“I thought you said the signal was coming from a ruin,” Velloro said into his comm unit, looking up at the huge, very intact fortification in front of him with a large, unruined door blocking the way forward. The captain’s response was garbled, no doubt thanks to the rocky, mountainous terrain between him and the Sunrise Maiden. “Ye… …is th… …thing there?”

Rolling his eyes dramatically for the sake of his companions, who had instinctively turned toward the comm unit to try to decode Navasi’s transmission, Velloro shrugged. “Guess we’re improvising, Chk Chk,“ he said, winking at Keskodai’s larval son as he spun slowly in his protective canister. “Raia, can you get that door open?”

Before the technomancer could respond, a recess in the doorframe began to flicker with a dim red light that grew brighter and more steady. As it did, the ground thrummed with the energy of a long-dormant system sputtering to life.

“Yes—I’ll get the door,” Raia’s telepathic response darted through the hallways of Velloro’s mind as she began casting a spell that would magically bypass the door’s locks.

Several other vertical recesses in the wall drew Velloro’s eyes as they, too, activated. Boxy machines rose out of the staggered parapets, topped with gleaming barrels pointing straight up, then swiveled down to point directly at Velloro and his friends.

“Fall in—NOW!” Velloro’s last word was a telepathic shout to prevent the opening salvo of eight massive turrets firing heavy rounds from drowning it out. With no time to be polite, he pushed through his companions, knocking them off balance. Raia’s spell failed as her concentration faltered, but she immediately began to cast it again, cleaving close to Velloro as he raised his shield just in time to intercept the first wave of pounding projectiles.

Illustration by Setiawan Lee

As he often did in these situations, Velloro began to experience time much more slowly, to take notice of everything around him more carefully. He saw the firing mechanism jam on the fourth turret to the left of the entryway. He felt the heavy, staccato thud of rounds as they slammed into the ground just feet away and began to describe a dotted line that would momentarily bring the molten-hot metal slugs into contact with his shield, his armor—and possibly his friends.

The firing seemed to slow, but Velloro knew the automated turrets were cycling shots to prevent overheating; those towers wouldn’t run out of ammunition any time soon. Raia, somehow sounding out of breath despite being in his head, said “I’ve got the door,” and it slid open with unnerving silence and speed.

Three red-scaled, lizardlike ikeshtis wearing sand-tattered defrex hides skidded to a stop just in front of the entryway. They had been running toward stairs leading to the top of the wall, but now they turned to the intruders, semi-auto pistols in their clawed hands.

Velloro immediately charged the startled ikeshtis, smiling as he did. With each step, he drew more and more energy from the ground beneath his feet pushing back at him, until he’d gathered an invisible storm of entropy around himself, a cloak of molecular disorder that easily deflected the ikeshtis’ first few panicked shots. In just a few seconds, he was among them, facing down the biggest one as the two next to him flinched in anticipation.

The large ikeshti took the opportunity to fire at the lashunta nearly point blank, two bullets screaming toward the ancient rune of Castrovel glowing in the middle of Velloro’s chest plate. Velloro grunted with the impact of the first, yet this he could use. As the atoms of the bullet interacted with those of his armor, disorder bloomed like a coalescing storm cloud. Molecular lattices broke and reformed in countless chain reactions, ones Velloro could shape, divert, invest—and control. As the second bullet hit fractions of a second later, Velloro used the explosive energy of the first, all its waste heat and shrapnel and friction, to mitigate the damage from the second. The shiny metal round clinked harmlessly off his armor, no more destructive than an idly flicked pebble.

The lizard creatures on either side of Velloro raised their guns, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to aim at Raia and Keskodai. But Velloro was ready to react, grabbing the barrels of both weapons with either hand and crumpling them as though they were made of thin-pressed aluminum, before dropping them to the ground with a smirk.

Velloro turned his attention back to the one ikeshti that was still armed and swung his fist in a wide arc, gathering the remaining excess energy into his chest before sending it screaming to his shoulder, down his arm, and into his fist, where it whirled and careened in an ever-growing nimbus of destructive energy. As his fist made contact with the stunned ikeshti, Velloro cut the tether with the disorder he’d hoarded, sending it fully into the creature’s dry and brittle armor, which splintered and caved in. The ikeshti fell to the ground writhing in pain, futilely scratching at the ruined clasps of its armor in a desperate attempt to relieve the crushing pressure.

As Velloro turned back to the other two ikeshtis, who’d drawn their batons and were advancing on him cautiously, a gruff and incredulous voice rang out from somewhere high up, bouncing off the towering flat walls of the fort.

“Velloro?”

He looked up and knew her immediately, a towering and extremely familiar shobhad who was shouldering a sniper rifle that had moments ago been leveled at Velloro’s head. As the shobhad held two of her four hands out to stop the ikeshtis, Velloro grinned at Keskodai, who had already begun to focus on ripping the newcomer’s mind apart with his own.

“Hold on a sec, bud. This should be interesting…”

About the Author

Joe Pasini is the Starfinder Lead Designer at Paizo. He is steadfast in his belief that gaming is for absolutely everyone, and he’d love to play a game with you sometime! You can find him on Twitter at @joeadultman. His most recent passion project, the Starfinder Deck of Many Worlds, is out in December of 2019.

About Iconic Encounters

Iconic Encounters is a series of web-based flash fiction set in the worlds of Pathfinder and Starfinder. Each short story provides a glimpse into the life and personality of one of the games’ iconic characters, showing the myriad stories of adventure and excitement players can tell with the Pathfinder and Starfinder roleplaying games.

Illustration by Remko Troost

Velloro was adopted into a large ysoki family on the dusty planet of Akiton as an infant, never knowing another home—and never having much interest in finding one. His family were devout worshipers of Iomedae, goddess of justice and honorable battle, virtues the young lashunta gladly embraced. He spent his youth playing and scavenging among Akiton’s numerous wrecked starships with his many siblings. Time and again, Velloro proved a fierce protector of his family, whether extracting them from collapsed wreckage, fighting off rival scavengers, or otherwise putting himself between them and the many other dangers of their dying world.

When Velloro reached adolescence, he developed into the korasha clade of his species, packing on muscle and becoming rather headstrong. As he grew, he became less able to squeeze into the small spaces common to salvage sites and began to look around for other ways to expend his boundless energy. His years of roughhousing and scrapyard scrapping quickly pointed him toward one obvious direction in Akiton’s limited job market: Velloro traveled to the ancient city of Arl to become a gladiator. The VitariTech Coliseum, a new sporting venue that hosted nonlethal gladiatorial combats, began rotating Velloro into their regular fight schedule. The arena promoters capitalized on his youthful and attractive appearance and off-world species, dubbing him the Castrovel Kid and giving him a set of armor sporting the planet’s ancient symbol.

As Velloro moved up through the ranks of other local combatants and gained a small following, he also became close with a fellow gladiator, a shobhad named Dhareen. She saw potential in the young competitor, and after defeating Velloro in a particularly important show match, Dhareen invited the dejected lashunta to take the Test of the Mountain. In this shobhad tradition, travelers climb to the summit of Ka, Pillar of the Sky, the tallest mountain in all the Pact Worlds. Velloro accepted the challenge, making the grueling 22-mile climb over several months.

While climbing Ka, the charismatic and sociable Velloro experienced something entirely new and, at first, unpleasant: loneliness. Yet as his isolation grew, so too did his connection to the mountain and to his home planet. He spent long evenings watching the wind blow dust off the volcano in arcing swirls, and took note of how each step he took changed the mountain in an almost imperceptible way.

One night, while sheltering under a shallow outcropping during a violent storm, Velloro felt a strange acceptance and calm wash over him. As he did, he noticed the whirling mixture of ashy sleet around him turn to a gentle eddy. With sudden clarity, Velloro remembered dozens of instances earlier in his life when he had subtly affected the state of matter around him—events he had dismissed as coincidence or even imagined. Invigorated, the lashunta began to intentionally exert control over his surroundings, structuring and deconstructing the molecular lattice all around him, draining energy from one system and pouring it into another as easily as pouring red tea between cups.

Upon his return to the Coliseum, Velloro had new purpose. He honed his newfound skills, mastering the subtleties of molecular change and using it to great effect in his gladiatorial matches. His tendency to crumple the armor and weapons of his opponents as he sent them flying across the arena quickly earned him the nickname the Castrovel Crusher. But change is constant, and as Akiton’s gladiatorial combats continued to gain in popularity, the demand for blood sport also grew. Claiming the need to compete with other arenas, including Eox’s infamous and deadly Halls of the Living, the Coliseum’s management began to pressure Velloro to mortally wound his opponents. Velloro adamantly refused; he saw no honor in needless blood sport.

One day, just before a match against Dhareen, Velloro’s manager told him, “finish her—or you’re finished.” Velloro walked into the arena, embraced his mentor, and deliberately walked out to an uproarious mixture of cheers and mockery, knowing he could never return to his beloved profession. Instead, Velloro turned an eye to the stars, where he knew there were others like his family, others who needed protection and assistance—and he knew he had the power to help.

Having inherited no small part of his ysoki family’s gregariousness, Velloro is quick to laugh and make new friends, and is an amiable adventuring companion. His Iomedaean personal code predisposes him to giving second chances, even to the seemingly irredeemable—but he doesn’t hesitate to unleash his full might against unrepentant foes. And despite the sour end to his gladiatorial career, his love of games and sport have not waned, and he is always happy to strike his famous Castrovel Crusher pose at a fan’s request.

Joe Pasini
Starfinder Lead Designer