Character Name: Selas Tariim
Age: 33
Species: Miraluka
Gender: Female
Appearance: Selas is not exactly what comes to mind upon hearing that she’s spent much of her life in academia. She is tall for a woman, her figure one of lean, dangerous lines, with scars on her hands and a smirk curving her lips. Her skin is a rich olive, touched by the sun of a hundred worlds, her dark hair falling to her shoulders and threaded with first shining strands of silver. Unlike many of her people, an unusual genetic expression has left her with a pair of blind, milky-white eyes, which she only rarely chooses to cover with the traditional Miraluka cowl or blindfold. Her features are playful and puckish, even flirtatious at times, the tilt of her brows and the set of her body conveying a serene, but not distant, confidence. She has a warm contralto voice, with a ready laugh and a light accent, consonants made liquid and vowels broad, and sharp as an obsidian knife when the need arises.
Selas’ dress sense is more practical than anything else, and she’s most often found in boots, trousers, buttoning shirts, and a comfortable jacket. Most of her clothing has plenty of clever pockets, and she usually has a few useful things clipped to her belt, including a thigh holster for a blaster. While everything is well-made and well-tailored, the materials are carefully chosen to not make noise, and to not restrict her freedom of movement. Selas prefers darker colors - deep blues, slate greys, and rich browns, and is very rarely seen wearing armor.
Rank: Professor (Associate), University of Agamar, Department of Xenoarchaeology
Role: Non-military / Force user
Unit: No permanent assignment
Skills:
- Force Savant: By her race and upbringing, Selas intimately understands the Force, its strength, and how to work her will with that power. She lacks the discipline and finesse of a lifelong member of the Order - but she is to be reckoned with in her own right.
- Duelist: Selas has spent her entire life around members of the Order, and while never a part of it, she has learned much. She is fluent in some forms of lightsaber combat, though these skills have rarely been tested to their limits - at least in part because she takes care to ensure that they aren’t.
- Thief: Even since before the fall of the Republic, Selas had a profound fascination with getting into places she shouldn’t be. She moves like a shadow, quick and silent, and has a broad knowledge of bypassing locks, overriding security systems, and disabling enforcement droids.
- Academic: Raised by an Archivist and taught the value of preserving the past and passing learning to others, Selas actually is an accomplished professor. She has contacts - and maybe even friends - in unexpected places, and can lend legitimacy to travel in the name of “research.”
- Performer: Selas is a fine singer, and collects songs from the places she goes. She often hums them to herself, even when she knows people are listening.
Weaknesses:
- You Are Not A Jedi Yet: Selas knows much, much more than she is supposed to, but is not a fully trained member of the Jedi Order. Those who have undergone specific and extended training, especially in saber combat, will likely outclass her.
- Suddenly Silenced: Being so tightly bound to the Force leaves Selas vulnerable to the movements of that power around her. The Dark Side tears across her psyche like a saw over bone, a sensation she lacks the mental discipline to entirely push away from herself.
- Hunted Down: Selas’ mother was a Master in the Jedi Order, and a subject of Order 66. She, and the Knights she trained, have been hounded down - but the hunters are very aware that she had a daughter.
- Needs A Protocol Droid: Selas is not familiar with military protocol, and was delivered to the Keep by Alliance command, unasked-for. She furthermore disrupts planning by pointing out things that should not be destroyed, if possible, because they’re of value to current and future historians.
Equipment:
- DL-18 blaster pistol, in a thigh holster. This weapon has been modified to feature a shorter barrel and be somewhat more compact.
- Bypass Tools - A selection of useful devices and tools to gain entry to secured facilities. The entire kit is much too large to carry with her with any stealth, so Selas picks things that will likely be most-useful when on a mission and takes a small selection with her. She is not always right.
- Knapsack - Usually on a cross-body strap.
- Small knife - A small knife, for cutting things that need to be cut.
- Comlink with earbud and haptic-feedback mode, where it only produces a sensation against her skin for simple messages.
- Jalis Tyral’s Lightsaber - This weapon belonged to Selas’ adopted mother, Jedi Archivist Jalis Tyral. Selas has modified it gently to fit her own hands and fighting style. She keeps it hidden most of the time, in a custom-fitted holster inside her jacket.
- A small, locked chest, with a handful of small treasures of the Jedi Archives inside.
History:
A dark room, a bright light, a metal chair at a metal table. Pageantry, of a sort, meant to put anyone approaching the Rebellion uneasy. They had learned hard lessons about accepting anyone who professed a desire to join the fight. Their own goals might be noble - but the tactics used against them could be anything but. Still, Selas wondered why they bothered. Certainly, the Rebellion would know that illumination would mean almost nothing to her. She could feel the chair, the lamp, and even the man leaning against the wall where the light didn't reach. Each were each outlined in her awareness, her peculiar sight, by the whirling, coruscating patterns that connected and flowed around everything in the universe. She heard the door lock behind her, then turned her blind eyes toward the man, an eyebrow raised.
“Ah,” he said, “I didn’t know whether to believe them.” He spoke heavily-accented Basic, vowels drawn out, the rhythm unsteady.
Selas took another step, put one hand on the back of the chair, and remained quiet for the moment. She did not sit.
The man let out a soft sound, halfway between a grunt and a chuckle. He pushed himself off the wall, brought a ciggara to his lips. Selas saw the Force wrapped around the lighter the man brought between his cupped hands, tight strands of will and memory twining around and through it, through him. A totem, a tangible memory of someone long gone, if she were to guess. Even the flame burned with a tight fierceness in Selas' perception, the pattern it made bursting apart when the man clicked the lighter closed. He took a long pull, blew out a spicy, sweet plume of smoke that Selas could smell more than see. he pushed himself off the wall with one hand, the other holding his ciggara, and crossed the few steps the pool of light.
“You’re Selas Tariim. Miraluka. Adopted daughter of Jedi Master Jalis Tyral, one of the people who survived Order 66. Lost both your parents as an infant and raised by Tyral, possibly out of a sense of penance. Your birth parents were field researcher staff at the Temple, and were killed due to Tyral’s negligence at the site of a Sith tomb. Am I right?” This close, Selas could see that the man had an artificial left arm, and that the neural bridges hadn’t knitted together right. She could hear the constant pain in the man’s voice.
“You’re ahead of me, if you want the truth,” Selas said, bringing her attention back to the man’s face, “I don’t know much about my birth parents.”
“She kept that from you? Not very Jedi.”
“She blamed herself. I know she thought their deaths were something that could - should - have been avoided. More than that, I never asked. I could see the ache, the anguish that memory caused inside her.” She took a breath, “Master Tyral raised me the best she could. She didn’t owe me anything, and I wouldn’t cause her that kind of pain.”
The man grunted, took another pull, blew out a cloud of scented smoke. “My adjunct tells me that you’re pretty well accounted for up until the Clone Wars. Not really trained at the Temple, not really part of it, but growing up there, spending your time in the Archives with Tyral. Not a lot contact with other kids your age, except in classes with...less traditionally-minded Masters. A certain amount of friction regarding things you learned and really weren't supposed to know, smoothed over by your mother's influence. We lose track of you for ten years after the Clone Wars, until you show up again on a planet in the Outer Rim, in trouble with the local authorities for breaking and entering, theft, and apparent smuggling, while you claimed-"
Selas cut in, her voice sharp, “Am I supposed to be impressed that you can collect holonet news and pull keywords from file archives? Are you trying to intimidate me with the idea that you can write an essay with citations? None of this was secret. None of it’s even interesting. Of course you lost track of my mother and I after the Clone Wars, that’s the kind of thing that happens when one of you is marked for death and the other is unusual enough to be an enormous target.”
“Then what were you doing for those ten years? Ten years when a Jedi Master would have been invaluable to the Alliance, ten years when all we needed was any beacon of hope, any sign, any momentary flicker of the Light?” The man snapped, his voice suddenly a harsh rasp.
Selas’ throat was suddenly tight, her skin flushed, and she fought not to raise her voice. “I was a child when the Temple fell. You know what happened to most of the children there, yes? Or, for that matter, what happened to anyone else? There was no way to fight, no way to stand your ground. The only choices were death or flight, and my mother chose to run. We packed up a few things that couldn't be left to burn and we ran, and we didn't stop running for years."
She leaned forward, both hands on the back of the chair, her voice still a crisp, tight hiss, "For years, we didn't stay anywhere for more than a few days, knowing that every moment we were hunted. We ran further and further into the Outer Rim, and the Empire's hunters followed us. For years, the only news we heard of the Order was when another survivor was cut down, and the galaxy would get that much darker. I grew up knowing that anyone I met could be looking for a little blind girl, and for much worse reasons than even the usual ones."
"You want to know what my mother spent those years doing? Why she wasn't trying to find your Rebellion, why she wasn't offering herself to you as a figurehead? She was raising me. On starships, in alleys, in rooms where the Imperials were a wall's thickness away, she taught me to think, made me do sums and conjucations. She showed me how the Force moves, how to make sense of what I saw, what I felt every day, and the power of the Light. She taught me the importance of knowledge, the value of passing the lessons of history onto others. She taught me to fight for myself and to protect those who can't stand on their own, and she taught me to love a world that wanted to kill me. She knew there had to be another generation of..." Selas' voice faltered, "That walked in the Light. Your Rebellion could never be so important that she would trade it for the chance to raise a daughter who understood that."
"She raised you to be a Jedi?" The man scoffed, his words edged in curling smoke.
"She raised me to make my own choices," Selas said, her voice almost under her own control.
"And your choices led you to being arrested."
Selas couldn't help herself, and a tiny smirk tugged at one corner of her mouth. "The funny thing about being on the run during your...formative years, are the useful little things you learn. What will be missed, what won't. I didn't have my first kiss until I was in my twenties, but I knew how to dismantle the locks on a shopkeeper's storeroom when I was fifteen. I was raised by a Jedi...but even she understood the realities of a fugitive life. But after a while, the hunting seemed to taper off. That long, dark cloud that seemed to follow us everywhere seemed less intent. We moved to somewhere a little more civilized, and tried to get a little more settled. Almost a decade on the run, and spending a week in the same place felt...weird."
She turned her gaze down, almost lost in thought. "Agamar has a wonderful university, and they're very welcoming of new students. I barely had to alter their records. They probably would have let me in besides, but...well. It never hurts to be certain." She smiled, "Their xenoarchaeology department is unbelievable. I felt like I had come home. There was so much information, so much to learn, to many stories to find. I won't pretend that I was the greatest student - any of my professors would give lie to that. But I loved field work, and they always needed students to swing a pickaxe. And once, they sent me to help excavate a crashed starship from the Old Republic days, and...well."
"Well?" The man stubbed out his ciggara, tapped the box for another.
"You know the Archives and the museums on Coruscant were looted by Imperials for their own collections, yes?" Selas said, "I'd heard the rumours, and this excavation was not only on the same planet - but the same province - as one of the worst offenders, someone who'd stolen ancient artifacts and texts because he wanted to have them just to himself. I found where his house was, and found that it wasn't very well secured - he never expected anyone else to come and take the things he'd so rightfully stolen, hm? So, one night, I...disproved him of that notion. The locks took ten minutes, and the sensors and alarms inside were good...but I'm better. I gathered up a few of the more-portable things and headed out. I thought I had gotten away clean, since the transport back to Agamar was leaving in a couple of hours." She smiled ruefully.
"Turns out he got up earlier than I expected. There were calls to port authorites and docking permits were revoked, and all manner of nonsense, and then a search of my bags, and then an arrest." Selas adopted a parody of an innocent look, "As it happened, though, I grabbed several things that the University had been trying to get on loan from Coruscant for decades, and had never been able to get their hands on. So, after about a week with the University's lawyers calling up obscure salvage laws, I was released, the Imperial got a receipt for his artifacts, and the University got to study them for at least a couple of years."
"And since then, you graduated, and went to work for the University," the man said, "With a career that keeps you mostly out of your office and classroom, often on planets with no communication for weeks or months at a time. You seem to have everything you could want."
"We both know that isn't true," Selas said, bringing her attention back to the man's face, the grin slipping off her lips. "It wasn't bad, no. Sometimes I almost forgot the truth. I kept reminding myself that this couldn't last, that I had to keep a low profile. But the hunting never stops, does it? And the Empire grew and grew, and things got worse and worse. I knew there wasn't going to be an end. For a couple of years, I thought I could pretend. I had fun. I went on a date. I had sex. But there was always a shadow, and it got closer."
She closed her eyes. "And then we heard the news, the first time in a long time. Another survior of Order 66 hunted down in the Inner Rim. Then another. And I made a choice."
This time, the man stayed silent, except for the crackle of the coal on the end of his ciggara.
Her voice sank a little lower, "My mother traveled with me, most of the time, when I was working for the University. They usually didn't know, but she helped keep me safe. And while we made our way through the galaxy, I asked her to teach me what it meant to be a member of the Order. Not...not to be a Padawan, or a Knight. I think we both knew then that there would be nothing like enough time for that, but...what it meant to her to be a Jedi. She taught me songs and stories, histories and riddles. I learned how the Archives had been ordered, how many times Archivists had tried to change it."
"And she taught me other things. I understand the Force, but making it move the way my mother could was...difficult. She told me that the purpose of the Jedi's power is to protect those who can't themselves. That walking in the Light sometimes meant violence. And she told me that sooner or later, it would be time to stop running. And she because of that, she gave me, over years and years, some of the Order's most precious knowledge, their closest-held secrets. She gave me a trust that I will have to work every day for the rest of my life to live up to, because she believed in me, and in the Force, and in the Light."
Selas took several breaths, and when she spoke again, her words shook. "She died six weeks ago. The Empire's hunters, they caught up to us on Tasariq. There wasn't enough time to get back to the shuttle, even if we both ran for everything our lives were worth. And she turned to me, and she told me I had to run, that she would make time for me."
Straightening, Selas took one hand off the chair that seemed now to be bracing her upright, that without it she might fall. She reached into her jacket, pulled out something that gleamed in the bright light. Against her own senses, she felt the thing as a surging, piercing, brilliant splinter against the Force - as intimately familiar as her own hand, and but wrapped in the memories, the will of another. Something that wasn't hers, but had given itself to her.
"She gave this to me," Selas' voice wasn't quite hoarse, but close, "And she walked down a hall filled with men with blasters, with nothing in her hands. I felt her die, but it wasn't from those weapons." A tear fell from one blind eye and down her cheek, "I felt the darkness swallow her light. Like something was torn out of me, raw and bloody."
"It's a nice story," the man said, and he stubbed out his second ciggara. "A nice tragedy. And you even have a dead Jedi's weapon, good prop. But tell me this - why are you here? If you're telling the truth the Rebellion wasn't important to your mother, and it sounds like it's never been important to you. We're not a grief counseling service, and we don't need more people with suicidal revenge fantasies, and we especially don't need people with weapons they don't know how to use, so I ask you, Miss Tariim, why are you here?"
Selas took a deep breath, and stood straight, taking her hands off the back of the chair in front of her. She looked at the man, saw the distrust, the fear, the annoyance flickering within him. She took another breath, and made herself relax, letting her senses rise away from her, the infinities that made up even this small room sleeting through her mind. She raised the hand that held her mother's lightsaber, the brilliance almost painful against her senses, and she focused her will on it. Through cracks, crevices, secret places and hidden catches, she wound her will around and through the weapon, weaving a web of her own power through it. She opened her hand, and the hilt stayed in the air while she brought her hand away, fingers making small patterns in the air, quite like if she were working a string puppet.
With a series of small clicks, the weapon came apart, each piece moving with slow precision away from every other, staying in place where Selas willed them to be. After a few breaths, the weapon lay entirely disassembled, the fire-orange gem at its heart spinning lazily. Selas' fingers still moved, slowly, cradling and guiding the strands of her her will wrapped around the saber. She turned her head to look at the man.
"I'm here because I'm making a choice," Selas said, her voice even. Not emotionless, not distant, just even.
The pieces of the saber started to click back together, slowly at first, then each piece moving a little faster, though none without control. She moved her hand toward the weapon, her fingers wrapping around the hilt an instant after the final piece slotted into place. She held the saber at her side.
"My mother stayed away from the Rebellion to raise me," she said, in the same tone, "She thought bringing another person into the Light was worth everything she could have done otherwise. I see the darkness to every side, and I choose to stop running, and I choose to walk in the Light. I choose to fight with the Rebellion."
She took another breath, and put the saber hilt back in her jacket, "If you'll have me."
Supporting Cast:
Xalen Dal - The man in the story above. He is one of the Rebellion's recruiters, and reveres the legends of the Jedi more than the reality. He wants saviors, and has received mortals. Smokes like a chimney, has a badly-attached artificial arm that causes him permanent pain.
Taneel al'Khar - Selas' superior at the University. She is perfectly aware of what Selas is doing and why, and is a willing co-conspirator against the Empire. Able to provide official-enough documentation for certain kinds of travel to certain areas, in order to assist with keeping a low profile.
Ranim Sulten - A Zabrak who sells cheap shuttles, in good shape, with no questions asked. Selas has dealt with him extensively over much of her life. He doesn't know her full name - after all, no questions.
