STATUS Alive – asylum seeker, held at the Section House for her own safety
RANK N/A – ship’s crew, not military
OCCUPATION Formerly crew of a scout vessel; currently a diplomatic asylum case
ACCESS LEVEL None – a guest of Section 18, not a member of it
AGE Unrecorded
ORIGINS Not of this world; a planet with unfamiliar stars, name given only as “Tah-eye” or “Tah-ehh”
YEARS OF SERVICE N/A
FIRST ON RECORD Session 74 – crash-landed at Garden Row, Chuza

Varan came down out of a storming sky in a scorched escape pod, elven in shape but not quite in feature – a blunt, upturned nose, faintly serrated ears, and tattooed spiral patterns with a black teardrop under one eye that she describes, flatly, as marks of slavery she cannot wipe off. She spoke almost no Common. What she had was a stolen sword and two words that needed none: they’re coming.

Her account, pieced together since: a githyanki raiding party boarded her ship hunting for something specific, tortured and killed her father and the rest of the crew, and grew fixated on this particular world partway through the interrogation rather than on their prisoners. While their attention was elsewhere she grabbed a dead commander’s silver sword and ran for a lifeboat. Whatever the githyanki actually wanted, her read on it is simple: if they turn their attention to something, they usually get it – and more of them are coming regardless of what happens to her personally.

FILE NOTES

Section 18 has kept her out of Dranathess hands so far on a technicality Brin drafted personally: diplomatic asylum, a foreign ambassador outside martial jurisdiction, papers filed before Sorcerer Kor-En’s Cobalt Rangers could argue otherwise. It has held, twice, though Kor-En has made it clear he considers the arrangement an insult rather than a formality.

The debt hasn’t gone away. A T’ai clan raiding party under Niizeg T’ai took the Kensington Klub’s patrons hostage specifically to force Varan’s surrender, sword included, and gave Section 18 until noon to comply. Varan’s own answer to that ultimatum came before anyone finished explaining it to her – she isn’t interested in being handed over as a gift, and if it comes to that, she wants a blade of her own rather than someone else’s mercy.

“I’ll not be offered to the T’ai scum like some sort of gift. If I’m going, I’m going with honour, and you’ll have the decency to give me a blade to drive into that bitch’s throat.”

Varan, on the terms of the T’ai ultimatum

STATUS: Filed under The Unknown, not for anything she’s done but for how little Section 18 actually knows about what she represents – a foreign national, a live intelligence source on an active alien threat, and quite possibly the reason that threat is now looking at Chuza at all. Case open, and escalating.