Amara grew up on Pfelez, an unimportant outer rim planet that had been torn apart by Civil War. Though nominally a member of the Republic, when their civil war began almost a century before the rise of the Empire, the Republic had already become too bloated to worry about such an unimportant outer planet.



When the war began, the great cities were destroyed, and nearly half of the twenty billion who were to die in the Burning Wars died in the first hours of the war. In most cases, this would have broken the will of either faction to fight, but the leaders had long before retreated into underground bunkers, and entire armies ate, slept, and lived underground. 

Amara was born to a pair of soldiers (for there were no citizens of the age of 16 or over who were not soldiers by the time she was born) whose names she barely remembers and who she never knew. They were 20 when she was born, and they both died before they could turn 21, as did most men and women on Pfelez.



Like most children, as she grew up a number of different soldiers from her parents' unit would take care of her, and then they would go away, and they would die. By the time she was twelve, Amara had retreated from the world, having watched dozens of would-be "parents" leave and never come back. Her only constant companion had been her older brother, who had been born two years before her. As he was fourteen and strong, he worked in the factories, making weapons of war, while Amara worked to collapse and beyond in the massive hospitals where millions of the wounded lay wounded, dying, dead. 

When they were "home" in the ramshackle collection of rubble and debris that provided incomplete shelter, insufficient warmth, and inadequate security, they would eat whatever they had managed to procure; there was no way to buy food with their income, had those who ran the factories or the hospitals even bothered to pay their workers in the prior fifty years.

Despite their poor nutrition and lack of food, both of them developed young, as men and women on Pfelez always did. By the time she was 14, Amara could have passed for 18 on most planets, and her brother Jerek, at 16 could have been in his early 20s. The fact that he had turned 16 did not pass unnoticed for long, and soon recruiters came to take him away. He managed to get 24 more hours with his little sister.



And in those 24 hours, the Empire came.

The stormtroopers landed, restoring peace and order to the planet in a matter of (what Amara would discover later were brutally efficient) hours. A day later, shuttles came and went, every moment of every day, dispensing medical supplies, food, clothing, prefabricated shelters. The Star Destroyers maintaining a low orbit overhead were the most beautiful, wonderful things Amara had ever seen, and she loved the roar of the TIE Fighters. Best of all, her brother, who hated the idea of fighting didn't have to go away.



About two weeks after they landed, the Imperials set up a recruitment center, and thousands of citizens flocked to join the ranks of their saviors. Including Amara, who had managed to obtain a fake ID proving she was 16, and thus at the age of majority of the planet, and eligible to go to the Imperial Academy. Jerek was furious, threatening to go down to the recruitment center and expose her. The two had a blazing row and Amara stormed out, on the next shuttle to Imperial Center.



She might have been only 14, but she had seen more death and destruction than men and women, even soldiers of the Empire twice her age. She looked and acted much older than she was. People were surprised to learn that she was "only 16". Desperate to get through her Academy courses, Amara signed up for a load of work that would get her done in two years, rather than four. She remained ignorant of the fact that many of the ranking officers in the Empire had little use for women, and somehow ignoring everything that was aimed to discourage her caused her Academy teachers and fellow students to give her some grudging respect.



Even with their grudging respect, the coursework was well beyond anything she had ever expected. Even as a nurse she had never experienced such long, grueling hours of physical activity and mental concentration. It was a revelation when, six months in, with the first semester's final exams approaching, a black market promoting prescription stims popped up. By the time the finals week ended, Amara was hooked, forging prescriptions to get enough stims to keep her going.



By the time her two years at the Academy were up, she needed a stim or two just to get through the day, becoming irritable and quarrelsome when she didn't get any, in addition to dealing with extreme fatigue. However, her impressive scores on aptitude tests and her incredible reflexes landed her in the TIE Fighter program.

During the year, she met many students, some her equal in the cockpit, some better, and some worse, but all with a burning desire to fly TIE Fighters for the Empire, achieve the fame and fortune that awaited those heroes whose celebrated accomplishments adorned their vidscreens every night.



They were always pushed to fly more hours, to do better, to set benchmarks, then beat them the next time around. It was during this time that one of Amara's classmates, in an attempt to get into her good graces (and probably, she realized later, her bed) introduced her to booster blue. It was an incredible drug, ten times better than the stims she used to stay awake, as they also enhanced her intellect and most importantly, her reflexes.

With the enhanced reflexes Amara easily rose to the top of her class, and stayed there, despite the fact that the booster blue combined with her stimulants would often cause her nerves to fray and she spent many sleepless nights, unable to fall asleep. The booster blue became more difficult to procure once she turned down her classmate's advances, but Amara had learned how to find things that were difficult to obtain during her time growing up on Pfelez.



When the long year of training was up, the students were assigned to different ships or planetary bases. Based on her scores, Amara was assigned to the <I>Corrupter</i> a front line Star Destroyer charged with "pacification" of "disorderly worlds". When Amara reported to Colonel Raeljic aboard the Star Destroyer he reacted with surprise to have a woman, and even as excited as she was, she couldn't help but feel that he immediately disliked her.



In her first mission, she was assigned a TIE Scout, but she was okay with that. She figured that once she demonstrated her competence she would get a slot in one of the combat squadrons. As the months passed, and despite the fact that she could outfly nearly everyone in her unit, Amara continued to get assigned to a TIE Scout, she began to realize that Colonel Raeljic was a traditionalist, and he had little faith in women.

But eighteen months after her first assignment, she became extremely grateful that she had never been assigned to a combat role. <I>Corrupter</i> was ordered to execute "Base Delta Zero" on a planet known as Medrin, which had refused to submit to Imperial rule. The protocol of Base Delta Zero was simple. Bombard the planet until nothing living remained. Over three billion inhabitants died as <I>Corrupter</i> reduced the world to slag.



This was the even that finally awoke Amara to the violence of the Empire, and shook her faith in their goodness and purity of their mission. Peace was one thing, but peace at any cost was another entirely, and Amara was not certain she could pay that kind of cost. Over the next three months she plotted her defection meticulously, following the movements of the Rebel Alliance as closely as she could, and finally, one mission she left in her TIE Scout and never returned. She found a contact with the Rebels on Corellia and turned over her Scout to the Rebellion, offering her services as a pilot. For the past few months she's flown a few escort missions, even once in an X-Wing, though she has yet to see combat. Mostly she's been flying freighters and transports, getting Alliance personnel where they need to be. It may not be glamorous, but it's important, and she knows she's finally on the right side.

Amara, first and foremost is young. She may not look it, and she may not act like it, but a certain amount of naïveté still exists within her. She knows more about war than most, and she knows primarily that people die. She knows that it is more than likely that she, and everyone around her will be among them. She forms no long-term attachments, avoids romantic entanglements, even friendships. She will work with a team, but she sees the team as a unit, and no part can be irreplaceable, because, inevitably she feels, someone will die. She still lies about her age, claiming to be 20, when she actually only recently turned 18. This may be more a security blanket than anything else, but it's another way of keeping her distance. If nobody can really know her, nobody can get too close. Though she naturally speaks with something of a Corellian accent, she has schooled herself to also speak like an inhabitant from Imperial Center, something that was important when she was in school.

But despite this, she believes in the concept of peace fervently. She believes war is terrible, and most wars are unnecessary, but she does believe in the idea of a just war. Her society imprinted the idea that their war was a just one on her mind, and even though she never believed it for a second, the concept of a just war stuck with her. When she witnessed the Empire carry out atrocities, despite not directly participating, she realized that what the Empire was doing was simply wrong. Utter destruction of a military target is perfectly legitimate, but the destruction of an entire planet, civilians too is simply wrong to her mind. That means the Empire is wrong, which means that its defeat, ideally forcing its surrender with a minimum of bloodshed, is the only legitimate path to peace. Still, she realizes that she has to fight, and kill, and (she is convinced) eventually die herself to bring that peace closer.


She is an addict, but she hides it very well, and she would insist that she doesn't need the drugs. They just make things a little easier. She's at the stage where she denies her addiction, but still hides her use, because she'd rather not talk about it. Perhaps in her most candid moments she can admit it to herself, but she doesn't see it as problem. Negative consequences have, as yet, been few and far between.

Contribution Rank: 2

Space Superiority: 0
Resource Acquisition: 0

Total Personal Duty: 0

Amara believes both of these are necessary for the eventual defeat of the Empire. Though she would gladly spend most of her time in a cockpit fighting the Empire, she recognizes that without ships and weapons, space superiority serves no purpose. She remembers what a coup the Incom deal was for the Alliance, and dreams of one day providing something similar.

Amara is taller than the average woman and quite slender. While she is muscular, most of the muscle is lithe, helping her reflexes rather than her physical strength. When she's going to be piloting a snubfighter, she still wears her black, form-fitting bodysuit fitted with the emergency environmental kit that is a key component of any Alliance flight suit. When she's not in the cockpit, she still tends to prefer to dress in black, usually cargo pants cinched up with a belt, and a black tee or sweater, depending on the weather. She does have lighter clothing, but she saves those for occasions when the black would be entirely inappropriate.

She wears her reddish-brown hair longer than she did when she was in the Imperial Service (now that she no longer has to wear a helmet to fly, she's let it grow out) but still shorter than traditional fashion dictates. She has a pretty, but not beautiful face, with arching brows, large chocolate-colored eyes, a small nose, and lips that, despite the stern expression she usually wears, are always curved up a little bit at the edges. 

When she walks, it's somewhere between the confident stride of a fighter pilot and cautious walk of a woman who grew up on a world where death could be lurking around every corner. When she's in a pilot's mood, that part of her will tend to come through more, and when she's in a cautious mood, that part of her will still tend to come through more. She rarely smiles, but even a small one from her can seem to light up a room.



She tends to wear her blaster pistol openly, having the full licenses and so forth that allow her to carry it. She keeps a vibroknife at her left hip, and carries an emergency crash kit in her omnipresent duffel bag, always ready to be stowed even in the small cargo space available in a fighter. She has a few belt pouches in which she keeps stims, both the more immediate injections and the slower-acting, but smaller tabs, and a few doses of booster blue as well as a few odds and ends.