- Intent: To submit a plot device that empowers at a heavy price
- Image Source: Relic Collectibles by Rowan Sherwin
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: Me (I am Darth Alekto)
- Primary Source: Fate's Embrace
- Manufacturer: Irina Volkov
- Affiliation: Elle Mors
- Model: N/A
- Modularity: No
- Production: Unique
- Material:
- Durasteel components modified with mechu-deru
- Kyber crystal
- Phrik
- Classification: Enhancement
- Weight: Light
- Resistances:
- Energy: Very High
- Kinetic: Very High
- Lightsabers: Extreme
- Other:
- Mechu-Deru: None
- Ion/EMP/Electrical: Low
- Force-Technological Enhancements: The Brace of Light is an enigma of technological and force-created origins. Through extrapolation of the extremely complicated process involved in crafting the organic crystal-lattice matrix found in holocrons combined with subtle manipulations of Mechu-Deru and empowerment found in Jedi and Sith amulets and talismans.
- Death Do Us Part: Once attached, the wearer is forever altered by the Brace of Light, the brace fusing to the body of the wearer through a passive process of Mechu-Deru, which transforms the flesh of the wielder into a seamless cross between machinery and organic matter. Hypothetically one could amputate the affected limb if early enough in the bonding process, however as weeks and months go on the appearance of the brace on the place of attachment is more akin to a scar or tattoo than a separate object fused to the wearer - in less ambiguous terms, the wearer and the brace become one and it will simply manifest somewhere else on the wearer's body. Upon death the object will lose its source of external power, turning it inert and in the process returning to its original form as a bracelet.
- Control: The Brace of Light, through the technological integration with the wearer through Mechu-Deru and the extremely complicated and nuanced addition of the crystal-lattice matrix, utilizes neural cues given by the wearer to determine which of its effects are active, and when to activate them.
- Valor: One of the three enhancements offered by the Brace of Light is the improved application of Force valor, which increases things such as reflexes, bodily speed, and perception. This enhancement must be willed into use by the wearer. When this enhancement is removed the wearer becomes disoriented and suffers from symptoms such as vertigo and delayed response.
- Enhanced Strength: An isolation of Enhanced Attribute, the enhancement of one's strength, is the second enhancement offered by the Brace of Light. Like valor, this must be willed into use by the wearer. When this enhancement is removed there is a short period where the wearer is physically weaker than they would typically be normally.
- Force Body: Similar to the other two enhancements offered by the Brace of Light, its final enhancement, an empowered Force Body, focuses on the physical traits of the wearer to enhance them further, and separately, from the wearer's own use of the force. Unlike the other two enhancements, however, this enhancement will only act when the wearer finds themselves in a potentially fatal situation - relying on a sort of danger sense, like a shield talisman, to make that distinction. This is instinctually activated and cannot be activated by the will of the wearer. Once this enhancement is removed the wearer becomes fatigued, drained of most of their stamina.
- Override: Utilizing Valor while already utilizing Enhanced Strength will simply "turn off" the Enhanced Strength from the bracelet, and the same is true when the opposite occurs - or when the Force Body enhancement kicks in. However, the drawback to removing the enhancements in question is not immediately applied when overriding existing enhancements with another, instead the drawbacks to all three enhancements are felt - regardless of whether or not the wearer utilized all three - at the same time upon removing the last remaining enhancement. This leaves the wearer essentially powerless and defenseless - and each successive "switch" or act of overriding an existing enhancement shortens the amount of time any enhancement can be active before causing the Brace of Light to remove any active enhancements itself. Trying to switch back and forth between enhancements in rapid succession, say twice each, for example, will result in an immediate loss of enhancements as a fail-safe in the Brace of Light, followed by a combined fatigue, disorientation, and loss of physical strength.
- Instinct: The wearer, upon proper integration with the Brace of Light, will gradually become aware of what abilities the bracelet can provide them with. This occurs after however long it takes for the bracelet to fuse with the wearer's nervous system, and thus their mind.
- Force-Technological Impairments: While the Brace of Light offers several benefits to its use, it is counterbalanced by immediate drawbacks to its use. However there are further designs integrated into the Brace of Light, designs which are not immediate and, unlike its enhancements, are not made known to its wearer upon integration.
- Through Sickness and Health: After the Brace of Light has fused with the body of the wearer, it allows the wearer to call on physiological enhancements through the three enhancements it can provide, however each use of the Brace of Light's enhancements slowly alters the body of the wearer on the subatomic level through a passive form of Mechu-Deru. The most well-known application of Mechu-Deru is Mechu Deru Vitae, or the use of Mechu-Deru to create technobeasts, and this draws from that application as inspiration for the process the wearer undergoes - as the Brace of Light slowly turns the wearer into a living bomb without their knowledge and against their will.
- Radical Light: The dark side of the force is typically attributed as the corrupting influence in the force by most scholars of the force, however the Brace of Light seeks to undermine that perception by slowly adjusting the mind of the wearer to become hardwired to mistrust those without clear grounding in the light, and creating a desire to either distance themselves from or purge the source of that darkness - gradually moving the goalposts in the mind of the wearer until anything less than totally pure is seen as an aberration that must be purified, typically through purging. This manifests initially as a feeling of greater purpose, as though the brace of light was intended for the purpose of fighting against darkness, until it achieves the much darker mental state mentioned before.
- Light Bomb: Upon reaching the final points of the former two impairments, the Brace of Light will wait until it is surrounded by a sufficiently sized group of people with a presence in the light and dark sides of the force to detonate the explosive formed within the wearer. This explosion vaporizes the wearer of the Brace of Light, leaving only the bracelet behind, and unleashes a wave of purging light not quite unlike a small-scale wall of light, which burns everything it touches like a cold flame and is especially harmful to dark siders but is still potentially fatal to any other that is close enough to be directly affected. Unlike a wall of light however, this can be defended against by a well-timed barrier or protection bubble. Unlike the ability this is compared to, however, the range of this explosion is more or less personal in distance, similar to the radius of a low-yield grenade for example.
- Enhanced Physiology: As made clear by the three potential enhancements the wearer of the Brace of Light can activate, the Brace of Light provides its wearer with improvements to either straight brute strength or physical senses and reflexes - or potentially a last-ditch improvement to physicality in general, per its instinctual force body enhancement - through the force. The enhancement of the Brace of Light is totally separate from the wearer's own use of the force, but only increases the wearer's abilities to a set point - so one cannot exceed the intended empowerment through "stacking" other items of power or being enhanced by others or themselves. One also won't be breaking beskar with their bare hands while enhanced either, as the effects are impressive but not ludicrous.
- Instinctive: Like a shield talisman that operates on a sort of precognitive danger sense to activate a protection bubble to prevent the wielder from being caught off-guard, the Brace of Light operates on a similar premise to grant them an empowered state of force body - which pushes the wearer past their limits, particularly their cognitive senses, reflexes, and physical restraint on strength. While most might have opted for a protection bubble in the case of assassination or an inability to protect oneself, this bracelet operates on the premise of turning its wearer into as much a weapon for the light side of the force as possible and disregards a direct defense with the idea that the best defense is a greater offense.
- Integration: Though the fusing of the bracelet to the wearer could be seen as having downsides, there is an undeniable upside to this as the integration of the organic crystal-lattice matrixes with the nervous system of the wearer's body, and thus their mind, allows a mental "willing" of control over the use of the bracelet, doing away with more traditional methods such as focusing the force into an amulet by allowing a direct neural interfacing with the Brace of Light itself. In far less terms, the wearer can choose to activate its enhancements by thought rather than channeling their will into the bracelet as one would an amulet.
- Quasi-Permanent: A terrible drawback to an amulet or talisman is that they are often in the form of pendants or rings or other physical objects worn and adorned by the person using them, which opens up the possibility for them to simply be removed in order to halt their use - the Brace of Light, however, more or less merges with the wearer over time by altering their physiology through a passive form of mechu-deru. This is more intended to prevent the wearer from avoiding the intended fate that isn't necessarily shared with them during the bonding process, in the event they become aware of it, but also serves as an early benefit to making sure they do not lose the empowerment provided by the bracelet inadvertently. Simply put, the merging process - after the weeks/months-long process has gone by - prevents someone from simply pulling the bracelet off, as it is a part of their body now - and as noted before, amputation of the limb, or spot on the limb, will result in the bracelet manifesting elsewhere on their body.
- Protection: While the Brace of Light is made of resilient materials, it is only able to offer the protection of these materials at the location of the brace - the bracelet merging with the wearer does not turn the wearer into a body of lightsaber resistant material, rather the bracelet itself is resistant only where it is visible. i.e; hitting the bracelet with a lightsaber will not cut through it, but striking at the arm above or the wrist below will cut straight through the wearer as it always would.
- Certain Death: The end result for anyone wearing this bracelet, who actively makes use of its enhancements, and finds themselves in a position where they are surrounded by beings who resonate in the dark and light side of the force - which is essentially inevitable, given the mind-altering processes the bracelet causes the wearer to undergo - is death by an explosive, purging, flame that is reminiscent of a wall of light manifested by a single individual gone out of control.
- Radicalized: An additional side effect that is long-term in nature is the subtle "re-wiring" of the wearer's mind with each successive use of the bracelet, which manifests initially as believing they have a greater purpose to fight for with the Brace of Light as the tool to turn them into a champion of that purpose and eventually leads them into a point of believing that anything less than totally pure in the light side of the force is an aberration that must be cleansed. Even the most pacifistic monk in the most secluded of words, who wholeheartedly believed and practiced a life of peace and harmony, would be driven to desiring to destroy and purge everything with even a hint of darkness or moral corruption while creating internal reasonings and justification for their own actions and changed beliefs.
- Ion Damage: Perhaps an unforeseen drawback, the act of being fused with electrical components that reshape the body of the wearer to seamlessly combine their organic matter with technological designs is an inherent weakness to ion weapons and electrical attacks. An ion bolt typically stuns a target with no physical harm done, besides perhaps a headache afterwards, but an ion bolt which strikes the wearer of the Brace of Light after being sufficiently integrated with it will suffer physical damage, such as nerve damage or burns, not unlike a droid being struck by an ion bolt. Electrical attacks create similar effects, though this difference from normal organic life is negligible as electricity is already lethal to most organic life. Both of these forms of attacks, however, will remove any active enhancements on the wearer and still result in the physical, albeit temporary, drawbacks setting in.
- Virus: As the Brace of Light utilizes and relies heavily on Mechu-Deru to operate, an adversary utilizing Mechu-Deru may be able to take advantage of this to cause the Brace of Light to experience malfunctions, like causing the activating of enhancements to instead de-power the wearer instead or a number of other potential effects - like an inebriated mental state, or a sensation of physical pain through manipulating the connection between the Brace of Light and the wearer's nervous system. In essence, an opposing user of Mechu-Deru could inflict the wearer with the equivalent of a holo-virus.
- Drawbacks: On top of the intentional designs put in place to harm the wearer, and the unintentional weaknesses by the nature of what the Brace of Light is, there exist still physical drawbacks which are incurred on the wearer after they remove their enhancements. For example, after ending the enhancement provided by Valor they experience a sense of vertigo and delayed response times; when ending the enhanced strength empowerment, the wearer becomes physically weaker than they were initially for a short period of time; and when the instinctive force body enhancement comes to an end it fatigues the wearer to the point that they can barely muster the stamina to stand. A strategy - overriding - exists to temporarily overcome this drawback by forcing an enhancement to activate while one is already active, ending the one which was already in place in favor of the next one, however each time this is performed in succession it reduces the amount of time any enhancement at all can be active until - approximately 4 times later, depending on the circumstance - the Brace itself activates a fail-safe which shuts off any and all enhancements it is performing and combines the physical drawbacks of all three enhancements all at once on the wearer.
Created long ago by a radical anarchist force user with the intent of decapitating the leadership of two sides of a conflict, sending their respective organizations into disarray, the Brace of Light was designed as a trojan horse-like means to destroy the leadership from within itself while also aiding them in their quest to defeat their dark-sided nemesis. At first the Brace of Light comes across as a valuable tool that empowers its wearer and turns them into a weapon or tool themselves for the cause of ridding the galaxy of the dark side of the force, but underneath this attractive exterior is a sinister secondary purpose which is to turn the wearer into a living bomb that, under the right circumstances - circumstances which the wearer is mentally conditioned over time to seek out - will kill both the wearer and their allies as well as those on the opposite side, provided things work out properly. At the very least the bracelet ensures the death of its wearer regardless, with some mild caveats.
As the bracelet is engineered through complicated marrying of technology and the force via mechu-deru, masters of mechu-deru can hypothetically exploit this fact to render the bracelet inert, reverse its effects, or simply use it as a means to attack the wearer. Ionic and electrical attacks are also substantially effective against the wearer due to the alterations made to their bodies during the passive mechu-deru process. It is also hypothetically possible to remove the device through mechu-deru and related force abilities, but this would require a lengthy process - not a simple wave of a hand mid-combat to remove the Brace of Light from its wearer, more akin to surgery or rehabilitation than casual use of the force.
Last edited by a moderator:
