Mara Dalinev

Plucked from her home world at the tender age of two, Mara was whisked off to Coruscant for Jedi initiate training. Eight years she spent being schooled alongside the other initiates in her clan, making moderate but not exceptional progress and passing her trials at the end of her tenth year. She was well known among her young peers for being particularly unskilled in most of the schools of combat but unusually resourceful and persistent.

Unfortunately, young Mara never had the chance to attend her Apprenticeship Tournament, the chaos and destruction of Order 66 cutting through her life before she ever had a chance to prove herself ready to become a Padawan. That fateful evening she happened to be visiting Master Kazdan Paratus at his workshop in the Jedi Temple, seeking advice on droid construction and how best to prepare for her upcoming battles. As death descended on the temple, Master Paratus fled, dragging Mara along in his panic, not realizing that she was ill equipped to help him until it was already too late.

Traveling alongside Paratus, Mara hid with him on the waste-covered planet of Raxus Prime, watching her unofficial master sink into the depths of madness caused by guilt over abandoning his peers and his own Padawan whom he had left behind. Nine long years she stayed, watching her "master" attempt to rebuild the Jedi Order from the heaps of garbage and junk that covered the surface of Raxus Prime. In the beginning she took whatever lessons he offered, thinking them true and good, but after several years it became apparent that his sanity was slipping away and she instead took on the roll of both caretaker and nursemaid to the ailing, male Aleena.

Eventually, at nineteen and her master so far gone as to no longer even remember her name--nor his own--she decided to strike out on her own, having repaired the ship that brought them there so many years ago. Try as she may, Master Paratus would not go with her and so she left him behind to find her own way, hiding her identity from the Empire and taking work as a mechanic or engineer wherever the pay seemed best.