Post by Space Core on Jan 11, 2013 22:21:18 GMT -5
Name: Kea Deschaine
Race: Zeltron
Age: 24
Height: 5ft9”
Weight: 155lbs
Birth place: Nar Shaddaa
Appearance: Kea, like most Zeltrons, is gorgeous (at least by most humanoid standards). Her crimson skin is smooth, unblemished and unmarked. Her features are delicate without being overly sharp, her nose straight but neither too long nor too pointy, her lips are full and nearly always twisted in a playful smile. Her body is lightly toned and curvaceous but not bulky, toned without having sharply defined muscles. Her slightly wavy hair is a rich sapphire blue and cascades about her face, falling down all the way to her mid-back, the bangs framing her face are shorter, hanging down to her collarbone, usually parted in the middle with one thick rogue strand cutting across her face. She mostly keeps it untied, except when she is exercising or sleeping. Her eyes are amaranthine coloured and seem to sparkle with good humoured mischief.
She never settles on any single outfit for any extended period of time, unless she is unable to change for whatever reason, but as most Zeltrons her clothing is usually quite revealing and in bright, flashy colours. There is always a time when she prefers to not be recognised by every passer-by in the street though, and on such occasions she’ll favour dull coloured clothes that hide most of her features and which don’t attract too much attention to her.
Personality: Kea is a laid back, energetic and fun loving person. She’s always on the lookout for new things to try out and lives her life in the carpe diem style. She relishes in the moment, making the most of the present and giving little thought to the future. She hates repetition and routine, and always strives to look for new things to try out and enjoy. She is fiercely independent, and can’t stand those who try to order her around, something she reacts to rather brusquely and angrily. However apart for those rare angry outbursts aimed at the commanding types she is mostly a very cheerful individual, graced with a very natural, often used smile and laugh.
Like most Zeltrons Kea is constantly searching for pleasure and entertainment, physical or otherwise, but preferably new and exciting. She is a skilled seductress, judiciously using her natural assets and smarts to become the object of the lust of the men (and women when the fancy takes her) around her. This does sometimes lead her callously toy around with people for no particular reason when particularly bored. Kea’s is a shameless flirt, enjoying the hunt in itself nearly as much as what comes after. Her love of seduction and love is only matched by her passion for both listening to and creating music.
Kea has a bit of a vain side. Like most people she loves to be complimented, even when it’s obvious flattery. She also enjoys attention, but not to the point of actively seeking it out, she gets enough of it on stage. Like most of her people Kea sees monogamy as a quaint but impractical ideal and she has never stayed tied down to one partner for very long, and she prefers her relationships to be short (unlike how she likes her sex) and passionate (just how she likes her sex).
Her obsession over a wide range of seemingly random endeavours for short bursts of time make those who know her see her as a bit of an eccentric, but when she sets her mind firmly on one project she will do her utmost to see it through. No matter how ridiculous, counter-intuitive or illogical it may be. As stubborn as an old goat, convincing her to drop some of her more reckless projects is never an easy thing to do.
Strangely enough for someone as famous as she, Kea has next to no people she’d really call friends. The strangers she often shares her bed with don’t exactly qualify, and her work has kept her moving from planet to planet, rarely staying in one place for any extended period of time. Additionally because she never performs with the same musicians more than a couple of times she hasn’t made any friends there. In a strange way she is extremely lonely. Another odd thing is that while as soon as she steps on stage and the music starts her nerves clam, she is still a nervous wreck in the few hours before a large concert. In a way she still hasn’t quite gotten used to performing for colossal crowds.
Kea’s natural telepathic abilities suffered from a stunted growth in her youth, which meant that now she’s fully grown her ability to feel the emotions of others is considerably less prominent than for other Zeltrons. This phenomenon was caused by the generally hostile mood of Nar Shaddaa, where she was born and lived for over half of her life, which didn’t encourage the flourishing of her telepathic ability as a child.
She doesn’t like to talk about her life before her father took her in. It’s not that she’s ashamed of those times, it’s simply that she has, after many years, managed to stop thinking about them too much. Speaking about those times brings back memories she’d rather leave dormant and feeling she’d rather leave unstirred.
However despite all her careless, rash and sometimes childish antics she is no fool and certainly no simpleton either. She is kind at heart; even if her habit of toying with others for her personal amusement would indicate otherwise. After all when she does toy around with people they usually end up in a win-win situation, and she’s never cruel. She has a capacity for sympathy and empathy which many would find unlikely in a young woman raised in opulence, but then again most don’t know she only came to know wealth in her teens. She hates owing anything to anyone and will strive to repay her debts as swiftly as possible.
When nervous she has a habit of wringing her hands and biting her lower lip, something she can nearly always be seen doing just before a concert, while sitting on a random object.
Occupation: Musician
Rank: professional songstress
Skills:
• Songstress and Virtuoso: Kea has mastered both the piano and guitar and is an extremely proficient singer. She prefers to write and compose her own music but has no qualms with performing covers. She is capable of interpreting a wide array of musical genres. In recent years her fame has somewhat limited the genres she gets to explore, which is one of her big regrets.
Ships/Vehicles:
Coulé class Starship:
swrponline2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=utilitarianships&action=display&thread=15623
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 4
Intelligence: 6
Speed: 5
Leadership: 3
Unarmed: 0
Melee Weapons: 0
Ranged Weapons: 0
Bio:
Pre-birth:
Kea was born on Nar Shaddaa, but that is not where she was conceived. Her mother Anya was an intrepid trader (and sometimes smuggler) of sorts, and her father, Jhan, was an up and coming politician. The two shared a short, but passionate affair which didn’t end on the most amicable of terms. By the end of it Anya was pregnant and while she was all for keeping the child Jhan disagreed. He had never intended for their time together to leave anything that could be traced to him. As a young politician he feared that if his past wasn’t spotless it would come back to bite him in the rear in later years, having a child with a smuggler definitely qualified as a possible weakness future political enemies could use. The two ended up by coming to the agreement that they should part ways, Anya would keep the child and Jhan would never be bothered by either of them, free to pursue his own career.
For a few months Anya travelled about on her business, buying where stocks were plentiful and selling where supply was short. Doing a little smuggling here and there, nothing unusual. Well until she got shot down by pirates and forced to land on Nar Shaddaa for repairs. It was from there that Anya’s life started going from bad to worse.
The attack had come at the worst possible moment. Anya had just bought cargo from the Hutt-controlled moon a few days before her freighter was attacked and what little money she had wasn’t enough to cover the repairs. Furthermore the cargo she had was nearly worthless on Nar Shaddaa. The Zeltron trader rapidly realised that she wouldn’t be able to get off the planet any time soon. By selling off her cargo she had enough to survive until her child’s birth was due.
0-3 years old:
And so she stayed on Nar Shaddaa until baby Kea was born. Anya could have called Jhan then, he would have pulled a few strings and she’d have been off Nar Shaddaa in an instant. But pride got in her way, she had promised never to bother him again and never bother him again she would.
After she had recovered from the birth Anya looked for work, but apart from trading she had never learned any real trade. In desperation she turned to what she knew best and became a dancer in a cantina, a job which she excelled at and which paid the bills. She even managed to enjoy it. Kea spent most of her youngest years in a nursery of sorts, a cold establishment in which the children of workers stayed when their parents were away.
4-12 years old
But eventually dancing wasn’t enough anymore. As the years passed Kea’s needs grew, and Anya was still saving on the side to repair her ship and one day return to her old life. As Kea turned four her mother took a rather drastic step. Anya began selling herself, as a Zeltron she could get an excellent price. Despite that she never managed to get as many clients as she would have expected. People were afraid of dealing with any prostitute who wasn’t working for any of the Hutt clans. Rumours of what happened to those who chose freelance sleepers rather than their Hutt backed competition were grisly. Still the backing of a Hutt would require that Anya sign a contract, one that could very possibly prevent her from leaving Nar Shaddaa.
Even without Hutt backing Anya was making more as a prostitute than as a dancer, but unlike dancing this job made her miserable. You might expect an individual from a race as promiscuous as the Zeltron wouldn’t mind prostitution all that much. You would be wrong. The telepathic abilities natural to the Zeltron meant Anya felt all her clients’ troubles, guilt and anger, which were let loose and unguarded when she provided her services.
The one thing that kept her going was her daughter Kea. At the age of four the young zeltron girl was growing up well. A quick study, she had managed to learn to speak both galactic basic from her mother and Huttese from the people at the nursery at a surprisingly young age. The growth of the child’s telepathic abilities however were somewhat stunted. Nar Shaddaa wasn’t exactly an environment which encouraged the probing of other people’s feelings. But Kea was skilled enough to feel her mother’s misery, and in a show of maturity and compassion surprising for her age she always strove to make Anya’s life easier. Kea did so by helping around their small apartment as much as her size would allow her to and by always trying to cheer up her mother.
At school she was a bit of an outcast in her first few years. It wasn’t really her fault, and most of the other kids didn’t personally dislike her. But unlike most of the kids in her small class her family (such as it was) wasn’t affiliated to a Hutt clan, and that made the other kids weary of her. Some of the bolder children frequently levelled insults at her, but the spunky kid wouldn’t let them trample all over her. She wasn’t as strong as the boys that teased, her, but she was considerably smarter and faster than them. Whatever insults they levelled at her she always brushed aside effortlessly with a witty rebuke, and whenever they tried to hurt her she always managed to evade their clumsy swipes.
In that time Kea befriended another girl in school, a Twi’lek by the name of Balea, two years older than Kea, but far meeker. She too was from a family free from Huttese influence, and the two became fast friends, united by a common situation, and in a way a common enemy. Kea would help Balea in school, and Balea would always welcome Kea at her house when Anya was away. The two children were practically like sisters.
School in itself Kea loved. She loved learning and discovering new things, new ways to understand the world around her, and tales from far away worlds enchanted her and provided a sweet distraction from the bleak life on Nar Shaddaa. By far her favourite way of telling a tale remained music and singing. Kea’s first experience with music was the songs her mother sang to her sometimes. Having travelled to many different worlds, Anya’s repertoire was considerable, and she had a song for almost any occasion. Joyful or sad, motivating or depressing. Anya would often encourage her daughter to sing with her, and Kea would always relish the exercise. As it turned out the young Zeltron was a natural. Music wasn’t taught at her school, but there was an old piano in the janitor’s room. The man was a kindly old Bith who had taken a liking to the cheery young Zeltron and he let her play whenever she wanted. He taught her the basics, and from there she began to teach herself with the janitor occasionally offering a short lesson whenever she was stuck.
Saying life was good for those years would be a bit of a stretch, but it wasn’t hell, and those years were definitely some of Kea’s happiest with her mother. Anya was miserable, but Kea always managed to make her forget her worries, and the young girl did all she could to make her mother’s time away from work as pleasant as possible, and mostly succeeded. As for Kea, she spent most of her time away from her mother either studying at school, playing music or at Balea’s place.
12-14: it’s a slippery slope to hell
Funny how small events can have such strong impacts. It was a fairly average day really. Kea was rushing down the stairs at her school to get to class on time, she’d spent her lunch break at the Bith janitor’s room, playing music, and she tripped. A clumsy and stupid mistake, caused by a combination of the fever she was running which he had hidden form her mother to not make her worry, and the fact that she hadn’t had lunch. She fell down several flights of stairs, and when she came to a stop she had suffered multiple fractures in her arms, legs and ribs.
Kea was rushed to the hospital rapidly enough, flitting in and out of consciousness and moaning she was sorry all the way. They managed to fix her up without causing any permanent injury. That was the good news. The bad news was the cost of the operation. If Anya used all her savings and sold what was left of her ship she’d barely have enough, and then she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent on the apartment or for food. Of course Anya did pay; she sold her ship, forever crushing her hopes of returning to her old life, and she used up all of her meagre savings, literally ruining herself in the process. Anya then turned to her last option to keep a roof over her and Kea’s head and food on their table; she signed a contract with the Hutt, effectively enslaving herself for life to the Desilijic Hutt clan. Well the contract was cut short eventually by conditions unforeseen by either party, ut more on that later.
As soon as she was stable enough to regain consciousness Kea found herself wishing she was still comatose, and sometimes that she’d never been born. She was very much aware of what she’d forced her mother to do. Anya didn’t tell her anything, but the teenager figured things out on her own soon enough, and the guilt was affecting her. Her eyes which used to shine with mischief and cheer dulled, and she became much more sombre, nearly overnight. Had Anya seen her daughter like this she probably wouldn’t have been able to live, but she never did. The increased number of costumers she got from being a Hutt backed prostitute barely left her any time to be with Kea. Any time mother and daughter were together, Kea forced herself to look and act like her old self, and most of the time failed, but her mother was always too tired or preoccupied to notice. The only time when she looked anything like her old self was when she played music, the only thing she found herself capable of pouring her heart and soul into.
At school the other kids had become far more accepting of Kea now that her family was owned by the Hutts, and they tried to befriend her. The Zeltron teenager would have appreciated that a few months earlier, but now she had no wish to be friends with them. Kea even became distant with Balea, and the Twi’lek was getting seriously worried that she’d never get better.
When Kea was thirteen the old Bith janitor died. In his will he left Kea the old piano, but as it turned out it wasn’t his to give away. The piano had belonged to one of the janitor’s old friends who lived off planet, and the instrument was shipped away.
As things seemed locked on a downwards spiral her body was starting to act up. Like all Zeltron she was growing up to be a gorgeous by humanoid standards, and she turned more and more heads in the street. Even by Zeltron standards Kea was good looking.
One day she decided she’d help her mother however she could, and without telling her Kea auditioned for a job as a musician for a crappy old cantina. The simple prospect of helping her mother, and of playing music again, was enough to make her slowly go back to being her old self again. Sure enough she got the job, and every other night she’d go out to the cantina and play for a loud, violent and mostly drunk crowd. The pay was, meagre, but it felt good to feel as if she was doing something. Working allowed her to lessen her guilt, and every passing day made her a little bit more like her old self.
A few weeks after her fourteenth birthday she had sex for the first time, with Balea of all people. Since Kea had been returning to her old self the two friends had been so glad to find each other again that they’d become closer and closer. Until they were more than just friends. Although to Kea this meant a lot less than it did for Balea who had had a crush on Kea for a while. For the young Zeltron it had partially been a primal urge, and partially been a desire fuelled by her telepathic abilities to make someone happy. But Kea’s life took another turn for the worse before the Zeltron could explain that to the love struck Twi’lek.
Around the same time, in more sumptuous areas of Nar Shaddaa a business deal was underway between a Herglic businessman and representatives from several Hutt clans. By the end of the meeting one single Hutt family was elected to pay in blood for acts of piracy undertaken by the Hutts. In truth Beluga Orcta was simply exacting revenge for something that had happened a little over half a century ago. But Kea knew nothing of all this. All Kea knew was that for some reason her mother had been raped and killed.
All the progress the Zeltron teenager had made towards returning to her old self didn’t matter, and she fell into self-imposed isolation. She came out for the burial, a small, short and lonely affair. Few people came to the burial of a random prostitute. Balea was there, trying to cheer up Kea, but the Zeltron pushed away the Twi’lek to return to her solitude in the apartment she had called home. Kea hadn’t even cried at the burial, she wasn’t sure she was capable of ever crying again. The shock was too much. Sometimes she fell asleep and woke up laughing hysterically for no reason. More than once she questioned whether she was going insane.
Eventually men came into the apartment and took her away. They were both of her own people, Zeltrons. One of them tried to explain what was happening, but she didn’t register anything he said. She just looked at him as he spoke and nodded absently. They took her to one of Nar Shaddaa’s spaceports, and off planet. A few days ago she would have given anything to get off the Huttese moon. To her it seemed like that was years ago.
The trip took a few days, but she mostly stayed in the cabin they had told her was hers, doing nothing but lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. They brought her food, which she didn’t touch at first. Well until she caught the smell of the dish and realised how famished she was. She hadn’t eaten in several days after all. After wolfing down several great bites she found herself starting to feel fractionally better, and yet she still felt numb, unable to feel anything except cold. The food’s warmth made her realise just how cold she was. She cloaked herself in her bunk’s covers, but to no avail as the chill clung to her.
On the third day of the trip she walked over to one of the two men while he was in the pilot chair and plopped herself down in the co-pilot chair next to him. He was surprised to see her out of her room, but seemed glad. He observed formalities by presenting his condolences; she vaguely nodded and asked him where they were taking her. The pilot replied they were going to a planet called Zeltros and proceeded to explain that it was their people’s homeworld.
Zeltros was too loud to Kea’s taste. Too loud and too colourful and too sickeningly pretty. She was immediately taken to meet the man she was told was her father. When Jhan saw his daughter he rushed to embrace her. The child didn’t return it, not out of spite, but out of indifference. He took her to his study where he sat her down and proceeded to explain why she had never met him before. He told her about his reasons for abandoning her mother, and he begged her forgiveness. He didn’t get it.
Kea’s shocked mind had decided to put all the blame for everything that ever happened in the galaxy on this man. For the first time since her mother’s death she showed emotion, and that emotion was rage. She screamed at him for what felt like hours, listing off everything that he was responsible for. In the process she reeled off most of her and her mother’s life on Nar Shaddaa, and Jhan seemed to grow paler with each word. But what right did he have to feel uneasy? She had had to live through that. When she was done there was no anger on his face, only equal parts pity, sadness and grief. And that angered her even more, but she couldn’t scream anymore, her voice had given out and she could barely speak audibly anymore.
For the next few days she isolated herself inside the room she had been given, which she felt was too spacious. Her rage burned itself out, but she was still angry. She had finally found an outlet and while she didn’t admit it to herself she knew subconsciously, very, very, very deep down that she was being pretty unfair to her father. For several weeks she remained alone, coming out for the occasional meal. Sometimes Jhan ate with her, and he tried to initiate conversations and he was always calm and understanding. On some level the anger she aimed at him was misdirected, and if he mistreated her she could justify it, but he didn’t give her any pretexts to hate him.
15-18: Healing, learning, thriving.
Her fifteenth birthday came and passed and this continued until the day when, on her way to a dinner with her father she got lost in the vast mansion and came upon a large room. It was empty save for a piano at the far end of the vast hall. She could have walked away; she hadn’t felt the urge to play music in weeks. Months even. But something drew her to the sumptuous instrument. She sat at the stool, lifted the lid, and caressed the keys, the theory coming back to her. At first her fingers were clumsy, but the notes soon gained in confidence and her hands began to move faster over the instrument. Soon enough she added her voice to the melody from the piano. It was a simple song, something her mother had sung to her often.
When she finished playing tears were rolling down her cheeks. She touched one of the salty drops and laughed joyfully as the tears spilled unchecked from her eyes. She cried in grief for her mother, while at the same time she laughed at return of her ability to feel.
She stayed in the piano room for a long time, just sobbing and laughing at the same time. Every now and then she’d play a song, staining the keys with her tears. Eventually Jhan himself arrived, and when he saw her he moved to retreat, but she asked him to stay. She was still angry at him, after all he wasn’t blameless, but he certainly was not the monster she had so desperately tried to paint him as. She had finally managed to realise that. She fell asleep in the piano room.
When she woke up the next day she found herself in the bed she had been given, still wearing the last evening’s clothes she had been given in the room she had been given. Jhan was on a chair by her bed, snoring lightly. She realised he must have carried her up to her room. As she stirred to get up he woke up. “I’m sorry,” was all that she managed, her eyes downcast. “Welcome home,” was all he had to say.
From that day on Kea’s life became much more like the life of a normal girl her age. Jhan called in tutors to get her up to the level of education she should be at; he also called in private tutors to teach her piano and to train her voice. Every day she would study for around eight hours with her tutors, not including the time she spent with her music teachers which came in daily as well. Every dinner and, when possible at lunch too her father and she would eat together, discussing the day’s lessons. After the meal she would sometimes show him how far she’d progressed on the piano. She grew healthier, stronger and more beautiful with each day. She was slowly managing to put her past behind her, and she grew all the happier for it. She was laughing and smiling a lot more than she ever had before.
Soon enough she grew from fifteen to sixteen, and Jhan decided to send her off to a proper school. Private tutoring was fine, but he wanted her to be around other children her age. It was as she entered school that she realised something that horrified her. She had completely forgotten Balea, her old Twi’lek friend. She had been so blank and empty after her mother’s death that she didn’t care, and when she started to get better she had been so absorbed in her lessons that she’d completely forgotten. That night she told of her friend left behind on Nar Shaddaa to her father, and he agreed to get her and her family off the Huttese moon.
By the time they returned to Nar Shaddaa though things had changed. Balea had grown resentful. In her mind Kea had abandoned her. Over time the Twi’lek had grown bitter and hateful, and when the young Zeltron girl came at her door she sent her away angrily. Kea tried to convince her, but the Twi’lek always sent her away. Eventually her father took her by the shoulder and gently led her away. He explained to Kea that this was Balea’s choice to make, and that Kea had done what she could. The teenager replied to him that if Balea stayed on Nar Shaddaa it would be her fault, not the Twi’lek’s. To this Jhan simply replied that what made a mistake forgivable wasn’t reversing the mistake itself, it was the simple act of trying with all your heart to do so, but that you always had to remember the mistake, simply not to let it torment you.
The two returned to Zeltros, and for some time Jhan was afraid that his daughter would fall back into a similar phase to the one she had experienced when Anya died. For several days after the events on Nar Shaddaa Kea was more reclusive than usual, which was the foundation of her father’s worries. His fears were baseless though, because, as she would explain to him later she had simply been thinking. Thinking about some way to convince Balea that she had not yet tried, and thinking about what Jhan had told her. To the first question she found no answer, and the more she thought about her father’s words the more they rang true to her. She had made a mistake, the blame for which she would always carry, but she wouldn’t let it torment her.
Further into her sixteen years Kea had her first man. It was a meaningless relationship, a fling if you would. Several of the boys in her class had been battling for her affection and she had taken a fancy to one of them. He wasn’t the strongest and he wasn’t the most handsome of the lot, but he was the most passionate. After that night she truly understood why her people liked the pleasures of the flesh so much. Nothing came quite as close, well to her music was better, but still lovemaking came a close second.
Life continued being much the same for the next two years and her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays came and went. She took her studies seriously, and was a skilled student, but where she really put in a lot of work was her music. Her piano teacher had introduced her to the guitar and she had picked up that instrument as well. She had mastered the piano, and was doing good progress with the guitar. Her voice was also coming along beautifully. While it had been sweet and innocent when she was a girl her vocals had matured along with her. Her voice was a bit deeper now, and she had vastly improved her technique. Whereas her singing used to be based solely on raw talent she now had the theory to back it up. When school ended for her she took a year off, using it to further her musical knowledge. She had made the decision to directly start a career as a musician and during the year where she wasn’t in school she took several jobs in various establishments as a musician, more to advertise her talent than for the money.
At the same time she multiplied her physical conquests. Thankfully most of her partners were Zeltrons, and much like her what they were seeking was physical more than sentimental. Of course she had some non-Zeltron exes which had been a little more possessive. Those relationships she had ended all the more swiftly. Once though an Iridonian lover of hers seemed very unwilling to let go. He became so obsessed with having her for him alone that it ruined him. That lesson was one that Kea never really forgot, and she has since always been careful to pick lovers that were a little less passionate about her, and more importantly a lot less possessive. During this time
19-22: Rising star
At the age of nineteen Kea started working as a professional musician, she mostly did small gigs, but it never felt right, never felt like she was accomplishing anything. Her father wasn’t helping her, at her request, but she still carried his name, and on Zeltros that held a lot of weight. So she decided to move away from Zeltros, away from where her father’s influence would help her. It wasn’t a rebellious move; she’d spent all her father-hating rebellious energy when she was fourteen. Rather the decision was made out of a desire to succeed on her own, to fly on her own wings you could say if you wished to be poetic.
Kea moved to Abregado-Rae, purchasing a small, clean and comfortable apartment in the outskirts of Abregado-Rae’s capital, despite her father’s insistence that she get a more spacious dwelling. She liked having a small house. It’s not like she needed hundreds of square meters anyways, she was living on her own after all, and had no plans to start a family any time soon. Or ever, but time only would confirm or deny that. At any rate she rapidly went job hunting; and was rejected most of the time without an audition. People either didn’t want or already had musicians regularly coming to their establishments.
In the end she landed a job in a small and quiet, but rather popular cantina. She was in luck as their previous musician had just resigned. She was offered a trial run. To most it might have looked like a triviality, but every day leading up to the night of her performance she was stressing out. She revised and re-revised the songs she would sing. She had to stick to popular songs; otherwise she’d lose the interest of the audience. She had to select songs that were popular but not overused. What if they didn’t like her? What if she wasn’t as good as she thought? What if she failed so bad no one would ever want to come within earshot of her?
The time finally came for her to take to the stage, and her whole body was shaking ever so slightly. Just before she climbed onto the stage the barman had offered her a stiff drink. That had helped a bit. She started into the first song hesitantly. The strong rounds of applause following that encouraged her, she ordered a second drink. Every successful song and every subsequent (and growing) round of cheering emboldened her. By the end of the night she’d fired up the crowd and they were singing along. She’d even invited a trio of friends to join her on the stage to act as backup vocals, a task which they took very seriously, and not unskilfully. By the end of it she got the job, and to top off the night she got one of her improvised backup singers to accompany her back home.
Every night she’d go down to the small cantina and play her songs for the crowd, and word soon spread. Word of the young new Zeltron singer travelled throughout the city and eventually reached the ears of people with some significant pull in the music industry. Men from various record companies became a common sight in the small cantina. Business was also going up. She had spent as close as makes no difference a year on Abregado Rae, and her twentieth birthday was fast approaching when she received her first few contract offers, not from any of the major labels, but it was a start. If some had started to make offers, others would soon follow, or so her father told her when she called him to give him the news.
For her birthday she returned to Zeltros, to be with her father. He had aged since she’d first met him; he was now on the wrong side of forty as he often jokingly said. Her birthday was a rather sumptuous affair, with dozens of guests. Near the end she was requested to sing, a wish she was more than happy to grant, after all it was much easier for her to sing than to give a speech.
A couple of days later she returned to Abregado-Rae, to find that the label offers had somehow multiplied while she was gone. Where she had received three or four before leaving, she now had twice that number. She immediately called up her father, suddenly feeling lost. The sea of choice was a rather intimidating sight. As usual he was calm and collected and he advised her to the best of his ability. He’d dabbled in the business world and hadn’t been unsuccessful. As far as he saw it she should avoid the biggest labels like the plague. The best would be if she could become the flagship artist of one of the smaller labels, the first few months would require hard work, but she’d have far more freedom in her contract than if she signed with an established label.
And she followed his advice. She picked the offer from a small company, after having negotiated the contract to be a bit more in her favour of course. The company had been created by a couple of Munn brothers. The two were hardly interested in music, but they were looking for profit, and they saw Kea as a key to making their little company grow. And she did exactly that.
Kea was tireless and passionate about her art. She had already written some material, and it was soon tested. At first the Munn brothers only managed to get her some small gigs on Abregado-Rae. Soon the word spread again though, the rumours were bolstered by advertising campaigns and eventually she was getting to play in front of crowds that were thousands strong. People liked her diversity, the fact that she dipped into a wide array of genres. Her first tour of Outer Rim planets happened when she was still twenty, and she recorded her first album in that same year. As soon as she received her first pay check, Kea put a portion of it aside and sent it away to Nar Shaddaa, to a poor Hutt owned Twi’lek dancer. She had not managed to get Balea away from the Hutts, but she would at least ease her time among them.
She had toyed with the idea of getting a fixed group to play with her on stage, but the Munn brothers turned down the idea, and they made a fair point. What they needed was to build her fame, and if she always used the same musicians they might take the spotlight away from her. In the end she yielded, and continued using whatever musicians they could find on the planet she was currently on.
By the time her twenty first birthday passed she had recorded a second album. Her fame had exploded, and she was now frequently having gigs on core worlds. She had won over the hearts of a veritable horde of fans all over the Galaxy. But still Coruscant remained closed to her. She continued to tour around the core worlds, until finally the Munn brothers scored the jackpot, and for her first concert on Coruscant they aimed big.
Kea’s first time in the capital was like a dream. She was amazed at the size of it all, the grandeur and the colours and the people. She had been to other ecumenopolises, but never one quite like Coruscant. The crowd was massive, an arena holding several hundreds of thousands of people, all there to see just her, was the venue. Some had travelled from the outer rim, just for her. She found herself just as stressed as for her first gig in that small cantina on Abregado-Rae, what seemed like decades ago to her. She was confident in her own ability, but these people deserved to see her at her best.
The gig went perfectly; she gave it all she had, by the end of the concert she was so exhausted that she could hardly stand. That one concert cemented her as one of the most popular artists of the moment. She was so exhausted that she didn’t even bother finding someone to go to bed with, crashing on her mattress at the end of the night. When she woke in the morning her father was there, and he was grinning like a child. He’d come to the concert without telling her, preferring to keep it a secret and surprise her just after, but he hadn’t had the time, so he was making up for it now.
She was glad to see him, as always, but that day there was a spark in his eyes that implied he had something he wanted to discuss. All day she pushed him for an answer or a hint, but he remained silent on the matter, replying to her questions with a cryptic “I’ll tell you at dinner”. Dinner came, dinner went, and he explained his plans. He wanted to buy the label from the Munn brothers. They had served their purpose or providing a small label that she could turn into her own. But she refused to do that. Kea wasn’t overly fond of the phallic-headed twins, they weren’t the easiest people to warm to, but they were good people at heart, or so she believed.
Truth be told the Munn brothers had feared that they would be disposed of as soon as Kea reached Coruscant, and they had prepared. Behind her back they had made some subtle changes to the contracts, exploiting a plethora of legal loopholes and effectively giving themselves a share of the royalties of her current works for life. As soon as they were sure their safeguards were secured they jumped ship, out of nowhere. They broke Kea’s contract, leaving her without a label. She had just turned twenty two when the news was broken to her.
Her father was all for charging in and taking them to court, but Kea refused. She didn’t want to be swamped down into a series of lengthy and ultimately worthless lawsuits. No. She would find a way to bounce back. After all her label was gone, but she was still renown all over Republic-controlled space (and maybe even further for all she knew) and that counted for something, but the crowds are fickle and she knew her fans were likely to eventually give up on her if she stayed silent too long. Of course given her royalties and her father’s position she could easily have stopped working and lived off of her CD sales. But she knew she couldn’t live without the stage. And so she stands, a lone artist without a label, free as can be, but with precious few contacts to call upon in order to net her the bigger venues and pay for advertising and equipment. The Munn brothers had taken care of all these things. Most of her days are spent in one of her two apartments on Abregado-Rae and Coruscant, resting. Her father had suggested that he could put in a few calls with some rich friends, but Kea had refused, she’d gotten in this mess without his help, and she’d get out of it without his help. She preferred it that way.
RP Sample:
Kea was wringing her hands and biting her lower lip nervously, sitting on one of the large metallic crates that took up a large portion of the back of the stage. She was always nervous before a concert, she’d hoped that after spending more than year performing it’d settle down and that hadn’t happened. It was frustrating really.
“Yo Kea, we’re going on,” one of the musicians called. A Bith flutist who was pretty damn good at what he did.
The Zeltron got up from her crate and stretched, regulating her breathing, before she stepped up onto the stage. As soon as she got on the explosion of sound and light overwhelmed her for a split second. The projectors were bright and right in her face, preventing her from seeing the crowd, or anything that wasn’t on the stage really, but she could hear then. Cheering, whooping, whistling filled the arena. Judging by the sounds there were probably a good hundred thousand people here. Not the biggest crowd she’d been put in front of, but definitely sizeable. She grabbed the old fashioned microphone on a stand, just as the first song kicked in.
The song seemed to last only a second to her. The thunderous guitar riff was always a good way to start a concert, the crowd immediately recognised the song and it energised them. By the time the last note faded the applauding was like a furious wave, once again she smiled. She never spoke to the crowd before the first song, mostly because she was too jittery. But now would be a good time to say something.
“Hello,” she greeted as the cheering subsided, and before she could get another word out the crowd began shouting and whistling again, any coherent words lost in the cascade of noise. “I’ll assume that means you’re glad to see me,” she added with a smile. More noise. “Now this next song I haven’t played in a long time, so you’ll have to help me remember the lyrics.”
That had been the truth. Well the bit about her not having sung this particular tune in a long time at least. She remembered the lyrics perfectly, but she let the crowd scream out the first few words on their own before starting herself.
The night’s crowd was pretty damn energetic, barely leaving any moments of silence, either clapping in time to the beat of the songs, screaming incoherently but zealously or singing along. The moments she personally preferred though were in the slower songs, when the crowd hummed along. Sometimes their voices all matched up perfectly at once, like a colossal beast, and it sent tingles down her spine every time.
Their energy became hers, and the more they spurred her on the more she enjoyed herself. The musicians behind her were also having a good time, and every now and then she shared a jest with one of them. Throughout the show lighting effects and pyro technics burst out in nearly every song from all over the place, that too was something she wasn’t entirely used to, and she was always a little anxious something would go wrong every time they fired off.
Between two songs she’d requested that the projectors be turned on the crowd, so that she could see them. A veritable sea of people stood just in front of the arena, separated by a three metre empty space which was cordoned off by security guards. Not for the first time she wondered what would happen if they suddenly decided they all wanted to invade the stage at once. The walls of the arena were completely covered in people and she could see a number of banners, some creepy, some heart-warming. She played an entire song with the spotlight on them, and she noticed that close to the arena the crowd had backed off, leaving a wide circle where several couples danced.
“Well now you know what it feels like to be stared at by a dozen lights,” she said jokingly as the song ended and the projectors whirled back onto her. “I also want to congratulate the very skilled dancers, give them a hand,” as she said so she clapped for them, and the entire crowd joined her, the projectors once again whirled around to focus on the area where the couples had been dancing.
At some point the Besalisk guitarist held her up in the air, her feet balanced on two. They maintained the position for the entirety of two of the more fast paced songs, and she made a mental note to congratulate him on his strength, endurance and skill.
When he put her down it was time for the final song, well she knew it wasn’t really the final song of the night, there’d be screaming for an encore, but still, the official last song of the concert was an important one. As they kicked into the final song fireworks exploded form the top of the arena they were in, showering the crowd in light, once again she could see them, and she noticed the couples were still dancing.
Predictably as soon as she and the musicians left the stage screams of “ENCORE” filled the stadium. They waited a few minutes, mainly to give Kea time to get a drink, but as soon as she’d drained an entire bottle of water they walked back on, the coherence the crowd had momentarily achieved immediately vanished and once again they were just making noise.
She whispered with her musicians for a few seconds, deciding which song to play, they ended up by covering an old human folk song. As soon as it was over they bowed and she took the microphone for one last time.
“I just wanted to say thank you to these guys,” she turned to thank each of the musicians individually before turning back to the microphone, “and also a big thank you to you guys. You were great," even when she stepped off the stage and retreated to her changing room she could still hear the noise form the crowd. She was beaming as she downed another full bottle of water.
Theme Song: Lodi-Creedence Clearwater Revival
Woman-Wolfmother
Race: Zeltron
Age: 24
Height: 5ft9”
Weight: 155lbs
Birth place: Nar Shaddaa
Appearance: Kea, like most Zeltrons, is gorgeous (at least by most humanoid standards). Her crimson skin is smooth, unblemished and unmarked. Her features are delicate without being overly sharp, her nose straight but neither too long nor too pointy, her lips are full and nearly always twisted in a playful smile. Her body is lightly toned and curvaceous but not bulky, toned without having sharply defined muscles. Her slightly wavy hair is a rich sapphire blue and cascades about her face, falling down all the way to her mid-back, the bangs framing her face are shorter, hanging down to her collarbone, usually parted in the middle with one thick rogue strand cutting across her face. She mostly keeps it untied, except when she is exercising or sleeping. Her eyes are amaranthine coloured and seem to sparkle with good humoured mischief.
She never settles on any single outfit for any extended period of time, unless she is unable to change for whatever reason, but as most Zeltrons her clothing is usually quite revealing and in bright, flashy colours. There is always a time when she prefers to not be recognised by every passer-by in the street though, and on such occasions she’ll favour dull coloured clothes that hide most of her features and which don’t attract too much attention to her.
Personality: Kea is a laid back, energetic and fun loving person. She’s always on the lookout for new things to try out and lives her life in the carpe diem style. She relishes in the moment, making the most of the present and giving little thought to the future. She hates repetition and routine, and always strives to look for new things to try out and enjoy. She is fiercely independent, and can’t stand those who try to order her around, something she reacts to rather brusquely and angrily. However apart for those rare angry outbursts aimed at the commanding types she is mostly a very cheerful individual, graced with a very natural, often used smile and laugh.
Like most Zeltrons Kea is constantly searching for pleasure and entertainment, physical or otherwise, but preferably new and exciting. She is a skilled seductress, judiciously using her natural assets and smarts to become the object of the lust of the men (and women when the fancy takes her) around her. This does sometimes lead her callously toy around with people for no particular reason when particularly bored. Kea’s is a shameless flirt, enjoying the hunt in itself nearly as much as what comes after. Her love of seduction and love is only matched by her passion for both listening to and creating music.
Kea has a bit of a vain side. Like most people she loves to be complimented, even when it’s obvious flattery. She also enjoys attention, but not to the point of actively seeking it out, she gets enough of it on stage. Like most of her people Kea sees monogamy as a quaint but impractical ideal and she has never stayed tied down to one partner for very long, and she prefers her relationships to be short (unlike how she likes her sex) and passionate (just how she likes her sex).
Her obsession over a wide range of seemingly random endeavours for short bursts of time make those who know her see her as a bit of an eccentric, but when she sets her mind firmly on one project she will do her utmost to see it through. No matter how ridiculous, counter-intuitive or illogical it may be. As stubborn as an old goat, convincing her to drop some of her more reckless projects is never an easy thing to do.
Strangely enough for someone as famous as she, Kea has next to no people she’d really call friends. The strangers she often shares her bed with don’t exactly qualify, and her work has kept her moving from planet to planet, rarely staying in one place for any extended period of time. Additionally because she never performs with the same musicians more than a couple of times she hasn’t made any friends there. In a strange way she is extremely lonely. Another odd thing is that while as soon as she steps on stage and the music starts her nerves clam, she is still a nervous wreck in the few hours before a large concert. In a way she still hasn’t quite gotten used to performing for colossal crowds.
Kea’s natural telepathic abilities suffered from a stunted growth in her youth, which meant that now she’s fully grown her ability to feel the emotions of others is considerably less prominent than for other Zeltrons. This phenomenon was caused by the generally hostile mood of Nar Shaddaa, where she was born and lived for over half of her life, which didn’t encourage the flourishing of her telepathic ability as a child.
She doesn’t like to talk about her life before her father took her in. It’s not that she’s ashamed of those times, it’s simply that she has, after many years, managed to stop thinking about them too much. Speaking about those times brings back memories she’d rather leave dormant and feeling she’d rather leave unstirred.
However despite all her careless, rash and sometimes childish antics she is no fool and certainly no simpleton either. She is kind at heart; even if her habit of toying with others for her personal amusement would indicate otherwise. After all when she does toy around with people they usually end up in a win-win situation, and she’s never cruel. She has a capacity for sympathy and empathy which many would find unlikely in a young woman raised in opulence, but then again most don’t know she only came to know wealth in her teens. She hates owing anything to anyone and will strive to repay her debts as swiftly as possible.
When nervous she has a habit of wringing her hands and biting her lower lip, something she can nearly always be seen doing just before a concert, while sitting on a random object.
Occupation: Musician
Rank: professional songstress
Skills:
• Songstress and Virtuoso: Kea has mastered both the piano and guitar and is an extremely proficient singer. She prefers to write and compose her own music but has no qualms with performing covers. She is capable of interpreting a wide array of musical genres. In recent years her fame has somewhat limited the genres she gets to explore, which is one of her big regrets.
Ships/Vehicles:
Coulé class Starship:
swrponline2.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=utilitarianships&action=display&thread=15623
Attributes:
Physical Strength: 4
Intelligence: 6
Speed: 5
Leadership: 3
Unarmed: 0
Melee Weapons: 0
Ranged Weapons: 0
Bio:
Pre-birth:
Kea was born on Nar Shaddaa, but that is not where she was conceived. Her mother Anya was an intrepid trader (and sometimes smuggler) of sorts, and her father, Jhan, was an up and coming politician. The two shared a short, but passionate affair which didn’t end on the most amicable of terms. By the end of it Anya was pregnant and while she was all for keeping the child Jhan disagreed. He had never intended for their time together to leave anything that could be traced to him. As a young politician he feared that if his past wasn’t spotless it would come back to bite him in the rear in later years, having a child with a smuggler definitely qualified as a possible weakness future political enemies could use. The two ended up by coming to the agreement that they should part ways, Anya would keep the child and Jhan would never be bothered by either of them, free to pursue his own career.
For a few months Anya travelled about on her business, buying where stocks were plentiful and selling where supply was short. Doing a little smuggling here and there, nothing unusual. Well until she got shot down by pirates and forced to land on Nar Shaddaa for repairs. It was from there that Anya’s life started going from bad to worse.
The attack had come at the worst possible moment. Anya had just bought cargo from the Hutt-controlled moon a few days before her freighter was attacked and what little money she had wasn’t enough to cover the repairs. Furthermore the cargo she had was nearly worthless on Nar Shaddaa. The Zeltron trader rapidly realised that she wouldn’t be able to get off the planet any time soon. By selling off her cargo she had enough to survive until her child’s birth was due.
0-3 years old:
And so she stayed on Nar Shaddaa until baby Kea was born. Anya could have called Jhan then, he would have pulled a few strings and she’d have been off Nar Shaddaa in an instant. But pride got in her way, she had promised never to bother him again and never bother him again she would.
After she had recovered from the birth Anya looked for work, but apart from trading she had never learned any real trade. In desperation she turned to what she knew best and became a dancer in a cantina, a job which she excelled at and which paid the bills. She even managed to enjoy it. Kea spent most of her youngest years in a nursery of sorts, a cold establishment in which the children of workers stayed when their parents were away.
4-12 years old
But eventually dancing wasn’t enough anymore. As the years passed Kea’s needs grew, and Anya was still saving on the side to repair her ship and one day return to her old life. As Kea turned four her mother took a rather drastic step. Anya began selling herself, as a Zeltron she could get an excellent price. Despite that she never managed to get as many clients as she would have expected. People were afraid of dealing with any prostitute who wasn’t working for any of the Hutt clans. Rumours of what happened to those who chose freelance sleepers rather than their Hutt backed competition were grisly. Still the backing of a Hutt would require that Anya sign a contract, one that could very possibly prevent her from leaving Nar Shaddaa.
Even without Hutt backing Anya was making more as a prostitute than as a dancer, but unlike dancing this job made her miserable. You might expect an individual from a race as promiscuous as the Zeltron wouldn’t mind prostitution all that much. You would be wrong. The telepathic abilities natural to the Zeltron meant Anya felt all her clients’ troubles, guilt and anger, which were let loose and unguarded when she provided her services.
The one thing that kept her going was her daughter Kea. At the age of four the young zeltron girl was growing up well. A quick study, she had managed to learn to speak both galactic basic from her mother and Huttese from the people at the nursery at a surprisingly young age. The growth of the child’s telepathic abilities however were somewhat stunted. Nar Shaddaa wasn’t exactly an environment which encouraged the probing of other people’s feelings. But Kea was skilled enough to feel her mother’s misery, and in a show of maturity and compassion surprising for her age she always strove to make Anya’s life easier. Kea did so by helping around their small apartment as much as her size would allow her to and by always trying to cheer up her mother.
At school she was a bit of an outcast in her first few years. It wasn’t really her fault, and most of the other kids didn’t personally dislike her. But unlike most of the kids in her small class her family (such as it was) wasn’t affiliated to a Hutt clan, and that made the other kids weary of her. Some of the bolder children frequently levelled insults at her, but the spunky kid wouldn’t let them trample all over her. She wasn’t as strong as the boys that teased, her, but she was considerably smarter and faster than them. Whatever insults they levelled at her she always brushed aside effortlessly with a witty rebuke, and whenever they tried to hurt her she always managed to evade their clumsy swipes.
In that time Kea befriended another girl in school, a Twi’lek by the name of Balea, two years older than Kea, but far meeker. She too was from a family free from Huttese influence, and the two became fast friends, united by a common situation, and in a way a common enemy. Kea would help Balea in school, and Balea would always welcome Kea at her house when Anya was away. The two children were practically like sisters.
School in itself Kea loved. She loved learning and discovering new things, new ways to understand the world around her, and tales from far away worlds enchanted her and provided a sweet distraction from the bleak life on Nar Shaddaa. By far her favourite way of telling a tale remained music and singing. Kea’s first experience with music was the songs her mother sang to her sometimes. Having travelled to many different worlds, Anya’s repertoire was considerable, and she had a song for almost any occasion. Joyful or sad, motivating or depressing. Anya would often encourage her daughter to sing with her, and Kea would always relish the exercise. As it turned out the young Zeltron was a natural. Music wasn’t taught at her school, but there was an old piano in the janitor’s room. The man was a kindly old Bith who had taken a liking to the cheery young Zeltron and he let her play whenever she wanted. He taught her the basics, and from there she began to teach herself with the janitor occasionally offering a short lesson whenever she was stuck.
Saying life was good for those years would be a bit of a stretch, but it wasn’t hell, and those years were definitely some of Kea’s happiest with her mother. Anya was miserable, but Kea always managed to make her forget her worries, and the young girl did all she could to make her mother’s time away from work as pleasant as possible, and mostly succeeded. As for Kea, she spent most of her time away from her mother either studying at school, playing music or at Balea’s place.
12-14: it’s a slippery slope to hell
Funny how small events can have such strong impacts. It was a fairly average day really. Kea was rushing down the stairs at her school to get to class on time, she’d spent her lunch break at the Bith janitor’s room, playing music, and she tripped. A clumsy and stupid mistake, caused by a combination of the fever she was running which he had hidden form her mother to not make her worry, and the fact that she hadn’t had lunch. She fell down several flights of stairs, and when she came to a stop she had suffered multiple fractures in her arms, legs and ribs.
Kea was rushed to the hospital rapidly enough, flitting in and out of consciousness and moaning she was sorry all the way. They managed to fix her up without causing any permanent injury. That was the good news. The bad news was the cost of the operation. If Anya used all her savings and sold what was left of her ship she’d barely have enough, and then she wouldn’t be able to pay the rent on the apartment or for food. Of course Anya did pay; she sold her ship, forever crushing her hopes of returning to her old life, and she used up all of her meagre savings, literally ruining herself in the process. Anya then turned to her last option to keep a roof over her and Kea’s head and food on their table; she signed a contract with the Hutt, effectively enslaving herself for life to the Desilijic Hutt clan. Well the contract was cut short eventually by conditions unforeseen by either party, ut more on that later.
As soon as she was stable enough to regain consciousness Kea found herself wishing she was still comatose, and sometimes that she’d never been born. She was very much aware of what she’d forced her mother to do. Anya didn’t tell her anything, but the teenager figured things out on her own soon enough, and the guilt was affecting her. Her eyes which used to shine with mischief and cheer dulled, and she became much more sombre, nearly overnight. Had Anya seen her daughter like this she probably wouldn’t have been able to live, but she never did. The increased number of costumers she got from being a Hutt backed prostitute barely left her any time to be with Kea. Any time mother and daughter were together, Kea forced herself to look and act like her old self, and most of the time failed, but her mother was always too tired or preoccupied to notice. The only time when she looked anything like her old self was when she played music, the only thing she found herself capable of pouring her heart and soul into.
At school the other kids had become far more accepting of Kea now that her family was owned by the Hutts, and they tried to befriend her. The Zeltron teenager would have appreciated that a few months earlier, but now she had no wish to be friends with them. Kea even became distant with Balea, and the Twi’lek was getting seriously worried that she’d never get better.
When Kea was thirteen the old Bith janitor died. In his will he left Kea the old piano, but as it turned out it wasn’t his to give away. The piano had belonged to one of the janitor’s old friends who lived off planet, and the instrument was shipped away.
As things seemed locked on a downwards spiral her body was starting to act up. Like all Zeltron she was growing up to be a gorgeous by humanoid standards, and she turned more and more heads in the street. Even by Zeltron standards Kea was good looking.
One day she decided she’d help her mother however she could, and without telling her Kea auditioned for a job as a musician for a crappy old cantina. The simple prospect of helping her mother, and of playing music again, was enough to make her slowly go back to being her old self again. Sure enough she got the job, and every other night she’d go out to the cantina and play for a loud, violent and mostly drunk crowd. The pay was, meagre, but it felt good to feel as if she was doing something. Working allowed her to lessen her guilt, and every passing day made her a little bit more like her old self.
A few weeks after her fourteenth birthday she had sex for the first time, with Balea of all people. Since Kea had been returning to her old self the two friends had been so glad to find each other again that they’d become closer and closer. Until they were more than just friends. Although to Kea this meant a lot less than it did for Balea who had had a crush on Kea for a while. For the young Zeltron it had partially been a primal urge, and partially been a desire fuelled by her telepathic abilities to make someone happy. But Kea’s life took another turn for the worse before the Zeltron could explain that to the love struck Twi’lek.
Around the same time, in more sumptuous areas of Nar Shaddaa a business deal was underway between a Herglic businessman and representatives from several Hutt clans. By the end of the meeting one single Hutt family was elected to pay in blood for acts of piracy undertaken by the Hutts. In truth Beluga Orcta was simply exacting revenge for something that had happened a little over half a century ago. But Kea knew nothing of all this. All Kea knew was that for some reason her mother had been raped and killed.
All the progress the Zeltron teenager had made towards returning to her old self didn’t matter, and she fell into self-imposed isolation. She came out for the burial, a small, short and lonely affair. Few people came to the burial of a random prostitute. Balea was there, trying to cheer up Kea, but the Zeltron pushed away the Twi’lek to return to her solitude in the apartment she had called home. Kea hadn’t even cried at the burial, she wasn’t sure she was capable of ever crying again. The shock was too much. Sometimes she fell asleep and woke up laughing hysterically for no reason. More than once she questioned whether she was going insane.
Eventually men came into the apartment and took her away. They were both of her own people, Zeltrons. One of them tried to explain what was happening, but she didn’t register anything he said. She just looked at him as he spoke and nodded absently. They took her to one of Nar Shaddaa’s spaceports, and off planet. A few days ago she would have given anything to get off the Huttese moon. To her it seemed like that was years ago.
The trip took a few days, but she mostly stayed in the cabin they had told her was hers, doing nothing but lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling. They brought her food, which she didn’t touch at first. Well until she caught the smell of the dish and realised how famished she was. She hadn’t eaten in several days after all. After wolfing down several great bites she found herself starting to feel fractionally better, and yet she still felt numb, unable to feel anything except cold. The food’s warmth made her realise just how cold she was. She cloaked herself in her bunk’s covers, but to no avail as the chill clung to her.
On the third day of the trip she walked over to one of the two men while he was in the pilot chair and plopped herself down in the co-pilot chair next to him. He was surprised to see her out of her room, but seemed glad. He observed formalities by presenting his condolences; she vaguely nodded and asked him where they were taking her. The pilot replied they were going to a planet called Zeltros and proceeded to explain that it was their people’s homeworld.
Zeltros was too loud to Kea’s taste. Too loud and too colourful and too sickeningly pretty. She was immediately taken to meet the man she was told was her father. When Jhan saw his daughter he rushed to embrace her. The child didn’t return it, not out of spite, but out of indifference. He took her to his study where he sat her down and proceeded to explain why she had never met him before. He told her about his reasons for abandoning her mother, and he begged her forgiveness. He didn’t get it.
Kea’s shocked mind had decided to put all the blame for everything that ever happened in the galaxy on this man. For the first time since her mother’s death she showed emotion, and that emotion was rage. She screamed at him for what felt like hours, listing off everything that he was responsible for. In the process she reeled off most of her and her mother’s life on Nar Shaddaa, and Jhan seemed to grow paler with each word. But what right did he have to feel uneasy? She had had to live through that. When she was done there was no anger on his face, only equal parts pity, sadness and grief. And that angered her even more, but she couldn’t scream anymore, her voice had given out and she could barely speak audibly anymore.
For the next few days she isolated herself inside the room she had been given, which she felt was too spacious. Her rage burned itself out, but she was still angry. She had finally found an outlet and while she didn’t admit it to herself she knew subconsciously, very, very, very deep down that she was being pretty unfair to her father. For several weeks she remained alone, coming out for the occasional meal. Sometimes Jhan ate with her, and he tried to initiate conversations and he was always calm and understanding. On some level the anger she aimed at him was misdirected, and if he mistreated her she could justify it, but he didn’t give her any pretexts to hate him.
15-18: Healing, learning, thriving.
Her fifteenth birthday came and passed and this continued until the day when, on her way to a dinner with her father she got lost in the vast mansion and came upon a large room. It was empty save for a piano at the far end of the vast hall. She could have walked away; she hadn’t felt the urge to play music in weeks. Months even. But something drew her to the sumptuous instrument. She sat at the stool, lifted the lid, and caressed the keys, the theory coming back to her. At first her fingers were clumsy, but the notes soon gained in confidence and her hands began to move faster over the instrument. Soon enough she added her voice to the melody from the piano. It was a simple song, something her mother had sung to her often.
When she finished playing tears were rolling down her cheeks. She touched one of the salty drops and laughed joyfully as the tears spilled unchecked from her eyes. She cried in grief for her mother, while at the same time she laughed at return of her ability to feel.
She stayed in the piano room for a long time, just sobbing and laughing at the same time. Every now and then she’d play a song, staining the keys with her tears. Eventually Jhan himself arrived, and when he saw her he moved to retreat, but she asked him to stay. She was still angry at him, after all he wasn’t blameless, but he certainly was not the monster she had so desperately tried to paint him as. She had finally managed to realise that. She fell asleep in the piano room.
When she woke up the next day she found herself in the bed she had been given, still wearing the last evening’s clothes she had been given in the room she had been given. Jhan was on a chair by her bed, snoring lightly. She realised he must have carried her up to her room. As she stirred to get up he woke up. “I’m sorry,” was all that she managed, her eyes downcast. “Welcome home,” was all he had to say.
From that day on Kea’s life became much more like the life of a normal girl her age. Jhan called in tutors to get her up to the level of education she should be at; he also called in private tutors to teach her piano and to train her voice. Every day she would study for around eight hours with her tutors, not including the time she spent with her music teachers which came in daily as well. Every dinner and, when possible at lunch too her father and she would eat together, discussing the day’s lessons. After the meal she would sometimes show him how far she’d progressed on the piano. She grew healthier, stronger and more beautiful with each day. She was slowly managing to put her past behind her, and she grew all the happier for it. She was laughing and smiling a lot more than she ever had before.
Soon enough she grew from fifteen to sixteen, and Jhan decided to send her off to a proper school. Private tutoring was fine, but he wanted her to be around other children her age. It was as she entered school that she realised something that horrified her. She had completely forgotten Balea, her old Twi’lek friend. She had been so blank and empty after her mother’s death that she didn’t care, and when she started to get better she had been so absorbed in her lessons that she’d completely forgotten. That night she told of her friend left behind on Nar Shaddaa to her father, and he agreed to get her and her family off the Huttese moon.
By the time they returned to Nar Shaddaa though things had changed. Balea had grown resentful. In her mind Kea had abandoned her. Over time the Twi’lek had grown bitter and hateful, and when the young Zeltron girl came at her door she sent her away angrily. Kea tried to convince her, but the Twi’lek always sent her away. Eventually her father took her by the shoulder and gently led her away. He explained to Kea that this was Balea’s choice to make, and that Kea had done what she could. The teenager replied to him that if Balea stayed on Nar Shaddaa it would be her fault, not the Twi’lek’s. To this Jhan simply replied that what made a mistake forgivable wasn’t reversing the mistake itself, it was the simple act of trying with all your heart to do so, but that you always had to remember the mistake, simply not to let it torment you.
The two returned to Zeltros, and for some time Jhan was afraid that his daughter would fall back into a similar phase to the one she had experienced when Anya died. For several days after the events on Nar Shaddaa Kea was more reclusive than usual, which was the foundation of her father’s worries. His fears were baseless though, because, as she would explain to him later she had simply been thinking. Thinking about some way to convince Balea that she had not yet tried, and thinking about what Jhan had told her. To the first question she found no answer, and the more she thought about her father’s words the more they rang true to her. She had made a mistake, the blame for which she would always carry, but she wouldn’t let it torment her.
Further into her sixteen years Kea had her first man. It was a meaningless relationship, a fling if you would. Several of the boys in her class had been battling for her affection and she had taken a fancy to one of them. He wasn’t the strongest and he wasn’t the most handsome of the lot, but he was the most passionate. After that night she truly understood why her people liked the pleasures of the flesh so much. Nothing came quite as close, well to her music was better, but still lovemaking came a close second.
Life continued being much the same for the next two years and her seventeenth and eighteenth birthdays came and went. She took her studies seriously, and was a skilled student, but where she really put in a lot of work was her music. Her piano teacher had introduced her to the guitar and she had picked up that instrument as well. She had mastered the piano, and was doing good progress with the guitar. Her voice was also coming along beautifully. While it had been sweet and innocent when she was a girl her vocals had matured along with her. Her voice was a bit deeper now, and she had vastly improved her technique. Whereas her singing used to be based solely on raw talent she now had the theory to back it up. When school ended for her she took a year off, using it to further her musical knowledge. She had made the decision to directly start a career as a musician and during the year where she wasn’t in school she took several jobs in various establishments as a musician, more to advertise her talent than for the money.
At the same time she multiplied her physical conquests. Thankfully most of her partners were Zeltrons, and much like her what they were seeking was physical more than sentimental. Of course she had some non-Zeltron exes which had been a little more possessive. Those relationships she had ended all the more swiftly. Once though an Iridonian lover of hers seemed very unwilling to let go. He became so obsessed with having her for him alone that it ruined him. That lesson was one that Kea never really forgot, and she has since always been careful to pick lovers that were a little less passionate about her, and more importantly a lot less possessive. During this time
19-22: Rising star
At the age of nineteen Kea started working as a professional musician, she mostly did small gigs, but it never felt right, never felt like she was accomplishing anything. Her father wasn’t helping her, at her request, but she still carried his name, and on Zeltros that held a lot of weight. So she decided to move away from Zeltros, away from where her father’s influence would help her. It wasn’t a rebellious move; she’d spent all her father-hating rebellious energy when she was fourteen. Rather the decision was made out of a desire to succeed on her own, to fly on her own wings you could say if you wished to be poetic.
Kea moved to Abregado-Rae, purchasing a small, clean and comfortable apartment in the outskirts of Abregado-Rae’s capital, despite her father’s insistence that she get a more spacious dwelling. She liked having a small house. It’s not like she needed hundreds of square meters anyways, she was living on her own after all, and had no plans to start a family any time soon. Or ever, but time only would confirm or deny that. At any rate she rapidly went job hunting; and was rejected most of the time without an audition. People either didn’t want or already had musicians regularly coming to their establishments.
In the end she landed a job in a small and quiet, but rather popular cantina. She was in luck as their previous musician had just resigned. She was offered a trial run. To most it might have looked like a triviality, but every day leading up to the night of her performance she was stressing out. She revised and re-revised the songs she would sing. She had to stick to popular songs; otherwise she’d lose the interest of the audience. She had to select songs that were popular but not overused. What if they didn’t like her? What if she wasn’t as good as she thought? What if she failed so bad no one would ever want to come within earshot of her?
The time finally came for her to take to the stage, and her whole body was shaking ever so slightly. Just before she climbed onto the stage the barman had offered her a stiff drink. That had helped a bit. She started into the first song hesitantly. The strong rounds of applause following that encouraged her, she ordered a second drink. Every successful song and every subsequent (and growing) round of cheering emboldened her. By the end of the night she’d fired up the crowd and they were singing along. She’d even invited a trio of friends to join her on the stage to act as backup vocals, a task which they took very seriously, and not unskilfully. By the end of it she got the job, and to top off the night she got one of her improvised backup singers to accompany her back home.
Every night she’d go down to the small cantina and play her songs for the crowd, and word soon spread. Word of the young new Zeltron singer travelled throughout the city and eventually reached the ears of people with some significant pull in the music industry. Men from various record companies became a common sight in the small cantina. Business was also going up. She had spent as close as makes no difference a year on Abregado Rae, and her twentieth birthday was fast approaching when she received her first few contract offers, not from any of the major labels, but it was a start. If some had started to make offers, others would soon follow, or so her father told her when she called him to give him the news.
For her birthday she returned to Zeltros, to be with her father. He had aged since she’d first met him; he was now on the wrong side of forty as he often jokingly said. Her birthday was a rather sumptuous affair, with dozens of guests. Near the end she was requested to sing, a wish she was more than happy to grant, after all it was much easier for her to sing than to give a speech.
A couple of days later she returned to Abregado-Rae, to find that the label offers had somehow multiplied while she was gone. Where she had received three or four before leaving, she now had twice that number. She immediately called up her father, suddenly feeling lost. The sea of choice was a rather intimidating sight. As usual he was calm and collected and he advised her to the best of his ability. He’d dabbled in the business world and hadn’t been unsuccessful. As far as he saw it she should avoid the biggest labels like the plague. The best would be if she could become the flagship artist of one of the smaller labels, the first few months would require hard work, but she’d have far more freedom in her contract than if she signed with an established label.
And she followed his advice. She picked the offer from a small company, after having negotiated the contract to be a bit more in her favour of course. The company had been created by a couple of Munn brothers. The two were hardly interested in music, but they were looking for profit, and they saw Kea as a key to making their little company grow. And she did exactly that.
Kea was tireless and passionate about her art. She had already written some material, and it was soon tested. At first the Munn brothers only managed to get her some small gigs on Abregado-Rae. Soon the word spread again though, the rumours were bolstered by advertising campaigns and eventually she was getting to play in front of crowds that were thousands strong. People liked her diversity, the fact that she dipped into a wide array of genres. Her first tour of Outer Rim planets happened when she was still twenty, and she recorded her first album in that same year. As soon as she received her first pay check, Kea put a portion of it aside and sent it away to Nar Shaddaa, to a poor Hutt owned Twi’lek dancer. She had not managed to get Balea away from the Hutts, but she would at least ease her time among them.
She had toyed with the idea of getting a fixed group to play with her on stage, but the Munn brothers turned down the idea, and they made a fair point. What they needed was to build her fame, and if she always used the same musicians they might take the spotlight away from her. In the end she yielded, and continued using whatever musicians they could find on the planet she was currently on.
By the time her twenty first birthday passed she had recorded a second album. Her fame had exploded, and she was now frequently having gigs on core worlds. She had won over the hearts of a veritable horde of fans all over the Galaxy. But still Coruscant remained closed to her. She continued to tour around the core worlds, until finally the Munn brothers scored the jackpot, and for her first concert on Coruscant they aimed big.
Kea’s first time in the capital was like a dream. She was amazed at the size of it all, the grandeur and the colours and the people. She had been to other ecumenopolises, but never one quite like Coruscant. The crowd was massive, an arena holding several hundreds of thousands of people, all there to see just her, was the venue. Some had travelled from the outer rim, just for her. She found herself just as stressed as for her first gig in that small cantina on Abregado-Rae, what seemed like decades ago to her. She was confident in her own ability, but these people deserved to see her at her best.
The gig went perfectly; she gave it all she had, by the end of the concert she was so exhausted that she could hardly stand. That one concert cemented her as one of the most popular artists of the moment. She was so exhausted that she didn’t even bother finding someone to go to bed with, crashing on her mattress at the end of the night. When she woke in the morning her father was there, and he was grinning like a child. He’d come to the concert without telling her, preferring to keep it a secret and surprise her just after, but he hadn’t had the time, so he was making up for it now.
She was glad to see him, as always, but that day there was a spark in his eyes that implied he had something he wanted to discuss. All day she pushed him for an answer or a hint, but he remained silent on the matter, replying to her questions with a cryptic “I’ll tell you at dinner”. Dinner came, dinner went, and he explained his plans. He wanted to buy the label from the Munn brothers. They had served their purpose or providing a small label that she could turn into her own. But she refused to do that. Kea wasn’t overly fond of the phallic-headed twins, they weren’t the easiest people to warm to, but they were good people at heart, or so she believed.
Truth be told the Munn brothers had feared that they would be disposed of as soon as Kea reached Coruscant, and they had prepared. Behind her back they had made some subtle changes to the contracts, exploiting a plethora of legal loopholes and effectively giving themselves a share of the royalties of her current works for life. As soon as they were sure their safeguards were secured they jumped ship, out of nowhere. They broke Kea’s contract, leaving her without a label. She had just turned twenty two when the news was broken to her.
Her father was all for charging in and taking them to court, but Kea refused. She didn’t want to be swamped down into a series of lengthy and ultimately worthless lawsuits. No. She would find a way to bounce back. After all her label was gone, but she was still renown all over Republic-controlled space (and maybe even further for all she knew) and that counted for something, but the crowds are fickle and she knew her fans were likely to eventually give up on her if she stayed silent too long. Of course given her royalties and her father’s position she could easily have stopped working and lived off of her CD sales. But she knew she couldn’t live without the stage. And so she stands, a lone artist without a label, free as can be, but with precious few contacts to call upon in order to net her the bigger venues and pay for advertising and equipment. The Munn brothers had taken care of all these things. Most of her days are spent in one of her two apartments on Abregado-Rae and Coruscant, resting. Her father had suggested that he could put in a few calls with some rich friends, but Kea had refused, she’d gotten in this mess without his help, and she’d get out of it without his help. She preferred it that way.
RP Sample:
Kea was wringing her hands and biting her lower lip nervously, sitting on one of the large metallic crates that took up a large portion of the back of the stage. She was always nervous before a concert, she’d hoped that after spending more than year performing it’d settle down and that hadn’t happened. It was frustrating really.
“Yo Kea, we’re going on,” one of the musicians called. A Bith flutist who was pretty damn good at what he did.
The Zeltron got up from her crate and stretched, regulating her breathing, before she stepped up onto the stage. As soon as she got on the explosion of sound and light overwhelmed her for a split second. The projectors were bright and right in her face, preventing her from seeing the crowd, or anything that wasn’t on the stage really, but she could hear then. Cheering, whooping, whistling filled the arena. Judging by the sounds there were probably a good hundred thousand people here. Not the biggest crowd she’d been put in front of, but definitely sizeable. She grabbed the old fashioned microphone on a stand, just as the first song kicked in.
The song seemed to last only a second to her. The thunderous guitar riff was always a good way to start a concert, the crowd immediately recognised the song and it energised them. By the time the last note faded the applauding was like a furious wave, once again she smiled. She never spoke to the crowd before the first song, mostly because she was too jittery. But now would be a good time to say something.
“Hello,” she greeted as the cheering subsided, and before she could get another word out the crowd began shouting and whistling again, any coherent words lost in the cascade of noise. “I’ll assume that means you’re glad to see me,” she added with a smile. More noise. “Now this next song I haven’t played in a long time, so you’ll have to help me remember the lyrics.”
That had been the truth. Well the bit about her not having sung this particular tune in a long time at least. She remembered the lyrics perfectly, but she let the crowd scream out the first few words on their own before starting herself.
The night’s crowd was pretty damn energetic, barely leaving any moments of silence, either clapping in time to the beat of the songs, screaming incoherently but zealously or singing along. The moments she personally preferred though were in the slower songs, when the crowd hummed along. Sometimes their voices all matched up perfectly at once, like a colossal beast, and it sent tingles down her spine every time.
Their energy became hers, and the more they spurred her on the more she enjoyed herself. The musicians behind her were also having a good time, and every now and then she shared a jest with one of them. Throughout the show lighting effects and pyro technics burst out in nearly every song from all over the place, that too was something she wasn’t entirely used to, and she was always a little anxious something would go wrong every time they fired off.
Between two songs she’d requested that the projectors be turned on the crowd, so that she could see them. A veritable sea of people stood just in front of the arena, separated by a three metre empty space which was cordoned off by security guards. Not for the first time she wondered what would happen if they suddenly decided they all wanted to invade the stage at once. The walls of the arena were completely covered in people and she could see a number of banners, some creepy, some heart-warming. She played an entire song with the spotlight on them, and she noticed that close to the arena the crowd had backed off, leaving a wide circle where several couples danced.
“Well now you know what it feels like to be stared at by a dozen lights,” she said jokingly as the song ended and the projectors whirled back onto her. “I also want to congratulate the very skilled dancers, give them a hand,” as she said so she clapped for them, and the entire crowd joined her, the projectors once again whirled around to focus on the area where the couples had been dancing.
At some point the Besalisk guitarist held her up in the air, her feet balanced on two. They maintained the position for the entirety of two of the more fast paced songs, and she made a mental note to congratulate him on his strength, endurance and skill.
When he put her down it was time for the final song, well she knew it wasn’t really the final song of the night, there’d be screaming for an encore, but still, the official last song of the concert was an important one. As they kicked into the final song fireworks exploded form the top of the arena they were in, showering the crowd in light, once again she could see them, and she noticed the couples were still dancing.
Predictably as soon as she and the musicians left the stage screams of “ENCORE” filled the stadium. They waited a few minutes, mainly to give Kea time to get a drink, but as soon as she’d drained an entire bottle of water they walked back on, the coherence the crowd had momentarily achieved immediately vanished and once again they were just making noise.
She whispered with her musicians for a few seconds, deciding which song to play, they ended up by covering an old human folk song. As soon as it was over they bowed and she took the microphone for one last time.
“I just wanted to say thank you to these guys,” she turned to thank each of the musicians individually before turning back to the microphone, “and also a big thank you to you guys. You were great," even when she stepped off the stage and retreated to her changing room she could still hear the noise form the crowd. She was beaming as she downed another full bottle of water.
Theme Song: Lodi-Creedence Clearwater Revival
Woman-Wolfmother
