Tanith was born the daughter of an Alliance Navy officer, spending the first few years of her life on Coruscant before taking to space aboard one starship after another. As she explored the decks of each ship, she found herself drawn to the workshops, engine rooms and various pieces of intricate machinery that she sought desperately to understand the inner workings of, even as a young girl. She would constantly disappear from her family's rooms, which wasn't hard when her mother was more interested in the bottom of a bottle than looking after young Tanith, to visit these places of grease, gears and grime. The engineers at first were hesitant to have this daughter of a powerful officer scurrying about their dangerous environments, but once she began showing genuine interest and asking insightful questions for one so young they were all too happy to let her stay and sometimes pass on their knowledge.
Her father was always chasing her around each ship when he was off duty, dragging her back to the private rooms with an admonishment about the dangers of such places for a child. After many, many times doing this, however, word reached him from the engineers and technicians of her bright, inquisitive, intelligent nature, and so he relented, allowing his daughter to pursue that which seemed to interest her so. At least she would be better looked after when he was on duty in the reactor vault than by his morose wife.
By her early teens, Tanith was a permanent fixture amongst the engineers, craftsmen and technicians of whatever ship her father was stationed on. Her mother had left them years before, sick of the star-wandering lifestyle, without even a word to either Tanith or her father. Despite never having a close relationship with her mother, Tanith became quiet and dour after her departure, choosing to devote herself to her passion for technology rather than deal with her emotions. It was then that she had her first cigarra in order to calm her thoughts, which slowly became an addiction over the following years. Her father, an expert marksman himself, attempted to bond with his troubled daughter by teaching her to fire an assortment of weaponry. Tanith enjoyed this, eventually, but only if it allowed her moments of adrenalin-fuelled catharsis. At sixteen, Tanith's life was shattered entirely.
The ship she and her father were on was attacked, disabled and boarded by pirates, who slew most of the high-ranking personnel and slapped wrist-binders on the rest. Tanith was entirely unaware of her father's fate, and could pry nothing from her tight-lipped captors. Her mechanical talents were made known to the pirates, who quickly put her to working on their own weapons, armour and whatever other work they needed. A year after capture, she finally managed to convince one pirate whom she had feigned friendship with to tell her her father's whereabouts. He had been sold at the first shadowport the pirate ship had put in at after the raid. The pirate had no more information, but it was enough to spur Tanith on to planning her escape.
Tanith, after a few months of servitude, began accompanying the pirates shoreside in order to ensure the correct parts she needed for her current projects were purchased, but she would be chained by her left wrist to whatever pirate escorted her. It was while shackled to the pirate who mistakenly assumed the two were good friends that Tanith made her move. She had smuggled a small knife she had fashioned herself off the ship, and stabbed the pirate in the back when she deemed the time was right. He lay dying, gargling on his own blood, eyes both accusing and confused. She realised at the worst possible moment that the key to the binders lay back on the ship, and not with her escort, who summoned up superhuman levels of endurance to sieze her by the throat and try to choke the life from her. She struggled in his grip, beginning to black out and failing to pierce the pirate's body armour with her strength failing her.
After falling unconscious, she woke up in the slavehold back on the ship. Other prisoners warned her she was to be executed once the pirates found out she was awake. She was, however, now chained to a wall by her left wrist. She realised she still had a small dagger concealed about her person, and quickly came to the conclusion there was only one thing to do. She sawed her own hand off, snuck around the ship to cauterise her wound and fled off at the shadowport they were still docked at.
She failed to track her father's location after hopping to three different worlds he was purported to be on. The only clue she found was his old bush jacket, discovered in the slimy paws of the Hutt who had first purchased her father from the pirates, kept as a grim trophy. She made sure to leave that palace in cinders.
