserting the crystal and the power cell with the micro-tools he kept in his pockets, Apollyas’ secret Lightsaber was complete. He had not used the Force in the hilt’s construction. This thought did not strike Apollyas as odd until after his Trials were over.
Upon finishing his blade, he tested its construction and the switch that allowed him to “tune” it. Its natural length was a few feet longer than most, while its tuned, shorter length was a few inches shy of the average saber. The construction seemed a success. Upon finishing his secret project, Apollyas knew he would have to reveal his deception to his Master. He searched for her at their camp, only to discover the signs of a struggle. What could have caused such a battle, Apollyas did not know. The mountains were relatively safe.
Kel’n did not tell her apprentice that a passing trader had forgotten to properly maintain the locks on the cages of the animals he sold, allowing a
Thernbee to go free into the mountains. It lacked a mate and not a soul lived in the mountains that it could harm. The true Trials had begun for the young Jedi.
Apollyas followed the tracks of what seemed to be a fierce battle, the blood of two different beings mixing in patches on the ground. White fur had been scattered throughout the path. Eventually, the trail led Apollyas to a small cave, one that felt void of the Force. A pit within the Jedi’s heart opened as he stepped through the cave entrance. Quickly, the sounds of his Master and an unknown beast both crying out in pain reached his ears. Feeling a loss of control over his emotions, the Jedi instinctively reached for the makeshift Lightsaber that sat on his belt. With hilt in hand, Apollyas came upon a strange sight.
Before him stood not his Master and a beast, but a crying boy he found to be rather familiar. The boy’s clothes were dark, almost unnaturally so. He called to the boy, asking him how he had gotten into the cave, but the boy gave no answer. He reached out and grabbed the boy’s shoulder, hoping to calm him. The boy looked up into Apollyas’ face and smiled. In an instant, the boy had turned into a man, Lightsaber in hand. Apollyas thought he recognized the man, a mirror reflection of himself. Perhaps it was his father he faced or even his brother. Instead, Apollyas recognized what the man before him truly represented. As their blades clashed, the face of the man before him turned from the stubbly, short haired reflection of himself into the beautiful, flowing face of a woman with dark eyes. Her hair draped around her like a hood and the Lightsaber in her hand glowed red. Apollyas was facing his mother.
He did not know how he knew this to be true, he had no memories of his mother, but the figure before him merely mocked him saying that the truth remained buried, but never gone. It attacked, Apollyas barely able to keep up with the skills of this “Mother”. As they fought, the figure’s hair grew white and patchy. During a lull in the battle, it reached out towards Apollyas, beckoning him to come, suggesting an end to the fight. For an instant, Apollyas reached backed. As he did, the figure’s eyes flashed and its lips opened to send a mass of spittle into the Jedi’s face. Rather than being harmful, Apollyas somehow saw more clearly. The figure before him turned from the image of what he could only assume was his mother and into an animal he recognized as a Thernbee. Aware that he had been under a psychic attack from the beast and that its spit was dangerous, Apollyas instinctively reached toward the animal with the Force. His strength was beyond anything he had felt before. He pinned the Thernbee against a rocky pillar in the center of the cavern. Not wanting to kill it, he knocked its head against the pillar once more and set it on the ground carefully.
Remembering the danger of the animal’s spit, Apollyas reached into a nearby puddle and splashed water into his face. What remained of the spit had numbed a small portion of his ear, but Apollyas had avoided the worst of the Thernbee’s attack. Stepping out from behind the pillar, Master Kel’n smiled at her apprentice. She congratulated him on passing his Trials up to that moment. There was only one left for him to pass. She presented to him a small case filled with various Lightsaber parts.
Apollyas grew despondent and finally revealed to his Master that he had been deceiving her. He pulled his Lightsaber from his robes and knelt on the watery floor of the cavern, giving up the blade he had created to her, fully intending to give up the ways of the Jedi for his actions. Instead, she urged him to stand and gestured again to the case of parts. Kel’n told him what she had done, about the Council’s permission to do it, and explained that his Trials had begun days before. He stared at his makeshift Lightsaber with new eyes.
The Lightsaber in his hand was the culmination of his training before his Trials. The blade he would create at the end of his Trials would be the true representation of his connection to the Force, now made whole. By reaching back for the hand of his mother, Apollyas had accepted what he had only buried as a child: he was a Jedi like his mother before him. When he told his Master what he had witnessed during the psychic attack of the Thernbee, Kel’n merely nodded. She had her suspicions that he was the son of a Jedi Knight. The vision had proven this to her. When he told her that his mother’s Lightsaber had been red, Jedi Master Grithok Kel’n waved it off. Thernbees liked to toy with their victims before killing them. Apollyas was not convinced. Instead of focusing on the vision, Kel’n urged Apollyas to focus on more practical matters. The final construction of his Lightsaber.
Sitting down to meditate, Apollyas felt his connection to the Force surge forward once more. He had never been so intune with the Force, he felt it flowing through him now like a river. It wasn’t until that moment that Apollyas truly understood just how little of his potential he had been tapping into. He fell into a deep trance, feeling as though he were both outside of his body and inside it. Only in death could he be more one with the Force. The case of Lightsaber parts flew apart, leaving only the individual pieces of what would soon be his new hilt. The first incarnation of his blade flew from his hip, then separated into its individual components as well. In a swirl of Force energy, the pieces of his Lightsaber came together, no longer a mess of components barely sealed together. All that was missing was the crystal. Apollyas got to his feet and placed a palm on the central pillar in the cavern. Like bark from a tree, a small chunk of rock fell to the ground at the slightest touch. Beneath the rock had laid a yellow crystal, throbbing with energy. As though it had been made for this moment, the crystal left the rock and slipped into the waiting casing of Apollyas’ Lightsaber hilt.
As the Lightsaber sealed shut, Apollyas came out of his trance. He breathed the air of the cavern, taking in the dank, watery essence of it before finally stating:
“Well, I guess I’m a Jedi now. Can we take that thing back where it belongs, already?”
His former Master smiled, ready to present her first successful Jedi Knight to the Council.
Mechanical Statistics
Attributes
Physicality
Power: **
Finesse: ***
Endurance: **
Mental Acuity
Power: **
Finesse: ***
Endurance: **
Affinities
The Living Force: *
The Physical Force: *
The Unifying Force: *
Lightsaber Styles
Form I: Shii-Cho: *
Skills
Lightsaber Offence: 1
Lightsaber Defence: 1
Lightsaber Deflection: 1
Force Pull: 1
Repair: 1
Slicing: 1
