| The only thing meaner than a bounty hunter is a bounty hunter with a personal grudge, and Dengar has long held one for Han Solo. A successful human swoop jockey on the professional circuit as a young man, he challenged Solo-a hot-rodder on the private swoop circuit-to a race across the spiky crystal swamps of Agrilat. Racing to the finish line, Dengar didn't see Solo's swoop bike above him, and when he pulled up he crashed into the main fin on Solo's swoop. Besides suffering severe head trauma, Dengar was tossed out of the professional league, and he blamed his fate on Solo. His obsession with evening the score with Solo led to his nickname Payback. Later, the Empire rebuilt Dengar as an unfeeling assassin, cutting away his hypothalamus and replacing it with circuitry. It used drugs to give him a flawless memory but left him susceptible to hallucinations. He was a professional Imperial assassin until asked to kill the holy children of Asrat. His refusal meant retirement from Imperial service. Dengar became a freelance bounty hunter when he saw the bounty on Solo posted by Jabba the Hutt. He, Boba Fett, and several other trackers captured Solo along with Chewbacca and Luke Skywalker, but Skywalker used the Force to engineer their escape from Ord Mantell. Shortly after that, Dengar joined Fett and four others in the service of Darth Vader, but Fett beat him to the prize-the Millennium Falcon and its crew. Dengar had other run-ins with top Alliance officials and with crime lord Jabba the Hutt, whom he once tried to kill. He met the dancing girl Manaroo while on an assignment on the planet Aruza and rescued her several times, the last after she had been forced to become one of Jabba's dancing girls. Manaroo, a technological empath, was able to partly restore Dengar's emotions through the use of a thought-sharing device called the Attanni. Dengar rescued a half-dead Boba Fett from near the Sarlacc's Pit of Carkoon and nursed him back to health in time for Fett to be best man at the wedding of Dengar and Manaroo. Six years later, he and Fett almost captured Han Solo on Nar Shadda but failed again.
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