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Post by hugo on May 16, 2020 8:10:39 GMT -5
 Ru'Nalani Full Name • Ru'Nalani [Runa Nalani] Race • Twi'lek Birthplace • Colony Nine, Ylesia, Hutt Space Age • 24 Gender • Female Sexuality • Pansexual Faction • Fringe/Gray Jedi Concept • Rank 2 Wanderer, Dilettante Bounty Hunter, Mystic Languages • Twi'lek/Lekku, Basic, Huttese, Durese (spoken), Rodese (spoken) Assets • 1x single phase, acid yellow lightsaber; 1x commercial grade research Datapad; Humani-crafted pazaak cards lined with faux-goldium, a modest but improving wardrobe including light combat, utilitarian, and some formal wear; 1x ETS-71 Horned Owl Personnel Transport;' and 1x stunted Shyrack pup 'Mo.' Appearance All credit to the talented lonelion4ever for the now 7 year old commission he did for Runa when she first came to SWU! Height & Weight • 5'3" - 127 lbs. Overall Looks • Runa is charcoal, a rare but not unflattering pigmentation among her people; a smooth, dark gray colors her complexion, lightening around her face, Lekku, and extremities. She is a petite figure, standing around 5’4” and not 130 pounds dripping wet, yet Runa is in adequate shape if she lacks the brawn of her male counterparts. Her face is sharp and inquisitive, delicate and serious; Her face is punctuated by acid hued, almond shaped eyes that are framed with tattooed eyebrows. She lacks the buxom body standards imposed on some, but has some shape and even light musculature, though the great part of her training has been focused on efforts esoteric and academic. As such she is waifish by most standards, and long legs and a clumsy disposition make for a somewhat awkward, but attractive, figure. Runa opts for the nondescript. Her Lekku generally fall free or with one wrapped in front of her neck, typically adorned with one of several cheap goldium and argentium bands. In recent times, she has expended her feminine tastes and dresses in fashionable, if relatively conservative garb. When expecting action, she typicallly equips a light combat mesh suit under a light jacket and utility pants. Personality Profile Runa is as acidic as her irises at the surface. An unkind life has borned an unkind disposition. However behind a curt, asocial visage is a heart that burns passionately for justice. Runa feels her existence is defined by resistance to tyranny and slavery, and since her unceremonious flight from the Sith, sees herself as a sort of ends-justify-the-means emancipator of the weak and desperate. Once the acidic sheen dissipates, however, Runa is fiercely loyal to her allies, particularly those who she views as helpful to her cause or with whom she shares common interests. She is particularly fond of animals, dancing, and philosophy, and enjoys the occasional Jawa Juice Martini and good conversation. She speaks with a slight Twi’lek accent, but is conversant in a number of languages and can read Ancient Sith with the best of them. The Sith taught Runa many things, chief among them ruthlessness. Calculating and wry, the young Twi’lek prefers for use wits or intrigue to realize her goals. That said, she is less prone to brutality and greed than her former brethren, and a genuinely altruistic vein coupled with a budding, mystic and heretical understanding of the Dark Side compels Runa to the aid of those she views as the have-nots of the galaxy, namely slaves. Power, in the abortive Acolyte’s view, was not an ends but a means, a means to effect one’s ends—and her end is justice, her means slaughter. Background  Father • Pil'Analani, 29 at death, Ryloth Liberation Front fighter and former slave Mother • Ner'Valani, 54, former Jedi Consular, healer and seer Siblings • Vasil'Enalani, 19, Black Sun mechanic savant Other Important Connections • Overall History • REWORK IN PROGRESS While the midichlorians saw fit to inhabit the newborn, premature little Twi'lek girl her mother would name Runa in great numbers, fortune skipped her over. Rather than among the subterranean clan-settlements of her people, or in the relative sterility of a coreward suburban hospital where her fortunate bond would have spared Runa from a life of slavery, the Nalanis welcomed their firstborn daughter, who was small but healthy, in the cramped squalor of Colony Nine. A midwife and what handful of loved ones remained crowded around the young couple, finding small joys in the purity of new life or in kind-hearted remarks pointing out that the little girl had inherited her father's uncommon charcoal pigment (or less kind ones lamenting that she did not resemble her mother's pale yellow). Ylesia had been a major source of the Hutt spice supply for millenia, and Colony Nine was one of the newest and most brutal experiments in organic slave labor. Pila, Runa's young and witty father, like his wife and her mother Nyana, a pensive beauty with a quick and innovative mind towards cooking, were slaves of Duragga the Hutt. He joined scores of young men--old men were a rare site among the slaves of Colony Nine--of disparate origins but under a common, miserable yoke as they mined the deep spice pockets of the planet's hot, humid surface. Nyana was traded the rigors of the mines for the heat and bustle of the colonial mess halls, her quick wit, culinary skill, and blunt demeanor eventually earning her a top post over her fellow domestic slaves. It was by virtue of one of these privilges, as effective chef of the local barrack's food services, that Nyana saw a sliver of hope for her growing daughter, who had begun to walk and talk and would thus soon be put to work. She observed patiently for years, eager to get Runa off of the planet but cautiously, as there was much to lose. In the mean time, the waifish Runa grew into a gawky, inquisitive, and mischievious child, though she was of an undeniable good-nature and more than a little inquisitive. She Runa was six when the night came. As a young child, she was mostly useless to her owners, who oversaw their colonies from the comfortable agency of Trandoshan mercenary-slaver outfit, and before she could be put to work hauling toxic spice or joining her mostly Twi'lek brethren in the kitchens, Nyana sprang into action. It was deep in the night when the drowsy, confused girl was hurried into the cargo bay of a Jayo Nabal, a Rodain smuggler with whom Pila had become acquainted by chance when the scoundrel made off with a thousand kilos of spice right under the Hutts' noses. Through her authority as kitchen master, Nyana disguised the smuggler's arrival as a late night shipment of vegetables. Jayo, of coure, was compensated with a hefty rock of red spice slipped at great risk by Runa's father. Yet the smuggler took pity on the slaves of Ylesia, particularly the seemingly decent Nalani family. Runa remained silent, even long after they'd left the tyranny of Hutt Space, the girl as unfamiliar with the alien's language as she was with the dizzying change in scenery. The original plan was to deliver Runa to her parents' ancestral homeworld of Ryloth, where Nyana's brother lived with his wife's clan after escaping slavery on Zygerria. When neither the uncle nor the clan could be found--Jayo wagered they themselves had fallen victim to the planet's ubiquitous slave trade. This left him with little choice but to care for the girl until he could find someone to take her in properly. Yet this too did not go to plan. As weeks became months and then a year and then another, Runa grew attached to her Rodian savior, and he to her. As a smuggler, Jayo was always in some kind of trouble, and it was hardly an environment to raise an eight year old, but young Runa grew and learned, playing and eventually performing as co-pilot or navigator. Her limited grasp of Basic and Huttese were improved greatly during this half decade or so of adventuring, and Rodese became like a second mother tongue to her native Twi'lekki. This involved a number of run ins with either the law or the Black Sun, long and uncertain treks to the periphery of civilized space, or sketchy transactions in the shadows of gray buildings Runa thought too tall to be possible. During her early adolescence, Runa began to learn the rudiments of the smuggling trade from Jayo, though the somewhat clumsy and head-tails-in-the clouds Runa was a mediocre pilot and an abysmal failure as a criminal smuggler. Instead, the girl busied herself with the wide new world that was the Holo as well as any scraps of proper reading materia Jayo happened to accumulate. She pored over the limitless knowledge of the pan-galactic networks like the child of a scorned people forced to wander the desert wastes for some forty years. Such luxuries were unavailable to the slave Runa, and slave she was no more. As her knowledge of the galaxy's history and sociology expanded, her young mind a precocious sponge if at first stunted by a faulty education. It was here that the seeds of resentment, fueled by truth and growing homesickness for her bound family, took root. She became conscious of her Twi'lek identity and the plight of her people--and similarly exploited alien species--around the galaxy at the painfully young age of 11. As she neared her teenage years, the teen completed a standard secondary education equivalency exam and had plans to enroll in college. Jayo, who was now as much a father as an ad hoc guardian, readily agreed, seeing that the blossoming Runa, though she'd improved somewhat in her piloting and had shown some skill with computer systems, was meant for more academic pursuits, her voracious appetite for holobooks and the occasional guilty, child-like pleasure far exhausting her meager allowances. Yet the Force again had drastically different plans for Runa and her mentor-guardian. It was a routine run to Mygeeto, where a cabal of Sith youth had resolved to overthrow the local planetary aristocracy and place themselves as its primary representatives to the nascent Empire. Through one contact or another, Jayo filled their order for high grade thermal detonators, but the patched and heavily retro-fitted Dynamic class freighter that had been home to the unlikely pair of aliens only just missed its erratic jump to hyperspace when it was set upon by the interceptors of the Crysalis, the Interceptor class flagship of none other than a newly christened Sith Lady by the name of Peryys, a powerful Dark Jedi who'd emerged from the shadows to take a leading role in the nascent Sith Order. The old freighter was quick under normal circumstances, but its engines were stunned long enough for the battered craft to be caught in the tractor beam of the warship. What ensued was a hazy, violent blur of blaster fire and stun rays before blackness. Runa awoke in fine accommodations, the finest she'd ever seen. White and gilded goldium filled a well-apointed cabin, and the Twi'lek's belongings were placed neatly on a nearby desk. She soon found out that she was under the hospitality of Peryss, a Muun insurance magnate and previously clandestine practitioner of Dark arts. The relatively young, ambitious Prophetess sensed the untapped resevoir of Force energy within the tween Twi'lek, and had the girl spare even as her only friend was cut down in a merciless barrage of plasma. Peryss was a woman of vanity and intellect, her understanding of the esoteric rivaled only by her famous height- grande even for a Muun of High birth. Her pursuit of the Force had begun, like some fortunate few outside Republic space, young, by way of a personal tutor. She had been all too quick to embrace the new Sith Order when it formed, and her mastery of deception and manipulation through mystical means became a well-appreciated asset as the war unfolded between the Republic and Empire. Runa was a prisoner, as far as she could tell, but was treated civilly if curtly by her skeletal, puissante hostess. The Muun, who lavished the unaccustomed twi’lek with clothes of high fashion and meals like she’d never seen, soon revealed to the 13 year old girl, who, understandably, was a bundle of fear, loss, and uncertainty, that she was a Force sensitive and that she had great potential. This startled Runa, whose self esteem had largely been relegated to her internal, academic ruminations, but against all odds, the shell-shocked Twi’lek reluctantly dipped her toes into the darkness at her Lady’s urging. Soon she had fallen completely in. For the powerless, ability, authority, and confidence were like drugs. Runa resented Peryss, yet she soon accepted that this promise of power-and the chance of eventual revenge-was her best option. She began her training in earnest, initially from the confines of Peryss’ lavish but deadly flagship. This training was transformative in so many ways for the teenager. She was broken, beaten, torn completely apart, before painstakingly, deliberately pulling herself together piece by piece, Runa still, but re-made, reforged. Untapped reservoirs of Force energy were unleashed in a flash of months that became years as the war raged on. What had been a smart but altogether innocent fortunate, an urchin swept by a fortuitous current from the tortures of Ylesia’s sweltering floor, was reborn into a Neophyte- a capable mind and moderately strong natural connection to the Force, as well as a burning desire for relevance, for some scrap of what had never been hers-autonomy. Where her soon-acquainted colleagues were drawn by more material iterations of power, Runa sought a personal transformation. She, far too young to have known such things, no longer wished to be a slave, a victim, nor did she wish to be a master or marauder. Instead, during the following decade of strenuous tutelage under Lady Peryss and alongside a handful of other hand-plucked mystical talents, Runa combined her bookish habits and determined will to become a capable agent for change, a strange sorceress of the mind and senses. Runa grew talented in telepathy, her relative physical weakness overshadowed by her inherent and trained skills in reading and manipulating the minds of others. Almost. A large portion of the ships quarters were converted to a sort of dormitory academy for Peryss’ little entourage of acolytes. A brawny Cathar Udrin became Runa’s close friend, and the meek felonoid helped her improve her fencing skills to the point where she began to develop a unique style of Shien. She constructed a modified, Tonfa-hilt blade of an acid yellow crystal she’d taken from the corpse of a slain Jedi, and gradually improved her bladework by using a heavily defensive, counter attack centric form of backhand Shien. She remained a mediocre duelist well into her teens and twenties, only exceeding adequacy after extensive drilling and experience in the ravages of the War. Runa also continued her academic interests, immersing herself in the archives of the Kaas city citadel when their sect joined the assembling body of the Cult of Mysteries and the acolytes were integrated into the order as a whole. During these perusals of carefully preserved tomes of Sith lore, Runa learned their language and became keenly interested in the arts of illusion and misdirection. Peryys fell victim to hubris, and when Renata emerged victorious and undisputed Sithari, she fell along with many of the more vocal opponents of the new regime. Thankfully for Runa and her colleagues, the Order extended no such judgment to them, and they were assigned variously to the spreading outposts of the Order. Runa rose from adequate, if not showy acolyte status around this time. While supervising an expedition of Triumvirate artifacts directed by Lord Nostos, Runa uncovered and deciphered an undateable obsidian tablet. This was revealed to be a primitive hologram of sorts, it’s crude etchings imbued with incantations and instructions later discovered by the diligent Runa to be an ancient artifact unearthed by minions of Darth Traya, who’s taken a keen interest in Force Illusions before her demise. Runa’s discovery and subsequent mastery of the rare talent, first as simple mental diversions, peripheral distractions or distant whispers meant to scatter the senses. But as she grew into adulthood and competence, the Twi’lek was eventually capable of producing faint, then life like, visual and auditory mirages, a valuable weapon against enemies Jedi or not. While Runa was no savant, her particular telepathic skills did not go unnoticed, nor did her diligent archaeological efforts. She enjoyed a great deal of autonomy as she rounded into her early twenties, and spent this time in search of more knowledge relating to the talent she began referring to as Force Illusion. During these years of relative autonomy, Runa continued her dilettante fascinations with technology, history, and philosophy, the latter leading eventually to a series of serious ideological questionings that would ultimately lead to her abandonment of the Order, the false husk of power having been drained of its use. She also developed into her own person. No longer was she a cowering little girl, a weakling saved only by the magnanimity or calculating of a passing Sith, but a unique and cognizant individual. She had not forgotten her roots, and indeed, as her thoughts and sentiments drifted away from pure pursuit of the Dark Side and Imperial glory to deeper questions of justice and power, Runa became increasingly passionate about the slavery issue, particularly considering her parents remained in bondage on their hellish homeworld. After assigned the putatively prestigious role of lead apprentice for a newly discovered dig site on the Sith home world of Korriban, Runa assumed her new role with gusto. Yet she had by then decided, after careful deliberation, that she would leave the Sith. The acolyte felt her power was wasted as a cog in an academic, bureaucratic machine, and resented the interfering of her supervisors and the increasingly doctrinaire restrictions of the Cult and Body as a whole. Her discoveries at Site 11 were initially uninteresting; mostly mummified remains of old Sith Kings and sorcerers. It was only by fortune of an accidental cave in that Runa alone discovered a hidden chamber containing a massive volume of philosophical musings, unveiling a range of Dark side based philosophies and rites that must have existed long before a dominant religion coalesced amongst the Purebloods and the Dark Jedi invaders. She grew particularly attached the the writings of a Twi’lek, likely among the first generation of true Sith that invaded Korriban, which detailed extensively a minor cult which revered a semi-mythic Lady of Scales, a sith sortceess who used her gifts to escape from slavery and liberate her brethren before founding a kingdom that lasted a thousand years. Runa obviously related to the mythology before her, and she carefully but forcefully coerced her subordinate acolytes into an increasingly divergent philosophy. This was a distraction more than an end, and it wasn’t long before the Knight Visarion and a pair of acolytes, among them Runa’s bitter rival Karn Albrecht, fell upon them. As her quasi comrades were slain by the fury of the Knight and his acolytes, Runa was able to collapse the structure and use her unique mirage abilities to deceive the trio into thinking they’d seen her limp corpse crushed by the crumbling sandstone and brick. She used the momentary distraction to escape to a nearby comms outpost, where a gentle lie and soft touch of the force secured her a shuttle offworld and out of the clutches of the Sith, claws that had broken her chains but now suffocated her blooming power. Runa was determined to lay low, and used the aftermath of the Archeri crisis and ensuing diplomatic crisis and arbitration fiasco to fade into the galactic periphery, determined to remake herself again, shedding the limitations of hierarchy and sprouting a burning desire to use her newfound powers to effect a sort of swift but equitable justice. During this time, her new knowledge and years of practice payed off and Runa was able to manifest the beginnings of Force Sleep, lulling the minds of others into such calm that they lay down and take a nap. In recent months, she’s skirmished with a group of Trandoshans on Ryloth and was able to free a trio of children before hijacking the slavers’ ship and pilot droid. She has also, to fill her empty pocketbook, taken the occasional job or bounty, not reluctant to use her illusory gifts to hunt and trap the wicked. She is also keenly interested in seeing and learning about the wider galaxy, having spent much of her short life in either slavery or rigorous study. |
