#Ahriss Kallig

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hah! I finally figured out how I would build Ahriss as a 5e character!

lawful evil githyanki knowledge cleric

(she has probably never prepared a healing spell a day in her life)

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For the Tey legacy: 3, 7, 9, 21, and 23

3. Most humble VS Most arrogant

Humblest would probably be Yudema. I have a fair number of insecure or self-loathing characters, but fewer actually humble ones… Yudema though does tend to see herself as (and feels comfortable within) being a small piece of much larger wholes; and she tends toward being measuredly critical as a matter of precaution, and so doesn’t have much room for overconfidence or self-aggrandizement. It’s partly a(n Imperial) Chiss thing, partly a spy thing, partly a “how much of my Self can I elide into being simply a reflection of what my surroundings require” thing.

Most arrogant is DEFINITELY AHRISS, lmao. Late game/post canon Ahriss, at least; it’s something that comes along with the position and the absurd amounts of power she can draw on at a whim - she plays the role of confident capricious Sith Lord often enough in her rise to power that the facade ends up moulding into her existing personality.

7. “Sleep is for the weak!” VS “Sleep for a week”

Toss-up for this between Ahriss and Khisit… Ahriss can get away with it because of substituting the Force for basic human bodily needs, which is good because she’s a) busy and b) easily distracted in her free time by shiny things that are vastly more interesting than going to bed! Whereas Khisit just… doesn’t enjoy inactivity, and is pretty bad at listening to their body about being tired. And very good at listening to the burble of the caf pot in the morning.

On the other hand, Meshurat is probably the most regularly appreciative of lots of sleep. Vhe enjoys daily physical pleasures like food and sleep the most, and there’s just something so nice about flopping into bed and not having to move for a while after a long hard day of acrobatic murder.

(Errr, runner up goes to Rivka post-Vitiate possession, because she’s depressed as fuck and interacting with the rest of the world is terrible? But um. That’s not really happy or fun at all….)

9. Darkest backstory VS Lightest Backstory

Hmmm, these are both kind of difficult to say? Darkest could be Khaave (prisoner used for a biotech experiment in creating soldiers with the mind, knowledge, physical enhancements, etc. of a war droid, who escaped after the project exploded spectacularly); could be Ahriss (slave for the first 17 years of her life, injured and scarred as a child in an industrial accident that killed her parents, thus leaving her to fend for herself); could be Khisit (child of political asylum-seekers from the Sith Empire whose parents were assassinated when they were a baby; raised among the Jedi and thus amongst their particular flavor of institutionalized racism & psychological neglect) - but I guess they way I’ve written them, the heaviness of their backstories are kind of quiet rather than super dramatic? And also all rather different in tone. Although ooh! I don’t have a ton of detail for her, but for what I do have, Zairi certainly has a dark backstory - she’s a nonhuman slave in the Empire and she’s neurodivergent of the “emotional regulation issues, PTSD, and psychotic episodes” flavor, and these... don’t mix well, to give the understatement of the year. She is reaallly not treated well. (Thankfully, Jaesa comes along and picks her up as an apprentice! Things get better from there.)

Lightest..... hmm, I don’t know that I ever write characters with light backstories, hah. Maybe Meshurat. Vhe was a well-loved aristocrat child not subject to any particular traumas, at least; although does casual presence and expectation of violence beginning in childhood disqualify a background from being “light”, even if it’s a totally normal cultural feature? Asking for a friend.

21. Most religious VS Most atheistic

...... :) *chinhands* at that framing...... anYWAY....

Most religious would be a tie between Ahriss and Rivka. Ahriss is more involved in the formalized aspects of her practise than Rivka is (in part because Rivka is more attracted to the formal practises of her childhood community on Namadii than she is to formalized/communal Jedi practise), but for both of them, their religion traditions are very important to how they interact with the world on a day-to-day basis.

On the other side, mmm, neither Khaave nor Sochya really interact with any religious tradition at all... well, okay, to be fair Khaave does attempt to try out Mandalorian culture after she’s press-ganged into it after the Great Hunt, but it doesn’t ever click with her and she hands in a resignation letter so to speak after a while. (Jury’s out on whether all the other Mandalorian communities accept that, but....)

Honorable mention to Khisit, who has an antagonistic relationship to every religious tradition anybody has ever tried to stick them in :’)

23. Best at self-care VS Most self-destructive

... *stares at character page* ummmmmm...... Me...shu...rat...? I guess? Nobody in this house believes in self-care, istg. Meshurat is at least relatively psychologically healthy and doesn’t overwork zerself. I think vhe’d probably choke you if you suggested vhe relax with a nice bubble bath and some mindfulness, though.

Most self-destructive.... pick a card, any card ???? Rivka, Khisit, and Yudema are probably the front-runners, though. Yudema because he just straight-up tries to deny having a “self” to begin with; Khisit self-isolates and has a regular feelings-bottling plant up and running to great aplomb; and Rivka makes a hobby out of risky behaviours and self-harm for a while, trying to deal with all the assorted traumas of the JK storyline. Poor kids.

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tagged by @darth-char, fonts from here

Ahriss has a very swoopy flowery signature for all her important darthly documents

Khaave knows what letters look like on a screen, I suppose ?? and writes each one out individually. she’s a bit new at this ok, she’s trying.

would you like some crabbed up spikiness from holding the pen too tightly with your left slant?

Meshurat tends not to write by hand if vhe can help it, but vhe learned through copying motion patterns from a tutor.

scribbly scribbly, if you can read it just fine then Rivka’s not going worry about making it look “nice”.

Sochya’s gets the job done and he’s got better things to worry about.

Yudema tries to make theirs look fairly nice and even, but ends up sprawling a fair bit over the page.

not sure who all’s been tagged or has characters they’d want to do for this? but consider yourself tagged if you want to do it!

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wow guess who didn't remember how freaking brutal the npc animations were in the Organa Jedi enclave when you have to go save Elana Thul's Sith strike team D: like, flying leap onto cowering Sith enemy brutal. because I mean it probably depends on the Inquisitor, but, this would be only the... second? time that Ahriss had ever seen Jedi fight or fought them herself (first time was the ambush in the Balmorra planetary quest), and it's a very... intense impression, particular given that everyone she went to find, she saw either already dead or getting stabbed right through the gut o____o the cutscene animation plays it very much as a "whatever, I'm just more awesome than all these guys" thing, but honestly I'm more imagining Ahriss calling Elana back after she's dispatched the guy who killed Urtel Moren, and trying to put on a brave, unflappable face when in reality she's kind of freaked and shaking from the adrenaline.

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what the fuck how did I never realize Thanaton had an extensive backstory THAT MIRRORS THE GODDAMN INQUISITOR'S ;A; well shit, now I have Thanaton feelings ;~; .....also shit now I'm just imagining Ahriss discovering some years later that he'd been instrumental in retaking Begeren and being filled suddenly with a sense of loss and regret at what had happened for the first time. eeeeeeep.

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so I know the verbal slapfight with Thanaton just before the duel on Corellia is more or less “intended” to be a tradition-vs-newfangled lack of fucks given, in terms of how it’s written, but that’s… not really how it goes with Ahriss for obvious reasons. and as I was thinking about some language stuff earlier this morning*, it prompted this idea that I really like for a bit of how their confrontation goes -

- and so basically Thanaton says his piece about how she’s flouted all the rules of Sith conduct, allowing her to go unpunished would allow her and her ilk to run the Sith into the ground; Ahriss responds with how that’s all lies and he’s just following a grudge against Zash and her students. Thanaton finally plays his trump card of “slaves can never be truly Sith anyway,” and Ahriss’s response, just before blades are drawn, is:

“My family has kept the old Sith ways since the days of Marka Ragnos. Shall we cut palms here, and see between us whose blood runs darker?”

(*cue Thanaton’s lightsaber igniting*)

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I’ve been wondering off and on again lately what I want to do about Ahriss’s Nar Shaddaa storyline, because tbh it never really fit her character with what canon has, and the idea of your PC just sort of fancifully starting a cult (”cult”...) and it never being looked at too hard by the writing has started feeling increasingly... not cute.

and I’m thinking what I think makes the most sense to change it to, is that Rylee and Destris should really be the main actors since they’re the ones familiar with the actual context Palladius is operating in, and what they’re interested in is actually exposing his organization and bringing it down, rather than getting revenge by replacing him. the Sith Inquisitor, they need help from not to provide the grandiose figure that people should switch their worship to (eeeehhhhh... :S), but instead to be the public lightning rod for their smear campaign who can actually handle any silencing attempts (a.k.a. Palladius sending in his murder goons).

...this probably means most of the actual quests that make up the storyline would have to be dispensed with, but I’m uh. kind of ok with that.

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"you always a sicko, or did you just kind of fall into it like I did?" ANDRONIKOS OMFG man I'm so glad I'm replaying this, I barely remember his early dialogue and this is utter gold

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"what's a Killik? some other noble house?" "native aliens" a.k.a. Ahriss continues to be adorably un-worldly, and it *really shows* that House Thul has spent a bunch of its recent history in the Empire

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I definitely thought you could con Nomar into handing over his Elysium key without a fight even after sassing him, as opposed to killing him right there? oops. restarting that part of the quest then, because Nomar first being a superiority complex-having douchebag, and then a *lying* superiority complex-having douchebag when he decides to meet you there and kill you anyway, is a bit formative as Ahriss's first real experience with an actual live Jedi... (I think I'm also falling into a tendency of making her snarkier in this first chapter than she actually was/is, because I'm so used to how she acts when she's older.... weh. sadly, she is not yet at a place where she'd make snarky cracks about leaving a trail of bodies behind her, when she's still a small apprentice. ah well.)

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Rehanna Rist has a line about "I've seen more of war than you or that little bird Thul" if you're a tactless noodle and ask her straight up to call up Nomar Organa so you can kill him, resulting in her fighting you. I hadn't remembered that, but I like it! actually, I just like Rehanna Rist in general. it must majorly suck to be an assassin master who gets beaten and coerced by a tiny arrogant Sith half your age :/

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the sidequest to kill an Exchange boss out on the Dune Sea kind of cracks me up, because you take the dialogue option "I don't work for crime lords" (Andronikos disapproves, natch), and the quest giver Shayl Tasao (who incidentally I think is a gr8 npc who I'd love to see again) goes "oh, are you an upstanding citizen?" all sarcastically and Ahriss would just give her this extremely affronted look and say YES, ACTUALLY I AM and believe it 100% too :')

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also now kind of wanting to write a thing set in handwavey nebulous future!SWTOR where the Republic is hosting its first official state visit or whatnot (in the name of mutual peace?) for the Emperor and her wife and consort and et ceteras (princesses too? still uncertain because that seems... a little too risky from a security perspective), from the perspective of like, random audience Republic citizen. alas, some other day of the week.

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Odds for Ahriss, evens for Rivka? :3

oooh, okay *cracks knuckles* this is gonna be long

1. Ahriss has spent most of her life existing on one extreme end or the other as far as a spectrum of personal space allowances go. During her childhood and adolescence, her community overall didn’t have much in the way of individual space or privacy with the number of people living in the quarters they had, and space boundaries in interactions with anybody of higher status weren’t really hers to set; and this sort of constant presence of other people was largely adapted into a background noise she became numb to as a way to deal with it. Of course later as a Sith Lord, she’s subject to the opposite extreme, because of course you don’t crowd the personal space of a Sith, what do you have a death wish? Which is a bit of a subconscious shock that takes getting used to, but it largely ends up being more to her taste eventually? So at that point, she would be probably more likely to feel uncomfortable with other people getting too close to her, but that doesn’t really... ever happen much.

3. Depends on what kind of art museum! If it’s anything Sith-related, she’d be all over it, but otherwise not so much - most of her interest in art relates to what it has to say about history, and non-Sith history tends to cohabit in her mind with watching paint dry.

5. This is another thing that changes pretty drastically as Ahriss gets older. As an adolescent and a young apprentice, she tends to be very deliberate and think things through logically, but that honestly has a lot to do with the extent to which she suppresses her emotions at that point in her life than anything else. Later, her political work as a Dark Councilor also requires a good amount of deliberation and thus keeps her in the habit of such with her professional life, at least, but overall the further an aspect of her life gets from that context, the more likely she is to be impulsive and act on (momentary) emotion. OTHER PEOPLE certainly try to get her to find a bit of balance, esp during the Eternal Railroad timeline (cough Lana cough), but that especially is due to how easily she’d self-destruct out of impulsive poor decisions at that point, and not, like, any kind of active mental self-reflection on Ahriss’s part :X

7. Oh man. Well, for one thing, she was kind of rather terrified to face the Dread Masters again on Oricon. Not, hah, because of all their ABSOLUTE TERROR!!! powers, but because (as I’ve talked about a little in some fic), the way she experiences power and Force empathy makes the idea of letting herself get subsumed into their bond viscerally attractive. As for “overcoming” that fear.... ??? Honestly that’s not something I entirely understand, as a concept? In any case, there wasn’t any big story to it - she just needed to do it, so she did. There wasn’t any other choice.

9. Errr.... that really, really depends XD I suppose she’s more often gullible in an interpersonal sense, basically inclined to believe that anyone who’s kind to her actually has her best interest at heart? (coughZASHcough) Which has, lol, that’s definitely been taken advantage of x__x But then, on the other hand, if something runs counter to her expectations or prior experience, she’s absolutely skeptical to the point of rather extreme resistance to any information attempting to change her mind. (For example: anything about the Jedi not being evil incarnate; also Talos’s appeal to not search for immortality during the SI Rishi questline.)

11. Mmm, oh geez... for any sort of RPG with the three basic classes, she’d obviously be a mage. In something more D&D-esque, I’m inclined to say... *leafs through a wiki article on classes* ...cleric? Like. An evil cleric. But still. Warlock also might make sense?

2. Ohhhh gosh. Rivka would.... probably *really love* being a field archaeologist. She’s a big fucking nerd. But alas, the universe has not been kind to her in this respect, and it would probably never happen, or at least not until a lot of time and a lot of working through her feelings of her life not belonging to her happened :(

4. “Do they tend to try and cover it up and say they’re fine” OHHHH WOW THAT TOTALLY IS NOT A THING RIVKA WOULD EVER DO, OBVIOUSLY......... which is to say that is exactly what she does most of the time. Her combat prowess is one of the few things she’s been consistently praised and valued for, so anything that compromises that, she is very reticent to reveal to other people; and emotionally she also finds it hard to trust people with her weakness and pain. As for consequences, hah. There’s definitely the whole “untreated PTSD” thing going on after being controlled by Vitiate, which while probably not something that would have been dealt with regardless because Jedi, was not really helped by her keeping almost everyone at arms’ length about the whole matter.

6. I don’t think she is terribly easily creeped out by scary stories, honestly. Probably the most disturbing sorts of horror scenarios to her would be those involving a loss of physical or mental control over oneself - her mental abilities and confidence in them are pretty foundational to her self-concept, and the trope of Force users who lack self-discipline going off the deep end and committing atrocities and ending up controlled by evil desires is pretty well hammered into the subconscious of most Jedi of her generation.

8. Failed relationships, oof. Rivka does not handle them terribly well, mentally at least - she doesn’t try to cling to things once they’re clearly not working, but up to that point she’ll try to make things function even to the point of biting her tongue, and in general she’s very susceptible to self-doubt and blame over messing things up, being somehow wrong, et cetera. (I haven’t talked about it much on here, but one thing she had to deal with growing up was being shunted around through several different Jedi Masters before Orgus Din took her on, because of personality and theoretical outlook clashes. If anyone brings it up, she tends to act pretty blase about it, but it definitely left her susceptible to feeling like it’s something inherently wrong with her when a relationship goes poorly. In general, she’ll take a while to warm up to people and feel like she can begin to trust them on more than a superficial level.)

10. Rivka’s definitely a light packer. She doesn’t own a ton in the way of personal belongings to begin with, and what she does have is largely utilitarian - her comm unit/recording device, credit chits, her lightsaber, a couple of basic tools for maintaining her arm and leg in the field. If she’s got extra space for packing things and isn’t actively working on a mission, she’ll often have a datapad on her for reading.

...PHEW! :D

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so maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the Inquisitor should get some extra dialogue options on the Tatooine planetary quest when talking to/about Darth Silthar, of the “grad student meeting a professor whose papers they’ve been reading at a conference” sort. after all, they’re part of the same sphere, and according to the people on his Reclamation team, it sounds like he’s made quite a few interesting (re)discoveries.

(Ahriss especially I think would be at least passingly familiar with his name, considering one of those discoveries was of a temple on Ziost. at this point in her story, she’s not yet super invested in the history nerd angle of things, nor does she identify as being from Ziost to nearly the same extent that she does several years later, but it’s probably something she would have heard mentioned once or twice, and she’d still be fairly likely to remember his name better than some others if/when it came up in the texts Zash gave her during her training on DK.)