For seven generations, her family had stood proudly as the Chiss Ascendancy's liaisons to the Sith Empire's capital planet of Dromund Kaas. That is, until she came along.
Among the Chiss, children born with Force-sensitivity were rare; so rare, in fact, that there was a stigma surrounding them. She was a plague. A black mark. A poison. Her family was removed from their position, and their social and financial standing crumbled.
So began her life.
Nineteen years later, she found herself standing in front of a human pilot who was tripping up on every part of her name, and mispronouncing all of it. She rolled her eyes and leaned against the shuttle in annoyance. She didn't have time for this. She had just been summoned to Korriban, well ahead of schedule, and she'd be damned if she was going to be tardy on her first day.
"You know what? Just use my Core Name: Nikkitis."
The pilot visibly relaxed at the much easier to say name. She shook her head resignedly and sighed. Were all humans incapable of saying Chiss names, or was it just this one? Her Sith instructor and her Twi'lek instructor both seemed to be entirely capable of saying it. She could only guess that humans had a harder time wrapping their tongues around Cheunh, her native tongue. Of course, she had also been taught Basic, as all alien species had. Now, whether they could actually speak it was a different story altogether. It made some sense, as humans were the most prolific of the species in the galaxy, one barely being able to go anywhere without at least seeing them around, or evidence of their existence.
Yet another way in which the galaxy revolves around humans.
She produced her identification card for the pilot to check her in as she scanned her surroundings. She may as well get in practice at being suspicious of everything in her environment now.
All of the training she had received thus far was on her grandfather's secure estate on Csilla, the expansive training grounds being the only place safe enough for her to practice her "craft," as her parents had disdainfully put it. They most assuredly blamed her for her family's fall from the good graces of the Chiss Ascendancy leadership, as though she had any control over how she had been born. But this had led her to being far too lax at inspecting her surroundings. In order for her to survive amongst the Sith, though, that shortcoming had to be immediately rectified.
A mouse droid lazily scurried past her and she scrambled to remember the schematics of one as she watched it bob and weave between people, crates, and the odd astromech or GNK droid doing various tasks. Imperial Intelligence often used mouse droids to gather information due to their small size and inconspicuous appearance, she recalled, and she stood upright once more. It wouldn't do for her to appear lazy to Intelligence.
Time seemed to stretch on as she waited for her identification card to be handed back to her, so she began to inspect the shuttle that was to bear her on to her new life in the Sith Academy. She was only slightly surprised that the shuttle was an assault-class variant, but given the size and maneuverability statistics that had been drilled into her, it made sense. The firepower was virtually negligible, and completely unnecessary for this type of trip, but the Empire was nothing if not prepared. She begrudgingly acknowledged the foresight required in every step of the Empire's existence, both impressed by it, and not insignificantly intimidated, by the prospect of that rapidly becoming her reality as well.
I wonder if they'll let me look in the cockpit.
She wasn't inexperienced in flight, though, admittedly, she wasn't the best at it. Given that she had only flown Chiss spacecraft, and all of those were navigated around the relative position of Csilla within the galaxy, she couldn't help but wonder how the Empire's ships differed in their navigational capabilities, and how their position was calculated. Given the Chiss' tendencies to be completely isolationist, she hadn't been given the opportunity to try out Imperial ships, and she cursed the fact that she would likely be relegated to relying on a droid to do her flying.
Lost in her thoughts, she didn't register that the pilot was trying to catch her attention, but she subconsciously reached for the card that was proffered.
"My lord?"
She snapped back to reality abruptly.
"Are you ready to take off now, my lord?"
"If everything is in order, then yes," she said with as much of an air of authority as she could muster.
She'd have to get used to being called my lord as well, though she found the fact that all genders were called by the masculine variety of the title distasteful. She would much rather be called lady, but perhaps humans, the main driving force in the Empire, viewed femininity as weaker than masculinity, and the Empire valued strength to its very core. All of this was so new to her, and her head swam with questions.
It wasn't that she hadn't studied the other species in the galaxy, the interactions between them, or ensured that she was completely up-to-date on all of the political intrigue, but rather that all of the information she had gathered was all theoretical to her. The reality of the situation was far different than she expected, with massive gaps in the nuances of social etiquette between individuals outside of the Ascendency being impossible to relay in the books she had read. She would need to be flexible, yet careful, going forward. Perhaps she would try her hand at what she understood to be human levity and see where that "landed" her.
She looked down in mild disgust at the acolyte garb that had been sent to her, along with the hand-written invitation from Overseer Tremel to come to the Sith Academy. She remembered thinking that the invitation was rather old-fashioned of him, but, again, humans were almost completely foreign to her, a conceptual race to be studied from afar. Perhaps there was some kind of signal intended with that, some sense of antiquity trying to be conveyed. She knew humans were prone to indirect communication efforts and passive-aggressive jibes were common. But the clothing, she decided, disgusted her. Gray? She much preferred black, but she knew this was probably due to the slimming effects of black, as well as the fact that black was commonly used amongst the Chiss to pay homage to the race as a whole, black being the culmination of all of the colors of the Ruling Houses.
Curiosity spurned her onwards as she looked around the shuttle and inspected the others she found herself with. Two armored soldiers were in here with her, along with a human female in a flight suit. The female seemed to be ill at ease with her presence, looking stiffly forward, back uncomfortably straight, arms firmly secured to her sides, even though that meant that she was staring directly into the helmet of the man opposite her in a most awkward manner. Was it that she was a Force-sensitive, or the fact that she was a Chiss that made this woman so uncomfortable? Both were equally possible, though it likely was a combination of the two. She had been warned that humans often found Chiss unsettling, just as she found human interactions both curious and upsetting. Everything seemed both informal and formal with this species, and she was finding it hard to understand where the line was drawn.
Refocusing as she heard the engines change pitch, she watched the in-cabin indication lights to see when the pilots engaged the landing gear. She counted 83 seconds before she felt the cushioned landing. She would have to ask to be present for a pre-flight check in the future, as the female pilot shot out of her seat the moment they landed and made a motion to exit the craft. One of the armored soldiers stood as well, and she finally got a good look at his blaster rifle, mentally noting it as the standard-issue TH-17 with some in-house modifications. Having been lightly trained on infantry weaponry, she could appreciate the modifications being done, as the TH-17 could prove unwieldy at times. The second armored soldier remained seated, probably as a guard to the pilot and co-pilot squeezed into the small cockpit.
The door slid into its slot off to the side as the ramp lowered and she was immediately hit by the dry heat and brightness of Korriban. The rusty orange of the planet did nothing to ease the sting of the light on her eyes after the dimness of the cabin that she had been immersed in for the last hour and a half. Ignoring the discomfort she felt, she made her way down, followed closely by the soldier and female.
An older human male walked toward her as she descended.
"At last, you've arrived," he began. "Good, good. There is much to do and every moment is critical."
She turned back to look at her entourage, and the female bowed in a stiff, yet respectfully graceful, manner before leaving her to return to the shuttle. She turned back to face the man who greeted her, and began walking down the ramps from the landing pad to follow him if he chose to leave right away.
"I'm Overseer Tremel. For decades, I've administered the trials that prove who is and is not worthy to join the Sith Order. The trials are a chance to weed out the weak. Those who face them either survive and become Sith, or die."
She bowed her head to him.
"I won't disappoint you."
"Good. I risked a lot to make this happen." He abruptly turned and began walking to go inside, leaving her to politely trot behind him until she was walking by his side. "Yes, you are here and ahead of schedule because of me. I expect you to obey. You face your trials, you serve me, and I will make you the most powerful acolyte here."
"Sounds like a plan."
"The trials themselves are difficult enough, but they are hardly the greatest threat you face. There's an acolyte here named Vemrin. He's your enemy and he will try to kill you. We must prepare you."
"How is it that I already have an enemy?"
"All you need to know is that you are a threat to him, and he to you. We'll make sure you can stand up to that threat. The practice sword you've arrived with is insufficient - the blade of lesser acolytes. You need a dominating weapon. In the tomb of Ajunta Pall, there's an old armory. A strong Sith warblade awaits you there."
He proceeded to tell her about the tomb and the dangers within. Once they parted, she made her way to the tomb, easily cutting her way through the beasts known as k'lor'slugs that overran both the planet and the tomb. She couldn't quite understand why both the Overseer and the Sergeant she met within the tomb seemed to worry for her safety at facing the disgusting-looking things. Her training droids back on Csilla were far more difficult and deadly than these chitinous larvae. Even the tomb raiders she tangled with briefly were handily defeated compared to the combat droids. This was deadly to acolytes? She scoffed at what she perceived to be an insult, or at the very least, a gross underestimation of her strength, as she retrieved the warblade from its mount. This Vemrin fellow had better be worth the warning, or she'd be bored.
The exit of the tomb was, mercifully, at the foot of the Sith Academy. Having been raised on an extremely cold planet like Csilla, she found the heat almost unbearable, the air seeming to weigh heavy in her lungs, burning her throat in the same way as the oppressive rays of the sun here was trying to burn her skin. Asking directions from the Sergeant at the foot of the ramp, she took a shaky breath, made her way inside, and began her first proper day in her new life.