Character History

[inside_job]

Telrim was born on the Yeerk homeworld before the Andalites made first contact and inadvertently sparked the Yeerk conquest. Her home was not the famous Sulp Niar pool (effectively the Empire’s capital); she actually came from the unnamed pool on the other side of the planet where Akdor and the gang scooped up a quarter of a million recruits before booking it into the wild beyond. Given the resounding lack of advanced Yeerk technology at the time, it’s not clear if anyone in said pool knew this was coming or what the fuck was going on. For Telrim's part, she basically found out what a spaceship was right about when she and her kin got loaded onto one and whisked away to start a galactic conquest. At the time, it just seemed like some big, amazing adventure, and she was all in.

She got her first host serving as a warrior in the conquest of the Hork-Bajir homeworld, fighting the resistance there alongside her best friends Corfiss and Issek. They survived the Andalite-engineered genocide via quantum virus purely through being off-duty in the Yeerk pool when it reached their forces. By the time the chaos settled enough for them to be re-hosted, they were immediately given cleanup detail removing the bodies.

After this the strain of warfare really started taking its toll on their little squad, hitting Corfiss hardest of all. He finally chose to commit suicide via reproduction rather than keep grappling with the things he’d seen and his fear of what still lay ahead. Unable to talk him out of it, Telrim and Issek took up the traditional duty of mentoring his offspring (at least as many as they could reasonably be assigned). Watching her friend die this way, by his own choice, hit Telrim in a way none of the bloodshed had before. She remains deeply averse to the subject of reproduction in general. She is nevertheless proud of her students and remains on good terms with many of them, looking out for their career prospects and safety and getting some patronage in return from the higher achievers.

When they returned to field duty after their stint as instructors, both she and Issek were reassigned shiny(?) new Taxxon hosts. Being trapped in the body of a perpetually hunger-maddened, cannibalistic giant worm was also a pretty horrible gig, so both of them scrambled to get reassigned to recon as fast as possible: Issek as a biologist and Telrim as his backup, scouting new worlds and occasionally ecosystems for Yeerk exploitation, trading with the few species willing to do business with the Empire, or helping raid those who wouldn’t.

Eventually Issek left her behind, advancing up the ranks into lab research. Telrim remained happily running around the Empire’s fringes as an acquisitions specialist until Issek pulled some strings. Now part of the Earth invasion force, he'd decided things there were getting too sketchy even by Yeerk standards. Needing someone he could trust around, he put in a word to get his old friend transferred to join him. Telrim’s a bit sore about that, but she’s also starting to see why he needs her there…