One night I managed to sneak out without any of these monks breathing down my neck and this was when I encountered a curious vision: a kind of red-tinged skull in a dark-coloured cloak. At first I thought this was some bizarre Krelli monk cloak for some unusual ritual but when he introduced himself, I realised he had very little connection with the Krelli.
"My ordinary name is Klantral, but you can call me Darth Hadrol", the stranger introduced himself.
"You have made a comfortable home with the Krelli monks, but as long as you follow them you will never develop any real potential.
He then continued explaining how the flat world idea taught by the Krelli was all wrong – that the hawkmen they spoke of were not living Gods, but technological flying transport devices designed to travel from world to world, and that many of the stars in the sky were places where other worlds orbited, and these worlds were round, not flat. The idea of a round habitat seemed impossible – surely all its inhabitants would simply float off into space? But he explained how there isn't simply an up and down. The universe was governed by what used to be a unified FORCE, which soon after the universe's beginning split into several distinct forces – the gravitational force that stopped anything accidentally floating away from a planet's surface, the nuclear forces that allowed fusion to create energy within stars that harboured these planets, the electromagnetic force that allowed the transmission of light from these stars, and another unnamed force that gave Darth Hadrol's people, the Sith, their power, for many abilities, some of which, he explained, may be considered unnatural.
"You've lost someone, or you are losing some one aren't you?" I asked Bail. I knew there was definitely something he was hiding.
"Okay, maybe you are old enough to know. I'd always kept my wife Jaina out of people's view, in case it disturbed anyone".
I really lost control at this point
"Why do you have to suppress what is real? Jaina is the woman you love. Everything about this place – it's all false. You deny you abilities, you deny science, you deny love and you deny life. What have you been doing with your life? You basically keep her in this prison, just to keep this whole place looking like some multi-coloured paradise. Your entire existence is based around an invented fantasy to replace what you view as the brutal reality of life. But you don't realise, that however brutal reality is, it never needs to stay that way. A problem is never solved simply by denial of its existence."
"But we can only live on faith" he replied. And that's all we have to live on.
"Yeah, well I think someone needs a bit more to live on that that. I know you've already tried to change some thing. She's pregnant isn't she? And the baby isn't going to survive with you just sitting about preying to those hawkmen all day".
"And just what do you think would help her survive?"
I kind of knew how to answer this, but was a bit perplexed. I didn't say anything at this point. I simply concentrated. Concentrated on the double-helical structure of her DNA and the destroyed molecule receptors. Darth Hadrol had told me how it seemed the DNA divisions had a fundamental flaw that every time they divided, the essential receptors for the molecules that caused motion were degrading. But my attention was taken elsewhere. It seemed that inn a set of genes that didn't seem to serve any purpose. Later on I would be told that that was regarded as "junk DNA" and would eventually be understood to be coded sequences called midi-chlorians – forms of primitive intelligence coded by biology's universal computer code. The main thing I knew was that with a few changes of configurations of this code the DNA could replace all the functions of the main DNA.
For what must have been the first time for a long while, Jaina Kenobi awoke. When I saw Bail and Jaina together I was so glad they realised that there was far more to life that they realised. He just didn't seem to understand that with everything we've achieved, we could basically write a new script for the world. Like with the analogy of one-dimensional strings being the notes for a symphony of the universe. Well, who wrote the symphony? No one did. But perhaps we could.
From than on Mr Kenobi seemed to accept a lot more ideas. He became more detached from the other monks and seemed less interested in their rituals, but he and Jaina had stayed there too long to completely separate from the Krelli order. This was the only home they could ever adjust to.
Four months later, they gave birth to a baby boy, called Arna. But by this time I seemed to drift apart from that family, and Hadrol, who I would always meet twice a week one hour after midnight, replaced Bail as a father figure. Over time Hadrol explained more about his background – how he still regards his home planet as Korriban, which is now mainly ruins but still contains much significance for him. Also how his skull mask was one that was once owned by a previous Sith Lord called Darth Nihilis.
One of the first few lessons Hadrol taught me involved this completely impossible weapon. He had already explained that the "light guns" I had on occasion seen in action were generated by focusing light waves or infrared through a gas so as to focus them to lethal intensity, but this other weapon seemed similar and yet it was just a beam of red light that would simply stop when it reached a metre out the "cannon", if it could be called as such. To add further confusion he produced a further device and "clanged" the two together in a manner that laser beam or streams of plasma energy could not do. In a completely suicidal move he set down on the ground several automatic cannons, which fired a mixture of plasma energy, projectile weapons and some even firing conventional laser beams, which were inexplicably deflected by the stream of energy from this "lightsabre" as he called the weapon. He told me how they used to be regarded as ancient weapons that were sometimes even laughed at, but in fact the technology used to produce them required altering photon molecules at the sub molecular level, so that they would behave very differently from the ones we are familiar with.
"This weapon must never leave your side as long as you live", he advised as he handed me one of the lightsabres, "And this is where your journey begins".
A further four years later, Hadrol seemed to have mysteriously persuaded the Krelli to let me leave, and simply accepted that now I had reached the age of 16 standard years, which many cultures regarded as the age of maturity, I was free to travel as I pleased. Hadrol took me to Korriban, where I was introduced to the ancient tombs of Sith Lords from millennia ago. Many dated back to before the Sith ever used the Darth title that Hadrol had, but nowadays it was up to the master to appoint his apprentice with a "Darth" title at some stage in theory teaching. So he thought to use a variation of my name, Syfo Dyas, as part of my title…
Darth Sidious.
I never thought, however, that this title suited, and I would rather use one more appropriate to my unusual ability to reverse debilitating disease by the force of will…
Darth Plagueis.
After two years on Korriban, I began feeling urges to return to Naboo, and made regular return visits to the Krelli village, as if I was able to sense the scourge that was soon to approach their world…