Pulling off her helm Aran set it aside, shaking her hair out with one hand drying the strands with a shake into the air. Helm free from her hands, she unclipped the neck apparatus from its filtering unit, lifting it up and over her head to set it beside the helm.
It was almost armor, of a sort at least, and protection a year ago she would've balked at wearing. Except now she was on Kaas working as a Sith Alchemist and spending her time in the banks of the medical facilities of the capitol, sifting through medical files and more often disease samples to create her own strands.
Why? She paused in the absent-minded motion of running fingers through her longer hair as if contemplating her self-imposed question.
She felt the itch to test her creations in more than just a lab environment. She had unleashed her first creation, her first force-crafted plague, and watched it turn three slaves into berserkers who ripped each other apart. They had been gouging each other to pieces with their fingers, yelling and screaming, and instead of being torn by the pain she had inflicted she recalled grinning, a pleased look about her face, and she wanted to unleash it somewhere with purpose then. She felt the heady draw of their dying emotions, their pain, their screams of agony and pure rage, and had tasted them like a fine wine.
When the slaves were nothing but corpses and the contagion had been removed from the air Aran had turned her attention to one more task. Three vials. She'd made three vials of an antidote and sent them off by blind courier to her recipients. Why had she made those then? If the reason she had made her plague was 'because she could' and 'because it was interesting to do' then why had she crafted an anti-serum?
The same reason. After she had made her plague, it was a further challenge to make something to prevent it. But why had she made so little?
Her head turned as if looking down the hall of the rooms she was leaving. Her allies... had no need of it. Her allies were formidable, skilled, and talented. Her allies needed no protection from her creations because she wouldn't unleash them against them - they had become her good friends, not just allies. Confidants. The few things keeping her alive in the world she existed in now.
She pulled off her gloves, pressing a hand against the wall. Her allies had no need of an antidote because they would be standing with her, watching the results of her plague spread through their enemies. And the people she had sent it to... it was futile to hope they would understand what she did. Why she did it. What drove her.
It was an illusion, a hope, a secret wish she kept buried deep, displaying to no one - she wondered if that last hope would wear away with time or was it wearing away now? She had begun her second plague and realized that at no point would she send the vaccine to the people she'd mailed one to before. She would work on this new one, this banked secret, in the hopes that if she ran into people she had an unstoppable, unbreakable method of attack.
This time she would perfect the method of transport she had begun to grasp before. The first plague - it required inhalation to spread. But she now was attempting to directly manipulate the normal immune system inside a victim until it became infected. A plague begun in a way no one could defend against, at least no one who was not force sensitive. She'd need to start small - slaves - then work her way to the failed acolytes again.
And get new ones as well. Her last batch had died under her careful ministrations.
So many things whirled in her thoughts that she stopped herself, realizing now was the time for a break. Undoing the front of her robes so the skin could air, she went off in search of her current dancer, wanting to unwind. She would think better when relaxed, and nothing relaxed her quite as much as the feel of skin against skin, the beat of drums, the lute and lyre, all woven together into a dance of touch and taste.
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