Tamil Nirano

Tamil Nirano
Alias	None
Species	Salarian
Gender	???
Age	21
Birthdate	July 8, 2164
Birthplace	Erinle
Current Residence	Unknown
Height	175cm (5'9")
Build	Average
Hair	???
Markings	???
Eye Color	Black
Skin Color	Rust-speckled pale green
Occupation	Freelance sniper
Relationships	???
Status	Active
Player	Dread

Tamil Nirano (Erinle Tenosh Theslan Nirano Tamil) is a freelance mercenary seeking to assist the Redrock Agency. In combat, he specialises in sniping, the strategic placement of traps, deployment of non-lethal (and if the situation demands, lethal) toxins, and most of anything else that lets him think before he acts. He can be easily incapacitated by anyone trained in melee combat. That said, he generally prefers to seek means of avoiding combat, as pacifist as a mercenary in the Terminus systems can get away with - which is to say that by the measure of just about anywhere else in the galaxy, he's still quite ruthless.

Appearance

Tamil's crest down to the ridges of his eyes is a speckling of pale green and rust forming no particular pattern, registering a bit more as listless blotches of scarlet from afar than a smooth gradient from rust at the tips to pale olive on his face, although these purported shapes lose their cohesion up close, lost to the visual noise. His eye-ridges and the edges of his sunken cheeks embrace the olive hue almost exclusively, adding only a slight earthy tone that loses itself into the paleness around his lips. The rings around his eyes (red in most of his brethren) are pale to almost the point of soft grey.

When not in armour, Tamil enjoys surprisingly loose-fitting garbs more like agbadas, sirwals and to top it all off, even keffiyehs. His choice of clothes also serve to hide the Salarian sunken chest, but feel less limiting than the armour braces that usually do the same job.

He's a bit short for Salarian standards.

History

Tamil, generally interested in health and longevity, left Erinle with one of his brothers, Makash, on a broad xenobiological research project, hoping to gather insights from other alien species to improve nutritional technology for Salarians (especially for those on Erinle). The project pursued solutions involving biological augmentations that would be broadly applicable.

Makash and Tamil's first larger sub-project was to analyse the Hanar, hoping to engage with them on First Land. Since diplomacy was not their primary scientific focus, they were instead relegated to a station orbiting Island Wind, where they spent several years. They earned their keep with station security (Tamil) and janitorial tasks (Makash).

In a fit of irony, malnutrition from a diet not quite Salarian-optimised eventually caught up with Makash, making him brittle-boned even at young age and nearly killing him when an accident cracked much of his ribcage. Thankfully, Tamil was nearby, could give first aid, and the damage could be rapidly reversed by station medics.

Tamil corrected for the deficiency in his own diet and avoided any similar fate. Makash, however, left Island Wind after his recovery, supposedly disillusioned by their alleged local (lack of) progress. (Tamil has always found the timing suspicious, but admits "afraid of it happening again" couldn't really be Makash's motivation, either. He eventually came to assume the accident may not have been quite as accidental and someone wanted Makash off the station, for reasons Tamil can only guess.)

During his time at Island Wind, Tamil managed to have enough contact with Hanar religious beliefs to kindle his curiosity. Respectfully probing between the lines, he discovered that certain Hanar believed in a few purported cosmological geometries relating to the locations of Prothean artefacts, described just precisely enough to catch Tamil's interest and vaguely enough to make the matter difficult. He also learnt that the Protheans purportedly solved the problems of ageing that Salarians never managed to conquer.

Tamil initially dismissed the matter as mere religious waffling, but has since come to believe there may be a scientific basis to it. When he was 19, he left Island Wind in search for this knowledge, following the guidance of the Hanar cult's 'geometries' to search in areas of the galaxy where Prothean artefacts might yet lay undiscovered.

His search has brought him back into the Terminus systems; specifically, he believes that the systems clustered around The Phoenix Massing relay might yield the results he seeks. It's this quest that has brought him to Aite, although he didn't choose the planet with any particular confidence. Instead, he's simply hoping to score a job that will either let him earn enough to let him travel the systems in an appropriately generous chunk of free time... or simply a job that in itself leads to much travelling that might permit him to explore a little on the side.

Motivations

"Death is the stealer of minds and breaker of the tightest personal bonds. It's indiscriminate, crude, ruthless, and above all unnecessary. Not all things in nature die of old age, but the more complex the creature, the less likely that it can escape the creeping decline that leads to death. Statistics. We've known it's statistics for so long. We manage the symptoms, rewrite the worst offending genes, but at the end of the day, it's all too fundamental. The evolutionary fitness of the remaining genes is sound - statistics, more statistics, impersonal, unreasonable. The individual falters for the successful perpetuation of the foul gene. The gene cares not if the benefit it grants to its own survival burns your life like a candle. 'Procreate successfully and then and only then die horribly!'

A 'natural' death is evolution's indifferent afterthought. Ageing is a blight upon this galaxy, single-handedly dwarfing all other sources of suffering and pain, yet so rarely acknowledged.

And as you nod, yet still you wonder - what does a Salarian know about ageing? We die quickly; we don't spend years shuffling about as barely animated, desiccated corpses, what could we possibly know about the pain of gradual deterioration? But we have it all the same. We have more than enough of it to lament it, and recognise its horrors. Science has already brought us far; we've optimised what we could, and yet we still die, die and die.

I'm willing to barter with death, for a while. Adding a decade to our lifespans brought us space travel. Prise another decade out of death's skeletal clutches and it might let us do away with the bartering altogether."

Tamil's primary motivation in life is to seek a cure for ageing and death, not necessarily in that order. He's not the first Salarian to go on the journey, but perhaps the first to seek it in a rather unusual way - on the trail of what he believes certain Hanar tales of Promethean technology says, he's searching for a specific Prothean artefact he believes must lie somewhere in the Terminus systems, supposedly capable of repairing a form of cell damage that Salarian scientists have found no way around.

While his motivation is primarily the longevity of his own species - whom he considers generally intellectually superior to all other races (entirely independent of any thoughts he may have on his personal intellect, which varies from 'worthless' to 'brightest light in the room' depending on mood) and thus most likely to benefit from the technology, not to mention the 'rightful' species to first triumph over ageing and death - he finds ('natural') death and ageing deplorable in general and would like to solve the problem for the galaxy as a whole.

He's not oblivious to the problems that would come with an end to death, but considers them surmountable, quite despite the overpopulation (and intertwined military) scare the Krogan uplift initial brought with it - or perhaps especially because of it, given technology yielded a solution to that problem. That the solution was non-consensual only 'bothers' him to the degree strictly necessary for polite society.

Skills

Medicine

Given his theoretical background in xenobiology, Tamil is a decent medic, although he would certainly rather medical tasks were done by someone whose training had fully focused on medicine. He can do an acceptable job in a pinch, though, especially useful for first aid.

Weapons

Tamil used to deal with small arms while earning his keep as security on the Island Wind orbital station. In returning to the Terminus systems, a very peculiar brand of paranoia led him to invest in sniper weapons - he's certain that if his enemies are aware of him, he has little chance of defending himself, much more comfortable by learning to strategically take them out from a distance.

That said, owing to his general distaste of death and suffering, Tamil is not at all violent. While he regularly trains his sniping ability, he has yet had any need to use it and he prefers to keep it that way. While that may seem at odds with his freelance work, he's found that even situations where weaponry is necessary, it is rarely used, serving more as a deterrent and a means to level the playing field than to kill.

If possible, he prefers to incapacitate people rather than dispatch them outright. His moral convictions aren't quite so strong as to stop him from pulling the trigger, though; he's accepted that death is part of the current status quo, and with millions dying every day, one more corpse doesn't make a huge difference.

Equipment

Weapons

• an M-92 Mantis sniper rifle