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Darth Trocia, Dark Lord of the Sith is not an intimidating woman in her bearing; she has the look rather of a middle ranking bureaucrat, or the trusted secretary of a powerful business magnate. The kind of woman who makes filing systems and office functions beg for mercy, rather than people. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Trocia has never particularly minded being underestimated — the expression on a surprised foe in their moment of death is no less delicious, after all.
She sits at her desk, ensconced in her private quarters aboard her personal warship:
the Nightmare, a Harrower III class star destroyer she'd inherited from her master during the Fall of the Sith Empire. Although the ship has not flown in over a decade, slowly being allowed to become overgrown by the jungles of Dromund Kaas, its reactors and various subsystems have been maintained as best as is practical.
Trocia taps on her lip as she reads the terminal mounted into the desktop. Whatever she reads seems to amuse her, a thin smile creeping over her face.
She rises, a human gracefully entering her middle years, dressed simply in a red dress that does little to de-emphasise her unremarkable stature, but a good deal to bring out the warm tones in her dark skin. The space she moves through is long and narrow, one wall taken up almost entirely by a transparisteel window showing stormy skies and darkened treetops. Opposite it, on the far side of sensible furniture and a bed that lately held two, is a display case filled with every weapon imaginable. Blasters of all descriptions, swords and spears and knives and pieces of armour. In place of pride at the very top is a row of lightsabers — every item is polished to a gleam, and secured behind a flickering, red rayshield.
As she leaves her quarters, the guards standing immediately outside come sharply to attention. She ignores them in an approving sort of way, moving through her domain with supreme confidence. Her motley collection of troopers and ship personnel similarly stop what they're doing to show their respect, well aware that she will remember any slight to her authority. Lesser servants bow low. All move out of her way, giving her a wide berth down the blackened durasteel passageways of the ship.
Her journey takes her down a turbolift, and across most of the ship's lower deck. She knows
the Nightmare's layout instinctually, mapping out the most efficient way to reach her destination at all times. Finally, she comes to a large shuttlebay near the front of the ship, and to what she's here for.
"Dark Lord!" says the most senior of the soldiers clustered around the far wall, giving her a sharp salute. "I didn't expect you in person!"
"I imagine not, Lieutenant," she says, barely sparing him, or the several other soldiers a glance. Her attention is on the man being held prisoner by the largest of the troopers, forced down to his knees, glaring up at her. He's a classic Imperial beauty in the most traditional sense, complete with red skin and prominent facial ridges. She savours the sight — it isn't every day that one sees a Sith Pureblood being manhandled by a common rifleman. "Draler Aash," she says, putting a name to a face. "As pathetic as ever."
"I'm surprised you know my name," the prisoner says. With his hands forced behind his back, he's unable to catch the trickle of black blood that flows down from one lip.
Trocia arches an eyebrow. "My boy, you're part of an endangered species. I don't tend to forget a face like yours, particularly given the... previous circumstances of our acquaintance."
"You mean when you
killed my mother!" He attempts to surge up at her, but is slammed down to the floor with more force than is strictly necessary.
Trocia meets his baleful, red glare with cool, amber eyes of her own. Then she reaches for the weapon at her belt, igniting it with a distinctive
snap-hiss. Draler flinches back as she levels the plasma blade at his throat, the weapon's green glow casting his face into strange shadows. Her voice is perfectly calm: "Yes, that is what I mean. Your mother died like a Sith, with a weapon in her hand — a real Sith, boy, not whatever sad excuse you are. Did you think you were going to break into my ship and get your revenge armed with..."
"A blaster pistol, Dark Lord," the lieutenant supplies.
"... with a
blaster pistol," Trocia finished.
"I'm just here for the sword!" he says. He looks away, a dark flush of shame coming into his face. "I know I can't kill you."
She laughs, a pleasant, giggly sound that nonetheless makes him cringe again. "Darth Aash's only son, the last, ragged scion of a family stretching back to old Korriban... and the best you can manage is becoming an incompetent
thief. Maybe I'll let you look at the sword, before I have you thrown into—"
An alarm cuts through the air, echoing through every deck of the ship, signaling the crew to battle station. At the same time, Trocia's comm unit chims. She wastes no time in extinguishing her lightsaber, putting it away, and drawing out the miniature holocomm. She turns away from Draler Aash as she answers the call. "Yes?"
Fi's face appears, her alien features as unreadable as ever. "A ship just dropped out of orbit, Dark Lord," she says.
Trocia lets her face fall into a small frown. "What kind of ship?"
"A courier ship," Fi says. "They're not wearing it on their sleeve, but I
know the make." She imbues the last with a certain significance. Trocia is familiar enough with Nautolan body language to suss out the meaning.
"A
Jedi ship?" Trocia guesses. "Whyever for?" Before Fi can respond, there's a grunt from behind her, the sound of a body hitting the floor, and a metallic slamming sound. Trocia whirls around just in time to see Draler gone, having taken advantage of a moment of inattention from his captor. The triangular wall vent he has just gone through still reverberates from where the grate closed behind him. "
Find him!"
"Yes, Dark Lord!" the lieutenant says, mortified. The soldiers spring into action.
"Trouble?" Fi asks, her head still holographically projected from the comm.
"A trifling matter," Trocia says. "Give the order to shoot the ship down, by the way — we do have those turbolaser drills for a reason, after all." The last thing she needs is a Jedi running around her planet.
The fact that you're
not a Jedi is unlikely to have made her feel any better.
Some hours earlier, you're woken from a dead sleep by the touch of something cold and sharply metallic pricking your side.
With a cry, you scramble up and away, throwing off the covers and glaring at your unrepentant attacker. "Cut it out, Ex-two!" you say, rubbing at your poor, bruised side. X2-L4 only beeps dismissively, even in the face of your most powerful frown. So you throw your pillow at him -- X2 dodges neatly on his wheels, extends a grabber claw to seize it, and hurls the pillow hard back into face, hard.
"You did
tell the droid to wake you up at this hour," drawls a bored voice from nearby, but also from inside your own head.
You turn your bleary-eyed glare on the sinisterly-dressed woman seemingly perched on your bedside table, an elbow braced against her knee to prop her head up on one hand. With a huff, you get up out of your cabin's narrow sleeper, and pointedly reach
through her to snatch up the bottle of water you left there, taking a drink. She proves as completely insubstantial as ever. "He doesn't have to be so good at it!"
Your cabin is small, but modestly comfortable. Jedi ships aren't much for luxuries, but your bunk has a comfortable enough sleeping pad, and it's much roomier than your own poor ship, currently docked in the larger ship's tiny shuttle port. Despite the stark white Alderaanian colour scheme, the atmosphere reminds you of your mother's starship. It's just similar enough to be homey, even if it isn't exactly the same make or layout. You'd never expected to be travelling on another Jedi ship after hers, but Amira Rist has made no attempts to pressure you into accepting more orthodox Jedi teachings, and you don't find travelling with her difficult at all.
You quickly get dressed for an early morning workout, snapping your lightsaber onto your belt to finish things off. Imperius looks at you with condescending amusement, clearly noting your displease. "It's the last day before we get there," you complain, to her and to X2, or maybe to Past Skylah, who has betrayed you once again in this way.
"You're the one who committed to this training," Imperius notes, drifting along beside you.
"Trust me that when I say Dromund Kaas isn't exactly safe at the best of times, I'm not joking, and it's good you'll be prepared. Dying isn't particularly pleasant as a rule, I find. But I'm just the dead Sith living in your head — what do I know?"
"Okay, so, like, one? You can't be a dead Sith who is
living in my head. You're more like..." you hesitate. 'Dying' is right out, obviously, that would mean something else entirely. "... deading in my head, I guess. And two, do you always have to be so sarcastic?"
"Oh, absolutely," Imperius says without even a shred of hesitation.
"Terminal condition, I'm afraid. Has been all my life, and whatever you want to call this phase of existence."
She's right, you know, which is as annoying as it ever is. You know that if you turned around, you'd see Imperius's self satisfied smile and piercing yellow eyes, a Sith Lord's dark robes combined with an old slave brand she'd deliberately never had healed off her face. She's not really
there there, though. If anyone else were in the hall, they'd just see you talking to yourself.
As has always been your goal, you are headed back to the planet of your birth. Dromund Kaas, formerly the capital of the latest incarnation of the Sith Empire, now bombed out ruin occupied only by dense jungle plants and ravenous wildlife. After an... interesting pit stop along the way, you've managed to pick up Imperius, and be given this lift by Jedi Knight Amira, an old friend of your mom's. You don't expect the planet to be nice, obviously, but you feel very strongly that you have to visit it at least once more in your life. See the ruin brought on by your ancestors' greed and warmongering, and your adoptive Republic's final vengeance on them for it.
And so here you are, rolling out of bed, grumbling a little, and heading straight for the ship's small sparring room, a common feature in Jedi ships of this size.
But you're sure, in that way you're often sure of things that you're wrong about, that this trip should be less of a fiasco than the Tyrost stop had been.
Skylah's recent misadventures have led to her taking combat training more seriously. As the child of talented Force adept warriors, she is very capable of defending herself. When she encountered more experienced foes and life and death situations, however, she found herself sorely pressed.
Skylah is proficient in the Djem So discipline of lightsaber Form V, which offers a mix of strong offence and strong defence. The version taught to her by her mother, Arlunia, makes use of Force augmented movements and strikes to make up for Skylah's slight stature. As she trains more extensively for actual combat, though, she has found herself compelled to incorporate other elements to make a style all her own.
What form and style has Skylah been training most in on the way to Dromund Kaas? This is a vote that will affect the way Skylah behaves in combat scenes, and also say things about her character and where her mind is. None of them are traps, and their drawbacks are intended to make the story more interesting.
[ ] Form II, Makashi
Form II is specialised for duels, in particular lightsaber to lightsaber combat, relying on control and precision over raw power alone, but lacking the versatility of later styles. Skylah has trained in Form II under her mother, Nyx, a Makashi master, although she has let the skills fall by the wayside. Nyx's style, learned at the feet of the infamous Sith blade master, Darth Mortanna, attempts to make up for the style's lack of brute force by instead honing aggression into intense speed and rapid strikes, without sacrificing the precision the form is known for. On paper it should be ill-suited to blending with Skylah's current style of combat, but in practice her parents' styles have an almost inexplicable synergy, fitting together in surprising ways, and covering deficiencies that would have otherwise been invisible.
Teacher: Your pa'ma, Lord Nyx
"It is better to land one perfect blow than five lesser ones -- this much is indisputable. The true goal, however, should not merely be to settle for that one, shining strike. Rather, it is to land five perfect blows in the time it would take another swordswoman to ready her weapon."
[ ] Form V, Shien
Djem So's sister discipline, Shien focuses more on maintaining a flexible defence. It is particularly effective against multiple opponents and projectile weapons, training practitioners to be aware of attackers on all sides, at all times. Skylah's travelling companion, Amira Rist, has trained in the discipline under three masters, starting with her very first. She is entirely willing to tutor Skylah in it, noting that the two halves of Form V synergise very naturally together, as one might expect.
Teacher: Jedi Knight Amira Rist
"So, I don't have anything profound to say about this. Other than, well, this is what someone taught me once, and it's helped to keep me safe over the years. I'd like to help you do the same."
[ ] Form VII, Juyo
Known for its intense aggression and reliance on channelling emotion into raw Force power, Juyo is incredibly effective in battle, deeply controversial among Jedi, and embraced wholeheartedly by the Sith. Skylah's strange bond to the Dark Side apparition of Darth Imperius gives her the chance to learn the long dead Sith Lord's personal variant on the form. Imperius's style is particularly dynamic and mobile, making copious use of misdirection and outmanoeuvring tactics in addition to the form's raw power. As Skylah already has experience with augmenting attacks with the Force and touches the Force through her own idiosyncratic methods, she may have an easier time making use of the style than many Jedi.
Teacher: Darth Imperius
"People overcomplicate lightsaber combat. They try to make it profound, a clash of philosophies, a dance of blades. The truth is, you're trying to hack a living being apart with a hot plasma blade before someone else does the same to you. And most species can't do that very well if you've taken off their head, or cut them down at the knees. Don't be there when they try to hit you, and hit them hard enough that they fall in at least two places: That is my profound wisdom from beyond the grave."
