After Dinner...oh no, Darth Maul clones!

After their amusing dinner with the chancellor and her family, the group had little to do for a few days. They got updates on various things they'd been looking into. Oola's family informed her that the slavery ring had effectively shut down (yay), but that the Hutts were sending huge amounts of money to the Imperial remnants--like, "build some capital ships" kind of money. The probe that General Solo had offered to send came back with a positive manswer and likely coordinates of a corruptive Dark Side doohickey living in Abindosan's oceans. The Jedi from the Ossus library were still checking into the whereabouts of the Jedi ship, but they said they had a lead.

Ree had her knighting ceremony. There, she saw the strange cloaked figure that she'd seen before, but no one else could see it. That night, waking with a sense that someone else was around, she spotted that figure on her balcony. It waved for her to follow, then jumped off the building and led her to a cantina on the seedier side of the city. She found Z there, gambling with some guy who bore a family resemblance to Raasik Sent and Dalt. Cue drunken scramble as Jedi appeared in nasty dive, and then Ree and Z dragged the now-unconscious guy off to the group's ship so they could talk to him.

Mal Graf, his name was. Turned out, his father had entrusted a whole bunch of Jedi stuff to him, which he'd been keeping in his extremely cluttered apartment for the last several years. Scraggly but surprisingly honorable, the guy turned it all over to the Jedi Council. It was a whole bunch of stuff from Obi Wan and Yoda, including boxes of personal belongings from them and Anakin, Qui-Gonn...heck, it looked like the two of them had emptied out a house full of nick-knacks they'd collected over the years and deposited it in this apartment. Old records, personal journals, family pictures, extra sets of clothes, you name it. Heh, they woke up Master Skywalker at 4 am when they called the temple to let people know. He said, "What do you do while I'm sleeping?" then told them to bring it in and he'd meet them at 8 am, the lazy bum.

The group, various historians, and random curious Jedi sat around the place for the day, just sorting through it all. The council halls looked more like a Jedi yard sale than a solemn place of deliberation. They eventually figured out it must all have some connection with the planet Yanobar, which is an extremely backwater place where a bunch of Jedi families had gotten stuck way back during the Sith Wars, and then the coordinates had been more or less lost. Over the years, they've formed their own colony and Force tradition, called Zeishon Sha. They're very independent, but not really anti-Jedi. So, off to Yanobar.

There they learned that Dalt had visited several times in the past few years. And they ran into the mysterious cloaked lady, whose name was Tia, a member of the Zeishon Sha. She helped them out, arranging meetings with informative people. The story goes that during the rise of the Empire, Yoda and Obi Wan had stopped by and dumped all that stuff into the colony's keeping, asking them to get it into friendly hands at such time as it could safely be reclaimed. But some of the Graf family were pretty seedy. They snagged all that and ran off to Coruscant, hoping to sell it to the Emperor. Two other, more decent members of the family chased after them. But while they managed to reclaim most of the stuff, they couldn't risk carting off so much Force-permeated cargo, so they ended up settling down and hiding out with it in the crummy parts of Coruscant. Meanwhile, the seedy branch of the family took the couple of items and info they had, and sold it to the Emperor who rewarded them with a noble title. Thus we have the fancy part of the family (from the despicable side), and the lowly ones (the honorable branch). The Zeishon Sha, Tia explained, had been keeping an eye on the items and the family ever since, but had waited till now to notify the Jedi because (as Tia put it) Ree was the first one who felt both honest and approachable. (When asked about Master Skywalker, the reply was, "Yeah, I'm sure he'd take it well when a mysterious black-cloaked figure just appeared in his room one night. He's had great luck with those.")

Tia took them to meet the members of the Graf family who still lived on Yanobar. These guys were very cooperative but didn't remember a thing. A bit of checking revealed that Dalt had screwed with their memories. Lydia and Oola located his underground lab on the property (family member #1 said, "How the hell did he do that without anyone noticing?!"), which contained three exciting things:

First, copious notes on Kedrihm'val's planet. Dalt, the little scumbag, had followed the experiment eagerly. According to his notes, it was really all about the underwater fish people, called the Vodne, who guard some kind of sentient Force-sensitive coral reefs (news to Kedrihm, but then his people aren't great with the pinpoint-accurate history). These coral reefs form a collective consciousness which can remember everything that has ever passed upon that planet. The purpose this serves is not clear, but Dalt figured that if he could corrupt the Vodne guardians, then he could corrupt the reefs, and he'd end up with a whole sentient Sith planet. Wahoo. Kedrihm not a happy camper.

Second, a full-grown but quiescent clonee of Darth Maul. Oh, yeah, baby. Here's what I'm talkin' about. Zan put his lightsaber through the clone's skull, and damn the Dark Side Point.

Third, documentation on a second and active clone of Darth Maul, who's currently hanging out on Tatooine and dealing with the Hutts. Oh boy. The crazy thing is, Dalt didn't steal this technology. He invented his own cloning process, presumably figuring that since Palpatine wouldn't take him as apprentice, he'd just grow his own Sith master. As he grew the Darth Maul clone, he actually reprogrammed the...er, man's entire history and personality back into his head. So it's a real Darth Maul, not just a physical copy. Speculation led toward horrid thoughts of digging up some genetic material from the various Skywalkers who used to live out that way.