First Reply Old Habits, New Tricks

[Jak Meridian]

Corsucant was unique. Despite being the seat of power for the Jedi and those they guard for what seems like an endless period of time, beneath the surface was a would unto its own. Beneath the bustling streets of the upper levels and buried beneath generations of steel and iron was a world so very different from the surface.

The lower levels were many, so much so that you'd be forgiven for not realizing you were even in a 'lower level.' But one would quickly realize their mistake as the relative comfort of security above quickly becomes something else. Down here is where the real Corsucant was.

Jak smirked to himself as he tossed aside the credit chip. Below him lay a recently decommissioned droid, an older battle droid model that he was unfamiliar with. Credits, however, weren't his goal. He continued to shift his hands around the scraps the droid produced for a brief moment before stopping. He found his prize.

Slowly he stood up, a singular ion-battery in his gloved hands. While it was only powerful enough to provide life to a droid, it was just the right amount of power needed for his ship's navcom, which was dated and needed repairing. Placing it in a pouch on his utility belt, the Sith warrior turned swiftly and made his way down and out of the alleyway he had found himself in.

His ship was on the surface, about a hundred levels above. Not one to waste time, Jak began snaking his way through the busy crowds. It was curious to him- how busy these lower seedier levels were. It only confirmed his own feelings about the galaxy and those who found themselves living within it: every man for himself.

Jak was, however, a social creature. The years he spent hiding his force-sensitivity had turned him into quite a manipulative mind. He couldn't help himself but to try and make new friends, or enemies.

As he moved he felt a strange sense wash over him. Unlike most Jedi or Sith, who were devoted to the Force in their own unique ways, Jak did believe in luck. More than that he believed in fate beyond the Force. This feeling he found himself having was an indication.

Of a possible friend? Mayhaps a foe? The galaxy was a big place filled with opportunity. And one seemed to be coming his way, whatever way that may be.

@Open OOC: Bad at post starts but first time, open to anyone who sees a possible story!

 

[Darth Keres]

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Location: Coruscant - Underworld
Tag: Jak Meridian


The Underworld of Coruscant breathed like a diseased lung—slow, ragged, and full of the rancid vapors of a civilization that had long since rotted beneath its own brilliance. The upper levels glittered in sterile light, but here, below the veins of durasteel and smog, darkness was sovereign. Dripping pipelines whispered like veins leaking lifeblood. Holosigns flickered and died, their broken light washing the walls in sickly pulses of color, as if the shadows themselves were breathing.

It was through these stifling, dripping catacombs of civilization that Darth Keres moved—not walking, but gliding, as if gravity was a courtesy she declined. The air around her rippled faintly, disturbed not by her presence but by her absence of sound. Even the scavenger beasts, the eyeless carrion-feeders that scuttled among the refuse, withdrew into their nests, chittering with an instinctual terror that could not be reasoned with.

Her cloak trailed across the corroded duracrete like a veil of spilled ink. Beneath its folds, the armor whispered softly—an exoskeleton of blackened alloy etched with runes that bled faint violet light: she hunted for a taboo relic—one said to be older than the Republic, older than the Sith Empire, older perhaps than the Force itself. The Obsidian Anathema, it was called in forbidden archives—a shard of something that had once screamed in the void, a crystal heart torn from the corpse of a god. It was whispered to feed on resonance, devouring not energy but intention, turning belief itself into a weapon.

But then—a disturbance.

Not the mechanical groan of the lower city, nor the restless stirring of vermin. It was the Force, bending faintly beneath the weight of another will. Cold. Powerful judgmentally. Familiar in its cruelty.

Another Sith.

"I can feel you," she whispered, each word dipped in venom and delight. "A kindred rot… a rival song in the same key of ruin. Tell me, shadow—do you seek the Obsidian Anathema, or merely hope to die in its presence?" The Underworld held its breath, waiting for the first sound of the inevitable—when the silence between two Sith would finally fracture.

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Melee Weapons​
  • XIII​
• Armor​
  • Black Caskan Wolf-Snake Armor​
• Accessories​
  • k​
• Ship​
  • Taciturnitas​

 

[Jak Meridian]

He stopped in his tracks, the crowd now moving around him like a river would a boulder. In his mind he could sense her. Someone far more powerful than him was creeping into the fringes of his mind. It was a sensation few could truly describe. Of course one could use the Force to invade and influence the minds of many beings, but when one Force sensitive invades the mind of another Force sensitive? The sensation, the tension, was indescribable.

In truth he had no idea of what she spoke of- this Obsidian Anathema. But she had made the mistake of mentioning it at all, for an opportunity now presented itself. Despite not knowing what exactly it was he could tell by her words it must've been some object of immense power.

A weapon? An advantage? What, exactly, Jak could not know. He groaned with annoyance as the presence in his head finished speaking.

First he closed his eyes and allowed his mind to open to her. Not fully, of course, but just... enough.

Before her and Jak would be the flashing of a dozen images: bodies charred in the street, the garden up in flames, two Jedi with their lightsabers ignited, and his father. Between each image was the overwhelming sense of rage and of hate. It was a hate so intense and deep thy, he hoped, it would demonstrate to the presence in his mind that he was not just some Sith fodder.

The instant the assault of memories had ended was when he finally reached out with his own voice, "I don't know what you're talking about." Honesty, a trait not many Sith had. "But if it's an advantage against the enemy, I'll gladly help discover it."

The enemy. Such a simple term. His mind, closed off again, thought momentarily on the word. Would she assume he meant the Jedi? The High Republic? He shrugged it off before continuing down the street, his mind now searching for the uninvited presence. It didn't matter what she thought. Their enemies, for the most part, were the same.

Darth Keres

 

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Jak Meridian


Through the black shroud of her mind's eye, Darth Keres beheld visions scorched in dread and ruin. Two Jedi stood amid a wasteland of ash and silence—their light flickering like guttering candles before a storm. The air itself seemed to scream around them, charred and hollowed bodies all arrayed, faces frozen in the agony of betrayal. Opposing them, half veiled in smoke and shadow, loomed a figure—male, nameless, and still. His presence was not of flesh but of something older, colder. Then the scene evaporated.

"The Force shows me cruelty in its purest art," Darth Keres murmured to herself, her voice low and hollow, echoing off the unseen walls of the dark. "Two Jedi… their valor turned to ash, their flesh blackened like offerings to a god that never cared to listen." Her hand trembled as she brushed the air before her, as if tracing the outlines of the vision's smoke. "I can still hear their screams—sweet hymns of the self-righteous, dying in perfect despair. And him…" Her tone faltered, deepened. "That shadowed man—no name, no face, yet he intrigues me." A bitter laugh slipped past her lips, sharp as broken glass. "The galaxy rots, and even my dreams have learned the stench."

Her focus quickly changed.

Her presence slid into the other Sith's mind like the first chill of a grave wind—silent, invasive, and scented faintly of iron and rain.

{"You wouldn't understand."}

Darth Keres' voice continued to whisper through the marrow of his thoughts, soft as a funeral hymn.

{"Your mind scratches only at the surface of curiosity."}

A flicker of amusement coiled beneath her words, dark and slow, like smoke rising from a smoldering pyre.

{"I can feel the tremor in your curiosity. You pretend assistance— the thought of knowing what I know gnaws at you. You want to know what I've seen—what waits behind the veil of smoke and mirrors."}

A shiver of spectral laughter drifted through the mental link, ancient and hollow, as though it came from somewhere far below the living galaxy.

{"Join me! follow me into the dark, my brother in ruin..."}

Her tone a dreadful caress.

{...on a crusade of success or death. Glory and ruin as one, together we will unlock the mystery of a long, lost Sith artifact."}

Darth Keres fell silent, moving to a cracked ledge outside the nearby cantina, where she gracefully sat as the city's lights washed over her in sickly flickers; the air reeking of rust and old blood. She waited in stillness, a figure carved from ruin: her presence bending the silence around her. He will come.

Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Melee Weapons​
  • XIII​
• Armor​
  • Black Caskan Wolf-Snake Armor​
• Accessories​
  • k​
• Ship​
  • Taciturnitas​
• Personal Guards​
  • Silencers​

 

[Jak Meridian]

The truth was Jak didnt believe. The Force was something more, to most. Jedi viewed it as a path towards enlightenment and inner peace. But more than they that saw it for what it was: a Force. An unseen energy that surrounds, penetrates, and binds everything in the universe together. Some Sith, whether they admitted it or not, believed the same. The difference between the two was in execution: Jedi believed peace would unlock the path of enlightenment, Sith believed dominance would do the same.

Jak didn't believe in either. While there were hundreds upon hundreds of religions and cults spread across the galaxy, they all believed in some form or another of the Force. Not Jak. No the Force was simply a tool that some were lucky to use.

So when one approaches him with the proposition of hunting an ancient artifact, there's some reluctance on his part. There needed to be an angle, something that would benefit him at the end of it all. Thinking on his options for a moment his mind reached out once more to the unknown presence, "Show me where."

He had no idea where this quest was about to take him. But he remained steadfast, believing luck was with him.

Darth Keres

 

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Jak Meridian


Darth Keres let her presence seep back through into the cold corridors of the mindscape, her telepathic call unfurling like a velvet shroud soaked in night. {"Come to me,"} she whispered to the other Sith, her voice a serrated lullaby that dragged across their thoughts with deliberate, delicious weight. She spoke of a rendezvous at the Republic Science and Technical Center.

{"Meet me there,"} she intoned, each word sinking deep like a claw into the psyche, {"next to the decaying monument tributed to some fallen Hero of the Republic from a turbulent transition in the grand old history of the Republic."}

The Sith Lord moved through the crowded arteries of Coruscant like a shadow given hunger, her steps silent beneath the smothering glow of the city's endless towers. Citizens parted unconsciously before her, though none could explain the sudden chill that bled into their bones as she passed. She regarded them with an almost tender fascination—these fragile creatures stitched together by routine and desperation, luminous in their naïve devotion to a world that devours them piece by piece.

Yet, her admiration was laced with a cold, poisonous disdain. She saw in their forced smiles the rot of complacency, in the towering skylanes the gilded cage of a civilization too enamored with its own reflection to sense the darkness pooling beneath it. Coruscant, for all its brilliance, reeked to her of hollow triumphs and decaying virtues, a cathedral built upon the graves of forgotten truths—beautiful in its vastness, wretched in its soul.

Darth Keres halted before the looming statue, its stone surface sculpted into the heroic likeness of a long-dead Republic Admiral, eternally cast in a posture of hollow triumph. The monument rose from the caustic smoke-dampened plaza like a sanctified corpse, its polished exterior gleaming with the false purity of manufactured legend. She circled it slowly, her hooded cloak dragging across the ground like a funeral veil, eyes narrowing as she took in every chiseled boast.

"How quaint," she murmured, voice dripping with venomous amusement, "that they preserve their warriors in rock when their ideals crumble like ash." Her gaze flicked up to the Admiral's frozen stare, that upward tilt of valor meant to inspire generations. Instead, to her, it was the face of delusion—an icon of a Republic desperate to hide its decay behind monuments built of lies. "Stone cannot save you," she whispered to the effigy, "and when memories fade—you will not be mourned."

With a slow, deliberate insolence, Darth Keres folded her arms across her chest and leaned her back against the Admiral's sanctified monument, letting the hard stone press against her like a forbidden altar. The act was quietly heretical—a defilement of the Republic's pride—and the smile that curled across her lips was a serpentine thing, half-mockery, half-invitation to ruin. Shadows pooled at her boots, drawn to her as if eager to share in the sacrilege, and the dim lights of the plaza flickered as though recoiling from her presence.

She tilted her head back just enough to feel the chill of the statue's spine against her own, savoring the contrast between their worlds: one dead and remembered, the other alive and unbound. As she waited for the other Sith to arrive, her expression remained carved in a patient, predatory delight, as though she were preparing to greet not allies, but conspirators in the slow, delicious recovery of the stolen Sith Artifact.

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

• Melee Weapons​
  • XIII​
• Armor​
  • Black Caskan Wolf-Snake Armor​
• Accessories​
  • k​
• Ship​
  • Taciturnitas​
• Personal Guards​
  • Silencers​