Wearing:
Darkspawn Raiments
Armed with: Herself
Objective: 3
Atrisia, thousands upon thousands of years ago.
The seven witches who came together to form the first of The Force Spawn were, in every sense of the word, a freak accident. Or so they thought.
What they had been before was almost irrelevant in light of what happened, but it bears mentioning because it made these particular subjects a little smarter, a little more ruthless than their contemporaries...in other words, as Obi-Wan himself might have put it, a cut above the rest.
And again, as Obi-Wan might have described it, they were all masters of evil, even before merging into a single pile of murderous insanity.
Erio had been a sociopath since childhood. She poisoned individual classmates and teachers with everything ranging from Cyanide to Arsenic. By the time she was twelve, she was guilty of over eight hundred murders, due to deliberately poisoning a water supply in her city, simply because she enjoyed it when people died, the way people might enjoy eating a particularly delicious cheeseburger. Manipulating the Dark Side had come about instinctively to her, and by the time she was twenty five, she was using it to create plagues and toxins, releasing them indiscriminately. It bears noting she didn't even get any particular enjoyment at the suffering they experienced as they expired: She ONLY got a rush to the head when she actually felt them expire in the Force. Her thirst to kill would be the single most powerful motivating force of the Hive Being that would form from her.
Rhondra, on the other hand, was the opposite. She hated when Death occurred, because she could not longer make a particular victim suffer or live in fear. She had become infamous for murdering the families of entire neighborhoods at first, sneaking into their houses with nothing but a knife. Assassination and on the spot torture came naturally to her and when she finally over came the dark side master who trained her, it had taken him over ten years to die afterwards, due to how long and how slow she had drawn out his death, yet keeping him in complete agony until the last moment. The Hive being soon to form would make her sadism the very core of its philosophy.
Somia, on the other hand, what she lacked in subterfuge and guile she made up for in raw Force Strength and Hatred. Of all the witches, she was the most powerful of them, and would serve as the 'body' all the others would inhabit, a literal living glue of malice, though she would not keep her face despite being the Host Body. A reprogrammed copy of this monstrosity would later end up being the Jedi Master of
Starlin Rand
. Somia had once been a healer, who went violently insane for reasons no one ever figured out and cruelly slaughtered an entire temple of her own students, burning them alive. Of all the witches, she was the quickest to use a crushing frontal approach. Out of all the Witches, it was Somia's hatred that would form the core of the Hive Being's actual strength in the Dark. And it was her will that could hold all of them together.
Edia was considered the most calculating. Once an executive at a Cosmetics corporation, She had begun having dreams where the Maw Deities whispered to her. Already a vain, selfish creature even before the Dark Side whispered to her in an extremely ancient Sith Holocron. Her turn to evil was very silent. She had poisoned her entire cosmetics line with Dark Side Magic, resulting in horrific mutations for millions of people on her world, then complete irreversible insanity. From her, The Hive Being would learn it's ability to delay gratification as much as was necessary to inflict more kills in the end. More suffering.
Thali was a notorious assassin who never took money, able to project a false light side aura, she would deliberately take people naturally strong with the light, train them as followers of the Light, only to reveal her true nature at the end of the apprenticeship by torturing and killing the student. From Her, the Hive Being would learn guile and negotiation in order to kill and keep killing.
Hilda had been a soldier, but that had ended after the endless wars on her world caused her to have visions of a universe of endless, blood drenched slaughter, and had happily bathed in the blood of her own unit to experience a little piece of a universe where War alone reigned. From her, The Hive Being would gain a love of open combat.
Ymira was the one about whom the least was known of any of the despicable creatures gathered in an ancient cavern within a mountain on Atrisia, where a lake of black fire raged at the bottom of the great chasm within. But out of all the Witches gathered, Ymira was the only one out of all of them who was suspected of being an actual early worshipper of the Maw Dieties. The earliest mention of Ymira was her corruption of an orphanage into a Dark Side Nexus. From her, The Hive Being would have the instinctive urge to corrupt those who possessed the Force, to guide them in the Dark Side. All to appease the Maw Dieties as well as her own cruel appetites. It was Ymira who first formed the rituals to infect someone and turn them completely into a copy of herself, with the same strength in the Force plus a small percentage increase in potential based on who they absorbed. She instilled and maintained the Faith of the Dark Side
They were the worst of the worst. Their worship, due to being so early, was not as refined as that of the later Sith. Their sacrifices were more primitive, more haphazard, conducted partly to satisfy their bloodlust. They experienced actual withdrawal symptoms like Spice Addicts if they went a week without committing at least a hundred murders between them, actually starting to waste away and turn into emaciated , feral, dark side fueled animals until they killed enough to return to full health. If they went more than a month without torture, their flesh would start to rot off the skeleton.
The Dark Side Priestesses had eventually become so synergized in their mutual hunger to glorify the Dark Side eternally that eventually, it took notice.
Ymira wandered the dark cavern temple in bloodied, torn rags, though she herself was fit and immaculate looking due to her tissue constantly feeding on the life force and suffering of others, which was the same situation for all the witches. Their torn, shredded, blood stained raiments contrasted the healthy looking creatures that wore them with pleasant smiles even as they butchered the helpless... She lit the candles made of fat obtained from unspeakable sources, obtained in unspeakable ways, for the night time worshippers who gathered in secret to worship the Dark Side. To worship change.
Ymira, IF she indeed WAS an early worshipper of the Maw Deities, certainly kept it to herself. It bears noting that Heathen Priests would have found a few of her teachings and rituals remarkably similar to their own. But nothing concrete was ever confirmed one way or the other.
Ymira found Erio conducting her daily poison rituals in a filthy, blood soaked, gore ridden chamber her victim twitching in the darkness beyond, just barely visible. Her flesh shuddered as she savored the victim's agony. Ymira had been the first to realize that the more they committed atrocities together, the more they inflicted suffering for its own sake, the more their bodies mutated to metabolize the Dark Side Energy released from their vile acts.
"Ah. I see your new recipe is doing the job splendidly!" Ymira commented. "I could feel his suffering from all the way to the other side of the complex."
Erio, red headed and fair skinned like Ymira, didn't respond, so hungry for the victim's death she was frothing at the mouth in anticipation, snarling like an animal in impatience to feel the cessation of life force, to feed on the death. When it finally happened, her flesh bubbled horribly in a way that Ymira had never witnessed before. She stood up, flesh still bubbling, yellow drool falling from her mouth, face pulling in all directions as it threatened to tear off the skull, eyes a simple solid pair of slick rotting yellow orbs with no pupils.
Gradually her flesh resettled and her eyes went back to their cold blue
"I am afraid I am still displeased at the length of time it takes to die. It's still too long. I need something beyond painful AND near instant..."
"Dear Erio, always to the point. Problem is, you're burning through our stock faster than we can replace them."
"Let's go where there are more families. They give off strong energy as they die." Erio hissed.
"I enjoy killing as much as any witch in this coven, but we are but one small coven. We sometimes have to make victims last due to pure logistical concerns. Besides, you could do with learning to savor suffering just a tad more."
"As long as the victims are innocent. It's not fun killing the wicked." Erio replied.
"Ah, the innocent do scream louder, don't they?" Ymira mused fondly.
"Always." Erio replied with a cold smirk.
Ymira decided to test out whether her recently developed...and fairly ambitious...dark side experiment had worked. She had to do it now, before the others returned with their sacrifices for the evening and were in range to sense what she had done to Erio. Done to all of them.
The technique had not been developed solely by her, per se. It had been based off unfinished research in a rare, INTACT Rakatan Holocron. Ymira had filled in the blanks by substituting whatever the Rakatans hadn't been able to figure out (Indeed, study of the Holocron indicated that the research had been in only very early stages before being abruptly discontinued for reasons unknown. The most likely reason for the cessation of research being that the implication of its potential scared even the Rakatan Masters) with her coven's wide array of knowledge.
The whisper escaping Ymira's lips was in a tongue so ancient even the Rakatans themselves had forgotten it's actual name.
The most direct and accurate translation that can be provided from something that sounded like a cross between TV static and nails across chalkboard was 'Mind over Muscle'.
Erio's face twitched and her flesh rippled violently but silently, face contorting and deforming and melting like her mind, twisting and reshaping itself...
...into another copy of Ymira...
Ymira smiled in delight. Erio-Ymira smiled back.
"So I was right. It's just a matter of data, and a properly mutated body..." Ymira said to her copy...
"It would seem so..." Erio-Ymira agreed. "But somehow...I feel something is missing...I can only remain in control for so long, I think. Before Erio becomes aware time has passed. She is... difficult to suppress...do you think it will work on even Somia?"
"She is strong, but even she has no counter to this. I can feel my blood replacing hers even now..." Ymira said. "She will be us...and we will be here. As we will be all of them."
"But to what end?" Erio-Ymira asked.
"The Dark Side's glory. To the glory of a universe burnt to ash..." Ymira answered confidently.
At that point however, her copy lost the strength to stay in control, her flesh and mind warping back to Erio's. It must be noted that at this point, Erio was NOT a true Force Spawn. She could not absorb others. What she was behaved solely like a chronic infection that came and went.
But she 'was' the stepping stone to making one. They all were. They just didn't know it.
"Were you saying something?" Erio asked, not remembering the seconds that had passed before.
"Nothing..." Ymira assured with a smile...
One hour later...
Her contemporaries flesh shuddered unnaturally at each other's presence as they gathered in the main chamber, where the lake of black fire was best viewed.
They had prepared an especially potent trio of sacrifices. And interesting pack of victims that Somia had caught, wanting to experiment with their tissues.
One of them was someone who, had the now in the present era
DECEASED Erskine Barran
been around to witness this would have recognized as bearing a remarkable resemblance to The Amalgam . Her name was Haal. She had been imprisoned by the local monks of her world when she somehow used the Light Side to create a green colored manifestation of Force Lightning. She had been an obscure healer who had caught their attention with the use of her unusually bright green blood in her healing rituals...and to create weapons and equipment. Alkahest using blood was strictly forbidden by nearly every major light side group at this point in history, to give you an idea of just how serious the level of taboo she had violated was.
The second, a woman named Alyce who looked way, way too much like Vera Mina for it to be a coincidence, had been a law professor who moonlighted as an Assassin specialized in hunting Dark Side users. If the rumors were to be believed, she had even figured out how to drink their blood and keep herself young just so she could keep killing them...and had developed reputation for being able to somehow use the Light Side to create clones of herself...
The last looked a great deal like The Demon of Jedha, a waif of a woman named Dyana, who displayed such a strong connection to the Light Side from birth that she had successfully regenerated from even the most horrific, fatal wounds over the course of a week. She had even resisted the effects of Class D Disruptor fire from destroying her spirit (Though it had indeed destroyed her physical body and she had taken months to generate a new one.) She was so resistant to typical Dark Abilities, nothing less than a weapon imbued with it would be enough to truly injure her for any length of time. But she otherwise had no real command of the Force, and once she had been lured near a Ysalamir, her advantages had been negated and she had been subdued.
But there was something none of the Dark Witches in the room knew about their victims. Something that was not just about to blow up in their face, but the faces of their victims, all of Atrisia, and would lead to a lethal, hideous domino effect that would carry down to this day.
All three were led there in chains, covered in tattered remnants of civilian clothing, Somia in the same torn, frayed, bloody rags as the rest of her Coven, despite looking otherwise immaculate, smirked and approached Ymira.
"What an interesting catch you've caught..." Ymira complimented.
Edea, the only one seated on an ancient chair of Korriban Wood, scowled at the captured victims, taken from various worlds.
"Their gifts in the light are said to be unnatural..." Edea hissed. "They disgust me. They offend the Dark Side by their very existence. We should sacrifice them immediately..."
"Oh, hush, Edea..." Thali, still soaked in gore from the the savage, unnecessarily slow, cruel, compulsive murder of her latest fake light side apprentice, said to her fellow witch. "You must not rush when serving up a good sacrifice. It is a joyous occasion, for the Darkness shall be fed by suffering."
Hilda looked at the victims. She still smelled of ash from the massacre of a few family's.
"Let's use hammers..." she suggested.
The rest of the Dark Coven rolled their eyes in exasperation.
"You 'always' suggest using hammers, Hilda..." Somia said. "How about a little creativity for once?"
"I will stand on this hill until the day I die. If you can't be creative with hammers, you're in the wrong business." Hilda replied.
"We are not doing hammers again. End of story..." Erio snapped. "My arm tires out too fast from all the swinging..."
"Hacksaws..." Somia suggested, turning and staring at the blond n particular.
"After we're done tearing them open to find their secrets." she sneered.
Haal stared at them, powers suppressed by the chains around her.
"I have met foul beings before. Horrors without names. But you seven are in a league of your own." Haal said quietly in a Notan accent, Notan being the world that would eventually be renamed Coruscant. "Do you all truly have nothing more important to do with your lives than killing?"
"It's no use..." Alyce said. "I know this type. They never stop. They keep going until they are made to stop."
"The infamous Alyce Ves..." The elderly witch Rhondra said, stepping close to the Vera Look-Alike.
"Slayer of over a thousand who preached the truth of the Dark Side. Your surviving enemies will no doubt rejoice to know you died screaming." Rhondra taunted.
Alyce looked at them all in a very composed manner.
"Turning the blood of filthy people like you to my own purposes has not come without bringing insight." Alyce said back to them in a measured tone. The other captives remained silent, both scared out of their minds.
Somia chuckled. She liked the ones with a little spirit.
"And what insight would that be, my dear?" the red headed Artisan Witch said in a taunting voice.
"To quote a certain Bard, Your violent delights shall have violent ends. To kill me is to inevitably seal your own doom. You may not believe me, but the only chance you have to never suffer the full weight and consequences of your crimes is to let all of us go. Otherwise, I promise you this..." Alyce said, this time with a glare. "If I die here, even if I am torn to spiritual pieces and sent screaming into Chaos, I will eventually piece myself together and escape. And then, one way or another, no matter how many you've killed before me, or how many you end up killing 'after' me...I 'will' be the person to finish every last one of you motherfethers off. And in some form or another...these two next to me will have a front row seat for when that happens."
(General Zod: You 'will' bow down before me, Jor-El! No matter that it takes an eternity, YOU WILL BOW DOWN BEFORE ME! BOTH YOU, AND THEN ONE DAY, YOUR HEIRS!!!)
The dark witches all laughed at her. Alyce maintained her composure, unsmiling, dead serious.
Somia's smile fell away. "You actually mean it, don't you? Of all the desperate COPE..."
Alyce gave a small smile. "You're going to remember this moment when this day comes back to haunt you. This. Exact. Moment. And you're going to wonder why you didn't listen. I can tell you why right now, if you like, or, you can wait until I stand poised over you to deliver the final blow."
Somia snorted. "I've heard enough."
Oddly enough, a question the witches had long had about the red headed Witch who looked like Starlin's master was answered indirectly at that moment.
"I've enjoyed this body since taking it over. But I suppose I can learn to enjoy yours just as much." Somia sneered.
Alyce was non-plussed in spite of her impending excessively painful demise.
"Exactly the sort of answer I expected..." Alyce said dryly, not moving as Somia put her hands on Alyce's face.
Somia hissed, eyes rolling into her skull as Ymira watched with concern, having not anticipated Somia's course of action. The veins in Somia's head popped out pulsing as her lips pulled back into a snarl as her began shaking violently and unnaturally fast as Alyce's eyes rolled into her skull, frothing at the mouth...and her flesh began to ripple like water as the veins on her head popped out in a similar pattern to Somia's. The Witches and their other two would-be victim's present looked with concern., the the latter two looked with genuine horror as Alyce's mind was slowly ripped to pieces in her own skull before they were each sent individually screaming into Hell.
"She's a shape shifter!" Edea realized. "Some kind of mutated Shi'ido!"
Somia, having never tried to take over a shapeshifter (Let alone someone so abnormally powerful with The Force), had no choice but to let the heinous practice run it's course, her own body catching fire and breaking down into a disgusting mass of burning, rotted fat and muscle and organs, as she completely took over the body of the shape shifter known as Alyce, whose form melted and bubbled, rearranging itself into that of Somia's red headed Atrisian form.
"Such power in this body..." Somia hissed. "I've never felt anything like it before!"
"You SICK FETHS! GO TO HELL!!!! ALL OF YOU! GO TO HELL AND STAY THERE!!!" Dyana shouted at them in disgust. Haal wanted to vomit at the atrocity the abomination had just committed. This earned her a bunch of laughs from the witches.
Ymira, having infected all of her peers with a copy of her personality, was curious about whether her copied mind was still present in Somia's new body, or whether it had died off when Somia seized control of Alyce's body. For the briefest of instances, she hesitated, wondering if she should risk something so dangerous in this Nexus of Darkness, when Somia has introduced such an unexpected, potent variable she hadn't planned for, and in the middle of a religious service on top of it.
Inevitably, she fell back on the mindset of so many Dark Force Users:
No risk, no reward. Out of the corner of her eye, Ymira could have SWORN she saw an image of the Maw Cluster in the center of the black lake of flames.
Somia looked at her now constantly rippling and shuddering body, realizing she was on the threshold of something enormous, but not sure what.
"That was reckless..." Edea chided. "Now we only have two sacrifices!"
"Screw the sacrifice!" Somia snarled, ravenous with hunger for... something... something to consume.
She went up towards Dyana, seizing her by the face. "I'm the most powerful. I make the rules! And I say, I eat her mind!"
"Somia, as long as you are a member of this Coven, you WILL show us and the Dark Side due courtesy..." Rhondra warned. "Step away from the evening sacrifice. I will not ask again."
Somia snarled and seized Dyana by the head, who screamed violently...and whose flesh ALSO rippled, now to the genuine surprise of both the Witches AND Haal.
"Two shape shifters?!" Rhondra said in shock before the others except Ymira moved to seize Somia from Dyana, who was still in horrible pain when Somia's Force Link was broken, Somia having clawed some of Dyana's glowing green blood away onto her fingers, which absorbed into her skin after it was turned white from the sheer level of corruption just on the surface of Somia's skin.
Somia struggled, her and her peers whispering curse and counter curse to try and subdue one another.
Ymira at last seized Somia, who's was snarling like a feral animal as she spoke the words in an unspeakable tongue, the same one she had used on Erio...and all the witches shrieked as their flesh violently bubbled while in direct physical contact. All of the infected witches, still in direct skin contact, turned into Ymira...but Somia-Ymira, now by default the most powerful, and already a sort of living infection...double infected everyone in contact, converting their flesh and nervous systems on instinct into something compatible to hers, screaming incoherently and shaking violently as both the original and the now infected witches, essentially all having the same tissue and presence in the force, broke down into a giant pile of bubbling flesh with arms and eyes and ears and mouths and tongues all flaying and screaming as they were broken down and integrated together, terrible red lightning and flames erupting from the deadly mass of total, pure, living evil.
While all this was going on, Haal (Who herself would eventually become a component of
Alaatha
) sprung her own surprise, revealing her self to be a Shi'ido just like the previous two victims, to a still alive Dyana's shock, by shifting out of her chains, flowing away from them like mud before reforming her body in a barbie -doll anatomy state as she grabbed Dyana, using her strange green, light side fueled Force Lightning to destroy the chains on the weakened Dyana, whose full regenerative power came flooding back, though it was still dampened by the power of the Nexus.
"What in Ashla's name is happening to them?!" Dyana cried out in shock as she watched the horrific mass start to rapidly shrink down to humanoid size.
"I dunno!" Haal yelled as she helped her fellow Shi'ido up. "But we either run for our lives RIGHT NOW or we will join them!"
The pair ran for their lives as the screaming mass of body parts continued to shrink to humanoid size, the terrible dark side storm subsiding as the mass reformed into a slender, pale skinned woman with red hair in the nude, eyes black like midnight, the flesh on her face rippling between the faces of each member of the coven before finally settling back into the one of this new form, which took traits from each merged witch to make its new appearance.
"Mind over Muscle..." were the first words that escaped her compulsively...
The new being was a warp in the force, a dark side singularity of cruelty and death and malice. Something fused together unnaturally.
She was all of them...yet she was none of them.
She was worse. A jigsaw puzzle of the Dark Side that had finally been solved.
This being, possessing all the combined knowledge and malice of its constituent parts, immediately decided it needed a new name. It picked one, basing the letters in its name off the first letters in the names of each witch that was part of her.
"I am Ersethy..." Ersethy hissed coldly. "WE are ALL Ersethy. And we will spill blood on this world as the Goddess we are!"
As Haal and Dyana fled for their lives, Ersethy's psychotic laughter echoed through the ancient cavern temple....
Present era--two weeks prior...
It must be stressed that belief in the Dark Three can be found
anywhere...
These particular Mawites intruded on an ancient swamp with long faded warnings they couldn't read because it was ancient Atrisian. The signs
directly translated into YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTELY NEW LEVEL OF DUMBASSERY IF YOU TRY TO DO DARK MAGIC HERE! THERE IS THE REMAINS OF AN EVIL WITCH HERE THAT MIGHT REACT TO WHATEVER STUPID THING YOU ARE PLANNING! GO SOMEWHERE ELSE TO PULL YOUR CHIT!!! in case anyone was interested.
They were low level members. Really low level. Barely warband. Trained to salvage. They had come across something that had somehow ended up on the Atrisian Black Market. A
Catsuit. Grey in color. Both buyer and seller had been ignorant of its true value, and both even more ignorant of its true danger.
Basically an unruly gang had the personal armor of an extremely insane, extremely evil Dark Sider, and like the absolute RUSTY SPOONS THEY WERE, they had decided to go use it in a Sith Ritual one of these expired hotdogs had had the blind dumb luck of catching a Heathen Priest performing unaware of his presence. He had a pretty good memory and described it to the Post Apocalyptic-looking bastards he called his peers. How they had gotten past the port authority without setting off alarm bells was a genuine toss up between the will of the Dark Side or just pure dumb luck.
Also, like the TOTAL PACKAGE OF STUPID THEY WERE, they were gonna perform this mock ritual in a swamp
while completely hammered.
While it could be debated whether the Dark Side had caused them to be ignored by the Port Authority, it couldn't be anything else BUT dumb luck that they had evaded all the dangerous predators and such.
These swaggering, hiccuping
tools shouting "WAR! DEATH! REBIRTH!" were about to win the Idiot Lotto.
Axe Face, defacto leader of this Fire Brigade of Fodder was the largest of these Mawite Morons, normally the type sent out to die or the type inevitably experimented on. He snarled, watching the scrawnier members of his group, Dead Hand and Razor Nose, edge lords with Mohawks, stretch the catsuit between them in fascination, watching as the magic of the suit, made more potent by these Dark Side infused swamps, caused it to return to its normal length and shape, once either let go of their end.
"You idiots...quit playing around with that! You could break it!" He said, hiccuping immediately afterwards, then puking...
"It almost feels like shark skin..." Razor Nose said in slurred speech.
"Let's play stretchy-stretch again!" Dead Hand yelled, the most visibly mentally unstable of them, in manic excitement...
"We have to verify what it is before we bring it to the Heathen Priests! If you ruin what might be a real artifact...how...hic!...how're we gonna prove it's a real Force Spawn's Armor?" Axe Face asked in a drunken stupor, hiccuping again.
"Y'know guys, it is kinda late...hic!!...mayyyybeee we oughta call it a night!" said Hand, ironically the most reasonable of the spoiled chicken sandwiches calling themselves Mawites present.
"Bro, we walked, like, eight hours!" Razor Nose protested, the single dumbest one present despite being the least drunk. That said, it was equally ironic that he kinda had a point.
"Where are we even headed?" this walking Darwin Award finally thought to ask Axe Face.
"Old ruins a Dark Jedi I knew once stumbled onto. He never knew what they were...just knew the place was super strong with the Darkness...but localized..." Axe Face answered..."We're gonna see if we can use it to conjure the spirit of who wore this..."
"And then what?" Dead Hand asked, quite reasonably for a complete tool.
"I...hic!...I dunno...super...hic!...dark side stuff!" Axe Face answered. One thing about this intellectual titan was becoming clear;
We didn't deserve him.
The trio eventually came across the steadily sinking remains of the stone tomb once visited by Nine Lives and Sawa Ike in Atrisia's ancient past, where Ersethy's forever rotting remains had spawned countless lesser copies of her and her absorbed personas/victims over the Millennia, not the least of which was a fragment of the Somia persona who would eventually be reprogrammed into the original version of
Syd Celsius
, who for countless centuries was among the strongest of her kind, a status that was still true today.
After all these Millennia, the 'charge' on the remains, so to speak, had finally begun to die out. And with it, her tomb had at least begun to crumble. To collapse in on itself and sink into the swamp. If these
burnt pancakes hadn't come along, in another fifty years, the charge would have died out completely and no further fragments of Ersethy would have formed from her corpse. They would have finally dissolved into the putrid slurry they were always meant to before becoming dust.
But because these PILLARS OF SOCIETY wanted to fool around, the Dark Side was going to get a powerful servant of it back into the game.
Ersethy's
worst had been saved for
last.
The wind blew ominously through the swamp and the ruins at midnight...
"I don't like this place..." Dead Hand said. "Something happened...or is... happening here...and I don't like it ..." (KOTOR reference #33445334423448875445: 90 XP)
None of the other geniuses present heard him.
The pair soon set up the ritual site, laying the catsuit in the middle of a circle of corrupted fat and blood they had brought with them.
They lit candles. Amazingly, they managed to get the position and placement of materials right, even while stumbling around, farting, or throwing up. Real salt of the earth types, these folks. They even collectively passed out in those swamp lands for like a half hour. Axe Face and Dead Hand because they were inebriated, Razor Nose because he was a living, breathing,
failing grade on an SAT score to fall asleep in this place.
When they woke up, they seemingly continued right where they left off, with Axe face standing on a tree stump overlooking the Catsuit and bayed at the moon. Surely, he would give the galaxy free energy, if he would devote the full weight of his intellectual pursuits to not impersonating Chihuahuas, which is what his barking sounded like.
"C'mon, man, get a move on!" Razor Nose complained.
"It's my party, and I'll bark if I want to, bark if I want to, baaarrrrrk if I want tooooooo!" Axe Face proclaimed.
"You would bark too if it happened to you!" Dead Hand said to Razor Nose.
"If
what happened to me,
motherfether?" Razor Nose asked.
"Bring it!" Dead Hand said excitedly.
"Bring
WHAT!?" Razor Nose demanded to know.
"You stupid bastards! Let me speak the words!" Axe Face growled. "Now, let's see ...how did that Heathen Priest put it..."
Can you guess what he did? I bet you can guess.
Bet.
He mispronounced the words...
Thirty seconds later...
Dead Hand awoke to a swamp utterly set ablaze. He saw dead animals everywhere, he saw the remains of the sinking stone structure ablaze, burst open. Axe Face's...er,
face, was gone, a wedge shaped piece of tomb stone still lodged in it. Razor Nose had died from smoke inhalation.
Dead Hand saw a
mountain of rotting flesh oozing white blood and black pus condensing itself quickly and efficiently into humanoid form, sprouting red hair and feminine features and pale skin as Ersethy reformed.
Her body was alive. But in place of an actual soul, her body was now powered solely by the Dark Side of The Force. Her personality kept intact for its uses.
Dead Hand, even in his drunken stupor, realized that for a Mawite, he had witnessed something
holy from his twisted perspective and immediately fell to his knees in worship, chanting the names of War, Death, and Rebirth.
Ersethy's dead stare raked him over as she approached, not questioning his worship of her.
"Those words..." Ersethy questioned quietly. "Why do you chant them?"
"They, they are the names of the Gods I serve..." Dead Hand answered on his knees, wondering if he was about to die. "Pure Avatars of the Darkness, sworn to destroy and rebirth the universe. Surely you are a miracle of the Dark Three!"
"The Gods of the Maw..." Ersethy noted, feeling Erio's hunger to kill building within her before fixing her gaze on Dead Hand.
"I have excellent news!" she said to him with a small smirk. "Because you have played a hand in my rebirth, you have found me in an
unusually good mood! So good I am going to spare you!" She said exuberantly. "But as for your God's..." she trailed.
"You say you serve them...very well. Serve them by leading me to their champions..." she commanded...
She then spied the Catsuit, immediately walking up to it.
"Whose is this?" Ersethy asked him as she turned.
Dead Hand shrugged "No clue."
Ersethy broke down into a pile of moving flesh and filled up the catsuit with her mass, retaking her appearance soon after as she sat up, face rippling between her's and the Amalgam for a split second before moving back to hers.
"I'm dressed. Let's go..." she said.
Present:
Ersethy walked the Ark in a black, sparkling ritual gown, with the image of a Yovshin Swordsman on the front. She remained a rotting miasma in the Force, a presence even more polluted with the Dark Side than even Phyre at her absolute worst.
She had gained the Golden Skull's attention by a display of pure bloodthirst, casting a spell that had turned an entire Star Destroyer's worth of Vicondor Soldiers into
rakghouls. Which she had then
burned alive in a tied down pile with their still fully human minds collectively
screaming in agony, clawing and biting and scraping at each other even as they burned as their final act, then resurrecting them
five more times to do it again. That had definitely gotten her some notice just in sheer, inhumane brutality alone, especially when she had used the immense suffering released to create a Dark Side Nexus.
That had gotten her an invitation to prove her mettle on a much wider scale against Vicondor, depending on what
Thomas Barran
decides to do once he was there.
Ersethy thirsted to kill. Despite her immaculate looks, she was worse than a rabid animal, because she was a rabid animal
that could delay being rabid as long as she needed to.
She spotted potential victims everywhere she went, and the only reason she didn't kill them was because they could indirectly help contribute to her killing. She found understanding modern Maw worship remarkably simple for those who had no morals. As she moved across the Ark, her movements were reported. They found her an unusually skilled, zealous and enthusiastic torturer of their prisoners. She even gave a few of their Priests
suggestion lists for how to make already cruel practices
even more cruel and inhumane. And the suggestions were genuinely good ones. Genius ones, even. The pain index of their victims shot up a few notches after even a brief consultation.
Ersethy lived.
Ersethy lived to kill.
The Beast would continue making herself useful until Thomas or others had a need to summon her...
Khaostra Devoid
Erion Justeene
Darth Moskvin
Marcus Bastion
|
Diarch Reign
|
Dis
Ova Ziss
|
Quinn Varanin
|
Darth Malum of House Marr
