Wearing:
Ritual Armor
Armed With:
Gauntlet Vibroblade,
HB-42 Pistol.
Objective: BYOO
Five days Earlier,
Kytrand...
Magdalena actively rejoiced at the fall of two empires. The Light had reclaimed the core. Her new home of Kytrand was safe and hidden once more.
The Clones were celebrating. Despite having failed to retake Tython twice, none of that mattered now. In all the chaos of imperial collapse, they were quietly going ahead of the Alliance to kill stragglers and engage remnant forces where the Sith had not yet arrived.
The new power in the form of The Foundation rose...and Magdalena already had her presence in that faction as well.
House Bloodscrawl grew and worked silently in both the Alliance and The Foundation now, finding ways in through their massive humanitarian relief network. Hardcore believers in the Family Politics got the first way in, operating ninety-five percent of the time as Medics or Surgeons (House Bloodscrawl made it almost Mandatory to have medical experience, and already being a Doctor or Nurse with history was a good way of being offered to join House Bloodscrawl. (With memories being erased/rewritten
painlessly if the offer was refused), only five percent as
something else.
Something dedicated to silently crushing the throat of the Dark Side whenever it got in stomping range.
Magdalena silently tended to the plants in her greenhouse on Kytrand when she had felt her adopted son, Nathan, approach.
They had a lot of history between them. A lot of things best left as water under the bridge. But since making her the chief architect of Kytrand's Light-Side based State Religion, their relationship had slowly, hesitantly started to improve.
"Ah, Nathan!" Magdalena called out warmly at her son as he arrived in an all crimson business suit.
"You're just in time!" she said, I captured a Sith recently..."
She led him over to a hidden chamber in her Greenhouse and opened it with a spell. Nathan stared inside at the heavily injured Sith, slowly being brainwashed into being a sleeper agent with Alkahest runes
Nathan, giving zero feths about the Sith so long as he wasn't being
outright tortured or killed, did not criticize.
"How soon will he be ready?"
"Oh, two or three days, I imagine..." she answered with a shrug, neither of them capable of caring about violating the Sith's autonomy as she shut the chamber.
"What brings you to my chambers? And how is your lovely family?" she asked, clipping some errant stems from a rose bush.
"Vera's going to give birth to a Son."
Magdalena stopped in her tracks. She knew well his wife had been turned into a Force Spawn.
Children of such creatures are EXTREMELY rare, for multiple reasons.
Sensing she had an opportunity to be an actual mother to Nathan by giving family advice. The Abomination turned, pulled out a seat in the large greenhouse where she had tea and invited him to sit.
"You want to know what I know about crossbreed attempts." she said flatly.
"Not the most delicate way of putting it but yes." Nathan answered as he sat down. "Do you...personally know of any such attempts?"
Magdalena hesitated a moment.
"Mother?" he asked, just as hesitant in using the term.
"None that succeeded." she replied after a moment. "It is extremely rare for a Force Spawn to produce a successful pregnancy. Our physiology usually prevents it. There are no problems with the Baby? None at all?"
"None."
Magdalena rose up, pacing in thought.
"Perhaps the nonstandard Host body having prior status as a completely artificial creation is an X-Factor..." she mused. "How far along?"
"Four months." Nathan answered. "It's a boy..."
"A
boy?" Magdalena whispered in surprise. "That...that IS new. I've...never actually heard of a Force Spawn giving birth to
males..."
"What are the chances he'll be one?" Nathan asked.
"High...if I'm right..." she answered.
"And if you're not?"
"He will still be--and I am terribly sorry for having no diplomatic way of putting it...a
total freak of nature." she said sympathetically. "He's going to need a lot of love not to go insane. I'm sorry. But after what you told me about--"
She cut herself off, catching herself. Mentioning Julia Crownwraithe was the one thing in all the Galaxy other than mentioning Lysandra Crownwraithe that could still cause Nathan real, visceral pain. He still couldn't say the names most times. She had seen his nightmares and understood
why he couldn't.
She didn't blame him in the slightest for not being able to.
"--your... daughter..." she said slowly. "I believe her neurochemistry was fundamentally different due to the mutations in yourself that are still present even after you were resurrected. If the pattern holds, your son may have the same issues..."
Magdalena had suffered countless sleepless nights since that revelation took hold.
She altered Nathan using her own blood when he was a teenager to save his life. It had remade him into an enforcer of her will. She had been the Gethzerion to his Savage Opress, in Clone-Wars Fan Speak.
He had freed himself later, but some changes remained. Changes she couldn't predict when it came to having children, as he had originally not been meant to have any after his conversion.
She dreaded the idea it was her mutations upon the father that had helped contribute to the daughter turning into such a psychotic monster. He had flatly refuted this whenever she expressed that fear.
Laertia Io
didn't have an excuse like genetics, in his mind.
After all, it had not been his own altered genetics that had made him betray the woman who would later become
The Battalion
to the cult. That had been all him. To chalk it up to genetics stripped them both of responsibility for their respective actions.
Still, the fear that her own genetic tinkering had indirectly contributed to Julia's madness now shadowed her in her waking hours.
She wasn't sure what possibility horrified her more when it came to Nathan's daughter...the idea that Laertia's violent insanity was because of the neurological alterations she had inherited from her father that made her a legitimate genius like he was...or that it had nothing to do with her alterations at all. That Julia was just willfully evil in spite of all the breaks and opportunities she had been given. That her altered brain had simply made it easier for her to be malevolent, to tap into an inherently rotten nature that had nothing to do with what Magdalena had done to Nathan at all.
"I wish I had more optimistic answers..." she answered quietly. "I shall pray for the Light Side's blessings upon him."
"He's gonna need a lot more than that if you're right..." he answered back grimly.
"Then let's pray I am not..." Magdalena said. "May I offer you some tea, Son? You look like you need some."
He looked at her, and for the first time since re-encountering him, she saw him without his metaphorical armor in his gaze.
"That would be nice, I think..." he admitted.
Magdalena immediately began preparing tea...
Present...
The Elderly Force Spawn had absorbed enough energy to reverse her age to that of a woman who bore a disturbing resemblance to
The Amalgam
save for the blond hair. She also wore a slightly more armored catsuit. She had gone in with the relief crews of The Foundation as a mercenary, looking to clear out possible remnant forces in the deeper valleys.
Magdalena (Going by the alias
The Template among Foundation Forces) had been dropped into one troubling valley in particular.
It was forested, evidence of Sith defenses still evident. Magdalena thought the heavy fighting was over.
But this valley...
This valley looked like heavy fighting had been going on for hours...
The Template walked up to one of the Foundation rebels.
"What's going on here?" The blond abomination asked, her looks almost impossibly beautiful. She looked out of place. There is something about Force Spawn that most people, with or without the Force, find inherently disturbing on a subconscious level. Like seeing something out of the corner of your eye that you can't quite make out, but is indistinct enough for your mind to start making up unsettling theories about the rest of the shape at the edge of your vision, all the while your lizard brain debates whether turning to face whatever is at the edge of your vision to
finally have your curiosity put to rest...
Or to run away from whatever is at the edge of your vision as fast as your legs can possibly carry you.
In other words, for most people, just being in proximity, even when you don't know what they are, and couldn't possibly know what they are. Even when they have done
absolutely nothing...
They still inspire a fight or flight murmur in the soul one can't explain rationally. This confusion though momentary, can and has resulted in death for their victims. Some of them are the source for legends of shape shifting evil spirits on countless outer rim worlds both known and those lost to calamity. During the Gulag Plague, an encounter with one if you were ordinary was considered akin to encountering an outright
demon. Some Jedi of that era even explicitly believed one time encounters that they walked away from to have been such.
One Foundation soldier amongst them though, was a little more knowledgeable than the rest who were merely unsettled by her.
He was a farm boy from the outer rim, and his Mother, who had survived the Cult of the Brain Demon as a child, told her Force Spawn could be recognized by their choice of clothing, which was almost always an enchanted catsuit.
He went
deathly pale at the sight of her. But he said nothing, and his spine chilled as she tilted her head in his direction, sensing his fear.
The Spec Ops rebel leader, a rough looking man in his late forties in cobbled together armor and weapons eyed her in suspicion before answering.
"Uncovered a nest of Sith Assassins in this old emergency air base in the valley. The Sith had armored it up way too much for there not to be something. Fighting has been taking place for over an hour. We're the third squad sent in. They are fighting pretty hard to keep us out. Must be something they really want to keep." he muttered.
"Or, at the very least prevent us from taking." The Template replied. "Lead the way..."
The Squad Leader nodded and she followed the group past burnt, smoking trees splashed with blood and viscera. The Dark Side was very strong here.
It wasn't that long before they found their first dead Jedi, found decapitated and slumped against a tree. He still had his lightsaber.
"Where's the
head? One of the squad members asked.
The Template knelt down to examine the body.
"Why'd they leave his weapon is the real question..." she remarked clinically. "That's never a good sign in this profession. Means whoever or whatever killed him doesn't need it..."
She delicately plucked the simple but partly engraved lightsaber from his cold dead hand.
"Yoink." she remarked, handing it to the Squad Leader as a measure to start building trust before they went ahead, encountering more slain Foundation Jedi, all missing their heads, but not their weapons.
"What the feth is going on here?" The Template wondered as they finally got to the outer perimeter.
It was a scene of horrors. The fighting had once been fierce, but the Sith defending the perimeter were dead along with the foundation soldiers, apparently both sides having killed one another.
Her pistol came out of its holster, green lightning arcing between her fingers as she walked up to a force field gate that was still active leading to the sensor tower. The tower itself was splashed with blood runes.
Her electric judgement shot out as green bolts of lightning, burning away the Dark Side curses on the tower. The security field deactivated.
At the first sign of a blur and a warning from the Force, The Template opened fire with her pistol on instinct, powerful bolts riddling a completely mutated Sith Assassin who had hissing
spider faces growing out of his body, neck and face. It was an instant, collective
HELL NO from both her and the squad as they blasted the abomination apart.
"Well... that's new..." she chirped, turning to the squad.
"Well...I have good news...it's not the single
most horrible thing I've ever faced..." she trailed a bit.
"...bad news is, it's in the
top ten..." she added a second later.
"We should nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure..." she suggested. (PARANOID DELUSION: 1000 XP)
"Can't..." The Squad Leader grunted...
The currently young looking Magdalena's hand went to a hip.
"Lemme guess, substantial credit investment?" she muttered.
"Nah. Comms just ain't working. And we're in too deep to back track now..." he replied. "C'mon... let's go see what other nasty little surprises this place has..."
She sighed.
"If you insist..." she replied going ahead to where she felt the next greatest concentration of the Dark Side, the squad following...
Dean Walker
and
Katarine Ryiah
boarded on would still be intact when it came time to exfil - and provide backup should they call for it, or assist anything else
Amelia Hawthorne
/ Overwatch calls for.
