Appearance

Body Features

Lean build, angular features, and piercing eyes that always seem to be studying everyone around him

Apparel & Accessories

Often sports simple, practical clothing with just a hint of corporate flair. enough to blend into business settings but not appear wealthy or overly important

Mentality

Personal history

Malachai Roan was born in the North Atlantic Bloc, a bleak cityscape that jutted out of what used to be the British Isles. Steel-gray skies, towering holo-billboards, and neon-slashed alleys were all he knew as a kid. His father was old enough to remember the fallout from the Turning Point War of 2050, though not old enough to have lived through it himself, and never let Malachai forget that the Federation was built on blood and broken promises.

Like many kids growing up on Atlantic turf, Malachai had a basic neural chip installed at age eight, courtesy of a local corporate scholarship. It gave him limited VR access for schooling, but Malachai quickly learned how to manipulate software firewalls and piggyback on restricted net-lanes. While other kids spent breaks doing VR sports, he was snooping on corporate data streams and bugging his teachers’ comms. By fourteen, he’d assembled a mini-black market of stolen passcodes and secured a small fortune in cryptocurrency.

After spending his teenage years drifting between street syndicates, Malachai caught the eye of an upstart liaison firm that specialized in “off the record” negotiations between megacorps. Clients valued his knack for prying secrets out of tight lips. He smoothed out supply contracts for Aegis Corporation on Mars. He handled hush-hush labor disputes on the mining stations near Saturn. All the while, he kept building his personal web of blackmail and side-deals.

Under that polished grin and soft-spoken manner, Malachai treated human lives like game pieces. Not that he broadcast his twisted worldview, he was all charm and carefully cultivated empathy. To an outsider, he was just another corporate suit, albeit a slick one who got results. But behind closed doors, he turned blackmail, extortion, and sabotage into an art form.

It was during a corporate job on Europa that Malachai first heard about the NAUV Dalmathian. The wreck had disappeared beneath Europa’s icy crust in 2184, supposedly carrying nuclear fuel rods. That was the official story, anyway. Yet a whispered rumor floated around: the Dalmathian hadn’t just been carrying rods, it had something else locked in a secure container… something alien.

Naturally, the Federation’s official record was squeaky clean. “Tragic accident, total loss of crew and cargo.” Case closed. But Malachai caught wind of a stray sub-channel on the holonet that contradicted the official logs. Then, from a separate source, he learned that the Federation had spent billions hush-moneying private surveyors who’d scanned Europa’s ocean floors. There were no public scans available of the crash zone.

Malachai’s curiosity turned into obsession. He tapped into everything from low-level Federation dispatches to high-encrypted Enigma Dynamics data cubes. That was when he learned the real bombshell, a few obscure references suggested that the Dalmathian had been carrying an active Stygian sample for “containment studies.” The timeline clashed with official records, but it made sense of the intense hush-up. If the sample wasn’t destroyed in the crash, if it was still somewhere under Europa’s ice, then the Federation was covering up a major security breach.

To Malachai, this was a golden ticket. He’d never seen a war spark faster than when people believed there was a threat lurking in their backyard. And if the Federation’s prized defensive satellite system (the Mantle) couldn’t keep an alien vessel from smuggling in Stygians, what else were they missing? If he could prove the existence of an active Stygian presence, or even salvage remains of their biotech, he could blow open the biggest scandal in the system, and that scandal would become the perfect leverage to drive wedges between the Federation’s Eastern and Western blocs.

With that end goal in mind, Malachai played the long con. He bugged hololines belonging to mid-level Federation analysts, scientists, and even the family of one of the Dalmathian’s deceased officers. Through drips of personal logs and incomplete lab data, he pieced together a puzzle that almost nobody else believed existed.

The more he learned, the more enamored he became with the idea of weaponizing fear. If the Federation had truly encountered a surviving Stygian threat on Europa, the population would be in a frenzy, and each faction would blame the other for security lapses. Resources would be diverted to new weapons programs. Suspicions would run rampant. Old grudges from the Eastern and Western blocs would resurface...He wasn’t in it for riches. He wasn’t aspiring to become a senator or a corporate mogul. He wanted to watch as the entire house of cards started trembling.

Morality & Philosophy

As Malachai tells himself (in those private hours when he stared at his reflection in the tinted windows of his shuttle), war is the ultimate crucible of truth. In times of peace, humans lie to themselves about unity, about morality, about compassion. But in war, the raw truth emerges. People become who they really are: cunning, desperate, resourceful, or cowardly. To him, that reality is purer than any shallow facade of “universal harmony.” If the Federation falls into chaos, so be it, he believes it is destined to happen anyway, and he sees himself as nothing more than the subtle catalyst.

Personality

Motivation

Why do this? People might assume it is raw thirst for power, or money, or vengeance for his bleak childhood. His cynicism is anchored in the belief that humanity’s apparent unity is a fragile lie. He feels more honest lighting the fuse of conflict than perpetuating a system built on hypocrisy. Delivering the Federation into war would expose its hollow values and free people from the illusions that keeps them complacent. He sees himself as an architect of truth, even if it means plunging billions into misery.

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