Sith Baby!

Turns out, Dalt's Force ghost is easy enough to deal with. Kedrihm'Val's people excel at dealing with Force spirits. They can summon it to them easily enough if they have something of Dalt's. Since the group has plenty of things of Dalt's, this is a snap. It takes them a while, but they gain one bottled Dark Side spirit.

As it turns out, the Dark Side spirit is actually the spirit of the clone. It's the real Dalt who's in his body. Zann simply severs Dalt's connection to the Force, and they take him back to Coruscant as a prisoner.

While they've been off saving the galaxy one planet at a time, the New Republic has pursued investigation of the corrupt Miraluka ambassador (remember that?). They've learned that on the day the crew saved the Senate, a message was recorded as beamed out by the ambassador to a location the investigators can't track. While interrogating Dalt, they ask if he knew about this. He denies that she sent such a message to him, but tells them that she wasn't answering to him.

They realize that whoever she was dealing with must have had ties to the Senate, which will make investigation difficult and sensitive. Zann suggests a trap: they'll leak the fact that they're investigating and let people know where they're heading (they choose a random planet) and see if the person responsible comes after them.

The person responsible does attack them, using some kind of monsters made of...evil Force goo or something. They're all squishy and tentacular and generally disgusting. Ree fights one off after it nearly chokes her, discovering that when they're "killed," they disintegrate and leave Dark Side crystals behind. Drath freaking mauls the one that's sent after him, while Kedrihm'Val catches his in a sack and beats it off the walls until Z gets a bit gung-ho and nearly tries to blow up his room.

Unfortunately, while the crew ends up with pockets of evil crystals, they do not manage to capture any information on the person who sent them...although now they know that whomever it was is both interested in their destruction and steeped in the Dark Side (it couldn't just be a regular evil politician, oh no, it just had to be a Dark Sider. Dark Siders are jerks.) They discover that these goo-things actually are people (well, ex-people) who somehow swallow these crystals, which then possess them and turn them into monsters. How...revolting.

Cleaning up the mess, Ree discovers a note on her bedside table, from a bounty hunter, suggesting they go to Corellia. This elicits the following conversation over comm:

"Hello, Master Kyp. We just fought off evil Force goo-monsters, and a bounty hunter left a note in my bedroom."

"Oh, reaaaaaally?"

"Get your mind out of the gutter, Master."

Upon investigation, it does turn out that the Miraluka in question had ties to Corellia's embassy. The crew decides to pursue the lead, but they're warned that the mission might be politically sensitive, and are asked not to upset anyone important unless it's vitally necessary to do so.

They find nothing. Squat. The place is quiet as a...quiet thing. At a loss as to what to do, they choose to poke around an interesting old bit of news, about some relic that washed up on one of the beaches a while back. Turns out, "a while back" means years ago. But they're sort of curious anyway, because the story goes that this family--the Seraf family--was vacationing at a seaside resort where they found a bauble washed up on the beach. Shortly afterward, the parents were hideously murdered by some means that the authorities could never figure, but which looks an awful lot like someone might've torn them apart using the Force. Their passing left two young sons behind. With nothing else to do, the crew visits the resort, where they learn that one child (Adjen, aged 5 at the time) was later adopted by an anonymous individual, and the older son (Lerin, aged 14) simply vanished shortly after.

Well, this is curious, mysterious, and just possibly relevant. Oola decides she'll try her hand at some research, but finds the adoption records sealed shut like a...really tightly shut thing. She does learn that a man named Onjo Panib was in charge of the case, but they learn that he retired some years back and after that, his record disappear behind the same wall.

Here's where it gets interesting. A note turns up at their hotel with Panib's current address on it.

With the distinct scent of Mystery wafting in their sensitive, heroic little noses, the crew is off! Only to find that Panib won't tell them anything, except that the kid was adopted by a VIP who wanted the good deed to go unremarked. He remains, he says, sealed under an order of silence to this day. Frustrated, Oola calls Erin, the New Republic Investigator, to try to get the records unsealed. Erin agrees to work on that.

Meanwhile, they do have the family's old home address, which they decide to check out since Onjo's imitating a clam. There, they discover an unsettling thing: a Sith holocron. Obviously, something is not right. They do a bit of speculating, most of which is disturbing, until Erin calls them back to inform them that Adjen was adopted by the Corellian ambassador to the New Republic Senate. He now goes by the name Severan Tellik. Severan just happened to be on Coruscant around the time the whole deal with Dalt and the Miraluka went down.

Well, well. Looks like they stumbled onto a connection after all. Since they know now what Panib couldn't tell them, they decide to go back and try talking to him again. When they arrive, in true crime-solving fashion, the man is dead--of a lightsaber cut to the neck. All that remains are bloody footprints and...an ultraviolet flashlight?

Shining that around, they see a message written on the wall: "You should watch some home movies." What?!

Though a series of events that I cannot for the life of me recall (it might involve another note; they got a lot of anonymous notes), they discover said home videos hidden in a closet in the nice suburban home of a completely unrelated young couple on Coruscant. Watching those videos, they witness the hidden evil of the young child, who displays uncanny mastery of the Force at a young age, even constructing his own (black, how ominous) lightsaber from a strange sort of crystal that also washed up on that beach there (this, apparently, is what the child found, and what set him to murder his parents). Older brother Lerin in the videos is freaked the hell out, but Adjen hides it well from the adults.

Obviously, what we have here is some severe wrongness. To learn more, Oola does some research on the names of the parents--Jek and Mara. Turns out, they worked at Kuat Shipyards during the Imperial years...oh, round about the time Dalt lived there. After an accident at the shipyards that killed a number of people, the Serafs found this baby, who they figured had been orphaned. They took the little tyke in and raised him as their younger son.

Aha. This smells suspicious. A brief talk with Dalt, who's oddly cooperative, reveals that, hell YEAH, that explosion was his fault. He's quite proud of it, in fact. Dalt explains that he learned the Imperials were there in order to pick up a genetically engineered Sith baby shipped out of Thule, who was created to be the Emperor's specially-bred apprentice. Dalt didn't plan on having any test tube baby take his destined spot at the Emperor's right hand, thank you very much, so he blew up the entire bunch of 'em, killed the kid, and made it look like an accident. He's disgruntled to learn that he missed the kid after all, and wishes the crew the best of luck in hunting the brat down.

Asked about Thule, he tells them them that it's a planet the Sith lords hid way back when, where they kept all their stuff after the Jedi hunted them to near-extermination. The whole planet's full of Sith stuff, Sith people, Sith technology, Sith armies... Only the Dark Lords of the Sith know about it. It's located at those mysterious coordinates the group kept running afoul of. Darth Maul? Sure, he'd know all about it. Dalt opines that it's probably where he's been stashing all this stuff he keeps making off with.

Oh, goodie.

Well, anyway, back to the business of this kid. They need to catch up to him. Easiest way to do that is to get invited to a party the ambassador's family is attending. And, why, the heroes of Coruscant are visiting Corellia?! The ambassador thinks this is a perfect excuse for a party!

The party, as you might imagine, does not go well. They meet young Severan, who ducks out shortly afterward while everyone checks the food to make sure there aren't evil Force crystals in it. There are, disguised as caviar. Z bursts into action, kicking over the buffet table, while Drath starts knocking the caviar out of peoples' hands, shouting, "The caviar is evil, don't eat the caviar!" Zann and Kedrihm'Val proceed to exorcise a couple of people who chomped down on it before they could be stopped (yay, Force Light).

Ree takes off in pursuit of Severan, following him down a secret passageway under the house, but gets distracted by some people he had tied up in another room, who're slowly being gassed to death. Young Severan seems to think ahead. So he makes his escape. Meanwhile, the people upstairs notice the house is wired with bombs. They start herding people out while Oola shuts them down. Severan seems to feel like being thorough, though, so before he heads off-planet, he takes a swipe at the building with his neato custom-built Sith starfighter (built to the specs of a miniature Scimitar-class, that being Darth Maul's personal ship). He totals the ambassador's mansion, but sadly for Severan, by then the heroes have managed to get people to safety.

He takes off to Naboo. The very upset parents inform the crew that they have a vacation property on Naboo, and don't mind in the slightest if their Sith-baby son is arrested. Poor things.