The Gardener's Tale [Star Wars SI]

Synopsis: A self insert who was dropped into an alien body on corriban.

Author: YeahOkayCool

Site: Spacebattle

Chapter 1:

Hey there. My name's Tipros. I don't belong here, but I am anyway. Let me tell you about it:

Location: The Middle of Nowhere

Date: Not a Fucking Clue

I'm not sure where I'd have necessarily wanted my grand adventure across the galaxy to begin, but I knew that waking up half-naked and alone in the middle of a desert was not on my list of preferences. Not that it wouldn't be an interesting beginning, you understand, but it's one of those things that's only interesting when you watch it happening to someone else.

When it happens to you, it sucks. It really, really sucks.

At first, you're just confused—whatever you were doing just a second before in your old life is gone, ripped away like waking up from a dream. You look around at the rocky, arid gully stretching out below you, feeling the heat of an unfamiliar sun slowly baking your bare shoulders. You look up, expecting to see clouds or maybe a plane, but all you see is empty sky glowing a strange orangey color you've never seen before and two giant goddamn moons hanging in it like everything's totally normal. You finally notice that weathered statue of a hooded man with a sword off in the distance, and how from this angle the sunlight gleams off the polished stone sword to make it look like the statue's wielding a glowing beam of light, almost like a… lightsaber.

Then that strange feeling of movement on the back of your head finally becomes too persistent to ignore so you reach up to investigate—and stop when you notice that the weight is a tangled mass of ribbony tendrils waving around where your hair used to be, and your skin is bright blood red.

And then the truth of your situation finally hits you right in the soul like a runaway train, a thousand tons of shock and loss and fear and pain slamming into you all at once, crushing you in on yourself from all sides like the claustrophobic pressure of the deep sea and all you want to do—all you can do, really—is scream.

So I did just that.

Screaming felt good for a while, then it started feeling pretty bad for a while, and then even the concept of "a while" fell away as the outside world stopped existing. My thoughts exploded into incoherence. Random scraps of ideas and emotions came out of nowhere and streaked back out again. I couldn't even hold a thought. Kept screaming, though.

Eternity passed.

At the end of that eternity came silence—I had finally screamed myself hoarse. I took a deep, shuddering breath, exhaled, and tasted blood. Slowly, painfully, I began knitting my thoughts back together again. It started with a simple realization: that no matter what else I was, I was still me. I could still remember who I had been before. The memories were painful, but they were still there, and that was the important thing. My mind was still my own, no matter the species of my body. From that one axiom, that one handhold of sanity left in the infinite crush, I began to start considering my predicament more logically. I mean, it sucked that my old life was over, as far as I knew, but there didn't seem to be anything I could do about that right now, so there was no point in raging over it. And besides, there were definitely some good points to my situation.

For one, being a—what the hell were they called? Those Clone Wars aliens, right? Mikkian, I think they were—was admittedly a pretty big shock, but nowhere near as bad as it could've been. The Mikkians were basically Crayola-colored humans with wonky tendrils for hair—two eyes, two ears, two hands, and a mostly-human face. All stuff I could work with. I couldn't even imagine being a Miraluka, trying to figure out how to see using the Force. Or being a Hutt. Ew, fuck. If I had become a Hutt I'd be seriously considering suicide right now.

Secondly, I was still male. Thank God. Nothing against the ladies, of course, but I don't know if I'd be able to handle a change that… dramatic. Stick with what you know, right?

Finally, my old life being gone definitely had its positives, too—nothing that really balanced out the giant looming negative of everyone and everything I know and love is gone, probably forever, but the cloud did have a tiny glint of a silver lining. Waking up here was a hard reset, a completely blank slate. I had been given the perfect chance to start over, free from all my old responsibilities and concerns. And it wasn't just a whole world, but an entire galaxythat lay open ahead.

I mean yeah, getting here sucked royally, but how many people got an opportunity like this? No point in wasting it.

Okay, so. Time to make a plan. I re-focused and the outside world started flooding back into my awareness. The sun was a lot lower on the horizon than it'd been before I started screaming; if this planet was anything like Earth, it would be dark in about an hour. And deserts get dangerously cold at night. Definitely not a place to sleep half-naked on the bare earth. Priority Number One was finding shelter. Priority Number Two was figuring out what planet I was on and getting the hell off it, but one step at a time.

I looked down at the hooded statue looming over the plain like a sentinel. Obviously someone had built that, which made it the only sign of civilization in my field of vision. Smart money was on finding people in that direction.

Nowhere really to go but down.

It took me the better part of an hour to pick my way down the rubble-strewn slope, and by the time I got to the bottom the sun had already dipped below the ridge, blanketing the plain in shadows. It was slow going—I wasn't barefoot, thank God, but in the growing darkness I didn't trust my footing too well.

And the darkness wasn't just literal either. Don't ask how I knew, but I just knew that something on this planet was profoundly wrong. Maybe it was the sudden existence of a whole new sense organ on the back of my head. All those tendrils writhing around back there weren't just for show—they seemed to work a lot like snake's tongues, trickling a sensation into my brain that was like a super-strong combination of smell and taste. Maybe that's why they were always moving, they needed to constantly sample air currents. Regardless of exactly why, I was picking up all sorts of smells and tastes from the surrounding plain. I could feel it all, from the slightly alkaline scorch taste of the sand to the dessicated saltiness of the rapidly-cooling air. Trippy.

And the weird part was that underneath those smell-tastes was a separate sensation, underlying it all and overpowering them—a powerful bitterness, like black coffee brewed way too strong, with sickly moist notes to it like rotting flesh. It trickled into my head and I felt a sudden rush of energy, a surge of power that banished all my fear and exhaustion. That scared me, because as I felt the energy blossom through me I felt a surge of other, darker feelings. Anger, fear, hate, coming out of nowhere and filling me up until I felt like the energy was going to tear me apart from the inside. I wanted release. I wanted more than anything to just take all this energy and hurt something.

Shit, this whole planet just felt evil. That and the creepy statue gave me a strong suspicion of where I was—

Korriban.

Yes, the Korriban. Horuset-I. Graveyard of the Sith.

Well that's just great. Korriban. Of all the planets in the galaxy, I had to start off on fucking Korriban. If I don't die of thirst while wandering the desert, chances are I'll run across some kind of Sith or dark side cultists who'll be all too happy to kill me.

Well, I supposed as I picked my way across the now-dark plain, at least there was one spot of good news. I know that there's at least one settlement of Korriban with a spaceport: Dreshdae. A real shithole of shitholes, if my KOTOR playthrough was any indication, but chances are if I got there I'd be able to broker passage offworld. There was no way I was staying here any longer than I had to.

But before I could worry about that, I had to figure out where on Korriban, and more importantly when in the timeline, I was. Judging by the lack of living things around, chances are the Sith Empire was no longer a going concern. That didn't really narrow it down, though—I could be in pretty much any time within three thousand years from then and, well, shit. I really had no way of knowing when I was until I reached Dreshdae. Shit, don't think about it, just focus on the here and now. All I gotta do is deal. Just deal.

I was do busy just deal-ing that I practically tripped over the statue—or at least the dais the statue was on. One last beam of fading sunlight glinted off something metallic behind it. Getting closer, I saw that the statue was positioned just perfectly to hide a small, rectangular black door recessed into the rocky bluff. The door was wide enough to maybe fit two people passing shoulder-to-shoulder, and while obviously old it didn't seem to have any rust or scouring from the elements on it. Just a hinged slab of black metal, no designs or insignia or anything to tell me what it was.

Nothing but the bittersweet miasma of pure evil that rolled off it through the air. You could practically draw stink-lines over it like in a cartoon. This was a Sith tomb, no doubt about it.

But, it was also the only shelter around, and this evening wind was starting to pick up a dangerous chill to it. So I wrenched open the door and climbed in like a dumbass. What can I say? Death by vengeful Sith spirits was a far more exciting way to die than hypothermia.

In retrospect, I should've gone right back out and given hypothermia another try once I noticed that someone else was clearly living in this tomb. The fact that the tunnels branching deeper into the rock weren't pitch black was the big tip-off. I mean, unless the dark side could make those torches on the walls burn for thousands of years without needing to be replaced, there was obviously someone in here with me. I felt unease growing in my gut. If I was lucky, it might be just some treasure hunter looking for artifacts, and maybe If I talked to them I could bargain my way offworld.

If not… well, better not to even think about that right now. Getting your soul sucked out and used as a battery for a pissed-off Sith ghost is bad enough without obsessing over it beforehand.

Shrugging off my unease, I crept down the torchlit tunnel quietly as I could, Mikkian head-tendrils waving behind me. I couldn't seem to consciously control their movement—they just sort of streamed around, writhing against each other like a den of annoyed snakes. It wasn't uncomfortable exactly, but the sensation would definitely take some getting used to. Though I was getting better at making sense of the chemicals they were sensing. If I concentrated, the different smells and tastes almost formed a kind of map of the tunnel around me. It got so I imagined I could have navigated my way down the passages with eyes closed. I could just about sift through the overpowering bitter murk of the dark side to detect some kind of oily salty smell-taste from the chamber up ahead—a slight whiff of sweat, like you get from a lot of people in close contact.

My heart rate quickened. There were people behind that door. This being Korriban—and more specifically, the middle of a Sith tomb on Korriban—made the chances good that whoever was behind that door was not particularly friendly. The dangerous reek of Korriban's dark power was, if anything, even stronger behind that door. But I didn't really have too many options. If I stayed out here in the hall, there was nowhere to hide if whoever it was came out. That sounded like a big room in there, maybe even the main burial chamber. Chances I could find a nice hidden corner to curl up in for the night and be out before anyone noticed I was there. It was a risk, but one I was willing to take.

I pushed the door open slowly. The hinges glided silently against each other as torchlight flooded the hallway. I looked in, and I nearly had a heart attack.

Now, I really don't know what I expected to see when I opened the door. A sarcophagus, maybe some treasure hunters, a Sith ghost if I was really unlucky.

But I didn't expect to see a dozen or so figures, all in black robes and hoods, silently meditating in a circle in the center of the room.

I also didn't expect to see a glass-fronted metal cylinder, covered in control panels winking pale color into the gloom, resting upright like an obscene standing stone in the middle of their circle.

And I certainly didn't expect to recognize the figure inside the cylinder. Or more specifically, I recognized the figure's craggy, organic-looking armor, covered in crooked spines and pebbly scales.

My heart dropped into my stomach as I fought the urge to panic. Oh shit. Oh damn. I was way later along in the timeline than I thought. Did Dreshdae even still exis—

Then I felt it. The sickly bitter taste of darkness descended on me like a huge smothering cloud. Waves of foreign emotion buffeted me as I could feel the power of their combined minds building in the center of the room like a massive storm-front of power. The pod with the armored man in it was the only calm place in the room. He was like the eye of a hurricane, the hole of a whirlpool—he took in their power and let it flow in and through him without pause or interference, letting the crashing smothering waves of hate and rage wash through the room to join the endless black ocean of evil that was Korriban. My feet were frozen in place. I couldn't breathe. The power was overwhelming, I was drowning in it! Desperately, I gasped for air—

Only to see every single one of the figures turn to look at me.

One, a burly Chagrian with a missing horn, stood up. Slowly, his right hand rose to point in my direction. "None must know of our presence here," he said in a deep, oily voice. "Kill the intruder. So demands Our Lord Krayt."

The hooded figures rose and ignited their lightsabers in unison, crimson glow reflecting like fire off the swirling dust.

So I did what anyone would do in that situation: I turned and ran for my goddamn life.