Kassatiebbel's datalog

[translated from Dressellian]

I suppose the underlevels of Coruscant may be as uncharted as a newly discovered planet in the Kathol Outback but it lacks the desired atmosphere of independent discovery and exploration. When the head office is a comlink call away and you're at most an hour away from cantinas with two credit Lum nights and sleeping quarters that are actual quarters with actual beds, it's not the same.

Anyway, today's assignment is to find a glorified Imperial broom closet down in the underlevels. Exciting! Because it's dangerous they're sending a security droid with me, VLTD-8. It's an intimidating looking model, which did prove useful when some stupid Rodians tried mugging me. So we found the closet and the door was locked. Yay. Filed my report and went off to enjoy two credit Lum night.

[a few days later]

Back to the broom closet. Yessir, it's the exciting life of a New Republic scout for me!

[a little bit later]

Seven hells, what is that poodoo-for-brains boss of mine thinking? Making me play tour guide is bad enough but to a group of (untranslated word) apprentice Jedi?!? It's supposed to say in extra-large font in my file that I don't work with Jedi. (more untranslated words)

[later that day]
That went about as well as I expected. Bonus points for being exposed to an experimental strain of Krytos virus, that'll be good for a couple weeks worth of nightmares. But the nightmares are going to have to compete with spending quarantine with the Jedi to see which one first makes me turn off VLTD-8's inhibitions against killing sentients so that he can put me out of my misery.

[next day, still in quarantine]
Since I have nothing else to do right now, some observations about my fellow 'prisoners'.

• Tryce - as soon as I saw an old-style flight suit and lightsaber paired together I said to myself "Skywalker fanboy". I was half right, he's a fanboy but surprisingly not of a Jedi, of a civil war era hero named Wedge Antilles. He's even got an antique X-Wing that he's restoring. I know this because he won't shut up about the vintage proton torpedo tube he found in the pawn shop where we ran into the Trandoshan's black market ring. But that's okay, he's not obsessed with the Force and the Jedi Way which makes him less suspect in my book.
  
  
• Dr. Artemis - also less suspect since he serves Caduceus Galactic instead of the Jedi Temple and seems to rely more on his medical training than on the Force. Which is good because he appears to be an excellent physician.
  
  
• Dannel - Jedi padworm. (OOC:Heh, that's almost a pun.) And a bit too interested in the Sith artifacts we found for my liking. Someone needs to keep an eye on him. And that someone will probably be...
  
  
• Freya - ...because who better to watch a padworm than a librarian? Seems the closest this group has to someone who'll graduate to knighthood, can actually use the Force. So I'll be avoiding her.
  
  
• Mina - a grease monkey Jedi. Really? That's a new one on me. Like Tryce and Artemis she seems to be focused on things other than the ways of the Force but she's still affiliated with the Temple so I'm still suspicious.
  
  
• Eight - the security droid I mentioned earlier. Didn't notice it initially but it's also a Jedi, or at least it must have been built for Jedi training because it carries a lightsaber and knows how to use it. The Force laughs in my face again, sticking me not only with Jedis but probably the galaxy's only Jedi droid.
  

[translated from Dressellian]

The Force continues to have her way with me and directed events such that my mission to locate and rescue two missing scouts was to the same planet that the junior Jedi were headed to in search of more of Palpatine's Sith artifact collection. I will admit though that if it were not for their presence I may have ended up in the same dire straits as the two scouts who preceeded us to what turned out to be one of Palpatine's carnal pits of depravity.

I am disappointed that the metal-skinned fliers we encountered in the turbulent atmosphere turned out to be genetically re-engineered mynocks. While an impressive feat of biochemistry, as created creatures I do not get to lay claim to them as a discovery. The only other life on the planet, if it can be called that, were trapped impressions left by dying prisoners upon the Force. Given what appeared to be large quantities of Mandalorian Iron used in the construction of Palpatine's prison on the planet, I can only surmise that many of the prisoners were Force users like myself, possibly even some Jedi who the Emperor did not have killed out of hand. I can only hope that what we found were just impressions and not their actual life spirits, to have spent decades trapped in such a state is horrible to contemplate.

Another aspect of the mission that has left me feeling uncomfortable is the ease with which we use Eight as a servile tool rather than respecting it as a sentient in its own right. Droid independence is not something I have spent much time thinking about before but the more time I spend with Eight the more I am forced to ponder it. Especially compared to the case of the astromech droid that actually owns and captains the ship we traveled in, undoubtedly this droid is judged as a full sentient with all the rights accorded to such. But how do you make that judgment? Is there a scientifically determined threshold beyond which a droid is judged to be a rational being rather than just a construct following its programming? Is there a double standard that would be applied to droids like Eight whose programming, if freed of externally imposed inhibitions, would turn it into a mass murderer? Would a memory wipe and reprogramming be judged a technical exercise or the execution of an individual mind, even if it be a sociopathic mind? (I know that some cultures in the galaxy do essentially the same thing to their worst criminal cases.)

Such deep thoughts. Though I gather that many scouts become amateur philosophers given the large amounts of time we spend in hyperspace traveling between systems and working mostly alone in unexplored space so I suppose I should get used to it.

[translated from Dressellian]

Apparently my recorder rod stopped working a while back and my last couple of log entries ended up just being me talking to myself. So to briefly recap some of the high points:

• On Tatooine we captured a gangbanger assassin who had learned on his own to manipulate the Force into making other people burst into flames. Lovely. The Jedi Council wasn't sure what to do with him when we dropped him at their doorstep, apparently they thought we were going to kill every Dark Side user we encountered. Surprise!
  
  
• On Kessel we stopped someone who had been taken over by a Sith artifact. We rescued a bunch of miners who were being held captive and driven crazy (literally) but not without problems, namely Tyce gave into his fear of spiders and called upon the Dark Side to give him strength. Force knows even trained Jedi aren't perfect but how could his master have let him finish his training with such a strong fear lying just beneath the surface? Seems to me that with all the arachnid species and even sentient races out in the galaxy such a crippling fear would be a much bigger concern than "lacking discipline" and "not respecting the ways"!
  
  
• Something that may be even more disturbing was what we found on Raltiir. Droid on droid lightsaber action is unusual enough, but the realization that the defeated droid had built its own lightsaber raises the spectre in my mind of a Force-wielding droid, and apparently there are nine more out there! I suppose that some of the non-Jedi schools of Force users may not put as much ritualistic importance and personal significance to lightsaber construction, after all Darth Vader or one of his apprentices must have made Eight's generic-looking lightsaber, so maybe this droid didn't actually make its own lightsaber, maybe it was just done by the same sentient who designed the droid itself. I want to think that's the case, but my mind won't let go of the idea.
  
  
• Then we got in way over our heads and took it upon ourself to investigate the murder of a Jedi Knight. Sure, the group of them were enough to take down one Sith-possessed, Dark Side using scientist but reports of two assailants wearing lightsaber-resistant armor taking down a full Knight? Lets just say that I was hoping the mission would only involve learning the identities of the attackers and then we could pass the buck to the Jedi Council. As it was, we didn't accomplish that but we did encounter two other beings wearing lightsaber-resistant armor, that were also Force users, who were investigating it also and they thoroughly kicked our asses. Probably without even breaking a sweat. They were Jensaarai, who I gather are some kind of Jedi knockoffs that follow a heretical philosophy but aren't outright evil like the Sith. Though you'd never guess that from the artistic stylings of the armor they wear.
  
  
• To make a bad situation worse, we learned that the dead Jedi was one of several who have been having prophetic visions about the Dark Side destroying the galaxy in the near future. Four planets are involved and we've already been to one, our first STARS mision to the prison planet. I was able to help identify two of the others but the third one remains a mystery.
  
  
• Then we set off in search of a ghost ship, a dreadnought that had absconded with some boarders who thought they'd found some easy salvage. Looks like the ship belonged to B'omarr monks and was used a long, long time ago as a dumping ground for the brains that couldn't handle being separated from their bodies. After all this time it's probably just running on autopilot, it's doubtful there's any brains left aboard still alive after all this time. We're en route to the dreadnought's next stop, maybe the boarders will still be alive when it gets there but it's got such an old, slow hyperdrive I have my doubts that they could have found enough food and water to last them that long. And that doesn't even consider the possibility that they'd also have to deal with insane brains in jars controlling the ships systems and who knows what in the way of defensive systems.
  

[translated from Dressellian]

The ghost ship, as expected, was full of insane brains in spider-bots. To think that just a few months ago I'd have never said anything remotely like that previous sentence. We found one survivor and one almost survivor, the body was alive but the brain wasn't (having been removed and replaced with one of the insane jarred brains.)

Not much more to say on that one. Wish our current one was that simple. At the moment we're knee-deep in bantha poodoo on Vigil in the Corporate Sector. Rushing to the rescue of STARS Bravo, we found that they weren't in as dire of straits as their report had indicated and I think we made the situation worse. The trouble on Vigil is being instigated by a group of droids from the same line as Eight, and they immediately zeroed in on us when they noticed Eight. And unlike Eight, they appear to have no moral inhibition overrides, are probably carrying real lightsabers and they're very good at sneaking up on us unawares. We have two members of Bravo to rescue from the clutches of this nascent droid rebellion with little time to formulate any kind of plan. Fortunately (?) we tend to act first and think later so that may not be a hinderance....

[translated from Dressellian]

Amazing. Simply amazing. The Jedi Council confirmed my opinion that they're a bunch of scared bureaucrats who don't know the first thing about what they're doing or what it means to be a Jedi. That they could condone Freya attacking Tyce with a Sith artifact "to see what it does" blows my mind. I halfway believe that if Tyce had been killed in the process they would have simply shrugged and said something like "oh well, at least we know what it does now". And I'm more than halfway convinced that would have been Freya's reaction as well.

It's been very difficult for me to not give into the anger and hatred that's been aroused in me by this event. And the fear. The fear that the galaxy is going to be destroyed because the so-called Masters we have sitting on the Jedi Council do not deserve their positions or their titles. I can no longer work for them as part of STARS and I certainly cannot work with Freya anymore. So it's back to the scout service for me, assuming that they'll still have me.