Giles Durane

"The name's Giles Durane, your highness. These days I'm somethin' of a mercenary. In fact, due to my particular talents, some folks call me the Weapons Master."

- Giles Durane

Giles Durane, also known as the "Weapons Master," was a veteran of the Clone Wars. He was a friend of Bail Organa, and trained Organa's bodyguard, Sateen Vestwe, and later Organa's daughter, Leia Organa, in the use of weaponry.

Biography
During the Clone Wars, Giles Durane was good-hearted idealist. He served with Bail Organa, who saved his life on more than one occasion. But when the galactic conflict came to an end, Giles was left poor. So when a plague swept his homeworld, he had no money to transport his family off-planet. By the time he made contact with his friend Bail Organa, it was too late. At that point, Giles vowed to himself that he would never be poor or in anyone else's debt ever again.

Many years later, Organa hired Durane to teach his daughter Leia, who was serving her first term as an Imperial senator, how to use weapons to be able to defend herself. Though there was little money in it for Durane, he agreed because he owed it to his friend Organa. When Leia arrived on the planet Challon, Giles and his partner Gimlet were there and saved Leia from an assassination attempt. As Durane explained to her why he was hired, Leia was initially somewhat reluctant, being from the weaponless world of Alderaan, but her life was obviously in danger, and as Durane told her, "not all matters can be settled by senatorial debate."



Durane took Leia aboard his ship and trained her for a variety of weapons, from a handheld blaster to a ship's laser cannons. After a period of time, Giles spoke with Bail, and they both felt that Leia was skilled enough to defend herself, even though Giles thought she could use a bit more "speed and accuracy." As Leia continued with her senatorial business on Challon, General Emir, the man behind the failed assassination attempts on Leia's life, realized that he had hired the wrong assassins; the man who had been killing his assassins was the only man who could kill the senator. So he hired Giles Durane to kill Torgas, the head of the Assassins Guild, and to finish his job by killing the senator. Though he tried to warn Gimlet not to alert Leia, his partner tried anyway. However, Torgas arrived first and killed Gimlet just as he approached Leia. So when Giles Durane showed up to kill Torgas, Leia thought that she was safe. But then Giles told her of his job. His debt to Bail Organa was paid off, and now he was pure mercenary; he was going to carry out his job, no matter what. But when Giles fired his blaster at Leia, she spun out of the way and fired back, delivering a fatal blast with the speed and accuracy she had never achieved before. Giles dropped his blaster and fell to the ground.

With his dying breaths, Giles Durane told Leia that he always knew that someday, in the right circumstances, she'd get it perfect.

Behind the scenes
Durane appears in the comic story The Princess Leia Diaries in Star Wars Tales 11, but instead of being a huge man as portrayed in Weapons Master, he is a much smaller man with darker skin. However, the story is Infinities, so continuity is not an issue.

Appearances

 * Weapons Master
 * The Princess Leia Diaries
 * Crimson Bounty