Tarva

Tarva Formerly a member of Syrus' squad when he was in the #Navladian Military. He left her and the rest of the squad for dead when Rissa sent out a call for help when her father married her off. Shezza and the team survived and turned mercenary, since they could never go back to the #military, lacking Syrus as they were. Doesn't know it, but she has Imperial blood. #military stuck her and Syrus in the same squad in hopes sparks would fly and babies would happen and politics would lean in the favor of the #Military once it had a child of the old bloodline in its hip pocket. After Syrus left team and they clawed themselves out of wreckage, took one of prototype ships to Seps Coalition (one of team from there originally). Trade the ship to Seps Coalition for safe passage, permission to land. Otherwise wouldn't have been welcome on #gatekeeper planet. Resupplied, turned merc to survive. Null abilities-strongish. Can either do an active field of canceling out EVERYONE'S #sai around her (this is the harder one, takes concentration), or hide herself and team for small space. Better than a shield. You can feel a shield. You can't even tell someone is THERE without physically seeing/touching them. Turns merc after surviving plant explosion where Syrus leaves her and team. But with ties to Seps Coalition. Have to pay back cost of the ship they were given before the Seps Coalition will really let them go.

Book 3 Start Point
Tarva Tarva Tarva. She knows what her name means, and she lives to spite it. For twenty years she lived hating Syrus too, for what he did to her and the rest of the team. Now, having learned he's alive and found him. And better yet, having caught him, she thought she was doing good. She had the two sai to turn over for bond money and the man who left her for dead to torture and kill first. I don't remember if she learned if he was Rissa's sousi or not towards the end of the second book. Maybe so? Either way, she ended Book Two pretty good. And then at the start of Book Three, all that is going to fall apart. She's about to be betrayed, again, by the person who helped her pick up the scattered pieces. And her debt to the Gatekeepers and Seps Coalition, for their part in getting her back on her feet, is being called due as well. Suddenly, the day is not as great as she'd thought.

First, they are laying claim to Syrus, and to her, saying Syrus is needed to cut through the layers of code the wrap the Barbs up. Supposedly, he is from the last legitimate line of Emperors to have their blood wired into the Barbs as an all-access pass through almost any of the locks. Even when a way of generating key codes is introduced, the blood locks remain fundamentally the same, because of the uniqueness of DNA and the nanites in a person's bloodstream. A maruste may be temporarily overwritten, but the DNA doesn't lie, and that is the other half of the blood keys.

Tarva doesn't know that she'd descended from a branch of the Imperial family, but she was cut from the Barbs because some long ago ancestor tried to lead a rebellion against the Emperor that Jossa and Delfi nearly got killed. Their travel access was cut off as part of the effort to put the rebellion down. So she can touch Jossa barehanded-though she won't for quite a while because Tarva wears gloves mostly, or Jossa is wrapped head to toe in cloth) and the maruste will still light up for her. They're locked to Syrus's DNA though, so they'll light, but not Blossom entirely.

All of that is for the future, when revelations are coming and going. For now, she didn't even get a chance to argue with Fiel, because he told her at gunpoint that they were headed for the GK instead of the Fleet rendezvous point for the cargo drop off. Then she wakes up in a stasis box in an entirely different section of the galaxy than before.

She is going to be spitting mad at Fiel, and the GK, for doing this to her. She doesn't remember what happened just before she blacked out. Fiel might have told her why they were being diverted, he might not have. But she's essentially a captive now, on the Jormunger belt of space stations. Which is something she's going to learn as she goes.

She's also ended up in proximity to Jossa, who may or may not be awake yet, but once she is, all hell is going to break loose. For her own self-preservation, Tarva is going to have to do something about Jossa's antics, because Jossa is feeling a whole gamut of emotions at the same time and any feeling being in the vicinity is reacting to them on an individual level. It is dangerous to leave Jossa going like that, and Tarva isn't going to know what they're up against. But an out of control sai is a beacon for trouble, and Tarva at this point will be focused on survival first.

She won't be happy about having to deal with Jossa. And she'll be wanting to find Fiel and wring his neck, then Syrus, just to tie up loose ends. She has no experience in this place, it looks like nothing she's used to, and while she has the background of being dumped in places with little to no backup, she doesn't have as much talent for blending in as Syrus does.

She is a Null. She contains her own mind by default, erecting both interior and exterior shields without thinking about it. With conscious thought, she can extend that ability a certain distance, and completely wipe the minds of those around her from 'existence' or keep them from reaching out.

I don't know if she fully blocks everyone in range from feeling each other too, but past a certain point they are dampened at the very least. Touch may not even be enough to give Jossa a Feel for someone if Tarva is holding a strong shield over them. But Tarva can't really aim it at a single person and shield them. She can do herself, or she can do people in proximity. But she can't transfer the talent.

Nulls are very rare, and some of the only sai who never get a sousi, at least according to common lore. They end up loners, in a lot of cases, and very self contained. Tarva knows she was never even going to have a chance at what Delfi and Jossa have, or what Syrus and Rissa had even. She's going to have to be her own mental support, and for the most part, she's ok with that. But her exterior people keep yanking the rug out from under her, and now two of the men she's trusted most in the galaxy have betrayed her. She's looking at the ones who are left with suspicion, wondering when they'll stab her in the back too. So she'll have a lot of weight to carry as the story starts, and as it progresses and they learn to survive in this world, she'll have to give up some of her hold over Jossa's sanity in favor of keeping them all alive. Because she gets weaker as she gets more tired. And maybe she'll get some of Jossa's story out of her, and if not forgive Syrus, hold off on torturing him to death the first time she sees him. Hers is probably the most open ended of the emotional arcs at least, because she has fewer obvious problems to fix.

Bits

 * Thinks Syrus hates sousi- doesn't know about Rissa


 * Used a sai booster (injected) to help control Jossa, but more importantly, to spread her Null field out over the entire ship so they could hide. (Didn't realize Delfi was mostly siphoning Jossa, so it didn't feel as strong to Tarva


 * Null range is limited, and the more hammering her from the outside, the smaller her field. Jossa limits her to a few feet.


 * Can tell when something is fighting her Null field, but not what. So seeing people react emotionally to Jossa will clue her in, but a Speak aiming directly at her would only register as a ping against her shield.