(To be completed.)
Sidious is a favorite Sith of mine, as well as villain in general, and I think he deserves a respect thread.
This thread, however, will be different from most respect threads created here in that comics are not the only source material for Star Wars. To represent Sidious' capabilities, I will be posting plenty of comic scans but also quoting novels, sourcebooks, handbooks, posting links to youtube videos/showing scenes from movies & TV shows, etc. For those of you who are hazy on Star Wars knowledge, let me explain a few things first.
1. Just in case this needs to be said, EU is Expanded Universe. Basically, EU Star Wars is all information and material separate from the movies. This includes TV shows, comics, novels, video games, etc.
2. The Star Wars canon classes will be brought up in this thread at least a few times. So, to follow the terms I use and just to clarify, in Star Wars continuity, there are five canon classes.
G-Canon- (George Lucas Canon). This is the highest canon class. It includes only the movies and material pertaining to them.
T-Canon- (Television Canon). This is the second highest canon class and includes any information provided in TV shows. This includes Star Wars The Clone Wars, as an example.
C-Canon- (Continuity Canon). This is the basic canon. This includes everything else that is confirmed to be in continuity, i.e., novels, comics, sourcebooks/handbooks, video games, etc.
S-Canon- (Secondary Canon). This is essentially any information that has yet to be confirmed as canon. It should only be mentioned in the context that there is a chance a given piece of information could be non-canon.
N-Canon- (Non Canon). Self-explanatory.
3. I may also abbreviate the titles of events or series. For instance, Return of the Jedi is RotJ. Revenge of the Sith is RotS. So on and so on. However, I will also bring up the Dark Empire trilogy through and throughout this thread and will be using DE as an abbreviation for it. The reason for that is because Dark Empire is where a number of Sidious's most impressive showings appear and the series in which he reached his prime. It took place 6 years after Return of the Jedi, and Palpatine had been in hiding for that time, studying Sith teachings and growing in power. So anything Palpatine did before DE was prior to the peak of his power.
4. As I said above, I will be quoting books. I will have no scans of pages from novels and only a few from sourcebooks/handbooks. In general, I will take a section from a book, quote, and list what the source material is.
5. I will also be giving mention to the Dark Empire audio drama. Star Wars audio dramas are C-Canon and do, in some cases, one of them being Dark Empire, offer information not provided in the comic or novel they were based on. As with various books, I will be quoting it. But if anyone feels the need to check the source, I believe you can listen to the DE audio drama on youtube.
6. For those of you who may be skeptical about my using sourcebooks/handbooks as a legitimate source of information, understand that Star Wars source/handbooks have a much better level of credibility than Marvel handbooks, for instance. In comparison with the comic or novel that a certain section may be based on, Star Wars handbooks and sourcebooks tend to be extremely accurate and are often re-released every few years with updated information. Facts provided in sourcebooks are C-Canon.
Having gone through all that (hopefully it all makes sense), respect Palpatine.
Powers
Emperor Palpatine is regarded as the most powerful Sith to exist.
Vader imagined the power that could be his if he crushed Palpatine and established his own rule over the Empire. But first, he would need his own apprentice. By himself, he could not hope to defeat the most powerful Sith Lord the galaxy had ever known.
--Taken from Vader: The Ultimate Guide
Yoda went after Palpatine in the empty Senate chamber, but could not defeat the most powerful Sith Lord in history.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
Beyond the vision of the Jedi Knights, somewhere within the darkness, the greatest master of evil ever to use Sith power bides his time. As his strength grows, his plans begin to shape the course of the galaxy, and his snares await the unsuspecting.
--Taken from The Complete Visual Dictionary
When Yoda crosses sabers with the movie's arch-villain, he doesn't launch into a pinwheeling display of acrobatics, as he did against Count Dooku in Episode II. Instead, Yoda faces the dark side's fury, channeled by the most powerful Sith Lord in history. "Rob Coleman wanted Yoda to feel the power of his enemy," says Wheless, "like a force he's never dealt with before."
--Taken from Insider #86: Yoda's Right Arm
He is named the most powerful of the Banite Sith.
The Sith have waited millennium for the birth of one who is powerful enough to return them from hiding. Darth Sidious is that one—the Sith's revenge on the Jedi order for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.
--Taken from The Complete Visual Dictionary
The Sith Order, in hiding for a millennium, had awaited the birth of one who was powerful enough to return the Order to prominence. Darth Sidious was the fulfillment of that prophecy, capable of exacting the Sith's revenge on the Jedi for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Darth Sidious proved to be the grim culmination of a thousand years of Sith philosophy and teachings.
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
When the Sith finally emerged from a thousand years of watching and waiting, they numbered—in accordance with the tradition set down by Darth Bane—only two. The most powerful of these was Darth Sidious, an ice-cold, diabolically calculating genius equipped with the strength of the dark side of the Force, as well as an enormous wealth of Sith artifacts, equipment, and knowledge.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
Palpatine trained under Plagueis until he became more powerful and killed his master.
In truth, Palpatine was well versed in the ways of the Force, having been apprentice to Darth Plagueis the Wise, a Sith Lord who was a master of arcane and unnatural knowledge. In true Sith tradition, Palpatine murdered his Master upon receiving the skill and ability to do so.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Sidious served for many decades as the apprentice of Darth Plagueis, learning diligently at the feet of his Master. Once he possessed all of Plagueis' secrets, he retired him.
--Taken from Insider #88: Heritage of the Sith
"My own Master, Darth Plagueis, made the grave error of teaching me too much, at which point he became unnecessary."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
The Emperor is more powerful than any of his Force sensitive subjects.
Unknown to the Rebels, the Emperor had already laid the groundwork for the perpetual rule of his New Order. He had turned a Jedi into his new dark apprentice, the terrifying Darth Vader. Vader himself trained apprentices. And the Emperor created a corps of loyal, Force-skilled minions to maintain his rule. Most powerful of all, of course, was the Emperor himself.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
Sidious is stated to be the most powerful dark sider.
Inside the spacious interior of the Galactic Senate chamber, Yoda challenged the Emperor. The two engaged in a spectacular duel—a contest between the most powerful practitioners of the Force’s light and dark sides.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
It quickly became clear to Luke that this decrepit and seemingly defenseless old man was masterfully adept in the ways of the Dark Side of the Force. Indeed, as Vader had warned, the Emperor had become the Dark Side's most powerful expression.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
Even Ulic Qel-Droma would be envious of Palpatine. He had succeeded where all others had failed in taming the Dark Side.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He notes that his powers have grown tenfold over the decades he had trained with Plagueis.
Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious' powers increase upon Plagueis' death.
A tremor took hold of the planet.
Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.
A welter of voices, near and far, present and from eons past, drowned his thoughts. Raised in praise, the voices proclaimed his reign and cheered the inauguration of a new order. Yellow eyes lifted to the night sky, he saw the trembling stars flare, and in the depth of his being he felt the power of the dark side anoint him.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.
The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest. But in the end—though he could save others from death—he had failed to save himself.
A sense of supreme accomplishment puffed Sidious’s chest, and his thoughts unreeled.
Well, then, that wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it might be...
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. One heartbeat late and the universe would have recomposed itself, no imposition of will sufficient to forestall the currents. One could only observe and react. Surprise was the element absent from any periodic table. A keystone element; a missing ingredient. The means by which the Force amused itself. A reminder to all sentient beings that some secrets could never be unlocked.
Confident that the will of the dark side had been done, he returned to the suite’s window wall. Two beings in a galaxy of countless trillions, but what had transpired in the suite would affect the lives of all of them. Already the galaxy had been shaped by the birth of one, and henceforth would be reshaped by the death of the other. But had the change been felt and recognized elsewhere? Were his sworn enemies aware that the Force had shifted irrevocably? Would it be enough to rouse them from self-righteousness? He hoped not. For now the work of vengeance could begin in earnest.
His eyes sought and found an ascending constellation of stars, one of power and consequence new to the sky, though soon to be overwhelmed by dawn’s first light. Low in the sky over the flatlands, visible only to those who knew where and how to look, it ushered in a bold future. To some the stars and planets might seem to be moving as ever, destined to align in configurations calculated long before their fiery births. But in fact the heavens had been perturbed, tugged by dark matter into novel alignments. In his mouth, Sidious tasted the tang of blood; in his chest, he felt the monster rising, emerging from shadowy depths and contorting his aspect into something fearsome just short of revealing itself to the world.
The dark side had made him its property, and now he made the dark side his.
Breathless, not from exertion but from the sudden inspiration of power, he let go of the sill and allowed the monster to writhe through his body like an unbroken beast of range or prairie.
Had the Force ever been so strong in anyone?
Sidious had never learned how Plagueis’s own Master had met his end. Had he died at Plagueis’s hand? Had Plagueis, too, experienced a similar exultation on becoming a sole Sith Lord? Had the beast of the end time risen then to peek at the world it was to inhabit, knowing its release was imminent?
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He becomes more powerful after his death at Endor.
Resurrected in a youthful clone body, Palpatine does not reveal himself immediately. Studying the dark side of the Force to become more powerful, his education results in three manifestos: The Book of Anger, The Weakness of Inferiors, and The Creation of Monsters.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
Palpatine knew precisely why the Empire couldn’t last without his dread power: he had designed it that way. No one ever suspected how much he relied on the Dark Side of the Force. He shaped those of his government by using the Force against them. He used it to control his fleets and to drive his soldiers on to victory. He used it to destroy his enemies from a distance and learn of conspiracies against him. Without it, there was no way the Empire could endure, as he had designed it. The Dark Side flowed through him like some primordial ichor and was the key to all his power.
Soon he was ready to strike. Fully healed and in greater control of the Dark Side than ever, he finally acted to end the Mutiny.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Darth Maul feels Sidious' arrival on Mandalore as a roiling in the Force and perceives his presence in the Force as a hypnotizing and terrifying dark sun.
The feeling had begun as a faint stirring in the Force, like the tiniest ripple of something moving slowly through deep water, far away but drawing steadily closer. It intensified, until it felt like the Force itself was roiling, heaving like the sea in the grip of an enormous storm.
“I sense a presence,” Maul warned Savage. “A presence I haven’t felt since...”
And then Maul knew.
“Master,” he said, leaning forward on the throne.
The commandos guarding the royal chamber reached for their throats. As Maul watched, an unseen forced lifted them high in the air, then slammed them to the floor, where they lay motionless in their red-and-black armor. The doors opened, then closed behind a figure in dark robes. A deep cowl hid most of the face, leaving only a pale chin and a downturned mouth visible. To most eyes the man in those simple robes of rough cloth was unremarkable, just another being making his way in the universe. But to those who could feel the Force he was anything but ordinary. To them, he was a dark sun blazing with power that was simultaneously hypnotizing and terrifying to behold.
Darth Sidious, the reigning Dark Lord of the Sith, had come to Mandalore.
Savage stared at the new arrival in astonishment, transfixed by the sight.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Count Dooku sees Palpatine's power through the Force as an event horizon.
Now the scene below subtly altered, though to the physical eye there was no change. Powered by the dark side, Dooku's perception took the measure of those below him with exhilarating precision.
Kenobi was luminous, a transparent being, a window onto a sunlit meadow of the Force.
Skywalker was a storm cloud, flickering with dangerous lightning, building the rotation that threatens a tornado.
And then there was Palpatine, of course: he was beyond power. He showed nothing of what might be within. Though seen with the eyes of the dark side itself, Palpatine was an event horizon. Beneath his entirely ordinary surface was absolute, perfect nothingness. Darkness beyond darkness.
A black hole of the Force.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine himself is a Force nexus.
The key to Luke's turning is the moment when he and Leia realize the Emperor is no longer defined by his physical form, but has become a chaotic nexus of dark energies that swell and burst open the fabric of space, tearing apart everything in the vicinity, human and machine.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
His death over Endor leaves a small Force nexus above the Sanctuary Moon.
Any unusual localization, or vergence, of dark side Force energy. These strange locales emanated the dark side of the Force, and were considered focal points of power for dark side users. As such, they were often guarded by Jedi Knights to prevent their discovery and exploitation. Known dark side nexuses included the twisted tree-cave on Dagobah, Halagad Ventor's hermitage on Trinta, and a "stain" of dark side energy that hovered over Endor following the defeat of the Emperor.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine in a fit of rage causes blossoms to recoil and Plagueis' droid 11-4D to step back.
Plagueis made a soothing gesture and explained in great detail what had taken place. Concluding, he said, "He threatened, too, to place you out of reach."
All the while Plagueis spoke, Palpatine was storming through circles on the narrow path, shaking his head in anger and balling his fists. "He can't do this!" he snarled. He hasn't the right! I won't allow it!"
Palpatine's fury buffeted Plagueis. Blossoms growing along the sides of the pathway folded in on themselves, and their pollinators began to buzz in agitation. FourDee reacted, as well, wobbling on its feet, as if in the grip of a powerful electromagnet. Had this human truly been born of flesh-and-blood parents? Plagueis asked himself. When, in fact, he seemed sprung from nature itself. Was the Force so strong in him that it had concealed itself?
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious' power upsets the balance of the Force on the dark side world of Vjun and causes a weather storm merely by the emergence of a holographic image of himself.
Outside, the wind picked up another notch, shrieking and groaning among the eleven chimneys as if to announce the arrival of a hideous guest. Dooku's comm console chimed. He glanced over, expecting the daily report from General Grievous, or perhaps a message from Asajj Ventress. He reached over to open the channel, ecognized the digital signature of the incoming transmission, jabbed the channel open, and snapped to his feet. "You called, my Master?"
The hologrammic projector on his desk sprang to life, and the wavering form of Darth Sidious regarded him. As always the picture was oozy and unclear, as if light itself were uneasy in the presence of the Lord of the Sith. Dark robes, purple shadows—a patch of skin, pale and mottled under his hooded cloak like a fungus growing under a rotten log. From under heavy lids the Master's eyes, snake-cold and serpent-wise, regarded him.
"What would you have of me, Master?"
"From you? Everything, of course." Darth Sidious sounded amused. "There was a time when I wasn't sure if you would be able to overcome that...independent streak of yours. After all, you were born to one of the wealthiest families in the galaxy, with gifts and abilities far, far greater than any amount of wealth could bestow. Your understanding is deep; your will, adamant. Is it any wonder you should be proud? Why, how could it be otherwise?"
Dooku said, "I have always served you well and faithfully, my Master."
"You have. But you must admit, your spirit was not made for fidelity. After all, a man who will not bow to the Jedi Council, or even Master Yoda...I wondered if perhaps loyalty was too mean, too confining a thing to ask from so great a being as yourself."
Dooku tried to smile. "The war progresses well. Our plans are on schedule. I have dealt out your deaths, your schemes, your betrayals. I have paid for your war with my time, my riches, my friends, and my honor."
"Holding nothing back?" Sidious asked lightly.
"Nothing. I swear it."
"Excellent," Darth Sidious said. "Yoda came to the Chancellor's office this morning. He is going on a very special mission. Top secret." He laughed, a harsh sound like the bark of a crow. The wind rose again, shrieking around the mansion like a creature in torment. "When he arrives, Dooku...see that you treat him as he deserves."
Darth Sidious laughed. Dooku wanted to laugh along, but couldn't quite manage it before his Master cut the connection and disappeared.
Dooku paced his office. With the end of Sidious' call, the storm had slackened, and the shrieking wind outside now only sobbed quietly under the gables of Château Malreaux.
--Taken from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous
Leia records that she felt palpable discomfort and fear simply by being in the presence of the Emperor on her first meeting with him.
"But I was also overwhelmed by the knowledge that Vader was not only Luke's father, but mine, too. My memories raced to my first encounter with Vader. It was during my first trip to Coruscant, when I'd accompanied my father—that is, Bail Organa—to a reception for the Emperor. In hindsight, I'm surprised I was allowed to go, as it exposed me to both the Emperor and Vader. Granted, I'd never demonstrated any Force powers at that point, so perhaps Bail Organa thought it was relatively safe. I never knew anyone who guarded his secrets as well as Bail Organa.
The reception was at the Imperial Palace. As things turned out, it seems neither Sith Lord sensed anything about my true identity, for if they had, surely they would have done something. That's not to say their powers were weak. I'd meant to confront Palpatine and tell him what I thought of his xenophobic Empire, but as he approached me in the reception line, I was struck numb with fear. I remember thinking it was as if he were pitch-black inside. Vader loomed behind him like a malevolent shadow, and there was no doubt in my mind that if I had found the courage to speak my mind to the Emperor, Vader would have killed me on the spot."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
The Emperor has learned virtually every application of the Force there is from all different eras.
Palpatine has spent decades studying the most arcane and esoteric Jedi disciplines. It is believed that he has mastered nearly all the known powers, previously unknown powers, and devises new ones at his pleasure.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Force Storm
Storm is an ability in which a user manipulates various Force energies to tear a rift in space and time and open a wormhole that has high order destructive power, as well as the ability to transport matter across space and time.
Palpatine describes the creation of his Force Storm in his Book of Anger.
"I have learned that Anger and Will, joined together, are the greatest Power.
I have learned to meditate upon Anger and Will with clarity and precision, and I have learned to open the hidden reservoirs of Dark Side Power.
Anger concentrated by Will in the vital center of the body creates a portal through which vast energies are released—the energies of the dark side of the Force.
Standing watch with the mind, in my meditation of Anger, I have slain my enemies from great distances, through the dark side Power that permeates the galaxy. I have created lightning, and unleashed its destructive fire.
Using this knowledge, I can unleash the dark side energies that are all around us, even to shatter the fabric of space itself. In this way, I have created storms.
Through a simple act of Will, I can generate Force Storms, energy storms that are vastly destructive and virtually unstoppable. Although triggering such storms requires merely thought and inclination, I admit I am not yet able to completely control the phenomenon. Among my goals is to perfect this control."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
"The churning energy mass of a Force Storm can consume everything it touches, for at its eye is pure hate. Just as a black hole devours a star, this storm can swallow armies and fold space."
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
The effect of Force Storm is explained.
This is perhaps the single most destructive Force power known. This power allows the Jedi to twist the space-time continuum to create vast storms of force. The power also allows limited control of these storms. Capable of creating annihilating vortices, the storms can swallow whole fleets of spaceships or tear the surfaces off worlds.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook and Tales of the Jedi Companion
"The Force Storm is truly an awe-inspiring demonstration of pure natural energy. After using the Force to open a hyperspace wormhole, tremendous shockwaves will ripple through the fabric of space. Due to the Force Storm's potential for abuse, the Council has recently classified it as a dark side power."
"The Reborn Emperor used this at Da Soocha. It has the power to kill worlds."
—Luke
--Taken from The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force
Vast energy storms that connect wildly disparate spots across the galaxy, hyperspace wormholes are unpredictable and devastating. It was to the Rebel Alliance's detriment that Emperor Palpatine was able to not only control these storms, but to create them.
--Taken from Handbook Volume Three: Dark Empire
While on his personal retreat planet Byss, the Emperor sends a Force Storm to Coruscant in order to transport Luke to Byss and in the process ravages the surface of the world.
The shore of the western sea had been a glittering playground, a gay and glorious world that never slept, before the clone Emperor's Force storm had ravaged Coruscant. It had yet to fully recover.
--Taken from Before the Storm
Palpatine, without any visible effort or concentration, opens a wormhole more powerful than the one he sent to Coruscant that overtakes the moon Da Soocha V and consumes a fleet of capital ships as it descends on and destroys a New Republic base. Luke, Leia, and an unborn Anakin then join together in Force Harmony to loosen the Emperor's control over the Force Storm, causing it to tear apart the Eclipse along with Palpatine.
Luke: He's created another energy storm.
Leia: It’s descending on Pinnacle Base, consuming all the ships in its path. (Sound of comlink activating.) Mon Mothma, can you hear me?
Mon Mothma: Princess Leia. There’s an energy storm. It’s suddenly taken over the planet! We have twelve ships lost already. All our hands are being lost. We’re being wiped out!
Han: Leia, Leia! (Sound of comlink deactivating.)
Leia: You’re going to slaughter all those people.
Palpatine: Yes. Did I not warn you? I’ve played along with your Jedi dueling games long enough. Now, you will experience my full potency. I live as energy. I am the dark side!
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
He summoned up a huge Force storm, far more powerful than the one that had swept Coruscant. But this time, when Skywalker and his sister turned their combined resistance against him, Palpatine could no longer control what he had unleashed.
--Taken from The Essential Chronology
Before even fully mastering the technique, Palpatine creates a Force Storm with enough skill and precision to transport his body to Kaal from the second Death Star II without causing noticeable damage to the Death Star.
The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadowto plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body.
--Taken from Gamer #5
After Luke is funneled through the wormhole, Mon Mothma comments on the incident, saying that there have been Storms sent to multiple planets.
Mon Mothma: The energy storm that took Commander Skywalker, this is not an isolated event. Similar Storms have been detected in several systems.
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
Essence Transfer
Essence Transfer, Transfer Essence, or Spirit Transference is an ability that allows a dark sider to exit their body in the form of their Force energy consciousness and possess another body or even an inanimate object, usually by performing a ritual or speaking an incantation.
Sidious draws out Sith spirits while conducting Sith magic.
Chancellor Palpatine spent many years studying ancient Holocrons to learn the secrets of the SIth. The Holocrons enabled him to channel Sith spirits, who taught him how to harness dark-side energy and release lethal bolts of lightning.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
The Emperor explains how he survived his death at Endor to Luke.
He says that he can possess anyone and even threatens to possess Leia's unborn child.
Palpatine threatens to possess Luke and then voluntarily uses Essence Transfer to enter one of his clones.
He involuntarily enters his Essence state and travels back to Byss after he was killed by his own Storm over Da Soocha V, traversing interplanetary distances for months as an disembodied spirit.
While inhabiting a sabotaged, genetically unstable body, Palpatine is killed due to his weakened state and attempts to possess the infant Anakin but is intercepted by a fatally wounded Empatojayos Brand, who encases the Emperor within Force Light and, with the help of all other Jedi spirits, drags Palpatine into the Force as he dies, leaving Sidious to wander Chaos forever.
Though Palpatine seemed to be winning his war of conquest, his final clone body had begun to fail him, aging at a rapid rate and eaten from the inside by the sabotage of Carnor Jax. He tried to clone other bodies so that he could resurrect himself again, but Jax’s manipulations had tainted even the source material. Palpatine’s scientists and physicians could offer no solutions.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
His body mortally wounded by Han Solo, Palpatine tracked down the Solos and desperately sought to transfer his fading essence to the infant Anakin Solo. He was blocked and absorbed by the dying Jedi, Brand, who promised that he and all the other Jedi spirits would ensure the dark sider never returned—a fate Palpatine had feared above all others. The Emperor's reign was over for good.
--Taken from The Official Star Wars Fact File #120
"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
The Emperor tortures and kill Bevel Lemelisk for his failures of engineering and then controls Lemelisk's spirit to transfer him into a clone body, conducting this process a total of seven times.
Shortly after the Death Star was expected to crush the Rebel base on Yavin 4, Bevel Lemelisk had been summoned to meet personally with Emperor Palpatine deep within the Imperial palace. Lemelisk had been flanked by red-armored Imperial bodyguards as they whisked him off on a high-speed shuttle across the skylanes of the planetwide city. The millions of illuminated windows winked like corusca gems. Each point of light seemed to be another torch celebrating his triumph.
Lemelisk rubbed his jowls, pleased that he had remembered to shave this time. The red Imperial guards were a silent lot, standing at attention like statues. Lemelisk hummed and grabbed his jutting knees as the shuttle approached the enormous pyramid of the Imperial palace. The guards rushed him down the hall so quickly that their flowing scarlet cloaks billowed around them. When the group reached the door to the Emperor's private chambers, the guards stood at attention, their force pikes raised, their smooth plasteel helmets obscuring any expression.
Lemelisk jaunted happily into the vaulted room, pleased to see the black-cowled Emperor waiting for him. Palpatine hunched in his chair, reptilian yellow eyes glowing through the oily shadows cast by his hood. The Emperor appeared to be falling into ill health: His skin was blistered and folded in upon itself like a pasty drapery over his bones, as if decay had set in well before the advent of death.
But Lemelisk couldn't be troubled by unpleasant thoughts right now. He stood on the polished stone floor and made a cursory bow of obeisance. "My Emperor," he said. "I trust you have received word by now that our Death Star has destroyed the secret Rebel base."
"I have received word," Palpatine said and gestured with one long-clawed finger. Lemelisk glanced up at a clattering sound and saw a flexible wire cage released from the vaulted ceiling above. He ducked, but the cage fell squarely down over him, seating itself to the floor as if Palpatine were directing it with invisible powers. The cage was made of fine mesh, the grid barely large enough to stick his smallest finger through.
"Excuse me, Emperor?" Lemelisk said. "Is there something further you wish to discuss with me? Another project perhaps? Anything else I can do for you?" Lemelisk swallowed again.
"Yes, my servant," Palpatine said. "You may die for me."
"Uh—“ Lemelisk could think of nothing else to say. "I was hoping for something else, actually," he said stupidly.
Palpatine glowered at him. "I just received word that your Death Star was destroyed at Yavin. A puny band of Rebels with outdated fighters found a weakness in your design—a thermal exhaust port that allowed a single X-wing pilot to strike a fatal blow. One pilot obliterated an entire battle station!"
Lemelisk pursed his lips. "Thermal exhaust port, eh? I knew I must have forgotten something. I'll have to fix that in the next design."
"Yes, you will," Palpatine said with an icy voice. "But first, you will die for me."
Lemelisk blinked his watery blue eyes and reached out to touch the fine, tough wires of his cage. He looked around, and nervousness raged like a whirlwind around him. Though he had shaved, his neck itched fiercely. The Emperor sat completely still, yet he must have manipulated a set of controls because with a sharp snick at Lemelisk's feet tiny openings appeared in the polished stone floor, orifices that led down to a black unknown. He heard clicking sounds, the scrabbling of sharp, hard feet.
"I am most displeased with your performance, Lemelisk," the Emperor said.
Bevel Lemelisk shuffled aside as something small but iridescent poked out of the opening: a beetle of some kind. The eight-legged, hard-shelled insect shone a deep blue as it clambered into the light and paused to probe the air with waving antennae. From other openings five identical beetles emerged. They fluttered their wing cases, then took flight, buzzing around the enclosed space. Lemelisk swatted at one, but the blue beetle detected the motion and swooped toward him, sinking mandibles with serrated razor edges into the thick flesh of his palm.
"Oww!" Lemelisk flailed his hand until the beetle lost its hold. He stomped on it, cracking its carapace. But the scent of blood attracted the other beetles to him. He watched in horrified fascination as a dozen more of the insects emerged from the floor holes, fluttering their wing cases and buzzing toward him.
"Those are piranha beetles," the Emperor said, lounging back in his swiveling black chair. "They are native to Yavin 4, and I considered them too precious for extinction when your Death Star was expected to destroy the moon. So I rescued them."
The beetles swarmed over Lemelisk now. He slapped at them, shouting, paying little attention to Palpatine's words. "Stop this!" he yelled.
"Not yet," the Emperor said.
The beetles sliced through his clothing to the skin on Lemelisk's arms, his thighs, his chest, his cheeks. Blood flowed around him, drenching his shredded clothes. He could not keep up with the new injuries. Hundreds more beetles swarmed out, battering themselves against the cage mesh.
"These fine insects are not in danger of becoming extinct after all, though," Palpatine said, "since your Death Star did not work! You have failed me, Bevel Lemelisk," he said, slowing his words. His wrinkled, rubbery lips bent upward in a fiendish grin.
"And now, I'm going to watch these beetles devour you, bit by bit. They are very hungry, you see, and don't get satisfied easily. But if they gorge themselves and begin to slow down, don't worry—I have plenty more." The Emperor let out a glacial laugh, but Lemelisk could no longer hear.
The beetles buzzed in his ears, tearing at his flesh, his hair, his clothes. He struck at himself, throwing his body against the cage mesh. In the process, some of the beetles were stunned, and their own companions fell upon them, cracking through the iridescent shells and chewing to the soft organs within.
Lemelisk screamed and begged—to no avail. The agony went beyond his comprehension, beyond his imagination. His vision turned black after the piranha beetles devoured his eyes—but the pain continued for a long time afterward....
Later, Lemelisk had awakened, blinking his restored eyes, and was completely disoriented. He found himself in the same vaulted chamber, wrapped in a clean, white uniform. His body felt young and strong, without the paunch and the flab from spending too much time working on projects in his mind and too little effort maintaining his health.
Lemelisk bent his arms and looked at his hands, blinking in astonishment. Hearing a small buzz and clatter, he glanced over to find the wire-mesh cage still filled with buzzing, clacking piranha beetles that scampered up and down the walls, snapping their mandibles. Spattered patterns of fresh blood made arcs along the walls of the cage. Inside, he saw a carcass that had been stripped down to gnawed bones and shreds of clothing—the clothing he himself had worn only moments ago.
"You'll grow accustomed to your clone in a moment," the Emperor said, rubbing his knobby fingers over a strange ancient-looking artifact. "I trust that all of your memories have been transferred properly? It is an uncertain skill at best, and the Jedi I stole the technique from was reluctant to give me thorough instruction. But it seems to work."
Lemelisk nodded weakly, wanting to faint but knowing he didn't dare.
"Now don't fail me again, Lemelisk," the Emperor said. "I'd hate to have to think of an even worse execution for next time."
Simply hearing the word execution brought back to his mind the full horrors of the Emperor's executions, the excruciating deaths Palpatine had inflicted upon Lemelisk each time he made an error...
The deaths remained in Lemelisk's mind, ever-present shadowy nightmares—seven executions in all. Once, Palpatine had launched him out an airlock; the pain had been excruciating, though the death was mercifully swift as the sudden drop of pressure and the freezing cold destroyed his internal organs.
He also remembered being slowly lowered into a vat of molten copper, watching his body burn away inch by inch. (Why molten copper? Lemelisk had wondered. Finally one day, more than a month later, he asked the Emperor. Palpatine’s answer had proved surprising in its utter mundanity. “It’s what the smelter used that day.”)
Lemelisk had also been trapped in a vault filled with thickening acid mist so that his lungs dissolved and he coughed blood, and the acid continued to eat him from the inside out. The other deaths had been as imaginative and just as painful.
--Taken from Darksaber
The Death Star worked as planned, but fell victim to a design flaw at Yavin. As a result, the Emperor punished the engineer with the torture of flesh-eating piranha-beetles. Lemelisk died in agony, then awoke in the body of a clone. Motivated by fear, he set to work designing the second Death Stare, and also built the Tarkin super-laser. Lemelisk died seven times in total, dark side magic shuttling his consciousness through seven clones.
--Taken from The New Essential Guide to Characters
The Emperor travels to Byss by opening a Force Storm before his death on the second Death Star and transporting himself to one of his Hands, Jeng Droga, whom Palpatine possesses to return to Byss where his spirit is then removed from Droga and transferred into a clone.
The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadow to plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body. The infusion of Palpatine's overwhelming dark side energies reduced Droga to incoherent madness. Eventually, Palpatine's Grand Vizier Pestage was able to find Droga and tear the Emperor's essence from Droga's body.
--Taken from Gamer #5
By sheer force of will, Palpatine is able to return from the void with no host tethering his spirit to the physical realm.
Palpatine's body was destroyed. Separated from his clones, Palpatine was forced to survive in the maddening, bodiless existence of the void. Through sheer will he retained his identity, crossing the gulf of space to again take up residence in his clone body.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Midi-chlorian Manipulation
Midi-chlorian Manipulation is a dark side power through which the adept can command midi-chlorians for purposes such as healing, resurrection, or the creation of life.
Palpatine recalls that he and Plagueis had made headway in learning to control midi-chlorians years earlier.
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious and Plagueis perform meditative rituals in which they manipulate midi-chlorians and exercise dominion over the Force to imbalance the Force toward the dark side, spreading darkness throughout the galaxy.
While midi-chlorians appeared to resist manipulation of a sort that might imperil the balance of the Force, they remained passive, even compliant, in the case of a weak-willed being manipulated by one who was strong in the Force.
“The Bith—Venamis...”
“Dispatched by Tenebrous to test me—to eliminate me had I failed. But Venamis has been a gift; essential in helping me unlock some of the deepest secrets of the Force. Every creature you have glimpsed or sensed here has been a similar blessing, as you will see when I lead you into the mysteries.”
“What did the droid mean when it said the Magister’s pregnancies?”
Beneath the breath mask, Plagueis might have quirked a smile. “It means that the pregnancies were not achieved by normal means of conception, but rather through the Force.”
Surprise and disbelief mingled in Sidious’s blue eyes. “The Force?”
“Yes,” Plagueis said pensively. “But I failed to exercise due caution. As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics. I have been audacious, and the Force has tested me the way Tenebrous sought to. Midi-chlorians are not easily persuaded to execute the dictates of one newly initiated in the mysteries. The Force needs to be won over, especially in work that involves the dark side. It must be reassured that a Sith is capable of accepting authority. Otherwise it will thwart one’s intentions. It will engineer misfortune. It will strike back.”
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
And so it had been left largely to Sidious to bring the same fervor to the manipulation of events in the mundane world that Plagueis brought to the manipulation of midi-chlorians. Instead of challenging each other, they had both dedicated themselves to executing the Grand Plan. Political mastery and mastery of the Force. Someday soon, the Sith would wield both, with Sidious the face of the former and Plagueis behind the scenes, advising him about the latter. Like Plagueis, Sidious had moved judiciously, for unintended repercussions in the real world could be as damaging to the Sith imperative as blowback from the Force. The fact that the Force had not struck back argued that their partnership was something unique and in accordance with the will of the Force. Plagueis’s self-imposed isolation had taken a toll on some of the plans he and Sidious had engineered for the Trade Federation and other groups. But Plagueis had made what amounted to a full recovery from his injuries, and the dark side was no longer simply on the ascendant but risen and climbing toward the zenith.
Plagueis began to pace the cool floor. “No Sith have ever been in the position in which we now find ourselves, Darth Sidious: in step with the reemergence of the dark side, fortified by the signs and omens, certain that revenge and victory are near at hand. If the Jedi would abide by their philosophy of acting in accordance with the Force, of doing what is right, they would roll over for the dark. But they resist. Yoda and the rest of the Council members will double their meditation sessions in an effort to peer into the future, only to discover it clouded and unknowable. Only to discover that complacency has opened the door to catastrophe.
“If indeed they have been acting in accordance with the Force, how could we be succeeding in tipping the balance? How could the dark side be gaining ground? In fact, the Jedi have fallen away from their self assigned duty, their noble path. Could they have prevented it? Perhaps by having remained in control of the Republic, by electing and reelecting Jedi Supreme Chancellors. Or perhaps by absenting themselves completely from the affairs of the Republic, and attending to their arcane rituals in the belief that right thinking by them would keep the Republic strong and on course, the galaxy tipped into the light, instead of having allowed themselves to become marshals and enforcers.”
He cast a questioning look at Sidious. “Do you see the grand error of their ways? They execute the Republic’s business as if it were the business of the Force! But has a political body ever succeeded in being the arbiter of what is right and just? How easy it is for them to bask in self-assurance in their castle on Coruscant. But in so doing, they have rendered themselves ill equipped for the world we have spent a millennium bringing into being.”
He cleared his throat.
“We’re going to back them into a contradiction, Darth Sidious. We’re going to force them to confront the moral quandary of their position, and reveal their flaws by requiring them to oversee the conflicts that plague their vaunted Republic.
“Only Dooku and a handful of others have grasped the truth. All those years ago when I first met him on Serenno, I thought: What a blow it would be to the Order if he could be enticed to leave and embrace the dark side. What a panic it might incite. For if one could leave, then ten or twenty or thirty could follow, and the hollowness at the center of the Order would be plain for all to see.”
The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”
Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.
Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.
This was the office of the Chancellor.
Within the chair's shadow sat another shadow: deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.
And from the city. And the planet.
And the galaxy.
The shadow waited. It had told the boy it would. It was looking forward to keeping its word.
For a change.
The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it was the darkness. Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
More than a century before, when Tenebrous had been but a Sith apprentice himself, the magnificent computational power of his Bith brain had led him far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master. He had always been far too intelligent to be seduced by the traditional Sith metaphysical twaddle of dark destiny and the witless fantasy of endless war against the equally witless Jedi Order. Soon he had confirmed to his own satisfaction that the dark side of the Force, far from being some malevolent mystic sentience bent on spreading suffering throughout the Galaxy, was in truth merely an energy source, and a tool with which he could impose his will upon reality. It was a sort of natural amplifier he could use to multiply the effectiveness of his many useful abilities.
None of which was more useful than his matchless intellect.
Like many Sith before him, he had turned his powers toward knowledge of the future. But unlike any Sith before him, he had the enormous brain of his people, which combined sheer brute processing power with a level of analytic precision simply beyond the capacity of any other species. The future was always in motion, and while other Sith always struggled to foresee the faintest, least specific hints of what was to come, Tenebrous had no need to see the future.
He could calculate it.
While still merely an apprentice, his analysis had shown him the inevitable end of the Banite Sith and its preposterous Rule of Two. His calculations plainly indicated the coming of a shadow so vast it would darken the galaxy entirely—so vast it would mark the end of both Jedi and Sith as the universe had known them heretofore. The rise of the shadow would be the end of history itself.
Tenebrous had not the slightest doubt that the entire galaxy would measure time according to its arrival. Events would be marked by how long they had preceded the shadow, or how long after it they followed.
Though the exact nature of the great shadow remained occult, the remorseless logic of his extrapolation detailed the coming destruction of the Banite system, and the rise of what would become known as the "One Sith." One Sith! The conclusion was so obvious as to require no confirmation: one single Sith Lord would arise of such power that he'd have no need of any apprentice nor fear the Jedi. He would take and hold the galaxy by his own hand alone. Without an apprentice—or a Jedi Order—to destroy him, the One Sith would rule forever!
A heady prospect, with only a single drawback: Tenebrous was not to be that Sith Lord. His own death was clearly foretold, entirely inevitable, and it would precede the shadow by decades.
Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed. For a moment, Tenebrous found his perception cast far forward in time—to Plagueis' own death at the hands of his apprentice, who was himself only visible as a smear of darkness...
A shadow!
--Taken from The Tenebrous Way
Only Palpatine has been able to spread his darkness completely and totally over an entire galaxy.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
While manipulating midi-chlorians to imbalance the Force, Sidious and Plagueis accidentally conceive Anakin Skywalker as the Force’s response to their defying its will.
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”
Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.
Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.
Dooku smiled with his eyes, but not in mirth. “On the contrary, as you say. Since I’m interested in learning more about the possibility of an alliance.”
Palpatine adopted a hooded look. “You’re resolved to leave the Order?”
“Even more than when we last spoke.”
“Because of the Council’s decision to intervene at Naboo?”
“I can forgive them that. The blockade has to be broken. But something else has occurred.” Dooku chose his next words carefully. “Qui-Gon returned from Tatooine with a former slave boy. According to the boy’s mother, the boy had no father.”
“A clone?” Palpatine asked uncertainly.
“Not a clone,” Dooku said. “Perhaps conceived by the Force. As Qui-Gon believes.”
Palpatine’s head snapped back. “You don’t sit on the Council. How do you know this?”
“I have my ways.”
“Does this have something to do with the prophecy you spoke of?”
“Everything. Qui-Gon believes that the boy—Anakin is his name—stands at the center of a vergence in the Force, and believes further that his finding him was the will of the Force. Blood tests were apparently performed, and the boy’s concentration of midi-chlorians is unprecedented.”
“Do you believe that he is the prophesied one?”
“The Chosen One,” Dooku amended. “No. But Qui-Gon accepts it as fact, and the Council is willing to have him tested.”
“What is known about this Anakin?”
“Very little, except for the fact that he was born into slavery nine years ago and was, until recently, along with his mother, the property of Gardulla the Hutt, then a Toydarian junk dealer.” Dooku smirked. “Also that he won the Boonta Eve Classic Podrace.”
Palpatine had stopped listening.
Nine years old... Conceived by the Force... Is it possible...
His thoughts rewound at frantic speed: to the landing platform on which he and Valorum had welcomed Amidala and her group. Actually not Amidala, but one of her look-alikes. But the sandy-haired boy, this Anakin, swathed in filthy clothing, had been there, along with a Gungan and the two Jedi. Anakin had spent the night in a tiny room in his apartment suite.
And I sensed nothing about him.
“Qui-Gon is rash,” Dooku was saying. “Despite his fixation with the living Force, he demonstrates his own contradictions by being a true believer in the prophecy—a foretelling more in line with the unifying Force.”
“Nine years old,” Palpatine said when he could. “Surely too old to be trained.”
“If the Council shows any sense.”
“And what will become of the boy then?”
Dooku’s shoulders heaved. “Though no longer a slave, he will probably be sent to rejoin his mother on Tatooine.”
Plagueis came to a halt at the entry to Palpatine’s apartment. Eventually one of Queen Amidala’s near-identical handmaidens came to the door, a vision in a dark cowled robe. Her eyes fixed on the breath mask. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “Senator Palpatine is not here.”
“I know,” Plagueis said. “I’m here to speak with a guest of the Senator. A young human boy.”
Her eyes remained glued on the mask. “I’m not permitted—”
Damask motioned swiftly with his left hand, compelling her to answer him. “You have my permission to speak.”
“I have your permission,” she said in a distracted voice.
“Now where is the boy?”
“Anakin, you mean.”
“Anakin, yes,” he said in a rush. “He’s the one. Fetch him—now!”
“You just missed him, sir,” the handmaiden said.
Plagueis peered past her into Palpatine’s suite. “Missed him?” He straightened in anger. “Where is he?”
“Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn came to collect him, sir. I suspect that you can find him at the Jedi Temple.”
Plagueis fell back a step, his thoughts reeling.
There was still a chance that the Council would decide that Anakin was too old to be trained as a Jedi. That way, assuming he was returned to Tatooine...
But if not... If Qui-Gon managed to sway the Council Masters, and they reneged on their own dictates...
Plagueis ran a hand over his forehead. Are we undone? he thought. Have you undone us?
It was late in the evening when Plagueis made his way onto a public observatory that provided a vantage on the proprietary arabesque of a landing platform on which Queen Amidala’s Royal Starship basked in the ambient light.
With the cowl of his hood raised, he moved to one of the stationary macrobinocular posts and pressed his eyes to the cushioned eye grips. Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the boy had arrived at the platform in a Jedi ship; Amidala, her handmaidens and guards, and a loose-limbed Gungan in an open-topped hemispherical air taxi. Just then the latter group was ascending the starship’s boarding ramp, but Qui-Gon and the round-faced desert urchin had stopped short of the ship to speak about something.
What? Plagueis asked himself. What topic has summoned such an earnest look to Qui-Gon’s face, and such confused urgency in the boy?
Lifting his face from the macrobinoculars, he stretched out with the Force and fell victim to an assault of perplexing images: ferocious battles in deep space; the clashing of lightsabers; partitions of radiant light; a black-helmeted cyborg rising from a table... By the time his gaze had returned to the platform, Qui-Gon and the boy had disappeared.
Trying desperately to make some sense of the images granted him by the Force, he stood motionless, watching the starship lift from the platform and climb into the night.
He fought to repress the truth.
The boy would change the course of history.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs.
He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
“My experiments proved midi-chlorians could be controlled. If this is true, then could they not also be induced to create life at the molecular level? Midi-chlorians in the cells of the mother could, in theory, be persuaded o craft a zygote.
For consistency in my test subjects, I obtained hundreds of identical humanoids, each with consistent midi-chlorian level. After much experimentation, I succeeded in prodding the midi-chlorians to replicate themselves through asexual fission. Though in most cases, this process increased the numbers uncontrollably and killed the host.
But I believe that by using this method I can trick midi-chlorians into creating a zygote. Then it would simply be a matter of growing the subject under normal biological conditions. Such a subject could, of course, take years to hit the development milestone of a typical humanoid, but he could have a midi-chlorian count as high as 20,000 per cell. That is more than any Jedi or Sith in recorded history. Although entirely theoretical, such an achievement is intriguing.
If a new life form could be created where none existed before, the living could sustain their bodies indefinitely. Science has led to these conclusions, yet these events must be guarded with utmost care. For now, it remains purely theoretical.”
“I can’t help feeling a chill as I read the account by Plagueis, knowing that my father was known for his high midi-chlorian count, which was supposedly even higher than Yoda’s.”
—Luke
“The beliefs of the Jedi are expressed in ritual and storytelling. Plain language somehow eludes those who have grown up tightly wrapped in tradition.
The Jedi await the coming of a savior, a prophesied Chosen One who will destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force. The Jedi tell of Mortis, a place of impossible geography inside the angles of a gargantuan monolith. The three all-powerful beings of Mortis can assume strange shapes and exemplify the dark side, the light side, and the principle of balance.
Compelling? It is debatable, but at the very least it is an adequate way to illustrate an allegorical point. Day coexists with night, for example and construction is always followed by ruin. Yet many of the Jedi treat the legend of Mortis as literal truth. They believe that the Chosen One will prevent these gods and demons from tearing the universe asunder—that their champion will be a vessel of pure Force energy.
So we come back to midi-chlorians. These organisms allow beings to live and provide a connection to the Force. If bred in sufficient quantities, midi-chlorians can even conceive a new life form and bestow upon it powers greater than any Jedi has ever dreamed, generating a vergence in the Force.
If I induce midi-chlorians to create such a being, my handiwork would fit all the descriptions of their Chosen One. But he would be an agent of my will. How fitting that the misguided reliance on superstition could lead to a Sith creation that is hailed by the Jedi as a savior.”
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
Anakin’s mother, Shmi, confirmed in her own words what Qui-Gon had already suspected—the boy was immeasurably strong in the Force. Neither knew of Darth Plagueis’s suspected involvement in inducing midi-chlorians to create life, though Shmi informed Qui-Gon that Anakin had no natural father.
Palpatine had carefully cultivated Anakin's hopes for preventing this dire premonition, and had revealed everything to Anakin: Palpatine's secret identity as Darth Sidious. His murder of his own Master, Darth Plagueis. The role that the Sith had played in creating Anakin by manipulating the midi-chlorians.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
It was believed that the teachings of the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis, applied by his apprentice Darth Sidious, were instrumental in Anakin's birth, resulting in the conception of a boy with an unnaturally high midi-chlorian count.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Sidious comments to Plagueis that he could save his life with the Force as Plagueis used Midi-chlorian Manipulation to do for others in the past but decides against it, claiming to have the knowledge to support life with the Force.
Plagueis gulped for air and lifted an arm toward him.
"There's the rub, you see," Sidious said in a philosophical tone. "All the ones you experimented on, killed, brought back to life... They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body tat is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can't accomplish what you're asking of them."
Hatred stained Sidious's eyes.
"I could save you, of course. Return you from the brink, as you did Venamis. I could retask your body to repair the damage already done to your lungs, your hearts, your aged brain. But I'll do no such thing. The idea here is not to drag you back at the last moment, but to bring you to death's door and shove you through to the other side.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Darth Sidious sustains Vader's life through the dark side after his injuries on Mustafar, presumably through Midi-chlorian Manipulation.
An on Mustafar, below the red thunder of a volcano, a Sith Lord had already snatched from sand of black glass the charred torso and head of what once had been a man, and had already leapt for the cliffbank above with effortless strength, and had already roared to his clones to bring the medical capsule immediately! The Sith Lord lowered the limbless man tenderly to the cool ground above, and laid his hand across the cracked and blackened mess that once had been his brow, and he set his will upon him.
Live, Lord Vader. Live, my apprentice.
Live.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs. He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?
None would be found.
Sidious would have had to discover a way to compel midi-chlorians to do his bidding, and bring into being one as powerful as Anakin. As it was, Sidious and a host of medical droids had merely restored Anakin to life, which—while no small feat—was a far cry from returning someone from death.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Sith Lightning
Force Lightning is a dark side ability which projects raw Force energies in the form of electricity from the user's body and casts them on a target, causing pain or possibly death, as well as gradually sapping the victim's life.
Sidious projects Lightning powerful enough to reduce a Sithspawn to ashes.
Palpatine burns three Prophets of the Dark Side to bones with a burst of Lightning.
He generates Lightning powerful enough to kill a legion of stormtroopers with enough precision not to kill the Royal Guards in the area.
The Emperor knocks Leia unconscious with Lightning.
While weakened, Palpatine emits Lightning that incapacitates Leia; fatally wounds Brand, whose prosthetic body can sustain him in extreme temperatures and even the vacuum of space for a year; and kills Rayf instantly.
Brand: I realize our steam-powered technology looks barbaric to your eyes, Solo, but it's quite servicable and very solid.
Han: Yeah, like that walking droid suit you're wearing?
Brand: This "droid suit" is a sophisticated survival system. It can keep me alive on the hottest, or the coldest, planet in the galaxy. I could live for a year in the vacuum of space...without eating.
--Taken from the Dark Empire II audio drama
Sidious releases bolts of Lightning on Darth Plagueis, which dismantles Plagueis' breathing apparatus and leaves him disabled on the floor.
Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality?
The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He tortures Maul with Lightning, ripping bolts through Maul's internal organs and shorting out his legs.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
“There is no mercy,” Sidious said.
Bolts of energy ripped out from the Sith Lord’s fingers, tendrils of brilliant blue and purple that danced across Maul’s tattooed skin and ripped through his muscles, his organs. His mechanical legs convulsed, shorting out.
“You belong to me,” Sidious said. “Your existence is now perfectly meaningless.”
He stretched out his fingers and the energy tore through Maul again. Sidious watched the lightning build in intensity, his eyes unblinking, his teeth gritted in a triumphant, terrible smile.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious’ Lightning impacts Mace's lightsaber forcefully enough to bend the blade back toward Mace's face in spite of lightsaber's capacity for repelling Force Lightning and Mace's efforts to deflect it with Vaapad.
Lightning blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him. And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source.
Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.
Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"
This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
His Lightning hurls Mace Windu far out an open window.
"I need him alive!" Skywalker shouted. "I need him to save Padme!"
Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor. Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.
He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's. Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Mace had determined that Palpatine, a Sith master, was too dangerous to live. Anakin couldn't risk losing the Sith secret of immortality forever. He severed Mace's sword arm with his own lightsaber. Palpatine, unleashing a burst of Force lightning, sent the great Jedi Master out the window to his death.
--Taken from Vader: The Ultimate Guide
Palpatine's Lightning overpowers Yoda's Force Deflection and renders Yoda unconscious.
In the Senate Arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness. Then there were only the two of them. Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the Master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious unleashes Lightning while he and Yoda cross blades and hurl around senate pods simultaneously.
There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark. It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though these were traded, too. It came as the battle shifted from the holding office to the great Chancellor's Podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the Podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laserpoint of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the Senate Arena; it came as the Force and the podium's controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones crashing and crushing against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed the Senate's cheers for the galaxy's new Emperor.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
His Lightning overloads Yoda's limit on Force Absorption.
The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine kills Garrbo V'Droz with Lightning.
Garrbo V'Droz almost dropped his glow rod when it shined off a face he recognized in one of the chambers. There was a grim smile on its face. The green-haired occupant of the chamber was someone with whom Garrbo V'Droz was intimately familiar: his brother, the construction foreman.
Whirling on his patron, he whimpered, "What is the meaning of this?" Emperor Palpatine smiled and said simply, "It means that you and I are the only ones left who know the way through the labyrinth to my...home for treasures too valuable even for my museum above. And soon, it will just be me," the Emperor grinned horribly, as Garrbo V'Droz cowered.
"Don't worry, my friend," hissed the dark figure, gesturing grandly at a vacant spot in the chamber, "you shall have a place of honor here. You've earned it."
Palpatine raised his hands, preparing to strike, and then, allowing himself a final moment to savor the fear in his victim, added, "And if I ever need your services again, I will not hesitate to clone you."
V'Droz cringed as the Emperor threw vicious bolts of lightning from his hands and ensured that the galaxy's finest architect was forever a part of his last, greatest work.
--Taken from The Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook: His Finest Work
The Emperor's Force Lightning overcomes Luke's Force Deflection.
Palpatine raised his spidery arms toward Luke: blinding white bolts of energy coruscated from his fingers, shot across the room like sorcerous lightning, and tore through the boy’s insides, looking for ground. The young Jedi was all at once confounded and in agony—he’d never heard of such a power, such a corruption of the Force, let alone experienced it. But if it was Force-generated, it could be Force-repelled. Luke raised his arms to deflect the bolts. Initially, he was successful—the lightning rebounded from his touch, harmlessly into the walls. Soon, though, the shocks came with such speed and power, they coursed over and into him, and he could only shrink before them, convulsed with pain, his knees buckling, his powers at ebb.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Telekinesis
Force Telekinesis is a power through which a Force sensitive can move, contort, and control matter for a variety of effects, ranging from constructive purposes to destructive ones.
Palpatine shows Force Flight.
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine hurls his father around a cabin, contorts a bulkhead, strangles his mother, and kills his siblings with the Force.
Cosinga took a step in Palpatine's direction, only to be hurled back against the bulkhead separating the communications room from the main cabin. A female voice from behind the closed hatch asked in distress, "What was that?"
Nursing an injured shoulder, Cosinga looked suddenly like a trapped animal, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. He made a move to strike the handplate and open the hatch, but Palpatine thwarted his effort without raising a finger. Twisting violently around, Cosinga fell over one of the acceleration chairs, bloodying his face as it struck the armrest. A pounding began against the hatch.
"Guards!" Cosinga shouted, but the word had barely left his lips when the bulkhead against which he was slouched buckled inward, heaving him face-first to the floor and driving the breath from him. Palpatine stood rooted in place, his hands trembling in front of him and his face stricken. Something stirred behind his incandescent eyes. He heard the pounding on the hatch and whirled.
"Don't come in! Stay away from me!"
"What have you done?" It was his mother's voice, panicked. "What have you done?"
Cosinga pushed himself to his knees and began a terrified retreat, leaving smears of blood on the deck. But Palpatine was advancing on him now.
"If the Force birthed you, then I curse it!" Cosinga rasped. "I curse it!"
"As I do," Palpatine growled.
The hatch began to slide to, and he heard the voice of the guard who had escorted him from the Jafan III. "Stop!"
"Cosinga!" his mother screamed.
Palpatine pressed the palms of his hands to his head, then in eerie calm streaked to the hatch, pulled the surprised guard through the threshold, and tossed him clear across the cabin.
Raising his face to the ceiling, he shouted, "We're all in this now!"
Once more Sidious allowed his memories to unfold, and he relived the crimethe event, as he had at last come to think of it. His father's limp and blooded body. The smashed skulls of the bodyguards. His hands clenched around his mother's slender throat—but not really, only in his mind, strangling her with his thoughts. The lifeless forms of his siblings, slumped here and there...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He discreetly shifts waiters' aprons to uncover blasters concealed beneath them.
At the same time, Sidious used the Force to shift the apron of one of the waiters just enough to reveal the grip of a hold-out blaster the man was wearing at his waist. Lifting his glass for another swallow, he did the same to another of the waiters, whose apron concealed an identical weapon. Both had been manufactured by BlasTech, but not for common consumption. The E-series 1-9—the aptly named Swiftkick—was available only to elite members of Santhe Security, headquartered on Lianna.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious considers how easily he could hurl and slam his abductors against walls and crumble the Shimmersilk restaurant to evade capture but refuses the option for another alternative.
Sidious masked his smile: the Shimmersilk had a back room.
He stood clumsily, leaning deliberately toward one of the security men, gauging his body temperature, heart rate, and respiration. “I’m slightly intoxicated. I may have to count on you for support.”
The man made a sound of exasperation but allowed Sidious to place one arm on his shoulder.
How effortless it would be, he thought, as the dark began to rise in him, searing and hungry, yearning to assume control of his body and unleash itself, to break the necks of both of them, to tear their beating hearts from their chests, to hurl and plaster them against the walls, to bring the entire sour-smelling place down on their heads...
But he didn’t. He needed to meet his abductor. He needed to learn the names of all those responsible. He needed to prove to his Master that he was adroit and capable—a true Sith Lord.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He shatters a doorway and lifts two guards.
He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push, he took a wide stance in the shattered doorway and positioned the blade of the thrumming lightsaber vertically in front of him. Through the weapon’s glow he saw a dozen or more Santhe guards in uniform seated around a table littered with food and drink containers gape at him in disbelief before reaching for weapons fastened to their hips or scurrying for others buried beneath the rubble of their celebratory meal.
Sidious waded into the room, returning volleys of blaster bolts from those first to fire, then attacked, raising his left hand to levitate two guards into midair before running his blade through each of them.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious collapses a ceiling with the Force.
Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plans and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats. From the head of the table, Pax Teem gawked at him as if he might be a creature escaped from his most horrifying nightmare. And yet he wouldn't be the first to taste Plagueis's blade but the last; once he had been forced to watch the rest of his party butchered, from hooves to eyestalks; the painted ceiling brought down by Sidious's Force pull; the flames of a gentle gas blaze in the room's fireplace incited to a blistering inferno that Sidious tugged behind him as he soared from the table to the floor and closed on his final victim.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine kills dozens of small fish.
At the chamber's center, an enormous orb of transparent greenish blue liquid, nearly two meters in diameter, was suspended in the air above a circular dining table. Dozens of small, multicolored aquatic creatures swam within the orb, some so close to the surface that their swishing tails sent ripples around the orb's circumference.
Sidious smiled. "Excellent." He stepped past the boy and stopped beside the floating orb. Maul noticed that all the aquatic creatures within the orb swam to the far side, putting distance between themselves and Sidious. Sidious glanced at the creatures as if he found them only mildly interesting. "Maul, I have something important to tell you. I want you to listen carefully."
Maul listened.
Speaking slowly, Sidious said, "You...are...remarkable." Looking away from the watery orb, he faced Maul and added, "Very remarkable."
Maul did not know why he might be considered remarkable, or how Sidious expected him to respond. He decided to remain silent.
"Our galaxy is home to trillions of life-forms. Some are large, others small. But as diverse as they are, the truth is that most life-forms are just like these fish. Sidious gestured at the fish with a dismissive wave, and the fish appeared to shiver within the orb. "They seldom stray from where they were born. They spend their time worrying about their next meal, about how they might avoid pain, and how long they might live. They live in fear of one another. And then, they die. It does not matter if they are an insect, a fish, a man, or...a snake."
Sidious beamed at the boy. "Good." He glanced at the watery orb. "Ah! Look there, are those two fish."
Maul followed Sidious's gaze and saw a small fish with red and black stripes hovering beside a larger dark gray fish that had moved away from the other creatures to the bottom of the orb. Maul replied, "Yes, Master Sidious." He noticed that the smaller fish had yellow eyes, the same color as his own. The small fish stared back at Maul.
"How amusing," Sidious said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say those two were pretending to be us. If they were, I wonder where that would leave the rest."
Maul looked at the fish in the orb's upper area and saw them begin to jerk and spasm. Several fish puffed up twice their original size, shuddered violently, and suddenly deflated. Others rolled erratically through the water, their eyes bulging as their gills pumped furiously. But after a few seconds, all the fish except for the two at the bottom stopped swimming entirely and began drifting off in different directions. Some floated toward the top of the orb, but most sank down beside the two surviving fish, who continued to hover next to each other. As the fish sank, Sidious recited a strange verse:
"Far above, far above,
We don't know where we'll fall.
Far above, far above,
What once was great is rendered small."
Maul wondered what the words meant. He knew Sidious had somehow selected the two fish and maneuvered them to the bottom of the orb and caused all the others to die. He didn't know how Sidious had done this, but he suspected it was some kind of magic.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
He lifts a tapestry.
As Sidious stepped away from the floating orb, he waved his fingers at a tapestry that hung against one wall. The tapestry slid silently up toward the ceiling and revealed an open doorway built into the wall.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious throws several rocks at Maul; stops the stones Maul telekinetically hurls mid-flight; and lifts, moves, and smashes two boulders.
Leaving the cruiser behind, they proceeded to a nearby outcropping of bedrock, which was bordered by a broad field covered by small stones. The tops of a few large boulders loomed over the stones. Sidious and Maul stopped at the edge of the bedrock. Surveying the stones, Sidious said, "What do you see?"
"I see rocks, Master Sidious."
Sidious frowned. Then he pointed to the center of the field of stones and said, "Go stand over there."
Maul always felt especially vulnerable when he could not see his Master, but he did as he was told, stepping across the stones until he reached the designated spot. He stopped.
"Turn around."
Maul turned to face his Master. Sidious stood with his legs apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Sidious said, "I suspect that every creature that ever lived on Tosste did not think much about rocks either. I had hoped that you would be smarter. I'll ask you again. What do you see, spread out on the ground all around you?"
Maul's yellow eyes darted back and forth. He saw only rocks. Some were pebbles, others large stones, and there were the tops of a few boulders. As ever, he did not want to disappoint his Master, but he did not know any other answer than the one he had already given. Returning his gaze to his Master's face, he said hesitantly, "I see rocks, Master Sidious. Thousands of rocks."
Something hard slammed into Maul's left shoulder blade. He ducked as he spun to confront his attacker, and as he moved, he saw the object that had struck him. It was a stone, which fell on the rocks near his feet. Maul looked across the bluish-gray landscape. Not a trace of movement. No one had been standing behind him.
Another stone smashed into Maul's right bicep. He grunted as he spun again, this time to look back at his Master. Sidious had not moved. His hands remained behind his back. But from the trace of a wicked smile on the Man's face, Maul suddenly knew the stones weren't flying by themselves.
Lifting his gaze to the sky, Sidious said, "The creatures that once roamed this now dead ocean, they lacked imagination. Ultimately, that is why they all perished. They failed to see...potential."
Potential?! Maul suddenly sensed a small stone whizzing toward his head. He raised his hand to deflect the stone as he ducked, but the stones sailed past his fingers and clipped one of his horns. "Weapons!" Maul shouted. "I see weapons!"
Sidious sighed. "The correct response is..."
"I see weapons, Master Sidious!"
"Not fast enough," Sidious said as a stone smashed into Maul's lower back.
Maul crouched and grabbed the nearest rock. He no sooner lifted it from the ground than he felt it burning into his hand. He yelped as he reflexively opened his fingers and let the rock fall. How could the rock have generated such intense heat? He suspected it was his Master's trickery.
"Oh, come now," Sidious said impatiently. "Almost any humanoid with fingers can do that."
Two stones smacked into the backs of Maul's legs, knocking him off his feet. He gasped as his small body fell on the hard rocks. Looking up, he saw two more stones rise from the ground. He twisted his body fast, trying to shield his head.
"Maybe I was wrong about you being special," Sidious said as he watched the two stones strike Maul. "Maybe you are just as useless and stupid as—"
Several stones hurtled up from the ground around Maul's body. Battered and bruised, Maul glared at Sidious. The stones sailed through the air, all heading straight for his Master.
Sidious whipped one hand out from behind his back and extended it before him. The rocks stopped in mid-flight, then fell to the ground. "Is that the best you can do?" Sidious sneered. "I should crush you now."
Maul snarled as he jumped to his feet and swiped at the air with both hands. Dozens of rocks launched up from around Maul and raced toward Sidious. Sidious moved his other hand out from behind his back and flexed his fingers. The approaching rocks rebounded as if they had struck an invisible shield. Some of the rebounding rocks fell near Maul's feet. Surprised, he stumbled back. He wasn't sure what had just happened.
"Well done, young one," Sidious said as the dust settled around him. "You passed the test." He began walking slowly toward Maul. "The droid told me that you moved a staff without touching it, but I had to see what you could do with my own eyes. Did you feel it? Did you feel the power of your anger?"
"Yes, Master Sidious," Maul responded automatically. Until that moment, he had not known that he had in fact been responsible for making the staff jump up from ring in the training room. He looked at the rocks on the ground. He hadn't given any thought to launching them through the air either. He had just...done it.
Sidious came to a stop beside Maul. Looking down at the boy, he smiled and said, "I want to show you something. Stay close to my side."
Sidious extended his arms. Maul heard a rumbling sound and then saw stones sliding and bouncing away from two of the larger boulders that were about fifteen meters away, partially embedded in the ancient seabed. He realized the two boulders were rising slowly, as if an invisible giant were pulling them up from both boulders as they tore free from the planet's surface. Maul watched with wonder as they ascended several meters into the air.
Sidious flicked his fingers. The two boulders launched even higher. He flexed his wrists, and the boulders spun around together like a pair of enormous dancers. He moved his hands apart, and the distance the spinning boulders increased. Then Sidious clapped his hands together. Still spinning, the boulders swung into each other and collided with a thunderous crash. Shattered chunks and bits of rock exploded in all directions.
Watching the rocky debris rain down from the yellow sky, Maul said, "How, Master Sidious? How?"
"With the Force," Sidious said solemnly.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
With a wave of his hand, Sidious hurls TD-D9 across a room, smashing it against a wall with enough force to destroy it, shatter its head, and shake a watery orb.
As Sidious and Maul drank, TD-D9 hobbled back into the chamber carrying a tray that held plates covered by domed lids. The droid set the covered plates before the seated figures, then said, "Are you finished with me, Master Sidious?"
"Most definitely," Sidious said. Keeping his eyes on Maul, Sidious waved at the droid. TD-D9 lifted off the floor, flew across the chamber, and smashed into the wall. The impact was so great that Maul noticed small shock waves ripple across the suspended orb. The droid's photoreceptors went dead as its ruined body collapsed in a loud crash.
Maul didn't flinch. He thought of all the time he'd shared with the droid, how it had reared him and punished him, and how he'd never expected his Master to destroy it. He wouldn't have the chance to say goodbye, or to destroy the droid himself. All these thoughts raced through his mind, but he didn't flinch. Smoke began rising from the droid's shattered head.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
He throws a young Maul into the middle of a lake.
Then another memory comes to my mind. I am a small boy, walking with my Master on a planet that is all ice and snow. The wind cuts like a laser as we walk by a deep blue lake, but I am warmly dressed and don't feel the cold. I have just completed a series of exercises, rigorous ones that conclude with my having to run up the icy sheer slope of a mountain and come down at top speed. The effort called for superior balance and control. I feel fear, but I perform well, and I am hoping my Master will praise me. Instead, my Master raises a hand, and suddenly the dark side picks up my small body and tosses me into the middle of the lake.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
He uses Force Choke on Maul.
Maul had not wanted to disappoint his Master. He wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness, but he knew if he did, his punishment would be even worse. And then he thought of how long he had suffered on Orsis because he had not been allowed to use his powers, and he felt his shame transform into rage. He looked up at Sidious and was about to speak but his Master made a pinching gesture. Maul felt his throat constrict. Sidious walked a few steps away from Maul before he released his remote grip on Maul's throat.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious is a favorite Sith of mine, as well as villain in general, and I think he deserves a respect thread.
This thread, however, will be different from most respect threads created here in that comics are not the only source material for Star Wars. To represent Sidious' capabilities, I will be posting plenty of comic scans but also quoting novels, sourcebooks, handbooks, posting links to youtube videos/showing scenes from movies & TV shows, etc. For those of you who are hazy on Star Wars knowledge, let me explain a few things first.
1. Just in case this needs to be said, EU is Expanded Universe. Basically, EU Star Wars is all information and material separate from the movies. This includes TV shows, comics, novels, video games, etc.
2. The Star Wars canon classes will be brought up in this thread at least a few times. So, to follow the terms I use and just to clarify, in Star Wars continuity, there are five canon classes.
G-Canon- (George Lucas Canon). This is the highest canon class. It includes only the movies and material pertaining to them.
T-Canon- (Television Canon). This is the second highest canon class and includes any information provided in TV shows. This includes Star Wars The Clone Wars, as an example.
C-Canon- (Continuity Canon). This is the basic canon. This includes everything else that is confirmed to be in continuity, i.e., novels, comics, sourcebooks/handbooks, video games, etc.
S-Canon- (Secondary Canon). This is essentially any information that has yet to be confirmed as canon. It should only be mentioned in the context that there is a chance a given piece of information could be non-canon.
N-Canon- (Non Canon). Self-explanatory.
3. I may also abbreviate the titles of events or series. For instance, Return of the Jedi is RotJ. Revenge of the Sith is RotS. So on and so on. However, I will also bring up the Dark Empire trilogy through and throughout this thread and will be using DE as an abbreviation for it. The reason for that is because Dark Empire is where a number of Sidious's most impressive showings appear and the series in which he reached his prime. It took place 6 years after Return of the Jedi, and Palpatine had been in hiding for that time, studying Sith teachings and growing in power. So anything Palpatine did before DE was prior to the peak of his power.
4. As I said above, I will be quoting books. I will have no scans of pages from novels and only a few from sourcebooks/handbooks. In general, I will take a section from a book, quote, and list what the source material is.
5. I will also be giving mention to the Dark Empire audio drama. Star Wars audio dramas are C-Canon and do, in some cases, one of them being Dark Empire, offer information not provided in the comic or novel they were based on. As with various books, I will be quoting it. But if anyone feels the need to check the source, I believe you can listen to the DE audio drama on youtube.
6. For those of you who may be skeptical about my using sourcebooks/handbooks as a legitimate source of information, understand that Star Wars source/handbooks have a much better level of credibility than Marvel handbooks, for instance. In comparison with the comic or novel that a certain section may be based on, Star Wars handbooks and sourcebooks tend to be extremely accurate and are often re-released every few years with updated information. Facts provided in sourcebooks are C-Canon.
Having gone through all that (hopefully it all makes sense), respect Palpatine.
Powers
Emperor Palpatine is regarded as the most powerful Sith to exist.
Vader imagined the power that could be his if he crushed Palpatine and established his own rule over the Empire. But first, he would need his own apprentice. By himself, he could not hope to defeat the most powerful Sith Lord the galaxy had ever known.
--Taken from Vader: The Ultimate Guide
Yoda went after Palpatine in the empty Senate chamber, but could not defeat the most powerful Sith Lord in history.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
Beyond the vision of the Jedi Knights, somewhere within the darkness, the greatest master of evil ever to use Sith power bides his time. As his strength grows, his plans begin to shape the course of the galaxy, and his snares await the unsuspecting.
--Taken from The Complete Visual Dictionary
When Yoda crosses sabers with the movie's arch-villain, he doesn't launch into a pinwheeling display of acrobatics, as he did against Count Dooku in Episode II. Instead, Yoda faces the dark side's fury, channeled by the most powerful Sith Lord in history. "Rob Coleman wanted Yoda to feel the power of his enemy," says Wheless, "like a force he's never dealt with before."
--Taken from Insider #86: Yoda's Right Arm
He is named the most powerful of the Banite Sith.
The Sith have waited millennium for the birth of one who is powerful enough to return them from hiding. Darth Sidious is that one—the Sith's revenge on the Jedi order for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.
--Taken from The Complete Visual Dictionary
The Sith Order, in hiding for a millennium, had awaited the birth of one who was powerful enough to return the Order to prominence. Darth Sidious was the fulfillment of that prophecy, capable of exacting the Sith's revenge on the Jedi for having nearly eradicated the practitioners of the dark side of the Force.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Darth Sidious proved to be the grim culmination of a thousand years of Sith philosophy and teachings.
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
When the Sith finally emerged from a thousand years of watching and waiting, they numbered—in accordance with the tradition set down by Darth Bane—only two. The most powerful of these was Darth Sidious, an ice-cold, diabolically calculating genius equipped with the strength of the dark side of the Force, as well as an enormous wealth of Sith artifacts, equipment, and knowledge.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
Palpatine trained under Plagueis until he became more powerful and killed his master.
In truth, Palpatine was well versed in the ways of the Force, having been apprentice to Darth Plagueis the Wise, a Sith Lord who was a master of arcane and unnatural knowledge. In true Sith tradition, Palpatine murdered his Master upon receiving the skill and ability to do so.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Sidious served for many decades as the apprentice of Darth Plagueis, learning diligently at the feet of his Master. Once he possessed all of Plagueis' secrets, he retired him.
--Taken from Insider #88: Heritage of the Sith
"My own Master, Darth Plagueis, made the grave error of teaching me too much, at which point he became unnecessary."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
The Emperor is more powerful than any of his Force sensitive subjects.
Unknown to the Rebels, the Emperor had already laid the groundwork for the perpetual rule of his New Order. He had turned a Jedi into his new dark apprentice, the terrifying Darth Vader. Vader himself trained apprentices. And the Emperor created a corps of loyal, Force-skilled minions to maintain his rule. Most powerful of all, of course, was the Emperor himself.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
Sidious is stated to be the most powerful dark sider.
Inside the spacious interior of the Galactic Senate chamber, Yoda challenged the Emperor. The two engaged in a spectacular duel—a contest between the most powerful practitioners of the Force’s light and dark sides.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
It quickly became clear to Luke that this decrepit and seemingly defenseless old man was masterfully adept in the ways of the Dark Side of the Force. Indeed, as Vader had warned, the Emperor had become the Dark Side's most powerful expression.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
Even Ulic Qel-Droma would be envious of Palpatine. He had succeeded where all others had failed in taming the Dark Side.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He notes that his powers have grown tenfold over the decades he had trained with Plagueis.
Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious' powers increase upon Plagueis' death.
A tremor took hold of the planet.
Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.
A welter of voices, near and far, present and from eons past, drowned his thoughts. Raised in praise, the voices proclaimed his reign and cheered the inauguration of a new order. Yellow eyes lifted to the night sky, he saw the trembling stars flare, and in the depth of his being he felt the power of the dark side anoint him.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, he came back to himself, his gaze settling on his manicured hands. Returned to the present, he took note of his rapid breathing, while behind him the room labored to restore order. Air scrubbers hummed—costly wall tapestries undulating in the summoned breeze. Prized carpets sealed their fibers against the spread of spilled fluids. The droid shuffled in obvious confliction. Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through. And facedown on the floor lay a statue of Yanjon, one of four law-giving sages of Dwartii.
A piece Sidious had secretly coveted.
Also sprawled there, Plagueis: his slender limbs splayed and elongated head turned to one side. Dressed in finery, as for a night on the town.
And now dead.
Or was he?
Uncertainty rippled through Sidious, rage returning to his eyes. A tremor of his own making, or one of forewarning? Was it possible that the wily Muun had deceived him? Had Plagueis unlocked the key to immortality, and survived after all? Never mind that it would constitute a petty move for one so wise—for one who had professed to place the Grand Plan above all else. Had Plagueis become ensnared in a self-spun web of jealousy and possessiveness, victim of his own engineering, his own foibles?
If he hadn’t been concerned for his own safety, Sidious might have pitied him. Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.
Sidious took care, still reaching out with the Force. On closer inspection, he saw that Plagueis’s already cyanotic flesh was smoothing out, his features relaxing.
Faintly aware of the whir of air scrubbers and sounds of the outside world infiltrating the luxurious suite, he continued the vigil; then, in relief, he pulled himself up to his full height and let out his breath. This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone.
Wry amusement narrowed his eyes.
The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest. But in the end—though he could save others from death—he had failed to save himself.
A sense of supreme accomplishment puffed Sidious’s chest, and his thoughts unreeled.
Well, then, that wasn’t nearly as bad as we thought it might be...
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of an intuited perfect moment, and spring into action. One heartbeat late and the universe would have recomposed itself, no imposition of will sufficient to forestall the currents. One could only observe and react. Surprise was the element absent from any periodic table. A keystone element; a missing ingredient. The means by which the Force amused itself. A reminder to all sentient beings that some secrets could never be unlocked.
Confident that the will of the dark side had been done, he returned to the suite’s window wall. Two beings in a galaxy of countless trillions, but what had transpired in the suite would affect the lives of all of them. Already the galaxy had been shaped by the birth of one, and henceforth would be reshaped by the death of the other. But had the change been felt and recognized elsewhere? Were his sworn enemies aware that the Force had shifted irrevocably? Would it be enough to rouse them from self-righteousness? He hoped not. For now the work of vengeance could begin in earnest.
His eyes sought and found an ascending constellation of stars, one of power and consequence new to the sky, though soon to be overwhelmed by dawn’s first light. Low in the sky over the flatlands, visible only to those who knew where and how to look, it ushered in a bold future. To some the stars and planets might seem to be moving as ever, destined to align in configurations calculated long before their fiery births. But in fact the heavens had been perturbed, tugged by dark matter into novel alignments. In his mouth, Sidious tasted the tang of blood; in his chest, he felt the monster rising, emerging from shadowy depths and contorting his aspect into something fearsome just short of revealing itself to the world.
The dark side had made him its property, and now he made the dark side his.
Breathless, not from exertion but from the sudden inspiration of power, he let go of the sill and allowed the monster to writhe through his body like an unbroken beast of range or prairie.
Had the Force ever been so strong in anyone?
Sidious had never learned how Plagueis’s own Master had met his end. Had he died at Plagueis’s hand? Had Plagueis, too, experienced a similar exultation on becoming a sole Sith Lord? Had the beast of the end time risen then to peek at the world it was to inhabit, knowing its release was imminent?
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He becomes more powerful after his death at Endor.
Resurrected in a youthful clone body, Palpatine does not reveal himself immediately. Studying the dark side of the Force to become more powerful, his education results in three manifestos: The Book of Anger, The Weakness of Inferiors, and The Creation of Monsters.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
Palpatine knew precisely why the Empire couldn’t last without his dread power: he had designed it that way. No one ever suspected how much he relied on the Dark Side of the Force. He shaped those of his government by using the Force against them. He used it to control his fleets and to drive his soldiers on to victory. He used it to destroy his enemies from a distance and learn of conspiracies against him. Without it, there was no way the Empire could endure, as he had designed it. The Dark Side flowed through him like some primordial ichor and was the key to all his power.
Soon he was ready to strike. Fully healed and in greater control of the Dark Side than ever, he finally acted to end the Mutiny.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Darth Maul feels Sidious' arrival on Mandalore as a roiling in the Force and perceives his presence in the Force as a hypnotizing and terrifying dark sun.
The feeling had begun as a faint stirring in the Force, like the tiniest ripple of something moving slowly through deep water, far away but drawing steadily closer. It intensified, until it felt like the Force itself was roiling, heaving like the sea in the grip of an enormous storm.
“I sense a presence,” Maul warned Savage. “A presence I haven’t felt since...”
And then Maul knew.
“Master,” he said, leaning forward on the throne.
The commandos guarding the royal chamber reached for their throats. As Maul watched, an unseen forced lifted them high in the air, then slammed them to the floor, where they lay motionless in their red-and-black armor. The doors opened, then closed behind a figure in dark robes. A deep cowl hid most of the face, leaving only a pale chin and a downturned mouth visible. To most eyes the man in those simple robes of rough cloth was unremarkable, just another being making his way in the universe. But to those who could feel the Force he was anything but ordinary. To them, he was a dark sun blazing with power that was simultaneously hypnotizing and terrifying to behold.
Darth Sidious, the reigning Dark Lord of the Sith, had come to Mandalore.
Savage stared at the new arrival in astonishment, transfixed by the sight.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Count Dooku sees Palpatine's power through the Force as an event horizon.
Now the scene below subtly altered, though to the physical eye there was no change. Powered by the dark side, Dooku's perception took the measure of those below him with exhilarating precision.
Kenobi was luminous, a transparent being, a window onto a sunlit meadow of the Force.
Skywalker was a storm cloud, flickering with dangerous lightning, building the rotation that threatens a tornado.
And then there was Palpatine, of course: he was beyond power. He showed nothing of what might be within. Though seen with the eyes of the dark side itself, Palpatine was an event horizon. Beneath his entirely ordinary surface was absolute, perfect nothingness. Darkness beyond darkness.
A black hole of the Force.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine himself is a Force nexus.
The key to Luke's turning is the moment when he and Leia realize the Emperor is no longer defined by his physical form, but has become a chaotic nexus of dark energies that swell and burst open the fabric of space, tearing apart everything in the vicinity, human and machine.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
His death over Endor leaves a small Force nexus above the Sanctuary Moon.
Any unusual localization, or vergence, of dark side Force energy. These strange locales emanated the dark side of the Force, and were considered focal points of power for dark side users. As such, they were often guarded by Jedi Knights to prevent their discovery and exploitation. Known dark side nexuses included the twisted tree-cave on Dagobah, Halagad Ventor's hermitage on Trinta, and a "stain" of dark side energy that hovered over Endor following the defeat of the Emperor.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine in a fit of rage causes blossoms to recoil and Plagueis' droid 11-4D to step back.
Plagueis made a soothing gesture and explained in great detail what had taken place. Concluding, he said, "He threatened, too, to place you out of reach."
All the while Plagueis spoke, Palpatine was storming through circles on the narrow path, shaking his head in anger and balling his fists. "He can't do this!" he snarled. He hasn't the right! I won't allow it!"
Palpatine's fury buffeted Plagueis. Blossoms growing along the sides of the pathway folded in on themselves, and their pollinators began to buzz in agitation. FourDee reacted, as well, wobbling on its feet, as if in the grip of a powerful electromagnet. Had this human truly been born of flesh-and-blood parents? Plagueis asked himself. When, in fact, he seemed sprung from nature itself. Was the Force so strong in him that it had concealed itself?
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious' power upsets the balance of the Force on the dark side world of Vjun and causes a weather storm merely by the emergence of a holographic image of himself.
Outside, the wind picked up another notch, shrieking and groaning among the eleven chimneys as if to announce the arrival of a hideous guest. Dooku's comm console chimed. He glanced over, expecting the daily report from General Grievous, or perhaps a message from Asajj Ventress. He reached over to open the channel, ecognized the digital signature of the incoming transmission, jabbed the channel open, and snapped to his feet. "You called, my Master?"
The hologrammic projector on his desk sprang to life, and the wavering form of Darth Sidious regarded him. As always the picture was oozy and unclear, as if light itself were uneasy in the presence of the Lord of the Sith. Dark robes, purple shadows—a patch of skin, pale and mottled under his hooded cloak like a fungus growing under a rotten log. From under heavy lids the Master's eyes, snake-cold and serpent-wise, regarded him.
"What would you have of me, Master?"
"From you? Everything, of course." Darth Sidious sounded amused. "There was a time when I wasn't sure if you would be able to overcome that...independent streak of yours. After all, you were born to one of the wealthiest families in the galaxy, with gifts and abilities far, far greater than any amount of wealth could bestow. Your understanding is deep; your will, adamant. Is it any wonder you should be proud? Why, how could it be otherwise?"
Dooku said, "I have always served you well and faithfully, my Master."
"You have. But you must admit, your spirit was not made for fidelity. After all, a man who will not bow to the Jedi Council, or even Master Yoda...I wondered if perhaps loyalty was too mean, too confining a thing to ask from so great a being as yourself."
Dooku tried to smile. "The war progresses well. Our plans are on schedule. I have dealt out your deaths, your schemes, your betrayals. I have paid for your war with my time, my riches, my friends, and my honor."
"Holding nothing back?" Sidious asked lightly.
"Nothing. I swear it."
"Excellent," Darth Sidious said. "Yoda came to the Chancellor's office this morning. He is going on a very special mission. Top secret." He laughed, a harsh sound like the bark of a crow. The wind rose again, shrieking around the mansion like a creature in torment. "When he arrives, Dooku...see that you treat him as he deserves."
Darth Sidious laughed. Dooku wanted to laugh along, but couldn't quite manage it before his Master cut the connection and disappeared.
Dooku paced his office. With the end of Sidious' call, the storm had slackened, and the shrieking wind outside now only sobbed quietly under the gables of Château Malreaux.
--Taken from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous
Leia records that she felt palpable discomfort and fear simply by being in the presence of the Emperor on her first meeting with him.
"But I was also overwhelmed by the knowledge that Vader was not only Luke's father, but mine, too. My memories raced to my first encounter with Vader. It was during my first trip to Coruscant, when I'd accompanied my father—that is, Bail Organa—to a reception for the Emperor. In hindsight, I'm surprised I was allowed to go, as it exposed me to both the Emperor and Vader. Granted, I'd never demonstrated any Force powers at that point, so perhaps Bail Organa thought it was relatively safe. I never knew anyone who guarded his secrets as well as Bail Organa.
The reception was at the Imperial Palace. As things turned out, it seems neither Sith Lord sensed anything about my true identity, for if they had, surely they would have done something. That's not to say their powers were weak. I'd meant to confront Palpatine and tell him what I thought of his xenophobic Empire, but as he approached me in the reception line, I was struck numb with fear. I remember thinking it was as if he were pitch-black inside. Vader loomed behind him like a malevolent shadow, and there was no doubt in my mind that if I had found the courage to speak my mind to the Emperor, Vader would have killed me on the spot."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
The Emperor has learned virtually every application of the Force there is from all different eras.
Palpatine has spent decades studying the most arcane and esoteric Jedi disciplines. It is believed that he has mastered nearly all the known powers, previously unknown powers, and devises new ones at his pleasure.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Force Storm
Storm is an ability in which a user manipulates various Force energies to tear a rift in space and time and open a wormhole that has high order destructive power, as well as the ability to transport matter across space and time.
Palpatine describes the creation of his Force Storm in his Book of Anger.
"I have learned that Anger and Will, joined together, are the greatest Power.
I have learned to meditate upon Anger and Will with clarity and precision, and I have learned to open the hidden reservoirs of Dark Side Power.
Anger concentrated by Will in the vital center of the body creates a portal through which vast energies are released—the energies of the dark side of the Force.
Standing watch with the mind, in my meditation of Anger, I have slain my enemies from great distances, through the dark side Power that permeates the galaxy. I have created lightning, and unleashed its destructive fire.
Using this knowledge, I can unleash the dark side energies that are all around us, even to shatter the fabric of space itself. In this way, I have created storms.
Through a simple act of Will, I can generate Force Storms, energy storms that are vastly destructive and virtually unstoppable. Although triggering such storms requires merely thought and inclination, I admit I am not yet able to completely control the phenomenon. Among my goals is to perfect this control."
--Taken from Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force
"The churning energy mass of a Force Storm can consume everything it touches, for at its eye is pure hate. Just as a black hole devours a star, this storm can swallow armies and fold space."
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
The effect of Force Storm is explained.
This is perhaps the single most destructive Force power known. This power allows the Jedi to twist the space-time continuum to create vast storms of force. The power also allows limited control of these storms. Capable of creating annihilating vortices, the storms can swallow whole fleets of spaceships or tear the surfaces off worlds.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook and Tales of the Jedi Companion
"The Force Storm is truly an awe-inspiring demonstration of pure natural energy. After using the Force to open a hyperspace wormhole, tremendous shockwaves will ripple through the fabric of space. Due to the Force Storm's potential for abuse, the Council has recently classified it as a dark side power."
"The Reborn Emperor used this at Da Soocha. It has the power to kill worlds."
—Luke
--Taken from The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force
Vast energy storms that connect wildly disparate spots across the galaxy, hyperspace wormholes are unpredictable and devastating. It was to the Rebel Alliance's detriment that Emperor Palpatine was able to not only control these storms, but to create them.
--Taken from Handbook Volume Three: Dark Empire
While on his personal retreat planet Byss, the Emperor sends a Force Storm to Coruscant in order to transport Luke to Byss and in the process ravages the surface of the world.
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The shore of the western sea had been a glittering playground, a gay and glorious world that never slept, before the clone Emperor's Force storm had ravaged Coruscant. It had yet to fully recover.
--Taken from Before the Storm
Palpatine, without any visible effort or concentration, opens a wormhole more powerful than the one he sent to Coruscant that overtakes the moon Da Soocha V and consumes a fleet of capital ships as it descends on and destroys a New Republic base. Luke, Leia, and an unborn Anakin then join together in Force Harmony to loosen the Emperor's control over the Force Storm, causing it to tear apart the Eclipse along with Palpatine.
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Luke: He's created another energy storm.
Leia: It’s descending on Pinnacle Base, consuming all the ships in its path. (Sound of comlink activating.) Mon Mothma, can you hear me?
Mon Mothma: Princess Leia. There’s an energy storm. It’s suddenly taken over the planet! We have twelve ships lost already. All our hands are being lost. We’re being wiped out!
Han: Leia, Leia! (Sound of comlink deactivating.)
Leia: You’re going to slaughter all those people.
Palpatine: Yes. Did I not warn you? I’ve played along with your Jedi dueling games long enough. Now, you will experience my full potency. I live as energy. I am the dark side!
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
He summoned up a huge Force storm, far more powerful than the one that had swept Coruscant. But this time, when Skywalker and his sister turned their combined resistance against him, Palpatine could no longer control what he had unleashed.
--Taken from The Essential Chronology
Before even fully mastering the technique, Palpatine creates a Force Storm with enough skill and precision to transport his body to Kaal from the second Death Star II without causing noticeable damage to the Death Star.
The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadowto plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body.
--Taken from Gamer #5
After Luke is funneled through the wormhole, Mon Mothma comments on the incident, saying that there have been Storms sent to multiple planets.
Mon Mothma: The energy storm that took Commander Skywalker, this is not an isolated event. Similar Storms have been detected in several systems.
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
Essence Transfer
Essence Transfer, Transfer Essence, or Spirit Transference is an ability that allows a dark sider to exit their body in the form of their Force energy consciousness and possess another body or even an inanimate object, usually by performing a ritual or speaking an incantation.
Sidious draws out Sith spirits while conducting Sith magic.
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Chancellor Palpatine spent many years studying ancient Holocrons to learn the secrets of the SIth. The Holocrons enabled him to channel Sith spirits, who taught him how to harness dark-side energy and release lethal bolts of lightning.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
The Emperor explains how he survived his death at Endor to Luke.
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He says that he can possess anyone and even threatens to possess Leia's unborn child.
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Palpatine threatens to possess Luke and then voluntarily uses Essence Transfer to enter one of his clones.
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He involuntarily enters his Essence state and travels back to Byss after he was killed by his own Storm over Da Soocha V, traversing interplanetary distances for months as an disembodied spirit.
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While inhabiting a sabotaged, genetically unstable body, Palpatine is killed due to his weakened state and attempts to possess the infant Anakin but is intercepted by a fatally wounded Empatojayos Brand, who encases the Emperor within Force Light and, with the help of all other Jedi spirits, drags Palpatine into the Force as he dies, leaving Sidious to wander Chaos forever.
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Though Palpatine seemed to be winning his war of conquest, his final clone body had begun to fail him, aging at a rapid rate and eaten from the inside by the sabotage of Carnor Jax. He tried to clone other bodies so that he could resurrect himself again, but Jax’s manipulations had tainted even the source material. Palpatine’s scientists and physicians could offer no solutions.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
His body mortally wounded by Han Solo, Palpatine tracked down the Solos and desperately sought to transfer his fading essence to the infant Anakin Solo. He was blocked and absorbed by the dying Jedi, Brand, who promised that he and all the other Jedi spirits would ensure the dark sider never returned—a fate Palpatine had feared above all others. The Emperor's reign was over for good.
--Taken from The Official Star Wars Fact File #120
"One of the Emperor's Force Storms destroyed the Alliance base on the moon of Da Soocha and the entire fleet above it. Every day I'm reminded how lucky we are that Palpatine is lost to Chaos forever."
—Luke
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
The Emperor tortures and kill Bevel Lemelisk for his failures of engineering and then controls Lemelisk's spirit to transfer him into a clone body, conducting this process a total of seven times.
Shortly after the Death Star was expected to crush the Rebel base on Yavin 4, Bevel Lemelisk had been summoned to meet personally with Emperor Palpatine deep within the Imperial palace. Lemelisk had been flanked by red-armored Imperial bodyguards as they whisked him off on a high-speed shuttle across the skylanes of the planetwide city. The millions of illuminated windows winked like corusca gems. Each point of light seemed to be another torch celebrating his triumph.
Lemelisk rubbed his jowls, pleased that he had remembered to shave this time. The red Imperial guards were a silent lot, standing at attention like statues. Lemelisk hummed and grabbed his jutting knees as the shuttle approached the enormous pyramid of the Imperial palace. The guards rushed him down the hall so quickly that their flowing scarlet cloaks billowed around them. When the group reached the door to the Emperor's private chambers, the guards stood at attention, their force pikes raised, their smooth plasteel helmets obscuring any expression.
Lemelisk jaunted happily into the vaulted room, pleased to see the black-cowled Emperor waiting for him. Palpatine hunched in his chair, reptilian yellow eyes glowing through the oily shadows cast by his hood. The Emperor appeared to be falling into ill health: His skin was blistered and folded in upon itself like a pasty drapery over his bones, as if decay had set in well before the advent of death.
But Lemelisk couldn't be troubled by unpleasant thoughts right now. He stood on the polished stone floor and made a cursory bow of obeisance. "My Emperor," he said. "I trust you have received word by now that our Death Star has destroyed the secret Rebel base."
"I have received word," Palpatine said and gestured with one long-clawed finger. Lemelisk glanced up at a clattering sound and saw a flexible wire cage released from the vaulted ceiling above. He ducked, but the cage fell squarely down over him, seating itself to the floor as if Palpatine were directing it with invisible powers. The cage was made of fine mesh, the grid barely large enough to stick his smallest finger through.
"Excuse me, Emperor?" Lemelisk said. "Is there something further you wish to discuss with me? Another project perhaps? Anything else I can do for you?" Lemelisk swallowed again.
"Yes, my servant," Palpatine said. "You may die for me."
"Uh—“ Lemelisk could think of nothing else to say. "I was hoping for something else, actually," he said stupidly.
Palpatine glowered at him. "I just received word that your Death Star was destroyed at Yavin. A puny band of Rebels with outdated fighters found a weakness in your design—a thermal exhaust port that allowed a single X-wing pilot to strike a fatal blow. One pilot obliterated an entire battle station!"
Lemelisk pursed his lips. "Thermal exhaust port, eh? I knew I must have forgotten something. I'll have to fix that in the next design."
"Yes, you will," Palpatine said with an icy voice. "But first, you will die for me."
Lemelisk blinked his watery blue eyes and reached out to touch the fine, tough wires of his cage. He looked around, and nervousness raged like a whirlwind around him. Though he had shaved, his neck itched fiercely. The Emperor sat completely still, yet he must have manipulated a set of controls because with a sharp snick at Lemelisk's feet tiny openings appeared in the polished stone floor, orifices that led down to a black unknown. He heard clicking sounds, the scrabbling of sharp, hard feet.
"I am most displeased with your performance, Lemelisk," the Emperor said.
Bevel Lemelisk shuffled aside as something small but iridescent poked out of the opening: a beetle of some kind. The eight-legged, hard-shelled insect shone a deep blue as it clambered into the light and paused to probe the air with waving antennae. From other openings five identical beetles emerged. They fluttered their wing cases, then took flight, buzzing around the enclosed space. Lemelisk swatted at one, but the blue beetle detected the motion and swooped toward him, sinking mandibles with serrated razor edges into the thick flesh of his palm.
"Oww!" Lemelisk flailed his hand until the beetle lost its hold. He stomped on it, cracking its carapace. But the scent of blood attracted the other beetles to him. He watched in horrified fascination as a dozen more of the insects emerged from the floor holes, fluttering their wing cases and buzzing toward him.
"Those are piranha beetles," the Emperor said, lounging back in his swiveling black chair. "They are native to Yavin 4, and I considered them too precious for extinction when your Death Star was expected to destroy the moon. So I rescued them."
The beetles swarmed over Lemelisk now. He slapped at them, shouting, paying little attention to Palpatine's words. "Stop this!" he yelled.
"Not yet," the Emperor said.
The beetles sliced through his clothing to the skin on Lemelisk's arms, his thighs, his chest, his cheeks. Blood flowed around him, drenching his shredded clothes. He could not keep up with the new injuries. Hundreds more beetles swarmed out, battering themselves against the cage mesh.
"These fine insects are not in danger of becoming extinct after all, though," Palpatine said, "since your Death Star did not work! You have failed me, Bevel Lemelisk," he said, slowing his words. His wrinkled, rubbery lips bent upward in a fiendish grin.
"And now, I'm going to watch these beetles devour you, bit by bit. They are very hungry, you see, and don't get satisfied easily. But if they gorge themselves and begin to slow down, don't worry—I have plenty more." The Emperor let out a glacial laugh, but Lemelisk could no longer hear.
The beetles buzzed in his ears, tearing at his flesh, his hair, his clothes. He struck at himself, throwing his body against the cage mesh. In the process, some of the beetles were stunned, and their own companions fell upon them, cracking through the iridescent shells and chewing to the soft organs within.
Lemelisk screamed and begged—to no avail. The agony went beyond his comprehension, beyond his imagination. His vision turned black after the piranha beetles devoured his eyes—but the pain continued for a long time afterward....
Later, Lemelisk had awakened, blinking his restored eyes, and was completely disoriented. He found himself in the same vaulted chamber, wrapped in a clean, white uniform. His body felt young and strong, without the paunch and the flab from spending too much time working on projects in his mind and too little effort maintaining his health.
Lemelisk bent his arms and looked at his hands, blinking in astonishment. Hearing a small buzz and clatter, he glanced over to find the wire-mesh cage still filled with buzzing, clacking piranha beetles that scampered up and down the walls, snapping their mandibles. Spattered patterns of fresh blood made arcs along the walls of the cage. Inside, he saw a carcass that had been stripped down to gnawed bones and shreds of clothing—the clothing he himself had worn only moments ago.
"You'll grow accustomed to your clone in a moment," the Emperor said, rubbing his knobby fingers over a strange ancient-looking artifact. "I trust that all of your memories have been transferred properly? It is an uncertain skill at best, and the Jedi I stole the technique from was reluctant to give me thorough instruction. But it seems to work."
Lemelisk nodded weakly, wanting to faint but knowing he didn't dare.
"Now don't fail me again, Lemelisk," the Emperor said. "I'd hate to have to think of an even worse execution for next time."
Simply hearing the word execution brought back to his mind the full horrors of the Emperor's executions, the excruciating deaths Palpatine had inflicted upon Lemelisk each time he made an error...
The deaths remained in Lemelisk's mind, ever-present shadowy nightmares—seven executions in all. Once, Palpatine had launched him out an airlock; the pain had been excruciating, though the death was mercifully swift as the sudden drop of pressure and the freezing cold destroyed his internal organs.
He also remembered being slowly lowered into a vat of molten copper, watching his body burn away inch by inch. (Why molten copper? Lemelisk had wondered. Finally one day, more than a month later, he asked the Emperor. Palpatine’s answer had proved surprising in its utter mundanity. “It’s what the smelter used that day.”)
Lemelisk had also been trapped in a vault filled with thickening acid mist so that his lungs dissolved and he coughed blood, and the acid continued to eat him from the inside out. The other deaths had been as imaginative and just as painful.
--Taken from Darksaber
The Death Star worked as planned, but fell victim to a design flaw at Yavin. As a result, the Emperor punished the engineer with the torture of flesh-eating piranha-beetles. Lemelisk died in agony, then awoke in the body of a clone. Motivated by fear, he set to work designing the second Death Stare, and also built the Tarkin super-laser. Lemelisk died seven times in total, dark side magic shuttling his consciousness through seven clones.
--Taken from The New Essential Guide to Characters
The Emperor travels to Byss by opening a Force Storm before his death on the second Death Star and transporting himself to one of his Hands, Jeng Droga, whom Palpatine possesses to return to Byss where his spirit is then removed from Droga and transferred into a clone.
The moment the Emperor "died" at the Battle of Endor, Droga fell into an inexplicable insanity, butchering his crew and causing the Emperor's Shadow to plunge into Kaal's oceans. Even as he perished, Palpatine used the dark side knowledge the Sith Lords had granted him years earlier to rend space itself and transmigrate his essence across lightyears to Droga's body. The infusion of Palpatine's overwhelming dark side energies reduced Droga to incoherent madness. Eventually, Palpatine's Grand Vizier Pestage was able to find Droga and tear the Emperor's essence from Droga's body.
--Taken from Gamer #5
By sheer force of will, Palpatine is able to return from the void with no host tethering his spirit to the physical realm.
Palpatine's body was destroyed. Separated from his clones, Palpatine was forced to survive in the maddening, bodiless existence of the void. Through sheer will he retained his identity, crossing the gulf of space to again take up residence in his clone body.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Midi-chlorian Manipulation
Midi-chlorian Manipulation is a dark side power through which the adept can command midi-chlorians for purposes such as healing, resurrection, or the creation of life.
Palpatine recalls that he and Plagueis had made headway in learning to control midi-chlorians years earlier.
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious and Plagueis perform meditative rituals in which they manipulate midi-chlorians and exercise dominion over the Force to imbalance the Force toward the dark side, spreading darkness throughout the galaxy.
While midi-chlorians appeared to resist manipulation of a sort that might imperil the balance of the Force, they remained passive, even compliant, in the case of a weak-willed being manipulated by one who was strong in the Force.
“The Bith—Venamis...”
“Dispatched by Tenebrous to test me—to eliminate me had I failed. But Venamis has been a gift; essential in helping me unlock some of the deepest secrets of the Force. Every creature you have glimpsed or sensed here has been a similar blessing, as you will see when I lead you into the mysteries.”
“What did the droid mean when it said the Magister’s pregnancies?”
Beneath the breath mask, Plagueis might have quirked a smile. “It means that the pregnancies were not achieved by normal means of conception, but rather through the Force.”
Surprise and disbelief mingled in Sidious’s blue eyes. “The Force?”
“Yes,” Plagueis said pensively. “But I failed to exercise due caution. As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics. I have been audacious, and the Force has tested me the way Tenebrous sought to. Midi-chlorians are not easily persuaded to execute the dictates of one newly initiated in the mysteries. The Force needs to be won over, especially in work that involves the dark side. It must be reassured that a Sith is capable of accepting authority. Otherwise it will thwart one’s intentions. It will engineer misfortune. It will strike back.”
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
And so it had been left largely to Sidious to bring the same fervor to the manipulation of events in the mundane world that Plagueis brought to the manipulation of midi-chlorians. Instead of challenging each other, they had both dedicated themselves to executing the Grand Plan. Political mastery and mastery of the Force. Someday soon, the Sith would wield both, with Sidious the face of the former and Plagueis behind the scenes, advising him about the latter. Like Plagueis, Sidious had moved judiciously, for unintended repercussions in the real world could be as damaging to the Sith imperative as blowback from the Force. The fact that the Force had not struck back argued that their partnership was something unique and in accordance with the will of the Force. Plagueis’s self-imposed isolation had taken a toll on some of the plans he and Sidious had engineered for the Trade Federation and other groups. But Plagueis had made what amounted to a full recovery from his injuries, and the dark side was no longer simply on the ascendant but risen and climbing toward the zenith.
Plagueis began to pace the cool floor. “No Sith have ever been in the position in which we now find ourselves, Darth Sidious: in step with the reemergence of the dark side, fortified by the signs and omens, certain that revenge and victory are near at hand. If the Jedi would abide by their philosophy of acting in accordance with the Force, of doing what is right, they would roll over for the dark. But they resist. Yoda and the rest of the Council members will double their meditation sessions in an effort to peer into the future, only to discover it clouded and unknowable. Only to discover that complacency has opened the door to catastrophe.
“If indeed they have been acting in accordance with the Force, how could we be succeeding in tipping the balance? How could the dark side be gaining ground? In fact, the Jedi have fallen away from their self assigned duty, their noble path. Could they have prevented it? Perhaps by having remained in control of the Republic, by electing and reelecting Jedi Supreme Chancellors. Or perhaps by absenting themselves completely from the affairs of the Republic, and attending to their arcane rituals in the belief that right thinking by them would keep the Republic strong and on course, the galaxy tipped into the light, instead of having allowed themselves to become marshals and enforcers.”
He cast a questioning look at Sidious. “Do you see the grand error of their ways? They execute the Republic’s business as if it were the business of the Force! But has a political body ever succeeded in being the arbiter of what is right and just? How easy it is for them to bask in self-assurance in their castle on Coruscant. But in so doing, they have rendered themselves ill equipped for the world we have spent a millennium bringing into being.”
He cleared his throat.
“We’re going to back them into a contradiction, Darth Sidious. We’re going to force them to confront the moral quandary of their position, and reveal their flaws by requiring them to oversee the conflicts that plague their vaunted Republic.
“Only Dooku and a handful of others have grasped the truth. All those years ago when I first met him on Serenno, I thought: What a blow it would be to the Order if he could be enticed to leave and embrace the dark side. What a panic it might incite. For if one could leave, then ten or twenty or thirty could follow, and the hollowness at the center of the Order would be plain for all to see.”
The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”
Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.
Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.
This was the office of the Chancellor.
Within the chair's shadow sat another shadow: deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.
And from the city. And the planet.
And the galaxy.
The shadow waited. It had told the boy it would. It was looking forward to keeping its word.
For a change.
The Coruscant nightfall was spreading through the galaxy. The darkness in the Force was no hindrance to the shadow in the Chancellor's office; it was the darkness. Wherever darkness dwelled, the shadow could send perception.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
More than a century before, when Tenebrous had been but a Sith apprentice himself, the magnificent computational power of his Bith brain had led him far beyond the simplistic Force studies imposed on him by his Master. He had always been far too intelligent to be seduced by the traditional Sith metaphysical twaddle of dark destiny and the witless fantasy of endless war against the equally witless Jedi Order. Soon he had confirmed to his own satisfaction that the dark side of the Force, far from being some malevolent mystic sentience bent on spreading suffering throughout the Galaxy, was in truth merely an energy source, and a tool with which he could impose his will upon reality. It was a sort of natural amplifier he could use to multiply the effectiveness of his many useful abilities.
None of which was more useful than his matchless intellect.
Like many Sith before him, he had turned his powers toward knowledge of the future. But unlike any Sith before him, he had the enormous brain of his people, which combined sheer brute processing power with a level of analytic precision simply beyond the capacity of any other species. The future was always in motion, and while other Sith always struggled to foresee the faintest, least specific hints of what was to come, Tenebrous had no need to see the future.
He could calculate it.
While still merely an apprentice, his analysis had shown him the inevitable end of the Banite Sith and its preposterous Rule of Two. His calculations plainly indicated the coming of a shadow so vast it would darken the galaxy entirely—so vast it would mark the end of both Jedi and Sith as the universe had known them heretofore. The rise of the shadow would be the end of history itself.
Tenebrous had not the slightest doubt that the entire galaxy would measure time according to its arrival. Events would be marked by how long they had preceded the shadow, or how long after it they followed.
Though the exact nature of the great shadow remained occult, the remorseless logic of his extrapolation detailed the coming destruction of the Banite system, and the rise of what would become known as the "One Sith." One Sith! The conclusion was so obvious as to require no confirmation: one single Sith Lord would arise of such power that he'd have no need of any apprentice nor fear the Jedi. He would take and hold the galaxy by his own hand alone. Without an apprentice—or a Jedi Order—to destroy him, the One Sith would rule forever!
A heady prospect, with only a single drawback: Tenebrous was not to be that Sith Lord. His own death was clearly foretold, entirely inevitable, and it would precede the shadow by decades.
Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed. For a moment, Tenebrous found his perception cast far forward in time—to Plagueis' own death at the hands of his apprentice, who was himself only visible as a smear of darkness...
A shadow!
--Taken from The Tenebrous Way
Only Palpatine has been able to spread his darkness completely and totally over an entire galaxy.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
While manipulating midi-chlorians to imbalance the Force, Sidious and Plagueis accidentally conceive Anakin Skywalker as the Force’s response to their defying its will.
Palpatine’s eyes sparkled in sadistic delight. Valorum was getting everything he deserved. He had demonstrated some diplomatic skill during the Stark Hyperspace War, but his election to the chancellorship had more to do with a pedigree that included three Supreme Chancellors and deals he had cut with influential families like the Kalpanas and the Tarkins of Eriadu. His adulation of the Jedi Order was well known; less so his hypocrisy—much of his family wealth derived from lucrative contracts his ancestors had entered into with the Trade Federation. His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.
The Muun’s eyes narrowed. “One can’t be content to abide by the rules of the Jedi Order or the Force. Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”
Time is short.
Still in safekeeping on Aborah were texts and holocrons that recounted the deeds and abilities of Sith Masters who, so it was said and written, had been able to summon wind or rain or fracture the skies with conjured lightning. In their own words or those of their disciples, a few Dark Lords claimed to have had the ability to fly, become invisible, or transport themselves through space and time. But Plagueis had never succeeded in duplicating any of those phenomena.
From the start Tenebrous had told him that he lacked the talent for Sith sorcery, even though the inability hadn’t owed to a deficiency of midi-chlorians. It’s an innate gift, the Bith would say when pressed, and one that he had lacked, as well. Sorcery paled in comparison with Bith science, regardless. But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.
The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.
The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.
On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.
Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.
But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.
Drunk on newfound power, then, he had attempted an even more unthinkable act: to bring into being a creation of his own. Not merely the impregnation of some hapless, mindless creature, but the birth of a Forceful being. The ability to dominate death had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t equivalent to pure creation. And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.
But ultimately to no end.
The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.
Regardless, eight long years later, Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.
But he had yet to inform Sidious of this.
It was more important that Sidious remain as focused on manipulating events in the profane world as Plagueis was intent on dominating the realm of the Force, of which the mundane was only a gross and distorted reflection.
To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?
He recalled a stellar eclipse he had witnessed on a long-forgotten world, whose single moon was of perfect size and distance to blot out the light of the system’s primary. The result hadn’t been total darkness but illumination of a different sort, singular and diffuse, that had confused the birds and had permitted the stars to be seen in what would have been broad daylight. Even totally blocked, the primary had shone from behind the satellite’s disk, and when the moon moved on there had been a moment of light almost too intense to bear.
Gazing into Sojourn’s darkening sky, he wondered what calamity the Force was planning in retreat to visit upon him or Sidious or both of them for willfully tipping the balance. Was retribution merely waiting in the wings as it had been on Coruscant twenty years earlier? It was a dangerous time; more dangerous than his earliest years as an apprentice when the dark side might have consumed him at any moment.
For now, at least, his full convalescence was near complete. Sidious was continuing to become more powerful as a Sith and as a politician, his most intricate schemes meeting with little or no resistance. And the Jedi Order was foundering...
Time would tell, and time was short.
Plagueis entered the room that had served as his meditation chamber. Though the high-ceilinged space was already fixed in his memory, he studied the few pieces of furniture in silence, as if searching for some detail that had escaped his notice. His eyes lingered on the small antechamber in which he and Sidious had been sitting when they had brought about the shift, and the strength of that memory was such that he was catapulted into a moment of intense reverie.
Dooku smiled with his eyes, but not in mirth. “On the contrary, as you say. Since I’m interested in learning more about the possibility of an alliance.”
Palpatine adopted a hooded look. “You’re resolved to leave the Order?”
“Even more than when we last spoke.”
“Because of the Council’s decision to intervene at Naboo?”
“I can forgive them that. The blockade has to be broken. But something else has occurred.” Dooku chose his next words carefully. “Qui-Gon returned from Tatooine with a former slave boy. According to the boy’s mother, the boy had no father.”
“A clone?” Palpatine asked uncertainly.
“Not a clone,” Dooku said. “Perhaps conceived by the Force. As Qui-Gon believes.”
Palpatine’s head snapped back. “You don’t sit on the Council. How do you know this?”
“I have my ways.”
“Does this have something to do with the prophecy you spoke of?”
“Everything. Qui-Gon believes that the boy—Anakin is his name—stands at the center of a vergence in the Force, and believes further that his finding him was the will of the Force. Blood tests were apparently performed, and the boy’s concentration of midi-chlorians is unprecedented.”
“Do you believe that he is the prophesied one?”
“The Chosen One,” Dooku amended. “No. But Qui-Gon accepts it as fact, and the Council is willing to have him tested.”
“What is known about this Anakin?”
“Very little, except for the fact that he was born into slavery nine years ago and was, until recently, along with his mother, the property of Gardulla the Hutt, then a Toydarian junk dealer.” Dooku smirked. “Also that he won the Boonta Eve Classic Podrace.”
Palpatine had stopped listening.
Nine years old... Conceived by the Force... Is it possible...
His thoughts rewound at frantic speed: to the landing platform on which he and Valorum had welcomed Amidala and her group. Actually not Amidala, but one of her look-alikes. But the sandy-haired boy, this Anakin, swathed in filthy clothing, had been there, along with a Gungan and the two Jedi. Anakin had spent the night in a tiny room in his apartment suite.
And I sensed nothing about him.
“Qui-Gon is rash,” Dooku was saying. “Despite his fixation with the living Force, he demonstrates his own contradictions by being a true believer in the prophecy—a foretelling more in line with the unifying Force.”
“Nine years old,” Palpatine said when he could. “Surely too old to be trained.”
“If the Council shows any sense.”
“And what will become of the boy then?”
Dooku’s shoulders heaved. “Though no longer a slave, he will probably be sent to rejoin his mother on Tatooine.”
Plagueis came to a halt at the entry to Palpatine’s apartment. Eventually one of Queen Amidala’s near-identical handmaidens came to the door, a vision in a dark cowled robe. Her eyes fixed on the breath mask. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “Senator Palpatine is not here.”
“I know,” Plagueis said. “I’m here to speak with a guest of the Senator. A young human boy.”
Her eyes remained glued on the mask. “I’m not permitted—”
Damask motioned swiftly with his left hand, compelling her to answer him. “You have my permission to speak.”
“I have your permission,” she said in a distracted voice.
“Now where is the boy?”
“Anakin, you mean.”
“Anakin, yes,” he said in a rush. “He’s the one. Fetch him—now!”
“You just missed him, sir,” the handmaiden said.
Plagueis peered past her into Palpatine’s suite. “Missed him?” He straightened in anger. “Where is he?”
“Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn came to collect him, sir. I suspect that you can find him at the Jedi Temple.”
Plagueis fell back a step, his thoughts reeling.
There was still a chance that the Council would decide that Anakin was too old to be trained as a Jedi. That way, assuming he was returned to Tatooine...
But if not... If Qui-Gon managed to sway the Council Masters, and they reneged on their own dictates...
Plagueis ran a hand over his forehead. Are we undone? he thought. Have you undone us?
It was late in the evening when Plagueis made his way onto a public observatory that provided a vantage on the proprietary arabesque of a landing platform on which Queen Amidala’s Royal Starship basked in the ambient light.
With the cowl of his hood raised, he moved to one of the stationary macrobinocular posts and pressed his eyes to the cushioned eye grips. Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the boy had arrived at the platform in a Jedi ship; Amidala, her handmaidens and guards, and a loose-limbed Gungan in an open-topped hemispherical air taxi. Just then the latter group was ascending the starship’s boarding ramp, but Qui-Gon and the round-faced desert urchin had stopped short of the ship to speak about something.
What? Plagueis asked himself. What topic has summoned such an earnest look to Qui-Gon’s face, and such confused urgency in the boy?
Lifting his face from the macrobinoculars, he stretched out with the Force and fell victim to an assault of perplexing images: ferocious battles in deep space; the clashing of lightsabers; partitions of radiant light; a black-helmeted cyborg rising from a table... By the time his gaze had returned to the platform, Qui-Gon and the boy had disappeared.
Trying desperately to make some sense of the images granted him by the Force, he stood motionless, watching the starship lift from the platform and climb into the night.
He fought to repress the truth.
The boy would change the course of history.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs.
He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
“My experiments proved midi-chlorians could be controlled. If this is true, then could they not also be induced to create life at the molecular level? Midi-chlorians in the cells of the mother could, in theory, be persuaded o craft a zygote.
For consistency in my test subjects, I obtained hundreds of identical humanoids, each with consistent midi-chlorian level. After much experimentation, I succeeded in prodding the midi-chlorians to replicate themselves through asexual fission. Though in most cases, this process increased the numbers uncontrollably and killed the host.
But I believe that by using this method I can trick midi-chlorians into creating a zygote. Then it would simply be a matter of growing the subject under normal biological conditions. Such a subject could, of course, take years to hit the development milestone of a typical humanoid, but he could have a midi-chlorian count as high as 20,000 per cell. That is more than any Jedi or Sith in recorded history. Although entirely theoretical, such an achievement is intriguing.
If a new life form could be created where none existed before, the living could sustain their bodies indefinitely. Science has led to these conclusions, yet these events must be guarded with utmost care. For now, it remains purely theoretical.”
“I can’t help feeling a chill as I read the account by Plagueis, knowing that my father was known for his high midi-chlorian count, which was supposedly even higher than Yoda’s.”
—Luke
“The beliefs of the Jedi are expressed in ritual and storytelling. Plain language somehow eludes those who have grown up tightly wrapped in tradition.
The Jedi await the coming of a savior, a prophesied Chosen One who will destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force. The Jedi tell of Mortis, a place of impossible geography inside the angles of a gargantuan monolith. The three all-powerful beings of Mortis can assume strange shapes and exemplify the dark side, the light side, and the principle of balance.
Compelling? It is debatable, but at the very least it is an adequate way to illustrate an allegorical point. Day coexists with night, for example and construction is always followed by ruin. Yet many of the Jedi treat the legend of Mortis as literal truth. They believe that the Chosen One will prevent these gods and demons from tearing the universe asunder—that their champion will be a vessel of pure Force energy.
So we come back to midi-chlorians. These organisms allow beings to live and provide a connection to the Force. If bred in sufficient quantities, midi-chlorians can even conceive a new life form and bestow upon it powers greater than any Jedi has ever dreamed, generating a vergence in the Force.
If I induce midi-chlorians to create such a being, my handiwork would fit all the descriptions of their Chosen One. But he would be an agent of my will. How fitting that the misguided reliance on superstition could lead to a Sith creation that is hailed by the Jedi as a savior.”
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
Anakin’s mother, Shmi, confirmed in her own words what Qui-Gon had already suspected—the boy was immeasurably strong in the Force. Neither knew of Darth Plagueis’s suspected involvement in inducing midi-chlorians to create life, though Shmi informed Qui-Gon that Anakin had no natural father.
Palpatine had carefully cultivated Anakin's hopes for preventing this dire premonition, and had revealed everything to Anakin: Palpatine's secret identity as Darth Sidious. His murder of his own Master, Darth Plagueis. The role that the Sith had played in creating Anakin by manipulating the midi-chlorians.
--Taken from The New Essential Chronology
It was believed that the teachings of the Sith Lord Darth Plagueis, applied by his apprentice Darth Sidious, were instrumental in Anakin's birth, resulting in the conception of a boy with an unnaturally high midi-chlorian count.
--Taken from The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
Sidious comments to Plagueis that he could save his life with the Force as Plagueis used Midi-chlorian Manipulation to do for others in the past but decides against it, claiming to have the knowledge to support life with the Force.
Plagueis gulped for air and lifted an arm toward him.
"There's the rub, you see," Sidious said in a philosophical tone. "All the ones you experimented on, killed, brought back to life... They were little more than toys. Now, though, you get to experience it from their side, and look what you discover: in a body tat is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can't accomplish what you're asking of them."
Hatred stained Sidious's eyes.
"I could save you, of course. Return you from the brink, as you did Venamis. I could retask your body to repair the damage already done to your lungs, your hearts, your aged brain. But I'll do no such thing. The idea here is not to drag you back at the last moment, but to bring you to death's door and shove you through to the other side.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Darth Sidious sustains Vader's life through the dark side after his injuries on Mustafar, presumably through Midi-chlorian Manipulation.
An on Mustafar, below the red thunder of a volcano, a Sith Lord had already snatched from sand of black glass the charred torso and head of what once had been a man, and had already leapt for the cliffbank above with effortless strength, and had already roared to his clones to bring the medical capsule immediately! The Sith Lord lowered the limbless man tenderly to the cool ground above, and laid his hand across the cracked and blackened mess that once had been his brow, and he set his will upon him.
Live, Lord Vader. Live, my apprentice.
Live.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs. He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?
How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?
None would be found.
Sidious would have had to discover a way to compel midi-chlorians to do his bidding, and bring into being one as powerful as Anakin. As it was, Sidious and a host of medical droids had merely restored Anakin to life, which—while no small feat—was a far cry from returning someone from death.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Sith Lightning
Force Lightning is a dark side ability which projects raw Force energies in the form of electricity from the user's body and casts them on a target, causing pain or possibly death, as well as gradually sapping the victim's life.
Sidious projects Lightning powerful enough to reduce a Sithspawn to ashes.
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Palpatine burns three Prophets of the Dark Side to bones with a burst of Lightning.
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He generates Lightning powerful enough to kill a legion of stormtroopers with enough precision not to kill the Royal Guards in the area.
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The Emperor knocks Leia unconscious with Lightning.
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While weakened, Palpatine emits Lightning that incapacitates Leia; fatally wounds Brand, whose prosthetic body can sustain him in extreme temperatures and even the vacuum of space for a year; and kills Rayf instantly.
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Brand: I realize our steam-powered technology looks barbaric to your eyes, Solo, but it's quite servicable and very solid.
Han: Yeah, like that walking droid suit you're wearing?
Brand: This "droid suit" is a sophisticated survival system. It can keep me alive on the hottest, or the coldest, planet in the galaxy. I could live for a year in the vacuum of space...without eating.
--Taken from the Dark Empire II audio drama
Sidious releases bolts of Lightning on Darth Plagueis, which dismantles Plagueis' breathing apparatus and leaves him disabled on the floor.
Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality?
The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He tortures Maul with Lightning, ripping bolts through Maul's internal organs and shorting out his legs.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
“There is no mercy,” Sidious said.
Bolts of energy ripped out from the Sith Lord’s fingers, tendrils of brilliant blue and purple that danced across Maul’s tattooed skin and ripped through his muscles, his organs. His mechanical legs convulsed, shorting out.
“You belong to me,” Sidious said. “Your existence is now perfectly meaningless.”
He stretched out his fingers and the energy tore through Maul again. Sidious watched the lightning build in intensity, his eyes unblinking, his teeth gritted in a triumphant, terrible smile.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious’ Lightning impacts Mace's lightsaber forcefully enough to bend the blade back toward Mace's face in spite of lightsaber's capacity for repelling Force Lightning and Mace's efforts to deflect it with Vaapad.
Lightning blasted the clouds above, and lightning blasted from Palpatine's hands, and Mace didn't have time to comprehend what Palpatine was talking about; he had time only to slip back into Vaapad and angle his blade to catch the forking arcs of pure, dazzling hatred that clawed toward him. Because Vaapad is more than a fighting style. It is a state of mind: a channel for darkness. Power passed into him and out again without touching him. And the circuit completed itself: the lightning reflected back to its source.
Palpatine still made no move to defend himself from Skywalker; instead he ramped up the lightning bursting from his hands, bending the fountain of Mace's blade back toward the Korun Master's face.
Mace's blade bent so close to his face that he was choking on ozone. "Anakin, he's too strong for me—"
This was beyond Vaapad; he had no strength left to fight against his own blade.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
His Lightning hurls Mace Windu far out an open window.
"I need him alive!" Skywalker shouted. "I need him to save Padme!"
Mace thought blankly, Why? And moved his lightsaber toward the fallen Chancellor. Before he could follow through on his stroke, a sudden arc of blue plasma sheared through his wrist and his hand tumbled away with his lightsaber still in it and Palpatine roared back to his feet and lightning speared from the Sith Lord's hands and without his blade to catch it, the power of Palpatine's hate struck him full-on.
He had been so intent on Palpatine's shatterpoint that he'd never thought to look for Anakin's. Dark lightning blasted away his universe. He fell forever.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Mace had determined that Palpatine, a Sith master, was too dangerous to live. Anakin couldn't risk losing the Sith secret of immortality forever. He severed Mace's sword arm with his own lightsaber. Palpatine, unleashing a burst of Force lightning, sent the great Jedi Master out the window to his death.
--Taken from Vader: The Ultimate Guide
Palpatine's Lightning overpowers Yoda's Force Deflection and renders Yoda unconscious.
In the Senate Arena, lightning forked from the hands of a Sith, and bent away from the gesture of a Jedi to shock Redrobes into unconsciousness. Then there were only the two of them. Their clash transcended the personal; when new lightning blazed, it was not Palpatine burning Yoda with his hate, it was the Lord of all Sith scorching the Master of all Jedi into a smoldering huddle of clothing and green flesh.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious unleashes Lightning while he and Yoda cross blades and hurl around senate pods simultaneously.
There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark. It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though these were traded, too. It came as the battle shifted from the holding office to the great Chancellor's Podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the Podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laserpoint of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the Senate Arena; it came as the Force and the podium's controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones crashing and crushing against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed the Senate's cheers for the galaxy's new Emperor.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
His Lightning overloads Yoda's limit on Force Absorption.
The end came with astonishing suddenness. The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine kills Garrbo V'Droz with Lightning.
Garrbo V'Droz almost dropped his glow rod when it shined off a face he recognized in one of the chambers. There was a grim smile on its face. The green-haired occupant of the chamber was someone with whom Garrbo V'Droz was intimately familiar: his brother, the construction foreman.
Whirling on his patron, he whimpered, "What is the meaning of this?" Emperor Palpatine smiled and said simply, "It means that you and I are the only ones left who know the way through the labyrinth to my...home for treasures too valuable even for my museum above. And soon, it will just be me," the Emperor grinned horribly, as Garrbo V'Droz cowered.
"Don't worry, my friend," hissed the dark figure, gesturing grandly at a vacant spot in the chamber, "you shall have a place of honor here. You've earned it."
Palpatine raised his hands, preparing to strike, and then, allowing himself a final moment to savor the fear in his victim, added, "And if I ever need your services again, I will not hesitate to clone you."
V'Droz cringed as the Emperor threw vicious bolts of lightning from his hands and ensured that the galaxy's finest architect was forever a part of his last, greatest work.
--Taken from The Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook: His Finest Work
The Emperor's Force Lightning overcomes Luke's Force Deflection.
Palpatine raised his spidery arms toward Luke: blinding white bolts of energy coruscated from his fingers, shot across the room like sorcerous lightning, and tore through the boy’s insides, looking for ground. The young Jedi was all at once confounded and in agony—he’d never heard of such a power, such a corruption of the Force, let alone experienced it. But if it was Force-generated, it could be Force-repelled. Luke raised his arms to deflect the bolts. Initially, he was successful—the lightning rebounded from his touch, harmlessly into the walls. Soon, though, the shocks came with such speed and power, they coursed over and into him, and he could only shrink before them, convulsed with pain, his knees buckling, his powers at ebb.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Telekinesis
Force Telekinesis is a power through which a Force sensitive can move, contort, and control matter for a variety of effects, ranging from constructive purposes to destructive ones.
Palpatine shows Force Flight.
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Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine hurls his father around a cabin, contorts a bulkhead, strangles his mother, and kills his siblings with the Force.
Cosinga took a step in Palpatine's direction, only to be hurled back against the bulkhead separating the communications room from the main cabin. A female voice from behind the closed hatch asked in distress, "What was that?"
Nursing an injured shoulder, Cosinga looked suddenly like a trapped animal, his eyes wide with surprise and fear. He made a move to strike the handplate and open the hatch, but Palpatine thwarted his effort without raising a finger. Twisting violently around, Cosinga fell over one of the acceleration chairs, bloodying his face as it struck the armrest. A pounding began against the hatch.
"Guards!" Cosinga shouted, but the word had barely left his lips when the bulkhead against which he was slouched buckled inward, heaving him face-first to the floor and driving the breath from him. Palpatine stood rooted in place, his hands trembling in front of him and his face stricken. Something stirred behind his incandescent eyes. He heard the pounding on the hatch and whirled.
"Don't come in! Stay away from me!"
"What have you done?" It was his mother's voice, panicked. "What have you done?"
Cosinga pushed himself to his knees and began a terrified retreat, leaving smears of blood on the deck. But Palpatine was advancing on him now.
"If the Force birthed you, then I curse it!" Cosinga rasped. "I curse it!"
"As I do," Palpatine growled.
The hatch began to slide to, and he heard the voice of the guard who had escorted him from the Jafan III. "Stop!"
"Cosinga!" his mother screamed.
Palpatine pressed the palms of his hands to his head, then in eerie calm streaked to the hatch, pulled the surprised guard through the threshold, and tossed him clear across the cabin.
Raising his face to the ceiling, he shouted, "We're all in this now!"
Once more Sidious allowed his memories to unfold, and he relived the crimethe event, as he had at last come to think of it. His father's limp and blooded body. The smashed skulls of the bodyguards. His hands clenched around his mother's slender throat—but not really, only in his mind, strangling her with his thoughts. The lifeless forms of his siblings, slumped here and there...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He discreetly shifts waiters' aprons to uncover blasters concealed beneath them.
At the same time, Sidious used the Force to shift the apron of one of the waiters just enough to reveal the grip of a hold-out blaster the man was wearing at his waist. Lifting his glass for another swallow, he did the same to another of the waiters, whose apron concealed an identical weapon. Both had been manufactured by BlasTech, but not for common consumption. The E-series 1-9—the aptly named Swiftkick—was available only to elite members of Santhe Security, headquartered on Lianna.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious considers how easily he could hurl and slam his abductors against walls and crumble the Shimmersilk restaurant to evade capture but refuses the option for another alternative.
Sidious masked his smile: the Shimmersilk had a back room.
He stood clumsily, leaning deliberately toward one of the security men, gauging his body temperature, heart rate, and respiration. “I’m slightly intoxicated. I may have to count on you for support.”
The man made a sound of exasperation but allowed Sidious to place one arm on his shoulder.
How effortless it would be, he thought, as the dark began to rise in him, searing and hungry, yearning to assume control of his body and unleash itself, to break the necks of both of them, to tear their beating hearts from their chests, to hurl and plaster them against the walls, to bring the entire sour-smelling place down on their heads...
But he didn’t. He needed to meet his abductor. He needed to learn the names of all those responsible. He needed to prove to his Master that he was adroit and capable—a true Sith Lord.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He shatters a doorway and lifts two guards.
He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push, he took a wide stance in the shattered doorway and positioned the blade of the thrumming lightsaber vertically in front of him. Through the weapon’s glow he saw a dozen or more Santhe guards in uniform seated around a table littered with food and drink containers gape at him in disbelief before reaching for weapons fastened to their hips or scurrying for others buried beneath the rubble of their celebratory meal.
Sidious waded into the room, returning volleys of blaster bolts from those first to fire, then attacked, raising his left hand to levitate two guards into midair before running his blade through each of them.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious collapses a ceiling with the Force.
Now Sidious gave full vent to his ire. Crashing through the doors, he landed in the center of a table covered with plates of grains and grassy plans and surrounded by a herd of grazing Gran, whose boisterous laughs froze in their throats. From the head of the table, Pax Teem gawked at him as if he might be a creature escaped from his most horrifying nightmare. And yet he wouldn't be the first to taste Plagueis's blade but the last; once he had been forced to watch the rest of his party butchered, from hooves to eyestalks; the painted ceiling brought down by Sidious's Force pull; the flames of a gentle gas blaze in the room's fireplace incited to a blistering inferno that Sidious tugged behind him as he soared from the table to the floor and closed on his final victim.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine kills dozens of small fish.
At the chamber's center, an enormous orb of transparent greenish blue liquid, nearly two meters in diameter, was suspended in the air above a circular dining table. Dozens of small, multicolored aquatic creatures swam within the orb, some so close to the surface that their swishing tails sent ripples around the orb's circumference.
Sidious smiled. "Excellent." He stepped past the boy and stopped beside the floating orb. Maul noticed that all the aquatic creatures within the orb swam to the far side, putting distance between themselves and Sidious. Sidious glanced at the creatures as if he found them only mildly interesting. "Maul, I have something important to tell you. I want you to listen carefully."
Maul listened.
Speaking slowly, Sidious said, "You...are...remarkable." Looking away from the watery orb, he faced Maul and added, "Very remarkable."
Maul did not know why he might be considered remarkable, or how Sidious expected him to respond. He decided to remain silent.
"Our galaxy is home to trillions of life-forms. Some are large, others small. But as diverse as they are, the truth is that most life-forms are just like these fish. Sidious gestured at the fish with a dismissive wave, and the fish appeared to shiver within the orb. "They seldom stray from where they were born. They spend their time worrying about their next meal, about how they might avoid pain, and how long they might live. They live in fear of one another. And then, they die. It does not matter if they are an insect, a fish, a man, or...a snake."
Sidious beamed at the boy. "Good." He glanced at the watery orb. "Ah! Look there, are those two fish."
Maul followed Sidious's gaze and saw a small fish with red and black stripes hovering beside a larger dark gray fish that had moved away from the other creatures to the bottom of the orb. Maul replied, "Yes, Master Sidious." He noticed that the smaller fish had yellow eyes, the same color as his own. The small fish stared back at Maul.
"How amusing," Sidious said. "If I didn't know better, I'd say those two were pretending to be us. If they were, I wonder where that would leave the rest."
Maul looked at the fish in the orb's upper area and saw them begin to jerk and spasm. Several fish puffed up twice their original size, shuddered violently, and suddenly deflated. Others rolled erratically through the water, their eyes bulging as their gills pumped furiously. But after a few seconds, all the fish except for the two at the bottom stopped swimming entirely and began drifting off in different directions. Some floated toward the top of the orb, but most sank down beside the two surviving fish, who continued to hover next to each other. As the fish sank, Sidious recited a strange verse:
"Far above, far above,
We don't know where we'll fall.
Far above, far above,
What once was great is rendered small."
Maul wondered what the words meant. He knew Sidious had somehow selected the two fish and maneuvered them to the bottom of the orb and caused all the others to die. He didn't know how Sidious had done this, but he suspected it was some kind of magic.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
He lifts a tapestry.
As Sidious stepped away from the floating orb, he waved his fingers at a tapestry that hung against one wall. The tapestry slid silently up toward the ceiling and revealed an open doorway built into the wall.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious throws several rocks at Maul; stops the stones Maul telekinetically hurls mid-flight; and lifts, moves, and smashes two boulders.
Leaving the cruiser behind, they proceeded to a nearby outcropping of bedrock, which was bordered by a broad field covered by small stones. The tops of a few large boulders loomed over the stones. Sidious and Maul stopped at the edge of the bedrock. Surveying the stones, Sidious said, "What do you see?"
"I see rocks, Master Sidious."
Sidious frowned. Then he pointed to the center of the field of stones and said, "Go stand over there."
Maul always felt especially vulnerable when he could not see his Master, but he did as he was told, stepping across the stones until he reached the designated spot. He stopped.
"Turn around."
Maul turned to face his Master. Sidious stood with his legs apart, his hands clasped behind his back. Sidious said, "I suspect that every creature that ever lived on Tosste did not think much about rocks either. I had hoped that you would be smarter. I'll ask you again. What do you see, spread out on the ground all around you?"
Maul's yellow eyes darted back and forth. He saw only rocks. Some were pebbles, others large stones, and there were the tops of a few boulders. As ever, he did not want to disappoint his Master, but he did not know any other answer than the one he had already given. Returning his gaze to his Master's face, he said hesitantly, "I see rocks, Master Sidious. Thousands of rocks."
Something hard slammed into Maul's left shoulder blade. He ducked as he spun to confront his attacker, and as he moved, he saw the object that had struck him. It was a stone, which fell on the rocks near his feet. Maul looked across the bluish-gray landscape. Not a trace of movement. No one had been standing behind him.
Another stone smashed into Maul's right bicep. He grunted as he spun again, this time to look back at his Master. Sidious had not moved. His hands remained behind his back. But from the trace of a wicked smile on the Man's face, Maul suddenly knew the stones weren't flying by themselves.
Lifting his gaze to the sky, Sidious said, "The creatures that once roamed this now dead ocean, they lacked imagination. Ultimately, that is why they all perished. They failed to see...potential."
Potential?! Maul suddenly sensed a small stone whizzing toward his head. He raised his hand to deflect the stone as he ducked, but the stones sailed past his fingers and clipped one of his horns. "Weapons!" Maul shouted. "I see weapons!"
Sidious sighed. "The correct response is..."
"I see weapons, Master Sidious!"
"Not fast enough," Sidious said as a stone smashed into Maul's lower back.
Maul crouched and grabbed the nearest rock. He no sooner lifted it from the ground than he felt it burning into his hand. He yelped as he reflexively opened his fingers and let the rock fall. How could the rock have generated such intense heat? He suspected it was his Master's trickery.
"Oh, come now," Sidious said impatiently. "Almost any humanoid with fingers can do that."
Two stones smacked into the backs of Maul's legs, knocking him off his feet. He gasped as his small body fell on the hard rocks. Looking up, he saw two more stones rise from the ground. He twisted his body fast, trying to shield his head.
"Maybe I was wrong about you being special," Sidious said as he watched the two stones strike Maul. "Maybe you are just as useless and stupid as—"
Several stones hurtled up from the ground around Maul's body. Battered and bruised, Maul glared at Sidious. The stones sailed through the air, all heading straight for his Master.
Sidious whipped one hand out from behind his back and extended it before him. The rocks stopped in mid-flight, then fell to the ground. "Is that the best you can do?" Sidious sneered. "I should crush you now."
Maul snarled as he jumped to his feet and swiped at the air with both hands. Dozens of rocks launched up from around Maul and raced toward Sidious. Sidious moved his other hand out from behind his back and flexed his fingers. The approaching rocks rebounded as if they had struck an invisible shield. Some of the rebounding rocks fell near Maul's feet. Surprised, he stumbled back. He wasn't sure what had just happened.
"Well done, young one," Sidious said as the dust settled around him. "You passed the test." He began walking slowly toward Maul. "The droid told me that you moved a staff without touching it, but I had to see what you could do with my own eyes. Did you feel it? Did you feel the power of your anger?"
"Yes, Master Sidious," Maul responded automatically. Until that moment, he had not known that he had in fact been responsible for making the staff jump up from ring in the training room. He looked at the rocks on the ground. He hadn't given any thought to launching them through the air either. He had just...done it.
Sidious came to a stop beside Maul. Looking down at the boy, he smiled and said, "I want to show you something. Stay close to my side."
Sidious extended his arms. Maul heard a rumbling sound and then saw stones sliding and bouncing away from two of the larger boulders that were about fifteen meters away, partially embedded in the ancient seabed. He realized the two boulders were rising slowly, as if an invisible giant were pulling them up from both boulders as they tore free from the planet's surface. Maul watched with wonder as they ascended several meters into the air.
Sidious flicked his fingers. The two boulders launched even higher. He flexed his wrists, and the boulders spun around together like a pair of enormous dancers. He moved his hands apart, and the distance the spinning boulders increased. Then Sidious clapped his hands together. Still spinning, the boulders swung into each other and collided with a thunderous crash. Shattered chunks and bits of rock exploded in all directions.
Watching the rocky debris rain down from the yellow sky, Maul said, "How, Master Sidious? How?"
"With the Force," Sidious said solemnly.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
With a wave of his hand, Sidious hurls TD-D9 across a room, smashing it against a wall with enough force to destroy it, shatter its head, and shake a watery orb.
As Sidious and Maul drank, TD-D9 hobbled back into the chamber carrying a tray that held plates covered by domed lids. The droid set the covered plates before the seated figures, then said, "Are you finished with me, Master Sidious?"
"Most definitely," Sidious said. Keeping his eyes on Maul, Sidious waved at the droid. TD-D9 lifted off the floor, flew across the chamber, and smashed into the wall. The impact was so great that Maul noticed small shock waves ripple across the suspended orb. The droid's photoreceptors went dead as its ruined body collapsed in a loud crash.
Maul didn't flinch. He thought of all the time he'd shared with the droid, how it had reared him and punished him, and how he'd never expected his Master to destroy it. He wouldn't have the chance to say goodbye, or to destroy the droid himself. All these thoughts raced through his mind, but he didn't flinch. Smoke began rising from the droid's shattered head.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
He throws a young Maul into the middle of a lake.
Then another memory comes to my mind. I am a small boy, walking with my Master on a planet that is all ice and snow. The wind cuts like a laser as we walk by a deep blue lake, but I am warmly dressed and don't feel the cold. I have just completed a series of exercises, rigorous ones that conclude with my having to run up the icy sheer slope of a mountain and come down at top speed. The effort called for superior balance and control. I feel fear, but I perform well, and I am hoping my Master will praise me. Instead, my Master raises a hand, and suddenly the dark side picks up my small body and tosses me into the middle of the lake.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
He uses Force Choke on Maul.
Maul had not wanted to disappoint his Master. He wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness, but he knew if he did, his punishment would be even worse. And then he thought of how long he had suffered on Orsis because he had not been allowed to use his powers, and he felt his shame transform into rage. He looked up at Sidious and was about to speak but his Master made a pinching gesture. Maul felt his throat constrict. Sidious walked a few steps away from Maul before he released his remote grip on Maul's throat.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
