Hypothesis

by unspeakablehorror



Summary

Notes

A/N: Just a very quick chapter to show how Plagueis is coping with all this. Because he's not just going to take this indignity lying down, right?






Plagueis tapped his journal with the pen, pondering his next words.

In summary, the effects of the liquid are indeed quite debilitating. I find that the plans I have carefully cultivated for over a century seem beyond my current capability to implement, and indeed I even question whether my insights are actually worth bringing to pass. There is a great deal of self-flagellation and doubt as well, over events that should be long-forgotten and dismissed. It's all quite disgusting, really.

He sighed, then switched off the datapad, dropping it and the pen onto an empty space on his workbench. As difficult as it had been for him to write that entry, he felt it was also invaluable. It was an essential record into his mental state, one which might otherwise be forgotten or glossed over in the future, and he did not want to lose what might be important information. Clearly, the Nightsisters were hoarding a psychological weapon of great power, and if he must suffer from it, he also fully intended to utilize the experience to learn how it might be turned to his own purposes.

Of course, it would be helpful if he had another data point. Sidious, of course, immediately came to mind, but he also didn't think his Apprentice was as likely to record his thoughts in sufficient detail to be of benefit to Plagueis. It would be laying all his vulnerabilities bare to another, something which Plagueis suspected that Sidious had learned to prevent himself from doing in his time as a Sith. His previous attempts to question Sidious about the liquid had yielded adamant alarm about the liquid's effects, but only an incredibly vague description of said effects that deftly evaded any messy specifics.

But Plagueis could make do. He'd had the thought that certain criminal underworld elements might make good experimental subjects in this regard, and the idea had instantly appealed to him. He was also extremely curious about what the effects of the liquid would be on an average person, and on a Jedi. There was the difficulty that it seemed to actively limit its own voluntary consumption through some as yet unknown mechanism, but Plagueis thought that could be easily overcome through injection by a third party.

He turned his attention to the microscope on his workbench. Bending his long frame over it, he carefully adjusted the lenses until the liquid sample came into focus. This sample looked similar to the previous one, the items of interest being minuscule black orbs suspended in ordinary pond water.

It was clear to Plagueis that these orbs, whatever they were, were the active agents of the solution. It had also become clear through a number of focused experiments that the orbs interacted primarily with midichlorians.

Which made absolutely no sense at all. Plagueis had determined that their effects were purely psychological. He had tested his Force abilities afterwards and found no noticeable differences from his previous benchmarks. Which of course directly contradicted what he had sensed, but observations didn’t lie.  Plagueis had never had his Force sense deceived in such a way before, but then everything about these entities was highly unusual.

What he should be seeing was some sort of exotic neurotransmitter, but his attempts to introduce the orbs into cultivated neural cells had shown no interesting interactions. They didn't even have interactions with the midichlorians inhabiting the microorganisms in the pond water. It had only been when he'd examined a vial of his own blood, taken after the incident, that he'd finally seen that the orbs were binding to his midichlorians, forming some sort of complex lattice around them.

One spidery hand grabbed a dropper, which he filled with a sample of his own blood from a month ago, a sample that would not have any of the peculiar black orbs of its own yet. He watched with anticipation as the red liquid hit the orb-filled water.

And...nothing happened. Disappointed, he tried several more samples of his own blood and the blood of others, with the same underwhelming results. Sighing, he grabbed a datapad and recorded the information.

The process must only occur in vivo, and only in certain organisms. And those sorts of tests would have to wait. He checked the time. In exactly two standard hours, he would begin his work day. He frowned. Damask Holdings had been having some difficulties ever since the incident with these unidentified menaces, for which said orbs were clearly at fault. While the worst blow to him in his mind was how this would affect his plans as a Sith, it didn't help that his day job had been suffering as well.

His hearts just weren't in it anymore.