Prisoner: the nameless Nerazim murderess

The Nerazim prisoner, whose name was never recorded, was a dangerous protoss criminal and a murderess of her own kind. Condemned by protoss society, she was held as the sole inmate of a prison ship that later went derelict, drifting in Terran Dominion space until a crew of Kel-Morian Combine scavengers unknowingly opened her cell. The Nerazim butchered her liberators, seized a Dominion Liberator, and enslaved the massacre's last survivor, the young engineer Caleb, whom she drove to uncover a secret Umojan laboratory on the world of Aeneas. She claimed the experimental anti protoss weapon hidden there and summoned the Tal'darim Death Fleet against the base that built it, but her plans ended when Caleb wrecked their escape ship and sent it into a Tal'darim mothership, killing them both.

A Heretic Among Her Kind#

The prisoner was a known murderer and criminal of protoss society who killed other protoss and reveled in their deaths. Among the greater protoss culture she was considered a heretic of some sort, a judgment severe enough that she was not merely executed or exiled but sealed away. Some time before the End War, she was imprisoned aboard a protoss prison ship as its sole inmate, confined to a chamber bathed in strange light. What became of her jailers was never learned. The vessel's records simply cut off, and the ship went derelict, drifting silent and dark with its single passenger still sealed inside.

The Magpie Massacre#

Years later the wreck was uncovered by a group of Kel-Morian Combine scavengers under Captain Nero Theban. The crew of the Magpie boarded the vessel in search of protoss technology, an illegal salvage carried out in Terran Dominion space some time after the Second Great War. A party of scavengers unknowingly opened the door to the prisoner's chamber and set her loose. Cloaked and silent, she struck at the terrans with her claws, killing the scavenger Orry as she tried to report the situation to her captain. The Nerazim then moved slowly through the ship, picking off the fleeing scavengers with brutal efficiency as they retreated toward the Magpie.

The survivors never escaped on their own vessel. Terran Dominion forces under Captain Barlow apprehended the scavengers for illegally salvaging protoss technology, and when Dominion troops pulled the derelict's logs, they discovered the record of the Nerazim inmate and the danger she posed. Barlow judged that the safest course was to destroy the prison ship with the prisoner still aboard. The captive scavengers broke out of their cells before the deed was done, and in the chaos the Dominion's Liberator opened fire, annihilating both the Magpie and the protoss derelict. It was a hollow victory. The prisoner had already crept aboard the warship.

Mistress of the Liberator#

The Nerazim announced herself to the survivors through the corpses of the Dominion marines, speaking psionically through the dead to promise that every one of them would die. The scavengers destroyed the bodies, but the horror worked on them faster than her blade did. The crew turned on itself. Caleb argued for sealing the bridge and venting the ship to space, while Theban demanded they hunt the protoss down. She slaughtered them one by one until only two remained, Caleb and his oldest friend Kyra.

The prisoner appeared before the pair and explained that she needed someone alive to pilot the Liberator. Kyra insisted that she should be the one to live, and the Nerazim seemed to agree, handing her a gun and telling her to kill Caleb. As Kyra prepared to fire, the Nerazim stabbed her in the back. She told Caleb that he was the stronger of the two, but that his pain was malleable, and for that reason she could use him. She guided her new thrall to the cockpit and had him take the warship into warp space.

The Hunt for the Umojan Weapon#

The prisoner could glimpse into the minds of those she killed, and from her victims she had taken two words, an "Umojan job," along with the existence of a secret laboratory hidden on the Umojan world of Aeneas. She ordered Caleb to infiltrate the planet, and he took work as a munitions laborer at the nearby Spearpoint Base, a factory of the Umojan Protectorate, while she waited in the wilds for results.

Her patience was real but narrow. When Caleb crept out one night using a device he had built to disable the base's laser grid, she accepted his explanation that he was blending in to avoid suspicion, then confiscated the device and shoved him back through the open laser gate, telling him he would not escape and would remain inside the base. Days later she murdered the factory worker Russell, tearing out his chest and leaving the body where all could see it. After ten days without progress she killed Jace, the shift manager of Caleb's work group, impaling him through the chest with her claws and throwing the corpse onto Caleb's bed. She forced Caleb to declare that he belonged to her and granted him five more days to find the laboratory.

Caleb struck back the only way he could, tipping off the Umojan shadowguard without ever speaking a word. Three shadowguard ambushed the Nerazim in the outskirts, breaking her plasma shield with a grenade and wounding her, but she slaughtered all three. Enraged, she stormed the facility, killed Caleb's friend George, and butchered Frank after he reacted to her with hostility. When she demanded to know whether Caleb had betrayed her, his technical truth, that he had not talked to anyone, deceived her. He then revealed that the laboratory lay near the base's school farm.

The Nerazim carved a trail of bodies through the hidden laboratory. Inside, the Umojan scientist Dr. Robertson ambushed the pair with an experimental anti protoss weapon, and it was Caleb who shot her in the chest with a laser pistol. The prisoner told her shocked thrall that he had used his instincts to protect his master. She claimed the weapon for herself, declaring she would turn it against her enemies, and had Caleb contact the Tal'darim to bring the Death Fleet down on Spearpoint Base.

Death Above Aeneas#

With the weapon and its power source in hand, the Nerazim met Caleb at a shuttle and escaped the planet as the Death Fleet bombarded the Umojan defenses. She proclaimed that she would now undo her enemies. When Caleb doubted she could manage it with a single gun, she answered that she had one gun, one power source, and many secrets, and that he would bring about her enemy's destruction.

Caleb refused to be part of it. He fired his pistol into the shuttle's navigation panel, over and over, until the ship careened out of control. The Nerazim sliced off his arm, but he only laughed as the shuttle plunged into a nearby Tal'darim mothership. The explosion consumed both vessels, vaporizing the weapon, the thrall, and the prisoner alike. The murderess who had outlived her jailers, two crews, and a shadowguard ambush was finally undone by the one terran she had chosen to keep alive.

Personality and Abilities#

The prisoner was a brutal and ruthless killer. She harbored a hatred of "little things," terrans among them, and reveled in bloodshed and in pain of every kind, physical and emotional, yet her love of killing extended just as readily to her fellow protoss. She hunted the way a predator does, treating those she murdered as prey and taunting them as they died. For all her savagery, she was capable of long planning and genuine patience when power was the prize, waiting through days of quiet while her thrall searched for the laboratory she coveted.

In battle she could cloak herself in shadow much like her Nerazim kin, and she killed with both a warp blade and her long claws, whose extended sharp nails could rip a terran open. She could blink across short distances, generate a plasma shield, and speak psionically through the corpses of the dead, a power she used to terrorize survivors. Her skill and agility were sufficient to overcome even Umojan shadowguard, three of whom she killed after they had wounded her.