leia_naberrie posted: DragonLotus - The pieces are sloooowly coming together... Three 'o's. Are you trying to hint something there?
DragonLotus posted:Enjoy your time off and hope your muse is stocking up on her goodies while you're away.
There was no cloud. No spreading pall to cast its shadow over the hearts and souls of the Jedi on Yavin IV or their brethren scattered across the infinite corners of the galaxy - or even their separated brethren, wielding the Force with legal impunity in the highest echelons of the Empire. The Force had already been clouded for hundreds of years. The hearts and souls of the Jedi had been in mourning for even longer. And as for the Others - the death of a Jedi was too commonplace for it to register as more than a drop in their awareness. Especially when the Jedi in question was one as powerful as the Grandmaster: one who had taken certain steps to ensure that even after death, he still lived. Yet one Sith Lord had felt the old Jedi die. A hollowing in his ribs. A sense of loss - not the loss of a possession but of something he never had, never would have. And all the more painful for that. He was sitting cross-legged in his cell sharpening an extremely powerful weapon - his will - when he had felt it. First the whisper of sorrow. Then the outcry. His eyes had flown open and he had stared at the invisible wall of the force-field in shock. Can it be? Is that -? And as suddenly as the feeling came, it left him. Vader opened his eyes to find himself lying on his side on the hard floor, watching the mothballs floating in dawn’s glow.
Elsewhere in the Empire, the Emperor and Sith Master was looking for his apprentice. Neither Sith Lords nor Galactic Emperors tended to be the most pleasant of companies when crossed. There was something about the double combination of ultimate political and metaphysical power that intoxicated most sentients – and other sentients extremely wary of the holders. One very brave psychoanalyst once declared all the Emperors since the time of Bane’s apprentice insane. Brilliant, yes. Charismatic, yes. Incredibly competent in their ability to hold the lives and minds of billions of sentients under the order and will of one individual – yes. And all the more insane for that faculty. (The psychoanalyst didn’t live very long after that declaration. And neither did the general profession of psychoanalysis in the Empire. But that’s another story.*) The bottom line of the matter was that a Sith Lord and a Galactic Emperor who had lost his apprentice was a person best approached from a very, very far distance. It was with this prescience that the Emperor’s Hand gave his report on the latest findings on Vader’s disappearance. The pale blue figure of Ferus Olin seemed to flicker from more than signal interruptions as it knelt above the holoproj disk. “Lord Vader himself de-activated the cam-droids, my Lord. Imperial detectives have confirmed that the scraps from the explosion on the landing platform indicate two vessels. One was identified as Lord Vader’s, the other as a mercenary called Jango Fett.” “The Mandalorian bounty hunter?” “Yes, my Lord. My Lord, there is—” The voice shook a little and Sidious growled. “My Lord… there is further evidence that s-someone was killed in that explosion-” “I read your heart as clearly as glass,” Sidious hissed and the tiny image of the Hand trembled. “You wish Lord Vader dead. He is not. You will do well to concentrate your efforts in finding him, Olin and not engage in foolish daydreams.” Olin had gone a very, very pale blue. “Yes, my Lord.” “Do not dare approach me again until you have news of his whereabouts.” Olin swallowed painfully. “Yes, my Lord.” Sidious killed the signal and the weak, ineffective image died with it. He strode to the balcony, overlooking the lake and the island in it. His eyes were not for the things below though. They were high above, glaring balefully at the pale dawn sky. ‘’ Seven days ago, Darth Vader had called into the Force with such agonizing desperation that Sidious had cut himself off from his bond with his apprentice in self-preservation. For precious minutes, he had lost contact with Vader, and when Sidious had reached back into the maelstrom of eternal power for his apprentice’s hand, it was gone. What remained were tremors in the Force, akin to the reverberations of an earthquake that had occurred almost a century before. These reverberations were so subtle that only an extremely powerful and skilled Force-user – who was desperately searching for the most powerful, if not the most skilled, Force-user – noticed them. Finally, Sidious had satisfied himself that the bond had not been severed. Indeed, only death could do that. And that made matters worse. What power could hold a Sith apprentice so far away from his Master, that the Master could not sense the other’s location or his state of existence? What else could and was that power doing? The Jedi. Sidious saw their hand in this as clearly as if they had sent a message and signed it with their stamp. Or more accurately, the stamp of the one that called himself the Grandmaster. And no doubt with the help of the Jedi-keeper, the one they called the Guardian. The old Sith had scoffed at the practice, mocked their weak ‘brethren’ for their dependency on a non-sensitive for protection. As Sidious’ old Master Plageuis had always said: If the Force-wielders needed to seek shelter with those who could not touch that power, that alone was reason for their extinction. Hundreds of generations of one unchallenged Dynasty and the old diseases had crept back into the Sith – over-confidence, and complacency. Over the centuries and under the sleeping eye of the Sith, the Jedi had grown in numbers from a scattered handful of half-trained defectors to a persistent cancer in the Empire – with the help of their Guardian. By mysterious techniques, these Guardians had the ability to hide sensitives from normal Imperial detection – even before they were born. Working hand in hand with the Jedi, the Guardian would then undertake the early training of these sensitives, and eventually lead them to the hidden covens of the Jedi, populating their numbers and swelling their ranks until they had become more than an irritation. They had become a plague. Yes, indeed. The Guardians had been underestimated and they had grown in power greater than any Sith now could withstand. How else could Darth Vader, the pride and glory of the Sith, even greater that Darth Bane himself, have been captured? Sidious resolved that this oversight would be corrected as quickly as possible. But first, Vader had to be recovered. The fact that he had not felt a severance of the bond between himself and his apprentice bothered him. Why did the Jedi hold Vader and not destroy him? Did they seek to turn him into one of their own? It had been done before. “What are you up to, old friend?” The Sith Master whispered dangerously. “What wild, mad scheme are you plotting in that traitorous mind of yours?” The soft rustling of the curtains in the room behind made him almost imagine that his whisper was echoed back - in the shape of an answer. Fanciful. The Sith Master meditated on his missing apprentice. And when that yielded no further revelations, he meditated on the complete annihilation of the Jedi and their devotees. ‘’ Not very far from where the Emperor brooded – (within the same world as a matter of fact although the other players were happily unaware of this fact) – the hunt for Darth Vader moved a little further to its goal as the wife of the new Deputy Governor of Theed opened a door and invited two of the Emperor’s Hands into her home.