Trunk Diary: Dromund Kaas

You can’t go home again.

Not that I really wanted to.  Dromund Kaas didn’t leave me with a lot of happy memories.  But the biggest worry was that some of my old acquaintances would see me as a Sith and would try to start something, either blackmail me with things from my past or try to kill me as some kind of proof of their ability.  It didn’t happen though.  I should’ve known.  The ordinary people try not to look at the Sith too closely because it might get the Sith to start looking at them, and the Sith never bothered to look closely enough at an ordinary person like me to remember me.  So all I have to do is look out for Sith or others that are going to try to take me on based on my current status as a Sith, not based on what happened before.

Hamr put it in his on special way, but I ended up taking his advice and went with a military-style uniform instead of Sith robes.  Sure, Hamr put it as it being “sissy”, but the robes are the sorts of things you can get away with if you have enough power to not care if anyone laughs.  Doreau had an interesting point about them, which gave me another reason to avoid them.  See, the Jedi wear robes, too, but their robes definitely look religious.  They look like monks.  But the Sith don’t want to look like monks, and so they tailor them all differently.  And yet, for the most part, they still wear robes.  And robes either look religious or silly.  She said that this all made sense if the Sith really were a splinter group from the Jedi, sticking to the trappings of their origins without realizing it, while trying to free themselves from it so that it wasn’t obvious.  It made one wonder, she said, what other trappings they were subconsciously holding onto without realizing it, and what other contrasts were there just to make them different from the Jedi even if it didn’t fit with their code.

I didn’t want to fit in with the Sith.  I wanted to fit in with the people.  And a uniform is a way to project a sense of authority while still linking yourself to the everyday.

So, of course, my first mission here was to violently put down a slave uprising.

You’d think that as a former slave myself I’d try to avoid killing them and be sympathetic to their cause.  But just like the captain of the Black Talon, what they were doing was pretty much suicide.  A slave rebellion didn’t really have much of a chance getting off the ground or getting too far because of the differences in power.  So starting one is just an excuse to get everyone involved brutally killed.  This one actually managed to get some traction … which only meant that it wasn’t a real rebellion, but was something set up by the Sith.  That’s even worse, as they’d only live just as long as needed for the Sith to get what they want.  All in all, the slaves were dead anyway, and if I needed to kill some of them off to bring down the Sith it wouldn’t make much difference.

I did come across some slaves that were trying to apply the Sith code.  They thought that it meant that the Sith get power from killing people in ritualistic ways, and so they were doing that to their fellow slaves.  It was kinda nice to get into a simple murder investigation again.  Anyway, when I discovered them they said that they wanted to actually join the Sith, and they even had some Force powers to justify it.  So I sent them to the Sith, just to create a new problem for them.  See, there are two rough philosophies in the Sith:  the brutes and the eclectics.  The slaves had the entire Sith philosophy backwards:  they thought that hurting and killing people is what gave the Sith power.  But it’s not.  It’s gaining power that lets the Sith do those sorts of things and get away with it.  The brutes use that power to do the sorts of things that the slaves thought gave the Sith power.  The eclectics sniff at those sorts of crude interests, but their interests aren’t less cruel, just more … perhaps “artistic” is the word.  That’s the one they’d want to use, anyway.  So the brutes will see promise in these and their attitude but then face new competition, while the eclectics will see them as barbarians but will also have to face their direct and brutal methods.  At the end of it all, the slaves will be killed by one or the other of them, but until then will be a reminder to them of how like those slaves they are which will cause them some discomfort.  And the more uncomfortable they are, the better I like it.

That’s also why I took the mission to investigate the Revanites.  Revan was important to both the Jedi and the Sith, and his philosophy could be one to bridge the two.  But I didn’t care.  The information would be useful and knowing about the movement could serve my purposes.  And it worked out well, as in order to hide her order the Revanite leader gave me the chance to rat out the Sith Lord who was the Master of the guy sent to find them, and I took it.  This would just introduce more conflict in the Sith ranks and meant that I would get the gratitude of a group that might come in handy later.  So it was a big win for me.

The main thing I was doing was finding an artifact that Zash wanted.  The thing was, when I went there it turned out that the guardian that no one could get past who had the information she needed happened to be an ancestor of mine.  He’d been waiting for an ancestor for a while, and gave me what Zash needed, and some other advice.

Now, this was interesting.  When I succeeded at that thing that no one else could do, Zash was surprised that no one else thought of shooting lightning at it.  But maybe that wasn’t it.  Maybe that had been tried before and it hadn’t worked, but it worked for me, because I had a connection to that that I didn’t know about.  I didn’t know about that family link here, but what if Zash did?  She’d said that she found out about me through a dream, but maybe she’d done a ton of research on me and found that link, and then used that to start down the path that she needed to get whatever it is she wants.  These are too many coincidences to take lightly, and Zash is definitely more meticulous than she’s letting on.

At any rate, I’ll have to keep that in mind as I go about looking for the artifacts of Tulak Hord that she needs for some ritual.  There’s definitely more going on here than meets the eye.

Tags: TOR Diary