Star Wars : Tanya

Her cheeks turned red as Tan'ya tried to get a hold of herself. She chewed on her pillow and grit her fingers, while staring at the childish face in the mirror left her frustrated and confused. Even compared to her second life she'd never had an emotional reaction like this, not when soldiers died or her plans were rejected.

Father hadn't even said no! All he'd said was he'd consider the idea, and yet something had taken hold of her. All Tan'ya could do to protect her dignity was run away and hide.

"This isn't normal, damn it!" Tan'ya hissed at her face in the mirror. "I wasn't like this in my first life, I wasn't like it in my second either. Something different about this body."

Tan'ya was the Devil of the Rhine! She had reviewed and approved operations where acceptable casualties were in the hundreds of thousands! The smell of rotten blood and festering mud was hardly enough to make her nose wrinkle anymore! The Great War had lasted years, she'd been there from the start right to the end, never once had she lost composure in front of her soldiers, and she was nearly the same age then as she was now!

But it was different this time. All it had taken was a gentle rejection from her father, and Tan'ya had almost been moved to tears!

"It's this body!" She concluded. "This damn child is too soft, too pampered! The chemistry of my brain is out of whack because I've been coddled for too long!"

That was it, that had to be the answer. Even in Tan'ya's first childhood in Japan, when he'd been a young boy he largely had to take care of himself. His parents worked at infamous black companies, working long hours and barely seeing him. He'd been an only child, raised by television, school teachers and the internet. He cooked his own food following recipes he found online, and promised himself never to be like his parents. He would retire young, happy, and enjoy his life instead of sacrificing it all in obscurity as a corporate wage slave.

Then Being X appeared.

There was no point comparing the life of a literal princess raised in an actual palace to that of an orphan sent to war before her age was in the double digits.

Tan'ya reasoned her way through all this. It was so obviously true, and there was no better explanation. She'd figured out what was wrong, and now the obvious path forward was to implement a solution. She could do that, right?

But somehow the tears didn't stop.

"Damn it!" She hissed, pawing at the corners of her eyes. "Damn you, Being X!"

...

By the time the ship finally arrived in system to the New Temple, Dooku was in a terrible mood and he could sense his daughter was much the same. After sulking for hours she'd finally come back to the ship's bridge, calmer and more composed, radiating determination through the Force. Seeing this, Dooku just knew he would soon be hearing more about the Trade Federation cruisers. Tan'ya was even simmering with resentment.

Eventually his daughter's curiosity won out, and she asked him, "What planet is that?"

"That is Indinor, 5th planet of the Liana system." Dooku informed her.

Indinor was a barren world of black, brown, gray and red hues. Oceans of mud turned coloured with old rust, met great flats of exposed granite, that were darkened in places from plasma scoring. In the distant past when warring empires ruled the entire outer rim, Indinor had been strip-mined of every accessible mineral.

After that, they cracked open the planet's surface to get at the plasma and hyper-matter reserves closer to its core. Whatever native ecosystem that had been present was annihilated by this process, leaving behind a toxic industrial wasteland, with only a few remaining drilling and pumping stations left to extract what little value was left.

Even with all that damage done to it, life proved to be a resilient thing. The planet still had breathable air, and water that could be soaked up from the oceans of slurry by certain crustaceans and amphibians. In the ten thousand years since, whatever native creatures had survived the apocalypse began to adapt and reproduce.

Offworld visitors to the planet had left behind a variety of introduced species, and some forms of hardy molds and fungi native to Felucia could be found growing in the cracks and crevices of the Indinor's granite fields and abandoned strip mines. Perhaps one day, tens of thousands of years from now, Indinor could even heal, but right now no one would want to reside in such a worthless place.

Except Dooku. There were two features which led him to choose this site.

The best feature of Indinor, and what attracted Dooku to it in the first place, was its location. It sat directly on the Perlimian trade route, with many smaller hyperlanes spiraling off of it to give access to the Hydian way, and almost the entire galactic north east.

A force of jedi located here was in a perfect position to monitor, patrol, and block any force moving from Huttspace or the Corporate Sector. It was a perfect place for his Jedi to check the two greatest threats the people of the Outer Rim faced. That location was the sole source of all of Indinor's economic activity, a hypermatter refueling station in orbit above it that was also host to almost its entire population.

The other reason Dooku chose to build here was that it was located in the Tion Cluster, which was central to his future plans. The Duke of Raxus had great influence across the cluster, and leveraging his relationship with the man had gotten Dooku an excellent price on the entire planet from the former Count Murgo, who only retained ownership of the station.

Murgo was willing to exchange the title of Count to become a Baron in exchange for a suitable marriage into the Serenno lineage, provided by Dooku, and a hefty sum of credits, provided by the Temple on Coruscant. Tan'ya now had a new step-cousin, once removed.

Now the entire world was his, to do with as he pleased. No committees, bureaucrats, debates. or constituents. Dooku would simply tell his army of droids what to do, and it would be done according to his vision.

If only it wasn't for that meddling Jedi Council.

The landing ramp lowered, and the muddy, grimy air of Lianna rushed through the entrance of his ship. So far, almost all construction on the New Temple had been done by droids, and almost entirely in preparation for what was to come later.

The first thing made was a landing pad to move large amounts of construction materials, then a small temporary power plant, a recharging station for the droids, a number of warehouses to store things, and so on and so forth, until finally the foundations of the temple itself were laid. Currently the droids were working on erecting a scaffold around the exterior of the building, swarming like so many little insects about the place.

Tan'ya felt distinctly unimpressed in the Force. Dooku didn't blame her. Right now the Indinor Temple wasn't much to look at, but to him it was a blank canvas. He could build anything he wanted, and in time he knew it would be beautiful and mighty.

Dooku directed Tan'ya to the temporary classrooms, a small distance away from the landing pad. The small collection of premade hab-blocks dropped from orbit was where his small force of jedi resided for now.

In addition to classrooms there were places to sleep, meditate and a small data center for research. Dooku had even seen fit to clear a small square of stone and roll out some turf and soil to create a fifty meter square of green grass on this desolate world. He had intended it to be somewhere that younglings could play and exercise, but so far the knights mostly used it.

Currently, the Temple only had one student, a padawan, and with the inclusion of Tan'ya there would be another. One padawan, one youngling, ten knights, and two Jedi Masters. That was it, the entirety of Dooku's temple.

"A foundation to build upon." He told himself, making for the site office. Once inside he turned on the caf-stim machine, and began reading through the droid's construction reports. Progress had been smooth in his absence.

According to the Command Droid, the scaffolding would be finished this week, shortly before he took himself and Tan'ya home for the weekend. The water hadn't even finished boiling yet, when the sound of footsteps outside allerted him to the approach of the Temple's only other Jedi Master.

Sifo Dyas stepped through the door, a worried expression on his face. He had tilted eyes and dark hair, and was half a head shorter than the Count. "Dooku, the Council requested a force nexus that wasn't tainted with the Dark Side. This is neither of those."

"Good morning, Jedi Master Sifo Dyas." Dooku replied. "There's water in the caf-stim machine if you want to help yourself."

Sifo did just that, shaking his head in disbelief. "People used to think of me and Qui-Gon as the rebellious mavericks, but you have raised the bar."

Dooku scoffed. "That's only because they don't know what you've been up to."

"We've been up to." Sifo corrected him. "But genuinely, Dooku, I have to know. Why here?"

"It has a very central location." Dooku replied. "The land was cheap, and compared to the rest of the Outer Rim it has a thin dark side presence."

"Only because there's such a small force presence here at all." Sifo scoffed. "Why not one of the moons of Yavin? There's little presence of the Dark Side, and it's a force Nexus."

"Because Yavin is in the middle of nowhere. The lanes into and out of that system take days to navigate, and hyperwave communication can't enter the system without additional transmitters. Any Temple built there would be even more blind and isolated to the threats and events of the Outer Rim than the one on Coruscant."

"The Council is furious, Dooku."

"This is the first I've heard of it."

"That's because they've given up trying to talk to you." Sifo shook his head, and smiled ruefully. "If getting married did this to you, it's no wonder the Council forbids it."

Dooku poured himself a cup of caf stim and turned to face Sifo. "The way the council treats the Dark Side, I can't help but observe we're slowly being driven from the Galaxy."

"How so?"

"Any world where the Dark Side is too strong, the Jedi abandon. Over time more and more worlds are tainted with the Dark Side, and the Jedi are driven further and further to the core of the Galaxy." Dooku swirled the stim in his hand, then looked up at Sifo. "We are slowly but surely retreating, and never advancing."

Sifo creased his eyebrows. "When you put it like that, it sounds like we're losing a war."

Dooku didn't reply, he just took a slow sip. After a long pause, he said, "This world will become a Force Nexus in time, with enough Jedi living here and communing with the Force. As they do, the taint of the Dark Side will slowly dissipate until it disappears entirely."

"That's going to take centuries. Millennia, maybe."

Dooku met his gaze. "Then we shall build a strong foundation, one that will weather the ages."

...

if you want to read ahead of the public release you can join my p atreon :

p atreon.com/Rimanovi