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[b]Name:[/b] Lyla Matar
[b]Age:[/b] 14
[b]Species:[/b] Human (Coruscanti)

[b]Appearance:[/b] Brunette, long hair, usually open with a few braids to keep them from getting in the way. Light brown eyes. Long, delicate fingers - her right pinky, annular and part of her hand are robotic (covered in white plasteel). 5'1" tall, scrawny.

[b]Force Abilities:[/b] Lyla has a strong connection to the force when it comes to telekinesis. Pushing, pulling and levitation are intuitive to her and she can move small and even larger objects with relative ease. Increase her own speed and assisting her own jumps is something she can manage, with some concentration. But manipulating the minds of others proves difficult.

Beyond that, she has the rare innate ability of Mechu-Deru, giving her a better understanding of technology (see non-force abilities) and perhaps even more, should she find a way to channel and focus it.

[b]Non-Force Abilities:[/b]
- [i]Lightsaber Use:[/i] While far from hopeless, Lyla is not particularly great with her lightsaber. In theory, she knows all forms as well as she should at her age and has near-perfect scores when it comes to deflecting shots and training with bots, but she loses over 60% of her sparrings with fellow students because she has trouble anticipating their next movement, making a better understanding of mind tricks her foremost requirement if she is to ever improve beyond her current level.

- [i]Technophile:[/i] Early on, Lyla exhibited an intuitive understanding for all things technical. Machinery both heavy and light, electronics ranging from simple door circuits to droid cores and even artificial limbs... Lyla has been curious about them all and, though her teachers described her as erratic and inattentive at times, exposes a deep calm and focus when she is working with or on tech.

[b]Personality/Motivation:[/b] Lyla is usually quiet, reclusive even. She is friendly and cordial around her few friends but keeps to herself when she is on her own or around people she isn't familiar with. While usually respectful and loyal towards her masters, telling a lie when she thinks she can get away with it is not beyond her - which so far usually resulted in her being found out and lectured about honesty and its importance to achieving balance with the Force. Despite knowing the Jedi Code by heart, like any student her age, practicing it proves difficult and strong emotions can still overwhelm her, especially when she feels like she is being treated unfairly.

[b]Biography:[/b] Lyla's biography is the same as that of many children on Coruscant - Living in the slums as part of an abusive family, she was forced to earn her keep from an early age by sifting through the trash, looking for valuable scrap or intact components among the ten-thousands of tons of garbage that the megalopolis let fall through the cracks on a daily basis. Like many others, she one day returned to her home to find it abandoned, her parents gone, walls riddled with blaster fire to send a message to the gamblers, debtors or simply those who wouldn't pay for 'protection'. Lyla never found out which one of these her parents had been; all she knew was that, from age 4 onward, she had been alone.

Alone in the slums meant sleeping in tight sewage pipes, between garbage piles, behind condensators... anywhere where you weren't at risk of being found and killed or taken and sold as a slave. The high politics of the surface didn't reach the bottom of the city's canyons, not even below the Jedi Temple where Lyla was born. From some of her hideouts, she could see the sky, the spires, this symbol that gave her the hope that she would live to see something better than Coruscant's underworld. She dreamed of somebody coming down there and saving her. But as her fifth birthday came and passed, she realized that not even the Jedi ventured that far into the abyss.

So, she began to climb. Whenever she managed to earn enough credits to survive a few days, she ventured to higher levels, inching closer to the surface. Her talent for fixing things proved both invaluable and dangerous the higher she got, as debris became scarce and criminals hid behind smiles. One day, a few months after turning six, she worked on yet another droid for a trader but just as she was done, a fight broke out in the street, blaster shots flew back and forth and the droid exploded, taking two of her fingers with it. To her luck, she was close enough to the surface for Temple guards and a few Jedi to investigate and was found by a knight. As she recovered, her connection to the force was discovered and she was initiated.

Her dream came true but it was not quite as she had hoped it would be: Days of fighting for survival were replaced by monotonous routine, by meditation and training; the family she had hoped to find turned out to be a monastic order, her masters caring but somehow detached, most of her fellow younglings friendly but introspective. The love and care she had been looking for was not directed at her but at all of them. Balance in all things. It made Lyla content but the lack of extremes, the unbreakable equilibrium of the Temple that she couldn't find in herself made her feel like an outsider for the longest time. Thanks to her friends, she managed to integrate herself into the Order over time but she could never quite shake the impression of being a foreign object among the Jedi; a mental image that was reinforced by having two of her fingers replaced with plasteel.

As the years passed, the training revealed her as a strong personality, with both positive and negative implications. Her talent was evident but so was her difficulty to fully grasp the teachings and find inner peace. While others had such a tempered sense for the Force of living things that they could count how many people were in the Temple, Lyla had trouble feeling the presences around her unless she was completely focused. Her own appendage sharpened her senses for what wasn't, strictly speaking, alive. Every machine, every droid, every circuit and flow of electricity was like a tiny ripple on the Force's surface to her, a constant white noise that distracted her when she tried to feel the things the Force was flowing through.

When she turned fourteen, finally, she was told that she would have to face her trials soon. That same day, she overheard two of the masters talk about her, expressing their doubt that she could pass - "Too unpredictable." "No restraint." "Gifted, no doubt, but lacking in..." - Confidence, joy, pride: All vaporized in an instant. However, none of it ended up being of any significance - As night enveloped the temple, the Republic and Order of Jedi descended into a long darkness...

[b]Secrets:[/b] 
- Lyla has hidden most of her childhood from even her closest friends. While all masters know the circumstances of her initiation, she only talks about her time before the Temple when absolutely necessary - a problem that a few of her teachers presume to be responsible for her lack of development in a few areas.

- Lyla constructed a fully-functional lightsaber over the months leading up to the attack. Though the disappearance of several parts and crystals has not remained unnoticed and she is suspected, it was unknown to her masters that she succeeded and managed to hide the fruits of her labor in her dormitory.

[b]Relations:[/b] Being a member of Thranta Clan, Masters like Yoda have occassionally taught and supervised her and she recognizes them, but due to her young age and reclusive nature, there are few members of the Order (and clan) she has exchanged more than a few words with, beyond her two best friends and a few fellow initiates. She knows and trained with Enrik in the past but their relationship is superficial at best.