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NAME: Elensa
FACTION: Independent
SPECIES: Hapan (Near-Human)
AGE: 24 Galactic Standard Years
GENDER: Female
HEIGHT: 5ft 8inches
WEIGHT: 134lbs
EYES: Deep Blue
HAIR: Straight, Blonde
SKIN: Caucasian (Pale)
FORCE SENSITIVE: Yes
COMPOSITION AND APPEARANCE
Elensa carries herself with all the arrogance of a Hapan female, straight-backed posture with an expression of well-schooled disdain, though it is fairly rare that her face is ever seen openly, since she prefers to conceal it behind a veil, keeping her features well hidden in the best tradition of her homeworld, revealing it only with good reason, and even then, only to a few. The rest of the time, only her eyes are left visible, surprisingly bright that appear a deep-blue when illuminated by sunlight.
Although she is practically blind in darkness, it remains her preference to remain concealed within deeper shadows, making her presence known only when she feels it appropriate. Limited by her physiology in this respect, her trained Force Sensitivity has allowed her to overcome this particular shortfall to a certain extent - her vision in darkness is still non-existant, but she compensates with her Force Sensing capabilities. As such, she's even taken to blindfolding herself from time-to-time, to enshroud her eyes in darkness even in the light. Without the blindfold, her most noticeable feature are the two black tattoos aligned with each eye, in the shape of tear trails, there to represent her sobriquet of 'Lady of Sorrow'.
Disrobed, her body showcases it's most prominent disfigurement: a vivid white scar that travels along her slender neck, in place of her vocal cords. The bombing of Coruscant removed any ability she ever had to verbalise her thoughts, and has left her bereft of speech. Although for a time she gave thought to a vocabulator prosthetic to enable her to retain some form of verbal communication, she has rejected this in place of the use of telepathic projection and elaborate hand gestures. Time and practice with the latter has allowed her to fool others by silently mouthing the words she then projects into the minds of her victim, but she only does this to maintain the illusion of speech. Among her brethren, she dispenses with this altogether, and guards her words in the most disabling but effective means possible.
Her attire remains fairly tasteful: she prefers to wear long dresses with trailing skirts, concealing her body completely so that the loose-fitting clothes conceal her figure, and in deference to her Sith beliefs, mostly in darker colours, which also helps her to remain hidden when in the shadows. Brighter colours are too much a sign of unnecessary ostentation, though she will adopt them if she needs to spend her time among people that are not her brethren, feeling that the best approach to deception is to appear as though you belong in a place where you should not be.
PERSONALITY
Cold, unapproachable and distant, Elensa is about as anti-social as it is possible for a being to become without dedicating herself to some absurd form of self-exile. Her preference is to keep people at arm's length as much as possible, and allows very few into her inner circle, barring perhaps a few confidantes and her former Master, though as with all good Sith, she is highly suspicious of even these. She carries herself with a natural arrogance developed both from understanding of her own powers and from her Hapan heritage, and is particularly disdainful of men, seeing them as inferior. As such, those few for whom she does share some affinity tend mostly to be female.
A woman of considerable emotion, Elensa is prone to whim, acting unpredictably even towards those who she counts as allies, and as such is a fairly dangerous individual. Her personal views are mostly known only to herself, and she has often violently responded to those who dare to put forth their views as fact, believing that to be the height of arrogance. Though arrogant herself, she feels such a state is generally undeserved by most, finding them unworthy in her eyes, so she often takes opportunity to humble such beings in a fashion both demeaning and eventually fatal. Those she sees as potentially falling into the trap of arrogance are often put in their place before such a lethal consequence becomes warranted.
Her sobriquet is well-earned, Elensa being something of a sadist in a psychological sense, finding pleasure in the emotional pain of others, believing that they are strengthened or destroyed by such inner conflict, and believing her purpose to be a catalyst of such anguish. She is, as such, an opportunist: if she finds a vulnerable spot, she'll poke and prod at it until a wound is created, one she can pour salt into. She accepts this as a necessary function of personal evolution: a person either gains strength and perspective from facing a difficult truth, or they sink beneath it, to have their lives extinguished at her hands, the only form of mercy she displays.
However, she considers physical brutality to be the basest of all possible actions, to be resorted to only if necessary. The merest fool can kill, she maintains, but a Master destroys by breaking a person into pieces and allowing them to do it to themselves through their own insecurities, weaknesses and failings. To her, this is an artform: to use a person's weaknesses against them such that their fall becomes inevitable. Faced with other Force Users, she has always sought to force their submission by a barrage of truth, destroying their very convictions in order to facilitate her ends: bringing them over to the true path. Anyone who would interfere becomes a victim of their own foolishness and is crushed beneath her boot heels.
Any sense of humour she displays is considerably dark, matching the rest of her personality. She takes pleasure in watching the internal struggles of others and finds the little ironies of action to be truly amusing, always quick to point out hypocrisy or contrary action. She rarely laughs, however, unless doing so only serves to provoke another to anger, rage or depression, since she considers laughter as much a weapon as any of the other emotional means in her arsenal.
With her particularly dispassionate approach to others, dehumanising them as a matter of course, it is rare to see her disciplined outer exterior drop, but when provoked, she can switch from calm to a torrent of pure rage within seconds, and her convictions regarding violence tend to vanish in such an instant, the end results as sudden as they are thorough. In this, Elensa sees herself as a perfectionist: she refuses to leave a job unfinished, and will happily see to the elimination of a person in their entirety, stopping her pursuit only when that utter destruction is achieved.
On the exterior, however, she is calm and collected, distant and yet utterly arrogant, unfailingly seeking to make sure all around her know their place: at the bottom of the ladder. She treats very few people with the respect due an equal, and even then only grudgingly. Deference is not in her nature, not even to her former Master, and she treats even him with patient disdain, as if to say that their relationship exists only at her convenience. Beneath it all, however, her deep anguish at pains suffered and the experiences of her early life have left her scarred and are a source of endless rage if she chooses to draw upon it, but she prefers to embrace this damage rather than ignore it. The dichotomy of control and utter volatility is a strange one that she has always struggled to balance.
ABILITIES
A woman of considerable subtlety, Elensa prizes deception above all other virtues, seeking to confuse and trick others, believing that this is the best way to expose their vulnerabilities and leave themselves open to her psychological attacks. This is best demonstrated by her illusions displaying speech even though she is utterly incapable of it, but this is merely one weapon in her considerable repetoire. Her telepathic skills are perhaps the most prominent of all her abilities, forced into such development because of her injuries and the rage brought on by her enforced silence.
However, this is merely the first expression of her powers. She is adept at illusions and is able to wield telepathic projection to terrify, torture and destroy those unfortunate to find themselves in her web. She is particularly proud of her ability to kill purely through the use of telepathy, inducing a form of terror so powerful that the victim becomes overwhelmed, usually succumbing to a heart attack or aneurysm, brought on by psychologically-induced stress. This is however reserved only for those foolish enough to cross her, or who seek to interfere with her work, so it is rarely employed.
Her senses are more unusually focused than those of most Force Sensitives: her ability to detect life has long since been stunted through psychological trauma, and she can now only sense others if their minds are directly seeking her out, or if she can physically see them. However, in a manner she views as compensation for this weakness, she is particularly adept at sensing thoughts and emotions from any being she perceives in this way, and often uses these senses as a means to manipulate her way into their mind: carrying her thoughts along the same pathways as their own, and then inducing the gentlest of pressures that can drive a mildly suspicious thought into paranoia, or a surge of anger into psychotic rage. She is thus intrigued by disciplined minds, but also repulsed by them, so she considers Jedi to be a prize, and takes great delight in using her skills to break them of their mental control.
Though she possesses telekinetic ability, it is rare that she employs it, considering overt displays of power to be in bad taste, preferring to work behind the scenes, undetected until the victim is in no position to do anything about it. This also holds true for lightsaber usage: though she possesses one and is trained in the use of such a weapon, she rarely employs it, and often goes for a year at a time without even picking it up for reasons other than to keep her form in practice. To kill with such a weapon is distasteful to her, and she has only used it to such an end twice in her lifetime, once while training as a Jedi.
BIOGRAPHY
Born on Hapes itself, I am the child of a noble family, a bloodline that has existed for centuries, though the youngest of three daughters, so it was never expected that I would become the head of our household or play anything but a minor part in Hapan politics. That particular lack of prominence was always useful to me, because an older child of such a family is groomed to engage on the battlefields fought in the Royal Court, always jockeying to place our House in a stronger position, close to the throne. A younger child is an irrelevance unless the eldest meets an untimely end, so we perhaps have more vistas open to us.
You'll want the details of my early life, I suppose? Irrelevant, really, but I suppose a story would be incomplete without a beginning. My mother ruled our house, as is appropriate, my father of little interest in the scheme of things. His duty was done, and after that, well, what use was he? I can't be certain as to whether or not my mother had him killed, but if she was responsible for that, who could blame her? I would certainly have done the same. Sufficed to say, he wasn't around much during my childhood, so ours was very much one where men were just a minor irritant to be ignored, at best.
Humans would think of fancy schools, private and secluded with sprawling grounds and strict discipline, designed to cater to the elite of society and to produce the best-educated young women in the Galaxy. Such ignorance. My education occured at home, under the auspices of various tutors designed to provide me with a path suitable to my talents. All of them naive fools, in retrospect, considering society to be privileged, built upon rules and subject to the whim of the latest fashions. A carefully sculpted world full of pretension, polite smiles and knives in the back.
The Jedi came before I reached my adolescence. Though most of our people still hold a natural distrust of Jedi, they were permitted there nonetheless, to seek out those who might join their ranks. The one who came to us was good. Very good. He spoke no words of service to a greater good, no rhetoric about the rare gift that Force Sensitivity presented. No, this Jedi spoke of their members as the true elite, living gods among mundane mortals with the potential to do great things, to bring glory and honour to their house. It was sadly something of a vogue among Hapans, in much irony: every true noble house would aspire to have a member in the Order's ranks, even if they had to drag forth a three-times-removed second cousin from the darkness of wherever they'd hidden them. My mother, sensible woman as she was, wasn't immune. And what better fate for a younger child?
So, goodbye privileged upbringing. Farewell, beautiful clothing and refined culture. Hello, austerity, endless lectures on humility and graciousness, greetings to lifelong service to a greater good and to the Force. Those latter parts were those emphasised for me in my first few months at the Jedi Temple at Tython. Apparently they'd had Hapan children join their ranks before, and knew we'd take some work to turn us into good little Jedi. Perhaps they even had some little success with me, and for a time, I was taken with their ideals, but in truth, the Jedi were always slaves to a power they did not understand and did not have the strength to use as it should be. But those are thoughts born of retrospection, are they not?
I first met my Master there on Tython - I will say little of him except to say that he is unusual among the Jedi. Secretive, sneaky, withdrawn, but very much dedicated to his duty. He was a man who recognised the beauty of being subtle, the true pleasure that can be found in achieving a goal without using force or even being seen to play a part in events that unfold before your eyes. I never understood why he chose me, but he taught me the art of fading into the background and learning to play with those who could not see you. I wonder sometimes if he ever realised what he was doing in unleashing my potential in such arts, but if he had, I doubt he would have bonded so well with me. And, oddly, even I felt an affection for him then.
Our time together came to an abrupt end while I was in my late teens, a growing woman, Padawan and aspiring Jedi. I remembered where I had come from, and I was still Hapan at heart, but my Master had showed me what it meant to be a Jedi, and that was all I wanted from life: to follow in his footsteps. The bombing of the Coruscant Temple changed all that. Nobody had expected it, but the consequences were foreseeable enough: Jedi dead, the Order hurt. Things weren't the same anymore.
I was supposed to be dead. Can you imagine? Dead to all those who believed that I could not possibly have survived. Perhaps I didn't. What I was died that day, my foundations taken apart, the pieces of my life ripped into shreds and discarded like so much trash. Ironically, the cause of it all was a simple defensive reaction to pain: flashburn in reverse. I had buried myself so deep inside that a Jedi might walk past me and never detect me. I had imprisoned myself inside my own flesh, and perhaps that's as close to truth as to metaphor. The remnants of the Temple had taken my ability to express myself, my home become shrapnel to tear away my voice and nearly the rest of me, too. It was agony only understood by those who I share it with, making them feel it the way I felt it. But describe it to you? I cannot.
Recovery took longer than you'd think, too long perhaps. Lost, blinded to the life that had left me behind in the shockwaves of a detonation, I wasn't a Jedi, not a Padawan, not really even sentient, for I could no longer express the slightest thought. The agony of physical pain, blunted by time, sharpened by the anguish of knowing that none would ever again hear my voice, of knowing my bridges were burned. Brothers and sisters taken from me in a torrent of fire, teachers and mentors vapourised just as my connections to them became. Cauterised like a lightsaber cut, the future severed from the past.
My new Master found me this way, and far from aiding me, he only added to my agonies. Pain was our teacher, anguish the fire in which we are forged, sorrow far from a soothing balm, rather an acid gnawing at our very souls. He taught me all this, made me see the foolishness of that Jedi pretense, that all their sacred foresight had failed to protect them. And how can the Jedi serve when they cannot even save themselves? No, it was a lie, one that hurt me deeply to even admit, much less discard. I could not be a Jedi, he told me, because I had not embraced my fate as the Will of the Force. No, I raged against it, struggled against chains made from circumstance, screamed a silent denial and refused to accept it. And him? He taught me that my pain was also my power, and set me free by teaching me the truest of lies: the Force serves us, not the other way around. The chains that bound me were of my own making, and it was I who had to release myself, and use my knowledge to do unto others...
So, here I am. Older, scarred, victim of more that most will experience in a lifetime. I suffer daily, trapped inside myself because I can never share myself the way you do with another. Silence is my family, loneliness is my spouse. You joke, share secrets, scream and shout when it all gets too much, whisper gentle words to the lover lying beside you, and you think nothing of it. You know nothing of true sorrow, because you can always soothe it through expression. My Master was clear on this point: all are ignorant of what it is to truly suffer, because suffering is only achieved in true silence. And silence is truly the most terrifying of things: welcome, then, to my world.
No longer Jedi, I am something else entirely. Your worst nightmare, not because of who I am, but what I represent: the terrifying fate that you would avoid at all costs. Am I to be pitied? No, that's you, I'm afraid. After all, it is the unknown that truly scares us, the potential of trauma that might happen, the possibility that all you are and all you know will simply end up as debris. Well, step into my parlor. I'll teach you. I'll let you experience that unknown first hand, and you no longer need to fear it. In fact, in the end, you won't fear anything at all. Or feel anything. Let that be my gift to you: I'll lift the veil from over your eyes, and let you see what reality is really like. And then I'll take all the pain away, a mercy I never received.
As I said, welcome to my world.
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