Valley of the Dark Lords

"You heard the Forge Master." Snapped Poacher, who slung his musket over his back and retrieved the combat blade from his forearm sheath to replace it, twirling the vibro-knife once for effect before holding it in a reversed grip. He motioned with a wave of the blade for the others to proceed to the front entrance, which was secured behind a massive set of heavy looking stone doors. The bandanna wearing squad leader stopped in front of the doors and tapped them with the butt end of his knife, listening as he did so in an attempt to gauge their thickness. It was clear they were going to take a bit of effort to budge. Stepping back, the B1's head swiveled towards the largest member of Droid Force 66, Smasher. "Smasher, this looks about your size. Bring it down."

"Roger, Roger." Replied the droid with a B2 chassis, B2 limbs, and a B2 head... Alright, it was possible the largest member of the exclusive squad of B1s was in fact just a B2 droid, though the rest of the members appeared to turn a blind photo-receptor to that obvious fact. Smasher pressed his mechanical hand pads against the door and leaned his shoulder into it, driving one foot into the floor after the other as he pushed with all the power his droid body possessed. Steam hissed from his joints as the hydraulic pistons worked overtime, merely shifting the door at first, then forcing it forwards a few inches. Within a minute, Smasher had widened the breach until it was large enough for Lord Valefor's broad shouldered form to enter without having to squeeze. Poacher patted Smasher on the back as he passed by the overworked droid and led the way into the tomb.

Mech switched on a light attached to his long droid head, dispelling the darkness with a cone of yellow light, while Alpha tapped her own pit droid nose to activate the flashlight at the center of her face. Reticle took up and a covering position from the rear, his long rifle sweeping back and forth as he checked for movement. "Quiet as a crypt." Remarked the sniper, lifting his vision from his scope. "Stow the chatter." Cut in Poacher, picking up the pace.

"Try not to damage anything." Screeched the synthetic voice of the spider-robot scurrying beside the Demon Lord as the Professor made his thoughts clear to the other droids. "This entire structure is a priceless wealth of archeological knowledge."

Droid Force 99's tech specialist Mech stepped to the front of their group and scanned the two feline lifeforms with some sort of enhanced optical visor interfaced with his photo-receptors. "Raxshir, also referred to as a sabertooth, are a feline species native to Shili, a planet in the Expansion Region of the galaxy. Carnivorous by nature, their diet consists primarily of Kybuck, herd animals that graze in the grasslands near where the Raxshir make their dens." Ah, well, that explains it then... "Shili?" Replied Poacher. "Then what are they doing here?"

Heavy metal footsteps clanked on the stone floor as Smasher pushed his way forward. He pounded a mechanical arm against his grit polished chassis in response to Poacher's question, leaning down as his vocabulator elicited an unusual distortion that sounded reminiscent of laugher. "Haho. Didn't you hear the Boss? The Sith like to keep em. They're kind of cute actually." "Smasher..." Warned the Bad Bunch's leader in his signature gravely tone. "It's fine. They seem friendly." Famous last words. Much as you might expect, the moment the team's muscle bent over and tried to pet one of the two felines, the sabercats pounced. The one closest to Smasher snapped its jaws, locking them around the B2s hand, then yanked hard to pull the droid off balance. Meanwhile the second leapt up and pounced off the B2s tall shoulders, sailing over the group in a graceful arc that saw it land on all four paws behind them, before scampering off into the dark recesses of the temple tomb. Mech and Reticle fired a few blaster bolts after it, but soon turned their attention to the cat attached to Smasher's arm.

Poacher sighted down the barrel of his blaster, lining up the kill shot, when the smallest member of the team stepped between the group leader's aim and the Raxshir, raising her small pit droid hands in a placating manner while approaching the large felinoid. Hey, Big Guy. Spoke Alpha's vocabulator in a monotone droid voice. The sun's getting real low. Static hissed from the tiny droid's speaker at a repeating interval, sounding somewhat like a Loth cat's purring. The Raxshir, which had been shaking its head back and forth as it tried to rip off Smasher's arm, seemed to calm in response to this. Slowly it ceased its assault on the B2 and eventually released his hand. The creature turned its felinoid head towards Alpha and proceeded to lick the pit droid across the singular lens at the center of its head.

"I think it likes you, Alpha." Said Poacher, lowering his blaster, only to be pushed aside by Reticle who was shaking his elongated droid head in irritation. "Why do I sense that we've picked up another pathetic lifeform?"

"Gentle-droids, please!" Shrieked an impatient Arachnus, stamping down his multitude of legs with such force that it caused the spider young recharging in the porous slots on his dome shaped chassis to chitter and screech. "Lord Valefor has a schedule to keep. We can afford no further delays." Also, he had run the calculations and the longer they spent inside the temple looking for the Fabricator General's prize, the greater the odds they'd become surrounded by the arisen undead approaching from all across the valley.

"Right, you heard it from the Reg." Said Poacher, once more focusing the team's attention. He pointed down an adjacent hall. "That corridor there seems a straight shoot towards the central chamber. Let's get moving."

As the Bad Bunch went into action, the Professor was left speechless, stewing in synthetic annoyance as he muttered under his breath. "Reg? I'm a spider assassin fitted with a tactical droid brain for the Dark Forge's sake..."

Very well, Master." Conceded the synthetic sycophantic spider-bot. "You are as wise as you are red." Technically accurate. Cones of light projected from blasters carried by the B1s and Alpha's nose lens dispelled the darkness of the dusty tomb as Poacher led the way. Valefor's wisdom was further verified by allowing the automatons to lead the way, as there were indeed traps, and plenty of them. The Bad Bunch's numbers whittled down quickly...

Mech ended up punctured and pinioned by a dozen Sith saber darts, Smasher fell chassis first into a pit of spikes, Reticle tried to shoot the other Raxshir when it reappeared only to have his bolt reflect off a mirrored wall back into his own power core, and Alpha and her new pet were crushed beneath a rolling stone sphere that Poacher, Arachnus, and Valefor were just able to outrun before entering the central chamber of the temple. As the leader and sole survivor of Droid Force 99 threw open the final doors, a razor edged lanvorok disc took the B1s head off, causing sparks to erupt from his neck before Poacher's chassis toppled over. Of course, the Professor's assassin suite of sensors had detected all of those traps prior to the Bad Bunch members stumbling into them, but they really should have considered the dangers they might encounter in the tomb before calling the incredibly spiteful SD-K4 droid a Reg.

"Apologies, Master. Comm...Ensign Beezlebub gave them a great reference. I think something might be stuck in his circuits."Arachnus scurried over Poacher's droid corpse as he and Valefor, the only two left alive, entered the final chamber. Incredibly contained within the great black pyramid was another ziggurat with stone steps leading up to its highest platform, atop which was some sort of chest...no, his photo-receptors zoomed in closer. A coffin. It was a black lightless thing, bound in lightsaber resistant Sith iron chains as thick as Garrax's cock ring, sealed with an equally strong looking lock. Light shone from two crevasses in the vast expanse of the ceiling above, centered on the ziggurat's top.

Nervously the Professor ascended after the Demon Lord, scurrying silently on his stealthy segmented limbs as he sought to keep pace with his master, pausing only occasionally to observe their surroundings. His plethora of photo-receptors completely encircled his domed chassis, providing the mechanical spider-bot with a 360 degree view of his surroundings, which captured several images and recordings in his data-banks for later upload to the Forge Network and dissemination back aboard the safety of the Felstorm. His own thoughts mirrored those of his master. He tapped the strange sarcophagus with the razor tip of a leg and attuned his audio-receptors to listen for even the most minuet of sounds, then gave up when it became clear that the odd material or thickness of the coffin was muting any and all noise from inside.

Most unusual. Typically Sith were buried in the Valley of the Dark Lords as a way of veneration, providing a place of honour for their mortal remains due in part to whatever contribution they had made to the Sith Order or to the darkside itself. Being buried here was not considered a punishment, and yet, here appeared by every outward indicator to be a case of just that. After all, why would the dead need to be bound by chains?


Valefor's instruction snapped Arachnus back to attention. He struck one of his metal forelegs against his chassis in a salute. "At once, master!" Moving beside the bulky winged Fabricator General, the Professor planted his two front legs at the base of the coffin, attempting to slide their tips underneath the stone sarcophagus to gain a bit of leverage. While his master pushed, the spider-bot tried to lift, hoping that between the two of them they might be able to flip the large box off the ziggurat and out of the way. At first it refused to budge at all, but a concerted effort between the pair eventually saw that change, even as steam hissed from the SD-K4s joints and sweat dripped down the Demon Lord's back. Slowly but surely, the stone coffin shifted, causing the entire temple around them to rumble and shake. Centuries of accumulated dust and ancient crumbling mortar rained down from above, descending around them in an obscuring veil that blanketed the ground at the base of the ziggurat, making it impossible to see the floor or the way they had come. As if that wasn't odd enough, the academically inclined assassin's multitude of sensors alerted the chief librarian to the fact that the temperature inside the pyramid had just dropped several degrees. Beyond the light lit top of the interior temple the rest of the chamber descended into an eclipsing darkness that grew more oppressive with the passing of each second. "Uh, Master..." Began Arachnus, clearly unnerved.

Trespassers! Wailed a voice in a banshee like shriek that reverberated in the Force even as it was heard out loud. Those that attempt to free the Betrayer, shall join her in eternal confinement!

The sounds of heavy footsteps, armoured footsteps, echoed across the cavernous chamber. Obvious to anyone with ears, or in Arachnus' case audio receptors, the noise was coming from the base of the pyramid and growing louder by the second as whatever was generating the sound got closer. The first of them appeared from the darkness in the shape of spectral wraiths whose bodies consisted of dust, given animation by whatever foul spirits lingered in the hateful heart of the temple, who seemed to possess these sand husks and grant them artificial sentience. Though markedly different, their large hulking forms were reminiscent of the massassi that used to call Korriban home prior to their extinction, replete with dust formed shields and spears in mockery of the battlefield implements they might have carried in life. Four of these dust wraiths came at Valefor, and two more came at Arachnus, though that was only the start. Moving the sarcophagus had clearly woken up the inhabitants of the temple, and they were not happy to have guests...

As bolts of crackling lightning from the Legionis Hastae obliterated the recently formed bodies of dust wraiths, the destruction of the animated golems released the sinister spirits contained within each, causing their spectral essence to flit around the chamber briefly before their souls were dragged back down into the otherworldly realm of Chaos. The banishment of their phantom kin seemed to only further enrage and infuriate the remaining dust warriors, whose eyes flared bright yellow like balls of boiling acid.

With the assistance of the Fabricator General, one of the dust wraiths facing the Professor tumbled over the ziggurats side and fell into the ranks of ascending temple guardians, disrupting the marching formation though it seemed to only encourage them further. Rather than continue in orderly rows of two, they climbed on their hands or knees, with some even slithering on their bellies like snakes made of sand. Arachnus quickly disassembled his other opponent, raising his forelegs up defensively to parry a spear thrust, then punched his legs into the dust wraiths abdomen in rapid succession until the undead golem burst apart in a cloud of choking chalk. One of the two small manipulator arms he had recently installed extended from beneath his chassis, holding in its vice like grip the librarian-bot's disruptor pistol. The academically inclined assassin flicked off the safety and listened to the signature whine of warming plasma churning inside. Swivelling his chassis around like a spinning top, the spider-bot depressed the trigger and let loose a beam of coherent energy, vaporizing a slew of wraiths as they reached the pyramid's top. Smoke poured from the muzzle and the power pack sizzled unstably, having depleted the entire cell swiftly. With his other manipulator arm, the SD-K4 knocked the spent battery out of the back and slapped in his only spare, then backed away from the ziggurats edge as more dust warriors reached the upper platform.

He was about to fire again when a group of wraiths overwhelmed him, clamping their arms around his own to ruin his aim, only for one of the creatures to smack the pistol out of the Professor's hand. The disruptor struck the ground and skidded to a stop at the base of the coffin, near the platforms edge, bleeding acrid smoke as the newly installed power cell was damaged on impact with the hard stone ground. In fact, the power cell was beginning to glow orange, suggesting it was on the verge of overloading and exploding.

That, however, was beyond Arachnus' ability to respond to currently. His combat programming took over as the dusty dead swarmed him, manipulating his eight razor edged legs as though armed with a half dozen swords. Impervium alloy honed to a micron thick edge severed sand torsos and limbs in an expanding cloud of dust. The Chief Librarian of the Felstorm proved in that moment why the assembly line workers of the Dark Forge referred to him as the Arachnid Assassin of Hypori, dismembering dozens of opponents with lethal precision, despite their enemies seeming to be largely dead already. Unfortunately all that dust was beginning to clot up his joints, slowing the Professor down with each kill, causing his usually silent movements to become loud as grit ground between his working servos.

"Ah-choo!" The academically inclined assassin-bot sneezed in his synthetic fashion, scattering a deserts worth of dust from his vocabulator unit that puffed from his speaker grill in a choking cloud. Arachnus rapidly rotated his chassis, his multitude of red mechanical eyes blurring together into crimson streaks as he spun like a top, expelling sand trapped in his gears before coming to an abrupt stop. "Oy vey, Master." Groaned the Professor in ancient Sith, one of the six million forms of communication he happened to be fluent in, chittering noisily on grinding legs as he scurried over to Valefor's side. "I'm going to require complete disassembly to get all the sand out of my joints, but otherwise I am still operational, your Forgeship."

He didn't overly fret about what had just happened. When you traveled the galaxy with Lord Valefor as long as the Professor had, you got used to bizarre paranormal activity occurring, playing havoc with his suite of combat sensors. Arachnus immediately accepted that the Red Sage's unparalleled mastery of the the sorcerous arts had been enough to resolve their current crises. It was simply what his master did.

More sand shook loose from the holes on the spider robot's porous metal head as his army of mechanical offspring began to bale out the cavities in which they resided. Several of the mechanical arachnids sprung noisily from their holes, their joints as clotted with grit as their spider host, and quickly surrounded the incorporeal form of the Force Ghost in their midst. The Betrayer, that's what the temple spirits had called her. Curious. The small spider bots illuminated her semi-tranluscent form with a red glare projected from their singular sinister red photo-receptors as they encircled her like prey.

Interestingly enough, Arachnus, who had a long established history of hating organics for their biological squishiness, did not instantly feel a surge of synthetic revulsion as he observed the Force Ghost among them. This was likely due to the fact that she completed lacked any trace of organic part, thus his programming likened her more to a hologram, which he didn't seem to have a problem with.

"What do we do with her, Master?" Inquired the eight legged librarian, directing one of those segmented limbs at the surrounded apparition, who had actually knelt down and was now probing one of his spider-children with a ghostly finger in clear curiosity.

"At once, Forge Master!" Shrieked Arachnus in reply now that an order had been given. Broadcasting a recall signal to the miniature spider bots, the academically inclined assassin was quickly swarmed by his mechanical offspring, which returned to the pores of his domed head. He then began to lead them back the way they had come, retracing Poacher's path through the ancient temple, as all the booby traps along that route had already been sprung. An antenna emerged from a slot on the Professor's head and rotated a small receiver dish clockwise, allowing the robotic arachnid to access the Felstorm's central database via the Forge Network, filling the spider droid's tactical processing unit with what limited information was available on the subject. The Felstorm's chief librarian filled the winged red skinned Sith and his spectral new associate in on the details as he led them towards the temple's entrance. "Sith archeologists postulate the Valley of Golg's construction to have occurred sometime about 200,000 BBY, predating even the colonization of Coruscant by the human precursors known as the Zhell. Originally home to the burial sites of several notable Sith, few of the Valleys structure remain standing, having eroded over the millennia by the desert sands. Laser imaging scans taken by the Felstorm during its passage over the region have determined several intact structures boasting architectural designs similar to the Sith ziggurats we have on file, buried beneath the Valley sands. The largest of which is located at the last recorded coordinates for the tomb of Sith King Dathka Graush. It may be possible to gain access through the tombs upper chambers with a bit of digging." More work for the Legios.

As the motley trio of villains rounded the last corner and walked up the last hall leading to the temple's main entrance, they should have seen rays of the sun kissing the sand dusted flagstone steps outside, but instead it looked like night had eclipsed this half of the planet rather than the mid day it should have been. A faint cawing shriek of avian predators could just barely be heard over the Professor's synthetic droning.

"This unit concurs with the etheric projection's..." Lady Alysane. "...assessment. Assuming the tomb hasn't been picked clean by holocron-thieving Jedi or grubby fingered fleshling treasure hunters, there may be several Sith artefacts of interest located within the Valley of Golg. A wise choice to investigate, Master. I am confident we can secure a few new exhibits for the Daemonium Bibliotheca. Our transport should be arriving right about..."

Before the spider-bot could complete that sentence, the synthetic squawk of his inbuilt vocabulator slowed to a stop as the SD-K4 assassin droid's multitude of red mechanical eye lenses came to focus on the sight outside the temple. Unbeknownst to Lord Valefor and his mechanical minions of the Legios Cybernetica, the Felstorm's arrival on Korriban coincided with the sixty-third summer of the Sith species calendar year, a rare migratory events that saw the sky blotted out by millions of predatory Shyrak. There were so many of them occupying the airspace that it made it impossible for repulsor craft to maneuver through the region. A Sheathipede-class shuttle summoned from the Felstorm to serve as an interplanetary transport for the Demon Lord and his party was caught among the crush of shyrak, suffering catastrophic failure as several of the creatures were sucked into the air-intake on its engines, blowing durasteel parts in flaming belches from malfunctioning engine cones. It rapidly spiraled into a dive and smashed into the valley sands fifty meters from where the trio were standing, exploding on impact with the grounds, scattering flaming steel across the sand. To make matters worse, the rest of the dunes around them didn't look much better. The damaged remains of destroyed Hailfire droids smouldered alongside the carcases of long dead leviathan, there were Multi-Troop Transports resting on their sides with their hulls ripped open and their worker droid occupants ground up inside into a fine metal shrapnel. Everywhere one looked, gilded B1s of the Exorcist Legion could be found in various states of disassembly, their muskets snapped like twigs or still sunk bayonet deep in the mummified corpses of the arisen dead.

In the distance they could see where HMP Gunships had been forced down by the shyrak swarms and were set upon by reanimated massassi or terentak, it was difficult to tell which given how few remains were left behind after those war machines had given a good accounting of themselves before succumbing to the sheer numbers of their foe. It wasn't all bad though. Thirteen Hellrider units came roaring over the dunes ahead of their position, the engines of their 125-Z treadspeeders snarling loudly as they tore up the red sand under their spinning tracts. They lowered what looked like obsidian spears with flaming tips, what were in reality power lances with super-heated armour puncturing heads. Their cavalry charge smashed through a column marching skeletons, grinding bone into dust beneath their tread, and setting ablaze the desiccated remains. The barbed biker droids ground to a stop at the temple entrance, a few feet from our stunned villains.

"Well. It's no Sheathipede..." Admitted the Professor, scraping the underside of his chassis with reversed leg. "...but, under the circumstance, it'll have to do." He scurried over to the riders and shooed three of the IG Lancer droids off of their bikes, privately thanking them for their service with a screech of hexagrammic binary code. Arachnus left the lead bike for the Demon Lord, selecting the bike positioned just behind and to the right of his Master's, leaving the other similarly positioned on the left side for the etheric projection, as it appeared capable of physically interacting with its surroundings.

A crack of thunder overhead signalled the start of the rain. Surprise, it wasn't really rain. All those shyrak in the sky created an awful lot of shyrak shit, which fell to the ground in the form of bluish droppings that temporarily changed Korriban's sands from red to purple, a once in a century event that attracted biologists from across the galaxy. A filthy deluge poured down from the sky, putting out fires from exploded munitions and damaged war machines, coating the entire valley in skyrak guano save for the shadow of the Felstorm. The star pyramid's massive bulk was large enough to force the shyrak swarms to divert around it, making it appear as though the Forge Master's flagship was at the heart of a leather winged hurricane. Riding beneath it would provide them with some cover, but one way or another, it was going to get filthy.

Treadspeeder engines snarled angrily as plasteel treads chewed through Korriban sands, speeding the Forge Master, Alysane, Arachnus, and their escort of ten Hellrider units towards their destination. Overhead, the massive black floating obelisk of the Felstorm carved a path through the sky, visible changing the pattern created by the Shyrak swarms as they were forced to move around it. Or at least, that's what the smart reptoavians did. The less intelligent among them flew straight into the hull, killing themselves on impact, causing their bodies to fall from the sky in the form of leathery clawed hail. Those caught under the front tracks of the growling 125-Zs were ground to mulch and ejected behind the rumbling bikes in a meaty spray. However, it wasn't until they reached the edge of the Shyrak shit curtain that had blanketed the ground before the star pyramid above moved to shield the area with its incredible bulk, that their progress began to slow, as the sand turned into a purple quagmire of avian excrement. Several of the IG-Lancers found themselves struggling with the controls, turning the accelerator handles as far they would go, only for their treads to slip and sink into the filthy forming mud. Foreword lumens winked to life and beamed yellow cones of illumination ahead of the stalling bikes as the headlight systems activated.

"We're not going to make much headway through this mire, Master." Screeched the irritated assassin-bot as he fought with the handlebars of his bike. :: Arachnus to the Felstorm, we could use a hand down here. ::

The response they got was exactly as you might expect. Across the black hull plates of the slow lumbering star pyramid, its banks of dual laser cannons opened up in a blistering display of light, concentrating overlapping bolts of laser on the desert ahead of the obstructed riders. As scalding hot laser boiled the landscape away, its super heated the desert sand to glass and evaporated whatever liquid remained, forming a glowing path across the dirty dunes towards their destination.