Wookieepedia:Featured article queue/December 1, 2009

Ecclessis Figg was an eccentric explorer and entrepreneur who founded Cloud City and propelled himself into vast fortune with the creation of a business empire. After leaving his homeworld of Corellia at eighteen, Figg spent his next years taking jobs and participating in adventures along the Corellian Trade Spine. After he saved the life of a woman named Yarith, a lesser noble of the Royal House of Alderaan, Figg courted and married her. Yarith opened her fortunes to him, giving him the capital he needed to found the Outer Javin Company.

Figg's company sponsored a number of expeditions along the Trade Spine, the businessman and his wife participating in many of them, and Figg's eventual charting of new hyperspace routes through the Twin Nebulae made him an extremely wealthy man. He eventually turned to the seemingly unremarkable gas giant Bespin, on which years ago he had discovered vast amounts of easily accessible Tibanna gas, a hyperdrive coolant. When Figg found that Bespin's Tibanna was naturally suited for the ammunition of blasters, he expanded his operation into the airborne colony Floating Home. With the help of Ugnaughts, who he freed from slavery in exchange for constructing the colony, Figg had his new facility built. He saw the potential in Bespin's natural scenery for tourism and expanded the colony even further, turning it into the floating metropolis of Cloud City, a site of luxury, entertainment, and gambling.

Figg lived long enough to preside over the formation of the Anoat sector, and after making pronouncements on the future of Cloud City's government from his deathbed, the entrepreneur died. His children survived him, continuing the Figg name and propagating the fortune and influence the man had built up. Figg himself remained a legendary figure in the region, especially among the Ugnaughts.