MkVenner

Appearance:

Native Language: Basic

Hair Color: Black

Eye Color: Green

Skin Color: Very Pale

Height: 5'8

Weight: 135 lbs

Age: 19

Full Name: Owain Glyndwr MkVenner

Build: Slight and sinewy

Tattoos: A blue spread-winged bird of prey across the left eye and forehead

Homeworld: Dantooine

Notable Skills:

1) Skilled with both sword and knife work

2) A knack for not getting lost

3) Long experience with stealth

Background:

I was born to a humble little family of six on Dantooine. The entire family, myself included were private, reclusive people. Our little home was built kilometers from the nearest town, and because of it, we had to depend entirely on one another. My father, two brothers and I were expected to bring in the daily meals from hunting and keep the homestead in working order. My sister and mother took care of the usual household chores like cooking and cleaning.

There were very few landmarks on Dantooine's steppes and grasslands. You might come across a large tree or oddly shaped rock, but other than that, a person was on their own. After a while, I found I didn't need landmarks. I just knew where I was going. When confronted with nothing but open grass as far as I could see, something in the back of my mind whispered me my way home. It was not some supernatural ability, or something bred in me by past generations. I think it was just something I picked up in order to survive.

The only real thing of value we owned was a beautiful, leaf-shaped broadsword my father kept locked away. He'd been forcing me to learn how to use it for as long as I could remember, either directly in sparring matches, or indirectly in conditioning the right muscles and the like. It was a heavy thing, even when I was fully grown, used more for bludgeoning somebody to death than for the fancy swordplay I later saw around the galaxy.

My father had a saying he hammered into my skull from an early age, usually at practice with the sword. It went "If you're going to kill anything, a man or beast, you owe it to them to look them in the eye when you do. If you can't bear to do that, then it doesn't deserve to die, then, does it?"

Because of that, we never used blasters. Instead, we were down to using a simple, straight-bladed knife on our hunting trips. It forced a person to learn when the prey was at its most vulnerable point, how to close on it without being seen, heard or even smelled. On Dantooine, the terrain made that very difficult. With a lot of practice and patience, it was doable, but hard.

I left home when I was seventeen. I hired on with a smuggling crew, captained by a gruff old ex-soldier named Harris, at the Khoonda spaceport. I found myself liking Harris and his crew. They weren't really hardcore criminals, but as Harris explained to me once, "Just a bunch of unlucky folk trying to make a living."

My third job with them turned to disaster. It was supposed to be a simple exchange of disruptors for credits. We acted as the middlemen, ferrying the disruptors from the seller to the intended buyer, who was supposed to hand over a series of stolen account numbers and accesses for our client and a hefty sum of open credits for us. Things got complicated when the New Republic showed up.

They popped out of no where, shot our contact and his two bodyguards dead in five seconds flat, and turned their guns on us. I managed to slide away off to the side, only to be met by a burly Republic trooper who hammered my head against the wall until I blacked out. Before I lost consciousness, I saw Harris go down, hit in the head and kidney from two opposite directions.

The New Republic threw me in prison. For a young man used to wide, open grasslands, it was torture. And the inmates were not much help. I guess I was lucky they did put me in a prison complex, instead of shoving me off to say, Kessel, or some other prison colony. But it still almost drove me mad.

I did manage to escape after a year. Somebody started a riot, and I took the opportunity to avoid the confusion and lead myself out. If they put any genetic identifier or other tracking system on me, they didn't care to use it. By the next morning, I was off-world, bound for what I later found out was territory safeguarded by a faction calling itself the "Vast Empire." It didn't take much persuasion for me to enlist.