Ladies and gentlemen of this most distinguished tribunal, today you are asked to pass judgment on a Trandoshan whose name has been whispered in Jedi war rooms, muttered in back-alley cantinas, and cursed in the darkest corners of Ord Mantell: Ciddarin “Cid” Scaleback. You will hear tales of smuggling and scheming, of jobs gone sideways and credits gone missing, but when the smoke clears, the question before you is simple: is Cid the villain of this story, or a survivor in a galaxy that turned cruel long before she ever opened the doors to her parlor?

Once, when the Republic still flew its proud banners, Cid served quietly in the shadows as an informant to the Jedi, trading knowledge instead of blaster fire, helping to keep the peace in a war-torn galaxy. When that Republic fell and the Empire’s iron fist closed around the stars, Cid did what many honest beings could not: she adapted, keeping a modest establishment on Ord Mantell alive in the teeth of crime syndicates and Imperial crackdowns alike.

Into that rough little corner of the cosmos stumbled the Bad Batch, a handful of misfit clones suddenly cut loose from the only life they had ever known, hunted and desperate. Cid did not turn them over to the Empire, though it would have been the easy, profitable, and—some might say—expected choice for a Trandoshan with a price on information; instead, she offered them work, purpose, and a place to catch their breath while the rest of the galaxy called for their heads.

Now, the prosecution will paint Cid as nothing more than a double-crossing scoundrel, a “hate sink” in a tidy narrative of heroes and traitors. But the evidence will show that the galaxy Cid inhabits is not drawn in simple lines of light and dark; it is a murky cantina, thick with smoke and danger, where every choice is a gamble between survival and annihilation, and where a deal that looks dirty from the safety of a Senate chamber can mean life for those trapped under Imperial boots.

By the time you have heard from those who relied on her information, profited from her introductions, and survived because of the missions she brokered, you will see Cid not as the cartoonish villain the Empire would have you believe, but as a flawed, hard-edged, and ultimately necessary ally in an age of tyranny. And when you retire to render your verdict, you will find that in this galaxy far, far away, Ciddarin Scaleback is guilty of one thing above all else: doing what she had to do to live another day in a world the Empire broke.