#cipher posting

Khoann but kind of . if he was Sith :P

As per request on Discord, I made this. Yes, I created a horrible situation on purpose.

First of all: I myself was reallly worried about this idea of the machine going off and the tech classes gaining force sensativity (more worried about the implications for Theron though) but it has left some intreuge because i hope we are able to just mostly ignore that force sensativity all together.

Now! Khoann! my funny little agent who has been given farrr to many reasons to hate the sith and distrust the force in general. One of the ideas i have been playing with in my head for a whileee was giving him some sort of fear directed at he himself being force sensative, which has sprouted into basically giving him an irrational fear of becoming force sensative.

at a very young age he watched his twin sister using the force and then being taken away by a sith to never hear from her again, in his tiny child mind i can imagaine him rationalising this (fairly traumatic) event (to him atleast) into a sort of 'the sith will take you away to never see your family again if you can use the force'.

Over time as he got older i do belive this warped into a general fear of force users, which at some point turned into apecifically a distrust of the sith to eventually (now that hes with the alliance) a hatred of most Sith. Yet this irrational fear has still stuck with him in the back of his mind, for most of his life he knew and believed that someone couldnt just *become* force sensative.

theres also this thing i drew a few months back of Khoann as a sith, and i think as hes grown up, hes thought about this scenario of 'what if i was force sensative' a lot and he hates it everytime.

but now he is! thanks nul . and malgus . and jadus i guess. and i can imagine he is NOT HAPPY ABOUT THIS!!!!! pretty horrified infact..,,, his single worst fear has come true.

this whole storyline and finding out what nuls machine is and what malgus plans to do with it has stressed him out quite siginificantly thoughout LOTS and in the actual game where he is commander, this stress is also probably how he slips up somewhere and the empire catches onto his ties with the republic.

But in my own headcanon canon where Kiiber is the Commander and Khoann is one of their advisors/agents i find their relationship quite interesting within this context. Because Kiiber is the first Jedi(and force user) that tried to help and understand Khoann and in turn, he had ever fully tried to be friends with and i think thats where his fear of the force kinda started to turn into a 'oh okay so the sith just suck' and now that they are best friends hey ! he actually liked the jedi now ! and would rather not see them destroyed by malgus' plan.

ALSO ALSOOOO it furthers Khoann and Therons ying and yang dynamic i have kinda created, with Theron really wanting to be force sensative/be a jedi, to the point he consisntantly did a specific meditation belived to establish a connection to the force, vs Khoann really really not wanting to be sith to the point he tried to activley avoid any sith and gained an irrational fear of becoming force sensative.

Lions maybe can't jump that high, but you know who can?

Cipher Admin Dakim.

Alright, well, in that case the unskippable dialogue has been triggered. Still, even this post gets long, there are many details I'll leave out (there is a reason my lore doc is over 100 pages long), and I also want to be very clear that while there is lots of theorizing going into this, this is also headcanon stuff and at the end of the day my personal lore, so I'm not claiming this is canon or exclusively canon interpretation or any sort. It's me taking what little the game tells us, vibing, interpreting and then making some shit up to fill the holes.

In my verse, Cipher started out as a normal gang like Team Snagem and any other. It has also existed for many decades at this point. The deeper lore of that, as well as the founder and what went on in the early years, is probably only interesting to me and also not further relevant to the original topic, which was what long term goals Cipher is pursuing, so we'll skip that.

It all starts with Cipher making the jump from gang to crime syndicate. Why? Well, we'll have to talk about Orre in general to understand why I think these people do what they do.

Orre is a region with lots of issues, to put it mildly. Issues that affect almost everyone - the fact that so many people are involved in crime, the lack of a Pokémon League, the desolate state of various settlements, poverty, violence, instability, you name it.

Now, what is a syndicate for? Investing together and promoting the interests of its members. If you look at the admins, you can find some examples of people who have interests that, shall we say, are greatly hindered by the state of the Orre region. One example is Venus who clearly wants to be a celebrity and grow her fame, but she's stuck in an underground town populated by ex-miners and their descendants. Pokéstar Studios and the like are far away. Another example is Snattle who wants to be Governor of Orre, but even if he got elected he would have to deal with all these issues by himself, issues he most likely has no chance of solving which would ensure he doesn't stay in power for long. It's probably also just not fun to try to lead Orre of all places.

(We also have very different interests in Cipher, the biggest example being Ein who, as many suspect, just cares about doing his research in peace and getting paid, while the general state of Orre as well as the damage he does to it are of no concern to him, but: As long as this interest aligns with everyone else's, there is no problem with him being in a syndicate with these other people.)

So to conclude, there are various people in Cipher who would benefit from a more developed and stabilized Orre. But that isn't happening on its own anytime soon, is it? Places like Pyrite Town don't even have an official mayor, the police is ineffective, and most people are dirt poor.

We know that Cipher is, aside from any sort of ambitions regarding Shadow Pokémon as a concept or even the whole taking over thing, making money. Nascour confirms this when he talks about Wes causing financial damage to Cipher and the whole thing with the show battles; it's also obvious from Realgam Tower as an entertainment facility with various ways to attract guests and lure them into spending money. The crazy amount of money that Cipher apparently has access to has already gone into developing the region, if you will, by constructing Realgam Tower to make even more money.

I think that Cipher wants to, as a first step, take control of the entire Orre region so they can stabilize and develop it, but on their own terms, without any sort of government or other authorities interfering. This is also why they're working on having their own government with Snattle. What sounds like it could be beneficial for other people in Orre at first - and in some ways it might have been! - comes with the big catch that this process would of course be dictated by the interests of the syndicate, likely resulting in ruthless exploitation of any and all people whose interests they don't care about, as well as lack of regulation and no safety for anyone opposing them. We all know the Cipher blacklist. Also Cipher would most likely treat Orre as a cash cow aside from it being its new power base, milking whatever they can to acquire more money that they can reinvest and create a vicious cycle of accumulating more and more financial power in addition to any sort of political power they have also acquired.

Now, we have the classic cartoon villain talk from Cipher's leaders that they want to rule the world and honestly? I kind of don't take that too seriously. The one thing I can imagine is them trying to grow their influence internationally after they've secured Orre and/or the whole thing with Cipher branches in other regions, as implied by Sherles in XD and the fact that Greevil travels internationally. The way things are in my verse, Cipher is very focused on Orre as of right now because that was the thing that started it all and what annoyed its leaders the most, but - sure, they would be down to just keep going after. Why not? There is money to be made.

I would like to add that I find the implication of Cipher branches existing in other regions to be quite the interesting thought experiment. I mean, we never had anything canonically confirmed, yes. But remember: Cipher was a grand conspiracy that had to be uncovered first in Colosseum.

(And none of that would have ever happened if Rui didn't just so happen to see a Shadow Pokémon and then decided to speak up and later just so happened to be rescued by someone who just so happened to have a snag machine and be good enough as a Trainer to be able to help her and willing to agree to it, no less. Yes, there were other good people in Orre who noticed something was wrong and were trying to do things, but they would've all failed and eventually had Cipher coming after them, which... yeah, good luck to Kids Grid if they had to fight Venus themselves with their one Shroomish (iirc), to name one example.)

Point is: These Cipher branches might exist. And we just don't know it because they were never found out. Beloved characters from the Pokémon series may have been Cipher all along, and we just never knew. Lance having his Dragonite attack a Team Rocket Grunt that one time? Hmm, very Cipher of him. Cynthia's crazy strong Garchomp that apparently everyone had trouble defeating? Reminds me of Nascour's Metagross in the manga. Malva and her connection to Team Flare? Who knows, maybe she's been a Cipher double agent (and Venus' bestie) all along.

You think Ardos was lying? You think he was making baseless threats when he talked about Cipher living forever and people watching Michael? Are you sure?

Anyone could be Cipher.

The way Jovi interacts with Ardos breaks my heart. And here's why.

Jovi calls Ardos "Mr. Cool Man" and later refers to him as a "nice person". She's in awe of witnessing him and his Pokémon in action and thinks he's a nice guy. I've talked about how the game sprinkles in hints that Ardos is a bad person early on in a different post, but Jovi is a young child; she can't spot those hints and fully buys into the persona Ardos is putting on.

This little girl thinks the man who will go on to try to kill her brother is nice and cool. Because she's a precious baby who doesn't know yet how cruel the world can be, especially with Cipher in it. Can you imagine how much it would shock and disturb her to hear what happened on Citadark Isle?