Symphonis enjoyed playing with her toys. She enjoyed moving her chess pieces across the board, supplanting one with another in delicate games. She enjoyed watching them execute orders they were unaware of having ever been given, she enjoyed watching them move to her whims. She enjoyed the feeble struggles they made when conditioning inevitably cracked and broke down and before their recovery protocols - buried deep - took over. she enjoyed collecting them back up every few years to see what conditioning had lasted and what had broken down faster, what minds were more resilient and what ones needed to be hammered flat again.
She tended to enjoy the games their protectors played just as much. Just as she moved her pieces so to did the protective, discovering kinds. They brought her agents into their hearts and homes, past their security in vain and misguided attempts to liberate her creatures from her thrall.
One of those struggles had just begun.
She rarely worked with Chiss - they were hard to get, hard to keep and so often they went back home before any meaningful work could be gleaned from using them. But she'd managed one or two - or perhaps even more scattered across her holdings, she lost count - and one of her prizes had been discovered. She'd stripped everything from her pet Chiss Ker, from her name to her House to her family - everything gone. Chiss were resilient but even their vaunted training preparing them for Imperial service was nothing against a Sith's determination.
To build a willing tool one had to start from an appropriate beginning, breaking down and removing the imperfections which would later cause unwanted traits - insubordination, for one. Rebellion was quaint too but only if it stopped short of actual resistance. So like all of her tools the Chiss' mind was assaulted and her foundational memories altered and clouded until she was left with a mind as blank as one with language skills and those inherent memories could be. Then it was the laborious process of laying in intricate commands, catches and counters and blocks so that while her toy could struggle it would never be free. The Force gave her even further leeway to play, altering the mind to make her chosen operatives loyal, obedient to the point of death and wiring them for the skillsets she liked them to display.
That she built in protections in case one of them or their code phrases got away went without saying. And now it seemed one of them had gotten that free, if Ker's little stunt on Quesh was to be analyzed. Roak'erith'wyn had been a brilliant example of a perfectly molded assassin, the perfect spy, the perfect informant - she'd gone so far as to artificially limit her field effectiveness so that her actual skills were only slightly above that of a perfect Cipher. No need to hand her targets a tool that was suited well for what tasks it'd be assigned on, right?
Symphonis frowned delicately, snapping her fingers in silent command. At the signal one of her attendants eyes focused and they sat down, taking up position against her. They were human, a brilliant - if defiant - scientist. Now they were another of her tools, another of her pawns. And at the moment they were also her chess opponent.
It would substitute for playing against the Chiss she'd spoken to when her bid to recover Ker had failed. Her first bid. There would be others, and they would eventually succeed, or the Chiss agent herself would make them succeed, driven by routines that even now had to be whispering in her mind. She had meant to activate more but her opponent had moved quickly and as her toy had reported, had managed to compromise her programming keyword. He'd even gotten her sub-dermal audio implants removed in time, the whispered taunts as he'd destroyed them making the Sith smile.
Not rage. Raging at a foiled plan was for lesser Sith. No, she smiled and began the game anew.
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