Beyond Good and Evil

[ekimmak]

I can't believe I forgot about this, had to get through several chapters at once. I'm guessing that the problem with your inquisitor is

the death of the love interest on Alderaan. Even a lightsider is extremely cold about that, so I guess it's good to see someone who actually feels the consequences of that. In a critics fashion, of course, people dying is never a good thing.

 

 

The thing I hate the most is that you don't appreciate all your companions correctly. So, Quinn is a ranged tank. That doesn't make him a benchwarmer. My second Knight ran the full game with T7 (except where I had to use Kira), and I never had any issues. My tank vanguard would often enjoy games of 'tug-of-war' with his tankdroid, and I actually find ranged tanks MORE useful than melee, because a ranged tank will stay where you tell him to.

 

But maybe I'm just easily worked up about the misconception of companion viability.

 

And most of the 'light side' options were the usual grab bag of inconsistent and even mutually contradictory silliness that Imp LS choices tend to be.

 

So you think pretty lowly of LS choices too? I've been considering writing a fanfic that's almost a rewrite of the inquisitor storyline, so she actually feels like a lightside sith, rather than a "don't kill this random person". Or copy Cole McGrath.

[Euphrosyne]

I would like to preface this by saying "thank you for still reading", and that I am soooo happy that you're asking Big Questions and making deep comments.

I can't believe I forgot about this, had to get through several chapters at once. I'm guessing that the problem with your inquisitor is

the death of the love interest on Alderaan. Even a lightsider is extremely cold about that, so I guess it's good to see someone who actually feels the consequences of that. In a critics fashion, of course, people dying is never a good thing.

Kind of, yeah.

One of the few LS choices I made with Saki in Chapter 1 was trying to get Rehanna and Nomar back together. This was for a whole cornucopia of RP reasons that made a lot more sense in my head at the time. Early on, I figured that she'd have had a mild secret thing for Zash for the way her new Master acted toward her, and I also figured that she'd be utterly crushed by hearing that Zash really had nefarious plans for her at the end of the prologue. Since neither Nikki nor Urtel was really 'her type', by Alderaan she felt very alone and saw Rehanna as basically herself in a few decades; fixing this for her would be kind of a way of proving to herself that it didn't always have to be that way for everybody, and by extension herself. (If that made sense.) That, and doing this would take a Jedi out of the Order.

 

At the time, the fact that Nomar double-crosses you was one of the few parts of any class quest that hadn't been spoiled for me already, so I was outraged - if not totally surprised - when I found him and his goons at the Elysium. I'd just started outlining how I wanted Aly's story to work, and I'd been thinking about how I could include Saki in that somehow, so I was already deep in character, trying to formulate a narrative in my mind for how to explain this whole thing. So when he showed up, I felt like he'd betrayed me, not just my character, and that he'd abandoned one of my friends at the metaphorical altar, not just hers. Most of the backstabs in SWTOR are very premeditated and foreshadowed; even if Baras and Zash and Quinn and the like hadn't been spoiled for me, I would've seen them coming. Nomar, on the other hand, totally blindsided me at one of the worst possible times. After playing through that fight, I felt pretty depressed in RL for a few days.

 

So I kind of transferred those emotions over to Saki. I guess finding out about the full extent of Zash's plot - and dealing with the aftermath, having her former Master and her current servant fighting each other for control of his body - would also have really messed her up. And since, by then, Saki had Bound Ergast and Andru, she'd already be dealing with the beginnings of the insanity that plagues the SI through Chapters 2 and 3. Compared to all those other problems, the incipient war against Darth Thanaton and his attempt to freeze her out of the Imperial and Sith hierarchy would be a relatively simple and easy to solve issue.

 

Anyway. Long-winded answer to a somewhat pithy query. But that's where I figure Saki's head's at right at this point in the story.

The thing I hate the most is that you don't appreciate all your companions correctly. So, Quinn is a ranged tank. That doesn't make him a benchwarmer. My second Knight ran the full game with T7 (except where I had to use Kira), and I never had any issues. My tank vanguard would often enjoy games of 'tug-of-war' with his tankdroid, and I actually find ranged tanks MORE useful than melee, because a ranged tank will stay where you tell him to.

 

But maybe I'm just easily worked up about the misconception of companion viability.

Actually, Quinn's a healer, and is therefore intrinsically useful to every Warrior.

 

This isn't to say I never used Quinn. On Aly, Quinn stayed with me pretty much from the end of Balmorra straight through to about halfway through Tatooine, when I decided I was overgeared and overleveled enough to not care anymore. And then he spent most of Alderaan with me, too, because by then he was so overgeared (and my Presence was high enough) to allow me to solo most of the heroics there. I got the 1000 kills cheevo with Quinn pretty darn quickly. So from a game-playing perspective, I like him just fine.

 

From a role-playing perspective, I don't like him very much at all, and that's even before Corellia. Aly's an LS Sith, and Quinn doesn't approve of most LS choices, so there's that; although Quinn creditably does go in for the 'duty and honor' sorts of choices (unless they affect him personally, cough cough), he also likes the Empire, and Aly really doesn't like the Empire at all. I tried to make it clear, especially in Chapter VII, that although they have a decent working relationship and can even connect on things not directly related to the Empire, Aly personally doesn't think of him as a friend. And it's not clear that Quinn even understands what friends are, so.

 

From a story-writing perspective, Quinn (and Vette) haven't spent much time directly accompanying Aly because this story isn't about them. It's not even really about Aly. It's about Jaesa, and if Jaesa spent the whole story hanging out on the ship or doing crew missions, things would get pretty boring pretty fast. That isn't to say that Aly only rolls with Jaesa from here on out; Quinn did the Nar Shaddaa bonus series with Aly back in Chapter VI, and Jaesa certainly didn't participate in the battle of the Foundry. And there's going to be a stretch coming up in the next couple of chapters where Jaesa cools her heels as Aly does missions with somebody else. (It was planned out way before you made that post. )

 

Plus - and again, from a story-writing perspective - Quinn is a member of the military, and as portrayed in the game he is basically the ur-staff officer, a sort of Erich Ludendorff-Moxley Sorrel hybrid, making all the plans and handling all the scut work while his commander takes all the credit and glory. It makes perfect sense, in the context of the war for Taris, to keep Quinn at headquarters where he can actually use his talents properly, instead of bringing him out into the field where all he does is just play medic.

This method of using Quinn was very strongly affected by the way he's employed in the final Warrior class quest on Taris, when he stays back at the Crater Command Post and coordinates the siege of Olaris while Pierce, Vette, and Jaesa accompany the Warrior into the city and lay waste to the War Trust's defenses.

 

In that vein, Vette doesn't go with Aly very much, because I see her as honestly much more interested in making money and doing crew missions than wandering around through the muck of Taris killing a bunch of people with Aly. But Jaesa's her apprentice - her new apprentice - so it makes a lot of sense for her to be with Aly most of the time from here on out, honing her skills and experiencing teachable moments and whatnot.

 

Phew. See, this is what happens when somebody gets me going. I can even churn out several paragraphs about characters that I don't particularly care for.

So you think pretty lowly of LS choices too? I've been considering writing a fanfic that's almost a rewrite of the inquisitor storyline, so she actually feels like a lightside sith, rather than a "don't kill this random person". Or copy Cole McGrath.

Yeah, I get pretty dissatisfied with a lot of the Imp LS options, but it's not just the ones where an actual morality choice is made. Often as not, none of the three dialogue choices for a given conversation really work with LS characters; you get a mix like "rah rah, FOR THE EMPIRE"/"I'm just in it for the money"/"KILL EM ALL" and honestly all of those are pretty distasteful for a character like Aly or the Alyverse's Cipher Nine. That's the main reason I got into writing fanfic, actually - to let me roleplay in ways that the game's story wouldn't allow, that are still more or less congruent with the overall storyline.

Edited July 6, 2013 by Euphrosyne

[ekimmak]

*facepalm* I meant Pierce. I find healing companions useful, but by no means are they the ONLY choice that everyone makes them out to be.

 

Oh, yeah, and I really hate it when people give a one-liner and then kill themselves. Because normally I have a much better comeback ready for them, but they're too dead to notice.

Edited July 6, 2013 by ekimmak

[Euphrosyne]

Oh. Well, Pierce isn't getting much use because he's not a companion yet.

[UncleOst]

Chapter I - Nightmares and Daydreams (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter II - Felinx and Rodus (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter III - Road to Revelation (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter IV - Twilight of the Idols (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter V - Mvndvs Inversvs (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter VI - Traitor (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter VII - Bitter Work (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter VIII - Diapason (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter IX - Apocalypse (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter X - I'd Rather Be In Love (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter XI - Plan Zero (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter XII - Planetfall (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter XIII - The Province of Uncertainty (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter XIV - Iron Dice (Text) (Notes)

 

Chapter XV - Aggressive Expansion

 

 

Epic. Freaking Epic..

[NgeneR]

Just to say, I got into writing out my characters' stories for much the same reason--the options (LS, DS, neutral) don't really fit either character or situation. The worst have to be on Republic side. I kind of see my Jedi Knight, for instance, as somewhat impudent, thoughtful, politically aware. Naturally, no conversation choices for that occur. Poor guy--has a terrible time being himself. Even if the choice looks possibly impudent, sarcastic, or generally snarky, it comes out something else entirely: "Yes, Master, the force be with us all." You get some hints of humor--for instance, on Alderaan, when Orgus Din threatens to fire him as padawan if they get eaten by the Killicks, and when the Knight has the option to tell Angral's apprentice that he doesn't need to see him, he can smell him. (And the apprentice makes some comment like, Gee, you make me want to actually get to know you. Pity I have to kill you.)

 

My real problem with the entire set up is the lack of subtlety: Empire evil! Republic good!. Complexity is what stories are about. If you want black/white, right/wrong, character is unimportant. Bioware seems to have been aware of this. A few of the story lines do show the possibility of that sort of complexity (agent is the most obvious, but you get some of it in the trooper as well). I suspect Bioware might have been stymied by the requirements laid down by Lucas, but then I never thought Lucas was much good at character development. They probably also ran out of time. Developing a storyline like the agent's would have taken a lot more time and programming, which game developers often don't have.

 

To get back to the point, your story pleases me because of the complexity. It's not just a retelling of the warrior story, but an expansion of it, filling in the gaps. I like it very much.

Edited July 7, 2013 by NgeneR

[Euphrosyne]

Aggressive Expansion

 

“…And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Atē by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry ‘Havoc’, and let slip the dogs of war…”

-Marcvs Antonivs, Julius Caesar, III, i, 270-273

 

 

“I’m growing tired of asking this,” snarled Thana irately, “so it will be the last time. Where is Kom Orda’s base?”

 

She released her Force choke hold on the hapless Republic soldier and he sank to the ground, desperately gulping in as much air as he could, massaging his damaged throat and whimpering painfully.

 

From what I could see through the gloom of the nighttime Tarisian jungle, he was taking entirely too long for her liking. She loomed up over him ominously and thumbed her lightsaber on. Then, blindingly fast, she flicked her wrist and brought the crimson blade within a handspan of the prone soldier’s neck.

 

“Okay, okay!” he gasped. “General Orda’s CP is in the…” He coughed uncontrollably. “…in the Junction.”

 

Thana deactivated her lightsaber. “Good. I know the place.”

 

Even though being anywhere near her made my skin crawl, I tried to suppress my emotions and turned to the hapless soldier. “What about defenses?”

 

“Ever since…aaaagh…ever since the convoys in the Sediment got shut down, they moved the walkers back here. There’s a few of them covering the approaches to the base.”

 

She rolled her eyes. “Who cares? We’re Sith. We can rip those things to pieces without even trying.”

 

“I don’t know,” I said hesitantly. “Maybe it’d be best if we called in air support.”

 

“You little weakling,” she bit out. “Well, you can wait for your precious bombers, and while you’re doing that, I’ll just go ahead and storm the place.”

 

“With what? There’s only one One Woman Army on this planet, and she’s not here.”

 

“Don’t make me laugh. She’s as incompetent as you are. But I’m sure there are some loyal servants of the Empire around who aren’t afraid of their own shadows.” She gave me a tight little smile. “At least I can thank you for leaving me all the kills.”

 

Then her finger twitched imperceptibly, and the lightsaber she’d been idly toying with ignited-

 

And slashed open the soldier’s abdomen. A huge gash opened up from his waist to his chest, his eyes went dull, and in the Force, I could feel his presence vanish. A couple of seconds before, he’d been a human being, with hopes and fears and dreams; after Thana got through with him, he was just meat.

 

“Hmm,” Thana said idly, sniffing the air ostentatiously, as I gaped at the fresh corpse. She poked at what was left of his belly with the tip of her still-lit lightsaber. “I suppose he wasn’t full of crap after all.”

 

She skipped off into the bowels of the jungle, humming jauntily, and left me in the clearing with what was left of her prisoner.

 

I hobbled off a few meters into the underbrush and threw up. Then I just stood there for a few minutes with my hands on my knees, gasping for air, barely conscious of the jungle around me. It took me awhile before I could finally force strength into my legs again and start moving.

 

The last two weeks of fighting had been awful. That first night, with the air assault, Cipher Nine’s raid on the weapons stockpiles, and our attack on Frellka’s mine, had pretty much decided the outcome of the battle in the Brell Sediment. Twelfth Corps had fragmented under the revitalized Imperial Army’s hammerblows, expertly directed by Aly and the rest of the staff.

 

But those fragments had still put up a terrific fight. So we’d battled them to the edge of the Tularan Marsh, and in the eyes of a lot of the commanders, the only thing that was left to complete the local victory was the destruction of Orda’s headquarters itself.

 

While Aly was all too frequently stuck at the Brell base, orchestrating the battle and keeping Darth Gravus under control, Thana had been everywhere on the front lines. Supposedly, she’d broken with Gravus after the first few days, angry that he was letting Aly have her way. But she always seemed to have soldiers ready to fight alongside her, and good intelligence on Republic positions. If she’d really “slipped Gravus’ leash”, then there was no way she could possibly be as effective as she seemed to be.

 

So that meant Gravus was backing her secretly, and that meant he was trying to set her up as an alternative to Aly, undermining the war effort and, for good measure, redirecting the aim of the campaign from “destroy the Republic’s genocide base” to “massacre the Republic’s troops and civvies”.

 

This was not an acceptable solution.

 

Aly had resisted the obvious answer for awhile. She refused to admit it, but I’m pretty sure she was worried about having me work on my own, although to be fair, that wasn’t the whole story: I’d also be working on my own in the middle of a massive war zone trying to ride herd on an insanely dangerous sociopath. But there was nobody else who could keep tabs on Thana, so eventually she relented. Which is how I got stuck in the depths of the jungle watching her mutilate corpses and murder prisoners: my mission was to stop what I could (not much, if anything) and report on everything else.

 

I thumbed my comlink on and did just that. “Master?”

 

“Hey, Jaesa. What’s up?”

 

“Thana found Orda’s CP. He’s holed up in some place called the Junction – you know where it is?”

 

“The Junction? Yeah, that’s an old network of tunnels the Republic was using for decon work before we chased them out of the Sediment. Grid square, uh…whatever, I’ll mark it on your datapad’s map. I can be there in twenty.”

 

“We don’t have that kind of time,” I said hurriedly. “Apparently Orda’s got a group of walkers covering the entrance. We need a fire mission, but Thana’s not going to wait. I think she’s planning to just commandeer a platoon of soldiers and use them as cannon fodder while she sneaks into the base.” Then I reconsidered. “Well, ‘sneak’ might be too strong a word. But you get the idea.”

 

She swore feelingly in what sounded like Huttese. “Okay, then. I guess you’re it. The bombers will be off the pad soon, ETA four minutes. I’ll try to get there as fast as I can, but if I don’t make it in time…well, I trust you to know what to do.”

 

Despite everything, I felt buoyed by the vote of confidence. “Thanks, Aly. I’ll keep you posted.”

 

“See you, Jaesa. Stay safe.”

 

Then she switched off. I stuffed the comlink back into my robes, changed direction to follow the icon on my map, and started to sprint again.

 

Getting to the Junction was tricky enough. With the Republic military breaking down, clusters of rakghouls, ferrazids, and all manner of Tarisian wildlife had started to leak into the battle zone. I had to skirt these packs as I found them, and even this far into the Tularan Marsh, there were an awful lot. It helped that Thana’d been through several minutes before, and that she’d left a swath of destruction behind her. As I ran, I reflected that I hadn’t really needed Aly to show me where Orda’s CP was; all I had to do was follow the screams.

 

By the time I got to the bunker that served as the entrance to the Junction, Nost’s bombers had already come and gone. I could see the burned-out hulks of the Republic walkers, and a smattering of corpses wearing both black and white uniforms. The white-hats that were left were dazed, confused, and aimlessly wandering the area in shock. It wasn’t terribly hard for me to sneak past them.

 

What waited for me inside was…worse.

 

To say that Thana had made a mess on her way in would be a pretty colossal understatement. Equipment had been smashed, more or less at random; several fires had started and were slowly spreading through the compound, bathing the tunnels with a demonic, flickering glow – the only thing that passed for light, with all the artificial lights knocked out. I stepped on something squishy in the gloom, looked down, and had to turn away: it was just an arm. Maybe Nautolan, or Mirialan, even Twi’lek: somebody with green skin. No sign of the rest of the body.

 

Similar sights greeted me as I moved deeper into the Junction – body parts scattered at random, piles of lacerated dead Imperial and Republic soldiers, one akk guard dog with both of its bulbous eyes gouged out. It was a charnel house. A sort of first taste of what the entire galaxy would look like if the Sith won the war.

 

Slowly, the sounds of battle met my ears. I could hear Thana slaughtering more soldiers deeper inside the command post, and undisciplined, haphazard blaster fire. Afraid of meeting her – especially when she was still in combat, still gone blood simple – I slowed down, became more circumspect, tiptoed from room to room. Eventually I came to a blast door with controls nearby that had been shattered beyond any semblance of repair, doubtless to try to keep the attackers out. Thana’d already been through it, though, and left a gaping hole in the middle of it, large enough for me to pass through.

 

Thana wasn’t inside anymore, but she’d left her mark all the same. It seemed as though the Pubs had tried to make some sort of stand there. She left their lightsaber-carved corpses all over the room – along with one or two dead blackhats, probably from the platoon that had followed her in. Didn’t seem like she paid very much attention to most of them, though. They were only battle casualties: a few quick slices with a lightsaber, or a little exertion of will to crush the trachea, and she moved on.

 

Only one of them, leaning up against a corner, had really been maimed. She’d done something to his abdomen, and against my will I drifted over toward him to get a closer look, and then he started making a kh kh kh sound with his mouth and Sithspit he was still alive.

 

I rushed over next to him and got a good look at his face for the first time – the only face I’d have any chance of recognizing in this place. It was Kom Orda himself, dressed in the same armor as the rest of his soldiers, one hand hanging limply from a massive assault cannon he no longer had the strength to lift. And it was easy to see why. Thana’s lightsaber had sliced apart his belly. He didn’t even have any abdominal muscles anymore; the only reason he was still sitting was because she’d propped him up against the wall.

 

He turned to me and managed to whisper something low that I couldn’t make out.

 

“…I can’t hear you, General,” I murmured.

 

“Kill…me…”

 

“I can’t. No. You’re going to survive this.”

 

“No…don’t let her get her…” He made that kh kh kh sound again, and I realized why: he had to cough, was trying to cough, but he literally didn’t have the muscles to do it.

 

“I…” The words caught in my throat as I slowly realized that he really wasn’t going to make it. Not even if I’d brought a medical droid with me. All that was left for him was a short life with as much pain Thana could pack into it for him.

 

Or I could end it for him. Before she came back.

 

My arm was shaking as I slowly drew my saberstaff from my belt and tried to figure out any possible way I could to comfort him. “It’s all right. I can make this quick.”

 

“At least…I know…Empire will never win…”

 

For a few seconds I paused, wondering what Orda could possibly mean. Never win the war? Never win on Taris? Did the Republic have some sort of ace up their sleeve? Was he protecting some kind of secret, like information on Project Siantide or the base in the Tularan Marsh? Or was it just the last defiant outburst from a doomed man desperate to find some meaning in his death?

 

It would’ve been too cruel to make him wait for oblivion just to tell me.

 

I blinked back tears. There is no death, only the Force…

 

The emerald blade thrust into Orda’s forehead. He went out instantly. Didn’t even close his eyes.

 

I shut down my lightsaber and stumbled backward, eventually coming to rest against the opposite wall. My legs felt like jelly and my vision was swimming. This whole war had been awful for me so far, but this place pushed it to an entirely new level. I was finding out what I couldn’t do anymore. I couldn’t handle this. I was stuck in a gigantic, endless horror. Every choice I had was between awful and worse. I killed people every day.

 

And then I felt Aly step through the hole in the blast door, and I remembered why I was doing it.

 

She spent a few seconds just standing there at the entrance, taking stock of the situation. But then she rushed over to me, using her strong arms to support me as I slid down against the wall and came to rest on the floor, and I was burying my head in her shoulder and gasping incoherently about how awful everything was in there, and the tears started flowing and I babbled and babbled like I could expel the awful memory of being inside this hell just by saying it.

 

We just sat there for what felt like an eternity as I sobbed against her shoulder and she whispered and made reassuring noises and did her best to fill our Force bond with feelings of comfort and safety. Eventually, I heard the sounds of battle, deeper in the Junction, slowly peter out. It was that that finally forced me to my feet and stanched the flow of tears from my eyes: that I was sitting there, bawling selfishly, while people were still dying elsewhere in the Junction.

 

Aly could tell exactly what was going through my mind, because she whispered to me, “Don’t worry. It’s still not your fault.”

 

I tried to mumble something reproachfully, but it just came out as a pitiful little gurgle.

 

Thana strutted back in through the hole in the door a few minutes later, as we were searching the place for any more valuable intelligence. Unsurprisingly, she was all by herself – not a single one of the soldiers she’d brought with her had survived the bloodbath. Orda’s corpse was one of the first things she noticed.

 

“Shame, really. I thought for sure he’d last until I got back.” Then she got a closer look at the hole in his forehead and clenched her hands into fists. “Wait, did one of you idiots give him a mercy killing or something?”

 

Aly rounded on her. “I used the promise of a quick death to force some information out of him,” she said imperiously.

 

“Oh really,” Thana sneered. “Like what?”

 

“Locations on the troops that have been besieging Outpost Morne,” she shot back. “For whatever reason, your Master…”

 

“He’s not my Master,” Thana cut in with an eye-roll.

 

“…your Master,” continued Aly irritably, “thinks that Melkor Dinn’s support might be worth having. So I sent a battalion to clear a path to the outpost as soon as I got that information.”

 

“Oooh, another battle?” Thana asked brightly.

 

“It’s, ah, probably over by now,” I said, seeing where Aly was going with this.

 

“Hmp. Spoilsports. Well, have fun cleaning up and visiting gross, lecherous old men while I get to have all the fun.”

 

Thana spun on her heel and stalked out the door. I turned to Aly. “How the blazes did she get here so fast?”

 

“Good question. It does seem like she manages to be everywhere at once, huh?”

 

“Always just one step ahead…”

 

Aly shrugged. “Whatever. We still have one advantage over Thana.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Me, silly,” she laughed. “One on one, I can beat her like a red-headed stepchild.”

 

“I think she is a red-headed stepchild,” I pointed out.

 

“So it’s a good comparison, then.” She looked around the room again. “Let’s have the rest of this conversation on the way to Outpost Morne. I try not to spend more time in slaughterhouses than I absolutely have to. Let the infantry clean up.”

 

We walked the few miles to the outpost. It was still pretty early in the evening, and with the destruction of Twelfth Corps’ CP, there weren’t many Republic troops hiding out in the jungle to make life difficult for us. Aly’s battalion had cleared the rest of the way. To my surprise, she hadn’t totally been lying to Thana about those troops; she really had just ordered those men to relieve Morne Outpost. It just wasn’t on the strength of intel from Orda’s base.

 

When we finally got there, we had to pick our way through the rubble of the outpost’s defensive walls, skirt the wreckage of a suborbital shuttle that’d been shot down there, and wend our way between dozens of pallets bearing injured soldiers and Sith in most of the open areas, which had been converted into field hospitals. Dinn had brought a sizable contingent of Sith and their retainers along with him, but precious few of those were alive and on their feet when we got there. Most of the able-bodied troops were the blackhats that Aly had sent to break the siege.

 

Dinn himself had a little two-story prefabricated structure for a command post. Aly barged inside without a knock or an announcement, and nearly got herself brained by the bars of a makeshift prison cell that’d been set up right next to the door. Inside, I could see a small, emaciated woman in civilian clothes, wearing a shock collar and bearing all the obvious signs of torture on her neck and forearms. But Aly seemed to barely pay any attention to her at all, instead focusing on the shriveled, stooped, heavily implanted Sith Lord sitting next to the cell.

 

It didn’t seem as though he really noticed us, because he continued with his interrogation of the pitiful woman in the cell. “Mola, my dear, don’t lie. Tell me about the rakghouls.”

 

She struggled to her feet, holding onto the bars for strength. “I…I’m just a xenozoologist. I’ve told you everything…ahhh!” Dinn cut her off by thumbing the shock collar’s controls and sending her spasming to the cell floor.

 

“That’s not necessary,” growled Aly. “Put the shock collar controls down.”

 

At this, he looked over at us, and his one remaining eye lit up. “Ah. Forgive me, milady. I get so wrapped up in interrogations I…lose my head.”

 

“Lord Dinn,” she said icily. “At what point were you going to leave the questions to somebody else and actually take up your duties of command?”

 

“Oh, there’s no real rush. These soldiers seem to have everything well in hand, and besides, Miss Haxtor here is a veritable fount of information on our newest threat: the rakghouls. If you hope to deal with the Republic in these marshes, you’ll need to neutralize the ghouls in some way.”

 

“I wasn’t aware they’d penetrated this far into the marsh.” Aly kept her tone civil, if only barely. “Is the Republic’s cordon breaking down that badly?”

 

“You know of them. Good, good. Yes, it seems the Republic’s armies have had more pressing concerns than the ghouls lately, so they’ve been leaking in all over the place. In particular, they seem to have infested much of an old sewer complex slightly north of here. Those vicious mutants are swarming in there, tearing apart anything – and anyone – that gets in their way.”

 

The woman in the cell had managed to claw her way to her feet again. “Serves you right,” she said defiantly. “Sith created the rakghouls to begin with!”

 

Dinn’s lone eye rolled in its socket, and he triggered the shock collar again. And just like last time, Mola’s body went into paroxysmal convulsions and flopped to the floor.

 

Aly’s eyes narrowed. “I ordered you not to do that,” she said mildly.

 

“She’s just a Republic prisoner with an overly free tongue, nobody worth consideration.” Even still, he surreptitiously placed the shock collar remote in a little alcove on the wall. “But she is correct about that: an ancient Sith engineered the plague…”

 

She ignored him and continued. “We can’t have you disobeying orders.”

 

Then she picked him up by the neck and rammed his face into the computer console along the wall.

 

Reflexively, his hands fired off streams of Force lightning, but it all passed into the wall, or into the terminal in front of him, throwing off sparks and melting some of the controls. His limbs spasmed, uselessly trying to do some kind of damage to his tormentor. But he couldn’t get any strength behind his blows, and Aly ignored them all.

 

She kept battering his head into the computer. I could hear the crunch of his nose breaking, and through the Force, I could feel the hairline fractures develop in his skull. After several more hammerblows, his neck finally gave out with a sharp snap. She tossed him bonelessly to the ground. For a few seconds, his throat kept making the same kh kh kh sound as Orda had, and his body twitched helplessly, but then his eye went dull and he was silent.

 

And I just stood there and watched.

 

Aly knelt next to Mola’s little cage, ignoring the sack of meat that used to be a Sith Lord right next to her. “Are you all right?” she asked solicitously. “Lemme get that thing off you.”

 

Mola just huddled inside her cell with a terrified look on her face. “What…what did you do?” she gasped.

 

“What I had to,” Aly said. She picked up the remote from where he’d put it down and carefully deactivated the collar. “Should be free to remove it now.”

 

She reached up and popped the hateful thing off hesitantly, as though she were in a dream. “Are you going to kill me?”

 

“No. Never.”

 

“Why are you doing this?” An excellent question. One I really, really wanted to ask, myself. But I couldn’t, not until we were alone.

 

“Because he was a murderous, sadistic, evil jerk? Oh, that reminds me.” She walked over to the doorway and beckoned to a nearby blackhat. “Hey, you. Clean up this mess.”

 

After the grunts had removed Dinn’s corpse from the room, she turned back to Mola. “Well, the short version is that we’re trying to change the Empire from within, and we really don’t like it when Sith scumbags start torturing innocent people like yourself.”

 

Mola blinked her cloudy eyes. “There’s no way this is happening to me.”

 

“Believe it.”

 

Words started spilling out of my mouth. “Miss – uh, Doctor – Haxtor, do you know anything that we might find useful? You know, about the rakghouls, about the genocide, about where the Republic’s troops are…”

 

Mola’s face went even paler than it already was. “Genocide?”

 

“Yeah, didn’t you know?” Aly said. “The reason the Republic resettled this hole is because they wanted to use it as a base to launch their genocide campaign against the Sith Empire.”

 

“That’s crazy,” she said.

 

“Crazy or not, it’s true. What do you think all those troops are doing out there in the Tularan Marsh? Building a huge base, foundry, and supply depot for this whole shindig.”

 

“I don’t know anything about that!” Mola gasped.

 

Aly smiled encouragingly. “Hey, don’t worry about it. There’s no reason you would. And honestly, it doesn’t matter. But it’s in everybody’s interests if we do our best to neutralize the rakghoul threat, right?”

 

“Could you tell us what you know about them?” I started again.

 

“If this is the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine, you’re doing it wrong. The bad cop can’t threaten me if he’s dead.” Mola mustered a sickly little half-smile.

 

My Master looked like she’d just come to a snap decision. “Nah, we’re going to let you go anyway, as soon as you’re good to travel. But before you go, we’d really appreciate it if you told us what you know about the raks, so we can kill them or drive them off. If the raks get their hands on Imp soldiers, they get more raks, and nobody wants that.”

 

“So once the rakghouls are dealt with, you and the Republic soldiers can get back to killing each other like civilized people?”

 

I coughed a halfhearted laugh. “Something like that.”

 

“Okay.” She stumbled over to a chair in the corner, sat down, and visibly gathered herself. “I’ve been here for about a year. Most of the other xenozoologists in my group left the planet a few months back, but I stayed on as a consultant with the Army. Stupid decision. We still had enough data to publish something like four papers, although only one of them’s actually made it because of classified information restrictions and all that…”

 

“Wait,” I interrupted, “I remember reading that paper back when I was Master Karr’s Padawan. You described that new subspecies, the nekghouls, right?”

 

Mola nodded, obviously gratified that somebody’d noticed. “Yep, that was us. The rakghouls that can use the Force. I’m surprised anybody outside the academic community noticed it.”

 

I blushed. “Well, it’s a hobby…”

 

“So,” Aly said, “the rakghoul studies.”

 

“Right, sorry. As a consultant, I’ve been doing a couple of things. First one was studying rakghoul migration patterns.”

 

“They’re a migratory species?” my Master asked.

 

“Rakghouls have to practice limited amounts of migration,” said Mola, “otherwise their local food sources won’t support the population. They tend to move on before a region’s totally denuded. That’s one of the reasons there’s so many in the Olaris hinterland: because the colonists supply a plentiful potential source of food.”

 

“That’s disgusting, but it makes sense.”

 

“Yeah. Anyway, I was working on a project for the Army in conjunction with that big super-secret reactor complex through the transport network, where we’d try to release radioactive material to induce rakghouls to move away from certain areas. But even before I got captured, we only had limited access to reactor byproducts. Those Project Siantide guys don’t like to lose research cycles.”

 

Aly leaned forward. “Project Siantide? What do they have to do with the reactor? Do you know what they’re doing there?”

 

Mola shrugged. “Haven’t the foggiest. Some top secret military thing.”

 

“Okay. So the radiation?”

 

“Limited success. The Army guys were trying to get the rakghouls to drift over into Imperial territory, but we didn’t really have enough toxic waste to do it properly.”

 

“This transport station that you mentioned – is this Transport Station Five, to the north?” I piped up. “The one with access to Zone Zero and all these other areas?”

 

“That’s the one,” Mola nodded.

 

I peered at my datapad and the latest Intelligence and scouting reports. “Says here that the Republic’s had to abandon most of the complex to rakghouls over the last few days due to losses on the front lines. They still hold the reactor and a few other chambers, but it’s not looking good.”

 

The academic slumped. “I know that should make me feel outraged and horrified, but after the past month…”

 

“I understand,” I said sympathetically. “This war messes everybody up. You need to get the first shuttle you can offworld once we bring you back to Republic lines.”

 

“Yeah,” she said bleakly. “But wouldn’t your ships just shoot it down?”

 

“Nah, the Empire’s trying to kick the Republic off the planet – there’s no reason to blast something that’s leaving.” Which wasn’t totally true; if the War Trust flew the coop, Baras would be livid. But according to Lieutenant Pierce, the generals that were left were dug in deep and in it for the long haul – an inexplicable reaction from men whose forces were crumbling in the face of Imperial and rakghoul attacks, but still.

 

Aly tapped her chin. “Okay, so what about the other thing?”

 

“Oh, the nekghouls. When we were doing our research about seven, eight months ago, we had a group of Jedi come in and, uh, I guess you’d say they negotiated with the neks. It was kinda cool, really, like we had the Republic’s all-stars out here, if only for a little while. They did a lot of stuff we didn’t totally understand, but the upshot was that a Jedi Master, a Nautolan guy named Sulan, came out to try to train the nekghouls in the use of the Force.”

 

“Wait, what?” Aly said disbelievingly. “You do know that raks are, like, Sith alchemy gone horribly right. They’re intrinsically dark-side creatures.”

 

Mola raised her hands. “Hey, I was the one who brought that up earlier, remember? But Master Sulan seems to think that he can, I dunno, redeem them or something. He’s been with them in their nest in the backup power plant a couple klicks southeast of here, teaching them the ways of the Jedi and all that.”

 

“See, this is where that inane Jedi ‘save all the things’ attitude comes back to bite people in the butt,” growled Aly. “Those abominations need to be exterminated, not pampered.”

 

I put up a halfhearted defense of the Jedi Order for old time’s sake. “Aly, if they’re sentient, it’s our responsibility to try…”

 

“Not with those things. Three gets you the sabacc pot this Sulan guy is compromising your Code left and right just to show some ‘progress’ with the neks, like promising them power and strength through the Force. Disgusting. You won’t get anywhere with Sith creations.”

 

“What about you?” I asked pointedly, the memory of Melkor Dinn’s stove-in skull extremely fresh in my mind.

 

She lowered her eyes. “That’s not fair, Jaesa.”

 

“Well, we can talk about it later.” I turned to the xenozoologist. “So that’s the lowdown on the rakghouls?”

 

She nodded. “Yep. Both the Army and the Jedi are trying to turn them into weapons against you Imps. After working on this stuff for the last several months, and after some time subject to the tender mercies of that lunatic you just killed, I frankly can’t be bothered to care about those projects anymore. They’re basically war crimes. Just burn them down. Everything to do with rakghouls.”

 

“I can do that,” Aly said confidently. “Thanks, Dr. Haxtor.”

 

Mola buried her face in her hands. “I just want to go home.”

 

“Well, we can do that, too. Jaesa, you’ve got a good handle on the closest remaining Pub outpost, right?”

 

I flipped from screen to screen on my datapad. “Pretty good handle. I think Cipher identified a regimental CP about a klick and a half northwest of here.”

 

“Good enough. Doc, are you okay to travel?”

 

“If it means going home, I could walk all the way to Olaris.”

 

“Well, let’s just take it a kilometer at a time. You need to hit the refresher before you go?” Aly hooked a thumb at the stairs to the second floor of the little prefab outpost.

 

“You’re kidding, right?” She bolted for the steps and took them two at a time.

 

Once she was gone, I sighed unhappily. “I’m sorry, Aly.”

 

“For what?”

 

“That Sith creations comment. I was over the line.”

 

She grimaced. “Coming from almost anybody else…”

 

“I know.”

 

“But you do have a point. I guess it’s not so clear what separates me from them.”

 

“Especially after you beat a man to death like that,” I added. “That’s scary, Aly.”

 

“What, and Homicidal Psycho Jungle Girl’s homemade slaughterhouse wasn’t?”

 

“You know what I mean. She is who she is. And you are who you are.”

 

“Okay, fine. It’s no excuse. But what was I supposed to do with him? Drop him off with the Jedi like we did with Karr?”

 

“I don’t know, Aly,” I said helplessly. “I don’t have the answers. That just…it felt wrong. Even though you had cause. It was, I don’t know…like what Zylixx was trying to do with you, a murder, but with the veneer of respectability about it, the claim to have had just cause. Like you were going through the penumbra of the dark side, becoming part of the jungle here.”

 

“I see what you mean, but…aagh.” She massaged her temples.

 

“Besides, Aly, why kill him and not, say, Thana and Gravus? What separates what Dinn was doing from what Thana was doing?”

 

She shrugged expressively. “Dinn wasn’t just a morally acceptable target, he was a viable one. He got most of his power base killed over the last several weeks of fighting. Nobody really thought he was worth the bother anymore; even Gravus cared more about holding Outpost Morne itself than having Dinn’s support. But Thana and Gravus have got a whole army behind them.”

 

“Which they wouldn’t have if you’d just killed them when we got here, back when everybody hated them,” I said sourly. “You had the perfect excuse and now look what’s happened.”

 

Aly gazed at me with a gimlet eye. “Look who’s being bloodthirsty now.”

 

My shoulder slumped. “I know, but…I guess I don’t know. Look, all I’m saying is, I trust you. But what you did there was just terrifying. Even if it kind of made sense. Even if he really did, sort of, deserve it.”

 

“I know," she said, wrapping her arms around me tightly. "I guess I need to think more before I do these sorts of things. Check up with my moral compass.”

 

We just stood there, feeling the closeness, for about a minute or so, before she finally spoke up again. “But we can discuss all this more when you get back.”

 

“Get back?” I said dopily. “From where?”

 

“You’re taking Dr. Haxtor out to Republic lines. I need to get administrative stuff worked up, plan for whatever the heck we’re doing with the mess in the transport systems…”

 

“You caught that Project Siantide reference. Is that what you’re thinking about?”

 

“Yeah,” she said tiredly. “That reactor was on the corrupted list we got from the Brell mine, but we’ve got no idea why the War Trust was using it. Mola gave us something of a clue: they need the reactor byproducts for it, whatever it is – spent fuel rods, urania, you name it. And now that we’ve got control over Outpost Morne, we’re close enough to mount an assault on the transport station. It’ll be nice to have you for that, if you’re up for it.”

 

“Absolutely. And the rakghouls?”

 

“Well, if we have the reactor to ourselves, maybe we can release the waste and establish a sort of radioactive perimeter of some kind. The nekghouls, though, have got to go. Kick Sulan out and torch the power plant. Maybe we can get Cipher or Saki to do that.”

 

I raised my eyebrow unconsciously – yet another of Aly’s habits that I’d picked up. “Lady Sakaria’s here?”

 

“Yeah, she touched down a couple days ago. Been rooting through the Brell area, looking for datalogs or some other such garbage. And the Grand Champion’s off with Fett’s Mandos, gleefully wreaking havoc on the Republic Army.”

 

“Huh. Gang’s all here.” I heard the plumbing upstairs cycle as Mola finished her business.

 

“Yeah. But like I said, we can talk about that when you get back. Just make sure she makes her way to Republic lines safely, okay?”

 

I smirked. “Yes, milady.”

 

“Oooh, you. I’ll get you back for that.”

 

I looked up at the stairs and saw Mola trudging down. “If you’re all finished up, doc, we can saddle up right now.”

 

“I was ready to be out of here days ago.”

 

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.” I turned to Aly and gave her a peck on the cheek. “See you soon.”

 

“Stay safe out there.”

 

None of the Imps or Sith really noticed us as we made our way through the wreckage of the outpost and back out into the jungle. We stayed pretty quiet for the most part and didn’t draw attention to ourselves. It was only when we’d gotten back into the wilderness that Mola started talking.

 

“So,” she asked, “what in all nine Corellian hells are you?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but Sith generally aren’t nice people.”

 

I smiled. “I’m not Sith; I’m just really good at faking.”

 

“Are you a Jedi secret agent or something?”

 

“That’s as good a way to describe me as any other,” I shrugged.

 

“I thought the Order frowned on girlfriends. And Sith. But she definitely qualifies on both counts.”

 

“Yeah, well, I thought the Order frowned on genocide,” I sighed.

 

“I don’t totally believe what your girlfriend said about that mass murder stuff,” said Mola, “but I don’t know that I’d totally disapprove of it, either. Getting rid of the Sith seems like a pretty good idea to this particular torture victim.”

 

“Yeah, but you only see the Sith that go out to fight and try to rule over the galaxy. There’s billions and billions of people in the Empire, and most of them are just normal folks like you. This genocide thing is aimed at them, too.”

 

She bit her lip. “If you say so. That doesn’t really answer my question, though. So if you’re not really a Jedi, and you’re not really Sith, what are you?”

 

“Well, I used to be in the Order, but I got caught up in something way over my head. I found out my Master wasn’t really all that good of a person at all, and he fell to the dark side by pursuing a vendetta against the Sith. And then Aly asked for my help, and…well…”

 

“I don’t know much about this dark side/light side stuff. Like you said, it’s way over my head. But you seem like a pretty good person, and you really have something going with her.” I could see the ghost of a smile on her face in the darkness. “Makes me wonder what you’re doing on Nightmare World here.”

 

“Trying to stop it from getting worse,” I said as we reached the edge of a clearing near where the regiment was supposed to be.

 

Mola surveyed the field before us. “Good job,” she deadpanned.

 

The place reminded me of Orda’s bunker. Trenches and fire bases had been ripped apart, craters – from artillery or from the effects of dark side power, and I didn’t really want to guess – pockmarked the ground, and ruined equipment and war matériel littered the ground. Dead bodies lay in heaps all over the clearing – mostly Republic, but more than a few Imp troopers and even a couple of Sith corpses.

 

“Well, this is a problem,” I mumbled.

 

“No kidding. Guess we should try and see if anybody’s alive.”

 

We pushed our way out of the trees and trudged into the ruined camp. The moonlight lent an eerie quality to the place, lighting up grotesque expressions on the faces of corpses in rictus, and the crazily dancing shadows cast by the fires of burning bunkers and hovertrucks reminded me all too much of ghosts – ghosts being the only things that could possibly be moving here in the land of the dead…

 

A tingle at the back of my neck, a shiver down my spine, and suddenly my eyes snapped wide open and my reverie ended.

 

We weren’t alone.

 

I shoved Mola into a bomb crater and dove in behind her just as blaster fire erupted around us in a semicircle. None of the shooters were visible, but that meant nothing to the Force; afforded the temporary cover of the crater, I stretched out with my feelings to try to find our ambushers. It was easy to tell that they were from the Republic. Figuring out how many there were was hard enough, since all their minds were bent on the same purpose – killing us – but eventually I found the differences between their thoughts, and started counting. I stopped when I got to ten.

 

Five seconds had elapsed since the shooting started.

 

I spared a glance for Mola, huddling in the crater next to me…or, rather, not really huddling, but lying in a heap, breathing shallowly. Then I saw the still-smoking blaster crease across her ribs and winced.

 

Plan one: charge out of the crater, fight the soldiers, drive them off, and try to help Mola when I could. Flaws: probable injury to myself, near-certain aggravation of Mola’s injury, definite injury and death caused to the soldiers around us. Unacceptable.

 

Plan two: leave Mola where she was, dodge the blaster bolts, and escape without engaging the soldiers. Flaws: potential injury to myself, certain death for Mola, failure to accomplish the mission Aly’d set for me. Similarly unacceptable.

 

Plan three…

 

“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop shooting! We surrender!”

 

The blaster fire slowly slackened until a loud whistle cut off the last few overenthusiastic shooters.

 

“Look, I’m a defector, and I’ve got an escaped prisoner with me. She’s hurt really badly, we need medical attention. Please.”

 

A gruff, almost hoarse voice came back, sounding like the stereotypical noncom in every war holodrama that’d ever been made. “That prisoner wouldn’t happen to be a Jedi Padawan, would she?”

 

“What?” I shouted confusedly. “No, but I am. She’s a xenozoologist.”

 

“I don’t know what the kark that is, but it’s too stupid to be made up. We’re coming in. If we see weapons out, we start shooting again.”

 

A few seconds later, a couple of whitehats peered over the rim of the crater and saw us hiding there. One of them called for a medic while the other bade me move away from her. I surrendered my lightsaber and kept my hands in the air.

 

As the medic busied himself with Mola’s injury, the noncom – a Weequay with his helmet off – and some other troopers made their way over to me. At least two rifles that I could see were covering me, both from pretty far away: they weren’t taking any chances.

 

“You said something about defection,” he said without preamble.

 

“Yeah. Yes. I used to be a Padawan, but…”

 

“I don’t really need to hear the details,” the sergeant cut me off. “And I don’t really care, either. The glowsticks can deal with you.” He turned to one of the soldiers with me. “Dose her up.”

 

Oops. Of course they wouldn’t want a Force user to be conscious in transport.

 

And then I felt the sting of the lecepanine dart in my arm. I only had a couple of seconds left. As I lost control over my body, I filled my psychic link to Aly with strong feelings of reassurance, of security, a sense that even though I was gone – and she’d find out that I’d been captured quickly enough – that she didn’t have to go get me.

 

We’d had it right back on the Audacious: there was no way we could come up with one big plan for saving the colonists and neutralizing Taris at the same time. There were too many variables, too many people working against us, too many things to go wrong. All we could do was inch forward, bit by bit, shaving the odds a little every time and doing what we could on a day-by-day basis.

 

And sometimes, eventually, things would start to come together on their own.

 

For some insane reason, I had a Force premonition that that was exactly what was happening. As bad as it looked – the Republic was recapturing me, noted traitor – I had the feeling that surrendering instead of trying to fight was going to make everything turn out all right.

 

…I hoped.

 

[Euphrosyne]

Notes to Chapter XV

 

"...but there's a lot of room for...aggressive expansion." Which is what the Imps are doing now.

 

Particular relevance of this Shakespeare quote: it actually comes near the end of Antony's war with the conspirators, not the beginning. (Most people erroneously seem to think that crying 'havoc' means starting a fight.) Letting loose the dogs of war is a reference to permitting the troops to pillage and despoil the enemy's camp, generally in the aftermath of a victory. Thana's kinda sorta doing that here.

 

And we have a Grand Moff Tarkin reference to start us off. You know

when you have self-referential (incestuous?) Star Wars jokes.

 

Thana's totally fake "emancipation" from Gravus annoyed me in the game. I kind of got a subtext from the later missions that she was still totally working for Gravus, but it might've just been my imagination. Nevertheless, I incorporated that into this story. Also it - and the total destruction Thana visits on Orda's command post here - makes Thana seem like less of a paper tiger.

 

The Junction played a role in the Consular class quest on Taris, which is where Aly got that "decon work" comment from; you'd never know if you just played Imp side.

 

"Follow the screams" (sadly, no obviously available YouTube clip) comes from the T. rex's invasion of San Diego at the end of The Lost World (the mediocre movie, not the excellent book).

 

Orda's dying words are more or less taken from the mission "Race for the Kill", but the situation in which Jaesa encounters him there is, obviously, significantly different. There's some Stalton there...Lesh...Runt...even Shadow.

 

Speaking of red-headed stepchildren, I've decided that Durik Vesh, from Voss, is Thana's father. Or possibly grandfather.

 

Mola Haxtor played a minor role in the Republic's bonus series on Taris, providing background for the nekghouls. Her reappearance in "Rakghoul Roundup" and "Culling the Nekghouls" was kind of cool. But I was absolutely livid that you couldn't do anything to help her out: even an LS player has to just let Dinn (and Thana) zap her a few times and ask a few terse questions, and that's it. So Aly got to be the author avatar again, there. I'm vicariously living through my fanfic characters.

 

"You put down your rock...and I'll put down my sword...and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?" I squee at

from The Princess Bride.

 

Going through the penumbra of the dark side and becoming part of the jungle are ideas from Shatterpoint, although Stover actually articulates them while I just sort of throw out references as though the characters and readers have any idea what they mean.

 

That regimental CP that Jaesa and Mola head toward is actually sort of in the game, although in that case it's less than a platoon of Republic soldiers. But the location's there (north-northwest of Outpost Morne). In-game, the only thing it plays a role in is the Inquisitor quest "Laying the Trap", when the Inquisitor raids it as part of the overall plot to ensnare Ashara. That's where that question about the Padawan comes from: the NCO and his men are there looking for Ashara, who's disappeared briefly to make contact with Sakaria.

 

Speaking of Sakaria, here's a screenshot of her, because frankly it's unreasonable to expect you guys to visualize everybody properly with my terrible characterizations. (Yes, she's still wearing the Black Talon Inquisitor's Robe. It's the best one.) I'd get more, but I haven't managed to take a decent screenie of Aly or Cipher Nine yet.

 

Edited July 9, 2013 by Euphrosyne

[NgeneR]

Popping more popcorn--and getting the party trays loaded up again.

 

Nice work integrating Taris--that was a tough world.

[Zandilar]

I really like how you've departed from the Taris storyline, and I especially like how you have Jaesa running around on her own and not with Aly all the time. It makes sense in a big war type situation, rather than the very guided quest paths we get in the game.

 

I actually read a different subtext with Thana Vesh. Her anger is all for show, she's using it covering her fear. When LS SW tells her to do something LSed, she does it with little complaint, and big missions where she should have succeeded on her own DSly, she failed. She's not incompetent, she's just... scared, and not really as evil as she tries to make herself out to be. A lot of her boasting comes across like she's trying to convince herself. Maybe I'm just seeing things, though.

[Adwynyth]

Popping more popcorn--and getting the party trays loaded up again.

 

Nice work integrating Taris--that was a tough world.

Pop all the corns!

 

*hauls in a couch* We're gonna need this, I think.

[Saelinne]

Reading about your Thana I wish to go and do the planets quest and end it with her being a...ugh...not so living

...for once. But its your story and she seem kinda different here which is perfectly ok...maybe I even misjudged her in game too. Or maybe dark side corruption doesn't work like I think and she is not a good guy putting a mask for others:)

 

...and I never had a LS IV character so won't comment on your main character:P

[ekimmak]

Well, you've certainly done a good job of making me hate Thana Vesh. Again.

 

While managing to make her still a threat. Nice work.

 

I also think Jaesa should have waited another five seconds to come up with a better excuse than defection, because it will not improve her standing when it's found out that she was lying. As if there aren't enough trust issues between the superpowers already.

[Euphrosyne]

Thanks, everybody.

I actually read a different subtext with Thana Vesh. Her anger is all for show, she's using it covering her fear. When LS SW tells her to do something LSed, she does it with little complaint, and big missions where she should have succeeded on her own DSly, she failed. She's not incompetent, she's just... scared, and not really as evil as she tries to make herself out to be. A lot of her boasting comes across like she's trying to convince herself. Maybe I'm just seeing things, though.

Reading about your Thana I wish to go and do the planets quest and end it with her being a...ugh...not so living

...for once. But its your story and she seem kinda different here which is perfectly ok...maybe I even misjudged her in game too. Or maybe dark side corruption doesn't work like I think and she is not a good guy putting a mask for others:)

 

...and I never had a LS IV character so won't comment on your main character:P

 

I kind of, sort of, ish agree. It's very easy to read Thana as compensating for feelings of inadequacy by doubling down on the Sithiness in conversation. There's definitely at least something there. The thing is that fear and anxiety don't really argue against her being pretty much full-on DS. Fear is fundamental to the dark side, after all. And you find posturing from pretty nearly every Sith in the games, books, and movies.

 

So I see where you guys are coming from, but I wouldn't go nearly as far as you in characterizing her that way. The reason this is spoilered is because Thana's inner demons do end up playing a role in this story.

 

And just because she plays up the whole "I'm a warrior" angle in conversation doesn't mean that everything she ever says is an attempt to cover up something. For instance, she's seen to engage in torture of both military and civilian prisoners, and plausibly claims to have done so to more. She betrays the player character and tries to get her killed, albeit by proxy. Those things are pretty unequivocally evil. It doesn't really matter whether she's doing it for the same reasons as Christopher Browning's "Ordinary Men" or if she's doing it because she's just a sociopath like the other Sith. It's still evil.

 

But the real problem there, as far as I'm concerned, isn't her fear and her posturing. Those make sense for what she is. The problem is what I believe the source of those things is, namely, her dubious competence. She gets captured twice, outwitted and knocked out of another fight, and it's painfully easy to win the asinine "contests" that Gravus sets up between the two of you. Thana is a decent character, but she's just not a credible opponent. And since the whole Taris planet quest is structured around the antagonism between Thana and the player, that's a serious problem.

 

As for why she's okay with the character doing LS stuff, I feel like that's more game mechanics than anything else. If Thana ignored the player character's orders to do LS stuff, people would complain about the pointlessness and the lack of choice. The truth of the matter is that Thana does exactly as much to stop the character from LS actions as, say, the Dread Masters do at the end of the Belsavis planet quest: a little bit of whining and that's about it. And nobody seriously disputes the Dread Masters being evil.

 

I also think Jaesa should have waited another five seconds to come up with a better excuse than defection, because it will not improve her standing when it's found out that she was lying. As if there aren't enough trust issues between the superpowers already.

One of the things I've tried to do here is make sure my protagonists make mistakes. Nobody likes a Mary Sue. Of course, some of these are dictated by the way the game's story and my story interact, like Aly's decision to keep Thana and Gravus alive, or Jaesa's decision to let Ulldin and Zylixx set a trap for Aly instead of actually going to meet her. But I've tried to add a few in to the rest of the story, too.

[Lesaberisa]

I've been enjoying this very different approach to the SW story (also it's a much more interesting take than my in-game playthrough, since I was going full-bore Sith monster to get the Legacy DS 5 unlock).

 

Your Thana is more palatable and interesting as a character in this limited space than she was in game for me.

 

 

I lean towards your interpretation of her, although judging from the codex entry, she's (to me) implied to be almost evil by nature, although any 'nurturing' by the Sith exacerbated her already destructive traits:

 

 

Thana Vesh spent her childhood cultivating an explosive temper and destroying everything she laid eyes on. When Thana discovered her talent with the Force, she tested her destructive talents on her military parents' bodyguards. After the eighth guard was found broken and mangled, Thana's terrified parents tried to suppress their daughter's power; Thana lashed out, and the resulting devastation burned an entire Kaas City block to the ground. Thana's parents were consumed in the blaze and their Force-adept orphan was sent to the Sith Academy on Korriban

 

 

So, i'm guessing there's some unresolved emotional problems (like you said - inadequacy/fear/fear of failure seem likely to me), but it's not really enough to make her compelling for me.

 

I think I probably have the lowest opinion of Thana so far in this thread - I didn't find her interesting at all, and I spent almost all of Taris on every Imperial toon just waiting to kill her. She combines the completely abhorrent personality with the utter incompetence that you mention (apart from getting to kill mooks on occasion); if she'd been a clever/capable monster, that would have been more interesting - at least she's a threat. Had she been incompetent but displayed any nuance in her characterization, that would have been more interesting too - she's someone to pity or sympathize with, possibly.

 

Instead, we got this "rivalry" with the Sith equivalent of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum that greatly overstayed its welcome (for me, at least). I much prefer your version, that at least could plausibly pose as a threat to someone other than nameless NPCs, and the sometimes very vocal group of players that post on the forums wanting her as a companion....completely baffles me.

 

As for her accepting LS decisions - I'm guessing that was game mechanics too, as I'm sure there would have been plenty of people complaining if she disregarded their choices and bad things happened anyway. I guess I could be charitable and say it was intended to show she was also afraid of the player character too, but...eh.

 

The only part of her story I enjoy is killing her (which I've done on every character, regardless of LS/DS alignment).

 

Edited July 10, 2013 by Lesaberisa

[ekimmak]

Thana could have been much worse.

 

Other people could have believed her bragging about being the superior sith/imperial supporter. As it is, about the only people who think she's a threat are herself, and the republic captives that she torments.

 

But yeah. I will never understand why people demand that she become a companion. About the finishing touch on my hatred for her was finding out that she's one of those broken enemies I keep dreading my fights against. Being an assisting character did not help.

Edited July 12, 2013 by ekimmak

[SongOfEuterpe]

I am LOVING this story. Reading about Aly and Jaesa makes me want to break my healing streak and reroll a Warrior!

Often as not, none of the three dialogue choices for a given conversation really work with LS characters; you get a mix like "rah rah, FOR THE EMPIRE"/"I'm just in it for the money"/"KILL EM ALL"

Ha. Couldn't agree more. That's one of the reasons I'm appreciating Aly's character (and dialogue) so much. I find that those conversation options only fit my characters' personalities when I give up on imagining something more complex. (for example, my lovely and laughably greedy bounty hunter. She reminds me of Mr. Krabs from Spongebob. "MONEY MONEY MONEY ar ar ar") It's nice to see a little more thought put into LS choices than, "Oh all right, maybe I shouldn't kill this particular dude. Aren't I wonderful?" Pats for Patrick!

 

And with that last chapter, whoo. Aly loses her cool. I'm really starting to see the application of the Nietzsche quote back in Chapter 9. Jaesa's role as Aly's "moral compass" seems like it's going to prove to be plenty interesting in coming chapters.

"You put down your rock...and I'll put down my sword...and we'll try to kill each other like civilized people?" I squee at my own references from The Princess Bride.

Hahaha YESSS! Epic squee! The notes are great. Provides a lot of background and I have to look back through the chapters after seeing all the references I missed!

 

Basically, this thread is total awesomesauce, keep going. Got my popcorn all ready for the next chapter. Any of that Dr. Pepper left?

[MishraArtificer]

Basically, this thread is total awesomesauce, keep going. Got my popcorn all ready for the next chapter. Any of that Dr. Pepper left?

Just the last dregs. I'm going to the store to get some more tomorrow.

[frauzet]

Mind if I join in?

Brought a bag of Gummibärchen.

No orange ones left, though.

Try the red ones, they are second best

 

One of my favorite chars in swtor is my marauder. Somehow he ended up being light V. Not really sure how it happend. I think, I often found the dark side choices to be dumb.

 

I got 'flamed' by my guildies for letting the settlers on Taris escape. Then I asked them, how they intended to spread fear and terror across the galaxy (do you say this in English?), when they never let anybody escape to tell the tale.

 

I see my marauder as being neutral, despite his character sheet stating otherwise. He tries to control his passions instead of being controlled by them, nevertheless making good use of them in dark-side terms. He would have been a terrible Jedi.

 

So I enjoy your story very much, because aside from showing me a Jaesa, that I have never seen, imho you are doing a great job describing a light-side SW and the problems and moral conflicts she is facing.

[Euphrosyne]

Whoa, lots of new voices/comments. Glad to see everybody enjoying the story so far! Technically, this is still 'once a week' update schedule I'm on, here.

I got 'flamed' by my guildies for letting the settlers on Taris escape. Then I asked them, how they intended to spread fear and terror across the galaxy (do you say this in English?), when they never let anybody escape to tell the tale.

 

Yeah, that's exactly what you'd say in English.

 

[Euphrosyne]

Friends of Old

 

“If you didn’t have a death sentence, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down, even when you’ve been taken off the board; life goes on, even if it’s life under a microscope or life in a cage. And second, if you just hang in there, some day they’re going to have to let you out.”

-Balder “Shadow” Moon, American Gods

 

 

They put me in a white room.

 

Abstractly speaking, it was kind of neat. The pallet I slept on, the table with two chairs, and the prison’s excuse for a refresher were all molded out of the same stuff the walls and floor were made out of. The furniture was actually part of the room itself: no chance of detaching any of it to aid in an escape attempt.

 

Not that I was really thinking about one in the first place.

 

There weren’t chronos or anything inside the room, so a normal person wouldn’t have been able to tell time – a standard tactic, denying people the ability to understand the daily rhythms of their lives, forcing them to lose their grips on reality. The lights never dimmed, and meal times alternated weirdly; sometimes six or ten hours apart, sometimes just one. But I had a connection that most prisoners lacked. Through the Force, I could touch the edge of the biorhythm of the entire planet: I knew when it was night and when it was day. That link gave me all the strength I needed.

 

I got my first visitor about a day and a half after I woke up: a tall, bluff, ruddy-faced human Jedi with the weight of experience on his shoulders, a luminous beacon in the Force. He didn’t bother to introduce himself, which was the first sign that I got that something was wrong. Instead, he just sat at the table across from where I’d been meditating and stared at me, waiting with his hands folded.

 

Jedi training inculcates the kind of patience that most other beings can only dream of. But I had a further advantage. Not only had I trained as a Jedi, I’d had to live with Aly and Vette for the past several weeks. With that kind of experience under my belt, I could outwait anyone.

 

Besides, it wasn’t as though there was anywhere else I had to be.

 

Eventually – after possibly twenty or thirty minutes – he figured that out, and cleared his throat. “Why are you here, Miss Willsaam?”

 

I did my best not to let the tingle of surprise that went through me show. Apparently it worked.

 

He sighed. “We know you’re not a defector; Dr. Haxtor was able to tell us that much, along with some…ah…crazy story about mass murder. And judging from what we know of the last few weeks, you probably could’ve fought those soldiers and won. Yet you allowed them to capture you. Why?”

 

Now, that was interesting. I opened my eyes. “She’s okay?”

 

“Yes…” he said neutrally.

 

“Well,” I said brightly, “that’s good. Thanks.”

 

The Jedi grimaced, but kept his beady eyes on me. Without looking downward, he pulled something from a belt pouch and started flipping it from finger to finger.

 

“It’s not that you fell to the dark side that makes you so interesting,” he said. “Plenty of Jedi become corrupted for various reasons.”

 

I elected not to dignify that little jab with comment.

 

“I simply cannot understand why you’re here now. What are you trying to do?”

 

Instead of responding to him, my gaze fixed on his fidgety right hand. He palmed the thing that he’d taken from his belt pouch, then started flipping it between his fingers again, then did a Corellian drop and made it reappear in his left hand. It looked almost as if he was doing…coin tricks.

 

I closed my eyes and immersed myself in the currents of the Force, not obviously stretching out with my senses, just trying to let my feelings take me to wherever I needed to go. This was…easier said than done. But then I felt it: he did have a credit chit in his hand. And I could feel something else there, too. A nanometer-sized ampoule inside, with a little needle attached.

 

It was the same kind of poison General Frellka had used.

 

Smiling blandly, I opened my eyes again. “Hmm. What was that about ‘crazy stories’ again?”

 

He frowned, sensing my confidence and not understanding why. Then he slowly looked down at the credit chit he was unconsciously playing with. Biting his lip, he hurriedly replaced the chit in his belt pouch.

 

“Yes…” he muttered. “Something preposterous. Killer droids and ancient lasers. The sort of story that wouldn’t even make it as a holodrama.”

 

“Crazy enough to be reality,” I said cheerfully. This guy was a really bad liar; he was practically letting me interrogate him. What was this “ancient lasers” business?

 

“Sith,” he said derisively. “You’ve clearly lost your mind.” He turned to leave, but paused in front of the door, as though hoping for me to give a rejoinder to keep him in here.

 

I didn’t bother. Instead, I folded my body into the Warrior’s Seat and closed my eyes again. After several seconds, he finally keyed open the door and departed the room, and left me alone with my thoughts.

 

And my demons.

 

Over the next several days, the meals came and went. I slept when I needed to, and thought when I couldn’t. The meditation came to feel more like brooding than anything else, because I couldn’t get my mind off that last conversation with Aly. Again and again, I replayed Melkor Dinn’s death in my mind. Something about the way that had happened felt horribly wrong. But I kept thinking about it, and I couldn’t see what it was. Why should I care so much about this one dead Sith when I’d personally killed many more Republic soldiers?

 

It’s not that I felt sympathy for him; he was a disgusting Sith who cared nothing for the lives of the men under his own command, let alone the lives of Republic soldiers or civilians like Mola. And it’s not that I necessarily expected Aly to do anything differently. Keeping him from torturing Mola was the right thing to do. It wasn’t like we could stick him in jail or anything. If anybody deserved to be killed for what they did to other human beings, it was somebody like Dinn.

 

In short, it was a perfectly justifiable, even a perfectly Jedi murder. Almost like Aly had gone looking for it, just like Zylixx had been looking for a reason to kill her.

 

But I couldn’t pretend that they were the same kind of thing. Dinn was an unquestionably bad person who was committing torture right in front of us; Aly had been an enigma whose only crime, as far as Zylixx was concerned, was that she had red skin.

 

Still, there were some other concerns. Fighting, for instance, made me uncomfortable no matter what; I always wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. But going all the way back to that sparring session on the Fury, Aly’d shown me that she liked to fight. She enjoyed the violence. Rarely was she happier than when she was carving a path of destruction through a gaggle of enemies with her lightsaber.

 

If I went through and thought about it rationally, being uncomfortable about that didn’t make much sense. Aly was good at fighting. She was born to do it. Enjoying battle was understandable. And honestly, if she felt miserable about the fighting she was doing, it wasn’t as though that magically flipped a switch and made the deaths that she might cause morally acceptable. Dead was still dead. At least she wasn’t mutilating the dead like Thana would, or taking pleasure in inflicting suffering.

 

I’d never be like that, I hoped. But I could understand and respect it in Aly. Hell, it was one of the reasons I liked her so much: because her fighting spirit, the joy she took in combat, made her seem so alive. I knew as well as anyone else that the Jedi weren’t the emotionless robots that a lot of people seemed to think they were, but next to Aly they might as well have seemed that way.

 

Still. Dinn was an unarmed man – or, well, as unarmed as any Jedi or Sith might ever get. And she just…bashed his head in.

 

Well, I heard her voice say with a humorless laugh, he should’ve armed himself, if he was going to decorate his office with abused prisoners.

 

I opened my eyes and smiled despite myself. She had a point. Of course, if I was starting to hallucinate my girlfriend’s voice after only four days in this dump, I was even worse at this than I thought. For something that had to be a hallucination, it’d seemed awfully real. I must’ve been so far gone that I could barely tell when I was having a breakdown.

 

Then I focused on what was in front of me and realized that that wasn’t the only thing that I was hallucinating. Because I had a visitor and it was literally impossible for her to be here.

 

I blinked a few times, then rubbed my eyes, but the apparition didn’t go away. Instead, she blew out her breath with a little sigh.

 

“I must be starting to crack up in this cell,” I said aloud, “because there’s no way you’re sitting in front of me.”

 

No response. She simply folded her hands and stared at them.

 

“Yeah, there’s just no way. The real you would’ve come back at me with some snide remark.” Since this was clearly a dream, I just kept talking. Babbling, really. “Jaesa, Jaesa. What in the worlds is happening to you?”

 

“That,” said Kira Carsen, “is a really good question.”

 

I was astounded. “Sithspit, you’re real?”

 

“I’d much rather this be a dream,” she said tiredly, “because that’d be light-years better than imagining my friend drove her Master insane and went off to join the lightning-and-choking-people brigade.”

 

“Hey, that’s not exactly how it happened,” I said defensively.

 

Kira leaned back and rested her hand on her forehead. “I don’t know if I want to hear your lunatic justification for this or not.”

 

“You know me, Kira. Am I the kind of person that would do that sort of thing?”

 

“I don’t even karking know anymore, okay?” she shot back. “Last time I saw you, you were Miss Perfect Padawan Pants, and now you show up on Taris with the Sith, dressed in some skanky robe and whoring it up with the Empire’s greatest general and a couple of her sociopathic henchmen. Go ahead. Tell me how that comes out looking like anything other than ‘you fell to the dark side’. I’m all ears.”

 

“Look, I know it seems bad. It’s just that…” I scanned the room, sensed a sort of…watchfulness about the place. “Is this place bugged?”

 

“Of course it’s bugged.”

 

“Well,” I said nervously, “I…I have a story for you. But I’m only going to tell you. I trust you. And I don’t want anybody else listening in.”

 

She squinted at me for what felt like an eternity, looking for something in my eyes, my face, my demeanor…some clue, I guess, as to whether she could let me do this. Finally, she found it. She twitched her finger, a subtle shift of intention, and the watchful feeling I’d sensed dissipated.

 

“All right,” she said. “Video recording only. Just in case you decide to try something really stupid.”

 

I gave her a relieved smile. “Thanks.”

 

“Yeah, well. Maybe my Master’s dumb ‘give evil a chance’ mentality is rubbing off on me.”

 

“Okay, well. I guess I should start at the beginning. About three months ago.”

 

She frowned. “I think I was out on some dump in the Outer Rim. We were still talking back then. Why didn’t you tell me?”

 

“Well, I didn’t know what was going on at first.” I paused, thinking furiously about how to present the story. “Wait, you wouldn’t have happened to have been on Tatooine, would you?”

 

“Uh, I dunno. Lots and lots of sun and sand and rocks and more sand?”

 

“That’s the place.”

 

“Sounds about right then.” She looked at me curiously. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Crazy coincidence, that’s all. Anyway. So I started having these dreams…”

 

And it all came tumbling out, from Master Yonlach to Hutta. I told her about my Master’s fall, and Aly’s pitch, about the indescribable experience of touching her mind and seeing the horror of her past.

 

“I just couldn’t turn my back on her,” I said emphatically. “She genuinely wanted – wants – to make the galaxy a better place. And she’s right, too. I mean, look at what the Republic’s doing, what the Jedi are doing. We’re…they’re so wrapped up in fighting the Sith threat that nobody pays attention to what it all means for the civilians of the Empire. Does a shopkeeper on Coruscant really deserve less concern than a waiter on Dromund Kaas?”

 

“And it never occurred to you that she could just be, I dunno, lying about all that?” said Kira.

 

“Come on,” I laughed. “Remember who I am. Nobody can lie to me.”

 

She blanched. “I remember. I remember you playing games with that creepy power in the Temple.”

 

I winced. “Yeah, well, what I remember is seeing you and some of the other Padawans thinking about how much of a show-off I was. I guess that’s part of the reason I’m not really comfortable with it anymore.”

 

“Aw, come on. Teenagers say…uh, think…stupid things.”

 

“Doesn’t make them any less hurtful sometimes,” I said heavily. “Uh, not that I’m trying to lay some kind of guilt trip on you or anything.”

 

She laughed for the first time since we’d started talking. “Okay, this is just about the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve faced down giant bug queens and sand monsters. But talking to a Sith hippie just about takes the biscuit. You’re too neurotic and touchy-feely for the Jedi Order, let alone the Empire.”

 

“And yet,” I sighed, “I still ended up in the middle of this stupid war.”

 

Kira leaned forward. “Yeah, that’s the thing. Your story – about your Master, about Lady Alypia, all that stuff – it makes sense. I can see why you did what you did on Hutta. And I can’t really say you did something wrong, you know? I mean, you should have been able to just go back to the Jedi Order with what you had, and we could’ve taken care of you, but…I understand where you’re coming from. That you’re all about helping people, and you saw a way you could do that.

 

“But there’s still a big gap between ‘wanting to help people’ and ‘gallivanting across the galaxy fighting the Republic’, Jaesa.”

 

I sagged in my seat. “If there were any way to get the Republic off Taris without fighting, I would take it in a heartbeat. So would Aly. But they just won’t leave. All we’re trying to do now is limit the damage, trying to keep the Imperial troops in a relatively clean war.”

 

“But why? Why does the Empire need Taris so badly?” she asked. “Why can’t you just let the Empire’s forces stall and wither away, like they were before you got here?”

 

“About that,” I said hesitantly. “This is the part that I wanted the audio off for.”

 

“I’m listening.”

 

“A month ago, the Republic and the Jedi freed a prisoner from the Empire’s oldest and best-guarded prison.”

 

Kira’s face lit up. “You’re not talking about Revan, are you?”

 

I was thunderstruck. “How do you know anything about that?”

 

“My old Master was part of the team that got him out,” she said proudly. “I even got to meet the guy.”

 

“Okay, okay, wait. One: ‘old’ Master? Aren’t you still a Padawan?”

 

Kira shook her head. “Nope. They made me a Knight about a month and a half ago. Right after Alderaan and the whole Desolator thing.”

 

“Wow. Congratulations.”

 

“Yeah, it doesn’t totally seem real yet. This is actually my first mission on my own. Pretty big deal. Anyway, what’s thing two?”

 

“Well,” I stuttered, “I thought you were Master Kiwiiks’ apprentice. And I didn’t think she was the fighting type.”

 

She barked out another laugh. “Does the name ‘Marade Sunflash’ ring a bell?”

 

“Yeah, she’s the Knight who took down all those Flesh Raiders…”

 

“…and stopped Lord Tarnis, and rescued Dr. Godera, and went around the galaxy disabling a brace of Imperial superweapons before personally saving Tython from an Imperial fleet.” Kira grinned broadly. “You know, along with her loyal Padawan and her trusty astrodroid.”

 

That bowled me over. “Wow.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“No kidding.”

 

“Cross my heart.” She giggled irrepressibly.

 

I gulped. “Well then. This is…gonna be really awkward.”

 

“Why’s that?” she asked suspiciously.

 

“Did you ever hear anything else about Revan? Like, what his plans were?”

 

“I got the sense he was going off to pursue his private war against the Empire. Didn’t really catch any of the details, if he mentioned any.”

 

I bit my lip. “Private war against the Empire sounds about right. You remember the old stories about when he was a Sith, right? How he built this massive fleet using an ancient Rakata factory that was based on the power of the dark side?”

 

“Yeah…”

 

“Well, he had another one of those factories in his pocket. After, uh, Marade and the others freed him, he went back to it and reactivated it, using it to churn out a colossal army of extermination droids. These droids…well, they’re more powerful than your average combat droid, but what really sets them apart is that they have genetic scanners designed to sense anybody with Red Sith DNA. They were designed for the sole purpose of massacring the entire Sith species. You know: genocide.”

 

Kira didn’t say anything.

 

I tried to make a joke out of it. “And this is where the bottom drops out of the conversation.”

 

Didn’t work.

 

“What,” she said flatly.

 

“Yeah, I know.”

 

“I don’t even know what to think about that.”

 

“Well,” I said, “it does get worse. He wasn’t exactly doing that by himself. There was a Republic fleet protecting his Foundry, and a task force of Jedi guarding the assembly lines.”

 

Kira blinked and took a deep breath. “You said ‘was’.”

 

“Yeah. Darth Malgus sent Aly and the rest of his team of personal troubleshooters over to the Foundry three weeks ago. I was there, too. They took it over, wiped out the troops and Jedi defending it, and killed Revan.”

 

She swore under her breath.

 

“So the sequel is that the Republic shipped a bunch of those droids here to Taris before you guys lost the Foundry. And the main reason that the colony’s here at all is military funding, because the government wants to turn this planet into a forward base for striking at the heart of the Empire. That’s why we’re here.”

 

“Jaesa, you can’t expect us not to try to win the war,” groaned Kira.

 

“Look at it from my point of view!” I growled angrily. “What’s supposed to make me feel as though I can trust the Jedi and the Republic to fight a clean war? After what happened at the Foundry, and after the things we’ve been investigating here, I can’t believe that the Jedi are the ‘good guys’ anymore!”

 

She rolled her eyes. “Come on. Even if that is all true – and it’s both insane and too insane to be made up, so I’m not even going to try to formulate an opinion – you can’t say that the Republic and the Jedi are as bad as the Sith.”

 

“It’s not about being as bad as the Sith. They are who they are. You are who you are. It’s about being bad, period. When did they change the Jedi Code to allow for genocide?”

 

“Look, I don’t know anything about all this,” she grated. “I don’t even know if the Council knows. I can’t imagine Master Kaedan or Master Kiwiiks signing off on any of it. And Master Braga…well, I know for a fact that this isn’t part of what he’s doing.”

 

“How?”

 

“I just do.” She closed her eyes and propped her head up against her left hand. “The really loony thing is that your story tallies in so many little ways with other things I know about. Like yeah, I know about how big into Taris the military is, and how much control over the settlement they have. This is the second time I’ve been to this dump, after all. I know this place is supposed to be a forward base for the war against the Sith, although I didn’t have any idea about the genocide thing. And I can see where you’re coming from with Revan, because even if he was Mister Big Damn Hero, when I met him, he…well, let’s just say that it felt like the Sith Empire made him really, really angry.”

 

“Lots of people are like that,” I pointed out.

 

“More angry than anybody else. Also, you know something else about that old Revan story? When the Mandalorian Wars started, the Council wanted to keep him from fighting. But he was really big into intervention, and a lot of other Jedi felt the same way. After a while, it was like he had his own private Jedi army. Eventually, they went to go fight the war, despite everything the Council said.”

 

“So you’re thinking that something similar happened again?” I asked. “That he recruited Jedi who were fed up with the Desolator crisis and the dark plague and the Balmorra war and all the little cuts and jabs the Republic was taking from the Empire while the Council stood by and tried to keep the peace?”

 

“Maybe. I dunno. Maybe I’m just trying to keep the Jedi from being responsible for all this.”

 

“That’s the sort of thing I never thought I’d hear you say,” I said weakly. “Kira Carsen admitting that she might be a teensy bit biased when it comes to the Jedi Order?”

 

She laughed halfheartedly. “It’s just…when I look at you, I see Marade. You two are a lot alike. You know she’s the Ultimate Jedi and all that, but that’s, like…it’s her public persona. It’s how she acts, not how she feels inside. I mean, it’s real, but it’s a real act.” A sigh. “I’m not getting this across very well, am I?”

 

“No, I get it.”

 

“Well, for everybody else’s she’s the Knight of Renown, the perfect role model, the Hero of Tython, you name it. But sometimes, when it’s just us, she tells me about her doubts. She just thinks about things so much. On the battlefield, she doesn’t let that get in the way, but when we’re alone…well, you just remind me of her. A lot.”

 

“I don’t know what to say…”

 

She smirked. “How about ‘thanks’?”

 

“You know what I mean.”

 

“Sure, sure. Anyway, I trust Marade, and the hell of it is, I trust you, too. I guess I’d rather believe this about you and think that a bunch of Jedi I don’t know fell to the dark side, than imagine that you’re telling me one of the baldest lies in the history of the galaxy.”

 

My shoulders sagged slightly in relief. “Is she here?”

 

“Who, Marade? Nah. She’s on Balmorra with her new boyfriend.”

 

“I thought Jedi weren’t allowed to have relationships,” I ventured cautiously.

 

“Sure. I’d say she feels more loathing than love for ‘good ol’ Doc’,” Kira snickered. “Not that he’s noticed. Or if he has noticed, he doesn’t care.”

 

“Oh, is he one of those guys?” I said knowingly.

 

“Yeah. The galaxy’s gift to women. With an, uh, port in every port. Anyway, I just call him her boyfriend to piss her off. Works, too.”

 

I frowned. “Wait a second, Balmorra? Since when is the Republic on Balmorra?”

 

Kira was wearing an evil little smile. “Oh, we’re cunning. While the Empire launches its war for a largely useless nightmare of a jungle planet, the Republic sends its fleets to recapture one of the biggest industrial worlds in the Colonies. Even if the Sith win here, they come out worse in the end.”

 

“You know…I’m actually completely okay with that.”

 

“Not like you’ve got a choice. I dunno how good this Alypia of yours is, but a hundred credits says Marade’s better.”

 

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said confidently. “There’s a reason I call her the goddess of war. But why are you here?”

 

“Well,” she said, “I’m mostly just here checking up on the war effort here. Kind of a senatorial ‘fact-finding’ junket, except senators get to go to Pantolomin and I get to go to a zombie-infested swamp. I’m just happy that she finally trusts me to do something. Hell, the only reason I’m in your cell is because I was passing through the area on my way east and heard they’d captured you. I just had to try to see you, try to find out what happened to you.”

 

“You’ve got no idea how happy I am that you did,” I said cheerfully. “So what sorts of things was Marade asking you to check up on?”

 

Before she could answer, a guard opened the door and peered in. “Uh, Master Jedi, sorry to interrupt, but we seem to be having power problems all over the base. The audio recording system for this cell is out, and it’s not responding.”

 

Kira turned toward him with a venomous look plastered all over her face. “That’s nice. Hey, Private, tell me something.”

 

“Ma’am?”

 

“You like sex, right?”

 

His eyes bugged out slightly and it looked like he was having trouble breathing.

 

“I can tell if you’re lying. Jedi powers. Answer the question.”

 

“Yes…” he choked out.

 

“And you’re into travel, too, right?”

 

“Uh-huh…”

 

“Okay then!” Kira said brightly. “Screw. Off.” She flicked her hand in his general direction. He pulled his head back inside the door like an enormous turtle, and slammed it shut so hard that my ears rang and my teeth vibrated.

 

“That’s the Kira I know,” I chuckled.

 

She bared her teeth. “I always win my arguments.”

 

“You remind me of Aly.” It felt like a tidal wave of sentimentality was crashing over me. I hung my head and moped. “I miss her so much.”

 

Kira furrowed her brow and peered at me closely. “You sound like you and she…like there’s more than just a master-apprentice relationship there.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Jaesa, you dope.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I”, she continued, “am going to be very unhappy if this whole genocide story is just something she made up, and that you only believe because you’re completely head over heels for her.”

 

I shook my head sadly. “My power doesn’t work that way.”

 

“You gotta admit that you’re not making it any easier to believe you.”

 

“Then don’t just believe me. Snoop around. Find out what the Republic’s doing out in its secret Tularan Marsh military base. Look at the appropriations figures. Talk to the Council, learn what they knew. This story needs to get out so it can never happen. What we did to them after the Great Hyperspace War was bad enough. If you let the War Trust generals get away with their genocide plans, Aly’s going to be the last friendly Sith any of us ever sees.”

 

“I wouldn’t consider the architect of the Empire’s victories on Taris ‘friendly’,” she said sourly.

 

“If she could do this without fighting, you better believe she would. In a heartbeat.”

 

The glowpanels on the ceiling flickered and dimmed. Kira looked up disinterestedly for a few seconds before they regained their full charge, then shrugged and turned back toward me.

 

And deep within the recesses of the misfiring hunk of machinery that was my brain, something went click, like a key turning tumblers in an ancient lock.

 

Kira’d been talking like we were still on Taris. And then, she’d said this: just passing through the area on my way east. Passing through: we weren’t in Olaris, since she must’ve come from there. But if this isn’t all the way east, we’re not in the Tularan Marsh, either. That meant that the Republic had me locked up somewhere between those two places…and the only logical option was Aurek Base, on top of the 203-Meter Hill, the single best-fortified position on the planet.

 

Another, louder click: Kira had turned off the microphones in this cell, and nowhere else. That soldier, though: we seem to be having power problems all over the base…the sort of thing somebody might do to, say, infiltrate a base without being detected. The perfect cover for a sneak attack.

 

My own voice kept repeating itself over and over in my head: there’s a reason I call her the goddess of war…goddess of war…

 

And then, the final click, so loud that it resonated in my skull, as though this last piece of the puzzle had fallen from an incredible height to slot in perfectly next to the others. Hallucinating Aly’s voice, a voice that had seemed so real that I’d had to tell myself it was just a dream. But I’d been too hasty.

 

A Force bond knows no barriers.

 

Kira noticed the smile blossoming across my face. She could see a deliriously happy look in my eyes, the first genuine joy I could remember feeling ever since we landed on this horrible mudball. And she had to ask why. “Um, Jaesa? What’s up?”

 

“You know how you don’t really trust me about Aly?” I murmured.

 

“Uh-huh…”

 

I pointed at the door. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

 

As she turned around, a strange crackling hiss started to fill the room, and a spot on the door started to shine reddish-orange, growing brighter and brighter until with a final pop a brilliant bar of purple and white emerged. Kira stood up and grabbed for her saberstaff, and light blue blades flared into existence in front of her. She gathered herself in her ready stance, angling her lightsaber in a high guard. The purple bar started to make a circuit around the edge of the door, drawing a smoking, hissing, superheated line of char in its wake. It finally reached the other side, and what was left of the door fell heavily to the ground with an impossibly loud clang.

 

And staring back at me through the wreckage of the door was the face of the most beautiful woman in the galaxy.

 

“Jedi,” she snarled, “you do not want to get between me and Jaesa.”

 

Kira grit her teeth. “I have a name, you know.”

 

“Kira,” I said pleadingly, “trust me.”

 

For a few seconds she stood there at ready, her eyes narrowed and her senses hyperfocused, but then the tension drained out of her and she stepped aside, closing down her lightsaber. “I must be crazy. All right, Jaesa. I trust you.”

 

Aly brushed some of the smoking wreckage of the door aside with a tiny Force exertion, then shut off her own lightsaber and stepped inside the cell with Vette close on her heels. “Wouldn’t want to walk inside with my robe on fire…” she started to say, but then the rest was cut off as I charged across the room and planted my lips on hers.

 

Her eyes widened briefly in surprise before she relaxed into the kiss, bringing her arms around me to hold us closer together, draining out the whole past rotten week in a single motion and making everything right with the-

 

Vette cleared her throat ostentatiously. “Ahem.” Kira couldn’t help but laugh.

 

Aly and I pulled away from each other reluctantly, unwilling to tear our eyes away from each other. “Um,” I said sheepishly. “Hey, Aly.”

 

“Hey yourself.” She grinned. “I’d ask where you’ve been for eight days, but…”

 

“…yeah.” I slowly wiped the goofy smile off my face. “Anyway, this is Kira. She’s an old friend. And, I guess, a new one.”

 

“Congratulations,” Aly told Kira. “You’re the first Jedi I’ve met that didn’t immediately try to kill me. Way to follow the Code.”

 

“Nah, congratulate your girlfriend and the Hero of Tython, in that order. If this had been thirty minutes ago, I’d have attacked you without a second thought.” She pursed her lips. “So this is your second thought. Convince me that all this genocide and reforming the Empire stuff isn’t complete hooey.”

 

“You want the short version? Okay, chew on this: I just captured this base without killing anybody.”

 

Kira gaped. “That’s not possible.”

 

Aly moved aside so she could see through the door to the corridor beyond. “See for yourself.” And sure enough, it was completely empty. No guards, no guards’ bodies, nothing. And, of course, I hadn’t felt anybody in the area dying, and presumably neither had she. Sometime in the last five minutes, the Republic soldiers and the Jedi had just up and left.

 

“What…” she stuttered. “How…”

 

“A magician never reveals her tricks.” Aly tapped the side of her nose. “Let’s just say your base’s reactor is a lot more stable than your army thinks it is.”

 

I giggled. “I think you owe me a hundred credits, Kira.”

 

“Oooh, gambling? Are we betting on something?” chirped Vette.

 

Kira just stared into empty space. “Wow.”

 

“Now, I’m pretty sure nobody was able to wipe the base’s central computer,” said Aly, “unless Vette didn’t do her job.”

 

“Hey, watch who you’re talking to here!” Vette interjected, full of mock indignation.

 

Aly ignored her. “So that means we can go up and pull the records on what used to be Project Siantide before the blackhats come in to occupy the base. You know, for proof, Kira. Since you’re not going to take our word for it.”

 

“How would I know you didn’t plant the data?” she asked suspiciously.

 

“Puh-leeze,” snorted Vette. “All the terminals are still locked. Dammit, Kira, I’m a treasure hunter, not a slicer.”

 

“But we’ll have to move quickly,” added Aly. “After you?”

 

Kira led us out the door, shaking her head. “This is surreal…”

 

It only took a few minutes to walk through the ghost base and get to an archival terminal. Aly and Vette made sure to keep as far away from the computer stations as they could, so as not to give Kira any reason to suspect foul play. From there, it was another forty seconds of fairly tense slicing on Kira’s part before she had a datacard full of everything Aurek Base’s computer had on the War Trust’s plans.

 

She hastily slid it into her robes and looked up at us. “This is completely insane on every level.”

 

We started walking to one of the exit corridors. I caught Kira’s eye and shrugged. “It’s only insane if you assume that the two sides of this war are the Empire and the Republic. The way I see it, the real two sides of the war are the power-hungry lunatics who think the ends justify the means, like Revan and his gang, along with pretty much all of the Sith – and everybody else in the galaxy who just wants peace. The four of us, Kira, we’re all on the same side of this war.”

 

Aly picked up on my reasoning. “Yeah. You can push for peace and sanity on one end, and we’ll do the same on the other. Hopefully we’ll meet in the middle, right?”

 

“Take what you can find to Marade,” I urged. “If she’s half the parfit gentil Knight of honor that you say she is, she’ll be on board with us all the way.”

 

She nodded dazedly. “Yeah…I’ll do that. Least I could do.”

 

“Aly and Jaesa don’t tend to take no for an answer,” said Vette sympathetically. “They can be pretty persuasive, but it still feels like you got run over by a speeder.”

 

Kira laughed. “Yeah, I’m usually on the giving end of those little speeches, not the receiving end.”

 

We finally emerged into the Tarisian night. Compared to the dry, air-conditioned interior of Aurek Base, walking outdoors in the thickly humid jungle was as tough as walking underwater. All the familiar sounds drifted back to my ears, from the insects to the rakghouls to the rumble of far-off artillery.

 

Kira swung herself onto a speeder bike and settled into the seat. Then she looked up at us for a final goodbye. “Thank you. All of you. With how crazy this war is…it makes me feel a lot better that you guys are on the other side.” She paused. “And may the Force be with you.”

 

Then she engaged her repulsorlifts and roared off toward the west road.

 

As the three of us stood there in her wake, I turned to Aly. “I couldn’t help but notice you said ‘what used to be Project Siantide’. Feel like sharing?”

 

She smiled. “I had eight whole days to romp around the Tularan Marsh. And I spent most of them breaking the War Trust’s toys. It was all I could do to keep my mind off of you being captured.”

 

“I tried to let you know that I wasn’t in danger. Guess I’m not as good with this Force bond thing as I thought,” I said dejectedly.

 

Vette spoke up. “Oh, no, it worked. She told me about what she felt from you. But you know Aly. She’s kinda…mega-protective.”

 

“Hey, I can take care of myself. I’m not the kind of girl that needs rescuing all that often…”

 

“You were in a Republic prison! How in the worlds does that qualify as taking care of yourself?” Aly said with an extremely thick layer of mock incredulity.

 

I raised my finger as though to point out something, but stopped partway through and shook my head. “I guess you’ve got me there.”

 

She opened her mouth to speak, but the chime of her comlink interrupted her. Obviously irritated, she pulled it from her belt and thumbed it on. “What is it?”

 

“Milady? This is General Farvin. Our sensors indicate that the base is completely evacuated. Congratulations on a masterful performance.”

 

“Thanks, General. I get the feeling that this isn’t just a courtesy call.”

 

“Ah, no, milady, unfortunately it isn’t. We’ve lost track of Thana again.”

 

Aly swore, a roiling ZeHethbra curse. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where was she headed?”

 

“I believe she went to do something about the Cathar settlements to the northeast, milady. One of my lieutenants reported hearing her say something about ‘fur coats’. And the Eighty-Ninth Legion’s Second Battalion isn’t responding to our hails.”

 

“She took an entire battalion out of the line?” she roared.

 

“If she’s going after Bashun, she’s going to need it. That dirty alien’s dug in deep in one of the best fortified cave systems in the entire Sinking City. And, milady, you know that a lot of the troops have been itching to get him back after the last few days. They say he needs to be put down.”

 

She was panting out of sheer frustration, but visibly pulled herself together. “All right, General. Thanks for the heads-up. Guess I’d better go fix this.”

 

“She’s beyond my control, milady. I’m certain you’ll be able to keep her from compromising the mission. Good luck. Farvin out.”

 

Aly stuffed her comlink into her belt and grit her teeth. Then she turned to me. “Jaesa, are you going to be okay to kick some tail after a week in the slammer?”

 

“Aly,” I said feelingly, “now that I’m back together with you I feel like I could take on the Emperor himself.”

 

She handed me a pouch of nutrient gel from a belt pouch and a canteen. “Well, choke down some of this and get some water into you. No sense in fighting stupid. Vette?”

 

“Yeah, boss?”

 

“I want you to get hold of Quinn. Have him redeploy the troops to cordon off the Cathar settlements in New Tarisian Dawn. Do not blockade them, just keep them away from Aurek Base. And make sure to leave them plenty of room to retreat. We want them to run, not fight. Got it?”

 

“Sounds simple enough.”

 

“Good.”

 

“The Cathar settlers? Thana’s going directly after the civilians now?” I asked with some trepidation.

 

“You got it in one,” said Aly grimly. “This right here? This is what the whole campaign comes down to. We need to save these people.”

 

With that, she loped off into the jungle, and I followed right on her heels.

 

[Euphrosyne]

Notes to Chapter XVI

 

"Friends of Old" is the [HEROIC 4] mission on Dromund Kaas in the Dark Temple Approach area, which pits you against the forces of the warlord Lord (Lady?) Tytonus of Begeren. There's obviously not a whole lot of similarity between this chapter and that mission; I'm more interested in how Jaesa's meeting up with...old friends. After a fashion.

 

I love Neil Gaiman too much to put a coherent note about the chapter quote here. I will say this, though: it's possible to guess Shadow's name from the text of American Gods, but Gaiman does say it straight out in "The Monarch of the Glen", a short story about Shadow in the collection Fragile Things.

 

I wonder what Jaesa will have to say about the Rakata mind traps on Belsavis after being in this particular white room.

 

The Corellian drop that the Jedi Master does is basically just a French drop: palm a coin in one hand and pretend you've moved it to the other hand, then "magically" reveal it to have migrated back over to the original hand.

 

A Warrior's Seat is basically what the Introspection ability is.

 

Unforgiven is my favorite Western, and that line about "he should've armed himself" comes from it: take a look at this clip.

 

All the way back in Chapter II, I mentioned "offhandedly" that Kira and Jaesa were friends. And now I finally got to use that particular Chekhov's Gun. Woop woop. In terms of the Jedi Knight plot, Kira goes over to Taris after Marade picks up Doc halfway through the Balmorra questline. There are plenty of ways to rationalize it - crew skill missions? - but fundamentally, Kira isn't with Marade when she's battering down the defenses of the Balmorran Arms Factory, Doc is, so I figured Kira was free to use elsewhere and had her take a little jaunt to the Outer Rim. Also, this is probably the single longest conversation I've ever written, so congratulations for slogging through it.

 

I think one could reasonably describe the sand monster that Kira fought - the sand demon, on Tatooine, during the Shock Drum questline - as a "giant bug" too, but that makes it less fun.

 

For additional Marade characterization, see my stories in the Short Fic thread here and here.

 

Kira knows that Master Braga isn't involved in this because of his involvement in the Jedi Knight Chapter 2 quest, revolving around capturing the Emperor.

 

I'm pretty sure everybody in the entire universe knows where "big damn heroes" is from, but if you are one of the unfortunate beings that does not,

.

 

The "sex/travel" joke is pretty much straight from Veep. Because this thread doesn't have enough Iannucci yet.

 

Laura Bailey, Kira's voice actress, is fairly prolific. One of her other recent roles was as one of the voices of the female Boss in Saints' Row the Third. "I always win my arguments" is one of the lines she can say when she kills a random mook in open world.

 

Jaesa's line about the last friendly Sith isn't exactly an obvious reference to a single thing, but when I was writing it, I was thinking of Primarch Adrien Victus' words to Dalatrass Linron during the war council on board the Normandy SR-2 near the beginning of Mass Effect 3.

 

"Misfiring hunk of machinery" is another Allston reference; in Solo Command, Myn Donos has a flashback to Ton Phanan saying something like that to him as he's trying to work through his feelings for Lara/Gara/Kirney.

 

Technically, I suppose, Kira's something like the third Jedi to not immediately try to kill Aly, after Volryder and Ulldin. That doesn't have quite the same sound, though.

 

I don't know much about Star Trek, but I figured that giving Vette a Bones line wouldn't be too unreasonable.

 

Parfit gentil is from Chaucer; he uses it to describe the Knight that is in the company of pilgrims. Apparently it's a corruption of 'perfect gentle', which would probably mean something close to 'perfectly noble' in modern English.

 

So, timelines. During the eight days that Jaesa spent in her cell, Aly attacked the super-reactor, dealt with General Minst, and cleared the sewers of rakghouls. Lady Sakaria invaded the nekghoul stronghold in the Tularan Marsh and blew up the reactor there, tearing the heart out of the Republic's nekghoul allies (and killing Sulan into the bargain). Aly, Cipher, Sakaria, and Majnun also completed the Taris Bonus Series (yes it's slightly out of order but makes more sense this way) and destroyed the Republic's secret Tularan Marsh genocide base. Pierce and Hurdenn found General Durant's stronghold, and Hurdenn launched his comically ill-conceived attack, sacrificing Pierce's squad for no good reason and forcing Aly and Vette to ride to the rescue. And that's about where we're at. Now, Aly'll sketch most of this out over the course of the next two chapters as it becomes relevant to Jaesa, since this chapter was awfully heavy on expository janx anyway, but I felt as though it was important to update the readers all the same.

 

Farvin's holocall is adapted from the conversations he has with the player and Thana surrounding the missions "Friends of the Republic" and "Cathar Assassination".

 

I liked it so much when Zahn deployed "a roiling ZeHethbra curse" in The Last Command (Clyngunn's response to Niles Ferrier's betrayal) that I decided to reuse it here as an indication of Aly's broad and colorful vocabulary. It's also a convenient way to avoid actually typing out the expletives, because Star Wars expletives frequently look goofy.

 

[greyjedibp]

I glad to see Kira make small appear in this chapter. Kira always make laugh.

[NgeneR]

Actually, "perfect gentle" would be derived from Chaucer's "parfit gentil"; Chaucer came first, and of course, gentle here refers to the aristocracy, as in gentleman, gentlewoman.

 

And I'm glad to see a new post. Forget the Dr. Pepper--where's my bottle of petite syrah? And the hors d'oeuvres?

[ekimmak]

Kira, Jaesa, you're both apprenticed to player characters, they're equally overpowered, ok? Now make up and be nice.