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Maul wanted to ask for forgiveness but his steadfast anger wouldn’t permit it. In any case, what was the point, since he had received beatings for being right as often as he had for being wrong. Welling up from some unreachable source, rage lifted his head and set his tongue flapping. But barely a word passed his lips when he felt his throat pinched closed by a negligent gesture of Sidious’ right hand.
“Don’t interrupt,” Sidious warned. He paced away from Maul, eventually allowing him to breathe, then turned to him.
--Taken from Restraint
Sidious appears to have telekinetically killed over a dozen Weequay soldiers.
Moving through a maintenance level to avoid more soldiers, Maul, Talzin, and the Nightsisters finally arrived in the hangar that housed Talzin's starship. Maul had expected to find the warlord's soldiers stationed in the hangar to prevent Talzin from reaching her ship, but he had not expected to find over a dozen Weequays lying dead on the hangar's deck. Although none of the Weequay bodies bore obvious wounds, Maul knew how they had died, and also the identity of their killer. Leaving Talzin standing with her Nightsisters, he moved across the hangar to face a dark alcove. He stopped, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head.
"Master."
Sidious stepped out from the alcove. He wore his dark robe, and his face was concealed by the shadows beneath his deep hood.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Talzin hadn't expected Maul to heed her command, and wondered as she ran why he was running with them. Did he actually intend to accompany them to Dathomir? She had begun to doubt that she had the power to subdue him a second time, or to persuade him to come. So what had changed? Had combat forged a primal connection of some sort? Or was he now prepared to accept his fate, despite what he had said about having perceived the presence of his Master?
Racing into the hangar, they saw that the deck was littered with fallen Weequays. None of the discolored bodies showed evidence of obvious wounds, but to a soldier they were dead. Clearly the Vollick had deployed them to keep Talzin and the rest from reaching the starship. Could they have turned on one another? She scarcely had time to consider it when she saw Maul come to an abrupt stop and drop to one knee with his head bowed.
“Master,” Talzin heard him say.
A human male stepped into view. Of average height, he wore a dark robe whose hood was raised over his head, concealing his face. Talzin could feel his power, not only in the Force, but in the dark side, as it was known to some. Even the Nightsisters could sense the man’s strength, and fell back a step in uncertainty, their energy bows aimed at the deck.
--Taken from Restraint
He again employs Choke on Maul, lifting him in the air and nearly rendering him unconscious.
It was in the early days when Lord Sidious was secretly working to consolidate the strength of the Trade Federation. My mission was to go to the planet Chryya and ensure that their thriving spice business would be turned over to the Trade Federation to manage. I would accomplish this through threats and intimidation. I would not reveal my Sith powers unless I left my opponent dead.
At first, I was successful. A few incidents convinced the frightened merchants to sign all the agreements. But then one merchant organized a protest. Before I could move against him, a groundswell grew among the people. Every citizen of Chryya destroyed their spice supplies rather than give in to the Trade Federation. They wrecked their economy for principle. I had not forseen this. In my experience, creatures are guided by their own comforts. I could not kill the entire population, so I had to leave and report my failure to my Master.
He did not take it well. He raised a hand, and the dark side grabbed me by the throat and lifted me high. My breath was squeezed out of me slowly. Too slowly. I had time to feel every stretched-out moment of panic as I struggled to force even the tiniest trickle of air into my lungs. When I was close to passing out, I was dropped to the floor in a heap. My Master walked away. He did not address me or call for me for some time. The removal of his favor was worse than the punishment.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
He tears Maul's lightsaber out of the latter's hand during a duel.
Sidious shifted like a liquid shadow, maneuvering around his apprentice. Maul was suddenly up against the wall, gasping for breath as his vision blurred. His strength was evaporating. He turned fast to see Sidious. Sidious lashed out with his lightsaber. Maul parried the blow, but then his lightsaber suddenly flew from his hand. As Maul heard his lightsaber deactivete and clatter across the cave's floor, Sidious raised his own lightsaber and advanced.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
I am gasping, trying to suck in enough air to keep going. My vision blurs as Lord Sidious raises his lightsaber. I parry the blow, but my lightsaber suddenly flies out of my hand, torn by the power of my Master directing the dark side. I realize then that he has just begun to tap into his own reserves. Mine are played out.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
Sidious pulls Maul's lightsaber toward himself and spins, moves, and activates it in mid-flight before levitating it back to Maul.
Darth Sidious raised his right hand, palm outward.
Before Maul could prevent it—even if he had chosen to do so—the long cylinder that was his double-bladed lightsaber flew from its hitch on his belt and went directly to his Master. But instead of grasping it, Sidious stopped the lightsaber in midflight, centimeters from his raised hand, and directed it to spin and rotate before him, leaving Maul to gaze at him in unabashed awe. Sidious bade the lightsaber to ignite. From each end blazed a meter-long blade of rubicund fire, hypnotic in the intensity of its burning. The free-floating weapon pivoted left, then right, eliciting a thrumming sound that was as menacing as it was rousing.
"An exquisite weapon," Sidious said. "Tell me, my young apprentice, what were you thinking when you fashioned it? Why this and not a single blade, as the Jedi prefer?"
"The single blade has limitations, Master, in offense and defense. It made sense to me to be able to strike with both ends."
Sidious made a sound of approval. "You must bear that in mind when you go to Dorvalla, Darth Maul. But remember this What is done in secret has great power. A sword master knows that when he flourishes his blade, he reveals his intent. Be watchful. It is too soon to reveal ourselves."
"I understand, Master."
Sidious deactivated the lightsaber and sent it back to Maul, who received it as one might a cherished possession.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Saboteur
Sidious shows enough telekinetic precision to activate and deactivate the controls of a transmission grid.
Darth Sidious, Master of the Sith, finished relaying his instructions to the Neimoidians and made a slight, almost negligent gesture. Across the room a relay clicked and the holographic transmission ended. The flickering blue-white images of the Neimoidians and the section of their ship's bridge captured by the split-beam transceivers vanished.
Sidious made another slight gesture. The Force replied in response, and the transmission grid beneath his feet glowed again.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He again deactivates a transmission grid.
Darth Sidious did not wait for a response; none was necessary. With a gesture he closed the relay, breaking the connection.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He again pulls Maul's lightsaber out of Maul's hand and draws it to himself.
Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
Sidious uses Choke to slowly kill Darth Plagueis.
Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis." He held his thumb and forefinger close together. "Try to keep yourself alive while I choke the life out of you."
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, and 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 that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can’t accomplish what you’re asking of them.”
The Muun’s eyes had begun to bulge; his pale flesh, to turn cyanotic.
Plagueis slid to the floor and rolled facedown. Death rattled his lungs and he died.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He is unaffected by a turbulent telekinetic storm from Plagueis.
Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch, knocking a statue from its perch. Sidious moved in, his hands upraised to deliver another bolt, his expression arctic enough to chill the room. A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.
Sidious's eyes bored into the Muun's.
"How often you said that the order of Bane had ended with the death of your Master. An apprentice no longer needs to be stronger, you told me, merely more clever. The era of keeping score, suspicion, and betrayal was over. Strength is not in the flesh but in the Force."
He laughed. "You lost the game on the very first day you chose to train me to rule by your side—or better still, under your thumb. Teacher, yes, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But Master—never."
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He rolls over Plagueis' corpse to inspect his condition.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious uses Choke to casually kill two Mandalorians.
The unmarked shuttle landed on the royal palace’s platform, reserved for Mandalore’s rulers and their most important advisers. The ramp lowered and a hooded figure in dark robes descended. The commandos rushing to intercept him reached for their throats, gagging, and the cloaked figure swept past them without a sideways glance, gaze fixed straight ahead.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
He again employs Choke on two Mandalorians to lift them into the air and slam them on the floor; opens and closes doors; and hurls Maul and Savage against a wall.
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. Maul felt himself leap from the throne, mechanical legs clacking down the steps and toward his old Master. The motion was almost automatic, involuntary. Maul’s earliest memories were of that hooded figure—his tests, his teachings, and also his torments. He had been Maul’s father, his protector, his torturer. He had been everything.
Maul halted before Sidious and kneeled, bowing his head.
“Master,” he said simply.
Sidious stopped. For a moment all was silent.
“I am most impressed to see you have survived your injuries,” he said, the voice as rough and cracked as Maul remembered.
“I used your training, Master,” Maul said. “And I have built all of this in hopes of returning to your side.”
Sidious lifted his head slightly, and Maul saw his yellow eyes beneath the hood. They were as cold as space.
“How unfortunate that you are attempting to deceive me,” Sidious said.
“Master?” Maul asked.
“You have become a rival,” Sidious declared.
He raised his arms and both Maul and Savage flew through the air, smashing into the elegantly patterned walls of the royal chamber and crashing to the floor.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious Force Pushes Maul against a wall, leaving Maul temporarily incapacitated until after Sidious kills Savage.
Maul tried to slash past Sidious’s guard, only to find his Master had given ground, causing Maul to extend his arms too far and leave himself slightly unbalanced. It was the smallest stumble, easily corrected, but Sidious saw it—and pounced before Maul could draw himself back. Snarling, he reached out with the Force and slammed Maul against the wall, leaving him lying stunned in a heap.
Savage knew the dangers of facing the Sith Lord alone, and pressed his attack before Sidious draw his hand back from Force-shoving Maul into the wall. Teeth bared, Savage windmilled his double saber, hoping to disarm Sidious or force him to give ground. If he did, that would allow the yellow-and-black Zabrak to follow his initial attack with a lightning-quick thrust that would penetrate Sidious’s defenses and wound or even kill him.
Maul tried to shake off his attack, rocketing up from the floor. Sidious neatly side-stepped Savage’s assault, drawing back as the massive Zabrak raised his double-bladed saber high to try to pummel him with it. Savage didn’t think Sidious was fast enough to take advantage of the brief opening in his defenses, but he was wrong.
Sidious rammed one of his blades through Savage’s black armor, the glowing crimson tip of the saber appearing between his shoulder blades. Savage gasped, his saber tumbling from his grasp. Sidious yanked his weapon back and Savage seemed to hang suspended for a moment, as if he were being levitated by with the Force. Then he crashed to the ground.
Sidious stepped back as Maul rushed to his fallen brother’s side.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
He smashes Maul against a wall and the floor.
Maul’s saber spun out of his hand, bouncing away across the floor. Then Sidious seized his former apprentice with the Force, hurling him against the wall. Maul’s vision swam. He tried to get up, but realized he was already in the air, held aloft by the Force. Sidious slammed him into the floor. Then Maul was off the ground again, legs kicking for purchase in empty air. He could taste blood in his mouth. His head hit the wall with a sickening crunch.
A rhyme crept into his head, a nagging sing-song bit of poetry.
Far above, far above,
We don’t know where we’ll fall.
Far above, far above.
What once was great is rendered small.
Maul could no longer remember where he had heard it, or what it meant. He was broken, helpless, useless.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious activates his lightsaber inside a neuranium sculpture, pulls it across the room, and then deactivates it as he draws it into his sleeve.
As a Jedi shuttle settled to the landing deck outside, the shadow sent its mind into the far deeper night within one of the several pieces of sculpture that graced the office: an abstract twist of solid neuranium, so heavy that the office floor had been specially reinforced to bear its weight, so dense that more sensitive species might, from very close range, actually perceive the tiny warping of the fabric of space-time that was its gravitation.
Neuranium of more than roughly a millimeter thick is impervious to sensors; the standard security scans undergone by all equipment and furniture to enter the Senate Office Building had shown nothing at all. If anyone had thought to use an advanced gravimetric detector, however, they might have discovered that one smallish section of the sculpture massed slightly less than it should have, given that the manifest that had accompanied it, when it was brought from Naboo among the then-ambassador's personal effects, clearly stated that it was a single piece of solid-forged neuranium.
The manifest was a lie. The sculpture was not entirely solid, and not all of it was neuranium. Within a long, slim, rod-shaped cavity around which the sculpture had been forged rested a device that had lain, waiting, in absolute darkness—darkness beyond darkness—for decades. Waiting for night to fall on the Republic.
The shadow felt Jedi Masters stride the vast echoic emptiness of the vaulted halls outside. It could practically hear the cadence of their boot heels on the Alderaanian marble. The darkness within the sculpture whispered of the shape and the feel and every intimate resonance of the device it cradled. With a twist of its will, the shadow triggered the device. The neuranium got warm. A small round spot, smaller than the circle a human child might make of thumb and forefinger, turned the color of old blood.
Then fresh blood.
Then open flame.
Finally a spear of scarlet energy lanced free, painting the office with the color of stars seen through the smoke of burning planets. The spear of energy lengthened, drawing with it out from the darkness the device, then the scarlet blade shrank away and the device slid itself within the softer darkness of a sleeve.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He opens a compartment in the ceiling of his office and lowers a cloak down to himself.
Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious and Yoda telekinetically hurl numerous senate pods while Palpatine additionally levitates a pod he stands on while the two cross blades and unleash and absorb Lightning 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.
He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor's Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his pod streaking in a downward spiral to the holding office at the base of the Podium tower.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious resists Vader's Force Scream and telekinetic outburst after the latter awoke on the operation table.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine uses Force Crush on Sedriss to subvert him into the Dark Side Adepts.
One of Emperor Palpatine's many dark side warriors was Sedriss, a young mercenary who displayed an aptitude for using the Force, if not any particular desire to join the ranks of the Imperial military. Various Imperial organizations tried to recruit Sedriss but found him insolent, insubordinate, and violently opposed to authority. He was awaiting execution for the deaths of a handful of Imperial officers when he was spirited away by members of the Inquisitorium, and dragged before the Emperor himself, who asked Sedriss simply, "Would you like to kill me?"
The Emperor looked inside Sedriss's heart and in his own way cut to the core of Sedriss's problem. Sedriss could not respect anyone whom he knew he could easily kill—which included most of his superiors in the military. The Emperor made a bargain with Sedriss: They would duel, and if Sedriss won, he could take the Emperor's life. But if Sedriss lost, he would serve the Emperor with unquestioning loyalty, or suffer the most terrible, lingering, ignominious death he could imagine. Confident of his chances against the frail old man, Sedriss agreed—and was promptly crushed to the ground by the Emperor's power. Sedriss admitted that the Emperor had defeated him and promised to honor their agreement. The Emperor didn't desist. Sedriss felt his ribs collapsing, and swore that he would serve the Emperor. Still the Emperor did not stop, until Sedriss felt his heartbeat slowly coming to a stop and begged to serve the Emperor. When he was finally able to stand, he instead knelt—convinced that this was a superior who was truly superior to him.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
The Emperor muses about his ability to destroy his office and demolish his palace but decides against it.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.
The Emperor curled his fingers into a gnarled fist. The Death Star, his most powerful weapon, perhaps the greatest achievement of his reign, the key to destroying the tedious Rebel Alliance once and for all...destroyed. Even now, the detestable Rebels were no doubt celebrating their victory. It was a meaningless victory, of course, and only a fool would think differently. But then, only a fool would join the ridiculous battle against the Empire.
Only a fool challenges the inevitable.
The Rebel Alliance was nothing but a nuisance, a millfly to be swatted away. But even a meaningless victory was unacceptable. The Rebels would be punished. The Emperor smiled—the Rebels would be crushed. And soon. His impatience swelled. Fury boiled his blood at the thought of waiting any longer. The rage called for release, and the Emperor knew that with a thought he could destroy his opulent office. He could crack the building's foundation, rain rubble on the heads of those unlucky beings trapped within. He could, with the full power of his anger, unleash a fireball of death.
But he chose to wait. He chose control.
It was another thing the Jedi had never understood. A lesson that even Darth Vader, such a quick study in the school of darkness, had yet to learn. The rage was only a beginning.
Control, that was the key. Patience. The ability to channel the flood, bend it to your will. Anger was the fuel that powered the dark side of the Force. But success depended on mastery of the anger. Vader spent his anger without thought; the Emperor hoarded his, as a Hutt hoarded his treasure.
The destruction of the Death Star had been a setback, but every defeat masked an opportunity. And this was an opportunity the Emperor fully intended to seize.
In fact, he already had a plan.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
He lowers a cage around Bevel Lemelisk.
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.
--Taken from Darksaber
The Emperor casually removes Luke's binders.
“Welcome, young Skywalker.” The Evil One smiled graciously. “I have been expecting you.”
Luke stared back brazenly at the bent, hooded figure. Defiantly. The Emperor’s smile grew even softer, though; even more fatherly. He looked at Luke’s manacles.
“You no longer need those,” he added with no-bless oblige—and made the slightest motion with his finger in the direction of Luke’s wrists. At that, Luke’s binders simply fell away, clattering noisily to the floor.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Telepathy/Empathy
Force Telepathy is a power through which Force sensitives can read, communicate, and manipulate thoughts. Empathy is a power through which Force sensitives can read, communicate, and manipulate emotions.
Sidious induces fear and aggression into the minds of Jedi across the galaxy.
During the Clone Wars, Palpatine conducted Sith rituals on Coruscant that radiated unnerving ripples in the Force, which caused anxiety among most Jedi throughout the galaxy, but also served to increase Anakin Skywalker's hunger for power.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
The Emperor communicates with Mara Jade across lightyears of distance and projects an astral presence that appears to her.
At the time of his defeat at Endor, Palpatine sends a vision to Mara, continuing his order for her to kill Luke.
Luke and Palpatine connect their minds while Luke is on Coruscant and the Emperor is on Byss.
Palpatine gains subtle hold over Luke's mind, nearly compelling him to the dark side.
After Luke agrees to serve as the Emperor's apprentice, he sends a message to Leia in the form of a vision, but Palpatine overrides his message and speaks to Leia through the vision, which renders her unconscious.
Luke escapes Palpatine's hold over his mind with Leia's aid.
Palpatine: Curse you, Jedi! No. A curse is not necessary. I have something better for you. Skywalker! I have broken you. Now, prove yourself worthy of serving me. (Sound of lightsaber activating.)
Luke: Yes, my master.
Palpatine: Bring your sister over to the dark side. You have the power.
Leia: (Sounds of waving lightsabers.) I don't know what he's done to you, Luke, but this time we're really leaving.
Luke: Leia, put the lightsaber away. I don't want to hurt you.
Leia: The last thing I'd do is hurt you, Luke. What's happened to you is not final.
Palpatine: (Palpatine laughs.) He cannot hear you, child. To him, you are a ghost. The faint memory of a former life.
Leia: Luke...listen. (Sound of lightsaber deactivating.) Luke. Oh, what have you done? What's behind his vacant stare?
Palpatine: Why, nothing, my child. Nothing. (Sound of the Force being used. Sound of speech echoing within Luke's mind.)
Luke: Nothing.
Palpatine: You are nothing.
Luke: Where am I?
Palpatine: Alone.
Luke: No. Help me.
Palpatine: There is no one. There is only the dark side.
Luke: I am a Jedi. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You are not a Jedi. You are nothing. You have no name.
Luke: My name is Skywalker. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You...have...no...name!
Luke: I...
Palpatine: Accept the dark side. You have no name.
Luke: I have no name.
Palpatine: You serve the dark side.
Luke: I serve...
Palpatine: Listen to the voices.
Luke: The voices...
Palpatine: Of the dark side.
Luke: Yes.
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power. The one power is hate.
Luke: Hate.
Leia: Luke.
Palpatine: Hate.
Leia: Luke, clear your mind.
Luke: Leia?
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power!
Leia: Luke, I'm your sister. I need you.
Luke: My sister.
Palpatine: You are alone.
Leia: Luke, listen to my voice. My child...will be a very great Jedi, because you will train him. You will train all my children in the ways of the Force.
Palpatine: Do not listen!
Luke: The Force... Leia... The Force... I am not alone. I am never alone!
(Sound of Force fades. Sound of voices returning to normal audibility.)
Palpatine: No! This can't be. No one returns from the dark side. You're mine!
Luke: Leia, help me. I've gone too far. I've found knowledge, all the dark things Father knew so well. The ability to control others, to destroy others if he chose, if I chose. Ben warned me; Yoda warned me. But I had to do it, Leia! I had to know what happened to our father! I had to know why he chose the dark side.
Leia: And now you know what happened to our father. It's time to come home, Luke.
Palpatine: Do not listen to her. Listen to the voice of the dark side. Your power is immense.
Luke: No. The powers of control and destruction weren't the only things I found in the dark side, Emperor. I also found great isolation and sadness. I found fear. These are the feelings my father felt. The feelings you feel, in your moments of darkest triumph.
Palpatine: Nonsense! Curse you Skywalkers, both of you! I'll tell you the truth about your father. (Sound of the Force being used. Luke screams. Sound of Force fades.)
Palpatine: The great Darth Vader was a sick man in an iron mask! Yes, that mask inspired terror throughout the galaxy, but the feeble heart within was forever possessed by the impotent side of the Force. You can be far stronger than he was. Dark Jedi, are you going to let your weak sister get the better of you? Get up! I can give you the power to break her. You will kill your sister, if I demand it!
Luke: No! I made a mistake. I thought I had to save the galaxy alone, all by myself. But the way of the Jedi is not a solitary path.
Leia: (Leia gasps.) The Holocron! Luke, the Holocron told me to join with my brother!
Luke: Yes. The Force binds us. Brings us together. Many people are fighting this war together. Our ally is the Force. Through the strength of the Force, your shroud of evil has been lifted from my mind!
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
When Vima Da Boda attempts to create a diversion and deceive Palpatine by pretending to be Leia, she is repulsed by the darkness in Palpatine's mind.
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine is able to shield his thoughts and Force sensitivity from Plagueis' attempts to probe him and lowers his mental shields after committing murder, after which Plagueis intends to teach him to rebuild his shields.
They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.
“Palpatine, I wonder how you would feel about working with us—Damask Holdings, I mean.”
Palpatine’s thick eyebrows beetled. “In what capacity?”
“To be perfectly blunt, as a kind of spy.” He went on before Palpatine could speak. “I won’t say that you and I want the same things for Naboo, because clearly—and notwithstanding your feelings about the architecture—you hold your world dear. My group, however, is less interested in Naboo’s government than it is in Naboo’s plasma and what it will fetch on the open market.”
Palpatine looked as if the plain truth was something new to him. “If you had phrased that any differently, I would have rejected your offer out of hand.”
“Then you accept? You’re willing to update us regarding whatever political machinations your father’s group may have in the works?”
“Only if I can report directly to you.”
Plagueis tried once more to see him in the Force. “Is that your wish?”
Palpatine returned a sober nod. “It is.”
“Then by all means, you’ll report exclusively to me,” Plagueis said. “I’ll see to it that the necessary arrangements are made.” He stepped away from the speeder as Palpatine powered it up.
Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.
Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels urgency exuding from Kycina.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels pride in groups of Jedi.
Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He compels a Sullustan lobbyist to reveal his intent and then seems to erase his memories.
Sidious adopted a look of wide-eyed innocence as he sat down opposite the Sullustan. They began to talk in a general way about current events and Senate business, before the lobbyist steered the conversation toward STP’s need for Senate approval to expand its operations along the Rimma Trade Route. Drinks and appetizers were ordered and reordered, and before too long Palpatine’s interest began to wane.
“I think you may have overvalued my worth to STP,” he said at last. “I’m nothing more than the voice of Naboo’s regent.”
The Sullustan waved his small hand in a gesture of dismissal. “And I think you undervalue yourself. Your short speech to the Senate put you on the map, Senator. Beings are talking about you. STP believes that you can be of great service.”
“And to myself, you said.”
“Naturally—” the Sullustan started, but Sidious interrupted him.
“In fact, you’re not here to recruit me.” Motioning negligently, he repeated: “You’re not here to recruit me.”
The Sullustan blinked in confusion. “In fact, I’m not really here to recruit you.”
“Then why are we here?”
“I don’t know why we’re here. I was instructed to meet with you.”
“Instructed by whom?”
“I, I—”
Sidious decided not to press him too hard. “You were saying?”
Again the Sullustan blinked. “I was saying... Just what was I saying?”
They both laughed and sipped at their drinks.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels malevolence surrounding an attack on Hego Damask.
Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels malevolence behind him when Maul enters the room.
Although Darth Sidious did not hear anyone enter his secret lair, he sensed a great malevolence flow into the room. From behind him, a deep voice spoke, "What is thy bidding, my Master?"
--Taken from Episode 1 Adventures: The Fury of Darth Maul
Sidious reads Maul's intent and thoughts.
"This rivalry between Lommite Limited and InterGalactic Ore intrigues me," Sidious was saying as he moved about the cavernous den that was both his sanctuary and repository. The hood of his cowl was raised over his lined face, and the hem of his robe trailed on the gleaming floor. His voice was a rasp, absent emotion but not without instances of intentional inflection.
"I see a way that we might exploit this entanglement to our own gain," he continued. "A push here, a shove there, and both mining companies will collapse. Thus, we will be able to deliver Dorvalla to the Trade Federation—the ore, the trade routes, Dorvalla's vote in the senate—and, in so doing, gain the further allegiance of Viceroy Gunray and his lackeys."
Sidious removed his hands from the ample sleeves of his robe. "Viceroy Gunray claims to be persuaded of the worth of serving us, but I want him fully in our grasp, so that there can be no doubt of his heeding my commands. With Dorvalla secured, he will likely be promoted to a permanent position on the Trade Federation Directorate. We can then further our larger plan."
Sidious cast his hooded gaze across the room to a deeply shadowed area in which Darth Maul sat silent as a statue, his tattooed face lowered, so that all Sidious could see was the crown of vestigial horns that sprouted from his hairless skull.
"Your thoughts betray you, my young apprentice," he remarked. "You are puzzled by my steadfast interest in the Neimoidians."
Darth Maul lifted his face, and what scant light there was seemed to recoil. Where his Master represented all that was concealed and mysterious in the Sith, Maul was the personification of all that was to be feared.
"From you, Master, I cannot hide what I feel. The Neimoidians are greedy and weak-willed. I find them unworthy."
--Taken from Darth Maul: Saboteur
From across the galaxy, Sidious detects shifting and uncertain thoughts in Gunray's mind.
“To be sure. But I warned you that this was coming. Supreme Chancellor Valorum has lost all credibility, and after what occurred at Eriadu, the Senate is determined to weaken the Trade Federation further. King Veruna may have been able to stall the Senate, but he has abdicated, and young Queen Amidala and Naboo’s Senator are leading the call for taxation. With the Senate preoccupied, the moment is right for you to begin assembling a fleet of armed freighters to impose a blockade.”
“A blockade? Of what system, Lord Sidious?”
“I will inform you in due time.” When Gunray didn’t respond, Sidious said, “What is it, Viceroy? Across the vastness of space, I can perceive the reeling of your feeble brain.”
“Forgive me, Lord Sidious, but, as my advisers have pointed out, the redistribution of our vessels carries with it considerable financial risk. To begin with, there is the cost of fuel. Then, with so many ships allocated to an embargo, a disruption in trade in the Mid and Outer Rims for however long the blockade is maintained. Finally, there is no telling how our investors might react to the news."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious reveals to Plagueis that he has been implanting mental suggestions into the latter's mind for years.
"You may be wondering: when did he begin to change? The truth is that I haven’t changed. As we have clouded the minds of the Jedi, I clouded yours. Never once did I have any intention of sharing power with you. I needed to learn from you; no more, no less. To learn all of your secrets, which I trusted you would eventually reveal. But what made you think that I would need you after that? Vanity, perhaps; your sense of self-importance. You’ve been nothing more than a pawn in a game played by a genuine Master.
“The Sith’ari.”
A cruel laugh escaped him.
“Reflect back on even the past few years—assuming you have the capacity. Yinchorr, Dorvalla, Eriadu, Maul, the Neimoidians, Naboo, an army of clones, the fallen Jedi Dooku... You think these were your ideas, when in fact they were mine, cleverly suggested to you so that you could feed them back to me. You were far too trusting, Plagueis. No true Sith can ever really care about another. This has always been known. There is no way but my way.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine perceives masked emotions and fury in Anakin.
Palpatine interlinked the fingers of his hands. “I’m told that you grew up on Tatooine. I visited there, many years ago.”
Anakin’s eyes narrowed for the briefest moment. “I did, sir, but I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
Palpatine watched him glance up at Obi-Wan. “And why is that?”
“My mother—”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan snapped in reprimand.
Palpatine reclined slightly, studying the two of them. Obi-Wan seemed not to have noticed the fury simmering in the boy, but for an instant Palpatine perceived a touch of his younger self in Skywalker. The need to challenge authority; the gift for masking his emotions. The yet-unrecognized power.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
As possibly a result of Sidious' innate telepathic/empathetic shielding, Shaak Ti is incapable of probing him through the Force.
The fact that Palpatine was flustered, confused, possibly frightened was obvious. But when Shaak Ti attempted to read him through the Force, she found it difficult to get a sense of what he was truly feeling.
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
Palpatine appears to use a Mind Trick on General Grievous.
"Welcome to the general's quarters," he said while he did input at a console built into the table. Shortly the bulkhead behind the swivel chair became a hologrammic display, showing the battle of Coruscant. The flick of a final switch summoned a stalked, eyeball-shaped holocam from the tabletop. "You're about to make an unscheduled appearance on the HoloNet, Chancellor," Grievous said. "I apologize for not providing a mirror, hairbrush, and cosmetics, so that you might at least camouflage some of your fear."
Palpatine's voice was sinister when he spoke. "You can display me, but I won't speak."
Grievous nodded at what seemed an obvious statement. "I'll display you, but you won't speak. Is that understood?"
"You will do all the talking."
"That's correct. I will do all the talking."
"Very good."
For no apparent reason, Grievous felt uncertain. "Lord Tyranus will soon be here to take charge of you."
Palpatine smiled without showing his teeth. "Then I am assured of being greatly entertained."
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
He feels Anakin's anguish and determination in Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, Saesee Tiin, and Agen Kolar.
In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious elicits a haze of confusion on Saesee Tiin, Agen Kolar, and Kit Fisto.
When Mace Windu led a team of Jedi Masters to apprehend Darth Sidious, none of them expected to face the power of the Sith Lord. His innocent appearance as Chancellor Palpatine, along with an application of a concentrated dark side confusion haze, enabled Darth Sidious to take down Agen Kolar, Kit Fisto, and Saesee Tiin.
--Taken from Lightsabers: A Guide to Weapons of the Force
Palpatine seems to read Anakin's thoughts.
Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.
He remembered playing a Force game with a shuura fruit, sitting across a long table from Padme in the retreat by the lake on Naboo. He remembered telling her how grumpy Obi-Wan would be to see him use the Force so casually.
Palpatine seemed to catch his thought; he gave a yellow sidelong glance as the robe settled onto his shoulders.
"You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power," he said. "Anakin, it's time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy."
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious senses Vader's thoughts.
"Keep still," Sidious interrupted, "before you damage yourself all the more." He gave Vader a moment to compose himself. "First, let me reiterate that the Jedi mean nothing to us. In having survived, Yoda and Obi-Wan aren't exceptions to the rule. I'm certain that dozens of Jedi escaped with their lives, and in due time you will have the pleasure of killing many of them. But of greater import is the fact that their order has been crushed. Finished, Lord Vader. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Master," Vader muttered.
"In burying their heads in the sands and snows of remote worlds, the surviving Jedi humble themselves before the Sith. So let them: let them atone for one thousand years of arrogance and self-absorption."
Sidious watched Vader, displeased. "Once more your thoughts betray you. I see that you are not yet fully convinced."
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Palpatine impels agreement from Senators who object his rule.
Mon Mothma hasn’t much combat experience, but she is as much a fighter as any commodore or commando. The only difference is the battlefield she commands is one of diplomacy and etiquette. As a leading Senator, she fought the rise of Palpatine with every tool at her command. At the time, she was unaware that Palpatine used the Dark Side of the Force to sway the less conscientious Senators.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He uses Drain Knowledge to tear information out of the minds of Jedi.
There was no great collection of Dark Side lore, nor any gather of its masters. Realizing the task that lay before him, Palpatine knew he must begin at once to attain control over the Dark Side. With the resources of the galaxy at his disposal, he gathered the greatest works of knowledge from over a million worlds. He studied the Force in all its guises throughout the galaxy, whether it was the shamanism of Jarvashqiine or the tales of the Tyia. Coupled with the perversions of the secrets he ripped from the living minds of Jedi he captured during the Purge, he learned more than ever expected.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
By use of Force Fear, Palpatine and Vader can create fear in the minds of other Imperials.
But the Force, of course, was quite real—and the black tentacles of its dark side had hardened Palpatine and his new pupil, Darth Vader, into evil incarnate. They shared its horrible energies, and used them to fill the minds of their subservient military minions with fear.
--Taken from the Technical Journal of the Imperial Forces
The Emperor is explained as influencing the minds and wills of the populace of Byss, which reached nearly twenty billion through the dark side into submission to his rule, rendering them mindless and maintained this control for decades even when he left the planet.
Almost mindless under the oppression of the Emperor's dark side influence, the people of Byss find their life energies constantly leeched off during the Emperor's vile machinations.
Throughout the worlds submissive to the Empire, Byss is renowned as a paradise, whose siren call multitudes to willingly apply for emigration to its shores. Once there, wrapped in the power of the dark side, the immigrants become completely submissive, their life energy forever enslaved to the mind that would devour a galaxy.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
What better lure for multitudes than Byss's siren call of beauty and peace? Once there, their wills are destroyed by the Emperor and his Adepts, and replaced with an illusion of tranquility as they blissfully surrender their life energy to sustain the Emperor.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor erases memories, presumably by utilization of Memory Rub, in very possibly millions of people on Coruscant in order to conceal the location of the Star Destroyer Lusankya's burial place.
The Lusankya—a Super Star Destroyer eight kilometers length—laid waste to the area beneath which it had lain buried for years. Green turbolaser bolts pounded the cityscape, freeing the ship from the ferrocrete and transparisteel prison in which it had laired. Wedge knew Super Star Destroyers had only come into service after the Battle of Yavin, which meant the Lusankya had to have been created and hidden on Coruscant before the battle of Endor. Unless the constructor droids just built it there, then built over it. The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet could have been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship's insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor's power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried? As hideous as that idea seemed, Wedge hoped it was the truth. The likely alternative—that the Emperor had ordered the deaths of all the witnesses—seemed that much more horrible.
--Taken from X-Wing: Krytos Trap
Now director of the Imperial Intelligence, Ysanne worked to demonstrate the usefulness of her office to the only person that mattered—the Emperor. Impressed with her suggestion to build a combination internment center and brainwashing facility, Palpatine gave her the Super Star DesteroyerExecutor from the Kuat shipyards—a twin to Vader’s Executor from Fondor. She renamed the vessel Lusankya, and, with help from the Emperor’s mind-fogging powers, Imperial engineers buried the tremendous battleship beneath the cityscape in Coruscant’s Manarai Mountain district.
--Taken from The New Essential Guide to Characters
Obi-Wan tells Luke about how Sidious had through the Force communicated with and made a deal with the Ssi-ruuk across the galaxy.
Luke fought back to consciousness. He felt a powerful presence in the Force and sat up too quickly. Invisible hammers bashed both sides of his skull. The screen stood dark. On the foot of his flotation bed sat Ben Kenobi, robed as usual in unbleached homespun, shimmering under the cabin's faint night glims. "Obi-wan?" Luke murmered. "What's happening at Bakura?"
Ionized air danced around the figure. "You are going to Bakura," it answered.
"Is it that bad?" Luke asked bluntly, not really expecting an answer. Ben rarely gave them. He seemed to come mostly to reprimand Luke, like a teacher who could not give up hounding his student after graduation (not that Ben had stayed around to finish his training).
Obi-wan shifted on the bed, but the bed didn't shift with him. The manifestation wasn't literally physical. "Emperor Palatine achieved first contact with the aliens attacking Bakura," said the apparition, "during one of his Force meditations. He offered them a deal, one that can no longer be honored."
--Taken from The Truce at Bakura
The Emperor feels Vader's anger and terror from across the galaxy.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
He probes the emotions and thoughts of ten Imperial officers including Captain Thrawn, Crix Madine, Commander Grev T'Ran, and Rezi Soresh.
Ten of the most powerful men and women in the galaxy faced the Emperor, fear rolling off of them in waves. These were beings who could destroy ships—or cities—with a single word. Their hearts knew no mercy; their lives were founded on cruelties great and small; their names struck terror in their enemies. And yet they trembled before him, made small and weak by their own fear.
The most elite members of his Royal Guard flanked the group, their expressions hidden by their featureless scarlet masks. The Emperor had taken great pains to ensure that his throne room was an awesome and intimidating sight, from the towering walls to the gleaming dais. Behind his shadowed throne, a wall of permaplas windows looked into the heart of the Coruscant night. But his servants ignored the trappings of power. All attention was fixed on the Emperor.
"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.
"How did it happen, sir?" one of the officers asked. "The Death Star was invincible."
"So we were led to believe," the Emperor agreed.
He peered closely at the man who had spoken. His face was blank, his features composed into a perfect mask of calm loyalty. But there was something beneath the surface. Not betrayal, no. But something...the Emperor reached out with the dark side of the Force, probing the man's depths.
"The Rebels found a weakness," the Emperor said, searching for a reaction that would reveal the truth. "Wisely, they exploited it."
Quickly, he ran through what he knew of the man: Rezi Soresh, of the planet Dreizan, a loyal, if plodding commander, his brilliance blunted by blind obedience. Just as the Emperor preferred it. Cold, ambitious, cautious—not the kind of man to speak up first, or at all, when silence would serve him better. And in the Emperor's presence, silence always served better.
"Were there any...survivors?" Soresh asked. There was a disturbance in the Force as something flared within him, something sharp and bright.
Hope.
Ah, yes. It made sense now. Rezi Soresh, husband to Ilaani Soresh, father to Kimali Soresh—or was. Two years before, fresh out of the Academy, Kimali had fallen in with a group of Rebel sympathizers. When the group came under suspicion, his mother had helped him evade arrest. She had procured him the text docs he would need to run away and take on a new identity—and then she revealed the truth to Soresh, giving him the chance to say a final farewell to his son.
Soresh had turned them both in. His reward: a promotion to Commander. His family's reward: a life sentence in the Gree Baaker Labor Camp. Several prisoner work squads had been assigned to the Death Star, the Emperor now remembered. Among them, the prisoners from Gree Baaker.
The Emperor smiled. "No survivors."
Soresh's face remained blank as his hope died. The Emperor suspected that Soresh himself was ignorant of the emotions that roiled beneath his surface. Likely, he thought he had left his family—and his guilt—far behind. The Emperor knew better.
"Only Lord Vader escaped," he added, enjoying the disappointment that filled the room. He of course knew of the petty jealousies directed at his most favored subordinate. No one could hope to understand the bond that existed between a Sith Master and his dark apprentice. Darth Vader had failed him before, and would surely fail again, but he remained the Emperor's only option.
True, if there were another—a being with Vader's power and potential, a Jedi with a susceptible mind and a healthy body who could rule by his Master's side—Vader would become disposable. But the Jedi were gone forever. He had seen to that.
"Lord Vader is making his way back to Coruscant," the Emperor said. "And when he returns, we will make arrangements to eradicate the Rebel threat once and for all."
"But sir, why wait?" Captain Thrawn asked. "We know the location of the Rebel base. Surely we can—"
"We can do many things," the Emperor said coolly, enjoying the way even Thrawn cowered before his glare. "We will bide our time. I will not risk generating sympathy for the Rebellion—when it is crushed, it must be crushed completely. This does not, however, mean we will do nothing." He pointed a spindly finger at the line of officers. "You will identify the top Rebel leaders. You will use this knowledge to destroy them, thus ensuring that the Alliance begins to crumble from within. And you will discover the name of the pilot responsible for destroying the Death Star." The Emperor savored the rage that burned within him at the thought of it. "The pilot will die—and whoever makes this possible will find himself richly rewarded."
Again, he probed the emotions of his officers. Beneath their fear, and their hatred, he sensed loyalty. An eagerness to act. They wanted to please him. But Soresh wanted more than that. He wanted to kill: a bloodlust for the man who had slaughtered his family.
Good, the Emperor thought. Loyalty was useful. Vengeance more so.
The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
From Wayland, Palpatine senses Vader's treacherous thoughts and mentally harms Vader with a message for to travel to Mount Tantiss from Bespin.
Boarding his shuttle, he ordered the pilot to lift off. A pity, my son, he thought. You could have joined me and together...we could have destroyed the Emperor and ruled the galaxy in his place. As he stared at the severed appendage in his hands, a sudden flash of insight struck the Dark Lord, realization dawning like the sunrise of Bespin. Perhaps, if you will not be turned, little Jedi, a suitable substitute may be arranged.
Suddenly, Vader was struck to his knees by the horribly powerful voice that rolled like fiery thunder through his brain. The pilots struggled vainly to ignore the Dark Lord's...discomfort. "Yes, my servant," the voice boomed in his mind, dripping raw evil. "Come to Mount Tantiss, immediately. I shall meet you there, and we will discuss my new trophy."
"Yes...my Master," Vader gasped, feeling an icy stab of dread in his soul, as the Emperor's mocking chuckle still echoed in his mind. His Master had detected his rebellious thoughts. This discussion would be most unpleasant. Most unpleasant indeed.
--Taken from The Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook: Clone B-2332-54
Palpatine seems to read Moff Jerjerrod's mind.
Moff Jerjerrod knelt before the Emperor in his vast throne room. He bowed his head and hoped he would leave the Imperial Palace alive.
"Rise, my friend. I have a special challenge for you," the Emperor said. "I want you to ease your campaign against the Rebels and leave your work in Logistics and Supply."
Jerjerrod shifted uneasily. He didn't dare voice his concern that he was needed in that ministry to make sure Imperial resources weren't overextended.
"Do not concern yourself with the logistical status of the Empire," Palpatine stated, as if he had read the Moff's mind.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook: In the Emperor's Service
He seems able to perceive all of Vader's thoughts.
Although Vader knows better than to disobey Palpatine, he questions the Emperor's command to delay the search for Luke Skywalker. He has also voiced strong objections to the Emperor's increasing reliance on Falleen prince Xizor.
Surprisingly, Palpatine has not disciplined Vader for these doubts. It seems that the Emperor already knows every thought that crosses his servant's mind, and knows how every event will unfold.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor notes Vader's intentions during a conversation.
"The Death Star will be completed on schedule, my master," Vader breathed.
"Yes, I know," replied the Emperor. "You have done well, Lord Vader...and now I sense you wish to continue your search for the young Skywalker."
Vader smiled beneath his armored mask. The Emperor always knew the sense of what was in his heart; even if he didn't know the specifics. "Yes, my master."
"Patience, my friend," the Supreme Ruler cautioned. "You always had difficulty showing patience. In time, he will seek you out..and when he does, you must bring him before me. He has grown strong. Only together can we turn him to the dark side of the Force."
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Palpatine reads Luke's thoughts and emotions to ascertain knowledge pertaining to Luke's Jedi training.
The Emperor sat before him, smiling. The moment was convulsive with possibilities... The moment passed. He did nothing.
"Tell me, young Skywalker," the Emperor said when he saw Luke's first struggle had taken its course. "Who has been involved in your training until now?" The smile was thin, open-mouthed, hollow. Luke was silent. He would reveal nothing. "Oh, I know it was Obi-Wan Kenobi at first," the wicked ruler continued, rubbing his fingers together as if trying to remember. Then pausing, his lips creased into a sneer. "Of course, we are familiar with the talent Obi-Wan Kenobi had, when it came to training Jedi." He nodded politely in Vader's direction, indicating Obi-Wan's previous star pupil. Vader stood without responding, without moving.
Luke tensed with fury at the Emperor’s defamation of Ben—though, of course, to the Emperor it was praise. And he bridled even more, knowing the Emperor was so nearly right. He tried to bring his anger under control, though, for it seemed to please the malevolent dictator greatly.
Palpatine noted the emotions on Luke’s face and chuckled. “So, in your early training you have followed your father’s path, it would seem. But alas, Obi-Wan is now dead, I believe; his elder student, here, saw to that—“ Again, he made a hand motion toward Vader. “So tell me, young Skywalker—who continued your training?”
That smile, again, like a knife. Luke held silent, struggling to regain his composure. The Emperor tapped his fingers on the arm of the throne, recalling. “There was one called…Yoda. An aged Master Jed…Ah, I see by your countenance I have hit a chord, a resonant chord indeed. Yoda, then.”
Luke flashed with anger at himself, now, to have revealed so much, unwillingly, unwittingly. Anger and self-doubt. He strove to calm himself—to see all, to show nothing; only to be.
“This Yoda,” the Emperor mused. “Lives he still?”
Luke focused on the emptiness of space beyond the window behind the Emperor’s chair. The deep void, where nothing was. Nothing. He filled his mind with this black nothing. Opaque, save for the occasional flickering of starlight that filtered through the ether.
“Ah,” cried Emperor Palpatine. “He lives not. Very good, young Skywalker, you almost hid this from me. But you could not. And you can not. Your deepest flickerings are to me apparent. Your nakedest soul. That is my first lesson to you.” He beamed.
The Emperor smiled. “Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless—take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete.”
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
The Emperor and Vader continue to read Luke's thoughts to discover Leia's relation to Luke.
Then, Vader and Palpatine both gained access to Luke's innermost thoughts, those that protected his sister, Princess Leia Organa.
--Taken from The Essential Guide to Characters
Palpatine controls the minds of his Imperial Sentinels.
"My monstrous chrysalides, with their magnificent metal-piercing fangs, guard the ramparts of my citadel. My mute Imperial sentinels stand by my throne, their annihilated minds and enslaved wills clear evidence the dark side can manipulate clones for any imaginative purpose. Although alchemy can create perfect beings, I have designed a weakness into all of these creations. The flaws are minute and known only to me. It would not do for any creature to be stronger than its creator."
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
Luke notes that Palpatine bent the mind of Kam Solusar, forcing him to abandon his life as a Jedi and serve the Empire as a Dark Side Adept. Luke undoes this mental hold.
Luke: I sense your old life. Before the dark side ensnared you. When the Force flowed through you.
Kam: No! No! No! (Sound of lightsaber turning off.) My life is forfeit, Jedi. Kill me.
Luke: I do not take life unless I must. Yours I give back to you.
Kam: Why? When I lured you here...I would have made this derelict space station your grave. The tomb of the last Jedi Master.
Luke: Instead, I will make it the place of your rebirth. You were a Dark Jedi once. But only because you fell under the Emperor's spell. Now that spell is broken! (Sound of the Force being used. Kam screams.) Kam Solusar, I give you back your life. I give you your freedom. I give you the power that is already yours—the power of the Jedi. (Sound of the Force fades.)
Kam: I...Skywalker...I'm free.
Luke: The Force is strong in you.
Kam: My old life...I remember it now. I...my father was a Jedi. I was a Jedi.
Luke: You are a Jedi, Kam Solusar.
Kam: I...I owe you my life.
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
The Emperor is noted as having a talent for inspiring loyalty to him with the Force.
As a Jedi, she would have been trained in the bending of minds.
Luke had seen Ben do it, had done it himself. The Emperor Palpatine had been a genius at evoking that kind of desperate loyalty, that need to serve him, calling forth the echoes of one's own fears like a skilled musician calling forth beauty from a flute.
--Taken from Planet of Twilight
Farsight/Vision/Sense/Precognition
Farsight, Vision, and Sense are Force powers that allow the user to peer into the future, gain clairvoyant information, detect life, and perceive all surroundings, among other uses.
Sidious is aware of the beginning of the Yinchorri attack.
He senses the death of a Jedi Council member.
Sidious sees Yoda and Anakin in battle at different locations across the galaxy.
The Emperor senses that Vader is still alive.
He senses indecision in Luke.
Palpatine foresees his meeting with Luke on Byss.
The Emperor sees Luke's treachery against his efforts.
He senses Luke's presence in his cloning laboratory.
Sidious recalls that the dark side had informed his invulnerability as a child, and he distilled that assurance during his training.
Sidious took a moment to respond. It was odd to think now that he had once known fear. Though never incapacitating fear, and never for very long. But as a child, he’d experienced fear as a conditioned response to threat. Despite a reassuring voice inside him that had promised no harm could come, there had been, for a time, a chance that something terrible could happen. More than once his father’s raised hand had made him cringe. Eventually, he had understood that he had conjured that voice; that he hadn’t been fooling himself by exercising some infantile belief in invulnerability. And he understood now that it had been the dark side telling him that no harm could come to him, precisely because he was invulnerable. Since the start of his training, the voice had quieted by becoming internalized. Teem’s belief that he had power over him might long ago have moved him to pity instead of stirring anger and loathing. Raw emotion was a consequence of leading a double life. While he relished his secret identity, he wanted at the same time for it to be known that he was a being who could not be trifled with; that he wielded ultimate authority; that merely to gaze on him was tantamount to glimpsing the dark matter that bound and drove the galaxy...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine foresees that Plagueis would arrive at an event on Chandrila and divulges that he has frequent premonitions.
The planet Chandrila sponsored a monthlong retreat for members of the Legislative Youth Program. Once a year young beings from a host of worlds arrived to participate in mock Senate trials in and around Hanna City and to tour Chandrila’s vast agricultural projects, wilderness areas, coral reefs, and garden parks. It was in Gladean Park—a game reserve outside coastal Hanna—that Plagueis paid young Palpatine an unannounced visit. But it was Plagueis who was surprised.
“I knew you would come, Magister,” Palpatine said when Plagueis and 11-4D turned up at one of the game reserve’s viewing blinds.
“How did you know?”
“I knew, that’s all.”
“And just how often are your premonitions correct?”
“Almost always.”
“Curious,” 11-4D remarked while Palpatine was hurrying away to excuse himself from the company of two friends.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine senses Plagueis' powers.
Palpatine’s lip curled in anger and menace. “Is this the wisdom you offer—the tenets of some arcane cult?”
“The test of its value is whether you can live by it, Palpatine.”
“If I had wanted that I would have forced my parents years ago to surrender me to the Jedi Order instead of transferring me from school to private school.”
Plagueis planted his hands on his hips and laughed without mirth. “And of what possible use do you think a person of your nature would be to the Jedi Order? You’re heartless, ambitious, arrogant, insidious, and without shame or empathy. More, you’re a murderer.” He held Palpatine’s hooded gaze and watched the youth’s hands clench in fists of rage. “Careful, boy,” he said after a moment. “You are not the only being in this plush stateroom with the power to kill.”
Palpatine’s eyes opened wide and he took a step back. “I can sense it...”
Plagueis grew deliberately haughty. “What you sense is a fraction of what I can bring to bear.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He sees through the eyes of a beast while hunting.
Blended into the herd, the animal Sidious had fixed his sight on would have been indistinguishable to normal beings. But Sidious had the animal in his mind and was now looking through its eyes, one with it.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He perceives beings around him as blurs of energy.
Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels the presence of a Nightsister, is guided toward her location, and senses dark energies emanating from her.
Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
As his power grows, Palpatine more frequently sees beings through his Force perception and detects details he was oblivious to before.
The hood of his stylish robe raised against a chill wind, Palpatine hurried through the streets of Theed. The sudden turn in the weather abetted his desire to avoid making eye contact with strangers or, worse, encountering anyone he knew. As he grew stronger in the dark side, the profane world became a stranger and stranger place, swept by currents he’d had no previous awareness of and populated by vaguely outlined life-forms he saw as magnitudes of the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
While talking with Plagueis, Dooku, and Sifo-Dyas, Palpatine senses that an onlooker is closely watching him.
Palpatine sensed scrutiny from someone outside the circle the ten of them had formed. Just short of the Senate Building's Great Door, Pax Teem had stopped and was gazing at Palpatine, his eyestalks extended. And Palpatine could hardly blame him, since even he had been caught off guard by Plagueis's eagerness to acknowledge him in public.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
His attention is drawn to an upper window where Sun Guards enter the building.
No sooner did the holoimage dissolve than two of the security men began to advance on him. Sidious readied himself for action. A Force blow to send them reeling back toward the holoprojector, then a leap, arms extended, hands curled into claws, one for each windpipe, which he would tear from their throats—
The Force intruded, drawing his attention to the windows in the upper walls.
At once, the sound of repeating blasters and pained cries echoed from adjacent rooms; then a nerve-jangling shattering of glass as Sun Guards crashed through the high windows and began to rappel to the filthy floor, firing as they slid down on their microfilament lines, catching the Santhe men and the Rodian with so many bolts that their bodies were left quartered by the volleys.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine senses Sate Pestage outside his door and feels the dark side being unleashed at an attack on Hego Damask.
He was standing in the center of the room when he sensed someone in the corridor outside. Fists pummeled the door; then it slid to one side and Sate Pestage burst into the room. Seeing Palpatine, he came to a sudden stop, and the panicked look he wore on entering transformed to one of visible relief.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he nearly screamed, running a hand over his forehead.
Palpatine regarded him quizzically. “I was occupied. What has happened?”
Pestage sank into a chair and looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to know?” He paused, then said, “In the interest of separating what I do from what you do—”
Palpatine’s eyes blazed. “Stop wasting my time and come to the point.”
Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
While traveling to Aborah, Sidious has a vision of Aborah and perceives it inordinately saturated in the dark side.
A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He senses lifeforms which are used in Plagueis' experiments in locked cells.
Sidious was still trying to make sense of the droid’s statements when they entered a long corridor lined with windowless cells. Through the Force he could sense life-forms behind each locked door.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He knows that Maul is still upset about a snake bite.
"I know you're still upset about the snake that bit you," Sidious said, continuing around the watery orb until he had a clear view of Maul. "I know everything about you, Maul. Everything."
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious is aware of a drawing made on the wall of Maul's room.
Maul's steps did not falter as he continued following the droid, but his mind was suddenly racing. He wondered what consequences he might suffer because of the drawing. He said, "Did Master Sidious see the drawing?"
"I don't know. I erased it right after you fell asleep."
"Then how would he even know about the drawing...unless you told him?"
"I didn't have to tell him," TD-D9 said. "You should know by now, child...Sidious knows everything."
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious sees Plagueis' form in the Force.
Just arrived on the Hunters’ Moon, Sidious studied Plagueis as the Sith Lord and his droid, 11-4D, viewed a holorecording of a black-robed Zabrak assassin making short work of combat automata in his home on Coruscant, some hovering, some advancing on two legs, others on treads, and all firing blasters.
Twenty years had added a slight stoop to the Muun’s posture and veins that stood out under his thinning white skin. He wore a dark green utility suit that hugged his delicate frame, a green cloak that fell from his bony shoulders to the fort’s stone floor, and a headpiece that hewed to his large cranium. A triangular breath mask covered his ruined, prognathus lower jaw, his mouth, part of his long neck, and what remained of the craggy nose he’d had before the surprise attack in the Fobosi. A device of his own invention, the alloy mask featured two vertical slits and a pair of thin, stiff conduits that linked it to a transpirator affixed to his upper chest, beneath an armored torso harness. He had learned to ingest and imbibe through feeding tubes, and through his nose.
Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He senses the position and flight path of the Scimitar even after the cloaking devices render it invisible.
Maul bowed his head and hurried up the rear boarding ramp into the cockpit module. Sidious lingered to watch the ship rise and edge out of the hangar, becoming invisible as it flew over The Works. Through the dark side, he continued to track the Scimitar as it angled north toward the Jedi Temple rather than south, and away from the Senate District.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious is capable of interpreting the currents of the Force to ascertain information and does so to learn that Nute Gunray had lied.
Sidious stood motionless and silent on the transmission grid, his fingers steepled, his mind meditating on the eddies and currents of the Force. Those of lesser sensitivity were oblivious to it, but to him it was like an omnipresent mist, invisible but nonetheless tangible, that swirled and drifted constantly about him. No words, no descriptions could begin to convey what it was like; the only way to understand it was to experience it. He had learned over long years of study and meditation how to interpret each and every vagary of its restless flow, no matter how slight. Even without that ability, however, he would have known that Nute Gunray was lying about Hath Monchar's whereabouts.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He senses a communication sent to him before it arrives and ascertains that Maul is telling the truth.
Darth Sidious could feel a slight disturbance in the Force before his scrambled comlink chimed, and knew by this that his apprentice was about to contact him. He stepped to the holoprojector and activated the grid. Privacy failsafes glowed green before he spoke.
"My apprentice. Your mission is complete." It was a statement, not a question. Sidious knew Darth Maul would not call to report failure, and there were no untoward signs in the energies that surrounded his image.
"Yes, my master. The Jedi Padawan died in combat. She fought well, for a neophyte. An explosion generated from our battle destroyed Lorn Pavan and his droid." Darth Sidious nodded. He could feel the truth of the statement even at
He stretches out with the Force and is guided by the dark side to act on his opportunity to kill Plagueis.
A few meters distant, Sidious came to a halt, gazing at Plagueis for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something. Then, blowing out his breath, he set his own glass down and reached for the cloak he had draped over a chair. Swirling it around himself, he started for the door, only to stop shortly before he reached it. Turning and stretching out with the Force, he glanced around the room, as one might to fix a memory in the mind. Briefly his gaze fell on the droid, its glowing photoreceptors whirring to regard him in evident curiosity.
A look of sinister purpose contorted Sidious’s face.
Again, his eyes darted around the room, and the dark side whispered:
Your election assured, the Sun Guards absent, Plagueis unsuspecting and asleep...
And he moved in a blur.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious views Plaguies through the Force and notices his gathering midi-chlorians.
Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels a disturbance in the Force and then stretches his perception to view distant stars.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious peers into the past to uncover information about Darth Plagueis and Tenebrous.
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?
He raised his gaze to the ecliptic. The answers were out there, coded in light, speeding through space and time. Liquid fire coursing through him, visions of past and future riffling through his mind, he opened himself to the reconfigured galaxy, as if in an effort to peel away the decades...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels a sense of loss upon Maul's defeat.
Sidious moved back into the room to take a closer look at Plagueis. Then, after a long moment, he returned to the window and pulled the drapes aside.
His spirit soared, but briefly.
Something was shading his sense of triumph: a vague awareness of a power greater than himself. Was it Plagueis reaching out from the far side of death to vex him? Or was the feeling a mere consequence of apotheosis?
Outside, the summits of the tallest buildings were gilded by the first rays of daylight.
With the Battle of Naboo concluded—lost, in his estimation—Palpatine had no time to bask in adulation or celebrate his win. His first order of business, indeed his first official duty, was to travel to his homeworld to congratulate Queen Amidala and her new allies, the Gungans, on their surprise victory.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Theed and learned of Darth Maul’s defeat at the hands of the Jedi in a power-generator station that he understood in part the reason for the sense of loss and profound solitude he had experienced following the murder of Plagueis.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious foresees every maneuver Maul and Savage make prior to its use.
But strong as he had become, Maul found himself in awe of Sidious. The Sith Lord was astonishingly fast and efficient, and the Force flowed through him effortlessly. His sabers stabbed and slashed through the smallest hole in an opponent’s guard, his movements never carried him a millimeter out of position, and he could sense every attack Maul and Savage made before it developed.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious notes a detail in a conversation with Darth Tyranus without being told.
Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension. "These are the envoys from Troxar," his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn't ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.
--Taken from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous
Palpatine can detect currents in events and determine possibilities from them.
Once again, Darth Sidious had divined the actions they would take well in advance of their own deciding. The talent had less to do with being able to peer into the future, than with having access to streams of possibilities. Sidious wasn't unerring. He could be surprised or taken off his guard—as at Geonosis, as in the case of Gunray's mechno-chair—but not for long. His mastery of the dark side of the Force endowed him with the power to decipher the currents that comprised the future, and to comprehend that while those currents were manifold, they were not boundless. Such mastery was one of the skills that distinguished Sidious from Yoda, who believed the future was so much in motion it could not be read with any clarity—especially during times when the dark side was on the ascendant. But how could Yoda be expected to see the whole picture with one eye closed? Deliberately closed.
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
Sidious can perceive events wherever darkness exists and feels Anakin's turmoil and the approach of Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, Saesee Tiin, and Agen Kolar.
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. In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious searches the Force for the name to christen Anakin with and confers on him the name Vader.
Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.
"Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker."
Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.
"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"
There was no hesitation. "Yes."
Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin's brow. "Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth..."
A pause; a questioning in the Force—
An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies—
He heard Sidious say it: his new name.
Vader.
A pair of syllables that meant him. Vader, he said to himself. Vader.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He feels a disturbance in the Force signaling a threat approaching Vader.
A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful.
"The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition, Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader—I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps...
"How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan... "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had...redecorated...the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste...
The holding office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic comprised the nether vertex of the Senate Arena; it was little more than a circular preparations area, a green room, where guests of the Chancellor might be entertained before entering the Senate Podium—the circular pod on its immense hydraulic pillar, which contained controls that coordinated the movement of floating Senate delegation pods—and rising into the focal point of the chamber above. Above that podium, the vast holopresence of a kneeling Sith bowed before a shadow that stood below. Guards in scarlet flanked the shadow; a Chagrian toady cringed nearby.
"But the danger is real; be mindful."
"I will, my Master. Thank you."
The holopresence faded, and where its huge translucency had knelt was now revealed another presence, a physical presence, tiny and aged, clad in robes and leaning on a twist of wood. But his physical presence was an illusion; the truth of him could be seen only in the Force. In the Force, he was a fountain of light. "Pity your new disciple I do; so lately an apprentice, so soon without a Master."
"Why, Master Yoda, what a delightful surprise! Welcome!" The voice of the shadow hummed with anticipation. "Let me be the first to wish you Happy Empire Day!"
"Find it happy, you will not. Nor will the murderer you call Vader."
"Ah." The shadow stepped closer to the light. "So that is the threat I felt. Who is it, if I may ask? Who have you sent to kill him?"
"Enough it is that you know your own destroyer."
"Oh, pish, Master Yoda. It wouldn't be Kenobi, would it? Please say it's Kenobi—Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him..."
Behind the shadow, some meters away, Mas Amedda—the Chagrian toady who was Speaker of the Galactic Senate—heard a whisper in Palpatine's voice. Flee.
He did.
Neither light nor shadow gave his exit a glance.
"So easily slain, Obi-Wan is not."
"Neither are you, apparently; but that is about to change." The shadow took another step, and another.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He senses Yoda's weakening under barrages of Lightning.
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
Sidious is warned through the Force of Vader's fatal situation on Mustafar.
Clone troops were already swarming into it. "It was Yoda," he said as he swung out of the pod. "Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building." He didn't have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger. Mortal danger.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Emperor Palpatine senses that Mas Amedda is sending a message to him.
Alert to a mild disturbance in the Force, he swung toward the throne room holoprojector a moment before a half-life-size image of Mas Amedda resolved from thin air.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Sidious senses Vader's progression in his training.
Sidious was pleased. Vader had done well. He had sensed the change in him, even in the brief conversation they had had following the events on Kashyyyk. Now that Vader had begun to tap deeply into the power of the dark side, his true apprenticeship could begin.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Presumably through the Force, Palpatine is aware of the existence of Maw Installation, despite Grand Moff Tarkin's intentions of withholding information of its existence.
The Tarkin Doctrine offered two important elements. The first was a cogent and important plan for the Empire's future: "Rule through the fear of force, rather than through force itself." The second was to establish an invulnerable and powerful superweapon, part dramatic symbol, part real threat. Tarkin himself was developing plans for the weapon and he had established a hidden think tank of designers and scientists in a black-hole cluster known as the Maw. The Grand Moff didn't think the Emperor yet knew of his secrets, and intended to present the plans for any weapons developed himself, taking all the credit. Palpatine did know though, as he knew of Tarkin's ambitions.
--Taken from The Essential Guide to Characters
Palpatine uses the Force to glean information on disloyal subordinates' plans against him.
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.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He senses Commander Grev T'Ran's mouth flinch at the nearly unnoticeable beginning of a smile.
"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
Palpatine senses the pilot who destroyed the Death Star at the heart of a gathering darkness and is assured that he will find the pilot.
The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
The Emperor senses how powerful Luke could become, the threat that Luke could pose to the Empire, and that Vader would fail to compel Luke toward the dark side.
But then the Emperor sensed a new current in the ever-flowing energy of the Force. It began as a subtle, barely perceptible power surge, but in a frighteningly short time grew into the bright light that he came to know as Luke Skywalker. Lord Vader had sensed it too, but he lacked the vision that the Emperor possessed. As soon as this new power became known to him, the Emperor began plotting to corrupt it.
He worked his scheme with the guile and cunning that were his trademarks. The Emperor's plans may have reached further back in time than anyone could possibly imagine, for his ability to foresee the future was astounding. Perhaps the Emperor did not destroy Obi-Wan Kenobi with the rest of the Jedi because he foresaw the old man taking young Luke under his wing some day in the distant future. Obi-Wan had failed once, and had created Vader, the Emperor's greatest servant. Perhaps the Emperor expected him to fail again, giving the Emperor an even more powerful tool.
Perhaps he also foresaw the boy's part in the destruction of the first Death Star. Perhaps he knew that if Luke succeeded, his overconfidence in his newfound powers would cause him to make a mistake, to attempt to turn his father, to dare to beard the Emperor in his own den. The Emperor was fully capable of sacrificing the Death Star if it would gain him the last Jedi.
This is all merely speculation, for no one, not even Vader, ever really knew what was going on in the black recesses of the Emperor's mind. It is clear, however, that the Emperor was not surprised that Lord Vader failed to turn his son to the Dark Side—he had, in fact, counted upon it.
--Taken from Galaxy Guide 5: Return of the Jedi
When the hologram of the Galactic Emperor finally spoke, it did so with a voice even deeper than Vader's. The Emperor's presence was awesome enough, but the sound of his voice sent a thrill of terror coursing through Vader's powerful frame. "You may rise, my servant," the Emperor commanded.
Immediately Vader straightened up. But he did not dare gaze into his master's face, and instead cast his eyes down at his own black boots.
"What is thy bidding, my master?" Vader asked with all the solemnity of a priest attending his god.
"There is a grave disturbance in the Force," the Emperor said.
"I have felt it," the Dark Lord replied solemnly.
The Emperor emphasized the danger as he continued. "Our situation is most precarious. We have a new enemy who could bring about our destruction."
"Our destruction? Who?"
"The son of Skywalker. You must destroy him, or he will be our undoing."
Skywalker!
The thought was impossible. How could the Emperor be concerned with this insignificant youth?
"He's not a Jedi," Vader reasoned. "He's just a boy. Obi-Wan could not have taught him so much that—"
The Emperor broke in. "The Force is strong in him," he insisted. "He must be destroyed."
The Dark Lord reflected a moment. Perhaps there was another way to deal with the boy, a way that might benefit the Imperial cause. "If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally," Vader suggested.
Silently the Emperor considered the possibility.
After a moment, he spoke again. "Yes...yes," he said thoughtfully. "He would be a great asset. Can it be done?"
For the first time in their meeting, Vader lifted his head to face his master directly. "He will join us," he answered firmly, "or die, my master."
With that, the encounter had come to an end. Vader kneeled before the Galactic Emperor, who passed his hand over his obedient servant. In the next moment, the holographic image had completely disappeared, leaving Darth Vader alone to formulate what would be, perhaps, his most subtle plan of attack.
--Taken from The Empire Strikes Back
Still, when Luke, if only momentarily, gave in to rage at the Emperor and swung his lightsaber blade down to finish the old man, he found Vader’s blade already blocking his. Luke relented and tried to avoid any further surrender to the Dark Side, but Palpatine knew the Skywalker anger too well. He had foreseen just how powerful Luke could be if he turned to the way of destruction. More powerful than Vader.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Palpatine knows his subordinates decisions before they do.
Palpatine is a master of manipulation and has no qualms about using crime lords, Grand Moffs, or other powerful figures as pawns in his game. Strangely, it always seems that he knows how all of his pieces will move several turns before they do.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor discerns information surrounding Xizor's attack.
"One wonders how that hotheaded young man managed to get into a protected corridor," the Emperor said. But there was no wonder in the Emperor's voice, none at all. Vader's face froze. He knew. It was not possible, for the guard who had admitted the would-be assassin into the corridor was no longer among the living, and none but that single man had known who ordered him to allow the young man access—but somehow, the Emperor knew. The Emperor's mastery of the dark side was great indeed.
--Taken from Shadows of the Empire
Sidious is made aware through the Force of the Rebel infiltration of Endor and knew that Luke would come to Vader willingly.
Lord Vader stepped out of the elevator and stood at the entrance to the throne room. The light-cables hummed either side of the shaft, casing an eerie glow on the royal guards who waited there. He matched resolutely down the walkway, up the stairs, and paused subserviently behind the throne. He kneeled, motionless.
Almost immediately, he heard the Emperor’s voice. “Rise. Rise and speak, my friend.”
Vader rose, as the throne swiveled around, and the Emperor faced him. They made eye contact from light-years and a soul’s breath away. Across that abyss, Vader responded. “My master, a small Rebel force has penetrated the shield and landed on Endor.”
“Yes, I know.” There was no hint of surprise in his tone; rather, fulfillment.
Vader noted this, then went on. “My son is with them.”
The Emperor’s brow furrowed less than a millimeter. His voice remained cool, unruffled, slightly curious. “Are you sure?”
“I felt him, my master.” It was almost a taunt. He knew the Emperor was frightened of young Skywalker, afraid of his power. Only together could Vader and the Emperor hope to pull the Jedi Knight over to the dark side. He said it again, emphasizing his own singularity. “I felt him.”
“Strange, that I have not,” the Emperor murmured, his eyes becoming slits. They both knew the Force wasn’t all-powerful—and no one was infallible with its use. It had everything to do with awareness, with vision. Certainly, Vader and his son were more closely linked than was the Emperor with young Skywalker—but, in addition, the Emperor was now aware of a cross-current he hadn’t read before, a buckle in the Force he couldn’t quite understand. “I wonder if your feelings on this matter are clear, Lord Vader.”
“They are clear, my master.” He knew his son’s presence, it galled him and fueled him and lured him and howled in a voice of its own.
“Then you must go to the Sanctuary Moon and wait for him,” Emperor Palpatine said simply. As long as things were clear, things were clear.
“He will come to me?” Vader asked skeptically. This was not what he felt. He felt drawn.
“Of his own free will,” the Emperor assured him. It must be of his own free will, else all was lost. A spirit could not be coerced into corruption, it had to be seduced. It had to participate actively. It had to crave. Luke Skywalker knew these things, and still he circled the black fire, like a cat. Destinies could never be read with absolute certainty—but Skywalker would come. That much was clear. “I have foreseen it. His compassion for you will be his undoing.” Compassion had always been the weak belly of the Jedi, and forever would be. It was the ultimate vulnerability. The Emperor had none. “The boy will come to you, and you will then bring him before me.”
“Vader bowed low. “As you wish.” With casual malice, the Emperor dismissed the Dark Lord. With grim anticipation, Vader strode out of the throne room, to board the shuttle for Endor.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
The Emperor foresees that Luke will attempt to redeem Vader.
Young Luke had tasted the power of the Dark Side through his anger and his fear. Doubt clouded his mind, and he was unsure he could survive another confrontation with his father. Yet he was also sure that there was still good in his father; he was willing to risk everything to attempt to bring it out. The Emperor counted upon this, as he thought, "mistaken" belief to draw the boy into his trap. Once Luke was in his power, the Emperor would destroy Luke's friends and loved ones. Then he would force him to kill his father. Luke would be his, and the last hope would fade from the galaxy.
--Taken from Galaxy Guide 5: Return of the Jedi
Sight/Listening
Force Sight and Listening are powers through which a Jedi can augment the acuteness of their physical senses.
Palpatine seems to block out sounds around him and increase his hearing to catch a faint echo of news told to Vidar Kim.
Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy. He kept himself still as a disturbing echo reached him. By the time an ashen Kim was returning to the table, Palpatine was already out of his seat and hurrying to meet him.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Kim stared at him as if from another world. “They’re dead. Everyone. My wife, my sons...”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine enhances his hearing to listen to senators who had fallen asleep and hear the conversation between Kinman Doriana and Sate Pestage.
The crepuscular chill of the Senate Rotunda had a way of lulling many to sleep. Sharpening his senses, Palpatine could hear the gentle snoring of human and nonhuman Senators seated in hover platforms adjacent to his station; more clearly, Sate Pestage and Kinman Doriana, opposite himon the platform's circular seat, gossiping maliciously.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He appears to augment his eyesight to peer at Padme and Ian Lago.
Palpatine smiled tightly.
“What brings you to the docks, Senator?” Jobal asked.
“More than coincidence, m’lady. In fact, a matter of utmost urgency that involves your daughter, Padmé.”
“She’s here,” Ruwee said.
Palpatine looked at him. “On Coruscant?”
“Here, at Tannik.” He pointed to a nearby dock, where an energetic dark-haired girl was directing an antigrav pallet of foodstuffs into the bay of a waiting freighter. Catching sight of her father, Padmé waved.
“Who is the young man with her?” Palpatine asked.
“Ian Lago,” Jobal said.
Palpatine sharpened his vision. “The son of King Veruna’s counselor?”
Jobal nodded. “He’s become a bit lovesick.”
“And Padmé with him?”
“We hope not,” Ruwee said. “Ian’s a nice boy, but... Well, let’s just say that Kun Lago would not be happy to learn that his son has been fraternizing with the enemy, so to speak.”
Realizing that young Ian was eyeing him with sudden interest, Palpatine returned the look for a moment, then said, “This brings me directly to the point of my visit. As you’re no doubt aware, our King has instructed me to support the Trade Federation on the issue of taxation of the free-trade zones.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious appears to heighten his vision to examine the corpse of Plagueis.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
The Emperor clarifies his sight with his rage.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
Force Concealment
Force Concealment is a power that masks Force sensitivity or alignment in the Force and hides a Force sensitive's presence or existence.
Because of his skill in Force Concealment, Palpatine is able to stand in the Council Chamber of the Jedi Temple itself without suspicion of his Force sensitivity.
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine is able to shield his thoughts and Force sensitivity from Plagueis' attempts to probe him and only lowers his mental shields after committing murder, after which Plagueis intends to teach him to rebuild his shields.
They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.
Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.
“But...when you were young, did you question your motivations, especially when they ran counter to everyone else’s?”
Plagueis held his challenging gaze. “I never asked why this or why that, what if this or what if that. I simply responded to my own determination.”
Palpatine sat back in the speeder seat as if a great weight had been lifted from him.
“Some of us are required to do what others cannot,” Plagueis added in a conspiratorial way.
Without a word, Palpatine nodded.
Plagueis had no need to delve any further into whatever traumas had given rise to Palpatine’s cunning, secretive nature. He simply needed to know: Does this young human have the Force?
“We’ll have to keep this meeting brief,” Plagueis told Palpatine while they were following an elevated pathway that connected the viewing blind to one of the park’s rustic lodges. “Your father may have dispatched surveillance personnel.”
Palpatine ridiculed the idea. “He is monitoring my offworld communiqués—that’s why you haven’t heard from me—but even he knows better than to have me watched.”
“You underestimate him, Palpatine,” Plagueis said, stopping in the middle of the pathway. “I spoke with him at Convergence.”
Palpatine’s mouth fell open. “The lake house? When? How—”
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?
Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine masks his presence in the Force from Nightsister Kycina and then lowers his concealment, allowing her to sense him.
Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit. Abruptly he made himself discernible in the Force, and immediately she turned her head in his direction and began to hurry across the square in his direction.
“Good sir,” she said in Basic as she drew near.
Feigning interest in the cheap wares of an itinerant trader, he pretended to be taken by surprise when she approached him from his blind side.
“Are you addressing me?” he asked, turning to her.
“I am, sir, if you’ve a moment to indulge a being in need.”
Her oblique eyes were rimmed by dark blemishes that matched the tint of her thick lips; poking from the wide sleeves of her robe, the tapered fingers of her hands bore long, talon-like nails.
Palpatine pretended impatience. “Why single me out, among this crowd of more richly attired beings?”
“Because you’ve the look and bearing of a man of intelligence and influence.” She gestured broadly. “The rest are rabble, despite their fine cloaks and headwear.”
He made a decorous show of suppressing a yawn. “Save your adulation for the rubes, woman. But since you’ve correctly identified me as better than the rest, you’re obviously aware that I’ve no time to waste on confidence games or tricks. So if its mere credits you’re after, I suggest you widen your search for someone more charitable.”
“I don’t ask for credits,” she said, studying him openly.
“What then? Come to the point.”
“It’s a gift I offer.”
Palpatine laughed without merriment. “What could you possibly have to offer someone like me?”
“Just this.” She opened the soft shoulder bag to reveal a humanoid infant of less than a standard year in age. The infant’s hairless head was stippled with an array of short but still pliant horns, and its entire body had been garishly and ceremonially tattooed in red and black pigments.
A male Zabrak, Palpatine told himself. But not of the Iridonian sort; rather, a Dathomirian. “How do you come by this newborn? Have you stolen him?”
“You misunderstand, good sir. My own child, this one is.”
Palpatine glowered. “You say that he is a gift, and yet you dissemble. Have you had dealings that have led you into such deep debt that you would part with your own flesh and blood? Or perhaps you’re addicted to spice or some other intoxicant?”
She stiffened. “Neither. I seek only to save his life.”
Palpatine’s expression changed. “Then speak honestly. You’re a long way from your coven, Nightsister. And a practitioner of magicks more than sufficient to keep your child from harm.”
Her eyes opened wide and bored into him, in search of explanation. “How—”
“Never mind how I know, Witch,” Palpatine said sharply. “The child, whether yours or not, is a Nightbrother, conceived for the purpose of serving the sisterhood as a warrior and slave.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine hides his Force powers from Ronhar Kim.
Orders to attend Vidar Kim's funeral had come from Naboo and from Plagueis, who said that he should us the opportunity to seek out Ronhar Kim and speak with him personally. Palpatine had yet to meet one-on-one with a Jedi, and a conversation with Ronhar would allow him to test his ability to conceal his true nature from another Force-user.
As wicked as Coruscant is, Plagueis had told him, the Force is strong there because of the presence of so many Jedi. If you are successful in hiding in plain sight, you will be able to conceal your nature from the most powerful among them. Take Ronhar into your confidence, and once you have, spend some of your time on Coruscant acquainting yourself with the spired headquarters of our enemy, and ask yourself: Is this not a fortress designed to hold the dark at bay?
Otherwise, Plagueis's silence on the matter of Kim's assassination had been deafening. On learning that King Tapalo had appointed Palpatine interim Senator, Plagueis had offered his congratulations, but nothing more. After months of not seeing him, Palpatine had hoped to find Plagueis waiting for him on Coruscant, but Hego Damask and the Muuns who made up Damask Holdings were conducting unspecified business on distant Serenno.
The funeral service was held at Naboo's embassy, which was located below and to the west of the Monument Plaza and the Senate. Dressed in a high-collared cape and purple robes, Palpatine arrived at the ornate monad in the company of Kinman Doriana, Sate Pestage, and Janus Greejatus, who had been dispatched to Coruscant by Tapalo, and whom Palpatine suspected had some strength in the Force. Kinman and Sate had forged an instant bond. The youthful Doriana wad made for a world like Coruscant, and he couldn't have asked for a better guide to the galactic capital's titillating underbelly than Pestage, who seemed to know every nook and cranny of the place. Ronhar Kim was among several dozen guests who were attending the service. Palpatine waited until the Jedi was alone in the viewing room before approaching him.
In concealing yourself, you will not be able to rely on your dark gifts, Plagueis said. Instead you must be yourself, submerged in the unified pattern to which the Jedi are attuned; visible in the Force, but not as a Sith. Since you cannot allow yourself to be seen, you must make certain that you are taken for granted. Disguised in the profane; camouflaged in the routine—in those same realms from which you can attack without warning when necessary.
A tall, muscular young man attired in black robes, Ronhar had thick black hair pulled into a bun behind, and with long strands in front dangling from temples to chin. In him, Palpatine could see Vidar, whose body was lying in state, supine on a massive rectangular stone bier. A simple blanket covered the corpse from shoulders to knees, and on the chest sat a shallow metallic bowel containing purple flowers and a lighted candle meant to symbolize the Livet Tower's Eternal Flame. Janus Greejatus would transport the cremation ashes to Naboo, where they would be scattered in the Solleu River.
"Jedi Ronhar Kim," Palpatine said as he entered the room, "please forgive the intrusion, but I wanted to offer my condolences in person."
Roused from his thoughts, Ronhar whirled on him, almost in defense, and scanned head-to-toe. "Who are you?"
"Palpatine," he said, "I've been appointed to succeed Vidar Kim as Senator of Naboo. I knew your father well."
Ronhar's vigilance eased. "Forgive me for not knowing more about Naboo, Senator...Palpatine. But in fact, until several weeks ago I wasn't aware that Vidar Kim was my biological father, or even that Naboo was my homeworld.
Palpatine feigned understanding. "No need to apologize. I imagine that the Force is, in some sense, its own domain."
Ronhar nodded. "I scarcely knew the man. Were it not for the fact that the was a Republic Senator, the Jedi Council would not have granted dispensation for me to meet with him."
Palpatine allowed himself to stretch out with the Force, but only for a moment, and chiefly to gauge the Jedi's reaction, which proved to be indiscernible. "Excuse me for asking, but why then did you choose to attend the service?"
Ronhar grew pensive. "No doubt you know about the tragedy that claimed the lives of his wife and sons."
"I do."
"Vidar Kim contacted me to ask if I would consider renouncing my pledge to the Jedi, in order to become the bearer of the family name."
Palpatine moved closer to him and added compassion to his voice. "He told me, Ronhar. Does your presence here reflect doubt as to your obligations?"
"No," the Jedi said, perhaps more firmly than he intended. "I'm only here out of respect for the man. As you may also know, he died at the hands of an assassin while in my company." Ronhar's voice betrayed disappointment rather than anger. "If I had acted sooner, he would be alive, and at present I can't be certain that the assassin's blaster bolts weren't meant for me, rather than Vider Kim."
"Who in their right mind would target a Jedi Knight?"
The Jedi sniffed and narrowed his dark eyes. "The Jedi do not lack for enemies, Senator. Doling out justice and ensuring that peace doesn't sit well with some beings."
"The world of politics is no safer, Ronhar. Not in this era, with so many in need. Thank the Force we have the Jedi."
"I wonder," Kim said.
Palpatine regarded him with interest. The Jedi was less interested in solving them murder of Vidar than he was in agonizing over his failure to prevent it. "You wonder about what, Ronhar?"
"What my life would have been had I not become a Jedi."
Palpatine adopted a look of shock. "The choice was not yours to make. You have the Force. Your destiny was a forgone conclusion."
Ronhar mulled it over. "And if Vidar Kim had elected not to surrender me to the Order?"
"A line of thought impossible to follow to any conclusion," Palpatine said.
The Jedi looked at him and squared his shoulders. "There are many forks in the path, Senator. Had I remained on Naboo I might have followed Vidar Kim's footsteps and entered politics. Perhaps it's not too late."
Palpatine showed him a tolerant smile and came alongside him, confident now that his true nature was beyond detection. "I have to admit that the notion of a politician with Jedi values is not without its appeal. In fact, the Republic was once overseen by Jedi chancellors only. But I'm afraid you're something of an anachronism, Ronhar. The galaxy appears to have rejected the idea of enlightened leadership. The best politician presently is merely exceptional, where every Jedi is extraordinary."
Ronhar laughed shortly. "More and more, Senator Palpatine, you begin to sound like my former Master."
"Would that I had such talents," Palpatine said, making light of it. "But I do have a proposition, Ronhar. Not only am I new to the Senate, I'm new to Coruscant. And it would be good to have someone to count on as a friend. So what would you say to an alliance between a politician and a Jedi? Through me you gain insight into the workings of the Republic, and through you I might better understand the Jedi, in their roles as peacekeepers."
Ronhar inclined his head in a bow. "I respect Vidar Kim all the more for bringing us together. May the Force be with you, Senator Palpatine."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He cloaks his Force sensitivity from groups of Jedi.
Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He conceals his Force sensitivity from Ronhar Kim, Dooku, and Sifo-Dyas.
The contingent of Senators had scarcely left when Palpatine heard his name called; turning, he saw Ronhar Kim in the company of two older human Jedi. Quietly he pulled his powers deeper into himself and adopted a mask of cordiality.
"Jedi Ronhar," he said, inclining his head in greeting.
The black-haired Jedi returned the nod. "Senator Palpatine, may I introduce Masters Dooku and Sifo-Dyas."
Palpatine was familiar with the former, but only by reputation. "A great honor, Masters."
Dooku appraised him openly, then arched his eyebrow. "Excuse me for staring, Senator, but Ronhar's descriptions of you led me to expect someone older."
"I disguise myself well, Master Dooku. My age, that is."
"Either way," Sifo-Dyas remarked, "a talent required by your position."
"An ignoble truth, Master Sifo-Dyas. But we strive to remain faithful to our conscience."
Dooku smiled with purpose. "Hold tight to that, Senator Palpatine. Coruscant will surely need your resolve."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious cloaks his and Darth Maul's presence in the Force as they inspect the outside of the Jedi Temple.
One of his earliest memories was that of being taken to the Jedi Temple. Both he and Sidious had been disguised as tourists. His master's command of the dark side had been sufficient to cloak them from being sensed by their enemies, as long as they did not enter the building. That had been unlikely anyway—the Jedi Temple was not open for tourism. They had stood there for the better part of the day, Darth Sidious pointing out to him the various faces of their foes as the latter came and went. It had been thrilling to Maul to realize that he could stand in the presence of the Jedi, could listen to his master whisper to him of their ultimate downfall, without the having any inkling of the fate that ultimately awaited them.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
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Maul wanted to ask for forgiveness but his steadfast anger wouldn’t permit it. In any case, what was the point, since he had received beatings for being right as often as he had for being wrong. Welling up from some unreachable source, rage lifted his head and set his tongue flapping. But barely a word passed his lips when he felt his throat pinched closed by a negligent gesture of Sidious’ right hand.
“Don’t interrupt,” Sidious warned. He paced away from Maul, eventually allowing him to breathe, then turned to him.
--Taken from Restraint
Sidious appears to have telekinetically killed over a dozen Weequay soldiers.
Moving through a maintenance level to avoid more soldiers, Maul, Talzin, and the Nightsisters finally arrived in the hangar that housed Talzin's starship. Maul had expected to find the warlord's soldiers stationed in the hangar to prevent Talzin from reaching her ship, but he had not expected to find over a dozen Weequays lying dead on the hangar's deck. Although none of the Weequay bodies bore obvious wounds, Maul knew how they had died, and also the identity of their killer. Leaving Talzin standing with her Nightsisters, he moved across the hangar to face a dark alcove. He stopped, dropped to one knee, and bowed his head.
"Master."
Sidious stepped out from the alcove. He wore his dark robe, and his face was concealed by the shadows beneath his deep hood.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Talzin hadn't expected Maul to heed her command, and wondered as she ran why he was running with them. Did he actually intend to accompany them to Dathomir? She had begun to doubt that she had the power to subdue him a second time, or to persuade him to come. So what had changed? Had combat forged a primal connection of some sort? Or was he now prepared to accept his fate, despite what he had said about having perceived the presence of his Master?
Racing into the hangar, they saw that the deck was littered with fallen Weequays. None of the discolored bodies showed evidence of obvious wounds, but to a soldier they were dead. Clearly the Vollick had deployed them to keep Talzin and the rest from reaching the starship. Could they have turned on one another? She scarcely had time to consider it when she saw Maul come to an abrupt stop and drop to one knee with his head bowed.
“Master,” Talzin heard him say.
A human male stepped into view. Of average height, he wore a dark robe whose hood was raised over his head, concealing his face. Talzin could feel his power, not only in the Force, but in the dark side, as it was known to some. Even the Nightsisters could sense the man’s strength, and fell back a step in uncertainty, their energy bows aimed at the deck.
--Taken from Restraint
He again employs Choke on Maul, lifting him in the air and nearly rendering him unconscious.
It was in the early days when Lord Sidious was secretly working to consolidate the strength of the Trade Federation. My mission was to go to the planet Chryya and ensure that their thriving spice business would be turned over to the Trade Federation to manage. I would accomplish this through threats and intimidation. I would not reveal my Sith powers unless I left my opponent dead.
At first, I was successful. A few incidents convinced the frightened merchants to sign all the agreements. But then one merchant organized a protest. Before I could move against him, a groundswell grew among the people. Every citizen of Chryya destroyed their spice supplies rather than give in to the Trade Federation. They wrecked their economy for principle. I had not forseen this. In my experience, creatures are guided by their own comforts. I could not kill the entire population, so I had to leave and report my failure to my Master.
He did not take it well. He raised a hand, and the dark side grabbed me by the throat and lifted me high. My breath was squeezed out of me slowly. Too slowly. I had time to feel every stretched-out moment of panic as I struggled to force even the tiniest trickle of air into my lungs. When I was close to passing out, I was dropped to the floor in a heap. My Master walked away. He did not address me or call for me for some time. The removal of his favor was worse than the punishment.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
He tears Maul's lightsaber out of the latter's hand during a duel.
Sidious shifted like a liquid shadow, maneuvering around his apprentice. Maul was suddenly up against the wall, gasping for breath as his vision blurred. His strength was evaporating. He turned fast to see Sidious. Sidious lashed out with his lightsaber. Maul parried the blow, but then his lightsaber suddenly flew from his hand. As Maul heard his lightsaber deactivete and clatter across the cave's floor, Sidious raised his own lightsaber and advanced.
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
I am gasping, trying to suck in enough air to keep going. My vision blurs as Lord Sidious raises his lightsaber. I parry the blow, but my lightsaber suddenly flies out of my hand, torn by the power of my Master directing the dark side. I realize then that he has just begun to tap into his own reserves. Mine are played out.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
Sidious pulls Maul's lightsaber toward himself and spins, moves, and activates it in mid-flight before levitating it back to Maul.
Darth Sidious raised his right hand, palm outward.
Before Maul could prevent it—even if he had chosen to do so—the long cylinder that was his double-bladed lightsaber flew from its hitch on his belt and went directly to his Master. But instead of grasping it, Sidious stopped the lightsaber in midflight, centimeters from his raised hand, and directed it to spin and rotate before him, leaving Maul to gaze at him in unabashed awe. Sidious bade the lightsaber to ignite. From each end blazed a meter-long blade of rubicund fire, hypnotic in the intensity of its burning. The free-floating weapon pivoted left, then right, eliciting a thrumming sound that was as menacing as it was rousing.
"An exquisite weapon," Sidious said. "Tell me, my young apprentice, what were you thinking when you fashioned it? Why this and not a single blade, as the Jedi prefer?"
"The single blade has limitations, Master, in offense and defense. It made sense to me to be able to strike with both ends."
Sidious made a sound of approval. "You must bear that in mind when you go to Dorvalla, Darth Maul. But remember this What is done in secret has great power. A sword master knows that when he flourishes his blade, he reveals his intent. Be watchful. It is too soon to reveal ourselves."
"I understand, Master."
Sidious deactivated the lightsaber and sent it back to Maul, who received it as one might a cherished possession.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Saboteur
Sidious shows enough telekinetic precision to activate and deactivate the controls of a transmission grid.
Darth Sidious, Master of the Sith, finished relaying his instructions to the Neimoidians and made a slight, almost negligent gesture. Across the room a relay clicked and the holographic transmission ended. The flickering blue-white images of the Neimoidians and the section of their ship's bridge captured by the split-beam transceivers vanished.
Sidious made another slight gesture. The Force replied in response, and the transmission grid beneath his feet glowed again.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He again deactivates a transmission grid.
Darth Sidious did not wait for a response; none was necessary. With a gesture he closed the relay, breaking the connection.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He again pulls Maul's lightsaber out of Maul's hand and draws it to himself.
Suddenly, my lightsaber is gone. It flies from my hand across the room. It lands in the hand of my Master. I never see him enter. Not if he doesn't want me to. The smile of triumph fades from my face.
--Taken from Episode 1 Journal: Darth Maul
Sidious uses Choke to slowly kill Darth Plagueis.
Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis." He held his thumb and forefinger close together. "Try to keep yourself alive while I choke the life out of you."
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, and 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 that is being denied air, in which even the Force is failing, your own midi-chlorians can’t accomplish what you’re asking of them.”
The Muun’s eyes had begun to bulge; his pale flesh, to turn cyanotic.
Plagueis slid to the floor and rolled facedown. Death rattled his lungs and he died.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He is unaffected by a turbulent telekinetic storm from Plagueis.
Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch, knocking a statue from its perch. Sidious moved in, his hands upraised to deliver another bolt, his expression arctic enough to chill the room. A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.
Sidious's eyes bored into the Muun's.
"How often you said that the order of Bane had ended with the death of your Master. An apprentice no longer needs to be stronger, you told me, merely more clever. The era of keeping score, suspicion, and betrayal was over. Strength is not in the flesh but in the Force."
He laughed. "You lost the game on the very first day you chose to train me to rule by your side—or better still, under your thumb. Teacher, yes, and for that I will be eternally grateful. But Master—never."
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He rolls over Plagueis' corpse to inspect his condition.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious uses Choke to casually kill two Mandalorians.
The unmarked shuttle landed on the royal palace’s platform, reserved for Mandalore’s rulers and their most important advisers. The ramp lowered and a hooded figure in dark robes descended. The commandos rushing to intercept him reached for their throats, gagging, and the cloaked figure swept past them without a sideways glance, gaze fixed straight ahead.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
He again employs Choke on two Mandalorians to lift them into the air and slam them on the floor; opens and closes doors; and hurls Maul and Savage against a wall.
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. Maul felt himself leap from the throne, mechanical legs clacking down the steps and toward his old Master. The motion was almost automatic, involuntary. Maul’s earliest memories were of that hooded figure—his tests, his teachings, and also his torments. He had been Maul’s father, his protector, his torturer. He had been everything.
Maul halted before Sidious and kneeled, bowing his head.
“Master,” he said simply.
Sidious stopped. For a moment all was silent.
“I am most impressed to see you have survived your injuries,” he said, the voice as rough and cracked as Maul remembered.
“I used your training, Master,” Maul said. “And I have built all of this in hopes of returning to your side.”
Sidious lifted his head slightly, and Maul saw his yellow eyes beneath the hood. They were as cold as space.
“How unfortunate that you are attempting to deceive me,” Sidious said.
“Master?” Maul asked.
“You have become a rival,” Sidious declared.
He raised his arms and both Maul and Savage flew through the air, smashing into the elegantly patterned walls of the royal chamber and crashing to the floor.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious Force Pushes Maul against a wall, leaving Maul temporarily incapacitated until after Sidious kills Savage.
Maul tried to slash past Sidious’s guard, only to find his Master had given ground, causing Maul to extend his arms too far and leave himself slightly unbalanced. It was the smallest stumble, easily corrected, but Sidious saw it—and pounced before Maul could draw himself back. Snarling, he reached out with the Force and slammed Maul against the wall, leaving him lying stunned in a heap.
Savage knew the dangers of facing the Sith Lord alone, and pressed his attack before Sidious draw his hand back from Force-shoving Maul into the wall. Teeth bared, Savage windmilled his double saber, hoping to disarm Sidious or force him to give ground. If he did, that would allow the yellow-and-black Zabrak to follow his initial attack with a lightning-quick thrust that would penetrate Sidious’s defenses and wound or even kill him.
Maul tried to shake off his attack, rocketing up from the floor. Sidious neatly side-stepped Savage’s assault, drawing back as the massive Zabrak raised his double-bladed saber high to try to pummel him with it. Savage didn’t think Sidious was fast enough to take advantage of the brief opening in his defenses, but he was wrong.
Sidious rammed one of his blades through Savage’s black armor, the glowing crimson tip of the saber appearing between his shoulder blades. Savage gasped, his saber tumbling from his grasp. Sidious yanked his weapon back and Savage seemed to hang suspended for a moment, as if he were being levitated by with the Force. Then he crashed to the ground.
Sidious stepped back as Maul rushed to his fallen brother’s side.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
He smashes Maul against a wall and the floor.
Maul’s saber spun out of his hand, bouncing away across the floor. Then Sidious seized his former apprentice with the Force, hurling him against the wall. Maul’s vision swam. He tried to get up, but realized he was already in the air, held aloft by the Force. Sidious slammed him into the floor. Then Maul was off the ground again, legs kicking for purchase in empty air. He could taste blood in his mouth. His head hit the wall with a sickening crunch.
A rhyme crept into his head, a nagging sing-song bit of poetry.
Far above, far above,
We don’t know where we’ll fall.
Far above, far above.
What once was great is rendered small.
Maul could no longer remember where he had heard it, or what it meant. He was broken, helpless, useless.
“No,” Maul heard himself gasp. “Have mercy. Please...”
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious activates his lightsaber inside a neuranium sculpture, pulls it across the room, and then deactivates it as he draws it into his sleeve.
As a Jedi shuttle settled to the landing deck outside, the shadow sent its mind into the far deeper night within one of the several pieces of sculpture that graced the office: an abstract twist of solid neuranium, so heavy that the office floor had been specially reinforced to bear its weight, so dense that more sensitive species might, from very close range, actually perceive the tiny warping of the fabric of space-time that was its gravitation.
Neuranium of more than roughly a millimeter thick is impervious to sensors; the standard security scans undergone by all equipment and furniture to enter the Senate Office Building had shown nothing at all. If anyone had thought to use an advanced gravimetric detector, however, they might have discovered that one smallish section of the sculpture massed slightly less than it should have, given that the manifest that had accompanied it, when it was brought from Naboo among the then-ambassador's personal effects, clearly stated that it was a single piece of solid-forged neuranium.
The manifest was a lie. The sculpture was not entirely solid, and not all of it was neuranium. Within a long, slim, rod-shaped cavity around which the sculpture had been forged rested a device that had lain, waiting, in absolute darkness—darkness beyond darkness—for decades. Waiting for night to fall on the Republic.
The shadow felt Jedi Masters stride the vast echoic emptiness of the vaulted halls outside. It could practically hear the cadence of their boot heels on the Alderaanian marble. The darkness within the sculpture whispered of the shape and the feel and every intimate resonance of the device it cradled. With a twist of its will, the shadow triggered the device. The neuranium got warm. A small round spot, smaller than the circle a human child might make of thumb and forefinger, turned the color of old blood.
Then fresh blood.
Then open flame.
Finally a spear of scarlet energy lanced free, painting the office with the color of stars seen through the smoke of burning planets. The spear of energy lengthened, drawing with it out from the darkness the device, then the scarlet blade shrank away and the device slid itself within the softer darkness of a sleeve.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He opens a compartment in the ceiling of his office and lowers a cloak down to himself.
Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious and Yoda telekinetically hurl numerous senate pods while Palpatine additionally levitates a pod he stands on while the two cross blades and unleash and absorb Lightning 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.
He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor's Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his pod streaking in a downward spiral to the holding office at the base of the Podium tower.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious resists Vader's Force Scream and telekinetic outburst after the latter awoke on the operation table.
And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Palpatine uses Force Crush on Sedriss to subvert him into the Dark Side Adepts.
One of Emperor Palpatine's many dark side warriors was Sedriss, a young mercenary who displayed an aptitude for using the Force, if not any particular desire to join the ranks of the Imperial military. Various Imperial organizations tried to recruit Sedriss but found him insolent, insubordinate, and violently opposed to authority. He was awaiting execution for the deaths of a handful of Imperial officers when he was spirited away by members of the Inquisitorium, and dragged before the Emperor himself, who asked Sedriss simply, "Would you like to kill me?"
The Emperor looked inside Sedriss's heart and in his own way cut to the core of Sedriss's problem. Sedriss could not respect anyone whom he knew he could easily kill—which included most of his superiors in the military. The Emperor made a bargain with Sedriss: They would duel, and if Sedriss won, he could take the Emperor's life. But if Sedriss lost, he would serve the Emperor with unquestioning loyalty, or suffer the most terrible, lingering, ignominious death he could imagine. Confident of his chances against the frail old man, Sedriss agreed—and was promptly crushed to the ground by the Emperor's power. Sedriss admitted that the Emperor had defeated him and promised to honor their agreement. The Emperor didn't desist. Sedriss felt his ribs collapsing, and swore that he would serve the Emperor. Still the Emperor did not stop, until Sedriss felt his heartbeat slowly coming to a stop and begged to serve the Emperor. When he was finally able to stand, he instead knelt—convinced that this was a superior who was truly superior to him.
--Taken from The Dark Side Sourcebook
The Emperor muses about his ability to destroy his office and demolish his palace but decides against it.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.
The Emperor curled his fingers into a gnarled fist. The Death Star, his most powerful weapon, perhaps the greatest achievement of his reign, the key to destroying the tedious Rebel Alliance once and for all...destroyed. Even now, the detestable Rebels were no doubt celebrating their victory. It was a meaningless victory, of course, and only a fool would think differently. But then, only a fool would join the ridiculous battle against the Empire.
Only a fool challenges the inevitable.
The Rebel Alliance was nothing but a nuisance, a millfly to be swatted away. But even a meaningless victory was unacceptable. The Rebels would be punished. The Emperor smiled—the Rebels would be crushed. And soon. His impatience swelled. Fury boiled his blood at the thought of waiting any longer. The rage called for release, and the Emperor knew that with a thought he could destroy his opulent office. He could crack the building's foundation, rain rubble on the heads of those unlucky beings trapped within. He could, with the full power of his anger, unleash a fireball of death.
But he chose to wait. He chose control.
It was another thing the Jedi had never understood. A lesson that even Darth Vader, such a quick study in the school of darkness, had yet to learn. The rage was only a beginning.
Control, that was the key. Patience. The ability to channel the flood, bend it to your will. Anger was the fuel that powered the dark side of the Force. But success depended on mastery of the anger. Vader spent his anger without thought; the Emperor hoarded his, as a Hutt hoarded his treasure.
The destruction of the Death Star had been a setback, but every defeat masked an opportunity. And this was an opportunity the Emperor fully intended to seize.
In fact, he already had a plan.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
He lowers a cage around Bevel Lemelisk.
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.
--Taken from Darksaber
The Emperor casually removes Luke's binders.
“Welcome, young Skywalker.” The Evil One smiled graciously. “I have been expecting you.”
Luke stared back brazenly at the bent, hooded figure. Defiantly. The Emperor’s smile grew even softer, though; even more fatherly. He looked at Luke’s manacles.
“You no longer need those,” he added with no-bless oblige—and made the slightest motion with his finger in the direction of Luke’s wrists. At that, Luke’s binders simply fell away, clattering noisily to the floor.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Telepathy/Empathy
Force Telepathy is a power through which Force sensitives can read, communicate, and manipulate thoughts. Empathy is a power through which Force sensitives can read, communicate, and manipulate emotions.
Sidious induces fear and aggression into the minds of Jedi across the galaxy.
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During the Clone Wars, Palpatine conducted Sith rituals on Coruscant that radiated unnerving ripples in the Force, which caused anxiety among most Jedi throughout the galaxy, but also served to increase Anakin Skywalker's hunger for power.
--Taken from The Ultimate Visual Guide
The Emperor communicates with Mara Jade across lightyears of distance and projects an astral presence that appears to her.
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At the time of his defeat at Endor, Palpatine sends a vision to Mara, continuing his order for her to kill Luke.
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Luke and Palpatine connect their minds while Luke is on Coruscant and the Emperor is on Byss.
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Palpatine gains subtle hold over Luke's mind, nearly compelling him to the dark side.
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After Luke agrees to serve as the Emperor's apprentice, he sends a message to Leia in the form of a vision, but Palpatine overrides his message and speaks to Leia through the vision, which renders her unconscious.
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Luke escapes Palpatine's hold over his mind with Leia's aid.
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Palpatine: Curse you, Jedi! No. A curse is not necessary. I have something better for you. Skywalker! I have broken you. Now, prove yourself worthy of serving me. (Sound of lightsaber activating.)
Luke: Yes, my master.
Palpatine: Bring your sister over to the dark side. You have the power.
Leia: (Sounds of waving lightsabers.) I don't know what he's done to you, Luke, but this time we're really leaving.
Luke: Leia, put the lightsaber away. I don't want to hurt you.
Leia: The last thing I'd do is hurt you, Luke. What's happened to you is not final.
Palpatine: (Palpatine laughs.) He cannot hear you, child. To him, you are a ghost. The faint memory of a former life.
Leia: Luke...listen. (Sound of lightsaber deactivating.) Luke. Oh, what have you done? What's behind his vacant stare?
Palpatine: Why, nothing, my child. Nothing. (Sound of the Force being used. Sound of speech echoing within Luke's mind.)
Luke: Nothing.
Palpatine: You are nothing.
Luke: Where am I?
Palpatine: Alone.
Luke: No. Help me.
Palpatine: There is no one. There is only the dark side.
Luke: I am a Jedi. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You are not a Jedi. You are nothing. You have no name.
Luke: My name is Skywalker. (Luke screams.)
Palpatine: You...have...no...name!
Luke: I...
Palpatine: Accept the dark side. You have no name.
Luke: I have no name.
Palpatine: You serve the dark side.
Luke: I serve...
Palpatine: Listen to the voices.
Luke: The voices...
Palpatine: Of the dark side.
Luke: Yes.
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power. The one power is hate.
Luke: Hate.
Leia: Luke.
Palpatine: Hate.
Leia: Luke, clear your mind.
Luke: Leia?
Palpatine: The one law is fear. The one fear is power!
Leia: Luke, I'm your sister. I need you.
Luke: My sister.
Palpatine: You are alone.
Leia: Luke, listen to my voice. My child...will be a very great Jedi, because you will train him. You will train all my children in the ways of the Force.
Palpatine: Do not listen!
Luke: The Force... Leia... The Force... I am not alone. I am never alone!
(Sound of Force fades. Sound of voices returning to normal audibility.)
Palpatine: No! This can't be. No one returns from the dark side. You're mine!
Luke: Leia, help me. I've gone too far. I've found knowledge, all the dark things Father knew so well. The ability to control others, to destroy others if he chose, if I chose. Ben warned me; Yoda warned me. But I had to do it, Leia! I had to know what happened to our father! I had to know why he chose the dark side.
Leia: And now you know what happened to our father. It's time to come home, Luke.
Palpatine: Do not listen to her. Listen to the voice of the dark side. Your power is immense.
Luke: No. The powers of control and destruction weren't the only things I found in the dark side, Emperor. I also found great isolation and sadness. I found fear. These are the feelings my father felt. The feelings you feel, in your moments of darkest triumph.
Palpatine: Nonsense! Curse you Skywalkers, both of you! I'll tell you the truth about your father. (Sound of the Force being used. Luke screams. Sound of Force fades.)
Palpatine: The great Darth Vader was a sick man in an iron mask! Yes, that mask inspired terror throughout the galaxy, but the feeble heart within was forever possessed by the impotent side of the Force. You can be far stronger than he was. Dark Jedi, are you going to let your weak sister get the better of you? Get up! I can give you the power to break her. You will kill your sister, if I demand it!
Luke: No! I made a mistake. I thought I had to save the galaxy alone, all by myself. But the way of the Jedi is not a solitary path.
Leia: (Leia gasps.) The Holocron! Luke, the Holocron told me to join with my brother!
Luke: Yes. The Force binds us. Brings us together. Many people are fighting this war together. Our ally is the Force. Through the strength of the Force, your shroud of evil has been lifted from my mind!
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
When Vima Da Boda attempts to create a diversion and deceive Palpatine by pretending to be Leia, she is repulsed by the darkness in Palpatine's mind.
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Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine is able to shield his thoughts and Force sensitivity from Plagueis' attempts to probe him and lowers his mental shields after committing murder, after which Plagueis intends to teach him to rebuild his shields.
They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.
“Palpatine, I wonder how you would feel about working with us—Damask Holdings, I mean.”
Palpatine’s thick eyebrows beetled. “In what capacity?”
“To be perfectly blunt, as a kind of spy.” He went on before Palpatine could speak. “I won’t say that you and I want the same things for Naboo, because clearly—and notwithstanding your feelings about the architecture—you hold your world dear. My group, however, is less interested in Naboo’s government than it is in Naboo’s plasma and what it will fetch on the open market.”
Palpatine looked as if the plain truth was something new to him. “If you had phrased that any differently, I would have rejected your offer out of hand.”
“Then you accept? You’re willing to update us regarding whatever political machinations your father’s group may have in the works?”
“Only if I can report directly to you.”
Plagueis tried once more to see him in the Force. “Is that your wish?”
Palpatine returned a sober nod. “It is.”
“Then by all means, you’ll report exclusively to me,” Plagueis said. “I’ll see to it that the necessary arrangements are made.” He stepped away from the speeder as Palpatine powered it up.
Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.
Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels urgency exuding from Kycina.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels pride in groups of Jedi.
Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He compels a Sullustan lobbyist to reveal his intent and then seems to erase his memories.
Sidious adopted a look of wide-eyed innocence as he sat down opposite the Sullustan. They began to talk in a general way about current events and Senate business, before the lobbyist steered the conversation toward STP’s need for Senate approval to expand its operations along the Rimma Trade Route. Drinks and appetizers were ordered and reordered, and before too long Palpatine’s interest began to wane.
“I think you may have overvalued my worth to STP,” he said at last. “I’m nothing more than the voice of Naboo’s regent.”
The Sullustan waved his small hand in a gesture of dismissal. “And I think you undervalue yourself. Your short speech to the Senate put you on the map, Senator. Beings are talking about you. STP believes that you can be of great service.”
“And to myself, you said.”
“Naturally—” the Sullustan started, but Sidious interrupted him.
“In fact, you’re not here to recruit me.” Motioning negligently, he repeated: “You’re not here to recruit me.”
The Sullustan blinked in confusion. “In fact, I’m not really here to recruit you.”
“Then why are we here?”
“I don’t know why we’re here. I was instructed to meet with you.”
“Instructed by whom?”
“I, I—”
Sidious decided not to press him too hard. “You were saying?”
Again the Sullustan blinked. “I was saying... Just what was I saying?”
They both laughed and sipped at their drinks.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels malevolence surrounding an attack on Hego Damask.
Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels malevolence behind him when Maul enters the room.
Although Darth Sidious did not hear anyone enter his secret lair, he sensed a great malevolence flow into the room. From behind him, a deep voice spoke, "What is thy bidding, my Master?"
--Taken from Episode 1 Adventures: The Fury of Darth Maul
Sidious reads Maul's intent and thoughts.
"This rivalry between Lommite Limited and InterGalactic Ore intrigues me," Sidious was saying as he moved about the cavernous den that was both his sanctuary and repository. The hood of his cowl was raised over his lined face, and the hem of his robe trailed on the gleaming floor. His voice was a rasp, absent emotion but not without instances of intentional inflection.
"I see a way that we might exploit this entanglement to our own gain," he continued. "A push here, a shove there, and both mining companies will collapse. Thus, we will be able to deliver Dorvalla to the Trade Federation—the ore, the trade routes, Dorvalla's vote in the senate—and, in so doing, gain the further allegiance of Viceroy Gunray and his lackeys."
Sidious removed his hands from the ample sleeves of his robe. "Viceroy Gunray claims to be persuaded of the worth of serving us, but I want him fully in our grasp, so that there can be no doubt of his heeding my commands. With Dorvalla secured, he will likely be promoted to a permanent position on the Trade Federation Directorate. We can then further our larger plan."
Sidious cast his hooded gaze across the room to a deeply shadowed area in which Darth Maul sat silent as a statue, his tattooed face lowered, so that all Sidious could see was the crown of vestigial horns that sprouted from his hairless skull.
"Your thoughts betray you, my young apprentice," he remarked. "You are puzzled by my steadfast interest in the Neimoidians."
Darth Maul lifted his face, and what scant light there was seemed to recoil. Where his Master represented all that was concealed and mysterious in the Sith, Maul was the personification of all that was to be feared.
"From you, Master, I cannot hide what I feel. The Neimoidians are greedy and weak-willed. I find them unworthy."
--Taken from Darth Maul: Saboteur
From across the galaxy, Sidious detects shifting and uncertain thoughts in Gunray's mind.
“To be sure. But I warned you that this was coming. Supreme Chancellor Valorum has lost all credibility, and after what occurred at Eriadu, the Senate is determined to weaken the Trade Federation further. King Veruna may have been able to stall the Senate, but he has abdicated, and young Queen Amidala and Naboo’s Senator are leading the call for taxation. With the Senate preoccupied, the moment is right for you to begin assembling a fleet of armed freighters to impose a blockade.”
“A blockade? Of what system, Lord Sidious?”
“I will inform you in due time.” When Gunray didn’t respond, Sidious said, “What is it, Viceroy? Across the vastness of space, I can perceive the reeling of your feeble brain.”
“Forgive me, Lord Sidious, but, as my advisers have pointed out, the redistribution of our vessels carries with it considerable financial risk. To begin with, there is the cost of fuel. Then, with so many ships allocated to an embargo, a disruption in trade in the Mid and Outer Rims for however long the blockade is maintained. Finally, there is no telling how our investors might react to the news."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious reveals to Plagueis that he has been implanting mental suggestions into the latter's mind for years.
"You may be wondering: when did he begin to change? The truth is that I haven’t changed. As we have clouded the minds of the Jedi, I clouded yours. Never once did I have any intention of sharing power with you. I needed to learn from you; no more, no less. To learn all of your secrets, which I trusted you would eventually reveal. But what made you think that I would need you after that? Vanity, perhaps; your sense of self-importance. You’ve been nothing more than a pawn in a game played by a genuine Master.
“The Sith’ari.”
A cruel laugh escaped him.
“Reflect back on even the past few years—assuming you have the capacity. Yinchorr, Dorvalla, Eriadu, Maul, the Neimoidians, Naboo, an army of clones, the fallen Jedi Dooku... You think these were your ideas, when in fact they were mine, cleverly suggested to you so that you could feed them back to me. You were far too trusting, Plagueis. No true Sith can ever really care about another. This has always been known. There is no way but my way.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine perceives masked emotions and fury in Anakin.
Palpatine interlinked the fingers of his hands. “I’m told that you grew up on Tatooine. I visited there, many years ago.”
Anakin’s eyes narrowed for the briefest moment. “I did, sir, but I’m not supposed to talk about that.”
Palpatine watched him glance up at Obi-Wan. “And why is that?”
“My mother—”
“Anakin,” Obi-Wan snapped in reprimand.
Palpatine reclined slightly, studying the two of them. Obi-Wan seemed not to have noticed the fury simmering in the boy, but for an instant Palpatine perceived a touch of his younger self in Skywalker. The need to challenge authority; the gift for masking his emotions. The yet-unrecognized power.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
As possibly a result of Sidious' innate telepathic/empathetic shielding, Shaak Ti is incapable of probing him through the Force.
The fact that Palpatine was flustered, confused, possibly frightened was obvious. But when Shaak Ti attempted to read him through the Force, she found it difficult to get a sense of what he was truly feeling.
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
Palpatine appears to use a Mind Trick on General Grievous.
"Welcome to the general's quarters," he said while he did input at a console built into the table. Shortly the bulkhead behind the swivel chair became a hologrammic display, showing the battle of Coruscant. The flick of a final switch summoned a stalked, eyeball-shaped holocam from the tabletop. "You're about to make an unscheduled appearance on the HoloNet, Chancellor," Grievous said. "I apologize for not providing a mirror, hairbrush, and cosmetics, so that you might at least camouflage some of your fear."
Palpatine's voice was sinister when he spoke. "You can display me, but I won't speak."
Grievous nodded at what seemed an obvious statement. "I'll display you, but you won't speak. Is that understood?"
"You will do all the talking."
"That's correct. I will do all the talking."
"Very good."
For no apparent reason, Grievous felt uncertain. "Lord Tyranus will soon be here to take charge of you."
Palpatine smiled without showing his teeth. "Then I am assured of being greatly entertained."
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
He feels Anakin's anguish and determination in Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, Saesee Tiin, and Agen Kolar.
In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious elicits a haze of confusion on Saesee Tiin, Agen Kolar, and Kit Fisto.
When Mace Windu led a team of Jedi Masters to apprehend Darth Sidious, none of them expected to face the power of the Sith Lord. His innocent appearance as Chancellor Palpatine, along with an application of a concentrated dark side confusion haze, enabled Darth Sidious to take down Agen Kolar, Kit Fisto, and Saesee Tiin.
--Taken from Lightsabers: A Guide to Weapons of the Force
Palpatine seems to read Anakin's thoughts.
Palpatine lifted one tentative hand to the misshapen horror that he now saw in the mirror, then simply shrugged.
"And so the mask becomes the man," he sighed with a hint of philosophical melancholy. "I shall miss the face of Palpatine, I think; but for our purpose, the face of Sidious will serve. Yes, it will serve."
He gestured, and a hidden compartment opened in the office's ceiling above his desk. A voluminous robe of heavy black-on-black brocade floated downward from it; Anakin felt the current in the Force that carried the robe to Palpatine's hand.
He remembered playing a Force game with a shuura fruit, sitting across a long table from Padme in the retreat by the lake on Naboo. He remembered telling her how grumpy Obi-Wan would be to see him use the Force so casually.
Palpatine seemed to catch his thought; he gave a yellow sidelong glance as the robe settled onto his shoulders.
"You must learn to cast off the petty restraints that the Jedi have tried to place upon your power," he said. "Anakin, it's time. I need you to help me restore order to the galaxy."
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious senses Vader's thoughts.
"Keep still," Sidious interrupted, "before you damage yourself all the more." He gave Vader a moment to compose himself. "First, let me reiterate that the Jedi mean nothing to us. In having survived, Yoda and Obi-Wan aren't exceptions to the rule. I'm certain that dozens of Jedi escaped with their lives, and in due time you will have the pleasure of killing many of them. But of greater import is the fact that their order has been crushed. Finished, Lord Vader. Do I make myself clear?"
"Yes, Master," Vader muttered.
"In burying their heads in the sands and snows of remote worlds, the surviving Jedi humble themselves before the Sith. So let them: let them atone for one thousand years of arrogance and self-absorption."
Sidious watched Vader, displeased. "Once more your thoughts betray you. I see that you are not yet fully convinced."
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Palpatine impels agreement from Senators who object his rule.
Mon Mothma hasn’t much combat experience, but she is as much a fighter as any commodore or commando. The only difference is the battlefield she commands is one of diplomacy and etiquette. As a leading Senator, she fought the rise of Palpatine with every tool at her command. At the time, she was unaware that Palpatine used the Dark Side of the Force to sway the less conscientious Senators.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He uses Drain Knowledge to tear information out of the minds of Jedi.
There was no great collection of Dark Side lore, nor any gather of its masters. Realizing the task that lay before him, Palpatine knew he must begin at once to attain control over the Dark Side. With the resources of the galaxy at his disposal, he gathered the greatest works of knowledge from over a million worlds. He studied the Force in all its guises throughout the galaxy, whether it was the shamanism of Jarvashqiine or the tales of the Tyia. Coupled with the perversions of the secrets he ripped from the living minds of Jedi he captured during the Purge, he learned more than ever expected.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
By use of Force Fear, Palpatine and Vader can create fear in the minds of other Imperials.
But the Force, of course, was quite real—and the black tentacles of its dark side had hardened Palpatine and his new pupil, Darth Vader, into evil incarnate. They shared its horrible energies, and used them to fill the minds of their subservient military minions with fear.
--Taken from the Technical Journal of the Imperial Forces
The Emperor is explained as influencing the minds and wills of the populace of Byss, which reached nearly twenty billion through the dark side into submission to his rule, rendering them mindless and maintained this control for decades even when he left the planet.
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Almost mindless under the oppression of the Emperor's dark side influence, the people of Byss find their life energies constantly leeched off during the Emperor's vile machinations.
Throughout the worlds submissive to the Empire, Byss is renowned as a paradise, whose siren call multitudes to willingly apply for emigration to its shores. Once there, wrapped in the power of the dark side, the immigrants become completely submissive, their life energy forever enslaved to the mind that would devour a galaxy.
--Taken from the Dark Empire endnotes
What better lure for multitudes than Byss's siren call of beauty and peace? Once there, their wills are destroyed by the Emperor and his Adepts, and replaced with an illusion of tranquility as they blissfully surrender their life energy to sustain the Emperor.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor erases memories, presumably by utilization of Memory Rub, in very possibly millions of people on Coruscant in order to conceal the location of the Star Destroyer Lusankya's burial place.
The Lusankya—a Super Star Destroyer eight kilometers length—laid waste to the area beneath which it had lain buried for years. Green turbolaser bolts pounded the cityscape, freeing the ship from the ferrocrete and transparisteel prison in which it had laired. Wedge knew Super Star Destroyers had only come into service after the Battle of Yavin, which meant the Lusankya had to have been created and hidden on Coruscant before the battle of Endor. Unless the constructor droids just built it there, then built over it. The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet could have been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship's insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor's power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried? As hideous as that idea seemed, Wedge hoped it was the truth. The likely alternative—that the Emperor had ordered the deaths of all the witnesses—seemed that much more horrible.
--Taken from X-Wing: Krytos Trap
Now director of the Imperial Intelligence, Ysanne worked to demonstrate the usefulness of her office to the only person that mattered—the Emperor. Impressed with her suggestion to build a combination internment center and brainwashing facility, Palpatine gave her the Super Star DesteroyerExecutor from the Kuat shipyards—a twin to Vader’s Executor from Fondor. She renamed the vessel Lusankya, and, with help from the Emperor’s mind-fogging powers, Imperial engineers buried the tremendous battleship beneath the cityscape in Coruscant’s Manarai Mountain district.
--Taken from The New Essential Guide to Characters
Obi-Wan tells Luke about how Sidious had through the Force communicated with and made a deal with the Ssi-ruuk across the galaxy.
Luke fought back to consciousness. He felt a powerful presence in the Force and sat up too quickly. Invisible hammers bashed both sides of his skull. The screen stood dark. On the foot of his flotation bed sat Ben Kenobi, robed as usual in unbleached homespun, shimmering under the cabin's faint night glims. "Obi-wan?" Luke murmered. "What's happening at Bakura?"
Ionized air danced around the figure. "You are going to Bakura," it answered.
"Is it that bad?" Luke asked bluntly, not really expecting an answer. Ben rarely gave them. He seemed to come mostly to reprimand Luke, like a teacher who could not give up hounding his student after graduation (not that Ben had stayed around to finish his training).
Obi-wan shifted on the bed, but the bed didn't shift with him. The manifestation wasn't literally physical. "Emperor Palatine achieved first contact with the aliens attacking Bakura," said the apparition, "during one of his Force meditations. He offered them a deal, one that can no longer be honored."
--Taken from The Truce at Bakura
The Emperor feels Vader's anger and terror from across the galaxy.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
This was what the rage could do for him. This was what pathetic Jedi had never understood, as they rejected their anger, letting cowardice block their path to the dark side. This was why they had been eliminated, and why the Emperor reigned supreme, his power unquestioned. His iron rule unassailable.
Until now.
"My Lord, the Death Star has been...destroyed."
The Emperor played with his memory of the moment, polishing it in his mind like a precious gem. Remembering: Darth Vader's voice as he delivered the news. Vader's anger, so forceful the Emperor could feel it from halfway across the galaxy. And with the anger, terror, for Vader knew how terribly he had disappointed his Master. Vader knew it was not the first time.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
He probes the emotions and thoughts of ten Imperial officers including Captain Thrawn, Crix Madine, Commander Grev T'Ran, and Rezi Soresh.
Ten of the most powerful men and women in the galaxy faced the Emperor, fear rolling off of them in waves. These were beings who could destroy ships—or cities—with a single word. Their hearts knew no mercy; their lives were founded on cruelties great and small; their names struck terror in their enemies. And yet they trembled before him, made small and weak by their own fear.
The most elite members of his Royal Guard flanked the group, their expressions hidden by their featureless scarlet masks. The Emperor had taken great pains to ensure that his throne room was an awesome and intimidating sight, from the towering walls to the gleaming dais. Behind his shadowed throne, a wall of permaplas windows looked into the heart of the Coruscant night. But his servants ignored the trappings of power. All attention was fixed on the Emperor.
"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.
"How did it happen, sir?" one of the officers asked. "The Death Star was invincible."
"So we were led to believe," the Emperor agreed.
He peered closely at the man who had spoken. His face was blank, his features composed into a perfect mask of calm loyalty. But there was something beneath the surface. Not betrayal, no. But something...the Emperor reached out with the dark side of the Force, probing the man's depths.
"The Rebels found a weakness," the Emperor said, searching for a reaction that would reveal the truth. "Wisely, they exploited it."
Quickly, he ran through what he knew of the man: Rezi Soresh, of the planet Dreizan, a loyal, if plodding commander, his brilliance blunted by blind obedience. Just as the Emperor preferred it. Cold, ambitious, cautious—not the kind of man to speak up first, or at all, when silence would serve him better. And in the Emperor's presence, silence always served better.
"Were there any...survivors?" Soresh asked. There was a disturbance in the Force as something flared within him, something sharp and bright.
Hope.
Ah, yes. It made sense now. Rezi Soresh, husband to Ilaani Soresh, father to Kimali Soresh—or was. Two years before, fresh out of the Academy, Kimali had fallen in with a group of Rebel sympathizers. When the group came under suspicion, his mother had helped him evade arrest. She had procured him the text docs he would need to run away and take on a new identity—and then she revealed the truth to Soresh, giving him the chance to say a final farewell to his son.
Soresh had turned them both in. His reward: a promotion to Commander. His family's reward: a life sentence in the Gree Baaker Labor Camp. Several prisoner work squads had been assigned to the Death Star, the Emperor now remembered. Among them, the prisoners from Gree Baaker.
The Emperor smiled. "No survivors."
Soresh's face remained blank as his hope died. The Emperor suspected that Soresh himself was ignorant of the emotions that roiled beneath his surface. Likely, he thought he had left his family—and his guilt—far behind. The Emperor knew better.
"Only Lord Vader escaped," he added, enjoying the disappointment that filled the room. He of course knew of the petty jealousies directed at his most favored subordinate. No one could hope to understand the bond that existed between a Sith Master and his dark apprentice. Darth Vader had failed him before, and would surely fail again, but he remained the Emperor's only option.
True, if there were another—a being with Vader's power and potential, a Jedi with a susceptible mind and a healthy body who could rule by his Master's side—Vader would become disposable. But the Jedi were gone forever. He had seen to that.
"Lord Vader is making his way back to Coruscant," the Emperor said. "And when he returns, we will make arrangements to eradicate the Rebel threat once and for all."
"But sir, why wait?" Captain Thrawn asked. "We know the location of the Rebel base. Surely we can—"
"We can do many things," the Emperor said coolly, enjoying the way even Thrawn cowered before his glare. "We will bide our time. I will not risk generating sympathy for the Rebellion—when it is crushed, it must be crushed completely. This does not, however, mean we will do nothing." He pointed a spindly finger at the line of officers. "You will identify the top Rebel leaders. You will use this knowledge to destroy them, thus ensuring that the Alliance begins to crumble from within. And you will discover the name of the pilot responsible for destroying the Death Star." The Emperor savored the rage that burned within him at the thought of it. "The pilot will die—and whoever makes this possible will find himself richly rewarded."
Again, he probed the emotions of his officers. Beneath their fear, and their hatred, he sensed loyalty. An eagerness to act. They wanted to please him. But Soresh wanted more than that. He wanted to kill: a bloodlust for the man who had slaughtered his family.
Good, the Emperor thought. Loyalty was useful. Vengeance more so.
The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
From Wayland, Palpatine senses Vader's treacherous thoughts and mentally harms Vader with a message for to travel to Mount Tantiss from Bespin.
Boarding his shuttle, he ordered the pilot to lift off. A pity, my son, he thought. You could have joined me and together...we could have destroyed the Emperor and ruled the galaxy in his place. As he stared at the severed appendage in his hands, a sudden flash of insight struck the Dark Lord, realization dawning like the sunrise of Bespin. Perhaps, if you will not be turned, little Jedi, a suitable substitute may be arranged.
Suddenly, Vader was struck to his knees by the horribly powerful voice that rolled like fiery thunder through his brain. The pilots struggled vainly to ignore the Dark Lord's...discomfort. "Yes, my servant," the voice boomed in his mind, dripping raw evil. "Come to Mount Tantiss, immediately. I shall meet you there, and we will discuss my new trophy."
"Yes...my Master," Vader gasped, feeling an icy stab of dread in his soul, as the Emperor's mocking chuckle still echoed in his mind. His Master had detected his rebellious thoughts. This discussion would be most unpleasant. Most unpleasant indeed.
--Taken from The Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook: Clone B-2332-54
Palpatine seems to read Moff Jerjerrod's mind.
Moff Jerjerrod knelt before the Emperor in his vast throne room. He bowed his head and hoped he would leave the Imperial Palace alive.
"Rise, my friend. I have a special challenge for you," the Emperor said. "I want you to ease your campaign against the Rebels and leave your work in Logistics and Supply."
Jerjerrod shifted uneasily. He didn't dare voice his concern that he was needed in that ministry to make sure Imperial resources weren't overextended.
"Do not concern yourself with the logistical status of the Empire," Palpatine stated, as if he had read the Moff's mind.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook: In the Emperor's Service
He seems able to perceive all of Vader's thoughts.
Although Vader knows better than to disobey Palpatine, he questions the Emperor's command to delay the search for Luke Skywalker. He has also voiced strong objections to the Emperor's increasing reliance on Falleen prince Xizor.
Surprisingly, Palpatine has not disciplined Vader for these doubts. It seems that the Emperor already knows every thought that crosses his servant's mind, and knows how every event will unfold.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor notes Vader's intentions during a conversation.
"The Death Star will be completed on schedule, my master," Vader breathed.
"Yes, I know," replied the Emperor. "You have done well, Lord Vader...and now I sense you wish to continue your search for the young Skywalker."
Vader smiled beneath his armored mask. The Emperor always knew the sense of what was in his heart; even if he didn't know the specifics. "Yes, my master."
"Patience, my friend," the Supreme Ruler cautioned. "You always had difficulty showing patience. In time, he will seek you out..and when he does, you must bring him before me. He has grown strong. Only together can we turn him to the dark side of the Force."
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
Palpatine reads Luke's thoughts and emotions to ascertain knowledge pertaining to Luke's Jedi training.
The Emperor sat before him, smiling. The moment was convulsive with possibilities... The moment passed. He did nothing.
"Tell me, young Skywalker," the Emperor said when he saw Luke's first struggle had taken its course. "Who has been involved in your training until now?" The smile was thin, open-mouthed, hollow. Luke was silent. He would reveal nothing. "Oh, I know it was Obi-Wan Kenobi at first," the wicked ruler continued, rubbing his fingers together as if trying to remember. Then pausing, his lips creased into a sneer. "Of course, we are familiar with the talent Obi-Wan Kenobi had, when it came to training Jedi." He nodded politely in Vader's direction, indicating Obi-Wan's previous star pupil. Vader stood without responding, without moving.
Luke tensed with fury at the Emperor’s defamation of Ben—though, of course, to the Emperor it was praise. And he bridled even more, knowing the Emperor was so nearly right. He tried to bring his anger under control, though, for it seemed to please the malevolent dictator greatly.
Palpatine noted the emotions on Luke’s face and chuckled. “So, in your early training you have followed your father’s path, it would seem. But alas, Obi-Wan is now dead, I believe; his elder student, here, saw to that—“ Again, he made a hand motion toward Vader. “So tell me, young Skywalker—who continued your training?”
That smile, again, like a knife. Luke held silent, struggling to regain his composure. The Emperor tapped his fingers on the arm of the throne, recalling. “There was one called…Yoda. An aged Master Jed…Ah, I see by your countenance I have hit a chord, a resonant chord indeed. Yoda, then.”
Luke flashed with anger at himself, now, to have revealed so much, unwillingly, unwittingly. Anger and self-doubt. He strove to calm himself—to see all, to show nothing; only to be.
“This Yoda,” the Emperor mused. “Lives he still?”
Luke focused on the emptiness of space beyond the window behind the Emperor’s chair. The deep void, where nothing was. Nothing. He filled his mind with this black nothing. Opaque, save for the occasional flickering of starlight that filtered through the ether.
“Ah,” cried Emperor Palpatine. “He lives not. Very good, young Skywalker, you almost hid this from me. But you could not. And you can not. Your deepest flickerings are to me apparent. Your nakedest soul. That is my first lesson to you.” He beamed.
The Emperor smiled. “Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless—take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete.”
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
The Emperor and Vader continue to read Luke's thoughts to discover Leia's relation to Luke.
Then, Vader and Palpatine both gained access to Luke's innermost thoughts, those that protected his sister, Princess Leia Organa.
--Taken from The Essential Guide to Characters
Palpatine controls the minds of his Imperial Sentinels.
"My monstrous chrysalides, with their magnificent metal-piercing fangs, guard the ramparts of my citadel. My mute Imperial sentinels stand by my throne, their annihilated minds and enslaved wills clear evidence the dark side can manipulate clones for any imaginative purpose. Although alchemy can create perfect beings, I have designed a weakness into all of these creations. The flaws are minute and known only to me. It would not do for any creature to be stronger than its creator."
--Taken from Book of Sith: Secrets from the Dark Side
Luke notes that Palpatine bent the mind of Kam Solusar, forcing him to abandon his life as a Jedi and serve the Empire as a Dark Side Adept. Luke undoes this mental hold.
Luke: I sense your old life. Before the dark side ensnared you. When the Force flowed through you.
Kam: No! No! No! (Sound of lightsaber turning off.) My life is forfeit, Jedi. Kill me.
Luke: I do not take life unless I must. Yours I give back to you.
Kam: Why? When I lured you here...I would have made this derelict space station your grave. The tomb of the last Jedi Master.
Luke: Instead, I will make it the place of your rebirth. You were a Dark Jedi once. But only because you fell under the Emperor's spell. Now that spell is broken! (Sound of the Force being used. Kam screams.) Kam Solusar, I give you back your life. I give you your freedom. I give you the power that is already yours—the power of the Jedi. (Sound of the Force fades.)
Kam: I...Skywalker...I'm free.
Luke: The Force is strong in you.
Kam: My old life...I remember it now. I...my father was a Jedi. I was a Jedi.
Luke: You are a Jedi, Kam Solusar.
Kam: I...I owe you my life.
--Taken from the Dark Empire audio drama
The Emperor is noted as having a talent for inspiring loyalty to him with the Force.
As a Jedi, she would have been trained in the bending of minds.
Luke had seen Ben do it, had done it himself. The Emperor Palpatine had been a genius at evoking that kind of desperate loyalty, that need to serve him, calling forth the echoes of one's own fears like a skilled musician calling forth beauty from a flute.
--Taken from Planet of Twilight
Farsight/Vision/Sense/Precognition
Farsight, Vision, and Sense are Force powers that allow the user to peer into the future, gain clairvoyant information, detect life, and perceive all surroundings, among other uses.
Sidious is aware of the beginning of the Yinchorri attack.
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He senses the death of a Jedi Council member.
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Sidious sees Yoda and Anakin in battle at different locations across the galaxy.
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The Emperor senses that Vader is still alive.
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He senses indecision in Luke.
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Palpatine foresees his meeting with Luke on Byss.
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The Emperor sees Luke's treachery against his efforts.
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He senses Luke's presence in his cloning laboratory.
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Sidious recalls that the dark side had informed his invulnerability as a child, and he distilled that assurance during his training.
Sidious took a moment to respond. It was odd to think now that he had once known fear. Though never incapacitating fear, and never for very long. But as a child, he’d experienced fear as a conditioned response to threat. Despite a reassuring voice inside him that had promised no harm could come, there had been, for a time, a chance that something terrible could happen. More than once his father’s raised hand had made him cringe. Eventually, he had understood that he had conjured that voice; that he hadn’t been fooling himself by exercising some infantile belief in invulnerability. And he understood now that it had been the dark side telling him that no harm could come to him, precisely because he was invulnerable. Since the start of his training, the voice had quieted by becoming internalized. Teem’s belief that he had power over him might long ago have moved him to pity instead of stirring anger and loathing. Raw emotion was a consequence of leading a double life. While he relished his secret identity, he wanted at the same time for it to be known that he was a being who could not be trifled with; that he wielded ultimate authority; that merely to gaze on him was tantamount to glimpsing the dark matter that bound and drove the galaxy...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine foresees that Plagueis would arrive at an event on Chandrila and divulges that he has frequent premonitions.
The planet Chandrila sponsored a monthlong retreat for members of the Legislative Youth Program. Once a year young beings from a host of worlds arrived to participate in mock Senate trials in and around Hanna City and to tour Chandrila’s vast agricultural projects, wilderness areas, coral reefs, and garden parks. It was in Gladean Park—a game reserve outside coastal Hanna—that Plagueis paid young Palpatine an unannounced visit. But it was Plagueis who was surprised.
“I knew you would come, Magister,” Palpatine said when Plagueis and 11-4D turned up at one of the game reserve’s viewing blinds.
“How did you know?”
“I knew, that’s all.”
“And just how often are your premonitions correct?”
“Almost always.”
“Curious,” 11-4D remarked while Palpatine was hurrying away to excuse himself from the company of two friends.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine senses Plagueis' powers.
Palpatine’s lip curled in anger and menace. “Is this the wisdom you offer—the tenets of some arcane cult?”
“The test of its value is whether you can live by it, Palpatine.”
“If I had wanted that I would have forced my parents years ago to surrender me to the Jedi Order instead of transferring me from school to private school.”
Plagueis planted his hands on his hips and laughed without mirth. “And of what possible use do you think a person of your nature would be to the Jedi Order? You’re heartless, ambitious, arrogant, insidious, and without shame or empathy. More, you’re a murderer.” He held Palpatine’s hooded gaze and watched the youth’s hands clench in fists of rage. “Careful, boy,” he said after a moment. “You are not the only being in this plush stateroom with the power to kill.”
Palpatine’s eyes opened wide and he took a step back. “I can sense it...”
Plagueis grew deliberately haughty. “What you sense is a fraction of what I can bring to bear.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He sees through the eyes of a beast while hunting.
Blended into the herd, the animal Sidious had fixed his sight on would have been indistinguishable to normal beings. But Sidious had the animal in his mind and was now looking through its eyes, one with it.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He perceives beings around him as blurs of energy.
Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine feels the presence of a Nightsister, is guided toward her location, and senses dark energies emanating from her.
Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
As his power grows, Palpatine more frequently sees beings through his Force perception and detects details he was oblivious to before.
The hood of his stylish robe raised against a chill wind, Palpatine hurried through the streets of Theed. The sudden turn in the weather abetted his desire to avoid making eye contact with strangers or, worse, encountering anyone he knew. As he grew stronger in the dark side, the profane world became a stranger and stranger place, swept by currents he’d had no previous awareness of and populated by vaguely outlined life-forms he saw as magnitudes of the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
While talking with Plagueis, Dooku, and Sifo-Dyas, Palpatine senses that an onlooker is closely watching him.
Palpatine sensed scrutiny from someone outside the circle the ten of them had formed. Just short of the Senate Building's Great Door, Pax Teem had stopped and was gazing at Palpatine, his eyestalks extended. And Palpatine could hardly blame him, since even he had been caught off guard by Plagueis's eagerness to acknowledge him in public.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
His attention is drawn to an upper window where Sun Guards enter the building.
No sooner did the holoimage dissolve than two of the security men began to advance on him. Sidious readied himself for action. A Force blow to send them reeling back toward the holoprojector, then a leap, arms extended, hands curled into claws, one for each windpipe, which he would tear from their throats—
The Force intruded, drawing his attention to the windows in the upper walls.
At once, the sound of repeating blasters and pained cries echoed from adjacent rooms; then a nerve-jangling shattering of glass as Sun Guards crashed through the high windows and began to rappel to the filthy floor, firing as they slid down on their microfilament lines, catching the Santhe men and the Rodian with so many bolts that their bodies were left quartered by the volleys.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine senses Sate Pestage outside his door and feels the dark side being unleashed at an attack on Hego Damask.
He was standing in the center of the room when he sensed someone in the corridor outside. Fists pummeled the door; then it slid to one side and Sate Pestage burst into the room. Seeing Palpatine, he came to a sudden stop, and the panicked look he wore on entering transformed to one of visible relief.
“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he nearly screamed, running a hand over his forehead.
Palpatine regarded him quizzically. “I was occupied. What has happened?”
Pestage sank into a chair and looked up at him. “Are you sure you want to know?” He paused, then said, “In the interest of separating what I do from what you do—”
Palpatine’s eyes blazed. “Stop wasting my time and come to the point.”
Pestage gritted his teeth. “The Maladian commander I did business with during the Kim affair.”
“What of him?”
“He contacted me—two, maybe three hours ago. He said that he felt humiliated because of the manner in which the Kim contract had been implemented, and wanted to make it up to me. He said he’d just received word that a Maladian faction had accepted a contract to carry out a major hit on Coruscant, involving someone closely affiliated with Damask Holdings.” Pestage kept his eyes on Palpatine. “I feared it might be you.”
Palpatine swung back to the window to think. Had the Santhe guards planned to turn him over to the Maladians following the holocommunication with Pax Teem?
He turned to Pestage. “Who took out the contract?
“Members of the Gran Protectorate.”
“It fits,” Palpatine said, more to himself.
“What fits?”
“Where are these Gran now?”
“As soon as I heard from the Maladian, I asked Kinman to keep an eye on them. They’re holed up in the Malastare ambassador’s residence.”
Palpatine blinked. “Here? On Coruscant?”
“Of course, here.”
“It’s not possible that they’re offworld?”
“No, they’re downside.”
Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.
“Palpatine!” Pestage said from behind him.
“Hego Damask,” Palpatine said, without turning around.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
While traveling to Aborah, Sidious has a vision of Aborah and perceives it inordinately saturated in the dark side.
A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He senses lifeforms which are used in Plagueis' experiments in locked cells.
Sidious was still trying to make sense of the droid’s statements when they entered a long corridor lined with windowless cells. Through the Force he could sense life-forms behind each locked door.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He knows that Maul is still upset about a snake bite.
"I know you're still upset about the snake that bit you," Sidious said, continuing around the watery orb until he had a clear view of Maul. "I know everything about you, Maul. Everything."
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious is aware of a drawing made on the wall of Maul's room.
Maul's steps did not falter as he continued following the droid, but his mind was suddenly racing. He wondered what consequences he might suffer because of the drawing. He said, "Did Master Sidious see the drawing?"
"I don't know. I erased it right after you fell asleep."
"Then how would he even know about the drawing...unless you told him?"
"I didn't have to tell him," TD-D9 said. "You should know by now, child...Sidious knows everything."
--Taken from The Wrath of Darth Maul
Sidious sees Plagueis' form in the Force.
Just arrived on the Hunters’ Moon, Sidious studied Plagueis as the Sith Lord and his droid, 11-4D, viewed a holorecording of a black-robed Zabrak assassin making short work of combat automata in his home on Coruscant, some hovering, some advancing on two legs, others on treads, and all firing blasters.
Twenty years had added a slight stoop to the Muun’s posture and veins that stood out under his thinning white skin. He wore a dark green utility suit that hugged his delicate frame, a green cloak that fell from his bony shoulders to the fort’s stone floor, and a headpiece that hewed to his large cranium. A triangular breath mask covered his ruined, prognathus lower jaw, his mouth, part of his long neck, and what remained of the craggy nose he’d had before the surprise attack in the Fobosi. A device of his own invention, the alloy mask featured two vertical slits and a pair of thin, stiff conduits that linked it to a transpirator affixed to his upper chest, beneath an armored torso harness. He had learned to ingest and imbibe through feeding tubes, and through his nose.
Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He senses the position and flight path of the Scimitar even after the cloaking devices render it invisible.
Maul bowed his head and hurried up the rear boarding ramp into the cockpit module. Sidious lingered to watch the ship rise and edge out of the hangar, becoming invisible as it flew over The Works. Through the dark side, he continued to track the Scimitar as it angled north toward the Jedi Temple rather than south, and away from the Senate District.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious is capable of interpreting the currents of the Force to ascertain information and does so to learn that Nute Gunray had lied.
Sidious stood motionless and silent on the transmission grid, his fingers steepled, his mind meditating on the eddies and currents of the Force. Those of lesser sensitivity were oblivious to it, but to him it was like an omnipresent mist, invisible but nonetheless tangible, that swirled and drifted constantly about him. No words, no descriptions could begin to convey what it was like; the only way to understand it was to experience it. He had learned over long years of study and meditation how to interpret each and every vagary of its restless flow, no matter how slight. Even without that ability, however, he would have known that Nute Gunray was lying about Hath Monchar's whereabouts.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
He senses a communication sent to him before it arrives and ascertains that Maul is telling the truth.
Darth Sidious could feel a slight disturbance in the Force before his scrambled comlink chimed, and knew by this that his apprentice was about to contact him. He stepped to the holoprojector and activated the grid. Privacy failsafes glowed green before he spoke.
"My apprentice. Your mission is complete." It was a statement, not a question. Sidious knew Darth Maul would not call to report failure, and there were no untoward signs in the energies that surrounded his image.
"Yes, my master. The Jedi Padawan died in combat. She fought well, for a neophyte. An explosion generated from our battle destroyed Lorn Pavan and his droid." Darth Sidious nodded. He could feel the truth of the statement even at
He stretches out with the Force and is guided by the dark side to act on his opportunity to kill Plagueis.
A few meters distant, Sidious came to a halt, gazing at Plagueis for a long moment, as though making up his mind about something. Then, blowing out his breath, he set his own glass down and reached for the cloak he had draped over a chair. Swirling it around himself, he started for the door, only to stop shortly before he reached it. Turning and stretching out with the Force, he glanced around the room, as one might to fix a memory in the mind. Briefly his gaze fell on the droid, its glowing photoreceptors whirring to regard him in evident curiosity.
A look of sinister purpose contorted Sidious’s face.
Again, his eyes darted around the room, and the dark side whispered:
Your election assured, the Sun Guards absent, Plagueis unsuspecting and asleep...
And he moved in a blur.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious views Plaguies through the Force and notices his gathering midi-chlorians.
Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. "Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels a disturbance in the Force and then stretches his perception to view distant stars.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious peers into the past to uncover information about Darth Plagueis and Tenebrous.
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?
He raised his gaze to the ecliptic. The answers were out there, coded in light, speeding through space and time. Liquid fire coursing through him, visions of past and future riffling through his mind, he opened himself to the reconfigured galaxy, as if in an effort to peel away the decades...
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He feels a sense of loss upon Maul's defeat.
Sidious moved back into the room to take a closer look at Plagueis. Then, after a long moment, he returned to the window and pulled the drapes aside.
His spirit soared, but briefly.
Something was shading his sense of triumph: a vague awareness of a power greater than himself. Was it Plagueis reaching out from the far side of death to vex him? Or was the feeling a mere consequence of apotheosis?
Outside, the summits of the tallest buildings were gilded by the first rays of daylight.
With the Battle of Naboo concluded—lost, in his estimation—Palpatine had no time to bask in adulation or celebrate his win. His first order of business, indeed his first official duty, was to travel to his homeworld to congratulate Queen Amidala and her new allies, the Gungans, on their surprise victory.
It wasn’t until he arrived in Theed and learned of Darth Maul’s defeat at the hands of the Jedi in a power-generator station that he understood in part the reason for the sense of loss and profound solitude he had experienced following the murder of Plagueis.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious foresees every maneuver Maul and Savage make prior to its use.
But strong as he had become, Maul found himself in awe of Sidious. The Sith Lord was astonishingly fast and efficient, and the Force flowed through him effortlessly. His sabers stabbed and slashed through the smallest hole in an opponent’s guard, his movements never carried him a millimeter out of position, and he could sense every attack Maul and Savage made before it developed.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Conspiracy
Sidious notes a detail in a conversation with Darth Tyranus without being told.
Even via hologram, the flickering figure of Darth Sidious, hideous in blue and shadows, seemed to strip his false youth away, leaving his bones brittle, his joints worn thin and knotted with tension. "These are the envoys from Troxar," his Master said. How could he know? Dooku didn't ask. Darth Sidious knew. He always knew.
--Taken from Yoda: Dark Rendezvous
Palpatine can detect currents in events and determine possibilities from them.
Once again, Darth Sidious had divined the actions they would take well in advance of their own deciding. The talent had less to do with being able to peer into the future, than with having access to streams of possibilities. Sidious wasn't unerring. He could be surprised or taken off his guard—as at Geonosis, as in the case of Gunray's mechno-chair—but not for long. His mastery of the dark side of the Force endowed him with the power to decipher the currents that comprised the future, and to comprehend that while those currents were manifold, they were not boundless. Such mastery was one of the skills that distinguished Sidious from Yoda, who believed the future was so much in motion it could not be read with any clarity—especially during times when the dark side was on the ascendant. But how could Yoda be expected to see the whole picture with one eye closed? Deliberately closed.
--Taken from Labyrinth of Evil
Sidious can perceive events wherever darkness exists and feels Anakin's turmoil and the approach of Mace Windu, Kit Fisto, Saesee Tiin, and Agen Kolar.
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. In the night, the shadow felt the boy's anguish, and it was good. The shadow felt the grim determination of four Jedi Masters approaching by air. This, too, was good.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Sidious searches the Force for the name to christen Anakin with and confers on him the name Vader.
Sidious raised the hood of his robe and draped it to shadow the ruin of his face.
"Kneel before me, Anakin Skywalker."
Anakin dropped to one knee. He lowered his head.
"It is your will to join your destiny forever with the Order of the Sith Lords?"
There was no hesitation. "Yes."
Darth Sidious laid a pale hand on Anakin's brow. "Then it is done. You are now one with the Order of the Dark Lords of the Sith. From this day forward, the truth of you, my apprentice, now and forevermore, will be Darth..."
A pause; a questioning in the Force—
An answer, dark as the gap between galaxies—
He heard Sidious say it: his new name.
Vader.
A pair of syllables that meant him. Vader, he said to himself. Vader.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He feels a disturbance in the Force signaling a threat approaching Vader.
A silvery flash outside caught Darth Vader's eye, as though an elegantly curved mirror swung through the smoke and cinders, picking up the shine of white-hot lava. From one knee, he could look right through the holoscan of his Master while he continued his report. He was no longer afraid; he was too busy pretending to be respectful.
"The Separatist leadership is no more, my Master."
"It is finished, then." The image offered a translucent mockery of a smile. "You have restored peace and justice to the galaxy, Lord Vader."
"That is my sole ambition, Master."
The image tilted its head, its smile twisting without transition to a scowl. "Lord Vader—I sense a disturbance in the Force. You may be in danger."
He glanced at the mirror flash outside; he knew that ship. In danger of being kissed to death, perhaps...
"How should I be in danger, Master?"
"I cannot say. But the danger is real; be mindful."
Be mindful, be mindful, he thought with a mental sneer. Is that the best you can do? I could get that much from Obi-Wan... "I will, my Master. Thank you." The image faded. He got to his feet, and now the sneer was on his lips and in his eyes. "You're the one who should be mindful, my 'Master.' I am a disturbance in the Force."
Outside, the sleek skiff settled to the deck. He spent a moment reassembling his Anakin Skywalker face: he let Anakin Skywalker's love flow through him, let Anakin Skywalker's glad smile come to his lips, let Anakin Skywalker's youthful energy bring a joyous bounce to his step as he trotted to the entrance over the mess of corpses and severed body parts. He'd meet her outside, and he'd keep her outside. He had a feeling she wouldn't approve of the way he had...redecorated...the control center. And after all, he thought with a mental shrug, there's no arguing taste...
The holding office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic comprised the nether vertex of the Senate Arena; it was little more than a circular preparations area, a green room, where guests of the Chancellor might be entertained before entering the Senate Podium—the circular pod on its immense hydraulic pillar, which contained controls that coordinated the movement of floating Senate delegation pods—and rising into the focal point of the chamber above. Above that podium, the vast holopresence of a kneeling Sith bowed before a shadow that stood below. Guards in scarlet flanked the shadow; a Chagrian toady cringed nearby.
"But the danger is real; be mindful."
"I will, my Master. Thank you."
The holopresence faded, and where its huge translucency had knelt was now revealed another presence, a physical presence, tiny and aged, clad in robes and leaning on a twist of wood. But his physical presence was an illusion; the truth of him could be seen only in the Force. In the Force, he was a fountain of light. "Pity your new disciple I do; so lately an apprentice, so soon without a Master."
"Why, Master Yoda, what a delightful surprise! Welcome!" The voice of the shadow hummed with anticipation. "Let me be the first to wish you Happy Empire Day!"
"Find it happy, you will not. Nor will the murderer you call Vader."
"Ah." The shadow stepped closer to the light. "So that is the threat I felt. Who is it, if I may ask? Who have you sent to kill him?"
"Enough it is that you know your own destroyer."
"Oh, pish, Master Yoda. It wouldn't be Kenobi, would it? Please say it's Kenobi—Lord Vader gets such a thrill from killing people who care for him..."
Behind the shadow, some meters away, Mas Amedda—the Chagrian toady who was Speaker of the Galactic Senate—heard a whisper in Palpatine's voice. Flee.
He did.
Neither light nor shadow gave his exit a glance.
"So easily slain, Obi-Wan is not."
"Neither are you, apparently; but that is about to change." The shadow took another step, and another.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
He senses Yoda's weakening under barrages of Lightning.
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
Sidious is warned through the Force of Vader's fatal situation on Mustafar.
Clone troops were already swarming into it. "It was Yoda," he said as he swung out of the pod. "Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building." He didn't have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger. Mortal danger.
--Taken from Revenge of the Sith
Emperor Palpatine senses that Mas Amedda is sending a message to him.
Alert to a mild disturbance in the Force, he swung toward the throne room holoprojector a moment before a half-life-size image of Mas Amedda resolved from thin air.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Sidious senses Vader's progression in his training.
Sidious was pleased. Vader had done well. He had sensed the change in him, even in the brief conversation they had had following the events on Kashyyyk. Now that Vader had begun to tap deeply into the power of the dark side, his true apprenticeship could begin.
--Taken from Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader
Presumably through the Force, Palpatine is aware of the existence of Maw Installation, despite Grand Moff Tarkin's intentions of withholding information of its existence.
The Tarkin Doctrine offered two important elements. The first was a cogent and important plan for the Empire's future: "Rule through the fear of force, rather than through force itself." The second was to establish an invulnerable and powerful superweapon, part dramatic symbol, part real threat. Tarkin himself was developing plans for the weapon and he had established a hidden think tank of designers and scientists in a black-hole cluster known as the Maw. The Grand Moff didn't think the Emperor yet knew of his secrets, and intended to present the plans for any weapons developed himself, taking all the credit. Palpatine did know though, as he knew of Tarkin's ambitions.
--Taken from The Essential Guide to Characters
Palpatine uses the Force to glean information on disloyal subordinates' plans against him.
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.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
He senses Commander Grev T'Ran's mouth flinch at the nearly unnoticeable beginning of a smile.
"The Death Star has been destroyed," he informed them, carefully noting their reactions.
Captain Thrawn betrayed no emotion. Complete control, the Emperor thought with approval. This one will go far. Crix Madine, leader of the elite Storm Commandos, frowned, conflicted emotions swirling deep beneath his surface. The fool thought he could hide his doubts from the Emperor. This foolishness would prove useful, thus the Emperor allowed it. For now.
Commander Grev T'Ran looked somber at the news. But before the expression dropped across his face, the Emperor had sensed something else. The beginnings of a smile. Such a small thing—a tensed muscle, a nearly imperceptible flinch—but it was enough. The Emperor had had his suspicions about T'Ran. Now they were confirmed.
He raised a finger, catching the attention of the Royal Guard. Then nodded. T'Ran's face paled as one of the guards peeled away from the line. His crimson robes swept the floor as he padded silently toward the traitor. The other officers looked away, their faces grim.
"Noooo!" T'Ran drew his blaster. "You can't—"
The guard's force pike jabbed into T'Ran's neck, silencing him forever. His body shuddered once, then dropped to the ground. The silent red figure waited on the Emperor's command, but the Emperor shook his head. They could take out the garbage later. For now, let the traitor stay where he was. It would serve as a helpful reminder.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
Palpatine senses the pilot who destroyed the Death Star at the heart of a gathering darkness and is assured that he will find the pilot.
The officers filed out, followed by the Red Guard, leaving the Emperor alone with his thoughts. Things were proceeding as they should, he realized now. As they must.
He would never doubt the power of the dark side of the Force to show him the way forward. The destruction of the Death Star was surely necessary, as it would guide him to this new path. Darkness was gathering, and the Emperor sensed that this pilot was at the heart of it. The dark side of the Force had brought him to light. The Emperor had only to find him—and the Emperor would find him. He knew that with an iron certainty. The pilot would be found. An ordered galaxy would follow. It was his destiny.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
The Emperor senses how powerful Luke could become, the threat that Luke could pose to the Empire, and that Vader would fail to compel Luke toward the dark side.
But then the Emperor sensed a new current in the ever-flowing energy of the Force. It began as a subtle, barely perceptible power surge, but in a frighteningly short time grew into the bright light that he came to know as Luke Skywalker. Lord Vader had sensed it too, but he lacked the vision that the Emperor possessed. As soon as this new power became known to him, the Emperor began plotting to corrupt it.
He worked his scheme with the guile and cunning that were his trademarks. The Emperor's plans may have reached further back in time than anyone could possibly imagine, for his ability to foresee the future was astounding. Perhaps the Emperor did not destroy Obi-Wan Kenobi with the rest of the Jedi because he foresaw the old man taking young Luke under his wing some day in the distant future. Obi-Wan had failed once, and had created Vader, the Emperor's greatest servant. Perhaps the Emperor expected him to fail again, giving the Emperor an even more powerful tool.
Perhaps he also foresaw the boy's part in the destruction of the first Death Star. Perhaps he knew that if Luke succeeded, his overconfidence in his newfound powers would cause him to make a mistake, to attempt to turn his father, to dare to beard the Emperor in his own den. The Emperor was fully capable of sacrificing the Death Star if it would gain him the last Jedi.
This is all merely speculation, for no one, not even Vader, ever really knew what was going on in the black recesses of the Emperor's mind. It is clear, however, that the Emperor was not surprised that Lord Vader failed to turn his son to the Dark Side—he had, in fact, counted upon it.
--Taken from Galaxy Guide 5: Return of the Jedi
When the hologram of the Galactic Emperor finally spoke, it did so with a voice even deeper than Vader's. The Emperor's presence was awesome enough, but the sound of his voice sent a thrill of terror coursing through Vader's powerful frame. "You may rise, my servant," the Emperor commanded.
Immediately Vader straightened up. But he did not dare gaze into his master's face, and instead cast his eyes down at his own black boots.
"What is thy bidding, my master?" Vader asked with all the solemnity of a priest attending his god.
"There is a grave disturbance in the Force," the Emperor said.
"I have felt it," the Dark Lord replied solemnly.
The Emperor emphasized the danger as he continued. "Our situation is most precarious. We have a new enemy who could bring about our destruction."
"Our destruction? Who?"
"The son of Skywalker. You must destroy him, or he will be our undoing."
Skywalker!
The thought was impossible. How could the Emperor be concerned with this insignificant youth?
"He's not a Jedi," Vader reasoned. "He's just a boy. Obi-Wan could not have taught him so much that—"
The Emperor broke in. "The Force is strong in him," he insisted. "He must be destroyed."
The Dark Lord reflected a moment. Perhaps there was another way to deal with the boy, a way that might benefit the Imperial cause. "If he could be turned, he would be a powerful ally," Vader suggested.
Silently the Emperor considered the possibility.
After a moment, he spoke again. "Yes...yes," he said thoughtfully. "He would be a great asset. Can it be done?"
For the first time in their meeting, Vader lifted his head to face his master directly. "He will join us," he answered firmly, "or die, my master."
With that, the encounter had come to an end. Vader kneeled before the Galactic Emperor, who passed his hand over his obedient servant. In the next moment, the holographic image had completely disappeared, leaving Darth Vader alone to formulate what would be, perhaps, his most subtle plan of attack.
--Taken from The Empire Strikes Back
Still, when Luke, if only momentarily, gave in to rage at the Emperor and swung his lightsaber blade down to finish the old man, he found Vader’s blade already blocking his. Luke relented and tried to avoid any further surrender to the Dark Side, but Palpatine knew the Skywalker anger too well. He had foreseen just how powerful Luke could be if he turned to the way of destruction. More powerful than Vader.
--Taken from Dark Empire Sourcebook
Palpatine knows his subordinates decisions before they do.
Palpatine is a master of manipulation and has no qualms about using crime lords, Grand Moffs, or other powerful figures as pawns in his game. Strangely, it always seems that he knows how all of his pieces will move several turns before they do.
--Taken from the Shadows of the Empire Sourcebook
The Emperor discerns information surrounding Xizor's attack.
"One wonders how that hotheaded young man managed to get into a protected corridor," the Emperor said. But there was no wonder in the Emperor's voice, none at all. Vader's face froze. He knew. It was not possible, for the guard who had admitted the would-be assassin into the corridor was no longer among the living, and none but that single man had known who ordered him to allow the young man access—but somehow, the Emperor knew. The Emperor's mastery of the dark side was great indeed.
--Taken from Shadows of the Empire
Sidious is made aware through the Force of the Rebel infiltration of Endor and knew that Luke would come to Vader willingly.
Lord Vader stepped out of the elevator and stood at the entrance to the throne room. The light-cables hummed either side of the shaft, casing an eerie glow on the royal guards who waited there. He matched resolutely down the walkway, up the stairs, and paused subserviently behind the throne. He kneeled, motionless.
Almost immediately, he heard the Emperor’s voice. “Rise. Rise and speak, my friend.”
Vader rose, as the throne swiveled around, and the Emperor faced him. They made eye contact from light-years and a soul’s breath away. Across that abyss, Vader responded. “My master, a small Rebel force has penetrated the shield and landed on Endor.”
“Yes, I know.” There was no hint of surprise in his tone; rather, fulfillment.
Vader noted this, then went on. “My son is with them.”
The Emperor’s brow furrowed less than a millimeter. His voice remained cool, unruffled, slightly curious. “Are you sure?”
“I felt him, my master.” It was almost a taunt. He knew the Emperor was frightened of young Skywalker, afraid of his power. Only together could Vader and the Emperor hope to pull the Jedi Knight over to the dark side. He said it again, emphasizing his own singularity. “I felt him.”
“Strange, that I have not,” the Emperor murmured, his eyes becoming slits. They both knew the Force wasn’t all-powerful—and no one was infallible with its use. It had everything to do with awareness, with vision. Certainly, Vader and his son were more closely linked than was the Emperor with young Skywalker—but, in addition, the Emperor was now aware of a cross-current he hadn’t read before, a buckle in the Force he couldn’t quite understand. “I wonder if your feelings on this matter are clear, Lord Vader.”
“They are clear, my master.” He knew his son’s presence, it galled him and fueled him and lured him and howled in a voice of its own.
“Then you must go to the Sanctuary Moon and wait for him,” Emperor Palpatine said simply. As long as things were clear, things were clear.
“He will come to me?” Vader asked skeptically. This was not what he felt. He felt drawn.
“Of his own free will,” the Emperor assured him. It must be of his own free will, else all was lost. A spirit could not be coerced into corruption, it had to be seduced. It had to participate actively. It had to crave. Luke Skywalker knew these things, and still he circled the black fire, like a cat. Destinies could never be read with absolute certainty—but Skywalker would come. That much was clear. “I have foreseen it. His compassion for you will be his undoing.” Compassion had always been the weak belly of the Jedi, and forever would be. It was the ultimate vulnerability. The Emperor had none. “The boy will come to you, and you will then bring him before me.”
“Vader bowed low. “As you wish.” With casual malice, the Emperor dismissed the Dark Lord. With grim anticipation, Vader strode out of the throne room, to board the shuttle for Endor.
--Taken from Return of the Jedi
The Emperor foresees that Luke will attempt to redeem Vader.
Young Luke had tasted the power of the Dark Side through his anger and his fear. Doubt clouded his mind, and he was unsure he could survive another confrontation with his father. Yet he was also sure that there was still good in his father; he was willing to risk everything to attempt to bring it out. The Emperor counted upon this, as he thought, "mistaken" belief to draw the boy into his trap. Once Luke was in his power, the Emperor would destroy Luke's friends and loved ones. Then he would force him to kill his father. Luke would be his, and the last hope would fade from the galaxy.
--Taken from Galaxy Guide 5: Return of the Jedi
Sight/Listening
Force Sight and Listening are powers through which a Jedi can augment the acuteness of their physical senses.
Palpatine seems to block out sounds around him and increase his hearing to catch a faint echo of news told to Vidar Kim.
Pax Teem was about to speak when a Gran messenger intruded on the privacy canopy.
“Senator Kim, we are in receipt of an urgent communiqué from Naboo.”
While Kim was excusing himself, Palpatine dropped into the Force. Conversation at the table grew faint, and the physical forms of Pax Teem and the others became indistinct—more like blurs of lambent energy. He kept himself still as a disturbing echo reached him. By the time an ashen Kim was returning to the table, Palpatine was already out of his seat and hurrying to meet him.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
Kim stared at him as if from another world. “They’re dead. Everyone. My wife, my sons...”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine enhances his hearing to listen to senators who had fallen asleep and hear the conversation between Kinman Doriana and Sate Pestage.
The crepuscular chill of the Senate Rotunda had a way of lulling many to sleep. Sharpening his senses, Palpatine could hear the gentle snoring of human and nonhuman Senators seated in hover platforms adjacent to his station; more clearly, Sate Pestage and Kinman Doriana, opposite himon the platform's circular seat, gossiping maliciously.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He appears to augment his eyesight to peer at Padme and Ian Lago.
Palpatine smiled tightly.
“What brings you to the docks, Senator?” Jobal asked.
“More than coincidence, m’lady. In fact, a matter of utmost urgency that involves your daughter, Padmé.”
“She’s here,” Ruwee said.
Palpatine looked at him. “On Coruscant?”
“Here, at Tannik.” He pointed to a nearby dock, where an energetic dark-haired girl was directing an antigrav pallet of foodstuffs into the bay of a waiting freighter. Catching sight of her father, Padmé waved.
“Who is the young man with her?” Palpatine asked.
“Ian Lago,” Jobal said.
Palpatine sharpened his vision. “The son of King Veruna’s counselor?”
Jobal nodded. “He’s become a bit lovesick.”
“And Padmé with him?”
“We hope not,” Ruwee said. “Ian’s a nice boy, but... Well, let’s just say that Kun Lago would not be happy to learn that his son has been fraternizing with the enemy, so to speak.”
Realizing that young Ian was eyeing him with sudden interest, Palpatine returned the look for a moment, then said, “This brings me directly to the point of my visit. As you’re no doubt aware, our King has instructed me to support the Trade Federation on the issue of taxation of the free-trade zones.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious appears to heighten his vision to examine the corpse of Plagueis.
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.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
The Emperor clarifies his sight with his rage.
The Emperor closed his eyes and let the rage consume him. An energy bolt of anger crackled across his body, turning his blood black with venom. A red mist clouded the darkness behind his lids. The fog of hate would have shrouded the vision of a lesser man. But when the Emperor opened his eyes, the blood-tinged world was sharper than ever.
Clarity. Understanding. Power.
--Taken from Rebel Force: Target
Force Concealment
Force Concealment is a power that masks Force sensitivity or alignment in the Force and hides a Force sensitive's presence or existence.
Because of his skill in Force Concealment, Palpatine is able to stand in the Council Chamber of the Jedi Temple itself without suspicion of his Force sensitivity.
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Before receiving any training in the Force, Palpatine is able to shield his thoughts and Force sensitivity from Plagueis' attempts to probe him and only lowers his mental shields after committing murder, after which Plagueis intends to teach him to rebuild his shields.
They got up from the bench and began to amble back toward the university complex. Plagueis submerged himself deeply in the Force to study Palpatine, but he was unable to glean very much. Humans were difficult to read in the easiest of cases, and Palpatine’s mind was awash in conflict. So much going on in that small brain, Plagueis told himself. So much emotional current and self-interest. So unlike the predictable, focused intellects of the Outer Rim sentients, especially the hive-minded among them.
Palpatine’s expression softened. “For a time I thought about adopting the name of our distaff line. I haven’t rejected the dynasty I was born into. I’ve rejected the name I was given. But not for the grandiose reasons some think. Just the opposite, actually. I’m certain that you, of all beings, understand as much.”
There it was again, Plagueis thought: the deceptive cadence; the use of flattery, charm, and self-effacement as if rapier feints in a duel. The need to be seen as guileless, unassuming, empathetic. A youth with no desire to enter politics, and yet born for it.
Tenebrous had told him from the start that the Republic, with help from the Sith, would continue to descend into corruption and disorder, and that a time would come when it would have to rely on the strengths of an enlightened leader, capable of saving the lesser masses from being ruled by their unruly passions, jealousies, and desires. In the face of a common enemy, real or manufactured, they would set aside all their differences and embrace the leadership of anyone who promised a brighter future. Could this Palpatine, with Plagueis’s help, be the one to bring about such a transformation?
Again he tried to see deeper into Palpatine, but without success. The psychic walls the youth had raised were impenetrable, which made the young human something rare indeed. Had Palpatine somehow learned to corral the Force within himself, as Plagueis had concealed his own powers as a youth?
“Of course I understand,” he said finally.
“But...when you were young, did you question your motivations, especially when they ran counter to everyone else’s?”
Plagueis held his challenging gaze. “I never asked why this or why that, what if this or what if that. I simply responded to my own determination.”
Palpatine sat back in the speeder seat as if a great weight had been lifted from him.
“Some of us are required to do what others cannot,” Plagueis added in a conspiratorial way.
Without a word, Palpatine nodded.
Plagueis had no need to delve any further into whatever traumas had given rise to Palpatine’s cunning, secretive nature. He simply needed to know: Does this young human have the Force?
“We’ll have to keep this meeting brief,” Plagueis told Palpatine while they were following an elevated pathway that connected the viewing blind to one of the park’s rustic lodges. “Your father may have dispatched surveillance personnel.”
Palpatine ridiculed the idea. “He is monitoring my offworld communiqués—that’s why you haven’t heard from me—but even he knows better than to have me watched.”
“You underestimate him, Palpatine,” Plagueis said, stopping in the middle of the pathway. “I spoke with him at Convergence.”
Palpatine’s mouth fell open. “The lake house? When? How—”
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?
Palpatine’s expression darkened. “You know nothing of my true nature.” He paced away from Plagueis, then stopped and turned to him. “You never asked about the killings.”
“I’ve never been one for grim details,” Plagueis said. “But if you need to unburden yourself, do so.”
Palpatine raised his clawed hands. “I executed them with these! And with the power of my mind. I became a storm, Magister—a weapon strong enough to warp bulkheads and hurl bodies across cabinspaces. I was death itself!”
Plagueis sat tall in the chair, in genuine astonishment.
He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.
Oh, what a cautious taming he would require! Plagueis thought. But what an ally he might make. What an ally!
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine masks his presence in the Force from Nightsister Kycina and then lowers his concealment, allowing her to sense him.
Some combination of the strictures—or perhaps recognition on Plagueis’s part for his apprentice’s unabated craving to visit Sith worlds—had landed Palpatine on scenic Dathomir. Sparsely populated and largely unexplored, Dathomir wasn’t Korriban or Ziost, but it was powerful in the Force, in part because of its fecundity, but mainly due to the presence of groups of female adepts who practiced dark side magicks.
He was meandering without clear purpose through one of Blue Desert City’s dustier quarters, far from the city center, when became aware of a faint pulse of Force energy, the origin of which was indistinct but close at hand.
Calling more deeply on the Force, he allowed himself to be drawn toward the mysterious source, as if he were a starship surrendering to the embrace of a tractor beam. A tortuous series of turns delivered him into a market area brimming with knockoff goods, ersatz jewelry, and bits and pieces of junk that had found its way to Dathomir from who knew where, and ultimately to a small square amid the hustle and bustle, on one corner of which stood a human female, whose symmetrically blemished face was the color of burnished durasteel, and whose flamboyant clothing identified her as a visitor to the city, likely from some remote village on the planet’s far side. The hood of her crimson robe was raised, and from one shoulder hung a soft bag the size of a small suitcase.
Palpatine moved to the square’s diagonal corner to observe her. She was eyeing individuals in the passing crowd, not as if searching for someone in particular, but with a gaze more in keeping with target acquisition. She didn’t strike Palpatine as a thief or pickpocket, though she did exude a dark energy informed by equal measures of urgency and deceit. Abruptly he made himself discernible in the Force, and immediately she turned her head in his direction and began to hurry across the square in his direction.
“Good sir,” she said in Basic as she drew near.
Feigning interest in the cheap wares of an itinerant trader, he pretended to be taken by surprise when she approached him from his blind side.
“Are you addressing me?” he asked, turning to her.
“I am, sir, if you’ve a moment to indulge a being in need.”
Her oblique eyes were rimmed by dark blemishes that matched the tint of her thick lips; poking from the wide sleeves of her robe, the tapered fingers of her hands bore long, talon-like nails.
Palpatine pretended impatience. “Why single me out, among this crowd of more richly attired beings?”
“Because you’ve the look and bearing of a man of intelligence and influence.” She gestured broadly. “The rest are rabble, despite their fine cloaks and headwear.”
He made a decorous show of suppressing a yawn. “Save your adulation for the rubes, woman. But since you’ve correctly identified me as better than the rest, you’re obviously aware that I’ve no time to waste on confidence games or tricks. So if its mere credits you’re after, I suggest you widen your search for someone more charitable.”
“I don’t ask for credits,” she said, studying him openly.
“What then? Come to the point.”
“It’s a gift I offer.”
Palpatine laughed without merriment. “What could you possibly have to offer someone like me?”
“Just this.” She opened the soft shoulder bag to reveal a humanoid infant of less than a standard year in age. The infant’s hairless head was stippled with an array of short but still pliant horns, and its entire body had been garishly and ceremonially tattooed in red and black pigments.
A male Zabrak, Palpatine told himself. But not of the Iridonian sort; rather, a Dathomirian. “How do you come by this newborn? Have you stolen him?”
“You misunderstand, good sir. My own child, this one is.”
Palpatine glowered. “You say that he is a gift, and yet you dissemble. Have you had dealings that have led you into such deep debt that you would part with your own flesh and blood? Or perhaps you’re addicted to spice or some other intoxicant?”
She stiffened. “Neither. I seek only to save his life.”
Palpatine’s expression changed. “Then speak honestly. You’re a long way from your coven, Nightsister. And a practitioner of magicks more than sufficient to keep your child from harm.”
Her eyes opened wide and bored into him, in search of explanation. “How—”
“Never mind how I know, Witch,” Palpatine said sharply. “The child, whether yours or not, is a Nightbrother, conceived for the purpose of serving the sisterhood as a warrior and slave.”
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Palpatine hides his Force powers from Ronhar Kim.
Orders to attend Vidar Kim's funeral had come from Naboo and from Plagueis, who said that he should us the opportunity to seek out Ronhar Kim and speak with him personally. Palpatine had yet to meet one-on-one with a Jedi, and a conversation with Ronhar would allow him to test his ability to conceal his true nature from another Force-user.
As wicked as Coruscant is, Plagueis had told him, the Force is strong there because of the presence of so many Jedi. If you are successful in hiding in plain sight, you will be able to conceal your nature from the most powerful among them. Take Ronhar into your confidence, and once you have, spend some of your time on Coruscant acquainting yourself with the spired headquarters of our enemy, and ask yourself: Is this not a fortress designed to hold the dark at bay?
Otherwise, Plagueis's silence on the matter of Kim's assassination had been deafening. On learning that King Tapalo had appointed Palpatine interim Senator, Plagueis had offered his congratulations, but nothing more. After months of not seeing him, Palpatine had hoped to find Plagueis waiting for him on Coruscant, but Hego Damask and the Muuns who made up Damask Holdings were conducting unspecified business on distant Serenno.
The funeral service was held at Naboo's embassy, which was located below and to the west of the Monument Plaza and the Senate. Dressed in a high-collared cape and purple robes, Palpatine arrived at the ornate monad in the company of Kinman Doriana, Sate Pestage, and Janus Greejatus, who had been dispatched to Coruscant by Tapalo, and whom Palpatine suspected had some strength in the Force. Kinman and Sate had forged an instant bond. The youthful Doriana wad made for a world like Coruscant, and he couldn't have asked for a better guide to the galactic capital's titillating underbelly than Pestage, who seemed to know every nook and cranny of the place. Ronhar Kim was among several dozen guests who were attending the service. Palpatine waited until the Jedi was alone in the viewing room before approaching him.
In concealing yourself, you will not be able to rely on your dark gifts, Plagueis said. Instead you must be yourself, submerged in the unified pattern to which the Jedi are attuned; visible in the Force, but not as a Sith. Since you cannot allow yourself to be seen, you must make certain that you are taken for granted. Disguised in the profane; camouflaged in the routine—in those same realms from which you can attack without warning when necessary.
A tall, muscular young man attired in black robes, Ronhar had thick black hair pulled into a bun behind, and with long strands in front dangling from temples to chin. In him, Palpatine could see Vidar, whose body was lying in state, supine on a massive rectangular stone bier. A simple blanket covered the corpse from shoulders to knees, and on the chest sat a shallow metallic bowel containing purple flowers and a lighted candle meant to symbolize the Livet Tower's Eternal Flame. Janus Greejatus would transport the cremation ashes to Naboo, where they would be scattered in the Solleu River.
"Jedi Ronhar Kim," Palpatine said as he entered the room, "please forgive the intrusion, but I wanted to offer my condolences in person."
Roused from his thoughts, Ronhar whirled on him, almost in defense, and scanned head-to-toe. "Who are you?"
"Palpatine," he said, "I've been appointed to succeed Vidar Kim as Senator of Naboo. I knew your father well."
Ronhar's vigilance eased. "Forgive me for not knowing more about Naboo, Senator...Palpatine. But in fact, until several weeks ago I wasn't aware that Vidar Kim was my biological father, or even that Naboo was my homeworld.
Palpatine feigned understanding. "No need to apologize. I imagine that the Force is, in some sense, its own domain."
Ronhar nodded. "I scarcely knew the man. Were it not for the fact that the was a Republic Senator, the Jedi Council would not have granted dispensation for me to meet with him."
Palpatine allowed himself to stretch out with the Force, but only for a moment, and chiefly to gauge the Jedi's reaction, which proved to be indiscernible. "Excuse me for asking, but why then did you choose to attend the service?"
Ronhar grew pensive. "No doubt you know about the tragedy that claimed the lives of his wife and sons."
"I do."
"Vidar Kim contacted me to ask if I would consider renouncing my pledge to the Jedi, in order to become the bearer of the family name."
Palpatine moved closer to him and added compassion to his voice. "He told me, Ronhar. Does your presence here reflect doubt as to your obligations?"
"No," the Jedi said, perhaps more firmly than he intended. "I'm only here out of respect for the man. As you may also know, he died at the hands of an assassin while in my company." Ronhar's voice betrayed disappointment rather than anger. "If I had acted sooner, he would be alive, and at present I can't be certain that the assassin's blaster bolts weren't meant for me, rather than Vider Kim."
"Who in their right mind would target a Jedi Knight?"
The Jedi sniffed and narrowed his dark eyes. "The Jedi do not lack for enemies, Senator. Doling out justice and ensuring that peace doesn't sit well with some beings."
"The world of politics is no safer, Ronhar. Not in this era, with so many in need. Thank the Force we have the Jedi."
"I wonder," Kim said.
Palpatine regarded him with interest. The Jedi was less interested in solving them murder of Vidar than he was in agonizing over his failure to prevent it. "You wonder about what, Ronhar?"
"What my life would have been had I not become a Jedi."
Palpatine adopted a look of shock. "The choice was not yours to make. You have the Force. Your destiny was a forgone conclusion."
Ronhar mulled it over. "And if Vidar Kim had elected not to surrender me to the Order?"
"A line of thought impossible to follow to any conclusion," Palpatine said.
The Jedi looked at him and squared his shoulders. "There are many forks in the path, Senator. Had I remained on Naboo I might have followed Vidar Kim's footsteps and entered politics. Perhaps it's not too late."
Palpatine showed him a tolerant smile and came alongside him, confident now that his true nature was beyond detection. "I have to admit that the notion of a politician with Jedi values is not without its appeal. In fact, the Republic was once overseen by Jedi chancellors only. But I'm afraid you're something of an anachronism, Ronhar. The galaxy appears to have rejected the idea of enlightened leadership. The best politician presently is merely exceptional, where every Jedi is extraordinary."
Ronhar laughed shortly. "More and more, Senator Palpatine, you begin to sound like my former Master."
"Would that I had such talents," Palpatine said, making light of it. "But I do have a proposition, Ronhar. Not only am I new to the Senate, I'm new to Coruscant. And it would be good to have someone to count on as a friend. So what would you say to an alliance between a politician and a Jedi? Through me you gain insight into the workings of the Republic, and through you I might better understand the Jedi, in their roles as peacekeepers."
Ronhar inclined his head in a bow. "I respect Vidar Kim all the more for bringing us together. May the Force be with you, Senator Palpatine."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He cloaks his Force sensitivity from groups of Jedi.
Elsewhere on the broad avenue—at key intersections, taxi stops, and mag-lev exits—stood groups of Jedi, a few with the hilts of their lightsabers conspicuously visible. For Palpatine the sight of so many of them in one place was at once exhilarating and sobering. Though thoroughly cloaked in the everyday, he could feel their collective pride trickle into him through the Force.
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
He conceals his Force sensitivity from Ronhar Kim, Dooku, and Sifo-Dyas.
The contingent of Senators had scarcely left when Palpatine heard his name called; turning, he saw Ronhar Kim in the company of two older human Jedi. Quietly he pulled his powers deeper into himself and adopted a mask of cordiality.
"Jedi Ronhar," he said, inclining his head in greeting.
The black-haired Jedi returned the nod. "Senator Palpatine, may I introduce Masters Dooku and Sifo-Dyas."
Palpatine was familiar with the former, but only by reputation. "A great honor, Masters."
Dooku appraised him openly, then arched his eyebrow. "Excuse me for staring, Senator, but Ronhar's descriptions of you led me to expect someone older."
"I disguise myself well, Master Dooku. My age, that is."
"Either way," Sifo-Dyas remarked, "a talent required by your position."
"An ignoble truth, Master Sifo-Dyas. But we strive to remain faithful to our conscience."
Dooku smiled with purpose. "Hold tight to that, Senator Palpatine. Coruscant will surely need your resolve."
--Taken from Darth Plagueis
Sidious cloaks his and Darth Maul's presence in the Force as they inspect the outside of the Jedi Temple.
One of his earliest memories was that of being taken to the Jedi Temple. Both he and Sidious had been disguised as tourists. His master's command of the dark side had been sufficient to cloak them from being sensed by their enemies, as long as they did not enter the building. That had been unlikely anyway—the Jedi Temple was not open for tourism. They had stood there for the better part of the day, Darth Sidious pointing out to him the various faces of their foes as the latter came and went. It had been thrilling to Maul to realize that he could stand in the presence of the Jedi, could listen to his master whisper to him of their ultimate downfall, without the having any inkling of the fate that ultimately awaited them.
--Taken from Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter
