Entry tags:
character history
SUMMARY:Vanadi is from a planet where everyone was doing just fine, and then humans showed up and ruined his life. He went from rich playboy adult son who won't stop throwing parties on the lavish family estate, to unwilling cybernetic test subject, sold by his government to a human scientist for the price of a bit of tantalizingly advanced human technology. His only real friend in the world saved his ass, and then had to keep on saving him through the course of a war-preventing adventure. He is now thoroughly tired of being a damsel in distress, and tired of most of his planet and their crummy ethics. After the adventure he decided to take off and go see the universe at large, where he became constantly broke and utterly homeless.
FULL BACKGROUND: There’s a little planet that humans have recently become aware of, which they have decided to call Wayland. It’s an unusual case, home to nearly 20 different sentient species, which have only recently and through generations of hard work come to a tentative accord with one another, after a long and bloody history. This, and the fact that very few of the denizens have any interest in seeing life outside of Wayland, have made this a remote and rather backwater planet.
Unfortunately, humans encountered a problem when landing for the first time on the planet. What technology the natives did have was powered by a unique source referred to as Light, present as an energy in the atmosphere that could be channeled down to the ground for use. Though it was never known to be anything but beneficial to the natives, the human ship passing through it reacted poorly, and the resulting radiation infected about 10% of the human populace with a fatal disease, and sterilized all of them.
After the humans landed and began to build their city from the remains of their transport ship, the static birthrate issue had to be addressed. Nearly every scientist, biologist, and geneticist turned their attention to it, but it was Dr Venus Vega that would come to have the most impact on the planet. Her solution was not to put her hope in human life yet to come, but focus on what they already had. She would find the way to immortality through cybernetics and eliminate the fear of sickness, old age, and death. All she needed was a test subject. She couldn’t work with a human, of course, since human life was now more precious than ever before, and couldn’t be endangered. She turned her attention to one of the native species, kitrites, whose genetic makeup was remarkably alike with that of humans.
Vanadi of House Vadarta would never have had any reason to care about any of this, had he not been chosen to assist Venus’s work. He had distinguished himself as a capable athlete in peak physical condition, and on top of that was known for disappearing for long stretches of time as he traveled and partied around the world. He was the youngest of four siblings, essentially simply tolerated by his parents who had long since turned their hopes to the higher achieving of his siblings, and he seemed to have very few close friends who would concern themselves with his whereabouts or wellbeing. He was perfect. She traded a bit of advanced human technology to the kitrite government for the right to work on him, and the deal was made. Vanadi was taken against his will to play host to her experimental cybernetic advancements.
Over the course of a few long months he was made faster, stronger, more durable, very deadly, and decidedly miserable. To test the full extent of the loyalty program Venus had installed along with the physical upgrades, Venus used Vanadi to deal with a scientist who had recently discovered and been appalled by her work on an unwilling subject. She ordered him to take whatever action he saw fit to, to ensure he wouldn’t do anything to endanger their project. Vanadi came to the reluctant conclusion that killing him would be the only certain way of keeping him silent, and the programming compelled him to carry it out. Venus’s work was a success.
Two things were unknown to Venus. The first was that Vanadi had a single good childhood friend, Maria Del Andallo, who began a search when Vanadi failed to show up for one of their yearly reunions. The second was that that atmospheric energy, Light, was not quite as innocuously inert as the people of Wayland assumed, and her lab used quite a lot more of it than the planet had seen before. And all that Light funneling down to one singular location didn’t sit well with the undiscovered beings who lived within the atmospheric fields and fed upon it.
Maria enlisted the help of a human who had already made himself an infamous nuisance, Riley Riker. They broke into Venus’s lab to free Vanadi, and Riley attempted to lift the obedience code Venus had installed on Vanadi — only to accidentally transfer command to himself. A second human met them at the closed down lab, Kelawar. She discovered that her father had been that unfortunate scientist that had uncovered Venus’s work on Vanadi and been killed for it, and Kelawar was determined to expose and punish Venus.
Before any sort of revenge could be planned or extracted, though, the Light funneling into the lab reached a maximum threshold, and one of the denizens of the atmosphere dropped in for a visit to completely devastate the lab. Venus was assumed dead, and with nothing left to satisfy Kelawar and Vanadi’s thirst for revenge, the group opted to escort Vanadi back to his home. Kelawar came along to try to de-program his obedience to Riley’s commands.
From there, however, conflict began to stir. More creatures like what had attacked the lab began to descend planetside and wreck havoc, and only the eyes of Maria’s species were attuned to see them. Various nations began to blame one another for the attacks, and the planet teetered on the verge of plunging back into the wars it had only just freed itself from. Vanadi’s group came to meet a young member of that strange new species that housed itself in the mechanical parts of Vanadi’s body (until they were able to build it a robotic body of its own), who called itself the Fiery Traveller. It helped them understand that its species was being attacked by this draining of the Light, their habitat, and together they managed to spread understanding and quell the conflict. However, it soon reported that the Light was still being drained at an alarming rate, which lead to the discovery that Venus was not only still alive, but had found a way to power herself with Light. The five of them confronted her and pushed her to overload herself with Light, which proved too much for her body and killed her.
Though they succeeded, Vanadi was left disillusioned and frustrated by the greed and lack of compassion he’d come to see throughout the planet. He left Wayland as soon as he was able to and figured he'd take his chances with the rest of the universe, where he'd heard there were better prosthetics and loads of new species to sleep with. Nearly immediately he discovered that his family's wealth stopped at the magnetic field around Wayland, and he was painfully broke in the universe at large. He currently takes employment as he can find it, enjoying life as a nearly penniless space hobo.