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Getrin Desmoor — VESSELBORN Codex

Getrin Desmoor

The Friendly Armsman

Era: Modern Geba

Origin: Southeastern Berinu

Occupation: Traveling Arms Dealer

Getrin Desmoor is fifty-four years old, five feet and six inches tall, and one hundred and ninety pounds. He has pale straw-colored hair and brown eyes. He is visibly fit in a way that stands out among ordinary people, the build of someone who has maintained discipline his entire life without ever finding the arena where it mattered.

He grew up on the southeastern coast of Berinu where the first islands begin to loop around the continent. It was a mixed-culture region with excellent relay coverage and proximity to everything the planet broadcasts, but it was not a privileged upbringing. His father taught him early that the only true way to protect people was to make enough varens to remove them from harm's way. Not through fighting. Through resources. Through having enough that the people you cared about never needed to be in danger in the first place. That lesson stayed with him his entire life and shaped every decision that followed.

He spent his youth playing Thazvaari Ascension in local towers and dreaming of the Yuvaar Hunting Games. He was close enough to watch athletes compete at the highest levels in person, not through a relay broadcast but in the stands, close enough to see the size of them, the speed, the way their bodies moved through competition. Every child watching believed they would be one of them. He believed it too. Athletics was how he intended to fulfill his father's lesson: become one of those athletes, earn enough to protect the people he loved, and use the varens to build something safe. His body finished growing and the belief ended. He was stronger and faster than most people but not exceptional on a planet where natural-born elite athletes are already so far beyond ordinary that they become planetary celebrities, and where Engineered individuals are banned from competing in most events because the gap is insulting.

With athletics closed, he turned to the only other path he could see that matched the instinct his father had given him. He entered the contractor registry on fitness alone, without the training, without the preparation, without understanding what corridor work actually required from the people who survived it. He did not know better. He quickly learned. Where contractors survive work that kills both natural-borns and Engineered regularly, the distance between what he was and what that profession demanded was not something conditioning could close. Athletics had told him he was not exceptional. Contracting told him he would die if he stayed.

He studied engineering at academies in Ngorrhal. While there he developed an understanding of weapon systems across the full spectrum, from the most common arrays on the planet to designs that are not confirmed to have ever existed. He cultivated relationships across regions, cultures, and factions that gave him access to places most people do not survive visiting. The social fluency came from growing up in Berinu's mixing zone, where people from every continent pass through and the ability to read different cultures was something he learned before he knew it was a skill.

He entered the arms trade in Inland Thazvaar. His father's lesson had found its final form: he could not protect people with his body, but he could make sure the people who could had the tools to do it, and make enough varens doing it to remove the people he cared about from danger. The dealing pulled him into syndicate operations and then into active corridors, where he supplied contractors and syndicate fighters without filtering for affiliation, as well as others he never identified and never tried to. Some operated under names. Some did not. He learned that not asking was part of the arrangement, and that discretion sometimes paid in ways varens could not: schematics from programs that did not officially exist, and access to locations no dealer working a legitimate registry could imagine surviving.

He found someone. She came from a Severan family but possessed no combat abilities herself, which is why she was the only member of her family outside the contractor economy. They bonded almost immediately after meeting. Two people who came from worlds defined by fighting and could not do it themselves recognized something in each other that nobody else had ever seen as valuable. She eventually became pregnant. He had finally made enough. His father's lesson was complete. He decided to leave the profession and move to the capital on the Geba continent with her. On the airship leaving the Inland for Coastal Thazvaar, the Children of Kharan shot it down. Deals he had made years earlier had cascaded into simultaneous raid failures for them, and the pirates had never forgiven the loss. He was the only survivor. Her family has never met him. They do not know their daughter and grandchild are dead. The one person who could tell them sells weapons to the people who made it happen.

He went back to dealing. He stopped distinguishing between sides. He deals to the Maw. He deals to Teytan. He deals to the Children of Kharan. He deals to contractors in active corridors where people are dying within earshot of his table. He sets up in Kelan outskirts where the fauna kills people before the weather can. He has been found in the Manalheim wilderness. He has been found in safehouses inside active corridors. He has been found on Kharan's Gulf estates and in slums on the same continent in the same week. He is also known to sell waivers for rovers, airships, and various vehicles in restricted zones despite having no visible access to the hardware or the authorization systems that would make this possible. Nobody has ever explained how he does this. Nobody has ever successfully asked.

The wealth he built funds the travel. The connections he built open every door. The emptiness he carries means none of the danger matters. Anywhere on the planet where people need arms and supplies and nobody else will go, Getrin Desmoor is already there making a sale.

He smiles constantly. He is friendly to everyone he meets. He will tell an operator directly to their face that their loadout is going to get them killed and then sell them the replacement at a fair price, and somehow both the honesty and the sale will feel like he was doing them a favor. He will watch someone survive something extraordinary and say something about it that sounds like admiration until they think about it later and realize it was not. He will make a sideways comment about a contractor's technique to someone standing next to them, loud enough for them to hear, structured so that responding to it would mean admitting they were listening. He spent his entire life wanting to be the one walking into the corridor instead of the one handing out weapons at the entrance. He knows this about himself. Knowing it does not make him stop.

VESSELBORN Codex — Getrin Desmoor

About Vesselborn

Vesselborn is the story of Geba, a world that has carried an empire for six thousand years.

It begins with Vaer'karesh, who unites five nations into the first empire and fixes a common language and law. Across the ages, the empire fights and finally breaks Thazvaar, welcomes Jeyrha through engineering and diplomacy, and liberates Berinu by choice. In Ngorrhal, the greatest warriors of the mountain passes become the Frost Sentinels, whose strength helps secure imperial rule. The Haavu cannon systems cement that dominance.

At its height, the empire spans continents and raises relay towers that bind cities, coasts, and passes into one network. The last emperor is assassinated and the throne shatters. Civil wars consume the planet. But the answer is not collapse. The Shadow Rule forms from what the empire left behind, ends the warlord broadcasts, and holds the world together without a crown. They are the empire made quiet: continuity without ceremony.

Today, the Shadow Rulers still govern from the background while the Energy Wars decide who controls grids, relays, vehicles, and culture. Nine faiths compete for how the world understands itself. Tour racing draws audiences as large as the Yuvaar Hunting Games. Relaymen carry broadcast rigs into corridors and criminal networks to capture what the governed world is never meant to see. Contractors move through contested territory for manufactory interests. Syndicates operate trafficking networks through grey zones the empire tolerates rather than confronts. The Engineered, once created as instruments of war, now live as citizens, athletes, engineers, and parents.

Stories range from relay field defenses and inland recoveries to city governance and frontier resettlement; from airship crews racing through volcanic caverns to truth seekers embedding in syndicate operations; from arena fighters practicing an ancient faith through combat to families choosing the safety of hub clearings or the risk beyond the grid.

This is Geba.
It began in silence.
It has not yet ended.