User:Green tentacle/Notepad

Biography
Thrawn spent much of his career in the Unknown Regions working to bring the untamed area under Imperial control. His successful career earned him the title of Warlord and saw his promotion to Grand Admiral&mdash;the only non-Human to achieve the rank.

Return to the Empire
The death of the Emperor saw the New Order spiral into chaos. The Empire found itself steadily pushed back from the Core Worlds as the Rebellion transformed into the New Republic and, by the time of Thrawn's reemergence from the Unknown Regions, the Empire was in control of barely a quarter of its former systems. Thrawn took command of the Imperial Military approximately four years after the Battle of Endor, transferred his flag to the venerable Imperial II-class Star Destroyer Chimaera and named Captain Gilad Pellaeon as his second in command.

One of Thrawn's first acts upon taking command of the Chimaera was to convert the former commander's luxury entertainment suite into a private command room which could effectively function as a secondary bridge. After the refitting was complete, the Grand Admiral would spend much of his time meditating there.

Thrawn soon began to formulate a strategy to defeat the New Republic and restore Imperial control. Several years earlier, Thrawn had found a reference to Myrkr, a world which had been inhabited for three centuries yet left largely untouched by the Galactic Republic and the Jedi. Upon investigating further, Thrawn learned that the indigenous ysalamiri had the ability to repel the Force using a Force-neutral bubble. The ysalamiri were a vital part of Thrawn's plan but his strategy also relies on some vital technology which he hoped to find in the Emperor's secret storehouse.

Thrawn spent over a year searching for the location of the storehouse while he began gathering Imperial forces for a major campaign against the New Republic. With the Empire's resources severely handicapped they were forced to use inexperienced crews, many conscripted by threat of force. Despite this, before launching his campaign, Thrawn ensured that all personnel were trained to a high level, to the point where even unconventional and typically difficult maneuvers like hyperspace micro-jumps became almost routine.

The search for Wayland
The location of the storehouse finally came to light following a scan raid to the Obroa system, one of many tactical surveys conducted in systems near Imperial space. A download from Obroa-skai's central library system revealed the location of the Emperor's storehouse in Mount Tantiss on Wayland. However, the raid did not run entirely as planned and the Imperial scoutships returned to the Chimaera pursued by New Republic forces. Although the Chimeara was outgunned by four incoming Assault Frigates, Thrawn chose not to retreat or call for reinforcements and risk revealing the strength of his forces. Instead he dispatched three sentry ships towards the incoming vessels and observed the enemy shift to respond&mdash;the pattern of their response was enough for Thrawn to identify the New Republic commander as an Elom. This was all the information Thrawn needed and he promptly ordered a Marg Sabl maneuver, knowing that the Elom commander would struggle to cope with the unstructured attack. The New Republic forces were defeated within the hour.

With the location of the Emperor's storehouse in his grasp it was time for Thrawn to put his plan into action. Breaking the Chimaera from the rest of the fleet, Thrawn set course for Myrkr where he dispatched shuttles to begin harvesting ysalamiri. The Imperials soon attracted the attention of the Myrkr based smuggler and information broker Talon Karrde who offered his assistance with collecting the creatures.

From Myrkr, Thrawn traveled to Wayland. During the five day journey he had the Chimaera's engineers develop portable frames to support and nourish the harvested ysalamiri. Thrawn was aware that Palpatine had left a guardian to watch over the storehouse and, working under the assumption that the guardian would be a Dark Jedi, intended to use the ysalamiri to provide protection. Upon arriving at Wayland, Thrawn, Pellaeon and Rukh took a shuttle down to the surface to locate the guardian. Instead they were met by Joruus C'baoth, a mad clone of the Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth who had perished in Thrawn's destruction of Outbound Flight. C'baoth claimed to have killed the original guardian and taken his place as ruler of Wayland before launching an attack on the Imperials, though his Force lightning proved useless against the ysalamiri.

Thrawn had long suspected that Palpatine used battle meditation to coordinate the Imperial fleet in battle, and had reached the conclusion that the shock defeat at the Battle of Endor was prompted by death of Palpatine and the sudden absence of his controlling influence. Despite C'baoth's apparently unstable personality, Thrawn attempted to persuade him to join them and use his will to enhance the coordination of the Imperial forces during their campaign against the New Republic. C'baoth was initially reluctant but Thrawn made an offer that convinced him&mdash;in exchange for fighting for Thrawn, the Empire would capture Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa Solo and her unborn twins so that he could take them as his apprentices.

The guardian was not all Thrawn sought on Wayland. Mount Tantiss contained the schematics to a practical cloaking device developed by the Empire shortly before the Battle of Endor, and one other "almost trivial bit of technology"&mdash;a full suite of Spaarti cloning cylinders.

Thrawn quickly began transforming Mount Tantiss into an active Imperial facility, ordering the power and defense systems restored to full power. Nearly eighty percent of the Spaarti cylinders were either functional or could be restored and Thrawn ordered that they too be brought into use as quickly as possible.

Hit-and-fade attacks
Thrawn also wasted no time in attempting to deliver on his promise to C'baoth. From his source in the Imperial Palace he learned that Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa Solo would be making a diplomatic trip to Bimmisaari and dispatched a Noghri commando team to capture them. However, the Noghri proved unprepared for Skywalker's abilities and the pair were able to escape. Thrawn was disappointed with the Noghri's failure but adamant that sooner or later the Noghri would succeed and ordered a second team to begin preparing for a mission. C'baoth, however, was already growing impatient and declared that if Thrawn could deliver Leia to him, he would take care of Luke himself. With the Empire preparing for a major attack on the shipyards at Sluis Van and unable to spare C'baoth, Thrawn was reluctant to let him go and agreed only to Pellaeon's suggestion of starting a rumor that C'baoth had been spotted on Jomark in order to lure Skywalker into coming to him.

Thrawn's objective for the attack on Sluis Van was not to decimate the New Republic forces but rather to capture as many ships as possible. To this end he planned a series of raids throughout the Sluis Sector aimed at forcing the New Republic to send reinforcements to protect Sluis Van and stretching their forces out to leave each ship undermanned and vulnerable. This process began with a three-prong hit-and-fade attack&mdash;Thrawn would lead a five-ship task force in an attack on the Bpfassh system while C'baoth used battle meditation to coordinate simultaneous attacks on two other systems.

After coming out of hyperspace within striking range of Bpfassh, the Imperials quickly launched their TIEs. When enemy fighters launched from a base on Bpfassh's third moon, Thrawn ordered the Inexorable to destroy the base while the Chimaera and the Judicator moved against the double planet itself. However, Thrawn's plan was simply to inflict damage and to frighten the enemy and, after destroying the orbital defense platform and several enemy ships, he ordered all three Imperial task forces to withdraw to the rendezvous point, leaving a few hundred dead in the Bpfassh system alone and the New Republic to waste resources sending reinforcements.

Part of Thrawn's plan for Sluis Van involved acquiring a number of mole miners. Research indicated the most likely source was Lando Calrissian's mining operation on Nkllon. The planet's unusually high level of sunlight intensity would pose a problem to most ships, but Thrawn knew that a Star Destroyer would be able to handle the direct sunlight for a few minutes and, although they would need to reinforce the viewports and remove external communications equipment&mdash;effectively leaving the ship blind and deaf&mdash;C'baoth would be able to ensure that the ship's performance was not hampered.

The Judicator's raid went as planned and the Empire relieved Calrissian of 51 mole miners. Thrawn, observing the raid from the Chimaera at the outskirts of the Athega system was interested to learn that C'baoth had detected Luke Skywalker's presence during the battle. C'baoth insisted on being taken to Jomark to wait for Skywalker, to which Thrawn agreed, after ensuring that repairs to the Judicator were underway. However, Thrawn actually planned to demonstrate that the increasingly arrogant C'baoth was not indispensable and had probes left at the edge of the system before leaving to watch for Skywalker's departure. Thrawn planned to deliver C'baoth to Jomark then backtrack at least twenty light years to intercept Skywalker on his way there and take him into custody. In addition, he suspected that with Skywalker on Nkllon, the Millennium Falcon may not be far away, and hoped that the probes would also lead the Imperials to Leia Organa Solo.

The search for Skywalker
Thrawn's hunch proved correct when a probe detected not only Skywalker's T-65 X-wing starfighter departing on a course for Jomark, but also the departure of the Millennium Falcon and Calrissian's Personal Luxury Yacht 3000, the Lady Luck, bound for Kashyyyk. After dropping off C'baoth, Thrawn took the Chimaera to set a trap from Skywalker. In order to hide his deception from C'baoth, Thrawn planned to make the ambush look like an accident and summoned an expendable light freighter and an Immobilizer 418 cruiser to the ambush point&mdash;when Skywalker emerged from hyperspace prematurely due to the Interdictor's artificial gravity well, he would see what appeared to be an Imperial attack on the freighter and assume that snaring him was merely a coincidence. Thrawn's plan worked and Skywalker's X-wing was caught in the Interdictor's gravity well. However, after the Chimaera locked a tractor beam on the fighter, Skywalker acted quickly to reverse-trigger his acceleration compensator, bringing the ship to a stop, and simultaneously fire a proton torpedo which was instead snared by the tractor beam. Skywalker was able to escape as the tractor beam pulled the torpedo towards it, causing minor damage to the Chimaera. However, Thrawn was aware that Skywalker's maneuver would have damaged his hyperdrive and he was unlikely to get further than one light year before becoming stranded. With the fleet too busy preparing for Sluis Van to conduct a search, Thrawn offered a bounty of 30,000 credits for Skywalker's capture.

Some time later Thrawn headed for Myrkr. Not only did the Empire required more ysalamiri but Thrawn's strategy called for more warships which he hoped Talon Karrde's contacts could supply. As his shuttle descended to the surface, Thrawn witnessed a chase involving two GAT-12 Skipray Blastboats which resulted in both crashing in the forest. During his meeting with Karrde he inquired about the Blastboats and was told that a former employee had stolen one and that another employee had pursued them. However, the lack of communication from the pursuing Blastboat was enough for Thrawn to conclude that Karrde's people didn't want him to know what was happening. Furthermore, when Thrawn mentioned the search for Skywalker and Karrde sounded surprised that it was still proceeding, he began to suspect that Karrde had found Skywalker and that it was the young Jedi who had fled in the Blastboat. Though he admitted it was unlikely, Thrawn felt that it was worth pursuing and, after stormtroopers found the crash site deserted, he dispatched ground forces to Hyllyard City to wait for the survivors.

Battle of Sluis Van
Meanwhile, Thrawn left to oversee the final stage of preparations for the attack on Sluis Van. The battle plane would take full advantage of the cloaking device constructed from the schematics found in Mount Tantiss. Instead of cloaking the entire ship, Thrawn's plan involved cloaking only the contents of the cargo hold on a PCL 27 freighter. Any New Republic defenses that scanned the ship on its way in to Sluis Van would see only an empty freighter, allowing it to deliver its true contents, the stolen mole miners and forty escorting TIE/ln starfighters, to the heart of the shipyards. While the New Republic defenses were occupied with Thrawn's task force, the mole miners would be free to steal any of the 112 warships in the system, using their plasma jets to cut through bridge emergency escape hatches and deliver stormtroopers to take control of the ships' command centers.

With typically precise timing, Thrawn brought the Imperial fleet into the system moments after the TIE fighters and mole miners launched from the freighter. The battle seemed to be going as planned and, before long, 39 ships were under Imperial control and heading for the perimeter. However, the unexpected presence of Lando Calrissian on the Millennium Falcon provided the New Republic with a way to foil Thrawn's plan. Calrissian used remote control codes to make the mole miners activate their plasma jets, burning through vital equipment on the captured ships and leaving them dead in space. Realizing that his plan had failed, Thrawn ordered the Imperial forces to withdraw.