[A/N : I took you guys' suggestions and edited the chapter. Here you go! See and tell me if this is better!]
_______________________
Finishing our meeting, we left with the queen's assurance of support, convening at the hangar.
"What will you do now? I don't think you have accomodation here on Naboo yet." Padme offered, "You can stay with us for now if you want."
"Thank you, Padme. If you could host Offee for a while, that would be great." I said.
"Just me?" Offee asked, "Where are you going?
"To my lab. I need to work on some projects, repair my armor, before I can go to Ryloth. In the meantime could you pick up our domicile certification for me?" I asked.
"Alright. But don't you dare rush into battle without me. Promise me you'll come back and get me when you are ready?" She asked, squeezing my hand.
"Of course, Offee." I said, looking her in the eyes.
I won't obviously. But better that she doesn't know that.
"And don't forget us either. We're coming with you to Ryloth." Anakin said, patting Ahsoka's back.
"Are you sure? You left the war behind, Anakin. Don't be so quick to jump headfirst into another so soon."
"If I can help save lives, to atone for the jedi's mistakes, I would like to go with you." He said.
But Padme beside him didn't look so sure.
With her eyes she gestured at me.
'Don't!'
I gave her a slight and understanding nod.
"Sure. When I come back for Offee, you can come along." I replied, "Now I really need to go. See you guys later. And take care of Offee."
I turned to walk away, when suddenly, Offee's eyes rolled back into her head, and a thundering crackle sound out. A wave of force energy rippled out from Offee, knocking us over.
"Offee!" I cried, grabbing her limp form, shaking her head.
"I have seen this before!" Anakin said, rushing beside me, "She's having a force vision! Lay her down on the floor."
I followed his instructions and asked.
"What now?"
"Now we wait! There's nothing that can be done." Anakin explained, shooing the palace guards away.
I sat down beside Offee as minutes passed before she spasmed again, and her eyes rolled back in.
She looked at me conflicted, and there was a deep sadness in her eyes, before she shook her head.
Now when she opened her eyes, the sadness had been replaced with resolve.
"What did you see Offee?" Anakin asked.
"Nothing." She said, with a resigned smile, tears glistening in her eyes.
As if anyone's believing that crap!
She grabbed me and pulled me into a deep, passionate kiss.
"Don't leave me alone. Come back to me, alive." She whispered, letting go, her eyes poring over every bit and feature of my face as if committing it to memory.
That isn't worrying at all!
"I won't. I mean I will. You know what I mean." I said, running my hand through her hair, planting microcameras and sensors on her.
She definitely saw something in there.
And I will find out what.
If it hadn't been necessary to repair my armor and free Ryloth in the given time frame, I would have stayed and interrogated her more thoroughly.
But I had work to do. I was running on borrowed time.
"Keep an eye on her will you." I said to Padme.
Padme nodded.
"Two eyes. As often as I can spare them."
While Anakin gave me a knowing proud big brother nod, Ashoka shuffled in place, eyes downcast, as she gave me a torn glance up, eyes quivering, threatening to break into tears as she waved farewell.
Is Ahsoka really that sad to see me go? Jeez. Such a cute little kid!
I took one last look at Offee standing back, and found her humming a tune, with a smile on her face.
"....you by my side, forever, you and I....."
I shook my head, chalking it up to her lovestruck antics and got in the van, starting the engine, my mind preoccupied with work.
Waving them goodbye, I lifted off and made for the Saraswati.
Driving into a nearby star cluster, I ope ed a portal to the Balmorra Run, just outside of the forcefield covering up the construction, and drove in.
Why couldn't I just portal into it?
Because I made the forcefield portal proof, in fear of someone stealing my portal gun and robbing me of everything by teleporting into the ship.
So here I am, driving in slowly, until I got to the ship and used the ship's portal system to teleport in.
I parked the car and took the shuttle to my lab, watching on my contacts the feed of the hundreds of thousands of droids and nanomachines working on the construction.
The symphony of their construction, the feeling of stretching my power all over them, my absolute control of the entire facility, it was beautiful, addictive even.
But with great reluctance I pulled away, entering the lab.
I had four goals for the day.
Scratch that. Five goals, after that force vision Offee just had.
1. Repair my armor.
2. Counter the jedi.
3. Free Ryloth.
4. Bring the war into a stalemate till all military contracts expire.
5. Find out exactly what the fuck Offee found out and if it's a threat to me.
For the first, my nanoforges were already at work, recreating the armor with a couple added nick nacks.
I walked over to the computer and began to code in some new gadgets, first and foremost of which would kill two birds with one stone.
I reached into a drawer and pulled out a death crystal, one of those things that shows you how you die. For some reason though it didn't show me anything of importance other than a million stupid ways to die.
Putting it in a spectral polarizer, multicolour beams zapped it, altering it's structure ever so slightly till it turned from ghostly blue to a nice even silvery orange. Taking that, I cut it with a laser shear and sanded it to the desired size.
Next, using a pair of mini tongs, I picked it up and placed it carefully onto a circuit board array that detected anomalies in the quantum nature of things, melting it in place.
Then with gloves on, I extracted the intestinal fluid of a timekeeper's slug gun thingy I stole from the ruins of the citadel. It could shatter people into countless theoretical shards with a single shot. Though I didn't know quite how to make it shoot someone.
That I mixed with a Klaxon herb and the ash from a victim of the 'owl at the end of time', and ran it through an emulsion blender, turning it into a sprayable liquid.
With that going, I spray coated the device in triplicate, before soldering on a simple binary display.
I looked at the palm sized finished product and using my power uploaded to it the code I had just created.
I pressed on the screen, and with a beep it turned on, showing a single flat line. Good. That means the timeline is stable.
I grabbed a pen from the desk and thought for a moment.
What should I call it?
Something simple, definitely. I'm sure I came up with a name for it sometime ago.
I sifted through the mess of blueprints and half crazed notes on the table till I found it's blueprint.
There in the margin was the name I had given it.
The time-space fuckery detector.
Something I had drawn up plans for just after that clone had come back in time to give me a goddamn heart attack.
No more, I swore.
Now, anytime somebody has the bright idea to mess with the timeline around me, I won't be left unaware. The device would basically serve as an alarm bell for me the next time a clone comes jumping through time.
But it had another use too, one I coded into it that Rick hadn't thought of.
It could now also detect whether someone was a threat to me across a period of time, changing the intended timeline to an undesirable one.
Someone like say, who had a force vision of a future they intend to change by fucking me over.
If she took a future altering action within range of my new time space fuckery detector, it would beep and tell me about it. It's no mind reading or destiny manipulation, but it'll have to do.
Sure it was only right about 40 percent of the time given how fast the future can change based on small actions but still, better than nothing.
At least this way, I avoid the predestination trap of prophecies and other such crap.
I slid the device into the assembler and fit it into the glove of my left hand. That should do. For now.
As the fabricator was putting the finishing touches on my armor, I focused on the second task at hand.
I needed to permanently incapacitate the jedi, rob them of their force superiority over me.
And to that end I turned to a probe I had sent into wild space a couple months ago. One that had just returned from one planet Lehon.
Yup. Rakata Prime bitches.
And with it, it brought organic samples of the civilization, containing the virus that had once ripped the Rakata from their connection to the dark side of the force, collapsing their force powered Infinite Empire.
Now if only I could modify it to target all species instead of just the Rakata, I could deal with the jedi lickety split.
After all, without their crutch of the force, they were less than able warriors wielding a laser sword.
Completely vulnerable to even the most primitive bow and arrow. Or a bonk on the head.
Whatever floats your boat.
I personally preferred death by raining dildos.
A fitting end for the jedi, if I say so myself.
Not that I planned on killing any jedi. After all, not all jedi will be present on Ryloth. Killing the jedi on Ryloth would make little sense, needless violence.
Especially when I can manipulate their now powerlessness to create guilt, making them and the republic believe that this is a divine punishment from the force for the evil deeds of the jedi.
That way, I can turn the remaining republican jedi into my pawns. Combine that, with the great number of jedi already leaving the order, lost quite like Offee, I could recruit them as General Hunt, with promises of creating a newer, better jedi order in the confederacy.
I would have my hands on jedi on both sides of the stalemated war. And nothing stalemates a war like a rumors of a plague ravaging the battlefield.
From there it'll be as easy as fielding a proposal for peace and viola, I become the supreme chancellor, bringer of peace for the republic while also being the liberator and supreme commander of the confederacy!
Something else to do on another day.
Wearing a hazmat suit, I picked up the sample from a quarantined airlock, and portaled it to another quarantined lab, where I began my experiments on the culture I had bred in a vat.
I pulled out a syringe of healing blood and poured it in, before setting a periodic injection of nutrients to the culture.
Then it was a waiting game.
It took a whole three hours before it reacted to the first humanoid DNA samples.
Then, faster and faster it consumed them all, sending boils running across the skin of Count Dooku's body.
As quickly as they had formed the boils dried out, leaving the skin parched and mutated with pockmarks all across it.
Carefully, I took a sample of the blood and matched it to another of Dooku's blood in the database.
The midichlorian count had fallen by over 80% in just one round of infection.
Imagine what subsequent plagues could do!
I could wipe out the force from the galaxy, once and for all!
Of course, I wasn't going to do that. I still planned on using Starkiller and Anakin. It wouldn't do me any good to just wipe out their force abilities.
I just needed to deal with the jedi in an isolated, closed system. A closed system that was hostile to all life.
A closed system like Ryloth, where the hottest temperatures rose to nearly 300 degrees celsius in the summers.
Perfect petri dish for eliminating the jedi.
Then when the jedi have failed and retreated, I can just waltz in on my new armor, and free the sector from separatist control, becoming the hero that freed Ryloth when the jedi could not!
Sure this would mean that the Twilek people would be forever cut off from the force and so would their subsequent generations.
It was a hereditary disease after all. But otherwise, with a vaccine, they could even recover and maybe in a couple millenia of crossbreeding with other species, they would once more be able to connect to the force. Maybe. Hopefully. Probably.
Small price to pay for their freedom though, I'm sure they would agree if they ever knew.
Another couple of tests were made to make the virus non lethal, then a few more to create the vaccine and program nanobot plague scrubbers to remove the plague from the planet and it's surroundings, preventing a galactic outbreak, and I was done.
Now all that was left was to deliver these to 'General Hunt' and watch the fall of the jedi with popcorn and soda.