Character Lady Soraya Caldris

[Soraya Caldris]

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SORAYA CALDRIS

Age	Early 20s
Species	Hapan
Gender	Female
Height	180 cm | 5'11"
Weight	57 kg | 125 lbs
Force Sensitive	Yes

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Tall, with long and tapering limbs, Soraya features the narrow, elegant, aristocratic build. Slender without looking frail, she has straight shoulders, a lean waist, and a gentle curve at waist and chest rather than an exaggerated hourglass build. Even in practical clothing, she carries herself with a posture that is so drilled into her that she might have been born that way rather than trained. She carries herself as a woman brought up to be observed in one of the harshest glares in the known universe the Hapan Court. Level chin, straight back, with graceful movements that are measured. Jedi training has taken some of the ceremony out of her carriage, but not the underlying confidence and precision. She seldom slouches and never in front of people she doesn't know and trust.

Soraya's face is long, slender, and structured -- not delicate. High cheekbones offer definition that narrows into a clean jaw and a softly pointed chin. Her complexion trends towards warm, like her father, rather than her mother's paler coloring. It looks golden in sunlight, but paler under artificial lights. Her brow is broad and framed with thick, dark eyebrows in a natural shape. Her eyes are large, dark brown, slightly almond-shaped, wreathed with heavy lashes. In warmer light they look closer to amber, but at distance -- either physical or emotional -- they can look black. She has a long, straight nose, narrow through the bridge but substantial enough that she is considered the plain jane of the four Caldris sisters. Her mouth is a touch wide, well-shaped, with a pronounced cupid's bow and a fuller lower lip. At rest, she looks serious, with a neutral expression easily mistaken for displeasure or hauteur or just plain RBF.

Her hair is very dark brown, lustrous, thick, and long enough to fall well below her shoulders when loose. She often wears it in a restrained braid or braided loop.

INVENTORY

One (1) lightsaber, blue bladed.
One (1) blaster pistol, Hapan manufacture.
One (1) knapsack, including: clothes, personal effects, credit chits, datapad, communicator.

PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS
Soraya is composed, observant, and difficult to know quickly. She was trained from childhood to move through the challenging theaters of formal Hapan Society without giving offense or surrendering advantage, and later taught by her Jedi instructors to examine emotion before acting upon it. In moments of calm, the two disciplines reinforce one another, but in recent moments of crisis, her ability to control her tongue and her actions can weaken. She has a strong instinct to conceal her emotions and to avoid making promises she doesn't know she can keep.

Her composure -- or perhaps more accurately, her reserve -- isn't really coldness. Soraya is capable of considerable warmth, particularly with frightened people, younger people, and people in crisis. Her care is practical and attentive rather than made of easy reassurance or exaggerated affection. She remembers what people tell her and notices if they haven't eaten or slept and tries to give them useful choices when circumstances allow.

Soraya is forgiving of ignorance and fear-based actions and particularly unforgiving for those who instill or exploit fear in others.

She displays the confidences -- and insecurities -- of someone raised among wealth, rank, and position. This doesn't take the shape of obvious boasting, but there is a touch of something that would approach arrogance for those who came up outside the insular confines of the Hapes Consortium. When she takes the trouble to speak, she expects to be heeded, and she assumes she can learn whatever she wishes to know, with extremely limited patience for incompetence, obstructionism, or defiance. She is accustomed to beauty, education, and etiquette as social currency. Jedi training taught her to question these judgments, but didn't erase them. Outsiders might consider her expectations snobbery, especially towards people who mistake crudity for honesty or aggression for strength.

It's frightfully common.

In that vein, Soraya has a disdain for combat, which could be mistaken for timidity. She has an instinct to control conditions under which such conflicts occur: gather information, identify leverage, and prevent opponents from setting the pace. When surprised or frightened, Soraya becomes more precise. People who don't know her well could misread this for calm.

Pride in her accomplishments is mirrored by a deep shame in her failures. Praise makes her uncomfortable when she believes it is undeserved, or if it is offered for an outcome accomplished by methods that would not survive an examination. Pity is worse. Soraya would rather be condemned for a choice she made than treated as some unfortunate to whom events merely happened.

Despite these personality elements, Soraya isn't humorless. She has a dry and restrained sense of humor. Among people she knows well and trusts, her personality can be sharper and occasionally petty, revealing a younger and livelier woman beneath the solemnity of the Jedi exterior or the weight of position -- one who once expected a future that contained ordinary friendships, family visits, professional frustrations, and time enough to grow into herself.

As far as her beliefs are concerned, Soraya is politically committed to Hapan sovereignty. The Mandalorian occupation, the purge, and their installation of a puppet Queen Mother are intolerable to her, regardless of her opinion of any individual claimant to the throne. Legitimate Hapan government must arise from the Hapans themselves -- naturally, the matriarchal nobility, let's not get crazy -- and not host of foreign brutes with a nonsensical 'culture' propping up an illegitimate monarchy.

Her feelings toward the aristocracy are more complicated. She is both privileged by, and caged by, her position in the nobility. As the daughter of a wealthy and influential regional aristocrat, she has access to money and comforts and privilege. But as the youngest of six children, and the fourth daughter of four, she grew up understanding that she was not expected to be significant in dynastic concerns. The fact that she was something of a surprise -- with over a decade between the birth of the next closest sibling -- means that she was isolated from most of her siblings' social lives, and her parents' peers often did not have children in her age range. She is capable of disapproving of corruption, dynastic vanity, and the casual cruelty of people protected from consequences, but Soraya is less skilled at recognizing when her own assumptions about breeding, education, and authority reproduce the same faults, even if in quieter form.

Her Hapan upbringing has also left her with a set of inherent expectations around class and particularly gender. She is accustomed to women exercising authority and men being more readily evaluated as consorts, assets, dependents, or instruments of a house's will rather than as pure, empowered individuals. Jedi life challenged these assumptions and Soraya would consciously reject crude claims of female superiority. She would choose to frame it instead as a cultural recognition or even a bastion of female empowerment in a galaxy that is not always kind to women.

She is aware this is self-serving to the point of being disingenuous.

Still, she may reflexively underestimate men in general, particularly if they expect command as a matter of course. Her prejudice is more likely to emerge as skepticism than contempt for outsiders, but it is still prejudice. She is less flexible when it comes to Hapan men overstepping their place; they should know better.

Perhaps the most consequential part of her philosophy was drilled into her by her mother: helplessness while in possession of power to act is morally obscene. This belief drives her courage, her compassion, and much of what is best in her. But it is also the root of the dark impulses that have awoken within her during the purge and its immediate aftermath. Soraya increasingly confuses the ability to intervene with the right to decide and the duty to protect with authority to control.

Soraya likes:

• Savory food, particularly roasted vegetables and river fish, soft cheese, and savory pastries.
• Floral tea, over-steeped, with sweetener.
• Cooking [note: in this instance enjoying the process is not a reliable guarantee of positive results].
• Music by string quartets or other small-scale instrumentals.
• Legal intrigues, evening soap operas, and murder mystery holodramas.
• Prefers cool rooms for sleeping.
• Swimming, for exercise or pleasure.
• Dancing for leisure.

Soraya dislikes:

• Melons. Too mushy.
• Caf, unless it is absolutely drowned by creamer and sweetener.
• Food with heavy cream sauces.
• Foods in aspic or other gelatin-based concoctions.
• Loud alarms, particularly those that sound like klaxons.
• Horror holofilms.

Physical habits:

• Naturally left-handed, though all-but functionally ambidextrous due to training.
• Handwriting is narrow, upright, very legible. Prefers writing personal notes by hand.
• Curls her hair around her index finger when exhausted; denies this religiously.
• Wears little jewelry regularly, other than a small Caldris signet ring as a pendant under her clothes.
• Hates the appearance and sensation of chipped nail lacquer, so usually wears none.

Social quirks:

• Remembers how people take their drinks (a relic of her time as assistant hostess to her mother's salons).
• Loathes being sung to on her birthday, particularly in public.
• Rarely uses diminutives or pet names. If she does it's a sign of deep affection.
• Says "I see" to mean "I disagree but it's not worth arguing the point."
• Uncomfortable with compliments about her appearance due to her Hapan upbringing. Being smokin' hot is like the bare minimum.
• An unusual attraction to a well-shaped nose. Don't ask.

STRENGTHS

• Social Perception: skilled at reading hierarchy, tension, and motive as a result of her court upbringing. It makes her effective as a negotiator, investigator, or infiltrator.
• Composure: Soraya functions well in a crisis. Fear tends to narrow her attention rather than fluster her, ands he can give orders, maintain a deception, or keep focus on an objective while injured or frightened. There is a cost, but it usually comes after the adrenaline stops pumping.
• Lightsaber Training: Disciplined in the use of a lightsaber, she is better defensively than offensively. She excels at holding ground, controlling distance, and generally surviving long enough to escape or alter the circumstances.
• Mental Influence: With a particular talent for sensing fear, uncertainty, and emotional pressure, when used properly this allows her to calm people, recognize people close to snapping, and seek to defuse confrontation. It also makes her particularly adept with mind tricks, coercive suggestion, and amplifying fear.
• Access to House Caldris: While she is not the heir to House Caldris, her family name still opens doors and provides her access to money, safety, and contacts. She is usually loath to take advantage of her family, particularly during times of crisis, because it could expose her family to risk.

WEAKNESSES

• Limited Offensive Power: Soraya is not a battlefield prodigy. She can defend herself ably, and is dangerous in a contained confrontation, but she lacks the raw physical strength and overwhelming offensive ability to dominate larger groups or heavily armored enemies. Prolonged combat wears her down.
• Need to Control: Soraya becomes less reasonable when she cannot identify or manage a threat. Uncertainty in a crisis feels intolerable to her, particularly when lives hang in the balance. She may act without adequate evidence, conceal information from allies, or reject a safer plan that involves trusting someone she's not convinced by.
• Secrecy and Shame: Soraya is willing to acknowledge that she has made mistakes, but reluctant to reveal enough detail for others to judge them. She hides injuries, emotional deterioration, ethically dubious decisions, and lapses into dark side territory because she fears being restrained or distrusted.
• Weak Practical Skills: Soraya can use standard vehicles, communications equipment, and Jedi and everyday tech. But she is not a natural mechanic or improvisational engineer. She doesn't have a talent for diagnosing machinery failures. She's always had people for that!
• Provincial Aristocrat: Consciously more egalitarian than some Hapans of her class, Soraya still carries assumptions about class, gender, education, and authority. She can underestimate men, dismiss plebs -- err, peasants? No, working class people, that's what they liked to be called, right? -- or people who don't communicate in a polished way. This creates blind spots going both ways; she may discount those not of her kind, or implicitly trust her own sort to her detriment.
• Night Vision: Like most of her Hapan brethren, Soraya has poor low-light vision.

HISTORY

Lady Soraya Caldris was born the youngest daughter of a wealthy provincial Hapan noble house, whose influence rested less on court office than on land, patronage, and generations of local authority. House Caldris was well known on its homeworld and respectable enough to maintain a presence at the royal court, a fact that was only bolstered by the fact that it had little appetite for intrigues. With several older siblings ahead of her, including three elder sisters, Soraya was spared the heaviest of dynastic expectations. Still, she was educated as befitted her station, trained in etiquette, languages, history, music, and social perception, but with her future left comparatively open.

Her childhood was spent mainly at the Caldris estate and court. She was remembered as observant, well-behaved (generally), and capable of being polished when required. The discovery of her sensitivity to the Force before her tenth birthday redirected her life before the expectations of aristocratic life fully took root. She was trained in a local enclave, where she was allowed to continue interacting with her family. The habits of her upbringing initially proved both useful and difficult to surrender. She adapted readily to formal study, meditation, and disciplined training, although austerity and suspicion of attachment to possessions proved challenging.

Recently, after over a decade of study, she was elevated to the rank of Knight in the enclave.