Tomas Varek
The Mutilated Disciple
- Health
- 34
- Stamina
- 8
- Age
- 59
"He was beautiful once. Now he's just a walking mass of scar tissue and blunt force trauma."
Passive
Your cards with the Slow keyword have +1 Piercing Attack (deals at least 1 Damage, even if blocked).
Loadout
Who they are
Tomas spent thirty-five years inside as an elite athletic trainee, and at fifty-nine his massive frame still carries the power of that engineered youth; but no one can read an age in keloid scar. His face is a grotesque mosaic of thick raised scar tissue from Roach's railway machete, crisscrossed across cheeks, brow, and throat. His right eye is pulled downward into a demonic squint, his cold grey left eye watches from the ruin, and his jawline is mangled. Grey now streaks the greasy dark brown hair hacked away in irregular chunks around jagged scalp scars, and the patchy stubble breaking through the scar tissue is greying too. His pale skin is mottled with chemical burns and frostbite. He has no tattoos. He stands 192 cm and 102 kg, hunched forward in a predatory lumber, in torn, scavenged heavy combat gear bound with iron wire ties: reinforced blackened plate armor scraped through to rust-red oxide primer at every edge and dent, over a dirty ballistic Kevlar vest faded to rust-red, with strapped black knee and elbow pads edged in rust-red and grease-black canvas trousers patched and seamed in rust-red, with an industrial steel plug in his left ear. He fights with a naginata: a seven-foot ash haft banded in iron wire, capped with a 60 cm curved blade ground from a railway leaf spring, heavy enough that a full swing breaks through a raised guard. In a chest pouch he carries fury-synth syrettes, spring-loaded auto-injectors of a Syndicate-synthesized combat stimulant that floods him with rage and deadens pain, which he jabs into his thigh before an assault, and again in the middle of a fight whenever he is hurt. From a locomotive's emergency locker in the yard he took a single-shot flare pistol, a stubby signal gun, and he keeps it loaded with a magnesium flare that burns through fog and cloth alike.
Since last winter he has lived alone in the abandoned freight boxcars of the Sector 9 Switchyard, a wraith who beats rumors out of any scavenger who strays into his yard. He fights for revenge: to find the masked fighter who moves like Silas, and to butcher the daughter of the master who discarded him.
The years before
Year0
The Unscarred Face
"Thirty-five years inside, and they put me out through the Titanium Wall with the rest of them. I walked out with my head up and my hair combed, the only face in that crowd worth looking at. Nothing out here had touched it yet."
Tomas Varek
Year1
The Bribe
"Elias Thorne offered clean water, tailored Kevlar and protein. Silas offered self-denial and chalk circles. I took a dozen of his best trainees down to the Cisterns with me and became Elias's chief enforcer. The slums learned to pay on time."
Tomas Varek
Year1
The Lead Student
"Thirty-five years inside as an athletic trainee, and Silas Locke's lead student from the day I walked into the rotunda. His palm strike was measured. Mine was not. I put my weight through it and broke sternums and timber posts alike."
Tomas Varek
Year1
The Rescue of Lyra Vance
"My enforcers had Lyra Vance. Silas Locke came through them with a bo staff and took her back. From that night the two of them were one problem instead of two, and I have been paying for it ever since."
Tomas Varek
Year23
The Ambush
"I laid the trap for Roach in the Switchyard. He took my attack to the ribs, tackled me into the gravel and fired into a solvent canister under the ties. When I could see again he had me pinned to an iron truck, and he carved my face apart."
Tomas Varek
Year23
The Lantern in the Boxcar
"Roach took my face, and the Syndicate took my rank after it. I went into the dead freight cars of Sector 9 and stayed there. I keep one lantern and I keep my back to it. Nobody out here needs to see me now."
Tomas Varek
Year24
The Spent Injector
"Where the convoys were hit on the eastern spur I found where she had knelt in the snow, and beside it a spent auto-injector, clean glass and spring steel, its needle still bright. I know injectors. Nobody out here makes glass that clean."
Tomas Varek
Year24
The Three Vigils
"A courier boy with brass goggles wept and gave me her sleeping place, her road and the night she would next cross the eastern spur. I kept three freezing vigils on the word of a child. Nobody came. On the fourth night I understood."
Tomas Varek
Pack 4 · Dr. Wei Lin vs Tomas Varek
All five packs