Private The Profits of Doom

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Scherezade deWinter


The city's skyline shimmered like a blade in twilight, each tower a fang of glass and steel biting into the bruised heavens. Amid them all rose the headquarters of Shiny, a name so deceptively innocent that it felt like mockery when one stood beneath its shadow. The building pulsed faintly in the night — a hum, a vibration — like something vast and sleepless breathing behind the walls. Darth Keres arrived as the fog thickened, her cloak trailing across the rain-glossed pavement. The company's insignia — a simple radiant sphere in her mind — gleamed above the doors. It seemed to stare at her, to know her name before she spoke it.

Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of ozone and sweet decay. The walls shimmered faintly, alive with motes of light that drifted like dust in a dream. She could hear distant machinery humming in rhythms too complex to be random, too structured to be sane. There was a wrongness in it — a pulse that matched her heartbeat, then overtook it.

An assistant of indeterminate age and shape greeted her, eyes blank and voice smooth as oil. "The Owner will see you now," it said, though its lips did not move. The elevator that followed was not an elevator at all, but a shaft of translucent light that drew her upward through layers of silent, shuddering architecture — each floor stranger than the last. Offices filled with people typing on invisible terminals. Corridors lined with mirrors that reflected nothing human.

At last, the light dimmed, and she stepped into an office that seemed to hang between worlds, like a casket holding the lies of the galaxy. Stars burned just beyond the transparent walls — not the familiar constellations of her galaxy, but alien geometries that twisted perception itself. At the center stood the Owner of Shiny. Behind her, the stars flared like eyes opening. Darth Keres realized then that Shiny was no company — it was a hunger, a being that devoured illumination itself. Every invention, every idea, every dream that bore its mark was a spark torn from some mind, consumed, and replaced with quiet obedience. And she smiled when she stepped out into the fantasy: Evolution.

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

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

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Darth Keres

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In truth, Scherezade hadn't expected to be there that day. The owner of Shiny, there had been a time where she opened offices and factories all around the 'verse, making sure she had somewhere to land almost anywhere in case of need. There had been a list of her locations somewhere, but at present she just chalked it up to her personal droid to remember where they were. Unfortunately, the droid wasn't presently with her, as he still had some things to beyond the galaxy's edge, a place where Scherezade had recently spent over a decade at.

It was nice to come back and see her finances had grown during her absence. And it was hard for her to understand, sometimes, how she had gone from having to hunt for food or go hungry, to this. But here she was, nonetheless, her office filled with various scrolls and blueprints, some on paper and some on random pads that showed information, written in at least twelve different languages, with at least two of them being dead considered dead languages. Yeah… Scherezade didn't really worry that anyone would be finding these and understanding what they were. They were… A strange little narrow view into the great chaos that was her mind.

"Your next appointment will be here within moments, Ms. deWinter," a voice said over her intercom. Scherezade blinked. "What appointment?" No answer. This was… Off. She wasn't used to this. Was it another one of those pranks set up by Twinkle Doom? It wasn't funny anymore! The damned droid had been the one to come up with the entire children's birthday party line and occasionally tried to out-chaos the Sithling's own chaoticness. Sometimes, it got really wild.

And really, she was more than happy to let whoever this mystery person down, and just cancel the whole thing. She didn't know what the meeting was for, or about, or what she had to even have prepped for it.

But then the person had entered the building, and Scherezade sensed it. Sith. Not new, definitely an experienced one.

Fine!

She would hold the meeting as planned, even if the planning hadn't been hers. But since the other one was already here, there was no time to change clothes, so that other Sith would be seeing her in random dark denims and a pale pink top. Nothing to do about that now. Her own blades were stowed on her body and in various secret locations around the office. It was rare to find Scherezade deWinter without having immediate access to at least a dozen blades or so anyway.

Now the woman was in the office. Instinct made Scherezade smile back before she inhaled deeply. She recognized the Korun in the woman's blood, but hadn't scented the other half of it before. Something human or near human, to be sure, but not something she had any experience with. Still, the bottom line, as Scherezade liked to call it, was effectively mostly human.

"Welcome to Whimsy," she grinned from ear to ear, waving her hand to make a small pyramid of scrolls fly off the chair intended for visitors and guests to clear it, and motioned for her to take a seat.

"Let the droid know if you want anything to eat or drink," she said while she took her own seat in the pink leather chair behind her desk, moving her hands to move the mess on the table away from it and to the floor instead, only barely noticing a note that specified the meeting. Odd.

 

[Darth Keres]

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[]

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Tag: Scherezade deWinter

The business office loomed like a sanctum of sterile ambition, a cathedral built not for gods but for profit and precision. Its walls were tall panes of blackened glass, veined faintly with frost, reflecting the world outside in distorted shards of dim light. The floor was polished obsidian, so immaculate it seemed to swallow every footstep into its depths. A faint hum pervaded the air—machines breathing, lights flickering, the pulse of something inhuman that governed the place.

The illumination was anemic and unkind, casting long, needle-thin shadows across the floor. They moved slightly, unnervingly, as though reacting to her presence. Even the temperature seemed to drop upon her entry, as if the office itself recognized Darth Keres as one of its kind—a being of quiet dominance, drawn to the stillness where sound dared not linger.

The woman sat poised behind her desk, her form etched in the pallid glow that seeped through the glass. Her skin was pale as moonlight upon marble—untouched by warmth, almost spectral. Long, wavy strands of wild brown hair framed her face like tangled ivy creeping across old stone, moving faintly as if stirred by an unseen current. And her eyes—those dreadful, radiant emeralds—burned with an unnatural light, cutting through the dim air of the office like twin shards of verdant fire.

Darth Keres watched in silence as she moved toward the now vacant seat, each gesture precise, deliberate, haunted by something unsaid. The faint luminescence of her gaze reflected in the polished surfaces around them, multiplying her presence until it seemed the entire room was watching—her own crimson eyes calculating.

As Darth Keres lowered herself into the guest chair—its leather chilled and unwelcoming—the silence thickened. Between them stretched a quiet tension, sharp as a blade and colder than the void beyond the stars. The woman’s eyes met hers, and in that green light there was no warmth—only the echo of power restrained, and the hollow elegance of something not entirely human.

“Water,” she murmured, her voice low and edged with authority—a sound that seemed to hush the mechanical hums of the room. The droid obeyed at once, its metallic limbs whispering against the marble floor as it poured from a crystal decanter. The liquid caught the light like liquid glass, rippling with pale reflections that seemed too fragile for the silence surrounding them. She accepted the glass without thanks, turning it slowly in her grasp as though weighing more than just water within.

Her crimson eyes rose then, fixing upon the woman with the glowing emerald stare. “I am Darth Keres,” she said, each word deliberate, shaped by cold conviction. “I have seen empires rise and rot beneath their own greed. I have walked through their ashes and found something far purer—control born of silence, order carved from ruin.”

She leaned forward, the glass untouched, her gaze unblinking. “Your corporate realms intrigues me. It thrives on whispers, deception, and quiet daggers. A fitting theatre for one who understands the elegance of power unspoken.”

The faintest smile ghosted her lips—thin, deliberate, dangerous. “I do not seek mere profit. I seek dominion. The structure beneath the illusion. To weave the company’s pulse into the rhythm of my will… until silence itself answers to me.”

The droid lingered, forgotten. The water within her glass stilled, reflecting both women—one of cold calculation, the other of emerald fire—caught in a fragile moment of shared ambition beneath the pallid light.

"Indulge me, if you will," her words filtering under a breath of sulfur and malice, "on the philosophies of your own personal realm."

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

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

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Darth Keres

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Scherezade's eyes followed the woman's movements. She could smell the Darkside coming off her in whirls and eddies of invisible smoke, as she made no attempt to conceal it. Quite the opposite; it seemed the woman delighted in the theatrics of it. The lowering temperature, the way she sat, the way her presence multiplied… Scherezade knew these tricks. Had seen then performed in memories that had never been hers thousands of times. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew she could do them as well, if she ever decided she wanted to. So far though, she hadn't.

The droid obeyed the order for water without pause, just as it'd been programmed to. This however, was indeed a surprise. Strangers rarely wanted just water. Usually it was Whyren's Reserve or something equally faux-posh like that. The only one she had ever met that wanted just water had been her own grandmother and she… Was a story for another time. If nothing else, the stranger, presenting herself as Darth Keres, had done one thing that few people had managed to do with their mere presence and a single small gesture. She had Scherezade interested.

And then came the words. Almost poetic, one could say. And while one might argue they were there to make an impression, the warning beneath them had not gone unnoticed. Ancient, danger, beware. Another person would perhaps have decided to end the meeting or try to snake away at the sound of that. But not Scherezade. Her entire life was about tackling down opponents that were bigger than her, stronger than her, better than her. And this Darth Keres… Was yet to let her know whether she would be any of those, or a potential ally. But an ally for what?

Most Sith did not regard Scherezade deWinter as a kindred spirit. Much like her family, she had opted to pass on the way of the Darthlings while still maintain the title of a Sith. Sith Lady, Sith Lord, Sith Warrior… It didn't matter. She was those things and many more. But she had no place among the established Sith Orders, and she knew it.

The description of quiet daggers did bring a smile to the Sithling's face though. A warm and genuine one at that, too. It was an interesting way of describing it. She decided that she enjoyed Keres' poetry then. Things that were not quite accurate, but translated a certain aspect of truth nonetheless. This woman was very dangerous indeed. What other talents she had, words were among them. And words tended to stab worse than knives, as Scherezade's life had insisted on showing her time and time again.

And it was philosophies she wanted now.

Very well.

Scherezade pressed a hidden button on her desk. The wall groaned and shifted, revealing a mannequin clad in plain Mandalorian armour, rolling forward on silent wheels. Another press brought the room alive with fans whirred to life, sucking and tossing air in chaotic currents that bent the faint light into shifting patterns.

She stood, calm, deliberate. From a drawer she drew a disposable glove, snapping it over her hand, then dipped it into the next compartment. Her fingers emerged coated in something that caught the harsh light. A pink, almost unnatural glitter, trembling like a heartbeat in her palm.

"Chaos," she said, her voice crisp, measured, a blade sliding free, "is not what most believe it to be. Most call disorder chaos. They fear what cannot be neatly controlled, what cannot be predicted. That could not be further from the truth."

She moved around the desk, her back to the mannequin, a slow, fluid motion that made the air itself seem to hesitate. The glitter sparkled in her hand, beautiful, poisonous, a small storm held captive.

"Chaos," she continued, "is the amplification of the smallest act. A whisper of intention that cascades into the unforeseen."

She blew, and the glitter erupted like a constellation torn loose. The currents of wind carried it outward, circling, twisting, alive. It hovered near Darth Keres, teasing the boundary of her flesh. But no matter how close, the glitter recoiled, bending, retreating, unwilling to touch her. The wind seemed to obey Scherezade's silent command.

The particles spun faster, gathering momentum, then arced back toward her. Instead of hitting her, they went around the Sithling, and struck the Mandalorian armor with a hiss, acid meeting metal. Smoke curled, dark green and iridescent, as the suit wept and twisted under the corrosive magic.

Scherezade's grin was sharp, a slash of predation in the dim light. The glitter fell around her like a storm contained, its chaos perfectly obedient, until the next moment she chose to release it.

Another droid rolled in, wielding a broom, and began to sweet the now-exhausted glitter out of the room. The destroyed armour returned to the compartment in the wall.

"We also organize childrens' birthday parties if that is more up your ally," Scherezade smiled and took her seat again, her body language a lot more comfortable than it had been a few moments ago.

 

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Scherezade deWinter

Darth Keres let the word "Chaos" slip from her lips like a secret jest shared with the void itself—half whisper, half laughter. The syllables twined in the air like smoke from a black candle, at once playful and prophetic. "Ah… Chaos," she murmured, eyes glinting with mirth and menace alike, "the universe's finest sense of humor."

Darth Keres moved in haunting, calculating steps; halting before the corroding ruin of armor, its metal hissing and weeping beneath the caress of acid. She watched in still delight, the air thick with the scent of dissolution, and spoke as though to a confidant unseen.

“Observe,” she murmured, her tone both mocking and reverent, “how Chaos paints with ruin’s brush. Such artistry—where order weeps, and the metal learns humility.” Her smile curved like a crescent moon in shadow. “There is a certain beauty in the word itself, is there not? Chaos. It dances upon the tongue like a secret too amused to stay silent. It devours with elegance, yet leaves the remnants glowing, as though proud to have perished beneath such poetry.”

She tilted her head, watching the last curl of smoke rise from the melting helm. “Some worship peace,” she mused softly, almost laughing, “but I find Chaos infinitely more polite—it never pretends to last.”

Darth Keres clapped her hands in approval of the visual displays, then spoke with a smile that gleamed like moonlight on a blade. “Chaos,” she whispered, “is the poet, while Destruction is merely its muse. One composes, the other sighs—and together they waltz through creation’s ashes.” Her laughter was low, velvety, and cruelly amused. “How beautiful they are when they forget who leads the dance… for in truth, Chaos always writes the final verse...do you not agree?"

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

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

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Scherezade's gaze followed the other woman as she stood up from her chair and walked over to inspect the armour. She wasn't sure what he was expecting, or whether she was even expecting anything at all. All the poetry she gave were of things that were already deeply rooted within the Sithling. There had been a plethora of reasons she'd been dubbed as a Princess of Chaos, even by those who knew nothing of her true background and how they had come too close to comfort with it. But she'd eventually accepted the title, embraced it, and breathed it.

"Most Sith don't bother to concern themselves with beauty unless it's the vanity type," she chuckled at Keres' words, already knowing the hundreds if not thousands of examples that would come to the woman's mind. Anyone who'd ever been involved in a Sith organization knew that well enough.

But worship… Worship was not for her. Too many ancestors revered as gods for her to ever been wiling to do that in any serious connotation. Her family was an old one, and though there was a certain chance Keres was sufficiently old to remember things from before the Gulag, she didn't want to bring it up just then.

Neither did Scherezade bother too much with politeness. She knew most of the rules, to be sure, but adhering to them was too exhausting. She was a person who preferred to go and try to slay a krait dragon with her bare hands than attend a polite group dinner where every word and action would be put to the test… And then fail. It was a weakness, on all accounts, and she was deeply aware of it.

"Nope," she answered with a simple shrug, her casual tone presenting itself in such a stark manner against Keres' poetic speech, "I think the winners, survivors, or people that had never been around to experience anything are the ones that decide how to draw the result of anything, but their point of view isn't an objectively true one. And neither is Chaos'."

Tapping another one of the buttons on her desk, a small droid wheeled in with a tray. This time, there was a mug that looked like it should contain beer on it, but instead of beer, the contents was pink cream. Full fat. And with ice cubes. The Sithling rarely drank alcohol, and today wasn't a reason to break habits.

Scherezade took a long and refreshing gulp before setting the mug down again.

"You wanted to know my philosophy," she continued, "and now you have it. Tell me, Darth Keres , what do you want? Why did you come to this meeting? There is nothing you have learned here that you could not have learned from afar."

 

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Scherezade deWinter


To Darth Keres, the lesser Sith were but embers — loud, fleeting, and pitifully bright — while she was the void that devoured their light. Their fury was motion; hers was cessation. They screamed to be heard by the Dark, while she was the Dark's quiet breath. In her sight, their power was a child's tantrum before the cosmic hush — for they sought to wield the abyss, and she had long since become its still, watching eye. "Do not trifle me with comparisons to what is, what is not, what makes us Sith. Speaking of politics might ruffle egos. And what I behold as caustically beautiful, I've killed over less opinions."

She circled the woman — the one she knew to be Sith by rot, stench, and ego — like a celestial predator tracing the orbit of a doomed star. Her gaze was not of this world: it peeled back flesh, thought, and pretense alike, beholding the soul beneath as one might observe the flaring of a candle in a vacuum. "You bear the mark of the Dark," Keres murmured, her voice both near and distant, as if spoken through the folds of eternity. "But you mistake it still for hunger, for conquest, for self." She paused behind the woman, where the shadow of her form bent strangely — reaching further than it should. "You think to wield power through blood and empire. and chaos. I seek something colder. Purer."

Her fingers, dirty and cracking, drifted along the edge of a metal desk, and where they passed, the steel seemed to lose its sheen, as if light itself had tired.

"I am here," she continued, "for the pulse beneath all commerce — not wealth, but control of meaning. Capitalism is but another altar — one where faith is measured in profit, and belief in acquisition. To own what others, crave, to make them worship the illusion of choice… that is domination far beyond war."

She leaned closer, her words curling like frost. "You Sith, still sadly obsessed with passion, still trade in blood and fear. I trade in dependency. In silence disguised as prosperity."

Then she smiled — a small, knowing curve that made the shadows seem to hold their breath. "You see, I do not seek to conquer the galaxy. I intend to purchase its soul."

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

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

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Scherezade held back a river of chuckles that threatened to erupt from her. She knew these kind of words, these types of descriptions. That was how her own grandmother spoke, how her great aunt spoke. Two women who had wielded immense power, and one of which who had tried to hone Scherezade as a blade only to find the granddaughter defiant and intending on carving her own path through whatever came after her. Her grandmother had also tried to kill her. And like everybody else, she had failed in that endeavour.

As Darth Keres circled her, Scherezade's chair just spun as executive chairs were known to do, but the Sithling's pose atop of it remained casual, almost… Not quite lazy, but maybe bored. Still, the glow of her gaze followed the other woman. Dogs that barked rarely bit, but when they did, it tended to hurt, and Scherezade had no intention on getting bitten just yet.

Again Keres spoke, this time mentioning the control by name. Speaking of blood and fear and silence and prosperity. She had leaned closer in that time, and Scherezade was grateful that Keres' breath did not reek. She really hated morning breath.

"Unfortunately for you," she responded, still unmoving from her desk, still not reaching for any weapon or power she might wield with the Force, "Whimsy is out of souls stock."

Now she permitted a single chuckle to escape her lips. It was either that or burst out laughing with a potential to roll on the floor.

But then again.

She was a galaxy-wide known terrorist. Or at least used to be, but every time she met someone from the past, the term was still used. She also funded terrorists, rebellions, uprisings…

And that was the issue, wasn't it? Scherezade wielded no actual political control anywhere. Even after surviving many of the galaxy's head honchos in battle. Never had political control, except for that one place she would refuse to discuss with anyone who was not of her blood, but that one place had no bearing on the galaxy at large anyway. And now, after all of that, she had ended up with the Black Sun of all places.

At last, Scherezade let her leg rest comfortable with her boot on the floor. She leaned somewhat forward, elbows on her knees, and a saccharine smile appeared on her lips, sharp and bright.

"So tell me, Darth Keres," she spoke again, her voice now dropping lower into velvet, just above a whisper, "when the buying's done and the galaxy's soul is yours, what do you want to do with it? Because as you probably know… Anything that can be owned, can be stolen."

 

[Darth Keres]

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Tag: Scherezade deWinter

The Sith woman had asked, with that familiar hunger glinting in her eyes, about souls — the how, the why, the price. But Darth Keres only regarded her with the patience of something older than understanding, the faintest suggestion of a smile playing across her lips, as if the question were both amusing and tragic.

"Collecting," she began, her tone neither whisper nor voice but an intrusion upon thought itself, "is a crude word. It implies ownership, limitation — the delusion that a soul may be had." She moved then, slow as the fall of ash, circling the woman again as galaxies might spiral around a dead god's gravity. "I do not collect. I harvest resonance. Every being leaves behind an echo — a trembling of identity that stains the Force. When they die, what lingers is not spirit… but memory fossilized in pain."

"My plan," she said at last, "is not conquest. It is correction." Her hand rose, and for a fleeting moment, one could see it — the faint, translucent sphere hovering above her palm, within which countless faint motes of light spun, colliding, merging, screaming soundlessly.

She stepped closer to the Sith woman, until her words became breath on the other's mind rather than her ear. "You seek to gather armies. You seek to build empires. I build unmaking. When my work is done, no soul will flee the cycle. No Force will carry them. All will return to the same stillness from which I was born."

Her smile deepened — not cruel, but reverent, as if describing a sacrament. "You see, my dear, you make Chaos to prove you exist. I make Chaos to remind the universe not to forget."

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Spoiler: Gear Loadout

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

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Darth Keres

---

This time, Scherezade really raised an eyebrow. Armies? Empires? Prove she existed? Oh, Darth Keres had some chutzpah. And she got the notion that the woman didn't understand her… At all. It as a thing, with people ancient and brooding enough. At some point they tended to think they'd seen absolutely everything, so anything that came across their path had to be an imprint of something they already had experienced.

And maybe Keres had experienced someone like Scherezade before. But her snap judgements clearly showed that whoever it had been, it was not the person she was thinking of, because every word she gave betrayed the fact that she had absolutely no idea about Scherezade deWinter.

A younger Scherezade would have punched her in the face just to make the point. But these days, she was somewhat calmer. Still the fart atop a launched missile that a friend had once described her as, but just a touch more mature and patient.

"When you asked for my philosophy, I didn't think you were looking for an opponent to clash words with," she admitted. She had thought this would go in an entirely different direction, and there was no shame in saying that she had been wrong, "but I think what you think I am, is a mass of fantasies you've got in your head. Pink fluffy strawomen you could fight with."

And perhaps a battle would come. But not yet.

"But I think, the biggest difference between you and I…" she continued, "is that your strawoman is wrong. I don't make Chaos to prove I exist."

Centuries inside the pebble. Decades beyond the galaxy's rim. She knew what she was talking about, for all of the good it did for her. Proving to exist… Maybe once. Maybe. When she had gotten out of the pebble, all she had wanted was to be loved and accepted. Reality had shown her the odds of that ever happening were slim to none. And yet somehow, so many years had passed, and she was still a young woman, both in mind and in body, her lifespan that had lasted for nearly a millennia somehow folded into roughly fifteen years of existence.

"I've been forgotten, many times," came the final words. Some people who had done less than her already had monuments in their names. She… Did not, and probably would not.

And only now that she thought about it, did she realize another difference from her young life. Now, presently, she was totally okay with that notion.

"And when I decide to move on, I'm afraid my soul, or my spirit, won't be yours for the taking," she chuckled, "we deWinters have our own ancients who lay claim to it."