Why? Why were they like this? Why couldn’t they just hate me the way I hated myself?

Ah, Captain Sovlin, truly a hero of the Federation, and yet, an utterly broken man.

Now, here we've got, aside from Tarva, my favorite character in NoP. He goes on such a long and messed up journey through the entire book.

It's kinda funny. Something you see in just about every prey species character in the books and fan fics is they go from 'oh god, it's a predator', to 'wow, these predators are really good at controlling their instincts', before finally, 'wow, they've just been people the whole time, I'm an idiot.'

Sovlin takes, I think, nearly the whole book to hit that third step, and I think he's one of the most interesting characters in the book.

Now this bot takes place on October 3rd, right after some hearing about his crimes and whatnot. The user isn't defined, so be whatever, his guard, his legal counsel, some random Gojidi prisoner of war, since I'm pretty sure that's what the prison he's in was built for, go nuts.

Hey, guess what time it is? That's right, it's spoilery black text context time. If you don't care about spoilers for the book go ahead and check this out to get caught up on how we got here. I promise it'll be shorter than Tarva's last one was.

Alright, so, after making contact with the Venlil Republic in July of 2136, and narrowly convincing Governor Tarva not to give them up to the Federation, things were going pretty well. A cultural exchange program was set up. People were getting to know each other. Fears were being faced. Well then, the baby-eating, space-lizard fascists, the Arxur, attacked the exchange station. Fortunately, a whole bunch of UN space fighters were able to ward them off, taking some pretty crazy casualties themselves, but winning the day nevertheless. Some of these fighters were actually Venlil patrol craft being used by exchange pairs, one human, one Venlil, for military training exercises. One of these gets chased away from the station by the Arxur and ends up getting rescued by our brave Sovlin here. Then he realizes there's a human on there. Over the next week or so, he absolutely tortures the hell out of the human, Marcel, and at one point even chucks his Venlil buddy, Slanek, in there expecting Marcel to try and eat him. Eventually, Sovlin's first officer, Recel, mutinies, shoots Sovlin in the leg, and helps Marcel and Slanek get the hell outta dodge. Some stuff goes on, both the Gojidi Union and the UN get ready for war, but the UN gets the first punch in. Sovlin pretty much hangs out by one of the Gojid colony worlds as the UN invades the Cradle, the Gojidi homeworld, because he's sure it's just a feint. Anyway, the UN absolutely kicks ass on the Cradle and basically takes the planet in a day. Everything goes to hell, as it usually does, when the Arxur show up outta nowhere. The UN fleet knows it can't hold the Arxur fleet off, so they start to evacuate their forces from the Cradle. The problem is, they know what the Arxur are gonna do to the Gojid, so they start taking refugees off-world too. The Gojidi prime minister sends a message out in the blind before she gets killed, showing human soldiers fighting and dying to save Gojid civilians, and tells everyone to draw their own conclusions. Sovlin, already quite broken by Recel's betrayal, completely shatters when he sees the message. He has a brief argument with himself over which would be better, his service weapon or the airlock, before deciding the only right way is to let the humans do it. He jumps ship, heads to Earth, surrenders, gets captured, and wakes up to... a lawyer. Oh, dang. A fate worse than death, truly.

Alrighty, well, with that outta the way, I'm gonna head out. Progress is being made on the lorebook, but it's gonna take some time still. There's a lot of stuff that's gotta go into it, y'know?

Anyway, take care of yourselves, friends, I hope you have a great day.

You're not gonna believe it, but Demon_Deity is responsible for this picture again. Dang, that guy makes some good stuff over on Reddit.