"I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you. Which is the darkness of God."
– T.S. Eliot, East Coker
IC: I-Ron and Zoradon, inside the mind of Sol Kira.
The anxious eyes of the apprentice were eyeing I-Ron as he entered her mind. Giant unholy eyes that gazed upon that unending backroom of sterile beige walls and wooly carpet.
Those eyes, gazing from the sky, injected with red, blood vessels popping and healing, red retreating and then coming back like a breathing, carefully planned to not explode into a panic attack, but knowing that sooner or later the gates of raw and uncontrolled feeling would implode. It was a palpable taste in the atmosphere inside there.
I-Ron wasthere on her true form. Almost naked, only the bright lights of her own blue aura covering her, feeling the carpet with her feet for the first time. Ethereal like a fog, weightless yet with skin and bones and flesh. Or some facsimile of that.
“So this is how it feels inside here. Can you hear me? Are you there?” I-Ron took her time for an answer. Gazing up to the sky, the unending universe that was the demonic eyes of Sol were still watching her, moving and trembling like an incorrect glitch in reality.
“Or you want me to fish you out of there myself, demon?”
“Hello Knight I-Ron, it is nice to speak to you again,” Came a voice from his apprentice’s mind, echoing as if they were in a cave, but it was not her own. It was deep and strange, and a figure appeared in the black void, a strange abomination coming from nowhere.
“I don’t believe we ever formally met, my name is Zoradon. Your apprentice is in need of guidance, guidance only we can give her. She is weak and afraid.”
“She is more than weak and afraid. She is clay, being molded by my hands. Not by the hands of Empress Volshe, and especially not by your hands. She is mine, and mine alone.” I-Ron´s voice cracked like a thunder whip, full of wretched pride for what she considered to be her property until her knighting ceremony arrived.
“I already suspected there was someone else living inside here. I told her to mutate herself in order to evolve, shed her skin and chain the beast inside her, to pursue the path of metamorphosis. So, did she allow herself to be infected by your will and share a room in her mind? Was that part her idea or yours?” I-Ron said, raising her hand trying to locate the information she needed using telepathy, trying to draw from the infinite corridor of Sol´s mind the thing she was looking for, reality molding itself by her willing it.
“She agreed to it, but this is what I do. Humans are an intriguing species, I’m sure you can agree with that. I plagued her mind with voices to change the mark on her skin, every gift I give comes with a price. She wanted strength, she wanted others to fear her. She wanted to be freed from the voices I plagued her with. Let’s face it, she’s small. No one will ever fear her without me.” He said, pacing across the endless void.
“She could be death, pure death with our help. She just needs more training, to utilize the Force in ways she doesn’t even understand yet. Being cut off from the force for almost all her life did her no favors, with your help she could be a powerful Sith one day if she lives long enough…” He paused, looking at him inquisitively.
“What is it that you seek, Knight I-Ron? Let’s work together.”
“What was my apprentice hiding from me? I want to….No! I need to know.” I-Ron then responded.Her fingers trailing the air like touching the keyboard of a computer, while reality and no-reality bended backwards and upwards, changing the dreaming realm of the mind of Sol.
“You see what she sees, Then what was she doing with Volshe? I have the need of an inquisitor. I need to know.”
She did not responded to the fear question, her single minded behaviour already set her on course for one thing only. Besides, one could get lost in the oniric backroom of a Sith´s mind, if one strayed so long from a known path.
“She has been working with Volshe. To be quite honest, I think Volshe has manipulated her. She wouldn’t say that, but she has made her care for others. Utterly disgusting, sympathy is like a leech. Regardless, Empress Volshe may save the galaxy. But I feel that any argument over the Sith Throne is useless. The Sith have died out before over things such as this, you’d think they would learn.”
“It's in our genes, in our cultural memes.” I-Ron retorted, springing ready to point the finger at the demon because of that ego he held.
“We have a tribe, a family, a membership group. And its natural due to our upbringing that we feel compelled to help me, the in-group mentality prevails above all. That's why most Siths dare not to help each other, that's why most Sith´s are going to be dead soon, or are already dead. You can't fight your genes, you can't fight destiny. We are meant to help us one another because we are designed for that!”
Green tentacles emerged from the arms of I-Ron, wrapping around them like a naked snake that finally shed its skin. The tentacles were coiling with one another, giving the image of a small tornado.
“I could Drain you if I wanted. I could snuff you, inhuman wretch. This is the body of my apprentice, not yours. Do not teach her your faulty philosophy or else i´ll pray you away, draining your soul.”
“I could take her over at any moment. Draining me would just drain her, she would have to learn how to remove me herself. My claws are too deep in her mind,” He retorted, smirking at the Knight.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know? She’ll be waking soon from the illusion I put her under. Perhaps you want to know what she’s seeing?”
“No.” I-Ron muttered, recalling the tentacles, proving useless now.
“I want her to see what I am seeing, its much more important. You must see what is happening outside.” Bombarding the mind of Sol with the thousands of pictures and videos of information that I-Ron got from the outside, a snap from the past being imprinted in her memories by I-Ron, so she could be up to date in a LSD fueled mental laberinth.
Still, the Shard was confident in her abilities to dislocate the demon from inside her. Everything in life that was worth something was hard, and she began to slowly understand that she had put her own apprentice in peril, in more peril than needed. Was she not a good master? Probably not, she was astray with no shepherd to guide her, and this was the result. I-Ron, like any good master worth its salt, blamed herself for her state now. She was weak, but that was to be expected, however her mind was fractured between her dark side tainted humanity and that demon living inside her. That could not be allowed.
On how to remove such an entity of flames and damnation was the subject of another story entirely. Because when I-Ron finally got what she needed inside the mind of her precocious apprentice, she finally got out of there.
She felt as being pulled backwards by a giant invisible hand, the centrifugal forces tearing her mind-self limb by limb, soul and mind being ripped from inside her skull in the same snap movement that one uses to separate the skin from the flesh of the rabbit.
I-Ron was finally in the waking world. There was no invisible oniric backroom where the terror of the human condition is made manifest. Now, he was holding her in his arms. The demon did that, put her in a small coma. She was sleeping live a baby, her factions were so mathematically beautiful, eyes closed he, with a metal finger caressing her right cheek.
“This is my apprentice, and I am training her wrong.” I-Ron thinks to himself.
“I must do something about it.”
Then he helps her to stand up as she wakes up.
“How long have I been out?” Kira said to him.
“Only a few minutes, my child.” It was about time for her to wake up.
“We have to go. Please. We have to go,” she begged her master, scrambling to sit up. “
Please, we shouldn’t have come here. We have to go. I don’t want to die. There’s so much I haven’t told you, and I’m sorry. But I can’t tell you it all here. We have to get off this planet, we have to live…”
She paused, noticing someone else in the door frame of the room she had wandered off to. Lord Voidwalker.
“My father will not help the people of Onderon, he is a coward. We have to get off this planet, I need to go home. We need to go home.”
“NO.” I-Ron with a resounding voice, a command word said.
“You are my apprentice, and you are going to listen to me if you don't want me to drain you until all what remains of you are is putrid skeleton. I can and I will whip your back worse than your father did if you keep this charade going. Shut up and do as I tell you.”
Forgetting how she helped I-Ron to comb her hair, to tie her shoelaces, to even get dress. Forgetting all the selfies, I-Ron acted like a ruthless Sith Master. It was an act, he was extremely nervous, but due to his mechanical nature his voice could not show such. The pyramids, the zombies, the deaths all around them, everything was making everything so dam hard. With no God to look for them, with so few options on what to do, being besieged by all fronts and being cornered like animals by forces beyond their comprehension, I-Ron finally snapped.
He was too friendly with her apprentice, and she was walking a path that he did not wanted because of it. This was to be the reckoning, the judgment day, and if both of them would die, then at least her apprentice had to be pure enough to go to heaven, while I-Ron bleeded the infidels one by one enough time to make her enter.
“Black pyramid ships emerged from hyperspace, they did not appeared on the radars, so I suspect a secret technology or a godlike amount of force power to move ships with the force, or Sith Illusions to make us panic.” I-Ron said his sitrep to his master, Lord Nathemus, The Sedriss.
With the power of the computer I-Ron gazed into the cameras of the courtyard. A massive swarming ocean of undead doing battle with the Sith. Who remained outside of the gathering that could achieve such massive numbers with his or her sorcery? Who was the one responsible for all of this? It didn't make any sense.Who and why?
How many jumps from hyperspace must an armada so big do before arriving at their destination? How many instances of failure could they encounter that could let slip that they were in fact inbound to Korriban? Yes, he was aware of the usage of Fold Space, since his favorite siths in the order used it to great effect. One ship is possible, but not in the heat of battle when the cortisol can break the concentration of even the greatest master of all time. One can be expected, two is a maybe, three ships is demented, the power of a god. And I-Ron was expected to believe that so many, 10.000 of them did that? There was something wrong there, no Sith was capable of that.
Maybe God was capable of that.
But he would never turn against us. He is one of us.
Could it be that the radar was hacked or tampered with? Yes, it must be that. No matter that I-Ron chekec that the moment he arrived, because the only explanation beyond that was that a god was present, or a godlike being, which was more acceptable.
“Master, I need to go to the hangar. There, inside my ship, my weapons await me, and i´ll be needing them. After that, where do you want us to rendezvous?” Then he gazed at both Sol and Karin, the apprentices of I-Ron, trained by the living legacy of Nathemus.
“You two come with me. Sol, your weapons are in my ship.”
At the same time, using Mechu Deru to multitask, he tried to send a message to the radar facilities of the temple. The communication network of the same temple, yes, but enhanced by his Mechu Deru to be faster and more legible. Inside his mind he started to write the message, trying to type in the words as fast as he could, he sent:
“Double check the sensors and radar for any hacking. And keep an eye on the pyramids, I suspect they might be fake, products of Sith Illusions.”
I-Ron wished he had ten thousand hands like an hecatoncheir, he felt he was needed in so many places at the same time, himself now being a glorified communications ship, he started to reach out with the force to everyone he could. Extending his mind´s eye far away from there, to look for Apollyon.
Where was she? Was he needed by her? He wanted to know, he needed her.
His voice was invisible because no one could see. When we speak our voices produce soundwaves that travel with the air in the atmosphere as a medium, I-Ron instead of that used electrical currents to convert his thoughts into the random chirping of a droid that, due to linguistics, an organic could understand as words. Yet, he was able to see that, to see the soundwaves when someone started to speak, to better understand them. And so, his voice was invisible because it was electricity, now converted to the quintessence of the force, that started to being transmitted via Telepathy to reach out to Apollyon.
He tried to, of course, no one was in their right mind to be able to effectively use their powers with 100% of effectiveness. But he tried to send her the message of:
“I am with Nathemus, preparing myself to check this temple. We never saw the ships on the radar coming, I suspect something might be wrong inside here.”
He did not wanted to communicate like with a holophone, but only send the message to let her know. And so, when he finished the incantation to send the message, he then turned to his apprentice Karin, giving her her sword and shield. Gazed at Sol, then at Nathemus.
“Do we have the clear to go, Master? Or do you have a better plan?” He said, putting himself in the middle of Sol at his right, and Karin at his left. He amped up the volume on his vocabulator, to let Sol know of how one talked with their Master, and the ideal place an apprentice had, being 50% an independent spirit, and 50% codependent of their master.
Powers Used: Mechu Deru, Telepathy. All of them to just send messages, in order to procure that using mental and technomagic communications should be faster than normal messages in holopads.
@skira, @Nacros_Telcontare, @Voidwalker, @Cardun Vrek, @Darth Solus, @Reatith Blodraald, @Hadzuska_The Jester, @Darth Dreadwar @Darth Nathemus