Thief of Dreams

Scientific achievement

Yeagerbomb - (noun). Ingredients:
1 repulsorlift, travelling at high speed;
1 bacta tank full of water, less the volume of 1 undies-clad Yeager Lexics (removed) ;
1 sudden stop.

— Strategy or destruction technique invented on Bethal IV by Mentat KitKat while also stripped down to a single pair of black BDU shorts.

Before Admiral Angelo d'Arcy can be rescued, his route must be determined. All remaining resources are split into very small teams and sent to check any possible transportation method or path.

An ImpSec operative reports to Captain Simon Illyan that an Imperial vessel disguised as the merchant ship Valera's Pride may be trying to sneak its prisoner along a route past Bethal System, stopping at the nearby defunct Hypernet Nav Relay Buoy, just a wee bit to the galactic north of Pelagia Province. Illyan assigns Captain Benacor and Padawan Ysadora to go check it out.

Shortly afterward, Master Yoda receives a decidedly odd series of emails from the former private eye: she thinks she might've found some long-missing VIPs in a village called Duskwick, she says, but she isn't sure. A woman calling herself "Lin Bai" is the village seamstress, but Vanya and Eleni recognize her as Senator Padmé Amidala Skywalker. A young man of the village introduces himself as "Dobai Penota", saying that he has lived there all twenty-five years of his life. He claims no relation to "Lin Bai" despite being in fact Padawan Luke Skywalker, according to Vanya.

The village of Duskwick itself is very strange, too. Located on the agricultural world of Bethal IV, the soil beneath it and in the surrounding forest all test highly for deurinium which is a very poor grade of phrikitemetal ore; phrik metal (and, therefore, deurinium) conducts and dissipates energy better than many metals, though deurinium does not handle the kinds of energies that most manufacturers would prefer. In this particular case, the net result is that Force-based energy systems tend toward chaos.

Well-known and previously typical pirate clan the Blood Wind Raiders are the local lords for this village ... and, unexpectedly, they take their position of authority seriously: they collect "tribute" from the villagers, yes, mostly in the form of food; and they patrol in shifts around the borders of the village and farmland, keeping people and livestock safe from the strange panther-monster-droid creatures which lurk in the surrounding forest.

The Raiders are serious and goal-oriented regarding their responsibilities: they patrol in threes or fours. They have at least one group on duty at each corner of the border during the hours of night. They respond very quickly to any sudden disturbances, because the "night panthers" have dragged villagers away before.

All this, and a general sensation of creepiness, when the investigative team has not even begun to find any hint of the prisoners' route.

Based on certain of her comments, Yoda suspects she may have found a terrible new Sith experiment -- and if that's the case, Vanya and Eleni are going to need a lot more backup than one squad of the Beskar Aran. Vanya sets to work trying to restore Luke Skywalker's sense of self, even handing "Dobai" a lightsaber and then shooting him in an attempt to make his lifelong training kick in, while Eleni has a frank discussion with the leader of the Blood Wind Raiders.

Things get worse.
Much worse.

In a cavern system under the nearby hills,

"Doctor Droid" conducts the "research programme" outlined for it by Dr. Jacques Legrange at the direction of Emperor Palpatine. One part of it is to fully suppress memories in a population of citizens, convincing them that their current lives are how things have always been therefore not something against which to rebel. Another part of it is the merger of vat-grown biological parts with preprogrammed droids. A third part of this "programme" somehow involves having people in glass canisters full of a bacta-mystery fluid mixture.

Those people include missing prisoners Yeager Lexics and KitKat

and Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.