Chapter 5: The New Master

Palpatine:

At the exact time I met with my future master, and it seemed almost as if he had prepared a test for me. That night I encountered the superficial appearance of Darth Hadrol, but I already had the ability to sense personalities to know that this was in fact Lord Plagueis, emerging victorious from the Sith master who betrayed him.

He would never know that all I cared about was which if the two won, which would prove to me which of the two, were stringer. He would never know that it was I who, by sensing the presence of a Sith Lord during my membership of Black Sun, was able to convince Darth Hadrol to carry out a move that would almost certainly bring him into conflict with his apprentice. I knew that by Sith tradition there were never more than two at any one time, and that for me to be one of those two, I would have to endure that one of the existing Sith was eliminated. I was not concerned which one would survive, only that it would be stronger of the two, and the stronger one would be the better one to teach me the ways of the Force.

"I congratulate you on your victory", I told him " I understand you have usurped the command of your traitorous master, and now you are the new Lord of the Sith".

Darth Plagueis:

For all of Palpatine's abilities he never struck me as someone who would be interested in the ways of the force, yet he claimed he had some kind of ability and needed someone to bring his abilities out. At this point I really didn't trust this person. But he allowed me to give him a kind of trial, whereby he would explain his long-term plans and why he felt there was a need to re-balance the force and change the way the Republic was governed. He made all sorts of preposterous claims about commercial organisations had somehow got the entire Senate in their pocket, and that industry had completely eroded the power of democracy. I really wondered what he was talking about, as on Naboo the only experience I'd had with business and finance were the various village markets on both Naboo and Tattooine, selling clothes and machinery on the streets, and negotiating fairly reasonable prices. To suggest that these types of people were galactic dictators seemed like compete lunacy.

But soon, my perceptions of this were turned upside-down…

Rather than taking me to some backwater world, where lawlessness was rife, like the first planet I remember, Tattooine, he showed me what was going on in the suburbs of Coruscant. Before going anywhere he requested I train him in a psychological cloaking ability I had acquired from my old master, which allows most weak-minded people to not even realise you are there. We followed someone into his apartment who was applying for employment through the Holonet and observed how he was being asked to agree to all sorts of ridiculous conditions – that he would agree to allow his company of employment to have insect-sized cameras following him all the time, to ensure that his behaviour at all times was compatible with the company's expectations.

We had visited about twenty different apartments that day, and each time we came across wilful volunteers to allow all sorts of horrific observational agreements assigned to themselves.

He agreed at this point to show me the nefarious hive of operations. Although most of the ordinary commercial work was carried out on Nemoidia, their more covert operations were carried out on the uninviting world of Mustafar.

When we arrived I knew why they chose this place. No one would send any form of inspectors to this world, which was continually turning itself inside out with volcanic activity.

Palpatine told me we would be very limited in what we could observe as the surveillance here was greater than anything the Republic could dream of. But at his point I would beg to differ. I was, after all the master rather than the apprentice.

"What are you doing?" He asked. "Their remote sensors will find us any second".

"You have to trust me " I answered, "If you want me to help you then you must realise I have the ability to stop these people. When you see that no ship locks onto us you will know that there is nothing they can do against us".

He seemed very reluctant to allow me to go any further but I convinced him that if we couldn't outsmart this enemy now that we could never beat them. Before he could even figure out where this commercial union hid their technological centre I felt I knew already. I seemed to be able to sense complex technology and even identify remotely if hat technology was good or evil. I showed him toward hat I felt was the inner sanctum of this Corporate Hell.

We were within a mile of their main factory but Palpatine dared go no further. I told him to go back to the ship, and that I would compete the journey. Foreseeing the Commercial Alliances' horrific surveillance techniques, I took my own visual recorder with me. On the way I played back a few of the recordings, of the funny creatures in Lake Yoda, of Bail Kenobi playing a bat-and-ball game with his son, then set it to record the shadowy activities in this factory. Any moment now I would be coming into range of its visual sensors, or maybe not.

Practising with my own camera, I was able to record objects that were not really there, and also to point it towards a volcano and ting into it to make it look as if I was recording a sunny desert. The n I tried the ultimate test, of pointing the recorder at myself and picking up nothing but a recording of what was behind me. Compared to getting into the inner workings of someone's DNA cycle, altering the inner workings of a simple machine seemed like child's play.

I cold almost visualise their video capture devices as a source of evils eyes, I could visualise when they would see me approaching them. I was then able to see through the eyes of these cameras and make them see what I wanted them to see

With very little effort I was able to walk amongst the workers of this factory. All along I observed a large screen that displayed what was going o in the factory and, as planned, I, oddly enough, did not appear on it, despite hundreds of cameras pointing at me at any one time.

This commercial organisation had sunken to new depths. As well as observational cameras they had been manufacturing all sorts of implants that would attach into people's glands and even their brains, to monitor their hormonal activity and in some cases even to control it. At his point, my hatred had taken away my mind-control. I had appeared on one of their sensors and every alarm went off. They had deployed a platoon of very brutish-looking guards who would be no more than a target to take out my aggression on. They were so easy to dispatch I was able during the fight to send a message to Palpatine to jam any transmissions that may leave this planet.

After killing al the guards I would not atop there. The Infiltrator ship, the Scimitar, we had brought with us had a good arsenal of nuclear warheads that would be sufficient to destroy all the rather unprotected factories that created this surveillance equipment. We left Mustafar, and whilst briefly uncloaking the Infiltrator ship, let loose several warheads towards strategic targets, converting the very factories into fiery decorations, that would add to the volcanic heat of this planet.

The ship we used that day would turn out to be our ideal weapon in the future. It was originally one that Palpatine had conned a secret shipbuilding company on some backwater planet into building under the supervision of an individual caller Raith Sienar. Soon after this escapade we named the ship the Scimitar.

Our little visit to Mustafar would disrupt the Commercial Alliance's plans for some years but I realised that we would need a long-term plan to restore democracy to the Republic and keep the commercial sectors under control. I knew we could never simply come out and tell everyone that we were the Sith and that we were now in control. We would always have to hide in the shadows or pretend to be something else. I told him how my time in the Krelli order meant that I could easily convince the Jedi order that I was wanting to join the Jedi Academy on Coruscant and could possibly rise to become a member of the Jedi council. Palpatine also seemed to think his career in the Naboo military meant that he could take up a successful political career and eventually become a senator with a great deal of influence, and that together we could convince the Republic to make a heavier stand against the Commercial Alliance. Palpatine also warned that the Commercial Alliance were also building up private armies and even getting droid manufacturing industries to experiment with dedicated combat droids, and that it would eventually be necessary to convince the Republic to develop a fearsome military deterrent.