SithLore

If there were a point of no return, Kress would have passed it sometime between eleven and two in the morning. Her night began with a couple drinks in a ritzy little Euphornis casino, migrated to a dive bar, and after a bottle of something brewed in someone else’s basement she bought out of the trunk of someone’s speeder in the slums, it all went fuzzy. Ringed fingers tapped the bottleneck with her back pressed flat against the cold, waterless bath tub, laying in full clothing with a busted lip.

Her wrist buzzed, datawatch lighting up and casting a hologram with an alarm that read, “Sleep so you can train in the morning, loser.” She set it earlier that week after a particularly hard look at her progress compared to other sith in the temple. Groaning, Kress figured sober her knew what she was talking about and crawled out of the tub onto unsteady feet to catch a glimpse of her roughed up face in the mirror. Puffed lip with a cut, and a nick on her chin, eyes that were heavy with the weight of all the alcohol in her system. She was a proper hot mess again.

A hot mess minus one particularly important, red gem earring.

Panic shot from the base of her feet to the top of her scalp as her hands frantically searched herself for the missing jewel.

“Frack, frack, FRACK! Silas is going to actually bury me. Where is it?!” The drunken assassin started fretting over what that ill-tempered sith lord would do to her if he found out she lost the soul gem, force enhancing, sith sorcery thingamajiggy that he gifted her to help with that pain in the butt force block of hers. The thing wasn’t just rare and probably difficult to create, but it was valuable, and now it was missing from her ear!

“Alright…retrace your steps, Kress, you idiot moron.”

Retracing her steps was a waste of time. Whatever happened to that stone, the memory of it was lost on a tide of gin and failure. Such a priceless thing, a gem she needed if she was going to get anywhere training in the force without the use of glitterstim, and it was lost in a city the span of an entire planet! “Okay Kress…Maybe it’s in the apartment! It’s a stone charged with force energy or whatever, right? Maybe you can sense it if it’s close enough…” She was talking to herself again, something she did when there was no one else around to calm her nerves. If that earring was anywhere in the vicinity then she should be able to sense its energy through the force.


{ SENSE LVL2 APP -begin- }


Inked lashes shut over reddened hazels and Kress tried to imagine where the lost crystal would be in her apartment, thinking ‘Feeeeel the force. Think only about the force. Come ooooooooon force! Find the earring!’ only for the dripping faucet to beat like a hammer in her brain. The air conditioner blowing down her next from the vent overhead chilled her skin. There was a small hole forming in her sock and she could feel it. She needed something in her stomach or she might hurl…Concentration was lost and whatever imagery she’d formed was too , if she even had an inkling of how to do this to begin with. Kressara was half drunk, sick on strong liquor, and her mouth hurt. Of course she wouldn’t be able to focus! Turning the sink nozzle to feel the cold water on her hands, Kress splashed her face. She needed to connect to the force, but it was so foreign. It didn’t feel like anything to her, not like the chill of air on wet hands, or her aching stomach. She was cut off from it and occasionally that veil lifted to reveal a truly beautiful, living force that made the universe tick, just out of sight and out of mind enough for most to miss it. With so few encounters under her belt that she could understand, this was beyond difficult. How could others focus on something so intangible and ethereal without their minds getting in the way?

She took a deep breath, stepping away from the basin before closing her eyes once more. Despite her pickled greymatter wanting to throw a billion thoughts into the forefront of her mind the minute she decided to focus on actually sensing the force, Kressara rehearsed out loud to herself what she recalled from her first attempt looking at the world through its influence. “It’s alive, flowing around and through all things…it’s there, even if you’re distracted, even if you don’t feel it like everyone else…”

Plucking a pair of earbuds from her patchy, studded jean vest, Kress plugged her ears and connected them to her datawatch, cranking up her music as loud as she could stand it when finally it hit her. Music. She could relate her inability to sense the force to music more than she realized before. Drums, guitars, synth, vocals, all of it was in the forefront of the song to the point that only a bass guitarist would pick out the bassline thrumming in the background. Life was a multitude of different parts all written to compose one massive song, and the force was like that illusive harmony lost behind the melody and the beat. As cheesy as it sounded, it finally clicked.

“Follow that harmony.” Kress told herself and shoved her hands into her pockets, eyes still closed. She started internally, listening to the spaces between heartbeats that she once believed to be silence when her mind’s ears picked up on the slightest twinkling. Flexing her fingers, rather than testing the strength of her grip and the power behind trained hands, she paid attention to the feeling of something unseen reacting to her movements like manipulating water in her pockets, her own presence in the universe. The smell of a flowering plant hanging by the window caught her mind, but instead of allowing it to distract her, she looked without her eyes to see vibrations in the force running through its petals and stems with the slow flow of chlorophyll, begging for the planet to spin on its axis a little faster and bring out the sun.

There was something beneath her bed, something small and the force bringing it to the front of her mental perception told her it held life. Could it be the sith sorcery made earring? Smiling to herself, Kressara felt her way through the apartment without opening her eyes and knelt down before the bed, reaching out for the source of the small energy source. Prickly legs brushed her fingers and wriggled wildly, sending the blitzed sith leaping to her feet and eyes shooting open to see a decent sized spider scuttling off under a dresser. “Not the earring!” She shuddered, wiping her hand obsessively against her pants leg.

Deciding to keep her eyes open, Kressara reached out through the force like she had before, picking out traces of an ancient energy hiding beneath the rest of the world’s distractions. It was diminished, but she sensed something akin to Silas’s energy. She couldn’t entirely describe it if you asked her, but it just felt like a piece of him had once been in her room, before she left for the night. The sense trailed out beyond the front door, leading her into the hallway and down a flight of stairs on wobbly legs, into the lobby where another tenant tried to speak to the force focused sith.

“Not now, Mrs. Holt…I’m following my earring.” Kress blurted, earning a confused look from the woman as she stumbled out the building and into the street.

The earring left a vibrant trail of force energy, like perfume lingering in the air long after the one who wore it walked away. Even with eyes open, ears assaulted by high volume music, and the sticky humidity of the night clinging to her bare arms, Kress could sense the places where that sorcerous little gem brushed against other energies in the force. She followed it as quickly as she could, marveling in the louder, larger, easier to feel sensations of people and their auras walking past so much that she nearly lost her focus on the earring. How crazy she must have looked, smiling at strangers like they were new, mystical beings while hurriedly rushing through the streets smelling like alcohol. Even her own excitement couldn’t stop her, despite being overjoyed that she was finally making progress. Kressara ignored it all and kept after that signature until at last vibrations of the force led her to the open trunk of an illegal booze vender. On his ear, her missing earring. Its unmistakable draw on the force was like a cold, bright spot in the hot, dark street to her soul, clashing with the duller, muddied presence of the man who’s stretched old earlobe harbored the stone.

{ SENSE LVL2 -WC 1,050- -end- }

“Ah! you again! Come to sell off a few more pieces?” The man wearing her earring perked up with a money hungry look in his eyes as soon as they set themselves on Kressara. Cursing under her breath, she approached the illegal vendor leaning on the open trunk of his city speeder and asked, “That earring…did I sell that to you?”

Lips pulled wide and the salesman replied, “You sure did! Pretty little gem. Real fire to it!...sorry, but a deal’s a deal if it’s buyers remorse you’re suffering, lady.”

Groaning, she responded, “Can I just buy it back? I really shouldn’t have sold that…” to which he shook his head and answered, “Not a chance. You traded me for it! I don’t see what you traded it for on you. You’re out of luck.”

“What did I even trade for it? I can get it back, I’m sure.”
“Can’t say, lady. I’ve had a lot of traffic tonight.”
“But you just said that you didn’t see it on me, so I know you remember what it was.”

Shifting eyes glanced to his wears and then back to Kressara. “Maybe I don’t want to trade it back! You made the deal. Can’t blame me if you regret it later!”

Now here was one of those times that defined a person. Kressara could have easily taken the earring back from him by force, but as much as she hated it, the man was right. She’s the one who drunkenly peddled away a valuable possession without thought for consequences. If it’d been some snobbish rich vendor, then she wouldn’t think twice about taking back what was originally hers and then some, but that was just another man riding the poverty line on Euphornis. It not only went against her personal code to steal from her own people, but against the rules of her organization too. You steal from the poor of Euphornis, you get slapped with a rough penalty. To do so might forfeit the position of leadership her punks trusted her with.

So that meant getting her earring back the hard way.

“Look. If I find what you traded the earring for, will you PLEASE return it?”

Sly, the salesman nodded, “Alright, but on one condition! I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re on your own! Figure it out, I’ll return the earring, but if you can’t find the trade before sunup, too bad for you.”

“Deal.” Kressara reached for a handshake.

He wasn’t the only clever cheat. Gripping his hand hard, Kressara pulled him off balance and based off nothing more than a memory of something she read in the temple texts, fueled by her recent high of success, she thought to attempt seeing the past through an object, through the earring.

Psychometry App Start


Drawing from her connection to the force (still enhanced by her recent success) and using it as a propelling point for her next attempt, Kressara focused gin hazed eyes on the glimmering red gem. A focus of sorts, a crystal formed through sith sorcery by Silas and given to her as a means to bypass her mental block from the force without the use of heavy inebriation. It glowed red like the corrupt kyber crystals of the sith and unnatural amounts of energy radiated from its facets. Even standing in its presence, in conjunction with the high alcohol content in her cross faded blood, Kressara could feel her brain unlocking. Like a knot in her mind slowly loosening, allowing the flow of the force to move freely through the threads of her consciousness, she grasped the earring between her thumb and forefinger. She couldn’t remember what happened, but the force significant gem could be touched upon and read.

Time slowed, her eyes glazing over entirely as she focused on unlocking glimpses of the earring’s history through the force. Flashes of red burst in her vision, nearly causing the woman to falter and stagger away out of fear she’d just busted every blood vessel in her eyes, but she steadied herself. It felt as though she was lifting from her own body, seeing nothing of the alley but only those scarlet explosions of light on a blank black background. The stress of a new sensation settled into her nerves and like slipping into a dream from a light sleep, crimson flashes stabilized and the alley reformed within her vision.

Only it wasn’t the alley. Not like she knew it in the present. It was all red. Every bit of it from the brick walls of the buildings surrounding her, to the puddles like red wine in the streets, to the night sky illuminated under the vermillion glow of a blood moon and matching stars. The people passing her by were painted in scarlet and in a panic, Kressara tried to look down to see if her own body was so unnaturally shaded, only to realize there was no body.

“Hey! How much for that fracking adorable stuffed toad?”

Her own voice echoed out, but Kressara knew for a fact she wasn’t talking. The vendor’s sleazy response came next. “That earring, lady. I’ll trade you the toad for it!”

Kressara felt as though she were swinging on a rope when her perspective shifted. Pulled away from where she’d been dangling, she saw herself from the perspective of the earring, being handed to the merchant. Talk about a crazy trip…

“Excellent choice, miss! Here you are! One stuffed Loth Toad. Enjoy him!”

For a moment, the world went black as the man’s fingers encased her, but soon with no small amount of stomach turning jostling, Kressara (or her perspective through the earring) was hung from a new ear lobe to watch as her past self excitedly accepted a round, blobby, entirely unintelligent looking amphibian plush from extending hands of the shady salesman.

The red world went bright again, flashes blinding Kressara as she fell away from the earring and plummeted through the space between the past and her own mind. Her consciousness slammed back into her own body and the jewel tones faded to the regular color spectrum of the dark, presently less populated alley. Kressara’s insides churned and the merchant’s squabbling finally reached her own ears before unhanding him and leaving the earring on his ear alone. She staggered off to the side of the street and spilled her guts in a drain, heaving for air with the taste of recycled gin on her tongue.

It wasn’t perfect, but she got what she needed. Though the attempt rocked her to her core and seriously disoriented her, Kressara swelled a bit with pride she hadn’t expected to feel. Based off nothing more than an excerpt from one of the professor's books and a little liquid courage, Kressara managed to see the past through an object tethered to the force. If she recalled correctly, the art was called Psychometry.


Psychometry App Finish: WC 691/300

“Hey! You made a grab for the earring, you little thief!” The back alley merchant staggered back and protectively cupped the jewel to the side of his head, but Kressara was too busy wiping the taste of stomach acid and alcohol from her tongue on the back of her sleeve.

“Calm down, dude. I wasn’t trying to take the earring. If I was, I’d have it. I was just working around the terms of our agreement.” She huffed for fresh air.

Confused, the stubborn man questioned, “What do you mean? What did you do??”

Kress stood up straight and haphazardly walked away from the drain. “Don’t worry about it, man. I’ll catch you before the sun rises…don’t you go anywhere.”

She had the object in mind now. A brown and tan, large stuffed loth toad with two soulless glassy eyes and a small mouth, which made a ribbit sound when you squeezed it hard enough. How could she have forgotten that thing? Even worse, why did she trade a priceless sith sorcery gem for it??

Whatever spurred her to do such a foolish thing (likely just a combination of drugs and booze), the plush toad wasn’t in her apartment. She would have noticed it while looking for the earring. So somewhere in the great wide cityscape of Euphornis, a stuffed animal hid that was the key to her avoiding a probable death sentence from the present lord of the sith. Stalking the streets, Kressara wished the memories of the earring had stretched so far as to show her a direction, but she’d have to rely on her own pickled memory instead.

“If I were a drunker me, where would I go with a big stuffed toad?”

Only thing is, she wasn’t drunk. Not anymore. Vomiting after a dive into the memory of the earring sobered her up something fierce.

“Well…maybe I could just get a little high.” Kressara knew better. She was trying to quit, she really was, but she’d already relapsed earlier that night and she wouldn’t stand a chance of retracting her steps and working the force without keeping her mind open. Already she could feel the door in her mind shutting and her connection to the force weakening as it seeped through the cracks. With a defeated sigh, she brought a spice laced death stick to her lips and fished a flip lighter from her pocket.

One strike, a spark.
Two strikes, a spark.
Three strikes, a flame.

Mentally noting that she needed to refuel her lighter, Kress sucked the end of the deathstick and breathed in a deep, intoxicating rush of mind numbing air. Releasing a plume of smoke from her nostrils, she let her shoulders drop as the doors opened once more, regaining some of her ability to connect. She had to take enough to stay out of it, while also remaining lucid. It was a fine line, but after so many years using substances to maintain some measure of fluidity in the force despite her still unknown disabilities regarding it, keeping on her toes while feeling like the world was spinning beneath them was a talent well mastered.

“Hey! What are you smoking? Ma’am, wait right there where you are with your hands visible.”

Oh no. Eyes cut across the road to a pair of Euphornis cops stepping out of a 24 hour convenience store, setting down their late night refreshments on a bench before B lining after her. The last thing she needed now was to be apprehended before she could find that plush, thus buying her earring back. Taking one last big puff off the deathstick, Kressara kicked off into a whole-hearted sprint down the street and left the officers shouting after her. They took chase, calling in a couple police bots to the area to help them run down their suspect as she turned down a side street. Boot soles slapped against the concrete and the maze of walls lead her to a deadend filled with trash cans and laundry dangling overhead from rooftops several stories up.

Force Jump App, Start


Sucking down another breath of spiced air from the deathstick between her lips, Kressara closed her eyes to the sounds of authorities and police bots navigating the city alley maze towards her dead end location. Her only escape without a fight stood several stories overhead and she didn’t have her gear on her to help her easily scale the height to safety. She’d have to rely instead on the force. With her mind open, toxins in her bloodstream pumping to the source of her usual blocked greymatter, the assassin rehearsed old lessons in her mind that she heard in passing from other students in the temple.

”Feel the force flowing through your legs. Breath it in from the air around you and draw from its power. Gather that energy around your legs and focus it on your desired trajectory, then, when it builds to the point of snapping, unleash that energy as you leap for your target and propel yourself forward.” The instructions ran through her memory, as did the failure of the students she laughed at in passing.

It couldn’t be that hard, right? Kressara unlocked her knees and narrowed her eyes on the rooftops so high above, flexing her calves and willing her own force energy to concentrate around those muscles. She imagined it like a pin slowly pulled back by a trigger, her body being the trigger and the force being the pin that would soon send her flying towards her destination. Breathing deep around the deathstick, she focused on the rooftop and mentally begged the force to bring her there safely.

“Hey! Stop!” The arrival of a cop startled her into jumping prematurely, releasing the energy building around her legs and soaring up from the ground, but not nearly as high as she needed to leap.

Kressara made it to the second story, two out of ten, clumsily catching a window ledge by a miracle instead of falling back down to the concrete. Straining to pull herself up, the airborne addict rose on wobbly legs to lean against the glass and peer once more to the promise of escape beyond her reach. Looking down, she surmounted that two stories was quite a feat. Perhaps with a second try…

Repeating the same process as before, this time with stun guns aimed on her and police shouting warnings, she let the energy of her own force signature gather and build around the muscles of her legs, under her boots, and against the ledge, golden hazels zeroed in on the sky above the roof. Determined to fly up to that perch like the blackbird of her callsign, Kressara bent her knees, let her heart and soul forget all fear of falling, and like a crow taking flight she leapt from the window ledge. Energy cracked and sprung her upwards, arms out as though they were wings. Convinced she could fly past the clouds if she wanted to from the initial burst of force energy strong enough to bust the window upon her launch, Kress envisioned the force pulling her ever upwards.

Windows and clotheslines fell away as she ascended, the police and their bots shrinking as the sky drew closer. Wind battered her and whipped her skin through the fabric hung from her frame, soul in flight with her body along for the ride. She reached the rooftop, but soared well past it, realizing one crucial failure to her success in jumping so high with the force to jet her upwards…

…landing.

Mentally cutting off all propulsion from the force, desperate to stop her momentum, the rush of wind slowed and for a brief moment she was weightless before gravity flung her towards the roof tiles. Kressara landed feet first, but her jello legs gave way beneath her and caused her to roll. She had successfully made an impossible leap through the force, but what goes up must come down. Taking a beating from the tumble, Kressara skidded to a stop and gripped some exposed pipes to keep from falling down the opposite side of the angled roof.

Deathstick dropping from her lips, Kressara couldn’t shake the dreamy illusion of flying for a moment before reality brought her back down to earth.

Force Jump App, End. WC 702/300

One rooftop wouldn’t keep the police from catching up to her eventually, so off she ran, leaping smaller gaps and bounding over exterior ductwork across the skyline when she mistook a dirty glass ceiling for stable footing. It cracked beneath her boot and gravity pulled her into the darkness of an empty warehouse with an ear splitting shatter.

{ Alteration 2 APP Start }



Kressara groaned, pulling herself up on her hands and knees with broken glass from the ceiling overhead falling from bloodied blonde locks. The thunderclap headache following her tumble was intense, but passed almost immediately upon reopening her eyes. Yet something was off and it wasn’t the possible concussion. Something felt knocked loose, as though the resistance to the force ever present within her mind was somehow shaken free just a little, allowing the force to flow even more freely through her aching, foggy brain. Eyes straining to adjust to the darkness of the warehouse peered around her, taking notice of rows of massive glass sheets hanging from the ceiling on racks, moonlight from the broken ceiling and tall factory windows passing through their stained clarity to cast colors all around the room. Something pricked her senses, bringing her attention to the patches of multifoliate patterns over the concrete and machinery…ghostly people. Figures with no faces, nor defining features standing in the colors with bodies no more solid than clouds of dust. Blinking hard, she was almost certain they were hallucinations. Very familiar hallucinations, as though she were seeing something for the first time which had always been there. Was her mind free to see things now which she couldn’t before? Reaching out through the force, Kressara tried to feel the specters which stepped closer in response. Shaking and uncertain, the fallen assassin asked, “Are you real?”

One of them lifted their hand towards her, raising a single shard of glass from the floor to let it hover between them and held it there, waiting for something. Guessing what it wanted, Kressara lifted her hand in turn and focused on the levitating shard, feeling pulsing energy with every beat of her own heart ebbing and flowing like tides in her veins. Willing that energy forward to interact with the hovering glass piece, Kress’s fingers tingled and twitched as swirling ethereal power illuminated by glimmering factory dust encompassed the shard. The ghost dropped its hand and Kressara remained focused, keeping it in the air with a baffled smile, but movement beyond the windows startled her, snapping her focus and letting it fall to the floor with a plink and scitter.

Police lights pierced the dirty windows, freezing her in place as she felt the energizing inspiration already threatening to lock itself away behind a barricade in her mind. They passed, leaving the warehouse silent save for the white noise of distant traffic and wind. When next Kressara looked, the ghosts had encircled her like they were making up the points of a compass, all pointing to the broken glass surrounding her.


“Okay…I’ll try.” Real or not, they wanted her to accomplish this. Whatever was hidden behind the block in her consciousness which withheld the force from her, it wanted her to break it. Whether these figures were a part of her, or merely imaginary, she believed that what they wanted to teach her was important. So she tried again, this time with greater determination to please the specters.

Bringing both hands out beside her, palms facing the ceiling, she took a deep breath and upon exhaling, beckoned the force to react with her breath. Light and glass dust bent with the escape of air from her lungs, traveling along her arms in shimmering braids of energy to the scattered pieces all around her. It electrified her spine, filling her body with cold sunlight and the kind of pressure that sinks into your bones before the rain. It wasn’t anger, or fear, or even ambition that drove her to alter the will of the force, but something so humblingly overwhelming. It was neither sadness, nor joy, and yet it moved her to tears and pulled the laughter from her lungs. It was realer than touch and stronger than desire, older than gods and it both pinned Kressara to the floor of the warehouse in reverence, and inspired her to leap from the ground and dance as though no mortal woe would matter ever again. It was what her peers called the force, what they were so lucky to feel without restraint. It eluded her all her life like ghosts in the corners of her vision and now it was all around her, so thick she could breath it.

Kressara focused through tears of chaotic emotions, worshiping the energy that passed over each shard of glass. She choked on the desire to cry as trembling hands lifted higher, altering the glimmering tendrils of stirred up contamination carried on the currents to wash beneath the glass and lift it within a hardly visible grasp. Clasping each piece, Kressara raised her arms and with them the force pulled broken glass into the dusty air. Each piece captured the light and threw shining blurs of pure white into prismatic shade as she rose to her feet. The ghosts vanished, but she didn’t want to stop there. Overjoyed, Kressara twirled in place and let the force spin with her, pushing the shards and dazzling her in a vortex of glinting refraction. Like a domino effect, the energy altered by her will and reacting to her playfulness caused a shift in the airflow of the factory, unintentionally pushing giant glass panes and causing them to swing on their racks.

Kressara brought her hands in close, eyes widening on the huge slabs as the broken pieces fell to the ground, clinking and shattering like a rain of tiny diamonds to her ears. Realizing this was only just the beginning of something far more powerful and startled into stillness once more, she stood awestruck in the dancing colors of the swaying stained glass panes.


{ Alteration 2 APP end. WC 945/700 }