Grif Grawley

Grif Grawley was a male Human farmer who lived on the moon Sulon with his wife Carole and their daughter Katie. When the Grawleys became involved in an anti-Imperial demonstration, the Empire retaliated by burning their home in an attack that killed Katie and scarred Carole. In order to escape further repercussions from the Empire, Grif and his wife, along with almost four hundred other Sulonese people, were then spirited away by the Rebel Alliance sympathizer Morgan Katarn to the planet of Ruusan. After helping the colonists settle on the planet, Katarn returned to Sulon. Years later, Grawley ran into an Imperial probe droid, PD 4786, while escorting his gra herd animals on a long-range forage. Grawley was able to destroy the droid, and, under the impression that the Empire had found Ruusan, tried to warn the other settlers, but they did not listen.

Imperial forces led by the Dark Jedi Jerec then attacked and destroyed the settlement of Fort Nowhere. The survivors turned to Grawley, who agreed to help them and soon became their leader, as they settled in the ruins of an old temple in the unexplored part of Ruusan. Shortly afterward, Morgan Katarn's son, Kyle, and his companion Jan Ors, arrived on Ruusan and met Grawley and his men, telling them that Morgan had been killed by Jerec. The younger Katarn came to Ruusan on behalf of the Rebel Alliance in an attempt to stop Jerec from obtaining the power located within Ruusan's fabled Valley of the Jedi. Grawley assisted Katarn in his task and led him to the native Bouncers, one of which, Floater, agreed to lead Grawley and the two Rebels to the Valley. While en route, however, the group ran into one of Jerec's probe droids, AD-43. Grawley engaged the droid in melee battle, and used his hunting knife to damage its systems. The droid carried Grawley on its carcass, flew into a canyon wall and exploded, which also killed Grawley. However, Katarn and Ors were still able to complete their mission, and successfully killed Jerec before he could fully harness the power of the Valley.

Running from the Empire
"Once he put us on the ground and got things organized, he borrowed a skimmer and took off. Everybody said he was crazy. Who knows when he ran into the bouncers, but he did. They call him "the knight who never was," whatever that means."

- Grif Grawley, on Morgan Katarn

Grif Grawley was a Human male farmer who lived on the planet Sullust's moon of Sulon with his wife Carole and their little daughter Katie during the Imperial Period. Grawley was on friendly terms with fellow farmer Morgan Katarn and his son Kyle, who eventually left for the Imperial Academy. Tired of life under the oppressive heel of the Galactic Empire, the Grawleys and a number of other Sulonese people tried to exercise their freedom of speech by organizing anti-Imperial meetings, holding them in the privacy of their homes at first, and then in loosely organized gatherings. When it was decided to move their demonstrations to the streets of Sulon's principal city of Barons Hed, the protesters asked Katarn to join them, but he declined the offer, in fear of severe repercussions that might follow from the Empire.

Deriding Katarn a coward and certain that the Empire would not dare to resort to violence, the Sulonese nevertheless held their demonstration, but disbanded before the Imperials could react and follow with arrests. However, due to a series of holographic recordings taken during the protest and a traitor in the demonstrators' midst, the Empire soon established the identities of the so-called "agitators" of the insurgency, including Grawley and his family. One night, the Empire struck back with a force that consisted of All Terrain Armored Transports and Viper probe droids to burn the protesters' homes.

Grif and Carole were outside their house and bore witness to the attack firsthand. They first saw an Imperial probe droid passing near their home, and then a series of blaster shots tore through and set their house on fire. In an attempt to rescue Katie, who was inside at the time of the attack and cried desperately for help, Carole bolted toward the home; Grif barely pulled her back before the structure collapsed, which killed their daughter. Carole had also been severely burned, but nonetheless survived with prominent scars on her face. Two more families were massacred that night, and the Empire made no attempt to hide its involvement in the attacks, evidenced by clearly-visible AT-AT tracks near the scorched buildings. In fear of additional punishment to follow&mdash;not excluding the possibility of transportation to slave labor camps&mdash;the protesters turned to Katarn for help, and admitted that he had been right all along. Around 2 BBY, Katarn, who had secret ties with the Alliance to Restore the Republic, secured help and funding from Alliance sympathizers and developed a plan to move the people away from Sulon. In a first stage of his plan, Katarn hid Grif, Carole, and 345 more men, women, and children on an abandoned space station in the Sullust system. Life aboard the space station was difficult due to severe cold and over-crowdedness.

Katarn then hired the blockade runner Cyclops captained by the smuggler Jerg to transport the fugitives to another planet. Ten years prior to that, Jerg had stumbled upon the planet Ruusan, which he claimed was free of Imperial presence, and Katarn chose to take the Grawleys and the other Sulonese people there. Among the few possessions that the would-be colonists brought with them to Ruusan were fertilized gra ova, a product of genetic engineering that allowed them to grow the gra herd animals. During the long trip to the planet, Grif took his time to memorize the electronic manual for the gra, and learned about their instincts. After he helped the men under his care settle in and near Fort Nowhere, a military installation built by Jerg's smuggling gang and used as a storage for their goods, Katarn left the planet. Before he did so, however, he ventured into the countryside, where he encountered the native Bouncers, globe-like creatures that sailed on the wind. The settlers noticed that all the Bouncers they met after Katarn's departure called Katarn "the knight who never was," although neither Grawley nor the other colonists knew what that meant. Before he left, Katarn had also taught Grawley and the colonists a primitive communications code that he used in order to send signals to his agricultural droids back on Sulon. As the code was no longer used by the Empire, the colonists could use it to safely communicate between themselves and employ as a sort of friend-or-foe identification system.

Droid encounter
"So, I tangled with an Imperial probe droid, rammed it with my airspeeder, and hoofed it here. It could have been a loner, dumped into our atmosphere by a passing ship, or it could be part of something a lot worse. I suggest you pack what you can, load your families on skimmers, and follow me. There are places where you can hide."

- Grif Grawley, unsuccessfully trying to warn fellow settlers of an incoming attack

As years passed, Grif and Carole settled on their newfound home planet, and lived in a house dug in a hillside twenty klicks south of Fort Nowhere, faced south to take advance of the winter sun. On Ruusan, they returned to their work as farmers, although they found it much harder than it had been on Sulon due to scarcity of water, and Grif and Carole came to refer to what they did as "outcropping." In addition to the harvest of crops, the Grawleys looked over a personal garden and possessed a herd of gra. Although his life entered a steady stream, Grawley could not forget the sight of his daughter's death and started to drink. On the eve of Katie's birthday around 4 ABY, Grawley attempted to anesthetize himself with a bottle of an alcoholic beverage called the "Old Trusty" at the Smuggler's Rest cantina in Fort Nowhere. He was so drunk that Carole had to come to the cantina, load him into an airspeeder, and drive him home. The event made Grawley a target for mocking among the cantina patrons.



In 5 ABY, six months after his intoxication incident, Grawley traveled in his speeder to the countryside, following the gra on a long-range forage. As night approached, the creatures traveled to the nearby hills in order to escape predators, following their genetically-programmed instincts. Grawley stopped at Hill 461 for night and activated Fido, a boomerang-shaped machine of his own design that was equipped with a variety of sensors and was supposed to alert him to any danger. After he used a comm unit to say goodnight to Carole, Grawley checked Fido's sensor readings. The machine assured him that everything was alright, except for the fact that the network of weather and surveillance satellites, established by the smugglers who had built Fort Nowhere, had gone off the air. Grawley was not very alarmed and assumed that the problem would soon be fixed.

Grawley spent some time looking at the sunset with a bottle of the Old Trusty, but, thinking that Carole would not approve of him drinking, he took his electrobinoculars and walked to the highest point of the hill, hoping to have a glimpse at the native Bouncers, whom he found fascinating. Switching to infrared mode, Grawley saw what he at first thought was a Bouncer. However, he then realized that the heat signature was too intense and too high in the air, and that the object moved against the wind. Grawley then realized that the object was an Imperial probe droid and that it had spotted him. He wondered if the probe had been launched by a passing scout ship, which was consistent with standard Imperial scouting procedure, or if it had been deployed by a ship currently stationed in orbit, which would have explained why the satellites had gone offline. Whatever the case, Grawley realized that he must destroy the droid and warn the other settlers. Taking controls of his speeder, he drove straight at the machine. He then grabbed his blaster rifle, stood up for better aim, and shot at the droid twice; the first shot missed entirely, while the second one barely scratched the droid's carcass, and the machine responded by firing its own weapons at Grawley's speeder.

Grawley realized that the droid outgunned him, turned the vehicle, and pushed it down toward the surface. The tactic helped Grawley gain more forward momentum, while at the same time forced the droid to convert more of its onboard computing capacity to low-level navigation. Taking advantage of his knowledge of the local terrain, Grawley headed toward a nearby ridge and stopped his vehicle at the top. The droid lost the speeder's heat signature behind the rock, and switched to its holocams. Grawley then grabbed his handmade remote controller for the speeder and his blaster rifle, and then jumped to the ground. Activating the remote control, he accelerated the speeder away from the probe droid, and the droid started firing at it. Grawley then maneuvered the speeder with the controller, setting it on a collision course with the droid. When the speeder rammed the droid, both machines exploded. Taking the droid's ID plate&mdash;which read PD 4786&mdash;as proof, Grawley set off to Fort Nowhere to warn the settlers of the fact that the Empire had found them. Grawley had to walk fifty kilometers on foot, and, tired, he reached the gates of Fort Nowhere at the sunset of the next day.

At the city gates, he was greeted by a sentry named Horley, from whom Grawley learned that the city's mayor, Byron Devo III, was in the Smuggler's Rest. As he entered the Rest, Grawley was met with a round of mocking among the regulars, who remembered the night six months before. Silencing the crowd by destroying the cantina's sound system with his rifle, Grawley demonstrated the droid's ID plate and told the patrons about his encounter with the droid. He advised them to evacuate Fort Nowhere immediately, but most of the colonists did not really believe his words, due to Grawley's reputation as a drunk. Grawley then asked Marie Peeno, Captain Jerg's second-in-command, about the sudden deactivation of the weather satellites. Peeno told everyone that the satellites had all went down at the same time and had not come online since. She also said that there were no starships in orbit they could contact, as Jerg had left the planet and taken all the smuggler ships with him and was not expected to return in a month. Still, Mayor Devo was certain that the Empire had not found them yet and even if it had, he was certain that any attack against Fort Nowhere would be futile, due to the Fort having been turned into a fortress by Jerg's smugglers. Realizing that he could not convince the settlers to leave the Fort, Grawley angrily exited the cantina and returned home to Carole, who was already worried for him being late.

From mocked drunk to trusted leader
"Welcome to our temporary home. Those fortunate enough to survive the attack on Fort Nowhere banded together, collected what resources they could, and came here."

- Grif Grawley

It turned out that Grawley had been right in his suspicions, as the destroyed droid had been dispatched by the Dark Jedi Jerec, who had come to Ruusan in search of the fabled Valley of the Jedi, which contained the trapped souls of the Jedi and Sith who had perished in the final battle of the New Sith Wars a thousand years ago. Jerec sought to harness the power of the Valley and become the new ruler of the Empire. Jerec's forces attacked Fort Nowhere, killing many colonists and forcing the survivors to flee into the badlands, an area they knew very little about. The surviving colonists, who realized that they had been wrong to ignore Grawley, turned to him for help, arriving at his home and setting off perimeter alarms. Grawley agreed to help the survivors and led the survivors to the previously unexplored territories, where they found the ruins of a temple in the badlands&mdash;which had been used by the Jedi as a stronghold during the war&mdash;and they settled there. Shortly thereafter, Grawley and his men witnessed a ship approaching the ruins of Fort Nowhere. In an attempt to identify the affiliation of the ship's pilots, the colonists used Morgan Katarn's old code, encoding the coordinates for a landing site with it. The ship landed at the prescribed location, indicating that its pilots were not Imperial.

Grawley then dispatched Fido in order to have a look at the newcomers with its holocams, while he and Carole laid in hiding in the hills far from the landing site. Having inspected the visitors' ship via Fido and found nothing dangerous aboard, Grawley then checked the ship's crew, which consisted of a man and a woman. Recognizing the man as the son of Morgan Katarn, Kyle, Grawley flew Fido to his and Carole's position and back to Katarn several times, giving Katarn a signal to follow the machine. After the two flew their starship to the temple, following Fido's lead, Grawley and his men met the newcomers there. Grawley greeted Katarn, but being unsure of where his loyalties lay, ordered him and his companion to surrender their weapons. Katarn then introduced his companion, Jan Ors, and went on to explain that his father had been killed by Jerec years earlier. The younger Katarn had defected from the Empire when he had become aware of this. Katarn and Ors were Rebel agents, who attempted to foil Jerec's plans for galactic domination. Moreover, Katarn claimed that he had recently discovered that he was a Jedi.

One of the colonists, Luther Pardy, who was in possession of Katarn's confiscated weapons, initially doubted his story, prompting Katarn to use the Force to pull his lightsaber from Pardy's hands. The colonists drew their blasters, but Grawley, convinced that Katarn was on their side, ordered them to stand down. Grawley then offered Katarn to help in his quest and proposed to meet with the Bouncers, seek their counsel, and ask for their help in finding the Valley. Grawley, Katarn, Ors, and six colonists took refuge in a temple of stone near the site where the Bouncers were most likely to appear. As they were waiting for the Bouncers to come, Grawley told Katarn about his father's meeting with the globe-like beings. When the Bouncers finally appeared and Grawley's group was ready to move out and meet them, Katarn spotted an Imperial skimmer and two speeder bikes moving toward the Bouncers. Those were Jerec's troops that intended to slaughter the Bouncers for fun, and they opened fire.

Unwilling to let the Bouncers be killed, Ors took her blaster rifle and scrambled to a sniping position overlooking the site of the carnage. Katarn told Grawley that his men were free to take any prisoners, but none of the Imperials were allowed to escape. After Ors took out one speeder bike with a carefully-placed shot, the rest of the Imperials started firing back at Grawley and the others, and one of the colonists was killed in the firefight. Nevertheless, the fight was soon won by the Rebels and Grawley's men, who, with some help from the Bouncers&mdash;who also lost one of their own&mdash;managed to kill all the Imperials, obtaining the skimmer and one of the bikes relatively intact. In order to keep their presence secret, Grawley and his men buried the Imperials in carefully camouflaged graves. Using a combat knife to carve words in the sand, Katarn then communicated with the leader of the Bouncers.

One of the Bouncers, whom Grawley referred to as Floater, agreed to serve as a guide to the Valley of the Jedi for Katarn and help them reach it without running into Imperial troops. When Katarn asked the Bouncer leader if he knew if the Rebels would succeed in stopping Jerec, the Bouncer replied by writing down a line from the Poem of Ages, the same poem they had told to Kyle's father, and which stated that a knight would come who would fight a battle and would free the spirits of Jedi and Sith trapped in the Valley. Katarn wanted to look for other scrap from the battle that could potentially point to their involvement in the patrol's disappearance, but Grawley believed that they had to leave before dawn. Although Ors wanted to depart for the Valley immediately, Katarn felt that the time was not right and decided to regroup at the temple. Grawley and his men, alongside Katarn, Ors, and Floater then returned to the colonists' base.

Shortly afterward, Fido spotted an Imperial force consisting of an AT-ST and an AT-AT nearby. In an effort to spy on the Imperials and&mdash;in case they headed toward the temple&mdash;to lead them away, Grawley, Katarn and Ors took the recently captured skimmer and set off to a hiding place near the base, where they climbed up a rocky path to the ruins of an ancient fortress. There, they took their electrobinoculars and spied on the Imperial forces. Katarn suddenly felt in the Force that the patrol was led by one of Jerec's Dark Jedi and that the Dark Jedi had felt the Rebels too. However, much to Katarn's surprise, no attack followed; in fact, the Imperial group was commanded by Yun, a Dark Jedi whom Katarn had previously had the chance to kill but decided to spare. Although Yun's troops had found a helmet belonging to stormtrooper RW957 from the destroyed Imperial patrol, Yun decided to repay the debt to Katarn, and he stalled his forces by ordering them to set up camp and wait for the next day to continue the search.

Death
"This is for Katie, this is for Carole, and this is for me!"

- Grif Grawley, as he repeatedly stabs the probe droid

Realizing that their presence on Ruusan was still kept secret from Jerec's troops, Katarn decided to proceed with his planned infiltration of the Valley of the Jedi, where Jerec's men had already began excavation works. At nightfall, Grawley, Katarn, Ors, Katarn's droid WeeGee, and Floater, all boarded Katarn's ship, the Moldy Crow, and flew to the Valley, landing five kilometers from the Valley in order to avoid detection. Leaving WeeGee at the ship and hiding the ship under a camouflage net, Grawley and the two Rebels set off toward the Valley through the mountains, led by Floater. At dawn, they were 1/2 kilometer from the Valley, ascending the nearly vertical slope of a brittle ravine. When Grawley pulled himself up onto a broad shelf, however, he witnessed a probe droid, AD-43, that was alerted to the Rebels' presence.

Acting on the first notion that came to his mind, Grawley charged at the droid openly, and the droid charged back at him. There was no time to pull out his blaster, so Grawley just opened his arms, the machine slammed into him, and they both floated over the abyss. As the droid seized one of his legs and crushed it with powerful pincers, Grawley pulled out his knife and proceeded to strike the droid repeatedly, attempting to avenge for everything the Empire had done to Katie, Carole, and himself. Katarn and Ors could only watch helplessly at the fight between the man and the machine, not risking to fire their weapons due to the high risk of accidentally hitting Grawley. Grawley's frenzied attack damaged the droid's critical systems, and it plunged into the canyon wall, taking Grawley with it and killing both in an explosion. Before it was destroyed, however, AD-43 had managed to report spotting Grawley and his companions, allowing Jerec to set a trap for Katarn. Grawley's death angered Katarn, making him even more determined to kill Jerec. Katarn and Ors succeeded in thwarting Jerec's plans, killing him and his entire cadre of Dark Jedi and fulfilling the Bouncers' prophecy.

Personality and traits
"Grif wouldn't know a probe droid if it was floating in his whiskey&hellip;"

- One of the Smuggler's Rest patrons

By 5 ABY, Grawley was already not a very young man, but he was in better physical shape than most men half his age. Despite that, he found himself tired during the fifty-kilometer long return trip to Fort Nowhere. However, Grawley was more used to scrambling rocky terrain. When he, Katarn, and Ors were climbing a mountain to spy on the Imperial patrol and, later, to reach the Valley of the Jedi, Katarn was out of breath, while Grawley seemed almost entirely unaffected. Grawley was a skilled mechanic, having built Fido with his own hands from whatever parts he could buy, borrow, or steal, and having assembled his speeder from salvage. Grawley also constructed the remote control for the vehicle. He was very attached to his machines and had a penchant for giving names to them, naming the water pump at his home "Jenny." During his encounter with the first probe droid, Grawley talked to his speeder, willing the rusty vehicle to work, and he was sorry that he had been forced to sacrifice the speeder in order to destroy the probe droid. Grawley also possessed a hunting knife 1/2 meter long, whose blade had been fashioned from diamond-hard hull metal.

Grawley deeply loved his wife Carole, and considered her gorgeous even after she was severely burned while trying to rescue Katie. He was deeply affected by the loss of his daughter. Haunted by the feeling of helplessness that he had felt during her death, Grawley attempted to find relief in alcohol. This, however, only led to his embarrassment and resulted in Grawley having the reputation of a drunk and the cantina regulars laughing at his expense, which angered Grawley. When he was fighting the probe droid AD-43, Grawley attempted to exact his revenge on the Empire by destroying the machine. Grawley considered Morgan Katarn an interesting man and was disappointed to find that Katarn had been killed. Although some of the settlers felt fear and loathing toward the Bouncers, he was fascinated by them, learned about their habits, and tried to have a look at them at every opportunity. When he started telling Kyle Katarn about the Bouncers in great detail, such interest surprised Katarn and made Grawley feel self-conscious. During the battle with the Imperial patrol, Grawley was shocked when he saw Katarn killing the Imperials with his lightsaber.

Grawley could not get used to the heat and the dust of Ruusan and found it difficult to work as a farmer there, as water was hard to come by. He seriously considered following the example of some other settlers, who did cave-farming, growing plants by artificial light. However, he realized that cave-farming had its disadvantages, and he did not like the prospect of being closed in inside a cave. On the other hand, the time spent on Ruusan taught Grawley to improvise and make due with what he had. Because of this, during his encounter with the probe droid in the desert, Grawley displayed some quick-thinking, using the speeder's ability to fly at low levels and the local terrain to his advantage. He also became skilled in navigating Ruusan's terrain and was able to find his way back to Fort Nowhere without any navigating equipment. Overall, Grif and Carole tried to take their hard life on Ruusan lightly, jokingly calling a flat piece of hard-packed dirt near their home "the veranda." Grawley himself displayed a somewhat sarcastic sense of humor, referring to Devo III, as the "fat guy who thought he was a mayor," which made Horley chuckle. Although the smugglers who built Fort Nowhere claimed that there were ruins on the three moons of Ruusan, Grawley was not interested in this.

After Fort Nowhere was destroyed by Jerec's troops, and the "townies"&mdash;as Grawley called the town folk&mdash;turned to him for help, Grawley agreed despite the fact that they had not listened to his warnings. He eventually became the leader of the survivors, and Carole was amazed that her normally tactless husband never reminded the town people of their mistaken judgment. In their turn, the survivors followed Grawley's orders without question. As the leader of the survivors, Grawley displayed cautiousness, ordering Katarn to surrender his weapons until they could find out more about him, and later making use of shadows to maintain a low profile while he, Katarn, and Ors were driving the stolen skimmer in order to spy on Yun's troops. However, he believed that the odds of Imperials finding some remains of the missing patrol were very small and did not spend time to look for any remaining leads, but he was proven wrong when Yun's men found RW957's helmet.

Behind the scenes
Grif Grawley and his family were first indirectly mentioned in Dark Forces: Rebel Agent, a 1998 novella written by William C. Dietz, which included a reference to the three families massacred on Sulon. Dietz's follow-up novel Dark Forces: Jedi Knight, revealed that the Grawleys were one of those families and featured Grawley prominently. In the book, he was illustrated by Dave Dorman. Grawley was also featured in the audio dramatization of Dark Forces: Jedi Knight, wherein he was voiced by Jay Hornbacher.

Inconsistencies
Dark Forces: Rebel Agent implies that Morgan has evacuated the Sulonese after three families, including the Grawleys, have been massacred. However, the audio dramatization of Rebel Agent implies that most of the colonists have listened to Katarn's warnings and have evacuated, while three families have stayed behind and been massacred. As such, the Grawleys are not among the three massacred families mentioned in the Rebel Agent audio drama. As a result of this alternative portrayal of events, the Jedi Knight audio drama makes no mention of Katie's death and Carole's scarring. In the Jedi Knight audio drama, Grawley learns of the satellites malfunctioning while communicating with Carole. He then hears the impact of the probe droid landing. Still keeping contact with Carole, he tells her to warn the other settlers of the droid, while he goes to check it.

The following encounter with the droid is also presented shorter in the audio drama. Grawley does not use the rocky ridge as a cover. Instead, after the droid fires at him, Grawley simply turns the speeder around, using it as a battering ram, and jumps right before the impact. In Jedi Knight, when Grawley reaches the gates of Fort Nowhere, he is informed by Horley that Carole is worried for him, and Grawley says that he will call her. However, in the audio drama, Grawley asks Horley to call Carole. In the audio drama, Grawley, Katarn and Ors do not go to spy on Yun's patrol. Instead, Yun senses them from afar while they are still at the temple. There is also a difference in the portrayal of Grawley death scene between the two sources. In the audio drama, Katarn and Ors stop to catch their breath while climbing the mountains, but Floater insists on going further, and Grawley follows him, which is when he runs into AD-43. In The Official Star Wars Fact File 124, the image of Grawley fighting the droid AD-43 is mistakenly captioned as depicting Morgan Katarn's capture by a probe droid on Sulon.

Appearances

 * Dark Forces: Rebel Agent
 * Dark Forces: Jedi Knight
 * Dark Forces: Jedi Knight audio drama