Alecta grew up in mid-rise slums on Coruscant, seeing the glittering world above from afar but only able to glimpse it when she snuck up as an older kid.

Her mother says her father was a war hero, going off to fight and die in the Clone Wars, but she has no idea if that's true. She barely made enough as a waitress at a diner to keep them in the tenement with the lights on. Alecta spent a lot of time out on the streets, never far from a fall to certain death, but she never feared that; she feared the neighborhood gangs eager to extort her scarce lunch money, the bullies in her barely-funded primary school, the cops who behaved little better than gang enforcers themselves. And in that fear she found power. Power to make the bully think his skin was crawling with steel-mites. To tug the hair of the girl about to turn out her pockets, even when her arms were being held down. To get the cops to go chasing off at a noise in another direction.
Always little, always subtle, never anything she could consciously control.

And then she saw a monster.

All clad in black, taller than any man she'd ever seen, drawing breaths like a pent-up vent fan, with lifeless, featureless, mirror-dark eyes.

She screamed in fright, tried to make it go away - and then she couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

The fear only made her push harder. In response, she felt something she couldn't describe or quantify. Looking back, many years later, she would speculate it was Vader's self-loathing welling up. Back then, she just felt the grip tighten around her throat...

"Sir, is this the target?" Suddenly Alecta was flung into the arms of the stormtrooper who'd spoken up. "No. But this one has potential. Take her to ISB headquarters and see she is delivered to Tremayne. Personally, sergeant."

"Yes sir!"

Alecta was sure she could slip out of the trooper's grip on the way. But the monster had said she had potential. Only her mother had said that before, at least said it and meant it.

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Alecta stood on the secondary bridge of ISD Furious, watching the battle just past the viewports. Red and green in a seemingly endless crossfire. A corvette disintegrating under Furious's withering guns, only for a seemingly out-of-place cargo ship to rocket through its debris cloud. The corvette’s sacrifice had given the Gallofree transport enough cover and time to slam into Furious’s neighbor in the blockade formation, breaking her spine with what must have been an entire cargo hold of proton bombs.

"Sound and fury, signifying nothing," hisses the man next to her as he senses her flinch away from the fireball, blinding even through the auto-darkening transparisteel. "The last petulant gasps of a dying Rebellion."

"Tell that to Riposte's crew," she mutters in reply, watching faint lights flash across the hull of the mortally wounded Star Destroyer, disgorging escape pods as it starts to pull apart into two halves. She could feel the sudden terror of her crew like a dull ache, muted both by distance and the oppressive presence of their master above masters, Emperor Palpatine.

More comfortingly, she could feel the maelstrom of righteous fury that was the monster that had elevated her above the spires of the city by finding her. She liked to believe that he kept apprised of her progress. Feared he would never care.

The fear helped her focus, most of the time.

"Have faith, child." Kal Ebon, the Tenth Brother, chuffs dismissively at her murmurings, turning to his tattooed face to glare at her. "I believe this is enough watching. Go practice with the training droids." It was an insult, to be sure. She had experience now. She'd been on an actual Jedi hunt, even though it had turned out to just be an old man who knew a few parlor tricks in the end.

Alecta storms off the secondary bridge, leaving nervous officers in her wake. She'd prove she'd finished her training, soon. Maybe even earn a number. Maybe kill Kal for his.

But she won't get the chance to kill him, because just as she passes the blast doors, the compartment she left shatters in a scream of tearing metal. All she sees of the space she left behind is a fireball as the hatch frantically irises shut.

Alecta's heart pounds in fear. Not the focused fear she's used to, that she's mastered and leashed. Panic.

And then the sudden feeling of emptiness, like all the background noise of the world got switched off, leaves her reeling against the wall. The Emperor's presence was gone. And Vader... different. Regret mixed with sadness, yet somehow... peace. And then, too, nothing.

In her panicked delirium she sees a man, someone she's never met before, a man so intensely pretty she'd sure she would have remembered him. Even in her 'hallucination' his attention is fleeting. "You can be more than this. Leave." How is that smooth voice familiar? And then he's gone.

Leave. That was simple enough. The damage control teams rushing to seal the breach part around her, knowing to leave well enough alone. The crew on the flight deck has far more urgent matters to attend to than taking the risk of gainsaying her. The rebels have much more to worry about than an unmarked shuttle fleeing the frantic battle.

"Bogey, we're leaving." The red-striped black BB-5G unit rocks back and forth on its uni-tracked body for a moment before bobbing its head in a seeming shrug and rolling up the boarding ramp and off to the cockpit. Alecta follows, numbly working her way through the checklist as alarming shudders propagate through the hangar.

The Death Star vanishes in a fireball in front of her almost as soon as the shuttle shoots out of Furious's hold, suddenly clearing a route to hyperspace.

You can be more than this. How could she be anything now?

Before the Battle of Endor, Alecta's main ambition was to impress Darth Vader and be elevated to the rank of full Inquisitor, hoping to eventually take Tremayne's job. Vader's lack of acknowledgement on the rare occasion their paths crossed just spurred her to try harder.

Then Vader died, and though Anakin's last thoughts were focused on his children, he did spare a thought for the lonely mind so desperately focused on him, exhorting her to become more than what the Empire would have made her.

But she has no idea what that looks like, and she feels very small in a very big galaxy, trying to find a place in this new era. All she really knows is that serving the scraps of the Empire would be a dead end.

Betrayal 10

Alecta doesn't consider herself a traitor. The Empire died with the Emperor, and her motivation died with Darth Vader - and then there was his final command to her.

But others in the Inquisitorious - whichever splinter they see as legitimate - may not see things her way. And even if not motivated to revenge, former members of the Inqisitorious, the ISB, and other dark-ops organizations of the Empire might see her as an asset in the wind, useful if recovered.

Alecta is a young human woman with raven-black hair and amber eyes. Her build is just to the curvy side of athletic, and her conventionally-pretty face is more accustomed to deliver a glare than a smile, though she tries the latter more these days. Her wardrobe is still mostly black, for what she insists are practical concerns.