Darrian Reach, Jedi Knight

Name: Darrian Reach

Nicknames/Aliases: Dare

Species: Human - Coruscanti

Gender: Male

Age: Forty-four standard galactic years

Homeworld: Coruscant





Height: Six feet, six inches - 1.98 m

Weight: One hundred ninety-three pounds - 87.5 kg

Eye Color: Green

Hair Style: Dare wears his hair fairly long and often ties back the top and sides.

Hair Color: Darrian's hair is just a few shades darker than a chestnut brown.

Facial Hair: He's experimented with beards, sideburns, even a respectably sized mustache - but nothing ever really sticks for long.

Skin Color: Dare is a fairly dark-complected man.

Build: Darrian is as long-limbed and slim as he is tall.

Distinguishing Features: Height aside, Darrian has aged much more gracefully over the past few years than he should have had any right to. He hardly looks forty and might even be able to pass for someone in his mid-thirties - there isn't a gray hair on his head and only a few wrinkles mar his face.

Apparel: Darrian generally prefers to wear a heavy traveling cloak and his own take on that tunic common to most Jedi, as well as a more traditional pair of pants and heavy boots. Dare's tunic tends to be a little thinner, a little more form-fitting than most, so as to keep the sleeves and material from catching on things as he works. He owns a few of these garments and prefers subdued hues - grays, browns, and greens.

Weaponry: The only weapons Dare (usually) equips himself with are the Force and his lightsaber. His is fairly standard among such weapons - hilt just shy of thirty centimeters long, one blade emitter, a texturized plastoid grip to provide a comforting weight and better feel. Its most notable aspect is the synthcrystal lodged in its housing, a gem which generates a bronze-colored blade. He's been known to carry a blaster pistol - most commonly a DL-44 model - but does not do so regularly.

Equipment: He doesn't normally carry much. A datapad, a comlink, a rebreather, and some hard credits really round out most of his usual gear.





Profession: Jedi Knight

Skills: Darrian is in excellent shape and is a skilled acrobat. He has some affinity for both investigation and negotiation; is a decent pilot; and received an extensive education during his time at the Jedi Academy.

Force-Sensitive: He sure is.

Training: Dare picked up most of what he knows from a combination of basic schooling, training as a security guard before he joined the Jedi, and his training as a Jedi.

Vehicle: None

Starship: Dare doesn't technically own his own ship, but he tends to pilot a Jedi Order-owned vessel in order to get around - usually an X-Wing or old Z95 Headhunter.

Other Possessions: Darrian doesn't own much - he forsook most of his worldly possessions when he joined the Jedi.

Companions: Other Jedi, occasionally





Factional Affiliation: The New Jedi Order

Rank: Jedi Knight

Sexual Preference: Heterosexual

Relationship Status: Single (but also kind of married to the light side)

Personality: Darrian tends to come off as extremely genuine and honest - he is a Jedi, after all. Something of a moral subjectivist, he spends a lot of time trying to do what he considers to be ethically 'right' and about as much time meditating on just what constitutes that. He tries to be as selfless as he can, tries to be soft-spoken--not to say he doesn't enjoy a fair dose of sarcasm now and then--and tough-skinned enough not to let words get to him.

Of course, as much as he tries to represent his idealized Jedi, Dare isn't without his own neuroses. He's a little too hard on himself at times, but then he has good reason to be - he lost the only apprentice he's ever taken to darkness, simply because he was careless. He's certainly haunted by paranoia that that brush with darkness, letting it creep so close without even the slightest inkling, has tainted him in some way - and he tends to be at least a bit overzealous when it comes to atoning for that or when rooting out darkness in whatever form it takes.




Force Archetype: Consular

Powers Known/Level of Mastery: Consular Knight - 10/4/0
Apprentice: Force Barrier; Basic Mind Tricks; Close Telepathy; Force Flash; Force Jump; Force Sense; Force Speed; Force Stun; Tutaminis; Force Valor
Adept: Advanced Telekinesis; Force Empathy; Force Heal; Precognition

Lightsaber Forms Known/Level of Mastery: Consular Knight - 1/1/0
Adept: Niman
Apprentice: Soresu





The Reach family's residence in the midlevels of Coruscant represented their socioeconomic status quite well: they were a tight-knit family living a comfortable life, maybe not rich but just well enough off to make things work. Darrian was the second of three children, the first boy of two. His youth was about as comfortable and uneventful as his home life: he was just another boy going through his early schooling through the waning days of the Empire. He was well on his way to a boring, if secure future as the night shift security guard at a small bank not far from his family home when the New Republic came even close to considering an assault on Coruscant, and had spent more than a few years in that capacity when the first troops finally began their assault.

He was lucky enough to have taken a day off on when the time finally came, managed to make it to an emergency shelter along with the rest of his family. Hours quickly stretched into days as they sat in a musty old room filled with hundreds of other people, waiting for the fighting to end and some semblance of order to return. Given the periodic impacts of Golan defense stations falling from earth to devastate Coruscant's surface, it took quite a while - but eventually they emerged, strung out and dirty but somehow alive.

The first publicized details of Jaxus Ke'ra's attempt to revitalize the Jedi Order reached his ears a few weeks later. Naturally, as the son of two individuals who'd been around to see the Jedi fight and defend the galaxy in the Clone Wars, he heard his fair share of both rumor and fantasy even through the moratorium the Imperials placed on anything relating to Jedi, and eventually decided to show up to the office building listed more out of a desire to see if the Jedi were as he'd imagined than any possibility that he might have been Force-sensitive.

Dare's surprise was more than palpable when Ke'ra himself greeted him. While the man was hardly what he had expected, Dare could hardly have turned him down when Ke'ra sensed the Force somewhere within him and offered Dare an early apprenticeship. He put in his two weeks' notice almost immediately and went off to join the Jedi Order, to become a building block on its way back to glory. Dare was a member of the first class of apprentices, a fairly large collection of individuals that saw him learning alongside people from all walks of life. It was the first time he'd really met someone from a lifestyle significantly different from his own and he relished every moment.

The learning process was hardly as difficult as he would have expected, at least at first. The new recruits spent weeks at a time simply learning how to meditate and harnessing basic Force abilities such as telekinesis, a straightforward process that saw more than a few of the more marginally Force-talented individuals wash out or quit. Eventually, they graduated from mental techniques to basic lightsaber training - something Dare struggled with significantly more than he had in learning how to use the Force. He struggled to even learn the basics of Shii-Cho, let alone engage in the occasional practice duel with another student and fight competitively. It was a good thing the training sabers they learned with were nonlethal; Dare dealt with more than a few welts, bruises, and minor burns and likely would have been dead many times over in real fights.

Eventually, though, the trainees reached a point where they were free to study what interested them. Dare usually gravitated towards meditation, exploring the nature of the Force, and learning new ways to apply it. He was quick to pick up on Force talents, at least, even if lightsaber training went poorly at best. A basic understanding of the various lightsaber forms pretty quickly determined that learning Niman would be the best fit for Dare; it was a form that was fairly easy to learn, contained some basic aspects of most of the other forms, and would allow him more time to hone his Force potential. The move to Tython hardly interrupted anything - it just enhanced the experience.

Towards the end of his last year at the academy, Dare finally felt comfortable enough in his skill with a lightsaber to go ahead and take the opportunity to create his own. He realized fairly quickly that it was far from a slow process - growing the synthetic crystal alone took days at a time, and Dare had to go through it a second time when his focus slipped for some time and a significant flaw developed within the first crystal. Assembling the lightsaber, envisioning how the various parts fit together perfectly, was just as meditative, requiring just as much focus, and this was something Dare accomplished on his first try. The feeling when he finally activated his lightsaber, examined the bronze blade with wonder, was utterly indescribable - and it signified that he was approaching readiness for the Jedi Trials.

The first Trial Dare was subjected to was fairly straightforward: he was to be willingly tranquilized, moved to an unfamiliar location, and survive until he completed the Trial. What he wasn't told was that he would be subject to defending himself against an essentially endless horde of warriors, the swarm of which only abated after a few hours, when Dare realized that they weren't acting as people should have upon being stabbed, dismembered, or otherwise subdued - he was in an illusion. It ended promptly thereafter, and Dare awoke to hear that he had passed the new Order's somewhat abbreviated versions of the old Trials of Insight, Skill, and Courage.

His second Trial was designed to be more reminiscent of the Trials of Flesh and Spirit: he was essentially ordered to meditate and focus deeper inward than he ever had before, to confront his inner darkness and emerge victorious.

Hours of silent meditation and soul-searching finally resulted in something: he saw a specter of himself, a pale Dare who just… felt evil and bore a red blade. The two argued and fought in his mind for what felt like another eternity, until eventually the real Dare won out with an immense display of willpower. He was unsure if the specter was a representation of his inner darkness or his fear - a Dare who had fallen to darkness and wielded it as his ally, but it didn't matter in the end.

He had completed the Trial, and that meant he was to be a Jedi Knight. Darrian's official Knighting ceremony was but a few days later, in front of the nascent Jedi Council Ke'ra had recently assembled. Allowing a lightsaber to rest a few millimeters above either shoulder for a few minutes afforded him the full responsibilities and privileges that came with a Jedi Knight, which included something of an obligation to help the Order grow and cultivate its numbers.

To get his feet wet and figure out how to pass his knowledge on, Dare initially only took one apprentice - Sena Navaro, then a nineteen-year-old girl who thought quite well of her abilities and possessed a thirst for knowledge the likes of which Dare had never seen. Her apprenticeship went well for the first several years - the two of them did quite a bit of gallivanting around the galaxy whether in search of knowledge or artifacts, to mediate conflicts, or simply to find a nice quiet place to meditate and advance Sena's studies.

They stumbled across a Sith holocron once upon a time, an artifact Dare immediately recognized for how dangerous it could have proven. He was careful enough to warn Sena that it wasn't to be touched without his presence; but like any inquisitive student, she of course began investigating the device in secret as soon as opportunities began to arise. Her abilities began improving significantly shortly afterward, but Dare would never have guessed that she had been gleaning knowledge from the holocron for months, maybe even a year, until it was too late.

Sena was eventually lost to darkness. The two of them had been (unsuccessfully) attempting to negotiate through a labor dispute on Eriadu when, after a particularly misogynistic comment, she suddenly snapped and began Force-choking one a rather hard-headed corporate representative. A duel broke out when Dare attempted to restrain her, one much tighter than Dare would have expected. Nonlethal tactics did nothing but cause the student to sink into a Force-enhanced rage, so her Master, back against the wall and in serious danger of being overpowered, elected to sever her arm to try and subdue her. If her immediately electing to jump out of a third-story window was any indication, losing an arm just below the shoulder had hardly slowed her down--if it had at all.

She was long gone by the time he could regain his composure enough to follow her, and she'd taken his confidence in both himself and his ability to try and resolve this dispute with her. Dare immediately took a sabbatical that lasted a year before he finally gave up hope. He'd been so determined to track her down and redeem her, but he had came up with nothing but more ways to blame himself. He strongly considered retirement from the Jedi Order after failing not only himself, but also his apprentice and the Order, so grossly. A bit of soul-searching later, however, Dare eventually did decide to at least remain a fringe member.

Even so, time still started to heal that wound. Darrian started to recover from his detachment from the Order in the years that followed, even if he still hadn't seen even the slightest trace of his former apprentice. He began involving himself in galactic matters where necessary, almost rediscovered just what it was that had made him approach the Jedi in the first place. He finally started to move on just prior to the resurgence of the Sith and even started considering taking on another apprentice for the first time in nearly a decade.