Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Private Bootup Sequence

The life of a datashard was always one of the more interesting stories. When compared to most other things that were lost when people moved it was more often than not one of the most looked over items on whichever checklist the occupants at the time had in their minds. Sometimes they were lost in some forgotten corner that never got cleaned out, and sometimes between the cushions of a couch left behind due to space concerns, but whatever the reason had been, that was not the case for this particular datashard.

A clean up crew had arrived at the scene of a particularly gruesome massacre. Crimson flecks and dried up pools of blood were scattered across the walls and floors. Given the stench it had been evident that this very room had gone untouched for at least a few days. Shock and horror lingered in the eyes of the victims that had violently flatlined during whatever event had transpired here. As the days passed and more and more ‘evidence’ was lost to the solar winds, the crew would slowly find more and more items that they could sneak with them and peddle off for a nifty bonus on the side. One such item was a very tiny shard in a very easily overlooked corner of the room. At first it had been stuck in a form of helmet-looking device, but once detached was easily pocketed.

In either a stroke of genius or dumb luck the cleaner had peddled this particular item off to a black market salesman figuring the shard to contain some form of information on whatever organization had been behind this slaughter. While that was very much not the case, this was the lifecycle that it went through for over a few months. From one peddler to the next, one cyberpunk to the other, attempts at deciphering the contents remained seemingly impossible.

That was, until someone finally caught the small crack in the code from which a single thread was pulled back to reveal something far bigger than anyone had expected: it was not just a memory stick, it was quite literally the imprinted memories of someone. It was by all accounts a human being in raw data form. The revelation shot like a bolt of lightning through the Coruscant underground and once the owner of the memories had been revealed, the offers began to pour in.

But not all who heard of it were interested in paying the full sum. Whether by yet another stroke of dumb luck or skill the shard would end up in the possession of one ‘Andro Fern’. Together with his friends as well as a network of underground hackers, Andro had managed to retrieve not just what they thought to be the body of their goddess but an intact copy of her memories, a complete collection of her being without any awareness or the repercussions it would have on her.

A few months passed as the assets shifted around to hide their trace...





“Subject secured aboard the Aurora. Heart rate…Stable but dropping. Dank farrik, I wasn’t made for this.” A groan rumbled from the man’s throat before he began to dig through a nearby pile of cables and electronics in a hurry. “Go to med school, become a doctor. Forget all this slicing stuff…” His voice mocked with frustration before he pulled out a wire with a triumphant grin. “And miss out on something like this? Not a chance, mother.”

“Andro, for force’s sake. You know you could just NOT say these things out loud, right?” An impatient voice called from across the room behind a screen. “Just makes you seem crazier than you actually are.”

“I could, but I ain’t gonna.” Andro called back and flashed her a grin much to the woman’s annoyance. Her eyes rolled for a moment before she set her attention on the computer screen again.

“You are sure it’s her?” A third voice chimed in. “Like, for sure sure? Body dysmorph-”

“You don’t forget your goddess’ face, Erich.” The half-crazed Andro called back and approached the blonde woman floating in the nearby tank. “I spent years trying to find her ever since she left without a word. And now here she is.”

“Make it sound like she’s your ex or something.” The woman muttered.

“I wish! That honor was all Locke’s.” The man scoffed and approached the woman’s workstation with the memory shard in hand.

“And you are sure it’s even intact?” She asked and grabbed the datachip between her index finger and thumb.

“Have some faith, Glitch.” Andro responded with a pat on her back.

“We have no reason not to.” Erich muttered. “For that kind of price they would have been suicidal not to have checked its integrity first.”

“Alright, fine.” Glitch relented and put the chip into her terminal. “And once we wake her up after the procedure, what exactly do you expect will happen?”

Andro looked over at Erich for a moment before they both looked back at Glitch without another word.

“Do not tell me you never got that far.” She groaned. “Whatever, it’s your creds down the drain.”

“Mhm, now proceed. Please.” Andro said and slowly leaned in over the terminal to look over at his pet project. “We have a god to awaken.”
 
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There were few blessings as divine as the chance to slowly drift between what was and what is. It was to understand the circumstances of your own existence and the course that had brought you to where you are. This course was one that most people would walk and one that always ended the same, and though many had tried to cheat it and adjust the speed of the flow they would all, ultimately, suffer the same fate. For life was not one to care for your better wishes. When it ended, it ended, and that was it. So it was, and so it always had been.

When cheaters tried to prosper and pull themselves out of the river to go backwards along the river to where they once were they would find that the only one they had cheated were themselves, and doubly so those who swum upriver. There was no going back, and there was no going forward. The river was exactly where it needed to be. Such was the case for all, and such was especially the case for the woman that drifted on a shard ejected from time itself against her will. The river flowed, but she remained in place. Others may have passed her by but that was to be expected.

But recent events had nudged her dormant splinter back towards the river. As the shard slowly picked up more and more speed, she found herself thrown back into a reality that did not align with where she had left off. The curtains of consciousness was rolled back, and in the wake she was left with nothing but fear and confusion.

The river stopped for no-one. To understand where in time you were was an underappreciated blessing. Few ever seemed to grasp this.





The shades of a dream turned nightmare was pulled back all too quickly as the peaceful slumber of eternity had become the sudden awakening of an undesired re-emergence. As a wide eyed set of amber irises were thrown back into life they did so with a panicked gasp. The memories of an illegitimate past began to flood the forefront of her awareness as adrenaline began to pump in heavy doses. For a second she scanned the room before she jumped into action.

“Ten-thirty-two, life support!” A panicked voice called out over the intercom. “We’re experiencing failures in engines, fuel, power. All systems critical!”

This room was different but there was no telling whether or not the people were. Using the force and immeasurable strength, the newly awoken blonde pried a pipe from the wall and held it at the ready. Steady footfalls and adrenaline pushed her towards Andro who in a bout of unexpected fear and confusion remained frozen solid in place for what he had done. This was not how it was meant to have played out, this was not how he had imagined it. She was supposed to be grateful, she was supposed to have been ecstatic to find a new lease of life, not this.

“Andro!” Glitch shrieked with a shrill hiss. “What have you done?!”

“I— I—” The man stammered. “I don’t know!”

“Calm her down! She needs to calm down, now!” Erich tried to shout over the alarms. “She will kill us, you hear?”

“Kaili, stop, plea—” Andro’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The pipe in the blonde goddess’ hands impacted against the side of his temple with a sickening crush. Blood splattered against the wall as the pipe struck true and Andro fell to the ground, limp and motionless as the others raised their hands to show their surrender.

“Andro!” Glitch exclaimed in sheer grief. “No!”

“Kaili, stop! We mean you no harm!” Erich called for the patient to stop. “You have been injured, we saved your life.”

The blonde took one step towards Glitch before her amber eyes seemed to blink in confusion. Saved her life? She had no memory of them, the job she had gone on before she woke up in this room was one she had done alone with a friend whose name she could not recall. At the sight of the maimed man on the floor. Her eyes set on the man on the ground. An uneasiness fell over her as the pipe slipped from her hand.

The apartment, the terrorists, the device…

Her throat swelled up. Memory after memory flooded her consciousness and pushed the present into the back of her mind where they had once belonged. As the swelling continued she began to gag until finally the acids of her empty stomach burst between her lips. The realization of her actions slowly dawned on her as reality faded yet again and the shock became too much to bear. Her knees fell weak, her strength gave way and in that, Kaili Talith fell to the ground unconscious.

A sigh of relief called over the intercom.

“I don’t know what you did, but whatever it did, it worked.”
 
What did ghosts dream of in uneasy slumber? Where mere mortals could see respite and safety, those who stood above could do little more but pretend to understand this state of near-death. Kaili Talith was no god and yet she was no mere mortal either, for mortals did not possess the ability to cheat death in the way that she just had. Her body was genetically the exact same as the one she left behind and the memories imprinted upon it were the very same memories that its previous host had held from childhood, right up to the incident.

It was in this state of confusion that the blonde would — if time permitted it — begin to understand the true repercussions of falling out of the river’s flow. She would see that while the world that she had left behind was one of sorrow and regret for those around her, it was only she who had yet to process it. Her former lover now thought her dead, the friends she might have once held close had all moved on with their lives. She was well and truly alone, and that — more than anything else — was a lesson that she would learn sooner rather than later.





“Is he alive?” A soft voice asked. A genuine sense of worry lingered under her words. “Will he survive?”

A silence fell over the room. Glitch refused to acknowledge the blonde woman’s presence, Erich struggled to find the right words as he looked upon his friend and the bandage wrapped around his eye socket. Not so much to help with recovery as it was to hide the grotesque gap that now existed where once there had been an eye.

“Andro is blind, because of you.” Erich muttered, his hands tied into fists that curled to push his nails into the palm of his hand. “All he wanted was to bring you back.”

“I’m so sorry.” Kaili begged, and reached out to touch Erich’s shoulder who quickly shrugged it off. “I was— Before I—”

“Do you ever shut the feth up?” Glitch snapped and stood up from her seat and approached Kaili, arms reaching out to shover her away from Andro’s bed. “Haven’t you done enough?”

“I never asked to be brought bac—” Kaili tried but was interrupted by another shove. “Glitch—”

The woman before Kaili proceeded to swing for the face with a wide swing that was quickly caught within the palm of the divine clone’s hand. A struggle ensued as Kaili fought not to let the anger inside consume her, to snap once more and cause them more pain. She wanted to take the high road and keep her nerves under wraps, but fate did not permit her.

Glitch did not relent. Her head moved back before she thrust her forehead into Kaili’s nose. The blonde reeled back with her hands under her nose to catch the blood that began to stream along her upper lip. A guttural growl emanated from her throat before, in a blink, her fingers had wrapped around the headbutting lady’s throat, lifting her into the air with a tight grip.

“I never asked to be awoken, I never asked for any of this to happen to me.” Kaili scowled as she continued to press against the other woman’s pulsating neck. “The last time I was awake—”

“Kaili! Stop!” Erich cried out to deaf ears.

“—I was attacked by strangers who sought to violate everything that I am.”

Glitch found the floor with a heavy thud. Her lungs filled with air from a desperate gasp as Kaili stared down upon her pitiful form.

“I am sorry that I have injured your friend, truly, but you should be happy that I didn’t do anything worse. Force knows I have the ability in me, but I know better than to do so.”

“I’m not a murderer.”
 
How would the force deal with the reintroduction of a new variable that technically already existed? How would it cope with the duality when one instance held two different values at the same time? The frayed threads of destiny and fate had been realigned, yet what had once been a single path with winding detours had now turned into two separate yet equally connected routes. One road began where the other ended, and yet the other road had both ended where one began and was then inserted alongside its new branch with no respect for how much it tore at the fabric of time.

Kaili’s existence was a paradox. In her state she existed but she did not, her true self was somewhere out there and yet it did not. After all, what was it that truly made a person a person? The vessel or the content? She had the memories and she had the mannerisms of herself, she even had the body even if it wasn’t the original. By most regards she was the exact same Kaili that had been stripped of her life in that shoddy apartment on Terminus.

And yet, was she?

That was a question she did not have an answer to.





The days didn’t pass with ease. A tense silence had fallen over the entire ship. Erich was the most understanding, but he had also been raised under a family that had seen Kaili as their goddess. Glitch saw a threat to not only her own life but that of her friends. An uneasy agreement to avoid each other had been struck in the aftermath from what had happened in the medbay, and the less noise Kaili made for herself the better it all seemed to be. A quiet consensus seemed to be a desire to leave her at the first starpor, but that would not have been what Andro wanted.

The man still stirred in his hospital bed, stable but unconscious. As the others slept, Kaili did her part to overlook the recovery. As the others were awake, she slumbered in uneasy dreams. The trauma of her awakening still haunted her.

But that was just the beginning. Before long, things would go from bad to worse.
 
To exhale deep and find a world beyond the border of consciousness was a gift both precious and cruel. As the mind slowly slipped from awareness to something of its own creation it was easy to catch glimpses of how your body tried to cope with the stresses that it was put through. As the days grew longer and as Kaili felt her strength and awareness come back to her in the world of the living, so did it too in the world of imagination where she resided in her sleep.

What once was a source of respite quickly became a neverending gash from which her present bled through. The calm seas of the inner mind turned into storms, uneasy scenes from the thinly-veiled boundary of perception became nightmares. With time she found that time itself would grow distorted and rest harder to come by. Recurring dreams became lucid visions, lucid visions turned into a back and forth with an individual she had no memory of.

Brown hair swayed in the astral winds as a pair of equally brown eyes peered into Kaili’s amber. One movement of her arm was mirrored by the person before her, each step forward bringing them into each other once more before the nightmare ended and Kaili awoke, confused and alone.

The force did what it could to repair the damage that she had inflicted upon it.





Nights had never been this long before. In the last week alone, sleep had become increasingly difficult to come by. Dark bags lingered under her eyes as each brush against the recent past kicked up a dust cloud of emotion that she could not hide from. It clogged her throat, burned her lungs, and suffocated her existence under a heavy layer of loss and despair. She wanted to write it off as part of mourning the death of her best friend, but there was something about the pain that made her all too aware of the fact that it wasn’t so.

Each night that she had tried for sleep had been a night when she saw the same pale version of herself in the mirror. Corrupt amber eyes peered into her soul as she leaned over the bathroom sink. Sickly pale skin and sharpened claws carved into the porcelain with a deafening crack for each second that she stared at herself. The air that she needed to breathe was kept from her as her lungs was slowly set on fire.

Night after night she awoke in pain and discomfort as the familiar look of an echani woman, her lover, held onto her with a worried look. Amea screamed in her sleep now. She struggled against something that she could not see and it was starting to affect them both.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that something had happened, but neither of them knew what it was. How could they?
 
Devotion was a poison withwhich symbols of the past, of the present, and the future were granted more weight and meaning than they deserved. Those who sought it didn’t deserve it while those who didn’t want it did. It created an illusion under which corruption could spread like water against glass, right beneath the noses of those too blind to want to see it. It was how corporations were able to exploit several planets worth of people, how politicians could make them turn a blind eye towards injustice.

But more than anything else it was the source for which religious wars were allowed to ravage and destroy the galaxy over and over again. The Gulag Plague had been a chance for the galaxy to reinvent itself. But devotion forbade it, spat upon the voices of progress as the mantle of light and shell of dark was equipped once more in the name of feuds that should have been settled during the great blackout.

As the descent into reality continued it was this that dawned upon Kaili. They weren’t thoughts that she herself had ever held, but they were thoughts that she knew she would have come to realize eventually. The dreams in which she stared at an alien mirror image of herself continued, and for each day that passed she felt her own self affected by thoughts and ideas from this outside force.

For now she kept it under wraps. There was no need to alert the others just yet.



“You fething idiot.” Glitch’s voice cracked under her laugh before she let out an errant sob. “I thought you were dead.”

“Dead certain it would work.” Andro said and gave his girlfriend a queasy grin. “She still with us?”

“You could have died, friend.” Erich finally said as he let his friend go. “Good to see you still have at least the one eye.”

“Yeah, the schutta’s staying in—”

“Do not call her that.” Andro’s usually jovial expression fell into one of complete seriousness. “She didn’t know any better.”

“Andro, she nearly had you killed!” Glitch exclaimed in frustration. “You’ve lost one of your eyes for god’s sake!”

“You raised the dead and you paid for it.” Erich groaned as he slowly leaned back and crossed his arms. “Your devotion is admirable, but—”

Erich stopped himself as he caught the way that Andro seemed to have stopped listening. Instead his focus seemed to be anchored at the doorway where dressed in an all-white stood the figurehead of the religion he followed. His jaw slackened, his lips trembling with reverence. It was to see a miracle for the first time with his very own eyes.

“Mind if I come in?” She asked and the man motioned for her to enter. The other two looked at each other with a slow shake of their heads before they left the room to grant the two some space. “I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” Andro asked as Kaili took a seat on the bed next to his.

“Well, for the… You know, the uhh…” Kaili drew a circle around her eye. “Eye.”

“Oh, that.” Andro said and glanced away in embarrassment for a moment. “I should have known better than to just give you a hard reset like that.”

The conversation continued, apologies were exchanged. Life got a little easier to deal with.
 
The burn behind her eyes slowly began to envelop her entire being as the calm, restful sleep that she had needed began to take. Calloused fingers traced along the fabrics of the pillow, and for a moment her jaw slacked open as the world faded from vivid to pitch dark. Wet, raspy inhales echoed around the room as Amea Virou, after four long days of little to no sleep finally found the means to fall asleep with the help of the furry little creature that had come to lie next to her on the bed at the request of both of its caretakers.

This last ditch effort had been their last hope but one that seemed to have paid off in the end. As Amea faded off into a careless slumber under the watchful eyes of her two guardians she began to slowly stir. The body she inhabited ached, her entire being positively miserable, but at long last she found the rest that she had needed in order to recover.

Evelyn watched from the corner of the bed as her lover slowly drifted off. With a coffee mug in hand, her face twisted into a soft and yet cautiously optimistic smile. The days hadn’t been kind to either of them but they were managing to get by to the best of their abilities together just like they had said that they would.

As the minute mark passed, the timer was set. If Amea could get more than an hour of sleep, this would have all been worth it.




Things didn’t get better with the rest of the crew. Andro’s zeal was far from mirrored by the others and even Kaili could tell that her presence here was only tolerated for as long as he would tolerate it. With time would come the moment where she had to part their crew. By the looks she got from the others it was more likely to be sooner rather than later. While Kaili admittedly had no idea where to go, there was only ever the one place one could go to both disappear and reappear anew: Coruscant.

As luck would have it however, the course had already been set. By now there was little that Kaili could do but take the days in transit as they came. She had no means to reach her parents, the ink blot on her back that connected her to her father didn’t exist for obvious reasons, and there was no telling whatsoever what the hell had happened with Henry. The odds were clearly stacked against her but there still remained a small chance in all of this that if she could track herself down, if she could put this all right…

Her mind raced at the possibilities of what she could find when she looked into that particular mirror. Through hours of meditation the insight dawned upon her, and she began to understand just exactly what she needed to do.

There was a darkness inside of the person that she had become. Although the glimpses she had gotten were shards at best, where once she had tried to maintain a balance there was now an imperfection. There was a struggle just to breathe as she delved into depths that had grown to be unfamiliar to her. The ‘real’ Kaili was in pain, and yet she kept it all at bay through sources of strength that Kaili herself would not have anticipated.

Although Kaili was no stranger to the notion of love and its capabilities, she herself had also seen with her own two eyes just exactly what had happened the last time she dared to act upon it. Imagery of her self-inflicted heartache rushed through her mind. Visions of goodbyes left unsaid pained her as well as the reasons for hiding from her that Kaili had kept to herself. The idea that this ‘Amea’ imposter would be able to find love so soon after having known a love like that seemed like such an alien concept to her.

But perhaps that said more about Amea than it did Kaili who by all accounts was the one that should have been in possession of everything that this macabre persona of flesh and blood had taken for themselves. For the time being the blonde was at a loss, but with time she would find the means to take it back. Until then all she could do was meditate, and wait, for the day when they met to come.

All that she needed was a plan on how to go about it.
 
The ship had touched down five days ago. Kaili’s time with Andro’s crew had come to an end on a bitter note as his now ex-girlfriend threw him and his belongings off the ship once he had made it clear he had intended to follow Kaili if that was what was needed of him. In reality there was none, but her plans would be expedited ever so slightly the longer that he got himself involved. To stand between two lovers like this went against her ideals, but for her own plans to find any form of fruition she would need to even the playing field, gather capital and resources until she had a trap sophisticated enough to spring her prey in.

Because try as she might there was a bitterness that swept through Kaili’s mind. It poisoned her thoughts, her dreams, and plans. For the time being she was a pretender in an equation she hadn’t been able to solve yet. She needed to find the rogue variable and subtract it, but the fact that she had no idea about how to do it frustrated her to an extent she hadn’t expected.

At first it had been alarming but as time passed it became all the more evident that it was the natural state of things. If she couldn’t be who she was because of a piece in the puzzle that was missing, then she had no other choice than to find that puzzle and create a new one.

But before she could do that she needed money. Money, resources and manpower. Andro and his cheap apartment on the lower levels would do for now, but she needed more. She needed people that were capable. Andro was not it.

She needed something capable of destroying herself.
 

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