Lin Yue
Character
LIN YUE
"The blade moves only after the decision has already been made."
| ◈ Age | 23 |
| ◈ Species | K'paur |
| ◈ Gender | Female |
| ◈ Height | 1.86 m |
| ◈ Weight | 70 kg |
| ◈ Force User | Yes |
| ◈ Homeworld | Kiribi |
| ◈ Order | Order of the Uneti |
| ◈ Rank | Disciple |
| ◈ Discipline | Jianshu |
◈ PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Lin Yue is a tall, slender young woman whose appearance offers little immediate indication that she is anything other than near-human. She possesses pale skin, refined Kiribian features, striking light-blue eyes, and long raven-black hair that she typically wears loose down her back while gathering the upper portion neatly away from her face. A simple ornament of pale-green jade normally secures her hair, understated in much the same way as the rest of her appearance.
Her K'paur heritage is considerably less obvious. Beneath her outwardly human appearance are the denser skeletal structure, dual hearts, enhanced vision, unusual longevity, and regenerative potential characteristic of her species. Her slender build consequently disguises somewhat greater physical resilience than appearances might suggest.
Yue dresses according to the martial traditions of Kiribi rather than the better-known conventions associated with Jedi or other galactic Force Orders. Her clothing favors ivory, warm white, muted gray, charcoal, and restrained ink-blue, usually taking the form of layered martial tunics, a light shoulder mantle, broad cloth sashes, loose trousers, wrapped forearms and calves, and soft-soled footwear intended for controlled movement. Subtle embroidery and woven borders introduce Kiribian motifs without turning practical clothing into ceremonial finery.
Her movements possess the economy of someone who has repeated the same fundamentals thousands of times. Yue rarely fidgets, wastes few gestures, and settles naturally into balanced posture even when no fight is expected. More unusual markings are generally hidden beneath her clothing. The base of her neck bears the central brand of the Order of the Uneti, from which a branching network of ritual runes extends across her back. Minute fragments of kyber were embedded into the wounds during her initiation, and individual branches of the network correspond to Force disciplines in which she is being cultivated toward unusual specialization.
◈ PERSONALITY & BELIEFS
Lin Yue has already learned how a master is supposed to look. Becoming one is proving considerably more difficult.
Yue is naturally quiet, observant, and deliberate. She is neither timid nor particularly antisocial, but she sees little reason to fill silence merely because someone else finds it uncomfortable. She generally listens before speaking and, once she does speak, prefers saying exactly what she means. Her composure is genuine, but it is not effortless. Beneath the disciplined exterior exists all the impatience, competitiveness, curiosity, embarrassment, anger, and uncertainty appropriate to someone who has not yet accumulated the experience she would sometimes like others to believe she possesses.
Her response is usually to control those emotions more tightly. When irritated, she becomes quieter; when embarrassed, she becomes more formal; and when genuinely angry, her words tend to become unnervingly precise. Yue understands how to contain emotion far better than she understands how to process it, and she can sometimes mistake suppression for acceptance simply because both look equally serene from the outside.
She holds herself to standards she would rarely impose upon anyone else. In Yue's mind there already exists an idealized version of the woman she hopes to become: patient without passivity, disciplined without rigidity, powerful without arrogance, and compassionate without sentimentality. Beneath that formality is a quiet sense of humor, and Yue's jokes can be surprisingly sharp when she is comfortable enough to make them.
Yue is K'paur by blood and Kiribian by identity. Kiribi is the world whose language, customs, aesthetics, manners, and martial traditions shaped her. Her ancestry is a biological fact she neither hides nor considers irrelevant, but it has never supplanted the culture in which she actually grew up. Her name, clothing, jian, and understanding of swordsmanship are Kiribian, and each predates her formal relationship with the Order of the Uneti.
Jianshu is neither an Uneti discipline nor a Force power, and Yue does not regard it as an answer to lightsaber combat. It is the martial tradition she inherited from Kiribi. She was taught that swordsmanship begins before the blade moves, with breathing, posture, distance, balance, awareness, intention, and judgment determining whether the movement that follows has any value. She therefore favors precision over strength and economy over spectacle. The Force eventually became another sense through which she understood those principles, but it never replaced them.
The Order of the Uneti gave Yue the language through which she learned to understand her connection to the Force. She does not believe the Jedi or Sith possess exclusive authority over something as old and universal as the Force, nor does she believe wisdom consists of touching only those aspects of it that are comfortable. At the same time, she does not mistake balance for moral indifference. Power has consequences, intent matters, and self-control matters more.
On the boundary between the living and the dead, Yue is considerably less flexible. The dead may be loved, remembered, honored, and learned from, but grief does not grant the living ownership over those who have died. Death is not simply an inconvenience to be reversed when enough power becomes available.
The dead belong to the dead.
It is this principle more than any other that anchors Yue to the Uneti mission. Netherworld entities, breaches between realms, spirits unnaturally anchored to the living world, and those who would exploit the boundary between life and death are not academic concerns to her. They are the reason her Order exists and the reason her sword was changed into something capable of reaching them.
Yue also understands secrecy as an obligation rather than an inconvenience. She does not volunteer Uneti knowledge merely to satisfy curiosity and is perfectly comfortable allowing strangers to believe she is simply an itinerant monk carrying an unusual sword.
◈ STRENGTHS
▲ Jianshu — Economy of Motion — Yue has practiced Kiribian swordsmanship since childhood. Her technique emphasizes distance, timing, control of the centerline, redirection, precision, footwork, and the continuous relationship between attack and defense. There is very little wasted motion in the way she fights.
▲ Runic Savant — Perception — The strongest branches of Yue's Uneti branding concern awareness. Force-enhanced perception, danger sense, short-range precognitive impressions, spatial awareness, and the ability to read motion are areas in which she displays unusual aptitude. These gifts complement rather than replace her martial training.
▲ Runic Savant — Body and Balance — Another developed portion of her runic network concerns control over her own physical movement. Yue uses the Force to enhance balance, coordination, reflexes, short bursts of speed, and the precision with which her body follows intention.
▲ Telekinetic Precision — Yue's telekinesis follows much the same philosophy as her swordsmanship. She is considerably better at controlled, precise manipulation than overwhelming raw force. Disrupting someone's balance, retrieving her sword, moving a latch, adjusting an object's trajectory, or applying pressure at exactly the right moment comes naturally to her.
▲ K'paur Physiology — Yue's bones are unusually difficult to break, her vision is exceptionally acute, she possesses natural low-light vision, and her regenerative capability allows her to recover from injuries more rapidly when given sufficient rest and nutrition. Force-sensitive K'paur also require remarkably little ordinary sleep.
◈ WEAKNESSES
▼ Still Becoming — Yue knows what wisdom looks like, but she is considerably less certain what wisdom feels like when the correct choice is painful, humiliating, or unclear. Her training has given her structure, while the wider galaxy frequently refuses to offer any.
▼ Perfectionism — Yue's standards for herself are unreasonable. A mistake someone else would be allowed to learn from becomes something she dissects repeatedly, convinced that understanding every detail will prevent her from committing it again.
▼ Bloodlust — Yue falls toward the mild end of the K'paur bloodlust spectrum. The scent of blood tends to sharpen her focus and awaken an uncomfortable predatory awareness rather than immediately sending her into uncontrollable violence. What disturbs her most is that the sensation can sometimes feel useful.
▼ The Fade — The Fade is a degenerative condition unique to Force-sensitive K'paur in which their connection to the Force deteriorates alongside the learned self-control built around it. Yue presently shows no symptoms, but the possibility of losing the very control upon which she has built her identity deeply frightens her.
▼ Dark Side Susceptibility — Force-sensitive K'paur are naturally more vulnerable to the influence of the Dark Side. Yue's discipline provides protection, but not immunity, and her pride in that discipline could itself become dangerous if she ever begins believing she is too controlled to fall.
▼ Precision Over Power — Yue is built around technique rather than brute force. Opponents who deny her room to maneuver, overwhelm her with numbers, force prolonged contests of strength, or simply possess enough resilience to survive her precise attacks can drag her into the sort of fight she would prefer not to have.
▼ Temperature Sensitivity — Like most K'paur, Yue handles prolonged extremes of heat and cold poorly. Severe exposure can progress beyond discomfort into respiratory problems and potentially dangerous cardiac complications.
◈ HISTORY
Lin Yue was born on Kiribi to a K'paur family that had lived there long enough that Yue never grew up considering herself a visitor upon the world. Whatever distant history her species possessed elsewhere in the galaxy, her childhood belonged to Kiribian courtyards, traditions, teachers, and the particular rhythms of the culture around her. Her parents named her Lin Yue, and it remains the only name she has ever considered hers.
Her first education in discipline came from neither monks nor the Force, but from a sword instructor. Jianshu had been part of Yue's life for as long as she could meaningfully remember. As a child, she had imagined sword training would involve being handed a weapon and immediately taught how to fight. Instead, she was taught how to stand, breathe, walk, and hold her wrist correctly before being told to repeat the same movements until they became instinctive. Her Kiribian instructor possessed no association with the Order of the Uneti and never presented swordsmanship as a mystical pursuit. Technique, as he taught it, was simply the process of removing everything unnecessary between intention and action.
Yue proved talented, but she also proved impatient, and the two qualities spent much of her childhood fighting one another. Her natural physical advantages helped: K'paur eyesight was excellent, her balance came easily, and her body tolerated repeated training remarkably well. Other moments were harder to explain. Yue occasionally reacted to attacks before they properly began, seemed to know when someone was approaching before footsteps became audible, and sometimes caused nearby objects to move when emotion broke through the control she had not yet learned to maintain.
Her childhood changed abruptly when Yue lost her parents. She was eight years old when a civilian transport accident left her without an immediate relative capable of taking permanent responsibility for her, and she eventually entered one of the charitable homes maintained on Kiribi by the Order of the Uneti. To the child Yue was then, they were simply monks who provided food, education, shelter, and routine. Most importantly, they did not demand that becoming their responsibility meant ceasing to be Kiribian. Yue continued her ordinary education within the surrounding culture and was permitted to keep studying Jianshu under Kiribian teachers outside the Order, leaving her swordsmanship firmly rooted in traditions separate from the monks who were raising her.
The Uneti noticed different talents. Meditation exercises produced results that should not have been possible, and the awareness Yue displayed during martial practice became too consistent to dismiss. What had previously seemed like exceptional intuition was eventually recognized for what it was: Yue was Force-sensitive. Her education gradually acquired another layer, beginning with meditation before advanced Force techniques, awareness before power, and control before experimentation. She learned to sense the living world around her and discovered that the strange moments she had experienced throughout childhood were fragments of something infinitely larger.
For years, Yue understood only portions of what the Uneti truly were. Their charitable institutions were genuine, and their monks genuinely educated and protected those placed within their care, but another purpose existed beneath the public one, a purpose Yue would eventually have to choose before she could fully know it. In the meantime she continued training, initially keeping Jianshu and the Force in separate parts of her life. Eventually that separation became artificial. The Force could sharpen her awareness without changing a sword form, precognition could warn her of an attack without moving her feet for her, telekinesis could change the balance of an encounter without replacing judgment, and physical augmentation could make her faster without making bad technique any less dangerous. The Force did not complete Jianshu; it simply allowed Yue to perceive aspects of the art she had never possessed the senses to recognize before.
When Yue came of age, the Order offered her the choice that had always existed. She could leave with an education, skills, a community, and the Order's support in building a life elsewhere, or she could remain and finally learn what lay beneath everything she had been shown. Yue chose to stay. Only then did she fully understand the mission of the Order of the Uneti and the importance it placed upon preserving the boundary between the living galaxy and the Netherworld.
The revelation changed the meaning of much of her childhood and forced her to decide what kind of Uneti she intended to become. The answer was already hanging at her side.
Her jian.
Yue chose the sword as the weapon that would be bound to her through the ritual marking the end of her Initiate stage. Before the ceremony, the weapon was dismantled. Its Songsteel blade was retained and reforged to incorporate an Astracite-bearing fuller capable of serving as a medium for Force imbuement, while its original hilt was replaced with one built around wood from an Uneti tree and wrapped according to Kiribian tradition. Nothing about the process attempted to disguise what the weapon had always been. Instead, the Order became part of it.
Then came the crystal. Yue spent days meditating upon a large kyber crystal without food or water. Hunger became distraction, thirst became pain, time became unreliable, and eventually there was only Yue, the crystal, and whatever remained of her concentration when everything comfortable had been stripped away. She survived.
The crystal was broken, and its slivers were divided between monk and weapon. Some were embedded into the jian, while others were pressed into the fresh branding cut and burned into Yue's flesh: a central mark at the base of her neck spreading into a branching network of runes down her back, each pathway representing disciplines she might eventually awaken and master.
The healing process proved another ordeal entirely. Fever followed, then visions, and memory and nightmare became difficult to distinguish. Yue saw things she recognized, things she could not possibly have known, and places that did not obey the rules by which she understood the living world. She was frightened, became angry, and at one point wanted nothing more than for the entire ordeal to stop.
She endured anyway.
When the fever finally broke, the crystal embedded within Yue and the fragments embedded within her jian answered one another. The sword was no longer simply something she carried; it had become hers in a way no other weapon ever could be. Yue had survived the ritual, and the Initiate became a Disciple.
Her altered weapon did not make her invincible. It did something far more relevant to the work awaiting her. When the Force flowed through its Songsteel, Astracite, kyber, and Uneti wood, the jian could reach across a boundary ordinary matter could not, striking spirits, Netherworld manifestations, and other things that possessed presence without conventional flesh.
The Order had taken the sword Yue brought with her from Kiribi and given it the means to confront the enemies of the life she had chosen.
They had given her a sword capable of cutting things a sword normally could not touch.
That did not make Yue a master. At twenty-three, Lin Yue remains considerably closer to the beginning of that journey than she sometimes likes to admit. She is already a formidable swordswoman and possesses genuine discipline, unusual Force talents, and a philosophical foundation she takes seriously, but she is also impatient, proud, too harsh toward herself, and occasionally convinced that suppressing a problem is the same thing as overcoming it.
The wider galaxy is beginning to draw her beyond Kiribi and the controlled environments in which those habits formed, beyond familiar courtyards, teachers who can simply correct her stance, and problems that become easier if she repeats them enough times. Yue knows the woman she intends to become. What she has yet to discover is whether the path toward becoming her bears any resemblance to what she imagined.
◈ INVENTORY
◈ Bonded Kiribian Jian — Songsteel blade with Astracite fuller, Uneti-wood hilt core, embedded kyber slivers, and pale jade fittings. Force-imbued through Yue's Uneti initiation and capable of striking otherwise incorporeal entities.
◈ Kiribian martial clothing and travel garments
◈ Handwritten journals and meditation materials
◈ Basic medical and travel supplies
◈ Small collection of personal keepsakes from Kiribi