Draiko Ziratai

"Get in. We need to talk.” “There's not enough room for me and your ego."

- Draiko Ziratai and Sirin Ziratai

Draiko "Draco" Ziratai (/draɪˌkoʊ ziːrˌɑːˌtaɪ/; DREYE-koh ZEER-ah-teye) was a Force-sensitive Sith-blooded Human male from Thule who was active from the last decades of the Great Peace of the Republic onward.

Draiko Ziratai was a member of the family of the same name, an ancient Sith-Human bloodline known for its Force-sensitive members' outspoken support for the various iterations of the Sith Empire. Though trained from youth at Thule's Sith Arts Academy, Ziratai was significantly less ambitious than many of his fellow students and eschewed participation in the power games of his peers in favor of the academic study of the Force. A competent if uninspired lightsaber duelist, Ziratai pursued a specialization in Teräs Käsi, a martial art developed by the Followers of Palawa to combat the Jedi, and eventually departed his homeworld to study both Teräs Käsi and the Force among the Followers on Bunduki.

With his homeworld's entry into the Separatist Alliance at the start of the Clone Wars, Ziratai expected to serve as one of Darth Tyranus's Dark Acolytes. However, known to the Banite Sith for both his connections to Thule&mdash;a Sith resource world&mdash;and his loyalty to the Sith, he was hand-picked by Darth Sidious to teach Teräs Käsi to the Grand Army's clone assassins, specialized clone soldiers tasked with handling contingencies related to Jedi insurrections. As such, Ziratai, having ascended to mastery of Teräs Käsi as a Steel Hand of Palawa, joined the Republic Military as a contractor alongside a number of noteworthy Teräs Käsi practitioners.

With the Declaration of a New Order, Ziratai was enfolded into the Emperor's senior Dark Side Adepts and assigned the titles and positions of Emperor's Wrath and Governor-General of Thule. In the former capacity, he served as the Emperor's personal assassin, tasked with furtively dispensing justice to those enemies of the Empire too prominent to be handled by public enforcers like Darth Vader. In the latter, he was charged with safeguarding his homeworld in its capacity as a redoubt and Sith resource world, a post he held even after the Empire's collapse and the Emperor's death.

Physical appearance
As a Human of some Sith blood, Draiko Ziratai exhibited a diverse mixture of both Human and Sith physical features, manifesting common baseline Human traits like green eyes and brown hair in conjunction with sharp features, high cheekbones, and a mildly florid skin coloring that betrayed his distant Sith ancestry. However, as a native of Thule&mdash;a shadowy world cloaked in near-constant darkness and deeply immersed in the dark side of the Force&mdash;he likewise exhibited the distinctive ashen complexion, pallid appearance, and gaunt features of his fellow Human residents of Thule. Though sickly and cadaverous in appearance, he was deceptively strong and athletic for his size on account of a lifetime spent in concerted physical training and his own study of martial arts.

In reference to his given name, a Sith language word meaning "dragon/serpent," he bore a Sith tattoo which took the form of a heavily stylized vine snake coiled around his left forearm that employed several shades of red, green, and gold ink. A form of concrete poetry, the vine snake's body was composed of the text from the Sith language translation of the Ithorian poem Life's Memories by Soshu Londahl, a piece he considered one of his favorites.

Personality
As the scion of an ancient Sith Forceful bloodline born on a world drenched in the dark side of the Force, Draiko Ziratai exhibited a distinct predisposition towards the dark side that readily manifested itself in his personality. He had no moral compunction concerning the questionable ethics undergirding the Grand Plan nor doubts about the role he played in its execution. He personally considered the kratocratic individualism that characterized prevailing Tsisajak ("Sith doctrine" ) to be a desirable system reflective of the natural order in which the strong and fittest survived and ruled over the weak. He believed it was only natural that the Forceful rule the Forceless, and thus had no issues with the long-term plan of the Banite Sith to remove the Jedi and reorganize the Republic into a neo-Sith Empire.

Despite this, Ziratai was not without his redeeming qualities. Unlike many of his peers at the Sith Arts Academy and his fellow Dark Side Adepts in the Galactic Empire, Ziratai neither engaged in needless cruelty for sport, nor intentionally took life without need or greater purpose, and generally treated those Dark Jedi who did with undisguised distain and contempt. He frequently took pity upon the dispossessed and downtrodden, most notably those clone troopers alongside whom he served during the Clone Wars. He was very outspoken in his belief that the clones' disenfranchised state and artificially shortened lifespans constituted violations of Republic ethics legislation, and called out the Jedi leadership in particular for their hypocrisy in compromising their principles by leading a slave army in the defense of the Republic. He often furtively aided his clone comrades' attempts to desert the Grand Army and subsequent Imperial Military, despite the personal risk this posed to him as a senior Dark Side Adept.

Despite his prodigious natural strength in the Force and the political power his privileged status in the Empire offered, Ziratai was possessed of little personal ambition. He intentionally avoided the political power games of his peers during his tenure in residence at the Sith Arts Academy, preferring instead to dedicate himself to his studies in pursuit of Force mastery. Similarly, with the Declaration of a New Order and his subsequent installment as one of the most powerful and influential individuals in the new Empire, Ziratai made no effort to aggrandize himself at the expense of his fellow Dark Side Adepts, preferring to simply serve in his chosen capacities as Emperor's Wrath and Governor-General of Thule at the Emperor's pleasure.

Hobbies and interests
Ziratai maintained an interest in a number of hobbies during his lifetime, the most notable of which was music. A self-described audiophile, he was an avid fan of such "heavy" genres as Core Drive, Heavy Isotope, and Glimmik, and frequently subjected his largely sheltered clone assassin charges to such music during the Clone Wars out of a desire to expand their cultural horizons. His passion for music ultimately led him to take an interest in the culture of his Sith Master's homeworld of Naboo, a planet notable for its residents' refined appreciation for the arts. He cultivated a degree of proficiency on the hallikset, a seven-stringed instrument frequently used in the traditional music of the Naboo people.

In addition to music, Ziratai casually followed the sport of podracing, and considered himself a fan of the infamous pilot and hit man Aldar Beedo. Despite the Empire's outlawing of podracing and his own status as a high-ranking Dark Side Adept, Ziratai furtively continued to follow the underground circuit during the Imperial Period, and in spite of the considerable risk, occasionally used his influence in the Empire to retask or delay those Imperial agents charged with breaking up illegal podracing events.

Force powers
A scion of the Force-sensitive bloodline of House Ziratai, Draiko Ziratai was possessed of a potent connection to the Force. Though dwarfed and overshadowed in the Force by such noteworthy contemporaries as Darths Sidious, Tyranus, and Vader, Ziratai's raw ability, shaped and refined over many decades' worth of dedicated training and concerted study, nonetheless rendered him one of the more powerful Dark Side Adepts of his generation. However, his lack of personal ambition and patent disinterest in the acquisition of titles or thrones granted him few ample opportunities to publicly demonstrate his strength in the Force during his lifetime. As a result, only a select few of his contemporaries and peers were fully aware of his potential and the true extent of the power he wielded in the Force.

Like the majority of trained Force users, Ziratai was proficient in the most common Force power fundamentals universally employed by Force-using organizations, such as Force telekinesis, Force speed, and Force sight. As a graduate of the Sith Arts Academy on Thule, Draiko Ziratai was trained in a variety of disciplines commonly associated with the Sith, including Sith magic, alchemy, necromancy, and poisoncraft. Though he possessed a rudimentary understanding of the former three, he displayed a certain degree of aptitude for poisoncraft and frequently employed his talents in the development of toxins suitable for assassination, though the field remained one of his lesser specialties rather than his true focus.

As the hidden bastion of Thule had historically been home to the ancient Sith Empire's various stealth forces, the planet's Force users commonly specialized in the clandestine subtleties of espionage and assassination, with such fundamental stealth-based Force powers as Force stealth, Force void, and Force conceal constituting integral parts of the curriculum at the Sith Arts Academy. Like many in his family, Draiko exhibited a particular predisposition towards this niche discipline, and by the time of the Clone Wars, he was fully capable of both masking his true nature from other Force users and outright hiding himself in the Force at will, skills that made him particularly useful in his subsequent service to the Galactic Empire as an assassin and spy.

Combat skills
Though trained in lightsaber combat from a young age, Draiko Ziratai displayed no particular promise of note in this facet of Forceful combat. A competent if uninspired duelist, Ziratai's dedication and concerted study of the discipline ultimately provided him a degree of proficiency in Niman, the least specialized of the traditional forms, but he was readily outmatched by more talented opponents employing more specialized forms. He eventually augmented his baseline skills with the inclusion of certain Soresu and Shien techniques dedicated to the reflection and redirection of opponents' blaster bolts, and adopted Nikkos Tyris's unique Shien stance&mdash;blade pointed toward the ground in the dominant hand, with the nondominant hand riding on the hilt's pommel and directing the blade in a triangular pattern to deliver a series of quick slashes&mdash;after observing holos of the Anzat Dark Acolyte in combat during the Clone Wars.

Ziratai generally treated his lightsaber as a weapon of last resort, preferring instead to rely upon his more extensive knowledge of the Forceful martial arts. Though he achieved a degree of proficiency in the traditional Jedi discipline of Broken Gate during his time among the Force Warriors, his particular focus was Teräs Käsi, a martial art specifically developed by the Followers of Palawa for exclusive use against Forceful opponents. He spent over a decade in residence among the Followers on Bunduki, achieving both mastery of the art and membership in the group as a Steel Hand of Palawa. Along with title belt Teräs Käsi champion Phow Ji, Ziratai was one of a number of Teräs Käsi experts contracted by the Republic Military to provide martial arts instruction to Republic personnel. Ziratai was responsible for training the Grand Army's clone assassins in the martial art, ultimately enabling them to more readily disarm and subdue their Jedi adversaries during the Great Jedi Purge.

Linguistic ability
Like many of the residents of his isolated homeworld of Thule, Draiko Ziratai was a native speaker of ancient Sith, a language that still saw regular usage on Thule in major cities like Hurom and Kessiak. However, like most of the galaxy's denizens, he was likewise fluent in Galactic Basic Standard, though he spoke the language with a distinctive Sith accent and often faced difficulty in pronouncing some Basic words on account of the presence of certain phonemes in Basic that lacked equivalents in the phonetic palette of the Sith language. During his time among the Followers of Palawa, he cultivated a certain degree of conversational ability in Bunduki and päläva, though he was by no means fluent in these languages.

Armor
As a Follower of Palawa trained as a Steel Hand, Draiko Ziratai wore the traditional black Palawa tunic of his order. This close-fitting tunic, similar in style and form to the black Sith robes favored by members of the Banite Sith, was closely tailored to his form so as to not hamper his ability to engage in Teräs Käsi, the Palawa martial art requiring agility and a full range of motion. Following his perambulations across the galaxy, Ziratai eventually commissioned a set of Palawa robes woven from Verpine fiber threads, steel cloth, and ArachSilk to offer increased protection against conventional energy discharge weapons of both the ranged and melee varieties. This robe was notable for its vine-silk accents around the cuffs and collar, the cost of which equaled the listing price of a small starship.

In cases in which direct combat was unavoidable, Ziratai often augmented his robes with his family's ancestral suit of Sith beskar'kandar, a style of reinforced Mandalorian armor popular among members of the New Sith during the Light and Darkness War. Unlike many such Sith, including those of his forebearers who had likewise worn the beskar'kandar, Ziratai was mindful of the benefits offered by a full-face helmet in a combat environment, and augmented his suit with the inclusion of a traditional Mandalorian helmet likewise constructed of Mandalorian iron. However, as he was not a Mandalorian, Ziratai made no effort to decorate his suit in a meaningful manner to reflect personal accomplishments, indicate clan affiliation, or champion a color-coded cause.

Transports
Draiko Ziratai's main mode of transport was a Mon Calamari Shipyards DeepWater-class light freighter named "Searoamer" for its acquatic submersion capabilities. This nondescript vessel served as Ziratai's home away from home during his protracted perambulations across the galaxy, and was gradually enhanced and modified beyond its base functionality over a period of decades. During his period in service to the Galactic Empire as a senior Dark Side Adept, Ziratai was ferried about by the Imperial I-class Star Destroyer Abductor. Though he preferred to undertake his more furtive assignments alone aboard the Searoamer, the Abductor eventually came to serve as a mobile command center that could be brought in from the edge of a system at a moment's notice to provide reinforcements if needed. With the fall of the Empire, the Star Destroyer was reassigned to Thule on Ziratai's orders and served to protect that world and its repository of Sith lore.

Weapons
Like many of the Forceful residents of Thule, Ziratai carried a self-constructed Sith lightsaber assembled during his tenure in residence at the Sith Arts Academy from lightsaber components retrieved from the Hurom armory. This weapon sported a simple synthetic lightsaber crystal that gave its blade a dull silvery sheen. However, as Ziratai had failed to accurately replicate the natural geological processes of crystal formation while employing a geological compressor in the crystal's construction, the lightsaber's blade was unstable in form and frequently flickered and crackled when not shorting out entirely. Ziratai eventually replaced the defective crystal with a natural Durindfire crystal that retained the blade's silver hue but exhibited none of its previous imperfections.

Behind the scenes
Draiko Ziratai was envisioned by the author as being a complete overhaul and rewrite of his first Star Wars Fanon article, a profoundly terrible self-insert OC named Drewika Ziratae. As a challenge, the author attempted to preserve certain hallmark elements of the original character that contributed to its overpowered Marty Sue characterization while making the character both more believable and more compliant with established Legends canon.