He carries that sharpened crowbar of a sword everywhere
Mark Smith was a human who served for several years in the Light Infantry before the Third Civil War, and then worked for many years as an assassin-for hire.
Early Life[]
Mark Smith was born to a middle-class family on New Paris sometime in the late 2210's. While playing one day, he found in a closet what appeard to be a mere rusted hunk of metal, but once he grasped it in his hand, it transformed into a magical sword named Kuar. Kuar had been passed down his family line for several generations, but Mark Smith would be the one to wield it and develop its powers to their full potential.
As a young boy, one of his closes friends was a young werewolf named Steven "Jupiter" Jupedus, and the two would be close for many years. When Jupedus was drafted into the military at age 16, Smith volunteered for the Light Infantry in hopes of serving alongside him. Since awakened and unawakened soldiers normally served in separate units, Smith further volunteered for training as a special forces sniper, to increase his chances of working alongside awakened troops such as his friend. They did end up serving together for a while aboard the EFS Circe, but neither enjoyed the discipline of military life, and once Jupedus had earned his citizenship, they both retired from service at the first opportunity.
Private Contractor[]
Pollos and Jupedus in dress uniform
After leaving the military, he took his training as a sniper and went into business for himself as a highly paid assassin for hire, and Jupedus followed him as his partner in crime. The extensive criminal underworld and cutthroat politics of the Earth Federation in the mid-2200's was a profitable time to be a paid killer, and Smith did well. After one successful assignment, killing a weapons scientist on orders from Brigadier General Thomas Willard, the Tech Infantry Rebel military governor of the rebel-controlled New Madrid system, Smith and Jupedus were hired to assassinate Rashid King, the commandant of InSec. Reluctantly accepting the assignment, they travelled to Avalon to scout out their target in his lair at InSec Headquarters. Posing as tourists to get a guided tour of the facilities, they began plotting their attack, when their plans were accelerated by a run-in with a pair of low-level InSec goons sent to spy on them in turn. Infiltrating InSec HQ using the invisibility powers of Kuar, Smith succeeded in penetrating to the Commandant's office, but he found it occupied not by King, but by a hologram simulation of the Commandant, which did not react well to being stabbed. Confronted by King's deputy, In-Seok Pax, Smith killed Pax and made his escape.
While hiding from InSec agents and trying to figure out a new strategy for finding and killing King, Smith and Jupedus were approached by Resistance operatives, including the Horadrim known as Shannon, and her father, Kash, a senior Resistance cell leader. Shannon revealed to Smith that Pax had been a resistance mole, and that the Resistance could be of help in killing King. Smith agreed to work with them, but before they could offer him much help, the Resistance safehouse was raided by InSec troops, and Smith fled, believing the cell destroyed behind him. He tracked down King's home address and snuck inside...where King was calmly waiting for him. When Smith tried to attack King, he found himself being held at gunpoint by his lifelong friend Jupedus, who was an InSec mole the entire time. King in turn offered to hire Smith to kill Arthur Clarke, commandant of the Raptors, and one of King's political rivals. Smith angrily refused and fought King, but King easily defeated him. Smith fled back to the Resistance, and found the cell which he had thought destroyed in the raid still open and operational, and actively trying to talk him into accepting King's job offer and killing Clarke.
Most Wanted[]
Smith decided to try and continue his original plan of killing King by himself, and hatched a plot to corner him in the underground tunnel system that the paranoid King used to commute to work every day. Going to the public records office in search of a map of these tunnels, Smith was again confronted by King waiting for him, and the two fought again to a draw. During the fight, Smith discovered previously-unsuspected powers of his magic sword, and King offered to help Smith more fully understand and access the powers of the sword, if Smith would come work for him. Smith again refused, and King used his magick to put Smith to sleep.
Smith woke up in a chaotic barroom brawl, in the werewolf-centric nightclub/fightclub known as The Rage. In the mosh pit/arena, he was confronted by his erstwhile partner Jupedus, and the two fought. With the help of his resistance allies, Jupedus was chased away, but Smith then found himself confronted by Arthur Clarke, and the two fought in an epic battle of magic swords. When Clarke was distracted by plasma fire from Smith's resistance buddies, Smith was able to stab Clarke through the heart, killing him. In the awed silence that followed, Smith was able to get away, but he soon found that his act had earned him the permanent enmity of pretty much every werecreature in the Federation, and he was forced to take up King's offer of training and protection as his only chance at safety.
New Name and New Life[]
You almost wouldn't recognize him...then you see the sword
King was good as his word, and InSec provided Smith with a new identity: Xavier Pollos, a wholesale shoe buyer from Minos. The real Xavier Pollos had died recently in a rock climbing accident, and InSec had covered up his death so as to make use of his very real background as a convincing fake identity for one of their agents. Smith was given cosmetic surgery to change his appearance to match that of Pollos, and obtained some useful cybernetic enhancements of his own on top of those gifted him by InSec. After training for a while under King and learning some of the previously-hidden secrets of his sword, King abruptly dropped Smith/Pollos as a personal project when he was promoted to Marshal. King's successor as commandant of InSec, Herbert Gergenstein, did not get on as well with Smith, and Smith did not react well to suddenly being a much lower priority.
In these unpleasant circumstances, Pollos found himself with a new enemy. He was attacked on the street by the Vampire known as Elizabeth, the childe of Mordred and one of the Sabbat's top Assassins. Unable to defeat him or take Kuar from him, Elizabeth later contacted him and offered to employ him as an assassin, to kill Andrea Treschi. Pollos agreed, but when he tried to use the resources of InSec to carry out this mission, he found Gergenstein less than cooperative, and the mages InSec assigned him as protection less than competent. Treschi had gotten wind of the plot through his Raptor allies, and soon a Raptor hit squad ambushed Pollos in his apartment, knocked him out, kidnapped him, and delivered him to Treschi. Treschi and his henchmen tortured and mind-raped Pollos, then dumped him back at his apartment with his memory partly wiped.
Killing King[]
Sick of being manipulated by King, the Resistance, the Sabbat, and now Treschi, Pollos hatched a cunning plan. He deliberately provoked Elizabeth into chasing him, then led her on a merry chase through the streets of Avalon. Invisible himself thanks to the powers of Kuar, only Elizabeth's high-level Vampiric powers could track him, but she herself was far more visible. So when he led her into the Grand Council building, Pollos could run right past the heavily armed guards and sneak into the building, but Elizabeth was repeatedly shot by their plasma weaponry and killed. Inside thanks to this distraction, Pollos strode into the Grand Council chamber to find a firefight already in progress. King and InSec's treacherous involvement with the Resistance having been exposed by the return of Erich Von Shrakenberg aboard a captured InSec battlecruiser, King had tried to assassinate the entire Grand Council and seize power for himself. Chairman Abdul Johnson was already dead, and Von Shrakenberg and the few surviving Councilmembers were fighting a losing battle for survival. Pollos chopped his way past King's cyborg bodyguard and battled King one-on-one, killing him after a brief fight. Exhausted and drained of energy, Pollos collapsed soon afterwards, and was unable to resist when Andrea Treschi and several Raptors arrived to take him into Custody.
Reluctant Raptor[]
When he awoke, Pollos was presented with a stark choice: work for Treschi and the Raptors, and thus have access to their resources and protection, or take his chances in a Galaxy where over a hundred thousand InSec and Sabbat operatives all wanted to kill him for what he'd done to Elizabeth and King. With no real choice in the matter, Pollos accepted, and was sent to investigare the Elysian Fields Research Center, an InSec facility that was home to Project Nexus and Project Nimrod. As he arrived, the center exploded, and they were only able to capture a single person, a secretary outside on smoke break when it happened.
(to be continued)
He wandered for some time after that, eventually being contacted by Mordred, who wanted him to get an object of immense value on New Tokyo. Pollos discovered the Orb and used it to annihilate the K'Nes invasion fleet. Unfortunately, the proximity of the two swords caused Kuar to accerlate his use of it, which revealed the true purpose of the weapon - which was to make the user so dependent on it that the wielder could be a conduit for its creator, al-Hazen, to possess them.
The possessed Pollos continued to wander the galaxy for the next two decades, usually being forced to leave every six months because he would get into a fight with the local authorities. Eventually, Vin Dane and his allies sought him out in order to retrieve the Orb and stop the Caal Invasion. After a failed attempt on Jennifer's Star, they eventually tracked him down on Avalon. Demar Palencia finally killed off Pollos and gave the Orb to Vin Dane.
Behind the Scenes[]
Marcus asked Andy Hutchinson to change his character's name because Mark Smith was too boring. Kuar was intended to finally possess the wielder, but because the game ended abruptly, he had to speed up the final conclusion in the last act of Season 4.3.