<div class="floatleft">(https://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/e/e3/BronKonnar.jpg)</div>"Detest?"Konnar rolls that word slowly off his tongue and seems to think about it. He slowly nods. "Yes, I guess you could say that. It's a nice word to describe it."<br/><br/>That said, he tells you a bit more about his past, and the past of Demawand and how things have changed under the Empire.<br/><br/>Before the Empire came, Demawand was an independent planet. There wasn't much going there but farming and things were peaceful. Demawand had only a small militia force equipped with a dozen old Headhunter fighters for anti-piracy patrols, but they weren't used much, as most pirates don't have much interest in agricultural produce.<br/><br/>Turns out Konnar had just finished his training with the militia when the Empire came. Not as a fighter pilot or soldier, but as a starfighter mechanic. (That's where he got the basics for the job he now has, i.e. repairing farming machinery and landspeeders.)<br/><br/>The Empire disbanded the militia, annexed a lot of land and gave it to offworld agriculture companies that produced exclusively for the Empire, so a lot of the locals either lost their farms or had them reduced in size. There were some protests and a few acts of sabotage, but Demawand never had much of a strong government or some leader who could unite the disgruntled farmers into any organized force. Over time the locals either gave up their farms because the smaller farms couldn't make enough profit, sold their farms to the big businesses and either left the planet or worked for the large companies instead of working their own fields.<br/><br/>So on Demawand the oppression the Empire brought wasn't so much military as it was economic, in large parts executed by big business, allowing the Empire to run things with a pretty small force.<br/><br/>At least that's the story as far as the human population goes. Demawand also always had a pretty large Ithorian population, making up maybe 20% of the 2 million inhabitants of Demawand. They roamed around the continent in large "herd ships" (large repulsor platforms). While they didn't settle down in the same way the humans did, there was little conflict about land, as the Ithorians are gifted botanists and agriculturalists. They could make use of land that the humans found unprofitable, and Ithorian specialists were a welcome addition to any human farm,<br/><br/>When the Empire – and big business – came to Demawand, there were some clashes between the corporate guards and the Ithorians, as the corporations banned the herd ships from what was now their land.<br/><br/>From that on, the Empire restricted the Ihtorian herds to a relatively small and barren part of the continent, put them in a reservation "for their own protection from troublemakers", as the official reason went. The few Ithorians you'll find outside the reservation are tolerated, as long as they work for the companies that pretty much run the planet by now, but they are forbidden to rejoin their people in the reservation and are not allowed to congregate in groups of more than three at any time.<br/><br/>How things in the reservation really are is not really known, but rumor has it that at least a quarter of the original Ithorian population has starved over the years, as even their skills aren't good enough to feed the whole population from the land they have been given.<br/><br/>So yeah, Konnar sees some reason to detest the Empire.