STAR WARS: RETROSPECTION - Desecration

You try to meditate, but it's never been a strength of yours. Nothing of your vision returns to you from before, but you think that might be a good thing; that whatever it was telling you about is over and done with. Maybe. Maybe it's simply because you've never had a strong connection with the Force.

At some point you must have drifted into sleep, because some time later you find yourself being shaken awake by Rianna.

"Rand wants us. Did you talk to Gallador?" she says.

"I did," Galder says.

Galder will go with Rianna, saying nothing more about his conversation with Gallador.

"Hopefully one of them will be honest with us..." she mutters.

Rand is in the same room he was in when he told you of the existence of this holocron, Gallador seated near him.

"I think I have discovered all there is to find on this...which is not much. There was little left of the thing, after all," Rand says.

"So I noticed," Galder says. "Dusan did a number on it. Any idea why?"

Rand shrugs.

"Whatever information that it held when it was whole was too much for him to handle. These things happen. Iragez was known to be a planet where the Sith would experiment...my best guess is that it held knowledge of one of their experiments."

"Any details?" Galder asks.

"With it shattered as it was, there's little way of accessing what information that could have been stored on it," Rand says. "The runes carved on the remains appear to be some sort of warning, but about what...there isn't enough to tell."

Galder frowns.

"So you weren't able to find anything important at all?" Galder says. "Nothing?"

"No. Did you really think that I'd be able to find anything of importance from this?" Rand snaps, flinging the mangled bits of metalwork and shattered glass onto the table in the middle of the room. "Even in attempting to piece it together, there's not enough to make it whole. I'm not a miracle worker."

"Hmph," Galder says, feeling that Rand probably blames him for not grabbing enough parts or whatever. "Well, what about the books I brought back? Anything interesting there?"

"I've barely even begun to look at them, but I have a feeling there are a great many interesting things contained within them. That is not why I wanted you here, though."

"Oh?" Galder asks. "Why then?"

"I didn't expect you to find anything there, Galder. Sending the two of you out on this was more of a test than anything else."

Galder is a little more surprised by this response; he had half expected Rand to come down on him for talking to Gallador, or berate him for failure.

"... go on," Galder says.

"Your ability to cause havoc wherever you go is rather known. I was curious to see if you can handle doing things on your own without leaving a body count that could be completely avoided. Apparently you are incapable of this," Rand says.

"Shut up, Rand, you leave a disaster everywhere you go as well..." Rianna snaps.

"Only if I am doing so for a reason," he responds. "And I don't needlessly announce who I am."

Galder's brief moment of surprise is replaced by anger.

"Oh, so you would have let Dusan and his pirates get away with attacking us?" Galder says. "Not likely, bucko. Anyone who crosses me, dies. That's how it works. That's how it has always worked, if there is no upside to letting them live. What, did you want me to recruit Dusan and his thugs? They were nuts. I put them down."

"Going out of your way to kill every single person there was unnecessary. Not to mention getting spotted by a bounty hunter almost the moment you arrived on Tatooine."

"That I can't help," Galder says. "I have a reputation, especially on Tatooine. I finished my training there, before the Kuylen days. What do you expect, my homecoming to be peaceful?"

"There's a difference between having a reputation and deliberately calling attention to yourself! Kuylen managed to teach you some control of the Force and how to fight, but apparently he forgot about common sense."

This last quip sets Galder off.

"Shut your squid-sucking mouth!" Galder shouts, quickly igniting both lightsabers in a sudden flurry of motion.