| Appearance: |
Degre is a travel-worn traveler who keeps to himself, and his way of dressing shows it. He wears a cloak with a poncho overtop it, a wide-brimmed hat, heavy shirts and pants and mid-calf boots. He keeps a small pack with a bedroll a rifle, and a little camp kit, and keeps his pipe and a pouch of smokables on his belt. He also carries an augmented stun pistol on his hip, safeties removed and interface tampered with to all for customizations.
Degre is a tall man, and shows signs of genetic tinkering beneath his remaining augmentations. He has rich, copper-hued kinky hair that is shaved on one side of his head and shorn relatively short on the rest. His skin is dark brown and his features are broad, though the same half of his head that has been shaved is also heavily scarred where cyborware proprietary gilding was removed and not fully repaired. Degre's eyes are mostly dark, but they flash in the dark like a nocturnal beast's, and when viewed by methods other than plain human eyesight, they show flecks of ultraviolet and infrared refraction from iris to freckled sclera. Degre's scarring goes down his neck and covers his chest, growing more chaotic over his replaced arm. It's clear that the arm was a later replacement; a kind of dilute copper hue that mimicks a paler human's skintone. He keeps it under his cloak most of the time, cutting a one-armed silhouette when he's spotted out in the wild.
Degre was at one time a royal of a defunct religio-political order that held sway over Star City for hundreds of generations. He has been bred with a confident bearing and a formidable comportment, often belayed by the way he slouches whenever he's around others. Moreover, his nanobots were not able to be safely disengaged from some of their more nefarious purposes while trying to keep their health and life-extending properties. When he is stressed, Degre emits pheromones that at once repel strangers and demand compliance from this who were bred within the same system he was born to. They're relatively faint, but they can hit an unwary creature with a subconscious sense that Degre is bigger and scarier than he looks on first glance.
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| Personality: |
Degre is a sad old man who has not lived up to his expected potential... and he's kind of okay with that. He was born to rule Star City, but defected when he was sub-twenties to join the growing resistance who had been under the thumb of previous emperors for more generations than could be counted. This regime had built terrible, wonderful things, and had classed themselves gods of the stars. Degre refused to join that legacy.
He successfully aided the resistance from inside the system, threatening and conniving in a way that made it appear that he was maneuvering to put himself on the throne before all of his siblings and his father, the crowned Emperor. This was a screen used to destroy the entire system, however at the height of the final campaign, he faltered. There were a few people he valued that were to be killed. When he ultimately chose to damage his ties with the resistance to keep them alive, he was classed as a traitor and thrown into prison with them.
He spent years in isolation, repenting with the pain of uncertainty and loneliness, hoping that those who had taken over would have the self determination necessary to protect one another in a way that his own people hadn't cared to. He was stripped of most of his augmentation, including the markings that deigned him a ruler. His other augments came later. It wasn't very long that he was released back into Star City's prison system, uncertain of what to do with himself, certain he was done with life all save the body of his that wanted to keep living. He had shut down.
The day that Star City was overwhelmed by xenodragons was the day that Degre escaped. His prison wing was compromised and he killed a warden who was trying to prevent their escape. Degre figured that if the entire Station had been compromised, it was up to his fellow prisoners to determine whether they should flee or stay; anything else was a death sentence. He's regreted that decision ever since.
Degre's arm was ripped out by a young xenodragon, but he managed to survive by pulling himself to the occupied airlocks and getting help from other refugees taking on last-second passengers. He was unable to prevent another prisoner from joining them, though at the time he wouldn't have wanted to. It was when that prisoner killed the pilot and took over the emergency shuttle that he began the first of his grievances, and those multiplied when the prisoner joined up with pirates who planned to sell the escapees into slavery. Degre managed to foil that plan, but not without a lot of mess. The hijacked pirate shuttle limped along after some of the last escape ships to what would eventually be Nidus Descendi, where he was operated on in exchange for his help. Don't ask where the new arm came from. He isn't usually the sort to keep trophies.
Degre has spent the last eleven years tracking down pirates who have followed the refugees to this new planet, working on his own (for the most part) to prevent anyone else from being captured or killed. There is some core part of them that sees folks like those who settled at Nidus Descendi as "his", whether he means to or not. Even those pirates who might have hailed from Star City's are "his", though now that he's experienced such trauma, he is far more torn on rehabilitation.
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