Rot and Detritus of the Force (Kai Finreaj's Training)

[Andreus Makaryk]

The assassin had made Kai into a freak.

Few dared stare. Fear of the assassin kept most in line. Yet, there were few more conspicuous new arrivals to the Dark Jedi Temple than the assassin's new project. Kai knew he was little more than a pet, a slave at best. The assassin had told him otherwise, yet Kai did not believe those assurances. His bones crunched as he walked, emanating sickly crunching and cracking sounds with each step. LOUD crunching and cracking sounds, that drew the notice of those near, even if those near knew not to stare and draw attention to it for fear and/or respect for the assassin. Yet, with each step, dark energy seared through Kai's skeleton, all but searing it and glazing it back together again. A wonder his bone had not slagged, melted, re-slagged, re-melted into obsidian by now. Perhaps because obsidian was more brittle than the strength of the Dark Side would allow. Nevertheless, each footfall burned, hurt like walking through the caldera of an actively erupting volcano. Most of his hair follicles had begun to burn away from the mold of the Dark Side that held him together and prevented his body from simply falling apart due to the stresses placed upon it by walking. The pain sustained him; without the pain, he would have not the rage to tap into the fell energy that swirled around him, the fell energy that held his body together, the only force that prevented his organs from shutting down and his bone from splintering apart under the stress. Each step was a searing struggle, a monumental undertaking. His nimble speed as a seventeen-year-old boy was completely gone, having been sacrificed by the pain he now endured. Who could have known that one so weak could be made to endure so much? The pain that seared his body also meant he had the Force signature roughly equivalent to the size of a small moon. Another attribute that tended to attract notice, if not overtly.

Dark energy. This place was rife with it. Kai knew not what this place was, and he didn't ask. He had not spoken to the assassin that abducted him, crushed him, since he had first suggested that the two leave his former home. There was no point. His black speech was not worth the pain it caused. Occasionally, very rarely, the assassin had possibly seen fit to speak to his freak on the journey to whatever this place was, mostly for purposes of instruction, but Kai had never answered, at least not verbally. Any acknowledgment that the assassin had received had been more by physical act than verbal. Kai simply drew upon the dark energy that bound this place, allowed it to feed him. He was hungry, and he drank his fill from the aura of this place, whatever it was. Pain that should have sent a normal sentient at least into seizure spiked through Kai's body, partly from walking, and partly from the aura of this place. The pain kept Kai alive, awake, aware.

Still, however, Kai was clueless. He still did not know why the assassin preferred to torture, rather than kill him. It made no sense; he had never fought in his life. Though pain gave him strength, he was utterly defenseless; a mere slave trained here could crush him easily, and splatter his blackened remains all over the walls, though the assassin had already done so (though he seemed to have been content with splattering his family all over the place, not him). The question burned through Kai's mind, though for hours he had refused to ask it. But refusing to ask simply made it burn through his shell of a mind even more. Though he drew upon the Dark Side for sustenance and survival, the pursuit of raw power seemed pointless on its face to him. Entering random households to kill people for fun seemed pointless to him. He had never needed such power, and even if he had it, he still would have been completely crushed by the assassin's random crime spree. To him, the only point of his continued existence was to serve as the assassin's pet project, nothing more. It still did not seem like a highly desirable existence.

He must know.

The freak strained; the dark energies of this place funneled through him in such a manner as to draw the attention of a couple insolent, rubbernecking slaves. His jaw practically melted in searing pain as he began to open it, courtesy of the tortures inflicted upon him by the assassin (and this was just the beginning; the freak suspected the future held far, far worse). Yet, through pain, strength. The fell energies of this unknown place funneled through his glazed-over vocal chords, seared them again. Rot and death welled up in the freak's throat. The energy he drew for his sustenance amplified the expenditure required to speak; he drew a deep breath of air into his lungs, only to feel like he had doused his diaphragm in kerosene and lit it ablaze. The fresh oxygen was...anathema. He forced the air, tainted by entering his body, back out through the mouth; so fouled had it become that lesions formed on the inside of his mouth that blistered and burst, splattering thickened, half-coagulated, fully-blackened blood on the insides of his mouth. A few drops thereof dribbled out of his mouth, down his cracked lips, as he uttered his black speech. Though those who were present were better trained to resist its effects, if there were any weak-minded slaves around, they probably went running unless they feared the assassin more. The local wildlife did not know better. Birds scattered, snakes slithered, and insects skittered to escape the black, fell speech. The smell of rot permeated the air as a single raspy, yet powerfully uttered, word reverberated throughout the environment. The detritus of the Force that was the freak must know.

"Why?"

 

[Mars]

No peace, only suffering

The first line of the Dark Jedi code fit the pitiful sentient better then any other of the lines tattoo'd across his master's back in black ink. The elaborate tattoo took three days to complete using very simple tools, the Force and a high tolerance for pain. The ultra-dedicated Master Assassin lead a broken being through the temple towards his quarters where he would train the shattered Zeltron. As he walked among the halls few dared stare for fear of invoking the Miraluka. Loud cracks and crunches were audible from the obviously tortured man behind him as various bones snapped and were 'healed' by the Dark side energy that inundated his body, yet he followed on obediently in his master's footsteps.

The Temple was Aiden's home and he knew every hall and corridor like the back of his own hand. It was here he had trained daily for the last three years to stand where he did today. To reach the rank of Dark Master in the Bogan one had to be ready to sacrifice everything. Aiden had and, luckily for him, the payoff was previously unfathomed power that grew each day. The Dark Side was a powerful and dangerous thing, one not meant for the weak to be able to tame or control. Aiden was strong, the Dark side bent to his will and not the other way around. He rode the waves of Chaos like he was born to do so.

Aiden could feel his new apprentice's thoughts through the Force. Even before he uttered a word in his demonic voice Aiden knew what was coming. He was confused as to why Aiden, who had massacred his family on a whim, left him alive and tortured him. Kai spoke, and Aiden was not pleased. A vicious Mind shard would tear into the base of Kai's skull, one of Aiden's strongest powers and one Kai had yet to be desensitized to. In a tone so cold and full of malice it made the Kai seem like a Jedi, Aiden spoke.

"You will not question me, ever. You will follow what I say, because I said it. I allowed you life because you sought death and because unlike your pathetic family, you have some potential. Your a project now, a test. A test to see how strong I can make one of the weakest and most pitiful objects I've had the displeasure to be near." He said. As he spoke, he fed more and more power into the Mind shard, peaking as he finished with enough power to slay a normal man.

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

The assassin's voice failed to intimidate Kai; voice alone, no matter how potent, was nothing compared to the pain, the raw pain, that seared through the atrocity's body now. However, that in no way prevented the assassin from crushing his pet project utterly. Again.

A few seconds into his speech, the assassin's claws came out, and the pitiful weakling remained, just as he had been on Zeltros, as helpless to stop it as a ball of yarn. Only the claws that tore their way through Kai's mind were much more vicious than before. Though the atrocity had gotten better at harnessing the pain that tormented him for strength, this spike overwhelmed him, overwhelmed his (weak, compared to the assassin's power) capacity to turn it to his own benefit. The detritus collapsed to the ground, again, his bones emanating sick crunching sounds as his (its?) pre-corpse crumpled. But at least the assassin had answered his question, though the wretched detritus briefly wondered how he was to be taught anything, if he could not seek explanation for that which he did not understand. The thought was a flicker, nothing more. It had not the time to develop before the pain of the assassin's fell attack crushed him, crushed his mind, crushed his will, crushed his being, far more efficiently than any trash compactor ever devised by sentients ever could.

The detritus, weak and utterly impotent as it was, collapsed, unconscious. Sickly, dark black blood oozed out of his skin's pores, and any place where his cracking skin broke. Deprived of consciousness, the...thing...could not summon the will to draw the fell energy of the place to himself, to force it to sustain it. With no voluntary will, with no consciousness, with no ability to draw upon the Force, it suddenly found himself deprived of the ability to feed himself with his pain, its suffering. Unfortunately, breaking its will too severely seemed to have unintended consequences; its heartbeat failed; the mindspike had crushed and splattered its brain so badly that it had no hope of self-sufficient recovery. Its internal organs, or what remained of them, began to shut down. Death, glorious blissful death, began to take him.

The wretched detritus would be most fortunate if the assassin suffered such to pass. Unfortunately for the tortured, the assassin had an experiment to continue...

 

[Mars]

Kai was broken all over again in the face of Aiden's power. Disgust was visable on the face of the master assassin as his new apprentice died in front of him again. Unable to call the dark side to him, he was incapable of sustaining himself. Any other student and Aiden would have let the pathetic fool die there but unlike most, this one craved death. His time was not now though. Aiden raised both his hands and extended them towards the fallen Zeltron, filling him with fell energy to sustain the corpse as his body began to shut down without it's life line. When he stood back again and seemed ready to listen Aiden would begin the first, most important lesson.

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

Darkness took the detritus--not the blissful darkness of death, but rather the indomitable, flash-burning darkness of the dark side, courtesy of the assassin.

Kai writhed, his body contemptuously creaking and groaning back to some pitiful state of existence that may or may not be medically classified as "life." The assassin's fell energy surrounded him, smothered him. The wretched thing coughed up blackened blood, splattering a few drops here and there on the ground beneath him. He felt more part of the ground than above it, however.

Though the assassin had stopped feeding his power into making Kai's mind explode, the rotted "apprentice" still felt the side effects thereof. He struggled to remember what the assassin had told him before he had destroyed him (again). His head throbbed in pain; he had suffered no fewer than eight aneurysms, unfortunately for him, none of which had been lethal. The dark side had instead knotted together the broken blood vessels in his brain in eight strobe beacons of pure hell, courtesy of the assassin's power. Yet, as the assassin's experiment slowly regained consciousness, those half-patched aneurysms became the focus of a self-sustaining feedback loop, of the kind the assassin wished to see. The pain begat rage, which begat will, which begat survival. Cursed survival.

Slowly, the assassin's words returned to the experiment. More or less "no questions allowed," though at least with the decency to attach an answer to the first question, no matter how despised, though somewhat lacking. The explanation offered by the assassin failed to undo the pointlessness of Kai's continued existence, at least from Kai's point of view. Being someone's medical experiment was not exactly likely to result in a fulfilling life. Nonetheless, such as it was, it had answered his question. Once again, the other question of how he was supposed to learn what the assassin wished him to learn, when he was forbidden from asking questions about that which he did not comprehend, rose to the forefront of the experiment's mind. Yet the experiment dared not ask, certainly not trusting the assassin to answer in anything resembling a constructive manner. Doubt filled the experiment's mind.

Doubt that he could bring himself to ask a question of this assassin, even when his life depended upon it.

Perhaps that was the way to meet death.

 

[Mars]

Aiden grinned as the student's body was seared back together from the Dark Side. He coughed up black, nasty blood onto the floor as he started to come back. He began to wonder if the pitiful worm was even worth his time anymore, ha, good one. Aiden hadn't a clue in the lsightest what he had done to the wretched sentient but he liked the feelings of power. He was confident that the pain would sustain him for now however. He stepped over towards him and 'stared' directly at him.

"Do you want to learn? Do you want to kill to avenge your parents and pathetic family? I'm sure you'd love to kill me, wouldn't you Kai?" Aiden's voice was full of malice as he spoke. "I'll teach you, little boy. But you have to learn. If you don't learn, it'll just be torture untill your sentience is fully gone. You will not taste death. Oblige, and you'll have power. Power with which you'll slay many others to feed on their pain." He said. "If you want to learn, I'll teach you things. After I finish showing you're pathetic excuse for life how to do something, I'll ask you if there is something you did not understand and we will drill it to perfection. As my personal experiment, by the time we are finished the Jedi will fear you more then any other. Now go, study the Code of our order in the library. It is central to your training."

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

OOC: With Aiden's death, there really isn't much motivation for me to continue posting here, not even with retroactive RPing. Kai has passed into Belial's custody. As his powers had been left largely undefined, I'm just going to act as if Aiden was too busy beating and torturing Kai to teach him much other than maybe a week's worth of the most elementary lightsaber training, and the drain-type powers that he's already learned ICly in this and other RPs. Further training will be provided by Belial.

No, Belial isn't Bogan, and yes, Belial "taking custody of" Kai is a side effect of Aiden losing to Belial.