Solanos Nepacim

Unlike his boss Tarkah Ark Elnire, Solanos Nepacim’s appearance betrays none of his ruthlessness. If Tarkah should ask him to eliminate someone, Solanos simply asks “How would you like it done?”.   Solanos is one of Tarkah’s many Vice Commanders throughout the Thezumai Royal Navy, and his most trusted. The reason for this trust in Solanos is the same reason underlying Solanos’ surgical cruelty, and that's the belief in their liege lord, Nyza Thezumai. Whilst Tarkah adores the tyrannical matron as his mate and bed fellow, Solanos is a die-hard believer in her imperial ambitions to become the next Imperial Majesty of Rodinia, who will then resurrect the Empire of the Creatures of Earth.   This carries significance to Solanos given he's a fundamentalist adherent to the Vaalbaran faith and a card-carrying Rodinian supremacist. Vaalbaran's inherently supremacist, but most of its adherents in the modern age selectively ignore those uncomfortable chapters instructing them to conquer the universe in the name of Mother Earth. For Solanos and others like him though, they refuse to let those verses go. At his core, he’s probably using the faith as a framework and outlet for his views on non-Rodinians, and he wears those views outwardly as he clothes himself (to the extent a Rodinian does) in the red cloth of the Vaalbaran church.   He’s also dependable in matters of force, with few killers capable of racking up a greater body count in a short amount of time. Great psikinetic prowess, large spiritual power, millennia of fighting experience, and a nasty spiritual aura he can release when in trouble, has propelled his rise through the ranks into the favour of the Matron, becoming one of her most effective assets and assassins.   He's eager to accept Tarkah’s mission to hunt down Quixos and his friends, as it means settling an old score with one of them. Many years prior, returning Quixos to Rodinia used to be Solanos’ mission before it was given to Tarkah, and Solanos almost had the slippery Rodinian in his grasp. He orchestrated a genocidal interstellar war between two civilisations in order to bring Quixos out of hiding, seeking to use his good nature against him. When Quixos and the crew of the Quellor arrived to put a stop to the war, they were beset upon by Solanos and his assassins, and apprehended. In Solanos’ moment of victory, with a species being exterminated in the background due to his meddling without him showing a shred of concern now that they had served their purpose, he was betrayed by one of his own assassins – an agent called Sameth.   She was appalled at the lengths Solanos had gone to, in trying to capture the Quellor crew. He was beaten in combat by Sameth’s equally nasty spiritual aura, most of his other assassins were killed by the Quellor crew, and he was left to crawl back to Rodinia to grovel at the feet of Nyza to confess that their 1000 year long plot to lure in and capture Quixos and the Quellor crew had gone up in flames. He was still far too useful to be summarily dismissed however, but his duties were given to Tarkah and he was made subordinate to the Baron Adjutant.   He's still bitter about this. If events had unfolded differently, then it could have been him as the Baron Adjutant, and House Nepacim could have been second to Greathouse Thezumai. Back home, people talk about him behind his back as the Lord who bungled their House’s promised position. No one challenges him about it though, because he could easily kill them all.   In contrast to Tarkah’s rather laid back approach to command and softer humiliation centred approach to discipline, Solanos is unsurprisingly swift and harsh. The older he gets, the shorter his fuse seems to be getting with regards to acts of defiance or failure. It’s the reason why he's never built up a strong association of loyal subordinates or allies, whereas Tarkah has through his willingness to give people a second chance and remain approachable.   Does he have any redeeming qualities? That depends on who you are, and they're in the abstract. He’s proud of Rodinia to the point of delusion, and is willing to meet any of its enemies face on quite fearlessly be they demons or Nadrakians of the dreaded Ninth Caste. He’ll fight for Rodinia and its people to his dying breath.   His extreme brand of Vaalbaran also produces these strange quirks where following its logic to the very end results in him taking an unusually positive stance on humans. Whilst most Rodinians view humans as being on the verge of losing their civilisation to a series of very poor choices and don’t want them in the collective as a result, Solanos views this as heresy. To him they are fellow Creatures of the Earth and deserve the respect this affords them within Vaalbaran. In his view, it’s not up to anyone or anything other than the Earth itself to declare humans as a lost cause unfit to become Rodinians, as many Rodinians have been quick to do.