You wake up on a soft, warm carpet in a dark, climate-controlled room. Pulling yourself up to your knees, you look around. Comfortable furniture, a large, curving window currently tinted dark, the city-scape beyond barely visible. Holos on the walls. One catches your eye — your own smiling face beneath a regrettable haircut, taken on the sixteenth anniversary of your adoption.
You slowly pick yourself up and look around the dark confines of your family's living room, a place half a galaxy away from Tyrost, which feels utterly divorced from the place you just escaped. You have no idea how you got here.
"Hello?" you call. Nothing but your own voice echoing through the halls. Slowly, cautiously, you move through the room to try the nearest light. Nothing happens. You raise your voice again, tentatively: "Mom? Pa'ama? Jazt?" Once again, no answer.
You step into the kitchen, the silence ringing in your ears. Just as empty as the living room. Nothing here out of the ordinary aside from, incongruously, your mother's favourite souvenir mug sitting on the breakfast table. Revan's unmasked face stares out at you from amid several other historical figures, beneath the logo of the museum it came from. You reach out to touch it — still warm, full of fragrant stimcaf. "Hello?" you call out, turning in place.
Then, abruptly, you're not alone after all. Facing you in a rough semicircle are three dark-cloaked figures, faces in shadow, naked swords — actual swords! — held in their hands. "Uh... hi?" you try. "I'm... Skylah! This is... my house, I guess? Um... How are you?"
Their only response is to leap for you as one, blades crackling with red lightning. They only come down on air, however — you instinctively flip backwards, landing on the far side of the breakfast table, Jordan's blue lightsaber alive in your hands. Your attackers don't give you a moment's rest. One circles around the table to the right, another to the left, while a third vaults over it, sword raised to hack you down. You roll out of the way of this last one, their blade slashing open the cupboard behind you. You come up in time to just barely parry the one to the right, thrusting a palm out to hurl the one to the left back with the Force.
They don't even give you time to be surprised that the sword could parry a lightsaber, instead of being cut in half before they're on you again. You know already that this is too many at once. It's all you can do to stay alive in the face of their furious assault, and it's been all of a few seconds.
A purple blade hisses on, piercing one of your attackers through the heart from behind. Before they can properly respond, a second is entangled in crackling, violet lightning, not even screaming as they're thrown lifelessly against a wall. The third, you slash across the chest — the heat of battle is no time for hesitation. As quickly as they'd appeared, they're all dead.
You stare, breathing hard, at the newcomer. A narrow-shouldered figure of middling height, wearing an ostentatious, full-face mask as well as robes both elaborate and sinister. The saberstaff she holds is nearly half-again as long as Avress's, only one end currently ignited. When she speaks, it's in Imperius's voice, pitched higher now that it's not coming out of Elra's throat. "Oh, it's you."
"I thought you were stuck in Elra?" you say, warily.
"I was," Imperius says. "But, it appears the Jedi was right — the device has grown unstable. I believe it is drawing all our spirits into it, even from this extended range." She looks around at the ruins of your family's kitchen, focusing on the nearest window, at the endless city beyond. "Your memory, I assume. Where are we, Coruscant?"
"Empress Teta," You say, automatically. Your memory... that explains an awful lot. Although it also raises many further questions. "So... we're stuck here? Why are there Sith attacking us with warblades?" The bodies are gone — you never saw them disappear.
"Oh," Imperius waves a hand dismissively, "the mad ghosts of Ancient Sith, trapped for millenia. We'll meet more soon. We can still get out, however, if we can make out way to the Centre of the Soul Array before our bodies expire."
You frown at her. "... our bodies expire?" She doesn't have one of her own — that's why she's a ghost.
Sighing lightly, Imperius reaches up with her free hand and pulls the mask off. The face beneath is human, olive-toned, eyes sardonic and startlingly yellow. A pattern of raised scarration stands out on one cheek. Instantly, you recognise it as an Imperial slave brand. At the sight of that, something tugs at the back of your memory. Some historical fact or useful piece of information that's currently eluding you.
"Ah, well," Imperius says. "We'll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it. Unless you mean to do something rash."
"What, like, try to kill you?" you ask.
"Yes," she agrees, "that would qualify."
"But, you're already dead," you point out. "You're a ghost. How could I kill you?" You glance around at the places where the bodies aren't anymore. "How did we even kill them?"
"We didn't, really," Imperius admits. "They'll resurface eventually, here or somewhere else. I would very much not recommend experimenting with letting yourself die, however. It's never a good idea in these situations." She moves past you, free hand snagging your mom's stimcaf mug, which has miraculously remained undisturbed on the table. She notes the pattern on it briefly, before taking a drink. "Hm," she says, critically. "Too much sugar." Then she turns her yellow-eyed gaze back to you. "Since we're not going to kill each other at the moment, we need to get out of your memory, first thing — the exit will be somewhere of significance, rather than anything as sensible as the front door. What comes to mind?"
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Article:
What place of significance do you choose?
[ ] Your bedroom
[ ] The training room
[ ] The workshop
We totally should have brought Keel or Brenby, instead. It would have been really funny to pick someone we're mildly ga-ga over and then have a bad excuse to bring them to
