Scurvey Placebo — The Broken Engineer


Scurvey Placebo was hatched on Dosha like any other Trandoshan—but he never quite fit the mold. While his clutchmates hunted, Sskarr dissected their trophies, not for glory, but to understand the elegant machinery of muscle and bone. He saw life as a system of parts—replaceable, improvable, breakable.

His clan called him Drexs’ka—“One Who Cuts Wrong.”
The Empire called him something worse: useful.

Taken by the Empire

Scurvey Placebo was captured during an Imperial sweep of Trandosha. The Empire had learned that Trandoshans healed quickly and tolerated pain far beyond what humans could. They needed subjects who could survive tests that would kill their soldiers.

Scurvey Placebo was not arrested.
He was acquired.

Shipped in a prison transport to a deep-black Imperial cybernetics facility, he was stripped, tagged, and renamed by his handlers:

Specimen T-47.

He worked as an engineer by day and suffered as an experiment by night. Every design he created—servo musculature, nerve-link grafts, adrenal augments—was turned against him.

Torture & Experiments

The Empire did not simply torture Scurvey Placebo for information or obedience. They tortured him to collect data.

They amputated his arm without anesthetic to test regenerative shock limits.

They grafted a prototype mechanical replacement into exposed bone, rewiring nerves until he could no longer remember what pain felt like compared to anything else.

They used him to monitor failure thresholds—how much current a nervous system could take before it shut down; how quickly flesh rejected cybernetics; how many times a Trandoshan could die before his body refused to return.

Every time he passed out, they revived him.
Every time he fought back, they tightened the restraints.
Every time he healed, they opened him up again.

He stopped screaming only when his voice was taken by an overcharged neural feedback test—one that burned his throat from the inside. His voice returned eventually, rough and broken, but the screaming never did.

Escape

He escaped not out of hope, but because he wanted his torturers to die.

Scurvey Placebo sabotaged the power systems over months—small errors, misaligned capacitors, delays in relays—each one dismissed as routine malfunction.

Then, one night, he deliberately triggered a catastrophic overload from inside his cell.

The lights died.
Security fields collapsed.
Doors buckled.

Guards rushed in, shouting.
They did not shout long.

Scurvey Placebo broke free with a strength he didn’t know he still possessed. His mechanical arm, unstable but devastating, crushed armor like bone. The facility became a graveyard of sparks, blood, and twisted durasteel.

He left no one alive.

He did not escape.
He walked out.

Life in the Outer Rim

Scurvey Placebo fled to the Outer Rim, where Imperial reach weakens and monsters can disappear among smugglers and slavers. There, he rebuilt himself—slowly, obsessively:

He reinforced the Empire’s crude cybernetics with salvaged droid parts.

He implanted sub-dermal plating to protect the scars they left behind.

He replaced sections of his own spine with mechanical braces he welded on himself, screaming silently as he worked.

His body is no longer fully Trandoshan.
His mind hasn’t been for a long time.

He takes jobs fixing ships, crafting weapons, or making “quiet problems” disappear. His clients don’t ask questions. His enemies don’t live long enough to ask anything.

He hunts the Empire—not for justice, not for freedom, but out of a cold, unending need:

They turned him into a weapon.
Now he chooses the target.