Spoken like a true princess.

It would be startling, if anyone were watching. One moment, the empress is leaving the banquet hall in a poorly-hidden bad temper, and the next, a dark-haired aide is suddenly by her side as they step through the archway and continue down the corridor.

Plourr glances over her shoulder, but no one at the table appears to have been looking.

The corridor--walls steely blue, and floors a dark gray shining marble--is simple and empty, but for a guard who turns the corner and bows his head respectfully as he passes. Plourr tips her head in return, and she looks back again as they round the corner. No one appears to be staring or coming after.

Her evil plan is working?

"Welcome to Eiattu."

"This is painless, Princess," says the little doctor, hand on her hip. "I don't even need to touch you. Quit your complaining and roll up your tunic."

Half-reclining in the examination room, Plourr scowls up at the white-haired, ageless woman. "It's Empress," she complains, but she pushes her tunic up above her belly and leans back on her elbows.

"I delivered you twenty-two years ago," says Doctor Wilen matter-of-factly, flicking a switch on the machine beside the table. "You will always be a princess to me, Princess."

Plourr rolls her eyes but she falls silent and lets the doctor get to work, checking her blood pressure and her heart rate, among other things. She ignores the bustling woman and glances at Rial.

Plourr is in a tree.

It's not quite as strange as it might originally sound; she and Rial make a point of taking at least a day to themselves per week, and she tends to hightail it outside. The courtyard is small and overgrown, forgotten long ago; wild and beautiful, flowers spreading across all. The tree is low and sturdy and Plourr is sprawled across a heavy branch, her back against the trunk and one leg dangling, her foot nearly touching the ground. The tree is just under the overhang that leads into the 'yard, and, eyes closed against a ferocious headache, she listens to the rain pound the leaves, the soil, the overgrown pathways.

She always did love Eiattu's rainy season. She likes it even more, now. She doesn't look out across the plains and wish that she were riding; not in this mess.

Flopped facefirst into the pillows, blankets hauled up nearly over her head, Plourr hasn't moved in a while. These days, this means that she is asleep.

Tonight, however, that is not the case.

She has been silent and still for some time when she cracks an eyelid and sees that the light is still on. She hits out in Rial's general direction. "Rial," she mumbles into the pillow. "Give it a rest. Go to bed."

History:
Plourr was at the battle of Endor where she was a mechanic on the Mon Calamari flagship Home One. Even though the Alliance won, it suffered tremendous losses in starfighter pilots and Plourr's natural talent was discovered as the search for new pilot candidates went on. Despite her flying ability, no commander wanted to take her and her attitude on until Captain Wedge Antilles recognized her as an excellent pilot and recuited her into Rogue Squadron.

She was born Princess Isplourrdacartha Estillo of Eiattu, who had to flee her home planet as a child after a coup d'etat was staged and her entire family was executed by nobles. Much of her rough exterior is meant to hide her insecurities and the wounds left by being the only survivor of the massacre; by hearing her father and two sisters tortured and murdered, and by being forced to kill her traitorous younger brother in order to escape. She doesn't talk about it much. Plourr was raised by a variety of technicians in space garages across the galaxy, where she learned both her piloting skills and her infamous zeal for mechanics treating her X-wing just right.

Millirific!:
Since entering Milliways, she has returned to Eiattu, where she left the Rogues to reclaim the throne, and has chafed under the responsibilities, stresses, and constraints of being a princess and ruling a planet. She matured some, astonishingly enough, and married Count Rial Pernon, who she was betrothed to as a very young child. The marriage started off rocky and only happened out of Plourr's sense of duty, but everything slowly changed. She bounced back and forth between Rogue Squadron and Eiattu for a time, but she resigned her commission as a lieutenant in the New Republic Starfighter Command, and is a full-time planetary ruler.

Second civil war of Eiattu IV:
The throne engaged in a bloody civil war with Eiattu's nobles. In fact, reports of Rial's death (greatly exaggerated) in a bomb set by the Priamsta were what brought her home in the first place. The war was ugly and prolonged over several months, and after the flattening of Nental and scores of other cities and villages, the throne received a break and smashed the backbone of the resistance. In a last-ditch attempt to seize control of the planet, the Priamsta kidnapped the princess.

The good count received warning of it, but it still hurt like hell to receive the nobles' demands, while at the same time, in the jungles, the princess was rebuffing every chance given her to acquiesce to those same demands. Rial made a demand in response, but it hurt more than it helped. He did everything he could, down to giving potential solutions that the princess would hate, but in the end, everything came down to the princess herself (even if afterward, she would never admit to needing rescuing).

Life took its time returning to normal, after that. Or as close to normal as things come for Plourr and Rial, anyway (it includes purple crumple-horned snorkacks, thak races, and lots of charters, dinners, and politics). They were coronated and officially took the throne several months later.

These days, her title is Empress Isplourrdacartha Imarco Estillo, but really.

Call her Plourr.

In mid-February '07, Plourr found out that she was pregnant. Nobody died. (Yet.) She had a baby in November '07; Princess Ianna Estillo-Pernon is small, redheaded, very loud, and charming the pants off of people wherever she goes.

Notes:
Plourr comes into the Bar past the last bit of canon that ever mentions her, Mandatory Retirement. That means, you guessed it, we're in uncharted waters, folks.

Note on PB's:
Icons are of Plourr from the comics, as well as of Mariska Hargitay, Maureen O'Hara, and Eve Salvail. Her face looks most like Hargitay's, but she is definitely not a dead ringer for any of the real women.

The private hall outside the royal apartments is quiet now; the warm, faded red walls and shining tile floors tell no secrets. The two guards dressed in charcoal and purple uniform, standing uneasily outside of the door, however, are a different story. For one thing, there only ought to be one of them. For another --

Lelian and Marama stand in close conference. His arms are crossed over his chest, and her hands are twisting in front of her. Every so often, one of them glances down the hall or starts to bring a commlink to his or her mouth, but one guard always halts the other. Neither of them has produced a weapon, but both look deeply troubled and out of their element.

"Do you think we should call--" asks anxious Marama for the fifteenth time, ginger hair piled high, but Lelian only shakes his head and begins to pace.

Chin in her hands (both hands; it's a thing that she thinks bears repeating), Princess Isplourrdacartha Estillo glowers down at the open datapad and stack of rifled-through flimsi sheets on her desk. The night sky of Eiattu is beautiful behind her, stars glittering in the black sky, the outskirts of the city bright and cheerful, but Plourr is not bright or cheerful, nor is she glittery.

Absently sticking one hand through the holo representation of Eiattu IV revolving on the edge of her desk, its princess looks about as happy as the stuffy portraits of her stuffy ancestors hanging on the office walls.

Plourr is thoroughly sick of floating in pink goo. There is bacta, she thinks, trapped in her sinuses. She's just thankful that she was unconscious for the first few days. As it is, after four days with nothing to do but float, heal, sleep, and stare at the tubes running in and out of herself, she is going out of her mind. Rial visits, though, and that helps make it bearable; he talks to her even if she can't hear a word she's saying. For the first few days, when she's in and out of consciousness, she only has one memory, of him laughing as he says something. When she's more with it, they carry on a few conversations, Rial with gestures and inaudible words, Plourr with a range of facial expressions that is fairly impressive considering that the breathing apparatus is covering most of her face.

Still, she is going mad with boredom. So when the tech appears and points upward, and she hears someone pulling the top off of the tank, she is kicking upward even before she's told to.

A shower, a robe, some new bandages, and a whole lot of mouthwash later, she begins to feel halfway human again. She tests her body, her muscles, as the techs usher her around. Her arm is in a combination cast-sling--the cast is a noxious, horrible shade of bright green. somebody thinks they're really funny--and her right shoulder--which had had a low-set vibroblade taken to it--wrapped up in bandages. Her ribs are wrapped, too, and they're still aching; enough that she doesn't complain too much when the staff insist on the repulsorchair. Her knee is in a brace but she's not too concerned about that one; it's an old injury that tends to recur if she twists her knee. Her face, from what she can tell, is largely healed; they've taped up a few cuts on her fast left by shrapnel or nobles' rings and the majority of the swelling and bruising has gone down, leaving her eyes bright and clear.

When she's ushered into the hall outside the private medbay room, Plourr talks the tech into letting her get out of the chair and take the last few steps by herself.

"A few hours, Princess," the tech reminds her, removing the chair. "Then you've got to go back in."

"Yeah, yeah," she says impatiently, and--with one hand on the doorway for balance--she steps through the door.