When you descend into a cave system, the air is the first thing you must check.
Beta'd by Sesparra
The morning after the gala, the Emperor summoned Mara before him.
"What is your bidding, my Master?" she asked, grateful for the fact that she was kneeling with her head inclined, gazing upon the floor of what had been where the High Council held their meetings so that he couldn't see the momentary loss of composure on her face at the prospect of referring to a Sith Lord as Master.
"Rise, my Hand," he said, and Mara did, taking in the man's appearance for the first time as a Jedi.
To the untrained eye, his scarred visage could be written off as mere age and Dark Side exposure, but Mara had seen more than her fair share of people harmed or even killed by Force Lightning during her time in the Army of Light, and she knew the marks that that left behind, even after decades of healing. Aside from that, the "harmless grandfather" routine that he so delighted in putting on for his enemies was absent, although he did walk with his cane now, as well as setting aside the lightsaber he'd trained her with previously, so it wasn't impossible that his exposure to the Darkness he cultivated or even the ravages of time had harmed him in body if not in spirit more than he preferred to let on.
That distant galaxy pulled on Mara again, but it was a weak sensation, and almost before it dissipated, the Emperor had risen from his throne and beckoned. "Come, join me."
Mara did, taking his outstretched arm and focusing harder than strictly necessary on the kind of damage that could be done in the chaos after the fall of this Sith Empire before she'd had the chance to either provide some sort of framework for a coup that wouldn't result in a fractured state and a brutal war among the splinters of the Empire or a viable alternative state capable of defending itself from the manipulations and predations that Palpatine had exploited to create the Empire.
Palpatine walked through the palace aimlessly, not so much as a ripple in the Force to guide his steps, and eventually, Mara repeated herself. "What is your bidding, my Master?"
"Tell me," he said, after a moment of silence, "what do you think is the most important feature of my Imperial reign?"
Mara took a moment to come up with the kind of pragmatic answer that he would have expected out of the Emperor's Hand. "Your ability to project force within it and thus control it," she said, touching her lightsaber in demonstration.
"Eminently practical," he replied, sounding just the slightest bit amused. "I do not know that I would call that the core strength of my Empire's power, but it is only natural, given your training, that your thoughts would lead you in such a direction. It is close enough to what I had intended to discuss as to be immaterial, in any rate. I have… a number of facilities throughout the galaxy that contain several contingencies, as well as training lesser acolytes of the Dark Side to be able to, as you say, project force. One of these facilities is on Centax-2, and it has… missed the time by which it was supposed to provide a periodic report."
Mara nodded. "And I am to investigate the problem and, if I am capable, rectify it?"
Palpatine's hooded eyes lingered on Mara for a moment too long to be truly comfortable, even before she'd remembered her time in the Army of Light, and she spared a moment to ensure that the shroud of secrecy with which she protected herself showed him only what he expected to see in her head. "Indeed, my Hand."
"I swear it will be done," said Mara, almost bowing to him out of habit before remembering that, first, she was holding his arm, and secondly that that was far more a Jedi trait than one he had bothered to instill in his personal assassin.
"Excellent," croaked the Emperor, a sinister undertone to the word dominating Mara's focus. "I look forward to seeing your results."
Mara was much less prepared for the mission than she would have preferred to be in any other situation, but given the circumstances, even with an understanding of technology superior to anything the Architects could have dreamed of at their heights and the Force as her ally, she wasn't nearly fast enough to do more than rig up a miniaturized transmitter and data storage device in the pommel of the lightsaber she'd been wielding for years.
Still, a decade in the Army of Light, even if the first several years were kept away from the fighting, didn't come from collecting stamps, and without the Emperor directly supervising, she was much freer to use her preferred Niman, which was, save for possibly Soresu, the single best Form for fighting isolated from even the possibility of aid. Even beyond that, she had been supplied with an… extensive armory, and while taking all of it or even a significant portion would have been impractical, there were enough small articles and exotic pieces worth their weight that she could justify bringing them with her in a pack.
"Keep the engines warmed up, Teethree," said Mara, lightsaber in hand but not yet lit as she walked down the ramp. "Hopefully this is an in-and-out, but I might need a quick exit depending on what exactly the situation at hand is."
"Of course, Mistress," the protocol droid replied, inclining its head at Mara before returning to the cockpit, and Mara turned away from the closing ramp to scrutinize the facility.
It looked vaguely like most other buildings on Centax-2 did, all straight lines, smooth curves, and austere façade, but unlike most, this one had visible signs of disuse. The painted sections were peeling, the duracrete was pockmarked with water damage, and rust speckled the metallic components like door hinges and windowsills.
It looked, in other words, like a somewhat newly disused building owned by a company that couldn't afford to maintain it but hadn't had an offer to buy it worth taking, which was more than likely done entirely intentionally.
The door creaked as she pushed it open, and though there was some light filtering in through the dusty transparisteel of the building's façade, the pitting and corrosion had taken their toll on what illumination managed to pass through the windows into the interior of the lobby, and so Mara ignited her lightsaber as she walked, violet light spilling across the uneven floor. Absently, Mara kicked a rock, which clattered irregularly against the cracked and uneven tiles on the floor.
There was a miasma in the Force that intensified with every step Mara took deeper into the building, and she paused for a moment, closing her eyes and reaching for a Force technique that she hadn't had need for in years.
When she reopened her eyes, they were glowing with actinic white light, and then a wave of light burst from her, almost bomblike in its intensity, and she spared a moment or two to gawk dumbfoundedly at the eruption of Force energy that had come from her. She'd used Force Light before, under Pernicar's watch, and it hadn't been anywhere as fierce, or as easy to direct… ah, well, a matter for another time, she thought.
The miasma, unfortunately, was not more than mildly stirred, despite the scouring power of the Light, which was never a good sign.
The distant galaxy's gravitational pull shot out past Mara and dragged in a single-world system, mostly ocean with a variety of biomes on its landmasses. For a moment, it glowed, arcane sigils that she'd never seen before, either under the Emperor's thumb or with the Army of Light, superimposing themselves over it in sequence, and as each sigil vanished, she understood what it meant.
These sigils were, at their core, ways of lying to the universe in order to express energy through weapons, mostly elementally, but as more and more of them imprinted themselves onto Mara's psyche, the more she thought that there was an order, a system, even, to them, and the more she thought that she could probably figure out other forms of exotic energy applied through the Force and inscribe them onto an implement more permanently.
This knowledge didn't so much as cause a hitch in her step, but it did very nearly distract her from the whispered warnings of the Force, and so the detonation of the plasma mine almost caught her off guard.
Fortunately, Mara's contemplation had not rendered her wholly deaf to the Force, and so she raised a barrier between herself and the detonation, one that the wash of plasma failed to penetrate. Around the room, other mines began to detonate, hurling flechettes, poison gas, and in two cases chunks of ice everywhere, and Mara wrapped the barrier around her.
Once the detonations had finished and she could allow the slightly mirror-sheened barrier to fold away, returning to the Force, Mara hurled her lightsaber, sending it spinning through the clouds of poisonous gases, and thankfully in its wake they ignited, warming the room somewhat but not poisoning her.
The lightsaber smacked back into her palm and she proceeded down into a corridor that had only been revealed by the plasma mine spilling through what had appeared to be a wall at the time to deactivate some sort of holographic camouflage generator, which was sparking and melting on the floor erratically as she bent down to examine it, extinguishing her lightsaber as she did so.
Security through obscurity was all well and good, but the minute that someone could penetrate that veil they knew they'd found something worth finding, and Mara had very much pierced that shroud.
The Emperor wasn't prone to using minefields and advanced technology to defend his strongholds, so whoever it had been, it wasn't him- which meant that his projects had either been hijacked or had gotten away from him, neither of which was good especially with the proximity of Centax-2 to a major population center.
That said, Mara thought, things weren't quite as bad as they could be.
Whoever had overtaken this facility had clearly done so recently based on the hologram generator- it was a model that was designed for rapid deployment even by someone without the kind of technological expertise that Mara had, coming online out of the box within a matter of hours, and they were intended for months or even years of continuous activity with little to no maintenance during that same period. Mara pulled out a palm-sized screen from a belt pouch and connected it to what was left of the machine, and while most of it had been slagged, there was enough system clock left to show that this system had been put together less than a week before.
Accounting for the Emperor's security precautions and the time it would take to procure this kind of high-quality equipment, Mara thought, the facility had probably been compromised less than a month ago, and given the fact that they'd set up such a high-end holoprojector they'd probably intended to use this facility for the long term.
The fact that they didn't account for required check-ins, dead man's switches, and other contingencies meant they were either stupid or new, which, given the projector, Mara was inclined more towards stupid than new. Any two-bit thug with a blaster and a credit account could find a hologram generator, one way or another, but it took someone with both discipline and experience to circumvent all of the protections that Palpatine could afford to apply to this base, and clearly, whoever had done this lacked one or the other.
Mara stood from the still-melting holographic generator- it was well armored, but not nearly well enough- and disconnected the screen from it, returning it to its place in a belt pouch as she reignited her lightsaber and confidently strode deeper into the corridor.
The dark miasma continued to build, and eventually, she came upon the first signs of struggle: carbon scoring on the walls from blaster bolts, flecks of blood here and there, and the occasional shattered crater in the duracrete floors. It was another thirty feet before the first body came into view, already partially disintegrated thanks to decomposition.
The head was laying six feet away from the rest of the corpse, cut cleanly and with the telltale cauterization and abrupt smooth plane on the bones of a lightsaber wound.
And that's that!
Perks earned:
Magic: Enchanting (Samurai Jack, 200 CP): You can grant magical properties to weapons by marking them with ancient runes. Right now you only know how to give weapons elemental properties, but you can learn more enchantments by studying other enchanted and magical weapons.
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