| Life did not begin well for Kor à Zalth. From birth, he was branded one of the Yrak Pootzck (meaning: impure parentage and cowardly ways) - a name given to the members of Ubese species who were relocated from their homeworld, by the Republic, to colony systems such as Ubertica. Viewed by the so-called 'true Ubese' as weaklings, the residents of Ubertica grew up with two chips on their shoulder: the first towards the Republic, for near-enough destroying their homeworld, and the second towards the 'true' Ubese for casting them out as pariahs. Like all descendents of the Yrak Pootzck, Kor grew up with the understanding that he - merely through the act of living - had failed to live up to the past-glories of his ancestors. The most he and his family could hope for were to eke out an existence as mercenaries and enforcers, hoping that they could escape the attention of the bloody-thirsty 'true' Ubese.
At the advent of the Clone Wars, Kor and his parents - still nursing a grudge against the Republic - threw their lot in with the Separatists. They moved to the world of Atraken where they worked as hired-hands on a Separatist mining operations. Twenty-two years before the Battle of Yavin, the Clone Wars came to Atraken and, unwilling to release their control over the planet and its resources, the Separtists released a biochemical plague onto the world, killing 90% of the population and forcing the remaining 10% to flee, either to the stars - or underground.
Having lost his mother to the plague, Kor - a boy of nine years old - retreated beneath the surface of Atraken with his father and a band of survivors. The network of mines beneath the planets surface was extensive and the survivors were able, for a time, to navigate their way from supply outpost to supply outpost, picking at whatever rations were left untainted by the plague. It wasn't long before Kor's father perished too and, in time, Kor was left alone with only one of the miners, a man who took a shine to the boy if only because he was small and nimble enough to explore where a weathered old miner could not. It was in these mines that Kor first felt the Dark Side, though he did not know it at the time.
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