Gabriel Tosh: the ghost terrazine remade

Gabriel Tosh was a terran spectre and the leader of Project Shadowblade, a subversive rebel group opposed to the Terran Dominion. Once a devoted Dominion ghost and a passionate supporter of Emperor Arcturus Mengsk, Tosh was psychologically transformed by a psychic catastrophe and by his addiction to the gas terrazine into a nihilistic rebel waging a campaign of terror against the regime. During the Second Great War he allied with Raynor's Raiders, and depending on a choice in that campaign he either stayed with them or was killed by his former comrade Nova Terra. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)

Early life and the Ghost Program#

Gabriel Tosh was raised by his grandmother on the mean streets of Haji, with little access to education and no facilities to train his psionic abilities, which his grandmother regarded as voodoo. Out of fear, the Hajian elders banished Tosh and his grandmother to a remote shack on the edge of town. He was conscripted into the Confederate Armed Forces, which recognized his psionic talents and drafted him into the Ghost Program. He seemed to vanish from the record, and rumors ran rampant about his whereabouts. (StarCraft: Ghost Academy; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres; Gabriel Tosh (StarCraft II official site))

Tosh made the transition from Confederacy to Dominion and established himself as a hardcore supporter of the latter, becoming a passionate believer in Mengsk and the Dominion. In 2501 he led the Ghost Program's Team Blue, a group of trainees. A first-class trainee slightly older than his teammates, he personally welcomed Kath Toom to the team, and a spark formed between them. He led the team through training simulations alongside members including Nova Terra and Lio Travski, and though his teamwork drew early criticism, his lessons took hold and Team Blue improved. His teammate Nova was originally built as the star of StarCraft: Ghost, the action game Blizzard abandoned. (StarCraft: Ghost Academy; StarCraft II: Heaven's Devils; StarCraft: Frontline Volume 4)

Shi and the breaking of his mind#

His admiration for Nova grew into a distracting attraction, complicated by the infatuation of Team Red's leader, Dylanna Okyl. Academy policy forbade student relationships, and after Nova and Tosh kissed out of view of the cameras, Tosh rejected her advances to protect her, leaving her bitter but still close to him. After Teams Blue and Red were combined into Team Purple, the unit was deployed aboard the battlecruiser Cyrus to the Baker's Dozen, where a distress call drew them into combat against the zerg on Shi. (StarCraft: Ghost Academy)

When the downed Cyrus came under heavy zerg attack, Nova was sent to draw the swarm away with her powerful psionic abilities, and Tosh accompanied her despite his objections. Slowed by combat after his cloaking failed, Tosh did not reach safety as he claimed, and when Nova unleashed her power she caught and severely injured him. The mind blast altered his mental chemistry: he became immune to the memory wipe procedure and able to hide his thoughts from other mind-readers. While the other trainees were wiped on Mengsk's orders to keep the fate of the rescued Old Family heirs secret, the injured Tosh was not, and he was told he suffered from delusions stemming from an accident. (StarCraft: Ghost Academy; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)

Desertion and the rebellion#

The altered Tosh became disillusioned with the Dominion and the Ghost Academy, feeling that the situation had to change. After the deaths and disappearances of friends including Kath Toom and Lio Travski, and aware that his secret had been discovered, he faked his death on an early mission, though the Ghost Program continued to hunt him. He drifted into a slum on Tyrador IX, taking security work and turning to hab use in his depression, until he learned of a mind-expanding substance called terrazine. He spent months seeking it before finding it leaking from a rift on Altara, and there he met General Cole Bennett, a survivor of Project Shadowblade who now hated the Dominion. With Bennett, Tosh struck an agreement with the Umojan Protectorate to supply spectres for a coup against Mengsk, his contacts among former Dominion figures helping to spread anti-Academy propaganda. At some point his eyes turned a milky white. (StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres; StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)

In 2503 Bennett's rebels moved against Mengsk. On Altara, Tosh captured Kath Toom and exposed her to terrazine, intending to set her free, but she refused a place in the planned assault. The attack on Augustgrad failed when Okyl's terrazine-driven instability alerted the Dominion, and Mengsk escaped into a psi-shielded panic room. In the aftermath Bennett captured Nova and her ally Malcolm Kelerchian to coerce Nova into kidnapping Mengsk. Aboard Gehenna Station the operation collapsed into infighting: Bennett murdered Kath Toom to frame Nova, and when Tosh learned the truth from footage of the confession, he confronted Bennett, allowing Nova to kill the general with a thrown stalactite. Tosh took Toom's body and several indoctrinator chambers and, on the urging of the hallucination of his grandmother, traveled to his home planet of Haji. (StarCraft II: Heaven's Devils; StarCraft II: Devils' Due; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)

Project Shadowblade#

Tosh took leadership of Project Shadowblade, which remained a subversive rebel group opposed to the Dominion. He reappeared as a mysterious arms dealer and pirate, considered so dangerous that local mercenaries barred him from Deadman's Port. His hatred of Mengsk endured. By 2504, Tosh's Goons had developed a spectre-activating facility at Avernus Station, where he collected the substances jorium and terrazine. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; Gabriel Tosh (StarCraft II official site))

The Second Great War#

During the Second Great War, Tosh contracted Raynor's Raiders to pirate the resources needed to produce spectres for use against the Dominion, believing Commander Jim Raynor would be sympathetic to his cause. He hired the Raiders to mine minerals on Redstone III without mentioning their psi-enhancing jorium content, then came aboard the Hyperion, where he and his band played in the cantina each Saturday though he never ordered a drink. Through his interactions with Raynor, Tosh warned of the threat posed by Sarah Kerrigan, insisting she had to be killed, and sensed the visit of Dark Prelate Zeratul and the coming of the protoss and zerg hybrid. He repeatedly warned Raynor about Tychus Findlay and was suspicious of Doctor Ariel Hanson, whom he called a honey trap, a suspicion borne out when the rescued Agrian colonists succumbed to the zerg virus. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)

Tosh directed the Raiders to obtain terrazine from protoss altars on Bel'Shir, then asked them to break his fellow spectres out of New Folsom Prison. His secrecy unsettled Captain Matt Horner, and Nova contacted Raynor to warn against further cooperation, claiming the spectres were uncontrollably violent. Wings of Liberty leaves the choice to the player. If Raynor kept faith with Tosh, the Raiders freed the spectres, Tosh agreed that only volunteers would become spectres in the Raiders, and he supplied data to Chief Engineer Rory Swann so that spectre equipment could be manufactured; Heart of the Swarm later shows him still with the Raiders, offering to infiltrate the prison ship Moros to rescue Raynor. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm)

If Raynor sided with Nova instead, he turned on Tosh and attacked Avernus Station, destroying his jorium stockpiles, terrazine tanks, and psionic waveform indoctrinator. An aggrieved Tosh contacted Raynor from six light years away and tried to torture him with a voodoo doll, but the doll was attuned to Tychus Findlay instead, and Raynor was unaffected. The distraction allowed Nova to sneak up behind Tosh and stab him to death. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty)

Character#

Tosh was a skilled martial artist with good endurance and a high opinion of his telepathic abilities, fond of the balisong and given to claiming he would do anything to get the job done. His accent grew more pronounced when he was excited, and his mind had been addled by terrazine exposure. (StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty; StarCraft: Ghost Academy)

In his Ghost Academy days he had been a different man, a strong supporter of the Dominion who believed that whatever the regime's faults it protected people from the protoss and zerg. The confrontation on Shi altered his neurology, and his terrazine addiction warped his moods and perceptions until he experienced vivid hallucinations of his grandmother and of Maman Therese, the voodoo god of death of Haji. His nihilism took on an undertone of mysticism, and his bearing came to emulate that of his dead grandmother. He clung to the hope of reuniting his old Team Blue under the spectre banner, an ideal that hardened into an obsession and interfered with his operations. His psionic powers included telepathy, mind blast, and consumption, and after Shi he became nearly impossible to detect psionically, his abilities only expanding with continued terrazine use. (StarCraft: Ghost Academy; StarCraft: Ghost: Spectres)