Any intelligent being will find life tough at an Imperial penal colony. For Ella’asaren being sentenced to 20 years of hard labor was utterly terrifying. For anyone used to living in space, staying on an inhospitable planet can be utter hell.

Ella is spaceborn, born and raised on the medium-sized freighter her parents owned and operated. Her parents were fugitives from Ryloth who wanted nothing more than to have a quiet life for themselves far from the conflict of the Clone Wars. Her parents never talked about how exactly they came to have the funds to buy the Stardancer, back when Ella was only three years old, but the ship became their home ever since.

The Twi’lek couple took on a competent crew, and although they always had some rotation amongst the crewmen, many stayed for years and became family to the young Twi’lek girl who grew up on the ship. She was the oldest of three siblings, only a year older than her brother, Elemar’asaren, but three years older than her little sister, Uala’asaren.

Ella’s youth was exciting, when compared to other children stuck on one single planet. Her parents went where their work took them, but mostly transported goods and people within the Gordian Reach. Ella was home-schooled and from a young age she was expected to help with chores on board the ship. She learned how to cook meals, splice wires and even pilot the ship when her father was in a good mood.

Life became a comfortable routine. Pick up goods or passengers, fly to wherever they were to be delivered, pick up other goods or passengers and fly on. Ella visited most of the planets in the Reach, as well as several planets even further away, but she was always most comfortable on board the Stardancer.

When Ella got older, her parents allowed her to take part in negotiating for cargo and prices, recognizing the need to teach her the skills she would need to get a good price. She turned out to be a natural at striking deals with strangers, and gradually took on more responsibilities in that area.

This is why it was a bit surprising to her when her father suddenly started going out alone to negotiate for cargo deliveries. Her parents never told their children, but Ella wasn’t stupid. She realized that, for some reason, her parents were doing something illegal. She didn’t press them on this issue for the first couple of times it happened. It was only the occasional job. She wasn’t concerned, as such, but worried that this might mean her parents were struggling financially and needed to take on jobs that payed better than the usual cargo-hauls.

After a few more jobs, Ella had determined to confront her parents about it the next time they delivered a cargo she suspected to be contraband. So she was elated when they landed on an abandoned space station to offload several sealed crates, fully intending to get the truth out of her parents once they were back in space. She never got the chance.

The space station apparently wasn’t abandoned at all. After the crew had gotten about half of the crates out of the ship, several white-armored Stormtroopers emerged from behind closed doors, flooding the landing bay. The crew of the Stardancer had no choice but to surrender.

The entire crew was arrested and brought aboard an Imperial vessel that had been hidden behind the planet that the space station orbited. This was the last time Ella saw her parents, siblings or the rest of the crew. They were thrown into separate cells. She was interrogated briefly and with little enthusiasm, and after an hour of trying not to say anything that might get her parents or the crew into any more trouble she was finally charged with smuggling, and aiding and abetting a terrorist organization known as the Alliance to Restore the Republic. Only then did the facts click. Her parents hadn’t taken on smuggling jobs to earn more credits. They had, for some reason, decided to help the Rebellion by smuggling supplies.

Ella never understood how the Imperials knew where to find them. Like every other time they had smuggled goods, they were supposed to drop off the supplies in a certain area and then notify their contact how to find them. The contact wouldn’t know where they were to deliver the goods until after they had left. So nobody within the Rebel Alliance could have sold them out. Elle soon came to realize that the most likely explanation was that one of the crewmembers had sold them out. Which was a hard realization, since they had all been on board the ship for years, and she counted all of them as friends, almost as family.

Ella was transferred off the Imperial vessel a week later. She got a fair trial. Or so she was told. She never saw the inside of a courtroom. She was simply informed that the Empire had found her guilty as charged. To be honest, she couldn’t really fault their logic. Even if she had been given her day in court she wouldn’t have expected any other result. Like the rest of the crew, she had been caught red-handed.

She was sentenced to 20 years of hard labor at an Imperial prison camp. Before she was shipped out she heard through the grapevine in the prison that her parents, as heads of the operation, had already been executed for treason. She also heard that the rest of the crew had received sentences similar to her own. She hoped to meet some of them en route to the penal colony, but that didn’t happen. She learned that it was standard practice for the Empire to separate prisoners arrested together and send them to different facilities, if at all possible.

Once Ella’s shuttle landed in the Imperial penal colony she knew she was never going to survive 20 years there. She would be surprised if she were to last a year. Her only chance was to escape somehow, but the odds of that seemed slim, at best.

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Ella has become fond of Hartol Dunn, a farmer who owns a decently sized farm next to the closed-off area of the resettlement camp. The middle-aged human owns a herd of Tril, large mammalian herbivores native to the planet, raised for milk, meat and fleece. He has, on occasion, made a deal with the garrison of the resettlement camp to supply him with workers during the annual shearing season, as well as to help him round up his animals after particularly brutal storms that have scattered his flock.

Only two days after her arrival at the planet, before she had formally been assigned to any one work group, Ella'asaren was among the 10 prisoners sent, under guard, to help Dunn with the spring shearing. She spent several days with the widowed farmer. At first he took pity on her, shivering in the cold spring of Torque, and lent her an old thermal cloak that used to belong to his now deceased wife. After the shearing was done he told her that she reminded him of his daughter, who was off to university in the capital, and gave her the cloak.

Ella thinks fondly of the man, who, unlike the guards, treated her and the other prisoners with respect. It felt good being treated like a sentient being with a name, not just another number in the Imperial penal system.

Type: Belief - Freedom

Ella knows that she won't survive the conditions in the penal colony for long, and will do whatever it takes to escape. If she manages to do so, she will do what she can to fight the Empire that sentences people to die in hell holes like this. She is also curious to find out why her parents decided to risk helping the Rebel Alliance, and might just decide to make their struggles her own.

Family (5)

Ella's parents were executed by the Empire, but she has no idea what happened to her younger siblings. She has younger brother (Elemar) and an even younger sister (Uala). She will give anything to find out where they are, and to make sure they are safe.


Betrayal (5)

Ella is certain that one of crew of the Stardancer betrayed her parents and the rest of the crew to the Empire. She intends to find that person and make the traitor pay the ultimate price. The traitor might make a move himself if he hears Ella has escaped the penal colony and joined the Rebel Alliance. Especially if he or she is still working for the Empire...



Once she joins the Rebellion she is likely to have split duties:

Type: Personnel
Magnitude: 0
As an officer it is part of Ella's duties to see to the well-being of the soldiers under her command. She is devoted to her men and will do what it takes to ensure that they perform the mission they need to undertake in the safest possible way so that casualties are avoided, or at least kept to a minimum.

Type: Combat Victory
Magnitude: 0
The duty of every officer is ensuring that the mission they are assigned is completed. Ella is a competent pilot and wants to prove she has what it takes to both take on the Empire's finest personally, and lead others to victory against the forces of the Emperor.

Age: 19
Height: 1.78 meters
Build: Slim
Eyes: Brown

Ella'asaren is a tall and graceful Twi'lek female with slim build. She is considered very attractive, even for a Twi'lek, with smooth teal-colored skin and soft zebra-patterns on her lekku. When not in her flight suit she tends to wear form-hugging clothes, an old pilot's jacked and cargo pants.