Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Flotsam And Jetsam

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
Ganker Limpets only had fuel for a thousand light-years, and moreover they weren't so great at hairpin turns. But taking the offramp from Sekalus to Kal'Shebbol wound up being well inside their capabilities. That was about the only element of certainty in this whole operation. The linked bulk-freighter hyperdrives projected a burger-shaped hyperspace bubble with a major radius of fifteen hundred metres or thereabouts. Alec controlled the field geometry to some extent, as well as she could while commanding the Garden of Unending Delights. The refitted Huttese caravel clung to the main cargo of the hyperspace bubble: an Immortal-class dreadnought. But not just any Immortal. No, this one was a temporal shatterpoint made manifest, a sliver of reality among slivers of reality, a piece of the fracture. Somehow or other, at the Battle of Sekalus, a fleet-sized discharge of hypermatter had warped time itself. Participants had felt, lived, experienced a wide variety of subjective realities. In a very real sense, the ship had never left the system. It had exploded, been stalled, been slowed, been vaporized, been redirected, and universally been abandoned; it had been surrounded by a fleet that had left and then been right with it anyways and then exploded. So many realities at play. No objective truth. Hence, the Immortal she'd stolen was only a shade, a fraction of an immortal, not unlike a Cularin timeshadow. Studded with Ganker Limpets, it existed to the same degree as they did, but also much less.

The hyperspace bubble failed over Kal'Shebbol, and Alec got to work.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
When one wasn't a Force god, or even a Force-user for that matter, one's paranormal options were limited. Fortunately, Alec had something better than phenomenal cosmic power: she'd seen just about everything.

Time was of the essence, over and above any potential puns. She refueled the Ganker Limpets and commed an Underground fuel tender for accompaniment. Like the Garden of Unending Delights, the tender would need to stay close to the multiphasic quasi-real Immortal during its temporal flux. If either ship drifted outside the bubble, hyperspace would tear it apart. The tender nestled up against the Immortal, by Alec's guidance, and docked with something not wholly real. The Ganker Limpets, however, existed just fine, as did their fuel couplings. A few hours' work with spacesuits and fuel lines while in hyperspace, and the Limpets had a steady supply. Their course was a straightforward one: down the Rimma a little way, then into the Hydian, and thence to the Tyus Cluster, where the Rekalis had emerged into modernity.

The Tyus Cluster, where time ran much differently, and without consistency.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
Clan Rekali technology could get, admittedly, a little weird. The Ganker Limpets weren't the half of it. On her bridge stood a cousin, wearing Mandalorian armor daubed with Witch markings, chanting a Vahla blood rite, while a massive black insect pulsed on his chest. A Calypho Compass: a fate-twister, a path-maker, a symbiotic piece of hell. Chants and the scent of blood filled the Garden of Unending Delights. Clan Rekali astrogators were among the best in the business, at least when it came to results. Nobody could have accused them of professionalism.

A sensor cluster, proprietary tech, measured spatiotemporal anomalies; today, it gave off the strangest readings Alec had ever seen. In between blank spots and static, though, it churned out more information than any other tech in the galaxy could have provided, both when aimed at the shade of the Immortal and when pointed ahead, into the mouth of the Tyus Cluster and the Calypho Compass's reach. The latter punched a clear tunnel through the warp of the Cluster, through the stars and black holes and everything in between. The little flotilla entered the Cluster, and nothing changed. Nevertheless, at the heart of the Cluster, time ran much more slowly, by orders of magnitude. Not a place to linger, no -- but a great spot to dump the Immortal, before retreating to solve the problem.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
It came time to drag the Immortal out of the Tyus Cluster's heart, using proprietary Clan Rekali routes and methods specific to this location. When that time came, and after the chronotons settled, Alec was the first aboard.

Initially, they all looked dead -- the crew, that is. They'd fallen and never gotten back up, even in uncomfortable postures. Foreheads against bulkheads, weight pinioned on single limbs. Draped over railings at the waist. She carried a bulky Clan Rekali omniscanner, a good melee weapon in extremis, and it showed no higher brain function at all. No surprise there: they'd been both dead and alive for hours. Souls gone, neural signals interrupted multiple times a second with each gradation in phase. Meat dolls. No way back from that.

They'd been the enemy; that was a factor when considering disposal. They'd dropped off a raiding force that had happily tortured and butchered civilians. In the end, Alec and company stripped the meat dolls of their armour. After recording their biometrics and securing hands and eyeballs from the officers -- not that the ship's computers were healthy either -- the Rekalis dumped the crew into the nearest star.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
By the ritualized advice of the Clan Rekali astrogators, Alec plotted a carefully weird course through the Tyus Cluster. The idea was to stabilize the temporal hijinks by using the spacetime adjuster arrays to amplify the interactions between the Tyus distortions and the brute-force tunnels of the Calypho Compass.

The spectral Immortal wept and shuddered as it flew again, still under the protection of the fully extant Ganker Limpets. She'd shut down the reactor; now this aspect, this shade, of the deadly flagship was an inert hulk. Her heart felt lighter ever since they'd spaced the meat puppet crew. All was right with the world, and a tiny bit of justice had been exerted on behalf of the dead and semi-dead of Sekalus. Other reflections, other versions, of the spaced crew might still be extant, half-real like the ship. But by brute force and well-honed instinct, the latter was ceasing to be true. The flickering resolved, not into oblivion, but into an objectively real ship. Now that Alec's crew could perceive it properly without her precise and specific instructions, the mood of the operation changed. At that point, the question became: sell it or keep it? Such considerations would determine the nature of the repair and refit operation. And that decision, though this operation was Alec's coup, came down to her grandfather's discretion. Ember Rekali would need to weigh in. So would [member="Allyson Locke"], though for mildly different reasons.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
Removing the brain-dead crew, even working in close proximity to this thing, had put about two hundred Clansmen down with migraines and digestive distress. Ember had to assume a good portion of that came down to the relative quality of One Sith shipbuilding. This ship had its uses but they were few. Still, fear had its uses too, and nothing frightened neophytes like an Immortal-class dreadnought, whatever its other limitations.

He stood on the Immortal's bridge, which flickered in and out of reality around him. The ship had no power; a portable, self-powered console controlled the Ganker Limpets that studded the outer hull. Hyperspace roared past, controlled -- leashed -- by a team of Clan Rekali instinctive astrogators and their Calypho Compass symbionts. From time to time, Ember added a directional cadence to their ritual, altering their course through the timewarp of the Tyus Cluster. He'd spent nearly two decades in here, in the Cluster's heart, and eight centuries had passed outside. He'd raised his children here, and flow-walked, and learned to understand the strangeness of time in this place. Slowly, ever so slowly, the Immortal phased back into full -- though not exclusive -- reality. Somewhere, the ship had still been destroyed, halted, destroyed again, redirected, destroyed yet once more, and all of those conflicting realities were equally real. The Battle of Sekalus would have consequences that even Ember couldn't fully predict.
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
Eventually, the vessel stabilized, though it took a stupid amount of repurposed ritual. The Clansmen brought the reactor online again, and the ship sauntered across the Rim to Mandalorian territory. Beyond it, too, up the Braxant Run by a few parsecs. As Clan Rekali crews swarmed the Immortal and repaired it, Ember sent a message to [member="Isley Verd"]. Technically, Isley was his dead son's ex-wife's brother, but they were family. Brothers, effectively.

Mand'alor the Reclaimer-

Interesting title, Isley. Pointed, and I can see the point of it. We have quite a bit to discuss -- you, the Sith, Dathomir, Kintan, and some other things that need our collective attention. Alec managed to steal an Immortal that nobody was using. I've parked it just up the Braxant from Mando territory, partway to your neck of the woods. Come take a look, have a drink, and we can talk in private.

Ember Rekali, A.B., F.M., W.M., W.K.
 
Ner'vod-

You had me at "hello."

Isley.


The response would herald the eventual arrival of Isley several hours later. He came by means of the Ferocity: a well-earned treasure of the Brothers' last venture together. Upon arrival, he entered the Immortal and was promptly escorted to the Bridge.

"Ember! I didn't get my invitation to this beautiful heist." Here, in the company of a man Isley considered family, the Mandalorian could let down his guard. Genuinely, he was happy to see the father of Clan Rekali, as evidenced by the grin plastered upon his mug.

"I've brought something rather delicious from Echoy'la. Their own take on black ale."

The bottle was raised. Now onto the matters of importance.

[member="Ember Rekali"]
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
[member="Isley Verd"]

Echoy'lan ne'tra gal, it transpired, had genuine character. Off the bridge was a command officer ready room with a panoramic view. Ember had set up shop in there; he even had the Mirr, in case farsight was necessary.

"I'm still not sure how Alec pulled it off myself. The way she explains it, a bunch of different, equally valid realities converged or collided or split apart over Sekalus, around the time that a fleet's worth of hypermatter reactors exploded simultaneously. She didn't steal this ship so much as steal one of it. Strangest thing, being on a ship that was both real and not. But between instinctive astrogators, Alec's talent, Calypho Compasses, and my knowledge of the Tyus Cluster, we were able to stabilize the ship."

Ember grinned broadly -- Force, how long had it been since he'd smiled? -- and sucked back the ne'tra gal.

"Some people wanted to name it after Aaralyn, but I already named our Alor-class after her. Besides, she'd have hated her name getting associated with a ship this Sithish. No, I called this one the Gethzerion."
 
"It's Alec, need we say more?" began Isley, punctuating his words with a sip of ale. "Though, I can only imagine such a thing has been made plausible in the wake of...what have they taken to calling it...the Rapture? The Force is still not its old self, that much is certain."

Ah. Gethzerion. The Mandalorian gave his old friend a light tap on the shoulder in response to the name. "There's power in that name. Legacy." he said. "And on that note, I'm sure you've been curious as to why I've laid claim to the name and legacy of Mand'alor."

He went for poetic, but there was booze in his system. Sue him. Isley didn't say more beyond that, as he wanted to hear his elder brother's thoughts on the matter.

[member="Ember Rekali"]
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
[member="Isley Verd"]

"Not at all. I think I know exactly why you did what you did. The Mandalorian establishment is stagnant, and has been for years. Sessile inertia has driven most of the old guard to extremes. Ordo retired, Strider went Death Watch, I turned my focus to my Clan and the witches, Monroe went rogue. That leaves Gilamar, and I feel he's knuckled under. Become part of the 'objects at rest tend to remain at rest.' it was our collective sluggishness that spurred the current Death Watch incarnations and lost us three -quarters of our territory. Roche was an accident, a fluke. Then the Mandalorians signed that disgusting treaty with the Sith while I was isolated in the Hard Roil, and that was one more piece of stagnation. We failed to take Alderaan, then picked it up for a song after the Republic collapsed. We lost our Mand'alor and nobody stepped up, nobody cared. The shame of past years wears on you like it wears on me. You don't just want to reclaim territory, you want to reclaim identity. That's the source of your name."
 
"You know me so well, brother." He began with a chuckle.

"It was Wayland that was the icing on the cake."

"I clashed with Field Marshal Munin. He had gone Death Watch, but not out of a nefarious desire to kill his own people. I managed to talk him down, and what I found was that he was lost. Everyone fighting inside that mountain was lost. I had to do something."

"And my first thought was to claim the title the old fashioned way. But a Council at rest remains at rest. So I looked to a different direction. All those worlds we lost — all those people? They want to be whole again. They want to be home again."

"And thus far, it's going beautifully. You should come to Echoy'la one of these days."

Another swig.

"Now then, in becoming the Sole Ruler I've admittedly been a poor Witch King. The limitations of unable to be in two places at once. How fares Dathomir and our Witchmasters?"

[member="Ember Rekali"]
 

Ashin Varanin

Professional Enabler
[member="Isley Verd"]

"We assaulted a cult headquarters in Hutt Space, on Kintan, and took their library. We took the Dark Underlord's castle at the edge of Clan Rekali territory, then conquered the corresponding location in that planet's spirit plane. We made these."

Ember held up the back of his hand as he stood, revealing a ring shaped like a scarab with half-spread wings. He stood well to the side of his chair, away from his desk and Isley, then tapped into the power trapped within the ring.

"It's a standard talisman of transformation, but keyed to something decidedly offworld."

The shift from human/Vahla to lightsabre-resistant, fear-pheromone-emitting, acid-drooling rhak-skuri took long and painful moments.

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