"Count Dooku may have taught you to wave a lightsaber, General, but that does not make you my equal."
BASICS
NAME: Ventress
GENDER: female
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ORIENTATION: demiromantic bisexual
BIRTHDATE: Spring 2724
AGE: fifty-two as of Spring 2776
LOCATION: Semaca Weyr
OCCUPATION: dragonless, healer
APPEARANCE
EYES: blue
HAIR: silver
HEIGHT AND BUILD: five feet ten and a half inches; slight
PLAY-BY: Asajj Ventress; Clone Wars
FULL APPEARANCE: Ventress is long and slight, too rawboned to be considered lithe. She is thin, more angles than curves, and even if she had more weight it would not help. Her cheekbones seem sharp enough to slice flesh, and her chin is nearly a chisel. She has wide scars on both sides of her mouth, as well as several scars all over. Most of these scars were inflicted during war, and have healed to near invisibility.
Besides her hair, which grew back silver after her short brown hair was burned off, the most visible markers of her time as dragon fodder are the twin blades she wears at her hips. An odd accessory for a healer, to be sure, but even with scarred hands and a scored leg, Ventress remains poetry in motion.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Some would say that a healer should be kind, compassionate, and caring. They would say that Ventress has no business being a healer, and some days she would agree with them. No one who has wielded death as fluently as Ventress once did should also heal. But other days, she sees it as a sort of penance. She once took life, with blade and with dragon. It's only fitting that she help preserve it, now.
Ventress suffers from confidence issues, many days, and identity issues on other days. She has conflicting skills - capable of giving both life and death - that she doesn't have the background to integrate. So she spends her time in the guard, training and working as a field healer. It's an easier fit, cognitively, than a home-base healer, as she calls the ones who stick to the weyr. She is learning how to work as a team with other humans again, and maybe - just maybe - in this new land, she might try for a new bond.
HISTORY
FAMILY: A well-to-do family from Benden Hold; they think she is dead, and she has no desire to change that.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Obiwan of blue Obivask
BIRTHPLACE: Benden Hold
HISTORY:
Ventress seems to have no history longer than a few Turns. No one remembers her from any time earlier than 2760 - or if they do, they don't realize it. That's because she was born under a different name, and with a very different appearance. Once upon a time, her name was Asajj, and she was a dragon rider.
Asajj was a daughter of a Benden family, one of many, and at fifteen, she was the first member of her generation to be Searched for the weyr. She Impressed at her second clutch to a gorgeous green dragon; her Naaleth. The two were inseparable from the moment of Impression. Even in the midst of a war, Asajj and Naaleth were an unusually well-matched force.
But everything ground to a terrifying halt when Asajj was twenty-five. Naaleth was killed in dragon fire defending their home from Golre and her bronzes. Asajj was more protected from the burns - protected by her dragon - but she, too, felt the lash of dragon fire. It burned all the hair off her skull, and she inhaled the tail end of ash.
Asajj never returned to the weyr after that. Officially, she was considered killed along with her dragon - just another casualty in a war that took too many lives. And in a way, that was the absolute truth. Bright Asajj never left the battlefield. She died alongside her green. It was bitter, wary Ventress who walked away from a corpse-ridden field. Branded by dragons, Ventress avoided dragonkin for Turns.
She might had spent the rest of her life in solitude - whatever she managed of it, more corpse than shell and more burned than whole - was it not for a well-meaning healer at Telgar. He was a mind healer, and it was with his help that Ventress began to piece her life back together.
In fact, under his tutelage, Ventress discovered her most unusual calling in life - that of a healer. She had spent so many Turns dealing the opposite of healing, causing death and destruction to those who crossed her and her weyr, that the simple discovery that she could heal dismayed her. But it made sense, too. Healing took skill, patience, and time - all things she had honed as a rider. She is not a talkative healer, but a skilled spare pair of hands? That, she has on lock.
Her travels - because she would not go back to a weyr, not any weyr - took her to Fort Hold while it was still under the care of Lord Vellat. She hired on as a mercenary guard, and quickly found joy in sparring with the hold guards. One of which, a wher handler and his protégé, challenged her more than any other. They first became sparring partners, and then friends, then more.
But when Obiwan and Anakin followed Padme to Igen, Ventress stayed at Fort Hold. She was a candidate for Evander's elite wher guard, but was passed over in favor of another guard. Ventress became a field healer, learning just enough dragonkin healing to save lives.
She swore never to set foot in a weyr again, but then the weyrs needed to staff Semaca. She put in to transfer to the southern weyr, where even the very air promised new beginnings. Obiwan was there, along with his protégé. With her healers credentials, as well as her guard experience, Ventress' transfer was approved. Naaleth's specter is less evident on a different continent, and her therapy feline Tyrannus is having the time of his life.
