From Here to There

[Kratacos]

Korriban
[member="Yidhra"]

Vraukt was sat on one of the many chairs in the Korriban Academy. After the Resurgent Empire had reclaimed the planet and the surrounding systems in the sector, they had begun making reparations to the Academy Library. Information that was gathered from Krayiss Two's libraries by A'sharad Graush and [member="Vrak Nashar"] were brought to Korriban and had aided in stocking the freshly built shelves. Dozens of shelves were stocked now, and the archives were filled with Sith of various shapes and sizes.

They either worked on stocking the shelves, holocrates carrying the history of Sith as far back as they could find, or they were continuing to clean it out of dust.

Vraukt himself had multiple wounds from earlier confrontations with both shyracks and tuk'ata that had made homes in the structure, but still, the Sith Pureblood had won out. They may have been predators, corrupted by the Dark Side, but Vraukt had long since learned to hone the Dark Side into a weapon and he used it proficiently to enhance himself.

A long scar ran up his left arm now, but it is one that he would sport proudly now.

In front of him was a Datapad, and he was swiping through the pictures to gather information for what his Master, Lord Drakash sought for him to find. Once he found it in the runes and glyphs that the Datapad had pictures of, then he would set out and locate them. Unless, someone got in his way. Vraukt after all, was fairly good at listening and doing as told.

 

[Yidhra]

And Back Again

Yidhra turned over the tome in her hands. It was old. Heavy, too. The leather binding the parchment bore bitemarks and scratches, polished to a sheen by centuries of greedy fingers perusing its pages. It smelled of power and age. When she held it, it grew warm in in her palms, like a cat curling into a petting hand.

The title was strange, though. Perhaps there were once Sith that actually had a sense of humor?

A private smile cut across her stoic expression as she set down the book. Beside it on the table lay her eternal companion – a datapad with such massive storage that it dwarfed some of the smaller archives maintained across Athiss.

Knowledge was important, okay?

With spidery fingers the sorceress consulted her database, delighted to find no entries whatsoever. Her eyes flashed bright with excitement as she began to enter a brief description, some personal notes, observations.

Later, when she’d had a few hours (or days, or months) with the codex, then she would write a full-fledged record of the contents.

For now, however, the curious book remained one of her many secrets. That collection had expanded significantly after the Empire had taken over Vitiate’s old Academy on Korriban. Behind a collapsed section of the structure, the excavation party had uncovered a nigh-pristine part of the library. The ruined corridor had prevented access to the beasts prowling the rest of the building, many of which seemed to subsist on a diet of precious old tomes, as they had found the rest of the archives almost completely chewed-up or torn apart.

Still, that was months ago. They had taken many worlds since then, expanded both in number and influence. Yidhra had worked around the clock with nary a free moment, subsumed in research and experiments for the good of the Empire.

This was her first outing, now that things had calmed down a little. They had established a strong presence, and the immediate need for more was taking a cigarette break outside.

Yidhra was about to delve into the untold depths of the book when she heard soft steps coming from the right. Her first reaction was to stretch out her awareness, subtly brush against the intruder to determine her next step.

Ah.

“[member="Vraukt"],” she greeted, a note of undisguised surprise in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

 

[Kratacos]

His right hand lifted to his left forearm, running his fingers of the former over the scar that he now sported running down his forearm. The shyrack's claw hadn't gone deep, but the cut was long enough to tear and rend skin and flesh and turn it inside out, thus the resulting scar being idly brushed as he read the ancient sith glyphs on the DataPad.

Someone was approaching, but he didn't pay much attention to it, there was also someone walking through the Archive, almost at every hour of the day. Clearly, he had been there for some time. The Sith Pureblood hadn't been paying much attention however. Rising up out of the chair he was in, he started to walk along the shelves of the dimly lit Archive, long legs carrying him through the rows until he felt as if he was growing closer to that presence he had felt earlier.

Of course, it was surprising to feel that the presence was indeed familiar in nature.

A moment later, he turned a corner, and then his name was spoken and the orange hues of the Pureblood twisted away from the books and then settled upon the other Pureblood in his immediate vicinity.

What am I doing here?

A thought rose to the forefront of his mind, to say something snarky, or even to make an attempt at jesting.

He decided to go with his usual response.

Straight and direct.

"Working."

It wasn't a lot to go off of, but the six foot two Pureblood, evidently having grown since Korriban, took the initiative to step closer to [member="Yidhra"], twisting his DataPad around so that she could see the contents of what he was reading.

Specifically, it went back thousands of years, tens of thousands, the images of the Sith runs and glyphs illustrating the rise and fall of the Sith King Adas, or as much as could be found and cross-referenced through the information caches of the Galaxy. The One Sith's a large source of much of their material, as was Vitiate's Academy on Korriban, where they were now in fact.