Matsu Xiangu
The Haruspex
LOCATION: Jungle outside Kaas City
ENEMIES: [member="Valiens Nantaris"] | [member="Siobhan Kerrigan"]
ZOMBIE ACTIVITY: Thinning out near wall, still roaming through jungle destroying things and eating stray Jedi separated from main group. Massive-class creatures roaming.
MATSU | And in the spirit of watching a trailer too many times, it was hopeful that the duel ahead would not be as lackluster as bats versus aliens.
Matsu had never come to Dromund Kaas with the expectation to utterly win the day. But that had never been the point. If one were to look back on her life, they’d see she’d never had any particular problem with Jedi. She loved and hated based on personal merit, and the Jedi belief system wasn’t bad – if misguided and unrealistic. She’d picked Dromund Kaas first because it was poetic, not because her swath of pain had anything to do with them personally.
No, the point had been to show them what she knew now to be true. Suffering was not only the path to perfection as she’d always believed, but a state like godhood. She’d been Out There – further than the Unknown Regions, those places that everyone else avoided. She’d seen things and she knew what was coming. Didn’t they want to be ready? They spent so much time protecting themselves from each other – the Jedi from the Sith, the Sith from the Jedi, the independents simply from whatever currently threatened them. But they didn’t know what was coming… They didn’t know death was a nameless, faceless ceasing to be they could only escape through agony.
In her mind, the more she could hurt them, the more she was doing them a favor.
She could feel her legs bowing – it was that strange pain, the one that starts screeching to you that your body is bending entirely the wrong way somehow and to make it stop before you can’t go back. Her only saving grace was that she’d been in, she’d had the privilege of glimpsing such a unique, individual mind. (And wouldn’t she be glorious to turn? Imagine what suffering would do to a powerhouse like that. When They came, she would be unstoppable.) Her presence within the red-head’s mind in the last moments before she had to stop concentrating and was forced it, she was given a glimpse of the attempt as it began, and in response she called on the sorcery that had fueled the creation of her army. There were thousands of ways to shape the dark side to something corporeal, but with her legs quaking underneath her she went for the quickest: a blast of dark side energy directed at the Dark Sider much like the telekinetic tsunami that had been thrown at her. The leaves on the trees disintegrated in its wake, curling and puffing to embers and then dust. The earth shot up in clods of mud, rocks went flying.
Though she’d countered and maintained the ability to stand on her own two feet, pain like she was being stabbed shot up her calves with each step. When she paid attention she could feel something crackling, like the bones that the woman had targeted weren't broken but fissured, unsteady. That realization – that moment of enjoyment – left her open. At the last second she opened her eyes to the flaring green of a lightsaber, nearly silent against the crack of thunder that hid its arrival. Raising one of her phrik-laced arms just in time, it glanced off metal. Instead of cleaving her in two, it cut down over the right side of her rib cage, revealing the broken rib the woman had left Matsu with.
Following the downward diagonal path of the Jedi’s attack with her own saber, she pushed, attempting to shove him through the diagonal motion to make him unstable on the muddy ground.
“Don’t you see!?” she shouted at him over the newly down-pouring rain. “I’m trying to help you!”
[member="Sorel Crieff"] | The droid, not ancient but certainly built quite a few decades prior to Sorel’s discovery of its resting place, was extremely confused. When it had been deactivated, the Sith it had been serving had simply been tired of its talking. It wasn’t a great conversationalist - it had simply offered advice that its Master had not appreciated in the slightest. Damn Sith, always thinking they knew best…
But really, it wasn’t a good time to think about how annoying the Sith were. It appeared quite a bit had changed since the last time he’d been awake. He looked at the dark-haired woman, dusting off the gun he’d been clutching in his deactivated hands for who-knew-how-many-years.
“Query: what is happening?”
Before the woman could answer, the droid turned to a zombie that was reaching as if to grab her hair and yank her backwards over the edge of the booth.
“Statement: duck.”
Whether she’d already been moving or heard what it said, the HK unit registered the preternatural speed with which the woman moved. Sith? Jedi? It had to be Sith - this was Dromund Kaas! Either way, he let out a barrage of blaster bolts that destroyed the heads of the wave of zombies clambering up to their position. He did love guns.
[member="Connor Harrison"] | The Abomination had never known this sort of agony when living, and certainly not when dead. Almost nothing remained of its nervous system and therefore most pain was lost to it. But perhaps through some twisting of nature the Dark Woman had made it so anything threatening the brain would cause rage, a desperation to survive common only in the living. Roaring with fear that quickly turned to freakish rage, it slammed its fists in to the ground over and over, unaware of the Jedi’s escape as it tore at its own face trying to remove the saber burning through its flesh. Claws tearing through its muzzle, it destroyed flesh and muscle, removing teeth and tongue and anything required to just get rid of the burning in its face.
It let out something like a pained sigh as the lightsaber dropped from the gore, the blade deactivating as the hilt tumbled to the ground and stuck in the mud. And there the Abomination left it tangled within ancient tree roots as it turned on its haunches.
Nearly blind and making hideous gagging noises through a muzzle it had ruined in its need to rid itself of the saber it barrelled through the woods without direction. Little did it know, it was heading in just the direction the Jedi Master had taken to leave the Abomination behind and continue on to other important goals. Knocking down all the trees in its path, tearing the earth up in its wake, it sprinted headlong towards the sound of battle. Sound was almost all it had left.
As it left the treeline, the one eye that had any vision left at all caught motion - the JEDI.
With a hideous, gargled roar it bore down. It couldn’t see that it was barreling towards one of the huge cliffs standing over the basin surrounding part of old Kaas City, and in the end it wouldn’t have mattered - it just wanted the Jedi Master dead. The ground shook with its approach, another flare of lightning flashing off the gore of what was left of its face when it was a few feet from the sprinting Master. Reaching out with a clawed hand to try and crush the Jedi, it let out a startled cry as the ground suddenly disappeared from underneath it. Both clawed hands scrambled for the cliff edge, attempting to pull itself back up. With any luck, it had pulled the Jedi off the side with it and the Master lay a broken heap far below. It wouldn’t mind falling to its death just to see Connor’s crippled body at the bottom lying next to it as it died for the final time.
[member="Jenson Koraz"], [member="Aldera Antilles"], [member="George O Rourke"], [member="Joza Perl"], [member="Audren Sykes"] | Whatever the creature had been in life, it retained its rock-like skin in death. Holes torn in it by rot left it vulnerable to random blaster-fire and the constant barrage of fire from a brave little droid that dared to test it, but the majority of the things thrown at it simply served to make it angry. As a sudden salvo of fire from one of the gun emplacements tore in to one of the rot-wounds in its side, it let out a roar that flattened some of the slowly decreasing hordes numbers in front of it.
It was so angry, it did not notice the Nautolan crawling up its back.
Stalking forward, it crushed other zombies without mercy. It tossed them off the sides of the bridge simply because it might mean a Jedi fighting among them would die horribly at the bottom of the basin below. It would not fall until it had tasted their blood, until it might them all hurt, until they had to watch each other die at its hands.
Raising both enormous fists back high above its head, it brought them forward with all of its weight to slam down on the bridge.
A huge fissure zig-zagged up half the bridge under the impact, the structure shuddering horrifyingly under every living being’s feet.
[member="Jericho"] | The jungle surrounding the wreckage was thick with smoke. The crackling of wood burning smelled even more pungent in air pregnant with moisture, mingling with ozone to become heady and intoxicating. From the trees something more intangible than the zombies watched the Jedi crawling along the jungle floor.
They never gave up, did they?
From the branches, it dropped down silently. It appeared just as real as everything else surrounding it, but it was a creation of Matsu’s - sorcery at its finest, an illusion made real by the power of her connection to the dark side. Creating them was taxing and she’d made just a few. It was powerful here on Dromund Kaas in a nexus of dark power already excited by Matsu’s presence. But it was also far more intelligent than the zombies. Much like a certain illusion faced by a certain Jedi in a certain cave on Dagobah hundreds of years ago, this thing stalked forward and then got done on its knees in the mud next to the Jedi.
It looked like a young girl, eyes big in its head underneath severe, dark bangs. It did nothing but watch him.
“You could stop fighting and join her, you know? You are strong. You would have a place to use all that power without restrictions.”
ENEMIES: [member="Valiens Nantaris"] | [member="Siobhan Kerrigan"]
ZOMBIE ACTIVITY: Thinning out near wall, still roaming through jungle destroying things and eating stray Jedi separated from main group. Massive-class creatures roaming.
MATSU | And in the spirit of watching a trailer too many times, it was hopeful that the duel ahead would not be as lackluster as bats versus aliens.
Matsu had never come to Dromund Kaas with the expectation to utterly win the day. But that had never been the point. If one were to look back on her life, they’d see she’d never had any particular problem with Jedi. She loved and hated based on personal merit, and the Jedi belief system wasn’t bad – if misguided and unrealistic. She’d picked Dromund Kaas first because it was poetic, not because her swath of pain had anything to do with them personally.
No, the point had been to show them what she knew now to be true. Suffering was not only the path to perfection as she’d always believed, but a state like godhood. She’d been Out There – further than the Unknown Regions, those places that everyone else avoided. She’d seen things and she knew what was coming. Didn’t they want to be ready? They spent so much time protecting themselves from each other – the Jedi from the Sith, the Sith from the Jedi, the independents simply from whatever currently threatened them. But they didn’t know what was coming… They didn’t know death was a nameless, faceless ceasing to be they could only escape through agony.
In her mind, the more she could hurt them, the more she was doing them a favor.
She could feel her legs bowing – it was that strange pain, the one that starts screeching to you that your body is bending entirely the wrong way somehow and to make it stop before you can’t go back. Her only saving grace was that she’d been in, she’d had the privilege of glimpsing such a unique, individual mind. (And wouldn’t she be glorious to turn? Imagine what suffering would do to a powerhouse like that. When They came, she would be unstoppable.) Her presence within the red-head’s mind in the last moments before she had to stop concentrating and was forced it, she was given a glimpse of the attempt as it began, and in response she called on the sorcery that had fueled the creation of her army. There were thousands of ways to shape the dark side to something corporeal, but with her legs quaking underneath her she went for the quickest: a blast of dark side energy directed at the Dark Sider much like the telekinetic tsunami that had been thrown at her. The leaves on the trees disintegrated in its wake, curling and puffing to embers and then dust. The earth shot up in clods of mud, rocks went flying.
Though she’d countered and maintained the ability to stand on her own two feet, pain like she was being stabbed shot up her calves with each step. When she paid attention she could feel something crackling, like the bones that the woman had targeted weren't broken but fissured, unsteady. That realization – that moment of enjoyment – left her open. At the last second she opened her eyes to the flaring green of a lightsaber, nearly silent against the crack of thunder that hid its arrival. Raising one of her phrik-laced arms just in time, it glanced off metal. Instead of cleaving her in two, it cut down over the right side of her rib cage, revealing the broken rib the woman had left Matsu with.
Following the downward diagonal path of the Jedi’s attack with her own saber, she pushed, attempting to shove him through the diagonal motion to make him unstable on the muddy ground.
“Don’t you see!?” she shouted at him over the newly down-pouring rain. “I’m trying to help you!”
[member="Sorel Crieff"] | The droid, not ancient but certainly built quite a few decades prior to Sorel’s discovery of its resting place, was extremely confused. When it had been deactivated, the Sith it had been serving had simply been tired of its talking. It wasn’t a great conversationalist - it had simply offered advice that its Master had not appreciated in the slightest. Damn Sith, always thinking they knew best…
But really, it wasn’t a good time to think about how annoying the Sith were. It appeared quite a bit had changed since the last time he’d been awake. He looked at the dark-haired woman, dusting off the gun he’d been clutching in his deactivated hands for who-knew-how-many-years.
“Query: what is happening?”
Before the woman could answer, the droid turned to a zombie that was reaching as if to grab her hair and yank her backwards over the edge of the booth.
“Statement: duck.”
Whether she’d already been moving or heard what it said, the HK unit registered the preternatural speed with which the woman moved. Sith? Jedi? It had to be Sith - this was Dromund Kaas! Either way, he let out a barrage of blaster bolts that destroyed the heads of the wave of zombies clambering up to their position. He did love guns.
[member="Connor Harrison"] | The Abomination had never known this sort of agony when living, and certainly not when dead. Almost nothing remained of its nervous system and therefore most pain was lost to it. But perhaps through some twisting of nature the Dark Woman had made it so anything threatening the brain would cause rage, a desperation to survive common only in the living. Roaring with fear that quickly turned to freakish rage, it slammed its fists in to the ground over and over, unaware of the Jedi’s escape as it tore at its own face trying to remove the saber burning through its flesh. Claws tearing through its muzzle, it destroyed flesh and muscle, removing teeth and tongue and anything required to just get rid of the burning in its face.
It let out something like a pained sigh as the lightsaber dropped from the gore, the blade deactivating as the hilt tumbled to the ground and stuck in the mud. And there the Abomination left it tangled within ancient tree roots as it turned on its haunches.
Nearly blind and making hideous gagging noises through a muzzle it had ruined in its need to rid itself of the saber it barrelled through the woods without direction. Little did it know, it was heading in just the direction the Jedi Master had taken to leave the Abomination behind and continue on to other important goals. Knocking down all the trees in its path, tearing the earth up in its wake, it sprinted headlong towards the sound of battle. Sound was almost all it had left.
As it left the treeline, the one eye that had any vision left at all caught motion - the JEDI.
With a hideous, gargled roar it bore down. It couldn’t see that it was barreling towards one of the huge cliffs standing over the basin surrounding part of old Kaas City, and in the end it wouldn’t have mattered - it just wanted the Jedi Master dead. The ground shook with its approach, another flare of lightning flashing off the gore of what was left of its face when it was a few feet from the sprinting Master. Reaching out with a clawed hand to try and crush the Jedi, it let out a startled cry as the ground suddenly disappeared from underneath it. Both clawed hands scrambled for the cliff edge, attempting to pull itself back up. With any luck, it had pulled the Jedi off the side with it and the Master lay a broken heap far below. It wouldn’t mind falling to its death just to see Connor’s crippled body at the bottom lying next to it as it died for the final time.
[member="Jenson Koraz"], [member="Aldera Antilles"], [member="George O Rourke"], [member="Joza Perl"], [member="Audren Sykes"] | Whatever the creature had been in life, it retained its rock-like skin in death. Holes torn in it by rot left it vulnerable to random blaster-fire and the constant barrage of fire from a brave little droid that dared to test it, but the majority of the things thrown at it simply served to make it angry. As a sudden salvo of fire from one of the gun emplacements tore in to one of the rot-wounds in its side, it let out a roar that flattened some of the slowly decreasing hordes numbers in front of it.
It was so angry, it did not notice the Nautolan crawling up its back.
Stalking forward, it crushed other zombies without mercy. It tossed them off the sides of the bridge simply because it might mean a Jedi fighting among them would die horribly at the bottom of the basin below. It would not fall until it had tasted their blood, until it might them all hurt, until they had to watch each other die at its hands.
Raising both enormous fists back high above its head, it brought them forward with all of its weight to slam down on the bridge.
A huge fissure zig-zagged up half the bridge under the impact, the structure shuddering horrifyingly under every living being’s feet.
[member="Jericho"] | The jungle surrounding the wreckage was thick with smoke. The crackling of wood burning smelled even more pungent in air pregnant with moisture, mingling with ozone to become heady and intoxicating. From the trees something more intangible than the zombies watched the Jedi crawling along the jungle floor.
They never gave up, did they?
From the branches, it dropped down silently. It appeared just as real as everything else surrounding it, but it was a creation of Matsu’s - sorcery at its finest, an illusion made real by the power of her connection to the dark side. Creating them was taxing and she’d made just a few. It was powerful here on Dromund Kaas in a nexus of dark power already excited by Matsu’s presence. But it was also far more intelligent than the zombies. Much like a certain illusion faced by a certain Jedi in a certain cave on Dagobah hundreds of years ago, this thing stalked forward and then got done on its knees in the mud next to the Jedi.
It looked like a young girl, eyes big in its head underneath severe, dark bangs. It did nothing but watch him.
“You could stop fighting and join her, you know? You are strong. You would have a place to use all that power without restrictions.”
