The Fear is Mine [Pre-Game]

[Lord Bellious]

The red, menacing dunes had held her attention as they moved across the landscape. Where there had once been a crashed freighter on the plateau amid a grand desolation, only a husk of a part remained. Violent storms must have peeled it of layers, returning sentient ingenuity that had been its making into entropy. The planet devoured such things routinely, hid them in its bowels, hoarding secrets of dark aeons past.

Lord Bellious enjoyed buried secrets. She enjoyed the idea of great cleansing, of a clean cut that let the world reinvent itself over and over. Stability and the will to endure were worthless. All that mattered was how one swam in chaos, how one created and navigated its ever-ebbing-and-flowing patterns and vestiges.

She had come here to assassinate the sentimentality that might have still lingered in her heart, and related traumas. The desert wind, the courier of inevitability of destruction, washed her of many notions that the Sith Lord had no use for. Her passion needed no distractions in pursuit of a shattering future.

She reached out through the Force as she hopped on the speeder.

I want to speak with you, Master. About the future others fear to imagine.

She sped up straight to where the tendrils of the Dark Side were leading her.

[Dapper Dog]

Jadus' shuttle was nestled in a small valley far from anything that could be called civilized territory. He was alone as she could feel waiting inside the shuttle.

[Lord Bellious]

She halted the speeder by turning it sharply, stirring a dust cloud that once settled betrayed no presence as she had already entered the shuttle. Walking with patient yet unhesitant gait she would reach him soon, kneeling in obeisance before anything was said. in this she was different than Zhorrid; she had learned to distinguish between the urge to claim her freedom apart from the constraints of time and circumstance which encouraged calculating sequences and feeling the right moment for assertion. If anything, deprivation and restraint charged her passion and thus her raw power.

"Master."

[Dapper Dog]

Jadus attached his mask smoothly as she entered and spoke in his soft but commanding voice, “Apprentice.”

“I did not expect you to come, and yet I knew it would be so. Rise and join me for tea, it is a silly affectation, but it soothes me. As much as anything can soothe a Sith.”

“Those of us who know what it means to be Sith,” he finished.

[Lord Bellious]

"I find it reassuring that you know. It's way too early for me to doubt you, Master."

She nevertheless took note of the information, well realising that he was leading her on about being a tea aficionado. Now that he had told her, he would expect one day in the future to be treated with poisoned tea. To outsmart Jadus one had to do better than take notes. For now, Moyr was not contemplating attempting anything anytime soon. It was the time to be a dutiful and faithful apprentice.

"We could agree that tea stimulates your passion the right way, Master." She chuckled, rising. "I'd love to share some with you. Korriban wilderness is nothing but parching."

[Dapper Dog]

With the mask in place he poured her a cup and then said, “You have questions, apprentice. You have my attentions, might as well exploit it.”

[Lord Bellious]

She accepted the cup. If there was something in the tea, she would imbibe it. She had fought down poison before. While she saw no sense in Jadus doing it, she couldn't exclude it. Her life had been in his hands all these years anyway.

"I have been considering bidding for a seat on the Council. Knowing what you know and planning what you plan, I would be grateful for advice what can make it a bad idea at this particular fulcrum in time when the Emperor has reappeared, beyond the obvious."

[Dapper Dog]

“The Dark Council.”

His mask just stared at her for a long moment and he added, “Ambition is the right of every Sith, a general sense of entitlement that they will overcome any challenge just because it is a challenge. This is dangerous but it is the so-called Sith way.”

“If you are waiting for me to order you to desist then you will be waiting a long time, Apprentice. This moment is yours, just as you decide to drink the tea, you must decide if this seat is worth your life. I did not join the Dark Council out of ambition it was simple necessity, there was no other.”

Jadus continued, “The Dark Council is a shadow, it pantomimes what leadership should be… it is a symptom of a greater rot at the core of the Empire. There are some on that broken relic who could make the Empire what it should be, the rest care little for being Sith and only covet power.”

“They are afraid, but their Fear is misplaced.”

[Lord Bellious]

"I can see the rot even from the outside. For myself, I care not for splendour and other shadows that obscure the decay. Power is but a means to an end, not the ultimate goal. I swear by the Sith Code, so the only thing I truly seek is liberation through the Force. Supposing I have secured a seat on the Council, what is more likely: that it will loosen my chains, or detract me?" She paused. "Your sabbatical has left me thinking, as has Zash's reluctance to step up. Was it because you couldn't have done what you wanted otherwise?"

[Dapper Dog]

Jadus was quiet as his mask dipped down to look at his cup and then raised slowly back to her. His voice answered, “Sabbatical was unexpected, I delved deep into my meditations into the mysteries of the Force and the Dark Side, some mysteries do not have easy answers, my apprentice. Some truths are too terrible to consider.”

“Why would the reluctance of Darth Zash give you pause?”

[Lord Bellious]

"Because it has constituted a seeming departure from her former behaviour. I have known her as an indiscriminate power- and knowledge-seeker. I can see just two reasons for her to relinquish her chance to claim a place on the Dark Council. First, she might have discovered one of those 'truths too terrible to consider' you speak of, and that has led her to reassess her approach to the Dark Side. Second, she may have found out that it is not worth the effort, a burden more than a true ascendancy for a Sith. Perhaps even a trap."

Moyr took a long sip. "What has struck me is that the two are not mutually exclusive. Taking a hint from your words and following my own instinct and experience, I can tell with some confidence there are truths just outside my grasp... about the Empire... that were I to know them, I would see what the replenishment of the Council is truly about. Knowing there might be a trap is the first step in evading it."

[Dapper Dog]

Jadus gave an amused ah to her words and then said, “If you intend to evade the trap then what will you do?”

[Lord Bellious]

"Find out what the chains are. What's Emperor's real plan for the Empire and the Dark Council. Do you know it, Master?" She looked at his mask intently.

[Dapper Dog]

Jadus sat there in silence and then said, “As I said some truths are beyond comprehension. The Dark Side is more than just an Emperor it is the natural state that tears down the precious order civilized peoples cling to stave off the darkness that terrifies them.”

“I wish to see these masses stripped naked of their comforts and confronted with who they truly are. What we have become.”

He then gestured at the cup before him, “I dislike tea but my late wife loved it. She was a force and with her I knew I was limited, restricted. So we came to this place and had one last cup of tea and I killed her and made Zhorrid watch. I freed myself of restrictions.”

“The Emperor is planning what he has always planned the ascendancy of the Dark Side through him and only him. He is now without restrictions,” he said calmly.

[Lord Bellious]

It all began to click. The secret facility on Yavin, the reappearance, the recruitment.

"So he will dispose of the Council, and of the Empire, once their use to him has been spent and they have become a liability. He has already been preparing for it for a long time, in secrecy from his Darths. Your own drive seems like opening accords to this, to let the Dark Side flow by breaking the barriers built around it, to witness sentient civilisations being stripped bare of their complacency and comforts, tasting their true fear."

She paused. "This recruitment is likely for a wartime Council, one for destruction and chaos. Whatever the Emperor is going to do with it shall be the end of the Empire as we know it. His Empire, you wife, they have all been chains to be broken."

She put the cup down.

"I will make my bid, Master. It's a trap, but I will trigger it. Liberation presupposes entrapment. The Sith don't avoid chains, they break them. I shall let the Dark Side work through my actions toward the greater goal rather than stand aside. It may be my quick undoing but if it isn't so by whatever circumstance, and it is I who survive and you come to perish in the end, your work shall continue."

She smiled. "In the meantime, we'll see if you've reared not one, but two Twi'lek Darths who can set fire to the galaxy."

[Dapper Dog]

Darth Jadus stared at her and then said, “I must go.”

“There are affairs that need tending to.”

He rose and left her alone, the ship’s engines begin to humming as it prepares for take off.

[Lord Bellious]

Surprised and not, she needed no further confirmation that he speculation was valid. After a brief nod to Jadus' back, she rushed out of the ship and back to her speeder. She would make her way to the wild spot she had landed Bitch on. It was time to depart for Ziost, and face the dark future.

/Scene