Zaluna Myder

"I'm not brave. I'm an old fool. I remember too much. I remember how it was&mdash;and his it got worse, even before the Empire. I remember when people didn't kill guildmasters on a whim and walk away without a thought. And I remember when my people were safe. Those employees of mine are my children, and now one of them's in deep trouble."

- Zaluna describing herself to Hera and Kanan

Zaluna Myder, nicknamed Zal, was a surveillance operator and the supervisor of Myder's Mynocks at Transcept Media Solutions on the planet Gorse. Myder was not married and had no children. She valued her work life over family, and felt as if work was her home. She had an astounding memory, a large sum of which came from working at Transcept Media Solutions for over thirty years. Zaluna was on duty when a surveillance camera caught the dissident miner and demolitions expert Skelly making threats against the Empire and reported him to the authorities.

Zaluna became involved in the growing rebellion against the Galactic Empire when her fellow surveillance operator Hetto told her to pass a datacube to the rebel Hera Syndulla before his arrest. After being trapped in the toilet of a hoverbus, Zaluna joined forces with Hera and her companions Kanan Jarrus and Skelly to foil a plot by the Imperial industrialist Denetrius Vidian to destroy Gorse's moon Cynda. During the Gorse conflict, she lost her sight. With the help of Hera and Kanan, she relocated to another world to live a new life.

Background
Zaluna Myder was a Sullustan who was a resident of the planet Gorse. From her late teens onwards, Zaluna worked as a surveillance operator at Transcept Media Solutions' headquarters in Gorse City's World Watch Plaza building. Transcept was one of the few commercial operations on Gorse that was not attached to the mining industry. Transcept was a surveillance company that worked for both businesses and governments including the Galactic Republic and the Galactic Empire; monitoring the profiles and consumer tastes of Gorse's transient workers and residents. She worked at Transcept's Imperial "public order" surveillance division, which was nicknamed Myder's Mynocks. About eleven years before the Battle of Yavin, Zaluna was the supervisor of Myder's Mynocks.

Monitoring the Bomber
"I have a ping on Cynda cam five-six-oh. Threat to the Empire in spoken Basic. Elevator cam. Thirty-eight decibels, clearly intoned." "Who was listening?" "A transport driver [Kanan Jarrus]."

- Hetto and Zaluna picking up Skelly's verbal "threat" against the Empire

Zaluna was on supervision duty at Myder's Mynocks when Hetto, one of her subordinate operators reported that a surveillance camera had recorded a verbal threat to the Empire on Cynda, a thorilide-rich moon that orbited the planet Gorse. This verabal threat took place in an elevator and was witnessed by a transport driver. The camera reported to several surveillance supercomputers which comprehended the statement, measured it against mysterious metrics, and referred it to the Mynocks. This verbal threat had been made by Skelly, a dissident miner who was opposed to the Empire's blasting operations on Cynda. After consulting Skelly's records on their database, Zaluna discovered that the miner was "red-stamped"; meaning that he was mentally unwell and had been visited by Gorse's mental health authority.

Shortly later, she received an incoming hologram message from the Imperial Count Denetrius Vidian, the Empire's efficiency expert who had been dispatched by Emperor Palpatine to speed up thorilide production in the Gorse system. Vidian informed Myder that he would be inspecting the mining and processing operations on Cynda and Gorse respectively. In addition, Vidian initiated Security Condition One, which quadrupled the surveillance workload for Myder's Mynocks. After the message had ended, Hetto criticized Vidian and insinuated that the Imperials were out of their mind.

Zaluna warned him to follow the Empire's orders before returning to work. She then ordered Hetto to alert the Imperial authorities to Skelly's verbal threat in line with Imperial policy. When Hetto reminded her that Skelly was mentally unwell, Zaluna responded that the Empire did not care about the dissident's condition and that Skelly's comments were going to land him in trouble with the Imperial authorities. Stormtroopers were dispatched to arrest Skelly but he managed to escape following a brief struggle. Following his escape, Skelly initiated a test detonation on Cynda's Zone Forty-Two, that caused a cave-in on the moon and disrupted mining operations.

Due to the Imperial crackdown, the Myder's Mynocks were conscripted to assist the Empire's efforts to round up all local trouble makers prior to Count Vidian's impending visit to Gorse. While her Mynocks scanned Cynda's caverns for Skelly, Zaluna looked for the dark-haired transport driver the camera had captured Skelly arguing with earlier in the elevator. As a migrant worker, Transcept did not yet have a file on him and she nicknamed him the "Rugged Pilot". Unknown to Zaluna, this "Rugged Pilot" was the Jedi Padawan Kanan Jarrus, who had survived the Jedi Purge and was eking out a living as a freighter pilot.

Seeds of dissent
"Oh, Hetto, what have you gotten yourself into?" "Nothing you didn't know was coming. If my help's ever meant anything to you, you'll deliver this. And... I'm sorry."

- Zaluna's last conversation with Hetto before his arrest

Following the incident on Cynda, Zaluna had to deal with the increased presence of Imperial officers at the Mynocks' work floor, who quizzed her and went over recordings of events on the moon. After Skelly triggered a cave-in on Cynda through a test explosion, the Imperial authorities tried to cover it up by claiming that the collapse on the mon had been a natural occurrence. While monitoring Cynda's surveillance network, Zaluna received news that Skelly was in the custody of the refining company Moonglow Polychemical. Zaluna promptly informed the Imperials who informed their commanding officer Captain Rae Sloane's Imperial Star Destroyer Ultimatum.

Noticing her colleague Hetto's discomfort with the Imperials, Zaluna went to find him. Hetto promptly revealed that he had been in contact with a mysterious woman on the HoloNet and had downloaded sensitive information on the Empire into a datacube. He told her that he had hidden the datacube in a potted plant. Shortly later, Hetto was arrested by an Imperial lieutenant and his stormtroopers for "abusing the trust of the Galactic Empire." When the Imperial lieutenant questioned the loyalty of Myders Mynocks, Zaluna sprang to the defense of her team by pointing out that they had done everything that the Empire had asked. However, the lieutenant was unsympathetic and told her that everything that happened today would be reviewed.

Zaluna and her fellow colleagues were greatly troubled by Hetto's arrest since Hetto had worked for the company for the past twenty years. When a younger female colleague asked Zaluna what would happen to Hetoo, she admitted that she did not know. She told her colleagues that their company was a "tool" that could stop bad things like the earlier incident on Cynda. After the Imperials had departed, Zaluna went to the watering plant and found Hetto's datacube along with a small note that contained the name of a local cantina called The Asteroid Field and a woman named "Hera".

Rebel entanglements
"Were you in there all this time?" "Through the bashing and the blasting. The silly door's too thick&mdash;you couldn't hear me!"

- Skelly finding Zaluna trapped inside the hoverbus' toilet

Later that night, Zaluna headed to The Asteroid Field to meet Hera. On the way, she was harassed by a drunken bruiser named Ketticus Brayl, who was infatuated with her. Zaluna managed to ward him by showing him her blaster and telling him to return to his wife and children. During the journey, she wondered who the mysterious Hera was and speculated whether she was working for a rival surveillance firm. Despite her fears for her own safety and freedom, she vowed to uphold her promise to deliver the datacube to Hera.

Upon arriving at The Asteroid Field, Zaluna encountered Kanan and the bartender Okadiah Garson. After exchanging greetings, Zaluna disabled the surveillance cameras in the cantina. Once she was sure that no one was watching them, she introduced herself to Kanan; recognizing him as the miner who had stood up to Vidian earlier that day. She then told him that she was looking for someone named Hera. While Kanan did not know where Hera was, their problem was solved when Hera turned up at the cantina.

After exchanging pleasantries, Zaluna informed Hera that Hetto had been arrested by the Empire and that she was carrying his instruction to meet Hera. After speculating about Hetto's fate in Imperial captivity, Zaluna showed Hera Hetto's datacube. She explained that Hetto had been downloading sensitive Imperial files including requests made on the Imperial channel to the Transcept database. One of the files concerned a mysterious man named Lemuel Tharsa, a man who had visited Gorse twenty years ago. While bantering about her work as a surveillance operator to the offworlds, Zaluna caught side of Skelly, the dissident miner she had reported earlier. Fearing retribution, she slipped the datacube into her bag and left the cantina.

After leaving the cantina, Zaluna hid inside the toilet of a hoverbus in order to escape a stormtrooper patrol. This was a fateful decision that put her into the company of Hera, Kanan, and Skelly. Zaluna was trapped inside the hoverbus for almost an entire day. During her accidental captivity, the bus' driver Okadiah allowed Kanan and Hera to borrow his bus in order to infiltrate the Moonglow Polychemical refinery and spy on Count Vidian. After Skelly blew up Vidian's Imperial shuttle in an attempt to assassinate the Count, Vidian and his surviving Imperial entourage commandeered the hoverbus and used it to travel to an Imperial spaceport at Highground. Following a second attempt on Count Vidian's life, Skelly fled with Kanan and Hera aboard the hoverbus, outrunning several Imperial Troop Transports and two TIE fighters. The rebels managed to outwit their Imperial pursuers and fled to a quarry outside Gorse City.

Shortly after landing, the rebels heard incessant pounding in the door of the hoverbus' restroom. After Kanan opened the door, he found an exhausted Zaluna. Nobody had been able to hear Zaluna due to the thick door and the bashing and blasting during the pursuit. Zaluna quickly recognized Skelly as the bomber she had earlier reported to the authorities. While she was fearful of retribution, Kanan reassured her that Skelly was in no physical shape to hurt her. Zaluna told Hera that she had to discuss Hera's cube later and made preparations to return home since she had missed work. She also revealed that their hoverbus had a surveillance camera board. After some discussion, Zaluna also agreed to lead the rebels back to Okadiah's bar through routes that were not being watched by surveillance cameras.

Saving Cynda
While resting in one of the cantina's apartments with her new rebel friends, Zaluna listened as Hera proposed that they work together to fight the Empire instead of going after the Empire on their own. When Zaluna heard the rebellion being mentioned, she quietly remarked that it would lead them into troubled. While checking her datapad, Zaluna received word that her entire team Myder's Mynocks had been suspended and that she had also been suspended for not showing up for her shift. Zaluna was also fearful that the Empire was going to find out that she had been in the company of rebels and that she would lose her job or worse. After commiserating her job loss and troubles with the Empire, Zaluna and her rebel friends turned their attention to the recording device that Zaluna had located on the bus.

Zaluna attached the recording device to her holoplayer. After watching the material from the hoverbus surveillance, they discovered that Count Vidian was planning to destroy Gorse's moon Cynda. While Hera and Kanan reacted to Vidian's plot with disbelief, Skelly pointed out that Vidian now had the means to destroy Cynda, partly thanks to his research which the Count had misappropriated during their meeting at Moonglow. To Skelly's relief, Zaluna backed him up by pointing out that her mother had taug ther during her childhood that Cynda was all brittle because of the gravitonal weight generated by Gorse. She feared that Cynda's destruction was imminent.

Personality and traits
"You [Zaluna] saw me?" "That's one of the rare pleasures of my world. You spend all your time watching for bad people, and you want to forget what you see. But the good ones, those you remember."

- Zaluna discussing her work as a surveillance operator with Kanan

As a Sullustan, Zaluna Myder had large shell-like ears. Standing at a height of over a meter and a half, Zaluna was considered to be tall among her diminutive species. By the time of the Gorse conflict, Zaluna was in her fifties. Since her adolescence, she devoted her life to working as a surveillance operator at Transcept Media Solutions. As a career woman, Zaluna did not have a spouse or children. Until the Gorse conflict, Zaluna was politically neutral and played an important role in alerting the Imperial authorities to the dissident miner Skelly. The seeds of Zaluna's disenchantment with the Empire were first sown when her friend Hetto was arrested due to his dealings with the rebel Hera Syndulla. Later, she decided to cast her lot with Hera's rebel cells upon learning that she had been dismissed due to her ties to Hetto.

Appearances

 * A New Dawn