Resurgence

Epilogue

Rael is forced to walk on his own feet again. He's counted a few stops between Gannaria and wherever this is, though he could never guess where. Force suppression emission fields have been a constant the entire journey, as have blindfolds whenever he was walked through a compartment with a window, or during the transfer to a smaller ship. He could tell it felt humid there, and possibly swampish if the insects landing on his skin were anything to go by. It had been night, which he could tell from the lighting, and the temperature had been pretty warm for night, so it was probably miserable during the day.

When Rael left the Jedi Order, he traveled the galaxy as a hermit in the years between the Trade Federation's blockade on Naboo and his imprisonment on Taris and subsequent rescue and recruitment by Darth Kraven. He's used it as a chance to test himself, and had sought out the most blistering deserts, frozen tundra, muggy swamps, polluted seas, and shadowed woods. He'd put the Bantha fur coat that eventually became part of Big Boss' famous overcoat through quite the journey, so observing weather was something he could literally do blindfolded and without the aid of the force.

In the brief time he spent outside at the final destination Nemo had in mind for him, the weather he felt was mild. Low humidity, and he could smell both tree sap and sand in the air. Now he walks the interior corridors deep into the facility. He estimates a total travelled distance of at least a few hundred meters, all indoors and in pretty tight corridors. The floor and walls, as best he can tell, are bright white Imperial prefabs with a black stripe going down the floor. If he had to guess, Nemo used the cheap prefabs as the basis of his ever growing compound, then concealed and reinforced them with stone, concrete, and perhaps even steel bulkheads.

The guards are all droids; Rael can easily identify that from the clattering of their feet. They are mostly DT-Sentries, with a few RA-7 protocol droids at a ratio of about 6 or 7 to 1. If there are Dark Troopers, or Ashla forbid a Cyber Commando, they're being held in storage somewhere. No need to use them all the time just to watch an old man and perhaps a Nikto.

Rael is marched into one final room, and the singular Dark Trooper escorting him removes his binders and says, "You can take off that blindfold now. This is where you will be doing the majority of your work."

Rael takes off the blindfold and observes his surroundings, blinking through the bright white light reflected off of every surface. The room is divided roughly in half, with a common sort of no man's land in the middle. On one side is Nym, surrounded by organic samples, planters with exotic flora from the Necrotic Palace, refrigerators that presumably contain preserved fauna from the Necrotic Palace, shelves of Petri dishes, some at room temperature and others controlled, a Lisk in the process of being dissected on a table, and a single Bacta tube containing a prototype Cyber Commando for Nym to evolve and perfect Nemo's super soldiers.

On the other side of the room, a strange droid unlike anything Rael's ever seen is standing with its arms up and feet shoulder width apart. A droid prisoner? In its half of the room, engines, weapons, and other machines sit disassembled. Shelves and cabinets full of spare parts line the wall. Just as the Cyborg takes center stage for Nym, this droid's current project of focus seems to be a computer. Judging from the design of its inputs and outputs, Rael can only guess it's meant for advanced precision hyperspace calculations, likely to better navigate the Unknown regions.

Nemo says, "You know your own scientist. This android was once an Anomid named Drova Byork. His original body died a very long time ago, and he lives on through droids, since he has managed to replicate his knowledge into memory banks and identity onto personality matrices effectively enough to satisfy his original self's attempts to live forever. Needless to say, getting a mechanical supremacist and an organic supremacist to work together is a difficult task that you know I have little patience for.