Private Wicked as They Come

[Vesta]

WICKED AS THEY COME
​

Dressel

There were no clandestine meetings this time, things tended not to be quite so thoroughly planned when proximity to the enemy was so close. The planet she found herself on, that they found themselves on, was of little importance beyond its location - it was a spot on two hyperlanes, one which cut the galaxy down its middle and the other that ran perpendicular to it. More importantly, it was on the way to both the core and the outer rim. Having taken on the guise of a rather wealthy business socialite from the deep core, and of course retaining her identity beyond the confines of Alliance and Confederate space, this was an advantageous spot on a route that could either take her home or deep into the heart of enemy territory.

It was precisely for this reason that Onrai found the Shi'ido in the midst of her travels, looking slightly worse for wear. Or perhaps she was looking for her, she didn't know, but all that mattered was that the two had arrived on the same planet, the same starport even, at roughly the same time. Trade hadn't brought the Sith here, or anything quite so nefarious as her recent dealings on Rhand, The mundane was, unfortunately, simply a fact of life for nearly everyone in the galaxy - the Shi'ido was no different. For all the plainness of her plans, however, it didn't take much for things to change as if on a whim.

 

[Onrai]

Darth Mori

The last time the Sith then known as Vanessa Vantai had seen the woman then known as Vesta Zambrano, it was while she was trawling for acolytes - the same place she had encountered Inanna Hoole on what had become an ill-fated apprenticeship. It was most intriguing how the twice-false goddess had evolved over time, sacrificing the frailties of mortality in order to ascent to nascent godhood through her consumption of multiple primordial beings’ life force. That had of course been an interesting endeavor, a time when the Sith Empire was still extant and had not once again repeated its endless cycle of expansion and collapse. The results from this were plain: hidden beneath the subdued form of a mortal which Onrai currently wore was a being of immense power that defied the very existence of space and time - even as she sought to further penetrate the boundaries of the universe in order to gain dominion over all reality. The World Between Worlds would be hers to touch.

For now, it seemed, her obligations to another member of the Zambrano family seemed to take priority. Vesta had at one point been the “favored child,” from her recollection. Created to be almost perfect in whatever ways she could be made. Whatever had happened since that fateful meeting many years ago had clearly been detrimental to the shapeshifter, whose muted presence even undercover seeped a sense of damage and harm to her own preternatural self. It raised an eyebrow from Onrai as wisps of energy connected within her greater psyche, a scheme amalgamating within her mind - yes, there was a possibility, but such was not to be approached recklessly. She could not afford the latent hostility creating a being similar to herself could engender, and the disdain of Ingrid L'lerim towards her had been prior proof of the questionability of the process. So it was that her opener was plain and rather muted.

“Long day, huh?”

 

[Vesta]

Sleepless nights made days far longer than they had any right to be, and it had been weeks since the Sith lord had closed her eyes for more than a handful of minutes - even when she'd been nearly atomized on Rhand. Her tired gaze, a frustrated frame of exhaustion, slowly focused itself on Onrai with an expression of disdain. Every face and every presence had been committed to memory whenever she'd came across one that was new, and while she seemed changed it was still the same woman that had sought out her former apprentice during the midst of some acolyte nonsense on Bastion. Nonsense that she would have preferred to keep forgotten, but it seemed she didn't have the mental faculties to selectively remember a face without the context around it being given simultaneously.

"It doesn't end." She answered, the dark circles under her eyes agreeing with her by merely existing.

Sleep was something she was sorely lacking, but it was certainly not evading her - it hounded her, day after day, and it was only the nightmarish screams she couldn't shut out in her dreams that kept her from sleep. The subject of her sleep, or the length of the day, however, were not things that were common conversation pieces for her - and rarely did anyone, especially someone she could smell a motive from, waste her time with such pointless trivialities. Her eyebrows raised slightly as she momentarily shut her eyes, a sigh escaping from the small gap between her lips, before she tilted her head to the side and gave the woman a questioning look, an expecting one.

"Everyone always wants something, what are you after?" She asked, her tone as flat as her enthusiasm.

 

[Onrai]

"It never does." She frowned, the somber state of Vesta herself admittedly a fragment of disappointment. The twice-false goddess could sympathize with Mori's own frustration at the course of life. While she herself had been disdained as a result of putting the Gorgon into long-term storage due to the collapse of the Sith Empire and the disruption of her plans, it had encouraged her to look towards new possibilities, a new look on existence itself that she had never truly considered while shackled by the limitations of such a mortal concept. "It disappoints me to see such haggardness overtake so prominent a player in the grand game of the universe." Modestly cryptic language, yet still complex enough to hopefully pique a sliver of interest.

"What I want is to reach out and offer you a place in something more than the Sith. More than simple domination of the galaxy." She said in hushed tones. "Something that could have implications for all of creation. A chance to touch the fabric of existence itself and sew its threads in a new way." She smiled. "I would be glad to explain more in perhaps a more private setting." The entity motioned towards a seemingly ordinary door belonging to one of the many rooms the starport called home. There was nothing visibly unusual about it in the slightest.

Such normality was all it would hopefully take to garner that twinge of creativity.

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

Whether it was Kaine or Onrai , or anyone else for that matter, there was always the promise for something more. Solipsis had offered, teased even, the prospect of freedom from the past, an avenue towards liberation of the self, and that, in and of itself, was more than enough for her. The galaxy was far bigger than she, its stars and the black canvas they were smeared upon were not for her - none of it was. All that mattered was what was immediately her own, which had once been a number of things and was now far less. This mention of a galactic metamorphosis, however, was somewhat different than the run-of-the-mill conquest that so many in the old Imperial space had frothed at the mouth over.

It implied not simply taking from the rest to make the stars her own, but to change the very laws of nature to entwine herself into the canvas itself - a thought that was immediately as intoxicating as it was nihilistic.

Like a drug that she'd just been offered a hit from, she moved for more.

"Then let's talk." She answered, rising from her seat to walk towards the door she'd been directed towards.

 

[Onrai]

Upon entry into the door itself, the duo would find themselves in a radically altered location, one that certainly was not the scumsuckers' cantina the door had seemingly been attached to. The stars remained the only source of light within wherever they had been transported to. The floor looked and felt metallic, and within the area were dead consoles, the air itself stale as though they were within some sort of great cosmic tomb.

"You may recall this vessel." Onrai said. "The Gorgon, once my pride and joy within the Sith-Imperial Navy. She's been hulked and defueled for months now. Her remaining resources have been used to fuel what's left of the Sith navy under my control." The human-like form of the twice-false goddess began to melt, flesh seemingly dripping and gaining the consistency of wax left too close to a candle-fire. The ichor of midnight-blackness seemed to bubble up and out from within the corrupt visage, immolating the woman's form until she seemed naught more than a silhouette with two silvered eyes that could only be described as one thing.

Unnatural.

"Before the death of the Sith Empire, I and a select few took this vessel into the realm of Otherspace, to seek out and hunt the profane primordials who once held the galaxy in the palm of their hand. It was through slaying those creatures and feeding upon their power that I became what I am today." She smiled, the glimmer of her mock lips and teeth barely visible against the starlight. "I possess a power greater than that of Sith. I possess the power of gods."

She pondered for a moment on how best to elaborate. "It was through siphoning their power that I gained their knowledge - knowledge that there is in fact a way to perforate the borders of reality and bridge the dimensions, lines to different universes and states of reality. Hyperspace, otherspace... Even Mortis is an example of such a pocket universe capable of being realigned with our own through the creation of a gateway. But connection to a certain universe - the "prime universe," so to speak, would mean connection to the very place where the fabric of reality is woven and pulled. Access to that would allow any to truly become indisputable gods, for there is no higher form of existence than to shape the universe as the gods once did."

A hand was offered to Mori. "But every god needs to be part of a pantheon, a means of responsibility and counterbalance. My past attempts to grant that power to those I believed worthy resulted in failure. I now offer the opportunity to join me in this path to ascension - and to a future of just worship."

Darth Mori

 

[Vesta]

The transition of local space to somewhere far away, or at least she assumed based on the difference in the quality of air, wasn't quite as jarring as she felt the woman thought it might've been - she'd done this trick before, though under circumstances that made things far more seamless and much less open to the inconvenient ability of the mind to discern the subtle differences between one place to the next by way of patterns such as this. Kaine had been easier to fool, when she'd brought him to a glimpse of a world that was between worlds, but that was a rare occasion, a time before she'd made the choice between love and power - before she'd given it a pass to pursue the former instead of the latter.

'Oh, how times have changed.' She thought, thinking back to that time - to a Vesta that was much more complete than she was now, before she had ruined herself with the dreg of imitating human emotion.

Love,

a crutch.

"I do not, though I am sure I should." She offered, truthfully not recalling whether or not she had set foot on the vessel despite supposing she might have some time in the past. The mention of whatever cadaver of a navy that the Empire had left behind fell on deaf ears, however - she'd killed its brain, the body that remained was of little interest to her now, especially with her growing passion for newer horizons in the galactic west and center. She eyed the woman as she exhibited a strange transformation to what was, perhaps, the incorporeal, but, besides the state of being providing her some intrigue, she was still a shapeshifter and remained unimpressed - her focus was still on whatever it was the woman desired to speak to her about, not something as mundane as spectacle.

That was something she could provide for herself well enough.

Her expression shifted from relative disinterest and towards genuine curiosity - only to be dashed against the rocks with the mention of the sort of language she supposed that she ought to have suspected. Gods. She listened a little longer, to this delusion of entities that shaped the fabric of reality like some imagined seamstress or skilled painter, until a hand was offered and her reason for this talk was given. She took the hand, of course, but it was to give herself the leverage to position herself to better look her in the eyes.

"There are no such things as gods, only the stories of creation given power by the will of the people who desired it to happen. The force. You've met my mother, my real mother, haven't you?" She answered, visibly as much as audibly emphasizing the distinction of real with a change in demeanor and expression to something that seemed rather disdainful - resentful, even. "Concepts, ideas, that are desired by the whole of the galaxy, of reality - maybe all of them - that grow like stars, their gravity pulling others into themselves until, either by some sort of primordial rule or just sheer luck, they amalgamate into something resembling a will. It's all the force - all of it!" She said, her voice raising with an oddly impassioned take on the matter at hand - as if she'd gone down this rabbit hole once before.

"To become what it is you're after is the bind yourself in chains heavier, greater, than anything you could ever hope to imagine - you want to tether yourself to a permanent fixture, a stagnant state, beholden to the desires of the collective whole, even if you don't realize that is exactly what that is."

"I want to be mortal, I want to die, because when I surpass this fanciful notion of deification and then cease to be as I am now, it will be a testament to a power of my own, not something I've stolen from the manipulated dreams of followers - I want to be immortal in their memories, not as an idea. I want power, not devotion."

"If I am to be a god, I will be my own, no one else's - let them venerate me for their fear of me, or their envy, but not for the state in which I exist."

Onrai

 

[Onrai]

“A god does not have to be conceived by the worship of others. Only worshipped and able to fulfill the needs of their worshippers.” She said, a pause pursing upon her unnatural lips. “Your mother. Braith. Alekto. Whatever name it was she went by.”

A smile crossed the lips of the ethereal entity as she thought of the best way to explain things. “The concepts can however be instilled in that beneath the higher forms of life, whether through the puppeteering purposes of crafting new species within a laboratory, or through the grandiose restructuring of the galaxy as a whole. Both require a being to possess the power that to any non-secular entity would appear to be both brightly or darkly divine.” She pondered for a bit, thinking of a way to persuade precisely to Mori the most efficient way to accommodate her requests.

“Power.” She said. “A vague concept whose true limits are unbounded within the twilight of the universe. You want power, and I can grant you such. A power extant regardless of some tertiary quantity such as worship.” A shadowed hand reached into her own very essence, slowly extricating from within something that seemed even darker and more consuming of light than her own being. The object radiated evil. Darkness. Whatever she had unveiled was a maleficent artifact of pernicious proportions.

“Typhojem, the left-handed god. Worshipped by the ancient Sith, among others.” She said, examining the object as though it were a Corusca gem worth an entire star system. “And very real, for this is what remains of him. Shattered, the power of such an entity collapsed upon itself to form this crystallized heart.” She said. “It can grant you the power you desire, the distilled essence of a primordial being rarified and soon flowing through your flesh. I offer it to you, that you may go forth and achieve your ends with it. That we may achieve our ends.” She said.

the opportunity was there, if only for Mori to take advantage.

Darth Mori