Private The Shape of Collapse

[Darth Virelia]

"To push the boundaries of reality."

Tag - Kelric Thann


The silence of Sublevel Seven was not natural.

It was engineered.

A dead zone. Twelve meters of neutronium-reinforced stone and artificial tungsten alloy dampening plates surrounded the facility's core like the ribs of a buried beast. Holo-interference scrubbers blinked lazily in the corners of the room, nullifying passive telemetry. No comlink signals passed. No astromech chatter. Not even atmospheric cycling could be heard. The air was still. Perfectly dry. Clean enough to cut.

At the center of this quiet, beneath rows of black obelisks that served as data spines and entangled computation cores, stood the woman who had built this silence with her own two hands.

Serina Calis.

She did not pace.

She stood, statue-still, clad in a razor-edged silhouette of dark armor veiled in an ash-gray overcloak, her gloved hands clasped behind her back. She faced the reinforced viewpane—a false projection of the planet's surface above, cast in filtered reds and sallow greens. It showed the stars behind the Polis Massan dust belt in real time, though no window truly existed here. The image was nothing more than a theatrical indulgence.

And yet… she stared at it as if it might blink first.

Her presence filled the room like gravity. Cold, pressing, absolute.

She had dismissed the usual staff. Not out of secrecy—secrecy was a given here—but out of disdain. None of them were worthy of what was about to begin. Not the biometric techs, not the fractal-engine calibration teams, not the blabbering economists who liked to linger near breakthroughs so they could say they'd been part of them.

No.

This required only the mind.

A singular one.

And Serina, for all her mastery, was not so prideful as to think herself the only architect necessary. She was the will. The vision. The knife's intent. But to forge a weapon like this—to tear apart the fabric of certainty, to strike down shields without touching them, to kill not with force but with collapse—she needed a blade sharper than theory and colder than fear.

And that blade was en route.

She had given no name in the summons. There had been no invitation. Merely a directive. Delivered not through bureaucratic channels, but hand-etched into the memory core of a captured KX unit, its limbs shattered and spine twisted into a bow before her words were carved into its skull.

The instructions had been clear: Come to Polis Massa. Come to Theta-9. Come alone.

Behind her, the data-spires hummed to life for a brief moment. Lines of red script spiraled up their matte surfaces—Sith encryptions crossed with VESPER's machine language. The blend of Force-borne mysticism and recursive computation was Serina's personal cipher. Unbreakable. Living. Hostile to any mind that tried to unravel it.

A single line of readout lit across her private terminal:

ETA: 00:03:52.

Serina let the silence stretch again.

She moved then—not quickly, not nervously, but with a deliberate prowl, like a predator shifting its weight in the dark. Her boots made no sound as she crossed the length of the viewing chamber and entered the adjacent antechamber, a place built not for science, but for revelation.

Here, the true core of the project waited.

The chamber was a circle—perfect, unbroken. The walls were carved from obsidian and inlaid with veins of alchemical silver, each inscribed with meticulous micro-runes tuned to the vibrational frequencies of decaying kyberite. They weren't for power.

They were for persuasion.

In the center of the room stood an obelisk of containment glass, two meters high, filled with a swirling, violet-tinged fluid. Suspended within that fluid: a crystalline shard. Not kyber, not wholly. A synthetic derivative. A failed experiment. And yet…

It pulsed, slowly. A heartbeat of unstable light.

This was what she had salvaged from the wreckage of a crashed Clone Wars-era starship, buried in the sunless ravines of Teth. A reactor core fragment that had survived not just the crash, but the implosion of its own hyperspace coils. The material within had been partially fused with something—something that reacted to spatial interference, something that responded to proximity with other fields. It didn't hold energy.

It unwound it.

She had studied it for months. Bled for it. Fed it. Whispered to it in the dark. The shard was dormant now—but she knew what it could become. Not a power source. Not a weapon in itself. A lens. A seed of unraveling.

And when the scientist arrived—when their mind, unshackled and sharpened, was introduced to this crucible—they would see it too.

Not a weapon that burns. Not a gun that fires.

A device that teaches the universe to fall apart where she points.

The lights dimmed slightly. The sensors at the far end of the hall caught a signature.

00:00:31.

She returned to the center of the chamber.

The fluid in the containment glass rippled faintly, as if sensing the approach. Or perhaps responding to her anticipation. Serina did not look at it this time. She looked past it, to the doorway at the far end of the room. It would open soon. And when it did, her next co-conspirator—perhaps her next sacrifice—would walk through it, carrying the tools required to summon death in its most elegant form.

She could already taste it in the air. The potential. The shape of future battles turned not by overwhelming firepower, but by the failure of certainty. A Jedi's saber raised—only for the energy to fold inward. A cruiser's shields, flickering as logic disintegrated. A planet's defenses rendered meaningless because the very idea of resistance had been infected with entropy.

That was the future.

That was what she would engineer.

A soft hiss whispered through the room as the outer blast door cycled open.

The countdown vanished from the display.

Serina did not move.

She smiled.

 

[Kelric Thann]

Kelric has absolutely no idea what he was even doing here. At one moment, he's in his own lab working on a project. The next, he has a KX unit in his lab with instructions carved into it's skull. While a normal person would report it, Kelric couldn't help but be intrigued as to what this summons was about. So, here he was arriving on Polis Massa, a planetoid in a dense asteroid field.

His shuttle docked at Theta-9 where, upon exiting his shuttle, he was met another individual, presumably one of the staff. He was told to take a lift to Sublevel Seven where the person who had summoned him here was waiting. As he made his way through the halls, his curiosity grew. The staff on this floor certainly seemed on edge, and he doubted that was from the location alone. So, he began to wonder who this mystery "employer" (for lack of a better word) was.

He reached the lift and began the descent to the lower sublevels. He kept a tight grip of his briefcase in his left hand, while having his right hand close to his holstered blaster. He wasn't good in a blaster fight, but good enough that he may be able to leave in one piece if necessary. Finally, he reached the level he needed and made his way to the main chamber. As the door opened, he saw a woman in the centre and he began to realise just how quiet the area was, which put him on more of an edge.

"Greeting, ma'am. Are you the one who sent the message?"

_________________________________________

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To push the boundaries of reality."

Tag - Kelric Thann


The moment the chamber doors whispered open, Serina Calis did not turn.

She stood like a monolith, haloed by the faint violet glow of the containment obelisk behind her. Its fluid shimmered with quiet menace, the shard within pulsing once—like a heart recognizing another organism had entered the biosphere. The hum of the room, once inert, seemed to deepen. Not louder—lower. The frequency shifted, as if the entire structure exhaled in acknowledgment of Kelric's arrival.

Her voice followed in the silence like silk dragged across a blade.

"I did not send a message," she said without looking at him. Her tone was low, even, wrapped in precision. "I delivered a summons. And you came."

Now she turned—slowly, purposefully.

The woman who faced him was not garbed like a scientist. Nor a politician. Nor an admiral. She was something outside those categories—beyond them. Every angle of her presence was calculated: the tailored void-silk cloak that framed her tall, commanding frame; the matte-black bodysuit underneath, subtly armored but form-hugging enough to make the intent clear; and the eyes—gods, those eyes.

They didn't merely watch him. They evaluated. They dissected him before he'd spoken another word.

"You didn't report the unit. You didn't run. You didn't ask for payment or guarantees of return travel."

She began to walk. Not toward him—around him. A predator's circle. Her boots made no sound on the polished obsidian floor. The shard in the containment tank behind her flared again, faintly, as if feeding on the rising tension.

"That tells me more about you than any profile the archive dredged up. You're curious. Compelled. Perhaps…" she let her voice dip, her mouth curling into something between amusement and appetite, "...just reckless enough to be interesting."

She completed the circle, now facing him directly, her hands folded behind her back.

"You were chosen, Kelric, not because you're the best in your field. I could have sent for a dozen minds sharper in theory. No—what I needed was a scientist who would come." Her eyes narrowed with cool satisfaction. "Someone unsatisfied with the limits of what the galaxy calls possible."

Her hand gestured lazily, palm up, toward the containment unit. The shard pulsed again in response—as if it recognized the moment.

"What's suspended in that tank is not an element. Not a mineral. Not a weapon. Not yet. It's a failure. A beautiful, exquisite failure—raw decay incarnate."

Now her voice was heating, blooming with that dangerously seductive cadence of a woman who knew she was offering you something forbidden.

"I brought you here to help me turn it into the most elegant act of murder the galaxy has ever known."

She took a single step closer, the air between them thickening. The glow of the shard refracted in her eyes now—violet mirrored in steel. Her words dropped to a lower octave, just above a whisper:

"I want to kill shields, Kelric. Not overload them. Not bypass them. I want to make them forget what they are. I want to make every layer of defense—armor, barrier, field—come undone."

A pause. The silence again. Thick, coiled. Charged.

Then her tone shifted—back to calm, cold pragmatism. The predator sheathed her claws.

"I will provide you with whatever resources you require. Materials, facilities, a team of your choosing—engineers, theorists, alchemists if you need them. But make no mistake."

Her head tilted slightly.

"This is not a research grant. It's an imperative. You will design a system that collapses matter in flight. A payload that decays with purpose. That undoes logic. You will help me weaponize failure itself."

She took one more step forward—too close, now—and smiled. It was not kind.

"And in return, I'll give you the one thing science has never truly offered you, Kelric."

Her voice dropped to velvet:

"Control."

And just like that, the air cleared. Her expression flattened, professional once more, her figure turning to lead him toward a dark console where schematics began to dance into view—curves of unstable waveforms, fragments of containment geometry, half-translated Sith glyphs paired with energy yield projections.

"Now," she said, with finality, "Any questions before I give the general brief?"

 

[Kelric Thann]

Kelric was stunned at everything he had just heard from the woman's mouth. I mean, he's had some employers who were ambitious in the past, he has a current full-time Boss who he still sometimes questions if he (his Boss) can live up to his own hype. But, this woman was just confusing him. Yet, her words rang true, he couldn't resist the intrigue of what she was offering. This was due to the simple fact of he didn't know what she was talking about, and that alone excited him. Whenever he can legitimately say he has no idea of something, it definitely draws him in so he can research it. Although, he did have one issue with it.

"Well, ma'am, I don't have a question per say but a simple request: please at least try to sound like you aren't threatening me, I don't take kindly to it. You've definitely caught my attention, and I am very motivated to see your project through once you explain it, but I prefer to not feel like I'm being threatened to do what I love. If that is an agreeable request, I will gladly like to hear this project of yours in more depth."

Was it brazen? Yes. Will he be killed? The chance probably increased. But, being able to be appreciated for what he does and not feel like he's being threatened are simply parts of his dignity and integrity as a professional.

_________________________________________

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To push the boundaries of reality."

Tag - Kelric Thann



There was a pause.

A full breath's worth of silence hung between them—dense, stretched, fragile. As if the chamber itself inhaled, unsure what she would do. The flicker of the suspended shard behind her dimmed subtly, its pulse slowing in tandem with the tension that began to coil.

Serina did not blink. She stared at him with those glacial eyes, all the weight of her calculated presence bearing down like the pressure of the void.

And then—

She laughed.

Not mocking. Not cruel.

It was a low, husky thing—genuine, and worse for how rare that was. A sound from deep in her chest that cracked the atmosphere like a blade tapped against glass. Her head tilted just slightly as she regarded him anew, and when she spoke, the fire in her voice had shifted—less lash, more ember.

"You want respect in this place?"

She began to pace again, but this time it was looser. Less of a predator stalking prey, more of a queen measuring her court. She tapped one finger against her own lips thoughtfully, amused. Interested.

"How novel."

She turned back to him, and this time there was something different in her gaze. A hint of approval. Or something dangerously close to it.

"You're not wrong. I do enjoy threats. I enjoy leverage. Power games. Seduction of obedience. It's all very… efficient. But you—"

She crossed to him again, steps slow, theatrical now, circling. Her presence wasn't trying to crush him anymore. She was testing him. Weighing him.

"You walked into a blacksite buried beneath one of the most sensor-dead planetoids in the Outer Rim, with a half-burned KX skull as your guide and a holdout blaster for courage. You came down here, stared into a room where reality twists, and when I offered you fear, you gave me conditions."

"That," she said, coming to a stop before him again, "takes more than intellect. That takes conviction."

She studied his face for a long, breathless moment. Then nodded once—sharp, decisive.

"You will have your dignity, Kelric."

This time, she said his name on purpose.

The way it rolled off her tongue wasn't mocking or dismissive. It was acknowledgment. Recognition.

She gestured again toward the containment shard, but now her tone shifted to something richer—command blended with the thrill of revelation. The gravity of a mind in full motion.

"The project is called Resonant Entropic Decay. At its core is a synthetic lattice of kyberite-foam alloy discovered inside the husk of a collapsed hypermatter reactor. When subjected to harmonic destabilization, the material begins to unravel its own containment structure—releasing not raw energy, but entropy. Predictable, directional collapse."

She turned toward a nearby control panel, and with a wave of her hand, a complex model appeared in the air: a diagram of a toroidal weapon core, ringed in coils and black-rune inscriptions. Exotic decay patterns unraveled from its center like the petals of a deadly flower.

"Imagine, Kelric, a payload that doesn't detonate, but disassembles reality on contact. A projectile whose failure is the weapon. You don't punch through shields—you make them forget how to be shields. You don't destroy armor—you convince matter to stop cooperating with itself."

Her eyes met his again, burning now with mad clarity, the edge of something sacred and obscene all at once.

"What I need is a mind unbound by standard physics. Someone who can model entropy not as disorder, but as a tool. If you stay—if you help me design this—then you won't just make a weapon."

She stepped closer. This time there was no threat. Only gravity.

"You'll carve a wound in the galaxy so fine no one will know it's bleeding until they're choking on their last breath. You'll make something no Jedi can block. No shield can hold. No law can explain. And you'll know—deep down—that you helped birth a new age of warfare."

A beat.

Then her voice lowered, intimate, velvet-dark:

"And I won't threaten you again, Kelric. Not because you asked, but because I can see now—you're too valuable to waste on fear."

She turned back toward the display, letting him absorb everything.

And in that moment, Serina Calis did not dominate the room through pressure or presence.

She ruled it through vision.

Through the fire of something terrible and brilliant yet to be born.

"Now," she said, almost softly, "any questions before we get into the details?"

 

[Kelric Thann]

Kelric stood in silent fear. While he put up a brave face in front of this woman, he could easily tell that (if she so pleased) she could probably kill him with almost no effort. However, he stood up straight and waited for her response no matter the outcome that came; if he died, he'd have done so keeping his own integrity. However, he was very surprised when she began to laugh in a way that seemed genuine... and that, for some reason, unnerved him more than a cruel or mocking laugh would. As she spoke about how she would abide by his request, he began to breathe again (not even realising he was holding his breath). Then, as she spoke his name, he felt that she was acknowledging him, yet that did little to remove his silent unease with her.

That unnerve about her, however, began to make it's way to the back of his mind as she began to paint the picture of her completed project. He could see it in his mind, the destruction it could unleash, it's uses in battle. While the thought brought back his unease, he couldn't help but also see himself looking on proudly at the result. While acknowledgement by all would always be something Kelric strived for in his projects, he always valued his own opinion of himself above all other views of him. As such, all he saw was him achieving something so great, and that feeling of accomplishment that had always stuck with him.

While the unease and silent fear of the woman remained in the back of his mind, he considered them to be afterthoughts compared to the prospects in front of him. Despite this, however, there was one question that had popped into his mind after the woman had finished her grand pitch.

"It sounds like you already know what you're doing, the conditions required for it, the materials, and the equipment. I suppose the only thing to ask is: why do you need me when you already seem to be able to do all of this yourself?"

_________________________________________

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To push the boundaries of reality."

Tag - Kelric Thann



There it was again.
That flicker.
The quiet defiance.

Serina turned her head slowly, deliberately, her gaze sliding back toward him with a precision that made even the air seem to sharpen. For a few heartbeats, she didn't speak. She just looked at him—measured him. Not like a person. Like a blade on a forge. Like a piece of ordnance waiting to prove its yield.

And then—

A slow smile.

Not mocking. Not indulgent. Something far more dangerous.

Appreciation.

She drifted toward him again, her steps soft, smooth, each one echoing with a gravity far beyond her physical frame. There was no need to threaten. No need to dominate. She had already won his attention, and now, she was ready to feed the hunger that had grown behind his eyes.

"Why do I need you?" she echoed, voice rich with an almost amused reverence, like a storyteller savoring the rise before the crescendo. "Because, darling… I'm not trying to build a weapon."

She came to a stop in front of him again. This time, she didn't circle. She stood firm. Equal. Direct.

"I'm trying to translate one."

She lifted her hand, fingers curling slowly in the air as the holoprojection flared back to life. The model of the weapon core rotated midair—concentric rings of magnetized alloys, exotic lattice matrices, harmonic waveforms collapsing into a single unstable spiral.

"Do you know what this is?" she whispered, stepping closer, eyes fixed on the model. "It's not a cannon. Not a missile. It's a conversation with the fabric of reality. A whisper to entropy. A seduction of collapse. And I…"—her eyes flicked to him again—"…am fluent in the dialect of madness that makes it possible."

She reached up and ran a single gloved finger through the edge of the light, distorting the image slightly as her hand passed through the diagram.

"But translation is never perfect. There are margins I cannot cross alone. There are variables I cannot refine without a counterweight. I have the philosophy. The vision. The desire. But you—"

Her eyes narrowed, glowing faintly in the hololight's reflection. "You are the precision. The refinement. The engineer of meaningful failure. You don't just build things that work. You understand why they shouldn't. And that's exactly what I need."

Her voice dropped again—low, reverent, intimate.

"I could bludgeon this project into existence. I've done it before. I've torn life from circuits and ghosts from starfire. But this…" She gestured toward the shard in the containment field, which now pulsed as if it, too, were listening. "…this wants more than brute force. It needs a midwife. Someone to help birth it properly."

She turned her body toward him fully now, posture open, voice crystalline and unwavering.

"Because I don't want this to be a testbed. I want this to be beautiful. Functional. Elegant. Terrifying. A weapon so precise in its monstrosity that the galaxy doesn't know whether to worship it or quarantine it."

A slow smile crept across her lips again, softer this time. Almost human.

"And because I suspect, Kelric, that part of you wants to make something terrible. Something worthy. Something you'll never have to explain, because the moment it exists, the entire galaxy will feel what you've done."

She moved in—just a half step—voice barely above a whisper now.

"That is why I need you."

She let the silence fall again, like the closing of a circuit.

Then—

A single nod. Controlled. Confirming.

"Now come," she said, turning toward the secondary console. "We've work to begin. Collapse waits for no one."

 

[Kelric Thann]

For a moment, Kelric hesitated. It's true that to do something such as this would make him very well known across the entire galaxy, but at the same time, did he want it to be for something such as this? He was no stranger to plans of destruction and he'd admit with no shame if he were involved with such events. But the way this woman had phrased it made something in him send off emergency alarms in his head. However, these thoughts lasted only but a moment. Even if he wasn't already heavily invested in this project despite only just being introduced to it, he imagined the woman wouldn't take to his refusal lightly (especially since he knows about it all now).

So, he followed the woman to the console so he may begin to see just what specific part in this whole plan he would play. He was certainly intrigued before, but now this project had all his attention. He couldn't fault the woman for selecting him for the project. There were no doubt many in the galaxy that would be superior to him in this regard, but she knew just how to make him want to work on this project with all his heart and soul. That, he had to admire in the woman: she certainly seemed to know what she wanted and how to get it.

"Very well, Milady, lead the way."

_____________________________________________________________

Darth Virelia

 

[Darth Virelia]

"To push the boundaries of reality."

Tag - Kelric Thann



The moment the words left his lips—"Very well, Milady, lead the way"—the chamber seemed to shift.
Not physically. Not perceptibly.
But intentionally.

Like some dormant system in the walls had heard the final click of a lock sliding into place.

Serina didn't turn immediately. She let the words hang in the air, savoring them like a scent. There was no victory dance, no self-congratulatory smile. What passed over her features was far more dangerous: satisfaction.

The kind a master sculptor wore when the marble finally bled beneath the chisel.
The kind a tactician wore when the last piece of the enemy fleet turned where predicted.

She finally looked over her shoulder—just slightly—and something unreadable flickered behind those arctic eyes. Admiration? Interest? Calculation?

Or all three, braided into something much more seductive.

"Good," she said. Just that. One syllable, but it landed like a seal.

She turned toward the console, her cloak trailing like smoke behind her as she moved. Her hands, still gloved, danced across the recessed controls—not with the frantic speed of a technician, but with the smooth, graceful confidence of a woman who knew the machine would obey her not because it was programmed to… but because it understood fear.

With a low, resonant hum, the chamber dimmed to half-light. The holoprojector bloomed again—not a static schematic this time, but a fully animated construct: a rotating cross-section of the proposed weapon core. Labeled in high-order physics code, Sith runic overlays, and recursive math that almost seemed to writhe if stared at too long.

It was not a gun. It was not a bomb.
It was a conceptual failure engine.

Serina gestured toward the display with one outstretched hand, her tone now shifting into a different register—clinical, focused, but no less intense.

"Here is where we begin: the containment vector. We've isolated the synthetic shard's resonance decay profile, but it requires a stabilizer—a nested toroid that feeds harmonic bleed into a neutral zero-mass cradle. Every previous testbed melted into vapor before hitting forty percent charge. Your job is to design the framework—a shape that holds what doesn't want to be held. Not indefinitely. Just long enough to fire."

She tapped the schematic, and the rotating model expanded, revealing subcomponents and intricate schematics that blurred the line between engineering and ritual.

"You'll have full access to the VESPER material library: hypercarbon, ardanium folds, stygium-threaded casings. We also have two experimental compounds from a research station in the Unknown Regions—classified, but pliable. They react violently to anything resembling order. I suspect you'll enjoy them."

She turned toward him now, fully—closer than before. No veil of grandeur this time. Just intensity. Purpose. Fire behind the ice.

"But you'll also have me."

A pause.

Then a smirk—wicked, knowing, laced with implication.

"Not in the way your little cortex might already be fantasizing. Yet."

She stepped closer still, her voice dropping just slightly, like a secret folded into shadow.

"You'll have my oversight. My theory. My raw data. I want you inside this thing's every breath, every pulse, every moment it trembles before it collapses. I want your fingerprints on every inch of its failure."

Her gloved hand reached out—not to touch him, but to gently tilt the rotating image until it locked on a specific chamber deep within the core. It looked like a heart. Or a womb. Or a singularity pretending to be both.

"This is where it will be born," she said softly, almost reverently. "And when it screams into existence, when the first enemy shield falters and forgets its own nature... you will know. That moment? That failure? It's yours."

She stepped back at last, letting the fire dim just slightly behind her eyes.

"You've earned this, Kelric. Not because of what you've built—but because of what you can. And if you truly understand what we're about to unleash…"

She gave him a look like the galaxy had just been laid bare.

"You'll never want to build anything less again."

The room fell still once more.

Only the hum of the machine remained—low, reverent, like the prelude to a sermon yet to be spoken.