Zalveni

Identity

Ability scores

Saving throws

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Languages

Inventory

• Half-Vest · 2 kg
• Blaster Pistol · 1 kg
• Tool Kit · 1 kg

Backstory

Codru-Ji were not known for warmth. That was the first thing most people said when they met Zalveni, and the first thing they revised afterward. She was born on Munto Codru, in the shadow of one of the great castle-fortresses that dotted the planet's highland ridges, to a family that serviced the mechanical infrastructure of the ruling clans — the heating systems, the lift shafts, the ancient atmospheric processors that nobody else on the planet understood anymore. From the time she could hold a calibrator in any of her four hands, Zalveni was inside something that was broken, trying to understand why. Understanding *why* was always more interesting to her than anything the clans themselves were doing. The politics, the kidnappings, the elaborate power games — she watched them the way someone watches weather. Interesting. Irrelevant to her. What she wanted was off-world. Specifically, she wanted to reach the orbital shipyards above Corellia, where she had heard — through secondhand accounts and fragmented HoloNet transmissions — that engineers were doing work she could barely name. Cortosis-weave integration into hull plating. Experimental navicomputer architectures. Systems so layered and recursive that pulling one thread would unravel something entirely unexpected. She wanted to be the person pulling the thread. At sixteen, she got closer than she expected. A merchant vessel contracted her family for transit repairs, and in the chaos of a disputed political succession, Zalveni ended up aboard it when it departed. She told herself it was opportunity. It nearly killed her instead. The ship's secondary power coupling failed mid-transit — a catastrophic cascade she later reconstructed in her head a hundred times, identifying every junction she could have caught, every diagnostic she might have run differently. She was in the maintenance corridor when the overload hit. The blast took her upper right arm at the elbow, destroyed the eye on that side, and left the ear beside it little more than scar tissue. The ship's medic kept her alive. A Republic-contracted medical station in the Tingel Arm gave her back approximations of what she had lost: a prosthetic arm with sensor-sensitive fingertips more precise than flesh, an optical implant with a magnification range she still sometimes forgets is not normal, an auditory processor that filters frequencies she is only now learning to interpret. She survived. She is still not sure she has forgiven herself for the coupling she missed. She is nineteen now, working passage-to-passage along the Mid Rim's secondary trade corridors, attaching herself to ships that need someone who can diagnose anything mechanical and ask nothing in return but access to the systems she has not seen yet. Her toolkit is worn. Her half-vest is patched where the blast scarred it before she owned it. She carries a blaster she has never fired in anger and hopes, privately, she never will — not because she is afraid of violence, but because if it comes to that, something has already gone wrong that her hands could not fix. Corellia is still out there. The shipyards are still there. She is still reaching.

Roleplaying notes

- **The Four-Handed Advantage:** With INT +4 and expert-level Mechanics and Use Computer, Zalveni processes technical problems faster than she can explain them to others — roleplay the gap between her diagnosis and her ability to communicate it as a real source of friction, not just flavor. - **Codru-Ji Reserve:** Despite her uncharacteristic warmth, Zalveni's CHA +0 means her openness reads as bluntness; she means comfort when she says something plainly true, and she is often surprised when others do not receive it that way. - **The Diagnostic Ritual:** Whenever Zalveni enters an unfamiliar space, she instinctively catalogues exits, power sources, and visible mechanical systems before people — use Perception checks not to scan faces, but to read a room's infrastructure first. - **Earned Trust, Slow:** Zalveni attaches to people the way she attaches to machines — cautiously, with testing — but once she has decided someone is worth trusting, she is steady and unglamorous about it; she will not say she cares, she will just still be there. - **Technical Vernacular:** Zalveni speaks in systems and causality — she describes emotions, plans, and people in terms of function, failure states, and load tolerance; phrases like *"that's an inefficient path to the same output"* or *"I've seen that junction fail before"* bleed naturally into non-technical conversation.