Pax Velloran
Character
Pax Velloran
| Faction: | The Sith Covenant |
| Occupation: | Fixer |
| Homeworld: | Ord Mantell |
| Age: | Mid-30s |
| Species: | HUMAN |
| Gender: | MALE |
| Height: | 1.87 m |
| Weight: | 84 kg |
| Force Sensitive: | POS |
| Force Alignment: | DARK SIDE |
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION
Pax Velloran is somewhere in his mid-thirties, standing a little over six feet tall with a lean build that tends to disappear beneath the layers he wears. He keeps himself in good shape, though nothing about him immediately advertises a soldier or professional fighter. His movements are measured without looking rehearsed, and he rarely seems to waste much motion.
His face is narrow, with pronounced cheekbones, a strong nose, and dark eyes that have a habit of staying on someone just a little longer than expected. There is usually some tiredness around them, though whether that comes from lack of sleep or simple habit is difficult to tell. His dark hair is worn at a medium length and pushed loosely back, rarely staying exactly where he left it. A short beard follows his jaw, neat enough to look intentional without appearing particularly cultivated.
Pax dresses well, though not extravagantly. Black, charcoal, iron-grey and the occasional darker red make up most of his wardrobe, usually in fitted shirts, layered jackets, high collars and long coats made from durable rather than especially luxurious materials. There is enough polish to pass through a respectable lobby without drawing attention, but little that would look out of place in a docking bay or crowded cantina. Some of his clothes probably cost more than they should have. Pax has always considered appearances another kind of access.
INVENTORY
- Compact Blaster Pistol
- Encrypted Datapad / Portable Data Terminal
- Secure Comlink
- Electronic Bypass and Data-Spike Kit
- Assorted Encrypted Storage Wafers
- Concealed Lightsaber
- Utility Knife
- Several Unregistered Credit Chits
PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS
Pax is easy enough to talk to when he wants to be. He rarely raises his voice, doesn't seem particularly bothered by silence, and has a dry sense of humor that tends to surface when people least expect it. He asks questions without always making them sound like questions, and has an irritating habit of remembering names, stories, and small details from conversations other people have long since forgotten. Getting the same information out of Pax is considerably more difficult.
He can spend an evening listening to someone talk about their work, family, ambitions or problems and leave having offered remarkably little about himself in return. He doesn't necessarily lie when a subject turns personal. More often, he answers around the question or lets the conversation move somewhere else. Some of that is professional habit, and some of it comes from spending years watching otherwise harmless details become useful in someone else's hands.
What bothers him most is being caught unaware. A failed job can be written off and bad information can be replaced, but discovering that something happened right beneath his nose is harder for him to leave alone. When that happens, Pax has a tendency to go backward through conversations, records, manifests, names and messages looking for whatever he missed. Sometimes finding the answer matters less than understanding why he did not see it the first time.
His relationship with the Dark Side grew out of much the same temperament. Pax has little use for the idea that anger becomes strength simply by being indulged. Fear, hatred, ambition and desire all have their uses, and he is hardly above acting on any of them, but emotion that ruins a useful opportunity strikes him as little more than poor judgment. He has met enough men who destroyed things they wanted because hurting someone felt better in the moment to know where that road usually ends.
None of this should be mistaken for compassion. Pax will lie when the truth costs too much, manipulate someone if asking politely will not work, buy information that was never meant to be sold, and keep leverage he hopes never to need. Violence is not off the table either, though he generally considers it a poor opening move. Dead men answer very few questions.
The Jedi have gradually become a particular point of interest. Pax's curiosity began with their history rather than any personal grievance, but the more he read, the less comfortable he became with the contradiction between the way the Jedi described themselves and the influence they repeatedly held. They stood apart from governments while advising them, rejected temporal power while participating in wars, and repeatedly assumed responsibility for deciding how Force-sensitive children ought to be raised. More curious still was their persistence. Orders collapsed, temples fell, archives were lost and generations passed, yet eventually someone raised the name again.
Pax doesn't yet know what conclusion he intends to draw from that. For the moment, he is still gathering the pieces.
/-/-/ SUBJECT ASSESSMENT — SOURCE UNVERIFIED /-/-/
Velloran remains difficult to categorize from available reporting. He does not present himself as an enforcer, mercenary, political operative, or intelligence professional, though his work has intersected with all four. Accounts from unrelated sources tend to describe the same man: polite, observant, and considerably more interested in listening than explaining himself.
The extent of his network is uncertain. Velloran appears to rely on a small number of dependable contacts surrounded by a wider collection of acquaintances, paid sources, favors, and temporary relationships. Several individuals believed to have supplied him with useful information may not be aware they have done so. Reports suggesting a larger intelligence apparatus have not been substantiated, and may owe as much to Velloran's reputation as to his actual reach.
His finances appear similarly modest. Secure communications, private data storage, regular travel and a professional appearance suggest reliable income, but not substantial independent wealth. Source payments, equipment, travel, bribes and purchased access appear to consume much of what he earns.
Force sensitivity is confirmed. Known or suspected applications include heightened situational awareness, anticipation of immediate danger, perception of emotional states, limited mental influence and some ability to reduce notice of his presence. Combat training is also considered probable, though Velloran rarely advertises either and appears to prefer conventional solutions when they remain available.
The principal concern is his response to incomplete information. Velloran has repeatedly continued investigating matters after their practical relevance should reasonably have ended, particularly when events developed in ways he did not anticipate. In several cases, determining how information escaped him became more important than the original problem.
At present, Velloran remains a capable independent operator whose reputation occasionally exceeds his reach. There is no evidence that he currently possesses the intelligence network sometimes attributed to him.
There is sufficient reason to consider what might happen if he eventually does.
STRENGTHS
Pattern Recognition: Pax pays attention to details that are easy to dismiss when they appear alone. A changed shipping route, an unexplained absence, or a payment through the wrong company may mean very little at first. He is good at remembering those details long enough for a second or third one to make the first important. The Force helps on occasion, particularly when something feels wrong before he can explain why, but most of the work still comes down to patience and knowing where to look.
Social Instinct: Pax tends to let other people establish the shape of a conversation before deciding how much of himself to put into it. With some he is personable, with others purely businesslike, and with a few he says almost nothing at all. He has learned that most people eventually make their motives clear if given enough room to talk. Knowing whether someone wants credits, recognition, reassurance, leverage or simply to feel important has opened more doors for him than intimidation ever has.
Force Intuition: Pax's strongest connection to the Force tends to arrive as instinct rather than spectacle. He may catch the beginning of violence before a weapon is drawn, recognize fear beneath an otherwise convincing performance, or become convinced that something apparently unimportant deserves another look. These impressions rarely give him complete answers. More often, they tell him where to start asking questions.
WEAKNESSES
The Need to Know: Pax has difficulty accepting that some questions simply do not have answers available to him. When something catches him by surprise, he often keeps pulling at the thread after somebody else would have let it go. Most of the time that persistence serves him well. Occasionally it leads him somewhere expensive, dangerous, or better left alone.
Compartmentalized: Pax is far more comfortable learning about other people than allowing them the same opportunity. Even friends tend to receive pieces of him rather than the whole. He doesn't necessarily mean to keep people at a distance, but years of deciding what information was safe to share have made the habit nearly automatic. Someone can know Pax for a long time before realizing how few personal questions he has ever actually answered.
Limited Reach: Pax knows useful people, but not nearly as many as some clients assume. There are officials who will not take his call, systems he cannot access, organizations that have never heard his name, and questions he simply cannot answer. He rarely corrects people who think otherwise. Sometimes that reputation opens a door. Sometimes it means accepting a job first and then scrambling to become as connected as the client already believes he is.
HISTORY
Pax Velloran was born on Ord Mantell, in the Mid Rim's Bright Jewel system, where freighters, warehouses, customs offices and cargo yards were an ordinary part of life. Growing up around the people who kept that traffic moving taught him early that authority and access were rarely the same thing. A dispatcher might know more about a shipping company than its owner, a mechanic might know which captains were actually stranded, and the right customs clerk could solve in minutes what official procedure might delay for days. Pax remembered those details, and more importantly, he remembered the people attached to them.
By his early twenties he was working as a courier, carrying packages, data, documents and occasionally passengers between worlds. The work gradually expanded as previous clients began returning with different problems. Someone needed a missing shipment found, another needed an introduction, and someone else wanted records obtained without attracting the wrong kind of attention. Pax never really decided to become a fixer; by the time people started calling him one, he had already been doing the work for years. His talent was less in having an answer to every problem than in knowing—or finding—the person who might.
The Force had been part of his life long before Pax understood what it was. For years he dismissed it as unusually good instinct: changing plans for reasons he could not explain, recognizing fear beneath anger, or sensing that a conversation was about to become violent before anyone reached for a weapon. Eventually there were too many incidents to call coincidence. Whatever training followed came outside the Jedi Order and, from what little Pax says about it, outside most established traditions. It taught him enough to understand and control what he had been doing instinctively, while leaving him considerably more interested in what the Force could do than in the ceremony surrounding it.
That curiosity eventually led Pax into the history of the Dark Side. He began collecting accounts of old Sith orders, ruined empires, surviving traditions and lesser-known practitioners, partly to understand his own abilities and partly because unanswered questions have never sat comfortably with him. At the same time, his work as a fixer was producing another collection of information. Names, favors, reliable pilots, corrupt officials, company records, shipping routes and unexplained cargo movements accumulated until Pax began noticing connections between jobs that should have had nothing to do with one another.
It was through that overlap that he first became aware of the Sith Covenant. The first signs were not particularly dramatic. Certain businesses operating through the Core surrendered unusual portions of their production, industrial interests changed hands under terms that made little commercial sense, and cargo moved toward destinations that did not seem to justify it. Local governments remained in place and ordinary business continued, but wealth and resources were being redirected upward through arrangements that looked less like conventional taxation than negotiated tribute. The deeper Pax followed the paperwork, the more often people connected to the Dark Side appeared somewhere nearby.
That interested him more than the mere existence of another Sith organization would have. The Covenant did not seem to have swept aside every government within its reach and replaced them with a single bureaucracy. On many worlds the old political structures remained largely intact, provided they accommodated the power above them. Tribute might take the form of credits in one system, industrial concessions or production in another. Elsewhere, the influence of individual Sith seemed almost personal. Coruscant stood apart under direct Sith rule, but across much of the Core the lines between local autonomy and Sith authority were considerably less obvious.
For Pax, that ambiguity was difficult to ignore. His livelihood had always depended on figuring out where power actually rested rather than where official records said it should, and the Covenant appeared to operate on much the same principle on a scale he had never encountered before.
Its preoccupation towards the Jedi gave him another reason to keep looking. Pax had already begun developing his own doubts about the Jedi through his study of Force history, and the possibility that people within the Covenant had reached similar conclusions interested him. That did not mean he assumed they were correct. If anything, Pax wanted to know how they had arrived there and what they knew that he did not.
He has not formally sworn himself to the Covenant and does not yet think of himself as one of their number. He is no longer studying them entirely from the outside, either. Contacts have been cultivated, work pursued, and Pax has begun taking opportunities that bring him closer to Covenant affairs when they present themselves. The Covenant offers access to people, knowledge and institutions that would take Pax years to reach alone, but the attraction goes beyond professional opportunity. It sits directly at the intersection of his interest in the Dark Side, his growing suspicion of the Jedi, and the role information has gradually assumed in his life.
For now, Pax remains what he has been for most of his adult life: a fixer with a small but growing network, a reputation somewhat larger than his actual reach, and a habit of keeping information long after its immediate usefulness has passed. Whether his interest in the Covenant eventually becomes loyalty, opportunity, or something else remains undecided.