A long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away...
Approximately 3665 years before the Battle of Yavin, the Great Galactic War was in full swing. For more than fifteen years, the Sith Empire has been locked in a devastating battle against the Galactic Republic. While the Empire's vast army struggled to push forward, it was the duty of Imperial Intelligence to find or create an opportunity to secure a decisive victory.
One project they initiated would create a new, if ultimately short-lived, ally from the scattered clans of Mandalore. A more long-term venture was the Sleeper project - an attempt at mimicking or even improving upon the
Children of the Emperor through more predictable, scientific methods. By implanting a miniaturized artificial intelligence, subtle enough to avoid detection or damage to the host, but powerful and complex enough to be capable of interfacing with and controlling the host's brain, into a newborn child - preferably a Force sensitive - they believed they could create the perfect sleeper agent.
It would take months of hard work and an abundance of advanced alien technology to develop a working prototype. It would take the aid of a minor Sith Lord and incredible luck to find a suitable host, a human baby on the bustling moon of Nar Shaddaa. Born into a fairly unremarkable family in a place like that, the infant would likely go unnoticed by both sides of the conflict until Intelligence deemed her ready for field use. 'Sleeper X' would have ample time to adjust to his host, and to determine whether he was capable of performing his function as predicted.
The child, Maennia Belkar, was occasionally subtly guided away from more overt sources of danger, but mostly grew up without Sleeper's interference, fully unaware of the second mind she was sharing her head with. Whenever Sleeper forced her to make a decision, she believed it to be her own - for instance, when she chose to join Imperial Intelligence after witnessing a skirmish between an Intelligence operative and a few thugs on Nal Hutta in 3646 BBY. Naturally, this skirmish had been staged precisely to trigger such a response from the duo, and Maennia was unknowingly fast-tracked through training.
By 3644 BBY, she had participated in a string of what seemed to be catastrophic failures, setting the stage for Sleeper's primary mission; Sleeper himself had used the botched missions as a cover to conduct more important operations wherever they were sent, and was in fact responsible for her consistent lack of performance.
Finally, Maennia was sent on a suicide mission to assassinate the Jedi Master Matthew Auvinen Erelem. While Maennia only complied with it because she hoped the Jedi Master would give her a faster and less painful death than Intelligence seemed to have in mind for her, Sleeper and his supervisor were in fact counting on him to spare her life. It was a gamble, but it worked - Maennia stowed away aboard a ship bound for Tython and attacked the Jedi while he was meditating in the wilderness. Disarmed mid-charge by a simple Force push, the agent prepared to die - only to find herself confiding in the Jedi about the chain of events that she believed brought her there, and discovering her Force sensitivity when Sleeper caused her to 'accidentally' tip over a small rock and 'reflexively' stop it mid-fall. From there, the decision to become a Jedi came with very little encouragement from the AI.
Over the following months, Maennia was assigned to be the Padawan of Jedi Knight Ber-til Katarn*. All seemed well, and the young Padawan finally felt like she belonged somewhere. The two of them had even found a set of lightsaber crystals, to use when the time came for her to assemble her lightsaber. It would not last; she began having visions of a childhood friend being taken to be executed by Imperials, only to be rescued by a Jedi at the last second. She also had visions of herself in the same position, with nobody there to help her. Taking it as a sign that her friend had taken her place and needed her help, Maennia called in a favor from the Imperial agent Zorren Baltor**, who confirmed her fears. He warned of an attack on the
Republic transport Esseles, telling her that her friend was currently held aboard the Emperor's Glory.
Unknown to either side of the conversation, this was a trap orchestrated to capture Maennia and anyone who assisted her, allowing Sleeper to be debriefed prior to being rescued from Imperial captivity. Regardless, Katarn was successfully persuaded not to warn the Esseles crew, and instead joined his Padawan in its defense, lending her a lightsaber that used to belong to one of his friends/his master***. The operation was mostly successful - however, as Imperial forces rushed into the hangar, Maennia urged Katarn not to wait for her, rightly believing that the delay would result in his capture.
For anyone else, this chain of events would have led to a painful death following Maennia's similarly painful interrogation on Dromund Kaas. Instead, after the interrogation was complete, she was taken to a remote outpost on the planet Voss****, and Zorren was once again fed information about the situation. An unfortunate encounter between Katarn, Zorren and a Sith Lord on Nar Shaddaa delayed - and nearly prevented - the rescue attempt. This would potentially have cost Maennia her life, had the native Gormak not chosen that exact moment to launch their own attack on the outpost. Although she was severely wounded in the battle, she
did manage to escape, randomly downloading whatever data she could from the outpost's computers before she left.
Recovered by Baltor and Katarn, Maennia recovered quite quickly during the return trip to Nar Shaddaa. Unfortunately, her data dump inadvertently exposed her true nature.
Luckily, her data dump inadvertently exposed her true nature. She had recovered a partial recording of what was ostensibly her debriefing (in reality, it was Sleeper's debriefing, a distinction that was both irrelevant and unknown at the time) by her Intelligence supervisor. Despite her persistent belief to the contrary, this recording was not a forgery - more importantly, it implied that the Empire had managed to infiltrate the Jedi Order, deceive them so thoroughly and so effectively that such an agent could not be stopped from ascending to a position from where the Order - and the Republic it protected - could be completely destroyed. In her own mind, Maennia was a threat - not necessarily because the recording was genuine, but because no matter how much she believed it, the Jedi couldn't be absolutely certain it wasn't. She couldn't delete the recording without arousing suspicion, but she couldn't stay and let them kill her for something she didn't do.
After Zorren disembarked on Nar Shaddaa, the Padawan confronted her master, displaying the incriminating recording, all the while looking for a way out if Katarn attacked her. Instead, Ber-til chose to trust her, an act which prompted Maennia to come with him to Tython in the hopes that the Jedi Council would agree with his judgment. They did not - but they did not kill her, either. Instead, they decided to freeze her in carbonite until her innocence could be conclusively proven. Knowing that such a thing could never happen, Sleeper covertly sent a distress signal in the hopes that he could be safely retrieved.
Were it not for Zorren's discovery of the Sleeper project, and his subsequent desertion, he might have been right. A couple of years after Maennia was frozen, Zorren came out of hiding to visit Ber-til - by now a Jedi Master - and explained the situation to him. Maennia could never be released so long as there was even the slightest trace of the Empire or its ruler; the best they could do now was ensure that the young Padawan would be able to make a new life for herself when that time came. To that end, he contributed a sturdy durasteel cylinder with the inscription "From your master and friend, [BLANK]", locked with the passcode "Ber-til Katarn" and containing an expensive, very modifiable blaster pistol, a small sum of money and a farewell message explaining what had happened. Before he attached the cylinder to her carbonite block, Katarn chose to add Maennia's lightsaber crystals, and a holocron of himself to act as a teacher and companion if no one else was there for her.
In the end, Ber-til's efforts to protect Maennia would prove unsuccessful; by 3638 BBY, he had attempted to hide her on the planet Ilum, only to be attacked by the Sith Lord Arrom***** Lorn, who - having forcibly enlisted Zorren's aid by threatening the family he had started since his desertion - stole the carbonite after a brief engagement with the Jedi Master. Zorren made one last, desperate attempt to prevent Arrom's success by telling Katarn to follow them to Tatooine. In the heated battle that ensued, Arrom defeated Katarn and escaped, leaving Zorren behind on the planet surface. In the end, he could not bring himself to deliver Maennia to a death that she did nothing to deserve, instead choosing to fake his death and take an escape pod back to Tatooine with the carbonite.
For over thirty-six hundred years, it would remain there in secret, buried in a cavern in the middle of nowhere and protected by wild beasts, known only to Arrom's descendants - for they had misunderstood his warnings, and instead of thawing her out once the Sith Empire was gone, they merely passed the story along from generation to generation.
Finally, mere months after the historic Battle of Yavin, the secret was lost altogether when the father of the smuggler Bleras Lorn, a simple moisture farmer, was killed by a gang of Rodian pirates after Bleras couldn't repay a loan to their leader, Rattza. His ship, the YT-1300 freighter 'Dragonet', had been impounded by the Empire, leaving the young smuggler with no source of income and very few means of appeasing Rattza until the situation escalated and his father's estate was raided. However, Arrom had made a map of where he buried Maennia; both Rattza and Bleras managed to gain access to it, and raced to decipher the millennia-old document and discover what treasures Bleras' ancestor had stashed away. (In truth, Bleras couldn't have cared less - but he'd found a recording on his datapad, sent by his father during Rattza's attack, stressing the importance of getting there before the pirates did.)
Ultimately, Bleras got there first - if only by a matter of minutes. Instead of treasure, he found the block of carbonite, still holding the young woman captive after all these years. Fearing what Rattza might do to her if he found her, but incapable of dragging the carbonite out by himself, Bleras thawed her out, only to find that she had been so weakened by the experience that she could barely move. Regardless, this would not have been a problem were it not for the Rodians' untimely arrival. Despite Bleras' efforts to negotiate, a firefight ensued, and the pirates were only killed when Sleeper - using his neural interface to command the Force through Maennia - telekinetically accelerated the decay of a weakness in the ceiling above them, causing a 'convenient' cave-in that killed the pirates and trapped Bleras and Maennia.
Bleras eventually managed to find a way out of the cavern before their limited supplies ran out, and took Maennia to a nearby safehouse he had, where the ex-Jedi recovered enough to tell him her story. It took the better part of a week for Maennia to fully recover from her time in carbonite - but her connection to the Force never came back. She speculated that this was a side-effect of the time she had spent in carbonite, some form of brain damage that prevented her from drawing on her power. The real cause, however, was Sleeper - fearing that she may discover his presence, and knowing that she may attempt to damage him afterwards, he had started more actively interacting with his host's brain - for instance, deafening her to the Force. Regardless of the cause, this meant that Maennia's Force sensitivity painted a target on her back without giving her the power to defend herself. It was around this time that Bleras vowed to keep her safe from the Empire; he felt sorry for her, and he had a feeling that he was meant to protect her in the first place.
Unfortunately, the Empire - and one officer in particular, a Lieutenant Dyr Feonn - had found out about Maennia's existence, and a bounty was posted on her and her accomplice. It did not take long for the first attack to come, in the form of the
Force-blank Lethan assassin Aleysia Nur. Aleysia caught Bleras during a routine supply run to Mos Eisley, using him as bait to draw out and capture Maennia outside the city. She didn't care about Bleras, and left the unconscious smuggler behind as she took her Jedi prey to her base on the planet Lok, where she questioned Maennia and tried to provoke her into using the Force - a venture which, despite Sleeper's best efforts, nearly proved fatal for her.
In the meantime, Bleras had stolen the Dragonet from the impound dock and rushed to Lok, unknowingly followed by the Bothan bounty hunter Ousog Rhunn, who was in turn being followed by the Wookiee hunter Felbaar. After the Bothan captured him on Lok, Bleras convinced him to help him rescue Maennia - if only for the sake of getting the whole bounty. Unfortunately, Aleysia outmaneuvered Ousog and Bleras outside her base, but the Wookiee's unexpected arrival forced her to withdraw into the building, allowing him to take them all to safety before he went on with his business.
Sleeper's presence, however, was no longer unknown to Maennia - and it would not remain hidden from Bleras, either...