Zaluna Myder

Zaluna Myder, nicknamed Zal, was a female Sullustan surveillance operator and the supervisor of Myder's Mynocks at Transcept Media Solutions on the planet Gorse. Myder was not married and had no children. She valued her work life over family, and felt as if work was her home. She had an astounding memory, a large sum of which came from working at Transcept Media Solutions for over thirty years. Zaluna was on duty when a surveillance camera caught the dissident miner and demolitions expert Skelly making threats against the Empire and reported him to the authorities.
Zaluna became involved in the growing rebellion against the Galactic Empire when her fellow surveillance operator Hetto told her to pass a datacube to the rebel Hera Syndulla before his arrest. After being trapped in the toilet of a hoverbus, Zaluna joined forces with Hera and her companions Kanan Jarrus and Skelly to foil a plot by the Imperial industrialist Denetrius Vidian to destroy Gorse's moon Cynda.
During the Gorse Conflict, she lost her sight. With the help of Hera and Kanan, she relocated to another world to live a new life.
==Biography==
===Background===
Zaluna Myder was a Sullustan who was born on the planet Gorse. From her late teens onwards, Zaluna worked as a surveillance operator at Transcept Media Solutions' headquarters in Gorse City's World Window Plaza. Transcept was one of the few commercial operations on Gorse that was not attached to the mining industry. Transcept was a surveillance company that worked for both businesses and governments including the Galactic Republic and the Galactic Empire; monitoring the profiles and consumer tastes of Gorse's transient workers and residents. She worked at Transcept's Imperial "public order" surveillance division, which was nicknamed Myder's Mynocks.
Zaluna was alive during the last decades of the Republic and saw the Jedi in action. She held the Jedi in high esteem and regarded them as individuals who would figure out what to do when innocent lives were threatened, even in a no-win situation. Despite her respect for the Jedi, Zaluna thought that the Jedi were not gods but rather people who could find a way to fix problems. She never believe the Empire's story that the Jedi had tried to seize control of the Republic. In 11 BBY, Zaluna was the supervisor of Myder's Mynocks.Star Wars Rebels: The Visual Guide states that Kanan Jarrus and Hera Syndulla met on Gorse, as depicted in the novel A New Dawn, six years prior to the events of Star Wars Rebels. Star Wars: Galactic Atlas states that Star Wars Rebels begins in the year 5 BBY, thereby dating the events of A New Dawn to 11 BBY.
===Monitoring the bomber===
Zaluna was on supervision duty at Myder's Mynocks when Hetto, one of her subordinate operators reported that a surveillance camera had recorded a verbal threat to the Empire on Cynda, a thorilide-rich moon that orbited the planet Gorse. This verabal threat took place in an elevator and was witnessed by a transport driver. The camera reported to several surveillance supercomputers which comprehended the statement, measured it against mysterious metrics, and referred it to the Mynocks. This verbal threat had been made by Skelly, a dissident miner who was opposed to the Empire's blasting operations on Cynda. After consulting Skelly's records on their database, Zaluna discovered that the miner was "red-stamped"; meaning that he was mentally unwell and had been visited by Gorse's mental health authority.
Shortly later, she received an incoming hologram message from the Imperial Count Denetrius Vidian, the Empire's efficiency expert who had been dispatched by Emperor Palpatine to speed up thorilide production in the Gorse system. Vidian informed Myder that he would be inspecting the mining and processing operations on Cynda and Gorse respectively. In addition, Vidian initiated Security Condition One, which quadrupled the surveillance workload for Myder's Mynocks. After the message had ended, Hetto criticized Vidian and insinuated that the Imperials were out of their mind.
Zaluna warned him to follow the Empire's orders before returning to work. She then ordered Hetto to alert the Imperial authorities to Skelly's verbal threat in line with Imperial policy. When Hetto reminded her that Skelly was mentally unwell, Zaluna responded that the Empire did not care about the dissident's condition and that Skelly's comments were going to land him in trouble with the Imperial authorities. Stormtroopers were dispatched to arrest Skelly but he managed to escape following a brief struggle. Following his escape, Skelly initiated a test detonation on Cynda's Zone Forty-Two, that caused a cave-in on the moon and disrupted mining operations.
Due to the Imperial crackdown, the Myder's Mynocks were conscripted to assist the Empire's efforts to round up all local trouble makers prior to Count Vidian's impending visit to Gorse. While her Mynocks scanned Cynda's caverns for Skelly, Zaluna looked for the dark-haired transport driver the camera had captured Skelly arguing with earlier in the elevator. As a migrant worker, Transcept did not yet have a file on him and she nicknamed him the "Rugged Pilot". Unknown to Zaluna, this "Rugged Pilot" was the Jedi Padawan Kanan Jarrus, who had survived the Great Jedi Purge and was eking out a living as a freighter pilot.
===Seeds of dissent===
Following the incident on Cynda, Zaluna had to deal with the increased presence of Imperial officers at the Mynocks' work floor, who quizzed her and went over recordings of events on the moon. After Skelly triggered a cave-in on Cynda through a test explosion, the Imperial authorities tried to cover it up by claiming that the collapse on the mon had been a natural occurrence. While monitoring Cynda's surveillance network, Zaluna received news that Skelly was in the custody of the refining company Moonglow Polychemical. Zaluna promptly informed the Imperials who informed their commanding officer Captain Rae Sloane's Imperial Star Destroyer Ultimatum.
Noticing her colleague Hetto's discomfort with the Imperials, Zaluna went to find him. Hetto promptly revealed that he had been in contact with a mysterious woman on the HoloNet and had downloaded sensitive information on the Empire into a datacube. He told her that he had hidden the datacube in a potted plant. Shortly later, Hetto was arrested by an Imperial lieutenant and his stormtroopers for "abusing the trust of the Galactic Empire." When the Imperial lieutenant questioned the loyalty of Myders Mynocks, Zaluna sprang to the defense of her team by pointing out that they had done everything that the Empire had asked. However, the lieutenant was unsympathetic and told her that everything that happened today would be reviewed.
Zaluna and her fellow colleagues were greatly troubled by Hetto's arrest since Hetto had worked for the company for the past twenty years. When a younger female colleague asked Zaluna what would happen to Hetoo, she admitted that she did not know. She told her colleagues that their company was a "tool" that could stop bad things like the earlier incident on Cynda. After the Imperials had departed, Zaluna went to the watering plant and found Hetto's datacube along with a small note that contained the name of a local cantina called The Asteroid Field and a woman named "Hera".
===Rebel entanglements===
Later that night, Zaluna headed to The Asteroid Field to meet Hera. On the way, she was harassed by a drunken bruiser named Ketticus Brayl, who was infatuated with her. Zaluna managed to ward him by showing him her blaster and telling him to return to his wife and children. During the journey, she wondered who the mysterious Hera was and speculated whether she was working for a rival surveillance firm. Despite her fears for her own safety and freedom, she vowed to uphold her promise to deliver the datacube to Hera.
Upon arriving at The Asteroid Field, Zaluna encountered Kanan and the bartender Okadiah Garson. After exchanging greetings, Zaluna disabled the surveillance cameras in the cantina. Once she was sure that no one was watching them, she introduced herself to Kanan; recognizing him as the miner who had stood up to Vidian earlier that day. She then told him that she was looking for someone named Hera. While Kanan did not know where Hera was, their problem was solved when Hera turned up at the cantina.
After exchanging pleasantries, Zaluna informed Hera that Hetto had been arrested by the Empire and that she was carrying his instruction to meet Hera. After speculating about Hetto's fate in Imperial captivity, Zaluna showed Hera Hetto's datacube. She explained that Hetto had been downloading sensitive Imperial files including requests made on the Imperial channel to the Transcept database. One of the files concerned a mysterious man named Lemuel Tharsa, a man who had visited Gorse twenty years ago. While bantering about her work as a surveillance operator to the offworlds, Zaluna caught side of Skelly, the dissident miner she had reported earlier. Fearing retribution, she slipped the datacube into her bag and left the cantina.
After leaving the cantina, Zaluna hid inside the toilet of a hoverbus in order to escape a stormtrooper patrol. This was a fateful decision that put her into the company of Hera, Kanan, and Skelly. Zaluna was trapped inside the hoverbus for almost an entire day. During her accidental captivity, the bus' driver Okadiah allowed Kanan and Hera to borrow his bus in order to infiltrate the Moonglow Polychemical refinery and spy on Count Vidian. After Skelly blew up Vidian's Imperial shuttle in an attempt to assassinate the Count, Vidian and his surviving Imperial entourage commandeered the hoverbus and used it to travel to an Imperial spaceport at Highground. Following a second attempt on Count Vidian's life, Skelly fled with Kanan and Hera aboard the hoverbus, outrunning several Imperial Troop Transports and two TIE fighters. The rebels managed to outwit their Imperial pursuers and fled to a quarry outside Gorse City.
Shortly after landing, the rebels heard incessant pounding in the door of the hoverbus' restroom. After Kanan opened the door, he found an exhausted Zaluna. Nobody had been able to hear Zaluna due to the thick door and the bashing and blasting during the pursuit. Zaluna quickly recognized Skelly as the bomber she had earlier reported to the authorities. While she was fearful of retribution, Kanan reassured her that Skelly was in no physical shape to hurt her. Zaluna told Hera that she had to discuss Hera's cube later and made preparations to return home since she had missed work. She also revealed that their hoverbus had a surveillance camera board. After some discussion, Zaluna also agreed to lead the rebels back to Okadiah's bar through routes that were not being watched by surveillance cameras.
===Leaving Gorse behind===
While resting in the flophouse opposite Okadiah's cantina with her new rebel friends, Zaluna listened as Hera proposed that they work together to fight the Empire instead of going after the Empire on their own. When Zaluna heard the rebellion being mentioned, she quietly remarked that it would lead them into troubled. While checking her datapad, Zaluna received word that her entire team Myder's Mynocks had been suspended and that she had also been suspended for not showing up for her shift. Zaluna was also fearful that the Empire was going to find out that she had been in the company of rebels and that she would lose her job or worse. After commiserating her job loss and troubles with the Empire, Zaluna and her rebel friends turned their attention to the recording device that Zaluna had located on the bus.
Zaluna attached the recording device to her holoplayer. After watching the material from the hoverbus surveillance, they discovered that Count Vidian was planning to destroy Gorse's moon Cynda. While Hera and Kanan reacted to Vidian's plot with disbelief, Skelly pointed out that Vidian now had the means to destroy Cynda, partly thanks to his research which the Count had misappropriated during their meeting at Moonglow. To Skelly's relief, Zaluna backed him up by pointing out that her mother had taught her during her childhood that Cynda was all brittle because of the gravitational weight generated by Gorse. She feared that Cynda's destruction was imminent.
After resting the night with the rebels, Zaluna decided to travel with the rebels on Kanan's freighter Expedient and leave Gorse behind. She decided not to return to her apartment and pack her things since she feared that the Empire would be watching. Since Zaluna had no living family and friends on Gorse, she decided to leave the planet. She also wanted to see an actual sunrise, something she had not seen in her life. To reward Zaluna's services in providing data about the Empire's methods, Hera agreed to help the Sullustan start a new life in somewhere she could be safe. Before the rebels could make their way to the spaceport, they witnessed an explosion on Cynda. Realizing that the Empire was behind it, the rebels rushed to the spaceport where Kanan's freighter was parked.
Since Kanan's friend had been working on the moon just prior to the explosion, Zaluna and the other rebels traveled on the Expedient to find him. They quickly discovered that Count Vidian had ordered a test bombing on Cynda which had claimed the lives of many miners including Okadiah. Vidian had ordered this test in order to investigate whether the planned detonation of the moon would destroy its thorilide crystals. To support his plan, Vidian had used his phantom mining expert Lemuel Tharsa to fake the results to show that the detonation would not damage the moon's crystal. The original report concluded otherwise but Vidian did not show it to his fellow Imperials including Captain Rae Sloane. Satisfied, Vidian ordered all empty cargo ships in the Gorse system to follow Sloane's Imperial Star Destroyer to his depot in the Calcoraan system under the pretext of delivering Baradium-357 to stabilize Cynda.
After hearing Vidian's orders via intercom, the rebels decided to follow the mining fleet to Calcoraan in order to stop him. Before leaving, Hera asked the other rebels whether they consented to their plan. After Skelly agreed to take part, Hera turned to Zaluna. She asked Zaluna whether she wanted to go home and promised that no one would judge her for her decision. After some contemplation, Zaluna decided that she would be a brave person rather than coward. She also rejected her past as a surveillance operator and vowed never to help the Empire to oppress and imprison people again. Having reached a unanimous decision to stop Vidian's plot to detonate Cynda, the rebels traveled to the Calcoraan Depot.
===Stopping Count Vidian===
While traveling to the Calcoraan system, Zaluna and her fellow rebels received word on HoloNet that the Empire had covered up Count Vidian's test bombing by claiming that Moonglow's negligence had caused the bombing. This had given the Empire a pretext to nationalize the company and seize its assets. Zaluna picked that up after learning that the Empire had renamed Kanan's ship "Imperial Provisional Seventy-Two." After arriving in the Calcoraan system, the rebels discussed their plan to stop Vidian. Hera proposed loading Kanan's freighter with explosives and using it to destroy the Calcoraan Depot. However, Skelly suggested producing a fake report that claimed that detonating Cynda would destroy the throrilide crystals in order to confuse the Imperials. For that plan to work, they need to find Vidian. Zaluna offered to help by slicing a terminal in order to find Vidian.
While the other rebels loaded the baradium aboard the Expedient, Zaluna and Skelly managed to find out that Vidian had gone to his hub and also downloaded a copy of the space station's layout. Zaluna also managed to freeze several Visitractic 830 factory surveillance cams in order to help Hera and Kanan make their way through the depot undetected. The four rebels then traveled to Count Vidian's hub in a hovercart and found themselves in the Count's medcenter. Vidian soon detected the presence of Hera and Kanan and managed to overpower them with his cybernetic body. However, Skelly and Zaluna managed to take control of one of the Count's medical droids and used it to incapacitate Vidian with a sleeping serum.
The rebels then downloaded Vidian's brain into a portable terminal in order to access Vidian's computer system and produced a fake report to stop Cynda's detonation. To prevent the cyborg Count from recording them, Zaluna deactivated the unconscious Count's eyes and ears and also deleted the entire encounter with them. While probing through Vidian's mind, the rebels discovered that Vidian had suppressed the original test bombing report which showed that detonating Cynda would damage the thorilide crystals. After looking deeper into Vidian's memories, Zaluna and her companions discovered that Vidian had once been Lemuel Tharsa before succumbing to Shilmer's syndrome. They also discovered that Vidian had perpetuated the falsehood that Lemuel was a separate individual in order to produce fraudulent mining research to advance his own interests, which were linked to the comet-chasing industry.
Armed with the knowledge that Vidian had suppressed the original report on the Cynda test bombing, the rebels abandoned their plan to produce a fake report. Instead, Kanan tricked Captain Sloane into entering Vidian's private chambers. Posing as an agent of the Emperor, Kanan convinced Sloane that Vidian's planned detonation of Cynda threatened the Empire's strategic interests and got her to send the original report to the Emperor. Zaluna and her rebel companions then returned to the Expedient and left for the Gorse system.
===Saving Cynda===
While traveling back to the Gorse system, Zaluna reflected on the life-changing events that had occurred in the past few days. Despite toying with the idea of betraying her friends to the Empire, Zaluna managed to overcome her fears and doubts by recalling her own aversion to the Empire's oppressive policies. In the end, she decided to overcome her fear of the Empire and cast her lot with Hera and her companions. After exiting hyperspace, the rebels decided to disrupt the planned detonation of Cynda by harassing the mining ships in order to prevent them from unloading their thorilide supplies. Piloting the Expedient, Kanan ran circles around the mining fleet and managed to shoot down several TIE fighters. Meanwhile, Zaluna managed to tap into the Transcept systems and send a warning to the inhabitants of Gorse.
The rebels managed to land their freighter in the rear hangar of Count Vidian's harvesting ship Forager. Together, the four rebels managed to fight their way through the factory ship and make their way to Vidian's command center. While navigating through the ship's factory, they were separated from Skelly. Zaluna along with Hera and Kanan managed to make their way to Vidian's command center. Zaluna attempted to infiltrate the center in order to send a distress signal to Gorse but was captured by Vidian, who hurled her across the room. Before the cyborg Count could finish her off, Kanan and Hera entered the room and fought Vidian but were quickly overpowered. During the struggle, Zaluna attempted to shoot Vidian with her blaster but the Count managed to turn the blaster in her direction and blind her. Zaluna survived the blaster shot but was permanently blinded. The count then triumphantly announced his intention to continue with his detonation of Cynda.
Before Vidian could relish in his victory over Zaluna and her rebel companions, Captain Sloane received orders from the Emperor to terminate the planned detonation and to arrest Vidian. When Vidian defied Sloane, she ordered the Imperial fleet to destroy the Count's ship Forager in order to destroying the Detonation Control link. During the bombardment of the Forager, a wounded Zaluna and her rebel companions managed to escape the derelict ship. Kanan saved the three of them from being crushed by a falling catwalk by using the Force to levitate it aside. Zaluna and the rebels then escaped the Forager in an escape pod. Meanwhile, Vidian was killed by a vengeful Skelly, who detonated a bomb which destroyed the Forager and several nearby ships. While aboard the escape pod, Zaluna and her companions reflected on Skelly's death.
===A new life===
Following the Gorse Conflict, Zaluna started a new life on a sunlit agricultural world with the help of Hera. Prior to departing the Gorse system, Hera visited Zaluna's apartment on Gorse and managed to retrieve her personal belongings and effects. Zaluna was relieved that her apartment had not been ransacked and that no video surveillance imagery identifying her from aboard the Forager had survived. Zaluna settled in an empty house which Hera had purchased. Despite her blinded state, Zaluna was happy with her new life and refused to consider any treatment since she had seen enough. She received help from a young girl who came everyday to help her with chores. Zaluna was also happy to learn that her new home had a back garden with a tree, which she regarded as a memorial for her late friend Skelly. After exchanging pleasantries, Zaluna allowed her rebel friends Kanan and Hera to depart on Hera's ship, the Ghost.
==Personality and traits==
As a Sullustan, Zaluna Myder had large shell-like ears. Standing at a height of over a meter and a half, Zaluna was considered to be tall among her diminutive species. By the time of the Gorse Conflict, Zaluna was in her fifties. Since her adolescence, she devoted her life to working as a surveillance operator at Transcept Media Solutions. As a career woman, Zaluna did not have a spouse or children. She regarded her employees at Transcept as her own children and looked out for them when they got into trouble.
Until the Gorse conflict, Zaluna was politically neutral and played an important role in alerting the Imperial authorities to the rogue miner Skelly and other dissidents. The seeds of Zaluna's disenchantment with the Empire were first sown when her friend Hetto was arrested due to his dealings with the rebel Hera Syndulla. Zaluna was also horrified when she saw footage of Count Vidian callously murdering the guildmaster Palfa for disagreeing with one of his "reforms". Later, she decided to cast her lot with Hera's rebel cells upon learning that she and her fellow Mynocks had been suspended as part of the Imperial crackdown. Knowing that the Empire already knew about her friendship with Hetto, she feared that the Imperials would also discover that she had been in the company of Hera, Skelly, and Kanan. Having grown up on a sunless part of Gorse, Zaluna had never seen a sunrise and longed to see one all her life. This motivated her to join Hera and her rebel band.
While Zaluna initially took pride in her work as a surveillance operator, she grew disillusioned after learning that she was abetting Imperial oppression in the Gorse system by helping the Empire to arrest dissidents and other enemies of the state. Zaluna also questioned the official Imperial narrative that the Jedi had betrayed the Republic. She was old enough to see the Jedi in action during her younger days and respected them for saving the lives of the innocent even in difficult situations. Zaluna also did not believe that the Jedi were gods but believed that they were just people who inspired other people to do what was right.
==Skills and abilities==
As a surveillance operator, Zaluna Myder was skilled with operating computer systems and technology. Due to her line of work, Zaluna was familiar with the locations and operational capabilities of the surveillance cameras on the planet Gorse and its moon Cynda. She was also a skilled slicer and was able to hack into computer systems. In addition, Zaluna also wielded a blaster which she used for self-defense. While not a fighter, Zaluna attempted to come to the aid of her friends Hera and Kanan who were being attacked by Count Vidian during the Gorse conflict. During that skirmish, Zaluna was blinded and lost her sight.
==Behind the scenes==
Zaluna Myder first appeared as a secondary point-of-view character in John Jackson Miller's 2014 novel A New Dawn, the first Canonical novel to be produced in consultation with the Lucasfilm Story Group.
==Appearances==
*A New Dawn 
==Sources==
*
*Ultimate Star Wars
*Star Wars: Timelines
==Notes and references==
Category:Females
Category:Imperial defectors
Category:Personnel of the Galactic Empire
Category:Sullustans