Tammea Elimaar
Character · also known as Tam, Starlight
A young Zeltron girl and empath, orphaned in the Ghauba disaster, who becomes the newest member of the Misfit Stray's crew.
Appearance
A young Zeltron girl, nine years old. She is small. Her skin is the soft pink typical of her species, and she has light purple eyes and purple hair, usually worn in two braids, though she sometimes leaves it loose. As an empath, her coloring visibly shifts with her emotional state: under stress her skin darkens by degrees from rose through reddish-purple to deep violet, returning to its natural soft pink once she is calm. When worn down she shows it plainly, with shadows under her eyes and a washed-out cast to her skin.
Personality
Tammea is a Zeltron empath: she feels the emotions of those around her in waves and gives off pheromones, and she has not yet fully learned to filter it. Crowds and concentrations of fear, anger, or pain overwhelm her, and negative emotion is physically harmful to her, not merely upsetting; when exhausted or distressed she broadcasts her own feelings uncontrollably, which she regards with deep shame as a taboo. By nature she is curious, warm, and enthusiastic, quick to delight in things she finds beautiful, and she takes to machines readily. She has a genuine gift for ships and systems, asks sharp questions, and wants above all to be useful and to "pull her weight" as crew rather than be cared for. She finds comfort and purpose in creating things that bring others joy, especially cooking, which she learned in the community kitchens of her homeworld, and she loves color and music. After losing her parents she carries heavy grief, survivor's guilt, and a fear of being abandoned or seen as a burden, but as she settles she grows lighter, laughing at the crew's banter and offering easy, fierce affection. She is homesick for the life she left, trusting toward those who prove steady, and comes to treat the ship and its captain as an anchor.
In the story
These sections contain spoilers, grouped by arc. Open only as far as you have read.
Arc 1 — Escape from Ghauba
Tammea is introduced as a nine-year-old Zeltron girl — nearly ten — with purple-and-blue highlighted hair worn in two braids, pink skin, and light purple eyes. She arrives at the cantina with her two hooded parents seeking passage off-world, and it is her open, guileless delight in the blue-and-purple paint of the freighter that finally wears down Quinel Neviden's refusal to smuggle people.
She is an empath: she feels the emotions of those around her in overwhelming waves and emits pheromones. Negative emotions — fear, pain, the deaths around her — are not merely upsetting but physically harmful, and she has not yet learned to filter them. Under stress her skin darkens from pink toward a deep red-violet, and her mother warns she can be driven toward an "empathic shutdown." She is the daughter of two wanted slicers, Damika and Deklaen; she is homesick for Zeltros, having been taken from her home around age six when her parents feared the Empire might use her against them.
During the Imperial assault on Ghauba, both her parents die in the escape — her father shot in the hangar ambush, her mother sacrificing herself to breach the wall so the Misfit Stray can flee. In their last moments her mother presses a necklace into her hand and calls her "Starlight." From the cockpit doorway Tammea witnesses the orbital bombardment that destroys the planet. Traumatized and orphaned, she comes to see Quinel as something safe — "like an anchor in a storm" — and by arc's end he has resolved that she is crew.
Arc 2 — Cloud City Blues
On Cloud City, Tammea is deeply traumatized, unable to sleep for days, and consumed by grief and guilt. She swings between a brittle, forced cheerfulness and collapse; her skin stays a stressed, darkened violet. Her empathy overwhelms her in crowds, and when she is exhausted she broadcasts her own emotions uncontrollably onto everyone nearby — something she regards as the deepest taboo of her people, punishable by exile. A marketplace breakdown nearly ends in her running off the edge of a ventilation shaft before Quinel catches her.
At her breaking point she reveals that the necklace her mother gave her is a credit chip holding thirty thousand credits — meant to buy passage back to Zeltros if Quinel failed her — and, terrified of being abandoned, she tries to give it to him so he won't leave. He refuses the payment and tells her she doesn't have to buy his loyalty: "You're crew." She finally sleeps, and is given her own quarters, a converted storage room decorated in the blue and purple she favors.
She asks to learn the ship so she can pull her weight and be "really crew." She reveals a natural gift for machinery, cultivated by the Ghauba mechanic Kybuss, who let her watch him work and said she had a gift for it. Quinel agrees to teach her, and the crew departs for Nar Shaddaa on a job arranged by Garaath.
Arc 3 — Crossfire Run
Aboard the Stray, Tammea is now an engineer-in-training, absorbing the ship's systems quickly under Quinel's patient tutoring. She also takes over cooking duties — a skill she learned in the community kitchens of Zeltros, helping her cousins prepare food that brought people together. She continues to struggle with survivor's guilt, voicing the belief that everyone on Ghauba died because her mother and "Dek" sabotaged Star Destroyers and drew the Empire's attention; Quinel insists the blame lies with the Empire, not her family.
On Nar Shaddaa her empathy proves useful as well as painful. Amid the crushing emotional noise of the moon, she senses that the well-dressed contact, his men, and the sealed cargo all feel "contaminated" and sick — as though they had been handling something that left a residue — giving the crew a crucial warning about what they are being asked to transport. When Quinel and Dezmyn explain that their employer is Black Sun operating inside Hutt territory, Tammea reasons out for herself why a rival syndicate's presence there is so dangerous. Frightened of the job but trusting Quinel, she tells him plainly, "I trust you."