SPECIAL APPLICATION: Star Wars EU - Grodin Tierce [AU]
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AU (Alternate Universe) Character Application
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
AGE: 22
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Janine/Above, and Luke/Ben.
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Grodin Tierce (the clone)
SERIES: The Star Wars Expanded Universe
PERSONALITY:
Tierce
is an experiment. The clone of a Force-Sensitive soldier, with that
soldier’s mind and memories, plus some of the mind and memories of an
alien genius. That soldier had been indoctrinated or brainwashed into
highest, most fanatic loyalty, which the alien genius didn’t share,
though said alien was absolutely dedicated to a tangentially related and
less specific cause. Their clone spent some of his formative days in
the presence of a mad Jedi Master who shared neither obsession, but who
would casually touch and warp the minds of the people around him.
Unsurprisingly, the end result is not quite neurotypical.
In
most settings - in public, with most people - Tierce is a little
blank-seeming, sort of bland, enormously patient, and diffident. He’s
somewhat socially uncertain and awkward, but in a well-meaning way. He
likes people and wants to be useful, and can easily waste time on
frivolous pursuits, or dissemble. Insult him and he’ll either laugh it
off or be hurt; he can be made angry, but it takes some doing, and then
he’s more indignant than anything. Though he’s not clumsy or forgetful,
he sort of gives that impression - he often seems slightly distracted.
Similarly, he can seem a bit slow, clueless, unsure. Harmless.
It’s
not an act. Not really. He’s often like this when alone, too. On the
job - in situations where it’s called for - he seems decidedly crisper,
more alert, more focused.
That
crispness softens the line between his outer and middle selves. His
middle self is a warrior strategist. Sharp, intense, blunt, very sure.
The way he speaks and stands is different. He moves much faster, more
efficiently. He doesn’t dissemble and backs down only grudgingly, though
he will compromise if he sees enough of a need, and can use some very
biting sarcasm. As his middle self he’s much more of a perfectionist,
highly disciplined, and with little interest in anything outside of the
task at hand. He’ll interrupt people without apology. When he’s angry,
he’s clipped and cold. However, he’ll blunt his edges to soothe allies
into sticking with him.
He
doesn’t show that middle self to just anyone. If someone
has seen it and recognized it as different from his
focused outer self, he will show it to them in subsequent meetings, if
there aren’t people who haven’t seen it around. Tierce prefers to be
overlooked. He also finds it somewhat tiring to show this self for long.
Tierce
also has an inner self. It’s emotional, self-centered, without filter
or self-restraint. He hates switching into it, but if he doesn’t now and
again he sometimes enters it involuntarily and has a panic attack. His
posture and movements are different here, too, being erratic and sudden.
When he’s angry, he’s loud and sometimes violent. This self is never
voluntarily shown to anyone, but sometimes - during extreme desperation
or after trying to study artwork - it manifests around people. The inner
self is the most tiring.
Each
self is equally true, and they’re all him. He may do something while
showing his inner self for reasons he doesn’t understand as his outer or
middle self, but they aren’t split personalities. He can always hold to
a plan. He feels the same way about a given person as each self, though
between his outer self’s desire to get along and his middle self’s
discipline and narrow focus, it’s only as his inner self that everything
can be shown. Tierce has great control over his first and second
selves, and can change from one to the other easily.
No
matter which self is being expressed, he is quite intelligent, though
his outer self downplays this. Loyalty - service to something larger
than himself - is key to him, though wrapped around that is the drive
for revenge against what hurt the focus of that loyalty. In the pursuit
of goals related to that key, he is ruthless and willing to disregard
rules he normally keeps.
Tierce
has a bad habit of making assumptions, sometimes colossal ones, based
on observations and speculation. Sometimes these are right. Sometimes
they’re not right, but he’s close enough and sees the truth coming in
time to salvage the situation. Sometimes they’re very wrong. He doesn’t
understand people as fully as he might think, and tends to underestimate
them.
In
the long view, Tierce is extraordinarily patient. It doesn’t matter if a
goal will take ten years or more, he’ll commit to it. This isn’t to say
that he can’t feel impatience, but he can easily conquer this feeling
as his outer self, and as his middle is generally too disciplined to
break with the plan.
As
his outer and middle selves, he rarely tells anyone everything. He is
not trusting. Neither will he throw away allies if he still believes
there’s use left in them.
The
alien genius’s personality is partially reflected in his middle self,
but it shows in another way too. Tierce intermittently hears a voice
which he interprets as Thrawn’s, though it’s often too soft to really
understand. Whether or not it’s a second personality depends on how you
look at it. He thinks he does, more or less. He thinks that Thrawn’s
mind, or part of it, lives on in his head. He’s directed by it - the
rest of him has little initiative or imagination.
But
it’s his own voice. The voice of what he should have been - someone
intensely analytical, hyperobservant, and driven. And it has little
power - it’s a voice that fades in and out and a vague feeling, nothing
more. It follows along with and sometimes comments on his general
thoughts and on things it picks up through the subconscious. It never
comes completely out of the black with a thought; everything is either
an observation or connected to what he’s already thinking.
TIMELINE: After he dies, late in Vision of the Future.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Be patient, please. This will take a while.
Far
outside of the Republic there was a spacefaring people called the
Chiss. One of them was Commander Mitth’raw’nuruodo, core name Thrawn, a
tactician and strategist of unparalleled skill and boldness. He likened
combat to art and studied both.
A
large task force sent by then-Senator Palpatine was intercepted and
destroyed by Thrawn, even though his forces had been tiny in comparison.
Capturing its leader, Thrawn was warned about an incoming Jedi force,
Outbound Flight, and told it was a threat to the Chiss people. Not long
after making contact with Outbound Flight, their leader attempted to
strangle him with the Force, and so Thrawn’s forces destroyed them.
His
people exiled him for the tactics he used, and in exile he was picked
up by the Galactic Empire and trained. Despite being a nonhuman in a
society where nonhumans were seen as lesser, he worked his way quickly
and surely through the ranks until he was made Grand Admiral, one of
only thirteen.
On
the way he earned the respect of Darth Vader, and Vader’s secret
commandos, the Noghri. Noghri were collectively under a life debt to
Vader, believing that he had descended to save their world from a toxin.
In reality, the Empire had seeded the world with this toxin, and
Vader’s aid was a carefully-designed ploy.
Thrawn
apparently fouled up somehow in politics and was sent with his forces
on a “mapping expedition” in the Unknown Regions, which was popularly
thought to be a disgrace and a waste of his talents. In reality, he was
carving a new branch of the Empire out there, far from Coruscant and the
Core Worlds. Five years after the Emperor’s death and the Rebellion’s
victory he returned and picked up what was left of the Empire. From the
bridge of Captain Pellaeon’s Chimaera, he led a very successful campaign
against what he always insisted was the Rebellion.
Unlike
many Imperials, he could take a loss and recognize when he had made a
mistake, though there were relatively few of either. A lot happened,
but in sum, he allied with a cloned Dark Jedi, almost defeated the Rebel
upstarts, activated the cloning facilities on Wayland, and was killed
by his Noghri bodyguard Rukh at a critical juncture, after Leia exposed
what had really been done to the Noghri homeworld.
A
month before this, he uploaded some of his memories and personality
into a new project,an attempt to make a new breed of warlord. That
clone had some of his mind, but his body and most of his brain and
memories were cloned and transferred from the original Grodin Tierce,
hereafter called TR-889 for simplicity’s sake.
TR-889
was born and raised on midlevel Imperial Center/Coruscant. When
TR-889’s older brother left to join the Army, he followed a year later
at the age of seventeen, lying about his age to get in.
It
wasn’t long before he found himself in the Stormtrooper Corps, and with
his unit was sent out to do everything from clean out pirate bases to
put down Rebel insurgents to patrol stable cities. TR-889 was promoted
several times, eventually becoming a Captain; during this time he
briefly served under then-Vice Admiral Thrawn. He was known for having a
cool head and a sense of command, as well as extraordinary reflexes.
He
was also known for being very devoted to the Empire. He had absolutely
no sympathy for the Rebels. If the Empire said a thing was so, then it
was so; therefore, Alderaan was a tragic result of Rebels hijacking a
mining tool, and he would kill unarmed civilians of any age if ordered.
His lack of enthusiasm for classing people who weren’t healthy human
males as NonHuMan and inferior was really the only part of Imperial
doctrine in which he wasn’t a model Imperial - as he saw it, loyalty to
the Empire was more important than species, gender, or cybernetics.
While
they were stationed together TR-889 found unclear evidence that his
elder brother had Rebel sympathies. He’d confronted his brother and
heard vague excuses before the base they were both stationed on was
attacked by insurgents, and during the fighting his brother went MIA.
It was reported that he had saved his squad by throwing himself onto a
grenade. TR-889 believed this and discreetly disposed of the evidence.
He
performed excellently in the stormtrooper corps, and at the age of
twenty-three he was selected to be trained as one of the Emperor’s
personal bodyguards. They’re known by a lot of names - Imperial Guard,
Royal Guard, Red Guard, Emperor’s Guard - but here will be called simply
Guardsmen.
Training
for this position was intense. As might be expected, training in many
forms of combat, exotic and common, was part of it. So was learning to
work effectively alone or in pairs, spotting concealed weaponry,
‘reading’ a crowd, speaking and writing in a unique language, “slicing”
aka hacking records and droids, and techniques to sustain their
bodyguarded person until help arrived. Some of these involved the
Force, sustaining a life in particular.
But
it also involved a particular mental training. Tierce once says, “A
Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges, ever. His entire goal in
life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. This is his
goal in life, and his desire in death.” This training, or perhaps
brainwashing, caused yet greater loyalty to the Emperor, so strong that
in his presence Guardsmen were utterly subservient to his will. Even
before training’s end, the Emperor had them fight each other to the
death to test this loyalty. And they did, without hesitation or
question, although after the heat of the moment TR-889 wished he hadn’t
had to do it.
His
class started with forty young but expert stormtroopers. Training took
a year. At the end of it, between fights and people with stronger
affinity to the Force being removed to elsewhere, there were five
Guardsmen.
Months later, the Emperor died.
Many
Guardsmen died with the Death Star, but small numbers were often lent
to other high-ranking Imperials - both as bodyguards and to check their
loyalty. They were also rotated out to take out targets, or to make
them don normal stormtrooper armor and fight within the stormtrooper
corps in order to let them keep their edge. TR-889 was one of them,
taking out a Rebel cell, when the Emperor died.
It
shook him profoundly. Guardsmen didn’t have anything like as strong a
Force-bond to the Emperor as the Emperor’s Hands did, but the Emperor
had still become the center of his galaxy - loyalty to Palpatine
superseded any previous ties. One of the Guardsmen tried to commit
suicide. On instinct TR-889 tried to preserve his life, but the other
Guardsman had no will to go on. If the other two hadn’t broken his
focus, he would have died too. After that he and those other two
returned to Imperial service and split up.
TR-889
hid the fact that he was a Guardsman, since after the Emperor’s death
he didn’t feel like those who tried to run the Empire were worthy of the
same loyalty. Actually, TR-889 hacked his own service file. The
Guardsmen were a very secretive order, but records still showed him
disappearing entirely for a year, and never rejoining any specific part
of Imperial service. He changed them, and for years after that his
first act on gaining access to any database which might have a clue was
to find and alter related files.
In
the five years between the Emperor’s death and the return of Grand
Admiral Thrawn, he had himself transferred repeatedly until he started
to serve as part of the security detail aboard the Star Destroyer
Chimaera. He watched the Empire declining over the
years and was disgusted, but leaving it was inconceivable.
During
that time he came more regularly into contact with his family. While
he was on leave and visiting them on Imperial Center, Rebels sabotaged
the planetary shields and invaded. The current head of the Empire
planned for this to happen, having seeded the planet with a plague that
only killed nonhumans. TR-889 helped his family and a few of their
neighbors escape on the shuttle he’d come in on. Civilians weren’t
supposed to board those - later he reported himself in and was given a
slap on the wrist as reprimand.
One
neighbor was a woman he’d known as a child, and who resettled near
where his parents did. Within a year and a half they were engaged, and
at last TR-889 started to consider leaving service and settling down.
Then, however, Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Unknown Regions
and took the Chimaera as his flagship.
TR-889
found his near-worship of the Emperor returning in force, directed at a
new figurehead. His desire to leave the service evaporated completely
under the sense that he could serve a new great Empire, and his
non-military relationships suffered for it. He didn’t tell the Grand
Admiral that he had been a Guardsman, and he was never sure if Thrawn
knew, but he did find himself being cycled out into field missions which
tested his abilities. And he did well.
He
was picked to be the template for Thrawn’s experiment. Not long after
being cloned and uploading his memories, TR-889 was killed in an assault
on Generis.
The
clone Tierce was decanted shortly after this. Thrawn could have
ordered other mixed-origin clones to be made, but he didn’t. Tierce
didn’t immediately appear to be a success, but neither was he failure
enough to just be terminated, and perhaps in time he would prove
himself. He was stationed on the Chimaera as a high-ranked member of
security - not the same position his template had been in, but not far
from it either.
The
insane cloned Dark Jedi, Joruus C’baoth, was also on the Chimaera.
C’baoth had a way of seizing the minds of the people around them and
reshaping them a little, enough to get them to do his bidding. This
happened several times to Tierce. He hated C’baoth, but this slight
reshaping contributed to what his template had passed down to him, the
effects of brainwashing and that desire to serve something greater than
himself, and it probably added to his instability.
The
clone Tierce never knew that he had been tested and had failed. During
the Battle of Bilbringi he expected an attempt on Thrawn’s life to be
made, and assumed that it would be in the form of a commando team
docking in the shuttle bay, so that’s where he stationed his forces. He
was able to kill Rukh as the latter was trying to escape, but felt that
he had failed abjectly.
Knowing
that he would otherwise be pressed into the kind of service other
clones were assigned - turbolaser fodder, mostly - he altered the
records to show that Tierce had been severely wounded on Generis but had
survived, and after injuring himself with the help of a reprogrammed
2-1B surgical droid, he took his template’s identity.
He
kept that up for ten years. Tierce had some trouble relating to his
template’s family and friends. While he did have his template’s
memories he felt a little removed from and awkward around them. Thanks
to the reported trauma no one suspected he wasn’t his template, but the
inherited relationship with his fiance declined quickly and broke off,
which he always saw with a combination of regret and relief. For a while
he mostly coasted on his identity, doing little of note.
As
every effort the Empire made was beaten back, as they were ground down
to a fraction of their old glory, the attitude in much of the Empire
became one of grim resignation. There was even talk of ending the war,
bowing to the upstarts - the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Remnant,
the same Pellaeon who’d served with Thrawn - even spoke of it openly.
Tierce hated that attitude and plan with a passion, but there was little
he could do.
Five
years after replacing his template, Tierce found that his brother - his
template’s brother - wasn’t dead after all. He was serving the
Rebellion, having faked his death. Tierce took it personally and roused
out of his slump, calling on the brilliant part of himself to track the
man down and, eventually, kill him.
He
was now aware that he could do some good, though he was not Thrawn.
Tierce attached himself as the military liason to Moff Disra, who was
somewhat self-serving but ultimately loved the Empire, someone he could
manipulate and act through. Disra had always had criminal contacts, but
was terribly undiplomatic about his allies. Tierce was able to smooth
things out a little, and get him new contacts. One result was Disra
getting a major contract for Imperial starfighters.
Disra
was smarter than he seemed and, after eight months, looked into the
background of his very unremarkable military liason. Tierce was aware of
this and, though his records mostly reflected an innocuous past,
allowed him to learn that Tierce had been a Guardsman. Disra confronted
him, saw his middle self, and introduced him to Flim - an actor who
could perfectly imitate Grand Admiral Thrawn’s appearance, voice, and
sheer presence.
Disra’s
idea, the idea he’d sold Flim on, was to just bring this fake Thrawn up
and use him as a figurehead to rally the Imperial Remnant. Tierce
immediately had larger, grander plans. When Pellaeon retreated to an
isolated sector of neutral space and sent an envoy to talk to a Rebel
military leader, Tierce had the envoy captured and imprisoned. The envoy
signaled, but with the comm jamming active Tierce didn’t think anyone
had received it.
Presently
there was a crisis in the Rebellion revolving around the razing of an
innocent world and how that had been made possible by the efforts of a
handful of Bothans; the razing happened decades ago, but many cultures
took the subject as a good pretext to go to war with various rivals and
ancestral enemies.
Tierce
wanted to take advantage of that, and so he had several discreet,
competent Star Destroyer captains meet with Flim, who as Thrawn gave
them assignments. They were sent to wait cloaked in orbit above the
Bothan homeworld, as fleets started massing there. Disra had found the
secret cells - sleeper cells, not biological - of clones Thrawn had
scattered about and activated many of them, and Tierce repurposed those.
He also sent agents to instigate riots in already-unhappy crowds, and
more to prepare to sabotage planetary shields.
Knowing
that the whole crisis could be solved by finding just who made the
razing possible, Tierce hacked the Emperor’s private records of the
incident, finding and destroying any of his
incriminating records at the same time. Then he sent Disra’s pirate
allies to harass Pellaeon’s ship while under the sign of the people
Pellaeon was trying to contact, a calculated gesture.
Tierce
had Lando Calrissian and a Diamalan Senator who was hitching a ride
with him apprehended and taken before Flim, who as Thrawn deftly
convinced them that he was genuine, before releasing them to spread the
word - offering his assistance in the crisis. Another calculated
gesture. They then reactivated a few more clone cells and were around to
accept when an uneasy border-occupying Rebel world wanted to leave and
enter Imperial protection. The whole time they were propagating the
rumor that Thrawn was back, but keeping it as a rumor so the Rebellion
wouldn’t react with overwhelming force.
Disra,
increasingly uneasy about their alliance and the way Tierce was always
pushing his limits, threatened him and was instantly disarmed. Tierce
then gave the weapon back and explained that there was something called
the Hand of Thrawn, which he claimed was a person or a plan for ultimate
Imperial victory, and he was trying to draw them out.
The
Diamala sent a small attack force in anonymous ships to test them, but
Disra was able to identify them, and Tierce directed Flim into making
the opening move Thrawn had used against Diamala, which scared this
batch off.
When
Imperial ships got a recording of a mysterious ship making a flyby,
Tierce recognized it as Chiss/Empire of the Hand but soon found that the
recording was part of a ploy to find the Imperial capital which they
were at right now, and Rebels were there looking for data. At the same
time Pellaeon arrived to have a talk with Disra about some sketchy
dealings, and Disra’s angry pirate allies snuck in tailed by a Mistryl
shadow guard. Tierce interrupted the interrogation of Disra with a
report on the Rebels and offered himself, outer self showing, for
Pellaeon to question. As the Rebel situation became complicated Tierce
and Disra, having recovered his composure, switched places again, but
Disra found out that his angry pirate allies were in the palace and left
Pellaeon in his office.
Tierce
prioritized - Pellaeon would keep, they were on their way to finding
the Rebels, the only way to deal with the pirates now was kill them or
scare them, and what could scare them more than the Grand Admiral? He
assured Flim that he could protect him from anything... and when they
got word of the Rebels being tricky and Disra infuriated the pirates,
Tierce did. With the unexpected help of the Mistryl shadow guard, who
was out for the death of the pirate leader and hadn’t wanted anyone else
to get that kill. Flim started pitching the idea of an alliance to her.
Pellaeon
had underhandedly broken into Disra’s unguarded desk, found that his
envoy had been captured and detained, and left without waiting for his
host to return. Tierce told Disra to stop panicking - they had the
ultimate excuse, they could say it had all been at Thrawn’s orders. Then
he and Flim intercepted the Rebels - Lando Calrissian and Han Solo -
utterly convinced them that Thrawn was back, and gave them a doctored
version of the information they’d come for - carefully sliced and
altered to implicate many important Bothans.
Soon
Tierce made one of Thrawn’s tactical great assumptions, putting
together facts which appeared to mean that a Rebel force was going to go
to Bothan space to try to keep a lid on the situation, and realizing
that in fact it was a trick, and the Rebels were going for one of the
Empire’s great information hubs to try to get the data, as they didn’t
know about the doctored version yet. He had that base prepared, and also
decided to hold the talks with Mistryl representatives there.
And
yes, that’s where the Rebels struck, and were trapped, which impressed
the Mistryl reps. And then Pellaeon walked back on to the scene. He now
knew who Flim was... and who and what Tierce was.
Driven
into inner self, Tierce furiously told everyone on the bridge what he’d
kept secret his whole life, and almost pleaded with Pellaeon to let
things go on. He could win the war. He could have vengeance against the
Rebels. Pellaeon, saddened, said that vengeance had never been Thrawn’s
way, and the war was over. Tierce had been a failure - there had been
more than enough time after his creation and before Thrawn’s death for
more of his kind to be created, but there never had been.
Tierce
snapped, lunged for Pellaeon, and was intercepted by one of the
Mistryl. He was badly wounded; time in a bacta tank would have helped,
but there was no reason to waste that resource. He was quietly tried,
found guilty of treason, and executed, all without returning fully to
consciousness.
Note: Due to the length of the application, comments have been left enabled and all moderation comments have been screened.
AU (Alternate Universe) Character Application
PLAYER INFO
NAME: Joysweeper
AGE: 22
CURRENT CHARACTERS, if any: Juhani, Janine/Above, and Luke/Ben.
CHARACTER INFO
CHARACTER NAME: Grodin Tierce (the clone)
SERIES: The Star Wars Expanded Universe
PERSONALITY:
Tierce
is an experiment. The clone of a Force-Sensitive soldier, with that
soldier’s mind and memories, plus some of the mind and memories of an
alien genius. That soldier had been indoctrinated or brainwashed into
highest, most fanatic loyalty, which the alien genius didn’t share,
though said alien was absolutely dedicated to a tangentially related and
less specific cause. Their clone spent some of his formative days in
the presence of a mad Jedi Master who shared neither obsession, but who
would casually touch and warp the minds of the people around him.
Unsurprisingly, the end result is not quite neurotypical.
In
most settings - in public, with most people - Tierce is a little
blank-seeming, sort of bland, enormously patient, and diffident. He’s
somewhat socially uncertain and awkward, but in a well-meaning way. He
likes people and wants to be useful, and can easily waste time on
frivolous pursuits, or dissemble. Insult him and he’ll either laugh it
off or be hurt; he can be made angry, but it takes some doing, and then
he’s more indignant than anything. Though he’s not clumsy or forgetful,
he sort of gives that impression - he often seems slightly distracted.
Similarly, he can seem a bit slow, clueless, unsure. Harmless.
It’s
not an act. Not really. He’s often like this when alone, too. On the
job - in situations where it’s called for - he seems decidedly crisper,
more alert, more focused.
That
crispness softens the line between his outer and middle selves. His
middle self is a warrior strategist. Sharp, intense, blunt, very sure.
The way he speaks and stands is different. He moves much faster, more
efficiently. He doesn’t dissemble and backs down only grudgingly, though
he will compromise if he sees enough of a need, and can use some very
biting sarcasm. As his middle self he’s much more of a perfectionist,
highly disciplined, and with little interest in anything outside of the
task at hand. He’ll interrupt people without apology. When he’s angry,
he’s clipped and cold. However, he’ll blunt his edges to soothe allies
into sticking with him.
He
doesn’t show that middle self to just anyone. If someone
has seen it and recognized it as different from his
focused outer self, he will show it to them in subsequent meetings, if
there aren’t people who haven’t seen it around. Tierce prefers to be
overlooked. He also finds it somewhat tiring to show this self for long.
Tierce
also has an inner self. It’s emotional, self-centered, without filter
or self-restraint. He hates switching into it, but if he doesn’t now and
again he sometimes enters it involuntarily and has a panic attack. His
posture and movements are different here, too, being erratic and sudden.
When he’s angry, he’s loud and sometimes violent. This self is never
voluntarily shown to anyone, but sometimes - during extreme desperation
or after trying to study artwork - it manifests around people. The inner
self is the most tiring.
Each
self is equally true, and they’re all him. He may do something while
showing his inner self for reasons he doesn’t understand as his outer or
middle self, but they aren’t split personalities. He can always hold to
a plan. He feels the same way about a given person as each self, though
between his outer self’s desire to get along and his middle self’s
discipline and narrow focus, it’s only as his inner self that everything
can be shown. Tierce has great control over his first and second
selves, and can change from one to the other easily.
No
matter which self is being expressed, he is quite intelligent, though
his outer self downplays this. Loyalty - service to something larger
than himself - is key to him, though wrapped around that is the drive
for revenge against what hurt the focus of that loyalty. In the pursuit
of goals related to that key, he is ruthless and willing to disregard
rules he normally keeps.
Tierce
has a bad habit of making assumptions, sometimes colossal ones, based
on observations and speculation. Sometimes these are right. Sometimes
they’re not right, but he’s close enough and sees the truth coming in
time to salvage the situation. Sometimes they’re very wrong. He doesn’t
understand people as fully as he might think, and tends to underestimate
them.
In
the long view, Tierce is extraordinarily patient. It doesn’t matter if a
goal will take ten years or more, he’ll commit to it. This isn’t to say
that he can’t feel impatience, but he can easily conquer this feeling
as his outer self, and as his middle is generally too disciplined to
break with the plan.
As
his outer and middle selves, he rarely tells anyone everything. He is
not trusting. Neither will he throw away allies if he still believes
there’s use left in them.
The
alien genius’s personality is partially reflected in his middle self,
but it shows in another way too. Tierce intermittently hears a voice
which he interprets as Thrawn’s, though it’s often too soft to really
understand. Whether or not it’s a second personality depends on how you
look at it. He thinks he does, more or less. He thinks that Thrawn’s
mind, or part of it, lives on in his head. He’s directed by it - the
rest of him has little initiative or imagination.
But
it’s his own voice. The voice of what he should have been - someone
intensely analytical, hyperobservant, and driven. And it has little
power - it’s a voice that fades in and out and a vague feeling, nothing
more. It follows along with and sometimes comments on his general
thoughts and on things it picks up through the subconscious. It never
comes completely out of the black with a thought; everything is either
an observation or connected to what he’s already thinking.
TIMELINE: After he dies, late in Vision of the Future.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Be patient, please. This will take a while.
Far
outside of the Republic there was a spacefaring people called the
Chiss. One of them was Commander Mitth’raw’nuruodo, core name Thrawn, a
tactician and strategist of unparalleled skill and boldness. He likened
combat to art and studied both.
A
large task force sent by then-Senator Palpatine was intercepted and
destroyed by Thrawn, even though his forces had been tiny in comparison.
Capturing its leader, Thrawn was warned about an incoming Jedi force,
Outbound Flight, and told it was a threat to the Chiss people. Not long
after making contact with Outbound Flight, their leader attempted to
strangle him with the Force, and so Thrawn’s forces destroyed them.
His
people exiled him for the tactics he used, and in exile he was picked
up by the Galactic Empire and trained. Despite being a nonhuman in a
society where nonhumans were seen as lesser, he worked his way quickly
and surely through the ranks until he was made Grand Admiral, one of
only thirteen.
On
the way he earned the respect of Darth Vader, and Vader’s secret
commandos, the Noghri. Noghri were collectively under a life debt to
Vader, believing that he had descended to save their world from a toxin.
In reality, the Empire had seeded the world with this toxin, and
Vader’s aid was a carefully-designed ploy.
Thrawn
apparently fouled up somehow in politics and was sent with his forces
on a “mapping expedition” in the Unknown Regions, which was popularly
thought to be a disgrace and a waste of his talents. In reality, he was
carving a new branch of the Empire out there, far from Coruscant and the
Core Worlds. Five years after the Emperor’s death and the Rebellion’s
victory he returned and picked up what was left of the Empire. From the
bridge of Captain Pellaeon’s Chimaera, he led a very successful campaign
against what he always insisted was the Rebellion.
Unlike
many Imperials, he could take a loss and recognize when he had made a
mistake, though there were relatively few of either. A lot happened,
but in sum, he allied with a cloned Dark Jedi, almost defeated the Rebel
upstarts, activated the cloning facilities on Wayland, and was killed
by his Noghri bodyguard Rukh at a critical juncture, after Leia exposed
what had really been done to the Noghri homeworld.
A
month before this, he uploaded some of his memories and personality
into a new project,an attempt to make a new breed of warlord. That
clone had some of his mind, but his body and most of his brain and
memories were cloned and transferred from the original Grodin Tierce,
hereafter called TR-889 for simplicity’s sake.
TR-889
was born and raised on midlevel Imperial Center/Coruscant. When
TR-889’s older brother left to join the Army, he followed a year later
at the age of seventeen, lying about his age to get in.
It
wasn’t long before he found himself in the Stormtrooper Corps, and with
his unit was sent out to do everything from clean out pirate bases to
put down Rebel insurgents to patrol stable cities. TR-889 was promoted
several times, eventually becoming a Captain; during this time he
briefly served under then-Vice Admiral Thrawn. He was known for having a
cool head and a sense of command, as well as extraordinary reflexes.
He
was also known for being very devoted to the Empire. He had absolutely
no sympathy for the Rebels. If the Empire said a thing was so, then it
was so; therefore, Alderaan was a tragic result of Rebels hijacking a
mining tool, and he would kill unarmed civilians of any age if ordered.
His lack of enthusiasm for classing people who weren’t healthy human
males as NonHuMan and inferior was really the only part of Imperial
doctrine in which he wasn’t a model Imperial - as he saw it, loyalty to
the Empire was more important than species, gender, or cybernetics.
While
they were stationed together TR-889 found unclear evidence that his
elder brother had Rebel sympathies. He’d confronted his brother and
heard vague excuses before the base they were both stationed on was
attacked by insurgents, and during the fighting his brother went MIA.
It was reported that he had saved his squad by throwing himself onto a
grenade. TR-889 believed this and discreetly disposed of the evidence.
He
performed excellently in the stormtrooper corps, and at the age of
twenty-three he was selected to be trained as one of the Emperor’s
personal bodyguards. They’re known by a lot of names - Imperial Guard,
Royal Guard, Red Guard, Emperor’s Guard - but here will be called simply
Guardsmen.
Training
for this position was intense. As might be expected, training in many
forms of combat, exotic and common, was part of it. So was learning to
work effectively alone or in pairs, spotting concealed weaponry,
‘reading’ a crowd, speaking and writing in a unique language, “slicing”
aka hacking records and droids, and techniques to sustain their
bodyguarded person until help arrived. Some of these involved the
Force, sustaining a life in particular.
But
it also involved a particular mental training. Tierce once says, “A
Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges, ever. His entire goal in
life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. This is his
goal in life, and his desire in death.” This training, or perhaps
brainwashing, caused yet greater loyalty to the Emperor, so strong that
in his presence Guardsmen were utterly subservient to his will. Even
before training’s end, the Emperor had them fight each other to the
death to test this loyalty. And they did, without hesitation or
question, although after the heat of the moment TR-889 wished he hadn’t
had to do it.
His
class started with forty young but expert stormtroopers. Training took
a year. At the end of it, between fights and people with stronger
affinity to the Force being removed to elsewhere, there were five
Guardsmen.
Months later, the Emperor died.
Many
Guardsmen died with the Death Star, but small numbers were often lent
to other high-ranking Imperials - both as bodyguards and to check their
loyalty. They were also rotated out to take out targets, or to make
them don normal stormtrooper armor and fight within the stormtrooper
corps in order to let them keep their edge. TR-889 was one of them,
taking out a Rebel cell, when the Emperor died.
It
shook him profoundly. Guardsmen didn’t have anything like as strong a
Force-bond to the Emperor as the Emperor’s Hands did, but the Emperor
had still become the center of his galaxy - loyalty to Palpatine
superseded any previous ties. One of the Guardsmen tried to commit
suicide. On instinct TR-889 tried to preserve his life, but the other
Guardsman had no will to go on. If the other two hadn’t broken his
focus, he would have died too. After that he and those other two
returned to Imperial service and split up.
TR-889
hid the fact that he was a Guardsman, since after the Emperor’s death
he didn’t feel like those who tried to run the Empire were worthy of the
same loyalty. Actually, TR-889 hacked his own service file. The
Guardsmen were a very secretive order, but records still showed him
disappearing entirely for a year, and never rejoining any specific part
of Imperial service. He changed them, and for years after that his
first act on gaining access to any database which might have a clue was
to find and alter related files.
In
the five years between the Emperor’s death and the return of Grand
Admiral Thrawn, he had himself transferred repeatedly until he started
to serve as part of the security detail aboard the Star Destroyer
Chimaera. He watched the Empire declining over the
years and was disgusted, but leaving it was inconceivable.
During
that time he came more regularly into contact with his family. While
he was on leave and visiting them on Imperial Center, Rebels sabotaged
the planetary shields and invaded. The current head of the Empire
planned for this to happen, having seeded the planet with a plague that
only killed nonhumans. TR-889 helped his family and a few of their
neighbors escape on the shuttle he’d come in on. Civilians weren’t
supposed to board those - later he reported himself in and was given a
slap on the wrist as reprimand.
One
neighbor was a woman he’d known as a child, and who resettled near
where his parents did. Within a year and a half they were engaged, and
at last TR-889 started to consider leaving service and settling down.
Then, however, Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Unknown Regions
and took the Chimaera as his flagship.
TR-889
found his near-worship of the Emperor returning in force, directed at a
new figurehead. His desire to leave the service evaporated completely
under the sense that he could serve a new great Empire, and his
non-military relationships suffered for it. He didn’t tell the Grand
Admiral that he had been a Guardsman, and he was never sure if Thrawn
knew, but he did find himself being cycled out into field missions which
tested his abilities. And he did well.
He
was picked to be the template for Thrawn’s experiment. Not long after
being cloned and uploading his memories, TR-889 was killed in an assault
on Generis.
The
clone Tierce was decanted shortly after this. Thrawn could have
ordered other mixed-origin clones to be made, but he didn’t. Tierce
didn’t immediately appear to be a success, but neither was he failure
enough to just be terminated, and perhaps in time he would prove
himself. He was stationed on the Chimaera as a high-ranked member of
security - not the same position his template had been in, but not far
from it either.
The
insane cloned Dark Jedi, Joruus C’baoth, was also on the Chimaera.
C’baoth had a way of seizing the minds of the people around them and
reshaping them a little, enough to get them to do his bidding. This
happened several times to Tierce. He hated C’baoth, but this slight
reshaping contributed to what his template had passed down to him, the
effects of brainwashing and that desire to serve something greater than
himself, and it probably added to his instability.
The
clone Tierce never knew that he had been tested and had failed. During
the Battle of Bilbringi he expected an attempt on Thrawn’s life to be
made, and assumed that it would be in the form of a commando team
docking in the shuttle bay, so that’s where he stationed his forces. He
was able to kill Rukh as the latter was trying to escape, but felt that
he had failed abjectly.
Knowing
that he would otherwise be pressed into the kind of service other
clones were assigned - turbolaser fodder, mostly - he altered the
records to show that Tierce had been severely wounded on Generis but had
survived, and after injuring himself with the help of a reprogrammed
2-1B surgical droid, he took his template’s identity.
He
kept that up for ten years. Tierce had some trouble relating to his
template’s family and friends. While he did have his template’s
memories he felt a little removed from and awkward around them. Thanks
to the reported trauma no one suspected he wasn’t his template, but the
inherited relationship with his fiance declined quickly and broke off,
which he always saw with a combination of regret and relief. For a while
he mostly coasted on his identity, doing little of note.
As
every effort the Empire made was beaten back, as they were ground down
to a fraction of their old glory, the attitude in much of the Empire
became one of grim resignation. There was even talk of ending the war,
bowing to the upstarts - the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Remnant,
the same Pellaeon who’d served with Thrawn - even spoke of it openly.
Tierce hated that attitude and plan with a passion, but there was little
he could do.
Five
years after replacing his template, Tierce found that his brother - his
template’s brother - wasn’t dead after all. He was serving the
Rebellion, having faked his death. Tierce took it personally and roused
out of his slump, calling on the brilliant part of himself to track the
man down and, eventually, kill him.
He
was now aware that he could do some good, though he was not Thrawn.
Tierce attached himself as the military liason to Moff Disra, who was
somewhat self-serving but ultimately loved the Empire, someone he could
manipulate and act through. Disra had always had criminal contacts, but
was terribly undiplomatic about his allies. Tierce was able to smooth
things out a little, and get him new contacts. One result was Disra
getting a major contract for Imperial starfighters.
Disra
was smarter than he seemed and, after eight months, looked into the
background of his very unremarkable military liason. Tierce was aware of
this and, though his records mostly reflected an innocuous past,
allowed him to learn that Tierce had been a Guardsman. Disra confronted
him, saw his middle self, and introduced him to Flim - an actor who
could perfectly imitate Grand Admiral Thrawn’s appearance, voice, and
sheer presence.
Disra’s
idea, the idea he’d sold Flim on, was to just bring this fake Thrawn up
and use him as a figurehead to rally the Imperial Remnant. Tierce
immediately had larger, grander plans. When Pellaeon retreated to an
isolated sector of neutral space and sent an envoy to talk to a Rebel
military leader, Tierce had the envoy captured and imprisoned. The envoy
signaled, but with the comm jamming active Tierce didn’t think anyone
had received it.
Presently
there was a crisis in the Rebellion revolving around the razing of an
innocent world and how that had been made possible by the efforts of a
handful of Bothans; the razing happened decades ago, but many cultures
took the subject as a good pretext to go to war with various rivals and
ancestral enemies.
Tierce
wanted to take advantage of that, and so he had several discreet,
competent Star Destroyer captains meet with Flim, who as Thrawn gave
them assignments. They were sent to wait cloaked in orbit above the
Bothan homeworld, as fleets started massing there. Disra had found the
secret cells - sleeper cells, not biological - of clones Thrawn had
scattered about and activated many of them, and Tierce repurposed those.
He also sent agents to instigate riots in already-unhappy crowds, and
more to prepare to sabotage planetary shields.
Knowing
that the whole crisis could be solved by finding just who made the
razing possible, Tierce hacked the Emperor’s private records of the
incident, finding and destroying any of his
incriminating records at the same time. Then he sent Disra’s pirate
allies to harass Pellaeon’s ship while under the sign of the people
Pellaeon was trying to contact, a calculated gesture.
Tierce
had Lando Calrissian and a Diamalan Senator who was hitching a ride
with him apprehended and taken before Flim, who as Thrawn deftly
convinced them that he was genuine, before releasing them to spread the
word - offering his assistance in the crisis. Another calculated
gesture. They then reactivated a few more clone cells and were around to
accept when an uneasy border-occupying Rebel world wanted to leave and
enter Imperial protection. The whole time they were propagating the
rumor that Thrawn was back, but keeping it as a rumor so the Rebellion
wouldn’t react with overwhelming force.
Disra,
increasingly uneasy about their alliance and the way Tierce was always
pushing his limits, threatened him and was instantly disarmed. Tierce
then gave the weapon back and explained that there was something called
the Hand of Thrawn, which he claimed was a person or a plan for ultimate
Imperial victory, and he was trying to draw them out.
The
Diamala sent a small attack force in anonymous ships to test them, but
Disra was able to identify them, and Tierce directed Flim into making
the opening move Thrawn had used against Diamala, which scared this
batch off.
When
Imperial ships got a recording of a mysterious ship making a flyby,
Tierce recognized it as Chiss/Empire of the Hand but soon found that the
recording was part of a ploy to find the Imperial capital which they
were at right now, and Rebels were there looking for data. At the same
time Pellaeon arrived to have a talk with Disra about some sketchy
dealings, and Disra’s angry pirate allies snuck in tailed by a Mistryl
shadow guard. Tierce interrupted the interrogation of Disra with a
report on the Rebels and offered himself, outer self showing, for
Pellaeon to question. As the Rebel situation became complicated Tierce
and Disra, having recovered his composure, switched places again, but
Disra found out that his angry pirate allies were in the palace and left
Pellaeon in his office.
Tierce
prioritized - Pellaeon would keep, they were on their way to finding
the Rebels, the only way to deal with the pirates now was kill them or
scare them, and what could scare them more than the Grand Admiral? He
assured Flim that he could protect him from anything... and when they
got word of the Rebels being tricky and Disra infuriated the pirates,
Tierce did. With the unexpected help of the Mistryl shadow guard, who
was out for the death of the pirate leader and hadn’t wanted anyone else
to get that kill. Flim started pitching the idea of an alliance to her.
Pellaeon
had underhandedly broken into Disra’s unguarded desk, found that his
envoy had been captured and detained, and left without waiting for his
host to return. Tierce told Disra to stop panicking - they had the
ultimate excuse, they could say it had all been at Thrawn’s orders. Then
he and Flim intercepted the Rebels - Lando Calrissian and Han Solo -
utterly convinced them that Thrawn was back, and gave them a doctored
version of the information they’d come for - carefully sliced and
altered to implicate many important Bothans.
Soon
Tierce made one of Thrawn’s tactical great assumptions, putting
together facts which appeared to mean that a Rebel force was going to go
to Bothan space to try to keep a lid on the situation, and realizing
that in fact it was a trick, and the Rebels were going for one of the
Empire’s great information hubs to try to get the data, as they didn’t
know about the doctored version yet. He had that base prepared, and also
decided to hold the talks with Mistryl representatives there.
And
yes, that’s where the Rebels struck, and were trapped, which impressed
the Mistryl reps. And then Pellaeon walked back on to the scene. He now
knew who Flim was... and who and what Tierce was.
Driven
into inner self, Tierce furiously told everyone on the bridge what he’d
kept secret his whole life, and almost pleaded with Pellaeon to let
things go on. He could win the war. He could have vengeance against the
Rebels. Pellaeon, saddened, said that vengeance had never been Thrawn’s
way, and the war was over. Tierce had been a failure - there had been
more than enough time after his creation and before Thrawn’s death for
more of his kind to be created, but there never had been.
Tierce
snapped, lunged for Pellaeon, and was intercepted by one of the
Mistryl. He was badly wounded; time in a bacta tank would have helped,
but there was no reason to waste that resource. He was quietly tried,
found guilty of treason, and executed, all without returning fully to
consciousness.