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dragonrajafanfiction · 3 years

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Yggdrasil

"Is there anything you want to talk about?"

Toyama sat in his office behind a cup of tea across from his patient Tigre.

Tigre had been absent for two weeks performing entry exercises for Battlefield Training level 1. He'd performed exceptionally well, surpassing the students in his troop and complying dutifully with the strict schedule and regiment. At this point, not only was he physically able, but now he had experience in shooting, keeping watch, and setting up camp. He looked more tan, a bit stronger, more energetic. He kept decorum, but every time he saw him, he couldn't help but feel happy at his success.

Tigre had two more weeks of academic pursuits before returning to Battlefield Training for the next round. Toyama had been seeing him for his weekly counseling and needed to catch up with his mental health after missing a session.

Tigre took a deep breath, turning the delicate tea cup in his scarred hands. "I've been thinking a lot about where I come from. I didn't really care before. But people ask me questions like: where am I from? Who is my family? Where did I go to school? But all I remember is the cage. I should have memories growing up. Like going to school. I didn't learn to read and write in the cage. Who taught me? I don't know my real name. My real name is not Tigre. That's what they called me."

Toyama listened carefully. "Do you think these questions are important?"

Tigre was thoughtful for a moment. "No. That's not it. They're not important. I just don't want to tell people I lived in a basement all my life. I don't want to say that I don't know my real name. I don't know where my parents are…"

"But this is the truth." Toyama said gently. "How do you feel when they ask you these questions?"

Tigre thought about this and Toyama pulled a tissue from the box next to him and offered it to him.

"Sad…" Tigre said, wiping his face.

"What do you feel sad about?" Toyama asked.

"Just not knowing. I don't have anything to say… they ask who your parents are, you say I don't know and they… they look at me like they're sorry."

"That makes you feel sad?" Toyama asks. "Or are you sad before then?"

"Um…" Tigre tries to think. "Starting out, I never thought about my past. But now I'm afraid that every time I meet someone, they will ask questions like that. I'll already start getting sad before they ask that."

"So you feel bad in anticipation…"

"Yes. That's it."

Toyama nodded and made a note. "So when you meet someone, you feel sad because you feel like you can't open up to them about your amnesia. Then they ask about it. You tell them. They feel sorry, and then you feel sadder. Because they're sad."

"That's the gist of it."

"How do you think that is affecting your social life?"

"Probably not good. It's not easy to meet new people. I don't want to talk about myself."

"Understandable." Toyama was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, and, as though to signal a change of subject, he switched legs.

"Have you tried to remember?"

"Yes." Tigre licked his lips. "I remember hearing a big crash and seeing Chu Zihang walk out. I called him brother. Before that, I was lying down in the chains. I…"

Toyama kept quiet, making notes.

"I remember… fighting. Killing something or someone. Their faces were distorted. But I don't remember when that was. I remember people calling me Tigre, but they are just shadows in my mind."

"You don't remember doing anything else? Only rescue, fighting, lying down… and the shadows?"

Tigre sat still. He tried to focus. He was recalling images from his captivity. But he couldn't understand what order they went in. They called him Tigre… when? He killed that creature… but when? How long was he stuck down there? Which image came first? His memory was like two mirrors facing each other creating an endless array of identical reflection.

"What about before your confinement? Do you remember anything?" Toyama asked.

Tigre closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to think of a memory of his childhood. He tried to remember life under a bright sun and a blue sky. The feel of the warmth of the day on his skin…. and was struck with a sudden wave of nausea so intense that the tea he just drank bubbled into his mouth like a geyser. He rushed to the trash bin, knocking over his chair, and barely made it in time.

Toyama watched him gagging helplessly and stood up. "Do you need help?"

Tigre was shaking and struggling to catch his breath. Toyama knelt next to him. "It's okay. Just relax." He handed him a tissue to help him wipe his face. "Did anything come to mind?"

"No… nothing."

Toyama pulled Tigre's hair back to keep it from going into the vomit. "It's not a failure. We will find a way to recover your memories. Every attempt is progress. I'd like to propose something… I'd like to get a scan of your brain."

Tigre gave him a fearful look. "Will it hurt?"

"No. But I think we can both agree that just the act of remembering something forgotten shouldn't have this reaction right? This reaction is more physical than mental."

A few hours later, Tigre is back in the clinic, in the lab on the fourth floor where they had the MRI machine. Tigre was lying on his back listening quietly to music and staying as still as he could.

Toyama stood in the room behind the imaging machine and the technician operating it sighed in irritation. "None of the images are clear."

"Is he moving around?"

"No that's not it. I'm getting interference in the magnetic resonance. Does he have any metal on him? Or any implants?" The technician asked.

"Implants…" Toyama whispered. Could something have been implanted in Tigre? Something blocking his memories? "Can you see any implants?"

"I can't see anything with these terrible images! I have to stop the test." He clicked a few times on the program to abort the test. "Oh come on… what is happening…"

"What's wrong?"

"The computer screen just froze!" In the next second, the computer switched off and all the lights went out.

Red emergency lights from a generator came on. "Tigre… stay where you are, I think… ah the communication system isn't working either." The tech said.. "I'll go get him."

From the technician booth, there was a window. So Toyama saw the technician enter the room. He had barely gotten three steps in when the man abruptly collapsed to the floor and began convulsing.

Toyama started to hurry down but stopped. If he entered the room would he start convulsions as well? Tigre was not moving. Was he dead?!

Power suddenly returned to the room and the man stopped his seizures and lay still. Norma's voice suddenly came over the loudspeakers. "A very strong EMP was detected in this building. Agents are in route to investigate. I am assessing the damage. "

EMP? Electromagnetic pulse? The MRI machine was smoking!

Toyama rushed down to help the technician, kneeling down close. His eyes were rolled back white and he was breathing bloody foam.

Tigre had slid out of the MRI machine and looked stunned at the scene. "What happened?"

"You're alive! Thank God. Here, call for help."

Toyama tossed him his phone. He expected Tigre to catch it but it fell and cracked against the tile floor. Tigre just stared at him. "Who are you?"

Toyama felt the blood rush from his face.

Tigre looked at him in confusion. "Where am I? What is this place."

Toyama stood up. "No…" His voice trembled. He stepped towards Tigre in a daze. "No!"

Tigre backed away until he could back away no further. "Stay away!"

Toyama's eyes suddenly blazed yellow. While it was true that students could not use Yanling on campus, due to the nature of his work, Toyama would need special access to his Yanling at all times. A top secret method of defeating the Alchemy matrix that suppressed Yanling was granted him. So even though no one on Campus could use theirs, he could use his.

He stared into the wide and frightened eyes of Tigre and dove into memories that were already fading, burning to ashes like trees in a wildfire! Memories of them together in the hospital. Memories of his first day of school.

Burning fury burst from Toyama and he opposed the force operating on Tigre’s mind in a single burst, roaring like an angry lion and rushing in the fight. Such a reaction may have struck many as unexpected. Toyama was a gentle soul. He was a professor, a psychologist and a priest, but he was also a member of the Secret Party and a Hybrid. The trail of blood he left was invisible, the battles were fought on the stage of the mind. He’d erased family, friends, lovers, precious moments. So long as they were contaminated by memories of dragonkind, those thoughts were his to slaughter.

For the first time, this peerless psychological warrior was being tasked, not to destroy but to protect. He planted himself in the middle of this mental obliteration and started to rebuild it. Tigre didn’t understand how much Toyama knew him. He’d walked these neural pathways more ways than he could count, like a woodsmen in a forest, he knew the trails of the memories he created. He rebuilt them.

“Who are you?” He demanded this mental fire. “What are you?”

He received no answer, only a corresponding increase of force, like a bull locking horns with him. As their strength collided, Toyama received a vision that he’d never received so far. This was alien, not native to Tigre’s mind. An outsider thought.

A great tree, shrouded in mist, grew out of the desert. It was so tall that it pierced the cloud cover. Toyama watched in wonder as the white gleaming speck of a 777 passenger plane looked like a sparrow flying through its branches. At the base of the tree was a black dragon, but the dragon was dead. One of the tree’s roots ran through its eye socket. “Yggdrasil?”

Toyama could feel his own hands squeezing Tigre's arms tight while the other man struggled. Brainwashing was supposed to be a painless process. You were not supposed to be able to perceive the changes. Tigre didn't realize he was forgetting everyone around him a few moments ago. He had just failed to recognizeToyama. But now that he was both forgetting and having memories restored at once, he was trying to pull away and crying in fear, unable to control his own thoughts as two powerful entities struggled for custody of his mind.

Toyama held on to him. He regretted the trauma he was no doubt inflicting. Even though he was not religious, he worked in the Church on campus as a junior priest and knew how to pray. For the first time he actually did. He was up against something powerful, otherworldly. Even if Tigre would never trust him again, he prayed that he could at least remember him! The force that was erasing his memories was relentless, but it wasn't smart. It didn't try to figure Toyama out. It just erased memories in the same pattern once he restored them. Toyama could learn that pattern.

So long as Toyama safeguarded those memories, the attacker couldn't advance. The memory of meeting Chu Zihang the first time, waking up the first time in the hospital, the 3E exam -- these were the main points of interest to this mysterious entity. Toyama stood as a bulwark against them, and instead attacked this tree. Where is it?

Tigre's mind suddenly shut off and he slumped against him. Toyama's mind was kicked abruptly back into his body. Toyama felt unbearably hot and thirsty. Sweat dripped onto the linoleum floor.

Toyama reached up and felt Tigre's pulse through his neck. Though he was pale and limp, Tigre was still alive.

If there was really something implanted in his head, there should be a mark, a scar. Toyama carefully started running his hands over Tigre's scalp, looking for any deformity. His fingers ran over a small series of ridged right on top of his head.

Toyama tilted Tigre's face toward him to see and pulled his hair back with his thumb and forefinger. A scar, in the shape of an Alchemy rune? It was a perfect circle in a circle. Like an eye!

At this moment, members from the Executive board rushed in and surrounded him. “I’m alright! The situation is under control, but I have an urgent message for the school board! This is a serious situation!”

Toyama made sure that Tigre was moved to the 5th floor. “I’m sorry. But you have to be returned to quarantine. I don’t know if you can hear me...” Toyama whispered to the unconscious Tigre.

He raced back downstairs towards the library. He climbed to the second floor and burst into the door. The library was like a beehive that had been struck. It was full of workers trying to reconnect with everything that had been knocked offline by the EMP blast. Schneider and Guderian were watching. Who know where Manstein was.

“I need a word.”

Schneider looked at him in surprise. His shirt was wrinkled, and transparent against his chest and his hair stuck to his forehead.

“Guderian get our systems back to normal.” Schneider strode away and Toyama didn’t wait, immediately leaving the room to a side office.

“Here, it’s not much but at least wipe your face off.” Schneider offered him a tissue box.

“I’ve finally figured Tigre out. Tigre is not a dragon. He’s a hybrid. But there is something in him that is dragonkin. That is what is erasing his memories. I suspected something physically wrong with him for a long time. So I had an MRI scan done of his head. But when the scan began, a huge EMP blast exploded on campus! When I approached him, he acted like he didn’t know me. So I used my Yanling to peer in his mind and something else was there. Another thought, thoughts that weren’t his. These things were pruning his memories.”

“I dove into the mind of that thing and I saw a memory of a tree. A great tree in the fog. So big that a plane flying by looked like a bit of office paper in the wind. And at the roots of the tree I saw a dragon but it was dead.” He flipped over a piece of paper on a desk in the office and pulled the cap of a pen and held it in his mouth while he drew. I thought, Yggdrasil, but it’s not Yggdrasil. I believe this is a dragonborn thing.”

“Is it controlling him?”

“It’s erasing his memories for a purpose. It was after all memories of dragonkind in his brain. It didn’t seem… conscious. I didn’t adapt strategies, it kept going after the memories… like a zombie, mindlessly trying to eat his brain.” He finished his drawing and leaned on the desk. “I know that dragons can sense the thoughts of humans and can either attack or evade. So this sort of behavior isn’t unheard of. A dragon can manipulate the thoughts of humans. After all.. I can. I defended his mind as best I could. But as for now I’ve returned him to the quarantine area of the clinic to make sure he’s safe.”

Schneider rumbled. “An unfortunate turn of events.”

“I feel bad for him and for Chu Zihang. I know rescuing Tigre meant a lot to him.”

Schneider froze.

Toyama chuckled. “I know that boy too Schneider. He’s a kind person. He was happy to save Tigre and followed his progress because he cared. You kept Tigre alive for his benefit right?”

Schneider sighed softly.

“But we have to … face reality.” Toyama hung his head, leaning on the desk. “If that thing is in his head and it can’t be removed… it will likely kill him at some point. Even if we’re not forced to kill him.”

Schneider walked over and placed one hand on his shoulder.

#Dragon Raja

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goldenagewebnovel · 3 years

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Volume 1 Prologue

Virtual Reality.

The ever sought after paradise for everyone who loves video games.

The first virtual reality developments came in the beginning of the century, but they were all based on external hardware. Awkward remotes and gloves, bulky goggles. The hardware became smaller, sleeker, more immersive over time. But in the end, all they were was an entertaining trick — limited by what it could show and who could even physically use it.

They brought the player closer to the screen then ever before. But they could never bridge the gap between the real world and the game. The true holy grail of gaming would lie in fully immersive virtual reality; that would take you to the very edge of the screen, and then pull you inside. To wake up inside your favorite game, whenever you wanted. It was the dream that could never be.

And then came the Digital Mind Project.

A private think tank based in the city of Seattle. They gathered the world’s best programers, neurologists, biologists, and psychologists. After working for over a decade, they did it. They mapped and named every possible neural pathway in the human brain and explained it’s function. They created the first complete, digital model of the mind, and it could think like one.

Overnight, the processing speed of all technology in the world skyrocketed. Data could be processed faster and more efficiently then ever imagined. Brain diseases that seemed incurable now had mapped explanations and accessible cures.

The digital and physical revolution that resulted led some people to question where the limit really was. If you can put the human mind in a machine, couldn’t it work the other way around?

Countries, governments, armies, corporations — they all fought to develop and control this untouched potential. But the leaders of the Digital Mind Project had decided to join the race, and, just like before, they won. They developed a full scanning pod, that only required a user to sit in it. The pod would sync to the electric signals of the nerves pathways and, upon triggering sleep, allowed the person to fully connect to the machine.

They sold the design for the pods to every business that could afford it, all at the same time. In the middle of the 21st century the age of Virtual Reality had truly begun.

The first games to come out were… disappointing, to say the least. Barely more then tech demos. Allowing the player to get a unique experience but hardly qualifying as a true game. A rushed attempt at formatting a classic MMORPG as the VR game, Fields of Fighting, was a disaster. It was riddled with horribly coded AI, clunky, unnatural movements, invisible walls everywhere that could physically trap players by accident. It was unplayable.

All the technology you could ever need for VR was available, but game designers were struggling to catch up. They had to learn to think and create in a whole new dimension. The old techniques wouldn’t cut it.

That learning curve led to a drought in Full VR games. Most companies stuck to their tried and true dimension of game design, and if people were lucky they might see a halfway decent Full VR game release once or twice a year.

Then, without any warning, two of the biggest games to hit the market were released in the same year.

The first was a sprawling, open world RPG called, Record of the Ancients. Set in the fantasy genre, this was a single player game that offered its players absolute freedom of choice to explore the world and affect it however they wanted. The game held its own share of bugs and the occasional empty plain or lack of detail, but there was nothing else like it.

The second game was a massive multiplayer sci-fi battle called, Solar Forge. Players could freely participate in large scale, solar system spanning battles. Anything from piloting a ship, to organizing a galactic cruiser, to dropping into and storming an enemy vessel with your squad. Two teams ranging anywhere from 50 to 300 participants all fighting a space war to decide a victor. The largest scale fights could even span days, and a lot of people became addicted to acting as a space marine.

These two games sold more then anyone dared to dream, proving just how unique Full VR gaming could really be. They also set the trend for how these games would be approached. Either broad, if shallow, experiences in a large environment or the chance for rich world building but in a very narrow and strict environment. No one would even attempt to make up for the failed promises made by the flopped Fields of Fighting experience.

Things stayed this way for over a decade. New games came and fell, but Record of the Ancients and Solar Forge remained on top.

One day, without any big press releases or industry fanfare, a new game started putting up commercials and advertisement. It promised to revolutionize Full VR and offer an experience greater then any of it’s predecessors. Deeper, more detailed worlds. No restrictions on player freedom. An MMORPG that could support millions of players across the world, all at the same time.

These claims were so preposterously huge that no one believed it. Especially because they were being made by a brand new games company called Aurum Productions, that no one had even heard of before.

But the ads kept coming.

And once people started looking into the game, and more specifically, Aurum Productions, they learned that this new game had some shocking secret weapons going for it. The founder of Aurum Productions was a man named Mike Wirth, one of the former lead programers of the Digital Mind Project. He had brought a gift for this new game: a new piece of technology called, Player Perception Tuning (PPT).

In order to allow the most robust, flexible, and realistic experience possible a machine alone couldn’t cut it. Instead, PPT allows the players own brain, already synced with their pod, to process the game’s data for them on the spot.

Instead of having to code every aspect of the game to recreate reality, they instead offer the brain a very convincing framework of reality, and allow the individual brain to fill in all the pieces. Instead of realism, the programers were going for impressionism.

What they got was more realistic then any game ever made before it.

Since every player was acting as their own processor, it made it much easier to have everyone play at once. Since they only had to design the framework, the game team at Aurum had that much more freedom to create a real, enriched world.

In the summer of the year 2076, the groundbreaking Full VR, fantasy MMORPG, Golden Age, released.

__________________________________

In the void of space, above an endless fog, floats an island of gold and riches. There are artifacts, weapons, and sculptures — all crafted from precious metals and rare gems. Priceless artworks and fine clothing are lazily scattered about. The ground is made up of gold bars and golden coins. They drip from the bottom of the island into the void of the fog, but the island never grows smaller.

At the center of the island, purple strands of energy gather together to construct a humanoid wireframe.

From nowhere and everywhere at once, the Overvoice of the game speaks.

Hello, would you like to customize your character, or would you like a randomly generated one?

A voice from the wireframe responds.

“I’d like to customize.”

Very well.

From all over the island, wisps of light gather together to form a giant ball of light in front of the wireframe.

First, please select what race you would like your character to be. You can chose from Human, Dwarf, Orc, or Elf. You may also choose a ratio, of two of the previously mentioned.

“Human.”

Very well.

Some of the light gets shaved away, scattering into space. The ball of light has now roughly taken the size and shape of a human.

Please select what sex you would like your character to be.

“Um, I’ll take male for me.”

Very well.

Barely any light is shaved away but the figure of light now resembles a blank human male.

Please select your body type.

“How about we go with svelte but athletic. Like a martial artist kind of build, maybe?”

Very well.

This time, more light is shaved away and the figure now resembles a fit, athletic human man.

Would you like to move on to face sculpting, body sculpting, or voice sculpting next?

“You know what, just have everything else look like my real body.”

Very well.

Light flew away from the human figure in spirals of light until everything burst out. In the place of the light was a tan skinned, human man. The body was still athletic, decently tall, had long sideburns, stubble on it’s chin, gray eyes, and streaks of gray hair at the temples and the front. It had on a set of cotton pants and a cotton shirt, tied down by a coarse rope, and simple leather shoes. The body stared lifelessly at the wireframe in front of it.

In front of the wireframe, a hologram of a keyboard appeared.

Please spell the name of your character.

The wireframe reached out with a hand and pressed: D, 0, n. And hit enter.

Please pronounce how to say the name of your character.

“You pronounce it like you would for an Italian mob boss. Or like the dawn of a new day.”

Very well. Please step forward into your character to initiate syncing.

The wireframe took clumsy steps towards the human body in front of it. On contact, the purple lines of energy that made up the wireframe fused into the human body.

I could suddenly feel everything. The clothes against my skin. The shifting, hard coins that made up the ground under my feet. The cool breeze that started to blow across my face.

In front of my eyes I could see that the endless sky of space, littered with stars and streaks of purple throughout. Streams of the gold coins that made up the island were flowing off the edges. They were dispersing the fog.

In front of the island was a floating circular flat world. Absolutely huge, it took up my whole vision. There were three distinct continents in the center of the wide ocean.

The one on the left was made of sweeping mountain ranges and floating islands, that looked like they were made of gemstones.

The one on the bottom was a giant archipelago, made up of countless, rich islands.

The one on the right had sprawling green fields and verdant forests and crystal blue lakes.

The edge of the world had a misty, thick fog all around it, but I could see waterfalls flowing into the void of space underneath. The sun was bright and lit up everything beautifully. I could hear rising orchestral music playing from somewhere. From nowhere and everywhere at once, the Overvoice of the game spoke to me.

Welcome, to the world of Golden Age, D0n.

I felt like I could stare at that sight forever.

But I didn’t have that chance. Suddenly the ground began to rumble under my feet. The streams of gold flowing off the side rushed forward, and huge swaths of the island began to break off.

Eventually, the whole island destabilized, falling to the planet below. I went with it. As I was falling among columns of gold and treasure, I heard the Overvoice again.

Due to your region of origin, you will be starting in the Plains Continent. Below, you will enter the Tutorial Village. There, we have provided class instructors, resources, and all the knowledge you will need to explore the game. Have fun.

The ground was getting closer and closer. I could no longer see the edge of the world. Below me was an impossibly thick cloud.

All of the gold around me started to dissolve into particles of light.

I was in the middle of an uncontrollable free fall. The wind was rushing past me so fast it was whipping at my clothes and shoving my hair away. My eyes were tearing up from the force of it.

I felt a wide smile, that showed all my teeth, spread across my face.

It was time to play the game.

#Volume 1 #Story

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lithe-cloud · 5 years

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Since someone requested a character map for my fic A Single Reason, I’ve gone ahead and created this little puppy. Hope this helps anyone who is/was interested. These are all the OC/borrowed characters who have actually any important impact in the story, as well as a few facts you might not know about them.

Epitaph - a mafia-like organization operating throughout the whole of Japan. Drug and illegal firearms trade. Human trafficking. Assassination. Information trade. You name it, Epitaph is probably doing it. Currently is run by the Big Four and was, at the start of the story, almost 10,000 members and associates strong. Has currently gone to ground after a tenth of personnel were apprehended by police following Izuku, Momo and Hitoshi’s desertion.

Big Four

Alkaid - Current leader of Epitaph

Real Name unknown. Quirk: “SUPERNOVA” (ability to ionize gases into hot plasma). Mysterious and secretive, little is fully understood about her other than she has a love of mythology and traditionally feminine appearances. Izuku once saw her snap a man’s spine over her knee a la Bane from Batman.

Senri - Second in command of Epitaph, as well as functional Head of Business

Real Name - “Senri ???”, wanted Momo to call him “Gin” for reasons unknown. Quirk: “HAIR STRINGS” (can manipulate his hair as a prehensile tool). Has a very survival-of-the-fittest mentality, with some (never explicitly shown) p*d*philic tendencies regarding young girls. Doesn’t actually sleep with anyone under the minimum age, though, because he’s trash, but he’s not fucking stupid. Is childhood best friends with Ken and is a former accountant. Also the only one of the Big Four who, arguably, can’t fight.

Blessed - Chief Enforcer

Real Name unknown. Quirk: UNKNOWN. Was a hero before taking a criminal apprehension too far, causing the death of purse snatcher. Is now a wanted criminal was a warrant out for her arrest. Brutal and militaristic, she was the Suzumebachi’s primary trainer before their defections/deaths, as well as a frequent tormentor of Izuku for his quirklessness. She is the one who executed Changeling for attempting to defect.

Ken - Human Resources Manager

Real Name unknown. Quirk: UNKNOWN. Former underground illegal quirk-fighting champion turned villain, Ken is mostly just a career criminal out to take care of his aging parents and keep Senri out of too much trouble. He still manages to operate inside Epitaph and with it’s members with no shred of remorse or shame, and is Senri’s best friend, so, really, how good can he be?

Executives (Aka, Bungo Stray Dog’s characters lol) - as a side note, all their quirks are their gifts in BSD.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke - Izuku’s former Handler and tormentor. Blessed assigned his charge when the boy was 11 and he has hated Izuku ever since. Cruel, temperamental and sickly.

Hirotsu Ryuro - Hitoshi’s former Handler, as well as Head of Torture, Interrogation and Assassination. Was training Hitoshi to be his apprentice and eventual successor when he “retires”.

Ozaki Koyo - Assassin and Momo’s former Handler. Looked after and genuinely cared for Momo in her own way, but only started really recognizing Momo after she voluntarily murdered Phantom’s killer. She and Alkaid also coached Izuku on how to hone his natural charisma with speech-craft.

Other Members

Sakura ??? - Wanted for trespassing, arson and cyber-terrorism, he was Momo’s programming and infiltration trainer.

Hoshigaki - Expert Spy, Assassin and Infiltrator. Chageling’s former Handler before his defection and subsequent execution. Also is Alkaid’s older cousin. She and Blessed had a “thing” some years back.

Kurosaki - A smuggler who managed to get into the Big Four’s graces just enough to be assigned as Hecatoncheir’s Handler. He was murdered when she successfully managed to escape the organization. A member of the original squad sent to kidnap the kids.

Suzumebachi Program (The Squad of Precious/Dead Kidnapped Children lol)

Agent Gamayun - AKA ASR!Izuku

Agent Encantado - AKA ASR!Hitoshi

Agent Yakshini - AKA ASR!Momo

Agent Phantom - Real Name “Nijima Aya”. Quirk: “CHAMELEON” (mimic any color or texture visible to the human eye). She and Momo were closer than any of the other Suzumebachi agents. Dies to a villain raid days before her 10th birthday.

Agent Changeling - Real Name “Shouji Kaku”. Quirk: “STAND-IN” (place an optical illusion over anything he touches). Obsessed with stars and space and was a great story-teller. Shouji Mezo’s paternal cousin. Became suicidal towards the end of his life. Was executed after his fellow Suzumebachi aided him in a failed escape attempt 10 months before the story starts. He was 15.

Agent Hecatonchier - Real Name “Yosano Naomi”. Quirk: “REJECTION” (psycho-kinetically push objects withing a 10-foot radius away from her). The eldest Suzumebachi who became the group’s established leader, mother and older sister all in one. She loved and cared for her fellow Suzumebachi extensively. Successfully managed to escape Epitaph 4 months before the story starts and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. She is currently 16, approaching 17.

The Families - Aka, the people who are just happy to have their children back lol. 8 years is a long time without your babies, ya know...

The Yaoyorozu Family

Yaoyorozu Hisoka - Momo’s mother. Once wanted to be a hero, but became scared after her mother was involved in a car-bombing that left her permanently disabled, then transferred to the Business course. There, she met her future fiance and the father of her child, Tsuzuki Nagare, who would die in a car accident before their marriage. Founded the Yaoyorozu Corporation with Nagare to create premier heroics equipment, supplies and medical equipment. Became a secret underground hero a la Batman called “Lightscreen”, after Momo was taken. Her quirk, “Light Image”, allows her to generate solid light constructs. Her quirk combined with Nagare’s “Toxin Excretion” to make Momo’s “Creation” quirk.

Yaoyorozu Junpei - Momo’s maternal grandfather. A bit of a traditionalist, and a quirkless artist specializing in geometric patterns. He fought hard to gain every inch of his success throughout his life. Was in an artist’s slump before meeting Chidori. She rescued him from a villain attack, and he’s been inspired by her ever since.

Yaoyorozu Chidori - Momo’s maternal grandmother. A courageous and vivacious woman, she was the Shimmering Sorceress, the number 15th Ranked hero of her generation. She saved the isle of Shikoku from the echo terrorist, Chloroshield. In her 40′s, she convinced to retire after being involved in a car bombing that necessitated the amputation of her right leg. Her quirk is “Shimmer”, which grants her the ability to bend photons to her will.

The Shinsou Family

Shinsou Izuna - Hitoshi’s father. A free-lance graphics designer now employed by Hisoka and family man who wants to be supportive of his son, but is also intimidated by his large criminal record. Hitoshi and he share the same quirk, though Hitoshi’s is admittedly more powerful than Izuna’s. He likes working outside, which is part of the reason he’s so tan in the warmer months.

Shinsou Namani - Hitoshi’s mother. A former office worker turned Hisoka’s at-home secretary. Her family, the Seiwara, have a history of mental illnesses stemming from the fact that their family line has a gene that means their brains under-produce dopamine and serotonin. She loves her family very much, and thinks her son and husband are too much like each other despite not spending much time together. Her quirk allows her to sense the neural pathways in other people’s brains, giving her a very limited kind of general, multi-target telepathy.

Shinsou Noriko - Hitoshi’s bold and stead-fast younger sister. She grew up hearing stories of her missing older brother. Now that he’s back, she’s determined to get to know him and help him get back to normal life. Not being able to go to school and hang out with her friends bothers her more than she wants to admit. Her quirk is a mix of Nanami’s and Izuna’s, which allows her to implant powerful suggestions into people’s heads at will.

Other Characters (aka, the ones who have only appeared once or twice, or are recurring, yet don’t have a name)

Tanizaki Junichirou - A BSD character who, in this verse, is a budding politician. One of Alkaid’s information brokers wanted him taken out. Izuku killed him in chapter 2.

Chief Umeji - Tsukauchi’s boss and head of police in Musutafu. A hard-assed but fair man who trusts Tsukauchi’s judgement. His quirk gives him flowering plum-branch hair. His spouse is runs a flower shop painted with a blue rose. They have an adopted daughter. He appeared in chapter 7.

Kaiun Raiyo - Momo, Izuku and Hitoshi’s therapist. Her office is a huge swimming pool due to her aquatic-based mutation quirk causing her trouble on land. Got rejected from a hero course and took the time to try and figure her life out. Her quirk is based off the Abyssal Lagiacrus from Monster Hunter Tri/3U. Appears in chapter 12.

Probation Officer - Momo, Izuku and Hitoshi’s probation officer. He’s cold at first, but seeing the kids interact with their supervisors and hearing, week after week, of their good behavior, he’s starting to soften up. Appears in chapters 8, 9, 10 and 13. He might get a name. Maybe. Eventually.

Hope this helps anyone!!

#A Single Reason #Character Reference #Damn this got long #I try not to make my characters boring lol

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cutsliceddiced · 4 years

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New top story from Time: Inside the Dangerous Mission to Understand What Makes Extremists Tick—and How to Change Their Minds

On a cool winter’s day in early 2014, the American academic Nafees Hamid was invited for tea at the second-story at the Barcelona apartment of a young Moroccan man. It started well enough; they sat down at the kitchen table, chatting amiably in French while two acquaintances of the host sat nearby in the living room. Halfway through the conversation, though, things took a turn. “He started saying things like, ‘Why should we trust any Westerner?’” Hamid recalls. “‘Why would we not kill every one of them? Why should I even trust you—you are an American—sitting here? Why should I even let you out of my apartment?’” The man briefly left the kitchen and went into the living room to speak to the others in Arabic, a language in which Hamid is not fluent. But he repeatedly heard one word he did know: munafiq—a term that, at best, means hypocrite; at worst, “enemy of Islam.”

“I realized that they were talking about me, and that this was going in the wrong direction,” says Hamid, who had arrived hoping to coax the Moroccan to participate in a study.

As quietly as possible, he opened the second-story window and jumped out, his fall cushioned by the awning of a fruit stand below. Adrenaline spiking, he bolted to the safety of a crowded train station a few blocks away.

Field research on jihad has its hazards. Hamid, now 36, had come to the apartment knowing—from a questionnaire he had already filled out—that the Moroccan man harbored extremist inclinations. The effort was part of a larger project to discover the roots of radicalization and what might cause someone to fight or die—or kill—for their beliefs.

Richard MillingtonNafees Hamid in London on August 19, 2020.

But the work goes on, a part of a larger undertaking by an unusual network of policy experts and international scientists, many of whom have their own harrowing tales of escaping danger or navigating dicey situations in pursuit of groundbreaking research. Recently, the group published the first brain-imaging studies on radicalized men and young adults susceptible to radicalization. The private research firm behind the group’s work, Artis International, is officially headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., but doesn’t truly have a base. Its academics and analysts operate from far-flung places, tapping an array of funding from various governments, the U.S. military and academic institutions. The central goal of the firm is to advance peace by figuring out what motivates people to become violent—and how to reorient them toward conflict resolution, or prevent them from becoming violent in the first place.

Read More: This Researcher Juggled Five Different Identities to Go Undercover With Far-Right and Islamist Extremists. Here’s What She Found

That means getting as close to the perpetrators and their supporters as possible. Much of Artis’ work has been rooted in behavioral sciences and informed by straightforward research methods, like surveys. But Artis researchers have also pushed the boundaries of social science, through everything from experimental surveys on armed forces to psychological tests on imprisoned extremists. Its investigations have led researchers to the front lines of the war against ISIS, restive areas in North Africa, and lately into Eastern Europe and cyberspace.

Even by Artis standards, the recent brain-imaging studies conducted in Barcelona—the work that had Hamid leaping from a window—were remarkable for the level of risk the researchers undertook. The scientists wanted to find hard neurological evidence to support previous social-science findings and widely held assumptions: that extremists could be influenced by their peers, and later, that social exclusion may harden the beliefs of a budding extremist. To gather this sort of information, researchers like Hamid would have to scour the streets of Barcelona for extremists; somehow convince hundreds of them to take surveys; and then, after identifying the most radicalized, coax them to undergo multiple brain scans at a seaside hospital campus. What could possibly go wrong?

Origins: A Research Void

The roots of the Barcelona brain studies go back to 2005, when the U.S. government was still absorbing the 9/11 attacks. Richard Davis, who would go on to co-found Artis International two years later, had recently started working as a policy adviser for the U.S. Homeland Security Council (which reports to the President) and was alarmed by how the government came to its counter-terrorism strategies. “It became clear that many of the decisions that were being made—grand decisions about terrorism—were being made with little to no field-based scientific evidence backing them,” he says.

One key problem is that empirical extremism studies require access to materials that governments might not want to share, like transcripts of intercepted communications or interrogations, explains Liesbeth van der Heide, a research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague. Ideally, the studies also involve access to extremists themselves, who are even harder to come by. “There aren’t many of them,” she says. And the ones that succeed in carrying out violent plans “tend to die in an attack or flee.”

So most terrorism research has tended to draw on secondary sources—reports in the media, for example, or other books or articles already published on the subject, resulting, she says, in “an echo chamber repeating what others have said.” An exhaustive 2006 review of 6,041 peer-reviewed studies on terrorism published from 1971 to 2003 found that only 3% were based on empirical data. “Thought pieces”—articles where authors discussed an issue theoretically or offered an opinion—accounted for 96%.

This alarmed Davis. He believed that any government interested in curbing violence needed not more thought pieces, but a more scientific understanding of the people who commit it based on primary sources. Academics already doing this sort of work were rare exceptions, but both Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer turned forensic and clinical psychiatrist, and Scott Atran, an anthropologist, had spent extensive time with members of militant jihadist groups, from the Afghan mujahedin to al-Qaeda. Davis sought them out in the fall of 2005, and by 2007 had convinced them to help him launch a firm dedicated to on-the-ground research into violence reduction. They named it Artis, Latin for “of art,” “of skill” or, in some usages, “of science.”

That same year, Artis cobbled together funding from a range of institutions—including the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—to study the underlying causes of political violence. They decided to focus on a social-psychology concept called “sacred values”—a person’s deepest, most nonnegotiable values—which would lay the groundwork for their Barcelona brain scans.

Sacred Values

In the 1990s, social psychologists Jonathan Baron at the University of Pennsylvania and Philip Tetlock at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of “sacred values” to counter economic theories that suggested everything had a price. Certain values (like human life, justice, civil liberties, environmental or religious devotion) could be so sacred to people that they would be unwilling to act against them, no matter the cost or consequence.

Atran, who had been studying values for decades through the lens of anthropology, began applying this concept to the study of violent extremists after 9/11. It occurred to him then that, perhaps, the perpetrators had committed the suicide attacks in defense of deep values the rest of the world had been overlooking. By 2007, Atran had advanced this line of thinking in several articles about jihadist terrorists. His Artis colleagues found evidence that material incentives may backfire when adversaries see the issues at the heart of a dispute (like land and nationhood) as “sacred.”

The Artis team continued to hone the connection between sacred values and violence into 2014, when a comment from President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper Jr., gave them a renewed sense of purpose. In an interview, Clapper said that the U.S. had underestimated ISIS militants because predicting a group’s will to fight was “an imponderable.” In response to that comment, Atran and his colleagues decided to use their knowledge of sacred values to measure militants’ will to fight, which they believed was indeed “ponderable.”

That same year, they did survey-based research on networks in Spain and Morocco responsible for the 2004 Madrid bombings. It found that people were more willing to sacrifice their lives if they were part of a close-knit group that shared their sacred values. They also began laying the groundwork for a separate study, eventually published in 2017, that found that among members of various forces who fought against ISIS, those who expressed the most willingness to fight and die for abstract values like nationhood, heritage and religion tended to prioritize those values over their social groups, like family.

Still, by 2014 most such work had come from what fighters said in interviews or surveys. Atran was convinced that sacred values were so deep and powerful that the brain must process them differently than it processes decisions about more mundane issues. But to truly understand the relationships between neural pathways associated with such values and willingness to sacrifice for them, Atran and his colleagues believed they needed to get a look inside extremists’ heads.

Recruitment

Barcelona’s Raval district is a maze of graffiti-sprayed buildings and narrow streets. In recent years, chic galleries and boutique clothing stores have begun to spring up between halal butchers and Arabic-language bookshops, filling the boarded-up storefronts emptied by the waves of evictions that ravaged the primarily immigrant neighborhood following the 2008 financial crisis.

The locale has also been the epicenter for a number of foiled terrorist plots, and is carefully monitored by both Spanish and international intelligence bodies for jihadist activity. That made it an appealing place for Hamid and his colleagues to recruit radicalized men for their inaugural brain study on extremists. The Artis researchers planned to use a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to see whether a hardened extremist’s “will to fight” for his sacred values was susceptible to peer influence.

In early 2014, the group decided to target a small pocket of extremists in Barcelona’s Pakistani community that authorities had been tracking for years. They set their sights on 20- to 30-something first-generation Pakistani men who openly supported Lashkar-e-Taiba, an al-Qaeda affiliate based in South Asia. Initially, Hamid’s recruitment strategy consisted of becoming a regular at neighborhood cafés and conspicuously reading articles or books that he imagined might appeal to a jihadist, in hopes that someone would approach him. “That really didn’t work,” he says. “It was far more effective to be transparent.”

So he started to look for Urdu speakers who seemed like they had time on their hands. When he saw likely candidates chatting with friends on park benches or sipping tea at one of the many outdoor terraces in the Raval district, Hamid would approach them cautiously. “I didn’t want to seem like I was stereotyping an entire population … I think, also, I just didn’t want to get punched in the face.”

He explained that he was a psychologist conducting surveys on people’s strongly held values related to religion, culture and politics. After chatting for a while, he would invite them to take an initial survey designed to assess a person’s level of radicalization, according to three specific criteria: their support of the militant jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; their approval of violence against civilians; and, lastly, their expressed willingness to aid or participate in armed jihad. The survey took 30 to 60 minutes to complete, and Hamid paid everyone who took it €20 ($22) for their time. For the purposes of the study, a person who fit all three criteria was considered radicalized, in which case, Hamid would call them to ask if their friends might also want to take the survey.

As a Pakistani American, Hamid was acutely sensitive to the fact that the people he was approaching might feel profiled. (And in fact, a number of the nonradicalized people who gleaned the thrust of the survey questions were offended, he said.) However, he also recognized the scientific importance of focusing on this particular population.

“We wanted to study radicalization in the context of violent Sunni jihadism, which at the time we conducted our research was the main international terrorist threat,” he explains. It made sense to focus on recruiting from population (and Moroccan population for a follow-up study on the brains of budding radicals) because they represented the two biggest Sunni Muslim groups in the area. And, “the majority of people pulled into terrorist groups from the Barcelona region came from those two ethnic groups,” he says.

The Artis team also believed that it was scientifically important to study groups that weren’t white college students—a population so overly represented in cognitive-science study that they have their own acronym: people from white, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies (WEIRD). “Studying sacred values and willingness to fight and die in two separate ethnic groups with very different cultural backgrounds allowed us to examine the generalizability of our claims,” says Hamid.

To protect both the extremists and the study itself, rather than using names, the researchers assigned each volunteer a number. They also tried to avoid asking any questions in the surveys that might put them in tricky legal terrain. “I would tell [the volunteers], ‘Do not tell me anything about a crime you committed, because that will implicate me,’” says Hamid. Instead, the researchers asked hypothetical questions aimed at assessing participants’ beliefs and values, rather than what a person had already done or intended to do with them.

By the end of 2015, Hamid and his team had convinced 146 people to take the survey. He and his colleagues then followed up with the most radicalized of the group—the 45 men who met all three criteria—offering them an additional €100 ($120) to come to a laboratory for the rest of the study. Thirty men, ages 18 to 36, agreed.

Into the Lab

The Autonomous University of Barcelona’s fMRI lab is located in the basement of a blocky gray building flanked by patches of green lawn where, on sunny days, college students like to picnic and read books. There, a team led by Clara Pretus, a neuroscientist in her mid-20s, put these 30 men through the next stages of the study.

The men came to the lab in groups of three or four. After a brief orientation to ease their nerves, the brain scans would begin. The men would lay prone on the bed of the fMRI machine, which would back them into a tube. They wore goggles affixed to a video screen that would flick on and project a statement written in Urdu: “Prophet Muhammad must never be caricatured” or “The Qur’an should never be abused,” for example. Each statement touched on an issue that mattered to the group, based on previous surveys and interviews. The scientists knew which statements aligned with each man’s sacred and nonsacred values, based on those same previous surveys, and they wanted to know how their brains would respond to each. To figure this out, they asked the men to rate how willing they would be, on a scale of 1 to 7, to fight and die for each declaration.

The machine snapped pictures of their brains as the men used a handheld device to make their ratings. After they had gone through all the prompts, Pretus offered them the opportunity to review the slides again—but this time, they’d be able to see how their own responses compared with those supposedly given by their “peers.” This peer group was presented to the men as “the average opinion of the Pakistani community in Barcelona.” But in reality, the researchers had fabricated the ratings for the sake of the experiment. In some instances, the researchers made them appear to align with the men’s responses. In other cases, their “peers” appeared to be more inclined to fight and die for specific values. In still others, less.

After the men had seen how the ratings of their so-called peer group differed from their own, they were given the opportunity to go through the slides one last time—this time outside of the machine—and rate their willingness to fight and die for each statement once again. The scientists wanted to see if the responses from their “peer group” would make them alter their initial responses. In cases where anyone changed his mind, scientists would go back through the fMRI images to see what was happening in his brain as he reviewed the peer information that ultimately compelled him to reconsider his initial answer.

After they completed the final task, the men, whose names they never learned, were free to take their money and go, disappearing into the streets.

Findings

Over the following weeks, the team analyzed the data. As expected, the men expressed greater willingness to fight and die for their sacred values than for their nonsacred values. More interesting were what parts of the brain appeared involved with each question. When participants rated their willingness to sacrifice for their sacred values (defending the Qur’an, for example), parts of the brain linked to deliberation (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, inferior frontal gyrus and parietal cortex, which Pretus describes as parts of the fronto-parietal or “executive-control network”) were far less active than when they rated their willingness to kill and die for issues they cared about less (like the availability of halal food in public schools). Dr. Oscar Vilarroya, the lead neuro-scientist on the team, says this indicates that humans don’t deliberate about their sacred values: “We just act on them.”

While this may seem like common sense, the finding was significant, since nearly all sacred-values research to that point had been based on surveys and other tools that assessed what people said—not tied to brain activity. “When you’re taking a social survey, you can lie,” explains Atran. “But brain patterns can’t be faked.” It was the first published study scanning the brains of extremists.

Knowing extremists essentially don’t deliberate when considering the values most important to them confirmed something Atran long believed: that deradicalization programs focused on altering extremists’ beliefs through logic and reasoning, or through trade-offs and material incentives, are doomed to fail. Others had made this argument to explain why programs like France’s civics- and reward-focused deradicalization program, launched in late 2016, had flopped within a year. Here was brain science to support the case.

There was one finding of the study, though, that provided a glimmer of hope for an alternative approach: the areas in the brain linked to deliberation lit up when extremists realized their “peers” weren’t as willing to resort to violence to defend a particular value. And when given the opportunity, post–brain scan, to revise their initial answers to the question “How willing are you to fight and die for this value?” many of them adjusted their rating to better align with their peers. Hamid says this shows that peer groups, like family and friends, play a powerful role in determining whether an extremist will become violent. They will never be able to change the extremist’s core views or values, he says, but they can convince that person that violence is or is not an acceptable way to defend those values. This finding, Atran believes, could have real implications for governments and organizations working in counterterrorism.

“The lesson … is don’t try to undermine their values,” Atran says. “Try to show them there are other ways of committing to their values.”

Critiques and Real-World Applications

The team’s work, published in the Royal Society Open Science journal in June 2019, has garnered a flurry of attention, especially from social psychologists and other academics interested in human motivation. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University and author of the controversial book The Coddling of the American Mind, commended Atran and his colleagues on their “ecological validity”—how relevant the studies are to real-world problems. “We often use the easiest subjects to obtain, which are college students,” he says. “But Scott, at great expense and with great difficulty has always been committed to ecological validity—to studying people who are truly involved in extreme behavior, including terrorist behavior.”

But academics with a background in neuroscience, including Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, and Patricia Churchland, who studies the intersection of brain activity and philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, expressed more caution. Churchland reviewed the study for Royal Society. In her review, she says, she warned that the brain regions and neural networks from which scientists drew their conclusions are still not very well understood and have been associated with a range of functions beyond simply “deliberation.”

Atran points out that he and his colleagues never set out to map the connection between brain parts and behaviors. Instead, they sought to—and did—find brain patterns that lined up with the results of behavioral studies. (He adds the usual science disclaimer: “All results are tentative, and we look for replication.”)

Meanwhile, as the academic world weighs the research, the Artis team has published additional brain studies on radicalization. And the U.S. military and foreign governments are already plotting how they might put the findings to use. Since the Barcelona work first began, Davis and Atran have been fielding calls from security officials around the world seeking advice on how to deal with radicalized populations and how to apply their research to newer problems, like criminal groups spreading disinformation and taking advantage of weak governance amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Davis is adamant that his researchers steer clear of directly advising any military or government—he doesn’t want the fate of suspects or a nation’s security to be pinned on one of them. But he’s happy to send his colleagues around the world to share their research findings and even collaborate on projects.

And, in a twist, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado got in touch in 2016 seeking to collaborate and study how a cadet’s sacred values and identity with varying groups affect their willingness to fight and die. This April, the Academy, with Artis’ assistance, completed a small study that found that cadets who both viewed religion as a sacred value and strongly identified as a member of a religious group took greater risks than their peers in virtual combat situations. One key takeaway, according to Lieut. Colonel Chad C. Tossell, the director of the school’s Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center, is that the “spiritual strength” of soldiers is as important as the weapons and technology they use. An early draft of the study says the simulation designed for the research could be “useful for selection and training.”

Davis is encouraged by the constant interest he gets from governments, from those in the U.S. to Kenya to Kosovo. The U.S. military continues to aid in funding as the firm sets its sights on the next frontiers: figuring out how and why democratic institutions collapse and how cyberspace is being used to divide people and harden their values, turning nonsacred values into sacred ones. Artis’ work is “first and foremost about field-based scientific research,” and giving policymakers the facts they need to responsibly respond to the problems of the day, Davis says. “We can debate what the meaning of the empirical evidence is, but it’s better to have it than not to have it.

—With reporting by Mélissa Godin and Madeline Roache/London

via https://cutslicedanddiced.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/how-to-prevent-food-from-going-to-waste

#Time #top stories #IFTTT #news

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phosphorescent-naidheachd · 7 years

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Tiny!Obi-Wan and the Red Man, Part VIII

Summary: When an intruder with a red lightsaber invades the Temple creche, 6-year-old Obi-Wan Kenobi’s life is set on a new course. But taking a different fork on destiny’s path doesn’t necessarily alter your destination…

[Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII]

The stone altar burns, more like ice than flame, but Obi-Wan forces himself to keep his hand there.

The world tilts and whirls, only to finally stutter into place. Everything is oddly sharp and clear, crystallized and magnified. The stone beneath his hand has cooled, but the sensation of it is more somehow. Even the room’s scents seem realer than before – as though they had only been pale imitations until now.

“Do you have any notion,” the Sith Lord hisses, “what you have just done?”

Obi-Wan swallows.

He has a bad feeling about this.

Qui-Gon stumbles again, but forces himself to continue moving.

Something in the Force has shifted... but he cannot yet tell whether it is for better or for worse.

Mace appears equally affected, if not more so.

“You felt it too,” he says, and it is not a question.

Qui-Gon nods.

“There is a very old power at work here,” Mace says. “And I sense that young Kenobi is wrapped up in this.”

“You don’t think he’s the source, surely?” Qui-Gon asks, ducking to avoid hitting his head on a lower portion of the tunnel ceiling.

Mace’s face is more solemn than ever as he shakes his head.

“Qui-Gon... I don’t know.”

Something hums and fizzes through his veins, putting him in mind of the thrum of a ship’s engine, or of the weird-smelling bubbly stuff the old creche master used to drink when he thought they were all asleep.

The Force is thick in the air, so dense that he can nearly taste it.

Obi-Wan is abstractly aware that a portion of him is panicking -- what just happened?? -- but it remains distant, as though it were someone else’s panic rather than his own.

“What did I do, then?” he asks, and is surprised to hear how steady his voice sounds.

The Sith Lord scowls and seems to fight himself, but he replies nonetheless.

“You,” he says, “have just made yourself the first Master of this Temple that it has seen in over a thousand years.”

“But I thought that was Master --”

“A mere Jedi formality,” the Sith Lord scoffs. “To be Master of your paltry Order is a political position, nothing more. I speak of actual Mastery -- of real power. Of dominion over the Temple; of the ability to draw from its wellspring.”

Obi-Wan blinks.

That... doesn’t make any sense.

“You also,” the Sith Lady of the holocron says suddenly, “have made yourself his Master.”

She sounds vindictively gleeful.

“I don’t understand,” Obi-Wan says blankly, but he has a bad feeling he understands her all too well.

“An ancient Sith ritual,” she says, waving her hand dismissively. “Involves blood. Very dull, as I’m sure you realized.”

Dull is not the word Obi-Wan would have chosen.

Creepy, maybe.

Dangerous, definitely.

“The key,” the Sith Lady says, “is that you can control him, now, through your bond.”

He blinks again.

“Why are you helping me?” he asks, but he doesn’t take his eyes off of the live Sith Lord, whose expression is furious.

“Perhaps,” she says with a smirk, “I merely enjoy the irony.”

Feeling rather slow, Obi-Wan repeats, “The irony?”

“Why, the irony of the first Sith to take the Temple’s allegiance in centuries being a narglatch in sheep’s clothing, of course,” she says.

Her smile shows all of her pale, sharp teeth.

Obi-Wan swallows hard.

Then what she said hits him.

“Wait, Sith?”

“We’re getting close,” Qui-Gon says. It isn’t the bond that tells him that so much as it is the scent -- or is it the taste? -- in the air.

The Force is stronger here.

Heavier.

Wilder.

The distinctive tang of blood suddenly registers on his tongue, sharply metallic.

He lifts his head in search of the source, only to belated realize that he’s bitten his own tongue.

“I sense it too,” Mace says, and it takes Qui-Gon a moment to realize that he’s talking about nearing their destination, not the blood.

The Sith Lady looks lazily amused.

“You... you must have made a mistake,” Obi-Wan sputters. “I’m -- I’m a Jedi.”

“And your point is...?” she asks, raising a thin brow.

“I’m a Jedi,” he repeats helplessly, clinging fast to the one piece of certainty left in his world.

“Yes,” she says, “and you are also a Sith.”

“It... it doesn’t work like that,” Obi-Wan says.

Does it?

“I think you’ll find that it does,” she says mildly. “Do you know how Sith earn our ranks?”

“By killing each other,” Obi-Wan says.

Everyone knows that.

“Almost correct,” she says. “Sith advance by defeating one another. And you, young one, have defeated a Sith in combat and a Sith by treachery.”

“But I -- I didn’t kill either of them!” he protests.

“Traditionally, when a Sith is defeated, they are slain,” she says with a nod. “But that’s tradition, not law.”

“But it wasn’t m-- you were the...”

He trails off under her gaze.

And that’s when the Sith Lord chooses to strike.

A whisper of wind is his only warning before a red blade snaps into existence where his head had been mere seconds before.

If he was a poor match for the apprentice, Obi-Wan knows he’ll be at an even greater disadvantage with the master.

He scrambles away from the Sith.

Back, he moves, and back again.

His heart pounds against his ribcage, as if as frantic to escape his body as he is to escape the Sith’s lightsaber.

Backwards, backwards, b--

And then the world shifts.

His body screams in agony upon hitting a hard surface, sharp corners digging into his back, but that’s the least of his worries as the Sith Lord looms over him.

It’s then that he remembers Darth Arrava’s earlier statement -- supposedly he can control the other Sith.

“I regret,” the Sith Lord says, holding his lit saber close enough to Obi-Wan’s throat that he suspects he’s going to have burns there if he survives this, “that--”

Obi-Wan closes his eyes and reaches for the Force.

Unlike in times past, it leaps to him, a churning whirlpool rather than a placid lake. The sensation is overwhelming, but he doesn’t have the time to acknowledge it.

Where is... ahhh!

He can feel the place in his mind where their new bond is; it’s a thin, pulsing thread, viscid against his senses.

“T-t-turn off your lightsaber,” he says.

The Sith’s hand barely twitches

“All that power and you can’t even use it,” the Sith says derisively. “Yield to me, child, and I may spare your life.”

It didn’t work. Why didn’t it... maybe she was lying... what if...

No.

He can do this.

“You will turn off your lightsaber,” Obi-Wan says, tugging on that shared thread. “You will turn off your lightsaber and you will turn it off now.”

Sweat pours down his face as he brings his will to bear against the Sith Lord’s.

Seconds stretch out in a battle of wills before there is the snap-hiss of a blade being deactivated.

Obi-Wan sighs in relief --

He is on fire.

That is the only explanation for this kind of pain, coursing lightning-fast and twice as sharp through his veins. Even his teeth hurt.

“Focus.”

The voice sounds familiar, but Obi-Wan cannot place it.

“You -- will --- stop --” he gasps between bursts of pain, “hurting -- meeeee!”

Oh Force, it hurts it hurts it hurts ithurtsmakeitstopstopstopstop --

His vision starts to darken, then whites out in a corona of brilliant, all-consuming light.

The pain is such that words cease to exist. Time ceases to exist.

-- stopstopstopstopstopstopstop --

“STOP!”

And then, miraculously, it does.

By sheer dint of will alone, Obi-Wan forces himself to remain conscious and to speak.

“You,” he whispers hoarsely -- and oh, his throat hurts -- “will... not harm... me ever again... You will not... harm any Jedi again.”

He pushes the commands with all his might, channeling that seething, searing whirlpool.

Its radiance envelops him...

...and he knows no more.

“It’s a miracle the boy is still breathing,” Healer Vokara Che says briskly to her audience. “I’ve never seen anything like it, but research suggests the damage stems largely from a Sith phenomenon known as Force lightning.”

Qui-Gon winces.

Beside him, Mace frowns, and Yoda shifts forward on his gimer stick, shoulders sunken as though under a heavy weight.

“Yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like,” the Healer says. “Remember, the smaller the body, the more concentrated the effects; children aren’t built to absorb that kind of power and they don’t possess the requisite skills to block it.”

“Will he recover?” Mace asks.

“Oh, he’ll recover,” Vokara says, “but to what degree, I can’t say. Once he’s out of the bacta tank, we’ll run another series of tests on him. We know portions of his skeletal system were calcified, especially along his fractured left fibula. We’re fortunate you found him and brought him to us when you did, but he’ll have chronic pain in those areas for the rest of his life. As for his seizures, they appear to have lessened for the moment, but we won’t know whether they’re permanent until later down the road. No, what I’m far more concerned about is what we saw in his brain scans.”

“And that was...?” Qui-Gon prompts.

“Unusual activity in the frontal cortex,” she says. “It’s almost as though he burnt out certain neural pathways in his confrontation with the Sith. Tell me again, what was the situation when you located him?”

“When we entered the chamber,” Mace says, “there was a Muun standing over Initiate Kenobi’s prone form.”

Qui-Gon represses a shiver, remembering.

“I immediately recognized him as the magister of the InterGalactic Banking Clan. Damask tried to pretend he was another of the Sith’s kidnapped victims, but he knew too much... and had forgotten that he was still holding a lightsaber. When confronted, he tried to escape. We fought. When he realized that he could not win, he turned the blade on himself. His death was almost instantaneous.” Mace’s voice is matter-of-fact as he delivers the report, expressing none of the terror and anger of the scene. “We then commed Master Yoda, retrieved both bodies, and brought them here for examination.”

Vokara Che purses her lips and takes a deep breath.

“I did not ask you for a mission briefing, Councillor,” she says. “Describe Initiate Kenobi’s situation, if you please. You said he was prone -- where? The ground?”

“On a raised stone table of some sort,” Qui-Gon says roughly. His heart had nearly stopped in his chest when he’d seen seen the boy lying there, pale and still as death. “It was smeared with blood.”

Vokara nods, seemingly appeased.

“What was his pulse like? His breathing? Were there any tremors in his limbs? Did --” she cuts herself off in irritation and fumbles in her robes. A few moments later, she pulls out a flimsiplast and thrusts it at him with the words, “Just fill out the form.”

With that done, she gives them a curt bow, turns on her heel, and briskly strides away.

Qui-Gon is in the middle of filling out the flimsi when Yoda finally speaks.

“A Sith Lord, you faced,” he says slowly. “And yet away you both walked without injury.”

“With all due respect, Master,” Qui-Gon says, looking up from the flimsi, “I would not call him an easy opponent. Nor would I say that the boy came away uninjured.”

“Known for their restraint, the Sith are not,” Yoda says reprovingly, and taps his gimer stick against the ground for emphasis. “And when a Sith apprentice you faced, well-acquainted with these walls you became.”

“The Force was indeed with us,” Qui-Gon says, but a sense of unease is growing in him.

“Hmmmm,” Yoda says. “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

Mace’s forehead is wrinkled in thought. “We’re missing something.”

“Much we are missing, Master Windu,” Yoda says. “Fear death, the Sith always have.”

“Then why,” Qui-Gon says, picking up on the master’s train of thought, “would one kill himself?”

“A good question, that is,” Yoda says grimly.

“And how just how deep was this Hego Damask’s reach?” Mace asks.

And that’s a disturbing thought. The Banking Clan is both widespread and highly influential. Investigations are going to be a nightmare. And the press...

“Oh, I do hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Right on cue, Qui-Gon thinks sourly.

“Senator Palpatine,” Yoda says. “An unexpected pleasure, this is.”

The mild reproof seems to fly over the politician’s head.

“I heard that Initiate Kenobi had been wounded again,” Palpatine says, wringing his hands. “Dreadful business, dreadful business.”

“How did you learn this?” Mace asks.

An excellent question.

“Oh, I have friends,” Palpatine says dismissively. “I fear I’ve become quite... attached... to young Kenobi, and they’ve been kind enough to indulge me every now and then. But tell me, how is the boy?”

“Better than he was when we first brought him in,” Mace says, gesturing to where Obi-Wan floats in the nearby bacta tank.

His skin is still too pale, and it appears paler yet under the florescent lighting of the bacta tank. Most of the external damage has healed by now, but the occasional muscle spasm makes it clear that he is not well.

“The poor child,” Palpatine says, stepping closer. His hand twitches towards the transparisteel surface of the bacta tank, as though to touch it, but he pulls it back at the last second and cards it through greying red hair instead. “And I hear there was another intruder involved again? A, oh what do you Jedi call them, Shif?”

“A Sith,” Qui-Gon says, restraining the urge to roll his eyes. “And yes, there was.”

“Of course,” Palpatine says. “Do forgive me, I’m afraid my memory for all of these esoteric terms of yours is not as good as it once was.”

Qui-Gon inclines his head.

“Still, two violent intruders in less than a year... Are you sure the Temple is entirely safe?” Palpatine asks, glancing about nervously.

“Quite sure,” Mace says. “The Sith is dead. So you see, there is no need for worry; he no longer poses a threat to anyone.”

“Oh,” Palpatine says, eyes widening slightly. “Well... that is a relief. In that case, we owe this young man a debt beyond all measure for his valiant actions.”

His gaze on Obi-Wan is intense and Qui-Gon feels a sudden, absurd desire to leap in front of the bacta tank to shield him from view.

“Yes,” Palpatine repeats, almost as though to himself, “a very great debt indeed.”

Note: I borrowed the idea of Obi-Wan accidentally becoming a Sith due to a technicality from @letslipthehounds’ delightful You Shall Become (Me).

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