“You clones are used to depending on each other. Trusting in your fellow clones when the going get tough. Well. Now you need to learn how to operate on your own. Out there, in the wilderness, you can get separated from your squad and out of communications. You need to be able to find your way back to base. Fight your way back if you have to. To do that you need to be able to trust in yourselves and your own abilities. Out there, you need to be enough. And I’m here to teach you how. Leave the backpacks and gear belts in the transport. Take only the survival knives and water purification tablets. Come on, get a move on, ladies, it’s a ten-day hike to the base and it looks like it might snow. Move out.”
– Lieutenant Ylva Darmonian to a squad of clones on the first day of their wilderness survival training.

-*-*-*-*-

From a young age, Ylva Darmonian wanted to be a boy. Growing up on Corellia, she was always stronger and tougher than the boys her age. She was constantly getting into fights with the boys, always eager to show shut them up as they teased her. He family lived in a small mining town close to the snow line on one of the largest mountain ranges on the planet. It was a place for hard people and she loved it. She did well enough in school but her favorite was spending days on end hiking in the forested valleys, rock-climbing, rafting on the fast-flowing rivers and hunting deer, goats and other pray animals for food.

It came as no surprise to her parents when she joined the planetary defense force. Her father, a politician doomed to remain on the opposition in her community, and her mother, a kindergarten teacher, had known about Ylva’s dreams for years. They hadn’t encouraged her, but neither had they discouraged their only girl from following her dream.

Ylva had to wait for her eighteenth birthday to enlist but she had her heart set on joining the mobile ranger units and nothing would stand in her way. She did well in basic training, outperforming most of the other recruits through a mixture of natural ability and sheer stubbornness and determination to get good enough to join the mobile rangers. She served with the regular planetary forces for two years before her application for the mobile rangers was accepted, rising to the rank of corporal in the meantime. Her superiors knew she wasn’t leadership material, but she did well to keep her squad in shape and seemed like good material for an NCO.

The ranger training was brutal. Ylva had gone into it thinking she could get by on the talents she’d developed hunting and tracking, hiking and boating in her childhood. Never had she been more wrong. The ranger training took her abilities and honed them in a six-month training program. They trained in every conceivable environment on Corellia. On the arctic one day hiking through freshly fallen snow, and then chopping their way through the dense jungle at the equator the day after.

Unlike 80 percent of her fellow applicants, Ylva passed the tests required and was accepted into a mobile ranger unit. With the galaxy at peace, relatively speaking, and Corellia far from threat at any rate, the rangers were used as search-and-rescue, deployed to stop poachers and sent on endless training missions. To many it might sound boring, but to Ylva this was life as it was supposed to be. It was rough, hard and uncomfortable, and she loved every minute of it.

Ylva’s first time in real action came after she made Sergeant, almost three years after joining the mobile rangers. The Republic had received a request for assistance by the planetary authorities on Ragera IV, a small colony world on the outer rim, originally settled by a Corellian colony ship thousands of years ago. The local government was faced with an insurgency allegedly started by an ever-increasing minority of Zabrak. Corellia, like many other Core planets, sent aid and military assistance.

Fighting a militant insurgency on a barely habitable world with freezing temperatures and snow storms that could last for weeks was a terrible experience. The mobile rangers were deployed on Ragera for 22 months and Ylva did two tours of duty, each six months long. She lost a good number of friends in battle and took more lives than she cared to remember.

Like many of the other units deployed on Ragera, her mobile ranger teams were incorporated into the Galactic Republic Military on a provisional basis to improve coordination between companies deployed on the planet. Ylva didn’t mind. Corellia was her home world but she had always considered herself as a member of the Galactic Republic. So fighting for the Republic was just as good as fighting for her home world.

After her first tour of duty, Ylva’s performance and psych-reports were brought to the attention of the group of people tasked with forming the Republic Intelligence into an intelligence network. They needed dependable field operatives and recruiting trained military personnel with the right disposition was a good shortcut since very little additional training would be needed. When they approached Ylva and offered her a position she didn’t hesitate. So for her second tour of duty on Ragera IV, she was a field operative of Republic Intelligence, operating under the cover of a Lieutenant in the Galactic Republic Military.

For the next couple of years, Ylva performed well as an agent of the Republic Intelligence. The operations always seemed ad-hoc and under-planned, but she liked it well enough. She was mostly tasked with infiltration, military espionage and planning routes of advanced for military plans that were usually never set in motion. Rarely she would get much more sinister missions where her objective was to assassinate an important figure. A Twi’lek running against a sitting senator was the first. A suspected cult leader was the second. She never did like those jobs, but they were few and far between so she told herself they were vital for the Republic and pulled the trigger.

Everything changed with the battle of Geonosis. The Republic apparently had an entire army of clones ready to deploy that nobody had known about. Not even the head spooks trying to set up a proper intelligence organization called Republic Intelligence. At that time, Ylva still held the rank of Lieutenant in the Galactic Republic Military, on permanent loan to Republic Intelligence. With the re-structuring following Genosis, she was transferred to a support unit of the Grand Army of the Republic, still with the rank of Lieutenant.

In a clever maneuver to get more information on the clone army and the potential of the clones themselves, the head of Republic Intelligence loaned Ylva and several other field operatives to the GAR as wilderness survival trainers for specialist clone formations. Their job was to train the clones, but also to assess them and the army structure they belonged to. This worked well enough to get Ylva ingrained into the GAR, so much that she was requested as a liaison between the army and the Republic Intelligence.

Her job now is to work with the clones, and occasionally their Jedi commanders, to gather intelligence and assist with planning troop movements on the local level. It’s the strangest job she has had since she joined the planetary defense force back on Corellia, but Ylva has never been one to look back. So far she’s faced every challenge she’s come across and excelled, and she has no plans to break her good track record.

Belief: The Republic

Ylva is very sure that a republic is the least bad out of a long list of bad types of governments. She isn't blind to the problems of the Galactic Republic, but she also doesn't see a better alternative so she fights to maintain that bureaucratic fossil the best she can.

Belief: The Jedi

Although Ylva has never been able to move a grain of sand through the Force, she does belief that the Jedi are pure in their intentions to keep the Republic safe and that they do so using honorable methods. The Jedi have a mindset Ylva feels everyone should aspire to. This is why she feels bad about performing some of the less honorable duties her superiors ask of her. Acts that no Jedi would agree to. She's decided that it's better she do it to allow the Jedi to remain honorable. They are better off not knowing.

Intelligence: 0

Ylva's main duty is the gathering of intelligence, whether it be the movement of enemy troops for accurate artillery strikes or military action, or data from the enemy from abandoned vehicles or headquarters taken in offensive action.

Wetwork: 0

Ylva's psychology profile led to her superiors giving her tasks other agents would have balked at. She understands better than most that the death of a single individual can sometimes save the lives of hundreds, or even thousands. She doesn't relish in her duties when asked to assassinate a high-value target, but she does what asked off her to keep the Republic safe.

Ylva Darmonian is a pale-skinned human woman in her mid-twenties. She is fairly tall at 174 cm with an athletic build and a toned body from years of military training and hiking through the wilderness. He hair is naturally bright red but she dyes it a darker red shade mostly so that she won’t draw as much attention. Her pale skin has the tell-tale signs of freckles and after being out in the sun for a day or two the freckles tend to become much more pronounced.

When out in the field, Ylva wears practical gear, usually military-grade clothing, a compact and well-worn backpack and an assortment of weapons useful in her field of work. Her favorite weapon is a large, powerful scoped blaster rifle that looks heavier than it is thanks to the light-weight material she has used to replace the original stock and plating. She is hardly ever seen without a practical and light blaster pistol strapped to her leg, and when out in the wilderness she carries a vibro-machete on her back. It’s a practical tool to have to clear undergrowth, chop down small trees and such, and can also be used to devastating effect in melee combat. The final touch to her usual gear are her goggles, usually worn on her head, ready to be slipped on in case of trouble.