I’m pretty tired of having all these ideas thrown up in various .txt files on my desktop… so I finally gathered my wits a little more and tried to come up with a bit of a properly written story for Keth’s background….
“Just remember this: you kill them first, before they get a chance to touch you.”
No matter what, Sis – her true name was ‘Lenn’, but the kid had always called her ‘Sis’ – always had a strong sentence ready for each circumstance, and she never hesitated to let Keth know. True, to the eyes of many people, Sis was a weird girl, the kind of which mothers would have pointed at, forbidding their children to talk to her… the kind of which made all conversations drop a soon as she entered a room, simply by the sheer strength of her presence and assassine glance. When Sis wanted something, she used to take it, whatever the means. When Sis disliked someone, she always took her distances before it was too late. When Sis needed something to be done, she did it, quickly, properly, before anything could interfere with her plans – and preferably, acting on her own. On a planet like Coruscant, trusting someone wasn’t an easy thing, and trusting someone with your life was highly not recommended. Sis was careful, careful and dangerous; a necessity, since they hadn’t any other family than each other. After all, Sis was only six years older than her, even if her behavior made it hard to believe at moments.
Keth couldn’t remember very well when exactly Mom and Dad had been arrested, for a reason neither her nor Sis were aware of . She had barely turned 8 – that was the only sure thing about it. All had gone very quickly, the troopers bursting the door open, one of them motioning both girls in a corner of the room, a second grabbing Mom by her hair to maintain her against the ground, and a third one pointing his blaster under Dad’s throat. Keth hadn’t really understood very well… it was all about ‘treason’, ‘hiding information’ and ‘illicit trade’. Then Sis had flashed her a brief yet hard glance before taking her by the hand, turning to Mom, and awaiting her consent. The reason why none of the soldiers understood this silent exchange of glances would certainly remain a mystery; when Mom suddenly took upon her to resist, they all turned to her, and Lenn seized the opportunity to run away with her young sister. They heard the sounds of blasters firing, but never looked back to check whether their parents were dead or not, going on running, running, in the darknened streets, between the high skyscrapers, until the only sound that could be heard was the sound of their own feet hitting the ground. Keth’s parents were from then on considered as ‘officially dead’.
The following years weren’t easy for the girls, and it seems that from this night on, Sis never smiled again; she however took upon her to find means of living for the both of them, daily teaching her young sister everything she could think of about how to survive and make her way through life. They knew that going back to the light and to an official existence would be too dangerous, after what had happened to their parents; thus, they went on living among the fauna of low-level criminals that were still existing, a hard yet well-hidden existence. In spite of her young age, Keth quickly understood that ‘means of living’ involved more than its lot of illegal activities, and what kind of people her elder sister tended to meddle with. Low-level criminals, street thiefs, illegal bookmakers – small scrap, no real means of developping into bigger structures due to the planet’s government, yet present, as in any society. And thus, she simply remembered what Sis used to teach her – both through words and acts. Nobody would mess very long with the sisters, not if they wanted to stay healthy for very long.
The day ‘Sis’ disappeared too, without leaving anything else behind her than a hastily scribbled note telling her to be careful and leave the planet as soon as possible – the day the hired thugs tried to force her to tell them where Lenn had gone, until she showed them that a well-trained 16-years old girl could send men like them directly to the bacta tank – Keth didn’t need much time to decide that all I all, any other sun was ten times worth Coruscant’s. And here is the beginning of the travel that would lead her to Corellia, and from there – to become part of the Azu’kai.
