Kaylr Freidmann

Name (& pronunciation): Kaylr Freidmann (Kay lar freed mun)
Date of Birth (& age): 243-1786 using the Imperium calender (or 11.08.1786)
Place of Birth: Melanoc lunar colony, Part of the Sataré Reich
Gender: Male
Species/Racial Origin: ½ Hexenfolke/ ½ Shifter
Social Class/Community Status: Hexenfolke (Just a step above total scum within the Reich). Infected (not common knowledge)
Language: Satare, Galactic common, An adapted form of sign language, Morse code
Family/Friends/Pets/Etc: 2 Foster brothers, 1 foster sister (all older) and 1 half brother (younger)
Height: 5'6”
Build/weight: Slim side of average/ ~140lb
Hair: Red (Ginger), shaggily cut.
Eyes: Dark reddish brown, two slitted pupils in each eye
Limb Dexterity: Right
Personality type: ISTJ-A

68% Introverted
99% Observant
79% Thinking
85% Judging
58% Assertive

Detailed Physical Description: Kay's features are rounded and boyish and his eyes a little too large for his face. His eyes are an unsettling deep reddish brown colour and he has two pupils in each eye.
Whether this impacts his vision at all has never been proven, certainly he doesn't SEEM to have any problem seeing things fine.

While he has the gangly long limbed and disproportionate build of his mother's race, unfortunately he doesn't have the height. He appears to be built to a far smaller scale than most Hexenfolke, who generally stand well over six foot.

Kay's skin is a deep tanned colour, more typical of full blooded Satare than the paler skinned Hexenfolke. This contrasts sharply with his vividly red hair (also fairly typical of a full blooded Satare), which is cut to just past chin length. He often styles his hair messily, tucking the longer strands behind his ears.

A long ragged scar runs across one cheek, presumably from a knife or claw. It's not a topic he's ever particularly happy to discuss.

Two vertical lines are tattooed over his left collarbone and a runic symbol on his left shoulder. The lines are military markings, denoting a cadet who only completed the minimum compulsory training. The runic symbol is another common Reich tradition, a personal mark given upon reaching the age of majority. It's a form of identification.

Kay tends not to wear shoes unless he has to, when he is forced to wear footwear, it'll be soft comfortable shoes that don't confine his overly broad feet too much.

Kay is never seen without a large golden amulet around his neck.


While mostly human in appearance, Kay does have wings. His wings are huge and semi-opaque, with black and orange feathers. The insubstantial nature of these large wings makes Kay's life a little easier, they don't get in the way, but they do make it abundantly clear that he isn't totally human after all. With concentration, he can make these wings disappear, but it takes constant effort that most often, simply isn't worth it.

His hands are missing a digit. That's not to say he had a finger that got amputated, he never had a fifth digit on either hand to begin with. While he only has eight fingers, he does have ten toes.

Typical Clothing/Equipment: His everyday attire is conservative at best, often coloured in dull neutral tones. It's comfortable, nonrestrictive and practical.

Personality/Attitude: Kay is quiet, and though outwardly friendly there's something held back, reserved. He's extremely private and would much rather engage socially in a superficial manner than engage in actual personal and uncomfortable truths. He tells a lot of half truths and isn't particularly forthcoming with personal information.

He craves emotional attachment, but paradoxically finds actual intimacy and affection difficult. He can become closed and standoffish very quickly, shrinking back into his shell when things get too serious.

He's a workaholic, throwing himself into his work often to the detriment of his own health. He likes to keep busy, it stops him thinking about anything else. It allows him to forget.

When working, Kay's military training comes to the forefront. Brisk, firm and no nonsense, he's more efficient than compassionate. Perhaps this is simply his way of detaching, but he can come off as rather cold. His silence doesn't help matters, leading to the false assumption that he's not actually that interested in people.
His bedside manner is terrible, sympathy is something he has zero time for. If you want someone to pat you on the head and tell you it'll all be okay, Kay is NOT the guy to do it.

He comes across as overly serious. He does have a sense of humor, but it only tends to come out when he's with people he feels genuinely comfortable around.

Skills/Talents:

Medicine/First Aid – Kay's training covered both emergency situations and minor civilian complaints, though he's spent the majority of his career working Triage. As a result, he's well versed in first aid. He can suture wounds, splint broken limbs and of course knows how to use diagnostic equipment. His time in a foundling colony has left him with a lot of experience in field medicine (IE getting creative and using whatever you have laying around because you have no damn supplies again or the power's gone out again or something else has screwed up.)

Computer – Kay has to know his way around a computer/tablet for his work, he's no master coder or techie geek, but he can type fairly quickly and knows his way around a standard set up.

Occult – Mostly Hexenfolke tales his mother used to tell.

Herbalism – Basic folk medicine. Kay knows what's poisonous, which in itself is useful knowledge. He also knows which herbs can aid digestion, ease congestion and relieve pain, and so on and so forth. Unfortunately this knowledge mostly extends only to plants native to the moons of Satare. Over the years he's picked up bits and pieces of other cultures, but his primary expertise is in the native medicines of his mother's people.

Survival – Kay grew up in an environment that required him to learn basic survival. What's good to eat, what isn't? How to build a trap, how to build a fire and even basic butchery. He can cook, though what he cooks is very simple and to some, very bland. He can fish, he can hunt and he can find his way through thick woods without getting totally and completely lost. Usually anyway.

Psionics (Telepathy) – Kay's mental abilities extend mostly to mental shields, making his mind difficult to read or manipulate, and telepathic communication. With meditation, he can enter another person's mind, but only with permission and preparation. He doesn't enjoy reading minds, not only is it rude, it's unsettling and exhausting. He might pick up loud surface thoughts accidentally (some people think damn loud) but he tries not to eavesdrop.

Shapeshifting – Animal (warm blooded creatures only). He can't take on other people's appearance nor can he become objects. He's rather reluctant to take on flying forms, Kay isn't keen on heights. The actual process of shifting, even voluntarily, isn't pleasant for him. His half blood nature has left his body ill equipped to deal with the change of form and mass, he finds it painful and disorienting. It quite literally breaks every bone in his body and resets them as he shifts.

Suffice to say, it's not an ability he takes advantage of if he can help it.

Any form he takes always retains his colourations (red hair/fur, those weird eyes, tanned skin etc) and his hand deformity. He's also always below average size/height for whatever form he's taken.

Small firearm – Pistol – He knows how to fire a gun, doesn't mean he's any good with it. His military training covered the use of firearms and a sabre, though Kay hasn't picked up a sword in a long time. His talent with a pistol extends mostly to basic gun safety and how to clean and maintain the thing. Aiming really wasn't ever that high on Kay's list of priorities and it's difficult to really focus on your marksmanship when you're sleep deprived and mostly incoherent anyway.

Strengths:

Apparently Immortal – While it seems unlikely Kay will die of old age, he's still susceptible to disease or injury. Unfortunately his naturally youthful features and apparent stalled aging make him look significantly younger than he actually is. Though fully grown, everyone assumes he's in his teens. His short stature probably doesn't help.

Resilient – Though physically Kay isn't particularly strong, he can take a lot of physical punishment before giving in. His pain threshold is horrifyingly high and his resolve difficult to shift.

Weaknesses:

Elective mute – Whether it was his mother's violent death or a side effect of his subsequent raging fever is unclear, but whatever the cause, Kaylr hasn't spoken since the night he was attacked.

Disease – Angesteckte (The disease/infection/taint) – Transmitted through fluid exchange. (blood, bite etc…) Kay's illness could be best associated with the earth legends of werewolves. “The Disease”, as it was simply known, is believed to have been created as a weapon to use against the shape changers the Imperium were at war with. It would force them into one form, lock them there unable to change, making them easier to root out and eradicate. It helped that it also triggered a sort of madness in the brains of the infected, driving them to acts of intense violence against their own kind.
Drop the virus, and wait till the population tore one another apart. It was an effective strategy, at least until the shifters started to adapt.
Unfortunately, then the virus jumped the species barrier.  Nobody realised until it was too late. The disease ravaged entire communities, like the shifters before them, the civilians tore one another apart.
Whole villages were burned to the ground in an attempt to slow the progress of the disease, quarantines put in place to protect the uninfected and any suspected of being infected taken away for “processing”.

In the shifters, the disease itself was seldom fatal, their natural shifting ability protected them. It was the rage that killed them. The imperium however, had no such natural protection and the disease did not discriminate. It twisted and mutated the body, within a month those infected would die of massive internal injury, exhaustion and organ failure. Unfortunately, the illness was highly contagious well before obvious symptoms manifested.
While the Imperium have figured out a treatment, they haven't managed to cure it. They can only slow the inevitable death and manage the symptoms and accompanying madness as best they can.

In Kay's case, something in his mixed blood protected him from the worst of the disease, he changes, he has violent mood swings, but he seems to be mostly in control of his mental faculties and he isn't dead yet. His natural ability to shape shift, coupled no doubt with his father's inherited resistance to the disease, mean that while he's still highly contagious, his own symptoms are manageable.
Keeping away from planets with multiple moons also helps. Something about the moons triggers the change, though Kay couldn't explain why. That's not his area of expertise, all he knows is full moon means agonizingly painful forced transformations and temporary loss of sanity, keeping that to a minimum is a good thing.

Hunted – If the Imperium, or indeed any civilized society learned of his condition, it's unlikely they'd take it well. In fact, the Imperium would rather like to get a hold of Kay's blood, to figure out precisely what it is that's kept him alive all this time despite the regular changes and increased stress to his system.

Silver intolerance – While it won't kill him, Kay seems to have a strange reaction to pure silver in contact with his skin. Purest silver literally burns his skin like battery acid. Silver alloys cause a rash and itch badly. Quite why this is, nobody is entirely sure. His contact with pure silver prior to infection was limited if non-existent, so it's impossible to determine if this allergy is related to his condition. Not enough experiments have been done on other Infected to test the effect of silver.

Weak immune system – Kay's monthly changes may not kill him, but they do take their toll on his body. The stress of it all has left his immune system almost permanently weakened. He's far more susceptible to infection and illness than most of his colleagues.  Because of his weakened immune response it takes Kay longer to recover from even the mildest of colds. He gets sick often, and it lingers. He tries to avoid contact with illness if he can help it, but that's not easy when you work in as a medic. Thankfully his patients tend to be the sort brought in with gunshot wounds rather than children with the sniffles.

Fears:

Abandonment – Kay can't quite deal with being alone. He seeks out companionship wherever he can find it, because it's that, or being alone with his memories.

Infecting someone – "The Infection" is a terminal disease for most. The only reason Kay has survived is thanks to his father's bloodline. It is also an incredibly contagious disease, so naturally Kay's overly paranoid about infecting those around him.

Heights - He maintains it's a perfectly logical fear. Heights equate to falling, and falling is never good! The origin of this fear is lost to time though, if indeed it was even triggered by any particular event.

Hobbies/Interests:

Work, work and more work. Kay could easily be accused of being something of a workaholic. He simply claims if gives him something to do.

Humanitarian aid. Kay actually enjoys helping people, it gives him a sense of purpose and achievement

Freedom. Of speech, of mind, of body, it doesn't matter. To Kay, every individual has the right to be free. Even military school couldn't crush his liberal spirit.

Philosophy of Life: Everyone deserves to be free. However, just because you deserve to have free will doesn't mean I can't point out what a moron you are and how this injury you have sustained is totally your own fault and you won't get any sympathy for being a twit.

Attitude Toward Death: It's inevitable. Doesn't mean it doesn't hurt those left behind though.

Religion/Beliefs: The Imperium aren't big on religion, and Kay's never been one to believe in any sort of higher power anyway. Things happen, they just happen, there's nothing you can do about it. There's no puppet master pulling the strings, it's just crappy luck of the draw.

Fetishes/Strange Behaviors: Kay does NOT speak. He's been elective mute for well over a decade. He communicates mostly via notes, sign language or meaningful glares.
He can communicate telepathically but always asks permission, it's rude to go stomping around someone's head uninvited. He values his privacy and by extension, he values other's right to the same.

He doesn't really like public displays of affection, a handshake or a pat on the shoulder is about the extent of physical contact you'll get out of him most of the time.
Being near the full moon kinda screws up his inhibitions though, making him far more emotional and aggressive. Everything is amplified around this time, and he's not great at keeping these impulses under control.

Most Instructive/Painful/Memorable Experience: When he was 12, he wandered too far from the safety of the compound, too far and too close to nightfall. When he didn't come home at sundown his mother went to find him. He'd caught the attention of a pack of Infected, his mother shot them, pulled him to safety and told him to run. She died saving him, and he was left infected himself.

Sexual Preference/Experience/Values: Homosexual. Kay has not been in many relationships. Well, he's been in two now. His first ended badly, what with the guy dying horribly and all. It's left Kay a little bit messed up when it comes to intimacy and emotional attachment.

Education/Special Training: Military school, though he sort of flunked out of that and ended up doing backbreaking labor on some backwater colony instead. Breaking rocks doesn't teach you much, except patience and a lot of introspection.

Medical training. After breaking a lot of rocks, he was finally given the chance to actually complete his training. He was trained as an army nurse, surgical and medical but mostly surgical. Once he left the colony he went to work on a space station, right on the front lines. Most of his experience was fixing plasma burns, amputations and other such horrendous injuries of war.

Place/Type of Residence: Drifter
Occupation: Nurse/Medic
Place of Work: Vestia
Work-related Skills: First aid, making sure you don't die.. hopefully, sewing you back together, you know.. the usual. Has been dubbed "bad cop" in the medical bay, really doesn't mind.
Past Occupations: Frontier medic (Imperium front line)
Memberships: n/a

Notes:

- Kay like all members of the Imperium has a small ID chip embedded in his neck/shoulder. This contains his official Imperium ID, and all records they hold on him.

In Kay's case, his ID is a bit patchy. He didn't have a birth certificate till he was 14, and his date of birth is a bit vague as a result. He also has no father listed, just his mother, Olin Freidmann (Deceased). His ethnicity is listed as Hexenfolke.

His military record shows that he was at the academy for less than 6 months before being dragged before a tribunal and court-martialed. His crimes were "Failure to attend for duty",  "misconduct with fellow cadets" and "refusal to cooperate with tribunal investigations." He refused to name names. He was discharged and sentenced to 18 months "rehabilitation" on a distant foundling colony that was still being terraformed.  His record from this point states that he was a hard worker, and after 18 months elected to remain and began medical training.
Two years later he signed up to continue his training on the frontier, where his work ethic and efficiency was praised.
He graduated in 1806 (by the Imperium calender) aged 20.

He was a frontier medic, specifically a triage nurse on the front lines.

His medical record is also included but at the time of his medical, they had no tests for Lycanthropy. He's listed as having a physical deformity of the hands and eyes but his vision is apparently fine according to eye tests. His blood type is listed and there's a note about a suppressed immune system and suggestion of medications to treat this.

His psych report states he has "PTSD" and is elective mute. They could find no physical reason he couldn't speak, his report theorizes it's some sort of psychological block as the result of some massive trauma. It also lists him as being uncooperative with further psychological analysis. Despite being unwilling to discuss this trauma, he is otherwise considered to be sane and fit enough for duty.

- Kay and Matt left the Reich in 1809, they have been traveling for about 3 years now.

- Kay does have money, it's just all in Imperium credits and almost impossible to convert into something more widely accepted. Frontier medicine pays well.

- He and Matt have known one another for around 20 years, they are foster siblings. Kay has 3 foster siblings and 1 half brother.

- Kay's natural form is monstrous, a twisted and deformed creature. Kay finds his natural form not only horrendous to look at, but extremely difficult to function in. He can barely use his hands thanks to the talons, his tail and wings get in the way and generally it's just extremely awkward. Also people tend to freak out and throw things, or scream, or generally react with utter horror and Kay really would rather not have to deal with that. He's uncomfortable in his natural form, and would sooner pretend like it doesn't exist thanks. His own mental image of himself is his humanoid form, he considers that his "true" form even if it's not natural.

His necklace: Kay's amulet is a magical item, part of a seal used to shackle shapeshifters. It prevents a shifter from being able to change form so long as it's worn. Presumably it was originally set into something harder to remove than a necklace.
In Kay's case it's the only way he can retain his humanoid form for any length of time. His control over his shape changing is such that he can only maintain a form for an hour or so naturally. His natural form isn't pretty, or very practical, Kay vastly prefers not to look like a monster thanks.

He can't naturally shift while wearing the amulet, however his lycanthropic changes seem to be too strong for the magic, overriding it and forcing a change regardless. It's likely this constant undermining of the magic that's caused it to fracture, leaking arcana slowly as the magic breaks down.
Starr has patched the leak, but it's a temporary fix.

The amulet is NOT Satare, Kay isn't entirely sure where it came from. The Imperium haven't got magic, but no doubt an item such as this would have been extremely useful to them in their fight against the shifters. His mother bartered for it when he was around 3 or 4 years old, in a desperate attempt to allow him some semblance of a normal life. His mother only ever referred to the man who gave it to her as "the demon", so he isn't entirely sure where he was from or whether the item was something his race had created or stolen from some other world completely.

Starr made Kay a new amulet. The principle is much the same, it "locks" him into his current form. However her version has a workaround allowing Kay to change at will. It helps him retain a form, but it doesn't trap him in one. It's not clear how the Lycanthropy might interact with this new magic yet.




The tattoo on his shoulder, this is Kay's identification mark within the Imperium.