Battle Fog (closed)

[Je'gan Olra'en]

A tiny beam of sunlight caught dust-motes in an ethereal pillar through the centre of the room. At the apex of its conical ceiling, the minuscule window had gone from light to dark and back again since Je’gan Olra’en had entered.

This was not meant to imply that he had been paying attention to the time. The Knight’s face was deeply buried in a thick book on mentalics, one he had been meaning to delve into for months, and one that had required his new rank to access. It fascinated him and gave him new ideas, and more than that, it explained some of the more common mental tricks in detail.

He’d gotten the minor things out of the way first, taking extensive notes on a datapad as to the differences between how the book described the classic ‘mind trick’ and how his own version of it operated. Next up had been projective telepathy – forcing emotions on someone and the like. Overall, things seemed to be going well, or they had been up until perhaps three hours ago.

Then they’d started going great. He’d encountered a new technique, relatively simple, that seemed to have grand possibilities. Casting Confusion (the book referred to it with a capital letter) required a target mind, so for the time being he couldn’t try it out, but he was reluctant to close the book. He was going to read through the necessary chapters thoroughly once or twice more before he did so.

At last, the chapter wound to a close, and he released the heavy cover as well as the half of the book that came after. The thick ‘flimsi’plast slammed down viciously, and the pillar of light danced. Je’gan stood up and stretched. The remnants of a small, droid-catered supper lay across the conical room’s floor, and he’d felt no need for sleep. Still didn’t, in fact; he had plenty of energy, and was most definitely looking forward to trying out this ‘Confusion’.

He slipped his robe on over the gi and headed down the adjacent spiral staircase, book in hand. A dark-robed Sith carrying an old book wasn’t a terribly odd sight. He didn’t get many looks, except perhaps a few envious glances at his lightsaber by the younger members of the Order.

The training grounds gaped before him, and he spied his objective; two young apprentices going at it with Force-pushes. He smiled and took a seat on an out-of-the-way stone bench. The book flopped open, and he began to cast Confusion.

And failed.

Frowning, he headed back to the book and began running through procedures. The desired effect took the better part of fifteen minutes to achieve, by which point the two apprentices had ended their duel and moved on. Frustrated, Je’gan settled down even farther and waited for the next pair. There were always a few kids hanging around.

As he suspected, soon enough two more were duelling. He began Confusion again, and took a good deal of satisfaction in watching one of them momentarily forget how to do anything with the Force, causing a rather nasty training-saber burn and some befuddled youngsters. Je’gan chuckled, sat up, and left. Now it was time to rest.

Or, just maybe...to keep reading that book...

[Je'gan Olra'en]

The last of the droids were just exiting as he arrived at the base of the stairwell, hyperactive cleaning units that had only waited just long enough for the Sith Knight to depart before going berserk on the dust and the crumbs that Je’gan’s all-nighter had yielded. He took little notice of them, being immersed in the book mentally if not physically. Perhaps there were further permutations to Confusion and similar techniques. Perhaps, too, he should have finished the book before trying anything out, but his patience seemed to have gone a bit downhill since he’d joined the Order.

And perhaps that was as it should be. Not the loss of patience per se, but his talk with Damon had made it a bit more obvious to him that he really should be motivated more by anger. It seemed to work best for other Darksiders, after all.

He topped the staircase and threw himself down on the cushions piled in an alcove, giving the room a good once-over with his danger sense first off for safety’s sake. Everything appeared normal, so he returned to reading…

[Je'gan Olra'en]

Some time later...

The first thing his opening eyes spotted was the book, shut and laying on the floor. Comprehension flooded through him, remembrance of the past day's events, and with it came a smile.

He sat up, dusting off his robes and shielding his eyes from the ray of light that came through the hole in the roof. For the first time, he noticed that it was covered in transparisteel; logical in hindsight, preventing rain or snow from entering the meditation chamber.

His vision adjusted, and he picked up the book. This was one, he vowed, that would go absent from the library for quite some time. He'd fallen asleep before finishing, but according to the index the last chapters were about controlling minds, and better yet, changing them. Je'gan Olra'en wasn't delusional: he knew what he could accomplish and what he couldn't. Yet these fantastic abilities tugged at him just as strongly now as in his pre-sleep euphoria. Surely it couldn't hurt to look into it. He didn't expect to achieve anything but finding some new ways of planting compulsions, or perhaps get started on the sort of mind-control Southstar was always using.

That was more than enough to justify going back to the book. By the position of the sun, he didn't have a training session with Kes for a few hours. There was time and to spare.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

Later

As the sun was bright today, Je’gan had removed his coal-block outer robe and discarded it over a protruding tree-root, revealing a simple white tunic and pants of tough canvas. A dirt-brown belt held the gi shut. Looped around the belt was a lanyard that connected to what appeared to be a fat rapier without a blade, made of a silvery metal that caught and reflected the light like it was covered in mirror-shards. The Sith Knight’s feet were bare. He took a moment to enjoy the sunlight on his face and the grass under his toes, and then began.

In quite literally the blink of an eye, he went from his relaxed posture to a classical fencing/Teras Kasi kata, limbering up for the strenuous day ahead. The kata wasn’t recognizable to any other Sith he knew of. Even with almost a year to work on it, he hadn’t yet switched over entirely from solid-blade fencing (on which he’d spent a decade) to Second Form lightsabre combat. He’d merely adjusted his style so as not to depend on having a hilt. Azubah had a hilt, but regardless of how dense it was, the saucer wouldn’t stand up to another lightsabre for more than a second or two. Therefore, unless he wanted to lose large portions of his hands, he had had to guide himself away from all the old parries that absolutely needed a disc hilt to catch and lock strikes. This hadn’t taken terribly long, but it was still something he had to work on.

Not today, though. Even if he bore Azubah at his belt, that was more a matter of habit than anything else. Besides which, the Sith here could get jumpy, and Je’gan knew of at least two or three fellow members of the Order who might like to see him humiliated. No, today was all about his primary weapon: his mind.

He’d honestly never thought that this would turn out to be his calling. Acrobatic and skilled in both the rapier and Teras Kasi, he’d planned on basing his progress on physical combat. That was what Jodah had emphasized also, at least in the short time they’d had as Master and Apprentice before the older Sith disappeared. When he’d started training with Oolana Taine, though, she’d skipped all question of physicality and moved to mental attacks.

And thus had started a new era for Je’gan Olra’en. Mental warfare, he soon discovered, was his forte. Within the first lessons – how to withstand a simple attack – he’d picked up on how to initiate the mental bridge required for such an attack, and had riposted with an innate ease. He hadn’t won by any stretch of the imagination…but how much did that really matter? For a low-level Apprentice, he’d done fantastically well.

He practised like mad, even when Oolana left, and his regretful lapses later caused situations in which it was necessary to hone these skills practically. Going head-to-head with Jedi both Dark and Light greatly expanded his knowledge of what would work and what wouldn’t. When he was finally expelled from Corellia on probation, he had developed both technique and a certain amount of power, and these allowed him to beat the Sith Master Gov Mortis – at the expense of more pain than he’d felt before, and nearly more than he’d felt since, the only exception being his bout with an exceedingly odd Jedi Master’s Force Lightning. Yet he survived, and for that he was very grateful indeed.

As his quest persisted, he had definite trouble with a fellow Sith named Duvall, who he was able to defeat only because of these mental powers. In the process, he expanded his repertoire to include a form of mind-melding, and a further refinement of the consciousness-trick he’d used against Mortis. This allowed him to escape with his victim, Ceres.

Ceres…

His mind still rebelled at the thought of the naïve Jedi. Even though he was fanatically proud of having defeated his better self to kill her in service to the Order, there still remained traces of the feelings which had motivated his better self. One of those, he had thought at one time, was love.

But that was neither here nor there. The point was that he had greatly expanded his skills, albeit in partial response to his lack of exceptional Force sensitivity. To put him on an equal footing with another Knight, he absolutely had to grow, and refine the techniques he used. That was one of the greater reasons he’d tried so hard to pick up the mind trick, and possibly the biggest factor in his success. Since then, he’d managed minor illusions of all sorts, as well as the implanting of subconscious suggestions. He’d refined the mind trick and the mental attack to the point that he could actually kill someone’s mind if their shields weren’t too strong, or if they didn’t have much of a connection to the Force.

One thing yet remained before he’d be on the path to mastery of the mind, and that was the actual control of someone else. Southstar could do it; he’d seen his Master literally take over people’s minds. He wasn’t sure what the after-effects would be – on the subject, naturally – but having an instant minion could be pretty dang useful in a fight, or better yet in an infiltration. It was a skill he couldn’t afford to ignore. For this reason, he’d asked for volunteers among the lower echelons of the Order, Adepts who served on occasion as cannon fodder or sparring partners. He’d gotten exactly one response.

“Mr. Olra’en.” The voice was creaky and seemed choked, as if something like rotten wood was crumbling. “As you desired…”

Je’gan didn’t move; his kata was set to turn him around in three moves…two…one…

He spun in a literal blur; Azubah’s tip crackled an inch from the Adept’s nose. “Indeed. Respyrin, isn’t it?”

The bearded Adept jolted back a step, blinking against the harsh blue light emitted from the sabre. “Yes, it is. Shall we begin?”

Je’gan deactivated his weapon and clipped it onto the lanyard. “We shall,” he growled, and attacked.

He’d spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trying to figure out how to do this best. The first step was to get past mental shielding, and as he tried it became clear that Respyrin was no pushover when it came to defending himself. His first barrages literally rebounded, and even scored into his own shields. With a grimace, he increased the complexity of the attack, two streams of tiny blade-simulacra biting into the Adept’s defences a hair from the centres of self-control, physical and Force-based. Still, it didn’t get through.

Respyrin wore a smirk, albeit strained, as he continued to stand against everything Je’gan could bring to bear. The younger Sith in turn was nearly smiling as he tried different vectors, distractions, and everything else he’d used, even personified visualizations. It was only a matter of time before he broke through …

And then, at last, he did. Respyrin’s mind lay bare before him; he began the next stages of the process he’d observed in Southstar’s training missions: the subversion of the will. It took several minutes’ worth of battery on a few areas of the soul – as well as a paralysis blow to a nerve in Respyrin’s neck; he only needed to be conscious, after all, and he had looked about to strike – to subvert self-control. Tricky if not impossible. He’d done the same thing with rats and other animals, and the modifications for sentience weren’t terribly hard to puzzle out. Agency was tough to get past, though.

The next stage was to dictate orders. He could give commands through the auditory apparatus, and with agency suppressed, the Adept wouldn’t be able to disobey. That seemed simplest, but he remembered reading once about making the other person’s mind a sort of virtual-reality experience, allowing him to effectively be that person. After some time’s tinkering, however, it became clear that this was beyond him, perhaps far enough that he’d never reach it. He settled for giving a few commands and watching the Adept execute them – a process requiring some ingenuity on Je’gan’s part, as the Adept was paralysed – before pulling out and repairing as much of the damage as he could.

Consciousness of corporeality returned. He hadn’t even been aware that he’d lost it. The sunlight seemed horribly bright, causing him to cover his watering eyes. Respyrin was gasping on the ground. The paralysis was over. Only now did Je’gan notice that the sun was considerably lower. Hours might perhaps have gone by.

Respyrin stood up shakily and spat, ruefully rather than with the bad humour of most Darksiders Je’gan knew. “A nice little battle, Mr. Olra’en. Call me up anytime.” The bearded man limped off, leaving the Sith Knight to watch his retreating back.

A bit masochistic, maybe, but not a bad sort, Je’gan mused, picking up his robe. He was exceptionally tired and greatly desired sleep.

In fact, on second thought…

He laid out the robe under the tree again and drifted off to sleep. If somebody disturbed him, tough.

Tough on them, naturally.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

Coronet
Later still

"Yes?"

The voice was hard to make out; after all, the little speaker was pointed at the receptionist, and the hardware didn't have much power to begin with. Still, if Je'gan listened carefully, he could hear it, and quite clearly at that.

"A Mr. Orean to see you, sir. He-"

does 3:30

"-has an appointment for three-thirty." The receptionist put a hand to her head. Je'gan noted her confusion with a bit of satisfaction. His Mind Trick was not perfect, but it was a good bit better than the Jedi equivalent. 'Better' being relative, of course. More effective. More efficient. Sure, there were adverse effects, which you didn't get with a Lightsider's technique, but they were minor. Befuddlement, headache, all very low-key.

"Let him in."

"Yessir." The girl's hand fumbled for the switch, and a pair of heavy doors swung open. Je'gan smiled sympathetically at her and walked through smartly.

"Mr. Orean. I'm sorry, I must have forgotten to take down our appointment. What can I do for you?"

The doors closed behind Je'gan as he surveyed his prey, a wealthy politician of noted moral fibre. This close, the man was no less impressive; ex-CorSec with an impeccable record, Hos Metkess maintained the physique and the mental toughness.

The Sith Knight opened his mouth, summoned the Dark Side and blasted a gaping hole in the man's shields. Metkess gulped air.

"Excuse me," the politician panted. "I, ah, headache..."

Je'gan pressed inexorably in on free thought, while striding forward a few steps and assuming a concerned face. "Can I get you anything, sir?"

"No, I-aaah!"

Within minutes, Metkess' face went slack, and he keeled over onto the polished desk. Je'gan dashed to his side and took a pulse for the security cameras, then headed for the door.

"Sorry about that." Metkess' voice was almost totally normal, despite the change in the will dominating his mind and thus body. "It happens from time to time."

Je'gan made his turn convincing, maintaining his expression. "You'll be all right, then?"

"Oh, yes, yes."

"Perhaps I should reschedule. Anyone should rest after something like that."

"That would be nice of you, Mr. Orean." Face and body suited words. The politican looked dead tired. He probably would be for real once Je'gan released his control.

"I'll see you then," the Sith Knight promised, working frantically to alter Metkess' short-term memory as he nodded good-bye and headed for the door.

He smiled at the receptionist on his way out.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

snick

The bolt closed behind him, and Je'gan Olra'en was home for the night. He leaned back against the door and sighed deeply, feeling fatigue ache all the way to his bones.

"Four apprentices," he mumbled in Francais. "What was I thinking..."

To keep them straight, he ticked them off on his fingers. Kes'La Bardo - Phoenix Mars Whyte - Drake Shadowstalker - Prometheus. Yep. Four. The young Knight stared off into space with his hand still half-raised. Through the curved panoramic window that dominated his entire wall from waist-level up, Coronet flared against a darkening horizon. The meadows between the Palace and the city were deep in shadow, and far, far below. Perfect metaphor, Je'gan commented sourly, for the common people under Sith rule. Even the smallest child here in the Sith Palace considered herself above them; Ida Knoe, Lorani T'sava, Jorshal - especially Jorshal - those youngsters who claimed the eponymous title of 'Sith Brat'.

Je'gan wasn't sure if he considered himself above anyone. It was one of the small, persistent hooks that held him back. He knew it held him back. Without a sense of power, how was he expected to gain any power at all? At the first, less than a year ago, when under Sith tutelage he'd begun to transform his detailed theoretical knowledge into practical experience, he'd begun to feel as he thought he should: exalted. Better than he had been - and as a champion blademaster and martial artist, that had been pretty good.

And reality had slammed him with another irony. As if killing the people that he loved hadn't been enough, the more powerful Je'gan became, the less he felt superior. He gained the ability to make small objects explode - and his slump began. He was knighted by Southstar - and it got worse. He branched out his mentalics to include alteration and control - and he became downright morose.

A thought struck him, and he clenched his fist, eyes focused on nothing. For an eyeblink he hesitated, and then strode decisively through the door to his right, into the workshop.

"Lights," he commanded harshly, and headed for a large table. After a moment, he stopped in mid-step and repeated the command in Basic. This time, fluorescent tubes lit overhead, almost instantly. The Palace computer didn't understand Francais. He'd been meaning to try and find a foreign-language module to plug into the mainframe for some time, but things had just gotten too busy. For eleven months, give or take a little, they'd stayed that way.

The door shut behind him, and he scanned the room with his danger-sense at full focus. Nothing present could offer an sort of threat besides the equipment itself, which he checked over piece by piece. He tapped a command on the workbench's control panel, then another, and finally a third. Another door hissed up, and Je'gan smiled grimly as he walked under its rapid reverse a hair away from getting his long cloak caught in the lintel.

The gallery was perhaps ten metres by six. Despite the recentness of his career's inception, he'd filled a third of it. Amazing how much you could collect in a year.

It had a centerpiece: a transparisteel-walled display case that dominated the far end of the gallery. Inside was a human figure, distorted slightly by a stasis field. She looked to be in her early twenties, a girl with very pale skin and long blonde hair. Her fingernails bit into her palms; otherwise, she might have been simply sleeping.

Except, of course, for the charred and blood-rimmed oval in the front of her blouse, right where her heart had been.

Ceres Duvall. First and only love of Je'gan Olra'en's young life. First and only Jedi to fall by his hand.

"Hello," he said fondly, and a tiny echo came back. He approached the case in reverence. With each step, though, an unknown anger grew, until his boots made loud cracks on the soundproofed floor.

"I used to think that you were the reason I was feeling depressed. I knew you weren't the cause of it all before I was even knighted. It's gone on for too long, you see." He stalked back and forth in front of the case, gesturing grandly with his right hand while his left arm lay across the small of his back. All by sheer habit; the Knight couldn't have said where the stance had come from.

"And you wouldn't haunt me like that. Not you. Not my Ceres." His tone was normally modulated, yielding endearment and empathy and compassion. Now that she was dead, such emotions were safer to express. Not by much, though. That was why this entire room was soundproofed. The minor madnesses of Je'gan Olra'en would not leave these walls. And as he'd already verified, his exceptional danger-sense would pick up remote viewing with anything but neutral intentions or better.

"No, you'd wish me well. I know it. I know." All he was saying was in Francais. Things came easier to him in his native tongue.

Ceres' hair swayed in the stasis field. Otherwise, she didn't move. Irrationally, frustration crept through Je'gan.

"You wouldn't have helped me, but you wouldn't have stopped me. You owed me that much." Counting the things he'd experienced and learnt by contact with Zatania, really, he'd gotten as much out of the Duvall incidents as he'd given. In those days had come his first tastes of mind-melding, compulsion, projected unobtrusiveness, and of course making things explode by focused blasts to stress lines - to this day his sole corporeal offensive tactic. To one as incapable of channeling energy as he (no Force Lightning in his future, no pyrokinesis) that was important.

"I'm sorry, Ceres." His anger drained to a cold determination, and fatigue almost crept to the surface again. "I'd do it again...but I'm still sorry."

Je'gan swivelled on his heel and walked past the irrelevant trinkets. Cuulvaer's lightsaber, and Galarra's, and a few others from that ill-fated cult. A suit of reptilian combat armour from the Kruthia/Osidia war. A twenty-four-inch dirk with a wide hilt and one half-melted edge. Two halves of a plain steel bar that bore marks of lightsaber bisection. A multifaceted chunk of polished stone small enough to hold in a fist. Azubah - his first lightsaber - and much, much more.

The door hissed up and down again, and he stepped through in the brief pause. He hung his cloak on a hook on the wall and sat down in the middle of the floor.

"I am the heart of darkness..." In Francais, it lacked none of the potency. The Force was without language.

Deep meditation. Very deep. That was Je'gan's goal. All else in his mind fled before the eye-searing blue of determination. He'd gone deep when he made Irreantum, but now he wanted to go deeper. There were levels of difficulty between creating an alter ego he could slip into more or less at will, and remaking himself from the ground up. He was going to do it anyways. He had all night. If he really needed it, he had tomorrow as well.

Going this deep was frightening. Another irony. As he'd taunted a dragon-like Jedi so long ago, fear of the dark was quite something. Je'gan hadn't felt it in perhaps fifteen years. The Force was always with him in the dark.

This, however, was no ordinary dark. This was soul-dark, this was what he had become as a Sith after eleven months of training in ruthlessness and, yes, there it was...evil. Malice. Ill will for no reason. It was a bit of a shock, and it nearly stopped him.

But the soul is a treacherous thing. He had to continue to examine himself, or he couldn't find the path to get out. The uncertainty principle. Whatever you observe, you change. Never more true than now.

So he examined himself, his terrain, and with the preconceptions he'd most carefully formed about what his new self should be like, he began to change. It was uncomfortable at first, but it got better. As time progressed, he became more and more aware of how little the required changes were. By the end, things were much easier. Tying new moral frameworks into reflexes and such. Piece of cake, relatively speaking.

His eyes opened.

"...there is the Dark Side," he concluded.

He concluded.

Concluded. Bauble. Irrelevant.

He.

Je'gan Olra'en, Sith Knight.

Shule.

No...that wasn't enough. Still in the settling-in phases, and well aware that his mind was malleable in this state and at this stage, he recognized that something besides the simple name was required.

Rivin called himself 'Dark Lord'.

Fair enough. He was a Sith Knight and Rivin's equal.

Darth Shule.

Oui. Je suis Darth Shule.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

He was tired, and slept. Some hours later, he woke up feeling quite refreshed and more himself.

Shule-himself. The new version, the new experience. It was considerably stranger than being Irreantum. If he needed a break, though, he found out soon enough that he could just slip into his alter ego and that would be that. And he was adjusting well in any case.

The first thing he set out to try - there being no scheduled teaching sessions for a few hours - was his bugbear: energy manipulation. Shule accepted that he'd never be able to lift anything more than a few pounds with his mind, but something that he flat-out couldn't do was annoying. Really annoying.

And as he watched, delighted, his new psyche took that minor disquietude and turned it into something he could make use of.

"Now, let's see," he mumbled. "Back to high-school science. Energy exists in bonds and forces. That I remember. There's energy in movement..."

But where to start? The obvious answer was air. Gas particles, he vividly remembered, moved at high speeds. If you slowed them down enough, they became liquids; further, solids. Perhaps he might try making a liquid out of a gas.

He knew at once that to do that he'd need to sense individual molecules. His danger-sense was insanely acute, true, and he could feel his way around and between minds quite well...but otherwise, he didn't think he'd ever really concentrated on sensing. It had always seemed too simple, too mundane, and almost a waste of time. Mentalics, martial arts and blade combat had dominated his priority list for far too long.

With a certain hesitance, then, he reached out through the Force. Not much presented itself. Nothing, in fact. After a moment, the reason became clear: the portion of his mind that focused on Force-sense was almost hardwired to searching for danger, and failing that, for intelligent minds. With a certain effort, he pushed them away and moved past into a plane where his preconceptions ceased to exist.

After some time, he began to feel a bit of what he was searching for. He recalled his early reading, a quote from a Jedi about the Force binding objects together being prominent. There was something to that. But the objects he seemed to be sensing were big - bed, desk, chair.

On a hunch, he applied the same kind of focus that he used to alter minds and found that things got smaller, but not small enough. What he needed was a really minuscule point of view. Perhaps imagining himself as an atom-?

It wasn't that simple, not nearly. But eventually he managed to cram himself down to that level. The process wasn't as elegant as he felt it should be, but it worked, and he wasn't about to dispute that.

The outside world had long since drifted away, and Shule had given it a fond farewell before concentrating further. To some extent, he could feel the molecules of gas that made up the air, and as he examined them further he became aware all over again of the energy in their frantic movement. Sparks of light, that's what they were, and by brightening or dimming them he thought he might take or give energy from them.

It didn't work. Not in the slightest. Chagrined, he realized that energy had to have a source or a sink, and tried to pull energy from the light into he himself, now secure in a self-image about the size of one of those flecks.

Elation. He'd succeeded...

In tapping the energy of one molecule. One.

He tried two, and watched as they came closer together. More. More. Eight, ten, twelve, fourteen...

One hundred...

He was losing track of time.

One thousand...

Things were getting tough. Some part of him gritted imaginary teeth. Others could do this easily; why couldn't he?

Ten thousand...

More, more...

He stopped. For his efforts, he'd been rewarded with enough energy that he could actually feel it. And that was enough for one day. More than enough.

Reality snapped back, and joy almost drove thoughts of anger and the Dark Side from his mind. Almost, save for the fact that he was now Shule, and Shule didn't succumb to joy.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

The first thing he noticed was that the room was colder, which made sense once he thought on it. He stood up from his cross-legged posture and rubbed his hands briskly, noting as he did so that he really should have stayed on the floor; the stone was warmer than the air in the room.

His satisfaction didn't last very long. Sure, he'd done what he'd set out to do, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but it just wasn't enough. Southstar could drain energy from neurons at hundred-metre ranges. Rivin could use Force Lightning. It never entered Shule's head that each of the other Sith Knights was far more experienced than he.

A buzzer sounded, and he flicked it off, putting on his cloak over the rumpled tunic and pants and heading out. Time to teach again; playtime was over until tonight.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

snick

Another hard day's work had more or less paid off in the form of considerable progress from all involved. All Apprentices involved, that is. Even though certain of his students - notably the enigmatic teenager Phoenix Whyte - could probably have grasped his latest forays into energy manipulation, Shule refrained from any mention of it. He was in unknown territory here, and nothing was certain save that he had to tread with care. He might be going about this entirely the wrong way. If only he could access the Holocron...

But that was neither here nor there. Sith Knight or not, he didn't quite possess the courage to ask Lady Vader for access to that artifact. No, he'd long since determined that he'd go as far as he could and then try, using the thing as a check to make sure he'd done things properly. Force knew he'd hate to develop a whole personalized discipline of energy manipulation and then find out that there was a way ten times easier.

"Discipline," he snorted, lapsing into his native tongue. "I can make a room cold. Yeah...that's power, all right."

Memories of the fight with Cuulvaer/Galarra comforted him slightly; in her saurian Barabel form, the Dark Side cultist had been somewhat vulnerable to temperature shifts. But to blind her heat-sensing, they hadn't dropped the temperature; they'd raised it. That would be considerably harder. Shule didn't quite consider himself ready to try.

Sitting down in a comfortable leather chair - he'd had it brought up just the other day to help with these exercises - the Sith Knight began to enter deep meditation, then stopped. His eyes narrowed as an idea struck him.

Time to see if he could even make the room cold without sacrificing consciousness of the world around him.

He concentrated, but just a battle-focus, not to the same level as what he'd use for a mind-alter or something like that. This level of focus and power permitted such things as Confusion, Blindness, Illusion and Telekinesis - that last, of course, restricted to small manipulations only. The day he lifted more than he could physically was the day he would buy every Jedi on Coruscant a drink. Even fifty pounds was insanely difficult.

Taking a deep breath and putting thoughts of past failures out of his head, he tried and failed to achieve the viewpoint necessary for energy manipulation. He attributed it to unfamiliarity and tried again, bringing to remembrance how he'd done it last time. The main obstacle, he realized abruptly, remained the difference in level of focus. Keeping part of him in the outside world for combat dramatically reduced how much brainpower he could put behind the visualization. It was something he'd long since overcome for most of his other techniques, save for the bigger mentalic feats that he'd never tried to implement in combat, and thus he wasn't entirely ready.

Shule gritted his teeth and got ready to try as many times as necessary until he got it. That was just what he did. He got a strong theoretical basis for techniques, then sat down and tried, and tried, and kept trying until he got something that worked.

After perhaps half an hour, it finally clicked. He could see and concentrate on what was right in front of him, but he could also devote himself to deeper Force manipulations than battle-focus normally allowed. His apex abilities, mind alteration and control, were of course beyond that, but he felt instinctively that from here things would go a little better.

While the last trepidation disappeared, he began to reach for the necessary viewpoint, and found it shortly thereafter. It seemed considerably easier now that he'd done it before and knew what not to do. With this perception firmly anchored, things got easier and easier, and the room gradually chilled. It was barely noticeable, less so than the first try, but that was to be expected. Moreover, Shule was tiring significantly. He stopped the manipulation all at once and felt the slight reserve of new energy he'd acquired.

Perhaps...he might...

With a glance at the clock - he had another mentalics appointment at eleven tonight - he retained his point of view and began trying to feed energy back into the molecules. This was harder. Much harder. Energy seemed to bleed off in all directions. One stray manifestation hit the window and discolored a tiny spot on the transparisteel. The room got hardly any warmer.

He stopped trying and headed for the ensuite 'fresher. A tension he didn't know he'd been cultivating started to drain away once he'd splashed his face with cold water and taken a few handfuls to drink. He stared out the little round window at the darkening sky and wiped his mouth. Thoughts of home came back strongly enough that he wanted very much to just curl up and go to sleep. Hastily, Irreantum assumed dominance, and he tried to evaluate what had gone wrong with the dispassionate Shule-persona. He stood there for some time before coming to the conclusion that a psyche was not quite the same thing as a soul, he had changed the former rather than the latter, and he wouldn't really want to change the latter in any case.

So he was still vulnerable to emotion. Less so, but it was a weak point. Perhaps he should work on that.

Yeah...in all my copious spare time.

He re-entered the suite's main room and began again, tightening his focus and trying to tag energy to specific particles. It was, he soon found, more efficient. Just for comparison, he switched back and forth between Shule and Irreantum - no difference. More pure Dark Side power available to Shule, really, but the same efficiency with both of his psyches.

A slow smile graced Shule's face as the room began to warm back up. Further refinement of focus and target increased efficiency - this still took a lot more power than it really should have - and soon the place was almost back to the comfortable warmth it had been at all through the day.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

On this particular evening, Shule had nothing of any substance to work on. He'd practiced his mentalics, his Form II, his Teras Kasi and his newest tricks in energy manipulation, and today was exceedingly rare: he didn't have any training sessions at all to instruct.

Thus, being a man without great interest in society, he went to the library. The desire he felt as he entered the room was overpowering; his eyes were fixated on the Sith Holocron. Maybe at a later date, he insisted to himself, and moved into the deepest shelving in the back, where months had gone by without trespass. He hadn't come here since a few well-intentioned trysts in his early Apprentice days.

"Let's see..." he mumbled, scanning the manuscripts. "Weakness of Inferiors - Notes and Commentary. Annnd... The Screwtape Letters. Ildatch. Moving right along..."

After some time he found a thing which might be of interest. The book was undistinguished save by age, bound in brown leather with ornate bronze corners, and containing yellowed pages that held at least a year's worth of dust. It didn't have a title. Quick perusal revealed it to contain a great many things that spun poor Shule's head right around. He literally reeled.

"This is it," he choked out in gleeful Francais.

*** *** ***

Safe in his workshop, the Sith Knight sat down on the table and opened the book across his knees. The first words seemed intended to confuse, and once he got past that the theory alone was pretty dense. Pretty strange, too, and most of it was outside of his experience. What little he could relate to his earlier studies, though, fit exactly or with only minor conceptual modifications.

It wasn't, he soon found, a guidebook, but a treatise on how the Force related to living beings. He quickly seized on several ideas, but granted that he'd probably have to more or less memorize the book to do anything about it. And this was a reasonably long book. With his schedule, it would take a long, long time to finish. That was all right. He possessed the capacity for patience even if he didn't exercise that power.

It was twenty-two hundred before he realized it. Placing the tome on the table, he went back to the main room and changed for bed. Sleep was a long time in coming, and once it did there was still no peace.

Two hundred sixty-seven voices cry out in sorrow.

A crowd surrounds an island of darkness and in turn is surrounded by a deeper nothing. The island is a man, and a field of corporeal shadow which surrounds him. Though the crowd presses in, they cannot enter the shadow. It is a shield against their mourning. It is horror and loss beyond that bestowed by their simple fates.

They have lost their lives; here, death is a comma, not just an exclamation point. They can go on.

The man they mourn for is their killer. He is losing his soul.

They draw ragged breath in unison and emit two short, staccato wails. It seems to the man in the shadow that they are waiting for him to say something.

Darth Shule moans like an animal. "I cannot!" he wails, fearful imagination making it seem more a lion's roar than any noise which might come from the throat of a man. "I shall not!"

What is the difference, they say. Those should differ.

He falls to his knees. The sphere compresses, shrinks, but does not dissipate.

"We are who we chose to be!"

A taloned claw is raised, and it bears the young/old Sith Knight's chosen weapon: a dirk forged of pain. Effort and sweat and his blood and others'. All he has sacrificed. Eleven months and eternity.

The two hundred sixty-seven lift their own hands. Their wrists drip. The dirk is glassy red and brown crystal; lifeblood polished to a perfect sheen.

Blood of the past, Je'gan Olra'en, traded for blood of the future. Was this fair? they demand, swarming against the shadowfield. Was it right?

"We define right and wrong," he mumbles back. "We, the masters of the Force. It's what we do."

Only a God can set good and evil before the universe, Je'gan Olra'en.

"Then we are Gods!"

You deceive yourself.

"You seek to deceive me!"

Could we do so? You are the master of deception, Je'gan Olra'en. We are just the wood on your funeral pyre.

"I am the heart of darkness. I am Darth Shule."

You are pitiful.

He stands and flips the dirk around to a stabbing position.

"You shall die."

We are not the mortal ones here. You have killed us, or do you not remember?

Of course he remembered. Perfect recall, or close enough.

"I can destroy past death."

But who will care more? Us or you?

"If you cared, you would not be here. Like the others I will kill. To date I have killed you all and no more. Where are the others? Where are my obstacles to glory?"

Can you not guess reality and probability, Je'gan Olra'en? The Force is your ally.

Realization.

"No..."

You may die tonight.

"You have no power over me!"

So, so wrong. We own you, body and soul, because you owe us both. The bodies you ripped from us, the lives you denied us.

I myself gave them this power, he realized, but did not speak. And I must be the one to remove it. I owe myself that much.

You would have been the instrument of your body's destruction as you have been for that of your soul.

"Forgive us our debts-"

The blue-white blade of Magor ignited, and two hundred sixty-seven shades passed away in an infinite moment.

"-as we forgive our debtors."

The pale host gone, the shadow around the Sith Knight became a part of that infinite Shadow that defined Shule's reality.

And all there was now, was darkness.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

After a few months of being Shule, he was Shule without having to remember it. The name - and the persona - had grown until they were as much a part of him as Irreantum, the sole difference being in degree. Irreantum had been practice, experiment. Shule was much more.

He could still switch back and forth between them, of course. The Irreantum psyche was fully functional, requiring only a little maintenance. He did so, patching up the Dark Adept's quirks, because he didn't want to be bothered with the massive mental cleanup the degeneration would cause. He supposed with a great deal of effort he could excise it precisely enough that no trace would be left, but again, he didn't want to bother. Irreantum wasn't doing any harm there, after all.

He'd long since verified that both of his tailor-made personas could support the very highest expenditures of power that Je'gan had, and higher. They wouldn't come apart just because he was trying to make a tree look like a starship.

In light of today's activities, that was a good thing.

This afternoon, he had no training sessions whatsoever to teach. He didn't have to clean his rooms - he'd done that last Tyrday, himself, not trusting the Palace's droids anywhere near his trophy room or laboratory - and he didn't have any urgent summons to attend to. He didn't feel like travelling off-world, like he often did in such times.

What remained, he supposed, was training. He trained constantly, of course, but some things required more time than others. Mass mind control was one of them.

It could be done; anything could be done with the Force. But more importantly to him, it had been done. The library said so.

And thus he found himself on top of a skyscraper in Coronet, sitting on the very edge of the roof in a stolen chair and preparing to focus very hard indeed. He'd left his weapons in the trophy room, and was dressed comfortably in a well-worn black gi and dark green cloak. He had just eaten at a reputable diner until he was comfortably full.

Reaching out to the Force, he began to find intelligent minds in the building below. Some were weaker than others, and it was on these he focused at first. Testing his limits could come later; for now, he had to strike where the target was weak. He picked three to start. Lightly, he reached out and infiltrated their shields and then the minds beneath, subsuming self-control. It wasn't that light; down in the cubicles, two men and a woman had gone stiff and suddenly experienced a distinct fogginess that kept them from concentrating. Very good.

He had figured out the trick to pushing more of oneself into the target, to make control more efficient. It required a decrease in self-awareness; more focus on them than on him. He now did so. As one, the three stood up and headed for the roof, ignoring comments and questions from their fellow workers. He tried to make one stop and let the others continue, but as soon as one stopped walking, so did the others. Perhaps his touch wasn't light enough. Or perhaps, he realized after that failed, it just required a mental flexibility he didn't quite have yet.

He tried to go to a sort of vague overhead view, to see all three minds at once but not in any sort of detail. That was simple enough. From there, he tried to see them almost as limbs; go forward, go back, start to dance. He didn't let much beyond blind compulsion slip through, thus keeping himself from getting too confused, and while that added an uncomfortable level of individuality to the way in which they fulfilled their sudden, irresistible desires, it achieved the desired effect. One did go forward, one did go back to his cubicle, and one did indeed begin to dance in the middle of the hallway. Satisfied, Shule commanded them all to go to the street below. The trip took a couple of minutes, in which he stretched the limits of the overall view in terms of detail both in input and in sensation. At the end, he added and removed people from the little group to test how it felt.

They arrived in the street, at which point he commanded them to step into traffic. He released the control as they died one by one. It was almost like losing a limb, but he was more or less used to it. Several of his mind-control test subjects had died in one way or another.

He reached into the building and found people with great willpower and self-esteem. As he penetrated their minds, he discovered that they were high-powered executives. So much the better. After a little probing, he found that most of them were armed. And that was just excellent.

Five minutes later, a minor mob of suit-clad businessmen brandishing an assortment of vibroshivs and hold-out blasters stampeded out the front door screaming "Jedi!"

Annoying as the civil service was, he still had no compunction about giving PR a little boost.

The businessmen charged down the street. People began to run away from them. Picking a young, conservatively dressed human male seen through half a dozen hate-filled pairs of eyes, he compelled the mob to take him apart. The body, in the end, was unrecognizable. The businessmen marched back into the building and headed for their offices. On the way, he began to mold their memories; each had seen the man in an alley below, dragging a passerby in and killing them with a bright green lightsaber. Shule descended the building and made sure that there actually was a body there, and that the cause of death actually was a lightsaber. He'd made himself invisible, of course.

As he clipped Magor back to his belt, he decided to put on a bit of a show. His backup lightsaber - a straight hilt; Irreantum was a woeful fencer but capable at Form I - actually did have a green blade. Pulling it from its pocket inside his sleeve and wiping it clean of fingerprints, he made sure it was fully invisble and telekinesced it through the air to beside what was left of the body. He let the illusion drop - around the weapon, at any rate - and moved out of the alley and down the street, finding shelter before letting himself become visible.

People began to notice him as soon as he emerged, and immediately he was recognized for what he was. Some were belligerent, thinking they could get away with it in front of so obviously young a Sith. He disabused them of the notion rather forcefully and moved to examine the body.

Not much was left besides charred bone and spatters of blood. Not much except the lightsaber. He called it to his grip, wiping away the blood and giving it a practiced spin before tucking it into his belt beside Magor. Reaching out to the Force, he began to do something complicated. "Jedi," he murmured, just loud enough to be heard. "Jedi, the scum." He looked about him with a smile. "Good work, citizens."

People heard him, and felt pride - probably more than they thought they should have, but after all, hadn't they aided in the disposal of someone the news was always telling them was a terrorist? Yes, their new shards of memory told them, they had, even if it was just standing in the man's way as he ran, or kicking him once or twice as he went down under the pack of admirably selfless business executives.

Today, he decided, had been a good day for the Sith Order. And, purely incidentally, for himself.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

Tonight, and the next, he would devote to Shadow.

He'd discovered it by accident while teaching Drake. Knowing that his least tractable disciple was impatient with the incorporeal nature of mentalic attacks, and also knowing that he had nothing useful to offer instead - no 'bolts of power' or 'fireballs', such as everyone and their vornskr could project - he had tried on the spur of the moment to find something he could do that had sufficient drama to it that it could keep Drake interested. They'd practiced projecting emotion into another. It was purely by chance that he hit on the idea of projecting emotion into reality itself.

That was long in the past, as Shule reckoned time. Weeks, perhaps even months. He'd been teaching Drake for months now, and to be honest, the Apprentice was at the point where the old Sith Empire ranking system would have named him 'Warrior'. Malice Draclau had started Drake off perfectly. The Apprentice was strong in the Force, dedicated to improving himself, and very, very angry. Shadow suited him well.

Shule forced himself to stop thinking about his students. Teaching, he reminded himself angrily, was but one aspect of what he was striving to be. And how could he teach if he spread no time for his own studies?

He sat down in a massive armchair, lights turned far down, and began to drink his hot chocolate. Shadow wasn't one of the things he needed to use his work room for, and he preferred to stay in the relative comfort of his bedchamber. The leather creaked nicely as he levered his tired body into it. All today had been combat training. Both Lancer and Whyte were capable swordsmen, and Drake and Kes were coming up fast. He hadn't ached like this since the last of Southstar's training missions.

The upswing was that his mind was still sharp, and his connection to the Force undimmed by use. His full power was at his disposal.

Reaching to the Force, he projected a vague cube of Shadow in the middle of the room. His Sense abilities took over from his eyes. Nobody could see Shadow, anyways.

His hand came up, index finger raised, and twirled in a slow spiral; the cube followed the action exactly. Long past needing his hands to focus - that had been a specific goal not long ago - he still did it from time to time, as now, more out of habit than anything. It made things work a little better, but not much.

The hand dropped. He maintained control of the cube with only the slightest wiggle, and sent it lolloping all around the room, faster and faster. Shadow was a thought-projection only; it didn't have mass. It could go however fast or slow he wanted it to. In fact, seeing as he could create it anywhere he wanted (within reason)...

He focused, very hard, on what he wanted to occur, and the cube shifted from one place to another about two metres away. So Shadow could be teleported. Fascinating.

Leaning farther back in the exceedingly comfortable chair, he split the cube into a pair of flat slabs, manipulated them independently, then brought them back together to see if they merged. They did; the collision shocked them into a single oblong, which he divided again. This time, one piece was considerably smaller than the other. His goal was to see if he could bring them together, one within the other, and keep them distinct. The instant they touched, however, they flowed back together seamlessly.

Irritated, he examined the chaos that made up the two constructs, searching for some sort of feature he could change to make the two samples different enough to prevent them merging. Colour didn't work, he soon found, nor did density. Something more like frequency, perhaps...or direction...

He examined farther and found that the Shadow had nothing but chaos in its minute vibrations. All that meant to him, though, was that there could be. With infinite care, he began molding the vibrations of the larger part until they seemed to ripple, a regenerating, circular wave on an infestimally tiny scale. Then he brought the smaller piece into contact with it. Success. Undifferentiated Shadow wouldn't merge with harmonic Shadow. And if they had different frequencies?

He tied the larger piece of Shadow off with some effort, meaning that he let it stay as it was with no conscious control coming from him. The Shadow was connected to him by a handful of control ducts and by a power line. The power line he left alone; the ducts, he wove into a safe knot and let be. The thing still fed off him; or in other words, he still powered it. It just wasn't any of his concern until he untied the control ducts and they snapped back to him. This left him free to concentrate on the smaller piece and duplicate the smoothing of its internal motion. He almost didn't remember to make the frequency different.

A deep breath in and out stirred the surface of his forgotten, less-than-hot chocolate. Taking a firm grip on the smaller piece, he moved it into the larger one. No scattering, no chaos appeared. They weren't interacting at all. He tied the small piece off and began looking closer, at the seeming boundary between the two structures. Such a simple difference.

The examination took a little while. By the end, he needed a break, and devoted himself to the drink in his left hand. It had cooled to room temperature during his experiments. Hissing, Je'gan dove into the crazily low viewpoint at which he manipulated energy.

The particles of a liquid were denser than those of a gas, much denser. As he tried to isolate one to feed energy into it, he found that the surrounding particles bumped into it, knocking it out of his line of sight and thus his influence. Irritated, he actually focused further, and caught a single particle. He fed a small amount of energy into it - small even for this scale; he didn't want to break the particle, as excessive heat would do - and let it continue on its way. Another, another...then, as he'd done so many times with gas, many particles at once, until he found particles that were tightly packed and others that zipped around in empty space. The cup and the air, some part of him realized. He left those strictly alone.

He came out of the deep focus with hands comfortably warm and hot chocolate almost boiling. Ginger, it seemed, wasn't ginger enough. Too much energy had been put into the individual particles. The cup floated away in a telekinetic grip and settled down on the tiny, round table to cool. Power was addictive; he knew this. Its casual use appealed to him, an unmistakeable sign of how far he'd progressed. He didn't boast verbally anymore.

The tied-off Shadow was still intact. Fifteen minutes in the deep focus, and tiny errors hadn't destroyed it. It might have been attributable to his own work, or to the still-unclear nature of Shadow, but right now he didn't care. Professional interest had faded, only to be replaced by rampant, almost childish curiosity. If there was something more he could do with Shadow, he wanted to find out now.

He twisted and untwisted the nested objects; no difference, and nothing occurred to him. He shook them around fiercely, then sent them into convoluted spirals. They soared back and forth, up and down-

And, he finally realized, passed through his nightstand without a hitch. That was what had been staring him in the face. Shadow, while superb against living opponents, was insubstantial. A droid wouldn't be touched, and there were plenty of nasty droids out there. Machinery, structures...the list went on. All satisfaction in his creation was gone. There had to be a way of making Shadow corporeal. He drank his hot chocolate down to the dregs, and set to work again.

As with most things, straightforward willpower was the first thing he tried - and, as with many things, it was the first thing that failed. He knew he couldn't just create matter, ridiculous thought. Perhaps if he used the Shadow as a blueprint? No; he already knew that that wouldn't work.

An idea slapped him across the face. Some people - Lancer among them - could manipulate actual shadows directly, by some method that had to be rooted in instinct. Slipping into the deep focus for a minute, he blasted power into the particles of a candle-wick and set it ablaze. The mug from his drink cast a nice shadow. He touched the shadow with the Force, trying to find the sorts of indefinable things that Lancer had manipulated. It took a long time, and a great deal of experimentation, before he managed to make the shadow wobble out of sync with the flame. The effort cost him dearly, in both energy and imagination. It did, however, work, and that was all he needed. Now that he'd found what he needed to do, really, such an effort would be rather easy to duplicate.

The next step was also a matter of trial and error. Some ideas presented themselves, but it was guesswork, all guesswork. He picked the idea he favoured most and let fly.

Molding the shadows into the Shadow took a long time, even if the Shadowworking was relatively small and highly simple. The thought of making the shadows duplicate the wavelike motions of the Shadows was staggering, and even his most determined efforts failed. Then he tried simply to mold the shadow into the fabric of the construct, with defined edges. That worked, but the result was no better than a simple illusion that would fool cameras and cause necrosis in whatever it touched. Useful, maybe, but not at all what he wanted. He was tired of doing things indirectly, by trickery; so very tired. He was a warrior! A Sith! It would be solid Shadow, or it would be nothing!

Putting the previous failures completely out his mind, he looked into his dwindling grab bag of ideas and selected one that had dubious promise: using the shadow, being real, as a fulcrum to get something so similar to appear in reality. He would admit to being very surprised when a decent amount of exertion achieved the desired result.

He stood and flipped on the lights, looking closer. He could feel it as the shadow washed away due to inattention, leaving the cube of Shadow intact.

And visible. Literally, wonderfully visible. He touched it - his own Shadow couldn't hurt him - and felt a pleasant, springy resistance. Solid. His satisfaction knew no bounds.

Yet as with any fulcrum, he had had to apply effort. Heating his drink, lighting the candle, playing with Shadows and shadow, had taken so much from the Sith Knight that he was now essentially powerless. Bedtime beyond a shadow - hah! - of a doubt. His fingers snapped, and the cube reverted to being a mere thought-construct that soon dissipated.

He stopped and looked back at all he'd accomplished during this long night. How odd it all was. His invention seemed to be taking on a life of its own, cliché though it might be. In a way, it almost made up for the fact that lately, he thought of himself as Je'gan just as much as he thought of himself as Shule.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

He had placed a cage on his workbench some time ago, taking care not to get any part of his body within striking distance of the devenomed dinko. The little creature was absolutely fearless and insanely aggressive, and though he could literally have taken control of its one-track mind within a single second - and without too much mental damage for it to be useful in his uncoming experiment- its unwearying determination to kill and eat him was something he could respect. The palm-sized dinko, consequently, had its freedom of choice intact.

It was watching him again. A dull flame seemed to burn in its tiny eyes, and its clawed forearms clicked menacingly. He rather hoped his own malice was up to the challenge. He rather thought not.

Bending over the cage, he began to create a lump of Shadow near the dinko. The creature couldn't see it, of course; nobody but a skilled Forcewielder could see Shadow in its basic, incoporeal form. It did, however, have the effect of increasing that hatred in the dinko's eyes; Shadow was essentially projected hatred, and it couldn't help but effect anyone nearby. Sometimes he wondered what would happen if he linked with a Master or two and cast the stuff over the entire Jedi Temple. Would they figure out how to counteract it before someone fell to the Dark Side? Or, considering that it had corrosive properties where living things were concerned, before someone walked into it unknowing and died horribly? How would that be for Jedi PR?

The Shadow-lump stirred and lifted off the cage's sheet metal floor, then began to grow until it was the size of the dinko. Rippling, it projected five stubs that became limbs and a head. The lump was now vaguely humanoid. He didn't need to add detail at this stage of testing: form would follow function, or so he hoped.

Concentrating, he made the figure corporeal, a hand-sized humanoid made of dark smoke. It could now be seen by anything with eyes. The dinko was less than amused at being intruded upon; it launched itself at the figure and tore it to shreds. So. Not corporeal enough, but the concept was sound.

He created another Shadowman outside the cage and made it walk back and forth just out of the dinko's reach. The dinko hissed, flecks of spit flying out and striking the Shadowman. With little effort, he took the figure back to the incorporeal world and let the saliva fall through it. He thought he had good enough control of the figure now to do something useful with it.

The Shadowman walked through the cage and resumed existence. The dinko pounced and found itself pinioned in a burning, life-draining grip. Not to be deterred by its own immenent death, the dinko sank its fangs into the Shadowman's neck and bit its head off. The entire Shadowman dissolved into a seething lump of the stuff; a moment later, Je'gan regained control of his little construct and rebuilt it. He could have just let it sit for a few days, of course. Shadow was almost alive in some ways, one of which being that if it was woven into a tightly defined form - as in a construct - it would fill in any missing parts of that pattern, given enough time.

The fight raged on, but he could keep reconstructing the Shadowman and the dinko only had one body to begin with. In the end, the animal lay burnt and broken on the cage floor, and Je'gan commanded the Shadowman to sink its arm into the dinko's head up to the elbow. The creature convulsed once and was still.

He drew the Shadow up into the palm of his hand. The figure destabilized as it got diced into cubes by the bars of the cage, leaving it moldable but corporeal. He made it incorporeal again and began making it larger, until it was easily three feet across and hovering in midair. Waving his hands - excellent focus points for this work, he'd discovered - he began to work. The picture Je'gan had in his mind had a high level of detail, and he was being very careful. Maybe this project was too advanced for him, but after testing how to manipulate limbs and so forth in his battle with the dinko, he felt he could keep sufficient control over the Shadowworking to maintain its stability.

After at least an hour of redrawing lines and reforming contours, the Shadow had taken the form of a human slightly shorter than him. The figure was unquestionably female, if with a somewhat slimmer physique than most teenage males with this opportunity would be tempted to choose. It had joint areas, too, where the Shadow could bend, and he'd gone over each joint many times to make sure it worked perfectly and looked realistic. Her hair was much, much simpler than he'd thought it would be; it turned out that Shadow was ductile.

He had brought an anatomy text from the Palace library, and page by page created a framework within the contained mass of Shadow. Bones came first; he greatly simplified several things. Bones were more complicated than they appeared at first glance. Then came muscles, which in most cases corresponded in their outer limits to the edges of the Shadowworking. Occasionally, he had to change things, but the end result was far more realistic and would probably function better. All in all, she'd be slightly better-than-average shape. The basis on muscle for her body's general shape made her look it.

Now he finally felt safe about making it corporeal; it was far harder to alter corporeal Shadow that didn't have a specified flex point. He did so, and gasped as he felt the power drain redouble. Tying such a complex Shadow off - and anchoring it in corporeality, to an object - was time-consuming and exhausting, but he was capable of doing so to this large a chunk of the stuff. Not to mention that if he didn't, he'd lose it. All that remained was an anchor point.

Snapping his fingers, he hurried into his trophy room, and emerged with a necklace and pendant of brightly polished alloy. The pendant was shaped like a broadsword, highly detailed and slightly sharp. It was a keepsake of a training mission in which he and his Master had taken on a Dark Side cult; the necklace had been Galarra's, the co-head of that cult. They'd actually killed Galarra three times, every time together, and Southstar certainly hadn't seemed interested in the trinket when Je'gan had been sorting through the first body's effects. Like everything, the necklace had a signature in the Force and thus could be anchored to, but he hoped the long-term possession of the bauble by a powerful Forcewielder might make things easier.

The necklace laid out on the workbench, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the connections that bound the Shadowworking to him. They were of two types; control linkages, allowing him to move the Shadowman - woman, actually - and grounding wires, which kept it in physical form. He only wanted to transfer the latter, but they had been braided by his sculpting efforts to such an extent that he feared separation was impossible.

Severing the connections would send the line snapping away to destabilize the Shadowworking and let it dissipate. He had to catch it with the necklace somehow; that much was obvious. To give him the best chances of success, he bent the connectors towards and eventually through the necklace's Force presence.

The next step, the actual severing and catching, required that something was there to catch the flailing braid of linkages. The Force signature of the necklace should do that, but just in case he wove the Force subtly around it, boosting its signature to almost approach the complexity and connectivity of a living thing. Then he pictured the controls and grounds assuming the form of a net, a bulb of webbing instead of a connection to him, and in an eyeblink of willpower it was so, and the cord was whipping away. His positioning of the cord had been perfect; it snared neatly on the necklace's reality.

Hastily, mouth dry, he leapt to bind the cord to the necklace with all the power at his disposal - which, now that he wasn't maintaining the Shadow, was not inconsiderable. It was a patchy job at first, but as he put layer overtop layer and removed the lower, sloppier work only to feed it back into the bindings, he felt sure that the Shadowworking was becoming almost as tied to reality as a soul.

After an indeterminate amount of time, he was done, and he let everything, even the Force, fall away. A deep yawn escaped him as he went over to the small sink and splashed his face with cold water, then drank some. He'd been here for hours now; more than a decent night's work for sure, but it must be past three in the morning, and he was starting to become tired.

The Shadowwoman hadn't faded while he was tying it off; tied Shadow fed from the Force, and could theoretically last forever. In the bright light of the workroom, it appeared darker than midnight, without even the uncertain aid of stars. It looked very much like a three-dimensional hole in reality itself.

Rubbing the slight stubble on his chin, Je'gan set to work with Illusion, covering the black features in skin and cloth and metal. This, too, would need to be tied off (to the Shadow's Force framework itself, in fact), but he was determined to make a good job of it before he retired for the night. A good portion of his fatigue was still there, no matter how refreshing he found Illusion.

First came the face. Eyes, black like his, and behind that a flat white that he'd alter later. Teeth, a shade darker than white. Eyelashes and eyebrows - sculpted perfectly from Shadow - a darker brown that the eyes. Hair, medium length, brown. He took care to add subtle hints of blonde and red to it to give it depth; without them, it looked...dull. Then came skin. He guessed for most of the changes in tone from one place to another, but even with guesswork it didn't look half bad. Making a proper tan might have been a bit complicated - and slightly embarassing - so he tried to make everything faily uniform. It came out pale but presentable. Last were such details as the inside of its mouth, the texture of its fingernails and so forth. The tongue was hard to do, even though he'd already made it reasonably well in the sculpting stage. In the end, he was forced to go into the trophy room, appraoch the body in its stasis field, open Ceres' mouth with telekinesis, and memorize it. Wiggling someone else's tongue around was very, very odd. One might have thought it would be easier if the person wasn't really a person anymore. One would be wrong.

He'd been doing clothing throughout, a utalitarian set of tight, dark red tunic and trousers that would go unremarked-upon pretty much anywhere. The texture of clothing was tough to simulate, and he didn't even want to think about the complexities of making a tied-off illusion that would fall properly, e.g. looser clothes. Clothes, he soon decided, were an absolute pain. These had already taken far longer than he would have liked.

After some time, he had tied the illusion off, an even more complicated process than tying off Shadow. At least he'd had some help with it, even if the library had only given him the theory. From there, he'd just continued to tap into the control lines to change what he wanted to.

The first rays of sun were beginning to peek through the window. Ah well; it wasn't the first all-nighter he'd pulled, and it wouldn't be the last.

*** *** ***

He'd resolutely left the simulacrum - it sounded a bit better than 'Shadowwoman' - altogether alone for several more nights to regain his energy. By the end of the wait, he was bursting with ideas for changes he could make, and wasted no time in implementing them. The hair; a slightly different shade. The style was fine. The teeth; ever-so-slightly varied in colour across each enamel surface. It never occurred to him that he was doing something insanely complicated, advanced, and even dangerous. He didn't really have a purpose besides some vague thoughts on trying to construct a simple, formless intelligence from what he knew of how minds were put together. All he knew was that he was having more fun than he'd had in a long time.

Somewhere in the process of teaching and being taught, he'd managed to forget what fun was like.

After a week's worth of casual alteration, he finally judged the body complete. Now, he decided, was time to take a stab at the mind. A body like that deserved a mind of its own.

*** *** ***

The simulacrum was waiting for him.

Well, not exactly. For one thing, she was totally immobile. For another, even if she had been able to move she brobably wouldn't have cared that he'd walked it.

But it was close enough.

"Good afternoon, Jan," Je'gan said pleasantly, putting his half-dozen cages down in a row on the table. Jan said nothing, as usual, and pulling over a stool in one of his endless telekinesis drills, Je'gan sat down beside the table.

Without further ado, he tried to rip a mouse's soul out, and found that it was reasonably easy. Mice didn't have much in the way of souls. The ties between spiritual and physical took a while to find, but when he did find them they proved simple to sever. So.

He moved on, this time poking around for a way to transfer the anchor cables from one body to another. The invisible ties wouldn't stretch much, though, and they kept rebounding from where he tried to move them. So.

He ripped another soul out and tried to keep control of it. It was not a resounding success. So, in theory, that made body-trading impossible. On the other hand, he knew that Galarra had body-traded at least twice during the cult incident, so there had to be a way. For the moment, though, he was content to leave it alone and move on to the backup plan.

Making a mind was the most ambitious thing he'd ever thought of doing, bar none. A mind needed a brain to support it, and without removing some poor unfortunate's brain, he couldn't get one. Nevertheless, he was going to try to make a brain that didn't require physical existence in the same manner a human mind did. Why? Because he thought he might be able to, and that was more than enough reason to attempt anything.

He started with a lump of roiling Shadow, deep within the simulacrum. He hadn't put it there, merely isolated it from the main mass, because it stood to reason that he might get the best results with something that already had a bond to the construct, and he knew he would need all the help he could get. Slowly, taking infinite care, he memorized a structure in a random mouse's mind and began to form an equivalent inside that lump of Shadow. There; that was close, close enough that he couldn't see a single difference. He wasn't duplicating the brain, of course, but a higher-plane equivalent; still, from what he could sense, the structure he'd created worked much like he thought it should.

He moved on, duplicating more and more structures. Some he couldn't identify; the rest were things like instincts, or the relatively massive knot that contained everything the mouse knew about thinking twice. By the end of it, he was able to meld the component parts together et voila! If everything had gone right, when he let the 'brain' meld with the 'body' around it, it should work. He doubted it would have a soul...but then again he didn't want a servant to have a soul. Souls were too easily manipulated.

Letting out a long breath, Je'gan released the new construct and let it begin to interact with the rest of Jan. The body twitched and collapsed to all fours, where it scrabbled around with frantic speed. He observed its mouselike behaviour for a while before cutting the mind out and starting again. The experiment had been a success.

He moved on to the next cage, which contained a feline. This was a massive step up - as much so as trying something like Jan's body after only a few trial runs - and he couldn't help but feel a little unsure. He was going to try, though. He always did.

The cat's psyche was so much more complex than the mouse's that he felt daunted all over again. Interpreting a rodent psyche in Shadow of all things had been bad enough. The cat not only had about three times as many structures, but each was far more complex and detailed than the mouse equivalent - when it even had an equivalent. Stolidly, he began at square one.

One small mercy presented itself in the face of this awesome detail; Shadow didn't slip around, chaotic though it was. It held whatever shape he dictated for it. That was the only reason he'd managed to give the body's musculature realistic definition; those myriad lines and ridges had escaped him more than once.

After about an hour he paused, took a drink, and contemplated leaving the rest for later. The isolated Shadow-brain, being part of the mian construct, was still tied off, and re-infiltrating the control lines was easy. Something was driving him, though, the same something that had driven him to build Azubah and then Magor in one fell swoop apiece. It was possible that it was just a desire to create something new. If he'd had any talent at drawing, or at music, now might have been the point where he gave up the Force for art. The Force, though, and more specifically the Dark Side, was his paintbrush.

At last, he let the controls snap back to the inert ground of the necklace. A problem had been nagging him for a while on and off, and he'd just recalled it; Jan would emit an almost palpable hatred, whether she felt hatred or not. It was the very nature of Shadow. He'd been working with the stuff so much that he'd literally forgotten that effect. And now that he thought about it, telling Jan to do anything that involved touching a living creature would be tantamount to telling her to kill it. Shadow could often be lethal.

The solution he finally came up with wasn't one that suited him, but for lack of anything better it would have to do. Wielding the Force as if to create Shadow, he channelled his emotions into existence. The difference was that his dominant emotion wasn't hatred. He'd made himself feel peace and contentment. The result was like a lighter-coloured Shadow, very smokey, and easily malleable. He molded it onto the surface of the body in a very thin, dense layer, just under the illusion, and tied it into the anchoring. The hair couldn't become thicker without looking it, so he erased the hair altogether and made it anew, entirely out of the smokey, peaceful stuff. There. That should do.

His own Shadow wouldn't hurt him - he'd long since made sure of that - so he needed another tester. Reaching into a cage, he picked up a mouse by its tail and threw it at Jan. It hit and bounced off with no ill effect, as proven when it ran off into some corner of the workroom, out of the bright circle of light thrown by the overhead panel.

While he congratulated himself, he realized that there was another hitch; the peace and the hatred were fighting each other, which was pretty obvious in hindsight. The construct was destabilizing. Hastily, he thought of a feeling that fell half-way between the two emotions - passivity, more or less - made it corporeal, and inserted it between the Shadow and the Smoke. The reaction stopped.

That problem solved, he returned to the brain.

*** *** ***

When Je'gan entered the workroom, there was a brunette climbing his shelving units.

To all intents and purposes, it appeared that the overall concept of the brain was sound. The difficulty lay in the sheer complexity of a mind, and that the only transfer apparatus he had at his disposal was his near-perfect memory. Memorizing every fold and hook in a particular thoughtform, though...and with each mind containing literally hundreds of objects...

It had been a week's worth of late nights, and he'd just completed inputting a monkey brain. The mouse had hunted for food; the cat had thought he was food; the monkey was climbing things. Even though a Shadow couldn't really do itself much damage with the contents of the work area, he'd cleared it all out and laid the objects safely on his bedroom desk. Jan, needing no food besides a night's recharging from the ambient Force presence of the Palace, was inexhaustibly curious.

Well, the basic primate mind was a success. With characteristic lack of sense, the Sith Knight began working on a human prototype at eleven at night, working off of the self-sense that he used to manipulate his shielding and alter his psyche. After so many such experiences, the view was fairly clear, almost as much so as sensing another mind. But knowing the complexity of his own psyche, and armed with a new knowledge of just how complicated things got in a primate mind, he was daunted as he'd never been before.

"This is how I spend my liesure time," he muttered, dry-washing his hands into a flourish worthy of a symphony's conductor. "I must be going very very mad. Je suis fou, n'est-ce pas, Jan?"

Jan, currently hanging by her heels from the top shelf of a tool case, made no reply. Je'gan infiltrated the control lines and cut the monkey mind to bits, feeling no remorse over the loss of so many nights' work. A monkey shaped like a girl was of no possible use to him. To tell the truth, he wasn't entirely positive that a girl shaped like a girl was of any possible use, but someday he might need an absolutely loyal servant. Who knew where he could be in five years, or ten.

He took firm control of the body and had it leap down to the floor. Turning inside himself with the same split-view he now used for multiples of mind control, he began to mold Shadow into copies of the structures within his mind. As experience had led him to expect, it was painstaking work, and insanely minute in scale. Each would take from fifteen minutes to fifteen hours. There was detail inside the structures, too, and that had to be duplicated.

After some time, he came to long-term memory, a bloated object of staggering detail. The monkey's long-term memory had been shaky at best; Je'gan's was almost perfect, and stretched back fifteen years, his earliest memory being his fourth nameday. After much thought, he made an abbreviated version, with little actual information. All it was, basically, was the apparatus for collecting memories; Jan would almost be a blank slate, except for common practices - those were elsewhere. She'd know how to talk, and how to understand what she heard, and unless he was careful, she might know how to wield the Force, the basic techniques he used all the time. Things like simple telekinesis and telepathy, and maybe more. Yes, he'd have to be very careful when transferring the common-practice module. He knew how to do it, mostly; his experiences with Aztaroth and Torentin, with Irreantum and Shule himself, gave him a good basis for altering the component parts of a mind. That 'mostly', though, could get him killed.

As luck would have it, he encountered the node in question on the very next night. It, too, was bloated, if not so much as long-term memory. The practices hovered just out of 'sight'; as with the cat and the monkey, he had to get a very general sense of what was what. The first he came across was breathing, the next blinking, and so on. He practiced removing something from the template when he came across belching, swearing, coughing and scratching. The will to do being critical, it was a resounding success.

He had a little more trouble with Forcewielding and combat, which each encompassed so many different things that he was hesitant to wipe them all at once. From Forcewielding, he took all actual Force techniques all the way down to just above being able to feel the Force. If he took that out, Jan would either starve to death or become malnourished - the terms involved being only approximations, naturally. From combat, he left reflexes, ways of moving in everyday situations, and attention to detail; nothing more. She wouldn't know a punch from a kick, but she'd be able to respond to a blow well enough, and maybe learn enough from getting hit to be able to hit back.

Identity was tricky in more ways than one. The knowledge that she was made of the Force rather than flesh was a given; lying to her could have all sorts of unexpected consequences. He left large portions of the rest deliberately blank in hopes that she'd define herself while filling the void in her memory. Switching the general mindset from male to female was flatly impossible to do right without a female test subject, so he left that alone too. He put in a name: Jan Shadowchild. He also put in the name of every Knight, Lord and Master in TSO, and a few notable others, adding images and appropriate emotional tags. With a surgeon's precision, he duplicated the sharp sense of loyalty to him that had characterized his treatment of Aztaroth, then shook his head and erased it. If this worked, he'd rather have real loyalty in a servant, no matter how long that would take to develop.

*** *** ***

The details of sensory information had been difficult to duplicate. After some thought, he'd made a highly sensitive copy of an eardrum from the anatomy text. The ability of the construct to sense any changes in its framework was key to that, as in the sense of touch. Sight involved making a highly detailed lens that focused on a tailor-made psyche module. Right now, only one eye worked. Binocular vision was escaping him. He'd get it eventually, but the real challenges still loomed ahead: taste and smell. He couldn't duplicate those by any art that he possessed. It was going to take a massive feat of imagination to do so, and for the duration of this project he was pretty much sucked dry.

Then again, Jan wouldn't need taste, and smell, while useful, could be replaced by heightening other senses. It was easy enough to make her hearing slightly better, and a little fine-tuning in the eyes - which he'd been meaning to do anyways - brought her eventual vision to 20/20 or thereabouts. His own eyesight, while good, was slightly worse than 20/20, and seeing through Jan's eyes made everything clearer.

Being unwilling to cart Jan along with him into the city, he was forced to enlist the aid of several female denizens of the Palace, often without their knowledge. The mindset of a female Sith was generally homicidal, but he thought he could slice that out. All he needed was the way in which the female mind differed from the male, and that was more a matter of redoing the overall design scheme than of specific difference. Oh, he had to make minor changes to a dozen nodes or so - some of which were simply astounding - but it seemed to work properly.

On a more humorous note, he was forced to tie the control linkages for certain elements of the illusion that comprised her skin, hair and clothing into a part of motor control. Changing one's clothes and hair seemed deeply rooted in the female psyche. He'd known something of the sort, of course - at nineteen, he wasn't exactly a stranger to how women thought - but he hadn't imagined it was that important.

*** *** ***

Je'gan let the prototype human mind begin to interact with the body as he'd done with the mouse, the cat and the monkey; and, as he'd done in all those cases, he aided the connections, lining them up and melding them firmly. The human mind had roughly as many connections to wire in as the monkey, which worked just fine as far as he was concerned. He was intensely impatient to see what would work and what wouldn't. Even though the three previous trials had all gone off without a hitch, this one was a whole order of magnitude higher. Intelligence conferred that.

He closed the last connection and flipped an invisible, deeply buried switch. A grin stretched across his face as he felt a deep thrum through the Force. The culmination of over a month's work was at hand; the first testing of a human mind and body, each made entirely of Shadow, which was itself Je'gan's creation. He couldn't have been prouder had the Council knighted every one of his Apprentices right then and there; had Kes learned perfect self-control; had Whyte taught himself to be human; had Drake learned his limits; had Lancer fought a Master to a standstill. It was...exhilarating. Joyously so. He didn't think he'd felt real joy since he'd started looking into the Dark Side of the Force.

Jan blinked, displaying black eyes that mirrored his. The eyes focused on him, and full lips curved into a smile.

"Good morning, Je'gan," she said. He glanced out the window beside him even as he smiled back. A tiny sliver of flame was peeking over the horizon.

"Good morning, Jan," he replied, voice bubbling in excitement. "How do you feel?"

"Wonderful." She spread her arms happily. "What're we going to do today?"

"We're going to go for a run." He knew that her muscles worked properly - the monkey incarnation had proven that - and that her endurance, unlike her strength and speed, was superhuman. Given enough time, she could run him into the ground, even if he did have a good track record with physical enhancement. No; what he wanted was a chance to talk with her in a very informal setting, and see how well her mind worked. She was, he reminded himself, a prototype.

"Sounds good," she said. "To where?"

"Just around the perimeter of the Training Grounds. You might want to change, first. That bodysuit's pretty formal." Pause. "You do know how to change, correct?"

"I...I guess so." She cocked her head to the side. "Yes, I think I do." In a flash, her illusionary bodysuit's seams and borders changed, and the colour shifted. Now she was wearing a simple blue exercise outfit, quite modest for being virtually skintight. He was proud of that; erasing all hints of male bias in her clothing choices had been, he felt, one of the truest tests of his skill as well as his self-discipline.

"Here," he said, picking up a stray length of cord and cutting off six inches with his dirk. "Tie your hair back." He had no instincts for that sort of thing, nothing to carry over; a lot would simply be taught. It would probably take less time than editing her common practices to suit would have. After all, she had as good a memory as he, or should if he'd done that part right. It hadn't been a single part, really, more of a painstaking arrangement of several ones, and he meant 'painstaking'. It had been one of the biggest irritants in the entire project.

She took the impromptu barrette and tied her hair back into a practiced knot. "I'd like to see the sky," she said happily. "I mean, I can remember seeing it, but I can't remember what it looks like."

"Right there." A slightly befuddled expression crossed his face. "Out the window."

"Oh, no, I don't mean some little sliver of it. I want to see the whole thing." She headed out, stopping at the door and looking back over her shoulder. "Aren't you coming? And on second thought, hadn't you better change too? And maybe shower?"

He stared, really stared, until she blushed (one of the automatic changes in the illusion that he'd wired in) and looked at her feet. It was like his mom was alive again. A lab helper he needed. A new mother, he definitely did not.

The paralysis didn't last, however. Muttering under his breath, he picked out a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and a towel, and headed for the 'fresher at the end of the hall. "Don't get into too much trouble," he said as the door opened for him.

"Not shorts!" she called. "You've got very bony knees. Here are some sweatpants." He turned and snagged the pants out of the air, flipping the rolled-up shorts underhand. She caught them on the rebound - no binocular vision, after all, and thus no depth perception.

Abruptly, he became aware that he was getting some very odd looks. His old mentalics training partner Respyrin was among those who were simply smiling.

"Didn't know you were married, sir," the bearded acolyte said, obviously waiting for Je'gan to deny it. The Sith Knight laughed sourly.

If I had a companion of that sort, nobody here would see her. Or do you think my talents with Illusion don't extend to making someone else invisible? He gestured behind him into the bedroom, where Jan had begun sorting his disordered clothing. Take a good, long look, with the Force mind you. The acolyte nodded, still grinning, and approached the door. Jan had her blind eye, the right, towards the door, and she couldn't intercept telepathy.

"Palpatine's bones," Respyrin whispered. "Is that that stuff you-"

Shadow, yes.

"And you made it into-"

Yep. And too well. Slamming the door shut behind him, he took off for the 'fresher at top speed.

By the time he returned, she was well into his carefree attempt at a sock drawer.

[Je'gan Olra'en]

The experiments began.

First came the simple things. Physical Shadow, after all, had physical properties. Tensile strength: unexceptional. If it broke, it would heal itself within hours depending on the nature of the damage. This seemed to go faster the less light there was. Conductivity: none to electricity, none at all, due to Shadow not being made of atoms or similar particles - at least not that he could sense in the deep focus. Likewise for heat. Shadow, it seemed, couldn't absorb or generate electromagnetic radiation, and couldn't even be said to have a temperature. Basically, it felt exactly as cold or hot as the skin of the person who touched it. Density: quite light, not incomparable to plastic. Malleability: variable. Ductility: very high. It didn't react with anything he could find - it wasn't technically physical matter, after all, not without atoms or an equivalent - and that completed the basic tests.

The implications took considerably longer to work out. Jan would be vulnerable to physical attacks - especially to lightsabers - but impervious to Force Lightning, and the only real effect a fireball or blaster bolt would have on her would be based on the impact rather than the fact that it was made of flames or plasma. A slugthrower would do far more damage than a blaster. Telekinesis would affect her, as (for the moment) would mentalics. He had long been capable of insulating and protecting someone else's mind. She already had strong natural shields - her mind, after all, had been made from his - but Jan's shields, once complete, would rival his own and be capable of taking any mentalic attack from any one of his Apprentices and perhaps all at once.

He'd spent as much time on her, one way or another, as he had for either of his lightsabers. He wanted to have her around for a long time.

*** *** ***

He had a part in that beyond simply augumenting her mental defences, of course. That was why he wanted a 'signature'. Rivin used Force Lightning and massive telekinesis. Southstar used the Withering Touch. And so forth. Too, for Je'gan it was a status issue. He wanted to be seen as dangerous in his own right. He knew he was - Shadowart, Illusion, multiple-subject mind control - but he'd been so busy lately that he hadn't had time to prove it. And that rankled.

Five test subjects, all condemned criminals, stood in a row across from him. They looked tough and terrified, a unique combination. Then again, the materialized Shadowworkings hanging on the walls were twisted things, inanimate sculptures in infinite black. To be blunt, at times they even gave him a chill. Perhaps it was the vague resemblance of the one right over the door to a screaming face.

He hadn't spoken a word to them, and had ignored their mutterings. The fear in the room had given the whole place an almost palpable air of the Dark Side, and Je'gan drew on it without a second thought as to its effects on his own emotional state. Right now, he was busy aligning tools, bits of harmonic, corporeal Shadow that helped him in some of the more complex workings.

"You see these sculptures?" he said, gesturing to the sculptures all around. They weren't art, at least not primarily, but more tools. One of them served as a beamsplitter, for example, cutting a stream of Shadow into parallel strands with different harmonies. That had taken him so long to build it wasn't even funny.

The prisoners nodded slightly, and he continued. "They will cause you extreme pain and rapid necrosis if you touch them. I will not force you to do so; do not let yourselves or each other get too close to them."

They shuffled around a bit, looking at the sculptures warily. They were distracted, on edge, and their fear had spiked, giving Shule more power to work with. Reaching into those emotions with the Force and anchoring his mind on the shadows in the half-lit room, he ripped his hatred into reality and struck. A line of corporeal Shadow lashed out and fastened on the first man's arm like a snake. The wound was shallow, but as he'd said, the pain was indeed extreme, and the skin around the puncture wound was tightening and turning grey. There was little change in life-corroding power between Shadow that had been made corporeal and Shadow that hadn't. These results were right in line.

The man screamed and dropped to his knees, bashing his head on the table in the process. The Shadow writhed and convulsed across the table's edge as it struggled to maintain its hold. Je'gan called it back and let it coil around his arm. Sparkling black eyes shifted to another man, who looked as if he was about to run or fight. The human in question had twice Je'gan's years and at least a hundred pounds on him.

"You next."

The beamsplitter lifted to hover between them, and settled down on the lab table. He unleashed the Shadowserpent straight through the splitter aperture and instantly felt his construct divide. The tendrils, lashing independently, fastened around the big man's head and muffled the sounds he emitted. The other three backed off, searching for weapons. There were none. With affirming glances, they leapt at him around the table and he took control of their minds, full control. Part of what he'd wanted to do today had involved the mental nature of a Shadow attack, but perhaps that would have to wait. Besides...there were more where these had come from.

He made them walk back to where they'd originally been standing. Their faces and eyes were dead; he hadn't bothered with subtlety. Their minds would be scarred for life if they survived his experiments.

The Shadow had stilled since he'd moved his focus to mind control. The second man was just as still. A quick probe revealed that his mind was falling apart; he was dying from pain, stress and shock. The Sith Knight could have rebuilt his mind in minutes, but-

There was always a 'but'. Always. Some things were more important than a man's life.

He released the three who had assaulted him, leaving them with vacant eyes and dropped jaws. Hissing in frustration, he lifted the top off the beamsplitter and took the hydra out. The device went back into its corner.

He looked at the three men, whose attention was fixed on him. The Dark Side was overwhelming; the sculptures had, if possible, darkened. The convicts' fear literally stank, so much so that it sickened him.

"Oh, just die already."

The hydra drew back into a ball of Shadow hovering under his hand. It rippled, ceased to be harmonic, and flowed up the palm of his hand to the fingertip. His hand was now solid black. The three convicts backed away; in the process, one brushed a sculpture and was distracted. The Shadow on the Sith Knight's hand flowed out into a boquet of serpents, six in all, striking fast and hard and bringing down all three men within a handful of slow seconds. Their screams rang in Je'gan's ears as he finished them off. He was no longer surprised to discover that a smile decorated his face at the end of sessions like this.

The serpents danced around his hand, coiling and seeming to hiss. He turned them back into a spherical form, created a rim around the bottom, and placed the head-sized ball on a shelf where it wouldn't roll off. The anchoring process required serious power; he didn't want to waste any corporeal Shadow at all if he could avoid it.

He hauled the bodies up and dumped them into the waste tunnel, taking care to finish off the first one. They rattled cheerily down the tunnel for as long as he could hear, all the way down to their final immolation in a furnace. He straightened the beamsplitter and opened the door to his bedchamber.

Jan was waiting. Her arms were folded and her foot was tapping. "Your dinner's been ready for two hours now," she said accusingly. "What have you been doing in there?"

The convicts had been ushered in while she was showering, and her skills in Sense were practically nonexistent. He didn't doubt that she could feel how much of the Dark Side he'd been using, and that was about as far as he wanted her knowledge to go. Jan was naive in many ways.

"Just some experiments," he said, spying the plate and sitting down at his new table. "Thanks, by the way. This is great." His mouth was full, meaning it came out more like "Kibshhishh greshhh," but she understood and beamed.

They talked throughout his meal, mostly about small things. How his Apprentices were doing, or how her studies were progressing. She had, he discovered, no interest in being a Sith. The revelation caused him to do a double take.

"Or a Forcewielder at all," she clarified. "It just doesn't appeal to me." She gestured to his bookcase, where the theory guides he'd given her were neatly filed. "Thanks for the books, but..."

"No, no. Don't worry; it's not for everyone." He was smiling inside; problem solved. He hadn't been sure how others would take his personal servant being a Forcewielder.

Despite her insistance, he took his own plate down to the nearest mess hall. She came with him, and they continued their conversation. People noticed her, of course, but he didn't think she noticed in return. She was busy talking. Talk, talk, talk. Kes was the same physical age; Kes didn't talk this much. Of course, his first Apprentice was also a hardened gangster and assassin, so the comparison didn't really fit, but...

Yes, there was always a 'but'. Too many 'buts'.