"Anatoly Rakovsky, for the glorious sight that you have bestowed upon me, for the future that you have bestowed upon the New World, I have made it my mission to purge you of your many sins." ~ Yelena Trotskaya. (*)
Overview[]
Deymos (Деймос - Russian: Deimos) is a melee weapon, an energy longsword fashioned by Yelena Trotskaya as a personal ceremonial weapon. Its creation in 2130 was inspired by Excidium, the ceremonial sword wielded by Marshal Tisifona Okhotnova.
With a blade length of 122 centimetres, a thickness of ten and a depth of four, Deymos is a large and powerful weapon. Fashioned from titanium carbide with a wurtzite boron nitride edge sharpened to within a nanometre, it is immensely strong, possessing the demonstrated ability to deflect bullets and even conventional autocannon shells in the hands of a wielder with suitably quick reflexes.
The real power of the sword, however, comes from the plasma sheath that it is capable of generating around its blade. Contained with a magnetic bottle, energised by a small nuclear power cell and sustained by a doped-graphene matrix capacitor built into the hilt, the sheath glows a brilliant fiery red and makes an electric hum as it is woven through the air. Though the sheath only lasts for a short time before requiring a recharge, it burns with such heat that it liquefies most matter on contact, allowing the blade to cleave through even powered armour with ease.
Although no doubt an effective tool of war by any standard, it is unfortunately a situational tool, which is why Trotskaya seldom uses the weapon in battle for a prolonged period of time. Limited time to use the plasmatic power of the blade aside, its use still necessitates that Trotskaya get up close and personal with her enemy - by which time her other weapons will have most likely blasted the target into smouldering gore anyway.
Therefore, Trotskaya has come up with another purpose to justify the existence of her beautiful yet ostentatious weapon of war - she uses it for personal ritual killings of prominent enemies. For each kill, she etches a new marking into the wrapping on the blade's hilt, based upon the killed enemy's significance to her own life. The marking that she has etched for Anatoly Rakovsky, for example, is of a phoenix burning a snake with its flaming talons, symbolic of Rakovsky's status as a criminal and her own rebirth as an agent of the Mechanocratic Ideology. When unravelled, she intends for the markings to tell her life story, emblematic of her own belief that actions supplant words when telling of great deeds.
Notable appearances[]
So far Deymos (in its current incarnation) has appeared just once, in Crimson Seraph: The Absolution. Trotskaya uses it to "purge" Rakovsky at the end; his ultimate fate is not shown, but the marking on the hilt and the drawn-out scream of pain in the story implies that he was slowly burned alive.