Character Vesper Thrace

[Vesper Thrace]

VESPER THRACE

Age	Early 30s
Species	Human
Gender	Female
Height	5'5" | 1.65m
Weight	108 lbs | 49kg
Force Sensitive	Yes

PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

Vesper Thrace is surprisingly petite for a woman of her station. In a world dominated by physical strength and presence, she towers over her own slight height and stands stronger than her own slender frame. She is below average height, compact and wiry rather than bulky. She has a roughly hourglass figure, with shoulders a touch broader than hips and a narrow waist. There is nothing soft about the way she looks; her cheekbones appear to be razor sharp, her cheeks not so much gaunt as utilitarian, her eyes sharp as vibroblades, darkness peering from darkness, the dark eyeshadow and eyeliner, so common to her that they might as well be tattoos (of which she has a few, including most prominently, an older sigil of a religion she never knew but which was important to her parents.

A face that is all hard lines and controlled tension, her cheekbones are high and her jaw is strong, traits only accentuated by the fact that she wears her jet hair smoothed back severely, either into a tight bun or braided and coiled at the nape of her neck. Her nose is straightish, with a faint, almost imperceptible crookedness from certain angles that comes from being broken and badly set. Her mouth sits naturally in a firm, uncompromising line. She is rare to smile and when she does it is tight and fast. Her dark eyes are framed by strong brows, giving her a look of perpetual focus even when she is silent and still. Up close, there is a constant sense of assessing in her gaze, like she's watching escape routes and pressure points, whether in a ship or a person.

It's not to say she's unattractive. But she is certainly not a traditional beauty.

Her skin is pale, as a virtue of spending most of her time in space. When she gets some sun, it exposes a smattering of underlying freckles that could almost be charming. She sports various scars from a life lived on the margins: one on her lower lip, a faint, faded burn scar on the back of her left hand, a thin scar beginning at her left temple and disappearing into her hair. The rest of her body is a constellation of similar marks.

Vesper dresses for utility, not to look like a swashbuckling pirate. She has a heavy, dark ship-jacket cut close to the body, worn and patched at the elbows, which she usually wears on duty, over one of a myriad of dark coveralls or pants and shirts. Her wardrobe isn't fancy and it isn't luxurious, but it's practical and it's kept meticulously clean. She wears a belt with holsters for her blaster, a knife, and various tools. She is always carrying another hidden blade, although just where is not usually clear to those around her. The only embellishment she wears is a small metal token on a plain chain. What the token once was is indecipherable; it has been worn down by constant fretting, and now only sports a slightly uneven metal surface. Whatever it once was, it is now of significant important to Vesper Thrace.

INVENTORY

The Sirenjack, a pirate frigate; several blasters; several knives; some clothing.

PERSONALITY AND BELIEFS

Captain Thrace is hard-edged and pragmatic. Her priorities are survival first, crew second, and everyone else a distant, distant third. Vesper isn't one to posture, and certainly not to preach. Rather she weighs odds, angles, and the price and consequences of potential courses of action, and makes choices. She expects obedience from her crew -- perhaps ironically, from a woman who led a mutiny against her immediate predecessor -- but generally gets it because Vesper doesn't take risks lightly, and takes them even less lightly when it's not herself paying the price for any errors. To outsiders, she would come across as cold, blunt, dry, and sometimes acerbic. To insiders, like her crew, she is cool, blunt, dry, and marginally more tolerant of questions.

Vesper has no religion, no particular set of creeds. She is a ruthless pragmatist, but not a nihilist, and not a butcher. She recognizes the galaxy as being fundamentally rigged in favor of governments, corporations, and syndicates -- and against people like her. The only way to survive is by carving out their own space from the cracks. She rejects ideology, whether it's Jedi, Sith, Republic, Empire, or otherwise. Within that cynicism is a strict personal ethos: she will happily rob, ambush, and sabotage the powerful, but will not prey on 'regular folk' and will go to great lengths to avoid unnecessary civilian harm.

Her loyalty is intensely local: to her ship, to her crew, and to the vanishingly small list of people she has decided are hers.

STRENGTHS

• Survivor's Intuition: Vesper's low-key Force sensitivity manifests as a kind of intuition in sensing when plans are going to go wrong, when people are lying, or when violence is about to break out. For her, this isn't mysticism, but rather a bad feeling that she has a lifetime habit of trusting.
• Mental Shielding: Thanks to intensive training with Tavi Corvask , she has the ability to withstand mental intrusion from Force users. She keeps a tight lid on her reactions, compartmentalizes under stress, and can stay functional under psychic or emotional strain that could overwhelm others.
• Crew-Oriented Leader: Vesper Thrace commands through competence and consistency, with a track record of being transparent about danger and managing risk. She has made it clear that she will not throw crew away in pursuit of unrealistic scores, and her crew appreciate that about her.
• Underworld Fluency: Vesper speaks the unwritten rules of smugglers and fixers and dockside scoundrels. She understands how far you can push, when you need to pay, and when you should walk away before the guns come out.

WEAKNESSES

• Profound Trust Issues: Once reliant on idea of honor among thieves, Vesper's trust was shattered by her former captain, Savrix Xiralan, when he insisted on an operation that would have killed dozens of the crew. It took a mutiny to prevent the slaughter. This has led to a sort of isolation and emotional reserve. She is bad at sharing problems or asking for help.
• Mutineer's Reputation: Among some pirates and underworld players, mutiny is unforgiveable, no matter the reasons. Her reputation as a mutineer closes doors in certain circles and invites attempts to test her resolve or challenge her command.
• Limited Force Skillset: Vesper's training in the Force is limited. She lacks the breadth of training a Jedi or Sith would receive, and against a dedicated Force adept outside the realm of mental manipulation, she would be outmatched (although she is working with Tavi on the ability to telepathically slap a hoe that steps out of line).

HISTORY

Vesper Thrace was born in the shadow of the docks, in the stacked warrens that clustered around the cargo spines of Terminus. Her earliest memories were noise and vibration, container haulers screaming through the atmosphere, the deep shudder of heavy machinery, the grunt and hiss of cargo loaders levering heavy loads into cargo containers and cargo containers into ships. The walls of her childhood home -- really, just four disused cargo containers -- thrummed with every inbound freighter.

She was raised by an aged auntie, whose relation to her parents was never made clear to her. Auntie worked for one of the dock cartels, the kind that laundered manifests and made tariffs disappear. Sometimes it was numbers and sometimes it was people that had to be made to disappear. Vesper grew up on the floor beneath the cheap duraplast desk, watching boots come and go, listening to men and women talk about cargo and tariffs and fees. They thought she wasn't paying attention, but even from her earliest days, she always was.

By the time she was ten, Vesper was running errands for Auntie, taking encrypted slates through maintenance corridors, guiding off-world crews around inspection checkpoints for a fee, and learning which dock bosses could be bribed and which would report you to the fuzz for even attempting it. She was small, quick, and had a knack for vanishing into small spaces like bulkhead access corridors, ventilation shafts, and storage crates. But she had something more than that, too, something she didn't even know existed until much later. Every so often, Vesper would stop dead in a doorway when a gut feeling told her to, or step back from a loading platform a heartbeat before a crate broke loose, or refuse a job that should have been an easy thing. On Terminus, people called it beginner's luck or good instincts. She later learned that it was her tenuous connection to the Force.

The feud that drove her off Terminus began small, like most feuds of this nature. Two cartels were vying for control over who got to facilitate shipments for a larger criminal syndicate. One crew skimmed too much off the top, and someone's younger brother disappeared in a pressure lock. A bar burned, then a safehouse. The quiet shootings turned into open street fighting. Vesper watched friends vanish, saw Auntie come home one night with blood on her shirt that she wouldn't explain. One night, the containers shook so violently it nearly fell from its stack. Someone had blown a fuel tank to take out a rival courier's ship. The next morning, there were new bodies in the canal and new patrols in the streets. The crackdown was vicious. Terminus was no longer safe.

When Auntie died in the reprisals, Vesper made plans to leave. Savrix Xiralan arrived right on schedule. They'd had business before, and Xiralan knew her to be reliable, even if she was young and inexperienced. Someone who knew how to deal with docks and dockworkers was helpful for any scoundrel. At all of fourteen years old, she joined the pirate crew. She worked her way up the ranks, showing her value by fitting in tight spaces, saving time and money on minor hull repairs by being able to fit between bulkheads to do patch jobs. But she had other utility, too. The crew was amused by her -- one of them referred to her as "a toddler somebody taught to swear."

Vesper was loyal to Captain Xiralan. She worked her way into his inner circle as she rose through the ranks and earned his trust. By then she was no longer a deckhand. She learned navigation, fire control, piloting. She learned to read sensor data and understand it. She spent hours with one of the senior mates, Tavi Corvask , spending late nights in the holochart room, analyzing waypoint data, arguing good-naturedly about which convoy to hit and why. He took her under his wing, recognized her connection to the Force, and trained her.

As she grew more skilled, she grew more influential among the crew and with Captain Xiralan. When Coruscant fell to the Galactic Empire, Xiralan smelled blood in the water, and more, he smelled legend. The job that broke everything came in whispers at first: some corrupt Senator or another was planning to commandeer a Galactic Alliance treasury convoy, which, if captured, would make him richer than belief. Enough credits to retire for a hundred lifetimes, enough money to pay a war fleet to rival one of the smaller powers. Enough to buy an army. Enough to make the name Savrix Xiralan one to be feared and loathed.

They planned and plotted, they pored over stolen manifests and spy reports of dubious reliability. They paid thousands for glimpses of escort rosters. All the while, Vesper felt the stomach-churning worry that she had always associated with her intuitive warnings. Every vector she plotted ended with her sure in the knowledge that even if they managed to take the prize -- which was not certain by any means -- half of Xiralan's flotilla would be destroyed in the attempt, and the rest would be pursued to the ends of the galaxy, if not by the Galactic Alliance, by its rivals in the wake of its collapse. She knew Xiralan's practices as well as anyone, and knew that he did not have it in him to do the job quietly, quietly enough to limit the fallout.

A smash and grab, she told Xiralan, would be a suicide mission. He dismissed her concerns as overly cautious, and told her that whatever the cost, the top brass would make out like bandits. The more of the crew were captured or killed, he reasoned, the larger the cut for those that survived. He framed it as a joke, but Vesper knew the truth even when it was cloaked in a chuckle.

The next night, she sat down at the helm next to Tavi and said she couldn't do it. She couldn't be part of what would be tantamount to murdering their crewmates -- in a lot of cases, their friends. Xiralan had to be stopped. And if he wouldn't listen to reason, he would have to be removed. They agreed that far. The mutiny was almost bloodless. After gathering trusted crewmates and explaining their reasoning, Vesper and Tavi's hand was forced when word leaked out. They stormed the Xiralan's command post and deposed him. A firefight erupted in the bowels of the ship. When the other ships in the flotilla were made aware that Xiralan was relieved of command, it split the flotilla. Fire erupted between the ships, and some were destroyed. Vesper and Tavi escaped aboard Xiralan's ship, taking him to an abandoned outpost world to maroon him. Tavi wanted to kill him, but Vesper couldn't bring herself to do it. Without the flotilla and without weapons, Xiralan was no danger to anyone, she argued. Tavi was unsatisfied, but he relented. Xiralan and those who would not pledge their loyalty to Vesper -- reluctantly pressed into service as the new captain -- were left behind.

The ship had been damaged in the fighting, so the first order of business was to secure repairs, then to falsify the ship's identity. They learned of the impressive Mercy and, figuring any port in a storm, Vesper and Tavi decided to join up with her ranks, after pulling off a rather daring raid on an IGBC currency courier. Vesper needed time to come to grips with all that had happened, time to strategize to decide the best direction for the newly rechristened Sirenjack and its crew.