KMC Forums - Darth Tenebrous and the Galaxy Unbalancing feat

Tenebrous defies the will of the Force with his act of manipulating midi-chlorians, preventing them from being subsumed into the Cosmic Force after death, and severing them from the Force’s sovereignty entirely.

Amidst the billions upon billions of individual midi-chlorian deaths in Tenebrous' cells were a tiny fraction of midi-chlorians that were not dying.

That would not die so long as they inhabited a living host. These especially tenacious midi-chlorians - Tenebrous had privately labeled them with the jesting sobriquet maxi-chlorians - had been altered. Improved. It would not be an overstatement, in Tenebrous' opinion, to use the word perfected. These maxi-chlorians would indeed migrate, but not into the Force.

They would migrate into Plagueis.

To detect this infinitesimal percentage would require the precision of a Bith; it was far beyond his apprentice's limited perceptions - and indeed, Tenebrous had gone to considerable trouble to ensure it would always remain so.

Instead of actually training his doltish apprentice, Tenebrous had flattered Plagueis' mysticism while pricking his insecurities, sending him off on one useless, doomed-to-fail mission after another. In turn, Tenebrous had invested every available second of the freedom this afforded into designing, creating, and deploying the one weapon that Plagueis would never suspect.

Could never suspect. His own prejudices about the Force ensured Plagueis wouldn't believe such a thing was possible.

Tenebrous created a retrovirus that could infect midi-chlorians.

Midi-chlorians were, after all, merely symbiotic organelles that contribute to the organic processes of the living cells they inhabit. Due to their role in Force interactions, altering them was singularly challenging - they had an unsettling tendency to spontaneously express unexpected and unfortunate side effects - but by applying the full analytic prowess of his vast Bith brain and the preternatural power of his Bith senses to detect and resolve sub-microscopic structure, he eventually succeeded in creating a retrovirus that would transform normal midi-chlorians into long-lived maxi-chlorians.

The Tenebrous Way

To successfully manipulate midi-chlorians for them to do the user’s bidding, one must have enough will and strength in the Force to override the Force’s control of them and replace it with one’s own. Midi-chlorians are the Force’s “proxy army”; they execute the Force’s will and allow the Force to be sensed and used by mortals, in addition to being the basis for the Living Force and life in the galaxy. Thus, for Tenebrous to be able to manipulate them, he’d require the willpower to substitute the will of the Force, so that instead of executing the Force’s will, the midi-chlorians would instead execute Tenebrous’ will, and that is exactly what he did.

”The solution, therefore, is not to introduce new midi-chlorians but to impose one’s will on the midi-chlorians already present in the subject. This can be done through the energy of the pneuma. Just as a warrior in peak condition can lift a heavy weight, so can someone with a sharpened mental focus and an affinity for the Force achieve a measurable effect on living cells.

“I began with experiments on scurriers and other small creatures. I used my will, amplified through my body’s own midi-chlorians, to override the lesser concentrated midi-chlorian voices of the test subjects. This proved more challenging than I predicted. Because midi-chlorians are linked by a universal mind, the ones in my own cells seem to resist this imposition upon their fellows. But eventually I succeeded, first with small creatures, then with slaves purchased from the Hutts. I forced midi-chlorians to override their natural life cycles.”

--Darth Plagueis

Book of the Sith

A common misconception held that midi-chlorians were Force-carrying particles, when in fact they functioned more as translators, interlocutors of the will of the Force.

[...]

Only the Sith understood that sentient life was on the verge of a transformative leap; that through the manipulation of midi-chlorians—or the overthrow of the Forceful group that supervised them—the divide between organic life and the Force could be bridged, and death could be erased from the continuum.

[...]

“Yes,” Plagueis said pensively. “But I failed to exercise due caution. As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics. I have been audacious, and the Force has tested me the way Tenebrous sought to. Midi-chlorians are not easily persuaded to execute the dictates of one newly initiated in the mysteries. The Force needs to be won over, especially in work that involves the dark side. It must be reassured that a Sith is capable of accepting authority. Otherwise it will thwart one’s intentions. It will engineer misfortune. It will strike back.”

Darth Plagueis

Darth Plagueis was unable to achieve the same effect, describing the merging of midi-chlorians with the Cosmic Force at the moment of death as "inexorable." He then likened trying to prevent this to "using a sponge to dam a raging river."

The dispersal of midi-chlorians at the moment of physical death was, for lack of a better term, inexorable. Analogous to his fated confrontation with the Woebegone crew, the moment of death appeared to be somehow fixed in space and time. According to his Sith education, since Captain Lah and the others had been in some sense dead from the moment Plagueis’s gaze had alighted on the freighter, it followed that the midi-chlorians that resided in alleged symbiosis with them must have been preparing to be subsumed into the reservoir of life energy that was the Force long before Plagueis had stowed away. His attempts to save them—to prolong that state of symbiosis—were comparable to using a sponge to dam a raging river.

Darth Plagueis

Decades later, Plagueis was still unable to achieve what Tenebrous did, and only after unbalancing the Force on a galactic scale with the aid of Sidious and being amped voraciously as a result, did he manage to keep Venamis' midi-chlorians trapped in the physical world, stealing them from the Force's sovereignty and become their new master, like Tenebrous had done.

The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.

The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force's proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.

On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die.

Then, by manipulating the Bith's midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D's processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith's organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.

But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn't been enough for him.

Darth Plagueis

Given how what Tenebrous did was only gained by Plagueis after such a major boost in power, it would indicate Tenebrous was vastly more powerful than Plagueis up until that point. In fact, it could be argued that since Sidious and Plagueis are able to merge into a "discorporate and [...] single entity" that even their combined power wasn't enough to manipulate midi-chlorians, as they had to unbalance the Force first before Plagueis was able to revive Venamis. And it was the Bith's resurrection, not the unbalancing feat or their combined power, that "stunned Sidious into silence," indicating that keeping midi-chlorians trapped in the physical world - overriding the will of the Force - is more impressive. By this logic, Tenebrous would then be able to replicate the unbalancing feat and suffuse the galaxy with the dark side on his own.

What are your thoughts? Has Failkorion been surpassed (again)?