Guri is a human replica droid built as the personal assassin and enforcer of Prince Xizor, introduced in Steve Perry's Shadows of the Empire (Bantam Spectra, 1996) and appearing across the whole multimedia project — novel, Dark Horse comic and LucasArts video game.
The premise
A human replica droid is not a protocol droid in a wig. Guri is engineered to be undetectable as a machine by ordinary means, which makes her the perfect infiltrator and, more usefully for the story, means that nobody around her — including her — is entirely sure what she is. She is unambiguously the most dangerous physical presence in a book whose villain relies on chemistry and money.
Her own story
Xizor dies; Guri does not. Dark Horse's sequel miniseries Shadows of the Empire: Evolution (1998) hands the project to her, and it turns out to be about a machine trying to have her programming altered so that she can stop being an assassin — an attempt to find out whether there is anything underneath the function. It is a better and stranger book than its parent.
Continuity note
Guri is Legends throughout. Nothing from the Shadows of the Empire project was carried into current canon, and no human replica droid of her kind has appeared since the 2014 reset. She remains one of the strongest arguments for reading the Bantam and Dark Horse era on its own terms rather than as a discarded draft.
