Author's Note

Well, I've had this prologue sitting on my hard drive for months, waiting for an appropriate time to post it. I figure after the recent events of Questionable Cargo (chapter 14, for those not following that particular story of mine and who may be interested in checking it out), now would be a good time.

It is indeed a story about my sith inquisitor. However, I will be taking some slight artistic license. And though this story is independent of QC, the two stories are most certainly connected, and there will be references to each, as well as guest appearances from my other characters. You don't necessarily have to be following both stories to get the full experience, but if you want background on certain situations regarding other characters, it'd be a good idea to either ask me, or check out the other story.

Time passes relatively quick during the prologue, but the end of this prologue occurs approximately two years before the start of Questionable Cargo. However, the timelines will eventually converge.

Enjoy!

- BB

Disclaimer: Star Wars: The Old Republic is the property of BioWare and Lucas Arts. Please don't sue me.

The Harder They Fall
Prologue: The Higher They Climb

Slavery is a funny thing. It has this lovely way of making a person feel like they're worth less than the dirt beneath their master's feet. And the master certainly doesn't deny it because doing so would mean the slave is actually a living, breathing being, with complicated thoughts and emotions, and we certainly can't have them thinking that. Stars forbid they actually start feeling like their lives have meaning.

Sooner or later, the slaves will start to believe what their masters say, and that's when their freedom is truly taken away.

Minara, however, was not always a slave. She grew up on the streets, and was taken by Imperials when she was thirteen. Had she been taken at a younger age, like most of those taken with her on that life-changing day, perhaps she may have been broken by now, and more willing to give up her independence, but growing up on the streets of Coruscant's G17 district didn't shape fragile women. Her younger sister had been left behind to fend for herself in the seedy, poverty-stricken underworld of Coruscant, and she could only hope the example she tried to live by rubbed off on her young, impressionable mind enough to keep the young girl alive. That's not to say she was taken without a fight. She had a sister to look after (though there was no chance in hell she was letting that slip to the Imperials), and she was not about to just let herself be taken. It was a fight she had lost, however, and her ten year old sister had been left alone, forced to watch from the relative hidden safety of a metal air duct as Minara was dragged, kicking and screaming from their tiny shanty never to been seen again.

Indeed, eleven years later, she had not seen or heard from her sister since that day. She had no idea if the girl was even alive. Imperial slaves were not exactly privy to that kind of information, sister or not. She'd been in the service of enough masters to know that much.

There were talks of her being sent to become a dancer in some seedy cantina somewhere on Dromund Kaas when her real age was eventually discovered. But with her tendency toward rebellion, the slavers thought it would be easier to break her at the hands of a single master in his estate.

They were so very, utterly wrong. She became known for her efficiency, but it came with a healthy dose of insubordination to measure alongside of it. When one master grew tired of her stubborn resistance to learning her place despite their (often severe) punishments for such behaviour, she was simply sold to another master. There was no doubt in her mind that many other slaves would have been killed by now. The only reason she was still alive was because she never did anything half-way. If she was to be a slave, she would be the best damn slave there was, and though her masters' orders were typically carried out with no shortage of attitude (her cocked eyebrow and rolling eyes—though silent—were her most successful methods of annoyance to date) they were carried out faster and to a higher quality than any other slave in their employ.

Minara prided herself on building her skills—slicing, building, tinkering, cleaning, cooking, what have you—until they were perfected, because doing so earned her her life, and at least some semblance of personality. She had only ever refused one order in her time as a slave, and though it had cost her dearly, she did not regret it.

Slavery could always be worse, she told herself as she started her work for yet another master. Having no idea what to expect always made her slightly nervous, but she didn't survive on the streets by being inadaptable, There are always worse masters. I could be working for the Emperor himself. A chill rushed down her spine at that thought, and she shook it off as she was lead to her quarters, which... were not that bad, actually, and she allowed herself to wonder if maybe this master might be one of her better ones. He was a short, stubby man with a receding line of white hair. Some noble, apparently high on the Imperial food chain. She didn't really know any more than that; she honestly wasn't listening when the slaver told her who he was, and she wasn't really expected to know anything unless her new master said as much.

There was one thing she had learned, however, in her (albeit reluctant) service to the Empire. Not all Imperials were evil. In fact, most were everyday people; some were even reasonable. Granted, slave owners' willingness to put a price on a human life didn't make them the best of people to begin with, but Minara had served four other masters in her eleven years of service. Only one of those had demanded more from her than she was willing to give, in order to pay off a debt her mistress at the time had owed to some gang lord. When she refused, she'd paid dearly, but it was better than the alternative. Needless to say, her time was short with that particular owner.

After a short time in the service of her latest and final owner, she had to admit her lot was not too bad, considering. Stars knew she'd had worse masters. This man at least treated her with some (albeit a very minute amount) of humanity, and not like a piece of the furniture. It was a refreshing change, but still, even after all these years and having long since come to terms with her lot in life, she longed for her freedom.

She didn't discover her force-sensitivity until years after she'd been sold into slavery. She had no idea what it was at the time or what it meant, and kept it hidden from her master. It was too weak and untrained to be of any use to her, and her fear of what would happen if she was discovered helped her keep it to herself. Perhaps her connection to the force was why she had survived for so long on the streets. She could never be certain. All she knew was that she had always been unusually lucky, and had ridiculously quick reflexes. It made her somehow able to escape what would otherwise be a hopeless situation, dragging her sister behind her.

That was, until her last master, a stocky imperial moff named Mietro was pursued by republic spies, and she took the controls of his speeder, kicking it into speed in a tightly-cornered area of the city, manoeuvring it into a flip, or a roll, or just slightly to the side before blaster beams unleashed on them from where she had just been merely a fraction of a second prior. They'd escaped the tight quartered chase without even a scratch on the speeder.

So, when her master discovered her Force-sensitivity, even if he was relatively nice, she had certainly not expected her freedom to be one of the things he gave her.

Well... sort of.

Her "freedom" was the reward for saving Mietro's life, as opposed to letting him die and running to save herself. It came with the one condition that she be tested by the Empire and trained in the ways of the sith if she turned out to be powerful enough to do so. If not, she would return to his service, but she would be a paid servant rather than a slave. It still wasn't much of a life, if you asked her, but those were her choices, and if she succeeded in becoming a sith, she'd have to answer to a lot less, and her freedom might even lead her to her sister.

Even so, she had left one form of slavery and embraced another, some would say. Stars knew she wasn't looking forward to helping the Empire that enslaved her. Although, she did have to admit that the thought of growing more powerful and using that power to covertly destroy the Empire from the inside out sure was appealing, and it wasn't like she had anything to lose if she died in the process. Maybe this Sith thing wouldn't be so bad?

And who knew? Maybe she'd be able to use her newfound freedom to find her sister?

And so, she'd spent the next two years in combat and force training to build her skills in preparation for the trials before finally being enrolled in the academy.

Being an acolyte was just as bad as Minara had imagined. Her only real consolation was the fact that she was free to run her mouth to pretty much anyone she wanted, save for apprentices and sith lords. Overseer Harkun certainly didn't fit that description, and she always found some excuse to push on the boundaries a little. Perhaps if he was a little less likely to insult her and see her as nothing more than a slave, she would be less likely to supply him with a liberal amount of wit and comedic timing. Living on the streets didn't really encourage her to submit to authority, and if she was no longer officially considered a slave, she didn't see why she should answer like one, regardless if whether the overseer still treated her like one.

Besides, Lord Zash found her interesting, despite her tendency for insubordination. If that wasn't a license to push on the boundaries a little, she didn't know what was.

It wasn't lost on her that the only reason she hadn't been killed yet was because of Lord Zash's interest in her, and her skills had far surpassed most of the other acolytes—perhaps even all of them (and oh, how she wished to test that theory in a "friendly" battle with Ffon). The gusto with which she threw herself into her trials in order to prove herself was outmatched only by her hatred for the very empire she was assisting and her desire to see her slavers go down in a storm of her own lightning was so strong she almost dreamed about it.

She was not to be taken lightly, however. If her role was to be sith, there was no way she was going back to being anything less. Minara was determined to prove herself, and true to her history, she never did anything half-way. If she was to become sith, she was going all the way.

Perhaps her sister was force-sensitive too, she occasionally wondered. If so, she desperately hoped the girl ended up on the other side of the war, even if the thought of one day possibly having to fight her sister as a jedi absolutely terrified her. By the time she became an acolyte, it had been thirteen years since they'd last seen each other. What if Minara didn't recognize her sister? What if she ended up eventually killing her sister without even knowing it?

That thought filled her with such debilitating fear that she found she couldn't breathe.

Don't think like that, She told herself, You're going to get through these trials, become a sith apprentice, and use your power to find your sister and destroy the Empire from the inside out.

She had to wonder why the Empire saw any value in force-sensitive slaves like herself. She could never imagine willingly helping the Empire that enslaved her. She would have the power to do something as an apprentice, as long as she was discreet about it. They had taken her from her home, from her sister, and from a good (albeit hard and poverty-stricken) life of freedom and forced her into a life of servitude and confinement, and she hated them for it. Now, she was using that hate and that anger to make herself stronger, and eventually, when she was powerful enough, she would use that power to destroy the empire from the inside. The irony was almost poetic.

It was far from easy, however. Losing herself to the dark side was a constant temptation, and while she embraced the hatred and the anger, she loosed it on not on the republic, but on those of her own kind. In secret, of course. She would surely be executed as a traitor (if she were lucky) if she was discovered. But she had none of the resistance training of the Jedi. She had no knowledge of how to keep the dark sided tendencies within her at bay. She had only her sheer force of will, and the street-smarts of a woman raised in poverty to help her. But she was trying. She'd taken great pains not to lose herself to the dark side, as well as a number of extreme risks. She'd warned a captured jedi of a plan to use him against the republic once she let him go, and had refused to torture a fellow acolyte for answers after he'd witnessed a murder at the hands of a sith apprentice. Although, it should have been no secret when she joined the academy that she had a problem submitting to authority, despite the fact that she'd been a slave for the past eleven years. She did enough of that when she was a slave and now, she would make the most of her freedom—starting with Harkun. Minara rather did enjoy getting him riled up.

If being an acolyte was bad, being an apprentice was only slightly better if only for the increase of authority she now wielded. Her arrival on Dromund Kaas was a painful reality check that came at the hands of a slave rebellion. How she wished there had been some way to help them. They were her kinsmen, more than the other acolytes and sith. As it was, as much as she wished to see the rebellion succeed, a slave rebellion on Dromund Kaas was doomed to fail, and when it did, those slaves would be lucky if they died before being tortured for no reason other than wishing to cause them pain, and her plan couldn't afford a slip in her guise of Imperial support. The best she could possibly afford them was a quick, painless death rather than the slow torturous one they'd undoubtedly receive at the hands of the sith.

You're a sith too, Mina. A voice reasoned with her mentally.

Only in title. She answered without hesitation. She would spend the rest of her days keeping it that way. I won't lose myself to the darkness. I can't. I know what it does to people, and I can't become a person my sister would hate to meet.

They did attack her first, but that was beside the point. They saw her as a threat, and really, she was, because there was nothing she could do to help them, and rather avoided them as much as possible. She'd been on the planet only a day, and already her heart was aching for the things she had to do.

She could defect to the republic, she supposed. But her success wasn't guaranteed until she had more power. And besides, she could do so much more for them on the inside, in secret. Regardless, she needed more power, first. And not only that, she needed more freedom, and connections on the outside.

She needed to become a Darth.

Only then would she have enough freedom to take a few more liberties with her standing in the Empire.

Only then would she have the power to find her sister without putting the poor girl at risk.

Setting a course for Balmorra, Minara let out a sigh, staring out the viewport to a vast sea of stars with her arms crossed over her chest.

One thing at a time.