Xara

Xara is one of the main characters in the Elsaverse, featuring in several titles. She is a short, blind Elite Guard sent to Sangrive to bring Morland Reyes and Crow to their original world's justice; to accomplish her mission, she recruits a small group of people with powers called Xara's Angels. Although her fighting skills are legendary and she is able to enter "The Flow", a hyper-sensorial state that allows her to overcharge her senses and react quicker to stimulus, Xara says that she hasn't any power herself.

Xara is one of the alternative love interests that players can pursue in Saving Chloe (2018) non-canon paths; however, by the end of her last canon appearance, in Demon Guard (2019), she is starting to develop some romantic feelings towards Sa'al, a Bary'an female she meets just after getting back to her world.

Training and Betrayal
Born as a Terran, the human-looking race in the parallel universe, Xara was subjected to intensive and extreme training since she was only 3 years old, with a clear goal in mind: making her a top Elite Guard, a member of the most famous and feared military squad in the galaxy, the Terran Elite Corps. Xara trained underwater, while on fire, while being electrocuted, naked in blizzard conditions, and under assault from screaming banshees; she worked extensively with combat animals, and learned all the tactical info needed to deal with all kinds of enemies, from any species known. Xara is lethal with all of the Terran Weaponry such as swords, axes, and hammers, as well as with other non-standard weapons, although her favorite one is the Elite Guard spear. She is also highly proficient in flying all kinds of spaceships, which she can do even blind, as a significant percentage of her combat training was done in the dark, or in a blindfold, or in the fog. Xara is extremely strong, fast, resistant, and flexible. And, when needed, she can just step into The Flow: a hyper-sensorial state in which time seems to slow down and her senses go into overdrive, allowing her to gather even the tiniest detail of her surroundings to anticipate threats, react accordingly, and beat her opponents.

Emotions and diplomacy were never part of this training, though, and even fraternization was strictly forbidden in her elite squad: sex never was an act of intimacy, but just something they did to burn off nervous battle energy; this approach may have something to do with Xara's preference for extreme, rough sex. However, the most important consequence of this unbalanced training is that Xara is not able to properly identify and share, or even understand, her own feelings, and she has also a hard time identifying and understanding others': she's just a deadly killing machine programmed to follow orders and stay loyal to her command. For this reason, she wasn't even interested in hearing what a Dream Master that violated their king's dreams, Troi, had learned about Morland's actual plans of betraying his own people, as it's seen in Dream Master (2017). During that brief visit to this universe, though, she didn't duly note how time moved faster there than in their original realm; later on, this would make her new mission a bit harder to accomplish.

But this blind loyalty came to an end some time later, after all the Elite Corps members bar her perished in an ambush during the war against the Drae. When Xara reported back at Morland's command ship, she entered the bridge unarmed and, fully trusting in her king, lowered her defenses without realizing the hidden presence of his assassin, Crow. Instead of congratulating Xara for being alive and willing to keep protecting him, Morland scolded her, and Xara finally opened her eyes, right before being physically blinded: following Morland's orders, Crow ran her through with a dagger and then ripped Xara's eyes with her claws. Morland and Crow used the confusion to escape the ship and complete their treason, leaving Xara badly hurt. Still, Terran's Navy leader, Axis, reprimanded her for letting them escape and ordered a Dream Master to impose a punishment dream on Xara, forcing her to relive different versions of that failure every night, until she brings Morland to justice. Once Xara was physically fit enough, she was sent through a portal to Sangrive, where she quickly realized that the time had passed way faster than in their homeworld, and Morland has actually had 30 years to establish himself as a powerful and influential person in the city thanks to his foreshadowing power.

Sangrive Period
Alone in an unknown world with different rules and ways, and with a difficult mission that felt even harder due to the punishment dream that leaves her angry and frustrated night after night, Xara began to slowly make her way toward her goal. Fortunately for her, the punishment dream acts as bait for any potential Dream Masters out there, and it happened that, approximately by the time she got to Sangrive, Morland was trying to get his hands on the "Morpheus", a magical book of dreams that was brought to this world by Troi. To help her in her search, Morland's daughter, Chloe, was given a page from one of the book's incomplete copies, and she learned enough dream spells to be lured by Xara's dream. That's how the two of them met; although Chloe never revealed her actual identity, she agreed to act as a mole within her father's organization, feeding Xara with the limited info she was given. After Elsa forbade Chloe to use her knowledge about dream spells, Xara and Chloe kept communicating online; eventually, Xara met Elsa in her dreams too, as the bookstore owner was becoming a Dream Master herself after finally reading the "Morpheus" she was guarding.

While trying to stop Morland, Xara had to find a way to make ends meet in Sangrive. Thanks to her outstanding fighting skills despite her blindness, she got hired as a martial arts instructor in a local gym whose owner, Jan van Bruyn, was also a victim of Morland's manipulations and even offered her a small office to stay for free - much to Xara's annoyance, as she doesn't know the real reason behind this free rent and thought he was just taking pity of her. Probably in that same gym, Xara met Miranda, a woman with an unnatural ability to find solutions to the problems she faces, who agreed to help Xara occasionally, as she was also hurt by Morland's activities and was trying to oppose him on her own. Miranda's role was to use the mole's info to tell Xara what was Morland probably trying to achieve, and, in one of those exchanges, they realized that the singer Jessica Springfield was going to be targeted, as she has a power too. Xara's hastily approached Jessica and things went pretty poorly, but Miranda managed to protect the singer, and Jessica contributed greatly to minimizing the impact of the bombing Morland was planning. Eventually, Jessica agreed to help Xara too by calming her potential recruits, such as Theresa; however, this small group of heroines, called Xara's Angels by Jan, was not enough to take Morland down, especially after their mole fell in disgrace precisely because they were able to protect Jessica.

After a whole life following orders, Xara was actually terrified by the idea of having to lead, as her intensive training never prepared her for that role and she totally lacked the social skills needed to even understand some basic human interactions. Miranda's boyfriend, Lucas, offered to teach her some lessons in order to be a bit easier to follow, but she didn't have enough time to make some real progress. Xara never told her group about her real origins, or their powers', and this lack of trust almost drift the whole group apart when they managed to take Paul on board. The plan was for him to get in touch with his former girlfriend, Chloe, and try to get some info out of her, as they weren't aware of Chloe actually being their mole in Morland's organization. But Xara didn't tell them she already knew Paul from her self-defense lessons, and then Paul's power let them know that Xara, Elsa, and Chloe had something in common (their origins in the parallel universe) that Xara just didn't want to confess. The whole group became angry at her, but Theresa could see that, at least, Xara's actual goal was indeed to stop Morland, and this calmed them down a bit.

Meanwhile, Morland had learned about Xara's presence in Sangrive, thanks to her intervention to stop an incident at Miranda's workplace: Morland was trying to get an accountant killed, but Xara happened to be there to talk to Miranda and convinced the gunman to drop his gun; Morland's son, Charles was then ordered to gather info about that blind woman that wasn't supposed to be there. This led to Crow and Charles breaking into Xara's quarters at Jan's gym and abducting her, after sedating her. Xara's Angels immediately ran to Morland's mansion to free her, and Xara took the chance to finally accomplish her mission: she defeated Crow in a sword fight and then just had to collect Morland's unconscious body, as he had been badly beaten up by Paul.

Return to Homeworld
After saying goodbye to Paul and Chloe, Xara went through the portal back to her homeworld with her prisoners; upon arriving, she slew all Draegorai that were guarding the other end of the portal, located in a space station, and then stole a ship to escape with the Tech Witch that was enslaved to keep the portal running, Sa'al. During their trip to the Terran High Command, this female Bary'an comforted Xara after her punishment dream. But, unfortunately, when Xara confronted Axis and demanded her punishment to be lifted, Axis informed her that the Dream Master who actually imposed it had just died in the war, and no one else could lift it. As the Terran war against Drae was almost lost, Axis could only plead for Xara's forgiveness and granted her a modern spaceship to travel wherever she wanted, freed from any further obligation. Devastated, Xara left the Terran High Command with Sa'al, and, for a couple of weeks, they wandered around the galaxy, with Xara trying to adjust to her new reality and wondering about what to do with her life, and Sa'al comforting her every night after her now chronic punishment. They finally arrived in Beta, an asteroid that was not aligned with either side of the war; after showing her skills and protecting Sa'al during a forced performance for Beta's rulers, Xara and Sa'al earned their respect and agreed to cooperate with them, in exchange for their mutual protection.

But, most importantly, after visiting Beta, Xara starts to realize she's bearing some odd feelings for her new partner. Sa'al's presence every time she wakes up from her punishment dream drains all the frustration and humiliation from it to the point that Xara is actually anticipating that moment in which Sa'al comes and hugs her from behind. However, her limited comprehension of emotions doesn't allow her to understand what's happening to her, or why Sa'al is doing that for her. Unleashing that person that has been kept inside of herself for all of her life seems to be Xara's next task.

Miscellaneous

 * According to a conversation with Miranda in one of the non-canon paths in Saving Chloe, Xara stayed in Sangrive for over a year; in her homeworld, only a few days passed before she was able to come back with her prisoners.


 * Although Beth Lagrange's power is quite similar to the descriptions of The Flow, Xara assures in another SC non-canon path that she has no powers, and that her ability is just a consequence of her intensive training.


 * As it's seen in Saving Chloe, Xara's cane hides a sword in it.


 * Besides Miranda and Paul, other Elsaverse characters that were trained by Xara in Sangrive are Vince and Detective Michelle Won.


 * In Royal Guard (2016), Elsa mentions she has witnessed several variations of Xara's punishment dream, watching Xara fight in spaceships, in the Nazi-occupied France, on the back of a flying giant dragon, and even on a business environment where she's a lawyer and Morland is her CEO. Demon Guard (2019), though, established the space setting as the canon for Xara's universe.


 * At some point during the development process, Tora Productions writer, Tlaero, considered creating a game with Xara as the player's character. However, her blindness was a huge hurdle for a first-person visual novel and the idea was quickly abandoned.