Trunk Diary: Taris

Taris is a hell-hole.

Well, I guess that’s only to be expected on a planet that was bombed into oblivion by Darth Malak’s Sith a long time ago, but from what I’ve heard it actually wasn’t all that much better before that.  Sure, the city itself was nice, but the undercity had Rakghoul monsters that were pretty much the only things that really managed to thrive after the bombardment.  The Republic wants to rebuild it.  The Empire wants to stop them from doing that.

I’m siding with the Empire here, and worked against the rebuilding.  The reason is that the Republic isn’t doing this to help people.  If they wanted to help people, they’d get a lot more bang for their buck on a host of other planets.  No, they’re turning this into a symbol, and big middle finger to the Empire by rebuilding something the Sith wiped out.  That’s why they’re doing this and shipping people back who had homes here before and all of that.  I have no problem tweaking their noses and making their symbolic gesture more realistic.

I also had to work with another Sith named Thana Vesh.  She was pretty much the archetype of the sort of Sith I hate.  She was powerful, sure, but way too confident in her abilities and way too interested in hurting and killing people to think straight.  So, of course, she managed to fail a lot of her missions and get captured at least once doing that.  Her master Gravus didn’t seem that impressed by her attitude and used me as a foil to try to show her restraint, but it didn’t work that well.  I had a chance at the end of all of this to kill her, but I let her live.  You’d think that given my attitude I would have taken the chance to kill such a Sith, but she’s young, and there aren’t all that many ways things can end for young Sith with her attitude.  They overextend themselves and get themselves killed.  Or they learn restraint and harness their power.  Or they attach themselves to a powerful enough Sith that they can act on their desires without facing too many consequences for it.  If it’s the first case, then I don’t have to kill her.  If it’s the second, then she might end up as an ally somewhere down the road.  And if it’s the third, I’ll probably end up killing her when her master sics her on me.  Either way, I didn’t need to do anything now, and she might learn how things really are at some point.

Speaking of that, I had a chance to teach a Jedi that the Jedi Order aren’t any better than they think the Sith are much of the time.  At least the Sith are honest about it, but the Jedi often become masters of rationalizing the nasty things they want to do in the name of “serving the Light”, which means following their instincts and what they want to do and claiming that it’s “The Will of the Force”.  A young padawan named Ashara was getting visited by the ghost that I wanted to capture — turns out that I’m not the only one with Sith in the family tree — and so I had to convince her to let me into the compound to talk to it and, at the same time, to take the opportunity to convince her to doubt the Jedi.  She was proud and headstrong and that was my way in, but I tried to present myself as a reasonable Sith to show her that one can indulge in those things without turning into a monster.  Seems like I should have spent more time talking up the rewards, because when she let me in she had told her superiors about me and said that she didn’t believe that I was a reasonable Sith.  So her superiors tried to kill me and I killed them and captured the ghost — negotiating with it instead of just capturing it — and for some reason Ashara decided that she might as well join me as she probably wasn’t going to be able to go back to the Order after getting her superiors killed.  This wasn’t much of an endorsement and makes me wonder what her real objective is, because it really sounds like she was going to come with me no matter what I said.  I have to hope that the reason is because she’s being pulled to the Dark Side instead of her deciding that she would make a good independent double-agent.

After this, it looks like my inherited apprentices are in a bit of trouble, so it’s off to Quesh to help them.