This is my webpage for my former character Rellawy of the now defunct first iteration of Star Wars: Galaxy MUSH. Though I’m not playing her anymore, I keep this page up for posterity.
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Rellawy This is a young human woman, of perhaps 5’4″ in height, and a stocky, compact sort of build. Her hair is a sun-streaked mass of honey-gold, framing a face with generously defined features, and a faint smattering of freckles across her nose and cheekbones. She is not exactly lovely, not with a slight crook to that freckled nose and a jawline too broadly drawn to be delicate, but neither is she truly plain; rather, there is something austere and elemental about her, centered in the blue-green gaze of her slant-set, almond-shaped eyes. When she speaks, it is with a soft lilting brogue. |
Quick Facts
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General Profile
Her Personality
Rellawy does not like other sentient beings, for the most part. She has grown up with the double curse of her father being in a profession that insured that most of the people she has encountered to date have been of the unsavory variety — and having the gift she does, knowing she has to hide it from these same unsavory beings. She has spent her childhood and early adulthood always wondering when her gift would strike her next, who she would be forced to heal, and what danger it would cause her and her father… and thus, she’s become a wary young woman, as wary as any young woman should be when left alone in the seamier side of the galaxy.
Her Story
Rellawy Woodlake sometimes wonders if she is entirely human.
Oh, her father was human enough… as prosaic as a man as you could ever find, interested in very little besides traversing the trade routes of the galaxy, taking his freight from world to world, and making enough credits for himself and his young daughter to live on. But Jord Woodlake had also been a big bear of a man, ruddy of complexion, loud and booming of temperament, and utterly unlike the pale, small, taciturn girl whose earliest memories are of travelling on her father’s freighter, and the safety of her father’s large and looming presence.
Jord Woodlake had never been slow to chatter with his offspring, either — happy to expound for her on the details of the ship that was their home, or the planets they visited. There was but one topic he never mentioned to young Rell, and it was not until she was old enough to know that a father’s presence had to imply that there had once been a mother did she think to ask of him where hers was. And to a child who’d grown used to her father’s prompt answers on any subject that came to mind, to have him grow quiet and withdrawn was startling indeed.
It was not until shortly before Jord Woodlake’s death that he finally answered his daughter’s query — and vaguely, raising more questions within her than he answered. All Rell knows now is that when her sire had been a young man, he had visited a particular distant world… and encountered on that world a woman who had captivated him, heart and soul. She had granted him one night with her… and ten of that world’s months later, without message or warning, had delivered the infant Rell into his keeping.
Jord never told his daughter the name of the woman, or of the world she lived on. But Rell knows in her bones that she takes after that mysterious mother, in face, in form… and talents.
Her Gifts
Rellawy Woodlake is a healer and an empath, gifts that have thus far proven more bane than blessing, for she cannot witness pain without being driven to heal it… and she cannot heal without opening herself within to the one being healed. The worse the injury, the greater the drain on Rell… and the more she ‘sees’ of the one she heals, whether she wills it or no.
She has been aware of her gifts since her childhood, when they began to awaken in response to the occasional everyday injuries — a clonk on the head, catching a hand in a door — suffered by her father. As she grew older, though, she grew more sensitive, increasingly aware of pains and sufferings both great and small around her whenever she and her father visited a world. And as Jord Woodlake began to realize what his daughter could do, he became proud, awed, and worried all at once, certain that if word of her gifts got out that their usually tranquil existence would be irrevocably altered. But neither father nor daughter were comfortable with keeping completely silent — Rell couldn’t, if she encountered any kind of pain, and Jord, having a good heart, couldn’t help but do his best to shield his daughter’s privacy whenever her gifts demanded release. She cannot, currently, heal herself.
OOC Notes
The upper limit of Rell’s gifts as dictated by the SW:G wizcorps is that she will be less effective than bacta treatment. As her control and more importantly, her knowledge of what she’s doing, improves, she will approach that upper limit, but she will not cross it; she will eventually give a good bacta dunking a run for its money, but ultimately, bacta treatments will win out and part of Rell’s RP goals will involve not only learning her own limits, but also how to convince her own gift to sit down and shut up when it can’t accomplish something. Basically, Rell can sense what hurts, and accelerate healing. But she will not regenerate tissue that is no longer there and some things will be flat-out beyond her ability, period; e.g., she couldn’t grow Luke Skywalker a new hand, and couldn’t do anything for Darth Vader’s broken body within his suit of armor. Nor can Rell reshape tissue that’s already healed and scarred over; what she is sensitive to is pain, and an injury that’s already healed before she gets there is not going to draw her notice.
Empathically speaking, Rell is sensitive to the presence of life forms in her general vicinity, though this is a ranged effect and is good only for about ten to twenty meters. If she is in a sufficiently large crowd, or even in a highly populated area in general, her empathic senses will often be blanketed out in a kind of white noise, and this is why she frequently goes around looking as though she’s fighting off a migraine.
Normally, she can sense only very strong surface feelings from the sentients around her, as it takes the strongest of feelings to peak out of the white noise of her awareness of other life forms. For Rell to get more than surface feelings from a particular sentient — i.e., to get her to delve into old or buried emotions, or even just mildly passing ones — requires that she have healed that being, and how much she actually senses will depend on the extent of the healing she has to perform. Her sensitivity to a being she has healed is markedly stronger than with any other sentients, although this effect will eventually fade after several days’ time; she will retain the memory of what she has sensed, which may well affect her behavior towards the being in question, but will not retain the actual empathic link. Also, if she heals one being and then turns around and heals someone else, how much she senses from either will depend upon the degree of injury to both.
Rell’s gifts are not based in the Force, although she doesn’t yet know this IC; her gifts are derived from the non-human portion of her background, and are as much biological as empathic. Her healing requires actual physical contact to take place; she cannot heal from a distance.
More to be added to this section as events warrant. :)
Roleplay on SW:G
Recent History
It is not very long since the accident on Nar Shaddaa that damaged Jord Woodlake’s freighter beyond repair and killed Jord himself. Rell was unable to reach her father in time, but she felt his passing keenly, and it provided a harsh jolt that put her talents at their current strength. Now on her own, Rell is torn between the recurrent merciless demands of her gifts and a profound need to keep herself apart and alone; she fears seeing into the hearts of any who might need her aid, and fears even more deeply the possibility that one she heals might see into her.
Rell was taken in on the Smuggler’s Moon by Lerren, the Corellian who runs the bar called the Burning Deck, and who is an old friend of her father’s. Between Lerren and his two large ursoid bouncers H’rruuk and H’rraal, the girl led as safe an existence as could be managed in a place like Nar Shaddaa — which is to say, not very safe at all.
The danger of the Smuggler’s Moon didn’t stop Rell’s gifts from demanding that she direct her attention to whatever forms of pain might happen to be occurring around her. All too aware of the violence that permeates the place, Rell often walked Nar Shaddaa with a constant headache behind her eyes, fighting not to be made ill by the place in which she’d been stranded. She strove to keep as low a profile as possible, but it was inevitable that her talents would get her in trouble.
Following a nasty barfight in which he took a blaster shot to the shoulder and a vibro-blade stab to his gut, the petty smuggler and thief Galdric was happened upon by Rell Woodlake. Her gifts refused to allow her to pass up the man who had fainted in the dark alleyway, and thus, she healed him — but not before she got a look into his thoroughly selfish, dank little head, and not before his hulking Gamorrean partner, Tabak, witnessed her lingering suspiciously over Galdric’s fallen body. The young woman fled the scene before the Gamorrean could capture her — but, convinced that they can make use of her, the two began to sweep the city for her, intending to turn her over to their employer, Kelga the Hutt… not knowing that that same Hutt had once employed Rell’s father.
In the meantime, Rell’s existence was discovered by two men. The Corellian smuggler Han Solo discovered Galdric harassing the girl at the Deck and chased him off; not long after, Rell encountered Thomas Drake, captain of the Rampart — and secretly a Jedi Knight. To Rell’s utter amazement, Drake revealed his true identity to her, and urged her to leave the moon with him, claiming that not only did her gifts need training, but that her life would be in danger if she remained on Nar Shaddaa.
But for all that Rell was sickened by ongoing exposure to the place, and for all her acute awareness that she was less than capable of defending herself there, the girl insisted on staying. Rell was desperate to find Kelga the Hutt, who she knew only vaguely as her father’s last employer, as she knew he possessed the scrapped remains of her father’s ship — and, she hoped, his personal effects from the Mystery Lady as well. Having lost her father, the young healer was desperate to search his personal logs for any hint or clue of where he had met her mysterious mother.
Galdric, however, encouraged by the Hutt to capture the girl and bring her in, attacked her and would have hauled her to his employer had Thomas Drake and Han Solo not intervened to save her life. Rell was mortified that the two had had to step in to save her, and further embarrassed when Lerren sternly insisted that she would not travel the moon alone anymore. She grudgingly consented to H’rruuk and H’rraal serving as her bodyguards, but she could not bring herself to trust Lerren, the ursoids, or Solo or Drake enough to tell them why Galdric had been pursuing her. Drake dismissed her as a fool for staying on the moon, and Solo even growled once about being weary of ‘babysitting’ her.
Rell’s patience was already thin, and it took yet another young man trying to chivalrously offer to protect her to get her to make some compromises. Thraknor unwittingly touched off a sore spot in Solo by bringing up troubles with women — and when the Corellian hauled off and punched him, Rell sensed the flareup of hurt in Solo’s head. Troubled, she later offered Solo an apology and asked H’rruuk and H’rraal to teach her to defend herself.
Mellowing towards the girl, Solo offered her his assistance, and some advice about how to approach a Hutt when you’re seeking something from him; Solo also startled Rell by offering her a valuable jeweled box to take to Kelga as a bribe. Meanwhile, Drake, once more on Nar Shaddaa, gruffly electing himself to aid in Rell’s plans to find the Hutt. Still embarrassed over her vulnerabilities, the girl gratefully accepted both offers of help and tried to ignore how the two men drew her.
But neither offer of help managed to hold. Overtaken by other troubles, Solo abruptly departed Nar Shaddaa, leaving the promised jeweled box and a cryptic message for Rell with Lerren, promising he’d return to find her when he could. And before Drake could contact the girl again, Kelga the Hutt and his minions got to her first.
A raiding party broke into the squalid flat shared by her ursoid bodyguards, and although the two creatures rushed to her defense, H’rraal was gravely wounded. Prevented from healing him when her gift screamed into life, Rell collapsed, and the Hutt’s minions succeeded in preventing H’rruuk from following them by threatening to finish off his den-brother.
But the Jedi freighter captain quickly learned what had happened to Rell. When the despondent Lerren told him what had transpired, Thomas Drake immediately recruited Christopher Morgan — a Rebel major with a gift for artillery and explosives — to help him rescue the girl, and the two stormed Kelga’s hideout. The Hutt did not have long to gloat over his captive, for Drake and Morgan made short work of his stronghold, killing him and the treacherous Galdric, and fleeing Nar Shaddaa with Rell in tow.
Current Status
Now on Home One, the Rebel flagship, Rellawy has struck up an unlikely friendship with Major Morgan, and with the permission of Mon Mothma herself, remains on board as she begins training with Drake to try to get her gifts under control. Asked by Mon Mothma to join the Rebel Alliance, and more than half convinced to do so already, Rell nevertheless balks, unwilling to pledge herself until she knows she can control her talents… until she unearths the story of her mysterious mother, or at least begins to… and until she better understands the Rebel cause and why they fight the Empire. Rell has begun to do odd jobs under Morgan’s supervision around the ship’s massive Hangar deck, while struggling through assorted worries: missing Lerren and H’rruuk and H’rraal, concern over Solo’s abrupt departure off Nar Shaddaa and her rueful wish to give him his gift back, nervousness over word of her talents spreading through the Rebel ranks (for her gift has begun to demand its way again, with John Silence as the first to be healed by her)… and Thomas Drake.
Rell has been aghast at Major Morgan’s repeated hints that Drake is attracted to her. And between the Jedi’s own unpredictable mood swings, a brief chaste kiss in the middle of the Hangar, and what she has sensed from the man in unguarded moments, she is growing increasingly afraid that Morgan might be right.
The problem is… what does she do about it?
To be continued….
Rellawy Links
- Rellawy Roleplay Logs
(C)1998 Lucasfilm Ltd. STAR WARS(R), THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (R), RETURN OF THE JEDI (TM) and THX(R) and associated elements and logos are property of Lucasfilm Ltd. All content (e.g., clips, stills, designs, artwork, etc.) is protected by intellectual property laws and any use other than for private, non-commercial purposes is strictly prohibited.
STAR WARS (C)1977, 1998 Lucasfilm Ltd.; The Empire Strikes Back (C)1980, 1998 Lucasfilm Ltd.; Return of the Jedi (C)1983, 1998 Lucasfilm Ltd.