no Florida no real choice the Calculus blabbed on till last 5mins then screamed/raped the lesson in ways that only a chick could understand
and english wouldve been easier to learn surrounded by monkeys they were so ****ing out of control
got a comm. college GED and Degree now studying at Virginia Tech(dont ask about the shootings)
For my Master, Publius's chapter regarding Luke Skywalker vs. Palpatine in Dark Empire.
From Test of Wills by PubliusLeia Organa Solo and her unborn son were the sole witnesses to the greatest battle in history.She saw only a whirlwind as they swept through the room, their path tearing from one end of the room to the other, across the bulkheads, around the deck and through the air. They whirled and cut and parried and counterattacked faster than the eye could see, transforming them into a blur of sound and fury, their brilliant weapons angry flickers of light in the destroyed throne room. She caught the barest of glimpses of their struggle, heard the merest of whispers of the words they exchanged – words meant for the ears of Masters alone.
Though many thought her powerful – and indeed she was – she was a mere neophyte compared to these two mighty titans; she had once read that on many worlds the Jedi and the Sith were revered as gods. She knew now why this was so; she saw the awesome and terrible power that they could wield. For all her own potential in the Unifying Force – the Living Force – the Universal Force – for all her own potential, there was little more she could do than take refuge beneath the Galactic Emperor's overturned throne.
While around her, the test of wills raged.
Flash! as they turned in air, Flash! went their 'sabers there. Never before and never again in all of history had there been or would there be a battle such as this. Even now – as they flashed and turned and struck and clashed – echoes of their struggle could be felt all throughout the universe. They were as opposing divinities, as different as night and day.
There was Palpatine the Undying, the great Galactic Emperor, the manifestation of the dark side of the Force, in all his abysmal glory, all his great and terrible majesty. He was a void of hunger and narcissism, a voracious abyss that would never be satisfied until he had consumed all things and plunged the universe into eternal darkness. He had embraced the dark side even before he was born, he basked in its cold abyss. The peoples of the galaxy had become complacent in the light of the Jedi's vigil, and he had plunged them into darkness.
He had spent decades devoted to meditation and study, immersing himself in the secrets and lore of a thousand worlds and a thousand cults, secluded in his monasteries and libraries. He had made pilgrimages to Korriban, to Dromund Kaas, the Ziost, to Had Abbadon, to Arkania, to Apollyon, to Cos. He had mastered the great power in all its guises – the Force, the sublime Eternity, the All, the Great Unity, the Tyia, the Quwa Akhrín, the White Current – and in all its traditions – the Sith Lords, the Jedi Knights, the Krath Society, the Nightsisters of Dathomir, the Heresiarch Congregation, the Shamans of the Jarvashqiine, the Intisharim. He had learned the esoteric martial arts of Teräs Käsi and Yad Hadíd; he had mastered the forms and styles of the lightsaber. He knew the secrets of Quey'tek and the Doppelgänger, Malacia and Mortichro, Mechu Duru and Lilakhrin, and countless more. He was deeply immersed in the thousands of years of traditions from thousands of cults and sects. He was a specter of the past – a phantom menace – the revenge of the Sith.
There was Luke Skywalker, the simple farmboy from a backwater desert world, the guardian of the light side of the Force, with all his awe-inspiring power at its fullest. He was a beacon of honesty and generosity, willing to lay down his own life to save those of his friends. He had come from a planet with two suns into a galaxy lost in darkness, bringing with him a new hope for freedom. He had destroyed the Death Star and saved the brave Rebellion against the tyrannical rule of the evil Empire; he had redeemed the soul of a mighty Dark Lord of the Sith and shattered the Emperor's iron grip on the galaxy. The peoples the galaxy had been drowning in the eternal darkness of the Sith's reign, and he had brought them light.
He had only learned of the Force as a young man; his formal training had been cut short by the deaths of both his Masters. He had found few scraps of the lost traditions of the Jedi Knights; he had searched in vain for the knowledge of that noble order whose light the Dark Lord of the Sith had tried to extinguish. He had found little in the empty halls of the Jedi Temple and the wreck of the Chu'unthor, never even been to the few abandoned praxeums and libraries that still remained. He had not been instructed in the philosophies of the Jedi scribes, nor did he know their formalized techniques and disciplines and rubrics; he wielded his power in an unconscious and completely instinctive way. He did not speak High Galactic, had not been trained in the ways of the Jedi Knight's blade; he knew none of the forms, only using the Force to guide his hand. He did not know the histories and traditions of the cults of the Force that the Sith Lords and their Empire had eradicated. He had few ties to the history of the Jedi and their Order, fewer still to the countless other traditions and cults and sects. He was a vision of the future – a new hope – the return of the Jedi.
The one could never tolerate the existence of the other.
The Emperor had sought to convert the humble farmboy, to turn him to the dark side of the Force; not even his rejection of the dark side could turn the Sith Lord's thoughts away from him. The Sith Lord could not abide the Jedi Knight, could not simply destroy him. He needed to turn him, to destroy his will, to dominate his very soul. He needed to break him, to tear him apart and remake him in his own image. For his great weakness was his narcissism, his malignant and twisted self-love. To be rejected, to be challenged, to be defeated was unthinkable.
The humble farmboy had sought to defeat the darkness within his father, and within the malevolent Emperor who had seduced him and destroyed the goodness in him, the Emperor who was full of lies and was the father of lies. He had chosen to die rather than to become like him; yet he knew that he alone could ever hope to challenge the great and terrible Dark Lord of the Sith. He had risked everything to learn the secrets of the Sith, to gain from his enemy the strength he needed to destroy him forever. To stand by, to look on, to allow his existence was intolerable.
And so there they were, Palpatine the Undying and Luke Skywalker, the twin and opposing demigods. The swirl of their light and darkness was terrifying, a river of power that threatened to sweep away all around it. Luke's vast courage could never hope to overcome the Emperor's vast power; yet the Emperor's egotistical self-love could never hope to match Luke's altruistic self-sacrifice. They battled with more than just their lightsabers; they battled with their whole selves, mind, body, and soul. It was a battle between the Sith Lord who ruled and the Jedi Knight who served; the narcissist who exploited and abused and the philanthropist who defended and comforted; the darkness that chilled and the light that warmed; the abyss that consumed and the love that begot. It was a battle between the darkest evil and the purest good.
Waves of power and emotion poured off of the peerless antagonists, sending shudders through the vast warship from stem to stern. The overwhelming atmosphere of the battle struck the crew almost instantly; some collapsed at their battle stations, insensate and traumatized, while others fell dead where they stood. All throughout the galaxy those who were sensitive to the Force could feel the violence of the clash of titans, could feel the intensity of the test of wills.
And none felt it more deeply than did Leia Organa Solo and her unborn son. They were immersed within the sound and the fury; there, in that room, they peered into the depths of the souls of both the Dark Lord of the Sith and the Grand Master of the Jedi. And as they battled, Luke Skywalker knew that should he fail, both his sister and her child would be left defenseless and in the clutches of Palpatine the Undying.
Can there be any wonder that the humble farmboy defeated the mighty Galactic Emperor?
BEST FIGHT EVER. LAST LINE IS PURE AWESOMNESS!
Another excerpt.
"Palpatine of Naboo," the poetess Hari Seldona once wrote, "is an interesting man. Never before in galactic history has such evil been hidden beneath a mask of such beauty."Certainly she was not referring to his face; even before his disfigurement under what were best described as murky circumstances, Dr. Augustus Nero Palpatine had not been known for his dashing good looks.
Rather Seldona's mask referred to the idyllic world of his birth, Naboo, and to the undeniable brilliance of his mind. A prodigy even by the standards of a world whose aristocracy routinely used accelerated learning to create generations of preadolescents with university-level educations, the Incorruptible – that was what they called him on Naboo, ironically enough – had completed his first dissertation by the time of his tenth birthday, obtaining the first of many doctorates of philosophy, this one from the University of Aldera's Department of History and Moral Philosophy. In subsequent years he would add doctorates in economics, political science, military history, linguistics, hyperphysics, psychology, and psychohistory.
During the years in which he had served as Supreme Chancellor, it had been a popular joke to refer to the Office of the Supreme Chancellor as 'the Ivory Tower,' as it was Palpatine's academic credentials that were his best known feature. Seldona was neither the first nor the last to describe Palpatine as "a beautiful mind."
What many failed to realize was that for all his brilliance, Palpatine was no ordinary man. He was a man of genius, it was true, but that genius was thrawn. Like a diamond, his intellect sparkled, but it was also cold and hard. Palpatine's brilliance was the product of abomination; he had come into the world with that rarest of deformities – it was a matter not spoken of outside the most intimate circles of the House of Palpatine, in fact something that nobody outside the archducal family had ever even heard of.
Augustus Nero Palpatine was pre-born.
His mother, the Archduchess of Palpatine, had been a woman of society, a woman of great learning and grace. She had also been an addict of spice, that most empyrean of all drugs. There had been complications during the pregnancy, and it was the family's shameful secret that the child Augustus Nero was . . . abnormal, in many respects. Certain abnormalities are to be expected when a fetus already has a fully-developed intellect prior to birth. He had awakened to the universe secure in the knowledge that he was all that mattered; in all the years that followed, he never saw any evidence that caused him to reconsider this conclusion.
But his exceptional intellect was not the only secret that he had hidden. Palpatine's other secret, one altogether more sinister, was that he belonged to the most exclusive, most dangerous cult in existence; though the origins of his affiliation with the Order were lost to time, Palpatine had become one of the Dark Lords of the Sith. As he displayed the brilliance of his mind under the aristocratic and academic guise of Dr. Palpatine, he gave full rein to his power-hungry narcissism under the guise of Darth Sidious. And so this prince of many faces had set out to recreate the galactic order in his own image, to create a New Order in glorification of himself. Here was Seldona's evil lurking beneath masks of beauty; to satisfy his own lusts he had created a brutal war and torn the galaxy asunder, had orchestrated atrocities and war crimes for no end other than his own pursuit of power. His malignant self-love was all the justification he'd needed to destroy the Republic and proclaim himself ruler of an Empire that would stand for ten thousand years.
And so he had ruled the galaxy with an iron fist, his grip growing ever tighter as years and even decades passed. There had been resistance, to be sure, both legal and not, in the halls of the Imperial Senate and on the battlefields of the Rebellion. But he had grown steadily more and more powerful, the point that entire worlds were smashed to smithereens for having dared to oppose him. Finally he had felt a new enemy, one that could destroy him and end his reign of darkness. The Force – that unfathomable mystery – had revealed to him the danger posed by a single soul, a boy named Luke Skwyalker, and he had created an ambush at the Sanctuary Moon of Endor, plotting to ensnare the boy in the dark side of the Force, thereby hijacking his destiny and preserving the eternal rule of night. But the plot had failed; he had been betrayed by the very Apprentice he had meant to betray, and had met his death at long last. Good had triumphed over evil.
At least, that was the theory of it.