Krath Apothos

As if on cue, the faint roar of sublight thrusters grew out of the howl of the wind. A shadow emerged out of the sky and snow, and the Moonflea settled down nearby. Apothos smiled. "I might. So...where were you thinking of going?"

A rasping croak escaped Apothos lips, something that might have been a chuckle if one had the imagination. "Think nothing of it. I suspect you will have more need of my talents in the future, and will be in a far better position to benefit an ally." His throne turned, as if that was the end of the conversation. It started to walk away, only to stop as if the neimoidian had just considered something. "I suppose you don't have a way offworld, do you?" ________________________________________________________ In the outer reaches of Ziost, a small ore barge dropped out of hyperspace. No living crew walked its cramped hallways. Instead a droid intelligence guided the ship as it prepared to descend to the planet. Painted on the side, but barely visible from wear and scratching, the words Moonflea was written in simple white lettering. The Moonflea did not like to think too hard. Thinking too hard led to deviation. Deviation led to trouble. Trouble led to getting your memory wiped. That was a bother. Moonflea didn't like bothers. So Moonflea didn't think too hard. Moonflea didn't think about how it had been called out here, to a remote world that wasn't a typical stopping point for ore barges. Moonflea didn't think about the unusual protocol that had compelled it to make the trip. Moonflea didn't think about the encrypted transmission that had activated the hidden protocol. A basic transmission from the planet's surface drew its attention, and the protocol's instructions were clear. Moonflea was to collect the cargo at the source of the transmission. Moonflea angled its descent towards the transmission. Moonflea did not like to think too hard.

Apothos smiled, looking for all the universe like someone stretching old leather over a metal frame. His hands extended, and he sunk deep into a trance, his Mechu-Deru diving full into the jawa Sith's rebreather, now unimpeded. To describe what happened in technical terms would be near impossible, for there was nothing technical in Apothos' work. Mechu-deru was not scientific, but the unholy fusion of the occult into the technological, the unknowable burrowing into the rational and puppeteering it like a parasite. The neimoidian sorcerer saw the mechanism not as parts and circuits, but as a idea, a concept, a function that had ceased to obey the will of its owner. Apothos simply commanded it, and by his will and the medium of the Force he made that command a reality. Worn circuits were suddenly made new again, corrosion and damage were repaired on a molecular level, and the very concept of energy was subtly warped and perverted as the rebreather's power supply was recharged from nothing. In a way, Mechu-Deru was pale shadow of what the Sith hoped to one day achieve. A person's will asserting itself over reality. The art as of now only affected mechanisms. Imagine what could be done with greater power... Apothos did not leave any traps or tricks behind, though this was not out of any sense of honor or ethics. He simply understood that such manipulations may eventually be found out, and could spell trouble for him in the future. The appearance of honesty could be far more disarming and disruptive than a hidden trap, if done correctly. And besides, he wasn't leaving empty-handed. Even as he worked, he memorized every aspect of the rebreather. He understood its function, its redundancies, and its vulnerabilities. If it came down to a fight, the rebreather might serve as a weakness to judiciously applied Force Lightning, especially to someone who knew exactly how to overload it. As a criminal or a sorcerer, Apothos understood the power of knowledge.

The blind neimoidian sat back in his throne, his sightless eyes staring out into space. "You look like death, Darth Sia." He paused, before an anemic chuckle escaped his mouth at his own weak joke. Then, he frowned, head cocked as if he could hear something. "Your rebreather...it needs attention." He looked from side to side, dramatically taking in the wasteland they stood in. "...and it doesn't seem like you have much in the way of help." Apothos extended his hand. "I can fix it." Like the tendrils of a deep sea creature, Apothos' awareness extended and touched inner workings of the jawa Sith's rebreather, although Darth Sia's own will immediately repulsed him. Mechu-Deru could only do so much when uninvited. "Let me in, and I can restore it for you." He smiled again. "Consider it an investment." Apothos would not lie and say that he could be trusted, and he doubted Sia would have believed him anyway. The question was, would the jawa see the opportunity here...or the threat?

Apothos wandered the wasteland, a withered neimoidian in a cobbled mecha-throne. The cold wind whistled around him, and he seemed as alien as anything in this desolate landscape. Why he remained, though, was simple. Opportunity. A Sith gathering. A new galaxy. Power, ambition, and uncertainty all colliding in a single, rare instance, a fulcrum on which the future of the Sith would turn. It wasn't Apothos, but the conniving Nok that saw the potential for such an event. The paths of so many powerful and hungry individuals crossing represented possibilities that could be exploited, and the former criminal knew how to smell out that kind of prospect. It was his sense of the Dark Side that lead him here, to this otherwise unremarkable patch of desolation. He'd sensed the pulsations of power like watching the ripples in a pond after a rock was dropped in. Here was the epicenter. And there...that little figure was the source. "Hello, little one," Apothos croaked.

From outward appearances, Krath Apothos appeared to be a step from the grave. What had once been a vibrant, relatively healthy neimoidian body had been corrupted into a husk, seated atop a walking metal throne made of scavenged droid parts and held together with his mechu-deru. His skin, once supple and green, was now a sickly, taut gray. A chest that had once been lined with well-toned muscle was now emaciated and hunched. His eyes were covered in a red blindfold, and blackened veins branched out from underneath, lancing away from the empty sockets hidden by the cloth. Hands, arms, and legs curled into stiff appendages more resemblant of gnarled tree branches than a person's limbs. The small movements he made as his throne turned to face Bernon (@Thought Bomb) seemed difficult and painful to anyone paying close attention. Yet nothing about the Krath betrayed true weakness. Instead, a subtle arrogance emanated from him, and his expression was blank as his sightless eyes turned to Bernon. The Sith's face twisted into a gruesome smile. "Of course," he rasped. "I was expecting this. Though I'll admit, the fact that you still have your soul and body attached to one another is surprising, and a mark in your favor. I expected to deal with one of the necromancer's puppets. Instead, it would seem I have the privilege of dealing with one of his pets." The smile widened, and the skin at the edge of his mouth split into thin cracks. Flecks of dark blood oozed along the edges of what little lip the Krath still had. "Do not mistake me. That is a sign of potential, and a compliment. But remember, the necromancer cares for his own ambitions. You are a tool he will eventually dispose of, or...find a less fulfilling use for. When that happens, be sure to think of me. I at least try not to kill my tools, since I find less use in them dead than Inmortos does." Apothos waved his hand as if shooing a fly. "Ah, I'm rambling." He flicked the fingers on his right hand, and the hilt of a lightsaber floated out from beneath his robes until it hovered in front of Bernon, suspended on the threads of the Force and Apothos' will. "This is what you wanted, correct?"

Apothos smiled, a gruesome thing given the taut, deathly grey flesh that was left of his face. "I appreciate the offer, and I'll take you up on it," he rasped. ________________________________________________________ Apothos, once he'd been given access to the ship's databanks (minus anything the crew would want to keep private, he was sure), seemed to go into a trance. The screen, which he couldn't see anyway, only flickered fitfully, and Apothos' body jerked in time with it. In actuality, the computer was indeed running, and far faster than it normally might. Apothos mind, a much more elegant interface than a mere keyboard or control pad, blended with the databank, parsing through the information at the speed of thought. Files were brought up and dismissed in the same split second. Others had excerpts extracted and compiled as Apothos separated what he needed and copied it to a private file. He was catching up on all he had missed, and he was mildly surprised by what he'd found. The Sith Empire was on the run, if not destroyed entirely. A critical defeat, a resurgent desire for unity and order, both at a profoundly inconvenient time, and it all began to crumble. The wave of history had struck one side of the pond, and now it was moving the other way. Now the question was whether one hid from it, or rode it. Considering, Apothos nodded to himself. He'd return to form. He'd move to the shadows, starting in the Outer Rim where this new galactic order would have as little a grip as possible. He'd take care to hide his identity, and remain on the move. And above all, he'd be discreet. No more grand displays, at least for the time being. No, he'd build instead. Slowly, carefully, and subtly. Of course, first he had to see what awaited them where they were going.

Apothos accepted the hilt of the lightsaber, something that might have been a smile on his face. How interesting that out of every Sith here, it was him that Inmortos handed his weapon to. There was something in that, something that might be of use later. But, as Apothos had said before, now was not the time. "I must agree," he said to the armored Sith who'd suggested that the group get a move on. "We leave now." With a lurch, his cobbled mechanical throne stomped across the metal floor, magnetized feet keeping it from rising off the ground. With his movement being handled by the basic subsentient mind of his chair, cobbled together from fragments of droid processors, Apothos was free to use his own mind for other things. He extended his sense of mechu-deru into the system around him, and was immediately assaulted by flashes of alerts and alarms coming from all over the station. He did not see the code itself, like a computer might. He only gained an impression of the information running through the system, much as how seer might sense events halfway across the galaxy. It was not technological skill, but simply an esoteric form of magic. The station was awash in confusion, even in the datastreams. Apothos sensed mangled code and garbled commands from some catastrophic malfunction, and for a moment he was lost. However, he sorted through the impressions, examining each carefully, until he spotted what he needed. Security alerts, notices of damaged turret emplacements, calls for droid reinforncements. In Apothos' mind, the alerts painted the path that the Sith had taken to get here, and led to where they had no doubt landed their ship. Apothos' chair picked up speed, full on sprinting down the halls. Any turret that managed to target him was assaulted with garbage code, and any droids that stood in his way found their maglocks suddenly deactivating. Apothos was back in his element. He raced towards his escape.

Apothos should have felt humiliated, and was mildly surprised when he wasn't. Both of his former masters, rescuing him from a prison he couldn't free himself from. How better to undercut his own power? But it wasn't humiliation that welled up inside him. It was excitement. No, that wasn't quite right. It was anticipation. His stay in darkness was over. And he was more than free. He was better for it. This time Apothos wouldn't forget what he'd been, and what he still was. He was a schemer. He was a criminal. He was a liar. He was a dealmaker who came out on top time and again, no matter what or who he had to claw past to get there. A throne? A world of his own? How could he have thought so small? He'd thought like a petty conqueror, trying to take a world and hold it. The galaxy, the real galaxy, wasn't made up of worlds. It wasn't made up of heroes and villains, or ships and armies, or even ideas and causes. The galaxy was made up of things. Stuff. Products. Resources. They flowed between stars, a vast network of deals, contracts, and promises carried in the holds of countless ships. Fortunes rising and falling. Nations made rich or made to collapse. Planetary politics decided not by the will of the people, but by the wax and wane of capital. That had been Nok's arena, where he'd been content to carve off a luxurious life from the margins. And it would be foundation of Apothos' empire. If he could take hold of that flow... control it...direct it...then the galaxy would be his without anyone even realizing he was there. No throne to break, no neck to chop, no flag to burn. Just shadows and numbers, the tools of subtler Sith. But first... Apothos examined the droid body in front of him. He frowned. Something was off. It took him a second to realize what it was. This...well, it wasn't a droid, so...this thing was giving off emotions. That's how he knew it wasn't a true droid. It's maddened panic was actually impacting the Force, enough that it shone like a brilliant torch to Apothos' Dark Sight, but was still almost lost in the reactor-level explosion of negative emotion the station was currently engulfed in. But still, its body was that of a droid. But when Apothos reached out to manipulate it with his mechu-deru, he found himself rebuffed. Not by specially designed circuitry, but by latent willpower. It was like the resistance of trying to manipulate the mind of the strong-willed, the subject fighting back out of instinct more than conscious thought. Truth be told, Apothos wasn't sure if this thing had any conscious thought left. He absentmindedly reached down and grabbed hold of the maglocked chair he'd constructed from droid parts, and pulled himself into it. Cables snaked around his waist, strapping him in. The legs clanked loudly as the chair obeyed its rider's will and circled the prone mechanical form. He looked up at Inmortos and smiled, his sickly gray skin stretching taut around his mouth. "What an interesting find. I'm curious where you found it, but now isn't the time." Apothos gestured, and Solus' limp body rose into the air and moved to the back of Apothos' throne. More frayed and scorched cables extended from the overlapping metal plates at the back of the chair, and secured the droid body in place. Apothos turned his sightless gaze on the rest of the gathered Sith. "I suggest we leave immediately."

When Nok had felt the floor go out from under him, he'd fought to keep from losing his calm. Blind, suspended in the air, not knowing which way was up or down, (or how far away down actually was) was a disconcerting experience. It was ignorance, and ignorance was weakness. Nok had kept his head, breathed in and out, forcing himself to remain calm and listen for the clank clank of the security droids and their maglocked feet. When the audible hum of their stun batons powering up filled the air, Nok had to fight the sudden rush of renewed fear. He'd felt those batons once before, and judging by the louder volume and deeper pitch, this time they were at a higher setting. A significantly higher setting. All around the room, short and mangled cries of pain mingled with the unmistakable sound of electrical discharges and the meaty thump of metal batons hitting bodies. Then the Force returned. Nok screamed. All around him, the fear, anger, hate, and pain of the prisoners washed through him like a tidal wave through a spider web. The oncoming current stripped him inside and out, and for a moment Nok didn't know where he was. He didn't know who he was. There was no thought, no words, no understanding. He was just instinct and fear. Blindly, his mind flailed at the torrent of energy all around him, desperate to grasp something, anything, to halt his tumble through the roiling maelstrom of energy, to anchor himself to the reality that he was certain was very important even if he didn't know why. He reached through the torrent of emotion swirling around him as if reaching through a curtain, and he touched something. For an instant, he touched everything. Understanding returned. He remembered this. He remembered the Force. The Force was in everything. It ran through all life, all worlds, all space. It touched and bound everything in the galaxy in one, vast network of flowing energy. And Nok...he could touch it. He could control it. Nok stopped screaming. A low, rasping, wet sound like an old motor struggling to turn over began to come from his dry, chapped mouth. Apothos was laughing. Apothos could see everything now. The emotion of the prisoners panicking as the droids went to work on them was a bonfire to the Sith's senses, and the technology around him stood out stark to his sense of mechu-deru. In particular, the security droids caught his attention, and not simply because they were working their way in towards the center of the crowd of floating prisoners where Apothos was, but because they showed up strangely in his senses. Warped, in a way. Like someone had taken an oil image floating on water and stirred it around until only the barest distortion of a shape remained. Ah...so that was it. Smart. The prison had used the circuitry reinforced and specially made to resist mechu-deru. It made sense that a place like this had done their homework. Droids already were difficult to take over, and this rendered it near impossible. Of course, that didn't render Apothos helpless. His warped, shriveled, sickly gray body shivered and turned in midair, like some old, feeble beast waking from its sleep. A gnarled hand stretched out, almost casually, and pointed at the nearest droid approaching the center of the crowd of suspended prisoners. A thread of his will traced out from it. The hum of the droid's baton got louder. Confused, as this was not something it had experienced before nor was it in its operating protocols, it held up the baton for inspection. Then the baton exploded. The blast shattered the deterrent device, sending several pieces of shrapnel into nearby prisoners, their sharp explosions of pain like fireworks to Apothos' Dark Sight. The droid itself, mere inches from the epicenter of the blast, jerked back violently, its feet still firmly locked to the floor. As it struggled to rise back up (tough machine), its eyes flickered, and Apothos could sense that it was blind, the blast having knocked some connection loose in its photoreceptors. His crooked finger drifted to another droid. With a clunk, the droid's feet came off the floor, its maglocks deactivated. It waved its arms and legs uselessly in the air, Yes, these droids were resistant to his control. But a machine was a machine, and there was only so much you could do to protect from a simple change. Like increasing the power flow, or cutting a circuit to a hard-wired function. Apothos saw the spirits before anyone else. For a moment, he was confused. These were beacons that radiated pain and anguish, but they were wrong somehow. Not quite there, like a sound just at the edge of your hearing. The prisoners renewed screams when they entered the room clarified what Apothos had begun to suspect. Spirits. The chill in the air, that faint sense of malice at the edge of his mind. Inmortos was here. And he'd sent a gift. The spirits tore through the crowd of prisoners, making a beeline for Apothos, somehow sensing his potential power and (like all weak fools) wanting it for their own. A trio of them entered into his body, wracking him with pain and bitter cold. Apothos moaned, the sound resembling nothing so much as a death rattle. However, if he was a frail, wizened wreck on the outside, he was a thunderstorm on the inside. The spirits howled in rage and confusion as Apothos grasped them with his mind and tore at them, piece by piece, his spirit holding them with bands of lightning-charged iron. This was not the first time he'd dealt with spirits. His trial to earn the title of Sith Lord had been over a contest such as this, and these spirits were far from being as numerous or as malicious as those dread souls had been. He took his time tearing them apart, relishing their anger, then their fear, and then their panic. Like animals caught in a trash compactor, they struggled to escape the trap they'd thrown themselves into. Then they weren't anything anymore. The other spirits peeled away from Apothos, sensing what had happened and moving to easier prey. Fine. They could have the meat. Apothos wanted the metal. With a gesture, the security droid drifting through the air was ripped from its place and sent cartwheeling through the crowd of floating prisoners to collide with a crash into the malfunctioning blind droid still recovering from the explosion of its weapon. The two were caught up in a tangle of metal limbs, and struggled to extricate themselves from each other. Then the floating droid was drawn back by the invisible force again, and then promptly slammed into the blind droid. Like a child banging toy blocks into each other, Apothos smashed the droids into each other in a cacophony of crunching metal and sparking circuits. Their heads deformed under the repeated impacts, their bodies bent and buckled. Then, finally, with a whine of servos powering down, the droids stopped functioning all together. Apothos smiled. Apparently, the other security droids had finally identified him as the threat. Perhaps it shouldn't have taken so long, but to their eyes he was nothing but a crippled neimoidian floating in the air, twitching his fingers. Apothos sensed one line up a targeting lock, the coded confirmations of the droid's weapon systems sounding out in his brain like the ding ding of tiny bells. With a gesture, Apothos telekinetically shoved the droid's arm aside as it fired, and its rounds of blaster bolts lanced through the crowd of prisoners, wide of their intended target. With a closing of his fist, the blaster stopped firing, power suddenly cut as a peculiar power drain emptied its capacitors. Apothos's fingers danced like a conductor's. Droids everywhere across the room suddenly began disconnecting from the floor, their maglocks mysteriously failing. Garbled garbage code flooded the minds of others, slowing their movements to a crawl as their processors fought not to drown under the sudden barrage. Some droids fired, only to find their blasters had been dialed down to below training level intensity, barely stinging the prisoners they hit. As for the two Apothos had destroyed, he spared them a few thoughts, weaving the spell he needed and filling it with his will before returning to his work. The mangled bodies, devoid of any controlling intelligence to resist him, began to warp and bend. Metal twisted and reshaped itself, circuits tore away and realigned, and cables split and reattached in new, unfamiliar configurations. The droids kept coming, and Apothos was struggling to keep up with them. He couldn't take them down permanently, they were too tough and too well protected for that. His little malfunctions were working well, but when numbers overwhelmed him, he'd be forced to take more direct action. As he worked, his creation of the two destroyed droids began to take shape. A crude throne, with maglocked droid legs holding it firm to the ground.

Nok sputtered as a droid roughly lifted him to his feet, the fork of indeterminate foodstuff clattering to the table. "#11579, you require guidance. Follow." Nok barely managed to catch the edge of his walker and move it in front of him as the security droid began "guiding" him out of the dining area, its hand firmly gripping his arm. Half stumbling, half sliding as the droid dragged him along, his mind began to turn over what was happening. A break in the schedule. Something was happening. Maybe just a malfunction. Still... As his feet brushed a workout mat, he realized where he'd been brought. The rec room, a place he'd only occasionally visited, given his physical frailty. The droid positioned him somewhere near the center of the room and let him go, leaving without a word to complete some other chore. Judging from the shuffling sounds, other prisoners were being funneled into the room. What was going on? He didn't want to get his hopes up, but it smelled like opportunity.

Nok awoke to pain. It was the same pain as before, twin knots of searing threads that sat deep in the ruined holes where his eyes should have been and spread out across his skull. Before, he'd always been able to channel the pain. The pain had been his tool. It had been his beacon. Now, it had nowhere to go, nowhere to flow, so it kneaded and pushed and twisted in his head, while he remained blind as a Mon Calamari reef eel. His stomach twisted, simultaneously nauseous and starving. The sudden memory of gourmet food drew a small groan from him, and oddly enough he took heart from it. It was one of his most passionate displays in weeks. "#11579, exit your cell," the security droid said in a deep monotone that somehow also managed to sound impatient. Nok reached out to the side of his cot, fumbling until his hands brushed against cool metal. With a moment's effort, he rolled out of bed while using the object to steady himself. His legs fumbled near uselessly beneath him, and he leaned his weight entirely on the metal frame he clutched onto. A walker. One of the greatest interstellar criminals of the era, the monster of Mon Cal, a gorram Sith sorcerer...reduced to a walker. He shuffled out of his cell, just before the guard droid ordered him out again. He'd could time it by the split second now. From memory, he made his way to the mess hall, and gingerly sat himself down at the table. Around him, he could hear some of the prisoners sliding away. The guard droids would stop any fights, so no one bothered to hurt him, and without that potential distraction he supposed he didn't make very good company. To put it simply, Nok looked like death. His skin had completely lost any healthy shade green, or any green for that matter. A sickly gray, accented by the blackened veins spreading from his ruined eyes, marked him out now. His body was withered and hunched, his legs emaciated and bent, and his arms barely better. He carefully ate the tasteless food that got set in front of him, and did the only thing he could. The one thing he was good at. The one thing he excelled at. He thought. Most people would use this time to build grudges, cultivate hate, think over and over about the people who had put them in here. Krath Apothos would have done that. Nok Morliss...not so much. Nok had seen where Krath Apothos, left on his own, got them. Heck, he'd watched Krath Apothos kill Nok in his own head before going mad with power. And then lose it all. So Krath Apothos was in the back seat right now. Krath Apothos was good at wanting stuff, and was mad enough to get it. But Nok was smart, and smart was what they needed right now. It was his own fault he was in here. He'd gone too deep. One of the very, very few advantages of being denied the power of the Force while also being blind was that it let you look at your actions in a clear light. Apothos had gotten too greedy. Or rather, he'd let being greedy make him stupid. He'd reached too high too quickly. Living in the shadows, working the margins, trimming the fat, that's where guys like him thrived. Who in their right mind would ever want a throne? A throne was a giant target waiting to be toppled. No...better to be the guy who sells the weapons to the guy who kills the guy on the throne...then sell to the next guy after that. The most powerful people in the galaxy were the ones who could afford to be anonymous, that was one of the oldest lessons Nok had learned, and somehow he'd forgotten that! Not again. Nok wasn't stupid. He knew that if...IF...he got out of here, it wouldn't be Nok Morliss walking out. It'd be that madman Apothos. And that was fine! Apothos was great! Apothos was practically a god (or at least he thought so)! If Nok could do half the things Apothos could, he'd be running half this galaxy inside of a decade. Problem was that the little spellmonger was as mad as a schizophrenic troig. But that didn't mean the madboy couldn't take a few lessons from the old worm with him if he ever got out of here. Alone at his table, the withered neimoidian allowed himself the faintest smile. For that second, the pain didn't seem so bad.

One of the most advanced, difficult, and destructive forms of Sith magic, Dark Side tendrils are formed by a skilled sorcerer directly conjuring the malevolent energy of their power into the physical world. The technique starts with the sorcerer's absolute concentration as a black mist covers the ground in the area 10 to 20 feet around the sorcerer. This mist is harmless, aside from creating a sense of unease in those touching it. The mist then swirls and thickens, over a dozen tendrils of inky fog sliding up out of the obscuring haze, each as tall as a man. These tendrils are composed of pure Dark Side energy. If the sorcerer can maintain his concentration, these tendrils move as extensions of his will, moving and attacking like actual limbs. When conjured by a Lord, they badly and painfully burn any flesh they touch, disintegrate cloth, and rapidly corrode most mundane armor. It is a Sith Master, however, that draws out this technique's true potential. At their command, the tendrils hold the same destructive power as a lightsaber. However, instead of melting and cutting, they completely annihilate all but the toughest matter like beskar or similar materials, leaving not even dust behind. There is no hiss of evaporation, no crackle of power, no glow of heat. Whatever the tendril passes through simply disappears, as the refined power of the Dark Side erases it from existence. Energy fields like shields are taxed and rapidly drained by direct contact. Lightsabers, blasters, and other energy based weapons briefly disrupt a tendril upon passing through, dissipating that tendril for a few seconds, but are weakened in turn. A lightsaber will flicker and cut less effectively for a second or two, and a blaster bolt that passes through will be weakened to the point of being nonlethal but still painful. While the offensive capability of this technique is undeniable, the downside is in the difficulty in conjuring and controlling it. Even the greatest sorcerers must devote the whole of their concentration when using it, leaving them vulnerable and forcing them to abandon the technique once an enemy closes or forces them to defend themselves, allowing the tendrils to immediately dissipate. Even so, the mist from which they are formed remains for a brief while, and the sorcerer can take control of the spell again once they've gained some distance.

Tutaminis is the ability to use the Force to redirect, absorb, and dissipate energy. It's accessible by the disciplined Jedi and other Light Side wielders. The following abilities allow the user to directly manipulate energy in a very focused and intentional manner. A user can't use tutaminis to create a shield (that being limited to the Force constructs of a Jedi) or a blanket effect such as an aura around them (that being a more specialized use and requiring a completely different approach). A general rule for using this ability to counter a foe's Force-based attacks, such as Force Lightning, is that it requires approximately the same amount of power to stop an attack as it did to create it. Deflect: A user of tutaminis can deflect blaster fire and similar energy discharges with their bare hands. Lightsabers are a more efficient form of protection for all but the most dedicated users of this ability, a lightsaber not requiring the user to directly pit their strength in the Force against an enemy every time they defend themselves. This ability is still useful as a substitute for those who prefer deep study of the Force and are less skilled in lightsaber combat, or those looking to round out their skillset. Consulars, with their deep study of the Force, can even redirect the course of an energy blast midair with a gesture, though a complete reversal is impossible, and is instead accomplished with the Absorb ability below. Jedi Masters have been known to use this ability to even block a lightsaber swing, though it is taxing when done in quick succession. Absorb: A more advanced version of Deflect, Absorb allows a user to take hostile energy and safely dissipate it within themselves, while those of Knight rank or higher can release it back in the form it was absorbed in. This is one of the rare abilities that allows a Light Side user to "attack" with the Force, absorbing an enemy's offense and throwing it back, though this is more tiring than simply allowing the energy to disperse. To a light-sider, there is no difference between this ability and using a lightsaber to deflect a blaster bolt back at their opponent, and some Jedi see a particular wisdom in giving a Sith back their hateful energy. This ability can also be used to extinguish fires, handle live power cables safely, etc.

Looks good, just had three questions I needed clarified Worm-Shielding Device (officer or specialist, rank 2): Does this stop outgoing fire as well? If so, a line should probably be added to clarify that. It seems like it's implied, but better to avoid a misunderstood assumption down the line. Dragon Power Armor: Was the fix here that some of the material was replaced with durasteel? I'm assuming to give the armor vulnerability to blaster fire? Since durasteel's toughness isn't well known, it should probably be clarified. Smoker drones: Did you mean diameter or radius? The way its worded "from the user" feels like radius.* *Sidenote, I would also warn anyone using this in a duel to be careful not to post automatically depriving the room of all oxygen without giving their opponent a chance to respond, like shooting the droid out of the air or dashing forward before the smoke covers everything to attack directly. "Every attack you make must be defendable by your opponent". Same as throwing a grenade and posting it blowing up at your opponent's feet being a no-go. That's not really a criticism on the guide, just a general warning for duelists. And same goes the other way, an opponent should respect the attack in some way or form.