Sith didn't fare so well, out from under Horuset's light. Red skin faded towards orange, tendrils weakened, claws turned thin and buckled. He was born orange, didn't have any tendrils, and he'd inherited flat, blunt nails from his father.
But he still felt like kath crud if he didn't put sun lamps in his room anyway. Hybrid biology was stupid like that sometimes.
Usually the dry warmth helped him concentrate, but today it wasn't working. Too many other things to think about--his master's imminent betrayal first and foremost. It had been clear from almost the start that Baras didn't really see him as an apprentice he was going to keep: Baras had other apprentices he had failed to mention, and the man chewed through operatives at a pretty unsustainable rate, mostly by throwing an expendable apprentice at them. It was only a matter of time before Baras tried to have him killed too.
That was the ground state for Sith anyway, but right now it was actually worrying him. Baras was planning something big, but he had no idea what. Nothing had quite panned out, and his only remaining leads needed more time before he could do anything with them.
This was the sort of bad relationships and stress that had gotten him into party drugs and rage highs in the first place. He was doing better at keeping off of both these days, but--fuck, no, couldn't start thinking like that, he knew where that would go if he let it.
Maybe he should just try messing with the crystals again.
He set down his datapad on his bed next to him, hauling himself up to a sitting position and folding his legs up under him. He wasn't going to touch the actual physical crystals he'd been collecting--they'd already picked up enough bad feelings from him before he'd calmed the the hell down and remembered you could solve problems without murder. He'd been working on realigning them, and he wasn't in a good mood to try now. But maybe he could make another attempt to get his head around his other project.
He closed his eyes, trying to block out the rest of the galaxy: just feel the heat of the lamps on his skin, watch the patterns on the inside of his eyelids dance as he breathed deep, letting those fuzzy shapes fade into light refracting through himself.
Thinking of himself as a solid, single crystal was simple enough. He'd had weirder thoughts when he was stoned, honestly. Even splitting himself into a whole field of shining facets was pretty tame. But he was still trying to push it further. He knew he had it in him to be more complex than that.
It was an idea he'd held onto since before prison and the Academy. Kolir had figured out a pretty reliable stand-by for keeping his mates entertained when they were too high to be trusted with speeders--even autopiloted ones. Even stolen autopiloted ones. He'd found some geometric holograms someone had put together, projections of higher-dimensional shapes spinning through space you couldn't see. He'd fucking loved those things. Could watch them for hours, especially the really complicated ones. Fractals were obviously a huge hit.
And he still just liked them on an aesthetic level. Clean edges sliding and stretching in ways the eye struggled to follow, passing through itself but not really. Wrapping his head around it had been nearly impossible until he'd sobered up and gotten his hands on two very important things: the Force, and advanced maths.
The maths were honestly harder than the Force was, but he knew they could work together if he just figured out the right way to go about it. He had some help--Captain Quinn literally quivered with delight the first time he'd asked him for assistance with a textbook--and he had an actual work excuse for spending his time on this. It actually made him better in the field.
Jedi and Sith were trained to keep mental defenses up when fighting, and to try and tear down their opponent on the mental plane at the same time. But most of the techniques were surface-level, it always seemed. Like the basic training soldiers got. No theory, not enough to know how to improvise or push further. Sith just emotionally battered people until they gave up, or tried to parry and stab with sharp edges. Jedi tried to build an implacable, devouring wall of nothing, which was admittedly pretty intimidating. But everyone got taught basic thoughts to keep in mind: mantras, mental images, key events, that sort of thing. Everyone just seemed to think of what they needed to defend as "me, but with armor on". And everyone else assumed what they were attacking was "them, but uglier".
So a more abstract shape was an advantage. The shape surprised those who tried to push on his mind, they couldn't quite grasp what they were dealing with at first. But once they got it, they could conceptualize it without too much effort. At that point, it was hard to keep the upper hand. But a shape that was literally impossible within their plane of existence? That would stump them for a while.
And he could feel pretty doing it, which was always a plus.
He'd made some strides so far, managed to wrap his mind around some basic rotations. When it clicked, it felt right, and he could look at himself from any side along that axis that he felt like. But combining them was still a stumbling process. Moving was even harder. Trying to keep track of every face in a rectified or runcitruncated 5-cell (damn but that name did suck) was too hard to do consciously. It had to be instinct, working with the Force to push himself through a space that his body couldn't follow. And he wasn't there yet. He had pieces of it, but that wasn't yet good enough.
He kept stumbling, like chunks of him were sticking to the three-dimensional floor. It wasn't a good feeling. Probably not one he needed today. But if he tried just a little more...
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for Gabriel
Sith didn't fare so well, out from under Horuset's light. Red skin faded towards orange, tendrils weakened, claws turned thin and buckled. He was born orange, didn't have any tendrils, and he'd inherited flat, blunt nails from his father.
But he still felt like kath crud if he didn't put sun lamps in his room anyway. Hybrid biology was stupid like that sometimes.
Usually the dry warmth helped him concentrate, but today it wasn't working. Too many other things to think about--his master's imminent betrayal first and foremost. It had been clear from almost the start that Baras didn't really see him as an apprentice he was going to keep: Baras had other apprentices he had failed to mention, and the man chewed through operatives at a pretty unsustainable rate, mostly by throwing an expendable apprentice at them. It was only a matter of time before Baras tried to have him killed too.
That was the ground state for Sith anyway, but right now it was actually worrying him. Baras was planning something big, but he had no idea what. Nothing had quite panned out, and his only remaining leads needed more time before he could do anything with them.
This was the sort of bad relationships and stress that had gotten him into party drugs and rage highs in the first place. He was doing better at keeping off of both these days, but--fuck, no, couldn't start thinking like that, he knew where that would go if he let it.
Maybe he should just try messing with the crystals again.
He set down his datapad on his bed next to him, hauling himself up to a sitting position and folding his legs up under him. He wasn't going to touch the actual physical crystals he'd been collecting--they'd already picked up enough bad feelings from him before he'd calmed the the hell down and remembered you could solve problems without murder. He'd been working on realigning them, and he wasn't in a good mood to try now. But maybe he could make another attempt to get his head around his other project.
He closed his eyes, trying to block out the rest of the galaxy: just feel the heat of the lamps on his skin, watch the patterns on the inside of his eyelids dance as he breathed deep, letting those fuzzy shapes fade into light refracting through himself.
Thinking of himself as a solid, single crystal was simple enough. He'd had weirder thoughts when he was stoned, honestly. Even splitting himself into a whole field of shining facets was pretty tame. But he was still trying to push it further. He knew he had it in him to be more complex than that.
It was an idea he'd held onto since before prison and the Academy. Kolir had figured out a pretty reliable stand-by for keeping his mates entertained when they were too high to be trusted with speeders--even autopiloted ones. Even stolen autopiloted ones. He'd found some geometric holograms someone had put together, projections of higher-dimensional shapes spinning through space you couldn't see. He'd fucking loved those things. Could watch them for hours, especially the really complicated ones. Fractals were obviously a huge hit.
And he still just liked them on an aesthetic level. Clean edges sliding and stretching in ways the eye struggled to follow, passing through itself but not really. Wrapping his head around it had been nearly impossible until he'd sobered up and gotten his hands on two very important things: the Force, and advanced maths.
The maths were honestly harder than the Force was, but he knew they could work together if he just figured out the right way to go about it. He had some help--Captain Quinn literally quivered with delight the first time he'd asked him for assistance with a textbook--and he had an actual work excuse for spending his time on this. It actually made him better in the field.
Jedi and Sith were trained to keep mental defenses up when fighting, and to try and tear down their opponent on the mental plane at the same time. But most of the techniques were surface-level, it always seemed. Like the basic training soldiers got. No theory, not enough to know how to improvise or push further. Sith just emotionally battered people until they gave up, or tried to parry and stab with sharp edges. Jedi tried to build an implacable, devouring wall of nothing, which was admittedly pretty intimidating. But everyone got taught basic thoughts to keep in mind: mantras, mental images, key events, that sort of thing. Everyone just seemed to think of what they needed to defend as "me, but with armor on". And everyone else assumed what they were attacking was "them, but uglier".
So a more abstract shape was an advantage. The shape surprised those who tried to push on his mind, they couldn't quite grasp what they were dealing with at first. But once they got it, they could conceptualize it without too much effort. At that point, it was hard to keep the upper hand. But a shape that was literally impossible within their plane of existence? That would stump them for a while.
And he could feel pretty doing it, which was always a plus.
He'd made some strides so far, managed to wrap his mind around some basic rotations. When it clicked, it felt right, and he could look at himself from any side along that axis that he felt like. But combining them was still a stumbling process. Moving was even harder. Trying to keep track of every face in a rectified or runcitruncated 5-cell (damn but that name did suck) was too hard to do consciously. It had to be instinct, working with the Force to push himself through a space that his body couldn't follow. And he wasn't there yet. He had pieces of it, but that wasn't yet good enough.
He kept stumbling, like chunks of him were sticking to the three-dimensional floor. It wasn't a good feeling. Probably not one he needed today. But if he tried just a little more...
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