Name: Elara Sode
Codename: Shady Lain
Species: Human
Homeworld: Talus
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Height: 5'8"
Weight: 137 lb
Skin: Pale
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Blue
Occupation: Retired
Personal History:
Elara Sode was born to wealth. Her father was the CEO of a prominent import/export company on Talus and her mother was the heiress to a family of merchants. Her father did everything is his power to raise her in a respectable manner, teaching her the refined grace of an upper class woman and raising her to eventually inherit his company, or to at least found her own. Elara had no interest in such things, however. She knew that money made the worlds go 'round, but she also knew she could make her dreams come true without it.
Elara had a strange obsession with old crime holos. She would watch them over and over again, trying to glean whatever knowledge she could or fantasizing over the 'perfect crimes.' She was smarter than all that, though. She knew that the holos were only fiction, that the only way to really gain useful knowledge was to find it first hand. There were only two ways to do that: go out and commit some crimes, or find someone who is willing to teach you what they know. Any thought of the first option was quickly eradicated, though. Elara loved her parents and she knew what sort of trouble she would cause for them if she were to be arrested. The media would be all over it if the heiress of a major company were to resort to criminal behavior. So Elara's only option, then, was to find a willing tutor.
Finding a tutor was no easy prospect for Elara. Professional thieves, even retired ones, blend themselves well with society and they often made themselves large networks of 'friends' to keep themselves that way. Money, however, was a strong motivator for people to throw off their former friends. Four months after Elara's 15th birthday, she had found a man managing a shop in a middle-class district. The man denied her accusations at first, then laughed her off as a child, and finally reverted to outright hostility. However, Elara was determined to live her dream and the man reluctantly gave in.
The man gave Elara difficult jobs from the start. He figured that with enough effort, he could turn this innocent, young girl away from a life of crime before she got herself into more serious trouble. What he did not expect, was that Elara could be so driven to such an end. So the man began telling her stories about jobs gone wrong and the terrible things he had been forced to do. He told her about how vicious Hutts could be, he told her about the depravity of gangsters, and, finally, he told her about the killings of his comrades and associates. Elara was swayed by these stories so significantly that one day she did not return. The man was relieved as thought he had finally turned her off his own path.
Within a week, Elara had returned. She told the man why she wanted to be a thief. She told him about her dreams and aspirations. She told him about her anxiety at living a life without excitement and adventure. Elara's passion had stunned the man. Never once had he met someone so driven to a single end, especially not a teenager. It was at this point that Elara's training truly began.
Elara trained under the man for nearly seven years. He taught her slicing, lock picking, criminal law: all the things a professional should know. From time to time, he would send her on jobs to steal minor things, gradually increasing the difficulty of the jobs and eventually introducing her to some of his contacts. Under his guidance, she steadily grew to become adept with her new skills.
And then he was gone.
The man had gone missing from his store. Elara couldn't find him at his home nor any other place he frequented either. She spent nearly a month looking for the man, but it was a forgone conclusion. The man had either skipped town or was dead. Her intuition told her it was the latter, but she couldn't help keeping up hope. The man had grown to become like a second father to her and she couldn't just let him go overnight.
It was at this point that she decided she would strike out on her own. Elara ran from her home and leveraged some of her mentor's former contacts. She soon found herself working with a crew to steal from a local bank. This would be Elara's first big job and the others knew it. She was untested in their eyes and would only be a burden. Elara, contrary to their expectations, performed spectacularly. An unforeseen complication occurred when the slicer failed to fully disarm the security system and the alarm went off as they were leaving the premises. Elara intuitively knew which routes she could use to escape the police and she led her companions along until they were safely outside the cordoned area.
From that point in time, Elara quickly began to build a reputation for herself and her crew as they continued robbing a variety of venues. This was in no small part due to the fact that nearly every job they pulled nearly got them caught and Elara got them out every time. With the frequency of 'incidents' rising, the crew Elara was working with began to suspect her of leaking information. They reasoned that the only way she could possibly know how to get out safely was because she was working with them. The crew simply could not believe that her sensitivity to danger and natural intuition could be so high. She chose to flee rather than face their wrath. The entire crew was caught or killed on their next job and the true informant had come to light. Elara, however, never learned about this.
Using what money she had fled with, Elara boarded a freighter to the Mid Rim and found herself on Nar Shaddaa for the first time. It was an unfamiliar place for her and the locals were less than pleasant, but she believed she could make a life for herself here. She quickly built herself a new network of contacts using the skills she had learned from her mentor and the diplomacy she gained from her father. Within two months, Elara was billing herself as a freelancer and was back in work. Over the next few years, she built a new reputation for herself amongst the crime bosses and Hutts she worked with as a true professional. While she never seemed to have money, she was living her dream. Elara was happier doing the dirty work for Hutts than she ever was as the heir to a fortune.
This was until things started to go sour for her again. A string of bad jobs starting in 5 ABY hit Elara hard. Her luck began to run out, it seemed, and it was only a matter of time before she got caught or killed. As much as she loved her job sometimes, she was beginning to believe that her job didn't love her in return. She started contemplating a change in career, but her past employers got in her way. They all had too much on Elara for her to simply leave. If she were to break ties with the cartels, that would be it. She would never be able to work a job again. She would have to flee and hide out on some foreign world, living in fear that a cartel enforcer was just three steps behind her.
Elara's luck was at an all time low. Her money was running out and she was resorting to living on the streets outside a starport on Nar Shaddaa while looking for work. That was when she met the captain of the 'Broken Arrow,' a wookiee who went by the name Otociiirurra. While between jobs, she happened to bump into the wookiee. She never really knew how she could fail to see a creature so large in such a thick crowd, but what happens, happens. Though terrified for her life, for she believed at the time that she had inadvertently angered the beast, she tried to talk down the wookiee. Though confused as to why the woman was talking so much, he was impressed by her eloquence and believed that Elara would have some use as a negotiator. He offered her a position on his ship immediately.
Elara initially refused the position. She was terrified of having a local crime-boss send some of their muscle to deal with her and she certainly did not want to drag this wookiee into it. The wookiee, however, offered her a solution to her problem. He was employed directly to one of Durga the Hutt's immediate subordinates and he believed that while in his employ, his own protection would extend to her.
While torn on the loss of her career, Elara knew that her current position was untenable. She reluctantly agreed to employment by the wookiee and has been traveling with him since.