Born with a strong sensitivity and talent with the Force, Iskellia was a strange child. Small objects around her would move and float when she became bored, and she would sometimes show an uncanny ability to sense the moods of others. Her emerald eyes were always quietly watching and analyzing and judging everything, and the other children feared her studying gaze. Fear quickly turned to hate, and hate became torment as Iskellia found herself harassed and bullied by them when she was alone at school with nobody else around to protect her. She took to hiding, escaping from the kids who tormented her and the parents who didn’t understand her.
Iskellia was a good student at the local academy, and as long as she continued to bring home high grades, her parents were initially unconcerned with however she chose to occupy her time. With her father often distant and absent, Iskellia’s early childhood was happy with her loving mother staying home to care for her. The more Iskellia learned of the galaxy beyond Alderaan and its vicious nobility, the more she wanted to explore. The walls of her room filled up with her own artwork: music posters, paintings of city life on Coruscant, comic strips on Tatooine, zombie outbreaks on Taris…. Iskellia desperately yearned for more to life without ever asking herself what she would do if she ever got it.
She spent more time at home, becoming engrossed in the digital world of the HoloNet as a substitute for her lack of physical friends. The other children of the community had hated her for so long it became natural to them, as they could no longer remember ever doing anything else. They would frequently bully her or beat her up, often driving her off with thrown rocks, vandalism and petty theft. The young girl often came home from school with cuts and bruises, and she was more miserable than ever.
However, as Iskellia grew and matured, so too did her wild, natural power with the Force. She had little control over her abilities, telekinetic waves emanating from her in times of panic and fear. An ill-tempered hunting hound from their neighbor’s estate lunged at her on the way to class, and her wave of terrified power broke the animal’s leg. She later overheard that the crippled animal was put down, as the hunter could no longer hunt.
The fear and hatred of others had the tendency to breed disaster whenever she was around, and the young Iskellia became vindictive and vengeful. Tormented as she was by the other children, she would often strike back at them. Breaking toys and bones was easy enough with her fledgeling telekinetic capabilities, but breaking homes and lives was far more cruel. She listened to the whispering minds around her, plumbing their secrets and revealing infidelity or denouncing lies at the worst possible times, calculated for maximum social devastation. She was a wrecking ball to her entire community, and the more destructive she became, the more her peers ostracized and hated her, which only fed her own fury.
Then the deaths started. First it was the girl who had pushed Iskellia into the river, only for Iskellia to instinctively pull her in with the Force, leading the girl to drown herself in the struggle. Then it was a boy who lunged at her with a knife, only for her wild telekinetic surge to accidentally send the knife back into his own throat. The family’s coffers and funds were being drained dry by lawsuits, emergency medical bills, and bribes paid to her victims to stay quiet.
Desperate, her father even moved the family to another city entirely to try to start over when she was 7, telling his daughter that he had accepted a new job in the capital city of Aldera. A lie, of course. Their small town of Juranno had been effectively torn apart.
As Iskellia grew into a teenager and young woman, however, the problems only got worse. Puberty was not kind to her, leaving her taller, but still woefully thin with barely a curve anywhere. Her self-consciousness amplified her jealousy and rage at the more attractive phsysiques of her peers, and this rage soon turned to destruction as she fell back into her vengeful ways. Despite her mother’s best efforts, without anyone to help channel and control her, Iskellia’s wrath grew more terrible as she fell to violence and revenge as a first resort, rather than a last.
Finally, with financial and professional ruin staring him in the face as the rumors about his daughter spread, Kandor Sarken made a choice. He had heard of Novalife, a company that offered specialized counseling sessions, psychology and therapy sessions for “troubled” youths with “unusual” powers. As he was away from home on Coruscant for a business trip, he thought the least he could do to help his wayward daughter was to arrange for such aid. The Novalife representatives assured him that she would be well taken care of, and that the troubles and problems she caused were absolutely guaranteed to go away.
However, unknown to him, Novalife was just a front. Advance agents of Revan’s new Sith Empire were scouting the galaxy, probing the Republic for weaknesses for the master strategist to exploit. One such weakness, he determined, was the Jedi’s policy of recruiting the youth. He thought that if promising Force-gifted youngsters could be assassinated – or, even better, turned towards Sith ideologies – they would serve as fine foot soldiers in his coming conquest. The Novalife psychologist, one of the Sith’s advance agents, ultimately recommended that young Iskellia was too powerful and willful to submit to Sith dominance, and so selected her for a Sith death squad instead.
The commandos were sent to their luxurious mansion in the middle of the night. Guards were slaughtered, and all of Kandor’s own defensive inventions meant nothing to the crack commandos who blew through the walls with brute force. Iskellia’s mother was killed in the invasion as she threw herself across her daughter to absorb a round of blasterfire. The raven-haired young woman looked down at her mother’s cooling body, then looked up at the intruders. Her eyes began to glow with green power….
The next few minutes were hazy and difficult to recall as Iskellia finally unleashed all of the power she had been so carefully bottling up for so many years in a howling tide of grieving wrath. Somewhere amid the screams and carnage that followed, one trooper managed to crawl his way out of the room with a missing leg, severed by a jagged spear of glass telekinetically wielded like a cleaver. As he activated his comm to call for reinforcements, he pulled a thermal detonator off his belt and tossed it in before collapsing from blood loss. By sheer random chance, the detonator rolled right next to Iskellia’s face, where she had collapsed with sobs of grief next to her mother’s body as fires from the attack raged and spread throughout the house. The ensuing explosion atomized her mother’s corpse and blew half of Iskellia’s face and head off, sending her tumbling beneath the heavy dining room table. Exhausted by her eruption of power and pinned on her right side, she lay helpless and screaming as the fires began to consume the left side of her body along with the rest of her home.
However, death was not her fate. She was rescued by Karsa Neyari, a Nautolan diplomat who had been sent to negotiate a transfer of alliance between two unrelated houses. Either luck or the Force drew the woman to House Sarken that day, and Karsa arrived only to find the Sarken mansion in flames. She pulled Iskellia from the rubble and immediately transferred her to the nearest medical center. The young woman was horribly mutilated by her burns and wounds, and even with top of the line surgical droids, there were limits to what bacta could do. The left side of her body was so badly damaged that the healthy right side of her body had to be cannibalized to make up the difference. Her crushed left lung was removed, and with only one wheezing lung left to struggle through a burnt trachea, Iskellia was fitted with a negative-pressure breath mask to let her one lung do the work of two. Her long, flowing black hair had burned away to the skull, and the chemicals released in their high-tech home as it collapsed made her injuries far worse than normal fire would otherwise inflict. Her high cheekbones of Alderaani nobility now gave her face a gaunt, skull-like appearance beneath her heavy breath respirator oxy-mask, though her emerald eyes burned as brilliantly as ever out of sunken, wasted sockets.
When Iskellia recovered enough to be removed from the Intensive Trauma Unit of the medical center, she received a nasty surprise in the form of a bill: over 5 million credits. Even if she chose to drain her father’s accounts and estate, Iskellia didn’t have nearly enough to pay for it all. Instead, she chose to flee. As soon as she was able to leave the hospital and live on her own, she raided her family’s estate for a few last objects that survived, drained her trust fund dry, and bought passage offworld. This was finally her chance to explore the galaxy, but under circumstances that were far worse than she had ever imagined.
Her travels took her to Nar Shaddaa, the Smuggler’s Moon. She had heard a great deal about its pleasures, its reputation as the galaxy’s Party Planet where the casinos never closed and any manner of pleasure could be bought there at a price. When she arrived, however, she found that her imagination far outshone the reality of desperation, poverty, and rags-to-riches-to-rags rollercoasters of wealth and disappointment. Staying away from the high-rolling districts, Iskellia found herself work as a minor bureaucrat for the Port Authority, processing the landing permit requests for incoming ships. It was lucrative work that paid the bills of her small single-bedroom apartment, but dull and unfulfilling.
To top it all off, her medical expenses were getting harder to meet. Bacta-infused filters for her breath mask felt good and soothed her ravaged throat, but were rare and expensive to procure on the black or even gray markets. Normal filters and a spare mask were fairly easy to procure, but did nothing for the constant pain of her scars leaving her in a grouchy mood. Normal painkillers offered little relief, and the ones strong enough to make a difference were almost as expensive as the bacta filters, as both were often stolen from upscale hospitals in the Core Worlds.
Eventually she decided that, living upon the Smuggler’s Moon, she had better start living up to the name. Smuggling and assassination seemed to be the more lucrative pursuits on Nar Shaddaa anyway. She had tried her hand at gambling for a while, but she could only use her powers so many times and pass it off as “luck” before the Hutts running the tables got suspicious.
Her paltry funds allowed her to purchase a ramshackle speeder bike and begin making her hand as a smuggler, running local deliveries and passenger services with a minimum of questions asked. The zippy little speeder bike was her pride and joy, having liberated it from a swoop gang that ran afoul of a turf war. While most who came to the Smuggler’s Moon had their own transports, there were always those who, for one reason or another, wished to move about the bustling metropolis in complete anonymity, or who needed a particular package sent to a particular place by a certain time. Iskellia never asked questions; her empathic probing often told her far more than her customers thought they revealed. This saved her life on more than one occasion, as some of her prospective clients wished to have no witnesses upon completion of whatever they wanted delivered. Having the ability to sense this sort of deceit the moment she sat down proved an invaluable boon.
One of the side benefits of having her little speeder meant that she could join in the occasional swoop race that was held in the more dangerous underlevels of the city. The Force was her constant guide, humming with power and letting her react to obstacles and interference split seconds before her rivals to turn the tide in her favor. The income from such races wasn’t much, but extra credits never went unappreciated.
As she began to assert herself and income began flowing in, Iskellia was starting to feel like she had life figured out. An apartment of her own, an interesting and exciting job, enough income to fund her hobbies of HoloNet gaming and slicing….life finally seemed pretty good for Iskellia Sarken, all things considered.
But all things must change, and the ever-lawless slums of her apartment block on Nar Shaddaa were no exception. A gang of Hutt enforcers clashed with a group of spice haulers in the room next door to Iskellia, and it was only the tingle of the Force that saved her when one of the Hutt thugs blasted a rocket launcher into the room, liquidating the occupants and blowing Iskellia’s adjoining wall apart. The asthmatic Alderaani drew her own weapon and hid in the bathroom, waiting for the Hutt enforcers to finish their business and leave.
Afterward, picking through the rubble, Iskellia managed to scavenge together her possessions enough to fit into a backpack and a spacer’s duffel. Life, it seemed, always found a way to kick her while she was down.
She hopped aboard the first freighter she could find, a battered vessel named the Stormhawk bound for some planet called Viscara. Never heard of it, but maybe it was time to spend some time away from the high-density urban crush and head to the countryside. Little did she know, however, that the sleepy little Czerka colony held surprises for her…
