Private An Ceiling Cat Sayed, Beholdt, teh Good Enouf for Releaze as Version 0.8a

[Scherezade deWinter]

Micah​

Scherezade paused by the entrance, glowing green eyes staring at the vastness of space which was included in the interior design. She had not stepped foot in the Rest since her return from the Space Between Dimensions, and that had been nearly a year prior to now. Technically, she wasn't completely sure that she was supposed to be here anyway, but she'd decided to take her chances considering a few other events had that taken place in recent weeks.

Two out of the seven Hope Chests that existed were now in her possession. Not with her in this place, of course. A Sith she might have been through and through, but even she knew better than to bring artifacts of the Darkside into a place like this without going through all the proper channels first. At least, not unless she wanted to attack, and unlike many governments around the 'verse, the Silvers were actually not people she considered to be her enemies. Or not yet, anyway. Not until they'd make the first move against the Agents of Chaos, if everything went according to plan.

She remembered times in which she could walk in here and be welcomed. Her friendship with the former Master of the Order had played a huge role in that. It'd been odd, in retrospect, that the Jedi had accepted her presence for many months, almost as though she was one of them. Even after she accidentally exploded that Porg and got children covered in Porg blood and feathers.

So there she was, standing in place, blinking a few times, and looking around. So far, no one of those who were working around the entrance saw a reason to stop her. Scherezade wished she'd recognize at least some of the faces from back then, maybe drop a friendly hello or two, but all those she saw were strangers to her. Whether they were actually new at the job or she'd just not bumped into them wasn't known to her. But, she supposed it didn't really matter.

Taking a breath, she began to walk deeper into the building. The Rest was usually good about putting up signs that pointed you to the right direction, and she followed all the ones that pointed to the Rest's library. With the Silvers being around for so long and doing a whole bunch of stuff, she could only assume that is was worth checking their library to see if there was anything accessible about what she was looking for.

Upon entering, the Sith stopped in her tracks, and just looked at all the shelves stockpiled with datapads, books, tomes, and a multitude of other ways that were used to store knowledge. She bit her lower lip, not even knowing where the heck she could start her search, but knowing better than to start a Sith Blood ritual that could maybe help her find a clue or two about it.

Sighing, Scherezade just walked to the counter and gave whoever was sitting behind it an awkward smile.

 

[Jorah zos Darnus]

[ darth lolcat theme ]
​

Another glorious day.

For want of anything new to read, the young Cathar had open the Cran Halcorr biography of Stellan Gios. It was an ambitious undertaking, at well over eight hundred pages. But, he had a lot of time. And he'd read through all eight volumes the sacred texts of the Jedi more times than he'd have cared to admit.

Pages turners, they were not.

The boy's tufted, triangular ears twitched. He heard someone come into the library, but the young feline did nothing to acknowledge the presence. If he ignored them, then hopefully whoever this was would also ignore him. They could ignore each other! And then Micah could just continue reading through this anthology of idiocy, and whoever this person was wandering the archives could just see to their own enlightenment.

A shadow passed over him.

The boy's ears flattened out slightly. He had the impression that, no, this stranger was, in fact, not seeking to be ignored. Amber, catseyed pupils gazed outward, as the kit looked up from his book.

It was some human lady. Though, she didn't look like any of the Jedi who normally came in here. In fact, he was pretty sure he'd seen images and heard stories about a woman who looked just like this one.

Head tilting to one side, the boy's tail moved from side to side as he blurted out, "Aren't you the exploding porg lady?"

Scherezade deWinter​

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Micah​

Nope, she was indeed not seeking to be ignored. There were more than enough places in the 'verse for her to do that, but the Silvers had never been the ones to put her through it.

Now that the person behind the counter moved their attention to her, she could take a better look. Frankly, she should've seen it earlier, especially that now she could also smell the blood of the Cathar, though it was really redundant considering the fur and the ears gave it away much faster.

His head tilt to the side brought a smile to her lips. She knew what he was seeing. He was seeing Scherezade, the Sith Lord who somehow for a while had been accepted among the Silvers but had ultimately chosen not to join them. He saw the Blood Hound, daughter to a Force Affinity that not even she understood, though it unlocked access to powers and abilities she had never imagined she would be able to control. He saw the woman who'd been called the Princess of Chaos, the Mistress of Blades, and a bunch of other titles that really helped you declare your presence in a holoconference during times of plague.

Six feet tall and weighing twice what most women she noticed did, she held her presence all right. Especially when one took a single look at those green glowing eyes that radiated joy or sadness and could switch between the two at the blink of an eye as her emotions nearly consumed her much more often than she'd ever admit out loud. The one who had no qualms about slaves, the murder of children, who participated in rituals so dark that they had brought an yanked an entire person from another dimension and into a body within theirs. One who did not have her fifteen blades on her body now but usually did, and could use them all with terrifying precision.

The reveller of blood, the dancer of Chaos, she had stood upon worlds and washed herself in their peoples blood for daring to defy her wishes. The one who had told countless others that they were only limited by their imagination, whose own imagination had been more than enough to strike the terror into hearts of men much bigger and much stronger than her. Death on bloody wings, the woman who could only be kept from killing, often in horrible and incredibly gory ways, by the direct order of a precious few people.

"Aren't you the exploding porg lady?"

Scherezade's confident stance was visibly broken and she bit her lower lip, wondering if one of the library bookcases would be kind enough to just swallow her whole.Now she was just a young woman, or perhaps an older teen, standing there feeling very much out of place, almost as though someone had woken her up from her Saturday morning nap to drag her by the hair to one of those horrible family reunions where the aunts always ask you when you're finally going to marry and give your grandmother some grandchildren and the uncles insist on arm wrestling with you even though you cleraly just want to lock yourself in the bathroom.

Exactly like that.

"I go by just Scherezade these days," she mumbled, looking away for a moment before consciously forcing herself to look back at the kitten. "What do you guys have accessible to visitors who're looking for some mentions of horrible dark artifacts from thousands or more years ago?"

 

[Jorah zos Darnus]

[ darth lolcat theme ]​

"What do you guys have accessible to visitors who're looking for some mentions of horrible dark artifacts from thousands or more years ago?"

For an exploding porg lady, she had good taste.

Better than most who came in here, anyway. He was really getting tired of getting asked where the copy of Yaddle's biography was. "They keep all the good stuff locked away," the boy complained, propping his head up with one arm while the other gestured lazily toward the holocron vault. Instead, the boy reached under the counter and slid a dog-eared treatise on the socio-political decline of the Great Republic. "The most evil thing you'll find out here is a political analysis of some Gungan senator's role in the Declaration of a New Order," the Cathar stated flatly.

Yes, it was exactly as boring as it sounded.

So, of course, the Jedi library had no less than five copies of it. And usually three were out at any given time.

"Their selection is crap anyway," the kitten mused aloud. Was she one of those Jedi who hunted Sith? An archaeologist on the hunt for a new artifact to hide away in some vault somewhere? Who knew. It was true, nonetheless. "For that kind of research, you want the library at Bastion, or Ossus, or Korriban," the boy opined wistfully, as visions of Sith scrolls and grimoires danced in his eyes.

Except, even in the best case scenario, the good stuff was still locked away. "...but you'd need a Sith Imperial library card to check anything out, and mine's only good for acolyte level stuff," he added, holding up his Sith Imperial student ID.

So what about libraries that were outside the Sith Imperial library structure? "There were Sith Academies on Gentes and Iridonia that you could probably check out, but those are out beyond the Outer Rim," the kitten ventured aloud, mulling that thought over in his head. But that was laughable. Wild space?

"Nobody ever ventures out there though."

Scherezade deWinter​

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Micah​

All the good stuff was locked away. Of course. Why she had expected any good stuff to just lay there and be publicly accessible, at least to her, was beyond her. It wasn't as if all the hope chests she'd run into recently were laying bare open and just needed someone to play a successful game of connect the dots in order to get to them. Except they totally did.

"Yeah, not a fan of Vogon poetry," she sighed as the kitten behind the counter explained what the most evil thing she'd be able to find was.

That blew all her plans right out through the window. The Sithling had been so certain that she'd find answers or at least a clue about where to go next here in this library that she hadn't even considered for a moment that a plan B might be required. By the way it sounded, there was a good chance that she'd need a plan C and D as well.

Her distress almost made her miss the rest of what the Cathar had to say. Other worlds. Sith worlds. WIth big libraries that contained interesting stuff. And then he… What.

"Why does someone working in a Jedi library have access to Sith stuff on Sith worlds?" she asked, her glowing eyes now resting against him with the smallest of squints, trying to understand who it was that was in front of her. Definitely not just your average feline librarian.

And of course, there was that whole thing about having the libraries there again… Scherezade knew she couldn't really do the breaking and entering thing here on Kashyyyk. The Silvers could go get bent as a government, but she didn't really want to deal with the headache and ensuing problems in the friendly relationship she had with Josh Dragonsflame if she went that route. Her sister would probably conjure darkside tendrils to smack her over the head if she did it too.

But… That was not the situation with the SIth worlds. Heck, they wanted her dead anyway, so what was breaking and entering and pretending to be someone she was not in case she got caught when it came to them? She could probably take on another false identity and get an old contact to bring her papers that would look legit. She wouldn't be able to use Feyra Darling again though, that identity had more or less worn itself out. And she probably needed a slightly more complex name anyway, something like… Princess Consuela Banana Hammock! Yes, that was a perfect name for a false identity!

Scherezade forced herself to return to the here and now, where she was just Scherezade, a Sith trying to gain access to knowledge inside a Jedi library, and not a banana hammock princess from a weird place. The Cathar was still speaking, now about worlds beyond the outer rim.

"Wait, Gentes?" she repeated the name. It sounded so strange in her mouth. Her body took a step back on its own as the memories flashed in front of her eyes, of darkness and sorceresses and things that made the night itself fear them. The sound of Iridonia strengthen the sensations that flowed through her.

Oh, grandmother… That woman had her fingers dipped in so many dark plots that reigned for almost a thousand years, and many of those memories that occurred until seven hundred years ago had been flash burned into Scherezade's mind. She couldn't escape it, not without deleting all the contents of her brain and essentially becoming a new person, but that… Yeah, it'd been tried before, and the results hadn't been good, even though she got a new sister that way.

Scherezade let out a string of curses in a few different languages, some of the words mentioned probably enough to make a sailor blush before she retook the sliver of control that had been lost.

"I can go to Wild Space!" she perked up, the worry vanishing from her face, replaced with a huge grin. "I'm good at getting to places nobody ventures out though!"

Finally relaxing, she exhaled and then looked at the Cathar again. The Cathar… Who knew enough about those things in order to be able to tell her about it, who had a Sith library card with acolyte level access, and who… Frankly, was probably out of place. He didn't seem like the type to read a Gungan Declaration of a New Order unless he was forced into it.

"So what's your deal, kitten?" she asked. While others might have uttered the word kitten as a means to demean, Scherezade was far from that; she might as well have used his actual name, if she'd known it, and it would have sounded exactly the same, "What's someone like you doing… Well. Here."

And how close had I been to almost being a similar predicament as well? Though I'd never have agreed to do library service. And they'd probably have me cleaning porg poodoo instead.

 

[Jorah zos Darnus]

[ darth lolcat theme ]​

"Wait, Gentes?"

The boy's ears flexed. "It's a planet in the Anoat sector," he offered, reaching down under the counter and producing an atlas. Activating the holocron, the boy summoned forth a holographic celestial map. Flipping through the different sectors, the Cathar finally enlarged a sector of Wild Space. "The Sith Academy was set up there as a kind of warrior mill, in preparation for the wars started by Skere Kaan under the banner of the Brotherhood of Darkness. But, Skere Kaan also devised some novel uses for the Dark Side, so it stands to reason that there might be some useful knowledge leftover somewhere."

If one could get to that part of Wild Space. Though, it seemed as though this woman had that kind of access. Was she one of those Jedi Shadow people who tracked down artifacts?

"What's someone like you doing… Well. Here."

She didn't know? Was she a Jedi from a different order? "I'm from the Bastion Academy. I was working on a book report at the Great Library on Ossus when a whole bunch of Jedi kicked in the door, flooded the place, destroyed a ton of books, and then kidnapped me," the boy answered, opting for the honest answer because, well, for once the honest answer was very much on the Sith side of things as being the victims of this one.

If she was a Jedi, wouldn't she had known about that operation?

Testing a new theory about the person to whom he was speaking, the Cathar added, "I think that's generally called burning and pillaging, but I think the people here call it 'an errand of mercy' or some poodoo like that."

Her reaction to that statement ought to either confirm or disprove the working theory.

Scherezade deWinter​

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Micah​

"Kidnapped?" the Sithling repeated the word, blinking in surprise.

She'd heard tales of Jedi kidnapping children in the past, of course, but they were now thousands of years removed from the time that had happened in. And they kidnapped them to train them to become Jedi, not sit and do office work in a library. That was… Employee abuse?

Bastion was the Sith capital. Had the Silvers broken in just to kidnap some children? Scherezade was, granted, not a huge fan of the Sith Empire (as some graffiti on a certain planet might allude to), and not really a huge fan of the Silvers either, but she had a hard time imagining them doing something as despicable as that. What happened to children being borderline sacred or some sort of bs like that?

"Hypocrites!" she half spit out a few moments later. How many times had she been condemned for just being a Sith even though she hadn't done anything overly Sithie that would garner it? Heck, she was outright murdered, or almost murdered (accounts varied), her demand to know what she was being executed for being answered with just the way she swung with the Force. It was an incredibly biggoted view on life, the universe, and everything.

Well. That particular Jedi hadn't been part of the Silvers, rather part of the Galactic Alliance, and she currently held his still beating heart in a jar on the shelf in her bathroom. Space on her ship was incredibly cramped.

She sighed, looking at the library, and then back at the kid. He didn't taste right to be a Jedi. And he certainly didn't deserve serving time in a boring library for the crime of being a Sith child on Bastion. Sometimes, there was no bottom to the evil that Jedi could apply to others.

Scherezade nodded to herself, and focused her gaze on the Cathar.

"Wanna leave this place?" she offered, "My ship's right here." She didn't normally let people in it, and by normally it was more like, for over a year, because it was so completely the remains of blood magic that she'd tried to cover it with baby pink wall tapestries, but… A Force User would still be able to sense it. She mostly hoped the kid wouldn't.

"I can sneak you back to Bastion, or I can take you to where me and my merry insurgents are in the Unknown Regions. But we're not like Jedi, our people are free to leave whenever if they don't like our ideologies too much."

 

[Jorah zos Darnus]

[ darth lolcat theme ]​

It appeared that he had guessed correctly.

She was not a Jedi. In a way, that much was not a huge revelation. The Jedi did have plenty of allies outside their sad religion. Some were even Sith, of a kind. Such as the apostates of the Jensaari -- who might have been described as Diet Sith.

Instead, she offered him a way out. Either a ticket back to Bastion or a path that would lead to the Outer Rim.

Of course, as a Sith-Imperial, Micah's duty was to return to the Empire. But, returning empty handed did not dispose of one favorably to the Immortal God-Emperor. No, if he was going to return to Bastion, he would need to bring something of value with him.

"Were... you going to check out that Sith Academy at Gentes?" the kitten asked, curiously.

An artifact or some forgotten knowledge might just be the first step to returning home. Even if he had to take the long way around to get there.

He was a Sith. The path of the Dark Side was rarely as short or direct as the Jedi seemed to delude themselves into believing it was.

Scherezade deWinter​

 

[Scherezade deWinter]

Micah​

"Were... you going to check out that Sith Academy at Gentes?"

Scherezade paused, looking at the kittie cat. A moment ago, she'd offered to take him back home, and for half a moment she thought he was going to accept the offer and they'd be off. But instead, now he was asking about Gentes.

Gentes was totally the opposite direction of Bastion. If she was really going to go to Gentes… It was a travel commitment.

And of course, she had no way of knowing about the whole returning empty handed being a bad thing... Thing.

Did he want to come on an adventure with her? The Sith's grin suddenly widened. Yes. That was it. He probably wanted to get out of this stuffy library and go have some fun for once in his young life. She'd attended Silver parties. They weren't bad per-se… But she'd attended better ones. Except that one time they went all jurassic park and-

"Yup!" Scherezade announced before her thoughts pulled an ADH-Oh Shiny! on her, "Thank you very much for your assistance. I guess I'll be going now."

Turning around, the Sithling paused for just a moment, before looking over her shoulder. Oh, this was bad. They were going to kill her. She was going to have to beg Josh to get her out of the trouble she was just about to put herself in.

"You coming? I got lots of cheese and full fat cream on my ship. Some fried bantha fat cubes too if you're into that."

Nice going Scherezade, totally not being a stranger who's luring a child away with candy cheese.

"I also have the latest expansion of Sabers & Blasters!"