Ohta "Blackfinger" Tembo

Introduced: Post

Last Seen: The *Eminent Domain*, Janissary Space - Post

### Background

Owner and Captain of the ~~pirate~~privateer vessel *Eminent Domain*, a light cruiser of indeterminate provenance

Born in the bowels of the Shih Dynasty flagship, *Dragon of Traal*, to an unknown father and a mother hailing from the Clan of the Second Forward Ventral Battery, Blackfinger's early existence was a tooth and nail fight for every scrap of protein, every drop of water, every ounce of respect. As was customary for the Clan, and most other shipboard cultures below the Alpha Decks, his manhood trial took place before his twelfth birthday. He was tasked with either stealing a relic from one of the Dorsal Battery Clans, killing a man, or hunting a predator from the arboretum decks. He chose the latter, slaying a large jungle lizard and skinning it. Rejecting his offering as a simple, spiteful act to punish the bastard son of an unwed Clanswoman, the Clan's headman made him choose again. Surprising the man with a sudden knife throw that found its mark in his throat, the young Ohta then argued that he had fulfilled the letter of the law with regard to his trial, as it never specified which men might be unacceptable targets.

Fleeing his enraged Clansmen, the young Ohta eventually reached the boundary of the Clan's domain and bartered his tale to their neighbours, who found the tale uproariously entertaining and offered him brief respite. Brief, in that during the next Greycloak-enforced boarding party levy, he was selected, meeting the age requirement, and given the standard training for his role, as well as further training in stealth and sabotage, given he tested well for evasive skill and improvisational thinking.

In those days, then Lord-Sire Fredrik Di Muzio was still a man with thirst for combat and conquest, and it wasn't long before Ohta was crammed into a boarding torpedo with a battered cutlass, a cheap, throwaway pistol with twelve rounds of ammunition and no other gear but the trousers and boots he wore and a boarding party identification armband. Jostled to the front in the first wave of debarkation, he came face to face with actual life and death combat on a scale beyond anything he'd ever seen. Trampled in the scrum, and assailed on all sides by the noise, smells and sights of close quarter butchery, he attempted to fulfil his training's purpose, limping to the periphery of the melee to look for easily targetable infrastructure like power conduits, cabling and coolant exchanges.

Successful at first in evading notice, he was surprised by a man twice his size. It was sheer luck that caused that same man to slip on leaking coolant, tripping into Tembo, whose surprised stance caused the man to impale himself on the cutlass he'd been given, pinning him to the deck. Ohta managed to free himself and went on to disable a bulkhead door that had been feeding defending reinforcements additional fighters and supplies, allowing a beachhead to be established and fortified. Having also disabled the life support controls for that section, he prevented the ship captain depressurising or otherwise rendering the section hazardous, and by the time defenders cut through the bulkhead, a much more heavily armed secondary strike force had debarked, and they were able to push into the engineering spaces between decks while the beachhead - and several more like it elsewhere on the defending vessel - continued to disgorge a relentless tide of attackers in pressurised, chem-sealed armour, led by Di Muzio himself, who took the bridge and the surrender of its captain in short order.

yada yada blah blah several more boarding actions, drawing the notice of Di Muzio, growing into his leadership skill, exhibiting unusual luck especially where shady shit was concerned, being assigned to help a Dynasty noble rob a rival Trader, networking with sector pirates who got rich off said robbery, establishing himself as a canny corsair, ending up in Di Muzio granting him a Letter of Marque and finally being awarded the *Eminent Domain* as a reward for continuing contributions to the wealth of the Dynasty through ostensibly untraceable means.