Chapter 18

The Brotherhood of Darkness are cheap mother herders. I've been on several attack ram missions and despite not helping in any way, which they didn't know, I've just about earned enough kudos points to visit the academy 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 amount of darkside Holocrons put the Jedi's to shame. I hadn't seen the Jedi's holocrones as they were meant for masters and maybe their padawans but unlike the Jedi, the Brotherhood collected any information that would make them strong. No ability in the force was out of bounds, unlike the Jedi.

If you wanted to learn how to turn people inside out, there was a Holocron that had a master with its teaching in it. One holocrone could have 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. The worst part of it all was the Brotherhood didn't offer a Dewey Decimal Classification System. The Brotherhood had 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 prisoners than I did with the Brotherhood Holocrone library. In jail, it might cost me a packet of data disks full of entertainment but I had been taught the beginning of my illusions and mind manipulation.

Here, in the Brotherhood training grounds, everything costs something from the users, usually some action that might tear down your morels 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 much. I would easily kill anyone here and not think twice about it but not at the cost of my rational mind.

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 hot head initiate crushing it or slicing it in half because they felt like it.

And then there was the Brotherhood's speciality of not trusting anyone, especially their initiates. Highjacking a ship had a high chance of just being blasted out of the sky. A better pilot than me might have made it but my talents didn't go in that direction. My best chance of escape was 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 get the hell out of there. If there was some type of tech I could fiddle with then I might have made plans to escape but the planet was a dead end when it came to droids, computers and anything mechanical.

There was more bad news. Some asshat has learned force lighting and was pretty good at it. I wouldn't care but the jerk is using it to bend and break the other initiates to her will. It was a shame that when she turned up and used it on me I was forced to use my unique force lighting on her, she didn't survive. She was a genius in force lightning but I had been taught by legitimate dark lords of the force. Now I had a dead initiate body, which I sold and bought the index to the Holocrony library.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I choose Knowledge Drain. My logic is, if I'm going to be here then I might as well get what I can. I am not willing to save up the points by doing missions and killing just so I can learn from the Holocrons, instead, I'm 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 lightning or smack them in the back of their heads with a bit of telekinesis or even a modified grenade and then I would search their minds. It was hard because their strong negative emotions protected them but with my Force Enlightenment paired with Knowledge Drain, I got the best results I could muster every time. Some of the initiates shake and turn in their unconscious bodies but I don't feel bad for taking what I want from their minds. It's the Brotherhood of Darkness way and they would do it to me if they had better control. By the nature of the ability I couldn't be sure that someone hadn't already done it to me, but I seriously doubt it. If they found out I had been reborn, I would be locked in a room and experimented on.

The information was glorious. Learning from holocrons was the best, the information learnt from long-dead masters who specialised in the craft had no equal. The best part was some of those holocrons had emotional mind fuckery but I learnt it from the mind of the initiates which was like a filter.

I also used a few illusions and put them into the initiate's minds. If it wasn't for the initiates and masters.....and the missions and the killing, then it would be a nice place to learn. At least they severed meat, it was a shame that it was pickled, I guess they surely were evil.

My only 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 boring if it wasn't for the life-threatening initiates.

With nothing to do but pick the minds of the initiates I got really good, so good that I'm incorporating my mind illusions from afar. The trick is to persuade the mind with things it already knows and then embellish. If you go against the person's nature and and push in a direction they wouldn't take 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 use negative emotions to power their abilities. It is so easy to manipulate them. I've classified their emotions to better help me use my illusions. Hate, which seems to be the cornerstone of all the Darksider's emotions gets shit done but it can cloud the details of the Darksider. 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 is subtle, too much and the mind will rebel and cause unknowable actions, just the right amount freezes up the mind and body, giving me time to adjust. Frustration is a problem because of how the mind works hard to solve the problems, I use a little bit of Inadequacy to temper the rolling mind and curve frustration. I can't seem to use guilt to control my subject. It's not that Darksiders doesn't have any, they have tons of the stuff, it's just they choose to ignore it or 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 the Darksiders will be in deep doo-doo. Resentment and jealousy 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 thing when I manipulate the initiates. I can steal from them and then blame others.

That's how I got my hands on some interesting items