| Byl Laprovik began his career in the Rebellion as a grass-roots malcontent, displaced by Imperial policies and angry at the swathe of oppression they inflicted upon many worlds, including Coruscant. Hurling rocks and makeshift firebombs at Imperial patrols didn't accomplish anything to assuage his anger. He pooled together money to leave Imperial Center, finding a few contacts to direct him to a Rebel training camp on Dantooine, where he first started learning the tools of the trade in violent resistance. He learned to shoot his first repeating blaster, how to build improvised explosives, and how to fight as a guerrilla, in an asymmetric way. Even as the Rebel forces grew and became more organized, he never forgot those first lessons.
He joined the fray at the Battle of Hoth, fighting on the ground to buy time to evacuate Echo base. During the fighting, he, and thirty two other Rebel soldiers were separated from the others, and were left behind on Hoth in the wake of the Imperial invasion. Surviving by any means necessary, the hold-outs dug emergency shelters, pilfered Imperial supplies, and ambushed any scouts that neared their hiding place. Rumors abounded that the hold-outs fought viciously beyond the pale, torturing and executing Imperials unlucky enough to not be killed in their initial attacks. Eventually, the Empire withdrew from Hoth as there was no real incentive to hold the planet, and Rebel search parties picked up the grizzled survivors. From that point on, Byl officially tendered his notice in the Army, looking for a new calling. Alliance Intelligence was just what he was looking for.
As an early field agent, Laprovik worked with elements of the Bothan Spynet, comfortable in the field and able to make contacts with just the right people and extract exactly what was needed. The Bothans recommended him when Alliance command was looking for a small force multiplier they could use to incite mass uprisings in the Imperials' backyard. Phoenix Cell was derived for that purpose officially. Under Laprovik, it became much, much more. Alliance command attached Captain Eluna Thals to Laprovik's team, after successful developments between their Project Decoy team and Simonelle and Massad Thrumble's research led to the Human Replica Droid's creation.
Not simply content to foster support for native guerrilla forces and teach peasants how to build homemade bombs, Byl began funding his cells of insurgents with drug money. He achieved a loose network of soft power over local militias and warlords, and was able to use this force to enable kidnappings, assassinations, bombings, and to interweave a series of local uprisings into a nebulous wave of terrorism throughout the Empire. Where possible, he encouraged fundamentalism and any force magnifiers among the local populations, which metastacized into religious jihads, racial wars, and whatever was most convenient to turn the populations of worlds against the Empire as violently as possible.
None of this, of course, would mesh with his handlers in Alliance Intelligence or higher up, so often Byl spent as much keeping his activities hidden from his friends as he did his enemies. Officially, he was still simply forming insurgent groups to fight the Empire in small conflicts. Unofficially, he was bringing the war to the Empire in every dirty, underhanded, and illegal way possible. His hatred of the Empire had allowed him to write off the ends as justifying the means, and after his grueling ordeal on Hoth, he felt next to nothing at whatever collateral damage he might cause to arrive at his desired outcome.
Laprovik's most ambitious plot involved inducing the cooperation of Lilaena DeVille to attempt an assassination on the Imperial Tiberius Anar. The plot ultimately failed, but the sheer violence and proximity of the attempt would keep the Imperial high command second-guessing itself and its assumption of security, even within Imperial Center.
The agent's undoing came about as he began to suspect that the Rebel Alliance was somehow compromised by a Sith Lord. He confronted Dan the Man and Loklorien s'Ilancy on Schwartzweld certain that the enemy in their midst was Dan. s'Ilancy did not believe him, and incapacitated him in a fight. Only then was it revealed that Dan was in reality Darth Decepis, the Dark Lord of the Sith. The secret at last out, Decepis ordered s'Ilancy to kill Byl. She refused, but instead wiped his mind blank of his identity, and any recollection of what happened. With that, Laprovik was put back on his ship, and launched to space, and away from the two Sith conspirators.
Byl eventually made it to Bespin after making contact with James Prent, whom he had met on the Dauntless some time before. She helped him in his state of amnesia, and told him his name again. Though still largely ignorant of his past and actions, he began to understand that he was some sort of agent within the Rebel Alliance, but for matters of self preservation, felt it might be too dangerous to openly return to the Rebels until he figured out more. Before that could happen, however, the Inquisitorate attacked Bespin, forcing Byl and James to flee to a planet called Copperline. Little did they realize that Rebel Agents were following them too, as Eluna Thals and Jane Starborn investigated his mysterious disappearance.
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