Naomi Malchovitch stared out onto the desolate land from a cliff top on the planet Chau Sara, in the Sara System. The planet possessed jungles and dusty wastelands. She scanned horizon for any danger, minding the nearby marines in her peripheral vision. She widened her mental field to root out any threats to her or her reluctant comrades. She narrowed her eyes as she zeroed in on the disgustingly familiar feeling of an instinct driven member of the Zerg. The marines noticed the fast approaching Mutalisk, peppering it with high-caliber rounds from their C-14 Impaler gauss rifles.
The giant, almost serpentine Mutalisk is kept aloft in the air above them by a pair of powerful wings. The creature is known for spawning voracious glaive wurms and hurling them at its prey in an attempt to shred them to pieces. In part, it is very effective, but the 'lisk's leathery, almost paper-like wings are notoriously fragile and are always aimed for.
Naomi blasted a wave of telekinetic energy at the symbiote in deflection away from the Marines. Before the beast could strike again, she mentally lashed out at it, seizing it in her iron grip, yanking it out of the sky and slamming into a nearby boulder, allowing the Marines the opportunity to attack the giant creature. The beast immediately fell victim to their gunfire.
The Zerg are a terrifying biological alien race that is controlled by a hive mind, known as the Overmind, an extremely powerful psionic entity with an age unknown. Researchers speculate that it is a massive creature embedded in a planet and is unable to move, using its powerful mind to control the Zerg, over the distance of light-years in many different sectors of space. The race consists of many different species that have been assimilated from many planets and mutated over what scientists estimate as centuries.
She sighed and looked to the sky as a triad of CF/A-17 Wraith fighters roared overhead toward the east. She looked down at the group of marines and was relieved to see that had all survived. They gave her nods of approval, "Not bad, kid." a few said as they reloaded their guns and the empty shells making clinking noises as they hit the dusty ground.
She frowned as she sensed a feral presence nearby, she pressed against the conscience of the lone Zergling. The Zergling is a quadruped creature that stands about a meter tall, armed with a tough carapace of natural armor as well as two scythe-like appendages that protrude from where shoulder blades would be, serving as their main form of attack, as well as an impressive row of large, sharp fangs and corrosive saliva.
The alien crept nearby, behind a boulder. She sent out a telekinetic feeler and was able to pinpoint its location. She reached out to grab ahold of a boulder near it with her mind and slammed the rock it into the Zergling. She gave a little smirk as the boulder collided into the Zergling with a satisfying crunch. The beast let out a guttural screech of pain in heap of broken rock, blood and dust.
She paused and realized it was strange for a Zergling to be by itself. The monstrous aliens have a bad habit being in large groups. Before heading back to the base, she looked over to the east and thought about her father as she watched a triad of Vulture Hover-Cycles revving off to plant a field of spider mines, leaving dust clouds in their wake.
She promptly reached the base to report to her commanding officer, Lieutenant Carter. She snapped him a salute, "Sir, there has been a Zerg sighting, a Mutalisk and a Zergling in Sector Three."
He swore under his breath, "Fine, I'll have someone check it out. At ease, you're dismissed, report to the Psi Opts for your report."
She saluted him again, "Yes sir."
After she gave a brief report of the Zerg sighting to the technicians at the Psi Opts, she headed to her living quarters in the barracks and flopped down on her bunk. She looked to the small tabletop where a dented and tarnished silver locket lay. She pulled it to her face with her mind and opened it to reveal a picture of her mother, father, herself and her older brother on what appeared to be dusty field with a large house in the background.
Their mother had fiery red hair, striking emerald eyes, fair skin and sprinkling of freckles across her upper cheeks and nose with a pale smile. She quietly sighed as she gazed at the image, thinking of what happened to her nearly four years ago. Her mother was mauled along with the other medical technicians in an attack on a medical bay from in a Zergling rush before reinforcements arrived. Naomi was still in training at the time on Ursa, main base of operations for the Ghost Academy. The facility on Ursa was almost prison-like and was designed to train people from a young age with telepathy to harness their rare abilities.
She focused on her father in the small, oval picture. He was tall with pale skin, sandy brown hair, thin stubble and pale blue eyes as he extended and arm around his wife and children and a small smile hung on his face. He had become cold and easily angered and was never the same when his wife died.
She looked at the grinning image of her older brother Evan, they were about seven years apart and he was tall, like his father with brown hair, light blue eyes and fair skin. He shied away from his sister and father, throwing himself into his training and duties to the point of concern for her.
Naomi looked to herself in the portrait, six years younger. She looked the same as she did now with thick sandy brown hair, blue eyes with a shade of green around the iris, a kind of gift from both of her parents. She also a light sprinkling of freckles across her nose and upper cheeks with a bright smile on her face. She didn't forget about her family, as broken as it was, she loved them dearly and wanted to help them, just as they would for her. She then thought of when they still lived on the sister planet of Chau Sara, Mar Sara, before the advanced alien race, the Protoss, vaporized all life on the surface.
She and Evan had been raised out in the middle of seemingly nowhere, in a house that Naomi's father had inherited. He was raised by his grandparents when he was orphaned as a teen. When she was about ten years old and her brother was around seventeen, the Confederacy, an interstellar Terran military system, had suspicions of a telepath and had sent an agent called a Wrangler. Wranglers are people recruited into the military with a low Psi Index; sensitive to telepathy but no real telepathy skills of their own, trained to find other, more powerful telepaths.
The military saw an opportunity to send a telepath to the Ghost Academy when they tested her psionic energy and were startled to see that her Psi Index was quite high, being a PI11, it was rare for it to be so high, a normal Ghost being a PI5 or so, they also had discovered that Evan was of age and eager to serve in the military, their mother volunteering to join. Her brother and herself were fairly close but, when they came to the military life, their relationship drifted apart.
After they had reached the colony on Chau Sara, where her mother and brother were to be trained, and couldn't see each other for many months, Naomi had been shipped separately to the Ghost Academy on Ursa, a moon orbiting around the planet Korhal IV in the Korhal System. There she was then given special mental training, along with the few techniques the Confederacy knew with telekinesis, martial arts, and weapon training. Evan and herself were also required to have neural implants, a safety precaution should they decide to attack their superior officers. She passed the tests that were given to her, 'It's a miracle I wasn't killed in the process.' She thought bitterly and remembered the hours of intense training and near torture she endured.
She was also issued a special form fitted suit that covered every inch of her body aside from her head, with circuitry woven throughout the fabric to enhance her psionic powers, a C-20A Canister Rifle as well as genetic augmentations, such as special implants for enhanced senses and growth hormones.