Callista Ming

Callista Ming was a Jedi Knight from the time of the Old Republic who survived the Great Jedi Purge as a disembodied ghost, and later, in a new body, became romantically involved with Luke Skywalker.

Biography
Born on the water-world of Chad, Callista's lightsaber bore a ring of stylized sea-creatures around the hilt in token of her heritage. Rather than going through the normal process of separation from her parents and training in the Jedi Temple, she was recruited into the Jedi Order by the maverick Jedi Master Djinn Altis, who operated from the gas giant world of Bespin. While there, she met and fell in love with another Jedi trainee named Geith.

The Eye of Palpatine and the Children of the Jedi
Djinn Altis, Callista, and Geith survived the Jedi Purge, and remained in contact with other survivors such as Master Plett, who was sheltering a group of Jedi children on the remote world of Belsavis. But they discovered that the newly-formed Galactic Empire had built the massive dreadnaught Eye of Palpatine to attack Belsavis—a sort of proto-Death Star armed with super-heavy experimental turbolasers. Callista and Geith attempted to sabotage or destroy the massive ship, but were only partially successful, and both died in the attempt. Callista, however, used her talents in the Force to essentially 'haunt' the battlemoon's gunnery computer.

Reawakening and a new life
She remained there for thirty years, until Jedi Master Luke Skywalker and several other New Republic Jedi discovered the Eye of Palpatine and assisted her in destroying it. During the process, the two fell in love, and just prior to the station's destruction, Callista transferred her spirit into the body of Cray Mingla.

Unfortunately, the process cut her off from the Force. Later experiments, though, found her still in touch with the dark side, and eventually, after helping to deflect Admiral Daala's attack on the Jedi Academy. She was believed dead, having been stunned by Daala minutes before the Super Star Destroyer Knight Hammer fell into the atmosphere of the planet Yavin. However, she managed to escape the dying craft before it's destruction. Callista left on a quest to find a compromise to her powers.

The former couple are considered permanently separated (especially in light of Skywalker's marriage to Mara Jade), but in the course of her wanderings, Callista found many adventures—for instance, helping Leia Organa Solo defeat the Hutt Dark Jedi Beldorian on Nam Chorios, and solving the murder of the warlord Vrokk on Gamorr.

Relationship with Jedi orthodoxy
There are some unanswered questions about Callista's time as a Jedi Knight under the Old Republic and in the early years of the Empire. Jedi Master Djinn Altis was a maverick, allowing Jedi trainees to become romantically attached, and he taught techniques&mdash;such as the ability to preserve one's consciousness after death by transferring it to an inanimate object&mdash;which were lost to, or condemned by, the mainstream Jedi Order. Yet Callista seems to have been unaware of the heterodoxy of her own training: for instance, she seems to have accepted Luke's assumption that the "Children of the Jedi" were the children of Jedi parents, rather than, as seems more likely in the light of recent revelations, Padawans or younglings.

Nevertheless, Callista was an important witness not simply of the diversity possible in the Jedi Order in the last years of the Old Republic, but of the survival of fragments of its organization after the Purge. Some of the children from Belsavis became Imperial agents or trainees at Luke Skywalker's Praxeum, but the final fates of Masters Plett and Djinn Altis, like that of Callista herself, remain unknown.

Appearances

 * Children of the Jedi
 * Planet of Twilight
 * Murder in Slushtime
 * Darksaber