Jump to content

The Helvault -- Nespis VIII


handofthrawn

Recommended Posts

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.

Edited by Krath Apothos
  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
15 hours ago, Zalis Krales said:

Another droid, R6-D9 beeped loudly and rapidly at LV8-Y1. The command droid turned directly to the astromech droid. "What do you mean cell 200R6 is flooded?" The droid beeped again. "The lavatory is flooding. Those systems were updated two weeks ago, it is impossible for them to have any issues." The small astromech droid beeped and spun it's head around as it continued to explain. "Other lavatories are beginning to show the same thing. Our system must be compromised somewhere. Alert maintenance command." LV8-Y1 turned its upper body again and sent another message to all security droids. "Move all prisoners to rec floor under protocol red-seven-two. Await further orders." 

 

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.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
On 8/26/2022 at 12:25 AM, Krath Inmortos said:

Bodies began to float upwards, the magnetized feet of the security droids the only thing keeping them grounded. What breathable air remained aboard was all that there was or was ever going to be. In population dense and tightly sealed small areas there was less conscious time left than the plummeting station had remaining.

 

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.

 

16 hours ago, Krath Inmortos said:

Several screamed into the prisoner-laden hall to assail the senses and mind of Nok Morliss and anyone else who got in their way.

 

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.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/6/2022 at 7:56 PM, Karys Narat iv-Adas said:

 "Krath Apothos, we have come for you. It seems you still have some allies among the Sith...despite your fall. You were not forgotten, and still it seems have uses."

 

On 9/8/2022 at 10:09 AM, Krath Inmortos said:

”Lord Apothos.” Inmortos rasped loudly across the silence. “My apprentice. Come.” The body of Solus clattered to the ground before Inmortos. “A gift by which to expedite our departure.” 

 

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. 

 

On 9/8/2022 at 3:24 AM, Solus said:

Only his limbs randomly moved of their own accord, as the Shard’s voicebox repeated the same phrase over and over. 

 

“dne eht reven si dne eht reven si dne eht reven si dne eht reven si dne eht…"

 

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."

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/19/2022 at 9:53 PM, Krath Inmortos said:

Stepping forward, the death lord approached the throne of Apothos, lightsaber hilt held before him. “Morlissssssss,” he hissed with a snarl, “do not lose this or,” he nodded at Solus’ mechanized corpse, “my future tool. I will

return to you for this when you are free of this prison and I of mine.”

 

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.

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...