Chapter 7: Traveler

The next acolyte to return after us was Yellow Eyes. Despite being caked in sand, blood, and sweat, she had confidently sauntered back to the dormitories the next day as though she were queen of the universe. That quickly turned to shock, then rage, when she spotted Gaarurra, Squid, and I lounging in the common room.

I barely spared her a glance as she stormed off before going back to my book, only noting that my intuition had been correct about room placements. If I actually cared, I would have felt sorry for Gaarurra's former roommate, who would undoubtedly be shoved into her room in my place.

Speaking of Squid, I still hadn't learned his name and he didn't seem inclined to give it. It seemed he was a bit put out at us for just dumping him at the front door or something else, but he wasn't openly hostile and made sure to stay in relative proximity to Gaarurra or I.

Unless he tried something, I was content to let him be for the moment…not that I wasn't keeping an eye on him regardless. He may be sluggish from the near-death by heatstroke, but that didn't make him any less potentially dangerous.

After our action-packed day yesterday, I contented myself with reading through Spindrall's primer. Not that there was anything else to do. We didn't have access to the academy's facilities, like the training rooms or the archives. Due to Iren wanting to keep everything "fair," we were basically left to sit and twiddle our thumbs until the others got back.

The Sith Language was incredibly complex and maddeningly non-sensical to the point where I doubted I would ever attempt to speak it aloud. An agglutinative language, it possessed twenty-three phenomes made up of seventeen consonants and six vowels, making it remarkably limited compared to spoken Basic due to lacking "p" and "l" sounds.

Translating from Sith to Basic was never perfect and prone to mistranslations due to the absence of certain consonants. Apparently, it was so difficult for non-Sith to learn that even the original Dark Jedi got fed up and created auto-translate amulets. Thankfully, now there are "Sith-to-Basic" dictionaries.

On a morbid note, there are more than forty phrases dedicated solely to describing murdering one's teacher and taking their place. One of the tamer ones involved taking the blood-soaked skull of said teacher and showing it to one's fellow apprentices to establish dominance over them. I felt like that would only result in the galaxy's most dangerous game of "keep away."

And to think, I've only gotten a sixth of the way through the tome and I haven't even gotten started on translating Spindrall's notes. I'm still debating whether it portrays the ancient Sith as hardcore or just fucking nuts.

The sound of metal feet on metal flooring drew my eye up for a moment. Red photoreceptors stared back just as long before the silver-blue droid went back to its duties.

Pissing off the factotum droid wasn't my best decision. It held a grudge and short-sheeted my bed last night, as well as over-starching my spare pair of pants. I'm also going to be checking any food I get from it for poison, just in case. I really needed to remember that while it was a factotum droid, it was also a Sith factotum droid. It probably had assassination functions hidden away somewhere in that chassis.

In my defense, I was really tired and irritable at the time. On the bright side, it's good practice for when I would need to constantly watch my back for assassination attempts from my fellows. Silver lining and all that.

...

The Nautolan was next, arriving on the third day. I didn't know where he'd been sent, but he was followed by a pair of floating orbs made up of what looked to be hastily-cobbled together junk. Like Squid, he wasn't handling the heat very well, but he at least managed to make it to the academy on his own.

I didn't catch his name before he passed out in his room, so I just mentally dubbed him "Tentacles."

The Twi'Lek came in a few minutes after him. While she was covered in cuts and bruises, she was much less haggard-looking. She was even less social than Yellow Eyes, choosing to glare at everyone in silence before retreating to her quarters. Turned out, she was supposed to be rooming with Gaarurra.

I named her "Tails."

By now, I was getting used to my new accommodations. After noting that Yellow Eyes hadn't taken the chance to brutally murder me in my sleep yet, I'd taken the chance to shave and have a long shower, though I kept a knife within arms reach.

My captors had been more concerned with keeping us fed and working than clean. As a result, I had nearly a year's worth of sweat, blood, and cortosis dust clinging to me. I thanked my lucky stars that I was only capable of growing stubble instead of a full beard. I came out about an hour and a half later with more than a few cuts on my face, but I felt better.

After a year with no haircuts, my hair was shaggy and hanging down between my shoulder blades. Since I didn't trust either myself or the factotum droid to cut it, I just combed it and tied it back into a rough, low-hanging ponytail.

It wasn't new for me and I'd done it before during my "I'm going to try stuff" phase of middle school before I quickly learned that it literally took all day for my hair to air-dry. Though given how ridiculously arid Korriban was, that might be a boon now.

Despite how relaxed I was from the shower, Spindrall's message was still bothering me. "Ajunta Pall's path" could reference a lot of things. Not only was he the first Dark Lord of the Sith, he was one of the first, if not the first, Dark Jedi. His experiments in what would become Sith Alchemy were what started the schism in the first place. Whatever the old man's intent, he wanted me to translate the papers he stowed away in my bag.

Besides that, calling me a "Traveler" had some disturbing implications. Even in SWTOR, Spindrall seemed to know more than he ever let on. Maybe he actually did. Zash did supposedly treat him like a prophet, after all.

What else did he know? Did he know anything? Was he just crazy?

All the same, red eyes haunted my dreams that night.

...

"Horns" and "Spikes," the male and female Zabrak respectively, came in on the last possible day of our allotted time a few hours apart from each other. Horns had a ragged stump in the place of his left arm, though he was outfitted with an ill-fitting skeletal cybernetic prosthetic by day's end. Judging by how he kept accidentally crushing things, it was going to take a while for him to get used to it.

Tentacles and Spikes were roomed together and Horns was paired off with Squid.

I don't know why I was giving everyone stupid nicknames. Maybe it was to make them seem like less of a threat or something. Maybe it was just me getting something to piss them off with later. Or maybe I was just distracting myself from my own frustration at attempting to speak even a single word of the Sith Language.

Translating individual words was relatively easy. Figuring out grammar structures and tenses was another matter. Figuring out what sound "dz" was supposed to make was a separate beast from that.

Besides Gaarurra, Squid, and I, everyone had avoided each other as much as possible.

But even without empathic senses, there was a near-palpable sense of suspicion, paranoia, and distrust. If the academy didn't have a "no blatant murder" rule, this dorm would have erupted into a bloodbath by now, if only because of Yellow Eyes.

Probably the exact reason they have that rule, come to think of it.

I'll admit I was feeling it too, though it was mitigated by the small feeling of smug superiority at being the only one to come back completely uninjured.

...

The morning after the twins arrived, the dorms were filled with an unholy racket as everyone's datapads chimed loudly. Nobody said a word to each other as we pulled our clothes, non-descript black robes provided by the academy.

As none of them had been tailored for us specifically, I was treated to the sight of Tails practically drowning in her robes and Gaarurra cramming his way into a slightly too small outer robe. I myself only wore the short-sleeved under-tunic, pants, belt, and boots since it still felt too warm for the whole ensemble, even with the academy's climate controls.

Slipping a knife into my boot, I strapped my sword to my belt and headed out with Gaarurra and Squid. We'd learned quickly that it was a good idea to travel in groups. I may have been in the upper tiers of this particular group strength-wise, but I was far from top dog of the academy.

The older or more experienced acolytes occasionally let their power go to their heads and tended to pick fights with people they saw as beneath them, which included aliens and new arrivals. I hadn't seen it myself, but I'd seen what the successful groups were doing. If you weren't alone, they wouldn't bother you unless they were holding a grudge or massively outnumbered you.

We got to the Overseer's office without incident, though I felt a shiver go down my spine as we passed through the main hall, but it wasn't from the eyes around us. I didn't dare look up, knowing quite well just what was on the upper levels of the academy building.

Iren greeted us with silence from his seat behind his desk, yellow eyes scanning us as we filed in. They paused for a moment on Horns' cyber arm, then continued without a word.

"Congratulations are in order for all of you," He smiled at last, clasping his hands together under his chin. It wasn't a pleasant smile, "It is a rare thing to see every member of a group of acolytes return from their first task. Usually at least one or two go missing, either because they died or they got "lost" in the tombs."

Translation: The acolytes usually off the weakest link before the Overseers get the chance. The fact that no one did was weird for them.

"Now that all of you are here, it is time to discuss your training," Iren stood up and walked around to the front of his desk, "Perhaps contrary to your expectations, I will not be directly responsible for training you. My role is only to supervise the completion of your trials. You will be responsible for making certain that you are up for the task."

He picked up a datapad from his desk and typed in a few commands. The datapads on our own belts chimed.

"You now have access to the various facilities of the academy, such as the archives and the training halls. Make use of them as you see fit," He continued, "You will seek out any teacher you can find.

You will search for any scrap of knowledge you can piece together. You will toil until either your bones or your spirit break. Your success or failure, your life or death, will be in your hands alone."

Silence reigned in the office again.

"You are dismissed. When you have been assigned a task, you will be notified. Until then, good luck."

As the others started filtering out of the room, I stayed put for a moment. I could feel Gaarurra and Squid pause outside the doorway when they noticed I wasn't following.

Iren raised an eye ridge, "You have a question, acolyte?"

"I do," I replied, "Are we being groomed for a particular Lord or are we merely a pool to choose from?"

"The latter," He immediately answered, "That said, it may behoove you to make yourself more appealing and useful for your prospective Master with some independent work."

I said my thanks before rejoining Gaarurra and Squid. While it was a valid question, it was more to gauge the Overseer's reaction. Suffice it to say, I approved. While he was still a snob by default, he was a fair snob. He wasn't an outright ass like Harken or a complete snob like Tremmel.

Whether that made things going forward harder or not was still up for debate. Though he was fair with me, he was also fair with everyone else, minus the racial slurs. He would give just as much help to them as he would to me.

Though I was preoccupied with mulling over this, I noticed that I didn't feel the chill again when we crossed back through the main hall.

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