Oh, bone-burning bothersome girl!
Where did you get your necklace of bones?
And why, when the cream of your skin
bewitches the world,
do you arrive here
plastered with soot?
-Najrul Islam (of Kali)

Name: Esperanza Messiah (mess-SEE-ah)

Weight: 120lbs (Not in the sexy-underfed way, but in the underfed underfed way.)

Height: 5'9"

Age: 27 standard years

Eyes: Brown.

Hair: Black.

Home Planet: No formal name, though it might have a number somewhere.

Affiliation: The Sith. Sorta.

Rank: Knight.

Title (if you have one): She calls herself Shakti, but only because she hates her given name.

Appearance: Shakti's a tall, rail-thin woman in her mid-twenties. Streaking across her body are uneven spans of burn-scarred skin, and she hasn't had the credit reserve to have it fixed. Because of this Shakti actually goes to some trouble to avoid showing her skin, resorting to long sleeves and even gloves at times. She's often seen with a smile on her face, as she deals with most problems through a combination of curiosity and hysterical laughter.

Biography: Esperanza was raised in a pre-hyperspace culture along with her older brother Salvador and her younger brother Juan. Their community was dominated by a stern religious order that looked down on Force users as having access to power beyond a mortal's rightful potential.

As Salvador became more and more involved with the order, Esperanza and Juan became more and more concerned. Fleeing the community with a couple of other families, they sought to escape their older brother and his colleagues. Their flight was not a long one, and they were eventually located thanks to the efforts of their older brother Sal.

Desperate to find others using these strange powers, the order was willing to torture information out of their captives. Once they were finished with Esperanza, Juan, and their other captives, the next step was to publicly burn them.

Salvador had a change of heart before the order killed his sister, and rescued her from the fire despite being too late for their younger brother Juan. Salvador and Esperanza fled and he did his best to nurse her back to health. Eventually they were picked up by a Coruscanti Jedi who'd found himself on their world stopping for repairs. They left with him and both were briefly taken as Jedi padawans.

Esperanza, finding the moral absolutism of the Jedi offensive, left the order much to her brother's disappointment. Striking out on her own, she took the name Shakti and began to research her own path and her own approach to the Force. It was an approach that would someday lead her to the Sith.

She has made a yellow lightsaber according to specifications she found for the Form V style, though she uses it only rarely. In Shakti's mind they're better tools to protect from blaster fire than anything else, since she's trying to do a better job of not running around picking fights. Something of a personal goal.