Allison Tainer

Allegiance
 Species

Allison Tainer is an Imperial Security Bureau agent and a member of Task Force Spectre.

Appearances:

Episode 8 - Investigations

Episode 9 - Lockdown

Episode 16 - Boarding Party

## Background Info

It used to hurt. They used be so happy to visit when they heard about all the toys and the clothes that I had. I loved the feeling. I was important, respected. I had people to share the fun with that could make things more meaningful.
They always abandoned me. Father would buy the wrong brand or dress or I would forget what to say when they would be teasing me in the hurtful way that they would and then I would find out what their “friendship” was really worth. Everybody wants to be friends with the girl who can take them shopping or to a holovid show. All they ever did was take and take.
It didn't hurt anymore though. I knew how to get what I wanted. If someone wanted to come visit or take me out dancing then maybe I might say yes. Everything had a cost and I could pay that cost to get them to do what I told them to. Eventually they stopped asking but that didn't stop me. I learned that I could make them pay the cost. That felt good.
Father owned an important engineering firm that worked with some disgusting Sullustan corporation called SoroSuub. The government made sure that he was paid well to keep the aliens on side while taking advantage of their mineral rights and production capabilities. It was important work, Father said. No one wanted to work with the aliens but this was different. They were a means to an end. In the Galactic Empire, everything had its place and the place of the Sullustans was that of a loyal employee. There was good money in it and he was proud to be given the assignment.
Mother never understood. She always talked about how the Tainers were above the work of some middle management position over aliens. She would fight constantly with Father. Nothing was ever good enough for her. Father tried to make her understand but she left us and went back to her family. “Just like the others” Father said. “We don't need her, Princess.”
Things were never really the same after she left. Father just worked all day in his office so I didn't see him very often. The grand condominium set high in one of Coruscant's huge structures slowly began to decay. While before Mother had left it had been full of colour and shine, with expensive flowers and polished chrome sculptures giving the home a feeling of ordered beauty, her departure had led it to take on an almost sepulchral tone. Dust would build up on unused tables and counters, the flowers were gone and the lighting around the statues had begun to dim and throw uneasy shadows instead of the comforting highlights. Father didn't seem to notice. There was work to be done and he was getting more and more anxious.
For my birthday Father bought me a luxury droid and named it Nana. She was around five and a half feet tall and was modeled after a holovid star of during the days of the Clone Wars. Father said that that meant that she was retro, an antique and that that was even better than a new one. I knew what it really meant. She was more cheap, old and out of date but still Father felt the need to buy her because all the rich people had one.
Nana did her best. She would clean, cook meals or even play games with me whenever I asked her to but she was still just a droid. Sometimes she would ask why I seemed to not like to play with my friends anymore or why I spent so much time organizing my room when it seemed to look nice the way that it was. Of course she didn't understand, she was just a droid. All she made me think of was how Father seemed to be slipping further and further.
Eventually the men in the black uniforms started showing up. Father would take them to his office and talk for hours and after they had left Father would talk about how the rats were worse than they were before and that his superiors were angry at him but that everything would be alright. He just needed to work harder.
One day when I had come home from school Nana was gone. Father said that she had been malfunctioning and that they needed to get rid of her but they had a new housemaid named Vaya. This strange woman spun around from her cleaning when I entered and bowed deeply. It may have looked like a human while it had its long robes and hood up tied tightly covered up its coarse hair and antennapalps but I knew the stink of a Balosar. I looked at it with disgust and turned to Father. He couldn't look me in the eyes and studied the floor intently.
“It's only for a little while, Princess. She knows all sorts of new games you could play and I'm sure she knows all sorts of songs, don't you Vaya?” The Balosar nodded without raising its eyes. “See? You're going to have a great time.”
I didn't have a great time. I had a slimy Balosar skulking around my home. It annoyed me while I tried to study, moved my things constantly and made the most inane attempts at conversation. When we would play any games it always ended the same way; its death stick and spice addled brain could never keep up with an actual human.
Things in my room started to go missing. It wasn't hard to notice when something was out of place. The marble sphere and other relics imported from Dromund Kass dominated the room whereas the rest of it was in a comforting minimalist military style. The Balosar told me it didn't know what I was talking about. Just being in my room felt wrong after the creature had been inside. Everything was where it should be, it would try to say. I knew that it was lying.
I hadn't seen Father for months. Mother had left us. My most private place was being defiled on a daily basis. Everything I knew was being thrown into disarray and chaos.
I told it that I wanted to talk in my room. Once the Balosar entered I closed the door and locked it. The creature looked quickly around the room nervously.
“Is there something you needed, little lady?”
I had grown tired of its voice. I grabbed the heavy sphere off of its stand and struck two centimeters above and one centimeter forward from its ear. The impact made a sound not unlike the wet crack of a melon. All of my anger and frustration flowed naturally from my arm into the sphere onto its skull. The Balosar stumbled back towards the balcony. It took almost no effort to push it teetering form over the guardrail into the void.
I heard Father banging on the door. He was shouting, trying to find out what was going on. I crossed the room and opened the door for him in a perfectly calm state. Finally things were becoming right again. I turned my back from him and set the sphere back on its stand as the blood started to dry.
“What happened to Vaya?” Father asked, panting from exhaustion and terror.
“She fell”
I joined the cadets as soon as I was able. Living on Coruscant meant that I could go to the academy and continue to live with Father but I decided to live in the dormitories. I learned near as much from the other students as I did from the instructors. Now that we all were in uniforms I did not have my clothes to tell people that I was better than them. I discovered how to let them know by how I stood, how I looked at them, how I would move around a room. Words have power but I learned that there were ways to use them as knives or as hammers as needed.
Not everyone at the school were quick to accept their place. While the other students didn't take long until they knew to either do what I said or get out of my way, some of the instructors thought that just because they were there longer and had positions above me in rank that they were superior. They had rank over me but I knew that was a temporary kind of power. They were only teaching because they were too weak to survive in the navy in combat. I couldn't wait to be put against those pathetic insurgents and show them what it means to turn from the rightful rule of the Empire.
As the weeks and months passed by I received more and more messages from Father. He was fine, he would say, but they had had to sell some of Mother's statues. Don't worry, he would say, they were just cluttering the place up. Slowly the messages got more panicked as he would talk about looking into new places that he could move now that I was out of the house. He could live in one of those smaller apartments across the sector where that nice restaurant was. I knew the tone of the messages because it was a tone I had heard often enough from the other students. He was lying to me.
The day we of our graduation I met General Bast. He was High Colonel Moradmin Bast at the time. He looked perfect in every way. His uniform was perfect. His stance was perfect. His motions were perfect. His subordinates stood when he entered a room and sat when he sat. The man had an air of respect that was the first thing I truly envied. I could get what I wanted from students or even some teachers but this man was a walking embodiment of the will of the Empire. Father had always talked about how important it was to take command but he had always fallen short. This was a man who people feared.
The High Colonel was there to deliver the Dura-Khan cross to the students who had shown themselves to be exceptional in the close quarters combat training during their first year. I was one of the three out of our class of thousands to have earned the award. I hadn't been home for the months since I had first moved into the dormitories and wanted to tell Father myself about the achievement.
I did not expect Bast to be there. For a brief moment I thought that maybe he was telling Father of my award himself. That was when the storm troopers brought Father out of the house wearing stun cuffs. He had a black eye and blood dripping out of the corner of his mouth.
I will never forget the look he had when he saw me. It wasn't a look of worry, a look of confusion or anger. It was the look of a man who was truly worthless. All of his failures had caught up with him and he had to deal with what had always been true; he was never one of the people he was, not truly. All I could do was stand there in shock and shame as the man who was my father was carted out like a common criminal. All of his talk of being important and powerful meant nothing when the entire neighborhood could watch him be taken from his own home.
I couldn't believe that he could let that happen.
Colonel Bast saw me standing there shaking with fury and came to my side. Even the way he walked were perfect. He told me what had happened, how my father had let the Sullustans turn traitors. SoroSuub had been working with the terrorists for days and my father had been covering it up. The ISB only found out after it became clear that weapons and equipment that were freely given had started to show up at battlefields.
My father's actions had cost Imperial lives. People had died because of him. He had been lying to the Empire. He had been lying to everyone. He was weak. He was the same as the rats.
It was years later that I had gotten accepted into the Imperial Security Bureau. I should have been happy but it was also the day that the rats had found a way to destroy one of the most powerful weapons in the Imperial arsenal, The Death Star, and with it General Bast. The man who I most respected, who helped me find my true path was murdered by same people that some entire planets would dare call heroes.
I was going to make them pay for what they did. All of the thieves and deceitful cowards that were creeping around in the shadows and eroding all that makes the Empire great were going to pay for their crimes.
I still find hyperspace travel is the perfect time for quiet contemplation. It's fascinating how Balosar blood can stain marble for as long as it has. Maybe some day I could talk to one of the science team about that effect. The relic had supposedly been thousands of years old but nobody would know by looking at it on its stand on my shelf.
Agent Vakaren tells me that we will land on Onderon in three hours. The time for silent preparation is almost over. Soon it will be time to hear their screams. Hail the Empire.