Kyriaki
Dark Phoenix
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Codify a recurring NPC.
Image Credit: Here.
Role: Republican Guard agent, cell leader for the Shades of Duskfall.
Permissions: N/A.
Links: Into Darkness, After Darkness, Tephrike, Dominion of Light, Disciples of the Vader, Mahtara, Jedi Inquisition, Yuuzhan Vong, 400-Year Darkness, Firemane Industries, Netherworld Crisis, The Valkyrie's Diary, Darth Eisen, General Aruunzeb, Mezha Krazhmir, Synorostad, Camp Progress, Tranquility, Windian Jedi Order, Adlerberg, Hope Falls, Liberation Corps, Rock Breaker Corps, Kyriaki, Camp Sanctuary Refugee Facility, The Key Which Unlocks the Void.
PHYSICAL INFORMATION
Age: 29
Force Sensitivity: Non-Force User
Species: Zabrak.
Appearance: A Zabrak female of average height, with tanned skin and messy dark hair. One of the horns on her head looks broken. She has elaborate tattoos on her face, neck and arms. A scar runs down from the middle of her bottom lip to her chin. She is lean and wiry, with the body of someone used to deprivation and hardy living. Kinrath dresses simply and practically. Generally, her clothes are worn-in and have seen better days. She sticks with practical footwear that can withstand wear and tear and allows her to run in it. Long experience in a partisan army and without shoes means that her feet are rather calloused despite her best efforts. Her hands are similarly rough.
SOCIAL INFORMATION
Name: Kinrath - this is a nom de guerre. Her true name is Oekrau, but only few people know it.
Loyalties: Shades of Duskfall, Republican Guard, Tephrike, Popular Front, General Aruunzeb.
Wealth: She is a cell leader for a revolutionary insurgent movement. Thus her income is highly variable and irregular. Kinrath has some loot stashed away, and is not shy about supplementing her funds through theft, drug trafficking, smuggling and other criminal activities, but she's not rich by any metric.
Notable Possessions: A stash of fake IDs, a fake tooth filled with cyanide, and several wigs and other disguises. An engraved KEC lighter with silver plating. The lighter was made by forced labourers. She took it from a Vaderite officer she'd killed. Packets of cigarras. Copy of the Green Book, the manifesto and tactical manual of the Republican Guard. She has some Key stashed away, but doesn't consume the product herself.
Skills: Skilled in the use of small arms and most firearms, as well as explosives and good with knives. Kinrath is a talented escape artist, and can drive standard ground vehicles such as speeders and groundcars as well as hotwire them. Moreover, she knows the basics of battlefield medicine. Her background as a cell leader for the Shades has given her skills as an organiser and logistician. However, her experience lies in running operations on the tactical level, not large-scale, strategic management. Kinrath is a capable swimmer and a fine huntress who can hunt, skin and cook her own game. A life of hardship has given her a pretty cast iron stomach.
All in all, she is a hardened survivalist. She is also skilled in counterfeiting. Espionage is her tradecraft, but her primary role is to oversee agents in the field. Her survival skills come in handy when clandestinely moving people, contraband or weapons through dangerous territory. She knows a lot about the production, refining and distribution of the drug Key. As befitting someone in her line of work, she is capable of adopting numerous guises to throw off potential pursuers and hide in plain sight. Once she outwitted the police by swaddling herself in bandages and pretending to be a bedridden invalid. On another occasion she sent a girlfriend to deliver some confidential materials secreted in a coffin; the pickup was at the cemetery and she told her to pretend to be burying a dead baby with her bare hands.
Languages: Her mother tongue is Zabraki, the language of her people. She is fluent in Basic, Gamorrese, and Gunganese and is knowledgeable in Twi'leki. She has some understanding of lekku language, that is to say she can to some degree interpret gestures Twi'leks make with their lekku.
Personality: Driven, goal-oriented, secretive. When she receives fugitives seeking the aid of the Republican Guard, her face is often shrouded in cigarra smoke. Kinrath is no stranger to loss, and has been moulded by a life in the revolutionary underground. As a child, she was spirited away by the Shades, having lost most of her family. This earned them her loyalty. Kinrath is laconic and never says one word more than is needed. She is an able organiser who lives for her work. Fugitives and comrades have characterised their first impression of her as one of cold curiosity and extreme reserve.
She can be characterised as someone driven not so much by ideals or a higher cause, but by a mix of selfish and selfless. Selfish in that she wants revenge and reward, selfless in that she wants to help destroy the Vaderites, which will help save many people. Kinrath is not an ideologue or deep political thinker. She is with the Republican Guard because they saved her, but she has little patience for those who quote the writings of their philosophers with fervour.
Preachiness irritates her immensely. Hence she is bound to lose her patience with card-carrying, idealistic agitators who are wont to lecture anyone on the merits of the Republican Guard's latest pamphlet. She never bothered to read any of the classics where rebel thinkers elaborate on the brave new world they want to build after final victory has been achieved. She only read parts of the 'Green Book' because it actually had relevant things to say about the rebel army's strategy and thus the here and now. Ironically, Kinrath has never been to the Republican Guard's heartland due to the vast distances, and because the underground is her life. In her more sarcastic moments, she remarks that she helps fugitives cross over to the promised land, but doesn't set foot in it herself, likening herself to a figure from a Zabrak legend. Overall, she's more attached to the northern Republican Guard, which is focused on fighting the Vaderites, than the southern central command.
She is a down-to-earth woman of action focused on practical matters. She's never been to space and is very ignorant of the galaxy beyond Tephrike. She has heard of the star people who supported the Republican Guard against the Dominion and bombed the Vaderites, but she's seen preciously little of the aid they've promised. She correctly suspects that the foreigners are just another group who want to exploit Tephrike's perennial conflict for their own, selfish ends. Nonetheless. Kinrath has developed a guarded respect for Natalie Dorne, a human 'star woman' who aids the insurgents.
The Vaderites are human supremacists, and so Kinrath hates humans...save those select few who have proved that they have completely broken with the Imperium. She is willing to give those a chance...but they must show their commitment first. As a Zabrak, she can move a bit more freely among the Vaderites than say a Twi'lek or Mon Calamari. To the Vaderites all 'xenos' are lesser beings that are inferior to mankind, but they regard Zabrak as close enough to human to give them some limited freedoms if they 'know their place' and abuse other xenos for them.
Kinrath is a prudent, and when the situation merits it, ruthless woman who will not hesitate to eliminate suspected informers or frame them so that others do it for her. Her credo is that it is better to be safe than sorry. She may have a soft spot for the underdog...but it is buried beneath layers of cynicism and pragmatism. And she knows that someone who is in a bad spot could easily have been coerced by the secret police to become a mole.
She has a lot of experience running rescue and sabotage operations. In that capacity, she has helped many fugitives escape the Vaderite yoke...for a price. She is not interested in personal profit, but the rebels are not the knight in shining armour. The Republican Guard is fighting a war for survival, and so those who seek its aid must be able to offer something in return. This has rubbed more idealistic Shades the wrong way, but she has little time for those. Food and shelter are scarce in the underground, and the risk of infiltration is very real. However, she is protective of her people and keeps her word once she has entered an agreement. She takes the reciprocal exchange very seriously. For the same reason, she does not forgive if her trust is broken. She's fully aware that people in her line of work tend to have a short life expectancy and is fully prepared to die for the cause...if only to spite her oppressors.
Recent events have scarred her. When she agreed to help a Twi'lek family escape from Hope Falls, a glorified slave camp, her people were lured into a trap by the Vaderites. She gained valuable intelligence, but most of her team and is certain one of the Twi'leks, a slave called Shakka, betrayed her to the Vaderites. Unsurprisingly Kinrath holds a grudge against her...and the slave's master Kyriaki. But she is too professional to suddenly go on a vengeance crusade that could compromise her mission. She has kept her word to Lena, the wife of Shakka's cousin, and her little child because she correctly doesn't believe they were implicated.
COMBAT INFORMATION
Weapon of Choice: Her wits, knives, small arms and rifles. While she is a capable fighter, her best weapons are her smarts, not brute force.
Combat Function: For the most part, Kinrath does her best to avoid direct combat and to keep under the radar and pass through security without getting into a firefight. To that end she makes use of disguises, stealth, bribes and other means. However, when combat does come, she's surprisingly good with a pistol, improvised explosives or a knife. While a capable fighter, Kinrath cannot overwhelm foes through sheer physical strength and she has no genetic enhancements or preternatural powers to fall back on. So she makes extensive use of whatever's at hand, and she will never fight 'fair'.
Force Abilities (Force Users Only): N/A.
Strengths:
- Good shot. Kinrath possesses fast hands off the draw and a good eye.
- Capable spy, escape artist and skilled in the use of diguises. She has experience running an intelligence network, staying off the radar and living off the grid. Her survival skills come in handy when she has to lay low in the wilderness, for predators abound in Tephrike's forests.
- No experience in piloting aircraft or starships. She is no pilot and has never been into space.
- Limited experience with slicing. She can hotwire a vehicle and handle basic security systems, but she will need professional help for something more complex than that.
- Only human. She has no Force powers, genetic engineering or other supernatural skills, and must rely on her skills and wits to survive. Her resistance to Force-based mental powers is by willpower alone, so a powerful Master skilled in mentalism could overcome her mental barriers.
Kinrath is the product of a devastated, war-torn planet where the Dark Age never ended. When the Gulag Virus ravaged the galaxy, Tephrike descended into chaos. Cut off from the galactic trade it depended on, it experienced social and economic collapse. War, famine, the plague and other diseases killed millions. With the federal government unable to weather the storm, and warlordism on the rise, the local Jedi assumed a protective stance. Believing that they were the last Jedi in the galaxy, they staged a coup to restore order.
But this caused the planet to descend further into chaos. Good intentions were led astray, as the Jedi were corrupted by power and strife, establishing a totalitarian theocracy. Foes arose in the form of the Disciples of the Vader, a genocidal, human supremacist cult that established a breakaway state after their attempt to eclipse the light failed, and the Republican Guard, a revolutionary vanguard movement that sought to break the tyrannical reign of Force-Users, by any means necessary. The Vaderites established a totalitarian regime built upon the bedrock of slavery, human supremacism and Vader worship. Non-humans only had value to them if they could be exploited as servitors or slave labourers. Otherwise they would be murdered via mass shootings, chemical weapons or being worked to death.
Unlike on some planets, where every spot of land, even the inhospitable arctic, is claimed, on Tephrike the main factions only took what they could hold. Or rather they claimed everything, but their effective territory was only what they could hold. Hence the neutral zones. Her family's origins lie in a former neutral zone gobbled up by the Vaderites during her childhood. Her family was part of a small coalition of Zabrak settlements on the southern shore south-east from the Vaderite heartland. Her birth name was Oekrau.
Her parents were once prosperous farmers in a small Zabrak town. Her father Zhenan also worked as a lawyer, and was a notable respected by the community. Her early childhood years were relatively happy. However, the area of open land and lake was ideal territory for the human supremacist Vaderites to expand into as it gave them a stronger frontier and more open land to exploit. When the Vaderite army invaded and laid claim to the land in the name of the Imperium, the natives were offered a simple choice: collaboration or extinction. The natives were pressured to collaborate.
Examples were made of those who did not. Oekrau's father sought to work with the Vaderites, who made him one of the community's main aldermen. His predecessor had been sent to a concentration camp for 'sabotage'. Zhenan represented the people to find accommodations with the invaders. He was able to gain some minor concessions, but the Vaderites forced him to become complicit in their crimes. Thus he became the face of the invaders, being given unpalatable messages to pass on to his community, and began to hate it.
The Zabrak were promised cultural autonomy and greater rights than the average xenos since they viewed as 'half-bloods'. But they were resettled away from the temperate plains into the hard hills. One of Kinrath's early childhood memories consisted of her people being forced to surrender all possessions the Vaderites deemed 'excessive'. Her father was forced to help organise it. Officially they were supposed to receive compensation for their confiscated property, but it soon transpired that the 'certificates' the Vaderites had given them were completely worthless.
Arrogant Vaderite soldiers and maidens from the Amidala Corps harassed and casually abused her people. Zabrak who tried to make a run for it were shot. The people were shoved into trains as tightly as pigs to the market. They travelled without stops, even to relieve themselves. Her father eventually managed to negotiate with the Vaderite officials and get his people some relief and at least dispose of the bodies of those who had died...but he promised he'd no one would run. Thus Zabrak guards issued beatings to would-be escapees so that the Vaderites would not kill them. It was easy to rationalise. Then he signed an order decreeing that the families of escapees would receive inferior rations.
Their new masters pushed her people into mining for slate in the hills. The Zabraks could get jobs as supervisors, accountants and guards, but were increasingly forced into shifts themselves. When her people arrived, few preparations had been made to provide accommodations. Instead the native Twi'leks had often simply been kicked out of their own homes to make room for new arrivals...but no effort was made to provide them with temporary accommodations. Unable to hit back against the Vaderite oppressors, some of the already impoverished and now homeless Twi'leks lashed out against the newcomers who had been forced on them. Her parents tried to put up a brave front, but Oekrau was privy to many arguments between her father Zhenan and her mother Sedola.
Only many years later did Oekrau learn that the place she and her family lived in had thus been stolen from a native Twi'lek family whose members had been designated 'useless eaters' and kicked out. Her father wanted to limit bloodletting, so he helped organise a native security force, using the logic that it was better to police their people themselves than let the Vaderites do it. At first it was the Twi'leks who felt the brunt of the oppressive regime, with Zabraks serving as their supervisors.
Much of the dirty business was outsourced to Zabrak guards. Zhenan was desperate to keep the community 'productive' to avert the worst, at any cost. Zabraks got their own schools, where the teachers taught them it was their duty to serve the Imperium and prove themselves to the humans. Oekrau was a good pupil, and was selected to be sent to a 'special selection camp for gifted half-bloods' who might be considered for transfer to a boarding school. The goal was to 'civilise the xenos'. It was supposed to be a privilege. However, the girl and the other children were treated cruelly. They were forbidden to speak their native language, even when they were among themselves.
The little girl was cruelly bullied by the human teaching staff because her Basic was poor. Parcels and gifts from the parents never reached the children. Abuse was rampant. Zabrak culture, which was quite egalitarian in gender matters, was vilified, and the teaching staff tried to indoctrinate the pupils to hate it. When her father visited, the girl had to pretend that everything was fine. However, he was not fooled and pulled strings to get her out under a pretext. This probably saved her life, for soon there was a swing of the pendulum and Vaderite purists decided that 'assimilating' and 'civilising' the alien risked endangering the purity of the human genome. Thus she was able to come home.
But then the Vaderites began to tighten the screws. One day Zabrak policemen showed up in class while Oekrau was at school and arrested a popular teacher. Soon the parents of schoolfriends viewed as 'troublesome' began to disappear. Furthermore, other children began to treat Oekrau warily, as her parents were regarded as 'arch-collaborators'. Her former schoolfriends began to distance themselves from her. However, a girl she had been friendly with lashed out and attacked her. The poor child's family had been targeted and in her grief, Oekrau was her closest target. Being a child, Oekrau didn't quite understand the circumstances and was pushed by staff into saying something damning. The kid was picked up and never seen again. Oekrau was struck with guilt when she realised what she had done...but it was too late.
When an epidemic broke out, little Oekrau fell very ill. Her father was able to use his connections to bribe a Vaderite doctor to provide her with the medication she needed. Her younger sister did not make it though. The disease decimated the Vaderites' local labour force. They began to look for other sources, and introduced 'performance-based feeding'. At the same time some desperate Zabraks began to fight back. After another ration cut and the announcement that Zabraks would be conscripted in large numbers for slate mining, and would have to pay for their own tools and services such as sharpening and repairing, her father had had enough.
This abuse, coupled with those who had fled their homes to the mountains, along with funding from the Republican Guard started a minor rebellion in the region. However, the rebels were not clean as quite snow. A parent of one of her childhood friends, who happened to be a minor administrator in the local government, was blown up for being a 'collaborator'. When a Vaderite officer was blown up by an IED, the Vaderites chose fifty civilians at random to be executed as a 'reprisal'. Zhenan was able to persuade a Vaderite officer to at least let the children go...which meant a greater share of Twi'lek adults would be murdered instead and more Zabraks would be conscripted to toil in the mines. He and the other councillors had to sign the order.
Oekrau and her mother Sedola barely escaped a rebel firebombing on their house, and were robbed by rebels. Zhenan had inspected the slate mine the forced labourers were being forced to toil in, and the conditions were appalling. People were being literally worked to death. He refused to co-operate, though he knew the cost. Kinrath never saw her father again as he was taken away for 'questioning' but was 'shot whilst escaping'. Her mother had been pregnant when the father died. Now that they were out of favour with the regime, she and Oekrau were conscripted to toil in the mines to 'pay off the debt to society'.
Sedola tried her best to shield her daughter, even at the cost of her own health, and worked extra shifts to make sure the little girl was given less 'strenuous duties'. For a while Oekrau worked in the kitchen or polished the boots of Vaderite guards. However, her mother had the job of 'rubbling' or clearing the waste rock to get at the proper slate. Inevitably, the strain was too much for her mother, and her pregnancy was noted. Sedola was 'invited' to a hospital to be studied as part of the Vaderites' efforts to curb fertility. Oekrau's mother died of an 'infection' and the baby perished, too.
Oekrau was told that she now had the duty to repay her parents' debts with her labour. The girl was taken in by an uncle, who managed to bribe a Vaderite functionary. But as a reaction to the rebel attacks a full battalion of Imperial army troops burst into the town. Zabrak police officers were disarmed because some of them had secretly worked with the rebels. Wholesale executions of hostages, including children, were carried out at the behest of the local Imperial army battalion commander. A refugee column was bombed from the sky. Oekrau fled into the hills, while her uncle was shot as a 'terrorist'. The little girl, who was not even ten at the time, would have undoubtedly perished in the wilderness, but she was saved by the Shades of Duskfall. Her rescuer was a hardened Twi'lek survivalist called Bavana Yul.
This was a sub-group of the Republican Guard, though more focused on rescuing and protecting victims rather than waging war. Even at this early age, Oekrau understood that the rebels were not noble heroes...but they were allies for the time being. Her heart burnt with a desire for revenge, but she was also driven by guilt. Her experience filled her with utter hatred for Vaderites and collaborators, but also sympathy for the common man or woman caught up in the war.
The girl was brought to a hideout in the wilderness. The cell that had taken her in lived a nomadic existence, never staying in one place for long. In her early years, she was lucky to survive a Vaderite drone strike on a 'terrorist nest'. She and a few other children were believed to have perished in a cave-in caused by the bombing. Monsoon season caused heavy flooding, further trapping them. An older cell member who was supposed to get them to safety had been badly injured in the bombing and died of infection. Oekrau fell back on the first aid training her mother had given her to help the other children. She also took charge of dividing up their scarce rations. The children used rocks to dig holes to escape. One of the kids, the son of a Twi'lek priestess hanged by the Vaderites, taught Oekrau meditation techniques to help her stay calm and use as little air as possible.
They were out of contact for a week. However, Bavana braved the rising water levels and strong currents, and found them a week later on an elevated rock, and was able to get them out before the next monsoon rain. She had almost starved to death, but survived. The other children in the camp called her 'Ghost'. It was the first of many nicknames. Oekrau spent the next years learning how to shoot, track, hunt, and survive until she was sixteen. Her past trauma and the years in the wilderness hardened her. She grew up to be a self-reliant, solitaty and guarded young woman.
Bavana became her mentor, teaching her how to survive in the wilderness, how to read a map, evade patrols, use a gun and explosives. From now on she called herself Kinrath. She never became an ideologue. But though she didn't care for the finer points of Republican Guard ideology, she took their lessons about alien solidarity to heart. After all, she had seen first-hand how the Vaderites schemed to divide those they regarded as lesser beings. Bavana tempered her aggression, teaching her how to focus her anger. Bavana had suffered greatly under the Vaderites, having lost her entire family. But she taught Oekrau the virtue of patience. The Twi'lek went by the pseudonyme Mynock. Inspired by her, the Zabrak called herself Kinrath because the spider carried a deadly poison.
Her first job with the Shades was to help escort people being evacuated from Vaderite towns. Bavana organised the clandestine get-togethers and actually got the people out of Vaderite territory. Kinrath performed reconnaissance, memorised patrols and helped plan their route. She helped her mentor take people who had been slipped out of the Vaderite lines and then helped them get to Republican Guard safe zones. There was a lot of open but unclaimed land, with jungles, swamps and mountains blocking the path. Sometimes they could go by boat, but that was dangerous due to Vaderite air and sea patrols. So often she was leading people hundreds of kilometres on foot, surviving and foraging as she went.
But not everyone could be saved. In truth, only a fraction could. Kinrath had a friend amongst some people who were about to be executed for sabotage. They had been arrested in a random sweep because hunting down real partisans in the forest was too dangerous. She wanted to help them, but her mentor forbade it. When Kinrath tried to sneak out, she was stopped. She was angry, but her mentor forced her to realise that throwing her life away will not help her friend, herself, or any others. In the aftermath though they helped smuggle the dead Zabrak's family out. But the guilt never left her.
However, her mentor was also involved in the trade of a highly addictive narcotic called Key. The drug was extracted primarily from the seeds of the Crimson Orb Tree, a fruit orchard that grew across most of Tephrike. Officially all factions had declared the drug was illegal and declared harsh punishments for those caught with it, but in practice all were involved in drugmaking and trafficking. Kinrath was disgusted by this. Back in her home town, Zabrak and Twi'leks had been rounded up to plant and extract the orchards. Moreover, precious water had been diverted from communities to water the Crimson Orb, which demanded constant water. However, her mentor insisted that while the trade was reprehensible, it was necessary. Sometimes she brought Kinrath with her when she had to make deals with a local drug syndicate.
During one of her early assignments, she and her mentor had to retrieve some confidential materials a girlfriend of hers had secreted in a coffin. Kinrath had told her to pretend to be burying a dead baby. However, some collaborationist policemen saw them. Improvising, Bavana used her cover identity as a gravedigger, instructing Kinrath to help her dig a grave for someone the goons had just killed. The pair proceeded to put a bomb in the grave of a local human so that when they came to the funeral it blew up in the family's faces. Dead body and all. They then were able to skip town.
Her first major assignment consisted of helping evacuate a Twi'lek scientist, who had been developing new methods of improving crop yields through genetic modification. He'd worked in the town for years, but when the Sith arrived he was arrested and interrogated. However, he was useful enough to keep around as a low level menial in the labs, but it seemed likely that he'd soon be liquidated with his family and staff. The Shades want to extract him as his research could be crucial for denying food for the Imperium and improving it for the Republican Guard.
Kinrath knew of him through her father. She and Bavana were tasked with extricating him and his family from the lab. The plan was to sneak down river to the sea where a boat would be waiting to take them most of the way to the Guard where a submarine would surface and take the rest of the way. However, things went awry. A Republican Guard sympathiser was captured and tortured into revealing their intent, and Bavana was killed at the coastal boat point. So Kinrath had to journey overland, literally swimming at night across a bay with the family to avoid detection. They then made the trek through the plains and light jungle for 100km to get to a Republican Guard station from where they got supplies and vehicles to go the rest of the way. Vaderite aircraft spotted them though and attack, but Kinrath was able to escape and make the rest of the journey to the Republican Guard lines. This was a major success and the scientist's research helped boost Republican Guard production of food by about 15% in the coming years. Meanwhile the Vaderites found that the research data was useless to them due to deliberate errors inserted by the scientist into the work.
After this she got to do some more of the close in work at her request. Perhaps her handlers sensed she needed some closure, having lost both her family and her mentor to the Vaderites' reign of terror within the span of a few years. The Shades' overarching mandate was to help fugitives get to Free Tephrike, but she needed justice. And so she started tracking down the officer who had arrested her father. It took many months of deep cover work. By now the officer had been given a promotion transferred to a different town.
She found work as a kitchen aide in the garrison. At first she poisoned the food meant for the soldiers. However, she immediately became a suspect. However, she insisted she was innocent and ate some of the food in front of the Vaderites to prove it was not poisoned; after she did not fall ill immediately, they released her. Kinrath soon became ill, vomiting heavily but eventually recovering from the poison after drinking much whey.
Her next attempt was more successful. She managed to ambush and kill the officer when he was on his way home, having memorised his schedule. With the help of his Zabrak man-servant, she dumped his body in his car, then doused it with petrol and placed a heavy block of wood on the accelerator. She released the part break and jumped aside. The car drove forward off an embankment into a tree. Sparks ignited and the whole wreck burnt up, along with the wood. The death was ruled accidental.
However, some time after Kinrath was caught in a police sweep. The police tried to pin the murder on her. However, suddenly everything went quiet. The Zabrak was cautious, thinking it was a trap. But when she emerged, it turned out all police officers had vanished. She wondered what the hell had happened, and would only later find out that it had occured worldwide. However, friends and colleagues of her had vanished too, leaving her without contacts.
There were no messages from her handler. Moreover, the mass raptures triggered a millenarian fever on Tephrike, sending the planet spiralling into chaos. Kinrath was far from the Republican Guard heartland, and thus went underground. While trying to find out what the hell had happened, she did odds jobs, working as a farm labourer, and a mechanic. She managed to get together a rag-tag group of cut-off Republican Guard members and fugitive slaves. Ironically, one member of her crew was a Twi'lek Dominion partisan whose hatred of the Vaderites outweighed his disdain for the Guard.
Her group was able to help help fugitives who had escaped from a deportation train to a death camp and were now lost in the wilderness. However, she lacked resources. The Netherworld Crisis had caused a civil war among the Vaderites, but also wreaked havoc among the Republican Guard's network. Moreover, their southern central command had little support to spare due to being at war with the Dominion. Kinrath managed to get a job working for a Vaderite businessman who had an honorary KEC rank.
Half of his staff had vanished overnight, so the businessman was desperate for hired help. Kinrath was discreet, did not ask questions and good at hitting things. Her faked papers said she had been a member of a Vaderite auxiliary unit. It soon turned out that the businessman helped facilitate drug trafficking, and was making deals with various factions. After killing him, Kinrath got involved in the Key trade herself. She turned to it very reluctantly, and insisted that they only sell it to humans, though some of her comrades were less choosy. She shot one of them to make a point. And she and her crew took revenge on Vaderite 'settlers'. Farms, built upon a foundation of alien blood and bones, were looted and burnt down, farmers got their throats cut and their families forced to flee. Ironically, her criminal activities provided a certain measure of protection against Vaderite persecution. A Vaderite officer who had come dangerously close to uncovering her network was called off because his boss was corrupt.
However, the situation became more dire after the Vaderites managed to consolidate their power. The new Supreme Leader was a purist, who initiated an 'anti-corruption drive', and ramped up racial persecution. Kinrath narrowly escaped death when one of the fugitive camps was bombed. Paradoxically, some of her new partners were former Vaderite collaborators who had once been considered acceptable near-humans, but were now no longer considered pure enough because they had run afoul of this or that racial law. She worked with them with great reluctance, and never trusted them. After a KEC ambush resulted in large-scale loss of life, she suspected one such privileged 'half-blood' Mirialan had betrayed the group, and convened a drumhead court martial. Despite his protestations of innocence, he was convicted in the span of a few minutes. She delivered the death sentence herself. Deep down, she was troubled, but she would not let it show. Her network had to go underground, using their criminal contacts to protect themselves. But many of her friends died in the process. For every person she was able to rescue, a thousand could not be saved. She likened herself to a mythical Zabrak figure, who had been condemned by the gods to try and roll a huge boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top.
Around this time she heard rumours about a 'kindly Sith' called Filippos Siskakos taking in people. She was immediately suspicious and investigated, spied on him. She soon realised that he was not a Sith at all, but a very rare breed: an ordinary Vaderite soldier with a conscience who was actually trying his best to help persecuted 'xenos'. He ran a vehicle repair workshop for the army, and used his position to requisition Twi'leks and other persecuted as workers. By arguing that he was performing essential work for the military, he had deliberately accepted more assignments than his workshop could handle and employed a greater number of alien workers than was merited. At the same time, he issued Imperial Army identity cards, which were known to Twi'leks as 'holiday from death' passes because they gave them some protection from death. He also secretly gave them enough rations to survive. Kinrath was arrested by the military police as a spy and brought before Siskakos, about to be killed.
However, he lied and claimed she was one of his workers and he sent her out to fetch some tools. She was forced to stay with him for a while to maintain that cover, but she discovered he was moving people out. Suspicious she snuck in and finds they were being ferried out to safety. When confronted, he confessed that he had once believed the 'pacification actions' against people like her were necessary to 'civilise' them and make the world safe for mankind. Then he'd seen the truth when he witnessed the killing actions first-hand...and almost no one else in the 'honourable' army cared. When one of Filippos' men beat a Twi'lek and threatened Kinrath when she tried to intervene, the officer had him summoned to his office and presented him with transfer documents to a frontline unit. The two formed an alliance of convenience and she helped set up links with the Shades. In her heart she never truly trusted him…but he was probably the best human she'd met.
Eventually she was stationed north near Hope Falls and the surrounding areas after the heat down south became too great for the Shades. Officially, Hope Falls had been built by Grand Marshal Eisen to give the 'xenos a home'. In truth, it was a glorified slave camp. Kinrath worked with the Shades to rescue people from the new facilities, and infiltrate the local underworld. Time had hardened her. She would those fleeing persecution where she could...but they would have to provide something for the Republican Guard in return. This applied especially to those who had once been relatively privileged. Other Shades called her callous, but she saw it as being practical and realistic.
Around this time she got to know a 'sky-woman' called Natalie Dorne. She was the first space traveller Kinrath had ever encountered. The human had a contractual relationship with the Republican Guard. Kinrath was enlisted to get her through Vaderite lines so that she could blow up a Vaderite weapons' plant. The Zabrak was sceptical of her tale, and didn't trust her...but also somewhat curious about the outside galaxy. Unexpectedly, she risked her life to help Natalie out when the sky woman was cornered by Vaderite troops after carrying out her mission. The two remained in contact, though Kinrath had her watched.
Things took an unexpected turn when the Supreme Leader ordered an investigation of Hope Falls, which had fallen behind on grain quotas. The delegation was led by none other than Darth Lachesis, the butcher of Chios. She responded in predictable fashion - quotas were increased, rations reduced and the native administration was purged. However, human officials whose corruption had become too blatant also fell victim, though most of those who were killed were non-humans. The Butcher was accompanied by an enigmatic Sith called Kyriaki, who proceeded to investigate corruption in Imperial ranks with the help of her Twi'lek slave Shakka.
Predictably the human officials had set up a smuggling network that stole grain from the natives so that they could sell it on the black market. Shakka's cousin Firith happened to be a worker in Hope Falls with underworld ties of his own. Through a complicated series of events, they were able to make contact with Kinrath via courier, and offered intelligence on secret caches stolen from a human officer called Bakios, the former police chief. In return the pair wanted protection for themselves, Firith's wife Lena and his little boy.
Kinrath was suspicious, but decided to test them. The Twi'leks led one of her men, a Houk who was officially a member of the collaborationist police force, to a hidden arms cache to prove their value. Thus a deal was struck. When the time came to escape, at first everything went well. Kinrath knew that the Vaderites intended to clear the local hospital of 'useless eaters'. The most sick, the old and the infirm would be removed from the hospital and either murdered outright or sent to a camp to be experimented on. So would many members of 'disfavoured' species such as Twi'leks and Gungans. One of her agents planted a bomb outside the facility, while another was planted at the gates of Eisen's mansion, which Lachesis had turned into her field headquarters.
The twin bomb explosions served as a distraction for the troops, and had the convenient side-effect of killing some Vaderites. Shakka was able to escape the KEC base when twin bomb explosions distracted most troops. Little did she know that Kyriaki had grown suspicious and was monitoring the slave's calls. Shakka was able to meet with three of Kinrath's agents, Lena, Firith and their little boy at the waterfall, despite a dangerous encounter with a patrol. But the group was intercepted by Kyriaki and a KEC unit when they crossed the river. Shakka was captured, and Firith died, sacrificing himself to allow his wife and son to escape with a rebel and most of Shakka's intel.
Shakka expected death, and might have wanted it. However, Kyriaki managed to spin things as if it had been a sting operation to force the rebels out into the open. The intelligence acquired after the fight enabled the KEC to locate a Republican Guard hideout and kill or capture several partisans. However, the cell leader escaped. The Twi'lek slave was 'rewarded for her loyalty' by being given a special brand that marked her as a 'favoured' slave who would be granted a position of authority in Kyriaki's enterprise. At the same it tainted her in the eyes of the rebels. Shakka hated herself for it, but she had to choose to submit and make a devil's bargain to survive.
Kinrath had already evacuated her hideout, but the KEC hit the next node of the underground railroad. She wasn't there when it happened, but several of her people were killed. However, her Houk agent had been able to get away in time with Lena and her son...and the intel Shakka had given them. Feeling betrayed, Kinrath swore revenge, but she kept her word to Lena. She was eventually able to recover some of the stolen supplies, and arranged for Lena and her boy to cross the border. She has kept an eye on Hope Falls, where Kyriaki has in the meanwhile established a garments factory. Shakka has been 'promoted' to the position of one of the overseers.
