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I lived in a desert oasis with my kaprosuchus lusus, having built an impressive treehive within the available trees. While living on-planet, I took up a career as a therapier, albeit with quite a few differences from the human version of the profession. Alternian therapiers weren't meant to "help" people so much as keep them in line. We were trained to use our skills in psychology to manipulate and deceive our patients into adhering to the status quo, never questioning the caste system and accepting their place on it, quelling rumblings of rebellion and individualism. I had a love-hate relationship with my job because, on one hand, I was fascinated with trollian psychology and having the opportunity to explore it in others was invaluable to me, but, on the other hand, using it against people who were desperately seeking a way out from the life we were forced to live never settled well with me.

When I came of age to leave Alternia, I was recruited as a psycholiquidator. Psycholiquidators were tasked with interrogating those suspected of treason against the empire. More often than not, we were obligated to incriminate every suspect regardless of whether or not they proved to be innocent. Those who were definitively convicted of more serious crimes were sent to the threshecutioners to be publicly executed on live broadcasts. Psycholiquidators were not typically expected to engage in physical violence such as conquering planets or performing said executions, but we were trained in various martial arts on the off chance that we were needed in the Empress’s lethal brigades. Luckily my time serving the empire in this field didn't see much battle—something I had been counting on when I applied for the position as my exile became imminent—until war broke out.

The night came that a threat to the empire required our fleet to become soldiers in the name of Her Imperial Sacrament (A.K.A. Our Sacrament). Before we could join our comrades in the battle, however, our ship was infiltrated and our crew was taken by a rebel faction. Neurotransmitters were surgically implanted into our brains, forcing us to fight for the enemy on a barren planet they had chosen as their battlefield. I was a spectator in my own body during the fight, watching helplessly as my hands drew the blood of my comrades. The enemy had almost taken the upper hand when their base of operations was destroyed, releasing us from the neurotransmitters’ control. Unfortunately, this all happened at the exact moment that a soldier of the empire kicked me off a cliff. I remember them reaching for me after they realized what had happened, but I was just out of reach. I fell into the river below and blacked out.

When I awoke, surprisingly alive, I was on a threshecutioner ship alongside other wounded soldiers who had been abducted by the rebels. We were being transported to medicullers who would remove and examine the neurotransmitters in our heads. In the meantime we were confined to our isolated chambers because no one could be sure that we wouldn’t be “activated” again and start attacking. Many from my former crew did not survive the battle.

The captain of that threshecutioner ship was a cerulean named Skorpi Indomi. Hardened by a difficult life back on the planet and the subsequent battles he faced after joining the lethal brigades, he was a rather crass and imposing troll with burns on the right side of his face that he covered with a mask. His right arm and leg were also replaced by cybernetic prosthetics from the same incident.

For the entirety of my recovery process, I was under the impression that Skorpi had come to rescue us on behalf of the empire. It wasn’t until I was mostly healed, the neurotransmitter removed from my head, that he approached me privately as the defacto commander of my fallen crew and informed me under no uncertain terms that he was an undercover rebel warlord. He told me that he had rescued the stranded survivors in hopes that we would join his cause. I asked him why we would join the very people who had forcibly hijacked our minds to fight for them and he explained that that had been the doing of a separate faction unaffiliated with the efforts of the rebellion and that they had been a nuisance for them as well.

I listened to him explain the rebellion’s cause and why it was so necessary. He claimed that my help in rallying other psycholiquidators would be a great asset in taking down the empire a peg or two. I couldn’t deny that he made a convincing argument as he laid out all the faults in Alternia’s hierarchical system that I had been so blind to. I agreed to observe his operation before I made my final decision.

It just so happened that I was just in time to oversee an important mission that they were undertaking. They had received intelligence about a bastion of resources that served as a pulse point for the empire's forces, a distant colony planet across the galaxy. They planned to attack and destroy it, but not before tracking down the other bastions in the empire's supply network. It was during this mission, however, that Skorpi's fleet was detected by none other than the heiress, who apparently had been tracking them for some time. Our ship was intercepted, but, after a suspiciously quick confrontation, the heiress retreated. We knew something was amiss about the encounter, but we couldn't piece together what it was until it was too late.

We succeeded in destroying the supply colony nonetheless and it was then that I agreed to join Skorpi's cause after seeing what he was capable of and that allying myself with him wouldn't be an immediate death sentence. Convincing my former crew (what remained of them) was easier than anticipated and, as it turned out, many of them had connections that would be likely to help them, as well. Evidently I had been amoung the very few who had merely kept my head down and obeyed our orders loyally without ever bothering to challenge them. Even our late commander had confided in some of our crew her doubts about the empire. It was certainly a wake-up call to realise that feelings of rebellion were not as uncommon as I had thought, as well as that others were far braver to voice them than I.

After that revelation, though, we began organising. Planning. Carrying out missions with increasing ease as more and more like-minded trolls joined the cause. During my time working with them, I had grown quite close to Skorpi and the rest of his immediate crew.

• Khav'ak Maz'kin was a bronzeblood engineer who had a penchant for inventing...questionable solutions for even the most seemingly unsolvable problems. She was boisterous and overly friendly, and a little mad to boot, but I had learned to enjoy her company quite a lot.
• Exiyah Rheyas, Skorpi's right-hand man, was the goldblood hacker responsible for obtaining the classified information we used to target weak points in the empire. He was essential to our cause and he never was very humble about that fact.
• I had written off Noizze Kazlok as the ship's mechanic when I first met him until I realised that he could fix anything. He only needed to take something apart and put it back together once before he knew everything about how it worked and what it could do. In fact, he was the one who had made the modifications to Skorpi's ships that allowed them to travel undetected so easily.
• Hekate Skolle was a gentle and kindhearted jadeblood who had once run an underground orphanage that attempted to spare mutants from culling. Her operation was obliterated by the empire some sweeps ago, which had led her to joining the rebellion. It was easy to underestimate her from the quiet way she carried herself, but she had a sharp mind for strategy.

These were Skorpi's closest friends and comrades and, unbeknownst to us at the time, half of the "team" we would form in the Game we would come to play. The other half was comprised of our enemies, specifically the ones working for the heiress that had been hunting us down.

• First, there was the heiress herself, Kesari Karali. She was a militant warmonger who very much intended to overthrow her ancestor, but not before dealing with the "rebel scum" that threatened her bloodline's rule.
• Daevic Veryth was her violetblooded second-in-command, a yes-man type of troll who was very obviously horns over heals for his heiress, which made him infinitely more dangerous.
• Kiaria Altari was a burgundyblood, tragically enough, who sought to secure her own survival by giving herself completely to the empire. She was once a member of Skorpi's faction until she showed her true colours as a turncoat and caused the deaths of many of Skorpi's rebels.
• Then there was Crysis Legacy, an indigoblood prison warden who had been recruitedby the heiress after Skorpi himself had escaped detainment in the past. He was a man of pride and desired to be avenged, though his allegiance was not strictly to the heiress herself, even though their goals were currently aligned.
• Lastly amoung Kesari's notable followers was Nymiza Cosmos, a purpleblood practitioner of chucklevoodoos and perhaps her most powerful piece. Nymiza was a crazed individual, obsessed with her delusions about her own grandeur and divinity. I remember witnessing the tension between her and Kesari a handful of times, but, like Crysis, they had similar interests that allowed them to work together. Namely, Nymiza wanted Skorpi in...confusing ways that were seemingly both romantic and religious in nature.

There was one more, though. A stowaway who had been planted on Skorpi's ship during our encounter with Kesari. Xir name would later be revealed as Seisyl Egnami and xe was neither lowblood nor highblood, nor even a mutant of caste, but rather a drone. Xe did, technically, possess a mutation that only appeared in drones which made her biology more troll-like in appearance. An ebonyblood, if you will. Xe had certain qualities that made xem an invaluable asset to Kesari, not to mention the ease with which xe could be psychologically programmed to follow orders. Nymiza, in particular, was the one responsible for this, though this also meant that Seisyl was loyal to her and not the heiress, which presented its own issues later on down the line.

More to come later.