Dels'taron (Background, part 1)

Dels'taron leaned back in the passenger seat of the private speeder, sorting through a myriad of thoughts. Never had she seen so many Chiss in one place, and never had she felt the kind of longing to belong to something greater than herself as she had during the Red Flame ceremony. While her current position within House Arren was one of favor and she was valued highly by Darth Kaldaras, she still felt very much like the outsider who was to be shoehorned into a family she had no real place in.

When she was a child, she'd never thought to ask her parents how they'd come to live among the various alien species that made up the labor force on Au'Daxu or why they were the only Chiss family among their neighbors. It might have occurred to her that they were different if it hadn't been for the circumstances that bound them all together, creating a community among the men and women who were forced to work in the mines. They had all felt the oppressive boot of the Imperial guards equally, and they were all identified with the same terms.

Alien. Scum. Akk dog.

Even years later, the terms could send an internal shudder of rage through her when she wasn't prepared to hear them. By the time she had found herself counted among the rebellious group of youth who were griefing the guards who ran the labor camp, she had already been in trouble half a dozen times for minor offenses ranging from rude gestures to stolen rations.

That's when she had met Colonel Chadwick Kothe, who had been sent to deal with the dangerous rebel uprising that basically consisted of a group of bored, angry children with too much time on their hands while their absentee parents were working twelve hour days in the mines. Dels'taron had the misfortune of being the most recently detained member of the gang of miscreants, and while none of them were really afraid of the guards – having grown up around them and known them for years – the newly-arrived older human in his crisp uniform merely had to level his authoritative brown eyes at the Chiss teenager to make her nervous. It was immediately clear that he would not be as lenient or as forgiving.

Once he had her attention, he knew exactly how to walk the fine line between intimidation and manipulation. She found herself turning on her friends and their families, believing somehow that she was doing what was best for the community as a whole and safeguarding her parents. While she would come to realize years later that she truly had no choice but to comply with the formidable Colonel, she was convinced at the time that she chose willingly to betray everyone she knew, causing the deaths of nearly twenty of the community’s young people before he felt that the 'lesson' had been learned.

Kothe wasn't finished with Dels'taron. Leveraging her willing compliance, he convinced her that it would be in her best interest to go back to Kaas with him, assuring her that he would find her a place in Imperial service. Within the next year, she was also his wife – the pretty blue young alien on the social climbing middle-aged Colonel's arm at every official function – and a different kind of slave.