House Praji/Legends

House Praji was a wealthy Core Worlds family originally from Kaikielius. The Prajii were one of the original signatories of the Galactic Constitution, and over the twenty-five thousand years of the Galactic Republic's history, produced numerous military officers, politicians, financiers, and several Jedi Knights. Throughout their history, they maintained a pronounced rivalry with House Vahali, another noble house of Kaikielius. From 4800 BBY, the Prajii were established at the Praji Estate on Coruscant, where they established influence in the Bank of the Core, and in the lead-up to the Clone Wars, the Coruscant Ministry of Ingress. During the Galactic Civil War, they re-established themselves on Kaikielius at the expense of their ancient rivals, the Vahalii, from where they continued their influence on galactic politics despite the destruction of the Praji holdings on Coruscant during the Yuuzhan Vong War.
==History==
===Early history===
The earliest known progenitor of the Prajii was Tyler Sapius Praji, the governor of the pastoral Core World of Kaikielius. Tyler Praji was one of the signatories of the Galactic Constitution, the founding document of the Galactic Republic, in 25,053 BBY. On Kaikielius, House Praji was one of the Triad, the three most powerful of the Great Houses of the planet's aristocracy. Together, the Triad had a powerful voice on Coruscant, though perhaps owing to Tyler Praji's role in the foundation of the Republic, House Praji had the greatest ties to the capital.
House Praji maintained an ancient rivalry with the other houses of the Triad, House Vahali and House Juoni, which was believed to date from the colonization of Kaikielius. However, House Juoni was destroyed during the First Alsakan Conflict of 17,000 BBY after it backed Alsakan while its rivals supported Coruscant, leaving Kaikielius to the Prajii and Vahalii. For another five thousand years, the Prajii's power grew at home even as Kaikielius' galactic influence dwindled. In 11,660 BBY, during the Twelfth Pius Dea Crusade, Commodore Daymont "Veracity" Praji commanded a fleet in the Pius Dea-dominated Republic Navy. Daymont Praji led the bombardment of Zarracina III after the native Zarracines refused to accept annexation and conversion to Pius Dea rule.
===Exodus to Coruscant===
From 11,000 BBY, Kaikielius rivalled with Koros for influence in the Core Worlds, but infighting in the Koros system, and between the Great Houses on Kaikielius, prevented either from gaining an advantage. In 5000 BBY, however, the nine planets of the Koros system were unified by Empress Teta, putting Kaikielius at an extreme disadvantage. The Prajii's homeworld underwent rapid urbanisation and industrialisation in a desperate attempt to keep up with Koros, resulting in the development of the infamous "ring-cities," which were soon abandoned to poverty and crime. Fast losing money on Kaikielius, House Praji moved much of its operations to Coruscant, and after suffering badly during the Quake Years around 4800 BBY, abandoned the planet for good, leaving rule of the increasingly-ungovernable planet to House Vahali.
House Praji ceased to exist as a formal entity, and having sold their ancestral holdings on Kaikielius at a loss, the family had no real estate except on Coruscant. It would not recover economically for centuries, with many scions of the family falling into obscurity owing to financial mismanagement. However, the Prajii increased their informal influence by gaining election to high office, and eventually became the majority shareholders of the Bank of the Core. By 4225 BBY, the Prajii once again held great influence on Coruscant. Emppu Praji-Barck served as a Republic Minister of State for sixty years, while the family had produced several Jedi Knights by marrying sons to daughters of the Draay family. Derrica Praji was one of these Jedi around this time, training under Master Vandar Tokare on Ossus before, to the fury of his relatives, becoming part of a joint Republic-Jedi expedition to Kaikielius.
Emppu Praji-Barck, Derrica's great-aunt, had continually filibustered Senate debates on intervention in the Kaikielius system: all government positions were now filled by the Vahalii, but the planet was de facto controlled by criminals, pirates, and Hut kajidics, and the Prajii were content to let their rivals destroy themselves before they moved back in to pick up the pieces. However, the Republic had discovered that the Odominic kajidic had been supplying weapons to both sides in the war between gangs and police on Kaikielius. Now a matter of Republic security rather than one of law enforcement, the planet's criminal elements were ousted in the Kaikieli Reconquista. During the course of the Reconquista, Derrica Praji discovered evidence in the capital Kesipli that
Emppu Praji-Barck had committed sedition in urging the Odominic to supply both sides of the gang war. For the sake of his family, Derrica chose to destroy the evidence, though House Praji's objective of seizing sole power on Kaikielius had come to naught. Derrica cut all contact with his family in the aftermath and returned to Ossus to be named Jedi Knight.
===Plutocrats===
Despite the failure of their strategy on Kaikielius, the Prajii expansion continued apace from 4225 BBY as they accepted Coruscant as their home and increased their influence in the Bank of the Core. Following the abolition of the aurodium standard the Bank of the Core became a key backer of the Republic Treasury Reserve, and for millennia a Praji would always sit on the BOTC Executive Board. Over the centuries, the Prajii increased their ties with the rest of the patrician class through intermarriage: centuries before the Battle of Yavin, Lithio Motti married a Praji heiress to secure startup capital for his megonite moss-mining enterprise on Phelarion. The Motti family would dominate that industry for centuries, and during the Galactic Civil War, one of their number, Thalassa Motti, even married into the Eriadu Tarkins.
The Prajii's financial influence resulted in a political scandal sometime prior to 60 BBY: Supreme Chancellor Vaila Pecivas attempted to appoint Jideon Praji as her Minister of Finance. However, since Jideon was also Executive Board Chair of the Bank of the Core, the appointment was seen to create a conflict of interest, and holomedia uproar and a Senate inquiry forced him to resign after just days in the post.
By the start of the Clone Wars, the Prajii had grown to such wealth that the Praji Estate, near the Bank of the Core Plaza in Coruscant's Financial District, dwarfed provincial capitals on Outer Rim planets. Thousands of offices for the family's employees encircled a park large enough to land a Venator-class Star Destroyer, which was maintained by its own chapter house of Ho'Din gardeners.
===The Rise of the Empire===
By the last century of the Galactic Republic, House Praji's patriarch was Tannon Praji. Tannon was a great patron of the arts and built his own fortune separate to House Praji's while continuing the investment in the Bank of the Core. When Palpatine became Supreme Chancellor in 32 BBY, one of his first appointments was to make Tannon Second Minister of the Coruscant Ministry of Ingress under First Minister Zelebitha Effhod. Both were soon forced to deal with the pressures of large numbers of refugees displaced by the Separatist Crisis, and Tannon took the decision to close Coruscant's borders to new immigrants indefinitely. Tannon soon became First Minister after Effhod's death from Quannot's Syndrome just as the Clone Wars began.
Tannon was troubled by the decisions he had to make as the war progressed, though the Refugee Relief Movement cast him as an uncaring elitist, particularly after he denounced the destruction of art treasures in the Museum of Light on Tandis Four as an atrocity. As First Minister he oversaw efforts directed by COMPOR to deport en masse Aqualish, Gossam, and other species whose homeworlds had sided with the Confederacy of Independent Systems. This led him to be the target of numerous assassination attempts, once by Aqualish, and another by Zarracines. Consequently, he took the Bank of the Core's Special Agent Ottegru Grey, who had already foiled a number of Separatist attempts to destabilise the bank, as a bodyguard.
Other significant Prajii during the Clone Wars were Tannon's brother Griff, whose son Nahdonnis would become a prominent Imperial Military officer, and Tannon's wife Maree and their daughter Onnelly. While many of the Coruscant Prajii in this era were stereotyped as idle rich or career bureaucrats, a number did military service during the war: the Kalandar Installation was renamed "Fort Praji" in the honor of Colonel Collin Praji, and Moff Praji rose to command the GAR's Fourth Outer Rim Army.The Essential Guide to Warfare
Following Operation Durge's Lance, which saw Kaikielius conquered by the CIS, Tannon was forced to deal with refugees displaced from the Core Worlds itself. Shortly afterwards, Palpatine declared the foundation of the Galactic Empire. In the new Imperial hierarchy, Tannon oversaw the transfer of prisoners from captured CIS worlds and the movement of transients into new construction projects. Maree and Onnelly Praji were resettled at the "Emerald Splendor Estates" on the Deep Core world of Byss. The relocation was nominally part of a much broader "recolonization effort" intended to attract the wealthy and powerful. In reality, the world was Emperor Palpatine's private retreat. While there, Onnelly, Maree, and others like them were kept entertained, but unknown to them, Palpatine was secretly draining their Force energy in order to sustain himself.
===Later history===
Many of its members used their money and influence to enter into the higher-levels of the Republican and Imperial governments. The family donated a genetic template for the Imperial stormtrooper development program.
==Behind the scenes==
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Praji uses "Prajii" as the plural form of Praji.
==Appearances==
*Evasive Action: Recruitment
==Sources==
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==Notes and references==
Category:Coruscanti
Category:Families
 
Category:Noble houses