"Red"

Meet "Red", a grizzled veteran from the jungles of Catachan and a dozen engagements since.



Current Character Sheet




Catachan is the most infamous Imperial Death World in the galaxy. It is located in the Ultima Segmentum and is covered in dense jungle. The planet's entire ecosystem seems consciously hostile to all foreign life. Each and every element of the native flora and fauna of the planet represents a real danger to any human. Catachan's only valuable resource is its people, who by virtue of being born on the harshest world in the Imperium are invariably tough and cunning. It is home to the renowned Catachan Jungle Fighters regiments of the Imperial Guard.

Birth records show that Kar was born in typical Catachan fashion, during a raid by the carnivorous insectiod Catachan Devils on one of the mobile compounds that serve as homes for his people. Most of the compound was destroyed by the attack, including Kar's own family. When a second scavenging party returned to the site two days later looking for supplies, they found Car drinking corpse-starch fluid rations from a broken hip flask on his mother's body. Seeing his survival as a sign of good fortune, the scavenging party took him with them when they left, nicknaming him "Lucky". 



"Lucky" learned to aim and fire a gun before he could walk, and to hunt small animals with his miniature combat knife before he could talk. He survived to the age of five, a feat the fully half of all Catachan children do not achieve, then to the age of 10, a feat that another full half fail at. Throughout his life, the specter of death and destruction followed him wherever he went. Within days of him arriving at a new homestead, the homestead would fall under aggressive attack by native flora and fauna. "Lucky" was always fortunate enough to survive these attacks, but many of the people he lived with were not. Before too long, people started to think him cursed, and saw his name as a bit of irony.  By 15, as a result of constant exposure to danger and violence, he was considered a truly gifted melee combatant by his peers, and was permitted to enlist in the Imperial Guard as a Catachan Jungle Fighter.  



His squad was set upon by Catachan Devils their first day out, and slain nearly to a man. When "Lucky" returned to base camp alone, carrying the combat knives of his dead squad mates, and covered in their blood, he was rechristened "Lure". On a different world, he might have been cast out, but the Catachan have grown so used to death that they met this apparent curse as a new challenge, embracing it with bravado. Lure's curse continued to follow him throughout his career, which proved to be unexpectedly long. He distinguished himself well. He was not the best soldier, or the stealthiest, or the best shot, or the best at laying traps, but he did have a knack for coming through tough scrapes alive. Eventually he even learned how to use the sword like Devil's Claw. A weapon named after the meter long claws of the deadly Catachan Devils. The sword is so deadly and feared that even the filthy Ork enemy honors it by calling it "Da Cutta".



But all good things must end, and as much as this place seemed like home to him, it was not to be forever. As Lure was approaching his third decade, an age nearly unknown on deadly Catachan, the call came out for imperial guardsman to come serve the Imperium of Man. Lure and many others heeded the call.  He did a number of tours, including a tour in the infamous Pitt War, where is jungle skills were of little use, and his concept of humanity against the environment was shocked to the core. What was originally an attempt to violently suppress a mutant uprising on a hot and arid hive world turned into a decades long, protracted holding action. This blasted, soot covered hive world was nothing like home. In the Pitt Wars, the mutant threat could be more insidious and revolting than many things on Catachan. How could a man know who to trust in a world where someone might be plotting against you while wearing a human face? It was like a whole world full of invisible Brainleaf plants. He learned to never trust, to rarely sleep, and to hunt out mutation with remorseless vengeance.



Those Guardsmen who survive their time on Pitt rarely speak openly of their experiences, but the memories never leave them. Stories of starving refugees, oppressive dark catacombs, savage attacks by scav-cannibal infiltrators, of the pale and terrible witch-kin, and of seeing friends torn apart by “twist-brutes” are all whispered among Pitt veterans in the long watches of the night.

Eventually he finished his tours and was called back to Catachan, now an old man of 32 years old. He had thoughts of perhaps siring offspring before meeting his death in the jungles of his home. He took his recall orders and boarded the troop transport Zyntari. But the curse that had haunted Lure from infancy was still stalking him in the shadows. A navigational error and a mysterious engine failure caused the Zyntari to enter the Merina quarantine zone, forcing it to land on the planet. The cold, wretched world was home to the long silent Mara penal colony and.... something else.



What happened in the five days before the Imperial Navy reached the transport remains largely unknown to most. Lure was found in a sealed cargo container with over 500 dismembered guardsman around him. He was methodically chopping them into smaller pieces, working down the line systematically. He was covered in gore, and when the navy troops found him, they kept referring to him as "The Red One".  Other than the newly rechristened "Red", only a few hundred gaunt and haunted individuals survived out of the five thousand Guardsmen that set foot on Merina, and of those, many were later were executed for heresy or simply disappeared—unable to live with what they had experienced. For those few who survived, they will never admit that they were onboard the Zyntari unless under duress. Only the sealed reports of the Ordos contain the accounts of comrades turning on one another, of walking nightmares, vile scratching and half-heard whispers at reality’s fabric, and the incessant buzzing of insectile wings on the edge of the mind.

Red spent some time among the mind purgers of the inquisition, and was eventually found to be of somewhat sound mind and spirit. But rather than being discharged back to Catachan, or sent off on another guard dispatch to a blasted battlescape, he has been assigned to the Inquisition itself. He awaits his orders with a heavy heart....