Kath Toom

Kath Toom, later designated Agent X52735N, was a terran ghost who was eventually transformed into a spectre. A telepath trained at the Ghost Academy, she served on Team Blue alongside Nova Terra, Gabriel Tosh, and Lio Travski, and her life became bound up with theirs through the Academy, the Terran Dominion's ghost service, and finally Project Shadowblade.

A psionic childhood#

Toom grew up as the daughter of the vice president of the Kal-Bryant Mining Conglomerate on Pridewater, often present as her father conferred with board members by hologram. Her psionic powers manifested at a young age, letting her sense her father's thoughts and feelings and excel at games of intuition with the other board members' children. Her father grew concerned, telling her that such knowledge was not natural and that she would have to see a doctor, while the other children began to shun her, unwilling to play against someone who always won. She came to be recruited into the Ghost Program by a wrangler, and though her father fought to get her back, she was kept ignorant of his efforts.

Team Blue#

Under the Terran Dominion, Toom became a third-class ghost trainee at the Ghost Academy and joined Team Blue, whose leader Gabriel Tosh welcomed her, a spark forming between them from the start though she tried to ignore it. In an early simulation she sneaked into a planet-hopper without checking for booby traps and was killed for it, earning a low rating, while Nova Terra came closest to completing the mission despite poor teamwork. Toom complained of Terra's lone-wolf streak, but Preceptor Lagdamen held that bad teamwork was worse than none. As Terra's attitude improved and she began to help Toom on assignments, the two bonded over their similar backgrounds.

When the new student Aal Cistler began hitting on her, Toom, unimpressed as the daughter of a Conglomerate vice president, rebuffed him coolly and predicted he would soon wash out. Cistler plotted revenge, arranging for her father to be put under investigation for accounting irregularities tied to Sector 9. Though Team Blue later completed its training mission and Cistler was thrown out for dealing drugs, he escaped punishment through his father's influence and sent Toom a mocking message revealing he had been behind her father's troubles. When Cistler returned and joined the rival Team Red, he taunted her with news of her father's imprisonment, provoking her into losing a sparring match. She was glad, at least, to see Lio Travski return from detox.

Team Purple and the Baker's Dozen#

On the anniversary of the Fall of Tarsonis, Teams Red and Blue were merged into Team Purple under Gabriel Tosh. Toom and Cistler could not get along, the latter forever taunting her about her father, and Tosh told her they had to work together rather than fight. The team was sent on a training mission to the Baker's Dozen aboard the battlecruiser Cyrus, diverted from the fifth planet to the fourth upon detecting a distress signal from Old Family heirs besieged by zerg. Toom proved a fine shot with her C-10 rifle, downing numerous zerg, and when the Cyrus was downed and the team stranded, she suggested drawing the Swarm away from the ship before Nova Terra cleared the hatchery with a psionic blast. Toom took out approaching overlords with single shots to their vital organs, and the team made it back to the Academy, only for Arcturus Mengsk to order them memory-wiped, leaving her believing the mission had merely been canceled.

Love, loss, and the making of Agent X52735N#

Sometime after the events on Shi, Tosh and Toom began a romantic relationship that grew quite physical. Together they discovered that her father had committed suicide in the wake of the Conglomerate investigation, but Toom's memory of these events was wiped. To compound the loss, Tosh was reported killed on one of his first missions away from the Academy, and Toom and her friends believed him dead. She became a fully fledged ghost, received a full mind wipe as standard procedure, and was given the designation Agent X52735N. She took part in an operation on Gohbus against pirates and commonly worked as a ghost for the Annihilators, accompanying them on many missions.

Spectre#

In 2503, Toom was dispatched to the lawless world of Altara to investigate rumors of a UED terrorist cell, where she was ambushed and captured by Dylanna Okyl and woke as a well-treated prisoner of Gabriel Tosh. Her neural implant had been removed, her memory was returning, and her psionic powers had been amplified by exposure to terrazine. Tosh made clear that he meant to set her free and regretted the harsh methods he had used to bring her in. As the terrazine revived her memory through hallucinations and vivid dreams, she began to crave the gas, and she found herself drawn to Tosh's conviction even as she declined to join his mission. She came across a holographic Lio Travski, once thought dead and now an AI allied with Tosh, who told her of the Ghost Academy's darker practices. Confronted in an empty hangar by a hologram of her father, she learned the truth she had once known before her mind-wipe, that the Cistlers had framed him, and that he had tried to free her from the program. More memories returned, and she began to warm to the idea of becoming a spectre.

Toom witnessed Tosh's deteriorating mental state aboard the station even as their old feelings reignited. When an argument between Tosh and General Cole Bennett, leader of Project Shadowblade, turned violent, Toom stepped between them and took the full force of Tosh's psionic blast, was thrown back, and fled. She found her way to a captured Nova Terra, who tried to talk her down but, when Toom insisted on stopping her, incapacitated her with a psionic blast rather than kill an old friend. Nova swapped her hospital robes for Toom's spectre gear and used the unconscious form as a distraction. Bennett and Dylanna Okyl found Toom and, learning that Nova had beaten her and fled, decided she was of no further use. Bennett psionically crushed the weakened Toom as she tried to resist, and killed her.

Legacy and character#

Gabriel Tosh was aggrieved by Toom's death, and when Okyl informed him of it he lashed out and killed her. Convincing himself that Toom still lived, he took her body to the Palatine, and after the death of Bennett and the destruction of Gehenna Station he carried her corpse with him to Haji, intending to restart the spectre program when the time was right.

Toom was described as mouthy, bright, and tough, given to saying things plainly whether or not it served her. As a member of Team Blue she was a team player, but as a ghost she resented showing any weakness in her emotional armor. She was skilled with a C-10 rifle, and her psionic gifts included telepathy and empathy, with a Psi Index of 6.5 as a ghost that rose to at least 8 after her spectre enhancement, which also granted her telekinesis through terrazine exposure.