Yula Braylon

Yula Braylon was a female Jedi Master who initially served as a Jedi seeker, searching the galaxy for initiates to recruit into the Jedi Order. During her years as a seeker, Braylon had a son named Arath Tarrex, who became an initiate at a young age. However, his heritage was unknown to the Jedi Order for decades. Braylon had herself assigned to train Jedi younglings in order to keep a watchful eye on her son. She eventually received a seat on the Jedi Council, but lost her position when it was discovered that Arath, now a corrupt Jedi, was her son and that she had used her position to help cover his gambling debts and protect him from his debtors. Braylon then spent the interceding years trying to get back into the Jedi High Council's favor.
==Biography==
===Early years===
Yula Braylon was a renowned Jedi seeker, traveling the galaxy to find Force-sensitive children who could be recruited into the Jedi Order. However, during her time away from the Jedi Temple she conceived and gave birth to a son named Arath Tarrex, an act which would be highly controversial in an organization that forbade attachment. She therefore brought him in as an initiate, giving up her position as a seeker to train younglings at the Temple so that she could watch over her secret child. After several years she became a Jedi Master and gained a place on the Jedi Council, serving alongside famous figures such as Grand Master Yoda and Master Tera Sinube.
===Jedi Master and member of the Council===
In 90 BBY, Braylon attended a festival on Serenno with other members of the Jedi Order. The aim of the celebration was to showcase what Outer Rim planets had to offer the Galactic Republic, but the Jedi also put on a lightsaber demonstration for the crowds, with Braylon performing with Yoda and Tera Sinube. During the course of the event, a young initiate named Dooku, also the estranged son of Count Gora of Serenno, created chaos by inadvertently causing the planetary assembly hall to collapse on himself and his sister, Jenza. Braylon and the other Jedi masters rushed to the scene, with Braylon assisting Yoda in lifting the debris off the children so that they could be rescued. Despite their efforts, an ungrateful Count Gora, angry at the reappearance of Dooku, forced the Jedi to leave the planet immediately.
Two years later, Braylon and Yoda instructed the Hawk-Bat Clan on the importance and use of the Jedi Archives. When the initiates Zang Arraira and Sifo-Dyas questioned the masters about the busts of the Lost, Braylon explained that members of the Order could become disillusioned and leave, with some going on to become leaders and teachers elsewhere. That night, Dooku and Sifo-Dyas were caught attempting to break into the Archive of Forbidden Artifacts, a Bogan Collection, an exhibit of forbidden Dark Side artifacts. Braylon harshly reprimanded the boys, despite the fact that she herself had attempted to break into the collection when she was an initiate, before clashing with Master Lene Kostana when Kostana attempted to question Dooku on the Force vision he had had while interacting with the artifacts.
In 86 BBY, Braylon oversaw an exhibitory dueling tournament designed to show off the skills of the Jedi initiates so that some of them could be chosen as Padawan learners. The tournament resulted in Zang Arraira, Sifo-Dyas, and Dooku becoming the Padawans of Tera Sinube, Lene Kostana, and Yoda respectively, though Braylon declined to take one herself.
A year later, Sifo-Dyas experienced a vision showing a cataclysmic event occurring on an agricultural planet. When he and Kostana brought this to the attention of the Jedi Council, Braylon was skeptical and clashed again with Kostana over the nature of the visions. The Council helped Sifo-Dyas to decipher which planet it was that he saw – Protobranch – but both Braylon and Yoda decided that the future was by no means certain and that more meditating was required, much to the disgust of Kostana. Indeed, Kostana, Sifo-Dyas, and Yoda's Padawan, Dooku, would disobey the Council's judgement by traveling to Protobranch to try and help prevent and then help the survivors of the solar storm that occurred there.
Braylon continued in her duties as Jedi Master and councilmember over the following decades, and in 68 BBY she once again oversaw a dueling tournament put on for the selection of new Padawans. This tournament saw Dooku, by now a Jedi Master himself, choose the young Qui-Gon Jinn as his second Padawan learner. Braylon remarked that Jinn, whom she had instructed as an initiate, had a complete disregard for authority.
Sometime later, during negotiations between the Plinovians and Solodoe on Station Zeta, it was revealed that Braylon's secret son, Arath, stole the seal of office of the Solodoe ambassador Ketas in order to pay off gambling debts. Braylon ordered Arath to be removed from the talks and sent back for disciplining on Coruscant, before instructing the remaining Jedi to return the seal to Ketas in the hopes of salvaging the situation.
===Disgrace and later years===
Braylon also found issues with wider Jedi policy. When it was decided by the Council to send Dooku and Jinn to Coruscant's Dragonfire Air Rally in order to charm an ambassador from Candovant, Braylon criticized the move as making the Jedi no better than politicians and holostars. Though she was overruled, her argument troubled Dooku, who began to question the role of the Jedi in galactic politics and the direction in which the Order was going. However, it was not long before the two were at loggerheads again. Before the air rally, Dooku's brother Ramil, a competitor, had promised the Jenet crime lord Cenevax to forfeit the race but then reneged on the agreement. In response, she had his airspeeder sabotaged so that he crashed and was seriously injured. While attempting to uncover the truth, Dooku and Qui-Gon Jinn were stopped by Braylon, who ordered them to leave the investigation to the Coruscant Security Force. Dooku and Jinn disobeyed her instructions and were able to apprehend Cenevax, however they also uncovered the reason she had tried to hinder them. Her son Arath had once again built up a large amount of gambling debts, owing Cenevax a lot of money; in return for Cenevax's leniency, Braylon had been looking the other way. Dooku confronted Braylon in front of the Jedi Council, drawing his lightsaber and threatening her, to which she responded by igniting her own. However, Braylon soon relented and confessed her secret motherhood and illicit dealings with Cenevax. As punishment, she was removed from the Jedi Council, although she was not expelled from the Order.
By 42 BBY Braylon's relations with the Council remained frosty. Nevertheless, when Dooku was denied permission to return to Serenno in order to protect his homeworld from Abyssin raiders, she helped him secure transportation behind the Council's back by getting in touch with Lene Kostana and Sifo-Dyas, who agreed to take Dooku in Kostana's ship, the Truthseeker. Over the course of his mission to Serenno, Dooku would go on to make his final decision to leave the Jedi Order.
==Personality and traits==
Yula Braylon was an esteemed trainer of Jedi and presented a rather formidable figure in the Jedi Order. She was keen to enforce discipline in the initiates that she taught and had little patience for those that bent the rules. She warned Dooku not to form attachments and harshly reprimanded both him and Sifo-Dyas for their attempt to access the Bogan Collection, as well as showing distaste for Qui-Gon Jinn's anti-authoritarian manner. Yet this stood in stark contrast to her own behavior at times; she notably went against Jedi practice to have her son Arath, while as an initiate she had herself also tried to break into the Bogan Collection. Her attachment to Arath would lead her to aiding and abetting criminal elements. Braylon also believed that the Jedi were beginning to spend too much time politicking, which distracted them from their true purpose. She clashed with Lene Kostana over the latter's interest in Dark Side artifacts, believing them to be trivial and irrelevant.
==Behind the scenes==
Yula Braylon first appeared in the audiobook Dooku: Jedi Lost, written by Cavan Scott and published in 2019. She was voiced by Rebecca Soler.
==Appearances==
*Dooku: Jedi Lost 
*Dooku: Jedi Lost script 
==Sources==
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==Notes and references==
Category:Females
Category:Individuals of unspecified species
Category:Individuals with she/her pronouns
Category:Jedi Council members
Category:Jedi Masters of the Jedi Order
Category:Jedi seekers