Bultar Swan (Jedi Renaissance)

Bultar Swan was a female Human Jedi Master who trained with and served the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars and, later, the Jedi Renaissance. As a Padawan of Jedi Master Micah Giiett, Swan excelled at martial arts, and she later complemented her fighting techniques with a strong lightsaber defense under the tutelage of Jedi Master Plo Koon. Dedicated to her beliefs, she was respected within the Order for her record of never having killed an opponent prior to the outbreak of the Clone Wars. After becoming a Jedi Knight, Swan was routinely sent on peace missions, including one to the Fondor system to investigate the alleged reappearance of an ancient starship and to mediate a dispute over salvage rights to the vessel. Swan became entwined in a plot by the shipbuilder Groodo the Hutt to destroy the Fondor Shipyards, and she aided in destroying Groodo's Droid Control Army and thwarting his plan to take over Fondor Spaceport.

In 22 BBY, Swan was dispatched to the Sepan system to negotiate the cessation of a decades-long civil war, and later in the year, she joined a massive Jedi strike team that was sent to the planet Geonosis to rescue two Jedi and a Republic Senator, who were due to be executed by the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The ensuing battle launched a three-year galactic conflict known as the Clone Wars, during which Swan served the Republic as a Jedi General. She led Republic forces into battle on worlds such as Aargonar and Amaltanna; a battle on the latter world saw all of her troops die at the hands of the Separatist Droid Army. However, Swan was able to afterward trap Separatist Commander Baron Edi Wedd inside of his impregnable fortress and leave him to die. Three years into the war, she helped defend the Republic's capital, Coruscant, from the invading Confederate Navy.

Shortly after the Confederacy fled Coruscant, the Republic's Supreme Chancellor Palpatine was revealed to be the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Sidious, the being responsible for the war. His death at the hands of Master Mace Windu brought an end to the war and the Republic and the Confederacy entered into an era of peace and rebuilding. So to did the Jedi Order; under the guidance of Grand Master Tomac Moorcé the Order's size grew on Ossus where Swan would serve as a Master and a healer.

==Biography=

Early life and Jedi training
"If I may ask&hellip; when you sleep, do you ever have visions of your home world or your family?''" "''I was raised at the Jedi Temple. My home has always been with the Jedi."

- Anakin Skywalker and Bultar Swan

Bultar Swan, a Human female, was born on the planet Kuat during the final decades of the Galactic Republic. She displayed a high level of Force- sensitivity at an early age and was discovered by the Jedi Order. The Jedi separated her from her family and brought her to the galactic capital of Coruscant to begin training with their Order, and after several years of studying in the Jedi Temple, Swan was assigned to Jedi Master as his Padawan. Under Giiett's guidance, Swan displayed prowess in a number of combat disciplines, including and the. The Twi'lek Jedi Master aided Giiett in teaching Swan to blend the two unarmed combat styles.

Giiett was killed by Yinchorri extremists during the Yinchorri Uprising in 33 BBY, and Swan continued her training under Jedi Master Plo Koon, a longtime friend of Giiett's. Koon placed greater emphasis on practicing lightsaber combat than Giiett had, and helped Swan learn to use the weapon to complement her skills in martial arts. He took her to Yinchorr to visit the site of Giiett's death, and told her that her former Master had sacrificed his life in order to save several other Jedi. Although she still heavily felt his loss, Swan sensed that Giiett had been at peace at the time of his death and believed that he would have been proud of what she had accomplished in her training.

Knighthood
"He still has much to learn.''" "Then I hope he’s a fast learner." "And why is that?" "''Because we may need a great deal of strength if we’re going to prevent a civil war."

- Obi-Wan Kenobi discusses Anakin Skywalker with Swan during their mission to the Fondor system

Swan was knighted within the following eleven years, and entered active service as a Jedi Knight in a galaxy growing more dangerous. Shortly before 22 BBY, Swan's jurisdiction as a Knight included the Fondor system, and she was called on to mediate a dispute between Senator Rodd of the planet Fondor and Margravine Quenelle of the world's moon, Nallastia. A Fondorian patrol ship and a Nallastian freighter had both disappeared after encountering what appeared to be the Sun Runner, a starship that had been missing for four thousand years. Both Rodd and Quenelle were claiming salvage rights to the ship, and Swan spent a few days aboard the orbital Fondor Spaceport contacting her sources on Fondor and Nallastia in an effort to learn more about the situation. She was able to convince Rodd and Quenelle to allow further Jedi mediation instead of sending armed vessels to the site of the derelict Sun Runner, and Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Padawan Anakin Skywalker were dispatched to assist her. They arrived at Fondor Spaceport in the Republic cruiser Unitive and brought her to the site of the derelict Sun Runner; Swan briefed them on the situation during the journey through hyperspace.

When the Unitive arrived at the deep-space rendezvous point, Rodd's salvage hauler and Quenelle's rescue runner awaited them. The Senator and the Margravine both boarded the Unitive and joined the Jedi in the cruiser's salon pod. Swan sat with them at a round table as they argued over the salvage rights, but when both refused to budge, she appealed to Kenobi for help. His interruption was forestalled when the cruiser's lights went out and a ship-wide power surge fried every onboard system. Captain Pietrangelo found the group and explained that the surge had been caused when the Sun Runner's engines fired, and Swan put an end to the negotiations in order to stop the ancient ship and rescue any potential innocents trapped aboard. Senator Rodd led the Jedi through a docking tube to his ship, where Z-95 Headhunters awaited them. None of the pressure suits were an appropriate size for Swan, which prompted her to remain behind and watch over the squabbling diplomats while Kenobi and Skywalker infiltrated the Sun Runner. After several of the Unitive's systems were brought back online, Swan received a message from Fondor Space Patrol: The missing freighter and patrol ship had recently returned and docked at Fondor Spaceport. Accompanied by the diplomats' ships, the Unitive jumped to lightspeed.

The three vessels docked at the spaceport concurrently with Kenobi's Headhunter. He revealed that the vessel had in fact been a false Sun Runner, and that he and Skywalker had destroyed it after discovering that it had been on a crash course with Fondor. Skywalker's fighter had plummeted toward Nallastia during the melee, and Kenobi had only come to the spaceport to refuel before pursuing him. Quenelle offered the two Jedi a ride to the surface aboard her shuttle, and while she prepared the ship, Rodd took the opportunity to accuse Kenobi of having destroyed the real Sun Runner in a desperate attempt to prevent a Fondorian civil war. Swan and Kenobi sensed that he was hiding something—little did they know that he was in league with Groodo the Hutt, a shipbuilding magnate who had created the false Sun Runner with the intention of crashing it into the Fondor Shipyards and eliminating his competition.[10] Kenobi followed his instincts and contacted the Jedi Council to request reinforcements. Aboard the Margravine's shuttle, Swan and Kenobi homed in on the remains of Skywalker's crashed CloakShape fighter, which they found abandoned on Nallastia's surface. Following two sets of footprints, they flew to the fortress of Nallastia's Skull Queen, where they found Skywalker holding the moon's Princess Calvaria at lightsaberpoint.

Thwarting a Hutt
"Can you also control your nightmares?''" "Jedi don't have nightmares." "''Of course."

- Skywalker and Swan, on Nallastia

Swan and the others departed the Margravine's shuttle, and Quenelle informed everyone present that she was the Skull Queen and Calvaria her daughter. Amidst the tense situation, Skywalker explained that Calvaria had imprisoned Hondu and Tattyra Firewell, the zoologist parents of a young boy named Klay, whom she had mistaken for malicious poachers. Quenelle berated her and explained to the Jedi that the two were trapped between Nallastia's ancient Trinity Stones, which would cause a magnetic field to crush them to death in ninety minutes unless the fabled Lost Stars of Nallastia could be found and used to counteract their power. Swan, Kenobi, Skywalker, and Klay Firewell hurriedly joined Quenelle in her shuttle, which Skywalker piloted to the Cavern of Screaming Skulls. When they disembarked in front of the cavern, a giant spider appeared and fired silky filaments at the party. Swan dove in front of Firewell to protect him, but they both ended up ensnared in the web. A jolt of electricity fired through the filaments rendered them both unconscious, and Skywalker ferried them back to the fortress after Quenelle killed the spider with a vibroblade. Kenobi and Quenelle were able to recover the Lost Stars and save the zoologists, but Swan, after waking up, yet sensed that something was amiss in the Fondor system. After the Firewells departed for their homeworld of Corulag, Kenobi and a recovered Swan joined Quenelle and Calvaria at a celebratory feast while Skywalker rested. During the dinner, mother and daughter both declared their intentions to marry a confused Kenobi.

The Princess and the Margravine quarreled, and the latter pointed out that her daughter was already reluctantly betrothed to Prince Alto of Nallastia's Raptor Clan. Kenobi insisted that his life was one dedicated to the Jedi, and Swan came to his rescue by explaining that only one recent Jedi, Ki-Adi-Mundi, had been permitted to marry due to a low birth rate on his homeworld. Neither Calvaria nor Quenelle were swayed, and they agreed to a duel in one hour before both storming out of the dining room. A befuddled Kenobi sent Swan to wake up his Padawan while he went to the fortress's landing field—their reinforcements had arrived. An anxious Skywalker bombarded Swan with questions about dreams, eventually breaking through her insistence that he seek wisdom from his Master instead and prompting her to describe what she saw whenever she meditated. They then joined Kenobi at the landing field, where Masters Mace Windu and Kit Fisto disembarked from their Republic cruiser and revealed that they too had sensed darkness in the Fondor system. Windu appealed to Quenelle to let go of her desire to marry Kenobi, but their discussion was interrupted by the discovery of a letter from Calvaria: she did not love Kenobi and had only hoped to distract her mother, allowing her to run away and marry the Fondorian mechanic Rench, her true love. A beacon on the shuttle Calvaria had stolen homed in on Fondor Spaceport. When Quenelle contacted her daughter there, she learned that the spaceport had been taken over by a group called the Droid Control Army, who would issue demands in one hour. Swan, Windu, Fisto, and Quenelle decided to try to thwart them before that hour had passed, while Kenobi and Skywalker remained behind in case the takeover was a ruse. Swan and Fisto prepared the Republic cruiser while Windu and Quenelle retrieved the Lost Stars of Nallastia; with the artifacts in their possession, the group departed. The Stars' power allowed them to break through the spaceport's deflector shields; after they landed in a hangar, Windu destroyed a modified GNK power droid, whose upper casing contained a repeating blaster. Due to the spaceport's sheer size, the group split up in an effort to find Calvaria and any other potential hostages. Swan made her way through the complex, eventually riding a turbolift into a hangar and finding both Fisto and Windu, as well as Rench and Calvaria, the latter of whom was clutched in the limbs of a modified FX-series medical assistant droid. Windu ordered Swan and Fisto to lower their weapons, but when the droid dragged Calvaria out of the hangar, Windu followed and rescued her. The Jedi remained unaware that the army had belonged to Groodo, who had actually planned to send the spaceport crashing down into important factories on Fondor's surface after the hour had passed. However, the presence of the Jedi and the destruction of his army had sent the Hutt fleeing. The Jedi returned Calvaria and Rench—who was in fact Prince Alto himself—to Nallastia and took a much-needed rest.

Throughout the mission to Fondor, Swan learned much from Kenobi and Skywalker. Her experience made her an obvious choice for other peace missions, and in 22 BBY, she and fellow Knights Empatojayos Brand and Chellemi Chuovvick embarked on one to the Sepan system. Their task was to negotiate the cessation of hostilities between the residents of two neighboring planets, Ripoblus and Dimok, after decades of conflict between the two enemies. The three Jedi were able to bring the civil war to a month-long standstill, but upon their return to Coruscant, the fighting flared up again.

Entering the Clone Wars
In 22 BBY, the Separatist Crisis brought the Republic to its knees. Several thousand star systems seceded from the Republic, many of them joining the Confederacy of Independent Systems, led by the former Jedi Master Count Dooku. When Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered that the Confederacy was building a battle droid army on Geonosis, he was taken captive along with Skywalker and Senator Padmé Amidala of Naboo. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine was given emergency powers by the Galactic Senate, and he commissioned a Grand Army of the Republic. As Jedi Master Yoda went to Kamino to recruit an army of clone troopers that Kenobi had earlier discovered the Kaminoans had been secretly building for the Republic, Master Windu brought a Jedi strike team to Geonosis, Swan among them. As Kenobi, Skywalker, and Amidala stood in Geonosis's Petranaki arena surrounded by Separatist battle droids, the Jedi strike team infiltrated the arena and came to their aid, igniting their lightsabers and rushing at the droids.

Swan, who had largely rejected unarmed combat by this point, charged into battle with her lightsaber drawn. All of her combat training came into play as she struggled to resist the barrage of battle droid laserfire. Many Jedi fell to the overwhelming force of rapidly-firing droids, and Swan joined a survivor's circle in the center of the arena as the droids ceased firing and Count Dooku, observing the melee from above, called on the Jedi to surrender. Windu refused, and as the Jedi again raised their lightsabers, the clone army arrived, landing in and outside of the arena in LAAT gunships. The surviving Jedi boarded the ships, and a battle ensued between Republic and Separatist forces, initiating the Clone Wars. Swan and the other survivors joined the clones in sending Separatist forces fleeing from the planet.

Like many other Jedi, Swan became a general in the Republic's army, leading clone forces into battle against the Separatists. Six months after Geonosis, she led Republic forces against battle droids under the command of the Separatist commander Baron Edi Wedd on Amaltanna. All of the clones under Swan's command were killed while every battle droid was simultaneously destroyed in the process. As the lone survivor of the battle, Swan entered Wedd's fortress and sought out the Baron. Via comlinks and holocameras, Wedd followed Swan's every move and repeatedly taunted her, claiming that she could not reach his command chamber. During her search, Swan discovered corpses of native Amaltannans that had attempted to reach Wedd in the past. Wedd dispatched small spider droids and a pair of B2 super battle droids to halt Swan's progress, but the Jedi Knight swiftly destroyed them all. She also destroyed the fortress' communications array before arriving at the Baron's command chamber. Amidst more of Wedd's taunting, Swan plunged her lightsaber into the chamber door's control panel, short-circuiting the door-opening mechanism. Swan then left the fortress, abandoning Wedd to die in an inescapable tomb. Before the year's end, Swan was in charge of a contingent of clone troopers on a snowy planet. When they left their barracks and boarded an LAAT to confront Separatist droids, Swan herded the final stragglers aboard, and was reassured by the final entrant, Sergeant CT-7719, that he had nowhere better to be.

In 21 BBY, Swan and Jedi Master Ki-Adi-Mundi led Republic forces against the Confederacy on Aargonar. When Skywalker, Jedi General A'Sharad Hett, and Hett's Padawan Bhat Jul became trapped behind enemy lines, Swan lost contact with them, and Hett's troops began to give ground to the enemy. As the Republic base was overrun by battle droids, Mundi ordered Swan to hold the location until the clone troopers under his command finished gathering at nearby Vondar Canyon. A budding sandstorm prevented them from fleeing the planet, and they planned to mount a counterattack from the canyon after the storm lifted. In order to prevent the Separatists from seizing Republic supplies, Mundi further ordered Swan to disable whatever they could not take with them. The two Generals ignited their lightsabers and joined their clones in making a stand at the base. After holding it for a brief period of time, their forces retreated to the canyon, and Swan discovered that the ion-charged sandstorm had disabled the tracking, targeting, and communication systems of their equipment. Both Jedi boarded LAAT gunships and continued the fight from the air, hoping to get a better view of how the battle was proceeding. The onslaught of battle droids and IG-227 Hailfire-class droid tanks prompted Swan to order her troops to fall back, but her instructions were preempted by the arrival of Skywalker and Hett in a Gunship Bomber Enhanced closely pursued by a Gouka dragon. Their arrival shifted the tide of the battle, and the broken lines of the Confederate troops fell to the more focused Republic forces.

In 19 BBY, after three years of continuous warfare, the Separatists launched a strike at Coruscant. General Grievous, the Supreme Commander of the Confederacy's Droid Armies, brought the Confederate Navy into the system and began loosing warships against both military and civilian targets. His vulture droids and tri-fighters hammered themselves against the planet's defenses and disrupted traffic lanes; Swan, Jedi Masters Saesee Tiin, Agen Kolar, and several other Jedi piloted Jedi interceptors against the attacking Separatist ships. During the battle, Grievous kidnapped Supreme Chancellor Palpatine and brought the Republic's leader aboard his flagship, the Invisible Hand. Kenobi and Skywalker, now respectively a Jedi Master and a Jedi Knight, infiltrated the warship and rescued Palpatine, killing Count Dooku and forcing Grievous and his fleet to flee in the process. Over the next few days, Swan left Coruscant and transferred to a Republic medstation.

Jedi Renaissance
While Swan was at the medstation tending to wounded soldiers, Chancellor Palpatine revealed himself to Skywalker as Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith,