Application
Nothing posted earlier than this is related to Edensphere. A lot of them are responses to writing prompts, made while working out this character. Some no longer really fit.
CHARACTER NAME: Grodin Tierce (the clone)
SERIES: The Star Wars Expanded Universe
PERSONALITY:
Tierce is an experiment. The clone of a Force-Sensitive soldier, with that soldier’s mind and memories, plus some of the mind and memories of an alien genius. That soldier had been indoctrinated or brainwashed into highest, most fanatic loyalty, which the alien genius didn’t share, though said alien was absolutely dedicated to a tangentially related and less specific cause. Their clone spent some of his formative days in the presence of a mad Jedi Master who shared neither obsession, but who would casually touch and warp the minds of the people around him.
Unsurprisingly, the end result is not quite neurotypical.
In most settings - in public, with most people - Tierce is a little blank-seeming, sort of bland, enormously patient, and diffident. He’s somewhat socially uncertain and awkward, but in a well-meaning way. He likes people and wants to be useful, and can easily waste time on frivolous pursuits, or dissemble. Insult him and he’ll either laugh it off or be hurt; he can be made angry, but it takes some doing, and then he’s more indignant than anything. Though he’s not clumsy or forgetful, he sort of gives that impression - he often seems slightly distracted. Similarly, he can seem a bit slow, clueless, unsure. Harmless.
It’s not an act. Not really. He’s often like this when alone, too. On the job - in situations where it’s called for - he seems decidedly crisper, more alert, more focused.
That crispness softens the line between his outer and middle selves. His middle self is a warrior strategist. Sharp, intense, blunt, very sure. The way he speaks and stands is different. He moves much faster, more efficiently. He doesn’t dissemble and backs down only grudgingly, though he will compromise if he sees enough of a need, and can use some very biting sarcasm. As his middle self he’s much more of a perfectionist, highly disciplined, and with little interest in anything outside of the task at hand. He’ll interrupt people without apology. When he’s angry, he’s clipped and cold. However, he’ll blunt his edges to soothe allies into sticking with him.
He doesn’t show that middle self to just anyone. If someone has seen it and recognized it as different from his focused outer self, he will show it to them in subsequent meetings, if there aren’t people who haven’t seen it around. Tierce prefers to be overlooked. He also finds it somewhat tiring to show this self for long.
Tierce also has an inner self. It’s emotional, self-centered, without filter or self-restraint. He hates switching into it, but if he doesn’t now and again he sometimes enters it involuntarily and has a panic attack. His posture and movements are different here, too, being erratic and sudden. When he’s angry, he’s loud and sometimes violent. This self is never voluntarily shown to anyone, but sometimes - during extreme desperation or after trying to study artwork - it manifests around people. The inner self is the most tiring.
Each self is equally true, and they’re all him. He may do something while showing his inner self for reasons he doesn’t understand as his outer or middle self, but they aren’t split personalities. He can always hold to a plan. He feels the same way about a given person as each self, though between his outer self’s desire to get along and his middle self’s discipline and narrow focus, it’s only as his inner self that everything can be shown. Tierce has great control over his first and second selves, and can change from one to the other easily.
No matter which self is being expressed, he is quite intelligent, though his outer self downplays this. Loyalty - service to something larger than himself - is key to him, though wrapped around that is the drive for revenge against what hurt the focus of that loyalty. In the pursuit of goals related to that key, he is ruthless and willing to disregard rules he normally keeps.
Tierce has a bad habit of making assumptions, sometimes colossal ones, based on observations and speculation. Sometimes these are right. Sometimes they’re not right, but he’s close enough and sees the truth coming in time to salvage the situation. Sometimes they’re very wrong. He doesn’t understand people as fully as he might think, and tends to underestimate them.
In the long view, Tierce is extraordinarily patient. It doesn’t matter if a goal will take ten years or more, he’ll commit to it. This isn’t to say that he can’t feel impatience, but he can easily conquer this feeling as his outer self, and as his middle is generally too disciplined to break with the plan.
As his outer and middle selves, he rarely tells anyone everything. He is not trusting. Neither will he throw away allies if he still believes there’s use left in them.
The alien genius’s personality is partially reflected in his middle self, but it shows in another way too. Tierce intermittently hears a voice which he interprets as Thrawn’s, though it’s often too soft to really understand. Whether or not it’s a second personality depends on how you look at it. He thinks he does, more or less. He thinks that Thrawn’s mind, or part of it, lives on in his head. He’s directed by it - the rest of him has little initiative or imagination.
But it’s his own voice. The voice of what he should have been - someone intensely analytical, hyperobservant, and driven. And it has little power - it’s a voice that fades in and out and a vague feeling, nothing more. It follows along with and sometimes comments on his general thoughts and on things it picks up through the subconscious. It never comes completely out of the black with a thought; everything is either an observation or connected to what he’s already thinking.
TIMELINE: After he dies, late in Vision of the Future.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Be patient, please. This will take a while.
Far outside of the Republic there was a spacefaring people called the Chiss. One of them was Commander Mitth’raw’nuruodo, core name Thrawn, a tactician and strategist of unparalleled skill and boldness. He likened combat to art and studied both.
A large task force sent by then-Senator Palpatine was intercepted and destroyed by Thrawn, even though his forces had been tiny in comparison. Capturing its leader, Thrawn was warned about an incoming Jedi force, Outbound Flight, and told it was a threat to the Chiss people. Not long after making contact with Outbound Flight, their leader attempted to strangle him with the Force, and so Thrawn’s forces destroyed them.
His people exiled him for the tactics he used, and in exile he was picked up by the Galactic Empire and trained. Despite being a nonhuman in a society where nonhumans were seen as lesser, he worked his way quickly and surely through the ranks until he was made Grand Admiral, one of only thirteen.
On the way he earned the respect of Darth Vader, and Vader’s secret commandos, the Noghri. Noghri were collectively under a life debt to Vader, believing that he had descended to save their world from a toxin. In reality, the Empire had seeded the world with this toxin, and Vader’s aid was a carefully-designed ploy.
Thrawn apparently fouled up somehow in politics and was sent with his forces on a “mapping expedition” in the Unknown Regions, which was popularly thought to be a disgrace and a waste of his talents. In reality, he was carving a new branch of the Empire out there, far from Coruscant and the Core Worlds. Five years after the Emperor’s death and the Rebellion’s victory he returned and picked up what was left of the Empire. From the bridge of Captain Pellaeon’s Chimaera, he led a very successful campaign against what he always insisted was the Rebellion.
Unlike many Imperials, he could take a loss and recognize when he had made a mistake, though there were relatively few of either. A lot happened, but in sum, he allied with a cloned Dark Jedi, almost defeated the Rebel upstarts, activated the cloning facilities on Wayland, and was killed by his Noghri bodyguard Rukh at a critical juncture, after Leia exposed what had really been done to the Noghri homeworld.
A month before this, he uploaded some of his memories and personality into a new project,an attempt to make a new breed of warlord. That clone had some of his mind, but his body and most of his brain and memories were cloned and transferred from the original Grodin Tierce, hereafter called TR-889 for simplicity’s sake.
TR-889 was born and raised on midlevel Imperial Center/Coruscant. When TR-889’s older brother left to join the Army, he followed a year later at the age of seventeen, lying about his age to get in.
It wasn’t long before he found himself in the Stormtrooper Corps, and with his unit was sent out to do everything from clean out pirate bases to put down Rebel insurgents to patrol stable cities. TR-889 was promoted several times, eventually becoming a Captain; during this time he briefly served under then-Vice Admiral Thrawn. He was known for having a cool head and a sense of command, as well as extraordinary reflexes.
He was also known for being very devoted to the Empire. He had absolutely no sympathy for the Rebels. If the Empire said a thing was so, then it was so; therefore, Alderaan was a tragic result of Rebels hijacking a mining tool, and he would kill unarmed civilians of any age if ordered. His lack of enthusiasm for classing people who weren’t healthy human males as NonHuMan and inferior was really the only part of Imperial doctrine in which he wasn’t a model Imperial - as he saw it, loyalty to the Empire was more important than species, gender, or cybernetics.
While they were stationed together TR-889 found unclear evidence that his elder brother had Rebel sympathies. He’d confronted his brother and heard vague excuses before the base they were both stationed on was attacked by insurgents, and during the fighting his brother went MIA. It was reported that he had saved his squad by throwing himself onto a grenade. TR-889 believed this and discreetly disposed of the evidence.
He performed excellently in the stormtrooper corps, and at the age of twenty-three he was selected to be trained as one of the Emperor’s personal bodyguards. They’re known by a lot of names - Imperial Guard, Royal Guard, Red Guard, Emperor’s Guard - but here will be called simply Guardsmen.
Training for this position was intense. As might be expected, training in many forms of combat, exotic and common, was part of it. So was learning to work effectively alone or in pairs, spotting concealed weaponry, ‘reading’ a crowd, speaking and writing in a unique language, “slicing” aka hacking records and droids, and techniques to sustain their bodyguarded person until help arrived. Some of these involved the Force, sustaining a life in particular.
But it also involved a particular mental training. Tierce once says, “A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges, ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. This is his goal in life, and his desire in death.” This training, or perhaps brainwashing, caused yet greater loyalty to the Emperor, so strong that in his presence Guardsmen were utterly subservient to his will. Even before training’s end, the Emperor had them fight each other to the death to test this loyalty. And they did, without hesitation or question, although after the heat of the moment TR-889 wished he hadn’t had to do it.
His class started with forty young but expert stormtroopers. Training took a year. At the end of it, between fights and people with stronger affinity to the Force being removed to elsewhere, there were five Guardsmen.
Months later, the Emperor died.
Many Guardsmen died with the Death Star, but small numbers were often lent to other high-ranking Imperials - both as bodyguards and to check their loyalty. They were also rotated out to take out targets, or to make them don normal stormtrooper armor and fight within the stormtrooper corps in order to let them keep their edge. TR-889 was one of them, taking out a Rebel cell, when the Emperor died.
It shook him profoundly. Guardsmen didn’t have anything like as strong a Force-bond to the Emperor as the Emperor’s Hands did, but the Emperor had still become the center of his galaxy - loyalty to Palpatine superseded any previous ties. One of the Guardsmen tried to commit suicide. On instinct TR-889 tried to preserve his life, but the other Guardsman had no will to go on. If the other two hadn’t broken his focus, he would have died too. After that he and those other two returned to Imperial service and split up.
TR-889 hid the fact that he was a Guardsman, since after the Emperor’s death he didn’t feel like those who tried to run the Empire were worthy of the same loyalty. Actually, TR-889 hacked his own service file. The Guardsmen were a very secretive order, but records still showed him disappearing entirely for a year, and never rejoining any specific part of Imperial service. He changed them, and for years after that his first act on gaining access to any database which might have a clue was to find and alter related files.
In the five years between the Emperor’s death and the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn, he had himself transferred repeatedly until he started to serve as part of the security detail aboard the Star Destroyer Chimaera. He watched the Empire declining over the years and was disgusted, but leaving it was inconceivable.
During that time he came more regularly into contact with his family. While he was on leave and visiting them on Imperial Center, Rebels sabotaged the planetary shields and invaded. The current head of the Empire planned for this to happen, having seeded the planet with a plague that only killed nonhumans. TR-889 helped his family and a few of their neighbors escape on the shuttle he’d come in on. Civilians weren’t supposed to board those - later he reported himself in and was given a slap on the wrist as reprimand.
One neighbor was a woman he’d known as a child, and who resettled near where his parents did. Within a year and a half they were engaged, and at last TR-889 started to consider leaving service and settling down. Then, however, Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Unknown Regions and took the Chimaera as his flagship.
TR-889 found his near-worship of the Emperor returning in force, directed at a new figurehead. His desire to leave the service evaporated completely under the sense that he could serve a new great Empire, and his non-military relationships suffered for it. He didn’t tell the Grand Admiral that he had been a Guardsman, and he was never sure if Thrawn knew, but he did find himself being cycled out into field missions which tested his abilities. And he did well.
He was picked to be the template for Thrawn’s experiment. Not long after being cloned and uploading his memories, TR-889 was killed in an assault on Generis.
The clone Tierce was decanted shortly after this. Thrawn could have ordered other mixed-origin clones to be made, but he didn’t. Tierce didn’t immediately appear to be a success, but neither was he failure enough to just be terminated, and perhaps in time he would prove himself. He was stationed on the Chimaera as a high-ranked member of security - not the same position his template had been in, but not far from it either.
The insane cloned Dark Jedi, Joruus C’baoth, was also on the Chimaera. C’baoth had a way of seizing the minds of the people around them and reshaping them a little, enough to get them to do his bidding. This happened several times to Tierce. He hated C’baoth, but this slight reshaping contributed to what his template had passed down to him, the effects of brainwashing and that desire to serve something greater than himself, and it probably added to his instability.
The clone Tierce never knew that he had been tested and had failed. During the Battle of Bilbringi he expected an attempt on Thrawn’s life to be made, and assumed that it would be in the form of a commando team docking in the shuttle bay, so that’s where he stationed his forces. He was able to kill Rukh as the latter was trying to escape, but felt that he had failed abjectly.
Knowing that he would otherwise be pressed into the kind of service other clones were assigned - turbolaser fodder, mostly - he altered the records to show that Tierce had been severely wounded on Generis but had survived, and after injuring himself with the help of a reprogrammed 2-1B surgical droid, he took his template’s identity.
He kept that up for ten years. Tierce had some trouble relating to his template’s family and friends. While he did have his template’s memories he felt a little removed from and awkward around them. Thanks to the reported trauma no one suspected he wasn’t his template, but the inherited relationship with his fiance declined quickly and broke off, which he always saw with a combination of regret and relief. For a while he mostly coasted on his identity, doing little of note.
As every effort the Empire made was beaten back, as they were ground down to a fraction of their old glory, the attitude in much of the Empire became one of grim resignation. There was even talk of ending the war, bowing to the upstarts - the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Remnant, the same Pellaeon who’d served with Thrawn - even spoke of it openly. Tierce hated that attitude and plan with a passion, but there was little he could do.
Five years after replacing his template, Tierce found that his brother - his template’s brother - wasn’t dead after all. He was serving the Rebellion, having faked his death. Tierce took it personally and roused out of his slump, calling on the brilliant part of himself to track the man down and, eventually, kill him.
He was now aware that he could do some good, though he was not Thrawn. Tierce attached himself as the military liason to Moff Disra, who was somewhat self-serving but ultimately loved the Empire, someone he could manipulate and act through. Disra had always had criminal contacts, but was terribly undiplomatic about his allies. Tierce was able to smooth things out a little, and get him new contacts. One result was Disra getting a major contract for Imperial starfighters.
Disra was smarter than he seemed and, after eight months, looked into the background of his very unremarkable military liason. Tierce was aware of this and, though his records mostly reflected an innocuous past, allowed him to learn that Tierce had been a Guardsman. Disra confronted him, saw his middle self, and introduced him to Flim - an actor who could perfectly imitate Grand Admiral Thrawn’s appearance, voice, and sheer presence.
Disra’s idea, the idea he’d sold Flim on, was to just bring this fake Thrawn up and use him as a figurehead to rally the Imperial Remnant. Tierce immediately had larger, grander plans. When Pellaeon retreated to an isolated sector of neutral space and sent an envoy to talk to a Rebel military leader, Tierce had the envoy captured and imprisoned. The envoy signaled, but with the comm jamming active Tierce didn’t think anyone had received it.
Presently there was a crisis in the Rebellion revolving around the razing of an innocent world and how that had been made possible by the efforts of a handful of Bothans; the razing happened decades ago, but many cultures took the subject as a good pretext to go to war with various rivals and ancestral enemies.
Tierce wanted to take advantage of that, and so he had several discreet, competent Star Destroyer captains meet with Flim, who as Thrawn gave them assignments. They were sent to wait cloaked in orbit above the Bothan homeworld, as fleets started massing there. Disra had found the secret cells - sleeper cells, not biological - of clones Thrawn had scattered about and activated many of them, and Tierce repurposed those. He also sent agents to instigate riots in already-unhappy crowds, and more to prepare to sabotage planetary shields.
Knowing that the whole crisis could be solved by finding just who made the razing possible, Tierce hacked the Emperor’s private records of the incident, finding and destroying any of his incriminating records at the same time. Then he sent Disra’s pirate allies to harass Pellaeon’s ship while under the sign of the people Pellaeon was trying to contact, a calculated gesture.
Tierce had Lando Calrissian and a Diamalan Senator who was hitching a ride with him apprehended and taken before Flim, who as Thrawn deftly convinced them that he was genuine, before releasing them to spread the word - offering his assistance in the crisis. Another calculated gesture. They then reactivated a few more clone cells and were around to accept when an uneasy border-occupying Rebel world wanted to leave and enter Imperial protection. The whole time they were propagating the rumor that Thrawn was back, but keeping it as a rumor so the Rebellion wouldn’t react with overwhelming force.
Disra, increasingly uneasy about their alliance and the way Tierce was always pushing his limits, threatened him and was instantly disarmed. Tierce then gave the weapon back and explained that there was something called the Hand of Thrawn, which he claimed was a person or a plan for ultimate Imperial victory, and he was trying to draw them out.
The Diamala sent a small attack force in anonymous ships to test them, but Disra was able to identify them, and Tierce directed Flim into making the opening move Thrawn had used against Diamala, which scared this batch off.
When Imperial ships got a recording of a mysterious ship making a flyby, Tierce recognized it as Chiss/Empire of the Hand but soon found that the recording was part of a ploy to find the Imperial capital which they were at right now, and Rebels were there looking for data. At the same time Pellaeon arrived to have a talk with Disra about some sketchy dealings, and Disra’s angry pirate allies snuck in tailed by a Mistryl shadow guard. Tierce interrupted the interrogation of Disra with a report on the Rebels and offered himself, outer self showing, for Pellaeon to question. As the Rebel situation became complicated Tierce and Disra, having recovered his composure, switched places again, but Disra found out that his angry pirate allies were in the palace and left Pellaeon in his office.
Tierce prioritized - Pellaeon would keep, they were on their way to finding the Rebels, the only way to deal with the pirates now was kill them or scare them, and what could scare them more than the Grand Admiral? He assured Flim that he could protect him from anything... and when they got word of the Rebels being tricky and Disra infuriated the pirates, Tierce did. With the unexpected help of the Mistryl shadow guard, who was out for the death of the pirate leader and hadn’t wanted anyone else to get that kill. Flim started pitching the idea of an alliance to her.
Pellaeon had underhandedly broken into Disra’s unguarded desk, found that his envoy had been captured and detained, and left without waiting for his host to return. Tierce told Disra to stop panicking - they had the ultimate excuse, they could say it had all been at Thrawn’s orders. Then he and Flim intercepted the Rebels - Lando Calrissian and Han Solo - utterly convinced them that Thrawn was back, and gave them a doctored version of the information they’d come for - carefully sliced and altered to implicate many important Bothans.
Soon Tierce made one of Thrawn’s tactical great assumptions, putting together facts which appeared to mean that a Rebel force was going to go to Bothan space to try to keep a lid on the situation, and realizing that in fact it was a trick, and the Rebels were going for one of the Empire’s great information hubs to try to get the data, as they didn’t know about the doctored version yet. He had that base prepared, and also decided to hold the talks with Mistryl representatives there.
And yes, that’s where the Rebels struck, and were trapped, which impressed the Mistryl reps. And then Pellaeon walked back on to the scene. He now knew who Flim was... and who and what Tierce was.
Driven into inner self, Tierce furiously told everyone on the bridge what he’d kept secret his whole life, and almost pleaded with Pellaeon to let things go on. He could win the war. He could have vengeance against the Rebels. Pellaeon, saddened, said that vengeance had never been Thrawn’s way, and the war was over. Tierce had been a failure - there had been more than enough time after his creation and before Thrawn’s death for more of his kind to be created, but there never had been.
Tierce snapped, lunged for Pellaeon, and was intercepted by one of the Mistryl. He was badly wounded; time in a bacta tank would have helped, but there was no reason to waste that resource. He was quietly tried, found guilty of treason, and executed, all without returning fully to consciousness.
CHARACTER NAME: Grodin Tierce (the clone)
SERIES: The Star Wars Expanded Universe
PERSONALITY:
Tierce is an experiment. The clone of a Force-Sensitive soldier, with that soldier’s mind and memories, plus some of the mind and memories of an alien genius. That soldier had been indoctrinated or brainwashed into highest, most fanatic loyalty, which the alien genius didn’t share, though said alien was absolutely dedicated to a tangentially related and less specific cause. Their clone spent some of his formative days in the presence of a mad Jedi Master who shared neither obsession, but who would casually touch and warp the minds of the people around him.
Unsurprisingly, the end result is not quite neurotypical.
In most settings - in public, with most people - Tierce is a little blank-seeming, sort of bland, enormously patient, and diffident. He’s somewhat socially uncertain and awkward, but in a well-meaning way. He likes people and wants to be useful, and can easily waste time on frivolous pursuits, or dissemble. Insult him and he’ll either laugh it off or be hurt; he can be made angry, but it takes some doing, and then he’s more indignant than anything. Though he’s not clumsy or forgetful, he sort of gives that impression - he often seems slightly distracted. Similarly, he can seem a bit slow, clueless, unsure. Harmless.
It’s not an act. Not really. He’s often like this when alone, too. On the job - in situations where it’s called for - he seems decidedly crisper, more alert, more focused.
That crispness softens the line between his outer and middle selves. His middle self is a warrior strategist. Sharp, intense, blunt, very sure. The way he speaks and stands is different. He moves much faster, more efficiently. He doesn’t dissemble and backs down only grudgingly, though he will compromise if he sees enough of a need, and can use some very biting sarcasm. As his middle self he’s much more of a perfectionist, highly disciplined, and with little interest in anything outside of the task at hand. He’ll interrupt people without apology. When he’s angry, he’s clipped and cold. However, he’ll blunt his edges to soothe allies into sticking with him.
He doesn’t show that middle self to just anyone. If someone has seen it and recognized it as different from his focused outer self, he will show it to them in subsequent meetings, if there aren’t people who haven’t seen it around. Tierce prefers to be overlooked. He also finds it somewhat tiring to show this self for long.
Tierce also has an inner self. It’s emotional, self-centered, without filter or self-restraint. He hates switching into it, but if he doesn’t now and again he sometimes enters it involuntarily and has a panic attack. His posture and movements are different here, too, being erratic and sudden. When he’s angry, he’s loud and sometimes violent. This self is never voluntarily shown to anyone, but sometimes - during extreme desperation or after trying to study artwork - it manifests around people. The inner self is the most tiring.
Each self is equally true, and they’re all him. He may do something while showing his inner self for reasons he doesn’t understand as his outer or middle self, but they aren’t split personalities. He can always hold to a plan. He feels the same way about a given person as each self, though between his outer self’s desire to get along and his middle self’s discipline and narrow focus, it’s only as his inner self that everything can be shown. Tierce has great control over his first and second selves, and can change from one to the other easily.
No matter which self is being expressed, he is quite intelligent, though his outer self downplays this. Loyalty - service to something larger than himself - is key to him, though wrapped around that is the drive for revenge against what hurt the focus of that loyalty. In the pursuit of goals related to that key, he is ruthless and willing to disregard rules he normally keeps.
Tierce has a bad habit of making assumptions, sometimes colossal ones, based on observations and speculation. Sometimes these are right. Sometimes they’re not right, but he’s close enough and sees the truth coming in time to salvage the situation. Sometimes they’re very wrong. He doesn’t understand people as fully as he might think, and tends to underestimate them.
In the long view, Tierce is extraordinarily patient. It doesn’t matter if a goal will take ten years or more, he’ll commit to it. This isn’t to say that he can’t feel impatience, but he can easily conquer this feeling as his outer self, and as his middle is generally too disciplined to break with the plan.
As his outer and middle selves, he rarely tells anyone everything. He is not trusting. Neither will he throw away allies if he still believes there’s use left in them.
The alien genius’s personality is partially reflected in his middle self, but it shows in another way too. Tierce intermittently hears a voice which he interprets as Thrawn’s, though it’s often too soft to really understand. Whether or not it’s a second personality depends on how you look at it. He thinks he does, more or less. He thinks that Thrawn’s mind, or part of it, lives on in his head. He’s directed by it - the rest of him has little initiative or imagination.
But it’s his own voice. The voice of what he should have been - someone intensely analytical, hyperobservant, and driven. And it has little power - it’s a voice that fades in and out and a vague feeling, nothing more. It follows along with and sometimes comments on his general thoughts and on things it picks up through the subconscious. It never comes completely out of the black with a thought; everything is either an observation or connected to what he’s already thinking.
TIMELINE: After he dies, late in Vision of the Future.
CANON+AU BACKGROUND:
Be patient, please. This will take a while.
Far outside of the Republic there was a spacefaring people called the Chiss. One of them was Commander Mitth’raw’nuruodo, core name Thrawn, a tactician and strategist of unparalleled skill and boldness. He likened combat to art and studied both.
A large task force sent by then-Senator Palpatine was intercepted and destroyed by Thrawn, even though his forces had been tiny in comparison. Capturing its leader, Thrawn was warned about an incoming Jedi force, Outbound Flight, and told it was a threat to the Chiss people. Not long after making contact with Outbound Flight, their leader attempted to strangle him with the Force, and so Thrawn’s forces destroyed them.
His people exiled him for the tactics he used, and in exile he was picked up by the Galactic Empire and trained. Despite being a nonhuman in a society where nonhumans were seen as lesser, he worked his way quickly and surely through the ranks until he was made Grand Admiral, one of only thirteen.
On the way he earned the respect of Darth Vader, and Vader’s secret commandos, the Noghri. Noghri were collectively under a life debt to Vader, believing that he had descended to save their world from a toxin. In reality, the Empire had seeded the world with this toxin, and Vader’s aid was a carefully-designed ploy.
Thrawn apparently fouled up somehow in politics and was sent with his forces on a “mapping expedition” in the Unknown Regions, which was popularly thought to be a disgrace and a waste of his talents. In reality, he was carving a new branch of the Empire out there, far from Coruscant and the Core Worlds. Five years after the Emperor’s death and the Rebellion’s victory he returned and picked up what was left of the Empire. From the bridge of Captain Pellaeon’s Chimaera, he led a very successful campaign against what he always insisted was the Rebellion.
Unlike many Imperials, he could take a loss and recognize when he had made a mistake, though there were relatively few of either. A lot happened, but in sum, he allied with a cloned Dark Jedi, almost defeated the Rebel upstarts, activated the cloning facilities on Wayland, and was killed by his Noghri bodyguard Rukh at a critical juncture, after Leia exposed what had really been done to the Noghri homeworld.
A month before this, he uploaded some of his memories and personality into a new project,an attempt to make a new breed of warlord. That clone had some of his mind, but his body and most of his brain and memories were cloned and transferred from the original Grodin Tierce, hereafter called TR-889 for simplicity’s sake.
TR-889 was born and raised on midlevel Imperial Center/Coruscant. When TR-889’s older brother left to join the Army, he followed a year later at the age of seventeen, lying about his age to get in.
It wasn’t long before he found himself in the Stormtrooper Corps, and with his unit was sent out to do everything from clean out pirate bases to put down Rebel insurgents to patrol stable cities. TR-889 was promoted several times, eventually becoming a Captain; during this time he briefly served under then-Vice Admiral Thrawn. He was known for having a cool head and a sense of command, as well as extraordinary reflexes.
He was also known for being very devoted to the Empire. He had absolutely no sympathy for the Rebels. If the Empire said a thing was so, then it was so; therefore, Alderaan was a tragic result of Rebels hijacking a mining tool, and he would kill unarmed civilians of any age if ordered. His lack of enthusiasm for classing people who weren’t healthy human males as NonHuMan and inferior was really the only part of Imperial doctrine in which he wasn’t a model Imperial - as he saw it, loyalty to the Empire was more important than species, gender, or cybernetics.
While they were stationed together TR-889 found unclear evidence that his elder brother had Rebel sympathies. He’d confronted his brother and heard vague excuses before the base they were both stationed on was attacked by insurgents, and during the fighting his brother went MIA. It was reported that he had saved his squad by throwing himself onto a grenade. TR-889 believed this and discreetly disposed of the evidence.
He performed excellently in the stormtrooper corps, and at the age of twenty-three he was selected to be trained as one of the Emperor’s personal bodyguards. They’re known by a lot of names - Imperial Guard, Royal Guard, Red Guard, Emperor’s Guard - but here will be called simply Guardsmen.
Training for this position was intense. As might be expected, training in many forms of combat, exotic and common, was part of it. So was learning to work effectively alone or in pairs, spotting concealed weaponry, ‘reading’ a crowd, speaking and writing in a unique language, “slicing” aka hacking records and droids, and techniques to sustain their bodyguarded person until help arrived. Some of these involved the Force, sustaining a life in particular.
But it also involved a particular mental training. Tierce once says, “A Royal Guardsman never seeks special privileges, ever. His entire goal in life is to serve the Emperor, and the New Order he created. This is his goal in life, and his desire in death.” This training, or perhaps brainwashing, caused yet greater loyalty to the Emperor, so strong that in his presence Guardsmen were utterly subservient to his will. Even before training’s end, the Emperor had them fight each other to the death to test this loyalty. And they did, without hesitation or question, although after the heat of the moment TR-889 wished he hadn’t had to do it.
His class started with forty young but expert stormtroopers. Training took a year. At the end of it, between fights and people with stronger affinity to the Force being removed to elsewhere, there were five Guardsmen.
Months later, the Emperor died.
Many Guardsmen died with the Death Star, but small numbers were often lent to other high-ranking Imperials - both as bodyguards and to check their loyalty. They were also rotated out to take out targets, or to make them don normal stormtrooper armor and fight within the stormtrooper corps in order to let them keep their edge. TR-889 was one of them, taking out a Rebel cell, when the Emperor died.
It shook him profoundly. Guardsmen didn’t have anything like as strong a Force-bond to the Emperor as the Emperor’s Hands did, but the Emperor had still become the center of his galaxy - loyalty to Palpatine superseded any previous ties. One of the Guardsmen tried to commit suicide. On instinct TR-889 tried to preserve his life, but the other Guardsman had no will to go on. If the other two hadn’t broken his focus, he would have died too. After that he and those other two returned to Imperial service and split up.
TR-889 hid the fact that he was a Guardsman, since after the Emperor’s death he didn’t feel like those who tried to run the Empire were worthy of the same loyalty. Actually, TR-889 hacked his own service file. The Guardsmen were a very secretive order, but records still showed him disappearing entirely for a year, and never rejoining any specific part of Imperial service. He changed them, and for years after that his first act on gaining access to any database which might have a clue was to find and alter related files.
In the five years between the Emperor’s death and the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn, he had himself transferred repeatedly until he started to serve as part of the security detail aboard the Star Destroyer Chimaera. He watched the Empire declining over the years and was disgusted, but leaving it was inconceivable.
During that time he came more regularly into contact with his family. While he was on leave and visiting them on Imperial Center, Rebels sabotaged the planetary shields and invaded. The current head of the Empire planned for this to happen, having seeded the planet with a plague that only killed nonhumans. TR-889 helped his family and a few of their neighbors escape on the shuttle he’d come in on. Civilians weren’t supposed to board those - later he reported himself in and was given a slap on the wrist as reprimand.
One neighbor was a woman he’d known as a child, and who resettled near where his parents did. Within a year and a half they were engaged, and at last TR-889 started to consider leaving service and settling down. Then, however, Grand Admiral Thrawn returned from the Unknown Regions and took the Chimaera as his flagship.
TR-889 found his near-worship of the Emperor returning in force, directed at a new figurehead. His desire to leave the service evaporated completely under the sense that he could serve a new great Empire, and his non-military relationships suffered for it. He didn’t tell the Grand Admiral that he had been a Guardsman, and he was never sure if Thrawn knew, but he did find himself being cycled out into field missions which tested his abilities. And he did well.
He was picked to be the template for Thrawn’s experiment. Not long after being cloned and uploading his memories, TR-889 was killed in an assault on Generis.
The clone Tierce was decanted shortly after this. Thrawn could have ordered other mixed-origin clones to be made, but he didn’t. Tierce didn’t immediately appear to be a success, but neither was he failure enough to just be terminated, and perhaps in time he would prove himself. He was stationed on the Chimaera as a high-ranked member of security - not the same position his template had been in, but not far from it either.
The insane cloned Dark Jedi, Joruus C’baoth, was also on the Chimaera. C’baoth had a way of seizing the minds of the people around them and reshaping them a little, enough to get them to do his bidding. This happened several times to Tierce. He hated C’baoth, but this slight reshaping contributed to what his template had passed down to him, the effects of brainwashing and that desire to serve something greater than himself, and it probably added to his instability.
The clone Tierce never knew that he had been tested and had failed. During the Battle of Bilbringi he expected an attempt on Thrawn’s life to be made, and assumed that it would be in the form of a commando team docking in the shuttle bay, so that’s where he stationed his forces. He was able to kill Rukh as the latter was trying to escape, but felt that he had failed abjectly.
Knowing that he would otherwise be pressed into the kind of service other clones were assigned - turbolaser fodder, mostly - he altered the records to show that Tierce had been severely wounded on Generis but had survived, and after injuring himself with the help of a reprogrammed 2-1B surgical droid, he took his template’s identity.
He kept that up for ten years. Tierce had some trouble relating to his template’s family and friends. While he did have his template’s memories he felt a little removed from and awkward around them. Thanks to the reported trauma no one suspected he wasn’t his template, but the inherited relationship with his fiance declined quickly and broke off, which he always saw with a combination of regret and relief. For a while he mostly coasted on his identity, doing little of note.
As every effort the Empire made was beaten back, as they were ground down to a fraction of their old glory, the attitude in much of the Empire became one of grim resignation. There was even talk of ending the war, bowing to the upstarts - the Supreme Commander of the Imperial Remnant, the same Pellaeon who’d served with Thrawn - even spoke of it openly. Tierce hated that attitude and plan with a passion, but there was little he could do.
Five years after replacing his template, Tierce found that his brother - his template’s brother - wasn’t dead after all. He was serving the Rebellion, having faked his death. Tierce took it personally and roused out of his slump, calling on the brilliant part of himself to track the man down and, eventually, kill him.
He was now aware that he could do some good, though he was not Thrawn. Tierce attached himself as the military liason to Moff Disra, who was somewhat self-serving but ultimately loved the Empire, someone he could manipulate and act through. Disra had always had criminal contacts, but was terribly undiplomatic about his allies. Tierce was able to smooth things out a little, and get him new contacts. One result was Disra getting a major contract for Imperial starfighters.
Disra was smarter than he seemed and, after eight months, looked into the background of his very unremarkable military liason. Tierce was aware of this and, though his records mostly reflected an innocuous past, allowed him to learn that Tierce had been a Guardsman. Disra confronted him, saw his middle self, and introduced him to Flim - an actor who could perfectly imitate Grand Admiral Thrawn’s appearance, voice, and sheer presence.
Disra’s idea, the idea he’d sold Flim on, was to just bring this fake Thrawn up and use him as a figurehead to rally the Imperial Remnant. Tierce immediately had larger, grander plans. When Pellaeon retreated to an isolated sector of neutral space and sent an envoy to talk to a Rebel military leader, Tierce had the envoy captured and imprisoned. The envoy signaled, but with the comm jamming active Tierce didn’t think anyone had received it.
Presently there was a crisis in the Rebellion revolving around the razing of an innocent world and how that had been made possible by the efforts of a handful of Bothans; the razing happened decades ago, but many cultures took the subject as a good pretext to go to war with various rivals and ancestral enemies.
Tierce wanted to take advantage of that, and so he had several discreet, competent Star Destroyer captains meet with Flim, who as Thrawn gave them assignments. They were sent to wait cloaked in orbit above the Bothan homeworld, as fleets started massing there. Disra had found the secret cells - sleeper cells, not biological - of clones Thrawn had scattered about and activated many of them, and Tierce repurposed those. He also sent agents to instigate riots in already-unhappy crowds, and more to prepare to sabotage planetary shields.
Knowing that the whole crisis could be solved by finding just who made the razing possible, Tierce hacked the Emperor’s private records of the incident, finding and destroying any of his incriminating records at the same time. Then he sent Disra’s pirate allies to harass Pellaeon’s ship while under the sign of the people Pellaeon was trying to contact, a calculated gesture.
Tierce had Lando Calrissian and a Diamalan Senator who was hitching a ride with him apprehended and taken before Flim, who as Thrawn deftly convinced them that he was genuine, before releasing them to spread the word - offering his assistance in the crisis. Another calculated gesture. They then reactivated a few more clone cells and were around to accept when an uneasy border-occupying Rebel world wanted to leave and enter Imperial protection. The whole time they were propagating the rumor that Thrawn was back, but keeping it as a rumor so the Rebellion wouldn’t react with overwhelming force.
Disra, increasingly uneasy about their alliance and the way Tierce was always pushing his limits, threatened him and was instantly disarmed. Tierce then gave the weapon back and explained that there was something called the Hand of Thrawn, which he claimed was a person or a plan for ultimate Imperial victory, and he was trying to draw them out.
The Diamala sent a small attack force in anonymous ships to test them, but Disra was able to identify them, and Tierce directed Flim into making the opening move Thrawn had used against Diamala, which scared this batch off.
When Imperial ships got a recording of a mysterious ship making a flyby, Tierce recognized it as Chiss/Empire of the Hand but soon found that the recording was part of a ploy to find the Imperial capital which they were at right now, and Rebels were there looking for data. At the same time Pellaeon arrived to have a talk with Disra about some sketchy dealings, and Disra’s angry pirate allies snuck in tailed by a Mistryl shadow guard. Tierce interrupted the interrogation of Disra with a report on the Rebels and offered himself, outer self showing, for Pellaeon to question. As the Rebel situation became complicated Tierce and Disra, having recovered his composure, switched places again, but Disra found out that his angry pirate allies were in the palace and left Pellaeon in his office.
Tierce prioritized - Pellaeon would keep, they were on their way to finding the Rebels, the only way to deal with the pirates now was kill them or scare them, and what could scare them more than the Grand Admiral? He assured Flim that he could protect him from anything... and when they got word of the Rebels being tricky and Disra infuriated the pirates, Tierce did. With the unexpected help of the Mistryl shadow guard, who was out for the death of the pirate leader and hadn’t wanted anyone else to get that kill. Flim started pitching the idea of an alliance to her.
Pellaeon had underhandedly broken into Disra’s unguarded desk, found that his envoy had been captured and detained, and left without waiting for his host to return. Tierce told Disra to stop panicking - they had the ultimate excuse, they could say it had all been at Thrawn’s orders. Then he and Flim intercepted the Rebels - Lando Calrissian and Han Solo - utterly convinced them that Thrawn was back, and gave them a doctored version of the information they’d come for - carefully sliced and altered to implicate many important Bothans.
Soon Tierce made one of Thrawn’s tactical great assumptions, putting together facts which appeared to mean that a Rebel force was going to go to Bothan space to try to keep a lid on the situation, and realizing that in fact it was a trick, and the Rebels were going for one of the Empire’s great information hubs to try to get the data, as they didn’t know about the doctored version yet. He had that base prepared, and also decided to hold the talks with Mistryl representatives there.
And yes, that’s where the Rebels struck, and were trapped, which impressed the Mistryl reps. And then Pellaeon walked back on to the scene. He now knew who Flim was... and who and what Tierce was.
Driven into inner self, Tierce furiously told everyone on the bridge what he’d kept secret his whole life, and almost pleaded with Pellaeon to let things go on. He could win the war. He could have vengeance against the Rebels. Pellaeon, saddened, said that vengeance had never been Thrawn’s way, and the war was over. Tierce had been a failure - there had been more than enough time after his creation and before Thrawn’s death for more of his kind to be created, but there never had been.
Tierce snapped, lunged for Pellaeon, and was intercepted by one of the Mistryl. He was badly wounded; time in a bacta tank would have helped, but there was no reason to waste that resource. He was quietly tried, found guilty of treason, and executed, all without returning fully to consciousness.