“Inner Peace”

Galaxy in flames.
I sit here and watch it burn.
My soul feels Nothing.

The sky above Dromund Kaas was dark with the black clouds of the turbulent storm raging across the deserted valley. Sinya’ni pulled the hood of her red nightsister robes more tightly over her cyan lekku as she picked her way through the rubble of yet another failed Sith temple.

“They never learn,” she mused aloud. The Rutian may have been working under a Sith regime; however, her own beliefs stayed closer to grey. She avoided the cult-like adherence to what was called the Dark Side. To truly empower oneself, you had to let go of the foolish duality of the Force and accept it as one unified source. The darkness comes from the user. To accept that means you can no longer view yourself as a guiltless pawn of a dark agenda and take responsibility for who you are.

A flash of lightning lit up the valley, followed by a deafening thunder. The entrance to the ruins lay only a dozen meters ahead. Malevolent creatures were lurking in the shadows, and the diminutive Twi’lek could feel their eyes watching her. She paused–the archeologist should be nearby, if he was still alive. She reached out with her senses, pushing past the abhorrent creatures now tensed with anticipation, past the dark energies emanating from the mute walls...there, she felt it. The fear, the loathing. She could sense him deep in the ruined temple. She closed her eyes and thought at him *”Hang on, help coming.”*

The creatures were getting impatient. She hadn’t entered their trap yet. Drawing back from her probe and communication with the target, she shifted her focus to the creatures. Three of them were hunkered down in a small cave just to the left of the temple entrance. It was a simple thing really. A tug on a couple stones in strategic spots and the rock face over the cave collapsed. The three unknown hunters pinned beneath and behind several feet of rubble.

Moving on, Sinya’ni entered the temple. It looked much like most other Sith structures. Severe, foreboding, and completely Brobdingnagian. She carefully picked her way through the ruined halls to the waiting scholar. He was truly helpless hiding behind a downed pillar.

“Doctor Livingston, I presume? Come, let’s get out of here,” she said and offered a him a hand out from behind the rubble. “Stay close, we aren’t alone in here.”

“You think? What gave you that impression?” mocked Dr. Livingston, but he accepted the help and followed closely. They were only about halfway to the exit when an angry mutated creature attacked.

“Ahhhhhhhhh! Save me!” cried the cowardly archeologist as he started to run again. But Sinya’ni had the beast sliced in two before he had even rounded the corner.

“Get back here, you big baby!” The Twi’lek called out to him. Reluctantly he came back and they escaped the temple without another incident. Outside however–that’s a different story.

The three pinned gundarks were no longer buried and charged the two sentients exiting the temple. The scholar ran off once more. This time towards the ships.

“Fine! Run off and leave, why don’t you?” Sinya’ni called after him before fading from view. The gundarks circled a few times, trying to figure out where she went. She slowly walked all the way back to her ship. She didn’t even check to see if he made it to his ship safely. She made the liftoff as soon as possible.

“So long you ugly pile of Rocks…”

—-A Dance With Death—-

The smoke cleared and dust settled in the street exposing the bodies strewn across the ground like discarded litter.Principate soldiers walked around finishing off any Revenants still breathing. It was a massacre as the restoration soldiers had slaughtered the peaceful expansionists with little resistance. Well, that was about to change.

The small blue Twi’lek watched the aftermath of the atrocity from the shadows of an alleyway, waiting for her opportunity. She didn’t have to wait long. A trooper moved near the alley. He didn’t see what hit him as he was bleeding out on the ground. Several more troopers suffered similar fates before the commander noticed the missing soldiers.

Sinya’ni continued taking out the Principate’s oppressors one at a time until she heard a sound from behind her in the alley. The wall at the other end exploded outwards and a monstrous man stepped through the rubble behind the hidden Rutian. She spun around to face the threat and stopped–

Before her stood a seven foot tall Principate Trooper. It was hard to tell, but it may have been human at some point in its past. Now, large red crystals protruded out of his body at weird angles and he lumbered forward like a giant zombie. Sinya’ni heard a little girl scream in terror. The sound snapped her out of her stunned silence, only to realize she hadn’t been silent at all. She had been the one screaming!

The Twi’lek slowly backed away from the abomination. She had heard that the Principate had been using some crystal augmented soldier, but nothing prepared her for the grotesque creature ambling toward her.

The remaining soldiers in the street had come to investigate but quickly backed away. They were as afraid of the super soldier as the Revenants were. As Sinya’ni exited the alley, none of her enemies moved to stop her. They all backed off to give the super trooper room to work. The Twi’lek pulled out her heavy blaster and fired four shots–.

*pew, pew–pew, pew.* She soon realized why that thing’s allies gave it a wide berth. Not only was it scary as kark, but as the blaster’s crimson plasma blasts impacted the crystalline protrusions, they refracted through the prism and redirected in a random direction. Sinya’ni quickly transitioned to her lightsaber. The familiar snap hiss announced the amethyst blade as it sprang to life.

The creature continued forward unhindered. It didn’t even flinch at the attack. As it began closing the distance, Sinya’ni went on the attack lunging at the monstrosity. She vaulted over it plunging the hot energy blade into the thing’s shoulder. The satisfying smell of burning flesh gave her a glimmer of hope that was extinguished as soon as the blade touched the crystals. Before she had even landed, the saber was dead. The crystal created a feedback resonance that burned out the power supply in an instant.

Fear flooded her body as she desperately tried to reignite her lightsaber to no avail. Her thoughts turned to escape as the crystal creature backhanded her across the face. The strike sent her flying back into the ally where she landed into a rubbish pile. Stumbling back to her feet, she saw the creature resume its slow, methodical March towards her. The end seemed near as she threw her gaze around for anything that could save her. Using her years of practice and fueled by fear, Sinya’ni made a run for it. Leaping from wall to wall, she parkoured up the building and disappeared into the night.

Manually added by Master Idris Adenn

Manually added by Master Dacien Victae

Tenixir Revenant Target 1

__Buyer’s Remorse__

The soft green light from the control panel barely illuminated the cabin. Kalee Reecchi’s cold, dead eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. *She hadn’t even seen me coming,* mused the light blue Twi’lek as she looked down at the lifeless Restorer. The silence was almost deafening

The mission was simple. Infiltrate the ship. Kill the target. Escape the ship. So far, everything went like clockwork; however, the anger and guilt that suddenly hit her was unexpected. Sinya hadn’t known anything about her target. Just that she was a leader in the Severian Principate, and was actively rooting out anyone that didn’t bow to their assumed authority. But as the young Twi’lek’s vibroknife plunged into the woman’s diaphragm, she noticed the telltale scarring around the dying enemy’s neck. This was a former slave….

This realization led her to do a little digging. An hour or so of slicing into the console, Sinya found mission logs of Reecchi’s recent operations. Turns out, she was only after slavers. *Aleister will pay for this when I get back–* A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

“Who is it?” she asked making her voice deeper. Hoping whoever it was would not realize her deception.

“Sorry for disturbing you. You are needed on the bridge Ma’am.” the voice of a young man came hesitantly through the door.

“I’ll be right there. Give me five minutes.” Sinya listened at the door, but didn’t hear any receding footsteps. *He must be waiting for her,* she thought as she hastily formulated a plan of escape. Getting out of the ship had now become harder since she missed the changing of the guard. Steeling her nerves, she activated door panel….

As the door slid open, The diminutive Rutian leapt out at the unprepared soldier and slit the young man’s throat. Drawing on the force to help her lift him, she dragged the dying young man into the room and left him next to her target.

Stepping out into the corridor, she silently moved towards the docking bay. The living Force shrouded her form making her nigh invisible. It wasn’t until she reached the docking bay that the alarm sounded. She dropped down behind a toolbox as the ship came alive. The guards and technicians who had been complacently oblivious moments before, had awakened from their stupors and hurried to battle stations.

Sinya stuck to the shadows as she made her way back to the starfighter she had used to infiltrate the ship. The only problem was, with the ship on lockdown, there would be no patrols leaving. The young assassin climbed into her cockpit to hide while she formulated a new plan.

Her first thought was to slice into the ships scanners and fake an attack, but that would mean sneaking into the control room. Sinya looked at the exits and the added security. “Yeah, that ain’t happening,” she muttered. “Time for reinforcements.”

The Twi’lek tuned the fighter’s communicator to the Battleteam Oppress frequency. “Master, mission accomplished, bu I need help with this extraction. Can you stage a starfighter attack? It will give me a chance to slip out with their welcoming committee.”

A few seconds of static later, Aleister’s deep voice came over the speakers. “Stand By. It will take some time to organize even a mock attack. Stay alert. You will have a very short window in which to launch.”

“Acknowledged,” she replied. Then, she waited, and waited, and waited some more. It was a grueling four hours in that cramped cockpit before she heard the claxon alarm warning of the impending attack and the pilots directed to their fighters. But she was ready. When the first wave of fighters rose in unison and launched, Sinya’s matching fighter was in formation right along with them.

She was home free. The three hour hyperjump to the rendezvous coordinates seemed like forever as she reconsidered her allegiance to the pirates and her master who had sent her to kill an anti slavery extremist. “Aleister knew my position on slavery,” she said to herself out loud. “He chose to send me on purpose. Just to get under my skin. I won’t give him the satisfaction of letting him know it bothers me. But someday...I’m going to kill that bastard….”

The Tenixir Revenant’s CR70 pushed its way through the Doran star system. Soon it would arrive at Dondoran and thrust into a battle no one thought they could win. The Principate fleet had already been spotted setting up a blockade around the neural Hutt world. The Retributionists were outgunned and outnumbered, and they knew it.

The dour mood saturated the bridge as Rasha entered. She looked around at the scared faces and saw death. If they went into battle like this, it would be a short engagement indeed.

“What’s with the long faces? Soon we will have the opportunity to take the fight to the enemy. What we do here today matters. It matters more than you could possibly realize.” Rasha’s speech did little to raise their spirits. But she wasn’t done. She knew a defeated spirit was a defeated army. “For too long have we run. Too long has the Severian Principate enslaved the galaxy. It’s time to stand and fight! It’s time we freed ourselves of tyranny!”

“What do we do with a Principate soldier?”
she queried. “Hmm? Anyone?” She paused…”We kill that tyrant!”

She began to sing a shanty that had been heard around their base over the last few months. Soon everyone had joined in and spirits began to lift and pirates manned their battle stations with gusto!

“What will we do with a Principate soldier?
What will we do with a Principate soldier?
What will we do with a Principate soldier?
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

Stick’em in the belly with a vibrodagger.
Stick’em in the belly with a vibrodagger.
Stick’em in the belly with a vibrodagger.
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

Put them in a airlock, flush’em out.
Put them in a airlock, flush’em out.
Put them in a airlock, flush’em out.
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

Stick’em in a shuttle with a horny Wookie.
Stick’em in a shuttle with a horny Wookie.
Stick’em in a shuttle with a horny Wookie.
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

Put him in a cage with an angry rancor.
Put him in a cage with an angry rancor.
Put him in a cage with an angry rancor.
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

What will we do with a Principate soldier?
What will we do with a Principate soldier?
What will we do with a Principate soldier?
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!

Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
Way hay kill that tyrant.
When e’er you see them!”

Rasha nodded her approval as they spotted the enemy ships. “ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH”

((Shanty to the tune of “Drunken Sailor”))
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qGyPuey-1Jw

Bounty 4
__The Hound of the Basketweaver__

“Did you hear? There was another one last night,” Mrs. Trimble whispered to Lady Grey. Sinya tried not to listen to the gossip, but talk of the murderers always caught her attention.

“Yes, so tragic. The miller’s son was a sweet boy. What a terrible end to such a short life.” Lady Grey replied with the typical lies afforded the dead. In truth, Thomas was fifteen and already had a reputation among the maids. They knew not to let themselves be alone with the bastard. Of course, everyone knew he was a bastard– except his mother’s husband.

“That is the third one this year. Do you think it will happen again next month?” the lady’s maid queried. A look of fear overtook her countenance.”Who or...what could do such a thing.” She looked around suspiciously. In a town of hundred, the suspect list was rather short.

Sinya tried to ignore the lady and her maid as she continued her work. She needed to weave three more baskets and sell four before she could go home. Her father made it clear she had to make her quota today or there would be consequences. Lady Grey and Mrs Trimble had wandered out of earshot. It was for the best, she knew how the conversation would go. They would cast suspicion on the town drunk, the mortician, and the huntsman. Then, they would then say no one could be that savage and decide it must be an animal.

A few hours later, Sinya walked home dejected. She was still one basket short. As she rounded the last turn, she tried to prepare herself for her father’s reaction. Cutting reeds was hard work, and he always drank when he returned from the fields. By the time Sinya returned home, he was well in his cups and mean. But today, as the hovel came into view, she froze—. The sheriff and the constable were loading her father into the patty wagon. After a moment of shock, she ran down to them.

“What’s happened?” she cried as she reached the sheriff. “Do na take me dad! He has na done anythin’!

“I’m sorry Miss Ani. We have irrefutable evidence that your father killed the miller’s son,” the sheriff explained. “We found a trail of blood leading from the body to your barn where we found several bones buried. There’s only one explanation for it. Mrs. Crawley will be by shortly to help you collect your things and move you to the public house. She’s going to let you stay there for free. It’s all arranged. I’m sorry.” With that, they boarded the wagon and carted the inebriated man off.

Twenty eight days later…

Sinya was making the best of her situation. Her father had been beheaded for his crimes in the town square. She didn’t weep, though. She hadn’t loved the man. She just hadn’t known she could survive without him. But now, she was bussing tables at the pub and things were looking up. The town had moved on. Nobody spoke of the grisly murders or the man punished for it. It seems like everything was going to be ok. Then–the dream returned.

As Sinya wiped down tables, she overheard the patrons whispering. There had been another one. This time right here in town. The constable found him in his office...well mostly in his office. Some of the sheriff was also in the street, and on the sidewalk, and on the walls. Timer was, he had been dipping his pen in the company ink and his secretary left town after being seen with mysterious injuries to her neck. The morning after the next full moon, he was found butchered.

Apparently, her father hadn’t been a murderer, just a mean drunk. But that didn’t help anyone figure out who the true butcher was. Sinya didn’t know why she always dreamt of the murders, but they always left her tired and scared. She wished the premonitions would stop. She knew she couldn’t tell anyone. Witches were drowned here, no matter how helpful they were. So she continued in her work and left the mystery to the professionals...or what was left of them.

Manually added by Warden Aurora "Aura" Ta'var

(common couplet poetry)

__Beware the Desired One__

In the deep dark of the woods,
A grand temple once stood.
Many seek to lay its secrets bare,
But hidden knowledge, it will not share.

An artifact of power and renown,
No greater prize to be found,
Seek it out, if you dare,
But hopeful searchers must beware.

To crave the power is like a drug,
And the path before you is paved in blood.
Kill your enemies and watch your friends,
For it may be you who finds your end.