Verity “Vez” Hirundo is a Mirialan Odanite padawan with a sordid criminal past. Throughout her life, Vez struggled with latent Force-sensitivity that manifested through intrusive dreams and feelings. She tried to self-medicate through spice, leading to numerous co-existing addictions and an unstable career as a slicer, freelance investigator, and occasional bounty hunter.
Character History
Youth (13–36 ABY)
Verity Hirundo was born on Mirial in 13 ABY, where she grew up in a religiously and socially conservative community. For reasons unknown, she left her homeworld at the age of 14 and quickly learned to fend for herself by stealing and, eventually, slicing. As she grew older, she settled into a life as a skip tracer and occasional bounty hunter, picking up a prodigious spice habit in the process.
For her entire life, Vez has suffered from ominous premonitions and vivid dreams that reoccur until she follows the course of action that they urge. Although she tried to block them out with spice and alcohol, the dreams always won. It was not until she came in contact with the Jedi of Odan-Urr that Vez began to suspect this was a sign of latent Force-sensitivity.
Encounters with Odan-Urr (36–39 ABY)
Vez Hirundo, sexy and fearless bounty hunter.
Vez first encountered Odan-Urr on a job during the Miridian conflict, when she assisted a strike team led by the Jedi Turel Sorenn and Xirini Kurai in a mission to sabotage the Collective and steal an artifact of unknown power from Daggo Mouk. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, Vez’s actions helped two other members of the team, Declan Roark and Val Cole, draw together Clan Vizsla.[1]
It took another two years before Vez began working more steadily in the Kiast system. After one of her visions allowed her to save her colleague Jon Silvon during a job rescuing slaves from Felucia, Vez finally started to look into the Jedi at Jon’s urging.[2][3] She ventured into the abandoned Velastari Temple on Kiast, where she was challenged by visions of Odan-Urr’s spiritual founders. When she emerged with a holocron, Vez finally sought out teachers among the Jedi, including V'yr Vorsa and Teikhos Ta'var.[4]
However, the Jedi Order was far from a natural fit. Vez refused to give up mischief and treasure hunting, occasionally getting in the way of other Odanites.[5] The Mirialan struggled with her training under Vorsa and left after seriously injuring another padawan, Tassk Adroc, in a training fight.[6] She briefly returned to bounty hunting, although she struggled with her visions and her inability to keep up with trained Force-users.[7] Despite her troubled relationship with the Jedi themselves, Vez continued to work for Odan-Urr, including by putting her skills as a slicer to work against the Collective in the Battle of Arx[8] and Arcturus’ Dominion remnant in the Kiast system.[9]
Ultimately, however, Vez’s initial training amplified the Force-based sensations she’d been trying to repress her entire life, leading to a severe downward spiral. She tried to run a Swokes Swokes blockade using a cloaking device she’d sold for spice money, resulting in her capture and imprisonment for several months.[10]
The Jedi Path (40 ABY–Present)
Vez in her unorthodox Jedi robes.
After several months, Odan-Urr tracked Vez down and arranged for her release along with her ship, the Black Magic. Their condition was simple: Vez needed to stay sober and commit to training until she could exercise basic control over her Force sensitivity. Although she had clashed with her previous instructors, Turel Sorenn stepped up to take the troubled Mirialan under his wing. His high tolerance for unorthodox approaches and background as a lackey for the Hutts made him a better fit for Vez; his actual commitment to Jedi teaching made him a less dangerous influence than “Gray Jedi” such as Ethan Martes or Edgar Drachen.
The pair quickly established a good working relationship, forged primarily on missions far away from the Praxeum, such as an expedition to Ktath’atn.[11]
Based on promising initial signs, the Council allowed Vez to undertake solo missions for that Consular Conclave under Xolarin and Elyon de Neverse.[12]
Nevertheless, her well-earned reputation as a spice-fueled walking disaster continued to dog her.[13]
The launch of the Envoy Corps under Exarch Marick Tyris with numerous opportunities to broaden her horizons and practice her skills outside of Turel’s direct supervision.[14][15] Turel also had her dabble in rapport-building efforts with Odan-Urr’s on-again, off-again allies in Arcona, sending her for a friendly sparring session with Zig Kaliska and tour of the Voidbreaker.[16]
Description
Appearance and Attire
Vez is a woman of fairly average build, with a fern green skin tone. Her hair is generally thick, wavy, and black, although she keeps most of it dyed an unnaturally vibrant shade of pink. The left side of her head is shaved close to the skin, while the rest of her hair falls to about jaw length. Her blue eyes are set between high cheekbones and a high forehead; her nose is small and her lips full.
Vez is rarely, if ever, seen without copious eyeliner and lipstick in a bold shade of black, red, or pink. The tattoos on her face are surprisingly modest and orthodox. An elaborate stripe down the middle of her chin represents a familial affiliation. Two dots just above the space between her eyebrows indicate academic excellence in childhood, while a ‘chandelier’ pattern at the far corner of each eye demonstrates her successful rite of passage through a focus on both spiritual and scientific pursuits. A modernized—and very un-Mirialan—take on electro-tattoos work their way down from her shoulders through her upper arms.
Skills and Abilities
Despite her instability and unpredictability, Vez is sufficiently skilled as a slicer and skip tracer to make a living in spite of her reputation as being eccentric and difficult to work with. By her reckoning, she is the best slicer in the Kiast system—though Orse Olo disabused her of that notion.[17] She specializes in the infrastructure of the HoloNet and starship automation systems, being proficient enough in the latter to capture or disable warships with relative ease.[8][9] She is also accomplished at modifying droids, though she is likely outclassed in that area by Gui Sol.
Vez has a quick intellect, exceptional powers of observation, and a natural intuition for digging into difficult problems, all capabilities that were frequently augmented and/or numbed by various psychoactives throughout her life before the Jedi.
Although her Force abilities are still nascent, Vez has demonstrated a talent prophecy and sensory-based powers.[2] On multiple occasions, her attempts to probe abandoned Jedi temples has resulted in overwhelming visions.[4][12] Despite her prodigious talent for Force-aided perception, Vez struggles with most traditional Force powers and, most of all, with the discipline required by her training. She often finds herself embracing her nascent powers without actually being able to control them.
Personality
Although her padawan training and sobriety have left Vez much more stable and empathetic than she was during the worst years of her spice addiction, she remains impulsive, flippant, and occasionally abrasive. Her mannerisms, worldview, and cynicism, forged by growing up where life was cheap and crime was the only way forward, put her at odds with the Jedi. She makes her more orthodox teachers and peers uncomfortable and the feeling is mutual. Vez is self-consciously an outsider and she’s defensive of her attitude and way of doing things. More deeply, she’s terrified of driving off the first community she’s been accepted in and desperate to impress Odan-Urr with some grand gesture or another.
Vez has a deep-seated admiration for clever hacks, overpowered ordinance, and any solution to a problem that involves unexpected and gratuitous overkill. Not only does she tend to neglect simple and obvious tactics, but her sense of aesthetics leads her to stop and smell the chaos when she should be running.
Relationships
The Dukes
Vez has had close relationships with several heavily-customized droids over the years, such as the IT-O “electronics torturer,” Wobbles, and The Duke, a Viper probot.[8][18] However, in recent years she has replaced individual droids with a generalized personality matrix based on the original Duke. Vez wrote the Duke personality matrix to function as a bodyguard and caretaker; however, she carefully edited to remove the droids’ ability to be shocked, disappointed, or betrayed by her.[19] The Dukes compensate for her rough upbringing and her insecurities about her place in the Jedi Order, serving as surrogate parents or siblings. Although the individual Dukes are all designed to be deadly and intimidating, Vez more often relies on them as babysitters.[18][13]
The current Dukes are PowerDuke, a bodyguard on a Dark Trooper chassis, and MiniDuke, a (relatively) subtle version in a blastromech chassis.
Turel Sorenn
- "It’s been zero days since your last hurtful comment about my teaching methods."
- ―Turel[11]
Although Turel and Vez met as early as 36 ABY, when she was a hired hand in the Miridian conflict, the two did not have a lasting relationship until Turel showed up to bail her out of a Makem Te prison.[1] The Jedi gave her a simple choice: actually commit to Jedi training and a chance to turn her life around, or continue on her current trajectory and die before she hit thirty.
Since pairing up as master and apprentice, the two have found that their skills and personalities complement each other surprisingly well.[11]
Ruka Tenbriss Ya-ir
- "You know, you could’ve sent a bounty hunter like a normal person."
- ―Vez[20]
Vez first encountered Ruka under inauspicious circumstances: she had accepted a job from a member of the Ya-ir family to abduct Ruka’s husband, Corazon Ya-ir, and bring him back to the family to break up their marriage. The entire encounter was a disaster fueled by bad spice and worse decisions, as Vez made a nuisance of herself chatting up the dour Mirialan Sith before incapacitating Cora. Ruka gave chase, and between the two of them they effectively destroyed a Coruscant nightclub before Vez escaped without her quarry.[7]
Vez did not realize that studying under Turel would result in repeated encounters with his former padawan, Cora, giving her a strong preference for taking missions as far from Kiast as possible.
Much to their mutual chagrin, the Vez and Ruka were involuntarily married in a Selenian/Arconan tradition.[21] Despite Ruka’s attempts to have the marriage annulled, Vez avoided him for roughly a standard year. After crashing her date on, ironically enough, Selen, Ruka caught up with Vez on Vizsla’s Sundari Station. The two settled their most serious disagreements, annulled their sham marriage, and have settled into an uneasy peace.[20]