Family adventure? In Star Wars? God, I hope not. There's like a fifty percent chance someone named Lavaeolus would die, and I don't think my poor heart could take it.
I mean, if we were in a standard Star Wars setting, I'd agree with you 100%, especially one within the Skywalker generations. To me, this setting has always felt a lot more like "Star Wars as written by Stephen Sommers", which I hope comes across as the enthusiastic compliment it's intended as
Not to mention the much more mundane, yet also more nefarious, curse of "leaving architecture/construction in the hands of someone else after your death" -- you never know if the overseer is going to think "hey, I can improve on this, the original architect was clearly a boob" or (on the other end of the spectrum) if they'll decide to cut corners, 'cause hey, you're dead, your oversight capacity is greatly diminished.
Not to mention the much more mundane, yet also more nefarious, curse of "leaving architecture/construction in the hands of someone else after your death" -- you never know if the overseer is going to think "hey, I can improve on this, the original architect was clearly a boob" or (on the other end of the spectrum) if they'll decide to cut corners, 'cause hey, you're dead, your oversight capacity is greatly diminished.
"Skylah I remember the name of the man who did such a shoddy job building my tomb. Just wipe out half his descendants and my Holocron is yours."
"Yeah that sounds great but it's been thousands of years, so the records are hard to follow, and I don't even know where to start cause you were totally dead and he could have ended up anywhere, which isn't your fault, but you really should have just picked someone more reliable and it would just be such a det-"
"I get it! 1 descendents then! There has to be one somewhere on dromund Kaas..."
"Sure! Totally! I'll do that, laterish. Now, can we just go in already?"
"Well, we can go see where you're not-buried," you tell Imperius.
Amira immediately brightens up. "Oh, that should be fascinating! I've never had a chance to investigate a Sith tomb from that recent a time period."
"How is it," Imperius says, "that I am the ghost, and yet even I think that's a little ghoulish." You can tell that she's happier than she's letting on, though — that sort of thing bleeds through more and more, the longer you share a body like this.
You're sure that's fine.
"It should be interesting to go to one where everything isn't trying to kill us, hopefully," you say. The other ghosts you intend to deal with on this trip — the less tangible, less sarcastic ones — can wait. They're not going anywhere, after all.
"You'll want to sit down for this," Amira cautions, sitting in the pilot seat hours later. You don't second guess her, and slide neatly into the co-pilot's chair. Beyond the cockpit's forward window, hyperspace stretches on into infinity. That's deceptive, you know — you won't be looking at it for very much longer.
Sure enough, with a slight lurch, you drop back into real space. A garden planet looms huge before you, vast oceans and verdant continents obscured by massive, ominous storms. You're very nearly facing the planet's night side, the Dromund System's large, hot star nearly eclipsed from view by your destination.
"... There aren't any lights from Kaas City," Imperius says. She's standing roughly between the two of you, staring out the window at the planet of her birth.
"Well, yeah, the Republic bombed it to rubble, remember?" you say. "And everyone left. So it's going to be like... all empty and wrecked and overgrown and stuff."
"Yes, I recall," Imperius says, shooting you a withering sort of look.
You hunch down in your seat a little. "Sorry."
Amira glances up at you, and at the space beside you where Imperius should be — she's focusing most of her attention on flying the ship, however. "I know this must be difficult," she says, "I haven't been back to Alderaan in some years, and even after all this time as a Jedi, it's... nice to know that it's always going to be there behind me."
Imperius scoffs off the condolences. "Dromund Kaas is still here, Rist. It's just all the people who are missing."
"She says thank you?" you offer.
"No, I don't," Imperius says, glaring.
"No, she doesn't," Amira says, smiling. Then she adds: "There's a lot of debris around the planet from all the fighting at the end of the war. I'll have to be careful about taking us in." She flicks a switch, adding more power to the deflector shields, just in case.
Parts of shattered starships and space stations orbit around Dromund Kaas, many of them moving at genuinely dangerous speeds. As you watch, a chunk of gutted star destroyer tumbles past ahead of you — you try not to think about how many people died up here, but it's difficult. There's a somber weight pulling on you the closer you get to the planet, a sense of a Darkness deeper and more mature than over Tyrost.
Once, this place had been the highly militarised capital of a vast, interstellar empire. Now, nothing living remains in space around the planet other than you.
As Amira begins to take the ship into a controlled descent into the planet's atmosphere, at first things aren't worse than a few unpleasant jolts of turbulence. Your eyes are fixed at the continent that is your destination; dark, as Imperius has noted, but still the location of everything you're here for.
Then Amira banks dangerously hard, acting a good half second before the proximity alarm starts shrieking. A line of bright red energy tears through the cloud cover to your left, only the opening shot of a full salvo of turbolaser fire that chases dangerously close to the ship.
"Where is that coming from?" you ask, hands white-knuckled on the armrest of your seat.
"The ground!" Imperius says, not even her bored affectation surviving this development.
"Uh... Imperirus says the ground!" you say, without thinking.
Amira, whose attention is entirely absorbed in the task of flying the ship and keeping you all from being vaporised, doesn't so much as spare you a glance. "... Yes, thank you, Skylah," she says. Then she takes a deep, meditative breath and closes her eyes, letting the Force guide her directly.
You're still trying to find the sight reassuring, despite Imperius muttering something decidedly unflattering about Jedi, when all at once the ship banks down into a dangerously steep dive, plummeting through the atmosphere, barely controlled.
"I really need to stop landing like this!" you say, voice increasingly shrill. It's much scarier when you're not the one flying, as it would happen.
"We are not going to crash," Amira says.
"Says the woman flying with her eyes closed!" Imperius says.
You watch the metre on the shields' strength indicator drop precipitously as one of the turbolaser blasts grazes you, sending the whole ship shuddering. Then you're in the cloud layer, contending with high winds and terrifyingly frequent lightning.
"Do you know where you're landing?" you ask Amira.
"No," she says. She opens her eyes just as you break out from under the clouds. Whoever's been firing at you lost track of you while you were hidden from sight, and they're a little slow to recalibrate their fire, the streaks of red arcing up from a forested hill in the distance.
Trees spread out below you, all under a shrouded sky periodically lit up by flashes of angry lightning. These always somehow make you uncomfortable on a spiritual level. In the distance, you can see what's left of the durasteel towers of Kaas City — you're not going to make it all the way there, though. You're entirely certain, for a horrible moment, that Amira is going to plough headlong into the thick, dark canopy below. Instead, her goal only becomes apparent as she struggles to even out toward it — the trees break to accommodate a pebbly stream bed, not entirely dry. You brace for the impact, belatedly remembering to drag some crash webbing down over yourself, which was a good call.
The impact with the stream bed is not, precisely, a crash, but it does involve a little more sliding than is strictly advised by most flight schools, dragging a large furrow into the bottom of the stream in its wake.
"There! See! I landed, we landed, we're fine! Everything's fine!" The serene calm that Amira managed to maintain all through the crisis seems to be fraying at the edges now that you're out of immediate danger, giving way to something a little less Jedi-like. "You are fine, yes?" Amira says, turning to look at you in obvious concern.
"Um..." you're uncomfortably tangled in the crash webbing, but otherwise not injured. "Yeah?" you say. "I, uh, think I'm not dead! Good job!"
Amira lets out a hysterical sort of giggle, resting her head against the yoke. That's probably a good sign. Better than being nearly shot down, at least. Still, she manages: "The Force saw us to safety." It would have sounded more wise and mysterious if she hadn't still been hunched over with her arms over her head, fighting down more nervous laughter.
"Well, thanks, the Force," you say.
Amira abruptly loses her internal battle, and breaks out into another fit of giggling.
Imperius, who would be sagging with relief against a nearby surface if she weren't already dead, lets out a put upon sort of sigh. "Here for five minutes and we've already been grounded by turbolaser fire. I have an extremely bad feeling about this."
Article:
As Amira has established, you're fine! What immediately happens that makes Imperius correct, though? What do you need to deal with before anything else?
[ ] A patrol from Darth Trocia you need to lead away
"I haven't been back to Alderaan in some years, and even after all this time as a Jedi, it's... nice to know that it's always going to be there behind me."
