Igni Irae
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Intent: Codify one of Elpsis' Tephriki friends.
Image Credit: Here.
Role: Comms technician, coder and cryptologist. Companion for Elpsis and the Firemane gang. Apart from being tech support, Mara provides insight into Tephrike in general and the Dominion of Light in particular.
Permission: Ccan use Abregado-Rae Guild of Hammers equipment due to Firemane gaining access to ARGH tech in this thread.
Links: Rhea, After Darkness, Into Darkness, Decisions. Jedi Kyrric, Nexus City, Tephrike, Dominion of Light, Battlemaster Mahtara.
PHYSICAL INFORMATION
Age: Resembles a woman in her early twenties.
Force Sensitivity: Non-Force User
Species: Cloned Human.
Appearance: Mara is a human female of average height. She has dark hair and brown eyes. The Dominion has everyone cut their hair short. Long hair is inefficient and might caught in machines, and it might prompt vanity. Mara has started growing her hair out since leaving the Dominion. She has a scar in her left shoulder, where a Sith shot her with a slugthrower. She dresses modestly and dislikes revealing attire.
SOCIAL INFORMATION
Name: Mara Technician. The Dominion of Light has officially abolished family units. Instead people are assigned occupational surnames based on their caste and profession.
Loyalties: Elpsis, Firemane Industries, The Unchained, Natalie Dorne, Tephrike. Formerly: Dominion of Light.
Wealth: Low. She is a new recruit to Firemane and has little experience with finances, so it is held in trust. Her needs are cared for though. She is also friends with Elpsis, whose family is extremely wealthy.
Notable Possessions:
- Holdout Bolter
- Hypnogaze
- Racket's Bite
- Fire Star. Firemane decoration awarded to her for her role in rescuing Elpsis.
- Holopic of herself, her template and several of her clone sisters.
- U20 Field Link with a scramble key and other slicing equipment such as data spikes, anti-security blades, field security overloaders, EMP disruptors etc.
Tephrike was isolated from the rest of the Galaxy for close to four hundred years. Its long period of isolation only recently came to an end when Firemane initiated first contact. Its technology regressed during this time. As a result, the computers and technological devices Mara is familiar with are a bit dated by galactic standards.
However, she is eager to catch up and learns very fast. Natalie Dorne, a friend of Elpsis with a knack for slicing, has taken the young clone under her wing. Mara's technical skills are significant and she has a good eye for detail. She enjoys puzzles in her spare time. She speaks Galactic Basic, which is the standard language on Tephrike. However, centuries of isolation have caused the local dialect to diverge a fair bit from the standard. As a result, she speaks with a thick brogue. She has also picked up some Twi'leki and Gunganese.
Personality: Mara has only recently been given the opportunity to express herself freely as a person. Ever since her birth, she was indoctrinated and moulded by the totalitarian Dominion of Light, a theocracy led by extremist Jedi. She did not even have a family, as she was grown in a cloning tank. Her path was set from the moment she was born. Now she is her own woman, but her experiences have left their mark on her. She is still adjusting to the idea that she can make her own choices, as the concept of absolute obedience was drilled into her skull. For now she may have trouble openly standing up to her friends if they embark on a course of action she disagrees with, unless it is very serious or likely to put them in mortal danger.
Mara comes across as polite, uptight and rather timid. She is allergic to public speaking and feels awkward when she is in the limelight. But once she warms to someone she can be quite friendly. Mara is still adjusting to the outside Galaxy. Many things that most people take for granted are new to her, such as money, banks, private property, or something as baseline as having a family. However, while a bit ignorant, she is not stupid. She learns fast, has a strong thirst for knowledge and reads voraciously. Mara knows that she is no warrior, but when someone she cares about is in danger she will help them, even if it puts her in danger.
The Dominion sought to apply the teachings of the old Jedi Order to all of society. This included their stance on sex and romance. Mara was indoctrinated from infancy and is thus rather sexually repressed. Innuendo will probably go over her head or embarrass her if she understands the hidden meaning. This can produce some amusing awkwardness given the more liberal culture that permeates Firemane. Never mind the fact that her friend Elpsis is a proponent of free love. As is typical for Dominion clones, Mara is sterile, but Firemane has offered her treatment to restore her fertility should she desire it.
Beneath her socially awkward exterior, Mara is very driven and dedicated to her work. She feels guilty about what she considers to have been her blindness to the Dominion's evil. To a degree, she blames herself for the misfortune that befell her friends as a result of Firemane's decision to negotiate with her country. She considers herself duty-bound to help those who have suffered under Tephrike's perennial wars and oppressive régimes.
Mara's detests both Sith and Jedi. It should be noted that Tephrike's incarnations of these cults are her main point of reference. Thus she will judge Jedi, Sith and their followers based on what she knows from her homeworld. This may result in her being rather unfair towards non-Tephriki Jedi who are nothing like the totalitarian religious fanatics of her home planet. But this is a result of her experiences rather than malice on her part. Now that she has access to the HoloNet and interacts with outsiders, Mara has learned a bit about the Jedi orders of the Galaxy. However, what she has learned has not impressed her. She is also distrustful of the Republican Guard. She concedes that the rebels are a lesser evil compared to the Dominion or the Sith, but does not like them.
Mara knows that she is no warrior, but is very determined to help her people in any way she can. When in danger, her standard mode is to hole up in cover, fire her pistol and wait for backup and try to sneak out. This is appropriate behaviour given her strengths and weaknesses. However, she will risk her life if someone she cares about a lot is in peril. Mara is troubled by the fact that she has clone siblings who are still under the Dominion's thrall. She longs to free them.
All in all, she is strongly opposed to oppressive or imperialist forces. She is very loyal to Elpsis, whom she considers a good friend. Elpsis spared her and liberated her from the Dominion. She also gets on well with Natalie, an anti-Sith resistance fighter from Ession and friend of Elpsis. Both worked together to find the Inquisition black site Elpsis was being held in. Natalie has taken the young clone under her wing and helped her improve her technical skill.
Nyssa Vykaris intimidates Mara a fair bit, but she has warily accepted her since the Pureblood is Elpsis' friend and equally enthusiastic about killing Dominion minions, Vaderites and various other Sith. This does not seem very logical to Mara, but she is happy that the Red Sith does not want to hurt her, though she is wary of her. She has started to bond with Rhea, a fellow survivor of Tephrike. The Rattataki's had a truly awful life, as she was abused by both Jedi and Sith, and so Mara is trying to help her adjust and recover from her trauma. Both were freed by Elpsis and are close to her. Mara has struck up a tentative friendship with Mel, a former inmate of Serene Springs who participated in the prison revolt. One of Mara's 'siblings' had a relationship with Mel. The two were brought together by their doubts about the system, but denounced.
Mara was raised in a stiffling, repressive environment where Force-users held absolute power. She grew up in the belief that power could only be wielded by those who heard the will of the Force and could act in accordance. She looks up to Natalie a bit, as she is a Non-Force-User who has forged her own path and is not cowed or awed by space mages. This has not led to her adopting a radical anti-Force-User ideology like the Republican Guard, but she believes checks against abuse of power are important.
She supports the death penalty for particularly heinous criminals. Mara has turned against the Dominion, but there are some aspects of its culture that she misses, such as the camaraderie, her siblings and the sense of community. This is tempered by the knowledge that in it she was a drone with no real choice. Mara is mostly free of speciesism. For all its many faults and often despicable or plain insane policies, the Dominion is not speciesist. Many of its leaders have been aliens and human supremacism is looked upon very poorly. Thus Mara sees humans and non-humans as equals. She is quite eager to learn about other cultures. She gained a positive first impression of Tygaran elves since they played a prominent role in the Firemane contingent that inflicted a great defeat on the Dominion.
Having learned a bit about them, she can relate to them since until a few years ago they lived in ignorance of the greater Galaxy but then had to adjust to a whole new world. At the same time there is a part of her that is secretly jealous of the fact that Firemane was able to uplift them, but could not solve the problems of her homeworld. She hides it well, but occasionally it shines through. For all her open-mindedness, she dislikes Yuuzhan Vong. This is a product of her Dominion upbringing and the fact that they are heavily represented in the Republican Guard. Her experiences with the rebels have not been the best, to say the least.
COMBAT INFORMATION
Weapon of Choice: Slicing, blaster/slugthrower pistol. Mara is tech support, not a warrior. It is her goal to avoid direct combat. She uses her brain and her wits instead of her fists. At Elpsis' insistence, she has started to carry a Holdout Bolter on her person. It is normally concealed as a pendant.
Combat Function: Mara is not a warrior and she knows it. She is no sniper who never misses, no Force-User or martial arts savant. She received basic self-defence training from the Dominion, but that it is about it. As her surname implies, she is a technician. Mara will only participate in combat if pressed into it or if someone she cares about is in danger. She can fire a blaster and stick an enemy with the pointy end of a knife, but she will be outmatched in combat with a professional soldier unless they are distracted and she can get the drop on them. However, she is a capable slicer and cryptologist. This makes her a good support person, as she can slice into computer systems, crack codes and so on. To make use of these skills, she is best kept away from combat on the front lines.
Strengths:
- Very capable slicer and tech support person.
- Decent enough with a pistol.
- Mara is not a warrior. She only has basic self-defence skills, lacks Force powers or cybernetic enhancements. She would be at a great disadvantage against a Force-user or experienced lightsabre.
- Lack of experience in combat.
Virtually every world in the Galaxy was affected by the Gulag Virus. Galactic civilisation crumbled, interstellar trade collapsed and trillions died. The Dark Age lasted for about four centuries. Tephrike was hit especially hard. Isolated from the rest of the Galaxy, the planet regressed. Though rich in raw materiels such as precious ores and alloys, the planet had been dependent on trade to sustain itself. Now there was no one who could buy their ores and sell them food.
Countless died due to starvation, ecological disasters, riots and civil war. Tephrike's fragile democracy collapsed as the federal government proved unable to resolve the crisis. Its party system was fractured along lines of class and species. The Jedi of Tephrike were forced into a protective role. Believing themselves to be the last Jedi in the Galaxy, they held their Order responsible for the Long Night, as they had been unable to prevent the release of the Gulag Virus.
Finally, the Jedi staged a coup to topple the governments after its troops gunned down peaceful protesters. It was supposed to be a provisional emergency dictatorship that would restore order and then step down to enable a transition to democracy. However, over time it evolved into a totalitarian theocracy. Corrupted by their power and scarred by the horrors of never-ending bloodshed, the Jedi became the very thing they were sworn to destroy, while remaining adamant in their belief that they served the Light. They called their new state the Dominion of Light, a nation where every citizen would be controlled from cradle to grave.
Two factions rose to oppose them. The Disciples of Vader venerated as the long-dead Dark Lord as a God and preached a gospel of human supremacism, Dark Side worship and enslavement of all non-humans, drawing support from fallen Jedi and humanocentric portions of society. The other group was the Republican Guard, a secularist faction run by a military junta that idolised the Old Republic and opposed the Force theocracies, believing that the Force itself was a disease that led those sensitive to it to evil.
It received the backing of aquatic alien communities and of Yuuzhan Vong, who were targeted for extermination by the Vaderites and the Dominion. The Guard turned to terrorism, stirring up insurgencies in the lands of its enemies. Pervasive low-intensitiy conflict was followed by phases of intense battles and violence. The Dominion remained the strongest and largest nation, but could not unite the planet. All the while Tephrike bled.
This was the world Mara grew up in and was moulded by. Her birth was nothing spectacular. By the standards of the Dominion, it was expected, for ideally nothing could be left to chance in the Jedi theocracy. Not even the miracle of life, for sexual intercourse and conventional procreation were criminalised. Mara was born in a clone vat in a laboratory located in Nexus City, capital of the Dominion.
Like the Republic during the Clone Wars, the Dominion made ample use of cloned servitors, but took this a step further. The most devout, the best and brightest were 'invited' to join the Blessed Lineage Project. This was an offer they could not refuse. Upon agreeing to it, they would be immortalised by becoming the template for new lines of clones. People were grown, raised and educated by the state and assigned a workplace so that they could devote their energies to spending the rest of their working life repaying the Dominion for its benevolence.
This was also the case with Mara. She was the ninth in her birthing pod. She was given the best of flash conditioning so that she would have all the knowledge she needed to function as a productive human being. When she took her first breath, Jedi healers and some of her sisters were there to welcome her into the world. Mara was no ordinary, mass produced clone. Basic grunts in the clone army and labourers would have been grown en masse within a short period of time.
However, she was not meant to fight and die on the front lines, toil in a factory or in the fields. Instead she was meant to follow in the footsteps of a special template. Her name was Lara. She was an extremely skilled coder and mathematician, who had gained renown by cracking a Vaderite encryption device. The Dominion had scored a major intelligence coup, as it was able to decrypt important commercial, diplomatic and military communications.
Her success made Lara a heroine, and naturally her superiors decided that her 'blessed' genes had to be preserved. The fact that people were individuals whose development was not determined by their DNA was something they did not quite understand, as it stood in contradiction to their collectivist ideology. Regardless, even if Mara might not be able to replicate such a success, great things were expected of her. She was raised to admire her template.
Even before Mara took her first breath, flash memories had taught her that Lara was a heroine of the people and that she should aspire to be just like her. The Dominion sought to create a harmonious society, and that was only possible if it assigned roles to every citizen at birth. That they could dedicate their entire lives in the service of one particular purpose, coming to excel in it by the time they were expected to give back to the Dominion what the Dominion gave them by granting them what they need to exist.
Thus Mara went through a series of tests. These confirmed her aptitude for mathematics, codes, languages and puzzles. The teachers at the educational complex taught her all she needed to know to become a good citizen. Mara was a diligent pupil, albeit somewhat timid and shy. Her teachers praised her modesty. Her template Lara sometimes popped by to meet her younger clones and give speeches. Her visits were always a highlight for Mara. Throughout her education, the young clone was bombarded with Dominion propaganda. It kept her well-informed about the Windian Jedi Order's vision, the Dominion's victories, and how utterly dark and depraved the world was beyond the Dominion's guiding light.
After doing well in standardised testing, Mara was moved on to an advanced course. Lara was heading it, which gave her the chance to interact with her older clone. She was also able to bask in her fame a bit. Both got on very well, and Lara took her 'sister' under her wing. However, unfortunately it was not to last. One day when Mara was heading towards her course, she learned that Lara had been arrested for 'irregular activities'.
She had no time to process her shock, for she had come under suspicion as well. Thus the secret police took her in for questioning. The terrified clone protested her innocende and, to her credit, that of her older sibling. However, her words fell on deaf ears. Mara was not physically tortured, but kept in solitary confinement for several days. She had no contact to the outside world and was deprived of sleep.
The clone was subjected to intense psychological pressure. Her interrogators alternated between accusing her of conspiracy and appealing to her virtue. Disorientation and sensory deprivation techniques were used on her. Finally she was released from confinement, having been able to prove her innocence due to her clear naivete. However, she was forced to sign a declaration of fealty to the glorious Dominion and disavow her sister. Moreover, she had to perform self-criticism.
This cleared her of charges, but her arrest, however brief, still cast a shadow on her. Mara had an altercation with a clone sibling called Mina, who had been enthusiastic to exploit Lara's disgrace, which disgusted Mara. Shortly after being set free, the clone was sent to the front to help some army engineers. Until now Mara had spent all her life in the comparatively idyllic environment of Nexus City. There was little to buy in the shops and electricity could be unreliable, but all her basic needs were taken care of by the government. The streets were clean, there were seemingly no beggars and there were surveillance droids everywhere. But what she saw outside of the capital affected her deeply.
The area she was dispatched to had been deeply affected by war. There were ruins, mass graves and polluted rivers. The roads tended to be in poor condition. Many of the rural folk lived in poverty. The enlightened Dominion had done away with private plots and forced them to form collective farms. To her surprise, a good number of the farmers ignored the moral laws of the Dominion, for this territory was far from the centre. As a result, there were people who still spawned the natural way instead of being grown in a medically sanctioned manner in a laboratory. Having been used to sterile and clean environments, she was shocked by what she perceived as disorder and squalour. It was like being a traveller in a foreign land she felt a stranger to.
Mara was assigned to a supply base. There she helped set up a communications centre to better connect the area with the rest of the Dominion. Being a card-carrying Follower of Light, she was also part of their efforts to 'enlighten' the natives. But locals resented their most 'gifted' children being taken away to be educated by the state. At the time the clone did not quite understand their mentality. The area was also plagued by Republican Guard insurgents. Partisans sniped Dominion soldiers or functionaries and attacked convoys. They also targeted settlements with roadside bombs or primitive mortars.
Mara helped recover people trapped beneath debris and provided first aid to victims of these attacks. These events nurtured a strong revulsion for the Guard, whom she considered terrorists. As a result, she supported the Dominion reprisals. A ruthless search and destroy campaign flushed out Republican Guard cells. Mara was not involved in the fighting, but helped with communications, analysing and collating intel. For a while things settled down. Mara helped out in a Dominion education centre, teaching basic skills such as literacy. However, the peace and quiet did not last long.
The Vaderites attacked in full force. Despite Dominion resistance, the Sith managed to overrun them and massacred non-combatants. Mara survived the massacre by hiding. She was able to protect one of the children and keep the little boy from being enslaved or killed as well. The slaughter of her friends angered her and caused feelings of shame. However, she survived. By sneaking and using her technical skills, she was able to overhear a conversation a Vaderite officer had with his superiors. This gave her some intel on the Sith forces. With Sith forces crawling over the area, she and the child in her care tried to sneak out.
However, they were detected. Injured while trying to draw her pursuers' attention away from the child, Mara tried to defend herself with a slugthrower pistol, but she was no fighter. A Sith Acolyte wearing black robes and a Vader mask disarmed and overpowered her, then invaded her mind. But the boy she had been protecting had come across Dominion reinforcements. Thus help arrived when the Sith dug his mental claws into her.
Her rescuer was a Kel'Dor Jedi Knight. He engaged the Sith in a duel and slew him. Mara was brought to a field hospital to get medical attention for her injuries. The Jedi introduced himself as Kyrric, apprentice of Master Mahtara, a member of the Jedi Council. Though shaken by what she had been through, the clone insisted on being part of the Dominion's retaliatory attack against the Vaderites. She could not fight, but she could contribute in other ways. Kyrric agreed, and the intel she had acquired helped them drive out Sith troops. Mara put her skills as a slicer and coder to good use. She stayed in touch with Kyrric after this.
Meanwhile, the Republican Guard stepped up its activities. Its partisans had grown bolder, carrying out a series of assassinations and abductions. Many of their targets were militiamen and low-level administrators. They also used improvised explosive devices. This obviously caused civilian casualties. They carried out a covert raid against a Jedi enclave while most of the experienced fighters were away. Mara was filled with revulsion for them when she and the unit she was assigned to came across Jedi who had been turned Force Dead, mutilated and in some cases killed by the rebels. A good number of them were Padawans.
There was a trial and Mara was forced to testify against a local Jedi commander, whose template had defected. She was uncomfortable about this, for there was little evidence of treason, but she was afraid. The incident prompted her to work hard against the Guard, but also created some doubts about the Dominion. She was spurred into action against the Guard by its grand offensive during the Netherworld Event.
The Jedi and Sith were weakened when Akala's actions threw the Force out of balance. Emboldened by this, the Guard launched an all-out attack against the Dominion, hoping to end it once and for all. The base Mara was assigned to had to be hastily evacuated. The commanding officer who made the call was arrested by the secret police for disobeying the order to hald the line at all costs. For a while his staff came under suspicion. This included Mara. However, Battlemaster Mahtara intervened and countermanded the orders.
Mara learned that there had been an uprising in Nexus City. As far as she knew, the dark side magics that had caused the disappearances had driven people insane. At the time she had little reason to believe otherwise. She had her doubts about the Dominion, but countless people had vanished into thin air. Moreover, the Guard and the Vaderites had made common cause. It seemed like the end of days was at hand.
So she threw herself into her work. Her big break came when she was able to determine a Republican Guard push. The rebels had used elaborate means to conceal their deployments, as surprise and secrecy were their best weapons. Fake defectors, prisoners, staged communications messages, partisan activity and troop movements all served to convince the high command that the Guard intended to make a push for Aeolia, a comparatively rich province. The province was vulnerable and its loss would be a terrible blow to the Dominion. Many of the armoured vehicles seemingly being assembled for the push were in fact dummies.
What seemed to be Republican Guard operational plans fell into the hands of the Dominion's Bureau of Farsight. They seemed to confirm what many analysts and staff officers suspected. However, Mara found that all the signals and notes were just too perfect. There was just enough evidence to support something, and not enough other materiel if it was a real dispatch case. She suspected it was a deception.
The division she was assigned to had intercepted code words for targets, but she was unsure what they were. So she sent out a poorly coded message that Purity was running low on nerf meat. The Guard passed on that Section Z was low on nerf meat. Mara became convinced that the Guard's true target was Fortress Purity. Her superiors dismissed her claims, for it was regarded as sheer madness for the Guard to attack the citadel, which was a major fortification on the way to Nexus City. The Guard, they argued, would never be bold or insane enough to go for it. A general boasted that the Dominion air force would smash them if they tried to make the perilous trek.
However, Mara was undeterred and approached Kyrric. The Guard, she argued, was gambling because they wanted to go for the jugular. He was able to pass on her information to the Battlemaster. Mahtara followed Mara's instincts. When large Republican Guard forces marched on Fortress Purity, they were confronted by General Kennobi and his army. Again and again, the Guard tried to take the Fortress, but the battle ended in defeat for the rebels. It was a bloody rout that turned the tide of the Netherworld War. The Dominion celebrated a great victory.
As a reward, and to make sure did not go above herself, Mara was sent to a military base on one of Tephrike's moons. This was a posting of great trust, but also a lonely one. Only very few Tephriki had visited space in the past centuries. Owing to the lond period of isolation, many had superstitious beliefs about it. Her time there was peaceful and quiet. Until one day a fleet of spaceships appeared in the system. It was Mara who detected the Firemane fleet, prompting a squadron of ancient fighters to be deployed to confront them.
Unfortunately, initial contact went poorly. Believing that the intruders were demons or Sithspawn who wished their people harm, the Dominion pilots attacked them. This turned out to be a suicidal death charge. Firemane dispatched a force of soldiers to the moon. Dominion soldiers charged them, but were mowed down.
One of the Firemane adepts, Elpsis Kerrigan-Alcori, used her mental powers to calm the attackers and restrain them without bloodshed, as she realised that they were no threat and abhorred needless slaughter. Subsequently Firemane soldiers pushed into the small moon base, overcoming the defences.
Mara hid, but was found by Elpsis. Fearful of the intruder, she shot at her, but the primitive slug bounced off Elpsis' armour. However, rather than reliate, Elpsis tried to engage her in dialogue and reason with her. She was able to convince the clone that she was not a demon or a Sithspawn. The Great Darkness had come to an end life; there was life outside of Tephrike. It took some convincing, but Mara stood down.
She was brought aboard the Firemane warship as a 'guest'. To her surprise, her captors did not torture or abuse her. Instead she was given a nice room. Elpsis and her friend [member="Laira Darkhold"] questioned her a bit about Tephrike. Mara was loyal to her country and her people. So she tried to convince them of the Dominion's good intentions, while admitting that it was not perfect and there were aspects of it that frightened her.
She hoped that the outsiders would help them defeat the Vaderites and the Republican Guard so that her country could recover and embark on a saner path. However, she could not hide her fear of the Inquisition. She found the outsiders strange, but was intrigued by them and their technological devices. Feeling torn, she was happy when she learned that Firemane would be negotiating with her government.
Unfortunately, things escalated. While Battlemaster Mahtara wanted to accommodate and use the outsiders, the Grandmaster regarded them as abominations. For this reason Mahtara sought to marginalise and exclude him, but Grand Inquisitor Antonius went behind her back. When a Firemane delegation arrived in Nexus City to negotiate with a Jedi diplomat chosen by Mahtara, they were attacked by Dominion extremists dispatched by Antonius. Nearby Dominion soldiers and militia joined in after the fighting started, for they believed that their comrades were under attack by a foreign aggressor.
Elpsis stayed behind to hold off the attackers and allow the delegation to escape. She was captured by the Inquisition and brought to a black site, where she was tortured and brainwashed. In response, Firemane declared war and bombed the capital. The Grandmaster tried to destroy Firemane's warship with enchanted nuclear missiles, but this plan was foiled by Firemane pilots and Mahtara, who realised that all this would accomplish would be driving the outsiders to raze the Dominion.
When Mara heard of this, she made the choice to break with the Dominion. It was a hard choice, but it had slide too far into dishonour for her to back it. She made this with a heavy heart, rightly fearing for her siblings. Thus the clone technician offered her knowledge of Dominion codes and signals to Tegaea Alcori, head of the Firemane Exploration Corps. She was, of course, guarded and her suggestions were vetted, but she proved very helpful.
Firemane assembled two large task forces. One would teach the Dominion a lesson by assaulting Fortress Purity in concert with the Republican Guard. The other would find and rescue - or avenge - Elpsis. The second would be lead by Major Tempest. It carried out an initial strike on the Liberation Education Centre, a major Dominion brainwashing. There Natalie Dorne, an anti-Sith terrorist from Ession and one of Elpsis' friends, was able to secure encrypted records.
Mara volunteered to help decrypt and analyse the data. Though not from the Inquisition, she was able to give a lot of insight. Especially since the Dominion's tech was so ancient and divergent from what Firemane was used to and the obscure references were a language unto themselves. The two were able to discover Elpsis' location, a classified brainwashing camp called Serene Springs. Before Natalie departed, Mara pleaded with her to do what she could to save her friend, but also warned her that Elpsis might not be herself. In that regard she was correct, for the pyromancer had been brainwashed into becoming an obedient drone. However, Elpsis was able to overcome her brainwashing and kill the Grand Inquisitor. Her actions sparked a prisoners' revolt. She was reunited with her friends when Firemane troops stormed the camp.
By now Purity had fallen to the combined forces of the Guard and Firemane. However, the battle had been savage. Mara found her decision to rebel confirmed when she heard that General Kennobi had sent a force of Younglings on a suicidal death charge. Her hostility to the Guard remained though. She also heard that the Grandmaster was dead. In what many suspected was a coup, Mahtara took over. Kyrric stood at her side. This caused conflicting feelings inside Mara.
In the aftermath of the battle, Firemane's leaders decided to pull out. The freed prisoners would get the chance to go with them and the corporation would provide the Guard with aid in form of arms, advisors and sometimes air strikes in return for raw materials. Several of the freed prisoners were less than happy, believing that Firemane was abandoning them. But the corporation did not want to get bogged down in a protracted war.
Before leaving Tephrike, Firemane's warships bombed the Vaderites' citadel from orbit. Mara was reunited with Elpsis and decided to stay with the star people. However, she resolved that she would not give up on her homeworld or leave its people in chains. Her new friends Natalie and Elpsis agreed with her. The three had a reunion after Elpsis was well enough to walk. Natalie taught Mara about modern tech and the three made tentative plans for the future.
Last edited:
