nettles and/or bug

It's done!! I redrew every aspect of this so many damn times 😌 I like how it came out though <3

I'm still working out what she gets up to once she winds up with the Alliance. Humanitarian missions, helping to rebuild and support a community would be good for her. However she'd balk at combat, even in the name of defence. Her lightsaber is kept locked in a box and out of sight most of the time; the cold heft of it makes dread coil in her gut.

ekta actually wasn't the one to bring cele to coruscant, another master was. in fact, she'd been off world at the time, and came back a few years later to a child that looked ... eerily like her. she was pretty content to think that this surely wasn't the child that she'd given up for adoption.

cele however is LOUD in the force as a child. and ekta recognizes her as much as cele is aware of her presence. like any daughter, she's drawn to her mother, even if she doesn't understand why. the jedi allowed her to keep the medallion she gave to the twins, and her suspicions are confirmed once she sees it. her daughter had made her way back to her.

this was also how ekta found out the ariideks were dead. she'd been keeping tabs on the them because she (selfishly) kept tabs on them at the orphanage and was told a few years prior that zanya had been adopted out. she was devastated for months to find out her other daughter was dead -- and that she hadn't known.

that colors her relationship with cele a great deal. she wants to be protective over her, wants to build that relationship, but every time she even considers it, that genuine fear of responsibility to someone else rears its ugly head and she banishes the thought from her mind. considering zanya was already gone, she felt guilty for failing at being a mother (twice), and buried that guilt in work.

the sacking left major scars on cele as the eldest of the creche children at the time. her being able to misdirect soldiers and sith alike at her age meant that she could get the other children away from the fighting and hide them from the worst of their captors. she was looked up to afterwards by rhys, sylas and yoshiko as their elder psuedo-sister.

however, and what haunts her the most, is losing adamori. one of the youngest at the time, and because she had been trying too hard to calm one of the other children, she'd never noticed that he was gone. had never seen him taken, at least. for decades afterwards, she was convinced he was dead -- and that she let it happen.

(well. thats a strong word. a sith lord lured him away, which wasn't on her but she considers it to be her fault.)

cele is never quite the same afterwards, even if she acts like she is. her acts of heroism put her on the radar of the jedi at the temple, and when they resettled the majority of them to tython, cele was fast tracked into proper combat training. because of this, she molded to the expectations of someone far older than fourteen quite quickly ... and struggled in the aftermath because she refused to ask for help.

she knows the younger kids needed her at the time, and thats how she excuses not taking care of herself or her mental state. what's more true is that she was just afraid to face whatever lurked inside of her. she didn't want to slip backwards into those hours and days of terror. she didn't want to relive it all. so instead she separates her understanding of herself from the child she'd been and pretends to be older and more mature than she is. she doesn't want to let anyone else down.

little bit of parentification going on, since a lot of the creche children were split up to be on different worlds. these four stuck together, and cele became a mentor to them -- someone they could go to when they were scared and the like. it helps ... and is very detrimental because it just acts as a stopgap to keep her from facing her own problems.

cele really just wants to be enough for ekta to eventually take her on as a padawan, but by then ekta hadn't taken one in years. but she was a prolific jedi knight, and cele wanted to measure up to her more than anything. ekta kept pushing her away and this just made her even more determined.

she and ekta just don't see eye to eye a lot. ekta is far more straightforward, while cele will do anything to save someone else or prevent a mission from garnering too many casualties. she's a bleeding heart in a galaxy that wants her dead, and ekta has been trying to curb this behavior for years indirectly.

shes VERY strongwilled by the time she becomes an adult, and this does make her difficult with the masters who want her to remember her place. thing is, she has the ability to back up a lot of her plans. she also is very capable at a very young age -- and struggles to connect with her peers. she presumes this is just the price of being a jedi.

(she knows exactly what's wrong with her. has been to jedi therapy. keeps not looking at the real issues and assumes more training will fix her)

(doubly, she will do ANYTHING to control herself. even if it means encountering blackouts and ignoring her body and mind until it shuts down. control will make her a better jedi. control will make her more perfect. control will fix her. everything. surely.)

sacrificial lamb alert. she was like this even before the class story started, and while it wasn't malicious, the jedi knew she could be leaned on. depended upon. they kept pushing her, she kept meeting the challenges, and they never let up on her because she just never broke.

ekta actually wasn't the one to bring cele to coruscant, another master was. in fact, she'd been off world at the time, and came back a few years later to a child that looked ... eerily like her. she was pretty content to think that this surely wasn't the child that she'd given up for adoption.

cele however is LOUD in the force as a child. and ekta recognizes her as much as cele is aware of her presence. like any daughter, she's drawn to her mother, even if she doesn't understand why. the jedi allowed her to keep the medallion she gave to the twins, and her suspicions are confirmed once she sees it. her daughter had made her way back to her.

this was also how ekta found out the ariideks were dead. she'd been keeping tabs on the them because she (selfishly) kept tabs on them at the orphanage and was told a few years prior that zanya had been adopted out. she was devastated for months to find out her other daughter was dead -- and that she hadn't known.

that colors her relationship with cele a great deal. she wants to be protective over her, wants to build that relationship, but every time she even considers it, that genuine fear of responsibility to someone else rears its ugly head and she banishes the thought from her mind. considering zanya was already gone, she felt guilty for failing at being a mother (twice), and buried that guilt in work.

the sacking left major scars on cele as the eldest of the creche children at the time. her being able to misdirect soldiers and sith alike at her age meant that she could get the other children away from the fighting and hide them from the worst of their captors. she was looked up to afterwards by rhys, sylas and yoshiko as their elder psuedo-sister.

however, and what haunts her the most, is losing adamori. one of the youngest at the time, and because she had been trying too hard to calm one of the other children, she'd never noticed that he was gone. had never seen him taken, at least. for decades afterwards, she was convinced he was dead -- and that she let it happen.

(well. thats a strong word. a sith lord lured him away, which wasn't on her but she considers it to be her fault.)

cele is never quite the same afterwards, even if she acts like she is. her acts of heroism put her on the radar of the jedi at the temple, and when they resettled the majority of them to tython, cele was fast tracked into proper combat training. because of this, she molded to the expectations of someone far older than fourteen quite quickly ... and struggled in the aftermath because she refused to ask for help.

she knows the younger kids needed her at the time, and thats how she excuses not taking care of herself or her mental state. what's more true is that she was just afraid to face whatever lurked inside of her. she didn't want to slip backwards into those hours and days of terror. she didn't want to relive it all. so instead she separates her understanding of herself from the child she'd been and pretends to be older and more mature than she is. she doesn't want to let anyone else down.

little bit of parentification going on, since a lot of the creche children were split up to be on different worlds. these four stuck together, and cele became a mentor to them -- someone they could go to when they were scared and the like. it helps ... and is very detrimental because it just acts as a stopgap to keep her from facing her own problems.

cele really just wants to be enough for ekta to eventually take her on as a padawan, but by then ekta hadn't taken one in years. but she was a prolific jedi knight, and cele wanted to measure up to her more than anything. ekta kept pushing her away and this just made her even more determined.

she and ekta just don't see eye to eye a lot. ekta is far more straightforward, while cele will do anything to save someone else or prevent a mission from garnering too many casualties. she's a bleeding heart in a galaxy that wants her dead, and ekta has been trying to curb this behavior for years indirectly.

shes VERY strongwilled by the time she becomes an adult, and this does make her difficult with the masters who want her to remember her place. thing is, she has the ability to back up a lot of her plans. she also is very capable at a very young age -- and struggles to connect with her peers. she presumes this is just the price of being a jedi.

(she knows exactly what's wrong with her. has been to jedi therapy. keeps not looking at the real issues and assumes more training will fix her)

(doubly, she will do ANYTHING to control herself. even if it means encountering blackouts and ignoring her body and mind until it shuts down. control will make her a better jedi. control will make her more perfect. control will fix her. everything. surely.)

sacrificial lamb alert. she was like this even before the class story started, and while it wasn't malicious, the jedi knew she could be leaned on. depended upon. they kept pushing her, she kept meeting the challenges, and they never let up on her because she just never broke.

The knight, Theo, had his background changed a bit; his family was no longer killed by rivals. He left Korriban because he was disillusioned with life among the Sith. There might be more, idk yet, but either way, his family is still alive and well, and they become angry and feel betrayed. They thought he died in the tombs, then suddenly his face is plastered across Republic propaganda posters. His cousin, Lido, used to be his best friend, and she takes this most personally. She becomes the Sith warrior, and after their initial confrontation, she declares him dead to the family and dead to her. Her issue with him isn't that he wanted change--she's a LS Sith and reformist--but that he left and abandoned the family to do it. She prizes family (originally exclusively blood family, but this changes) and loyalty above all else (heh, she's in for a fun time in her story); in her eyes, Theo committed the most egregious betrayal possible. This occurs before she ever becomes the Wrath (I'm thinking very early, like they run into each other on Tatooine, maybe), so she puts him out of her mind for the rest of her story, and he tries to ignore the creeping guilt for the rest of his. I don't think Lido informs the family before his face appears on propaganda; it's not that she isn't planning to, but she didn't anticipate him being a prominent war hero so quickly, and she thought she had time to find a way to tell the rest of the family. Just fun things for my OCs to contend with~

Anyways, that's just context for the cliff hanger, which is Lido finding out that Theo attacked and killed the Emperor, who she thinks is going to reshape the Empire with her now that she's freed him from the Voice's trapped body. The Hand says he's not really dead, but she doesn't know what to believe. She's angry that the Hand never bothered to tell her he was even attacked until it was too public to avoid (isn't she the Wrath? Isn't she supposed to answer insults like this? Why was she not informed? (I actually can't remember if you get mail from the Hand regarding the knight's assault on Dromund Kaas and the Emperor, but in this, I'm thinking she doesn't regardless of what the game says lol), and she feels unsteady as her previous beliefs about Vitiate are challenged (i.e., that he's better for the Empire than the Dark Council, as he forced the Dark Council to sign the Treaty of Coruscant, so he must care for the welfare of his citizens more than they do, and he promised her a better galaxy on Voss) because he's made no changes and not even bothered to speak with her, and apparently now he won't even bother to let her know if he's alive. In addition, her position, which she previously felt was closer to power and autonomy than she'd ever had before, is looking more and more like her life under Baras--a longer leash, but a leash all the same. All of this is projected onto Theo, who she has an easier time being angry with.

This culminates in her hunting Theo down. It's no longer enough for him to be dead to her--he needs to actually die. She's not fully thinking clearly, and she's certainly not leaving room for her actual feelings on the thought of her cousin and old friend really dead. She refuses to remember how it felt to hear he'd been lost and presumed dead in the tombs of Korriban--the guilt (she was also on Korriban and never felt his death), the grief, the anger at a system that so callously threw away her loved one. She needs an outlet for her anger, and her life has been hunting one enemy after another for years now. Instinct takes over.

If this were a season, it would culminate in her finding him on Makeb (doing one last search for civilians to get them onto the ark) and attacking him. Their fight would last long enough for a groundquake to occur, and a cavern would collapse on top of them. As the cavern falls around them, Lido keeps trying to return to their fight, but she's uncharacteristically struggling, her vision switching between the current collapsing cavern and the cavern on Quesh falling around her. Theo is trying to stop the fight; even though he had no trouble defending himself up til now (he also has his own anger with her, especially her willingness to serve Vitiate and her unwillingness to see who Vitiate actually is), he stops, more concerned with what's happening with her than even the cavern still falling around them. The end would be a dark screen and Lido's still-panicked breathing.

It's fun for me to imagine because it's a parallel image of Lido's life figuratively collapsing around her, and her panic and association of it with the moment her life intertwined with Vitiate in the first place feels poetic to me. That she's also lashing out at one of the only people actually interested in what she's feeling and who sees her as fully a person, not a tool to be used, also hits hard for me. It's also a bit of a reversal of their class stories: Lido's journey in her class story has her deluding herself into believing she's in control, that she's truly gaining freedom through her pursuit of power, and Theo's journey through his class story is the opposite. He kills the Emperor, he's supposedly turned the page on a new galactic era and should feel like nothing and no one can stop him, but he feels more out of control than ever. She's building herself up, and he's crashing out. Then, Lido's life starts to fall apart (or, well, she can no longer ignore that it's falling apart and it's never been quite the way she wants to believe it is) while she's trying to hold onto her victory (becoming the Wrath and surpassing Baras), and Theo starts to return to himself a bit while helping Makeb's citizens escape certain destruction (yes, there's still killing, but this is about protecting life, and he's realizing he wants to be a Jedi, not the Sith he's been acting like, and uphold the principles he's cast aside in favor of taking on the role he thought the Republic needed from him. It's the first thing that feels right to him in a long time).

I'm still thinking about what the rest of the legacy is doing while Lido and Theo are having their disastrous family reunion, but this is already long and this is the main cliffhanger anyways, so I'll leave it at that for now :D

It's not from my "canon", because my main timeline is pretty canon compliant and the beats follow the usual story, so I don't know if that counts, but now I just want to get it out. (Slight tengeant, I have pretty good ideas on how to portray these usual cliffhangers in a manner that better fits having all the PCs in one place, like ending an arc at the end of KotFE chapter 1 instead with everyone losing to Zakuul one by one and letting stuff happen or on the end of LotS I've made a fic about the end of LotS I'm NORMAL about the end of LotS and the implication for each and every one of my PCs and no one has proof of the contrary.)

So. There is a timeline that diverges from my "main" because, in the confrontation with Valkorion the first time, my Sith Inquisitor is normally the one to kill him and become the Outlander. And there's an au for what if my deeply emotionally unstable Jedi Consular did it instead, inheriting the role and the responsibilities, and was slowly going insane over the weigth of it all and the lack of guardrails over anything for the first time in her life. Like things are making her insane and there's LESS consequences if she goes apeshit than when she was the Jedi Council's guarddog.

So I'm making her go insane as a treat.

TW death and the body is described a little but just a little bc the post is long enough as it is without my drawn-out descs

Sarh'el Llan, the Commander, has barely just claimed the Eternal Throne. Everyone's in a celebratory mood, preparing to party or already doing so. The first part of this story is coming to a close. Despite the multiple obstacles Sarh'el faced and everything she had to put up with, she did it. She saved the galaxy.

And then comes the murder, as it usually does when things get too chummy.

Sarh'el tries to get at Cyaka first. He's been a thorn in her side for the entirety of this Alliance and his services are no longer needed. (He IS more of a little shit as a consequence of the five years under Zakuulian ocupation, and he DID take her arm way back on Hoth)

Of course being the annoying little shit he is, he escapes by the skin of his teeth and Sarh'el declares the state of emergency. And she orders that everyone who vehemently stayed a Dark Force user should be exiled or executed as they are no longer welcome in her Alliance. Mass panic. But there are enough people following the order, either out of fear or respect or some twisted satisfaction, that a fucking purge happens.

Hold on stay walk with me that's not the cliffhanger part.

Eventually she manages to catch up to Cyaka before he can leave the planet. They get into a heated fight. And I want you to imagine, not only a Consular (that, iirc, is the class who's the most powerful force user of their generation) that has been trained and uplifted by other powers through being the Commander, but also that has no moral guardrails anymore, and that PLANNED how she could win this fight. She is SCARY. So she wins. Takes a few of his limbs as revenge for her arm, preventing him from running away or trying anything dirty too. She stabs his only eye left, and she prepares to finish it while her adversary's on the ground, writhing in agony.

That's where Theron arrives. Alone, because Lana was held back by some fuckers. He's stubbornly putting himself in between them both and arguing with her because he just wants to understand what the fuck has gotten into her. She tries to just get it over with (Cyaka's life) but Theron tries to wrestle the sabers out of her, and they get into a more physical fight. They're still not trying to kill the other but it's definitely gotten more violent, and Theron is not budging and it's angering Sarh'el like he's never angered her before. The tension rises when Sarh'el notices that [one of my other PCs] is dragging away Cyaka's body towards the ship, trying to take advantage of the distraction. She loses it and Theron doesn't want to understand and she tries her best to just push him away but he's stubborn in a bad way and he's so good at being obstructive and she's losing more and more her restraint and she's still wielding both her sabers by the way and they're still wrestling and then SLASH

Lana arrives just in time to see one of the person she trusts most in the galaxy slicing in half the other person she trusts the most in the galaxy. You have no idea how much I want to draw that face of pure abject horror as she freezes once she realises what's happening.

It takes. A few seconds for Sarh'el to realise what just happened. Enough, with the struggle before, for the ship with Cyaka and the other PCs to take off far away that she can't pull a Vader on them once she notices. Meanwhile everyone is too busy to help Cyaka on the ship figure out where Theron is because he's in full denial he didn't SEE it he couldn't but it had to be his arm, right. Or his leg. There just wasn't any scream because of the shock and the adrenaline. But he's too connected to the Force to be able to ignore it that long.

And Theron's body is still on the ground while Sarh'el is trying to get him back together because he was supposed to block it this wasn't supposed to happen and she curses at the Siths who escaped because it's Their Fault and she's NEVER going to let them get away with this. And Cyaka's mind is fully collapsing on itself on that ship because he just lost the person he was trying to become good for and who believed in him and trusted him to make the galaxy a better place day by day. And Lana is just frozen.

*I slam my hands on the table* And then shot on Theron's warm oooo so warm body and CUT TO BLACK. BAM. NO ANSWERS UNTIL I GET THE MONEY TO PRODUCE THE NEXT ISSUE /j

THAT's my big cliffhanger. I have an animatic that I'm never gonna finish, that is about how she got to this point. Everything culminates to this very moment, on Frank Sinatra's "My Way", about everything she had to suffer and everything she chose to do to end up murdering her best friend and only moral guardrail at that precise timeframe. The intention is to reveal right at the very last frames that the person who intervened was Theron so the cliffhanger can be even worse.

Stuff happens after that of course and it's delicious doomed toxic yuri with Lana and both Sarh'el and Cyaka getting consumed by their negative emotions and becoming a bleak shadow of their past selves, consummed by the desire for power just so they can have revenge and be their own definition of safe. Theron was a catalyst for the good in the moral compass of them both, not even counting Lana. And not only is he gone, he was MURDERED and they blame each other for it. And everything goes to SHIT, as things tend to do in these situations. And also I get to brainstorm about Lana angst and her missing Theron like she's never missed a friend before because they were worse than that.