As much as Skylah made it through her first taste of combat, she did almost die too many times to be comfortable with. If you need to use force, use overwhelming.
Also we did get puppeted by Imperious using this and killed a Sith Lord, so there's something to aim for.
A lot of words talk about the personal flourishes each teacher's style can have, but in the end this feels like the best way to cover the holes. Form 7 doesn't really address Skylah's pitfalls in combat, while the more precise form II feels more like growing to cover her weaknesses without introducing new weaknesses to worry about.
While most practitioners of different styles are of varying deadliness, it's generally considered that the Masters of those forms are roughly equal in actual combat. Otherwise, there still wouldn't be seven forms, the ones with less survivability would have been whittled down by constant galactic wars.
It's just it's more difficult to become a master at Makashi than it is to learn how to kill people with Juyo. That's why it's considered a stereotypically Dark Side form of lightsaber combat. An easy path darkness forever dominate your destiny, yada yada.
If anyone was curious, the header image says 'Star Wars: Fallen Empires II". Yes, including the colon, that's how it's supposed to be marked in Aurebesh.
If you look it up yourself, you'll likely find that some of the letters look backwards. Technically, that's how they're capitalized, which is why the S in Star and the S in Wars are mirror images of each other. Gaz did her homework to write it properly!
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.
I want to be tutored by a Sith to complement Artoria's teachings and make the most out of our mixed nature. However, between Nyx and Imperius our pa'ma's style appeals to me more... and Imperius already has a disproportionate amount of influence on our character courtesy of being in our head.
You are sixteen years old, back home on Empress Teta. It's a fine day, a cool breeze chasing away the heat of the sun — you stand atop a rocky hill, across from a Makashi master.
Despite being an ecumenopolis, Empress Teta isn't as entirely urbanised as the likes of Coruscant — large, deliberately preserved swathes of green have been left on several continents, great parks and nature preserves maintained by the crown. On the horizon, discoloured by sheer distance, you can see the city's towers soaring up into the sky. Your immediate surroundings, though, are a sea of green, the canopy of the forest stretching out from the base of the hill in all directions. The speeder is down there as well as the road, but it's easy to deceive yourself that this patch of wilderness you find yourself in is truly untouched. A place of birds and small woodland creatures, and not much else. There likely aren't other people around for miles.
Your pa'ma takes her lightsaber off her belt, bringing it up vertically in front of her face before she activates it, the bright red glow of the blade illuminating her face. With a flourish, she brings it down by her side, adopting a low, one-handed guard. Watching it sends butterflies through your stomach. You're the one who asked her for a real spar with live weapons, the way you've seen her and your mom do countless times. It's still more than a little intimidating seeing her facing you like this, tall, scarred and impassive as she is.
You take a deep breath and slowly let it out before copying her salute, the soft orange of your own lightsaber blade snapping to life. Your own flourish is a little less practiced, but you try to copy her guard — it always makes you feel uncomfortably exposed.
Things are quiet then, neither of you moving a muscle, staring at each other across the hill. Then, just as you consider making the first move, she's rushing into motion, briefly becoming a black-clad blur with a brilliantly red sword. You parry the first three strikes, giving ground all the way, that lethal, humming plasma blade in your mother's hand snaking out at you again and again so fast you're afraid to blink.
On the fourth blow, your blades lock together with a flash not quite drowned out by the sunlight, and somehow she levers your lightsaber up and away from you. The blade goes out as it flies through the air as you lose your balance, landing heavily on your backside. You stare up at her dumbly for a long moment, trying to catch your breath.
Her lightsaber goes out, and she clips it to her belt again. There's a look of amusement in your pa'ma's single remaining eye as she leans down to offer you a green-skinned hand. You pout as you accept it, letting her pull you easily to your feet. "You were still holding back, weren't you?"
She twitches a small, fleeting smile. "Of course I was."
You pout harder, going over to retrieve your fallen lightsaber. "Why, if you're still just going to win that easily anyway?" It's a silly question, but you'd admittedly been hoping to put up a better showing than this.
Your pa'ma looks at you for a long, quiet moment, turning her words over in her head before she voices them. "I fought with my master many times in training, starting when I was near your age. She wounded me on countless occasions -- small cuts, bruises. A broken arm, once. Years later, the first time I truly drew a weapon on her with hostile intent, in less than twenty moves, she'd bisected my lightsaber with half my hand in the way, seared open my face, and followed through with a stab through my torso. It would have killed me in long, agonising hours if sheer wounded heartbreak hadn't been enough to allow me to cling to life."
You stare at her wide-eyed. You can't help but trace the old scar that goes diagonally down her face, disrupting the tattoos that had been across the bridge of her nose. She doesn't like to talk about that incident very much; the worst day of her life, the one that had left her broken and betrayed in the dirt of Korriban, near to where her future wife had found her a year later "O...kay?" you say, trying to follow why she's saying this. "I'm not asking why you're not trying to kill me, Pa'ma!"
"It's a spar with live weapons, Skylah. My first goal will always be to not hurt you. When you're not holding back in a fight, your only goal is to win. You will never see that from me." Hearing her say that, you don't doubt that it's the truth, for all that you know that she's killed many, many people without losing a bit of sleep over it.
"Okay, fine," you say, walking back over to her. "How would it have gone in a real fight, then?"
She cocks her head to the side, a wisp of dark hair escaping her braid as she studies you. Then she reaches out with her sword hand, the one she'd lost all those years ago. Robotic fingers indicate your arm, just above the elbow. "On your second parry, you were a little too slow. In a real fight, I would have slid under your guard, sheared off your arm here, and continued onward to cut your throat." The hand twitches sharply upward to graze your jugular; you can't help but gulp. "Then I would have come back down to take your head off for good measure. Force Adepts can cling to life through impossible injuries; it's good policy to be certain of these things." Her voice is unemotive as she describes your violent death, clinical in its analysis.
"What should I have done differently?" you ask, unable to stop yourself from wincing a little.
"Be a tenth of a second faster," she says. "Give ground less easily. Compensate more skillfully for my greater reach."
"Okay, but like, that's just saying 'be better'," you point out.
"It is," she agrees.
"Mom is usually a little more constructive than this!" you complain.
"She is," she says.
You wait for the elaboration that simply doesn't come. "Why, though?"
"Lightsabers are incredibly deadly, unforgiving weapons," Pa'ma says. "As the major Form most singularly focused on dueling technique, fights between Makashi practitioners often come down to such matters of skill and execution. The difference in our abilities is too great for you to close it through means of clever spontaneity or tactical thinking."
"Right," you say, obviously discouraged.
"Honestly, I think you have a very strong foundation," she says. "You could match me eventually, if that's what you wanted."
That's a profound compliment — you know it at the time, even — but it's not what catches in your head afterward, when you'd both finished training to go have a makeshift picnic of packed dumplings while leaning against the hood of the speeder. What catches in your head are the simple words 'if that's what you wanted'.
At the time, you'd decided it wasn't. You were happy to have a lightsaber for the connection it represents to your family. You were happy to know how to use it without hurting yourself, to defend yourself and others and to do whatever other tasks were required. You'd had no interest in training yourself endlessly for lightsabers duels to the death, however; how many of those were you likely to end up in, after all?
As it turns out, at least two!
Your lightsaber hums encouragingly in your hand as you move through a sequence of exercises you'd learned years before, a one-sided fight against an imaginary opponent. Graceful cuts flow into elegant parries as fast as you can go; absent anyone trying to kill you, it's so easy to be as precise and skilled as you need to be. Simple to never make a mistake.
The truth is, you will probably never have the disposition or the drive to dedicate your life to this, the way your pa'ma has. You don't need to, though, you now realise. The skills she taught you are still useful, can still keep you safe. As you flow through a particular parry-disarm technique, you remember the way you used it on a Sith apprentice back on Tyrost — you hadn't enjoyed cutting her hand off, obviously, but it had let you win. Briefly, admittedly, but that hadn't been a problem with swordplay.
That is an utterly insufferable style," Imperius says as you finish and take in a gulp of water.
You look at her sidelong. She's leaning against the back wall where she's been the whole time, watching you work. "Insufferable?"
"Rigid control and meticulous precision and every movement just so, like someone who alphabetises her wardrobe. Just how self-serious is your mother, anyway?"
"Uh... extremely?" you say. Then amend: "Or like, not at all, usually? Kind of depends on which one you mean."
"Yes, that is the sense I got from that call I sat in on," Imperius says. "A useful sort of Sith, but one who would have found advancing through the ranks deeply frustrating, if the late Empire were anything like it was in my day." Well, that at least doesn't work out to an insult against your family, you suppose.
After that, you wash up, change, and go to do something about being ravenously hungry. In the starship's small galley, you find Amira Rist.
She kneels on the floor by the table, seemingly deep in meditation. She likes to do that in the mornings, but seemingly always in places that are odd and inconvenient, as opposed to the purposefully designated meditation room adjacent to her cabin. Today, the atmosphere is made a little bit better by the scent of fresh stimcaf filling the air, presumably provided by Amira's own droid, T9, before she'd left to monitor things in the cockpit.
Hearing you come through the sliding door, Amira unfolds herself, straightening up with a sigh. "Hello, Skylah. Imperius." She always adds this second part, despite the fact that she cannot see or hear the Sith. It's a piece of cordiality that is good, in a sense, except for when it forces you to serve as a go-between. Amira Rist is taller than you, but not by much. A slight, distractable looking human woman, pale-skinned and blue-eyed, her brown hair chopped off at jaw level.
"Hi, Amira," you say, moving over to the conservator to grab some breakfast. You also take a mug of stimcaf yourself, making sure to drown it in sweetener. "So, today's the day, huh?"
"It should be early evening, local time, by the time when we arrive, but yes," Amira agrees, well-bred Alderaanian tones betraying her aristocratic origins. "A matter of hours now. Have you thought about how you'd prefer to handle things, once we've landed and secured the ship?"
This has been an ongoing, three way discussion between you, Amira, and Imperius for more or less the whole trip. It's a whole planet, and even just focusing on the region that was formerly the sprawling metropolis of Kaas City, there are several places you want to look in particular. None of them are exactly safe, but... that's what the training is for, isn't it? With the planet more or less abandoned, you should only have to worry about dangerous wildlife and bad weather, both of which you know are abundant there.
Article:
Where do you plan on going first after landing?
[ ] The hidden tomb of Darth Imperius
Imperius's bones still rest on Tyrost, buried under the ruined temple she died in, but she says a site had already been selected for her tomb before her death, and is confident it would have been finished after her death. Amira is very interested in such archeological sites, and it might help Imperius get closure on things she's pretending not to need it for.
[ ] The Kaas City Expansion Zone, where you were rescued by your parents
You don't know who your birth family was, but you do know what part of the wrecked city you were discovered in as a very small child. You feel that you need to see this place before you leave the planet, even if any evidence about who you might have been is long since gone. Whether this is merely an emotional need, or the Force sending you a message, you're not entirely sure.
[ ] The fortress of Darth Mortanna, where your pa'ma lived
The sprawling complex that once belonged to Lord Nyx's master is far enough from the city to have been only lightly bombed by the Republic. It was her home for years, along with the woman who would eventually become Darth Shaed. No doubt it's long since been picked clean in the decades since the planet's abandonment, but you want to find a connection to this side of your adoptive family as well while you're here.
"Rigid control and meticulous precision and every movement just so , like someone who alphabetises her wardrobe. Just how self-serious is your mother, anyway?"
