The Spooky Sith Spire

The crew splits up into two groups, taking alternating floors. Zann, Oola, Onna, and Kedrihm’Val in one group (G1), Ree, Z, and Lydia in the other (G2).

G1, 1st floor: simple. Mess hall, garrisons, sleeping quarters. There’s still food in the mess. Sith seem to have left during perfectly routine day. Sleep quarters contain books and movies starring space-catfish. Place looks maybe even older than Sith. Rakata? Architects? Oola snags some goodies. Also find armories and guardrooms. One armory has some defense devices—big guns and stuff. Place doesn’t really feel evil or Dark Sidey.

G2, 2nd floor: looks like huge alchemy lab. Ree nearly collides with a Vader statue. Spot a long line or Sith Lord statues, and a pedestal for one more. The base holds liquid cement. Statues form themselves? Experiments seem non-menacing. Coming out of one lab, the Vader statue has turned to face them. Ree senses something inside it. Statue attacks her with a lightsaber. Ree tosses the saber away with Force, Z destroys it. Then they take out the statue. The ooze in the pedestal reforms into another Vader statue, but there’s no sense of the Force from it now. They grab a concrete ooze sample.

G1, 3rd floor: Techno-heaven: open-doored rooms like in the labs downstairs; and a comm. Center. Not Sith tech-based, it’s modified for Sith use. One comm. Is like a telepathy machine-comm, lets you telepathically contact anyone you want to talk to. Oola fights down urge to mess with Dalt.

G2, 4th floor: It looks like there’s no ground, but they can feel it beneath their feet. They’re surrounded by a star field. A star chart? Walls have Sith glyphs. On wall opposite door, there’s a huge mural: Luke and Vader with lightsabers crossed, Emperor sitting on his throne in background—their confrontation on the Death Star. There’s a door in the wall beneath the mural. They go inside to look around.

G1, 3rd floor: While Oola’s explaining gadgets, some of the devices activate. Screens light up, with scenes of Z, Ree, and Lydia. It’s farseeing: past, present, future. What could be, what could’ve been, what may still be. Oola can’t comm the other group on the floor above.

G2, 4th floor: The door closes behind them, electrical contacts heading downstairs go active. Loads of tubes and things take up most of the room. Door’s not locked when they test it, so they look around. Comfy chairs rest on a box-like pedestal. When they look in underneath, they find a brain wired into the chair.

G1: Downstairs, Oola sees scenes of what might happen in the room: leaving without looking around, finding the brains, their possible reactions.

G2: Ree won’t sit in the chair, though Z prompts her to. They hear movement outside. Z: “If Vader’s following us, I’ll shoot him in the face.” The wall mural is moving, acting out the fight, the last 10 minutes of Vader’s life. They wonder why it was so important to these people. Because it was the death of the last Sith? The room suddenly gets oppressive as the screen shows Luke kill Vader and take his place. “That’s odd,” says Ree. “You sure?” asks Z. Ree: “He’s not a Sith lord, is he?” Z: *meaningful look* Ree: “Have a little faith in him!” Ree wants to come back later. Oola finally makes contact with them on the comm and tells them about the visions they’re seeing on the computers downstairs. The mural activates again, showing Luke kill the Emperor, then head out as if it all happened like in the movie.

G1, 3rd floor: turns out, all the gizmos have brains in. This isn’t Sith tech; these are ancient, ancient, ancient brains, older than the building, which predates the oldest Sith artifacts. Kedrihm reads one brain’s thoughts: it’s alive, sentient, its attitude is cold and efficient. It’s just happy to have something to do after waiting around for so long. Kedrihm thinks they’re not like any of the races he knows: they’d be insane by now.

While they study the brain, they sense something behind them. Turning, there’s a Vader statue in their faces. They kill it quick, and note that the line of Sith statues from earlier is right there. Certainly wasn’t before. But there’s another statue at the end: it looks like Vader’s armor, but not quite. It’s shorter, the armor is sleeker, like it’s a Vader homage.

They decide to move on.

G1, 5th floor: It’s a chapel, untouched by the Sith. A huge Vaderesque statue takes up the left wall, and an equally big Vader statue faces it from the right wall. Computers are built into altar. Oola says it’s never been activated or used, only maintained. The hole in the altar would fit a crest…Skywalker’s, of course. The language isn’t Sith, nor Rakata. It’s the language they saw at Centerpoint: the Architects.

G2, 6th floor: Coming up, they get attacked by a big droid and three Massassi monster-things. Z smashes one down the stair well, and blasts himself back into the big droid. Lydia cuts off one of the droid’s arms. Ree slices a Massassi in half, Z plants a magnetic mine on the droid, then blows up the third monster.

G1: a falling Massassi crashes down the stairs past them. They finish the thing off.

G2: They find that the monsters were guarding a control panel for the floor upstairs where the rock used to be. They call Oola upstairs, Z goes down. Oola discovers the panel can be a big beam cannon, or a beacon. It’s been active for two decades, sending a beacon out into the unknown territories—activated the moment Vader died.

There are no cryostasis tubes for the monsters. How long can Massassi live? There’s been nothing on the top two floors for ages. There’s no tampering from the Sith on this floor or the one above. The rock was part of the original design. Was it held for whatever’s supposed to follow the beacon back?

They call Luke. He says he’ll send ships. They make a point of NOT mentioning the weird Luke stuff in here. Since Kyp knows Sith and Dalt knows the Ancients’ language (interesting point, there; they weren’t Rakata, how does he know it?), maybe the two of them can help translate all this stuff.

Oola hears mechanisms activate downstairs. The floors are beginning to rotate. It activated when it sensed sentient lifeforms being present for a little while. The machines must think that whatever’s supposed to be coming has arrived. A pedestal comes down to present the rock (which is missing of course). The stairway gets blocked off.

Downstairs, the same scene plays in the temple. Kedrihm identifies the building energy field as a farseeing, but it’s more than that: opening an actual path to the past. The vision is of Luke and Vader’s fight. The machine tries to zap Luke with the missing rock, but since it’s gone, nothing happens and everything plays out normally. Stuff resets, doors open, but Oola checks and discovers it can all be set off again. She snags the readouts. They suspect the idea may’ve been to corrupt Luke. Maybe he’s supposed to be the non-existent Sith in the Vaderesque armor.

Ree leads the way back downstairs, but a door closes behind her in the chapel, separating her from the others. When she turns to check it out, Drath steps up behind her. He zaps the altar and the Vader statue begins to move.

Oola gets the door open, comes face to face with the giant Vader. It puts a hole in the wall. And an evil Han clone. He pistol-whips Z, chucks a thermal detonator, then Kedrihm knocks him down. Zann takes on another Vader statue. Oola chucks a couple of her knife-droids into the clone, then finds another way down through the big hole.

SARR comms: “Shall we blow up Drath’s ship?” “No!” yells Drath. Ree: “I thought you knew, if you leave your toys where SARR can find them, he’ll break them.” Drath: “I love that droid.”

Kedrihm kicks Han off the giant Vader statue they’ve fought their way out onto and jumps down after him when Onna shouts a warning to move. The small statue Zann had been fighting follows.

Drath and Ree tear into each other. Zann’s fighting a Palpatine statue. Z to Han: “Drop the gun and fight like a man!” Han does, and Z shoots him. Oola’s droids are ripping into him pretty good at this point, too.

Oola picks her way over to the control panel and calls Dalt: “Translate this!” She wants to stop the statues. “They’re not technological,” he tells her. “Tell the others to use Force Light.” They do, which drives the possessing evil spirits out of them. Onna and Lydia sneak thermal detonators onto the backs of the big statue’s knees, bringing it down. It topples onto the Vader statue and Evil Han.

Ree forces Drath’s surrender, smashing his lightsaber and belt. Kedrihm’Val nerve-pinches him unconscious. They find more weapons on him and some hollow teeth.

The Republic ships get there, and Kyp came along for the ride. They drug Drath and hand him over. Kyp says the hieroglyphs looks like the place either inspired the Sith or they were following in the tradition of the beings that originally lived here. But what happened to the Sith, then? Why would the Architects keep the sphere, and for whom?

Getting home, they visit Dalt. Oola gives him stuff to translate. The Jedi say he’s doing better, “showing small degrees of kindness and modesty.”

Zann and Ree go to the bar and talk. So the Architects designed a thing predating anyone involved specifically to corrupt Luke. This hasn’t happened yet, but still could. Maybe the Council can give a training mission to the library ship. (note: I don’t remember what the training mission would actually be for.)

A crew from the spacestation calls Ree. Scans say there’s armor in a vault. It’s probably the Vader-homage armor. Why were the Architects so obsessed about this? The place wasn’t particularly evil.

They haven’t checked out the Oracle at Pelgrin yet. Maybe it’s modeled on this tower? There’s Pelgrin, this space station, Dathomir, the Thule fleet, whatever’s coming from deep space… What does it all add up to?

The next morning, Dalt tells Oola that his guess is “a small group of this race thought Luke being Darth Fuck-you-up was the galaxy’s only hope of survival.” He wonders if they should tell Luke, or if the “Skywalker blood will go all hogwild.” His advice: “Jettison the tower into a black hole. It has the ability to influence TIME. Tell me Luke will never think of going back to stop his father from ever being corrupted to begin with.” He points out that everyone probably noticed the place activate. But could the mysterious dwellers in the deep still be out there? “Beings of that power who can see through time, it’s far likelier they’re coming than not.” But what were the Architects so afraid of?

The Jedi and Kedrihm’Val all get called in to the Council. Luke thinks their next move needs to be dealing with the Thule fleet. Maybe they can slip someone onto Bimm and get some info to find out just what they’re still doing there. Regarding the thing that’s coming, tell the Chiss Ascendency. Maybe they have information or legends on what’s out that way. Or they could ask Thrawn…if they can trust him.