Invasion The Other Side of Peace | GA Invasion of TSE's Ziost/Tiss'sharl

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SEPARATE FROM TASK FORCE WINDU
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

"Ohhh, I see."

Quill sighed heavily.

"It's a miserable thing, coming face to face with just how far off the mark some Jedi have gone. I've been a Jedi thirty years - I've lived through every time a Jedi went bad. Ahto City, Korriban...and I've done what I can to bring justice among the Jedi. Many of us have. My name's Jend-Ro Quill, by the way. Don't worry about me. I'll take my lumps for doing the right thing, if it comes to that.

"Also," he said after another deep sigh, "I have an idea. You've clearly been through serious things at the hands of the Jedi. I'm good with memories, very good. If you're willing to share your memories of what the Jedi have done to earn these feelings, I give you my word I'll investigate. You have the sabers and I'll be distracted. If you feel me do anything other than accept whatever memories you offer, by all means take a swipe at me. Are you willing?"

She would, of course, detect no deception throughout; there wasn't any.

 

[Kisaku Oroken]

---

ALLY TAGS: Auteme Lucien Dooku
OPPOSITION TAGS: Darth Carnifex
​

As he rode the shuttle down clutching a grip overhead, Kisaku felt sick. It wasn't the turbulence. It was this world. It wasn't ideology that made his throat feel tight and bile rise within him. Kisaku had been far too absorbed in himself during the briefings to truly understand what he was getting into - worrying over his first time in combat.

All logic pointed to the idea that this was exactly what he was training for, what he was best at, and what he was meant for. Someone who fashions himself as a student of the sword will eventually go to war, yes? Somehow, however, that logic had fully escaped Kisaku up until this moment. He didn't want to kill anyone, and he was fully terrified of the possibilities that awaited him and the people he knew when they reached the surface.

They weren't even on the ground and the killing had already begun. Those with the luxury of seeing with their eyes had a moment of peace inside the landing craft. Not Kisaku -- the picture the Force painted was much more total. Complete. He could see beyond his own ship as other landing craft were violently torn through by turbolaser fire from surface defense batteries. If he focused -- see and feel the lives being extinguished within. Witness in the most raw sense their last moments of panic, pain, terror, and for some, final acceptance just before they were erased completely from his senses.

He could have stopped watching at any moment. Severed himself from the sight that the Force provided, for he would easily prefer the empty coldness of nothing to this. His ability for conscious decision making never came back to him until they hit the ground, and he was already trembling. Terror was not a strong enough word for what he felt.

And yet when his master moved to the front of the craft with the ramp dropping he stumbled over his own feet after her, his breath short. Following her into the citadel that brutally dominated the landscape bothered him much less than the scene around. As they got deeper, the crushing oppression of the place was almost a welcome replacement to the death and carnage that he'd left.

Almost, at least until they had made their way to what felt like to him, a threshold. A mild sense of panic had lingered from coming down onto the surface and it was rising. He could see a similar emotion passing through Auteme, but what was more - he could see passed the gates.

He could see a solitary figure even before they opened. And they were wholly different than anyone else Kisaku had ever seen before. Where as usually he could see the state of others' emotions he could not imagine what he felt now to be belonging to a person.

Hatred. Cold, distant. Almost an extreme disdain for his existence; perhaps not his in particular, but the feeling was so strong it felt like a knife blade to his throat. This... This was a Sith?

Auteme's words barely reached him, but when they parsed he felt numbly against his seninbari, clammy fingers finding the hilt of his saber as he drew it out. "T-there's three of us and just one ahead." Kisaku relayed, barely able to speak as he fixated on that cold, demonic figure forward. His voice became smaller. "...This is our duty..." He was trying to convince himself more than Auteme and Lucien.

 

[Darth Strosius]

Location: Sorzus Academy of Sith Arts
Objective: Defend the Academy, Put down the heretic threat
Tags: Alina Tremiru / Aaran Tafo / Okkeus Dainlei
Allies: TSE
Enemies: GA / NJO
-----------------------------------------------------

"...and I want you three focused on scrubbing any and all research notes from every database in the building. I don't care if it's for a new lightsaber or someone trying to make electricity with a vegetable, we don't leave it for the heretics to find. Am I clear?" The three acolytes in question nodded and were quick to run off, Alisteri noting down their names on the datapad in his hand with a small sigh.

Heretics are running rampant on the planet and here I am giving orders to evacuate.

He supposed that's what he got for arriving a bit later to the defense, stuck in the rear with a bunch of unarmed acolytes. Then again, how was he supposed to know which Legionnaire transport was going to leave and which one was going to Ziost? All the ships looked the same to him.

Arriving on the planet had been another matter entirely, as he found himself stepping out of the ship that he rode in on right as the invasion force arrived. That had been fun. Of course all of the fun jobs had already been taken, and he wound up taking the unwanted position of trying to get a bunch of acolytes to keep things in check away from the fighting.

Someone had to move out all of the artifacts and projects after all.

At first, some of them hadn't wanted to listen, but Alisteri was more than willing to show them how he handled such disrespect amidst a crisis like this. Suffice to say, that one acolyte walked away with only one black eye and a newfound outlook on life. He hadn't heard another peep out of that one, and for that he was thankful.

It was in that moment that he finally understood why many Sith masters tended to be rough on their apprentices.

Another sigh left him as he heard someone ask him a question over comms. "Yes you have to keep patrolling the lower levels. No, I don't know why our orders are so insistent. Look, only call me if you have something worthy to say, any more back talk and I'll come down there myself." He cut the conversation short and groaned, tempted to throw this accursed datapad across the room.

At the very least he wasn't here alone.

With a few quick taps he called his friend who was...well he didn't know where she was. He had lost track of her amidst his efforts in organizing the more pretentious acolytes. "Alina? Status report if you wouldn't mind, and please tell me some good news."

 

[Enyo Typhos]

Equipment: Armour, Rifle, Gas Grenades, Sidearm 1, Sidearm 2, Sabre, Ion Paddle Beamer, Cryo-Ban Gun.
Romi Jade

Ziost was a world with ancient history. Most of it was bloody. Once it had been a throne world of the ancient Sith. Then Vitiate, notorious megalomaniac prone to delusions of grandeur and monologuing, had rewarded the inhabitants for their zeal by consuming them and turning the planet into a barren wasteland. Eventually, Ziost had recovered. Other Sith rulers had claimed the world. Now once again war had come to the planet. Jedi and Sith would clash, as their forebears had done as they would do when the present crop had died off.

Amidst the ruins, Enyo looked upon a towering statue from centuries past. It was made of gold, though by now it had decayed badly, and towered over any human who'd come to visit. Agains tall odds it still stood proudly, having withstood the test of time. Or more likely no one had dared to melt it down due to some superstitious fear that it might be cursed. A long text had been inscribed upon the pedestal that held the statue.

"'My name is Vitiate, master of darkness:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Absurd, Enyo thought to herself. There were no gods, no god-emperors, no chosen ones or Sith'aris. It was all delusion and vanity. She recalled something an independent alchemist had once told her: “The Jedi rule in peacetime until their complacency brings conflict through which they fall and must return to their basic principles. The Sith dominate in chaos until their arrogance destroys them after which they return to the shadows. Democracy proves itself to be the worst system of rule…except for all the others. The galaxy has suffered through so many evil or incompetent or insane rulers it barely matters anymore. It has never, however, come under the rule of a good ruler – perhaps that would be the most terrifying of all outcomes.”

Enyo felt no loyalty to any ruler. The Terminatrix felt a jolt in her skull, and activated her internal comlink, responding through purely electronic transmission. "Status?"
The person contacting her was an HRD officer. "Alliance forces have made landfall. Jedi are inboud for the temples and other Sith sites."
"Acknowledged. Status of the Sith?" Cybernetic eyes turned skyward, she could see dropships descending to the planet's surface amidst anti-aircraft fire, and she could already sense the distant Force auras of Jedi.
"Mobilising. Orders?"
"Put up resistance, but let the Sith bear the brunt of the enemy's assault. If they collapse that is their fate. Elastic defence. Don't engage enemy columns head-on. Acquire material for processing where feasible." Sith were fond of saying that the strong did as they willed, and the weak suffered what they must. It was a mind set Enyo agreed with. Thing was, this also applied to them.

"By your command. Wasps are out and will keep eyes on enemy and allied movements." Enyo cut the connection. Sooner or later, Jedi would come to cleanse this place - as their forebears had done - and she would fight one, as her contract stipulated. She had been paid very well.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SEPARATE FROM TASK FORCE WINDU
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara




"Ohhh, I see."

Quill sighed heavily.

"It's a miserable thing, coming face to face with just how far off the mark some Jedi have gone. I've been a Jedi thirty years - I've lived through every time a Jedi went bad. Ahto City, Korriban...and I've done what I can to bring justice among the Jedi. Many of us have. My name's Jend-Ro Quill, by the way. Don't worry about me. I'll take my lumps for doing the right thing, if it comes to that.

"Also," he said after another deep sigh, "I have an idea. You've clearly been through serious things at the hands of the Jedi. I'm good with memories, very good. If you're willing to share your memories of what the Jedi have done to earn these feelings, I give you my word I'll investigate. You have the sabers and I'll be distracted. If you feel me do anything other than accept whatever memories you offer, by all means take a swipe at me. Are you willing?"

She would, of course, detect no deception throughout; there wasn't any.

If anyone else had suggested that to her, she would have laughed. She had yet to meet a peaceful jedi-- not one that hadn't tried to take her life first. Somehow that always made the apologies that came after ring false. They were always so good at telling her she deserved it, and the only way she would deserve anything different was if she forsook those she was trying to protect and let the jedi destroy them.

Jend-Ro Quill did none of that.


Was that because he had been her once? How could he stand to join up with such monstrous people? She had questions, but they stood in the middle of a corridor. The threat of exposure grew more severe as footsteps echoed from the landing below. Her eyes widened in unmistakeable panic.

"Not here. Follow me,” she implored, the sabers lowering. This was treasonous, but for a chance to fix this? She didn't care.

"And hide your jedi stink."

She turned on her heels, leading him briskly down the hall. Her heart slammed in her chest as she juggled the load in her hands, her eyes constantly snapping to the stair landing as she punched the code in.

33342

Beep.

She gestured him and his jedi robes in first. The lights were already on. He'd find himself faced with the tense eyes of a 12 year old boy. The glasses that framed his face were held together by pieces of tape. He was willowy and bruised and in his hands was a shaking gun. He didn't shoot, too locked down by fear.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TF WINDU AND MAYBE KIND OF SABOTAGING THEM
FORCE SIGNATURE VEILED, BUT IT BRIEFLY WASN'T
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill came to a screeching halt, not because of the blaster pointed at his chest but because of the bruises on that scrawny kid. And in a heartbeat he was back to his time as a Scriptor in the Raskava covert, a boy this age and this size with the exact same bruises. Anger flared unexpected and hot. He let out a shaking breath, hands up and empty, and stepped the rest of the way into the room to let Aradia follow him in.

Much as he wished for a personalized conversation with every Sith student in the academy, he simply didn't have the time. "Go to sleep, son," he said, and the abused Sithling crumpled. The blaster skittered across the floor; Quill made no move to pick it up. Instead he caught the boy before his head could strike the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Aradia, who could fairly easily skewer him with her lightsaber or his. "I can get him to safety, or you can."

"The memories now, please - all you have to do is think of them, not even in any great detail or emotional depth, and I'll handle the rest. I want to know why you hate and fear the Jedi so deeply. I want to fix what can be fixed."

 

[Alina Tremiru]

Darth Strosius | Aaran Tafo | Okkeus Dainlei

Unlike her friend, Alina was here with the intention to keep her fellow acolytes safe. She was a more senior acolyte now, yes, but she still felt that same bond. That need to keep them alive. This wouldn't go the way Dantooine had gone. Her task was a much more simple one. Oversee the artifacts being taken out of the academy for safe keeping. She had no issue with keeping her fellows in line. Like Alisteri, a swift punch sent one who decided to talk back into a wall with a bloody nose.

She nearly laughed as she heard Alisteri's voice over the com. He was having a hard time with this, huh? "Artifacts are secure and heading off world. The last of them are being loaded now, so I'll be able to double back. You know what we're supposed to do with the prisoners?" Some were to be broken into the Sith below, others had information the Sith needed or wanted. Alina was all too aware of this practice. She wasn't sure how she felt about it, but it was unlikely that these kinds of prisoners would just be left behind.

They'd only rejoin the Jedi.

"Prisoner's have been marked for collection. Proceed to round up the ones I'm forwarding to your datapad for transport, or if they're unwilling cut them down." The voice of the Academy's Overseer rung in her ear. Well, that answered that.

"I'm heading down there now. Meet when you can, Alisteri." With that she brought up her datapad, scanning over the list. She delegated among the acolytes under her charge to get the weaker prisoners. The one she was to escort? Aaran Tafo. She paused where she was when she read who was responsible for his capture. Quinn Varanin . Confusion settled in the back of her mind. Why did that matter? She took a breath before stuffing the datapad back in it's pouch.

No time to think. Only act.

Well. This wasn't good. Alina stood in front of the empty cell, a grimace on her face. Aaran was supposed to be here. Maybe she'd of had a chance to talk to him about Quinn. Learn more of her rival by how she handled opponents. Handled Jedi and their ilk. Now all she was left with was frustration. How did he smuggle a weapon in to cut the bars? She clicked on her com, glancing around the hallways.

"Ali, there's been a prison break. We have enemies loose below."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SEPARATE FROM TASK FORCE WINDU
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara




"Ohhh, I see."

Quill sighed heavily.

"It's a miserable thing, coming face to face with just how far off the mark some Jedi have gone. I've been a Jedi thirty years - I've lived through every time a Jedi went bad. Ahto City, Korriban...and I've done what I can to bring justice among the Jedi. Many of us have. My name's Jend-Ro Quill, by the way. Don't worry about me. I'll take my lumps for doing the right thing, if it comes to that.

"Also," he said after another deep sigh, "I have an idea. You've clearly been through serious things at the hands of the Jedi. I'm good with memories, very good. If you're willing to share your memories of what the Jedi have done to earn these feelings, I give you my word I'll investigate. You have the sabers and I'll be distracted. If you feel me do anything other than accept whatever memories you offer, by all means take a swipe at me. Are you willing?"

She would, of course, detect no deception throughout; there wasn't any.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



If anyone else had suggested that to her, she would have laughed. She had yet to meet a peaceful jedi-- not one that hadn't tried to take her life first. Somehow that always made the apologies that came after ring false. They were always so good at telling her she deserved it, and the only way she would deserve anything different was if she forsook her peers and let the jedi destroy them.

Jend-Ro Quill did none of that.


Was that because he had been her once? How could he stand to join up with such monstrous people? She had questions, but they stood in the middle of a corridor. The threat of exposure grew more severe as footsteps echoed from the landing below. Her eyes widened in unmistakeable panic.

"Not here. Follow me,” she implored, the sabers lowering. This was treasonous, but for a chance to fix this? She didn't care.

"And hide your jedi stink."

She turned on her heels, leading him briskly down the hall. Her heart slammed in her chest as she juggled the load in her hands, her eyes constantly snapping to the stair landing as she punched the code in.

33342

Beep.

She gestured him and his jedi robes in first. The lights were already on. He'd find himself faced with the tense eyes of a 12 year old boy. The glasses that framed his face were held together by pieces of tape. He was willowy and bruised and in his hands was a shaking gun. He didn't shoot, too locked down by fear.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TF WINDU AND MAYBE KIND OF SABOTAGING THEM
FORCE SIGNATURE VEILED, BUT IT BRIEFLY WASN'T
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill came to a screeching halt, not because of the blaster pointed at his chest but because of the bruises on that scrawny kid. And in a heartbeat he was back to his time as a Scriptor in the Raskava covert, a boy this age and this size with the exact same bruises. Anger flared unexpected and hot. He let out a shaking breath, hands up and empty, and stepped the rest of the way into the room to let Aradia follow him in.

Much as he wished for a personalized conversation with every Sith student in the academy, he simply didn't have the time. "Go to sleep, son," he said, and the abused Sithling crumpled. The blaster skittered across the floor; Quill made no move to pick it up. Instead he caught the boy before his head could strike the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Aradia, who could fairly easily skewer him with her lightsaber or his. "I can get him to safety, or you can."

"The memories now, please - all you have to do is think of them, not even in any great detail or emotional depth, and I'll handle the rest. I want to know why you hate and fear the Jedi so deeply. I want to fix what can be fixed."

"No- wait-!" Aradia's words died in her throat, the boy crumbling into the jedi's hands. She looked on in horror, hot dread rolling through her as she expected to feel the life leave the boy's small form. It didn't.

The boy's chest rose and fell in steady breaths, peaceful as he slept. She stared on warily, her weapons lowering again.

"I put him here," came her clipped answer, trying to dissuade the jedi from further action. If Quill was already listening, he'd see the memory why. Tilon was no fighter, but he was a frighteningly brilliant alchemist. A genius, actually. It didn't stop him from being assigned to the war front. All of them had. This was their home, they were expected to serve and defend it. When said in such plain terms, Aradia agreed.

Yet when faced with the obvious terror of the child prodigy, Aradia had helped him hide. She didn't exactly know why, but the reason came in somewhere along the word 'choice'.

He needed her to concentrate. Her eyes locked onto his, a single word uttered tightly.

"Bastion."

She leaned into the memory, scrambling to piece together her overwhelmed thoughts.

It was a frightening day-- the first trial she had ever committed to. She had only wanted to please her master and protect the grounds. She had thought she was prepared. She wasn't. She told them to leave. They wouldn't.

They descended upon the school courtyard in a blaze of bolts. It had been the first time she had surrendered herself to the darkside, but her commitment had granted her the power to save herself. She shied from this, guilt redoubling as he was granted flickering images of the storm troopers whose essence she had consumed to heal a saber wound to her gut. She had never seen herself that way before. It was that, or death.

One might have expected her perspective to end there, but it didn't.

Kyber Dark was executed. The imperials turned on their sith comrades. The storm troopers turned on the school, slaughtering the prisoners without reservation. Like the jedi of old.

She ended that day impaled to the courtyard wall. She hung limply, a statue's hand driven into her core.

She choked to death on her own blood, her vision going blurry as her peers died in the distance. Bastion fell.

---

Every other war was nothing compared to that one. It got easier not to think, the memories less vibrant in her mind.

---

From her perspective he would see Dantioone- the hatred in the jedi's eyes as they descended upon the temple with righteous fury.

Stop, she had demanded, throwing up barricades with the force.

They didn't.

Words did not halt them, though she tried.

She even begged.

They had come for vengeance. She wasn't strong enough to stop them, so she made herself stronger.

---

Then there was Korriban, and the bombs.

How could someone sacrifice a building full of people that way? An Academy, meant for children. She didn't understand. The jedi was her age, yet they claimed she was the brainwashed monster. She had not been able to stop the bombs, but the darkside sang freely through her that night.

---

By their hands she knew death. She knew loss, injury, and pain. They ignored her pleas. They took from her with a sense of owed due. To her, they were no better than the slave masters of her past. They were the monsters. They were relentless. Unmerciful. Killers.

And she was losing herself to it, her desperation to make it cease driving her down roads he'd know all too well. --She was planning something horrible, her actions culminating into one, devastating strike ba--

She jerked her thoughts away, elbow slamming into the door as she raised her saber to his neck.

She didn't mean to show him that.

 

[Lark]

Allies: TSE
Enemies: Takui

Soft speckles of diamond-like frost danced brilliantly in the space around Lark, the air itself taking on an azure palette. It was chillingly cold out on the surface of Ziost, deep in the tundra. Though thermal warmers provided a bit of warmth, Lark had always worn the cold like quilt, taking comfort in the glacial numbness. The cold welcomed him, accepted him despite being so touched by fire. It mattered not that the Galactic Alliance once again threatened the worlds of the Sith. The dark and the cold brought him strength.

If the light threatened to burn one to ashes, the dark was the only haven left for them. For some, it was all the galaxy had ever offered. The darkness provided shelter from the storm, a way to survive against that which sought to subjugate them to an even more wretched fate. The Alliance threatened to take away that which brought him peace. To rip away the only manner of salvation ever offered to the lost and wandering dregs of the galaxy. Lark would not let a sanctuary for the abandoned fall.

All shades of red painted the cold ground of the tundra, a morbid painting that put on display the lengths the Sith were willing to go to in order to protect what was dear to them. Lark deactivated his lightsaber, though it was functionally similar to the sword he had grown so accustomed to, it was still unfamiliar to him. He lacked that personal connection that he felt with the ancient, enchanted blade. But it would have to do. He'd use whatever tools at his disposal to defend this oasis of twilight.

But his mind briefly wandered from battle. Lark had become uncomfortably familiar with the maddening whispers that offered secrets unknown to the galaxy, though the hauntings of the Necronomicon had become less frequent over time. The hushed voices he heard now were not from that bizarre tome. No, however similar they might be, this was something different. These murmurs offered something, an answer to the threat Lark was facing.

Salvation.

 

[Eldaah Aderyn]

There was something... oddly peaceful about being left alone in a cell. It was quiet, and until someone came along to question her, threaten her, and so on, she could even meditate. She couldn't draw on the Force to free herself, not yet. Her Master desired her to be right where she was, and in the back of her mind, she could feel her Master preparing her plans to defend her world from the Alliance and the Jedi. It was odd, she pondered, that the Alliance hadn't brought any ysalamiri in to force her into a bubble, resorting to shock restraints that would activate if they detected the part of the brain that became active with Force use.

Strapped to the interrogation chair as she was, as she had been since her capture on Felucia, Eldaah was silent as Djorn Bline arrived and began to talk. Chatty for an interrogator, she supposed he had been chosen because of his background, something he even mentioned in his little opening monologue. She had to resist rolling her eyes as he suggested he had many ways to make her talk, and at his suggestion to begin with waterboarding. A probe or interrogation droid of some sort had accompanied him. No doubt it was laden with serums and other nasty little surprises to cause pain. It was all so... so...

Typical.

"I was wondering when I would get my hair washed," she remarked. It was the only thing she said, a small quip that would show just what she thought of his suggestion.

​

Water dripped from her body, dripped from the chair, puddled on the floor. Her arms bore evidence of injection sites and burns from the droid and its electro-shock, small acid spots, inflammation from chemical irritants. She had been silent through the entire ordeal thus far, which had likely frustrated her interrogator to no end. Eyes closed, breathing ragged and heavy, she took in his renewed monologue and almost... almost lost the battle with herself to not laugh.

Djorn believed her will broken? That she was close to revealing all the secrets she knew? He was enjoying the fact she was at his mercy, that he could torment someone. Oh she had heard the vitriol before from these men and women who formed the New Imperial Order. They would no longer be ruled by Force users, would no longer be used by them. They had cast them off, showed how THEY were superior, that THEY were defeating the Sith once and for all. It was a delusion, nothing more. One that they had created and bought into.

Green eyes opened. He wanted to know what she had to say hmm?

"If you think me broken, then you're grossly overestimating your abilities and underestimating what training a full Sith Knight goes through," she finally said. "The strong survive, the weak die. My Master was rather thorough in my education and conditioning, including lessons in pain. And I'm exactly what I think I am, and if you think even if you defeat the Empire that the Sith are broken, you're only deluding yourself."

Her gaze looked at the water on the floor.

"Your interrogation technique is sloppy, crude, and amateur. I suppose you learned how to do this from the holodramas, but that might be giving you too much credit. Threatening to electrocute me is a pathetic attempt to make me beg to make it all stop, that I'll tell you everything. Unfortunately for you, a threat like that is absolutely counterproductive when it comes to interrogation. The victim could say anything, lie through their teeth the entire time, and you'd never know it because you think you broke them."

She would have said more, kept inciting him with sarcasm and critique, but then Loske arrived.

"Jedi Treicolt," she greeted. "I'd give you a bow or handshake, but I'm currently indisposed for the moment." So Djorn had brought her here to probe her mind hmm? This time a small snort escaped her.

"Mental probes can be so much trickier than a non-Force user thinks, and to be so invasive to another being without permission is not something a Jedi would do. Much more our style."

Loske Treicolt Djorn Bline

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

BASTION - INSIDE SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TEAM WINDU
ENGAGING Darth Daiara

He'd expected bad. He hadn't expected this.

The girl's grieving pain slammed into him at a visceral level. His stomach jolted. He staggered forward, caught himself on the bunk where the unconscious boy had been cowering, and sat on the edge. And the Force blossomed around the memories, swelled past what she'd directly witnessed into visions of nearby, directly relevant words and deeds. Snippets of thirdhand information from those battles fell into place, gaining new context.

A Jedi guiding the NIO assault on the Bastion Academy - "Watch your fire, when possible use stun rounds, glop grenades and sonic weapons. We will not be killing children today. Those who resist...those who resist, do what you must." And the same Jedi, just an unsupervised Padawan himself, underestimating his own attack and impaling her, then saving her life despite the stormtroopers turning on him. An insane error on the part of whoever let that Padawan fight alone beside the NIO.

A Jedi cutting down apprentices during the assault on the Dantooine Academy. Those who resist, do what you must - the same rules of engagement, if they deserved that name. That same Jedi, having tried to talk Aradia down- "I'm not here...to kill anyone...but, if things don't change...if people like you aren't, let free from this, then many...many more people will die, like what the Sith did on Mandalore, Dac...my home. I don't want to hurt you...or any of the people you're trying to protect...I'm here to kill those who put you here, but so be it, I'm sorry." And then the attack. And a woman, a stranger, saving the youngest Sith initiates from a Jedi-backed New Imperial invasion that promised no quarter.

A Jedi planting incendiary explosives in a Sith library, deep in the Korriban Academy, while children - Sith acolytes - giggled nearby. Aradia had saved some of them. Others had died, perhaps many others, when the Jedi explosives torched the academy. And another Jedi Knight marching in to kill all remaining acolytes alongside the NIO. To purge the entire site.

Every one of those events, from the regrettable to the unconscionable...every single one was bound to the Galactic Alliance's New Jedi Order, of which Quill was a somewhat peripheral member, and its friendship with the New Imperial Order. A sense of deep betrayal and disappointment settled in.

By accident, he got the sense that Aradia had plans for vengeance. Understandable, but she reacted violently to the overshare. Between one blink and the next, her lightsaber crackled at his neck, singeing his short beard. His face was wet. Moisture hissed and crackled from the heat.

"I understand. This is why the Force brought me here tonight." He let out a shuddering breath. "Thank you for sharing that with me, Aradia."

As if there wasn't a plasma blade an inch or two from his throat.

"We should go."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SEPARATE FROM TASK FORCE WINDU
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara




"Ohhh, I see."

Quill sighed heavily.

"It's a miserable thing, coming face to face with just how far off the mark some Jedi have gone. I've been a Jedi thirty years - I've lived through every time a Jedi went bad. Ahto City, Korriban...and I've done what I can to bring justice among the Jedi. Many of us have. My name's Jend-Ro Quill, by the way. Don't worry about me. I'll take my lumps for doing the right thing, if it comes to that.

"Also," he said after another deep sigh, "I have an idea. You've clearly been through serious things at the hands of the Jedi. I'm good with memories, very good. If you're willing to share your memories of what the Jedi have done to earn these feelings, I give you my word I'll investigate. You have the sabers and I'll be distracted. If you feel me do anything other than accept whatever memories you offer, by all means take a swipe at me. Are you willing?"

She would, of course, detect no deception throughout; there wasn't any.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



If anyone else had suggested that to her, she would have laughed. She had yet to meet a peaceful jedi-- not one that hadn't tried to take her life first. Somehow that always made the apologies that came after ring false. They were always so good at telling her she deserved it, and the only way she would deserve anything different was if she forsook her peers and let the jedi destroy them.

Jend-Ro Quill did none of that.


Was that because he had been her once? How could he stand to join up with such monstrous people? She had questions, but they stood in the middle of a corridor. The threat of exposure grew more severe as footsteps echoed from the landing below. Her eyes widened in unmistakeable panic.

"Not here. Follow me,” she implored, the sabers lowering. This was treasonous, but for a chance to fix this? She didn't care.

"And hide your jedi stink."

She turned on her heels, leading him briskly down the hall. Her heart slammed in her chest as she juggled the load in her hands, her eyes constantly snapping to the stair landing as she punched the code in.

33342

Beep.

She gestured him and his jedi robes in first. The lights were already on. He'd find himself faced with the tense eyes of a 12 year old boy. The glasses that framed his face were held together by pieces of tape. He was willowy and bruised and in his hands was a shaking gun. He didn't shoot, too locked down by fear.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TF WINDU AND MAYBE KIND OF SABOTAGING THEM
FORCE SIGNATURE VEILED, BUT IT BRIEFLY WASN'T
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill came to a screeching halt, not because of the blaster pointed at his chest but because of the bruises on that scrawny kid. And in a heartbeat he was back to his time as a Scriptor in the Raskava covert, a boy this age and this size with the exact same bruises. Anger flared unexpected and hot. He let out a shaking breath, hands up and empty, and stepped the rest of the way into the room to let Aradia follow him in.

Much as he wished for a personalized conversation with every Sith student in the academy, he simply didn't have the time. "Go to sleep, son," he said, and the abused Sithling crumpled. The blaster skittered across the floor; Quill made no move to pick it up. Instead he caught the boy before his head could strike the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Aradia, who could fairly easily skewer him with her lightsaber or his. "I can get him to safety, or you can."

"The memories now, please - all you have to do is think of them, not even in any great detail or emotional depth, and I'll handle the rest. I want to know why you hate and fear the Jedi so deeply. I want to fix what can be fixed."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"No- wait-!" Aradia's words died in her throat, the boy crumbling into the jedi's hands. She looked on in horror, hot dread rolling through her as she expected to feel the life leave the boy's small form. It didn't.

The boy's chest rose and fell in steady breaths, peaceful as he slept. She stared on warily, her weapons lowering again.

"I put him here," came her clipped answer, trying to dissuade the jedi from further action. If Quill was already listening, he'd see the memory why. Tilon was no fighter, but he was a frighteningly brilliant alchemist. A genius, actually. It didn't stop him from being assigned to the war front. All of them had. This was their home, they were expected to serve and defend it. When said in such plain terms, Aradia agreed.

Yet when faced with the obvious terror of the child prodigy, Aradia had helped him hide. She didn't exactly know why, but the reason came in somewhere along the word 'choice'.

He needed her to concentrate. Her eyes locked onto his, a single word uttered tightly.

"Bastion."

She leaned into the memory, scrambling to piece together her overwhelmed thoughts.

It was a frightening day-- the first trial she had ever committed to. She had only wanted to please her master and protect the grounds. She had thought she was prepared. She wasn't. She told them to leave. They wouldn't.

They descended upon the school courtyard in a blaze of bolts. It had been the first time she had surrendered herself to the darkside, but her commitment had granted her the power to save herself. She shied from this, guilt redoubling as he was granted flickering images of the storm troopers whose essence she had consumed to heal a saber wound to her gut. She had never seen herself that way before. It was that, or death.

One might have expected her perspective to end there, but it didn't.

Kyber Dark was executed. The imperials turned on their sith comrades. The storm troopers turned on the school, slaughtering without reservation. Like the jedi of old.

She ended that day impaled to the courtyard wall. She hung limply, a statue's hand driven into her core.

She choked to death on her own blood, her vision going blurry as her peers died in the distance. Bastion fell.

---

Every other war was nothing compared to that one. It got easier not to think, the memories less vibrant in her mind.

---

From her perspective he would see Dantioone- the hatred in the jedi's eyes as they descended upon the temple with righteous fury.

Stop, she had demanded, throwing up barricades with the force.

They didn't.

Words did not halt them, though she tried.

She even begged.

They had come for vengeance. She wasn't strong enough to stop them, so she made herself stronger.

---

Then there was Korriban, and the bombs.

How could someone sacrifice a building full of people that way? An Academy, meant for children. She didn't understand. The jedi was her age, yet they claimed she was the brainwashed monster. She had not been able to stop the bombs, but the darkside sang freely through her that night.

---

By their hands she knew death. She knew loss, injury, and pain. They ignored her pleas. They took from her with a sense of owed due. To her, they were no better than the slave masters of her past. They were the monsters. They took, they slaughtered. They were relentless. Unmerciful. Killers.

And she was losing herself to it, her desperation to make it cease driving her down roads he'd know all too well. --She was planning something horrible, her desperation culminating into one, devastating strike ba--

She jerked her thoughts away, elbow slamming into the door as she raised her saber to his neck.

She didn't mean to show him that.

BASTION - INSIDE SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TEAM WINDU
ENGAGING Darth Daiara

He'd expected bad. He hadn't expected this.

The girl's grieving pain slammed into him at a visceral level. His stomach jolted. He staggered forward, caught himself on the bunk where the unconscious boy had been cowering, and sat on the edge. And the Force blossomed around the memories, swelled past what she'd directly witnessed into visions of nearby, directly relevant words and deeds. Snippets of thirdhand information from those battles fell into place, gaining new context.

A Jedi guiding the NIO assault on the Bastion Academy - "Watch your fire, when possible use stun rounds, glop grenades and sonic weapons. We will not be killing children today. Those who resist...those who resist, do what you must." And the same Jedi, just an unsupervised Padawan himself, underestimating his own attack and impaling her, then saving her life despite the stormtroopers turning on him. An insane error on the part of whoever let that Padawan fight alone beside the NIO.

A Jedi cutting down apprentices during the assault on the Dantooine Academy. Those who resist, do what you must - the same rules of engagement, if they deserved that name. That same Jedi, having tried to talk Aradia down- "I'm not here...to kill anyone...but, if things don't change...if people like you aren't, let free from this, then many...many more people will die, like what the Sith did on Mandalore, Dac...my home. I don't want to hurt you...or any of the people you're trying to protect...I'm here to kill those who put you here, but so be it, I'm sorry." And then the attack. And a woman, a stranger, saving the youngest Sith initiates from a Jedi-backed New Imperial invasion that promised no quarter.

A Jedi planting incendiary explosives in a Sith library, deep in the Korriban Academy, while children - Sith acolytes - giggled nearby. Aradia had saved some of them. Others had died, perhaps many others, when the Jedi explosives torched the academy. And another Jedi Knight marching in to kill all remaining acolytes alongside the NIO. To purge the entire site.

Every one of those events, from the regrettable to the unconscionable...every single one was bound to the Galactic Alliance's New Jedi Order, of which Quill was a somewhat peripheral member, and its friendship with the New Imperial Order. A sense of deep betrayal and disappointment settled in.

By accident, he got the sense that Aradia had plans for vengeance. Understandable, but she reacted violently to the overshare. Between one blink and the next, her lightsaber crackled at his neck, singeing his short beard. His face was wet. Moisture hissed and crackled from the heat.

"I understand. This is why the Force brought me here tonight." He let out a shuddering breath. "Thank you for sharing that with me, Aradia."

As if there wasn't a plasma blade an inch or two from his throat.

"We should go."

Her hand shook, the blade wavering inside that precious inch he had to spare. His tears felt like permission to hurt. His remorse validated her pain. There was something incredibly healing about having ones experiences accepted without refute.

They had always told her, as a sith, she deserved it.

Well, all except one.

Her stomach twisted in on itself, the recollection of what she had done to that boy nearly sending her to her knees. She saw it all differently now, the words he had said ... The things she had done to shut him up... Horrible, horrible things, and in the end she didn't feel any better.

The blade left her fingers, his saber clattering to the ground between her.

"We should go."

She nodded numbly, feeling like a shell as she sat there without words. As he was left to gather the sith boy, she was left to gather herself. There was nothing in this bunk for her, not even the saber she let clatter to the ground. She didn't want to touch it. Everything felt wrong in that moment. She felt compromised. Stolen from. By jedi, and sith.

"I'll take you to others who need to leave. Just... don't take us to them."

She caught his gaze, a bit of fierceness behind the lost soul that accepted his hand. She had enemies, alright. They just weren't him.

 

[Romi Jade]

Location: Ruins of Hâsk
Allies: Cotan Sar'andor & Mishel Kryze & GA
Enemies: Enyo Typhos (eventually) & TSE

*Meld

She cradled her stomach as she moved.

"Fog is never a good sign, I'm convinced..." She pushed her thoughts through the meld, she was the central link. Last time she walked through fog she was attacked by a being several meters taller than her? Sounds about right. Oh, and he had an affinity for fire.

She phased through the next cloud, walking in an unsure path towards the dark silhouette that she could only see the tip of from below. But she knew going in, that a miasma like this was to be expected -- it wasn't really naturally occurring at all. These sorts of places where dark energy was left to congregate usually manifested in forms meant to cloud senses.

There was always something underneath.

On the exhale, her breath shimmered to life, and the muttered wind followed. She whipped her head around, taking in what she could visually see. But she could feel on her figure the impending objects that would take up space around her; she didn't need the Force for that. "We're getting close. See any ghosts yet?"

Under her mental breath, "They're probably all frozen to feth."

Then her natural senses went off, jittering just on the surface of her skin as her framed walked between crumbling columns. And, just at the base of a staircase, she stood a moment, eyes closed -- just a moment.

She had her own doubts, but she knew better than to waste time focusing on them. She nodded her readiness and ascended the steps to the platform above, she curled her body through observation.

The entrance felt more like a tomb.

"Cotan you go first...you're strong, and man-manley. Lead the way."

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY, INTERIOR
FORCE PRESENCE CONCEALED
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill left his saber on the floor where she'd dropped it. After a long moment, he tucked it into his pack, just in case. It wouldn't do to let some Sith psychometrist or visionary glimpse the secret Jakku enclave.

He froze as footsteps - loud, brisk, jackbooted footsteps - sounded in the corrider. "Stay right here," he mumbled, palming the stun blaster from his pack, and slipped out of the room. There was a little crackle, like acolytes attempting Sith lightning. Quill ducked back in, swishing a black cloak over his shoulders. The all-enveloping garment wouldn't hide his ragged hermit's clothes up close, but it might be enough to pet him pass as a Sith Lord.

A Sith Lord who, with Suerton probability manipulation to grease the wheels, could conceivably lead a cohort of teenage acolytes out of the Sorzus Academy to safety.

In a moment of clarity, maybe even inspiration, he realized he had the wherewithal to create a false Dark Side signature after all. The Sorzus Academy was just this world's latest stronghold of unabashed evil. He'd spent the past two days getting in tune with this world, getting a good clear sense of it.

He'd already concealed his presence. Now he just let himself wash away, blend into the background evil, almost like Vaapad users going to the edge of the Dark. The trick, the false Dark Side signature, would only work somewhere like this, and only after attuning himself to the world in question.

Like the cloak, like the stunned Sith's lightsaber, it was only one piece of the costume. He drew on the memory of his father, a Raskava Elder - straightened up, let his face hold every bit of the grim determination that had brought him here - hefted the clawed black lightsaber - and turned to Aradia with the look and feel of a very different man. Elapsed time, under a minute.

Quill made a peremptory gesture of command. The unconscious boy levitated parallel to the floor, arms crossed on his chest.

"I am Darth...Prolix," Quill said. "Here to ensure this prodigy doesn't fall into Jedi hands. Gather your fellow acolytes and do it with haste. My vessel leaves shortly from the back plateau. Be on it."

Through the grim guise, he reached out and touched the young woman's mind, a brief spark of gentle reassurance.

"The New Jedi Order," said Darth Prolix firmly, "will not get ahold of you. Today or ever."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Rhis Fisto Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka)
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SEPARATE FROM TASK FORCE WINDU
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara




"Ohhh, I see."

Quill sighed heavily.

"It's a miserable thing, coming face to face with just how far off the mark some Jedi have gone. I've been a Jedi thirty years - I've lived through every time a Jedi went bad. Ahto City, Korriban...and I've done what I can to bring justice among the Jedi. Many of us have. My name's Jend-Ro Quill, by the way. Don't worry about me. I'll take my lumps for doing the right thing, if it comes to that.

"Also," he said after another deep sigh, "I have an idea. You've clearly been through serious things at the hands of the Jedi. I'm good with memories, very good. If you're willing to share your memories of what the Jedi have done to earn these feelings, I give you my word I'll investigate. You have the sabers and I'll be distracted. If you feel me do anything other than accept whatever memories you offer, by all means take a swipe at me. Are you willing?"

She would, of course, detect no deception throughout; there wasn't any.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



If anyone else had suggested that to her, she would have laughed. She had yet to meet a peaceful jedi-- not one that hadn't tried to take her life first. Somehow that always made the apologies that came after ring false. They were always so good at telling her she deserved it, and the only way she would deserve anything different was if she forsook her peers and let the jedi destroy them.

Jend-Ro Quill did none of that.


Was that because he had been her once? How could he stand to join up with such monstrous people? She had questions, but they stood in the middle of a corridor. The threat of exposure grew more severe as footsteps echoed from the landing below. Her eyes widened in unmistakeable panic.

"Not here. Follow me,” she implored, the sabers lowering. This was treasonous, but for a chance to fix this? She didn't care.

"And hide your jedi stink."

She turned on her heels, leading him briskly down the hall. Her heart slammed in her chest as she juggled the load in her hands, her eyes constantly snapping to the stair landing as she punched the code in.

33342

Beep.

She gestured him and his jedi robes in first. The lights were already on. He'd find himself faced with the tense eyes of a 12 year old boy. The glasses that framed his face were held together by pieces of tape. He was willowy and bruised and in his hands was a shaking gun. He didn't shoot, too locked down by fear.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TF WINDU AND MAYBE KIND OF SABOTAGING THEM
FORCE SIGNATURE VEILED, BUT IT BRIEFLY WASN'T
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill came to a screeching halt, not because of the blaster pointed at his chest but because of the bruises on that scrawny kid. And in a heartbeat he was back to his time as a Scriptor in the Raskava covert, a boy this age and this size with the exact same bruises. Anger flared unexpected and hot. He let out a shaking breath, hands up and empty, and stepped the rest of the way into the room to let Aradia follow him in.

Much as he wished for a personalized conversation with every Sith student in the academy, he simply didn't have the time. "Go to sleep, son," he said, and the abused Sithling crumpled. The blaster skittered across the floor; Quill made no move to pick it up. Instead he caught the boy before his head could strike the floor.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Aradia, who could fairly easily skewer him with her lightsaber or his. "I can get him to safety, or you can."

"The memories now, please - all you have to do is think of them, not even in any great detail or emotional depth, and I'll handle the rest. I want to know why you hate and fear the Jedi so deeply. I want to fix what can be fixed."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"No- wait-!" Aradia's words died in her throat, the boy crumbling into the jedi's hands. She looked on in horror, hot dread rolling through her as she expected to feel the life leave the boy's small form. It didn't.

The boy's chest rose and fell in steady breaths, peaceful as he slept. She stared on warily, her weapons lowering again.

"I put him here," came her clipped answer, trying to dissuade the jedi from further action. If Quill was already listening, he'd see the memory why. Tilon was no fighter, but he was a frighteningly brilliant alchemist. A genius, actually. It didn't stop him from being assigned to the war front. All of them had. This was their home, they were expected to serve and defend it. When said in such plain terms, Aradia agreed.

Yet when faced with the obvious terror of the child prodigy, Aradia had helped him hide. She didn't exactly know why, but the reason came in somewhere along the word 'choice'.

He needed her to concentrate. Her eyes locked onto his, a single word uttered tightly.

"Bastion."

She leaned into the memory, scrambling to piece together her overwhelmed thoughts.

It was a frightening day-- the first trial she had ever committed to. She had only wanted to please her master and protect the grounds. She had thought she was prepared. She wasn't. She told them to leave. They wouldn't.

They descended upon the school courtyard in a blaze of bolts. It had been the first time she had surrendered herself to the darkside, but her commitment had granted her the power to save herself. She shied from this, guilt redoubling as he was granted flickering images of the storm troopers whose essence she had consumed to heal a saber wound to her gut. She had never seen herself that way before. It was that, or death.

One might have expected her perspective to end there, but it didn't.

Kyber Dark was executed. The imperials turned on their sith comrades. The storm troopers turned on the school, slaughtering without reservation. Like the jedi of old.

She ended that day impaled to the courtyard wall. She hung limply, a statue's hand driven into her core.

She choked to death on her own blood, her vision going blurry as her peers died in the distance. Bastion fell.

---

Every other war was nothing compared to that one. It got easier not to think, the memories less vibrant in her mind.

---

From her perspective he would see Dantioone- the hatred in the jedi's eyes as they descended upon the temple with righteous fury.

Stop, she had demanded, throwing up barricades with the force.

They didn't.

Words did not halt them, though she tried.

She even begged.

They had come for vengeance. She wasn't strong enough to stop them, so she made herself stronger.

---

Then there was Korriban, and the bombs.

How could someone sacrifice a building full of people that way? An Academy, meant for children. She didn't understand. The jedi was her age, yet they claimed she was the brainwashed monster. She had not been able to stop the bombs, but the darkside sang freely through her that night.

---

By their hands she knew death. She knew loss, injury, and pain. They ignored her pleas. They took from her with a sense of owed due. To her, they were no better than the slave masters of her past. They were the monsters. They took, they slaughtered. They were relentless. Unmerciful. Killers.

And she was losing herself to it, her desperation to make it cease driving her down roads he'd know all too well. --She was planning something horrible, her desperation culminating into one, devastating strike ba--

She jerked her thoughts away, elbow slamming into the door as she raised her saber to his neck.

She didn't mean to show him that.

BASTION - INSIDE SORZUS ACADEMY
SEPARATE FROM TEAM WINDU
ENGAGING Darth Daiara

He'd expected bad. He hadn't expected this.

The girl's grieving pain slammed into him at a visceral level. His stomach jolted. He staggered forward, caught himself on the bunk where the unconscious boy had been cowering, and sat on the edge. And the Force blossomed around the memories, swelled past what she'd directly witnessed into visions of nearby, directly relevant words and deeds. Snippets of thirdhand information from those battles fell into place, gaining new context.

A Jedi guiding the NIO assault on the Bastion Academy - "Watch your fire, when possible use stun rounds, glop grenades and sonic weapons. We will not be killing children today. Those who resist...those who resist, do what you must." And the same Jedi, just an unsupervised Padawan himself, underestimating his own attack and impaling her, then saving her life despite the stormtroopers turning on him. An insane error on the part of whoever let that Padawan fight alone beside the NIO.

A Jedi cutting down apprentices during the assault on the Dantooine Academy. Those who resist, do what you must - the same rules of engagement, if they deserved that name. That same Jedi, having tried to talk Aradia down- "I'm not here...to kill anyone...but, if things don't change...if people like you aren't, let free from this, then many...many more people will die, like what the Sith did on Mandalore, Dac...my home. I don't want to hurt you...or any of the people you're trying to protect...I'm here to kill those who put you here, but so be it, I'm sorry." And then the attack. And a woman, a stranger, saving the youngest Sith initiates from a Jedi-backed New Imperial invasion that promised no quarter.

A Jedi planting incendiary explosives in a Sith library, deep in the Korriban Academy, while children - Sith acolytes - giggled nearby. Aradia had saved some of them. Others had died, perhaps many others, when the Jedi explosives torched the academy. And another Jedi Knight marching in to kill all remaining acolytes alongside the NIO. To purge the entire site.

Every one of those events, from the regrettable to the unconscionable...every single one was bound to the Galactic Alliance's New Jedi Order, of which Quill was a somewhat peripheral member, and its friendship with the New Imperial Order. A sense of deep betrayal and disappointment settled in.

By accident, he got the sense that Aradia had plans for vengeance. Understandable, but she reacted violently to the overshare. Between one blink and the next, her lightsaber crackled at his neck, singeing his short beard. His face was wet. Moisture hissed and crackled from the heat.

"I understand. This is why the Force brought me here tonight." He let out a shuddering breath. "Thank you for sharing that with me, Aradia."

As if there wasn't a plasma blade an inch or two from his throat.

"We should go."

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Her hand shook, the blade wavering inside that precious inch he had to spare. His tears felt like permission to hurt. His remorse validated her pain. There was something incredibly healing about having ones experiences accepted without refute.

They had always told her, as a sith, she deserved it.

Well, all except one.

Her stomach twisted in on itself, the recollection of what she had done to that boy nearly sending her to her knees. She saw it all differently now, the words he had said ... The things she had done to shut him up... Horrible, horrible things, and in the end she didn't feel any better.

The blade left her fingers, his saber clattering to the ground between her.

"We should go."

She nodded numbly, feeling like a shell as she sat there without words. As he was left to gather the sith boy, she was left to gather herself. There was nothing in this bunk for her, not even the saber she let clatter to the ground. She didn't want to touch it. Everything felt wrong in that moment. She felt compromised. Stolen from. By jedi, and sith.

"I'll take you to others who need to leave. Just... don't take us to them."

She caught his gaze, a bit of fierceness behind the lost soul that accepted his hand. She had enemies, alright. They just weren't him.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY, INTERIOR
FORCE PRESENCE CONCEALED
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill left his saber on the floor where she'd dropped it. After a long moment, he tucked it into his pack, just in case. It wouldn't do to let some Sith psychometrist or visionary glimpse the secret Jakku enclave.

He froze as footsteps - loud, brisk, jackbooted footsteps - sounded in the corrider. "Stay right here," he mumbled, palming the stun blaster from his pack, and slipped out of the room. There was a little crackle, like acolytes attempting Sith lightning. Quill ducked back in, swishing a black cloak over his shoulders. The all-enveloping garment wouldn't hide his ragged hermit's clothes up close, but it might be enough to pet him pass as a Sith Lord.

A Sith Lord who, with Suerton probability manipulation to grease the wheels, could conceivably lead a cohort of teenage acolytes out of the Sorzus Academy to safety.

In a moment of clarity, maybe even inspiration, he realized he had the wherewithal to create a false Dark Side signature after all. The Sorzus Academy was just this world's latest stronghold of unabashed evil. He'd spent the past two days getting in tune with this world, getting a good clear sense of it.

He'd already concealed his presence. Now he just let himself wash away, blend into the background evil, almost like Vaapad users going to the edge of the Dark. The trick, the false Dark Side signature, would only work somewhere like this, and only after attuning himself to the world in question.

Like the cloak, like the stunned Sith's lightsaber, it was only one piece of the costume. He drew on the memory of his father, a Raskava Elder - straightened up, let his face hold every bit of the grim determination that had brought him here - hefted the clawed black lightsaber - and turned to Aradia with the look and feel of a very different man. Elapsed time, under a minute.

Quill made a peremptory gesture of command. The unconscious boy levitated parallel to the floor, arms crossed on his chest.

"I am Darth...Prolix," Quill said. "Here to ensure this prodigy doesn't fall into Jedi hands. Gather your fellow acolytes and do it with haste. My vessel leaves shortly from the back plateau. Be on it."

Through the grim guise, he reached out and touched the young woman's mind, a brief spark of gentle reassurance.

"The New Jedi Order," said Darth Prolix firmly, "will not get ahold of you. Today or ever."

Her dour expression faded off, a look of shock twisting to wry amusement. The jedi earned the shadow of a smile, the first of its kind. "Darth Prolix." That sounded like acne.

The sharp-witted apprentice needed no further direction. Quick was the slave that operated behind a master's back. Quicker still was the sith that had something to lose.

She opened the door, letting the passing figure catch sight of her deep, submissive bow. "As you command." She straightened, the once soft edge of vulnerability wiped from the corner of her eyes. His words gave her something to fight for. Something more impassioned and less mindless than simply holding the gates and hoping for the best.

She turned on her heels, her chest lighter as she left that room behind her. "Matu--" She called out, hailing the passing group. "We have new orders. Where are the level ones?"

 

[Takui]

Lark
​

There was nothing subtle about their approach. Fear gripped the hearts of men as a power threatening their way of life swept in and rolled over. Takui struggled with the order, initially. They were to root out artifacts and positions of great importance; but other Jedi were loosed with the full and express intent of snuffing out lives. War was hell, and battle was a morally bankrupt song; but they were Jedi.

Their mandate was to protect life. Wasn't it? Was he wrong? Or was this the only way? Had the Sith fallen so far that there was no redemption? Was there an excuse to drive the Jedi to Total War?

Ryv Karis thought so. The so-named Sword of the Jedi was every bit a blade. His words, his actions, his truth cut to the quick of anyone who stood in his path. Even Taku wasn't spared his keen edge. Knight Karis wasn't just any sword- he was a double edged sword.

"...if there's no other choice? We're gonna do whatever saves lives. If this is the sorta thing you wanna do, I won't stop you, but we need to lay down some ground rules. That cool with you?"

His reluctant agreement came from the fact that Taku was soft spoken, frail, and impressionable. There were some things that had to be done, and Ryv wasn't wrong about that. But just the same, what Takui felt he had to do went beyond simple defiance.

An entire planet needed help. Certainly the vendettas of the New Jedi Order came second to the task of healing an ancient wound. The voice calling to him had progressively changed its tone as he came closer. Whatever potent power communed with him now, it begged him. Its pleas became more dire, more distressed.

Taku broke into a run.

"...sorry, Ryv," he murmured as he rounded the compound and headed for an isolated building, one where the only presence felt meager and pathetic, as if filled with fear. There were most assuredly children among them, and the young could not conceive of the evil that their elders sought to inflict on them. "You knew what you were doing when you put me on this team. This one's on both of us," he said as he kicked in the door.

To his surprise, Taku did not see women, children, or anything that resembled human. In a single ray of dim light was a Box. He froze. "Wh... what the heck...?" he asked as he chanced a step closer.

"Anyone here?" Takui inquired as he passed the threshold. The darkness all around him was consuming. It swallowed light and offered little visibility. Taku ignited his lightsaber, a silver color that offered very little more, but he felt a fraction safer.

He felt something strange as his eyes were drawn to the box. Somehow, Taku began to think that if he were just to open it... perhaps he would be safe. Another step forward.

Perhaps...

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY, INTERIOR
Darth Daiara

A hunchbacked, stern, bearded, black-cloaked man in his fifties-

-carrying a clawed lightsaber with a red blade-

-levitating a valuable and unconscious young prodigy in a horizontal posture-

-radiating a false but reasonably convincing Master-level Dark Side aura-

-followed by a handful of assorted Sith acolytes in their mid to late teens-

-tended not to get challenged in a place and time like this one. In fact a few more acolytes agglomerated onto the little party, just to follow someone who looked like they knew what to do. There was violence outside. There were other evacuation efforts - senior students relocating experiments and such. 'Darth Prolix' had a mission, and thus ignored them. In fact he ignored basically everything, single-minded Sith Lord that he was. He permitted the acolytes to rescue a couple of their groggy, zip-tied comrades who'd clearly fallen afoul of Jedi infiltrators - but everyone had to catch up and keep up. Darth Prolix stopped for no-one.

Within minutes of all this beginning, he led a round dozen acolytes out a back door and into the snow. The bulk of the Sorzus Academy separated them from the violence out front; Darth Prolix had no idea what was happening out there and didn't care.

Concealed in a snowbank on the back plateau was a nondescript freighter, an ideal infiltration ship with a stolen Jedi telesponder. Prolix unsealed the doors and let them inside out of the cold. He woke the floating boy, who seemed groggy and compliant and short on short-term memory. He deputized an acolyte who seemed disciplined and professional to set a sentry watch, and gave them all firm orders not to reveal this ship's location by attacking, or using lightsabers at all in the dark. He told them another Sith - another deputized peer - would arrive very shortly with a second group and the ship's all-important keycard. Once she arrived, they were to leave the system immediately.

Some wanted to go back into the Academy with him, to fight. He impressed on them, as only a Sith Lord can, that the Empire had invested huge resources into their training at this elite academy - that some of them might be the next generation of the Empire's Dark Lords - that it was vital they leave the system. And in the end he didn't care if they understood or agreed so long as they obeyed.

They believed him. They complied. They would wait for Aradia, and then they would slip away under that Jedi telesponder ID to whatever destination she saw fit.

Darth Prolix walked back into the snowy breeze, the picture of grim loyalty to the Rule of Order, and disappeared forever.

 

[Caldon Tenneth]

Leon Gallo
Equipment: Saber-class X-Wing. R7-C4​

It wasn’t that he didn’t like being on the ground.

It wasn’t because he thought himself to be a bad swordsman either, especially since he carried around two lightsabers on his belt. But when offered the choice, Caldon would always take being strapped into even the smallest cockpit over being a ground pounder. Ever since his master had shown him that old movie about Luke Skywalker when he was a kid, he knew he wanted to fly. And that introductory course that the Order had on piloting had only caused that desire to grow.

As he lifted off and followed Saber Seven out of the hanger, Caldon toggled the switches to activate the fighter’s cloaking device before splitting off as they had prearranged before the carrier had dropped out of hyperspace.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Caldon squeezed the trigger on the control stick as two Sith fighters passed in front of his nose, the four blaster cannons opening up and shredding the targets before he banked off to the right, not watching as they spun out of control towards the planetary surface of Ziost.

Some people found relaxation while drinking a cup of tea in front of a waterfall. For Caldon, it involved soaring through the sky like this.

A warning whistle from R7 gave him enough warning to bank slightly to the left as laser blasts flew past his canopy. Caldon yanked the throttle back and pitched the starfighter up, causing his pursuer to pass underneath him. He then threw the throttle back forward again and pitched the nose down again, locking onto the targets with his targeting computer and squeezing the trigger another time and turning another fighter into debris.

::Saber Seven, how are you holding up?::

Caldon banked off to the right and dove down towards the planetary surface, swerving left and right to avoid turbolaser blasts headed his way as he strafed another pair of Sith fighters while they were making an attack run on a series of troop transports headed back towards the fleet.

 

[Mrurh'en'lase | Hel]

Lightsaber | Suit
Night of the Wolf
Allies: Takui | Rhis Fisto | Dagon Kaze | Zark San Tekka | Asmundr Varobalder
Enemies: TSE | Laertia Io

​

Laertia Io.

The unmistakable name to the unmistakable face that reeked of deep-set infamy in the eyes of the Hybrid, who easily saw the wanton slaughter perpetrated by the she-wolf occurring further up the line of Sorzus Academy.

Infamy.

The word was very familiar to the Hybrid for a number of reasons, most contemporary being the many holo-vids and texts that she had watched and read of the she-wolf's actions on Dantooine. Her violent and epic clash with the Sword of the Jedi - recorded and claimed from nearby street cams and the helms of the deceased and able-bodied during the battle - had been one of particular note for the Hybrid. If for nothing else than the words shared between Io and Karis. An ideological debate that, in the end, truly resulted in nothing that the Hybrid could see. Nothing out in the open at the very least.

Perhaps more intriguing, however, - and infuriating - of this Io character for the Hybrid was the result of her actions, and the effects it had on the Hybrid. The reputation - the infamy - that came of said battle and the battles after was one of awe, veneration, fear, hatred, and disgust. Indeed, it was unsurprising to see the latter portion of this prominence in many of Hel's peers, particularly other Padawans on Coruscant who also studied the events of the fabled battle.

"Jedi are all the same...no matter the organization they serve...right?" one boy, four years Hel's junior, had squawked with a high-pitched voice. "How could she do this?"

No one else but the Hybrid knew. She knew better than they ever could or would. She had seen it before many times between the slum lords and the trade rings and the mercenaries.

Well, she thought she knew more than she did when in fact all she knew was the most basic of philosophies surrounding these events.

As the she-wolf and the Sword had showcased quite directly in their fight, ideological discords - especially like those shared between the Concord and the Order - often led to an unreconcilable feud and drastic actions. And more often than not, those drastic actions became unreconcilable and/or unconscionable. Laertia Io's actions against her own people, to those Padawans, were both. But Hel had little difficulty initially reconciling with the she-wolf's actions and reputation when she held onto the basic idea that a war was a war - and how hard she tried to hold onto that idea just to prove her superiority above the other Padawans. Yes, while Laertia Io's actions were objectively detestable from the point of view of most modern Jedi, they were not surprising to the Hybrid. The Jedi of the New Jedi Order were the enemy for the Silver Jedi Concord and Laertia Io's killing of them could be understood in that simplicity.

And then Bastion came and mutated this ignorant blissful simplicity into a multi-layered complex of confusion and resentment within the Hybrid. Before she had seen them first hand, she could deal with this overt defense of and alliance with the Sith. She could deal with the Concord and the Empire forming this tenuous group to face the Bryn'adûl to the South. She could deal with Jedi facing off against Jedi. She had the blessing of that ignorance. Then she began to read from the archives and then she encountered the Sith, the enemy, first hand.

And...now...she could not deal with it. She had to admit to herself that she did not really know as she thought she had. She was wrong. The Silver Jedi Concord...Laertia Io...was unreconcilable and unconscionable.

And the rage upon seeing her slaughter more Jedi in the defense of those creatures began to build and build and build until it could not be contained. So, turning to the fellow members of her strike team, faces she knew needed to succeed in their mission, Hel gave a simple curt nod with a grunt of rising fury and charged the woman down the line. Charged with all the might her indignation could grant her. Charged knowing that this woman, this she-wolf, was far beyond her own skills. She had faced the Sword and lived. Stood her ground against the greatest the Order could produce. There was no hope for victory here.

But she could not stop.

"Will not stop. No. No no no no no. You will not. You have to fight. Have to. Must. Must! FIGHT!"

The voice. Regrown from the darkness of this world once more. Cackling as a roar of wrath escaped the Hybrid's throat in such volcanic thunder, the ground beneath her feet shook with the vibrations. Gone for the moment was Hel. Gone for the time being was the young Padawan training under Master Fisto's tutelage. In her place was the Dark Hybrid, fueled by anger.

Fueled...by hate.

She swung towards the woman, orange blade screaming its banshee shriek, desiring flesh and bone and accompanied by the cry of the Hybrid: "LAERTIAAAAAAAAA!"

 

[Gat Tambor]

X X I I : T H E _ G A L A X Y
DIRECTOR
TRADE FEDERATION
IN PERFECTLY LEGAL SERVICE TO THE GA

---

---

---

I DON'T LIKE​

Rumors of Gat Tambor's death were greatly exaggerated. Granted, they barely existed at all. He'd not been in seen in the public eye for some time. Rumors spread as to what or why he was dragged into obscurity. Some believed it was the demands of his station, after all, being at the spearhead of the Trade Federation was no light task while also personally overseeing the projects undertaken by the Trade Defense Force, Kuat-Entralla Engineering and his very own Technoid Manufactorum.

In truth, he needed the hiatus. Two hundred thousand milligrams of Mind Spiral was the total amount of which Gat Tambor consumed on his retreat.

But alas, his trip into the psychedelic otherworld had to come to an end.

He'd make his return undermining Sith Imperial glad hands in their own space. Ideal.

Gat arrived to the fanfare that usually accompanied his presence, the Trade Federation symbolism present on himself and retinue, flanked by two Skakoan Foremen, confidants to the Director hailing from the Technoid Manufactorum. With a motion of the hand, they left his presence, a brief phrase in Skakoan giving them their last marching orders before they were dismissed.

Spotting his once rival and now, a man he was proud to call 'comrade', the Vice Chancellor Aerarii Tithe, he approached.

"ARERRRRRRERRRRUIRRR- Mister Tithe. I hope I have not missed too much of the proceedings, I have been briefed of the situation on Tiss'sharl...and I am most eager to begin our work." Gat states.

Then, he twisted a dial on his atmospheric pressure suit and he began to vent a subtle micro dose of Mind Spiral to himself.

THE TRADE FEDERATION
FT. THE GALACTIC ALLIANCE
Aerarii Tithe | Brama Tagge | Enlil | The Executive | Marlon Sularen | Otto Shule

THE SITH EMPIRE
Ingrid L'lerim | Telis Taharin-Zambrano | Alli Vern​