Invasion The Other Side of Peace | GA Invasion of TSE's Ziost/Tiss'sharl

[Marlon Sularen]

Location | League Chamber , Tiss'shari
Objective | Operation Chokehold
Tags [TSE+Allies] | Telis Taharin-Zambrano | Alli Vern | Ingrid L'lerim
Tags [GA+NIO] | Aerarii Tithe | Brama Tagge | Gat Tambor | The Executive | Enlil | Otto Shule

​

"Have the Commandos ready. This is a monumental opportunity that has been presented to us." Sularen said to an individual only known as the Phantom just as he left his Shuttle. For over Half a Decade , Sularen had been trying to jump start his corporation in which small compared to the Corporations of everyone present at this meeting. Early Attempts to expand had been sabotaged by groups such as the Zweihander Union and IGBC and Sularen had only managed to survive via smaller contracts with Sanjin , Bilbringi and his own Government on Byss in which allowed his Corporation to slowly grow in size with SularenCo making further acquisitions and further expanding especially with their recent seizure of Xa Fel.

At this point , SularenCo was mostly holed up in the Deep Core and Core Worlds with most of their assets located within Galactic Alliance territory with the exception of the Bilbringi Shipyards and their Mining Operations on 244Core and lol in the Unknowns. However today , the events unfolding here on Tiss'shari presented Sularen with an opportunity , an opportunity to expand and gain prominence after over 5 Years of hard-work and endless attempts to do so.

Already , before the Alliance even arrived at Tiss'shari and Ziost , Sularen had ordered his subordinate Rackham to conduct a quick probe of the Tiss'shari League via the Politorate and the Results were somewhat intriguing. With Brief Information Sularen had obtained on the Tiss'shari League , the Lord-Imperator of Byss had taken an interest in League Councillor Alexander Dulvin who apparently could be a potential ally to his cause via his position in the Kuat Drive Yards and his status as a War Profiteer and one of the richest individuals on Tiss'shari.

Soon enough , Sularen would enter the League Chambers where the rest of the GA/NIO Delegation and their Sith-affiliated counterparts were already present. Upon arrival ,Sularen quicky spotted the Vice-Chancellor Aerarii Tithe who was surprisingly nervous. The Man was very experienced in the Corporatist Sector , more experienced then Sularen and Sularen assumed that he was to lead the Joint GA-NIO Delegation here on Tiss'shari.

In addition to Tithe , there were 2 other individuals that caught Sularen's Attention immediately. Alli Vern of the Zweihander Union and Ingrid L'lerim-Vandiir of the Eternal Empire , the former being the leader of a Corporate Entity that had betrayed Sularen and denied him from the opportunity to transform SularenCo into a Megacorporation overnight and the latter having been responsible for the deaths of 30 Million people on Byss and halting Sularen's Efforts to Militarize the Beshqek System along with having forced Sularen to reveal his true colours for the first time.

These two individuals [Alli Vern and Ingrid L'lerim-Vandiir] had set off a series of chain events that saw SularenCo reduced to a simple minor corporation denied from the glory of prominence and Sularen's Government at Byss entering at odds with the Alliance. Sularen resented both the Eternal Empire and Zweihander Union and by extension their leaders who now compromised Sularen's Position.

Soon enough Sularen took his seat at the edge of the GA-NIO Delegations side of the Table waiting for the others to take their seats and begin the negotiations. Sularen felt nervous as he sat down however feeling out of place as he was certain these individuals probably thought little of him and saw him as a simple throne on the side as most high-ranking individuals did given Sularen's Sour Reputation.

But nevertheless Sularen maintained a clam posture , ready for the negotiations to begin and hopefully by the time it ended he would finally gain some recognition and prominence and be able to further expand his Corporation as he had planned. Now , Sularen waited as only time could tell whether he would leave Tiss'shari having completed his goal of gaining prominence or failed miserably once more.

​

 

[Reiner Talmanes]

S I T HㅤC I T A D E L

Auteme | Gala Geert | Aelys Lucien Dooku​

The cold hard durasteel of the shuttle interior was a welcome friend as the craft rocked, rattled and juked its way through incoming enemy fire. The muffled sounds of explosions detonating a scant dozen or so meters either side of them doing little to ease the apprehension growing in Reiner’s gut as they drew closer and closer to their intended destination. His eyes closed as if it would somehow make the ride a little more bearable. All it had really achieved was earned him a few nudges, jokes and dismissive remarks from the marines that packed in either side of him.

Ziost; gateway to more than a few would be Sith empires and tinpot dictatorships of the Outer Rim. He didn’t need to open his eyes to know they were seconds from touching down. There was simply no mistaking the thick miasma of the darkside they were rapidly descending into. It was all so vast and alien, nothing like the sprawling urban jungle of his native Coruscant. He was used to brutal gang violence, petty crime and back alley murder. Open warfare on a planet steeped in blood and the darkside was a new one.

“Ah reckon’ ya gotta be second guessin’ that wish t’see more of the galaxy right ‘bout now, eh, kid?” The marine - Ardellian, wasn’t it? - to his left queried with an audible grin, his breath as hot and as thick as his accent. His baby face features, complete with peach fuzz beard, undercutting his attempt to play the hardened veteran of a thousand campaigns. The tremor in his voice matching that in his hand as he fixed the buckle on his squad-marked pauldron. “Ziost might not be the end of the line, but ah figure it ain’t far off.”

Reiner cracked a hazel eye just as the light went from a baleful red to a bright green that was as Corellian as the marine yapping at him. His comrades were already leaping to their feet, gear already checked and double checked several times over, their movements all but screaming the fear, anticipation and adrenaline rush that was taking over.

“Steady on, friend.” The Jedi replied a force lightness as he slid to his feet, his combat boots landing on the deck plating with a steadiness he still didn’t quite feel. As a true Lorrdian, however, he was resolved to simply fake it until he made it. Or at least until the likes Ardellian were out of eyeshot. Already he was adjusting his body language into something more placid and less tense. “If you go using all your vocabulary in a single sentence like that, people might just think you’re not the backwater hick you are.”

Adrellian's laughing rebuttal was lost in the sound of the landing ramp touching down and the sound of dozens of boots charging into the fray, the pair of them swept along for the ride as they were pushed onto the awaiting surface of Ziost and into the imposing shadow of the Citadel. A scattering of blasterfire from one of the windows caused Reiner to duck and sway to the side in search of cover, his lightsaber igniting with a snap-hiss to provide a measure when none seemed forthcoming. An explosion rocking the side of the building a split second later as the marines silenced it in their own blunt force fashion before he had a chance.

He made himself feel a bit better by redirecting the worst of the debris and dirt that rained down upon them with an exaggeratedly slow wave of his free hand. The motion buying a quick second to glance backwards, the forced smirk on his lips quickly becoming a thin and drawn out line as they settled on a slumped figure. It seemed Ardellian’s spiel had been more accurate than he would ever known. The marine still remained where he had collapsed, scant feet from the lip of the landing ramp, that peace fuzz face frozen in disbelief at the smouldering black hole that now occupied pride of place on his breastplate.

A cold icicle settled in the pit of Reiner’s stomach as he forced himself to turn away, saber feeling heavy in his hand as he moved up to join the Shield of the Jedi and her companions as they drove forward into the Citadel. As a street rat from the lower levels of Coruscant, a place where life was expensive and death absurdly cheap, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen someone die - and it certainly wouldn’t be the last time before the day was through. But that fact didn’t make it any easier. Definitely didn’t shake the feeling that he was a long way from home.

“End of the line, huh, Ardellian?” He mused softly to himself, “Alright. Let’s see about that.”

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy
​

Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

 

[Leon Gallo]

Caldon Tenneth​

Flight crews buzzed about. Mechanics ran through their final checklists with pilots. Fuel pumps decoupled from craft. Men and Women ran about in flight suits. Droids were lowered into their slots of larger fighters and bombers, then locked in. Amid this chaos, a pair of X-02 Saber fighters readied for take off. Saber Squadron only had two pilots flying today, the rest of its number preparing to fight on the ground. Only Three and Seven were flying, Leon had volunteered to help keep Sith fighters away from the transports and then bombers away from the ground forces.

The Padawan's doubt in his abilities with a lightsaber had grown to the point he hoped to avoid any fighting with, but he couldn't just leave the fight alone. Not after his failure at Korriban. Breathing deeply in, then sharply out, Leon turned the inertial dampener down to 95. He'd grown to embrace the feeling of being thrown around, to feel more in tune with the fighter. The engines were primed, and all Leon needed now was permission to fly.

"Saber flight, you are clear to launch."

And so, Saber Seven lifted from the metal floor of the ship's hangar, and rocketed towards Ziost's atmosphere.

Aces High
​

Saber Seven leaned back in his cockpit. Just moments away, the battle of Ziost was raging. Fighters and bombers sipped around, fighting to support their ground units. Alliance transports rushed down to the surface to deploy the soldiers within. The X-wing’s stealth systems deactivated as the S-foils opened into attack position. The X-02’s blaster cannons roared to life as it dove into the attack.

The ship’s pilot leaned into his controls, fighting the forces pushing him back into his seat. As the Jedi's ship rushed downwards, he was pushed into the back of his seat. A flair of blaster cannons, and Leon was past the squadron of Sith fighters he’d attacked. The Padawan had tried to drop a Shadow Bomb in the middle of them, but his timing had been off, and it exploded well below them.

The X-02 pulled out of it’s dive as it’s pilot pushed himself through the forces pushing his blood to his extremities. Now rocketing upwards, the ship opened fire again. A pair of explosions above sent shrapnel rushing towards him. The fractured pieces of ship bounced off the X-wing’s shields as it again zipped past the now slightly reduced squadron.

This time, the Shadow Bomb detonated right in the middle of the enemy squadron. Leon didn’t see the damage he’d caused, but it looked like two enemy ships were falling on his radar. He reactivated his stealth systems as he flew away. Leon was alone, and the Sith were going to get reinforcements soon. The X-02 flew off again, to launch another attack somewhere else.

Leon relaxed again, listening to the chatter on Alliance comms, searching for any transports that needed help. He felt oddly at ease, despite the combat surrounding him. His mind was clearer than it had been in years. Was this what he'd needed? To be behind the controls of a fighter?

Or was it battle?

 

[Takui]

Allies: Creuat | Dagon Kaze | Zark San Tekka | Asmundr Varobalder | Mrurh'en'lase | Hel
Enemies: TSE

​

They were calling him a hero.

Takui could feel admiration in the way they looked at him. Bright, shining eyes stared in awe as he walked up to the Chancellor and received the accolade. Equal parts pride and shame waged war inside the Padawan as he accepted the Star of Coruscant, and the scene burned prominent in his memory even now.

That same misplaced sentiment radiated off of Dagon as they moved toward Ziost. He'd risked his life in defense of an Alliance world; but that was no more than any of them would do, and many others had already done that time and again. He ultimately lost that battle. He threw down his weapon and allowed his opponent to simply run him through.

While he cringed at the spiritual pain that burned in his abdomen at the thought, Takui knew that there would be many more situations that would put him in the same position again. Despite a distaste for that suffering, he would gladly do it again if the Force required it of him.

That didn't make him a hero. It made him a Jedi.

There was nothing more to say. The New Jedi Order had come to Ziost to put the threat of the Sith to rest. Profane temples, places of power, anything that they could do to kill the enthusiasm of the darkness and shatter its morale. The Light burned bright within these young men and women.

Now it was time to fan the flame in their hearts into an inferno and burn away the shadows.

​

Taku was the last man out of the dropship. Everyone else had their plan to go in fast and wild. Maximize collateral damage: as Ryv Karis had said, "by any means necessary."

The Padawan had ulterior motives of his own, however. Xa Fel had opened a series of cascading doors that revealed a much larger galactic problem. Corruption from the dark side, from evil people, all of these factors had the same lasting effect. It destroyed the ecosystems of entire worlds. Planets like Ziost, once lush and fertile were reduced to wastelands.

Not only did the Sith need to be ousted physically, Ziost cried out to him for spiritual freedom. Taku could feel the world writhing in thousands of years worth of agony. The pulsating heart of darkness was an anchor in the material world: it was centered around something.

He just had to find out what.

While the others busied themselves with assaulting the world's considerable religious infrastructure, Taku focused himself on finding the source of Ziost's deep seated darkness. If he could liberate this planet, one long considered an icon of Sith power, there was a chance it might flourish again.

He had to place his hopes in that bright future: without it, what was he even fighting for?

Lark​

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***​

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy
​

Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***​

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy
​

Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

 

[Inaros Kaal]

Outermost edges of the Ziost system
Aboard the Ionèl, Redeemer-Class
Alliance Reserve Forces not in direct engagement with the enemy
Actors:

- Kaal​

- Riem [NPC]​

​

"I don't know about this. Concentrating our advance along the Nache extends this war unnecessarily, don't you think?"

The officer stared intently at the projection. Thin strands wove a roughly circular web between the planets of the Stygian Caldera. The primary entryway into the system shone blue, as did its vertex on Korriban. Three rays extended out from there, two of which had a perpendicular line crossing them where blue transitioned to red, signifying the arbitrarily chosen borders between the Alliance's foothold and the Sith's Empire. The last ray was a solid blue line up to Nicht Ka, from where it transitioned into an alternating red and blue. Parallel to the curve from Nicht to its neighbour Ziost ran an arrow that showed the Alliance's most recent military move.

"You'd rather we run straight for Kaas? I suppose the Krote is stable enough, but Bosthirda would be a meat grinder. You saw what intelligence brought in," Kaal said. His gaze fixed on his second-in-command.

"Oh come on, you believe that? The new director gives me the creeps. Don't trust anything that comes out of SIA offices anymore."

"Watch it," Kaal's voice lacked any amusement.

"Right, right, sorry. Look, all I'm trying to say is the Nache was the worst decision we could have made," the officer shrugged. He was roughly in his mid-twenties. Fairly average height, black hair, clearly Coruscanti.

"Sure we might take Ziost, cripple their connection to some minor industrial centres, solid strategic advantage for sure, but it opens up another front along the Descri. We don't even know how long it'll take to pacify those worlds before we can move on to the Trete."

"Reports place a majority of Sith forces in the heart of the Stygian. Our garrison should hold Ziost long enough if we move down to the Trete fast."

"And give the Sith a thermal exhaust port? Come on, we know how this type of gamble ends. Haven't you learned from our Dejarik games?"

"This isn't Dejarik. They'll send part of their fleets up north to meet our advance, opening two fronts. We can force their hand by staying on the offensive, keep them on the back foot. This isn't your theory course anymore. Time's a scarce resource that we can't afford to waste."

"Then why didn't we pincer east first? Rhelg, Khar, Jag, and we're at Kaas. Our logistics lines would be less thin. We could consolidate at Jag and launch a two-pronged pincer on Kaas after we break Bosthirda."

"And the western fleets twiddle their thumbs while we do that?"

"When Kaas falls, they fall too. We'd save the Alliance a lot of resources that way."

Kaal looked at the officer for a moment. Riem was lost in thought, idly scrolling through readouts, trying to view memorized numbers in some light that would cast them in a novel context.

"You should read up on the Ruusan period. I know the curriculum puts more weight on recent history, with a splash of Palpatine's Empire, but out here you're not fighting an Imperial threat. Anyone who was Imperial already turned coats to grey," Kaal's tone was softer than before.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

 

[Djorn Bline]

D I A M O N D _ S N A K E
NEW IMPERIAL ORDER
ZIOST | REDEEMER | ABOVE NEW ADASTA
ARMOR | PISTOL | KNIFE

DEVILS
​

There were no restrictions on how to proceed in interrogating. Everything was free game to him, and this would be off the books. Even with interrogations there had to be some morals and ethics applied to them.

But for Djorn? The gloves were off. In fact, they were always off some time ago. Of course, he wasn’t always like this as a younger man, before he descended further and further into his career as an espionage operative. Ten or so years ago, he would have abhorred this idea and be revolted against it; the idea of enhanced interrogations or by its more common term: torture. But with each passing mission, the morals he held onto as a soldier slowly were cut off from him. Being honorable didn’t win wars, and his mistakes in the past of being compassionate only wrought death to his comrades in those chapters of his life.

Was he born for war? There was no definite answer for that question.

But he sure was molded by it.

“You know,” he began to his subject, a Sith disciple captured on Felucia. “If there’s one good thing I learned from the Empire, it was how to make someone talk.”

“So don’t you worry, I’ll make you sing. I’ve got lots of methods to try on you, especially due to your position as a Sith.”

“Let’s try...waterboarding, I’ll go easy on you.”

“And don’t worry, I won’t ruin the vanity on you. Not yet at least, I need you functioning for the meantime.”

The floor was wet with water, a small puddle rising after going through a few gallons of water on the restrained Sith. Accommodations were made to ensure tight security and to nullify the Force from Eldaah. Already he had went through some methods with the help of the probe droid at his disposal.

“I’m almost through with you, you damn queen. I’ve got you broken now. You can only take so much, can you? You’re not what you thought you were. Powerful and mightier than mere men like me, but that’s just a delusion you and your ilk bought up and stroke at. I should know, I spent most of my damn years surrounded by false gods such as yourself, thinking everyone should bow and kiss the earth that you stand on. But that all changed when Tavlar and the others broke the Sith on Muunilinst and Mygeeto. A damn shame I didn’t defect back then, but that doesn’t matter now.”

His eyes looked at her with anger and hatred, a vile smile etching on his lips just at the fact of a Sith at his mercy. The Sith Order he once served enjoyed playing god and manipulating their subjects for their own entertainment, crippling their bodies and minds and leaving them broken that could no longer be put together; like shattered glass on the floor.

“So let’s see what you’ve got to say, Eldaah. Don’t be shy; otherwise, I can encourage you and I’m sure water and electricity goes well together. Lucky for me, my assistant hasn’t-”

The blast doors opened, and in came the woman he requested to help him attend this interrogation. Loske. She could help him conclude this small assignment and get whatever they needed that could help with the efforts on Ziost, and maybe other matters that could be exploited from the Empire.

“-arrived yet. Bummer.”

His attention went on Loske as the Jedi came forward, observing the rather large facility being occupied for Eldaah and Djorn.

“No, not yet. Although, she’s about to break. Look at her, she’s just lucky I haven’t used my knuckles on that face of hers. And what I want? I need your help, maybe it’ll be more humane than what I’ve got in mind for our guest. I need you to probe her mind, I’m sure after what I’ve done to her she barely has the mental fortitude to protect her mind. Sooner we’re done, the sooner we can purge Ziost. So are you up for it? Or do I have to enhance my techniques on her? Your call.”

ALLIES | GA | NJO | Loske Treicolt
ENEMIES | TSE | Eldaah Aderyn

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

 

[Darth Daiara]

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill

Spoiler: The Story

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

If and when the Jedi leadership found out what Quill had in mind, they would be...immensely cross. Exile cross, potentially. But this was a matter of conscience. And therefore, without telling a soul, Quill had come early.

He'd learned a simple and valuable truth over the years: spend a couple of days on any given world, get to know its feel, get in harmony with it as much as possible, and your sense-based abilities improved. You could find others more easily, and from farther away, and he needed every edge he could get to keep this world from overwhelming him. As violence blossomed, Quill got up from the bluff where he'd waited, Force presence concealed, for the past thirty-six hours. He shook crusted snow off his hood and shoulders, and looked down at the Sorzus Academy. Lightsabers were flaring to life out front.

The Sorzus Academy had a reputation, a serious one. It trained sorcerers and alchemists at a high level - a research institution, effectively. Were its students complicit in great sins and debased magics? Quite possibly.

That didn't mean they automatically deserved to be massacred if persuasion failed. And Quill had his doubts that persuasion would have its day.

Stiff and sore from the cold, the erstwhile Hermit of Hoth shouldered his battered backpack. He scratched frost out of his moustache as he made his way down toward the academy. He skirted the violence out front, sank a guard into pleasant tenacious dreams, and slipped in a side door he'd identified some time ago.

***

The Sorzus Academy came across as professional, sterile, no particular smell of atrocity or filth. With a kyberite confessional talisman in hand instead of a weapon, Quill padded through the unfamiliar facility as quietly as he could.

He left footprints of melting snow. Unavoidable.

Ziost Academy


Kaalia had forbidden her from entering the frontline.

Schools weren't a frontline. At least, they shouldn't be.

Her master was trying to preserve her mind, the cost of war and the power she leaned into was collecting its toll- hard and fast, she wasn't holding back. How could she?

They were purging Academies.



They were here. She could feel them in the distance, their presence like a steady war drum moving ever closer. She let out a slow breath and opened her eyes. Amber hugged the outer rims, the blue starting to recede. The ethereal form of a storm trooper wavered before her-- the spectral being blocking her path. She walked through it, ignoring the reminder of what she had done.

It dissipated into the force, leaving the room without a soul. She pushed her way through the sterile halls, a light dimming above her. The faded form of a young girl in dark robes walked with her, flickering away as quickly as she arrived. She moved to confront the main gate.


No jedi would pass.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
SAME AREA AS, BUT SEPARATE FROM, STRIKE TEAM WINDU ( Takui Creuat Mrurh'en'lase | Hel Dagon Kaze Zark San Tekka )
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara
BAG OF TRICKS (packaged with nullification resin):

• Perspective Stone
• Jedi restraints
• Confessional talismans
• One of the Seven Husbands
• Glop grenades
• Stun blaster
• Zip ties

Some Jedi would say empathy had its dangers. Quill saw these grand halls and vaulted chambers through the eyes of the young Sith he hunted. To them this was a place of dreams. Challenging, deadly, but a promise and a home. And in a way he was a young man again, feeling the same about the scriptorium in the Centrality's Raskava Order covert. Before he understood just how far the Raskava would go for knowledge. Before he changed his path, or the Force changed it for him.

This was a high academy for excellent students, young adults and older - no young children that he'd felt or observed. But that didn't mean every student here was fully accountable for their own choices. Growing up in a totalitarian regime and Sith indoctrination impacted their agency to one extent or another. So when Quill found a pair of acolytes or young knights moving toward the front gate, he didn't reach for his saber even when they drew theirs. Instead he smiled and held up a rippled stone sphere.

Understand - Quill had grown up in the Raskava, who know memory-theft well. He'd learned to share memory from the elders of Entooine and the Gutretee, and employed those skills many times. He'd created this Perspective Stone, which made memory-gifting much easier. Therefore, between one blink and the next, the two young Sith found themselves remembering times they'd never known.

They knew what he'd faced and overcome at their age. They knew what it was like to realize that the Dark Side had no future and offered empty promises. They knew guilt and understood that it was possible to feel whole again. They knew exactly how it felt to overflow with the Light Side of the Force as only a Jedi Master could.

As their minds reeled with healing knowledge, Quill put them into a deep sleep and made sure their skulls didn't hit the floor. He zip-tied their wrists. He picked up their lightsabers just long enough to flood and heal the red crystals, turning them and their blades a soft white.

Perspective Stone in hand, he left them there and padded down the vaulted passages in search of more Sith lives to save.

Other students and instructors were making for the confrontation outside the front gate. He intercepted one, a red-haired young woman, at the top of a double staircase that curled down into an atrium like mandibles. Or maybe she intercepted him. He wasn't entirely sure.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



Aradia halted, unmoving as she found herself faced with an elder man. Her eyes narrowed, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as she looked beyond him and listened. She felt nothing telling from his form-- no spark of light or wash of righteous fury. Not a jedi then, except for the robe. The confusion became compounded by the lack of conflict raging up ahead. The gate had not been breeched.

He was so starkly different from the war-fearing jedi she usually encountered, she hesitated. But only for second.

Her saber hilt snapped into her hand, its blue length kept unlit. A jedi had once wielded it. Now she did, until the day came when she stopped losing her weapons in battle. Her fingers tighten around it.

"Your force signature," she demanded.

SORZUS ACADEMY
Darth Daiara

A few Sith could create a false Light signature; Quill had heard rumors of an obscure technique for wearing a false Dark presence. He had no such trick, and in any case keeping his presence hidden was a distraction he couldn't afford for long tonight. So he let his Force signature out, let the Sith girl get a sense of him-

And shrugged. For some reason the Force whispered that another memory dump wasn't the best course here. Instead he pulled the kyberite confessional talisman from around his neck and held it up. The talisman was central to, and empowered by, meditations on guilt and conscience and redemption.

Anyone but a sociopath had a conscience. A dormant one, often enough - trampled into submission or just pushed aside by the compromises of daily life. But wakeable, whatever that meant to this particular Sith. And not into despairing guilt, but into the kind of remorse that went hand in hand with hope of change and growth.

Quill remembered his youth in the Raskava with a shiver. Few indeed were the young Sith who had no regrets.

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill
​

Aradia's stomach dropped, her expression softening to bewildered horror. What it meant to be standing there, in that hall, slammed into her. This was war. The reality of it nearly brought her to her knees. She had killed and lost and would kill to stay alive. The reasoning she used and the walls she put up all melted away. She was left staring at the man she would murder too.

And she didn't want to.

The saber became too heavy, lowered limply to her side.

"What are you doing?" Came a smaller voice. Her attention snapped to the talisman, awareness stirring. "Stop that. Put that away." The words were commanding, but the tone dissolved into a plea. She did not like this. She took a step back, a defensive hand raising.

ZIOST - SORZUS ACADEMY
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

The elders of Entooine, the so-called Blue Bathas, had taught Quill the trick of making memories permanent. He considered fixing this moment, this feeling, in her mind. But that would run the risk of harming her. Guilt was meant to produce growth and then to fade over time when its job was done.

He opted against it. Instead he nodded and tucked the amulet away in a belt pouch.

"So you remember who you are," he explained. "To make sure you have a future. The war's coming to Ziost tonight, and before that happens I'd rather send as many students away from here as possible."

He unslung his ragged pack and stowed the Solitude Stone and the confessional talisman. He might need them later, but he didn't want to scare this young Sith, if possible.

"How young are the youngest here? Sixteen or so, I'm guessing?"

From a certain point of view, here came the treason.

"Can I count on you to help get them out?"

Ziost Academy | Jend-Ro Quill



"They won't go," she found herself saying, her mouth moving ahead of her confusion. "They have defensive points here, they'll just be hunted if they go out--" She stopped short, realizing there was no answer she could give to absolve herself of what she had done. No matter how much she wanted to with him. And he made her want to. She took another step back, her fingers tightening on the saber.

This wasn't right. He was an enemy.

"You're manipulating me," She accused, an edge entering her tone. "You're a jedi, you want them dead, you-you can't just make me forget that." It was a truth she knew all too well. For every thing she regretted, a jedi had done something horrible first. The jedi created her. It didn't matter how much she hated it, there were people alive because she did the hard things.

The saber snapped to life, her hand shaking as she raised its blue length before her. Just strike him down. Please no.

"You need to leave. Now."

SORZUS ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS
ENGAGING: Darth Daiara

Quill pulled out his lightsaber too and, with zero hesitation, tossed it aside to clatter on the floor. What was the point of principle if you wouldn't take a risk off it?

"Not going to fight you," he said. "And no, they won't be hunted if they go outside. Not if they take my ship. No guns, but a Jedi telesponder that'll get them, you, the lot of you kids out of the system."

He tossed the ship's keycard on the floor as well, this time between them.

"I've been where you are. I was a dark apprentice at your age. Born to it, raised to it. Go on - get the youngest, the ones that don't kill pets, the ones that still have a chance at a real life. Get'em off this fething world and do it now."

Aradia stared, feeling him out for a hint of dishonesty. Did she want to believe him because she felt she needed to do something now, or was there something in him that she understood?

Her attention flickered to his dropped saber. Her free hand flexed, calling it to her. "What will you do?" She asked, holding it firmly in her grasp. The force wrapped around the card, bringing it to her too. She moved carefully, watching his every movement as she kept her saber between them. Fool her once, shame on you. Fool her twice...

"They want blood. They won't forgive you for this."

Her expression pinched, her guilt doing little to soften the memories of why.

"They have no mercy for people like you and me. They will kill you."

 

[Darth Kentarch]

OPERATION CLEANSING FIRE
ZIOST
WEAPONS: LIGHTSABER | NIGHTFALL | DUSKFALL
ALLIES: GA
ENEMIES: TSE
​

Nothing.

No, Perhaps the disappointment of feeling nothing. It was the only thing he felt. Originally he believed there would be some feeling or emotion, something that would boil up inside him. Homecomings usually brought with them a rush of nostalgia or surreal feelings. After all, it had been years since he had stepped foot in the Stygian Caldera.

"You can hear it? Can't you?" Kentarch asked. "No, not the sounds of battle." The Sith Lord crossed his hands behind his back. His foot tapped at a very specific pace.

"As sure as every sun will rise. The sun will set." His tone was deep and ominous, almost baroque. "The sound comes just then as the sun sets. In a dream. Silver and green." After a few moments, he turned to face another Sith, an archivist. This one was bound to a chair.

"Pillars of salt and sand. We build them up, some higher than others." Kentarch knelt down so he was at eye level with the bound archivist. The will beaten out of him. "Empires crumble, just like pillars of salt and sand. Everything you cling and grasp to slips through your hands."

"Do you know what sound is?" Unfolding his hands he revealed a small knife in his right hand. He then tapped the flat of the blade on the bound archivist's forehead. "Waves. crashing upon the shore, the tide washing away your empire. But the Sith must face the tide again, and I must face my supposed kin."

A line of blood splashed across the ground. "The tide has brought me here to Ziost, at this moment in history. Not as a 'zatitsis', but as The Zatitsis." Kentarch's fingers wrapped around the man's throat. Then he tapped the now bloody blade on the man's cut forehead again. The Sith archivist struggled to breathe, his form thrashing about wildly, trying to free himself. "The Sith Empire tried to strike my name from history. But the tide dragged me up from the deep, waves crashing our fates together once time again. Now you must play out your part." His tone became more frustrating with each passing moment.

"Tell me where they keep everything!" Another line of blood splashed across the ground. This time there was screaming.


The Jedi had come. The sounds of battle drew closer. The black-cloaked figure that Darth Kentarch watched the New Adasta skyline as the Galactic Alliance descended upon the city. There would be no absolution in the fiery crucible of battle. In the adjoining room behind him was the broken and lifeless form of Sith Archivist still bound to a chair. Kentarch knew the Jedi would try and purge the darkness from this planet. Which was fine by him, these corrupted Sith would be torn out root and stem. From the shadows, he would ensure their rituals, history, and knowledge was destroyed. Retribution for try to strike his name from history.

Exhaling Kentarch gaze shifted from the descending Galactic Alliance forces to the direction of the Sorzus Academy.

 

[Jax Thio]

​

Location: Ziost​

Equipment: Jedi Sneaking Suit, Jax's Lightsaber​

Tag: Ripley Kühn , Pom Stych Tivé (enemy)​

​

"This suit is riding up the crotch."​

​

Jax sighed trying to get used to this sneaking suit Ripley gave him as he lead his troops through the forests of Ziosts ready to ambush the guards. He was so used of wearing loose fitting clothing, he wondered how the Zeltron managed to look good despite wearing tight leather. Jax has never done an infiltration mission before well that was a lie, he's done plenty of stealth missions but never in the heat of a battlefield. Despite nearly choosing the Sentinel path, Jax instead became a Guardian due to its action orientated missions. Still Jax always did have a soft spot for Sentinel work being in the trenches with Ripley for a while. The two had become fast friends as they worked to unravel a Shocktrooper conspiracy that started back in the battle of Korriban where Jax spotted a squadron of Shocktroopers murdering children inside the Sith Academy. There was no way the Chancellor nor a Jedi Knight would give the order to kill innocents despite their allegiance with the Sith. After thorough investigation, it was discovered that the conspiracy went deeper than what either of them anticipated.​

​

A large chunk of Shocktroopers were weary of the Cold War and felt that Chancellor Adhira Chandra a former Jedi was using her power to continue wage the Jedi's tired war against the Sith. Jax wasn't surprised as Adhira's critics disparaged her Jedi roots feeling that Jedi affairs should remain out of the political realm and stick to being peacekeepers for the Alliance. Despite the morale amongst the citizens of the Alliance victory at Korriban, doubt remained with some people wary of Chandra allowing the Jedi to take over the council. Most of it was conspiracy but the chatter Ripley and Jax picked up was that the murder of children was just the tip of the spear and there were plans of sabotage at Ziost.​

​

Ripley and Jax had yet to retrieve the footage of the Shocktroopers murdering children. If word got out, then despite the string of victories the fallout will be catastrophic not only for Chancellor Adhira but the NJO as well. Jax gulped gripping his Lightsaber, a lot was riding on this mission but right now he wished that Aveline Cuiléin his padawan was here with him. The two of them have been through many trials and tribulations but none so painful when Jax accidentally maimed her at Korriban. His teachings were an utter failure and Aveline nearly died because Jax was blinded by rage against Pom. His lax approach made Aveline ill prepared for battle and he was to blame, Aveline was better than Jax in terms of potential with the force that much was true but he needed to be a proper teacher for her. Jax left Aveline at Kasyhkk so he can relearn and reconnect with the force and also understand the power of Oneness in which he unleashed against Pom at Korriban.​

​

He made a lot of progress and he was twice the Jedi he was at Korriban but there was still that lingering doubt inside Jax. Perhaps it wasn't enough, maybe Jax was too weak, the Jedi sighed. "I miss you Aveline," Jax mumbled motioning his men to get in position. "I wish you were here with me my promising apprentice."​

​

He will see her Kayla Luspark and all of his friends again, Jax just gotta get this done first. "In position," one of the men said. Jax remained rooted to the ground watching Sith Troopers patrol the place. "Do it," The trooper fired his blaster rifle melting one Sith Troopers face and soon a barrage of blaster bolts decended on the patrol. Jax took out his Lightsaber and sprang into battle. "Time to kick ass." he smirked cutting down a hapless Sith Trooper.​

​

​

 

[Laertia Io]

Wearing: Black Knight Chitin

Armed with: SynthBreaker

Vorpal Saber

Psychic Lightsaber (Equipped with Velmorite Crystal)

Crime Hunter's Pistol (Charric Configuration)

Dashade Sonic Disruptor

Wrist Launcher (5x EXP Bolts, 007x Cryo Bolts)

Wrist Mounted B2 Battle Droid Cannon w/ Power Pack

Scattergun

Stouker Concussion Rifle

Objective: Cleansing Fire

Allies: TSE

Enemies: GA


Three hours prior


Aboard The Absolution, Laertia Io wept at what she was about to do. She wept at the destruction of her entire career as a Jedi of any sort at supporting the compact. But it was either this or let them destroy themselves. As long as they chose to fight Sith instead of Bryn'adul, they would throw away lives needlessly. She simply intended to make sure they paid in blood for adhering to it...

She had stopped being the Black Knight of Nar Shaddaa, and had slowly, but surely started being referred to as The Black Knight of Nar Kreeta by others. After all, Nar Kreeta was where it had all changed for her. Nar Kreeta was where she had really watched a world die, and nearly everybody else who had fought beside her.

Though she was too proud to admit it, Nar Kreeta had broken her on some level. She had been altered by a Sith Heretic before birth, her parents had been murdered by the Cult of The Brain Demon, and she had been intercepted by their Matriarch. Everything she believed of her life was a lie or misdirection and she had watched the people she had lead and the people she tried to save viciously murdered. The only thing holding her together was her family and the reinforcement to that was Syd.

Laertia wasn't even quite sure what waited on the other side of all this. All she knew was that these destructive clashes served no one. They had to unite and they didn't see the need.

She had killed so many Sith it had simply stopped being so personal for her, unlike other Jedi. This war had stopped mattering so much. She wasn't sure when it had started. Maybe it had started at Atrisia, when she encountered Darth Themis and learned a chunk of her own origins. Maybe it had stopped when The Amalgam revealed the truth on Kar Shian.

Maybe it had stopped mattering so much on the day she got her Brain Injuries.

Either way, Laertia was not the same person she had been when she had been tricked out of retirement.

She had eventually composed herself, dawning her scuffed and scratched Black Armor, recently repaired.

And then, as she had begun to do more and more often. She took as many weapons as she could carry while hitching a ride on a Saotome Envoy piloted by one of the daughters of Nine Lives , an Android named Meier.

In terms of personality, Meier seemed to be extremely bubbly, almost like a cheerleader. She was definitely the nicest one...Laertia had warmed up to her almost immediately, as her cheerful, happy nature reminded her of her 'Sister' Melinda.

The Envoy, a Rogue Shadow-type design streaked out of Hyperspace blaring a friendly Confederacy signal that caused the sith fleet fighting in space to let her past their lines, so she could fight on the ground.

The pulsating darkness and violence was foul to her but more foul still would be the consequences of letting them win. They'd completely screw up defensive efforts to hold back The Bryn'adul in any meaningful way in Sith Space. The Alliance was overstretching itself pointlessly. Needlessly. The Bryn'adul were all that mattered.

"We're about to be in the thick of it. Heavy Jedi Presence reported. You're in for a hell of a time..." Meier reported. "You sure you want to do this? You'll be fighting Jedi..."

"The Jedi Order is giving bad orders I refuse to follow...and refuse to allow them to execute without resistance..." Laertia replied, heartbroken but refusing to show it as the hatch opened and the Envoy flew low, allowing her to teleport down below and land amongst a crowd of GA soldiers and Jedi about to storm a temple.

She Introduced them to two shots from her hefty Stouker Rifle, the Concussion Blast ripping open a Jedi Knight and instagibbing him in front of her friends.

Laertia emptied the Stouker, the blast from each shot not only killing Jedi, but soldiers as well, then out came the Sonic Disruptor and the Wrist Mounted Blaster Cannon as she teleport-spammed the group from three different directions, firing everything as fast as possible, the Blaster Cannon and Sonic shots overwhelming the defenses of many Jedi, who were either killed failing to block the bolts, failing to dodge the sonic disruption shots, or both.

Laertia advanced on them once her disruptor ran dry, still firing the cannon into an unlucky Commando, who was shredded apart, but was forced to break it off after a Jedi's blade managed to strike the barrels with their Lightsaber, ruining the attachment. She drew the SynthBreaker. Despite her family and her Lover, in awful, heated moments like this, Laertia felt sometimes her weapons were the only friends she had left.

The inverted green blade shot out to its Maximum length, about a third longer than normal, and parried the next strike, her blade going through the brain as it counter attacked.

There could be no room for mercy.

Laertia found herself under attack from three Jedi Knights, her Form One swatiing their blades aside with a lethal fluidity that blended offense and defense, driving them backward even as they attacked ferociously.

"Traitor!" One of them shouted.

"You'd let the worlds of the Sith die to the Bryn'adul just to destroy the Sith. I'm just a traitor to stupidity. You're traitors to the whole galaxy, refusing to set aside your feud to stop the Bryn'adul. Die." Laertia snapped back, ripping his weapon out of his hands and burning through his face with his blade, blocking the blade of another and grabbing his neck with her cybernetic arm, breaking it and swinging him into the face of the third Jedi, breaking his neck and killing him instantly also.

Laertia began fighting her way to Sorzus Academy, scowling at the intense Darkness, refusing to submit to its power and temptation even as she killed the ones attempting to destroy it.

More Jedi opposed her as she fought through the streets, drawing her ash gray blade and slicing through a light plate of Phrik on a Jedi's torso, wincing at his shocked expression before he died.

She began bashing through various blade defenses as she fought, cutting down and like drawing the attention of those Jedi like who were fighting in the same area, Laertia brutally but quickly cutting down their allies as her blades crashed through flesh and metal, Laertia leaving no survivors in her wake, her skill allowing her to to often kill two or three in a very short span of time. Sometimes they lasted longer, but her skill was such that it inevitably destroyed their defenses, leaving them cut down in single strikes, cleaving right through heads to kill instantly...

Laertia didn't think beyond the next kill as she fought, cutting down Jedi with a brutal ease that disturbed her as she with drew to that cold, frosty place in her mind to cope with what she was doing.

Likely at this point, members from strike team Windu such as Takui , Asmundr Varobalder , Creuat , Dagon Kaze Mrurh'en'lase | Hel , and Zark San Tekka would likely have spotted her deadly rampage...but would they try and stop her, or would it be some other warriors with the skills required?

Either way, Laertia had not stopped killing Jedi since arriving on this world...

 

[Aaran Tafo]

BENEATH THE ACADEMY OF SITH ARTS​

Over the past few days, Aaran had figured that his life could have been in a slightly better position than it was previously. The Sith, in all their hospitality had insisted that he remain in their care ever since he was picked up by the delightful Quinn Varanin . Not that he regretted encountering the Echani princess. Nor did he regret saving her that day. Especially with how kindly the Sith had treated him. She was a rather refreshing change of pace from the majority of those associated with the Sith Empire he usually encountered.

But still, one thing led to another, a distinct flash of pushing the Princess out of the way of falling rocks. And the next thing he knew he was in a cell on a Sith ship heading back to Ziost. From there, he was subjected to the usual tender mercies many a Jedi met when they fell into Sith clutches. Certainly not an experience for the faint of heart. The first few days were so exciting they all blurred into each other. Foggy memories of those times clouding his mind. A simple defensive mechanism, his own mind distancing him from the memories to protect him.

It was not like they mattered with his current predicament. Nestled somewhere deep in the Academy itself. His unfamiliarity with the locale meant he could not tell where the hell he was. But he did know that he had overstayed his welcome. As kind as his hosts were. He really did have to get out of there. The issue lay in how insistent his hosts were in their hospitality.

His bedchambers were well equipped. A solid steel slab in the middle of a room. Aaran Tafo found himself chained to it. His manacles etched in various runes and sigils, all designed to supress his connection to the Force. How kind of them to relieve him of the burden of power while he was here. So he need not worry himself with such fanciful thoughts as escaping.

Thankfully, fulling cutting someone off from the Force was near impossible. The universal energy field was persistent like that. For the past few days. Aaran simply waited, focused and grasped for any dregs of powers that he could muster.

If not for the fact that Aaran was an exceptionally stubborn individual. He probably would have given up after the first day of attempted meditation. Frustration would have gnawed at him due to his inability to muster up even the slightest dreg of power. No doubt making him more vulnerable to the taunting and whispers of the Sith that occasionally showed up to visit him. The second day followed much like the first. Any attempt to muster enough focus to call upon the Force was met with only silence.

But as they say. The third time is the charm. And upon the third day, he could finally feel it. A whisper brushing across his senses. A spark of power that he grasped tightly, slowly nurturing it into an ember. One that he could nurture into a mote of power that he could do something with. He just needed to wait until the right moment.

And on the fourth day. His patience was rewarded. Even in his cell he could faintly hear the alarms. The defences of the school being mustered to repel any attackers. It was now he needed to act. The mote of power that he had stored away inside him roaring into life. His will and focus beseeching the universe to do him a solid and bend space and time for a single instant.

With a loud pop of displaced air. His sword, the faithful instrument of his will Arete appeared, landing in his outstretched hand. The faintly glowing silver blade pulsing in time with his heartbeat as he began to cut away at the chains binding him.

The good news. He was free. The bad news, he was still stuck under the Academy. Clad in nothing more than sack-cloth pants to preserve his dignity, armed with nothing but his blade. Outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded by danger on all sides. "So no different from your normal day." He reminded himself. Before continung his his attempt to dodge the scant patrols thay still remained on the lower levels. Thankful at least that the majority of the school's defenders were probably doing their best to repel the current assault. Not hunting someone already within their midst.

Alina Tremiru
Okkeus Dainlei
Darth Strosius

 

[Bayaz]

222nd Nova Corps

Twilight Company

Strike Team ???

Equipment: Armor {Aesthetic} | Rifle | Sidearm x2 | Knife
No Rest
​

The transport rumbled as it left the containment field of the Pathfinder's hangar. Twilight Company would be the first on the ground from the 222nd, though he had no doubt the rest of his brothers in arms would be there soon. The famed Wolfpack, led by Genearl Treicolt, was the main attraction in this assault, but a single battalion could only do so much.

Marcus looked to his left and saw one of the Shinies shacking his leg nervously, a sight he'd seen far too many times to count. He'd been that kid too, all those years ago after lying on his recruitment paperwork. He'd been 17 when he first tasted battle, seen what a Sith army could do to a defending world. He still had night terrors about the Graug and Sithspawn, yet here he was flying headlong into a Sith homeworld, ready to die for what was right.

He made his way over and clapped a hand on the lad's platted shoulders. He looked up from his nervous praying, the fear obvious in his eyes. While not as famous, Twilight Company had made one phrase ubiquitous throughout the 222nd. Its meaning was so easy to grasp that even Shinies could understand and do what needed to be done.

"Kill them first Marine," Marcus said simply before slamming his own helmet over his head. The HUD activated, giving him updates and reports on the other units situations. His IFF coordinator began picking up and registering the chips in all the nearby helmets and finished its start-up processes. They were ready. He settled on his speeder bike. The ramps opened up, wind buffeting the hold almost immediately and bitting through his bodyglove. The land was dark and no doubt full of Sith terrors but this was his duty.

"TWILIGHT COMPANY! MOVE OUT! KTF!" He revved and shot from the transport, his repulsors catching nothing but air. He felt his stomach lurch as he fell through the blaring wind. Blaster fire and anti-air weapons fired at them. One of the transports erupted into ball of flame and he watched as marines attempted to escape the doomed ship, flame still licking their armor.

He landed with a thud, the repulsors barely keeping his bike from flattening into a pancake upon impact. They rode towards the city gates, passing by defenses that otherwise would have shredded a standard infantry assault. Even then, most of those had been bombed out and were nothing more than smoldering piles of slag.

"WALKER!" Marcus saw it before he heard the call over coms. The massive thing lumbered towards them, its cannons trained on the speederbike assault. Overhead he heard the telltale scream of X-wings as they blasted the walkers legs from under it with torpedoes. Its knees buckled and it cascaded into the frozen earth, bending its neck at an odd angle...And providing the perfect ramp. Several of his squad caught on to what he was doing and fell in behind him. One by one they threw their bikes to max throttle, opening up the repulsor engines wide and flew off of the make-shift ramp, and sailed over the walls of the city. He cursed as one of his men caught the rampart, sending his speeder spinning into another, engulfing the two marines in a mangled mess of machine and limbs. Others though made it over just like him. The Sith troopers were just as surprised as he was that the plan had worked.

One of them though managed to get a shot into his repulsor engine as he rode down the walkway of the walls. He dumped the bike, tumbling to a stop before his bike careened off the edge and into a group of Sith troopers. One of his squad rode past, slowing just enough for Marcus to catch the marine's outstretched arm and drag him along. Blaster at the ready he rode on the marine's back, firing at Sith troops as they passed by, creating chaos.

Distraction: In place. Now it was the main force's turn to bust through the wall and begin its invasion of the city proper.

​

Aboard the ANV Indelible 6 - Temperory Flag
3rd Sector Fleet "Battlegroup Kenobi"
Bridge

Dracken Pryce stood in the center of organized Chaos. The Indelible 6 wasns't his usual choice for a Flag. It wasn't overwhelmingly powerful or backed with special features like the Starchild or Ouroborus. It wasn't quick like the big Corellian ships either. The Indelible 6, a Redeemer-Class Star Defender, was a versatile tool and one of the most common battlecruisers in the Alliance Navy. It, much like the Startides, was a symbol of the peace, justice, and security that the Alliance brought to the stars.

But it wasn't the Ouroboros.

"Admiral, the Pathfinder has made it into position." This definitely wasn't the Ouroboros. He nodded to the pink Twi'lek and watched as he sauntered away. Not the Ouroboros at all. He smirked and caught himself staring before returning his gaze to his readouts. Ava would have smacked him for that.

"Keep an eye on them. How are the others?" Pryce asked.

"Moving into position as we speak sir," Pryce nodded, satisfied with that answer. They had managed to push the Sith back enough to land troops and establish footholds in low orbit, but here the battle still raged. As if to remind him a turbolaser blast rocked the ship as it was absorbed by the ship's shields.

"May the Force be with you all" he thought to himself.