Seneestra Vi-Kaidos [Unofficial Character Sheet]

[Seneestra Vi-Kaidos]

NOTE:

Spoiler

I welcome questions/comments/concerns/corrections/suggestions/input within this thread, namely if it's on something that is quite clearly inaccurate, but understand that this thread is primarily for me.

This is an 'expanded version' of the official character sheet for my character, Seneestra Vi-Kaidos.

Basically just contains much more information, primarily for my own benefit, than I could include in the official CS.

This 'unofficial character sheet' is not an alternative to that posted in the Profiles board. Official approval and information is restricted to said Profiles submission. Material within this thread is not entirely or currently canon/official in regards to my character.

Seneestra Vi-Kaidos
The Silver Star​

“I have seen the void that lurks behind this galaxy. I have gazed past the stars and their trails of light and fire. I have looked beyond the dancing vessels and the brawling worlds that seek to claim the cosmos. They are all of them made of the same dust that scatters across the universe. When the maw is opened, when the darkness licks the wick and smothers the flame, then to dust they will all return.” —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Character Theme

NAME: Seneestra Vi-Kaidos
PRONUNCIATION: Seneestra: "Sehn-ee-struh" | Vi-Kaidos: "Vye-kye-doss"
FIRST NAME: Seneestra
LAST NAME: Vi-Kaidos
NICKNAME: Sen
MONIKERS: The Pale Shadow, the Black Captain
TITLES: Captain
HONORIFICS: Miss, Capt.
AGE: Unknown - Appears to be in her early twenties
SEX: Female
HEIGHT: 5'7"
WEIGHT: 118 lbs
PHYSIQUE: Athletic
EYE COLOR: Black
HAIR STYLE: Long, loose
HAIR COLOR: Silver
SKIN COLOR: Yellow tan
RACE: Yellow/White
SPECIES: Human
ETHNICITY: Sevari
NATIONALITY: None
BIRTHPLACE: Sevarcos II
BIRTHDATE: Unknown
ORIENTATION: Heterosexual
RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single
PARENTS: Deceased
CHILDREN: Unknown
OTHER RELATIVES: Unknown
RELIGION: None
CULTURE: Mixed - Sevari, spacer, pirate, Sith
CURRENT ROLE: Sith Knight
FORMER ROLE: Pirate
RANK: Sith Knight, captain
TITLE: Knight, Captain of the Strangled Star
COMBAT CULTURE: Sith Warrior
AFFILIATIONS (CURRENT): Sith Empire, the Strangled Star
AFFILIATIONS (FORMER): Jedi Exiles, the Wailing Widow, the Silence
FACTION: Sith Empire
FORCE-SENSITIVE: Yes
COMPARABLE ACCENT: Mandarin English

APPEARANCE

Wears different clothes, subject to change, mostly black, namely vantablack.

Picture this but picture it as clothing:

Spoiler

PERSONALITY

"Torn by two tornadoes, stretching me apart by the arms and the legs, like some toddler tied to horses. I cannot see my own hand in front of my face. I cannot feel. Nothing scares me anymore, and that terrifies me. So I shall bring the terror. I shall sound the gong. The galaxy will be judged, but not by me. I am merely the mallet of the master.” —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Seneestra Vi-Kaidos is single-minded in her goals, even if most others would not be able to comprehend just what exactly those goals are. With occasionally obscure speech, her words can even contradict each other, or at least seem to. From her point of view, this is no dilemma; she is less concerned with the opinions of others than she is with the facts since conjured from her experience with the dark side of the Force—and the mission that it has assigned to her. The mind, however, can be a delicate thing, particularly when entire years of one's memory appear to be lost forever. While her logic and reasoning seem absolute to herself, there is truly no telling how much of it Seneestra has gotten, well, terribly wrong.

The woman known as the Black Captain and the Pale Shadow are two entities within one, though this one person was not always the same person. Formerly a pirate who spent her days raiding around the galaxy, showing no mercy and expecting none in return, Seneestra would later encounter the defining moment of her very existence and one that would change it forever. A wound in the Force, a black hole, a wormhole—or perhaps the madness that results from spending countless time traversing a void of space where no stars are present to give off light. Whatever the reality, Seneestra’s own perception of it is paramount to her survival, if not her own spin on sanity, and any challenges to her dogma and doctrine are usually met with rigid resistance.

The Force is a power that she had since tapped into before becoming a Sith. As with many practitioners and students of this all encompassing energy, Seneestra has bound herself to it in more ways than one. Amid the undeniable presence of light, it is the dark side that guides her way, though not in what even most Sith might be able to relate to. For her, the Sith are merely a means to an end; a purpose of existence that may yet see a new beginning for the entire cosmos. Come what trials may, she will stop at nothing to bring both beginning and end, even if it means her life. After all, everyone dies at some point. In Seneestra’s mind, she is already dead.

Spatially Discriminating Reading Theme

BIOGRAPHY​

"Home. Here where the pastures are painted like poetry and the young and old leave their yurts to take up their yokes gladly. The horses' hides feel like feathers of silk that yield to gentle fingers. The farmers will till their fields for years till all that's unearthed is dirt. Sun and moon, harmony and tune, forever until never. Home. It is good to be home." —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

There are all too few events of Seneestra's childhood that she can recall to mind. She has long since attested this void to the tragedy of simply not wanting to. Further, when her mind and body appeared to leave this galaxy and venture into a time and place that was both and neither, her very birthdate became a lost cause. Where desires go, hers have since sailed on a ship that will never return, for what she remembers most as a little girl was being forced onto a vessel by the hands of her very own parents.

Sevarcos II, her homeplanet, was dry and rugged. Where the mountains did not stab the sky and shield their lesser lands from tumbling air that could twist into gale-force gusts, windswept plains stretched all around to be met by deserts no less sandy than those of Tatooine. "The World of Endless Wind", the planet was known as. What it should have been called was "the World of Endless Wind and Heat". Seneestra could remember the hot days well enough, more the sensation of sweat upon her skin than whatever she was doing at the time. The nights, however, were closest to heart; cool and sweet, like the hugs and kisses of a mother and father who must have never given them.

Seneestra would return to Sevarcos when she was an adult, to rediscover the splendor of the poor planet, but her childhood would remain a mystery. All she knew was that she grew up around the Equatorial Belt, in a village of a steppe that led to a flank of mountains, smaller though they were than those of the Northern Frontier. As reclusive and secretive as most Sevari, the settlement had slumbered in silence and relative peace upon a world that catered to spice and the vice that came with. As with all good things, however, the village of Draatar had its bad sores, and some of its secrets were also its worst.

A man, a woman—names not important. Probably, many children across the galaxy grew up learning the names of their mother and father. Seneestra never did. She could not have been younger than five or older than ten when she was selected for the sending. Like a parcel of mail, she was cast out of her home to the mines of the local spice lord whose name was equally unimportant, at least at the time. She didn't last long; her ultimate destination was in slavery, not within the vast underground networks of Sevarcos, but in outer space—aboard a pirate ship.

"Weep not, my friends! I shall be closer to you for the next few years—which will be the last of your miserable lives—than that bantha of a mother who brought you screaming into this galaxy!" —Captain Leggart "Scumtongue" Rhauza​

There weren't many monologues that Seneestra had retained over the years, helped no less by memory loss, but the speech of the Weequay who captained the Wailing Widow had never changed in all the years that she had served aboard his ship. A brute of a being, the kind who twisted his hand while smiling and watching as the whip lashed the backs of his slaves. Aboard the Wailing Widow, taking licks had simply been part of the daily routine, regardless of whether one had thought that they deserved it or not. To this day, Seneestra can still remember the screams. At first, they were her own, but beatings survived were ones that made her tougher. On that pirate ship, under the scourge of Scumtongue Rhauza, if you were not strong then you were weak, and if you were weak then you were dead.

Seneestra was not scheduled to die aboard the Wailing Widow, and somehow she had made sure that her captain knew it. She can conjure up the images of power that served as her pedestal, even as a small slave girl, taking what came her way as the years rolled on until she had managed to loosen her bonds—but she had not broken them. Once a slave, always a slave, especially in this galaxy. The girl would not have known what to do with herself outside of the cage that had been given her, so she sought to show her master that she could at least serve him in ways that stretched beyond scrubbing the decks or greasing the cogs.

Seneestra had not grown up around parents—she had grown up around pirates. Captain Leggart had allowed his fledgling corsair her ten minutes of fame, expecting her light to shine as quickly as it would fade, but the bird had proven itself capable of flying from the nest, if willing to return to the cage—for now. "Silence", she had once been called by the crewmates and the overseers who were graced with it by her presence. She had since learned to seal her lips even while whips wailed across her back, and she had no reason to talk much. It was all just as well. In service to her captain, Seneestra had learned to make others scream, without discriminating much when it came to her targets.

The Wailing Widow sailed on throughout the sorry seas of the galaxy, plundering and pillaging; marauders maddened by murder. Seneestra could remember her "Silence" as well as the screams; two sweet songs that were one and the same. Captain Rhauza had certainly spoken his fair share of scum, but he was right about one thing: he had been closer to Seneestra than her own mother. The years rolled on, the bodies and the bounties built up, and one day at some unknown age, the pirate vessel took on a passenger that Seneestra may yet never forget.

"You want to be rescued? No, you don't, do you? You are neither a slave nor a free woman. You are...something else. Very well. I won't free you. Instead, I will give you the means to free yourself. Take this. It is an instrument. Play it correctly, and the screams it produces will sound like music to your ears." —Klanres Al'men
​

It was a dark passenger that the Wailing Widow had picked up, though its captain had mistaken the man for a sack of meat and bones with a credit chip plastered on his forehead. Jedi, they were valuable, if dangerous to have as an adversary, but they were also predictable. Captain Rhauza had the numbers, he had the guns, he had the traps and the whips and the slave collars. What he didn't have was the correct understanding: this was no Jedi. The Vultan known as Klanres Al'men had since forsaken those principles, and now, aboard the Wailing Widow and unlike its thralls, he had nothing holding him back from unleashing his power and his wrath.

"These pirates? They were target practice." The words had imprinted themselves within Seneestra's mind, even years, decades, perhaps centuries later. Target practice was exactly what those pirates had become. Whether the man had needed her or not, Klanres had quickly caught on to a presence aboard the ship that he claimed had pulsed with the Force, like a beating drum. Seneestra might have been pushing past her late teens at this point, when the Jedi Exile had given her a lightsaber and the two had ignited their blades in unison to carve a smouldering path to the bridge of the Wailing Widow.

The mutiny had been murderous. The slaves had revolted. The ship was in need of a new leadership, and Master Klanres and his new apprentice had seized the helm to claim it. Captain Scumtongue had pleaded for his life with dribble on his lips, that much Seneestra could never forget. His hands were first to go, then the feet, piece by piece past the knees and the elbows. All the while he had wailed and wailed, and when he was at the part of becoming little more than a yodeling potato, Seneestra had reached the finale of her masterpiece. She flipped him onto his back, exposed his sweating skin, and moved her arm back and forth till it burned with agony as much as the pirate's back did, courtesy of his favorite shock whip.

The Wailing Widow had a new tune to play and a new captain to steer its course. It was music to Klanres' ears, who claimed on his own initiative the post and privilege of first mate. He had been covered in blood, the source of which Seneestra had decided to never inquire upon, and the crew thenceforth knew him as the "Red Commander". For her performance, Seneestra Vi-Kaidos was given a different title. She had been wearing the night the morning of her revolution, and her silence was as known as her cold exterior amid a void where a heart should be. The "Black Captain", they called her, and hers was a name that stuck.

"Who knows more of gods than I? Horse gods and fire gods, gods made of gold with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into mountains, gods of empty air and space... I know them all. I have seen their peoples garland them with flowers, and shed the blood of goats and bulls and children in their names. And I have heard the prayers, in half a hundred tongues. 'Cure my withered leg, make the maiden love me, grant me a healthy son. Save me, succor me, make me wealthy... Protect me! Protect me from my enemies, protect me from the darkness, protect me from the crabs inside my belly, from the spice lords, from the slavers, from the pirates, from the mercenaries at my door! Protect me from the Silence!' Godless? Why, I am the godliest woman ever to take off! You serve one god, but I have served ten thousand. From Hoth to Kalee, when souls see my ship, they pray.” —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos
​

Under new management, Captain Seneestra had thought it fitting that the vessel of her new life be named accordingly. Abandoning the scum that was the "Wailing Widow", the new name of the ship to call her own became a familiar one: "Silence". The name carried more than a memento; silence was the manner in which the ship sailed about the galaxy, cradling its crew so that they could maraud at will. The crew itself had taken on new membership, for the scum that had survived the onslaught, but refused to play by the new rules, were floated. Their living bodies had littered the void and drifted to whatever demise had awaited them out there between the stars. Scumtongue Rhauza and his stench marred the Silence no more. After cleaning house, any soul who remained on board had since pledged their loyalty to their new captain, and they had since learned that their vows could not be broken.

Meanwhile, Klanres Al'men, the Jedi Exile, had appeared content with his lot in life. He had no desire to seat the captain's chair. The man was after greater authority, as he had confided in his apprentice; the power of life and death itself. If that had meant killing, then Klanres had demonstrated it expertly. Wherever the Silence drifted, screams followed its tail, a trail of bodies serving as new decorations. Maybe they were pirates themselves, militant forces, space marauders with their own private creeds and cultures, or just the wrong ships at the wrong place and time. It did not matter. The Black Captain and the Red Commander did what they did for more than just pillage and plunder; theirs was the purpose to execute and destroy, and they did it like painters and poets.

Under Klanres' guidance, Seneestra learned more and more about the Force, from its methods and machinations to swinging a lightsaber and then another. She learned about the Jedi from a man who had exiled himself from the order, but her teacher knew the dangers of one-sided philosophy and brought another Jedi on board to eliminate any doubt. That other Jedi didn't last many days, but Seneestra felt confident in her revelations; the Jedi were weak, mere infants of a fading light. Learning more about them and the Force, however, would soon become a one-woman journey. That which she had shared for some legion of time with her master had ended when he had abruptly announced that he had to leave. It was to be a temporary departure, something about a matter he had to handle strictly by himself, and maybe he would have returned indeed. By that time, though, Seneestra would already be gone, her Silence living up to its name.

"There is no light in the void. No light. There is only darkness in the dark. Only darkness. Only the dark." —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos
​

Space madness. It is said that the dark recesses of space can instill a terrible beast inside a mind that dwells within it for too long; a monster so hungry for some semblance of company, of light, that they may end up cutting themselves to the bone in order to find it. Across the known galaxy, more worlds had been charted than not, and the galactic atlas was a growing phenomenon of nigh unfathomable space. Yet, there were those areas within regions like the Unknown Regions or Wild Space, even elsewhere, that contained nought but voids; holes in space where stars should have been. It might take hours, days, weeks or months to traverse them, depending on one's ship capabilities and how deprived of senses the crew had become. Seneestra had no immediate intention of finding out, but some holes fell over a person without said person having to fall into them first.

Truth be told, Seneestra can no longer remember where exactly she was when this darkness had engulfed her, never mind when. The galaxy was but a crib in a universe filled with them, and at the edge of light there was the black space of nothing between galaxies. Surely the Silence could not have drifted so far? Surely it would have been forced back beforehand? The answers lie in the stars, she wagered, but there in the void there were no stars. No ships beside her own. No help. No noise. Just silence, and a lingering radiation that interfered with onboard systems. All light from beyond was occluded from all sensors. A long, long way ahead, the direction being nowhere, the destination being nothing. Seneestra, her crew and their ship just drifted along, hoping for the best, but hope is folly in a hole that you cannot get out of.

​

Try as she might, the Black Captain was unsuccessful in claiming the sea of this space. There were no tides to overcome, no beacons to guide the Silence along; only the same blackness and darkness that lingered outside every window. True to the adage, some sorry souls aboard the ship went mad, driven insane by the nothing of it all. Not even one another's company was enough to sustain. Sensory deprivation. Depression. Fear. Reports of hallucinations snaked across the corridors; shadows with tendrils and frozen faces in the dark. Anxiety was a word that took on a whole new meaning, and trails of blood led to suicides and murders. Equilibrium could be a feat of accomplishment just by gazing outside the ship, a horror that had enthralled some against their gravest wishes. Throughout it all, Seneestra maintained hers as best she could: get through it, stay sane, survive. She still cannot remember if she was successful in the slightest.

"I hear the pulse of the awakening...along the moonlight that haunts the darkness... The last beat! The master rides across the moonlight!" —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Black holes. Sometimes they existed in people where hearts should have been. Seneestra was thought to have one inside of her, well before time and space had ceased to mean a thing in the void where light held no jurisdiction. The Black Captain, her crew had called her, but she was the captain of nothing and no one in the dark that knew no light. Black holes, of course, also meant something else.

They were celestial phenomena of the universe, witnessed in practice within this galaxy and theorized to be within others by extension. Immense gravity, inescapable pulls, eating up matter like a Rancor in a crowd. Insatiable monsters who dared a passerby to dance with them. They knew who would win and who would not walk away, while they sat still and did nothing but smile and relish the tasty morsel who came too close. Back then, back when, somewhere and sometime, Seneestra and her little tin can of a ship was on the menu that infinite night.

A black hole cannot be seen by the naked eye. The matter swirling around one, the streams of dust and rivers of light sinking into the maw, were the omens of the singularity. Unfortunately for the Silence, it was already in a black hole of a different kind, there where darkness had taken it and the stretch of space had since flicked the pinpricks of starlight out of all horizons. With systems draining and scanners no livelier, the black hole fell upon the vessel before it had fallen inside it. By the time the Black Captain had realized what was going on, when gravity like no other began pulling the senseless Silence toward more nothingness, it was far too late. The ship was going down, but who knew where down was...

All Seneestra and her crew could do was contemplate their own demise, now more certain than ever. Some prayed to their gods, gave into their regrets, wept upon one another's shoulders or drank their tears away. Their captain remained in the bridge, alone but somehow no longer lonely, if ever she had been. She can remember the moments at the viewscreen, or are those memories false ones too? Could she see the black mouth after all? Or was that a hallucination all on its own? She would never know. All she knew was that the Silence went round and round about the event horizon of the black hole, round and round and down and down, deeper and deeper until the whole galaxy looked like the back of your eyelids if you slumbered in the shadows.

“You look up from your worlds and see skies of blue or black; gray skies or red skies, green skies and purple skies. But the sky is just a lie, one that our stars have been telling us for millennia. I have been to the edge of space—the very edge. I have seen with my own eyes that which surrounds this galaxy. There is nothing hiding in the dark. It is the darkness that hides behind the light, waiting to pounce, there at the end of existence. A gaping throat; a silent echo; an infinite black void that waits to swallow us all.” —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Time passed, minute after hour, day after year, or maybe it never did. Time dilation was within the realm of physics, and if this black hole was indeed a wormhole that had led to another plane...well, who knew? By the time Seneestra Vi-Kaidos had come to her senses, if she ever had them to begin with, whatever had transpired in the void was a distant memory yet to be recovered. She hadn't merely escaped the black hole—she had escaped the entire space that had hidden it. Finally, she could see stars outside her ship, not too close but not too far, and also outside her ship were tentacles. Limbs. Arms and legs like spikes. They had not been on the Silence before, had they? It took little further study to realize that this was not the Silence. This was not the same ship. This was...something else.

Seneestra felt the urge to question, she felt a surge of fear, panic and adrenaline rushing over her like she were caught in the void and the hole and the throat all over again. Then it faded, like the flickering flame of a melted candle. She was at peace. She had all the answers and none of them. Questions that needed no marks at their end. Revelations in the dark while being blinded by the light. None of this made sense, while all of it did. That, she realized, made absolutely no sense—but she did not mind. Whatever happened, she had survived...or so it seemed.

Her crew had since suffered losses within the void, and further inspection revealed that all of her crew had finally perished—she was evidently the only one who had been spat out of the black hole and lived to forget it. Or was she? What had twisted her ship into the grotesque thing it had become, and the bodies of her crew into ghastly husks? There at the edge of spaceless space, crawling ever closer toward civilization, Seneestra had since learned not to question too much. The more she questioned, the less she received answers. She just accepted. The bodies of her crew remained still, save for a few. She picked those ones up and revived them, though they weren't quite the same as when she had last seen them. They, like the Silence, were something else entirely.

“Whom do you serve?" —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos
“I...serve...Seneestra." —Darkspawn​

Whatever dark power had animated these corpses, Seneestra wasn't quite sure. These, she accepted too. Like the living beings before them, however, these creatures denied neither her presence nor her will. They seemed as bound to her as she was to the dark, and so she welcomed them aboard her ship once more and let them call it home.

Drifting like before, though this time with a destination in mind, Seneestra sailed onward. Her journey came with deep meditation, reflecting as best as she could through the Force, conjuring up as many memories as possible. Fragments of fragments, bits and pieces, nothing absolute, with certainties as powerful but fleeting as quasars. Torturing her brain was the notion of where that 'black hole' had come from within the 'void'. Black holes were known to be the result of a star going supernova, but what kind of star could have collapsed, not only itself, but everything within thousands of lightyears?

Then Seneestra recalled what she had learned while studying the Force however long ago. Mysteries that the Jedi apparently strove to leave uncovered, but that men like Klanres Al'men had sought to unravel. Wounds in the Force. Holes in the Force. Catastrophes so prevalent that the very fabric of the Force was weakened. Had that been what had caught her? The darkness, the empty space, the black hole, the radiation, the star gone supernova—was it all some sick joke from the Dark Side? As with so many things of her existence, Seneestra may never know. All she knew was to go forward, to eat up these tidbits of information that came her way like the black hole that came before them.

Arriving in the galaxy proper, the moment was too timely to be coincidental. Seneestra now knew what to do. Her purpose was absolute, her objective within sight. The Dark Side had swallowed her—then spat her out to serve as its herald. It cared not for Jedi. It cared not for exiles. It cared only for itself, and that was for the best.

The darkness reigned supreme, rivaled though it was by the light. Yet, there was a reason that most of space was black, merely littered by bulbs of light that were like balls of dust in comparison. Those lights had to be switched off, the galaxy blanketed in black. Amid those lights, though, were shadows; shades of night that served their own purpose.

Seneestra, then, had to be more than both. She had to be like the moonlight. So she sailed ahead and cultivated her plans. She transformed her ship into a base of operations, her crew into soldiers to carry out those plans. The time of keeping quiet was gone. The Silence was no more. There in the void where no sun was ever seen, the Strangled Star had emerged from a black hole. Aboard it, Seneestra Vi-Kaidos, the Black Captain, had to be more than a captain. More than a ravager. She had to be the Pale Shadow. There was no going back now. The moonlight had to shine before the darkness could cover the galaxy.

“Bastard, my mother called me before she ate her lips, but I say daughter—of the Dark Side." —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Home. That was Seneestra's immediate destination, coming out of oblivion. She had some unfinished business there, some loose ends to tie up. Surely, by now, anyone who had ever known her had forgotten her, and she knew intimately what it was like to forget. Nevertheless, she also knew what open questions were like, and she couldn't afford to let theirs receive answers. Her mind made up, the Pale Shadow galloped back toward Sevarcos II for the first time in...who knew how long?

The village of Draatar had not changed much, that morning when Seneestra set foot upon the steppe. She was greeted with warm gusts this part of the equator, finding some solace in the relatively shielded area that would otherwise be unbearably uninhabitable. As always, men, women and children reaped and sowed what little could be cultivated before retreating to their refrigerated tents or beneath the ground and into their secret sanctums. It was a sorry thing, but sorrow was a luxury that Seneestra could not afford. The villagers of Draatar kept their secrets well, and Seneestra was there to make sure that they did.

There was another reason that she was present that morning. She had since learned of the year she was in, but nothing spoke truth more than a familiar face. Regardless, the time that passed in the galaxy felt different than had passed in the pit. Pushing the thoughts aside, Seneestra looked for her parents and found one of them. Her mother was an ancient thing, time doing to her face what it should have done to her daughter's. That daughter had not been recognized, so she reintroduced herself. The mother would hear none of it. That had posed a problem, because her descendant would have none of it.

Even old age could bring out the beast in a person. Her mother had put up a fight, blood flowing down her chin like a waterfall, and in the end her dying gasp was but a whisper to deaf ears. The yurt stank of death, a stench that Seneestra was since accustomed to. She left it, turning around only to set it on fire. Secrets, however, were not restricted to one's mother. This was their home, hers and Seneestra's, and its inhabitants knew them both, in their own way. There was no choice. The darkness had to consume. The drums of war were beating, and this was the last pulse—for the village.

With an emerald blade igniting, gleaming like the gemstone eye of a god, Seneestra slew every villager that was on the surface and beneath it, then she burned it all to the ground. There were still some loose ends, though, so she followed her leads to the nearby mines. The spice lord who ran them didn't remember her, but somehow, after all this time, Seneestra remembered him. Her father looked as shriveled as his wife did. His daughter told him what her mother had told her, but none of these words had to happen. No, they were choices. Seneestra Vi-Kaidos, their only child who they gave away like a jar of spice, was angry, and the darkness inside her let them know it.

Her father perished on the blade. The spice lord was next. His spice ring came afterward. The mines were flooded after sabotaging the water networks. Seneestra sang to their demise, the rains that cast anear serving as a memory that she would not soon forget. She took off from Sevarcos for the final time, letting the graves that she left behind serve as a reminder of a broken past. Her parents, her village, her slavers—all behind her now. But there was still another loose end. One last string.

In her reemergence, Seneestra had caught wind of the galactic power struggles, the splintered factions, the delicate balance of power that shifted left and right—wherever the wind blew, it seemed. Power and authority over the Dark Side, however, had been taken from the Jedi Exiles of old and amalgamated into the new Sith Empire, led by one Empress Andraste. This individual was a beginning and an end, in her own way, but not the end that needed tying. The Black Captain had forgotten a number of things, more than the average person did, but she had not forgotten the Red Commander. She had to find him, and it would take the Strangled Star to do so.

“You are Sith, or you are the enemy of Sith. Choose." —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

Returning to methods once employed during her tour as a pirate, infamous in reputation if invisible in person, Seneestra's hit-and-run tactics would rival those of the Deucalians. Raiding other ships and lesser locations rewarded the Strangled Star with stock and supplies, the means to keep flying, but more importantly with information.

Soon enough, upon emerging here and there and everywhere to be never seen again, Seneestra forged a new reputation of silence. Sailors spread word of the "shadow dreadnought" and the "shadow pirates"; marauders in a ship so black that it seemed to bend the space around it. The truth was in the eye of the beholder, but the shadow was exactly what the captain needed—not a spotlight. In time, and with a good deal of sweat and blood, Seneestra put the puzzle pieces together and determined the whereabouts of her late master.

Evidently, the one known as Andraste had not merely levitated to her position of power—she had climbed it, with blood and sweat of her own. There were those who had resisted her claim, opposing her politics with their own, and Klanres Al'men was worded to still be among the splinters who had refused to reattach themselves to the hull that was the Empress' own dreadnought. Seneestra had to find out for herself, and that meant finding her master. So she did.

The man had survived for this long by hiding in the shadows of his own making. His apprentice had encountered him within a forest too beautiful for either of these two souls and their scars that still bled black. Unsurprisingly, Seneestra's presence had been felt upon arrival. As much as she had been looking for him, he had been waiting for her.

Standing face to face with her master, former that he was, brought back a strange surge of pain and pleasure. They had felt both in their inseparable unity those years ago, and some things really did never change. Klanres looked older, more than she did, but younger than her parents. No, the man's age lie in his visage, there where light might have once been. There and then, as the apprentice had offered, was the opportunity to join together once more: two halves of the same shade.

Seneestra revealed to her master her new course, one that could not be changed. The Sith was her vessel now; organized aim to achieve an individual one. It was the way of the Dark Side. It was her one and only path and she could not change it. Together, they could grow stronger and achieve the goal as one. Klanres, however, had made up his mind already too.

He was always an individual first, a man who bowed to his own head—not some distant empress on a throne that he would never prostrate himself to, not in life. Turning the table, Klanres offered Seneestra to join him instead; to sail the galaxy in service to no one but themselves, doing whatever they wished, just like old times.

The master stood beneath the sunlight, and against her better judgment, the apprentice shined the moonlight in a plea that he might reconsider. Klanres, like the ones before him, knew too much. The darkness eschewed mercy, a luxury that Seneestra could not afford anyway, and she certainly could not afford to leave this man to his own devices, master or not.

“It was under you that I learned how to wield this weapon in my hand. It was you who taught me how to fill the void in my soul with the souls that I have slain. You are strong, my master, but I am stronger than you now, and I serve a new master now. If you fight me...you will die.”

“All men die in the end. All women, too. Children perish before they grow. Beasts are eaten by each other. Machines shut down. The planets stop spinning and the stars stop shining. This entire universe will one day rip itself apart, Sen. Before all that, even now, no one really lives. No, the lives of one Vultan and one Sevari amount to a hill of dust in this crazy galaxy.”

“I will offer you one last chance, Klanres Al’men… You are Sith, or you are the enemy of Sith. Choose.”

Klanres Al'men had chosen unwisely, and he had chosen wrong.

The two ignited their blades and clashed their sabers in a violent struggle, but in the end, the apprentice slew the master. She severed his head and took it with her back aboard the Strangled Star, where no noose could ever wrap around his neck and restrict what rested above it. No, Klanres was free now. The master had fallen to his student's blade. It was the only way.

"The last beat, the master comes, riding across the moonlight that haunts the shadows in the dark places. The trot of death, the gallop of destruction. The drums of war are beating, the violins of peace are vibrating. It is the music that brings the birth of a new beginning. I am the instrument of the end.” —Seneestra Vi-Kaidos​

It had been quite an endeavor to track down her old master, but tracking down the Sith themselves proved to be a simpler task. She already had intel to go off beyond the naked state of the galaxy at large. Klanres Al'men had been no warmaster, and in fact he was only affiliated with the opposition for his own selfish reasons. For his part, his contacts had helped keep him hidden and undisturbed, if not well enough.

To hunt the lower ranks, one typically dispatched a lower rank. There was no exception here. Seneestra searched for those who had been tasked with pursuing her teacher. Finding them, she tossed his head before their feet and introduced herself. The darkness emanating from her being did not go ignored, neither the frozen countenance of a head which had no body. The Sith heard her out, though the speech of an upstart darksider was not taken all that seriously. That did not faze her. Seneestra had the truth, and now she had a position within the Sith Empire where she may yet exercise it.

She was knighted thereafter, the Pale Shadow beginning a new journey to ride upon, and a ladder of her own to climb. Darkness was coming, the kind that no one alive today could conjure, ushered in by hands like hers. The last pulse, the master comes, riding across the moonlight. The darkness did not care if you were Jedi or Sith, accepted or exiled. Its hunger did not discriminate. When it came, it would cover everyone and everything, Seneestra Vi-Kaidos included. It was the only way.

SKILLS/ABILITIES​

• Lightsaber Combat - Seneestra was instructed on the forms of Lightsaber combat and taught how to dual-wield lightsabers.
• The Force - As she has been training for some time, while putting her skills to the test in battle, Seneestra is capable of using the Force and, in particular, enjoys using Force Lightning.

GEAR
​

Space Craft: The Strangled Star - Shadow Vessel
Land Vehicle: Cec Titan X2
Pistol: C3R-2A Blaster Pistol
Melee: Red Lightsaber x2

Spoiler

Zygerrian Shock Whip
Armor: Darkspawn Armor
Grenades: Smoke Grenades x3
Droid: Roach - MR Series Utility Astromech
Other: Comlink, ship beacon, datapad, holocam, medkit