The Brotherhood of Darkness are cheap mother herders. I've been on several attack ram missions, and despite not helping in any way a fact they blissfully remained ignorant of, thanks to my expert Force Camouflage and acting I've just about earned enough kudos points to visit the academy's library and peer into my first Holocron.
Looking at the vast amount of Holocrons lined up gave me chills. I had thought the Jedi Library was impressive, but the sheer quantity of Dark Side Holocrons here put the Jedi's to shame. I hadn't seen the restricted Jedi Holocrons, as they were meant only for Masters and maybe their Padawans, but unlike the restrictive Jedi, the Brotherhood collected any piece of information that would make them strong. No ability in the Force was out of bounds.
"Look at this wealth of knowledge, Ban," an older, scarred Initiate named Kresh sneered, walking past me as I stood before a towering obsidian shelf. "Only the strong get to drink from this well."
If you wanted to learn how to turn people inside out, there was a Holocron that had a Master with its teachings inside. One Holocron could contain the complete life story of an unimposing Master from a thousand years ago, or a Master who was able to mind control a long dead battle creature. In short, there were lots of less useful Holocrons, but the nature of the Dark Side meant that lots of Masters had made their own, ensuring an abundance of information.
The worst part of it all was the Brotherhood didn't offer a Dewey Decimal Classification System. Everything was haphazardly organized by size and color. The Brotherhood did have a way to navigate through this much information, but you had to pay for that as well. Nothing was free.
The Holocron library was a dead end. I didn't have enough kudos points to continuously check the many Holocrons for something that might be useful.
The whole thing was frustrating. I had better luck learning Dark Side powers from the criminals and prisoners I encountered on Coruscant than I did with the Brotherhood's Holocron library. In jail, it might have cost me a packet of data disks full of entertainment, but I had been taught the beginnings of my illusions and mind manipulation techniques from a genuinely knowledgeable underworld figure.
Here, in the Brotherhood training grounds, everything cost something from the users, usually some action that might tear down your morals and cause you to tread down the Dark Side with your emotions firing on all cylinders. That was the way the Brotherhood wanted it. But for me, the cost was too high. I would easily kill anyone here and not think twice about it, but not at the cost of my rational mind and emotional control.
The irony wasn't lost on me that while I was able to escape the greatest prison ever to be made, this dustball of a planet was causing me no end of trouble. If only I had some droids and machinery to work on without some hothead initiate crushing it or slicing it in half because they felt like it.
And then there was the Brotherhood's specialty of not trusting anyone, especially their initiates. Highjacking a ship had a high chance of just being blasted out of the sky by internal security. A better pilot than me might have made it, but my talents didn't go in that direction.
My best chance of escape was still to wait for the Brotherhood and the initiates to be defeated on one of their raids and just blend into the background, steal a ship in the chaos, and get the hell out of there. Since there was no usable tech I could fiddle with, the planet was a dead end when it came to droids, computers, and anything mechanical.
There was more bad news. Some asshat had learned Force Lightning and was pretty good at it. I wouldn't care, but the jerk was using it to bend and break the other initiates to her will. She was actively stealing their resources, and mine were next.
"You look like you need a jolt of motivation, Ban," she said, cornering me in the barracks, her hand crackling with blue energy. "Hand over your ration card."
It was a shame that when she turned up and used it on me, I was forced to use my unique Force Lightning on her. She didn't survive. She was a genius in Force Lightning theory and application, but I had been taught how to use energy manipulation to cause rapid biological failure by legitimate Dark Lords of the Force, gleaned from a few minutes of intense reading on a datapad before it was stolen. My ability was specialized and lethal, focused on internal damage rather than external spectacle.
Now I had a dead initiate body, which I promptly sold to the Master in charge of disposal for extra kudos points.
"A simple matter of self defense," I explained, projecting utter exhaustion and a feigned flicker of fear.
With the proceeds, I bought the index to the Holocron library.
"The Index only tells you the title of the Master who created it and the primary technique involved," the Master told me, taking the credits. "The context is extra. Start reading, Ban. Or die trying."
I chose Knowledge Drain. My logic was simple: if I'm going to be stuck here, then I might as well get what I can. I wasn't willing to save up the points by doing dangerous missions and killing just so I could learn slowly from the Holocrons. Instead, I was going to get my information from the other initiates by taking it straight from their minds.
It was a brilliant combination. I would stun them in their rooms with a little Force Lightning, or smack them in the back of their heads with a bit of precision telekinesis, or even use a modified, non lethal grenade I smuggled in.
Then, I would search their minds. It was hard because their strong negative emotions protected them, creating a psychic shield, but with my constant, refined use of Force Enlightenment paired with the Knowledge Drain ability, I got the best results I could muster every single time. Some of the initiates would shake and turn in their unconscious bodies, fighting the intrusion, but I didn't feel bad for taking what I wanted from their minds.
It was the Brotherhood of Darkness way, and they would do it to me if they had better control. By the very nature of the ability, I couldn't be absolutely sure that someone hadn't already done it to me, but I seriously doubted it. If they found out I had been reborn, I would be locked in a room and experimented on endlessly, a fate worse than death.
The information was glorious. Learning from the Holocrons indirectly was the best; the information learned from long dead Masters who specialized in the craft had no equal. The best part was that some of those Holocrons had deeply embedded emotional mind 'fuckery' that tried to push the user to the Dark Side, but I learned the techniques through the already filtered mind of the initiates, which was like a passive shield against the worst psychological effects.
I also used a few targeted illusions and mind suggestions, putting them into the initiate's minds to cover my tracks. If it wasn't for the constant threat from the initiates and Masters, and the endless missions and the killing, then it would be a relatively nice, if spartan, place to learn. At least they served meat, though it was a shame that it was pickled. "They surely must be evil," I thought, "if they enjoy pickled rations."
My only true activity was picking the brains of the initiates. There wasn't any tech to fiddle with, and I didn't dare try to connect to my business in case the Brotherhood was listening in. This kind of life would have been profoundly boring if it wasn't for the life threatening initiates who provided both learning material and occasional violence.
With nothing to do but pick the minds of the initiates, I got really good at Knowledge Drain and Mind Manipulation, so good that I started incorporating my mind illusions from afar.
"The trick is to persuade the mind with things it already knows and then embellish," I theorized in my mind. "If you go against the person's nature and push in a direction they wouldn't take, then then they start to rebel, and when that happens, Force users start to use the Force in ways that can protect them and interfere with my illusions. In other words, keep it as real as possible."
It was a paradox that normal people are harder to control because they have a diversity of emotions, wants, and needs, but the Dark Side users, despite their Force power, use only a narrow spectrum of negative emotions to power their abilities. This narrow focus makes them predictable and easy to manipulate.
I've classified their emotions to better help me use my illusions:
Hate: This seems to be the cornerstone of all the Darksider's emotions. It gets massive tasks done but it can cloud the details of the Darksider's mind. This is perfect for my manipulation. I can drive their mind to certain places with hate and use the emotion to blind them to any imperfections my illusions have.
Fear: This is subtle. Too much, and the mind will rebel and cause unknowable, unpredictable actions. Just the right amount freezes up the mind and body, giving me time to adjust and strike.
Frustration: This is a problem because of how the mind works hard to solve the problems it encounters. I use a little bit of Inadequacy to temper the rolling, problem solving mind and curve the frustration into self loathing.
Guilt: I can't seem to effectively use guilt to control my subject. It's not that Darksiders don't have any; they have tons of the stuff. It's just they choose to ignore it or immediately blame others for it. It's the fastest and most elusive of emotions, and because of that, I can't use it yet. But when I'm able to utilize it, the Darksiders will be in deep doo doo.
Resentment and Jealousy: These are a pair of super effective emotions that I use with gusto. This long forgotten dark side academy is filled with resentment. It's my go to emotion when I manipulate the initiates.
I used this framework to steal from one of the most powerful initiates, a male Twi'lek named Gorn, who had taken all my initial supplies. I created the illusion in his mind that Kresh, the man who first greeted me, had broken into his room and taken his prized cortosis weave armor plating.
"Kresh took your armor, Gorn," I whispered, manipulating his resentment toward Kresh. "He thinks he's better than you."
Gorn, consumed by hate and jealousy, immediately cornered Kresh, providing a massive, bloody distraction while I slipped in and took the real spoils: the armor plating, and a selection of exotic power cells he had recently won on a raid.
That's how I got my hands on some very interesting items.