Portrait of a Villain: Jin Blackheart
Written by Steven Schutt
Concept/Archetype: Space Pirate Lord
Keywords: space opera, science-fiction, cybernetics tyranny
Race: cyborg: was human
Profession: Overlord of the Sol System
The year is 2603, and Jin Blackheart, a man of a hundred seventy three years, controls a vast network of black market trade in exotic spices, sex, slaves, weapons and less understandable fare. His seat of power sits on the surface of the sun in the Sol system. A huge magnetic field twenty thousand times stronger than earth’s protects his citadel and the surrounding cityscape. Seven huge space stations surround the sun at equal intervals, similarly protected.
Of these, three act as starship docks, shipyards, and barracks where Jin’s war fleet and its crew spend most of their time. The surface of two other moons caters to Jin’s many soldiers and pirate lords. The innards of these moons house the millions of poverty stricken victims of Jin’s many plunders. The remaining two act as giant power plants supplying his cities with the fields that protect them from the sun’s heat.
The sun’s life shortens by a thousand years every day these plants suck away its energy. Jin Blackheart could care less. His empire spans to the moons of Neptune, and when the star dies in three thousand years, he plans to be set up as emperor of this sector of the Milky Way, with trillions of supplicants pleading for his mercy. They will all rot.
Blackheart has no illusions that he is the most powerful man in the solar system, and knows there are those who wish ill of him. For the time being, he does not care, since, even at almost two hundred years of age, anyone who wishes to kill him must first fight their way through the thousands of automated weapons, guards and traps that protect him.
The will of Jin Blackheart is law, and there is nothing anyone can do to change it.
Background
Born from the union of a Martian mine conglomerate CEO and a Saturnian gas tycoon, Jin Leram knew little other than the luxury afforded by the obscenely rich. For fifteen years, he wanted for nothing. He received the best schooling from both the top universities and schools and from his exceedingly demanding parents.
The methods of business, the taking of cities without bloodshed, the colonization of planets centuries ago, the methods of attaining riches through both legal and less savory means, the annexation of small business at largest profit; Jin learned and mastered all of this and more by the time he was twenty three years old. At the age of twenty four, Jin’s parents ordered him out of their mansion on Jupiter’s core and told him to find his fortune then return. Never the dutiful son yet still a genius, Jin took the expulsion as a challenge and walked into the lightning storms with a plan.
Jin’s first act once out from under his parents’ wing was to leave the safety of the noble quarter of the core. In a move both stupid and defiant, the young Jin walked, nobles clothes and regalia, into the roughest district he could find and began looking for the underworld. When he found it, he found that his practiced martial arts and defensive techniques meant nothing if your opponent had the speed of ten men and the strength of twenty.
He lost a literal arm and a leg in several fights for the honor of men, which of course meant nothing but the credits in his account. He replaced his lost limbs with cybernetic prosthetics fitted with hidden weapons to better defend himself. By age thirty, ninety percent of Jin’s body was replaced by cybernetics. His brain he replaced with an indestructible network of nanomachines, his lungs with plasma generators that fed the machines and his stomach with a portable black hole that constantly drew in matter from outside of him to keep him satiated.
His greatest achievement came in the form of his heart, a machine he designed and built himself. He replaced his most vital organ with a nuclear reactor fitted with a quantum ticker: essentially an immortality engine that pulled energy from space-time itself, transformed it into black, stellar plasma and circulated it throughout the body. Jin Leram became Jin Blackheart with the heart transplant, and with the loss of his name, he spent his last billion. Now dirt poor but with a mind and body to rival a quasi-god, Jin’s plan finally began in earnest: he would do more than his parents combined. He planned to rule the solar system itself in less than a century.
To accomplish this mammoth task, Jin used all his cunning to integrate himself into the underground on Mars, which, by the virtue of its position next to Earth, and Jupiter had connections to every planet in the system. His following was small at first, and his raiding ship was a clunker, but his plans of attack accrued an 89% success rate regardless. The authorities never found more than a minuscule trace of evidence, and none of it ever came close to Jin’s doorstep.
In ten years he commanded a small armada of fifteen frigates, two cruisers and a battleship and took prizes from everyone except the Lords of Sol, the twelve men and women who ruled the system. Jin’s ambition knew no bounds, and he wanted the Lords to bow to him, so he set about crushing them in one fell swoop. Knowing they ruled from Pluto, deep in the planet’s core, he resolved to obliterate Pluto from the universe. And he knew how to do it: use the Sun.
Once again, Jin Blackheart possessed almost no credit to his name and his connections were all but exhausted, but his weapon was unstoppable. A ring, a mile in diameter, attached to the sun and aimed at Pluto. With the push of a button, Jin funneled twenty earth masses of pure starstuff at the core of the once-ninth planet, ripping it from the fabric of space-time itself and collapsing it into an area of voidspace that became a no-man’s land in an instant. Knowing his weapon had only one more use left, Jin decided to play his hand for control of the system. Three months after Pluto disappeared into a horrid rip in reality, Jin Blackheart took the title of Emperor of Sol, and all knew that to cross him meant another planet’s death.
Motivations & Goals
As an immortal surrounded at all times by a thousand and one cyborg guards, traps and political webs, Jin fears nothing, and thus his plans are audaciously grand. In his one hundred and seven years of rule, he’s found that his vice grip on the solar system is tighter than ever, and looks to the stars for further conquests. However, progress is slow not because Jin cannot urge his followers to action, but because of the great distance of Earth from Alpha Centauri. To that end, Jin has three ideas that he plans to give his top scientists a decade, no more, to put into effect.
The first of these is simple, at least by Jin’s standards. He wants to create a giant slingshot that thrusts starships between space and time just long enough to reach Alpha Centauri. The first few ships will be manned with criminals, potential assassins and several thousand loyal, yet ultimately expendable, soldiers. Jin’s scientists will track all transmissions and analyze any failures and any contact on the other side. To make sure the communication goes uninterrupted, Jin himself put together a universal communicator that sends messages across the universal dark-matter net, and thus sidesteps matter and its hazards altogether.
The second is more complicated, but not without possibility. The proposed plan is as follows: tap into the aforementioned dark-matter net and use it as a superhighway to travel outside of material reality at speeds exceeding those of light. However, even in the twenty seventh century, the properties of dark matter remain somewhat mysterious. While scientists know how to capture and manipulate the stuff in simple terms, to use it as a propulsion source is a radical leap forwards.
Not even antimatter accelerates anything too far below light speed, and then only when it is focused into a molecular width beam. Ten years of research doesn’t seem, at least to Jin’s top researchers, to be a viable timeframe to jump science that far. Of course, with so many willing and equally brilliant minds waiting for their positions, those same researchers have nothing but success to think about.
Finally, Jin’s third plan, his favorite and perhaps the most improbable of them, is to stomp on the face of the Lords one final time and use the voidspace that was Pluto and pull the Alpha Centauri system close enough to Sol that interstellar traffic is not necessary.
To do so, Jin says, the void must be contained and focused, its polarity shifted such that it points directly at the desired star, then forced to pull with the strength of a galactic core black hole. In theory, this might be enough to, over the course of a millennium or so, do just as Jin desires, though only he would be alive to see the end result. His scientists, therefore, work to shorten the time span that they too might live to see mankind’s greatest achievement called from the imagination of a tyrant.
Organization
The structure of Jin’s empire, The Black Empire, is not simple, nor is it overly complex. First, its most powerful figure, Jin himself, has final say on all decisions made by the major power base, the Regents of a Star. These Regents make all laws and debate on them until Jin finds the time to read over summaries the Regents provide. Each law is several hundreds of pages long with several thousand sub-clauses. Since Jin does not read each sub-clause, nor are the Regents required to include them in the summary, none of them are foolish enough to do anything to undermine his rule. His network of spies is too vast and well informed and his punishments too far beyond sane comprehension.
Below the Regents are the Pirate Lords. This loose knit collection of powerful brigands and privateers must follow the laws of the Empire, but many of the sub-clauses in those laws are worded such that the Lords do as they please without fear of retribution. While this might insight chaos in most governments, Jin wrote a law early in his rule that even the Pirate Lords obey.
No one, unless given clearance from Jin himself, may keep everything they take, buy or sell without giving back something to the government. Thus, when a pirate steals an entire shipload of high-density starship fuel, he must give a percentage of that fuel to the government through some method. This is a well-known secret that all of Jin’s subjects merely accept when they receive their letters of credit for food, clothing and other essentials.
The unwashed masses, the trillions of people living on the six colonized planets and fifteen moons, not including those worthy enough to live on the sun with their king, comprise the rest of the empire. While there is a class structure within these many faces, and certain people have far more power than others, Jin’s government counts them all as a single entity.
However, this is not to say that someone cannot rise to Jin’s or his agents’ attentions. Powerful captains of industry who won their fortune by the sweat of their hands and the blood of their veins petition the Regents on an almost daily basis, hoping, many times in vain, that the council finds them worthy of notice. Those who succeed find themselves in possession of a mighty battlecruiser emblazoned with Jin Blackheart’s sigil, marking them as a Pirate Lord. They receive also a special cybernetic implant that serves three purposes.
First, it identifies the lucky man or woman as under the protection of the Black Empire and that they are not to be harmed except by those who similarly possess the implant.
Second, this implant tracks the movement of the new Empirical agents and catalogs their habits, quirks, business transactions, anything that the Regents or Jin himself might find useful for one of their many ventures.
Third, and perhaps most important to Jin’s ego, is the detonation chip that sits on the outermost surface of the implant. At any time, Jin, or a Regent at his command, may press a single button assigned to their agent and both he and an area a hundred miles in diameter will disappear in a horrid implosion into voidspace. The supplicant receives all this information on implantation, and thus many think twice before doing anything to betray their new master.
Adventure Hooks
Weapons’ End: One of Jin’s many weapon factories suddenly cuts off all communication with the Empire and the powerful, star plasma weapons produced there stop churning out. To make matters worse, one of Jin’s Pirate Lords broke his oath of fealty and found a way to deactivate the detonation chip in his implant. The two are, Jin thinks, not unconnected. A loyal Pirate Lord approaches the PCs and asks for their help in a delicate matter, but says no more, promising an explanation, and compensation, once they reach the area of interest.
On arriving at the weapons facility, the Pirate loads the party into an escape pod and jettisons them towards the floating deathtrap. A hologram in the pod tells them they have three days to solve the problem and gives the PCs a rundown of the situation. Finally, the message states that a great sum of money is already in their accounts, with more to come should they succeed. If they don’t there are others who would be happy to have that cash in their pockets.
He Speaks Truths: A beggar grabs one of the PC’s arms as they pass through a metropolis on Mars. He does not ask for money or food or water. He says a small band of thugs stole an Imperial signet ring and fled to a small warehouse on the fringe of the city. When asked how he knows this, he gives a cryptic response and grows quiet, telling the party only that recovering the ring will bring them a good reputation with the Empire.
When the party reaches the warehouse, they find the thugs dead, their hearts pinned to the walls, seemingly torn from their chests. The ring sits in the middle of the floor, shining in the gore. As the party travels to the nearest Imperial guard post to return the ring, several people around them also have their hearts ripped out, with no apparent reason. Suspicion of murder falls on the party’s shoulders, and they must work fast to both discover the identity of the ring and clear their names before the unknowing authorities try and destroy an Imperial R&D experiment.
Combat Tactics
The Ruler of the Black Empire, even at one hundred seventy three years, possesses the strength of twenty men and the martial ability to destroy ten of his finest guard droids without breaking much of a sweat. His left arm contains an ion cannon that can destroy five square city blocks at full power and extends into a blade when close combat becomes necessary. His right hand transforms into a flamethrower/missile launcher combination, and he can manifest plasma wings to fly at unbelievable speeds. His right eye can see in all light ranges and can emit concentrated gamma rays in a visible beam by mixing them with protons.
If for some reason Jin is without these weapons and reduced to mere mortal abilities, his skill with fist and foot is second to none. Given the opportunity, he breaks the legs of his opponent, stomps their skull into pulp, then throws them against a wall prepared with spikes or other sharp implements and proceeds to pummel their ribs to dust. This all, of course, assumes that the attacker somehow made it past ten thousand human guards, a dozen details of assassin droids and sentry guns and a labyrinth of traps and political intrigue that only Jin can decode given time.
Jin Blackheart by Nevermet Press is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.nevermetpress.com/contact.
