| Dramatis Personae |
| Oloth |
| Realms |
Retired
| Reality Fault |
General Info
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| Realms: Oloth: Dramatis Personae |
Dermott Leannan (Dermott)
Unlike most residents of the Oloth Sphere, Dermott originated from a more technological culture. His home world, Earth (one out of an infinitude throughout the multiverse), was a post-starflight, balkanized world that had once been under the aegis of a supranational oversight body, the United Nations. At the time he was born the UN, now under the influence of a consortium of businesses, was again attempting to wrest away the independence of her far-flung colonies.
He was born to a den of Fenriites, strict traditionalists who held by the ancient laws of the pack to the letter. While widely regarded as atavistic throwbacks, worshippers of Fenris Nich'Loki, the Fenriites had a strong cultural identity... and the young cub was never very comfortable with it. He was repeatedly demoted to increasingly lower positions within the pack hierarchy due to his thoughtful, dreamy nature. When the pack elders announced that he was a Child of Loki (the detested, ultimate expression of the influence of Loki Fenrisvater in wolven blood), he turned and became rogue.
In time he came of age and entered the New York Astratime College to study to be an officer aboard one of the commercial interplanetary ships plying the solar system. His dream was to someday command a true starship, instead of the slow in-system boats, but he was never qualified to do that, due to a variety of factors. Instead, upon graduation he was offered a commission in the United States Space Guard as an astral inspector, examining commercial vessels for safety. He did not particularly enjoy his work, though he was competent enough, and so his reviews of this time were good but not stellar.
Eventually his tour ended and the Space Guard called a Reduction In Force, dismissing him from service. For a while he lived at home, trying to break into the computer field, but lacked experience. One month after being dismissed from service he made the decision that would change his life forever.
One day representatives of a consortium of businesses approached him. The consortium was organized by a number of nameless companies, come together out of a concern about space piracy. So concerned were they, in fact, that they intended to stage commerce raids upon their own shipping. They believed this would increase the demand for their goods from outlying colony worlds, and shipping costs. The plan was completely immoral; there was no telling how many innocent lives might be lost, and anyone who joined in their scheme would likely eventually find themselves at the wrong end of a particle accelerator weapon. It took the young wolf less than an hour to decide to accept their offer, knowing he was damning himself for this.
It was at this time the lonely wolf assumed the simple nom du guerre of 'Dermott.' Because of his previous experience he was made captain of one of the smaller corsairs. His crew was convicted criminals, failed mutineers who were sentenced to prison, and other undesirables. They were not exactly the dregs of spacer life -- they were professionals, skilled in their fields, who for whatever reasons had nowhere to go but death, prison, or ignominy. Dermott was one of the few exceptions -- someone there freely and by their own choice.
After the all-too-brief training the pirates were released upon an unsuspecting region. They were hugely successful; piracy in the Earth Holdings was completely unexpected. Even after the United Nations entreated its members to undertake unheard-of measures against this sudden spate of commerce raiding, very few of the corsairs were actually captured. Those that were, were quietly "rescued" by the consortium before they saw trial. Or so the pirates were told -- a fact which was never really taken seriously.
Over the course of the next two years the pirates slowly became more and more of a force to be reckoned with. Clashes between them and the space militaries of the UN increased -- including, ironically, a revitalized US Space Guard. During this time the corsairs learned definitively that their captured fellows were quietly killed before standing trial, despite what they'd been previously told by the consortium. In addition, the pirates learned the consortium had undergone a change in management, and was now working to slowly destroy the corsairs. The pirates, however, had worked and fought for two years to stay alive, and had come to... if not enjoy the reaver's life, at least not wish it ended via a UN, Brazilian, or Russian nuclear warhead.
As a consequence of this news, most of the corsairs began to move out of the Earth Holdings region. The consortium took note of their movements, and the corsair fleet was ambushed in the asteroid belt of the Tau Ceti system. In the massive battle which followed no less than thirty pirate ships were destroyed, including the de facto flagship.
The surviving Pirates of Tau Ceti, as they were now known, fled the Earth Holdings for the Hundred Suns region, also known as the Colonies -- the "Third World" nations of colonized space. These colonies were the first made beyond the outer limits of the Earth Holdings, and were now too far from the Holdings to receive effective aid. Life in the Colonies had resulted in a rougher civilization, clinging to a sullen sort of independence. Each world was on its own, with at best a few cutter-class ships for local defense. In short, the Hundred Suns was ripe territory for a small fleet of desperate, technologically advanced pirates -- or at least that is how some of the pirates thought after initial scouting. Dermott was among the large number of corsairs who held to a policy of "conservation," believing that their first duty was to survive. While they could probably take in a tidy profit by razing the colonies to the ground, in the long run it would be more profitable to milk cows rather than butcher them.
Unfortunately not all the pirates agreed with this plan, and there were a number of decisive battles amongst their factions. In a short time the "conservationists" won out. Long term plans were drawn up to build supply and repair caches, to designate "hunting grounds," and to construct several hidden freeport colonies, which eventually lent their services to the black market of the Colonies. Several years passed, and the Colonies eventually accepted the new, if parasitic, inhabitants of their region.
The UN incursion into the Hundred Suns was the incident which marked the end of the Pirates of Tau Ceti. As part of a massive campaign aimed at the Rift Alliance, in another region entirely, the UN began to move in on the Hundred Suns. It was only through the efforts of some members of the Pirates, and those of the fiercely independent merchants of the Colonies, that the incursion was staved off. Dermott then led a number of corsairs to the Rift Alliance to warn them. Following a short but tense negotiation the pirates were (much to their surprise) not imprisoned, but rather made privateers of the Rift, flying under letters of marque to raid UN shipping. They were instrumental in the Battle of Hesperius, at which the UN "punitive action" against the Rift Alliance was halted and a cease-fire negotiated.
It was shortly thereafter that Misery undertook an exploration expedition and was caught up in one of the rare but not unknown space-time anomalies, throwing them into a completely different universe altogether. There, at first in order to survive and later because it was what they did best, they conducted various minor acts of piracy, and discovered the Oloth Sphere for the first time. Unfortunately shipping in the Malark regions of space became rarer and rarer, giving the Misery less and less to prey upon. Finally, facing lean times and in need of a purpose for his ship and crew, Dermott approached the government of the Oloth Sphere for a letter of marque. This request was, to Dermott's surprise, granted, and he and his ship and crew were charged to protect or at least avenge Olothian spelljammers which came under attack by technological forces. As the crew settled into their new lives on Oloth, they began to consider Oloth their home. It was there, in fact, that Dermott met and fell in love with a feline lady by the name of Ophelia.
Old habits of insularity and caution die hard. While Dermott became close friends to several people in this new domain, it was not until he met Ophelia that he realized this was someone he wanted to be with for the rest of his life. The relationship was a stunning tornado of activity. Shortly after meeting Ophelia, Dermott and she departed on an extended leave of absence, returning some months later to Oloth to announce their engagement. To Dermott it seemed perfectly natural; there was not a shred of doubt in his mind that this was the right thing to do. They were married a few months later. Because neither of them had family names -- Dermott was not going to dredge out a name from a past that no longer meant as much to him as it once did -- they chose their surname together: "Leannan," Gaelic for "Lovers."