One dead, fallen champion to another…
Beta'd by Sesparra
With the rest of the screens slowly growing more and more glitchy in time with the increasing intensity of the frantic blinking of the indicator lights on the few intact panels, there wasn't really anything else Mara could get from the security room, as much as she might have preferred to go into the the rest of the building more informed as to what it contained than she was.
A brief moment of focus roused her feline form from where it was drowsing in a corner, and it prowled through the pile of ashes that had once claimed to be a Sith with all the casual aloofness that Mara had last seen on Grand Moff Tarkin's haughty face.
The gravity of that distant galaxy brought Mara to both a physical and metaphorical halt halfway to a door recessed into a wall, brain shooting back to what Nadd had claimed.
He'd said they were Siith, not Sith… there was something familiar about that, something that she'd heard before.
It took a moment for her to dig up a half-buried memory from the Army of Light that contextualized the situation and she felt her blood run cold. One of Skere Kaan's most effective field commanders had been a man named Vifram Namra, an insectoid species from somewhere out in the Expansion region who led a regiment composed almost entirely of cloned versions of other Sith Lords. They were often less than mentally sound, and prone to making stupid mistakes both in combat and strategically, but there were more than enough of them to be a problem for even Hoth's unorthodox offensive Soresu, and they had always insisted on referring to the organization that they were a part of as the Brotherhood of Daarkness.
Much of Namra's knowledge of how to perform his cloning process so rapidly had been lost when Lord Farfalla had killed him several years into the war, and his cloned regiment had slowly shrunk as they lost numbers and failed to replenish their ranks, but for the time that it remained active, it acted as a potent force multiplier, playing a pivotal role in every battle they participated in.
And the Emperor was attempting to reproduce something similar to that in the modern day, after a thousand years of being able to develop Sith techniques in secret, unmolested by the Jedi.
"Kark," Mara cursed, waving the door open with more haste than strictly warranted- but then again, she had almost been killed by Namra's cloned Sith, back before she'd been Knighted, and it was only the fact that Pernicar and Hoth were such close friends that had prevented her from becoming just another casualty of the Reborn Regiment, and she wouldn't have faulted another member of the Army of Light for acting thusly in a similar situation.
Either way, her haste meant that, when she felt the Force pulse with warning, she was barely fast enough to kick off the floor, spinning around to hit the abnormally low ceiling feet-first just in time to watch an inch-long lock of her hair flutter to the ground, severed by a violet lightsaber that had come far too close to taking her head from her shoulders.
She didn't quite recognize the Sith's (Siith's? Mara wasn't entirely sure whether they were actually a part of the Sith Order) face, a haggard-looking Human man being relatively ubiquitous on Coruscant, but the bronzium breastplate, a cyclopean visor that looked like it had once been a larger helmet before being torn out covering his eyes, and the trail of red fabric down the front of his robes was a dead giveaway, especially with how often members of the Order who were more staunchly anti-war than their peers in the Army of Light compared Hoth to Revan.
He didn't waste his breath on speaking, just flicked his wrist and sent a red lightsaber scything up to where Mara had been a mere moment ago. She, in turn, dropped to the floor under it and lunged forwards, slamming her lightsaber into his with all the force of a planet-killing asteroid.
He managed the blow admirably, twisting out from under the majority of the impact so he could deflect her blade to the side, but he clearly wasn't prepared for the wave of telekinetic force she released just as he raised one fist, sending him stumbling back several paces and deflecting the bloodred lightsaber that had been spinning on a direct course for her neck into the wall hilt-first, where it clattered to the ground as it winked out.
Mara flicked her hand at the returned Sith Lord, tearing as much of the heat out of both him and his equipment as she could as she lunged back in, blowing through his sluggish guard with two slashes and then a telekinetic shove.
Her lightsaber flicked up, seeking to carve a path under the breastplate and through his chest, but he managed to summon his second blade to him just in time to turn a kill-stroke into a glancing blow.
Mara snarled, then shoved off the ground, brought her legs up and sent them pistoning out, alongside a telekinetic hammerblow, slamming directly into the clone's breastplate and finally managing to take him off his feet. "I don't have time for you!" she snapped, eyes flicking back to the bank of turbolifts she could just about make out behind him in the dim light of his lightsabers.
"Make time," he growled, kipping up and raising both lightsabers into a familiar Niman guard.
As good a front as he was putting up, she could see where the guard was just subtly out of position, where he wouldn't quite be fast enough to respond to a standard Djem So offensive or someone throwing debris around telekinetically…
A brace of nearly-flat, triangular-bladed knives floated up from where Mara had secured them around her leg, orbiting her head like a particularly deadly halo, as she leapt forwards to re-engage Revan's clone, probing at his defenses while one of the blades darted away from the rest, remaining out of the clone's line of sight as it did so.
He was good, but he was falling into the same rut that beginners always did with Jar'kai: he was more or less moving both blades as one unit. Sure, he wasn't always just swinging them like a stool in a bar fight, and every now and then he was downright innovative with how he was wielding them, but for the most part he was failing to reap the benefits of two blades while still suffering from the drawbacks.
More importantly, it made it easy to lead him around by the nose, and so when Mara sent the blades exploding out from where they were floating, he had just overcommitted to a two-blade overhand strike.
For what it was worth, he disengaged admirably, dodging or deflecting most of the blades that were aiming at more serious locations, but those few that got through did nick him… and the one that Mara had sent off in advance punched through the flesh of his back and spinal cord alike without even a token attempt at deflection.
As he collapsed forward, other daggers already swarming in to finish him, Mara felt the other galaxy's gravity stretch out, only pulling on her briefly before it dragged another system into place. Like the last one, it was a single-world system, and once again, symbols flickered over the surface of the planet briefly.
Unlike the last one, this system brought with it a divergent way of thinking about technology. Personal equipment was the name of the game, so to speak, be it an absurdly simplified ascension gun, a wrist-mounted computer capable of putting some starship mainframes to shame, or even thematic shuriken and ingenious technology crammed into projectiles.
The knowledge represented not so much as technical advancement over what she knew about the technology of the galaxy, but a novel way of utilizing its principles.
Either way, it wasn't something that she could truly exploit at the moment, despite the way that just looking at the brutally simple gauntlet on her left hand made her start itching to redesign it in a more ergonomic way.
Mara spun her lightsaber once, then brought it down, cleaving the still-struggling clone's head from his shoulders. That done, she gestured and returned the daggers, two or three slightly warped from the heat of the lightsaber that had deflected them, to their place on her thigh and extinguished her own blade.
After returning it to her belt, she raised a hand and summoned the two lightsabers that the clone had been using into it. She extended her senses to them, trying to touch the Kyber within, but when she sensed the fact that they'd been made with artificial crystals, bled into near-silence almost the instant they were removed from the autoclaves, at their heart, she very nearly dropped them, and only begrudgingly kept them so she could strip them for parts when she made it out to one of the Army's caches of Kyber to build her own lightsaber.
A wave of her hand had the leaking corpse and severed head float themselves over into a corner and then immolate, clearing the way to the turbolifts.
Inside, they were relatively spartan, as such things went- clearly intended for workers rather than dignitaries, unlike the lifts that at some point between Mara's last visit to the Jedi Temple and the Emperor's… renovations… had replaced the serviceable models that the Order had used.
They were in relatively good repair, too, long-dried bloodstains notwithstanding.
For a moment, Mara considered the prospect of scraping or scorching the blood off of the bare metal of the lift before dismissing it- it would take longer than she suspected she could risk and would occupy her attention beyond what she could afford in an environment where she could reasonably expect Dark Side combatants to ooze out of the walls, possibly even literally depending on the talents of the individuals that had been cloned.
As the lift descended, she took a moment to check over her equipment. The knives on her leg had been used, but the others she'd secreted on her body were completely intact and ready to go, her lanvarok was armed and in good repair, her holdout blaster was fully charged-
The doors slid open with an anticlimactic "ding" that had Mara's lightsaber snapping out in a Shii-Cho guard, only remaining unlit thanks to a heroic effort of will.
Thankfully, the corridor that the lift opened out onto was empty, though the flickering lights didn't make that particularly easy to discern, and Mara lowered her weapon as she emerged from the lift. The builders of the facility weren't anywhere near nice enough to label which direction the room full of tubes had been, but the Force pulled her, cat in tow, to enter the side to the right, so she did, following the Force through the dim, intermittent light of fluorescent bulbs in poor repair (or, maybe, deprived of the power to operate at full efficiency) past a number of unmarked doors and branching corridors.
The door that she found herself at was only distinguished from the others along the corridor by some slight warping of the frame near the latch, nothing that a less observant (or rather, less guided by the Force) person would pay particular attention to.
Despite the fact that the door was ostensibly locked, it slid open without any sort of manipulation of the latch or keypad on the wall, and once she stepped through she could see why: someone had practically ripped the wall apart and smashed the lock mechanism. For a moment, she was worried about the possibility of one of the clones having some sort of empathic link with some of the chrysalides that had been missing, but then she saw the marks of humanoid fingers having rent apart the metal by main force and relaxed.
Raw Force-enhanced strength was nothing to be scoffed at, but that was relatively simple to handle when comparted to a herd of chrysalides given common purpose and the directing intelligence of a Sith worth cloning, and though she'd fought her way out of that situation more than once, Mara was grateful she wouldn't have to do so again.
The rest of the room was… more or less what she expected: long rows of plastoid cylinders, some empty, some all but destroyed (mostly from the outside, but there were a few whose glass had clearly exploded from the inside as someone, or something, had smashed its way out) and some still full. As she'd noted from her brief time studying the cameras, many of them were the same blonde woman, who she could now identify as a Sephi having gotten a closer look, but others contained an eclectic mix of all sorts of species, mostly humanoid but there were chrysalides, tuk'ata, and other favored experimental subjects represented.
The gravity of that distant galaxy surged once again, and Mara stumbled sideways by half a step as she straightened, not expecting it from where she was halfway bent over one of the empty cylinders to examine the bloody interior.
From what she could tell, there wasn't nearly enough blood there to account for a body being fully exsanguinated, so why did-
There was a hissing sound, as if an air lock the size of the Jedi Temple was depressurizing, and then all at once, all of the remaining pods unsealed themselves.
Naturally, the first thing out of its pod was a tuk'ata, all but licking its lips at the bounty of helpless meat just ripe for the devouring, and Mara held back both a sigh and a curse as she ignited her lightsaber.
She never got the easy missions, did she?
And that's that!
Perks earned:
Gadgeteer (Young Justice, 300 CP): An inventive mind and the know how to make gadgets; though they can't do anything too outside of normal physics, you are perfectly capable of making functional things like grappling hooks, tracking devices, boomerangs that automatically return to you, and trick arrows. In addition to being very cheap to make, any gadgets that you have are almost as intuitive to use as your very limbs, allowing you to use and switch between them easily and without hassle.
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