Series: ZUKAHNAUT
Class: Vagrant
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Gender: Male
Species: Halian
Age: 87
Birthdate: December 26
Height: 7'3"
Weight: 740lbs
Short Description: A hulking 740 lbs of jaundiced green muscle, fat and warts, Zukah stands at seven feet, three inches tall (and more than half of that wide). The beast glares at the world with bloodshot yellow eyes from beneath a massive, wrinkled set of brows. He is balding, yet what hair remains is worn long and resembles the strings of an old and abused mop. It is a fading blonde, as is the thick unkempt beard that seems to double as a napkin for the brute. He has a faintly sour smell about him in the best of times.
Background
A hulking 740 lbs of jaundiced green muscle, fat and warts, Zukah stands at seven feet, three inches tall (and more than half of that wide). The beast glares at the world with bloodshot yellow-green eyes from beneath a massive, hairless set of brows. He is balding, yet what hair remains is worn long and resembles the strings of an old and abused mop. It is a fading blonde, as is the thick unkempt beard that seems to double as a napkin for the brute. He has a faintly sour smell about him in the best of times.
Zukah is a member of a race of fanged extraterrestrials called Halians, which have the ability to use the unique inherent elasticity of their cellular structure to alter their forms by means of Kyodaika, which renders them roughly triple their original size, strength and speed. Kyodaika also effects other minor changes to their physiology (most impressive amongst them being dagger-like claws, enlarged fangs, darker skin and the conversion of all fat tissue to muscle mass). That is... normally.
Zukah was three times the size of any proper newborn at birth, to the extreme misfortune of his mother. He was judged to be afflicted with "Amaranth Kyodaika" by his peers: a rare case of permanent engorgement. This caused him to be a constant target of ridicule and abuse. Kyodaika is meant to be a combat ability, not to be used in everyday life; Zukah was simply too big to be accommodated almost everywhere he went. The massive amounts of food he required drove his father into the poorhouse. In a desperate attempt to be rid of his son Zukah's father used the boy's size to pass him off as an adult and sign him up in the military.
The facade did not last long. Upon learning of Zukah's disability his superiors tried to make the most of it by teaching him attacks common to Halian soldiers. Perhaps worst of all was the fact that Zukah appeared to have no talents whatsoever in harnessing his body's ki (also known as chi) energy. He could not perform bukujutsu to fly, he could not direct his body's energy into offensive blasts or defensive shields. Attempts to teach him how to "revert" to a "normal" size failed. It was theorized that all of his ki was tied up in perpetuating his permanent Kyodaika and so could not be used for anything else. He also appeared to be aging at an advanced rate (at least for an Halian, a race that normally lives hundreds of years), a possible result of the state of Amaranth Kyodaika creating an unnatural strain on his body.
Deemed unfit for the ranks of Halia's homefront soldiers and unsafe for civilian life, Zukah was outfitted with weaponry that he did not fully understand how to use and shipped out to off-world battles as a foot soldier, still little more than a confused child.
As a member of Major Mejora's CE Unit (CE standing for simply Cripple the Enemy) Zukah found his hardships alleviated somewhat when he caught the eye of the Major himself. Mejora sympathized with Zukah's situation -- his uncle had been afflicted with Amaranth Kyodaika, he told the young private, and Mejora himself had been an illegal minor when he had first joined the Forces. The two bonded somewhat for the first several years of their service together, finding enough similarities between them (right down to blood type) to develop something of a mix of Commander/Soldier, Elder/Younger brother, and Father/Son relationships.
The CE Unit's mission was to travel to all planets with sentient life in the vicinity of Halia and integrate them into its global society. The planets' resources would be mined for the good of the entirety of the Halian people, and their inhabitants would become Hailian civilians. As to be expected, most planets were resistant to the idea of giving up their independence. Major Mejora's unit was forced to go into hostile territory after almost every "ambassador's visit" sent down to each new planet. At the end of each day of battle Mejora would be sure to seek out Zukah and explain to him the necessity of their actions, even as Zukah stared aghast at the blood spattered across himself.
"Zukah, look," the Major said to him one evening, in the twilight of their most savage battle yet. "These people. They're just ignorant savages acting out of instinct. Without our help most of them will die before they even reach the kind of social maturity that it would take to reap the kind of benefits that we're offering them. We're helping them." Perhaps seeing the doubt that still lingered in Zukah's haunted eyes, Mejora showed him an image of the most beautiful exotic girl he had ever seen. "This is X'un Lou," he said. "A member of the Demannu race from the planet Nukulos, the first planet we ever branched out to. Have you ever seen anything so gorgeous in your entire life?"
Zukah was forced to admit that he had not. "She isn't unique," Mejora told him. "In fact, she's average in almost every way for her people. The Demannu are some of the natural gems of the universe, but if we hadn't stepped in and taken over the burden of running their world? Zukah, these people were on a collision course with annihilation. They'd have reduced Nukulos and everything on it to a cinder given another five years. We found the bombs they were developing." The major waved a casual hand at the picture. "X'un Lou there is an escort to top officials now. She gets to visit hundreds of different planets and eat thousands of different dishes that she never could have even dreamt about existing back on that mudball. Treated like royalty every day of every year and makes twice our salary doing it."
Zukah's feeling of reassurance lasted just until they landed on the untamed planet of Volsaag. A planet whose surface was all but impossible to navigate unless one could fly, Zukah was left behind while the others went on to confront the resistance that the planet's inhabitants had reportedly been mounting in the wake of the Halian ambassador's message. Three thousand men left the ship that day, armed with the experience of hundreds of similar missions like this as well as weapons advanced far beyond anything that the locals were supposed to have access to. Three hundred returned at the end of the day. They had nothing to show for their efforts except a single prisoner who refused to speak: A female soldier.
Zukah was assigned guard duty, more to give him something to feel useful than anything else (the holding cells were state-of-the-art and required no maintenance). Hours after everyone else in the ship was asleep, the prisoner started talking to him. He was surprised at the sound of her voice, surprised enough to answer her. The more they talked, the more attractive Zukah realized that she was underneath the caked blood and dirt.
She told tales of the Halian peoples and race that sounded ridiculous at first, but seemed less so the more she spoke. He brought up Mejora's picture of the Demannu woman despite himself, and listened in horror as she described to him exactly how the Halians had "saved them" from themselves. The Demannu race had been half exterminated, with every male member of the race having been slaughtered and the females sold to brothels for "re-education" (brainwashing) and rented out to fat politicians and ambassadors. Their children were killed at birth if they weren't female, diluting the bloodline over the past several generations until, today, the race could be said to hardly exist at all anymore. Zukah had no way to refute any of her claims. There were more stories she had to tell, and by morning he found that he had fallen in love despite every iota of his senses.
Mejora led the remaining men on another mission along with the reinforcements that base had sent, leaving Zukah behind again to guard the prisoner (who called herself Yina). By noon Zukah was unlocking her cell and pledging himself to her cause as they fled the ship and hunted down a regiment of her own people. It soon became clear to Zukah that these rebels were far more technologically advanced than the Halian intel had indicated. In hours they had harnessed a DNA sample he had provided to them in order to create a customized virus that forced a permanent condition of artificial Amaranth Kyodaika onto any Halian exposed to it. The virus removed the safeties built into the disease in regards to ki conservation and resilience, meaning that any Halian infected would expand to Kyodaika size and then be unable to revert, the entire time having their ki energy burned away by the strain of maintaining the form. Soon their bodies would simply give up and die.
Zukah thought of his childhood, of all of the lies and pain and terror heaped upon him by the people who had been supposedly his own, and he felt nothing but an impending sense of relief. Soon he would be a hero, and he would be safe from the sort of hell his entire life had been. He would save these people from his own. He would save Yina, who had told him of a planet of giants where he could go to live once all of this was concluded to live out his life amongst people who would never call him Amaranth. And he would have his revenge against everyone who had ever mocked him for his condition. Soon everything would be okay. Yina's people called him "Stultus," which she said meant Saviour.
The Halian warship was hijacked that night. Mejora and his men were betrayed, infected, and brought to die at Zukah's feet on the dusty surface of a planet where Yina had landed the ship. The planet of giants, where Halia burned red in the sky like a single flaming eye, watching its impending doom with a baleful hatred.
"Traitor..." Mejora wheezed from his back in the dirt, his body grotesquely inflated beyond capacity. Useless muscles weighed down a body that could no longer summon the strength to move. "They'll kill the entire planet... women... children... our entire race... what did they promise you, bastard? What was your soul worth?"
"The service itself is my reward," would have been Zukah's answer. He never got to say it before Yina shot him through the back. "Stultus means idiot," she told him as he lay bleeding beside his former commander, gasping for air as he felt one of his lungs collapse upon itself. She levelled the gun at him, and he closed his eyes in terrified, confused anticipation of the killing blow.
The shot tore his head asunder, but only because of its volume. The actual round penetrated his stomach, ensuring a slow and agonizing death by gut wound. "Watch your home die, Stultus," Yina sneered at him as she pointed to the planet Halia burning in the darkening sky. And then she was gone. Tears rolling down his cheeks, Zukah helplessly tried to explain himself to Mejora, to any of his dying fellows scattered around him, but no sound would come out but whimpers.
When the Halian planet flared in the sky and vanished from sight forever, Zukah howled like the wounded and dying animal he was. The sound brought a pair of giants to the valley where he and the other Halians of his squad lay dying, and it was they who saved his life. Praising the gods for answering their prayers, the giants rumbled about the valley in search for a Halian alive enough to be of use to them. "All of them are dead or a half hour away from being dead," the larger one snorted. "One of them had to be alive in order to scream like that -- ah!" cried the other. He had spotted Zukah, writhing on the ground.
They inspected him and slapped away his hands in order to assess his wounds. "Nothing we can't fix at home apart from the loss of blood," the larger giant grunted. "I really doubt we have anything even close to whatever this thing's blood type is. It's no good. The gods are laughing at us!"
"Him..." Zukah gasped, pointing to Major Mejora's quivering body, straddling the border of death. "Same blood. Him. HIM!" And so Zukah betrayed his best friend twice in one day: Once to kill him and elevate himself to hero, and once to steal his blood and dignity as he died filthy and alone in a hospital bed so that Zukah could cling to life.
The giants rushed him to their home and healed him, replenishing the blood in his veins with Mejora's while mending his body. They used him to retrieve a cache of treasure for them, located down a path much too small for their massive bodies to fit inside a fortress left behind by a long-dead visiting alien species. Afterwards, the giants repaid him as he wished: instead of a share in their loot, he merely wished to travel to a planet as far away from the empty patch of sky that used to be Halia as possible. They were happy to oblige him with a piece of junk spacecraft too small for them anyway.
And that is how Zukah came to arrive on Earth. The journey was long and lonely and left him to his own thoughts. He has never been the same since. Upon crashing to the ground, Zukah immediately embarked on a frantic quest to erase every thought in his fractured mind through all of the substance abuse he could possibly endure. Along the way he discovered rock 'n' roll music, television, alcohol and humankind. Fast forward through an era unprecedented in Earth's history; an era that largely went unnoticed by the massive Halian in the thralls of his vices and his slowly unravelling sanity, and now Zukah enters this RP as the man he is today.
Zukah is a veteran of several wars and suffers from flashbacks and an addictive personality, amongst other maladies. He is sometimes gripped by mild dementia which distorts his perceptions of himself and his surroundings into a more palpable (or at least familiar) reality.
Always an outcast amongst his own people, Zukah now believes himself to be the last of the Halians and is at a loss as to how to deal with it. He's been hiding out on the planet Earth for more than half a century trying to figure it out, until only recently realizing that he had wasted decades of his life. Now he has emerged into the world, for better or for worse. Rock 'n' roll music, alcohol and junk food are, he feels, Earth's greatest natural resources.
Notes
This character is easily mistaken for the original Dragonball Ascendants character Zukah (v1.0). Unfortunately, there can only be one.