Since I recently finished Red Harvest I thought I'd make a respect thread for one of the characters I liked and enjoyed. So here it is, respect for Rojo Trace, a Jedi Knight of the Old Republic.

Since there's no pictures of him, here's a description:

He was a dark-haired man of unremarkable build and complexion, tall and steady and vaguely handsome in a way that didn't draw attention to the unshaven jawline, the green eyes, and the faintly smiling lips.

Source: Red Harvest

Force Powers/Abilities

Telekinesis

Telekinesis is a common Force ability that affords the user the ability to alter and distort the environment and reality around them.

Rojo uses the Force to slow his descent after jumping down a crater:

Before she could continue, Trace moved past her, turned, and jumped straight into the crater.

The plunge took the better part of thirty seconds, but to Trace it seemed both instantaneous and, in an unreal way, much longer. Shearing downward through the chasm, he summoned the Force, generating a cushion of resistance beneath him until he felt his free fall slackening, the crater walls sowing him down, individual molecules meshing to buffet his descent. Now, with a little bit of concentration, he could see every crack and divot in the rock as it passed.

By the time he noticed the rest of the warship lodged at the bottom of the pit, he'd decreased his rate of descent to the point where he could reach out and catch hold of the broken fuselage.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo uses the Force to call his lightsaber to his hand:

Deactivating the bubble, he opened his hand, and the lightsaber flew into it.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo states he intended to lift a stone altar from behind Darth Scabrous and drop it on top of him, showing he has the ability to, but he didn't have the time to do so:

Trace raised up one hand. He'd intended to levitate the stone altar behind Scabrous into the air----he could probably flip it around and drop it on top of Scabrous fast enough that he wouldn't have time to react.

Source: Red Harvest

Telepathy

Telepathy is the power to sense, communicate and manipulate the thoughts of others.

Rojo uses the Force to help a Bothan into giving him the information he needed:

"Haven't seen him around in a while," Gree said, after Trace had bought him a series of drinks, including a local favorite called Mind Eraser, and crossed his one remaining palm with a stack of credits. "Word is that he picked up a pretty sweet gig, nobody knows what."

Trace met the smuggler's gaze, holding it fast, feeling the Force flow through him into the Bothan's mind, completing the task that the liquor had already begun. "Did he say anything about a flower?"

"A..." Gree's face went smooth, all reluctance draining away from his voice so that the words came easily. "Yeah, that's right----he was going after a flower. Tulkh wasn't much of a talker, but we got liquored up one night and he started telling me about it."

"Who hired him?"

"A Sith Lord named Darth Scabrous."

Trace felt a sudden coldness pass through him. "Located where?"

"I don't know . . . a Sith academy . . . ?" Gree grimaced a little, struggling with the memory. "I want to say . . . Odacer-Faustin?" He blinked. "Hey, you think I could get another drink?"

But Trace was already gone.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo feels his sister in his head, screaming out through the Force:

HELP ME PLEASE HELPMEHELPMEHELPME----

He recoiled as if slapped. It was Zo's voice, screaming through his mind. The thought went rocketing through him, snapping him back to a state of total awareness.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo contacts his sister in her head:

Zo went rigid, yanking at the straps, knowing even as she did it that there was no way she could get loose.

Not with your muscles, Hestizo. Reach out with the Force.

It was the same voice that had called out to her just a moment before. She drew in a breath and fell absolutely still, closing her eyes, surrendering her mind to the moment so that time itself seemed to fall motionless, settling down around her like silt. And when she raised her arms up again, in one smooth motion this time, the bindings fell loose beneath her----it was as if she'd passed through the leather straps without a whisper of resistance. Her wrists swung outward, her torso and legs suddenly, shockingly free.

[...]

Hestizo, it's me--

The voice in her head again, the one that she still couldn't identify, although its words continued to waft upward through her mind, resonating outward, ripples in a pond. Even as she lurched backward again, the corner of the temple pressing her back so that there was literally nowhere left to run, she heard it calling out.

Hestizo--

Where are you? her brain cried back. Who are you? A remote possibility, wild but somehow impossible to ignore, burst into her mind fully formed. Rojo? Is that you?

Source: Red Harvest

Force Sense

Force Sense is a basic power allowing Force sensitives to sense their surroundings, feel and determine the thoughts or feelings of others, feel ripples in the Force signifying important events, the presence of the dark side, or even sense the future.

Rojo extends his senses to see if he could pick up any lifeforms on a crashed Sith warship:

Edging his way deeper into the vessel----bulkheads shifting even as he passed through----Trace paused, expanding his senses to draw in any indication of any remaining life aboard.

There was nothing.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo senses his sister and has a vision of her being captured and taken away, and also feels her fears and for a moment, her captor, all from another planet:

He withdrew his hand, preparing his ascent to the surface----

And sucked in a quick breath between his teeth. The bright lancet of sudden overwhelming fear that he'd just experienced had nothing to do with the warship or the remains of its crew.

Something else was happening, somewhere far distant.

Something far worse.

He saw his sister's face.

There could be no doubt about it. It was Zo and she was screaming in a frenzy of pain and helplessness. And although Trace couldn't see her attacker clearly, he realized from the erratic sunbursts of her thoughts that she had no defense against the thing that loomed above her, dragging her out of the Jedi Agricultural Corps facility, toward----what?

He stopped, frozen, his current locale utterly forgotten, blindsided by a storm of disjointed images: the shaft of a spear, dripping with blood; a flash of green; a whiff of something rancid and feral. His nostrils burned with the stench of a place that had been bottled up too long, a place of death and solitude and agonized last breaths. He could feel her confusion and apprehension pumping through his own circulatory system, as if they shared the same heart. For a moment he could feel the presence of her abductor.

Listen to me, Trace told him. I don't know who you are, but I am in possession of a very special set of skills. If you bring my sister back right now, unharmed, then I'll let you go. But if you don't, I promise you, I will track you down. I will find you. And I will make you pay.

Of course there was no response.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo describes the Sith Academy on Odacer-Faustin as a hive of dark side energy:

Disengaging the ship's main hatch, he jumped down from the cockpit and forced himself to stop and wait on the landing pad, his senses----both physical and telemetric----tuned for any immediate threat. The challenge, of course, was that this entire planet was a threat. Besides the blizzard raging overhead, the Sith academy was a black hive of dark side energy; Trace could feel it buzzing around him like a huge swarm of venomous insects. The psychic contamination was so thick, so total, that for a moment he felt a blur of vertigo attacking his balance, tilting it dangerously off kilter.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo senses the Sith students and Masters on Odacer-Faustin:

Lights flickered, dotting the twilight with motion, or the illusion of motion. People were out there, he sensed them----Sith students and Masters.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo senses more Sith "students" around him:

He sensed their presence around him, below and behind the unseen temples and stone outbuildings.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo creates a psychic Force net to try to catch any sense of his sister:

He stopped again, stretching out with his feelings, the Force casting a wide psychic net in search of any sign of his sister, but it retrieved nothing.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo feels his sister's presence inside a stone structure:

By itself, a fire would have meant nothing, especially on a planet of ruins where the Sith ruled and the dead had been restored to life.

But he also suddenly felt his sister's presence inside.

She's in there. She is.

Leaping off the broken pillar, Rojo Trace began to run.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo feels his sister in his head, as well as her pain:

Help me . . .

Trace felt his sister's scream go burning throughout his entire body. This wasn't just an impression, some random emotional flash----he actually felt her pain as it wrenched through his right arm, throbbing into his shoulder and chest, blasting up to the roots of his teeth. Tears boiled up in his eyes and the wind whipped them away. His legs went numb and he stumbled, almost falling over in the snow.

Source: Red Harvest

Psychometry

Psychometry is a rare Force ability that allows a Force user to read images and emotions from an object's past simply by touching it.

Rojo touches the body of a dead Sith that was on a crashed warship, and he feels the emotions and events of when the ship was crashing:

He closed his eyes again but didn't remove his hand from the mass of dripping flesh and bone. Proximity was important; physical contact was even better. Beneath the inner geometry of his own thoughts, he began to hear the curses of the crew as the ship's navigational system failed, felt their drawing horror as they realized the engine pods were going to bury them deep below the planet's crust. In the end, the impending inevitability of death had reduced them to something as brainless and scurrying as Mustafar lava fleas, their faith in the dark side, their sworn oath to the Sith Lords with their incantations and ancient sigils, stripped away in a final spasm of animal panic.

And then silence.

Always silence.

Source: Red Harvest

After touching the ground from the facility where his sister was taken, Rojo "sees" the events of her capture:

The panel hung open, and Trace looked in at the broken electronics equipment inside, squatting down to place both hands directly on the dirty, scratched surface of the chamber floor.

"As far as we can tell," Emmert said, "Hestizo was----"

Trace cut him off with a gesture, not bothering to glance up. A flurry of activity surged through him: he heard Zo's voice, and saw the face of her attacker----it was a Whiphid, he realized, the biggest one he'd ever seen----yanking her and the orchid out of the chamber. Trace felt his sister's surprise blurring into pain as the blunt end of the Whiphid's spear slammed her in the head. He felt the blinding impact as she jerked back, slumping unconscious to the floor, the flower tumbling from her grasp. The Whiphid bent down, hoisting her over his shoulder and grabbing the orchid at the same time before he turned and lumbered away.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo feels the emotions and events that happened in a control room after touching a chair from the room:

He ran past a control booth and stopped there----the hatchway hung open, dangling sideways, as if it had been partially ripped off its housing. The chair lay on its side in front of the main flight-control console, a datapad, and a pile of old holomags with titles like Hot Ships and Kuat Classics. Reaching inside, Trace rested two fingertips on the chair.

A vivid splash of violence erupted in his mind's eye----a man screaming, jerking backward, while a pair of pale hands groped through, clutching his shirt and trying to pull him out. Trace felt the man's trapped panic, his horror, as he tried to keep whatever it was away from him . . . that part of the image was just a crazed, blood-soaked blur, defined more by its frantic strength than any kind of shape or form. An instant later the image faded away.

Source: Red Harvest

Force Bubble/Force Shield

Force Shield, or Force Barrier, is an ability that creates a protective barrier of energy over the user.

Rojo instinctively creates a bubble of Force energy to protect him from debris:

From beneath him came a stuttering, squealing lurch, then a deafening crash as the fuselage of the crashed Sith warship swayed under his feet and abruptly gave way in a waterfall of sparks. There was a sudden whoosh and a plume of flame as a gas pocket blasted open from the wall.

The explosion rocked the crater to its depths. Snapping around, Trace felt huge slabs of scorched rock scaling loose, tumbling down toward him. On reflex, he threw up a solid bubble of air, pressing it outward to ensure enough breathable oxygen----too little and he'd suffocate inside here, a bug in a jar.

The bubble did its job. Debris hammered down on top of it, shale bouncing and skittering across the dome. Trace scarcely noticed. He cast his thoughts back toward Zo, back to the place in himself where he'd seen and felt the final compulsive timpani of her distress, straining for any hint of where she might be, where her captor was taking her.

Source: Red Harvest

Rojo creates a bubble for him to escape the Neti librarian Dail'Liss and the flames of the library, as it's on fire:

Closing his eyes, he let his body fall motionless in the grip of the Neti's branches, surrendering all resistance. He took one last deep breath and held it. That single lungful of air would have to last him . . . or else his last hope of helping Zo wouldn't amount to more than suicide.

He created a small bubble, not much bigger than his own body, and sealed it shut, evacuating the air from inside it as he did so. The flames on his clothes, oxygen-starved, guttered and died.

Step one done. Now get busy.

Jolting himself free from the Neti's branches, he lurched forward inside the bubble as hard as he could , his momentum knocking it loose and letting it fall down into the landscape of the library's floor.

The bubble spun and slammed into the heaps of burning holobooks, pitching him sideways inside it as it continued to spin. The library reeled around him.

Then, next to the Neti's trunk, he saw his lightsaber.

It lay among the creature's winding snake-like roots, in front of a large ragged knothole that had already started charring black. Steadying himself inside the bubble, Trace placed both hands along the inner curvature of its surface, spread his fingers out, and waited. A burning branch as big as his body swung down from high above, crashing off the top of the bubble, the Neti's twig-fingers clutched rigidly as they twisted and burned in front of him. Trace almost breathed in and caught himself. His body ached for oxygen, for even an ounce of fresh air, but he knew that if he dissolved the barrier now and tried to inhale, the surrounding heat would flash-fry him in seconds, starting with the lining of his lungs.

He looked at the lightsaber, laboring to evacuate every other thought from his mind. At the Jedi Temple, they had taught that it was never a matter of manipulating the object, but in eliminating the space that separated you from it. Yet at this moment, the object in question had never felt so far away.

To me. To me.

The lightsaber remained where it was.

Closing his eyes, he felt the bubble shift forward like a reluctant animal roused from hibernation, and begin rolling over the mountains of burning books, toward the Neti's scorched trunk. When he opened his eyes, the lightsaber lay right in front of him, poised near the ragged knothole less than a meter away. Trace centered himself, drawing up his composure. The timing of what happened next was critical. Deactivating the bubble, he opened his hand, and the lightsaber flew into it. Its handle was almost too hot to hold, but the solidity of it had never felt better in his life.

Source: Red Harvest

Lightsaber/Fighting Skill

Rojo uses the Form V Djem So, although it's not known if this is his main form, his only form, or just another form he knows:

When the red blade came at him again, Trace jumped upward. He put everything he knew about Form V's Djem So variation into that jump, leaping over Shak'Weth, spiraling through the flying snow, landing on the other side, and twisting around instantly, keeping his lightsaber at throat level with the intention of finishing the duel in a single stroke.

Source: Red Harvest

The Jedi Knight’s lightsaber techniques include powerful, synergistic combinations designed to render any enemy defenseless against a decisive finishing move.

Source: Galaxy Guide 16 The Old Republic

As a Jedi Knight, Rojo has honed his body and mind through years of disciplined training and meditation:

Through years of disciplined training and meditation, the Jedi Knight hones body and mind into perfect harmony.

Source: Galaxy Guide 16 The Old Republic

As a Jedi Knight, Rojo combines the foresight of the Force with unrivaled reflexes and practiced physical precision to turn combat into an art form:

Combining the foresight of the Force with unrivaled reflexes and practiced physical precision, the Knight turns combat into an art form, gracefully executing acrobatic feats in tandem with elegant lightsaber tactics.

Source: Galaxy Guide 16 The Old Republic

Rojo fights the Sith Blademaster Shak'Weth, but their duel is interrupted when a zombie Sith student subdues and kills Shak'Weth.

In his peripheral vision, a shadow twitched and slithered.

Trace stopped, hand reaching back for his lightsaber, and that was when he saw the man stepping out of the arched doorway to his left. Even before Trace glimpsed the man's face, he sensed the thin, bitter smile twisted over his lips, the threat of violence in those half-lidded eyes. The man's tunic and cloak blew out behind him, snapping whip-like in the irregular gusts of wind, and his voice, when it came across the broken landscape between them, was a low snarl.

"You landed on the wrong world, Jedi."

Trace turned and faced him directly. The man was a Sith Master, that much was readily apparent----perhaps an instructor at the academy.

"I am Shak'Weth, Blademaster here on Odacer-Faustin. I can only assume that you came here seeking humiliation and an unpleasant death."

"I'm here on other matters."

"Ah?" The Blademaster cocked his head slightly, looking marginally intrigued. "But you've found me instead."

Trace nodded. Actually, it was only stillness that had found him, clarity of thought, and it came as a blessing. The cold, the darkness, the stinging wind, all of these outside factors had simply ceased to exist. His entire world had shrunk to the exact distance between him and the man who stood before him, an obstacle in the way of finding Hestizo. Trace felt everything inside him beginning to relax and flow smoothly as the Force spread through his nerves and muscles, generating a kind of weightless balance between action and intent. He drew his own lightsaber, felt it blaze to life in his grasp, a perfect extension of himself.

The Sith Master's response was immediate. With a harsh grunt of fury, he flew at Trace, vaulting upward in the wind and angling the blade down with both hands, ripping through the ground where Trace had just been standing. The execution was flawless, a thing of almost organic brutality, as if the Blademaster had become a force of nature, another component of the blizzard that roared around them.

Yet he was still too slow.

Leaping sideways, Trace had spun around with his own lightsaber extended in front of him in a sweeping blow. The Sith Master was there, deflecting the attack and charging him again, hammering him backward with a viscous series of piercing thrusts and jabs, offering no quarter. Twice the blade came close enough to Trace's face that he could smell the scorched stubble on his cheek; the third slash came within millimeters of taking off his head.

Trace realized that regardless of what Shak'Weth had said a moment earlier, the Blademaster didn't intend to humiliate him, to toy with him or prolong the duel any longer than necessary. At this point, the Sith Master was attacking for the most primitive reason imaginable----to slaughter Trace and leave his steaming carcass in the snow. In that split second Trace saw the rest of the duel playing out in two distinct ways, neither of which would last long. Death was hovering over them now like a scavenger, close and claustrophobic----he saw it reflected in the Sith Master's eyes.

When the red blade came at him again, Trace jumped upward. He put everything he knew about Form V's Djem So variation into that jump, leaping over Shak'Weth, spiraling through the flying snow, landing on the other side, and twisting around instantly, keeping his lightsaber at throat level with the intention of finishing the duel in a single stroke.

Shak'Weth laughed----a bone-dry chuckle----and deflected the maneuver with mocking ease. He swung at Trace, and this time the Jedi felt a hot, bright stab of pain as the lightsaber seared through his cloak and tunic, slashing into the flesh along his rib cage. Drops of blood fell into the snow, disappearing as they melted.

"Too easy, Jedi." Now the Blademaster's shoulders and back were braced against the slouching stone wall behind him, its outer surface cracked and half collapsed, and he tensed to spring forward. "Now I shall finish you."

As he arched forward, Trace saw a pair of hands shoot out from the broken wall behind him, gripping the Blademaster by the throat and jerking him backward.

Source: Red Harvest

Thanks for reading. Click here to view my other Respect Threads.