"So the question becomes," Aurel says slowly as he pieces the information together, "who is in possession of the missing half, and is Adelmo aware of it? Given her actions, she might already be on the trail. Would she be able to decipher the scrolls once complete on her own?" this last question he directed at Saar.
"One problem Adelmo has is that she has a very utilitarian view of history. If it helps her, she uses it to help her, else she ignores it. It's why she doesn't mind blowing up all those ancient sites. She had a hold of a witness account of a loader who saw an unusual cargo on his ship and tried to steal it; he was caught, arrested, made a statement and subsequently executed. From that statement, Adelmo was able to identify that he was talking about the scrolls and she found out what ship he was on. She and Lennah followed the trail of that ship from planet to planet until they found it.
"But because it didn't seem useful, Adelmo had not put any effort into learning why the Scrolls were on that ship and why that ship dumped them. If she had, she might have been less surprised to know that they weren't complete. In fact, the Scrolls were being hidden for a later retrieval that never happened."
"That it is. The Scrolls are the real thing, you know. A genuine relic of an age lost forever. There is a reason these things are rare- even more so than that they were not created often, for even that being true, the Sith were around for a long time in large areas of space, so that adds to a number of rare artefacts.
"It's simply that they are not to be found any more. These things were made in the areas controlled by the Sith- and these are generally fringe areas, far out from the Republic and nearly all destroyed by the myriad events of history. One or two special things are still to be found... as some of us have experience of... but no-one knows where to look and there are more stars and planets to cover than anyone could in a thousand thousand lifetimes.
"So that leaves any that are with reasonable distance from the Republic. The only reason any artefacts would be there is that the Sith brought them with them on one of their invasions. In that case, the artefacts were nearly all either destroyed by war or recovered by the Jedi. That leaves little to be discovered.
"It's rare indeed for something like this to be brought into the reach of the Republic and then specifically hidden, so that it may still be there to be found. My speciality is in the understanding of history- and more particularly the people who made it. So my advantage is that I knew what Adelmo did not- that she was following a path that someone else had already gone down."
"Oh, there have been countless amateurs and charlatans over the many centuries who have tried, in their feeble ways, to gather the lost secrets of the Sith past. But there was one who had the ambition, the power, the knowledge and the resources to actually make it happen. He made a very particular issue of gathering such things as the Scrolls- so much so that he often diverted vast strategic resources towards securing them."