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The Emperor is dead and gone, and without the wealth, power, and connections she had always been able to enjoy, Mara is left adrift. She's managed to scrape by, picking up odd jobs here and there, but nothing really sticks. It's not like any of it is really a career. She's struck out on her own a lot, scavenging, salvaging, trying to rebuild the bits and pieces of her life until she can get her hands on the person responsible for it all: Luke Skywalker.

It's probably little surprise that the old Sith worlds have managed to catch her attention - most of them are as good a place as any to find something interesting, especially if you're tenacious enough to not be dissuaded by some minor challenges. Minor challenges made more difficult by the fact that she doesn't feel the Force as strongly as she used to - or, at all, for the most part.

It's on one of these excursions that she comes across the man encased in carbonite. This place was supposed to be abandoned for a few thousand years - surely it's not still functional - he's probably dead. Her curiousity is piqued, though, and whoever he is, she's fairly confident she can handle it. She debates it for another few moments before giving in and letting her hand hit the panel to thaw him out.

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"Mm-hmm." Garth'zel is going to let the subject drop there. He's said his piece, the next move is up to her.

He stands to leave a moment later. "I'm going to go read. I've got a lot of catching up to do."

No point hanging around while she's annoyed.

It takes Mara a couple weeks to come around to the idea of looking into her lost connection to the Force. It's a long shot. She doubts it'll work. On the other hand... What harm could it do, really?

At worst, maybe it'll at least satisfy Garth'zel's curiousity enough to get him to leave the subject alone.

She clears her throat from her seat in the cockpit. "I've been thinking about what you said. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to try to restore my connection to the Force."

"It wouldn't, no," Garth'zel agrees, looking over at her. "When were you planning for me to take a look at things?"

It'll be best to do this when she has no plans for an hour or two, since there's no telling how long it'll take him to work out what's wrong and make a start at fixing it.

"No time like the present," Mara shrugs. "What do you need to do?"

She figures since she's finally agreed to let him have a look, it's probably best to get it over and done with. No sense in putting it off any longer.

"Take a look in your head, basically. I have the feeling that whatever was done, was done there." He's aware that what he's asking of her could potentially be sticky. He'll just have to hope that it's already occurred to her that he'll probably need to go poking around in there.

Is she thrilled about letting someone poke around in her head? Nope. Did she already figure out that that's what this would come down to? Pretty much. Her expression is sour, but her mind's already made up. If they're going to do this, they may as well just get it over with.

"Fine. Do what you need to do."

"I'll do my best to ignore anything that isn't actually relevant," Garth'zel promises, leaning back in his seat, arms folded across his chest and with eyes closed to help him focus better on what he's doing.

She'll likely sense an extra person in there fairly soon, even if not exactly what he's looking at as Garth'zel tries to find what's wrong.

It takes some time, but he finally finds the anomaly, hissing in a breath as he examines it. It takes him some time to work out just what it was and what it's supposed to do, but once he does, he withdraws from her mind and opens his eyes. Working out how to fix it will have to wait until later. "I'm not sure whether to be impressed or to want to kill him myself."

"Fair enough," Mara nods.

It takes a lot of conscious effort not to try to immediately boot him out as soon as she feels the unfamiliar presence, but she tries to just sit back and ignore it and let him do his thing.

Finally, after what seems like far too long, he withdraws, and she's relieved that that's over for just a second until he opens his mouth.

"What? What did you find?"

"Long story short, your issues with your connection to the Force are Palpatine's fault. He tied if they worked to if you did something. It looks like it should go back to normal if whatever it is gets done. Can you think of anything he wanted you to do that you haven't done for whatever reason?" He couldn't make out that part. Just that her Force abilities were tied to a command of some kind.

Her mind snaps back immediately to the vacation Palpatine insisted she take as a reward for assassinating Dequc. The realization that the job was far too easy, the simulation she ran that proved the man she killed was actually just a decoy. Reaching out through the Force to inform Palpatine of what she had learned and...

Suddenly being slammed with the image of Vader's betrayal. Of Luke and Palpatine's supposedly loyal apprentice striking him down. The agony of his death that felt like it could be her own. His final command, echoing in her mind.

YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER.

She was unconscious for days, adrift in her own consciousness, as her mind tried to process what had happened. When she awoke, she was in Imperial custody, as the higher ups in the Empire scrambled to figure out who was going to take power with both the Emperor and his right hand out of the picture. No connection to the Force, no nothing. It never occurred to her that it could be something beyond some damage done to her mind after the traumatic experience of Palpatine's death.

"Yeah," she nods after a moment. "Yeah, I can think of something."

Garth'zel waits for her to finish working her way through things, aware that it was probably going to take some time.

"Anything you feel like telling me about? With an added note that knowing will probably make it easier for me to try to uncouple your Force abilities from whatever it is." He pauses before adding, "It's probably going to take awhile to figure out how to do it, even so."

This doesn't look like a fast or easy fix.

She's angry, frustrated, and understandably, feeling a bit betrayed. Flatly, she responds, "Not really."

After a second, though, she gives in, "Yeah. Fine. When the Emperor was killed, he let me experience it as well. He told me to kill Luke Skywalker, and... well, that's the last thing I remember."

"Hmm." Garth'zel mulls that over for a minute. "Hence your interest in killing Skywalker."

He's not going to mention that said interest was probably a compulsion. She's ticked off enough as it is. If she works it out on her own, fine. But one thing at a time.

No, it's not compulsion, it's revenge, and there's going to be no convincing her otherwise.

"Yeah," she nods. "He ruined my life, after all."

Garth'zel bites back on the urge that his own life was considerably more ruined. Instead, he'll take a different tack. "It looks like the Emperor had a hand in it as well."

A pause.

"No, I'm not blaming him for getting killed. I imagine it would be easier for you to make your way through things if you had full access to your Force abilities."

Even if the Emperor hadn't cut off her ability to use the Force, his death effectively cut her off from the Empire, so she can't really hold him entirely responsible.

"Well, yes. I never would have suspected it was intentional, though."

"Well, now you know." He considers things. "I think I'm going to need time to try to decide where to even begin on undoing things."

No, he doesn't consider running off to find and kill this Skywalker person an option.

Killing Skywalker is certainly an option Mara has considered. Unfortunately, even if she had the means to track him down at this point, she'd still be a little outgunned without the use of the Force.

"Well, let me know when you come up with something." Obviously.

"I will," Garth'zel says with a nod, rolling his shoulders as he gets up. "I'm going to see if meditating helps any. Don't expect to see me for probably at least a couple of hours."

"All right," she nods. Odds are, in a few hours, he's still going to find her in the cockpit.

Garth'zel spends the promised time in meditation, but while he's shown plenty of things involving the Empreror and, he assumes, this Luke Skywalker person, the Force is vague about what he should do.

Which he probably should have expected, honestly, but it still would have been nice if it was more useful.

He reappears in the cockpit at the end, taking a seat with a disgusted sigh. "The Force didn't feel like being overly helpful. At least, not in a way I can puzzle out. Maybe I'll see if it feels like being more useful tomorrow."

Mara's gone this long without the Force, and really, she's not getting her hopes up on recovering her connection to it any time soon. "Well, I suppose we'll just have to be patient until something useful comes to mind, then."

"There's not really a lot of choice," he says sourly before shaking his head with a sigh. "How long until we reach our next stop?"

"I suppose not." Really, she wasn't expecting an instant fix, or even a fix at all, so it's difficult to be too disappointed. She checks the panel as he asks for their ETA. "We should be there in about twenty minutes."

"Mmm. Anything in particular supposed to happen there?" With Garth'zel around to pay for things, work isn't quite as much of a necessity. It can be more of a thing to keep from getting bored.