Azeez Dara

Ark Pilot

Union of Free Lands

**Azeez Dara**, callsign **Nemean-6**, is a Bharatan man with an incredibly checkered past. Most of his life has been spent involved in criminal or mercenary work, and his recent induction into JSF Nemean as their chemical weapons specialist has brought some controversy with it. Azeez is considered a Hyper Lethal Vector alongside his military counterparts.

## Appearance

### Azeez Dara

Azeez is a man that rebuilt himself from the ground up into a monster. His appearance is intimidating by his own design, and the partially gold-plated cybernetics that make up the bulk of his internal body cost him nearly as much as his Ark. The most defining of these cybernetics is his massively oversized jaw which contains a mixture of filtration units, voice modulators, and motors that both greatly increase his jaw strength and allow him to somewhat emote despite his skeletal appearance. This mighty mandible, along with his piercing neon eyes, gives him an almost demonic appearance in poor lighting.

A tall man, standing at 6'2, Azeez is also incredibly heavy due to his cybernetics and muscle mass. He has numerous gang tattoos on his remaining flesh, many of which are cut up or interrupted by cybernetics and scars. His Nemean tattoo is a small traditionally-styled roaring lion on his left collar bone. The most noticeable of his tattoos is a large skull on his neck, with the Sons of Machines symbol on its forehead, as well as several phrases in Bharateese on its jaw. His hair is naturally blond, as with many people from the Belteuse ethnicity, and thus he wears it proudly.

Azeez's civilian apparel generally consists of popular Bharatan street clothes, and mixture of gold chains and rings. Meanwhile his military wear is somewhat generic, a simple mixture of Bharatan mercenary gear and Union military equipment. In combat he wears a shemagh coiled around his head, that totally obscures his face, leaving only the glow of his eyes visible.

## History

Azeez was born into the hive city of Arbaagnon, the capital of Bharata. His parents were of Belteuse ethnicity, and thus he was born outside of the caste system that divided Bharata's society. While at first that may sound like a blessing, amidst the tens of millions in Arbaagnon it was more a curse. The blonde hair and green eyes of his family instantly showed their lack of a place in Bharata's civilized society and condemned them to a life of begging and hard labor. Azeez's mother worked as a prostitute while his father worked in a local arms factory, his health constantly declining due to the incredibly toxic chemicals that went into early Ark engineering.

When he was only 5, Azeez got his first job in a local packing plant. He spent long days canning food, before him and his father would walk back through their slum at the very bottom of the five tiered megacity. For the first 17 years of his life, the only sun and moon Azeez would know would be that of humming streetlights. On his 8th birthday Azeez would get a small chemistry kit from his father and would begin to eagerly experiment with the chemicals, starting a life long fascination with the subject. The next day his father was fired from his factory job, as he had stolen from work to afford the present.

With his father jobless, his mother struggled to make enough simply to feed the family. One night she was propositioned by a rather shady gentleman, who offered to buy one of her kidneys for over 15,000 credits. Out of desperation to save her family, she told Azeez's father her plan. The following evening she would tuck Azeez in, and read him several stories from his favorite book, *Poems for Dreaming*, before leaving the house to meet with the man. That was the last time Azeez would ever see his mother.

After losing his wife in such a way, his father would begin to abuse any substance he could get his hands on. He would pawn away what little he and Azeez had to fuel his growing habit, including *Poems for Dreaming* and what remained of the chemistry kit. Once he ran out of things to pawn, he would begin to spend Azeez's cannery paychecks on drugs, only buying enough food for the two of them to survive. This would leave the poor 9 year old with only the clothes on his back and a deeply uncaring home. Each night he would return home from an eight hour shift to find his father passed out in a pool of his own vomit and urine, before crying himself to sleep on his now barren bedroom floor.

As Azeez's father fell deeper down his spiral of depression and hatred, his mind would warp into something cruel. He convinced himself that his wife had abandoned him for some rich upper class merchant, abandoning him for a better life and ethnically pure Bharatan husband. These are thoughts he would often share with his son while in a drunken stupor, ranting and raving about his slut of a wife until it brought the child to tears. And when those tears fell he would beat the boy violently for it, how dare he cry over a whore that abandoned his family, after all. Eventually Azeez would find hiding his emotions deep inside was far easier for both him and his father.

By the time he was 12 he and his father no longer spoke to one another. Each week they would exchange the minimum required number of words for Azeez to deliver his father's "medicine", and no more. Over the years he had come to hate and despise his father, believing that the man had killed his mother and simply used her disappearance as a ruse. This hatred would burn deep in his gut for a long time, eventually boiling over in an act of cruelty that would set Azeez on a course of violence and death that would consume much of the Bharatan underworld. Replacing his father's normal needles with ones filled with sewer water, he'd mix them in with the rest of the man's drugs and wait. By the next week, his father's left foot and both arms were rotting off, leaving him totally immobile. Over the course of a week he'd continue life as normal, ignoring his old man's pleas for help unless it was to feed or water him. The infection eventually reached his heart, ending both his and his son's suffering.