My name is Logan Caso. I was born and raised on Kosha, a settlement under strict control by the oppressive Obsidian Accord, who is ever seeking to expand their authority on all known civilized worlds through the Ebon Helix and other nearby sectors in this part of The Forge.
Like most people from Kosha, my father worked in the shipyards and earned a hardscrabble living for his family. Growing up to resent the harsh, often hopeless life on Kosha, I turned to a life of crime and sabotage against the Accord, eventually becoming a fugitive. I would often use my infiltration skills to hack their systems, and break into secure locations, often working with a demolitions expert named Beckett.
Having spent years eluding capture, the Accord instead imprisoned my parents. My younger brother Keelan managed to elapse capture, but he was later shot and killed by an Accord soldier.
With the help of an imposing and energetic pilot contact named Dex, who secured a stolen ship for me, I fled Kosha and made my way to the remote desert planet of Helios, where I’ve been hiding in the small, secluded settlement of Forsaken Outpost for five years.
It took a long time for the initial anger to subside; then it just became a dull, incessant ache that continues to fester, long after the Accord came for my parents. As hard as that was, though, it was even more soul-stealing to see my little brother gunned down in that laser firefight on the dusty streets of Kosha.
As the older sibling, it was my job to protect him, and I failed, and that’s going to haunt me for as long as I live. Sometimes I don’t even want to live. If you had asked me to predict my own future, I would have described two or three years of increasingly reckless behavior that would eventually lead downhill to a fiery death in my own tragic and pointless shootout.
Ironically, after leaving Kosha, I’ve become even more careful, if you could call it that. I just call it keeping my head down. In the five years I’ve been laying low on this dusty, hot, faraway desert planet of Helios, I haven’t made a single lasting friend. At best, there are a handful of people who get little more than a simple nod and the occasional two or three sentence interaction. Everyone else gets nothing, and that’s how I’ve preferred it.
Growing up under Accord rule was tough for any kid, but I hated what it did to my parents. My dad worked the shipyards his whole adult life, building solar fighters and omega-class battle cruisers for Obsidian. They paid little and treated him like crap, basically taking a little bit more of his soul every single day. And he was just one of thousands.
Everyone on Kosha who isn’t an Obsidian elite or else someone on their take is poor and lives a shitty, heavily oppressed life, and that’s just how they want it. Billions of credits flow into those starships, but the residents don’t see it. Most of the money goes to the defense contractors who live in luxury on Silvana Station, which is a very long way away.
A lot of people uprooted their lives to relocate to Kosha, thinking that it would be a good opportunity, but they were sold a con. It wasn’t, and the entire settlement has pretty much turned into a depressed serfdom, where most people barely scrape by.
Almost no one stands up to the oppression, though, because even minor dissent is met with swift authority. Everyone knows people who have disappeared, or who have been beaten, sometimes to death, right in the streets, and public executions are more common than you’d think. Most people keep their heads down and plod along.
I didn’t do that.
Most kids rebel in their own minor way, but I took it to extremes and kept going, long after most people grow out of their adolescence, get a job at the shipyards and settle down.
Not me.
I wanted nothing to do with that life, and so my youthful transgressions eventually turned into a regular pattern of theft, infiltration and even sabotage. It was never against the regular folk of Kosha, though; my actions were always targeted against the Accord and the elites who robbed us all blind right in front of our noses every single day. I did whatever I could to get back at them.
Of course, this got me into trouble. Big trouble.
When I was 25, I put together a small crew who broke into an Accord storage area and pulled off a pretty big heist. Unfortunately, one of the guys on the crew got caught and ratted me out to the authorities. I went into hiding and was able to evade capture. What I didn’t count on was them going after my family. I hate myself for putting them in danger but at the time it didn’t even occur to me. I didn’t see it happen, but I heard about it from my younger brother Keelan, who was there when the Accord soldiers came, arrested my parents for conspiracy and carted them away.
Keelan managed to get away, and he hung with me for awhile. I tried to get him to lay low, but his anger was too raw and one day, he confronted a group of Accord soldiers right there in the streets and opened fire. It was basically a suicide mission and they cut him down before he even knew what happened, at least that’s what it seemed like.
You can imagine how distraught I was after this happened. I saw them do it. I watched my brother die right in front of me, his body seared by laser rifles, just a few days after my parents were carted away to some prison facility somewhere. Who knows if they’re even in this sector anymore.
That was rock bottom for me. I knew I had to leave before my own anger would surely send me down the same road of self-destruction. My friend Dax, who taught me to fly, helped me secure a ship; an old beat up research vessel that had been retrofitted with guns, shields and the like.
I have no idea where it’s originally from, but the placards in the cockpit are all in some other language that I can’t read. Fortunately, most of the main controls are laid out in an obvious manner, so I was able to figure out what they do. Some of them I had to learn by trial and error. There are still a few buttons and switches that I still don’t know what they control, but even more interesting than that, there are some strange coordinates in the ship’s nav computer that shouldn’t even exist. They’re not on any map that I’ve ever seen.
Anyway, I named the ship Broken Sword, which is what I felt like I was at the time, and with Dex running interference for me, I was able to high-tail it off of Kosha before I was caught. One of the coordinates in the computer was for a planet called Helios, which was located on the other side of the Ebon Helix Sector.
I’d never heard of Helios before, and I was hoping that very few others had either. I set course and landed on this remote, desert world, at a place called Forsaken Outpost. It’s a pretty bleak place, certainly not for the weak willed.
The outpost is comprised of a less than a hundred people, most of who mine for moisture and salvage whatever they can find amidst the barren rock formations, ferocious dust storms, scattered derelict shipwrecks, and massive, exposed skeletal remnants of some long-dead titanic creatures that litter the dry sea beds and dune seas here. Whatever those creatures were that used to roam here, they’re not the only ones. The place is full of perils, and so our community is holed up behind grim fortifications that do an adequate job of shielding them from attacks by raiders and other creatures.
Helios is a dangerous place, but it’s far, far away from Kosha and my past, but it’s a great place for me to hide from the Accord, and from my own anger.
So far, no one has come looking for me. I don’t exactly advertise my identity, though. These days, I go by my callsign Dash, which is pretty much what I did. I don’t know how long I’ll stay… I didn’t plan on five years, but time flies when you’re bored in the desert.
STARFORGED ADVENTURES 
Leave a comment