So Niako

*Ekduul Thisa Phano So Niako* was one of the most notorious Drin Ath Midari marauders, active during the Settling Years and the Second Great Extension. She is notable for developing the "reverse mindrend" technique, which made her effectively immortal by letting her move from body to body.

## Description

### Physical characteristics

So Niako's physical characteristics are something of a moot point, given that they change every time she occupies a new body. In her original Drin Ath Midari form, however, she was renowned for her beauty and grace, which attracted a lot of attention from others around her social stature. It is speculated that this is one part of why she chose to live a marauder's lifestyle, away from the comforts and riches of her family's holdings.

### Personality

She appears to be highly driven, eager to make her mark on history. Her research comes before everything else, trying to perfect something no-one has done before. However, she is also cruel and sadistic, and what few eyewitness accounts exist of her attacks suggest she deeply enjoys the act of killing. She has been known to engage in reckless, suicidal attacks, in which countless of her own followers perish, which seems not to matter to her in the slightest. All in all, she is an incredibly dangerous person, a sadistic psychopath who does not seem to care about anything except her own horrible experimentation.

## History

### As a noblewoman

So Niako was born in EY 499 into the Thisa family, a moderately highly-ranked noble house. From a young age, she displayed incessant curiosity; where torture of slaves was merely a fact of life - or a pastime - for others, young Phano was very targeted and inquisitive in her sadism. She studied biology and physiology, and performed vivisections and other "experiments", deepening her knowledge of the body. When she learned the mithraic arts, she would try her out her new spells in a manner which can only be described as scientific, and would try to use them in novel ways. After being taught the basics of mindrending, she quickly discovered that the process could, theoretically, be reversed; thus, an ambition, bordering on obsession, was born.

Meanwhile, her family's situation was rapidly changing. The scion of one of the other major branches of the Thisa family, Samak Dreeth, had the thinly-veiled ambition of becoming Exalted Leader of Seph Konar, and he was cunning enough to make major headway towards this goal. Through his political maneuvering and assassination, the Thisa family was rising to become one of the most prominent noble houses on Seph Konar, and many lower- and middle-ranked nobles saw this upheaval as a chance to improve their own lot in life, by marrying into the Thisa family. Despite not being in Samak Dreeth's branch, Phano was renowned for her beauty, and so she was still seen as a prized catch. This led to an increasing number of suitors, marriage proposals, and assassination attempts, which she, being completely disinterested in Seph Konar's politics, saw as little more than distractions from her work.

In EY 548, Samak Dreeth finally came out on top. Seeing this as her prime opportunity - for not only were the distractions getting worse by the day, her research on her family's slaves was stalling, and she needed more variety in her subjects - Phano went to see her now all-powerful relative the very day he was named Exalted Leader, petitioning him directly for a Writ of Predation with his signature, allowing her to officially sever all political ties to her family and become an independent marauder. While he was slightly taken aback by her forwardness, he had heard of her reputation and her own ambitions, and he was all too happy to set her loose. She received a decommissioned frigate slated to be struck from the register of the Leyek Drath Ghaan and scrapped, and the usual marauder crew of exiled criminals, volunteers running from their past, and straight-up psychopaths, and set out for the border. The last transmission she sent before transitioning to FTL in the upper atmosphere of Seph Konar was to register her full, adult name, So Niako, two words from an ancient language, meaning "Stormwind" and "Reaper".

### As a marauder

She very rapidly gained a reputation as one of the most aggressive and dangerous marauders in the Farfringe, sometimes striking targets close enough to the Core Sectors they believed themselves to be safe enough to go without an escort. She proved to be extremely difficult to track down, much more so than any other marauder. Unlike them, she did not return to Drin Ath Midari space particularly often, as she used the slaves she captured for her own experiments, rather than bringing them home for sale. She was only tracked down a handful of times, and because she usually managed to fight off the attackers or slip away, it took a few decades for CSC forces to find out what she was trying to do. After this, a permanent task force was established to hunt her down and destroy her, but they had not been operating for very long and had had no success when Samak Dreeth started the Second Great Extension and almost all military forces had to be recalled to active front-line duty.

By this point, unbeknownst to the CSC, she had actually succeeded in developing the first basic form of the reverse mindrend, and she had been jumping from body to body for several years. However, because of how extremely invasive the process was, physical decay began to set in rather quickly, and she was forced to take a new body not long after her previous move. She was still working tirelessly to perfect this terrible process, with several goals. In the shorter term, she was trying to stabilise the transfer, slowing down the decay; she succeeded in this relatively quickly, increasing the amount of time until she had to find a new body from 4 to 12 years. In the middle term, she tried to ensure that this decay did not set in at all. Finally, in the long term, she tried to develop a method by which she could move *other* people's consciousness around, which would let her create the perfect infiltrators and sleeper agents, with a perfect, unbreakable cover, while still unquestioningly loyal.

These efforts had attracted the attention of other marauders, and of the Drin Ath Midari leadership as a whole. Particularly once she first succeeded in moving into another body, she attained near-mythical status among many marauders, and she had no problem finding individuals or even entire ships willing to do as she said, even if it meant laying down their lives for her aims. Because of this, she became an unofficial marauder "queen", normally operating alone, but able to call on large numbers of fanatically loyal soldiers should she need them. And finally, she did; after what is presumed to be a careless slip-up by one of her crew, transmitting a signal home on bands monitored by the CSC military, she was forced to assemble as many marauders as she could in order to defend against the three CSC battlegroups, and the large number of opportunists, bounty hunters and adventurers, which were converging on her position, now that they had her signature and could track her movements. It was to be in vain, as after a prolonged battle, several boarding parties were able to deploy onto her flagship, striking down her final host body in EY 655.

It is unknown if she succeeded in her goals of total stabilisation and third-party transfer. It is also unknown if she managed to transmit details of the procedure to Seph Konar, or if she taught it to other skilled mindrenders, though CSC military intelligence suspects she did, and has operated under that assumption ever since.

### As a legend

So Niako's legacy and reputation did not die with her, however. She has attained the status of a legend among the Drin Ath Midari, particularly marauders, some of whom have been observed to actually pray to her. Even in the CSC, the murky circumstances of her demise are the subject of many wild conspiracy theories, especially after it came to light that military intelligence is assuming her techniques did not die with her, *just in case* they actually didn't. They do, however, believe So Niako herself to be dead; even if she did somehow escape during the battle, which is deemed highly unlikely, she would have been stripped of her resources and her power base, and the other Drin Ath Midari would not know who she was if they saw her. She would also not have access to a supply of fresh slaves to transfer into, so her final host body would have simply decayed and died.

Nonetheless, this does not stop some people from whispering that she actually managed to succeed in her goals, and that her death was just a ruse. These people generally point to inconsistencies that aren't there, and a wildly unlikely string of possibilities and what-ifs. In recent years, they have begun claiming that messages have been intercepted from the Core Systems to marauders operating in the Farfringe, supposedly So Niako passing along instructions and information, but every government agency who has reviewed these claims, from the military to law enforcement to the GCC, have deemed these messages to be hoaxes, or the result of poorly-calibrated signal interpreters at best. This does not stop the wild theories from flying around the Infosphere, however.