First Reply Dark Splicing

[Darth Virelia]

"Secrets of a Forgotten Age..."

Tags -

Darth Virelia's shuttle cut through the veil like a blade, its engines whisper-quiet. When it touched down on the landing platform, the dust did not stir.

The doors hissed open.

Virelia stepped into the void.

Her armor caught the faintest glow from the shuttle's running lights — violet arcs gliding across black obsidian plates, like veins pulsing beneath the surface of something living. She moved with deliberate silence, a measured rhythm that made the emptiness feel aware of her presence. Her senses stretched outward, brushing the edges of the Dark Side that still lingered here — faint, diffused, but wrong. Artificial. A ghost built by human hands.

The interior was a labyrinth of derelict corridors and skeletal gantries, air thick with the metallic stench of oxidized blood and coolant. Discarded clone pods hung open like cocoons long since split, their interiors marked by claw scratches and blackened residue. Each one whispered of experiment and abandonment — of perfection attempted, and failed.

She touched one pod's rim with her gauntlet. The alchemical resonance vibrated faintly beneath the metal — not Force energy, not entirely. It was something grafted onto it. Synthetic divinity. Someone had tried to engineer the Dark Side itself into the genome.

Her lips curved faintly. Ambitious.

A console sparked weakly nearby, half-alive, its screen flickering through static. She approached, her reflection glimmering across the fractured glass, and pressed her palm against the reader. The system resisted her, as if the machine itself remembered its masters — then yielded under a ripple of invisible pressure. Data cascaded upward, fragmented logs and encrypted schematics dancing through the light. The words Project Chimera blinked once, then vanished behind layers of corruption.

She whispered the name aloud, tasting it.

"Chimera…"

The Force trembled at the sound, as though the word itself still carried weight. A resonance built from flesh, code, and something deeper. Perhaps this was what she sought — not mere cloning, but the translation of consciousness itself. A process that could replicate the will, not just the body.

She traced a line of dust on the console's surface, thinking. Whoever had run this place had known how close they stood to something divine. And they had hidden it well.

A low vibration rippled through the floor. A hum of awareness. A camera above her sparked to life, its lens twisting with a slow, mechanical whine. Then another. And another.

Virelia did not look up.

Instead, she smiled.

"So," she murmured, her voice a calm thread of silk through the static, "you survived."

The lights down the corridor flared one by one, awakening the darkness ahead.

Whatever haunted this place had just realized she was not here to steal its secrets.

She was here to understand them — and make them her own.

 

[Carisma Rostu]

Gear: Black Caskan Wolf-Snake Armor / Basic Lightsaber
Tag: Darth Virelia

Carisma stood at the edge of the ramp, eyes watching, calculating, processing all that laid before her. Her Mistress was here, she could faintly fill her through all the static and crackling energy surrounding the abandoned facility. Even the pull of the Dark Side was present, stronger and primal in nature.

Her fingers brushed the brightly colored panel on the transport's side hull, near the opening where the ramp separated the once closed doors, depressing a button that first recalled the ramp, followed by the doors shutting in a hermetically sealed fashion. Pulling the robe's hood over her head, she stepped forward; closing the gap between her and that derelict facility.

Upon gaining entrance into the skeletal remains of a building long past its glory days, she was surprised to find so many of the facility's systems where still operational, not quite full capacity, but enough to alert intruders it was awake and watching. What was her Mistress after?

Passing through rows of broken and dysfunctional pods, she pondered with more than just vanilla curiosity what had once been contained there, and for what purposes. And if the pods, now vacant, where purposely opened, or had a collection of somethings violently escaped. There was no time to investigate the mystery, she was already late.

Chimera she heard the Mistress speak, followed by a declaration that someone was indeed still here as she crossed into a different world. This world was scientific in nature, methodically created to faithfully serve those that mastered it. Carisma was no computer hack, whiz, or nerd; but these computers were old, decades past their prime, and yet, they too were operational, almost alive, as if they were possessed. Ghosts in the machines.

"What is 'Chimera', Mistress," Carisma inquired looking around the room, half expecting someone or something to jump out before adding, "Who or what survived?"

 

[Darth Virelia]

"Secrets of a Forgotten Age..."

Tags - Carisma Rostu

Virelia did not turn when Carisma entered. She stood before the shattered console like a priestess at the altar, one gauntleted hand resting upon the cracked screen. The dim light of the flickering holodisplay painted her armor in strokes of violet and shadow, every movement of her breath catching the dust in slow, hypnotic waves.

Her voice came low, intimate — a sound that seemed to coil through the room itself rather than travel through air.
"Chimera…" she repeated, the syllables drawn out like silk across a blade. "It is an ambition — one so obscene it nearly seduced the Force itself."

At last she turned, the curve of her mask's jawline reflecting faintly in the glow. Beneath it, her eyes burned through the haze, a sharp, dangerous amethyst.

"They sought to perfect obedience through replication. To make vessels that would not serve the Dark Side…" — she stepped closer, the words softening to a purr — "but embody it. To build life so flawless it would kneel not from fear, but from instinct. Imagine, Carisma — a being born without the burden of choice. Flesh sculpted to worship. Will engineered to love only command."

Her fingers brushed the air beside Carisma's cheek, not quite touching, yet her presence pressed all the same — the dark, slow pressure of possession that needed no contact.

"The Sith of that era were crude. They dreamed of gods and built dolls instead. Yet the echoes linger — patterns, imprints, fragments of code with memory but no mind." She gestured to the walls, where faint flickers of data still pulsed like dying heartbeats. "They learned how to make the Force remember. And if it remembers…" Her tone lowered, heavy with promise, "…it can be rewritten."

The silence stretched, taut, electric. Then Virelia's head tilted slightly, her voice soft as breath. "You felt it too, didn't you? The eyes that watched. The pulse that greeted us when we entered."

A faint hum trembled through the floor again, as if something beneath the surface had stirred.

Her lips curved behind the mask — predatory in delight.

"What survived, my dear," she murmured, stepping past her apprentice toward the deep corridor beyond, "is faith. Not the kind that believes in gods…" She paused at the doorway, violet light outlining her form. "…but the kind that creates them."