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Darth Plagueis Respect Thread - Updated

“The power of the dark side is an illness no true Sith would wish to be cured of.”

A revamped respect thread for one of the most powerful Sith Lords of all. The content of this blog will be split into the following parts:

  1. Force Power
  2. Force Knowledge
  3. Physical Attributes & Force Augmentation
  4. Lightsaber & Martial Arts Skill
  5. Force Abilities
  6. Cosmic Mastery

For the best reading experience, please peruse in blog format.

Now without further ado. Respect Darth Plagueis the Wise.

No Caption Provided

Force Accolades

Darth Plagueis was once the most powerful, and one of the most brilliant Sith Lords who ever lived:

Darth Plagueis, Novel Synopsis
Darth Plagueis, Novel Synopsis

Darth Plagueis: one of the most brilliant Sith Lords who ever lived.

Darth Plagueis, Novel Synopsis

As the penultimate member of the Order of the Sith Lords, Plagueis inherited the ever-increasing power of well over two dozen generations of Banite Sith:

For a millennium, the Sith maintained the order in secrecy, passing down their evil heritage. As they gained knowledge of the dark side of the Force, their powers increased with each generation.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace Scrapbook

For a thousand years we continued to follow Bane's Rule of Two, existing in the shadows, biding our time, growing in power, feeding our hatred.

Star Wars Insider 88: Heritage of the Sith

Ultimately, Bane's plan produced more powerful Sith Lords with every generation.

Star Wars: Force & Destiny

“Descended from Darth Bane, we are the select few who refuse to be carried by the Force and who carry it instead-thirty in a millennium rather than the tens of thousands fit to be Jedi.”

Plagueis, Darth Plagueis

Darth Plagueis was adept in some of the most arcane and unnatural applications of the Force:

Plagueis, the wise, was an adept of some of the most arcane and unnatural applications of the Force.

StarWars.com Databank: Darth Sidious

Darth Plagueis attained unprecedented mastery over life and death, a realm of ability described as the 'ultimate power':

Darth Plagueis: Like all Sith Lords before him, he craves absolute power. But like no Sith Lord ever, he possesses the ultimate power—over life and death.

Darth Plagueis, Novel Synopsis

For like no other disciple of the dark side, Darth Plagueis learns to command the ultimate power … over life and death.

Darth Plagueis, Novel Synopsis

His inward turn had enabled him to master the equally powerful energies of order and disorder, creation and entropy, life and death.

Darth Plagueis

"This puts me in mind of an old legend," Palpatine murmured idly. "Anakin-are you familiar with The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?"

Anakin shook his head.

"Ah, I thought not. It is not a story the Jedi would tell you.

It's a Sith legend, of a Dark Lord who had turned his sight inward so deeply that he had come to comprehend, and master life itself. And-because the two are one, when seen clearly enough-death itself."

Revenge of the Sith novelisation

"To cheat death is a power only one has achieved, but if we work together, I know we can discover the secret.”

Darth Sidious, Revenge of the Sith

Darth Sidious attests Plagueis’ ability to manipulate midi-chlorians to his great power and mastery over the Force:

“Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life.”

Palpatine, Revenge of the Sith

Through midi-chlorian manipulation Plagueis was able to tap into the deepest strata of the Force in ways that his ancient Sith predecessors had not:

In the same way that the pre-Bane Sith had been responsible for their own extinction, the great dark side Lords of the past had doomed themselves to the nether realm through their attempts to conquer death by feeding off the energies of others, rather than by tapping the deepest strata of the Force and learning to speak the language of the midi-chlorians.

Darth Plagueis

Palpatine perceived Plagueis through the Force as terrifying nexus of energy able to contain the full power of the dark side:

Seen through the Force, he was a nuclear oval of mottled light, a rotating orb of terrifying energy. If the Maladian attack had weakened him physically, it had also helped to shape his etheric body into a vessel sufficiently strong to contain the full power of the dark side.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis came to understand that there were no powers he could not achieve through sheer effort of will, and that if a Sith of equal power had preceded him, their secrets had been lost to history:

But Plagueis now understood that Tenebrous had been wrong about sorcery, as he had been wrong about so many things. Yes, the gift was strongest in those who, with scant effort, could allow themselves to be subsumed by the currents of the Force and become conduits for the powers of the dark side. But there was an alternative path to those abilities, and it led from a place where the circle closed on itself and sheer will substituted for selflessness. Plagueis understood, too, that there were no powers beyond his reach; none he couldn’t master through an effort of will. If a Sith of equal power had preceded him, then that one had taken his or her secrets to the grave, or had locked them away in holocrons that had been destroyed or had yet to surface.

Darth Plagueis

According to James Luceno, had it come a battle between Plagueis and Sidious, the former would more likely have emerged victorious, suggesting Plagueis to be the stronger of the two:

Q: Do you feel that, had it come to a contest of lightsabers or Force powers, Sidious would have prevailed anyway?

A: If it had come to a duel, I think Plagueis may have found a way to undermine his apprentice.

James Luceno, Facebook Q&A

Plagueis had been engineered by Darth Tenebrous to be strong in the Force:

A decade later, Hego would learn that while Caar had, in fact, done his best to keep his Force abilities to himself, he had come to the attention of Nome when the two had chanced to meet on High Port Space Center. Years would pass before Nome found Hego’s mother, whom he had conscripted not as an apprentice—for she wasn’t strong enough in the Force—but as a disciple, whose task it had been to romance Caar and bear the fruit of that seduction: a child whom Nome and Bith science predicted would be born strong in the Force.

Darth Plagueis

After infiltrating the body of his apprentice, Tenebrous finds Plagueis’ connection to the Force to be considerably greater than he’d ever suspected:

As he continued to explore, Tenebrous gradually became aware of the full range of his apprentice's connection to the Force, which was considerably deeper, broader, and more powerful than Tenebrous had ever suspected.

The Tenebrous Way

Consequence of his Master’s death, Plagueis finds his powers amplified:

With 11-4D deep in processing mode, Plagueis withdrew a vial of his own blood and subjected it to analysis. Despite the recent amplification of his powers he sensed that his midi-chlorian count had not increased since the events on Bal’demnic, and the analysis of the blood sample confirmed his suspicions.

Darth Plagueis

Despite being over a decade into his training, Plagueis’ remained powerful beyond Palpatine’s comprehension:

Palpatine hadn't been attempting to flatter Plagueis when he had called him wise-not entirely, at any rate. The Muun was powerful beyond Palpatine’s present understanding.

Darth Plagueis

And despite his powers increasing tenfold since, Palpatine remained uncertain whether he was as powerful and masterful in the Force as Plagueis:

Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying. He sometimes wondered: Was he a level behind? Two levels behind? Such questions were precisely what had driven generations of Sith apprentices ultimately to challenge their Masters. The uncertainty about who was the more powerful.

Darth Plagueis

Some two decades before Plagueis’ prime, Sidious believed that alongside himself his Master was more than equal to the Jedi’s most powerful members:

While he accepted that he and Plagueis were more than equal to the most powerful of the Jedi Order, he understood that they were no match for their combined strength—the Sith imperative notwithstanding.

Darth Plagueis

Through experimentation into the Force, Plagueis’ finds his own midi-chlorian count increased:

Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.

Darth Plagueis

Through his sheer presence in the Force, Plagueis unbalances the planetary nexus on Naboo, triggering mountain shaking earthquakes and freak weather event:

Later it would be said by Naboo and Gungan alike that they couldn’t recall a colder winter than the one that followed Hego Damask’s autumnal visit to their world. The rivers and even the falls below Theed froze; the rolling plains and tall forests were blanketed three meters deep with snow; plasmic quakes rocked the Gallo Mountains and the Lake Country, the Holy Places and the undersea city of Otoh Gunga; and many of the egresses of the underwaterways that hollowed the planet were blocked by ice floes.

Darth Plagueis

“On my first visit to your homeworld I recognized it as a nexus in the Force. And I remember thinking how appropriate it was that the dark side should be hiding on such a beautiful planet.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis intimidates a young Palpatine by revealing only a fraction of his power:

“Careful, boy,” he said after a moment. “You are not the only being in this plush stateroom with the power to kill.” Palpatine’s eyes opened wide and he took a step back. “I can sense it …” Plagueis grew deliberately haughty. “What you sense is a fraction of what I can bring to bear.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis unleashing his dark powers against a group of Maladin assassins creates an overwhelming disturbance in the Force, felt by both Palpatine and the Jedi, and leaving an aroma of dark side energy in its wake:

Palpatine paced away from Pestage. He opened himself fully to the Force, and was left staggered by an inrush of overwhelming malevolence. He planted his left hand on the desk for support and managed a stuttering inhale. Somewhere close by, the dark side was unspooling.

Darth Plagueis

“Master, we need to leave at once,” Sidious said. “What I felt, the Jedi may have felt, and they will come.” “Let them,” Plagueis rasped. “Let them inhale the aroma of the dark side.”

Darth Plagueis

“I’m relieved to learn that I didn’t disappoint you, Master. But the Jedi summoned the police to the Fobosi district moments after we left. The plan is already endangered.”

Color rose in Plagueis’s cheeks. “The Jedi have long known that the dark side has been reawakened and cannot be checked by them. Now they have felt it on their own Coruscant.”

Darth Plagueis

The experiments Plagueis performed in his volcano lair on Aborah transform it into a dark side nexus beyond anything Sidious has experienced, and rather what he would expect to find on a Sith world:

A standard month after the events on Coruscant, Plagueis summoned Sidious to Muunilinst. Sidious had visited the High Port skyhook but had never been invited downside, and now he found himself soaring over one of the planet’s unspoiled blue oceans in a stylish airspeeder piloted by two Sun Guards. As the speeder approached Aborah, he settled deeply into the Force and was rewarded with a vision of the mountain island as a transcendent vortex of dark energy unlike anything he had ever experienced. It was something he would have expected to encounter only on Korriban or some other Sith world.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis’ death triggers an immense disturbance in the Force, the dark side energies unleashed conferring themselves to Sidious and greatly enhancing his power:

A tremor took hold of the planet. Sprung from death, it unleashed itself in a powerful wave, at once burrowing deep into the world’s core and radiating through its saccharine atmosphere to shake the stars themselves. At the quake’s epicenter stood Sidious, one elegant hand vised on the burnished sill of an expansive translucency, a vessel filled suddenly to bursting, the Force so strong within him that he feared he might disappear into it, never to return. But the moment didn’t constitute an ending so much as a true beginning, long overdue; it was less a transformation than an intensification—a gravitic shift.

Darth Plagueis

Force Knowledge

From his Sith predecessors Darth Plagueis inherited a thousand years of teachings, including study into every aspect of both the Force and Jedi lore itself:

The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years' intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves.

They had become new.

Revenge of the Sith novelisation

Under the tutelage of Darth Plagueis, I inherited the Sith Archives – more than a thousand years of teachings passed in secret from master to apprentice.

Palpatine, Book of Sith

On Aborah Plagueis possessed one of the finest libraries in the galaxy outside of archives of Obrao-skai and the Jedi Temple:

The Muuns were said to abhor literature and to loathe keeping records of anything other than loan notices, actuarial tables, and legal writs, and yet Plagueis was guardian of the one of the finest libraries to be found anywhere outside Obroa-skai or the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Here, neatly arranged and cataloged and stored in climate-controlled cases, was a collection of treatises and commentaries accumulated over centuries by the Sith and their often unwitting agents. Ancient histories of the Rakata and the Vjun; texts devoted to the Followers of Palawa, the Chatos Academy, and the Order of Dai Bendu; archives that had once belonged to House Malreaux; annals of the Sorcerers of Tund and of Queen Amanoa of Onderon; biological studies of the ysalimiri and vornskrs of Myrkr, and of the taozin of Va’art. Certain long-lived species, like the Wookiees, Hutts, Falleen, and Toydarians, were afforded galleries of their own.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was a master of arcane and unnatural knowledge:

In truth, Palpatine was well versed in the ways of the Force, having been apprentice to Darth Plagueis the Wise, a Sith Lord who was a master of arcane and unnatural knowledge.

The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia

Despite his power increasing tenfold Palpatine was not sure he’d learned all his Master’s secrets:

Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis’ mastery over midi-chlorian manipulation reflected his vast knowledge of the dark side:

“Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith so powerful and so wise, he could use the Force to influence the midi-chlorians to create life. He had such a knowledge of the dark side, he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying.”

Palpatine, Revenge of the Sith

Through experimenting on Venamis, Plagueis unlocked some of the deepest secrets of the Force:

“But Venamis has been a gift; essential in helping me unlock some of the deepest secrets of the Force.”

Darth Plagueis

Forgoing sleep, Plagueis dedicates twenty years of unbroken study into both midi-chlorian manipulation and the few remaining secrets of the Force:

Determined never again to be caught off guard, he had trained himself to go without sleep, and had devoted two standard decades to day-and-night experimentation with midi-chlorian manipulation and attempts to wrest a few last secrets from the Force, so that he-and presumably his human apprentice-might live forever. His inward turn had enabled him to master the equally powerful energies of order and disorder, creation and entropy, life and death.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis claimed to have unlocked the secrets of life itself:

I have unlocked the secrets of life and by doing so will enable long-term plans to ensure Sith dominance for centuries.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis studied the fundamental principles of the Force, including Sith magic and mysticism, in ways that previous Sith Lords had not:

What is the Force? The Jedi say it is created by life. But I say the Force creates life. It is simple deduction – an obvious conclusion when supported by structural experimentation. Yet consider this: the galaxy’s leading scientific minds are largely ignorant of the Force, and the galaxy’s most skilled Force-users reject science. The latter are caught up in romantic mysticism, convinced they have been called by a higher power. The former has no excuse.

Thus, I will be the first to pursue this line of inquiry. A scientific understanding of the Force is not the same as the memorisation of incantations. Science seeks to understand the principle behind the reaction, not merely how to replicate it – particularly when the formulas are bloated with centuries of empty ornamentation.

To study alchemy, one must strip away its rhyming phrases and its perverse obsession with blood sacrifice. To study shamanistic talisman, one must look beyond the words of invocation. When a talisman unleashes its power, what is the true trigger? The words? The speaker’s tone? His mental state? If a talisman’s power resides inside the gem, what will happen if a fragment is shaved off, then another? Does the energy dissipate when sufficient mass is lost. Is the ratio consistent for similar gems and similar talismans?

The Sith of old never asked these questions, for tradition and obedience extinguished their spark of curiosity. And these questions are much more than idle speculation. My science will remove everything superfluous. In this way, the true nature of the fundamental elements that the Jedi and Sith wield so casually will be revealed.

So it must be that I am the first. I will change it all. The Sith wallowed in ritual even during the centuries under the Rule of Two, playing dress-up in frightening costumes and posturing for our followers. I will burn away the colourful wrappings and study the skeletal structure that reveals the architecture of reality.

The Science of Creating Life, Book of Sith

Through doing so, revolutionised Sith understanding of the relationship between biology and the Force:

My Master, Darth Plagueis, recorded his own musings on what he believed to be the true nature of the dark side. Although he had a fatal blind spot, he revolutionised Sith understanding of the relationship between biology and the Force.

Darth Sidious, Book of Sith

Physical Attributes & Force Augmentation

Strength

Plagueis scales a building by clinging to the wall:

Plagueis stepped away from the wall to glance at the upper-story windows, all of which were dark, save for an arched opening near the end of the wall. Crouching, he maneuvered through bushes under a series of wide windows, then began to scale the wall, fastened to it like an insect.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis breaks his Master's neck with a strike:

Plagueis leaned away from him, nonchalant, but in fact filled with an icy fury. "I'll find a way home, Tenebrous, as will you." And with a chopping motion of his left hand, he broke the Bith's neck.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis breaks into a transparisteel cockpit by assailing it with his fists:

When he tried springing the hatch, however, he found that it wouldn’t budge. He was ultimately able to gain entry to the cockpit by assailing the transparisteel canopy with a series of Force blows.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis launches a Zabrak across a cabin with a kick, crushing his chest cavity and slamming him against a bulkhead with enough force to snap his spine and pulp his arteries:

The Muun caught the lightsaber, but instead of bringing it to bear against Maa Kaap, he danced and twirled out of reach of the vibroblade and commenced parrying the Zabrak's martial kicks and punches, a side-kick to the thorax drove Maa Kaap clear across the cabin and slamming into the bulkhead. OneOne-FourDee’s audio pickups registered the snap of the Zabrak’s spine and the bursting of pulmonary arteries.

Darth Plagueis

He remained by the Quara’s side for a few moments, then moved quickly to Maa Kaap, from whose crushed chest cavity blood bubbled with each shallow breath.

Darth Plagueis

With his bare hands and in a severely injured state, Plagueis snaps necks, smashes skulls and windpipes, and plunges his fists through armoured torsos:

The closest of the assassins swung to him with raised vibroblades and rushed forward, only to be flung backward off the canted stage and against the room’s curved walls. Others Plagueis felled with his hands by snapping necks and putting his fists through armored torsos…

…In blinding motion his hands and feet smashed skulls and wind-pipes.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis disarms Venamis through sheer force, nearly removing his fingers in process:

The blade didn’t go deep enough to puncture the Bith’s lung but scorched him from chest to chin. As his large, cleft head snapped backward in retreat, Plagueis brought his lightsaber straight down, tearing Venamis’s weapon from his gloved hand and nearly taking off his long fingers, as well.

Darth Plagueis

Speed & Agility

Plagueis races across a landscape in a dazzling blur:

Cinching the robe around his waist, he began to move, slowly at first, then gathering speed, until to any being watching he would have appeared a dazzling blur; an errant dust devil racing across the treeless terrain.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis all but outraces rainfall:

Plagueis fixed the lightsaber hilt to his hip and set out at a fast clip, all but outracing the rain.

Darth Plagueis

Alongside Palpatine, Plagueis all but takes flight in pursuit of a herd of quadrupeds:

In mad pursuit of their prey and all but taking flight, the two Sith, Master and apprentice for eleven years now, bounded across the grassy terrain, their short capes snapping behind them, vibroblades clenched in their hands and bare forearms flecked with gore; blood caked in the human’s long hair and dried on the Muun’s hairless brow. Twisting and swirling around them was a herd of agile, long-necked quadrupeds with brown-and-black-striped fur; identical and moving as if possessed of a single mind, leaping at the same instant, reversing direction, cycloning gregariously over the short-napped savanna.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis appears to 11-4D as a gust of wind, forcing him to adjust his processing input to properly perceive him:

The woebegone had just reverted to realspace when 11-4D’s audio sensors registered unusual sounds from aft: an activation click, a prolonged hiss of energy, a dopplering slash, a stuttering exhalation of breath. The sounds were followed by a sudden outpouring of heat from the corridor that accessed the cargo bays and what might have been interpreted as a gust of wind. Only by adjusting the input rate of its photoreceptors was the droid able to identify the blur that raced into the cabin space as a male Muun dressed in a hooded robe, trousers, and softboots that reached his shins.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis moves as such speeds to appear like flashes of lighting to an onlooker:

The contest took them backward and forward through the trees, across narrow streams, and up onto piles of rocks that were the ruins of an ancient sentry post. Plagueis took a moment to wonder if anyone at the fort was observing the results of the contest, which, from afar, must have looked like lightning flashing through the forest’s understory.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis leaps over a ten-meter-high wall with ease:

He paused at the nebulous edge of the illuminated area to confirm his bearings, then made straight for the castle’s ten-meter-high southern wall and leapt to the top without breaking stride. Just as quickly and as effortlessly he dropped into the garden below and sprinted into the shadows cast by an ornamental shrub trimmed to resemble some whimsical beast.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis as an apprentice was slightly more agile than his Master:

“Master, allow me to lead,” Plagueis said when he reached Tenebrous. He was only slightly more agile than the Bith, but he had better night vision and a keener sense of direction, over and above what the Force imparted.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis evades, deflects and absorbs a barrage of blaster fire from omnidirectional shooters, moving at speeds almost beyond 11-4D’s processing ability, despite it extending to the calculating blaster bolt trajectories:

The Muun’s reaction to the barrage of bolts that converged on him required almost more processing power than the droid had at its disposal. By employing a combination of body movements, lightsaber, and naked right hand, the agile sentient evaded, deflected, or returned every shot that targeted him.

Darth Plagueis

Slowly surrendering energy, the bolts caromed from the deck and bulkheads, touching off alarms, prompting a switch to emergency illumination, and unleashing cascades of fire-suppressant foam from the ceiling aerosols…

…Only 11-4D’s ability to calculate trajectories and react instantaneously to danger kept it from being on the receiving end of any of the numerous ricochets.

Darth Plagueis

Through a combination of speed, acrobatics and agility, Plagueis deflects and evades omnidirectional blaster fire from the first ring of two hundred heavily armed automata:

On Hypori they were the prey, standing back-to-back in their black zeyd-cloth hooded robes at the center of concentric rings of droids, retrofitted by Baktoid Armor to function as combat automata. Two hundred programmed assailants—bipedal, treaded, some levitated by antigrav generators—armed with a variety of weapons, ranging from hand blasters to short-barreled burst-rifles.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis put his words into action as the first ring of droids began to converge on them, staggering the attack and triggering bursts at random. Orbiting Sidious, the Muun’s blade warded off every volley, returning the bolts to their sources, or deflecting them into the façades of the faux buildings surrounding them or into other droids. At other times Plagueis made no attempt to redirect the attacks, but simply twisted and torqued his rangy body, allowing the bolts to miss him by centimeters. Around the two Sith, the automata collapsed one after the next, gushing lubricants from holed reservoirs or exploding in a hail of alloy parts, until all were heaped on the ferrocrete floor.

“The next ring is yours,” Plagueis said.

Darth Plagueis

Then in alternation with a young Palpatine, Plagueis repeats this process until the floor was piled high with smoking husks:

The droids continued to converge, ring after ring of them, until the floor was piled high with smoking husks. Plagueis issued a voice command that brought the onslaught to an abrupt end and deactivated his lightsaber. The pinging of cooling weapons, the hiss of escaping gas, the unsteady whir of failing servomotors punctuated the sudden silence. Alloy limbs spasmed and photoreceptors winked out, surrendering their eerie glow. The recycled air was rotten with the smell of fried circuitry.

"Feast your eyes on our handiwork," Plagueis said, gesturing broadly.

Sidious switched off his weapon. "I see nothing but ruined droids."

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis bypasses Venamis’ defences with an attack velocity that turns his lightsaber into a blinding rod, scorching his opponent from chest to chin:

At the height of Venamis’s attack, Plagueis came back into himself with such fury that his lightsaber became a blinding rod. A two-handed upward swing launched from between his legs caught Venamis off guard. The blade didn’t go deep enough to puncture the Bith’s lung but scorched him from chest to chin.

Darth Plagueis

In a test of speed, agility and accuracy Plagueis alongside a young Palpatine defeats an army of several hundred Kursid warriors without killing them or suffering a scratch, and armed only with Force pikes:

“The next few hours will test the limits of your agility, speed, and accuracy,” Plagueis said, as several hundred of the biggest, bravest, and most skilled warriors—their bodies daubed in pigments derived from plants, clay, and soil—began to separate themselves from the crowds.

Darth Plagueis

To the clamorous beating of drums and the wailing of the onlookers, the warriors brandished their weapons, raised a deafening war cry, and attacked. A nod from Plagueis, and the two Sith sped across the plain to meet them, flying among them like wraiths, evading arrows, gleaming spear tips, and blows from battle-axes, going one against one, two, or three, but felling opponent after opponent with taps from the force pikes, until among the hundreds of jerking, twitching bodies sprawled on the rough ground, only one was left standing.

Darth Plagueis

Durability

Plagueis withstands the polar weather conditions of Mygeeto in thin clothing and with seemingly without discomfort, where the temperature was cold enough to freeze Palpatine’s blood:

The obedient orphan stood shivering in swirling snow. Around him rose ice pinnacles shaped like jagged teeth; a glacial wind howled through them. Plagueis stood nearby, flakes of snow and ice gyrating around him but never lighting on him, melting before they reached him. Unlike Sidious, who was outfitted in a thin enviro-suit, the Sith Lord was wearing only a cloak, narrow trousers, and a skull-cap.

Darth Plagueis

“Your blood is close to frozen. Too much time here and you will die.”

Plagueis speaking to Palpatine, Darth Plagueis

And before he was even eight years old, Plagueis was, without an enviro-suit, capable of enduring the same planet’s most violent storms:

“It was on this world that I first became aware of my Force powers and dark impulses,” he said, loudly enough to be heard over the wind. “Compared with temperate Muunilinst, Mygeeto is ruthless and uncompromising, but I learned to adapt to its harsh conditions, and before the age of eight I could venture out into the most violent storm dressed in less than you wear now.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis trains himself to forgo sleep, and indeed did not sleep for over twenty years:

Determined never again to be caught off guard, he had trained himself to go without sleep

Darth Plagueis

With dreamy weariness beginning to get the better of him, it was all Plagueis could do to lift the glass to his nose. No sooner did he set the drink down than it tipped over, saturating the tablecloth. His eyelids began to flicker and close, and his breathing slowed. In twenty years of never having had to contend with Plagueis in a state of sleep, the transpirator clicked repeatedly in adjustment, almost as if in panic.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis is seemingly unaffected by a swarm of voracious insects feeding off his blood:

Predators of any size had been hunted to extinction on the northern island continents, but the deep gorges were home to countless varieties of voracious insects that set upon him in clouds as he picked his way through the dense underbrush. Lowering his body temperature and slowing his breathing to alter the mixture of gases in his exhalations did little to dissuade the insects, so after a while he ceased all attempts at warding them off and surrendered to their thirst for blood, which they drew freely from his face, neck, and hands. Let them devour the old Plagueis, he thought.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was able to harden his skin so to be impervious to physical attacks:

Now Zuto and PePe dived at the Muun from both sides and actually managed to get a hold on him. But it was as if the Muun had turned to stone. The Kaleesh and the Quara attacked with teeth and claws, but to no perceptible effect.

Darth Plagueis

Despite making no attempt to defend himself, Plagueis is able to endure Sidious blasting him with lightning whilst drawing on the dark side more deeply than he ever had:

Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality? The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis numbs the pain of having his lower back pulped by rock:

At some point, probably when he was focused on murder, a rock or some other projectile had pulped a large area of his lower back, and now the thin tunic he wore beneath the enviro-suit was saturated with blood. Despite the swirling dust, he inhaled deeply, eliciting a stab of pain from his rib cage and a cough that spewed blood into the hot air. Drawing on the Force, he numbed himself to the pain and tasked his body to limit the damage as best it could. When the injury ceased to preoccupy him, he surveyed the grotto, remaining anchored in place but turning a full circle.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis is attacked by Maladin assassins, a decapitator disk removing a portion of his face, and severing his trachea along with several blood vessels. Yet despite being having also lost copious amounts of blood and multiple of his hearts threatening to fail, he summons the strength to attack his assassins physically and with the Force:

Plagueis pressed his right hand to the right side of his neck to discover that a disk had made off with a considerable hunk of his jawbone and neck, and in its cruel passing had severed his trachea and several blood vessels.

Darth Plagueis

With blood welling out from under Plagueis's cupped right hand and glistening in a pool on the floor beneath his neck, they had taken him for dead.

Darth Plagueis

Not a meter away stood 11-4D, five decapitator disks protruding from his alloy body and telltale lights blinking, in the midst of a self-diagnosis routine. Having run himself through a similar test, Plagueis knew that he had lost a great deal of blood, and that one of his subsidiary hearts was in fibrillation. Sith techniques had helped him perform chemical cardioversions on his other two hearts, but one of them was working so hard to compensate that it, too, was in danger of becoming arrhythmic. Plagueis moved his eyes just enough to fix the locations of some of the two dozen assassins that had survived the Sun Guards’ counterattack; then he dug deep into the Force and catapulted himself to his feet.

The closest of the assassins swung to him with raised vibroblades and rushed forward, only to be flung backward off the canted stage and against the room's curved walls. Others Plagueis felled with his hands by snapping necks and putting his fists through armored torsos. Spreading his arms wide, he clapped his hands together, turning every loose object in the vicinity into a deadly projectile.

Darth Plagueis

After Plagueis’ second heart fails, he remains conscious despite paralysing pain, before shattering the eardrums of his attackers, smashing skulls and windpipes and blowing apart their bodies:

His second subsidiary heart failed, paralyzing him with pain and nearly plunging him into unconsciousness. The assassins wasted not a moment, throwing themselves at him in groups, though in a vain attempt to penetrate the Force shield he raised. Again he rallied, this time with a ragged sound dredged from deep inside that erupted from him like a sonic weapon, shattering the eardrums of those within ten meters and compelling the rest to bring their hands to their ears.

In blinding motion his hands and feet smashed skulls and windpipes. He stopped once to conjure a Force wave that all but atomized the bodies of six Maladians. He spun through a turn, dragging the wave halfway around the room to kill half a dozen more.

Darth Plagueis

Despite incurring additional damage Plagueis remained capable of using the Force against the Maladians and before the arrival of his apprentices was on the brink of unleashing a final hell on his opponents:

But even that wasn't enough to deter his assailants. They flew against him again, making the most of his momentary weakness to open gashes on his arms and shoulders. Down on one knee, he levitated a Sun Guard blaster from the floor and called it toward him; but one of the assassins succeeded in altering its trajectory by hurling himself into the path of the airborne weapon.

With nothing more than the Force of his mind, Plagueis rattled the floor, knocking some of the assassins off their feet, but others rushed in to take their places, slashing at him with their vibroblades from every angle. He knew that he had life enough to conjure one final counteroffensive. He was a moment from loosing hell on the Maladians when he sensed Sidious enter the room.

Darth Plagueis

Then in spite of his grievous injuries Plagueis alongside his apprentice delivers swift death to the remaining Maladins:

Sidious and Sate Pestage, in whose hands a repeating blaster fashioned a hell of its own, a barrage of light that separated limbs from torsos, hooded heads from cloaked shoulders. Hurrying to Plagueis’s side, Sidious lifted him upright, and in unison they brought swift death to the rest.

Darth Plagueis

Later Palpatine would remark that the damage his Master had sustained had done nothing to diminish his strength in the Force:

Sidious pivoted to see his Master limp into the room, mouth, chin, and neck concealed behind a breath mask or transpirator of some sort. Most of the vibroblade wounds had healed, but his skin looked especially wan. Sidious had been wondering if Plagueis had been weakened by the attack, but he saw now that, for all the punishment his body had sustained at the hands of the Maladian assassins, the Muun was no less strong in the Force.

Darth Plagueis

Lightsaber & Martial Arts Skill

By Plagueis’ time the Sith had outgrown the use of lightsabers, using them only to humiliate the Jedi:

The Sith grew past the use of lightsabers, Sidious had told him. But we continue to use them, if only to humiliate the Jedi.

Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader

Despite having little interest in dueling, Tenebrous pronounced Plagueis a master of the art:

To Plagueis, lightsaber duels were tedious affairs, full of wasted emotion and needless acrobatics. Tenebrous, however, who had pronounced Plagueis a master of the art

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was heritage to a thousand years of study into every aspect of Jedi lore, which would have included all their lightsaber forms and techniques:

The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years' intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves.

They had become new.

Darth Plagueis

According to James Luceno, had come a battle between Plagueis and Sidious, the former would more likely have emerged victorious, suggesting parity to his apprentice as a duelist - a master of all seven styles of lightsaber combat:

Q: Do you feel that, had it come to a contest of lightsabers or Force powers, Sidious would have prevailed anyway?

A: If it had come to a duel, I think Plagueis may have found a way to undermine his apprentice

James Luceno, Facebook Q&A

Sidious can appear frail and slow, but the Sith Lord should not be underestimated - he is a master of all forms of lightsaber combat.

The Clone Wars Episode Guide

Alongside a young Palpatine, Plagueis defeated an army of the primitive Kursid people’s most capable warriors, wielding only a Force pike and without suffering injury:

To refrain from senseless killing, they wielded force pikes rather than lightsabers. Meter-long melee weapons used by the Echani and carried by the Senate Guard, the pikes were equipped with stun-module tips capable of delivering a shock that could overwhelm the nervous systems of most sentients, without causing permanent damage.

"The next few hours will test the limits of your agility, speed, and accuracy," Plagueis said, as several hundred of the biggest, bravest, and most skilled warriors-their bodies daubed in pigments derived from plants, clay, and soil-began to separate themselves from the crowds. "But this is more than some simple exercise in proficiency; it is a rite of passage for these beings, as they are assistants in our rise to ultimate power, and therefore servants of the dark side of the Force. Centuries from now, advanced by the Sith, they might confront us with projectile weapons or energy beams. But by then we will have evolved, as well, perhaps past the need for this rite, and we will come instead to honor rather than engage them in battle. Through power we gain victory, and through victory our chains are broken. But power is only a means to an end."

To the clamorous beating of drums and the wailing of the onlookers, the warriors brandished their weapons, raised a deafening war cry, and attacked. A nod from Plagueis, and the two Sith sped across the plain to meet them, flying among them like wraiths, evading arrows, gleaming spear tips, and blows from battle-axes, going one against one, two, or three, but felling opponent after opponent with taps from the force pikes, until among the hundreds of jerking, twitching bodies sprawled on the rough ground, only one was left standing.

Darth Plagueis

Despite being trained by Tenebrous to be an expert in his style, Plagueis defeats the Bith Venamis in lightsaber combat:

Venamis charged.

To Plagueis, lightsaber duels were tedious affairs, full of wasted emotion and needless acrobatics. Tenebrous, however, who had pronounced Plagueis a master of the art, had always enjoyed a good fight, and had clearly bequeathed that enthusiasm to his other trainee. For no sooner had the blades of their weapons clashed than Venamis began to bring the fight to him in unexpected ways, twirling his surprisingly limber body, tossing the lightsaber from hand to hand, mixing forms. At one point he leapt onto an overhanging greel branch and, when Plagueis severed it with a Force blow, hung suspended in the air-no mean feat in itself-and continued the fight, as if from high ground. Worse for Plagueis, Tenebrous had made Venamis an expert in Plagueis's style, and so the Bith could not only anticipate but counter Plagueis's every move.

In short order, Venamis penetrated his defenses, searing the side of Plagueis's neck.

The contest took them backward and forward through the trees, across narrow streams, and up onto piles of rocks that were the ruins of an ancient sentry post. Plagueis took a moment to wonder if anyone at the fort was observing the results of the contest, which, from afar, must have looked like lightning flashing through the forest's understory.

Realizing that the fight could go on indefinitely, he took himself out of his body and began working his material self like a marionette, no longer on the offensive, instigating attacks, but merely responding to Venamis's lunges and strikes. Gradually the Bith understood that something had changed-that what up until then had been a fight to the death seemed suddenly like a training exercise. Exasperated, he doubled his efforts, fighting harder, more desperately, putting more power into each maneuver and blow, and in the end surrendering his precision and accuracy.

At the height of Venamis's attack, Plagueis came back into himself with such fury that his lightsaber became a blinding rod. A two-handed upward swing launched from between his legs caught Venamis off guard. The blade didn't go deep enough to puncture the Bith's lung but scorched him from chest to chin. As his large, cleft head snapped backward in retreat, Plagueis brought his lightsaber straight down, tearing Venamis's weapon from his gloved hand and nearly taking off his long fingers, as well.

With a gesture of his other hand, Venamis called for his lightsaber, but Plagueis was a split second quicker, and the hilt shot into his own right hand. Sensing a storm of Force lightning building in the Bith, he crossed the two crimson blades in front of him and said: “Yield!”

Darth Plagueis

Force Abilities

Telekinesis

Plagueis alongside his Master hold up several enormous slabs of rock:

A few meters away Plagueis, hurled face-first to the ground by the intensity of the vaporising blast, lifted his head in time to see the underside of the domed ceiling begin to shed enormous slabs of rock. Directly below the plummeting slabs sat their starship.

“Master!” he said, scrambling to his feet with arms lifted in an attempt to hold the rocks in midair. His own arms still raised in a Force-summoning posture, Tenebrous swung around to bolster Plagueis’s intent.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis buries his Master by pulling down massive plummeting slabs with such speed and momentum that Tenebrous barely registered what hit him:

The cave continued to spasm underfoot, sending shock waves through the crazed ceiling. Cracks spread like a web from the oculus, triggering collapses throughout the grotto. Plagueis heard a rending sound overhead and watched a fissure zigzag its way across the ceiling, sloughing layer after layer of stone as it followed the grotto's curved wall.

Now, though, it was Tenebrous who was positioned beneath the fall.

And in that instant Plagueis perceived the danger Tenebrous had foreseen earlier: his death.

His death at Plagueis's hands.

While Tenebrous was preoccupied holding aloft the slabs that threatened to crush the ship, Plagueis quickly reoriented himself, aiming his raised hands at the plummeting slabs above his Master and, with a downward motion of both arms, brought them down so quickly and with so much momentum that Tenebrous was buried almost before he understood what had hit him.

Darth Plagueis

The resultant impact leaving Tenebrous’ head cracked open and chest cavity pierced by a stalactite:

His success in bringing the ceiling down on Tenebrous was proof enough that the Bith had grown sluggish and expendable. Otherwise, he would have divined the true source of the danger he had sensed, and Plagueis would be the one pressed to the floor of the grotto, head cracked open like an egg and chest cavity pierced by the pointed end of a fallen stalactite.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis levitates massive slabs of rubble to form a pile high enough for him to reach the oculus at the roof of a grotto. One that, despite his abilities, nothing short of a jetpack could get him up to:

Again he squinted into the light pouring in through the oculus. Not even his power in the Force was enough to carry him from the floor and up through the grotto's unblinking eye. Nothing short of a jetpack would do, and the ship didn't carry one. His gaze drifted from the oculus to the grotto's curving walls. He supposed he could spider his way along the arched underside of the dome and reach the eye, but now he saw a better way.

More, a way to accomplish two tasks at the same time.

From a spot mid-distance between the ship and rubble pile beneath the oculus, he immersed himself in the Force and, with gestures not unlike those he and Tenebrous had used in arresting the ceiling collapse, began to levitate slabs from the ship and add them to the rubble heap, stopping only when he had both exposed the hatch of the ship and was confident he could Force-leap through the oculus from atop the augmented pile.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was able to manipulate nanosyringes with microscopic Force nudges:

I guide the nanosyringes with microscopic nudges in the Force.

The Science of Creating Life, Book of Sith

Plagueis snaps a Klatooinian’s neck with click of his fingers:

“You dishonor your heritage and your weapon, Jedi,” Wandau managed to say. “You could have used … the Force to compel us to do as you wished. I’ve not only seen that, but experienced it.” The Muun’s face contorted in distaste. “If you’ve so little will,” he said in the tongue of Wandau’s species, “then you’re of no use to me, Klatooinian.” And ended Wandau’s misery with a click of his thumb and middle finger.

Darth Plagueis

Without gesture, Plagueis hurls a young Palpatine to the ground before pulling him back to his feet:

Sidious whirled, flinging himself at Plagueis, only to meet an irresistible force and be hurled backward to the frozen ground.

The Muun’s shadow fell over him. Arms folded across his chest, Plagueis loomed.

“If you’re to succeed in inhabiting both realms, Sidious—the profane world and that of the Force—you need to learn how to use guile to your advantage, and to recognize when others are employing it.” Without extending a hand, Plagueis tugged him to his feet. “If you can survive a few more days without sustenance or rest, I may be inclined to teach you.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis catches a young Palpatine off guard with a surprise Force choke:

"I waited to act until I saw Santhe chewing his first bite."

Plagueis brought the thumb and forefinger of his left hand close together, and Sidious, taken by surprise, felt his throat close. He gasped for breath.

"Yes. Just so you have an understanding of what Santhe must have felt." Plagueis opened his fingers and Sidious inhaled deeply, his face flushed and his hands stroking his throat.

Darth Plagueis

In a severely injured state, Plagueis unleashes potent telekinetic powers against a group of Maladin assassins - first turning every loose object around him into a deadly projectile with a clap of his hands:

Spreading his arms wide, he clapped his hands together, turning every loose object in the vicinity into a deadly projectile.

Darth Plagueis

Then with a Force wave all but atomises a dozen armoured Maladians, the results of which were mistook as caused by an explosive:

He stopped once to conjure a Force wave that all but atomized the bodies of six Maladians. He spun through a turn, dragging the wave halfway around the room to kill half a dozen more.

Darth Plagueis

So scattered were the latter, investigators initially suspected that an explosive device had been detonated, but no trace of a device was ever uncovered.

Darth Plagueis

Then without gesturing causes the floor to shake, knocking down several assassins:

With nothing more than the Force of his mind, Plagueis rattled the floor, knocking some of the assassins off their feet…

Darth Plagueis

While suffocating and intoxicated, Plagueis conjures a telekinetic storm that renders himself anamorphic, washing over his apartment to hurl objects about the suite:

Still struggling for breath, Plagueis managed to stand, but only to collapse back onto the couch, knocking a statue from its perch. Sidious moved in, his hands upraised to deliver another bolt, his expression arctic enough to chill the room. A Force storm gathered over the couch, spreading out in concentric rings, to wash over Sidious and hurl objects to all corners. In the center of it, Plagueis’s form became anamorphic, then resumed shape as the storm began to wane.

Darth Plagueis

Sidious pivoted to take in the disarray: antique furniture overturned; framed artwork askew. As if a whirlwind had swept through.

Darth Plagueis

Force Lightning

Plagueis generates lighting alongside his Master powerful enough to burrow through solid rock:

Hastening to the rim of the circular shaft, the two Sith removed their gloves and aimed their long-fingered unprotected hands into the inky darkness.

Instantly tangles of blue electrical energy discharged from their fingertips, raining into the borehole. Strobing and clawing for the bottom, the vigorous bolts coruscated into the lateral corridor the probe had excavated. Crackling sounds spewed from the opening long after the Sith had harnessed their powers.

Darth Plagueis

With a tangle of lightning Plagueis launched a Klatoonian into the ceiling of a cabin, leaving him as if his bones had turned to dust and his body paralysed from the waist down:

The lightsaber had scarcely left the Muun’s grip when Wandau flew from cover to bring the attack to the Muun, triggering his blaster as ceaselessly as Maa Kaap was still doing. This time, though, the Muun merely stretched out his right hand and absorbed the bolts. Traveling up the length of his arm and across his narrow chest, the energy seemed to fountain from the hand awaiting the return of the spinning weapon as a tangle of blue electricity that hissed from his tapered fingers, catching Wandau full-on and lifting him to the ceiling of the hold before dropping him to the puddled deck in a heap, as if his bones had turned to dust.

Darth Plagueis

He spent only moments appraising Semasalli before going to Wandau, who was conscious though obviously paralyzed from the waist down.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis kills an Iktochi Priestess by trickling lightning into her body, bringing her blood to boil and almost setting her hands aflame:

“Your message is premature and dangerous to my cause.”

“Then let me undo it! Let me do your bidding.”

“You are about to.” A fire ignited in her eyes and her body went rigid as Plagueis began to trickle lightning into her. Her limbs trembled and her blood began to boil. Her hands grew hot and were close to being set aflame when he finally felt the light go out of her and she crumpled in his grasp. Askance, he saw one of the Iktotchi’s Twi’lek disciples racing toward him, and he abruptly let go of her hands and stepped away from her spasming body.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis generates a storm of Force lightning that spreads across a landscape:

Getting to his feet, Plagueis extended his long arms in front of him and loosed a storm of Force lightning that crackled over the landscape, igniting fires in the grass.

Darth Plagueis

Force Bellow

Despite his trachea being severed and the lower half of his jawbone removed Plagueis summons a sonic shockwave that shatters the eardrums of his attackers within a ten-meter radius:

Again he rallied, this time with a ragged sound dredged from deep inside that erupted from him like a sonic weapon, shattering the eardrums of those within ten meters and compelling the rest to bring their hands to their ears.

Darth Plagueis

Telepathy/Affect Mind

Plagueis reads Venamis’ surface thoughts, noting how they flew in all directions:

“Tenebrous is dead.”

Confusion showed in Venamis’s eyes. “You wish it were so.”

Plagueis held his lightsaber off to one side, parallel to the ground. “What’s more, he died by my hand.”

“Impossible.”

Plagueis laughed with purpose. “How powerful can you be if you failed to sense the death of your Master? Even now, your thoughts fly in all directions.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis reads a young Palpatine’s surface thoughts, noting how he was speculating over the effects of his Master’s injuries:

Sidious pivoted to see his Master limp into the room, mouth, chin, and neck concealed behind a breath mask or transpirator of some sort. Most of the vibroblade wounds had healed, but his skin looked especially wan. Sidious had been wondering if Plagueis had been weakened by the attack, but he saw now that, for all the punishment his body had sustained at the hands of the Maladian assassins, the Muun was no less strong in the Force.

“Your thoughts betray you,” Plagueis said. “Do you think that Malak’s powers were weakened by Revan’s lightsaber? Bane by being encrusted in orbalisks? Do you think Gravid’s young apprentice was hindered by the prosthesis she was forced to wear after fighting him?”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis reads the mind of Jabba the Hutt to discern he was telling the truth, despite the Hutt species’ natural Force immunity making this notoriously difficult to do:

“I know something you may not yet know about the Bando Gora.”

Plagueis raised himself somewhat in the chair. Hideously masked Bando Gora assassins had become a growing concern in the Outer Rim, posing a problem to the leadership of some of the cartels Plagueis backed. “Now you have my interest, Jabba.”

“The cult has a new leader,” Jabba went on, happy to have the high ground. “A human female, she has entered into a plan with Gardulla, a Malastare Dug named Sebolto, and a Republic Senator to distribute contaminated death sticks, as a means of supplying the Bando Gora with brain-dead recruits.”

Plagueis stretched out with the Force to peer into the Hutt. Jabba wasn’t lying.

“This human female,” he said. “I’ve heard rumors.”

Again Jabba was telling the truth.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis hadn't lost interest in Venamis by any means, but the Yinchorri's immunity to Force suggestion-an immunity the species shared with Hutts, Toydarians, and others-had provided him with a new line of investigation.

Darth Plagueis

Hutts are notoriously difficult to influence or read through the Force. Their elusiveness has been a struggle for the Jedi since our forbearers left Tython.

The Jedi Path: A Manual to Students of the Force

Before the age of five Plagueis could manipulate the emotions of his playmates:

Hego was not yet five years old when he began to sense that he was somehow different. Not only was he more astute than his playmates, but he could often manipulate them, arousing laughter when he wished to, or just as often tears; comfort just as often as anxiety.

Darth Plagueis

In one instance mind-tricking another Muun child into jumping out of a window:

One afternoon a Muun youngster he had grown to dislike pushed his way past Hego in an effort to be first to reach a staircase that led down to the Damask home’s lower-level courtyard. Grabbing his peer by the upper arm, Hego said, “If you’re in such a rush to get downstairs, then jump out the window.” Locking glances, Hego repeated the suggestion, and his victim took it to heart. Many questions were asked after the youngling’s broken body was discovered in the courtyard, but Hego kept the truth from everyone but his mother.

Darth Plagueis

Having undermined the Force bubble made the Yinchorri immune to mind tricks, Plagueis compels a murderous Yinchorri subject it becoming peaceful:

A gift to Damask from the Council of Elders on the occasion of Yinchorr’s seating in the Senate, the towering reptilian condemned murderer shuffled to the center of the energy field that defined his cage on Aborah and, with confusion contorting the features of his beaked face, prostrated himself on the permacrete floor and mumbled in Basic: “I’m honored to be here and to perform whatever tasks you require of me.” Standing at the field’s shimmering perimeter, 11-4D pivoted his head toward Plagueis. “Congratulations, Magister. At last he responds to your suggestion. You have undermined his resolve.”

Darth Plagueis

If he could compel a murderous Yinchorri to become peaceful, could he-with a mere suggestion-accomplish the opposite by turning a peaceful being into a murderer?

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis compels a handmaiden into revealing confidential information to him:

Plagueis came to a halt at the entry to Palpatine's apartment. Eventually one of Queen Amidala's near-identical handmaidens came to the door, a vision in a dark cowled robe. Her eyes fixed on the breath mask.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said, "Senator Palpatine is not here."

"I know," Plagueis said. "I'm here to speak with a guest of the Senator. A young human boy."

Her eyes remained glued on the mask. "I'm not permitted..."

Damask motioned swiftly with his left hand, compelling her to answer him. "You have my permission to speak."

"I have your permission," she said in a distracted voice.

Darth Plagueis

Force Illusion

Plagueis creates a life-like projection of himself, tricking a young Palpatine into thinking it was the real thing:

Sidious steadied himself on the scree slope, the jagged stones beneath his bloody palms, elbows and knees quivering, as if yearning to immerse themselves in the frigid waters of the crystalline blue lake at the base of the near sheer incline. A few meters above sat Plagueis, cross-legged atop a flat-topped outcropping, his back turned to Sidious and his gaze seemingly fixed on the blinding snowfields that blanketed the mountain’s summit…

…Like a feline, Sidious leapt from the scree, his curled fingers aimed for Plagueis. But instead of vising themselves around the Muun’s slender neck, his hands went through thin air and met each other, leaving him to collapse face-first atop the outcropping. Off to one side he heard his Master laugh in scorn. Either Plagueis had moved faster than Sidious could discern or, worse yet, he had never been there to begin with.

“So easily tricked,” Plagueis said, confirming the latter. “You waste my time. More of this and the dark side will never take an interest in you.”

Darth Plagueis

Alter Environment

Plagueis affects a snow storm swirling around him so as not to be touched by a single flake of ice, all melting before they could reach him:

The obedient orphan stood shivering in swirling snow. Around him rose ice pinnacles shaped like jagged teeth; a glacial wind howled through them. Plagueis stood nearby, flakes of snow and ice gyrating around him but never lighting on him, melting before they reached him.

Darth Plagueis

Force Listening

Plagueis amplifies his auditory senses to pick up on a conversation out of earshot:

Plagueis moved to a stained-glass window just as two humans were hurrying through a hallway beyond. With rain overflowing a gutter high overhead, he felt as if he were standing behind a waterfall.

"Check on him and report back to me," the female was saying.

Plagueis recognized the voice of security chief Magneta. Sticking close to the outer wall, he paralleled the movement of Magneta's subordinate to the end of the hallway, then through a right-angled turn into a broader hall that led to a control room tucked beneath the sweep of a grand staircase. Plagueis sharpened his auditory senses to hear Magneta's man ask after Veruna, and a human female reply, "Sleeping like a baby."

"Good for him. While the rest of us drown."

"If you're so miserable, Chary," the woman said, "you should consider returning to Theed."

"I'm thinking about it."

"Just don't expect me to follow you."

Darth Plagueis

Force Perceptions

Tenebrous finds Plagueis sensory abilities more impressive than he’d expected:

Driven by the dark side-powered will of the Sith Master, the retrovirus propagated with incredible speed. As it carried his consciousness throughout his apprentice's body, Tenebrous found himself becoming pleasurably aware the he was gaining access to Plagueis' sensorium. He could literally feel what Plagueis felt, both the coldly clinical satisfaction at having successfully engineered Tenebrous' murder.... and the Force-perception that let Plagueis monitor the last vanishing remnants of Tenebrous' uninfected midi-chlorians.

Full access to his apprentice's Force-perceptions! Delightful. Better than Tenebrous had allowed himself to hope.

The Tenebrous Way

Plagueis was capable of perceiving the microscopic activities of midi-chlorians:

Through years of experimentation and directed meditation, Plagueis had honed an ability to perceive the actions of midi-chlorians

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was able to sense the state of his own midi-chlorians, perceiving that they had not increased despite an amplification in power:

With 11-4D deep in processing mode, Plagueis withdrew a vial of his own blood and subjected it to analysis. Despite the recent amplification of his powers he sensed that his midi-chlorian count had not increased since the events on Bal’demnic, and the analysis of the blood sample confirmed his suspicions.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis uses this ability to observe every detail of Tenebrous’ death:

Looking at the Bith through the Force, he perceived that the midi-chlorians were already beginning to die out, as were the neurons that made up Tenebrous’s lofty brain and the muscle cells that powered his once-able heart.

Darth Plagueis

This was Plagueis' customary technique: a close examination, through the Force, of the midi-chlorian decay that accompanied the physical death of his victims. Tenebrous was by far the most powerful Force-user whose death Plagueis had the opportunity to observe, and he had known all along that his apprentice would apply all his physical, mental, and Force capabilities-pitiful as they might be- to witness each slightest detail.

The Tenebrous Way

Plagueis senses how Shiido shapeshifter in the form of a Kubaz was manipulating electromagnets to rig a gambling machine:

The game was called Collider because players placed bets on the types and spiraling paths of high-energy subatomic particles created as a result of collisions occurring within the accelerator table and the random firings of deviating electromagnets surrounding it. Due to the unpredictable nature of the collisions, the house enjoyed only a small advantage—where the accelerators weren’t rigged—but the Kubaz was overcoming the odds by betting solely on the particle paths rather than the particle categories. With the table accelerator humming to life and the Kubaz sliding some of his chits across the gambling grid, Plagueis stretched out cautiously with the Force, sensing intense concentration on the part of the Kubaz, and then an extraordinary surge of psychic energy. The Kubaz was using the Force—not to steer particles along certain paths but to dazzle the electromagnets and significantly reduce the number of paths the created particles were likely to take.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis identifies the design and precise capabilities of every weapon wielded by a ring of battle droids as they fire at him omni-directionally, calculating the best way to deflect or evade them accordingly:

"Every weapon, manufactured by whatever species, has its own properties and peculiarities," Plagueis was saying, his own blade angled toward the ferrocrete floor of the battledome's fabricated cityscape, as if to light a fuse. "Range, penetrating power, refresh rate... In some instances your life might depend on your ability to focus on the weapon rather than on the wielder. You must train yourself to identify a weapon instantly-whether it's a product of BlasTech or Merr-Sonn, Tenloss or Prax-so that you will know where to position yourself, and the several ways to best deflect a well-aimed bolt."

Plagueis put his words into action as the first ring of droids began to converge on them, staggering the attack and triggering bursts at random. Orbiting Sidious, the Muun's blade warded off every volley, returning the bolts to their sources, or deflecting them into the facades of the faux buildings surrounding them or into other droids. At other times Plagueis made no attempt to redirect the attacks, but simply twisted and torqued his rangy body, allowing the bolts to miss him by centimeters. Around the two Sith, the automata collapsed one after the next, gushing lubricants from holed reservoirs or exploding in a hail of alloy parts, until all were heaped on the ferrocrete floor.

"The next ring is yours," Plagueis said.

Darth Plagueis

As only a child Plagueis is able to sense the dark side in Rugess Nome (aka Darth Tenebrous), despite it being customary for Sith of the Banite Line to hide themselves in the Force:

Even more puzzling, he came to sense a power closer to his own in a Bith visitor named Rugess Nome.

Darth Plagueis

"You must discover the dark side in your own way, and perfect your power in your own fashion. All I can do in the meantime is help to keep you from losing your way while we hide in plain sight from the prying eyes of our enemies."

"'What celestial body is more luminous than a singularity,'" Sidious recited, "'hiding in plain sight but more powerful than all?'"

Plagueis grinned. "You are quoting Darth Guile."

"He goes on to compare the Sith to a rogue or malignant cell, too small to be discovered by scans or other techniques, but capable of spreading silently and lethally through a system. Initially the victim simply doesn't feel right, then falls ill, and ultimately succumbs."

Darth Plagueis

As a child Plagueis senses the Force presence of Jedi, and as a power cross-purposes to his:

On several occasions, his father met with Jedi Knights and Padawans who came in search of Adegan crystals, which the Jedi Order used in the construction of training lightsabers. Hego had long since perfected his ability to mask his powers from others. Even without revealing his true nature to the Jedi he was able to sense in them a kind of like-minded power, though one that was clearly at cross purposes with his own.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis stretches out to scan a forest with the Force, perceiving the movement of an intruder before confirming their identity as a Force user:

Stretching out with his feelings, he began to scan the forest again. Someone was out there, but not in the area the guards were searching. He attended through the Force to the sound of movement in the trees. Had the Gran infiltrated an assassin? If so, had they found one clever enough to divert the Sun Guards into chasing an illusion? Damask and the other Muuns should have been the targets, but instead of moving toward the fort, the intruder was actually moving away from it.

He spent another long moment listening; then, like a wraith, he dashed down three flights of stone steps and out through the old gate into the waking forest, parting his cloak as he ran, his left hand on the hilt of the lightsaber. Lifting off in great numbers from their evening roosts and screeching in displeasure, the morning's earliest risers warned the rest that a hunter was on the loose. Of the most dangerous sort, Damask might have added: a hunter of sentients. In moments he was deep in a stand of old-growth greel trees well outside the security perimeter, when he sensed something that stopped him in mid-stride. Motionless, he drew inward in an effort to verify what he'd felt.

A Force-user!

Darth Plagueis

With Palpatine’s barriers no longer concealing him in the Force, Plagueis was able to sense the full extent of his power and the breadth of his emotions:

He could see Palpatine now in all his dark glory. Anger and murder had pulled down the walls he had raised perhaps since infancy to safeguard his secret. But there was no concealing it now: the Force was powerful in him! Bottled up for seventeen standard years, his innate power had finally burst forth and could never again be stoppered. All the years of repression, guiltless crimes, raw emotion bubbling forth, toxic to any who dared touch or taste it. But beneath his anger lurked a subtle enemy: apprehension. Newly reborn, he was at great risk. But only because he didn’t realize just how powerful he was or how extraordinarily powerful he could become. He would need help to complete his self-destruction. He would need help rebuilding those walls, to keep from being discovered.

Darth Plagueis

Force Precognition/Farsight

Tenebrous found Plagueis’ powers of foresight to be vastly more developed than he anticipated:

Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed.

The Tenebrous Way

Through Plagueis’ powers of foresight, Tenebrous foresees Plagueis’ death at the hands of Darth Sidious:

Now Tenebrous touched upon his apprentice's powers of foresight, which were also vastly more developed than Tenebrous had believed. For a moment. Tenebrous found his perception cast far forward in time-to Plagueis' own death at the hands of his apprentice, who was himself visible only as a smear of darkness....

A shadow!

For an instant, Tenebrous felt the death anguish of Plagueis.... and felt the searing agony Plagueis felt.... at his failure to have ever created the Force-user Tenebrous was to become! He would allow his own apprentice to kill him too soon....

The Tenebrous Way

In the wake of his Master’s death Plagueis senses from across the galaxy a being of near-equal power to his own:

He knew from his travels with and without Tenebrous that he wasn’t the galaxy’s sole practitioner of the dark side—nor Sith for that matter, since the galaxy was rife with pretenders—but he was now the only Sith Lord descended from the Bane line. A true Sith, and that realization roused the raw power coiled inside him. And yet … When he reached out with the Force he could detect the presence of something or some being of near-equal power.

The Tenebrous Way

Plagueis foresees the conflict that would consume Bal’demnic during the Clone Wars, as well as the specific causes for the fighting:

His destination close at hand, each incoming ocean wave reverberated inside him, summoning an unprecedented tide of dark energy. The knotted tendrils of time loosened and he had a glimpse into Bal’demnic’s future. Embroiled in a multifronted war, a galactic war, in part because of its rich deposits of cortosis, but more as a pawn in a convoluted game, the subservient Kon’me turned against those who had mastered them for eons…

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis senses the fallout of Palpatine murdering his family from across galaxy, seeing visions of past, present and future in the process:

A sudden current of intense dark side energy snaked through Plagueis. Stronger than any feeling he had experienced since the death of Darth Tenebrous, replete with flashes of past, present, and perhaps future events, the disturbance was powerful enough to snap him completely out of his trance. A rite performed; a confirmation conferred. Half expecting to find Venamis sitting upright on the table, he opened his eyes to the sight of 11-4D shuffling toward him from the operating theater’s communication console. Plagueis’s mouth formed a question: “Hill?” “No. The young human—Palpatine. A deep-space transmission.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis senses that he should not mention Kamino in the presence of Jocasta Nu, ensuring she would remain critically ignorant of the its existence a decade later:

Plagueis was about to mention Kamino when he spied Jocasta Nu approaching, and a feeling from deep in the dark side rose up inside him, strangling his voice box, as if refusing to let the word escape. “I apologize, Master Jedi,” he said when he could. “The name of the group was on the tip of my tongue, but I seem to have swallowed it.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis senses imminent danger just before being attacked by Maladian assassins:

At the same instant Hill’s right knee touched the polished stone, a jangle of foreboding laddered up Plagueis’s spine. Turning ever so slightly, he saw that 11-4D had rotated its head toward him in a gesture Plagueis had come to associate with alarm. The dark side fell over him like a shroud, but instead of acting on impulse, he restrained himself, fearful of betraying his true nature prematurely. In that instant of hesitation, time came to a standstill, and several events happened at once.

The high official gave a downward tug to the pendant he had placed around Hill's neck, and the old Muun's head toppled from his shoulders and began to roll down the tipped stage. Blood geysered from Hill's neck, and his body fell to one side with a thud and began to jerk back and forth as one after another of his hearts failed.

Yanking their hands from the roomy, opposite sleeves of their robes, the hooded members of the order made sidelong throwing motions, which sent dozens of decapitator disks screaming through the air. Muuns to both sides of Plagueis fell to their knees, their last breaths caught in their throats.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis accurately predicts that Sifo-Dyas would place an order for a clone army:

“And Sifo-Dyas? Will he do it?”

“Even if he decides against it, there may be a way to place the order in his name. But the Force tells me that he will do it.”

Darth Plagueis

In observing the death of King Veruna, Plagueis indistinctly foresees his own demise:

As life left Veruna’s body, the path he and Plagueis followed wound deeper into darkness and absence. Then Plagueis stopped, overcome by a sudden sense that he had already seen and traveled this path. Had he? he wondered as Veruna breathed his last. Or had the Force afforded him a glimpse of the future?

Darth Plagueis

In observing Anakin Skywalker through the Force, Plagueis foresees his future, and the impact he would have on galactic history:

Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the boy had arrived at the platform in a Jedi ship; Amidala, her handmaidens and guards, and a loose-limbed Gungan in an open-topped hemispherical air taxi. Just then the latter group was ascending the starship’s boarding ramp, but Qui-Gon and the round-faced desert urchin had stopped short of the ship to speak about something. What? Plagueis asked himself. What topic has summoned such an earnest look to Qui-Gon’s face, and such confused urgency in the boy? Lifting his face from the macrobinoculars, he stretched out with the Force and fell victim to an assault of perplexing images: ferocious battles in deep space; the clashing of lightsabers; partitions of radiant light; a black-helmeted cyborg rising from a table … By the time his gaze had returned to the platform, Qui-Gon and the boy had disappeared. Trying desperately to make some sense of the images granted him by the Force, he stood motionless, watching the starship lift from the platform and climb into the night. He fought to repress the truth. The boy would change the course of history.

Darth Plagueis

Listening in on a conversation between Maul and Sidious, Plagueis foresees Maul’s imminent downfall on Naboo:

In the distance, Sidious turned to Maul. FourDee sharpened its auditory inputs. “Sidious says: ‘You have been well trained, my young apprentice. They will be no match for you.’” The words stirred deep misgiving in Plagueis and he stretched out with the Force, attuned to its swirling currents. Momentarily, the gates that obscured the future parted and he had a glimpse of events to come, or events that might come. Either way, he was not encouraged. Had he and Sidious misunderstood? Would it be better to abort the plan and trust that Palpatine would be elected even without having Naboo fall to the Trade Federation? Once the Jedi learned of the existence of one Sith, would they launch an intense hunt for the other? Sidious had formed an almost filial bond with Maul. Attached to the present, he failed to grasp the truth: that this was the last time he and his apprentice might see each other in the flesh.

Darth Plagueis

Force Absorption/Force Deflection/Barrier

Plagueis deflects blaster bolts with his bare hands:

The Muun’s reaction to the barrage of bolts that converged on him required almost more processing power than the droid had at its disposal. By employing a combination of body movements, lightsaber, and naked right hand, the agile sentient evaded, deflected, or returned every shot that targeted him.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis absorbs a blaster bolt and redirects the energy into Force lightning:

The lightsaber had scarcely left the Muun’s grip when Wandau flew from cover to bring the attack to the Muun, triggering his blaster as ceaselessly as Maa Kaap was still doing. This time, though, the Muun merely stretched out his right hand and absorbed the bolts. Traveling up the length of his arm and across his narrow chest, the energy seemed to fountain from the hand awaiting the return of the spinning weapon as a tangle of blue electricity that hissed from his tapered fingers, catching Wandau full-on and lifting him to the ceiling of the hold before dropping him to the puddled deck in a heap, as if his bones had turned to dust.

Darth Plagueis

In a severely weakened state, Plagueis wards off a flurry of vibroblade attacks with a Force shield:

His second subsidiary heart failed, paralyzing him with pain and nearly plunging him into unconsciousness. The assassins wasted not a moment, throwing themselves at him in groups, though in a vain attempt to penetrate the Force shield he raised.

Darth Plagueis

Force Healing

Plagueis uses the Force to task his body into limiting the damage of having his back pulped by a projectile:

At some point, probably when he was focused on murder, a rock or some other projectile had pulped a large area of his lower back, and now the thin tunic he wore beneath the enviro-suit was saturated with blood. Despite the swirling dust, he inhaled deeply, eliciting a stab of pain from his rib cage and a cough that spewed blood into the hot air. Drawing on the Force, he numbed himself to the pain and tasked his body to limit the damage as best it could. When the injury ceased to preoccupy him, he surveyed the grotto, remaining anchored in place but turning a full circle.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis uses the Force momentarily stabilise a mortally wounded Zabrak:

He remained by the Quara’s side for a few moments, then moved quickly to Maa Kaap, from whose crushed chest cavity blood bubbled with each shallow breath. Again, the Muun ran his eyes over his victim, from Maa Kaap’s tattooed face to his large feet. Eyes closed, the Muun adopted a posture that suggested intense concentration or meditation, and Maa Kaap snapped back to panic-stricken consciousness. OneOne-FourDee tuned in to the Zabrak’s pulse and found it regular—but only for a moment. Then the rhythm of Maa Kaap’s heartbeat grew ragged and breaths began to stutter from his lungs. Soon he was dead.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis remarked that mending damaged body parts was no more difficult that levitating slabs of stone:

Calling on the Force to mend ruptured arteries, torn muscle, or broken bone was no more difficult than levitating slabs of stone. But such refurbishments had little effect on a being’s etheric shell, which was essentially the domain of the midi-chlorians, despite their physical presence in living cells.

Darth Plagueis

Force Concealment

Plagueis was capable of minimising his presence in the Force and so disappearing into the material world:

Lifting his hand from the hilt of the lightsaber, Damask minimized his presence in the Force, surrendering his eminence and disappearing into the material world.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis’ ability to conceal himself was so complete that even his apprentice failed to sense his presence in the Force:

Over Dooku’s shoulder Palpatine saw in surprise that Hego Damask, Larsh Hill, and two other black-robed Muuns were threading their way toward him. That he hadn’t sensed his Master spoke to Plagueis’s power to completely conceal himself, even from a fellow Sith.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis conceals his presence from Jedis Dooku, Qui-Gon Jinn and Sifo-Dyas:

When Count Vemec finally called a break in the proceedings, and many of the participants headed to the food tables, Plagueis found himself alone with Dooku, Sifo-Dyas, and Qui-Gon Jinn, and drew the cloak of the profane over himself.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis eavesdrops on a conversation between Sidious and Maul without being detected:

It certainly wasn’t that he didn’t trust Darth Sidious. But Plagueis had never observed Maul at close range, and he was curious about Sidious’s relationship with him. He knew that they had seldom met outside The Works, let alone walked together on a balcony of one of Coruscant’s most stylish monads in the dead of night, wrapped in their cowled cloaks. But it was only fitting that they should finally do so. With 11-4D close at hand, Plagueis stood observing the two of them from afar, his presence in the Force minimized.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was able to stand in the same room as Masters Yoda & Windu without being detected:

Just then the dome was filled with Senators and judges, corporate leaders and ambassadors, power brokers and media pundits, and contingents of Senate Guards and Jedi.

"Why did you order him to come here, of all places?" Damask asked Palpatine during a respite from the handshaking, casual conversation, and forced conviviality. Dressed in their finest robes, they were standing near a back-lighted waterfall, nodding to passing beings, even as the two of them conspired.

Darth Plagueis

At the center of the domed hall stood Valorum and Sei Taria, who was as media-savvy as she was lovely. Though ineligible for reelection, recently stripped of some of his Senatorial powers, and frequently engaged in defending himself against accusations by the Ethics Committee, Valorum had managed to make himself the center of attention, due to the presence of Masters Yoda, Mace Windu, and Adi Gallia among his followers.

Darth Plagueis

Midi-chlorian Manipulation

Through manipulating its midi-chlorians Plagueis undermines the Force immunity of Yinchorri, making it susceptible to mental suggestion:

A GIFT TO Damask from the Council of Elders on the occasion of Yinchorr’s seating in the Senate, the towering reptilian condemned murderer shuffled to the center of the energy field that defined his cage on Aborah and, with confusion contorting the features of his beaked face, prostrated himself on the permacrete floor and mumbled in Basic: “I’m honored to be here and to perform whatever tasks you require of me.” Standing at the field’s shimmering perimeter, 11-4D pivoted his head toward Plagueis. “Congratulations, Magister. At last he responds to your suggestion. You have undermined his resolve.

That resolve, Plagueis had learned after more than two years of experimentation on the Yinchorri, was in fact a kind of Force bubble fashioned by the turtle-like alien’s limited number of unusually willful midi-chlorians. This suggested that the Yinchorri was actually strong in the Force, despite his pitifully low count. The discovery had come as a breakthrough, and Plagueis was still grappling with the implications.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was able to influence midi-chlorians into healing the body:

Plagueis was finally learning to do that, and was just beginning to learn how to persuade, prompt, cajole, and coax them into action. Already he could command them to promote healing

Darth Plagueis

Through influencing midi-chlorians Plagueis was able to manipulate the very essence of life:

Sidious was apprentice to Darth Plagueis, a wise Sith Lord whose knowledge of arcane and unnatural arts was reputed to extend to manipulating the very essence of life.

StarWars.com Databank: Sith

Plagueis was to capable of inducing midi-chlorians into creating life itself:

After receiving the Sith title Darth Sidious, Palpatine studied the secrets of the dark side, including his Master’s apparent ability to generate life by influencing midi-chlorians.

Star Wars Insider 113: Palpatine

Plagueis could, it was said, coax the midi-chlorians present in all living cells to create life from nothingness.

StarWars.com Databank: Darth Sidious

A mystic obsessed with eternal life, Plagueis is believed to have possessed knowledge that could sustain those who were dying, and perhaps had even gained the ability to use midi-chlorians to draw new life directly from the wellspring of the Force.

Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology

Plagueis demonstrates this ability by conceiving life in various creatures:

Deeper in the complex, they moved past cages containing as many creatures as could be found in a well-stocked zoo. OneOne-FourDee indicated a cluster separate from the rest. “These are the Magister’s most recent pregnancies.”

Darth Plagueis

“What did the droid mean when it said the Magister’s pregnancies?” Beneath the breath mask, Plagueis might have quirked a smile. “It means that the pregnancies were not achieved by normal means of conception, but rather through the Force.”

Darth Plagueis

Having induced an imbalance in the Force Plagueis resurrects Venamis, killing him and bringing him back to life in this manner repeatedly:

On the same day they had allowed Venamis to die. Then, by manipulating the Bith’s midi-chlorians, which should have been inert and unresponsive, Plagueis had resurrected him. The enormity of the event had stunned Sidious into silence and overwhelmed and addled 11-4D’s processors, but Plagueis had carried on without assistance, again and again allowing Venamis to die and be returned to life, until the Bith’s organs had given out and Plagueis had finally granted him everlasting death.

Darth Plagueis

Previously Plagueis described the moment of physical death as an inexorable eventuality, and in this way subverted the natural and cosmic orders:

The dispersal of midi-chlorians at the moment of physical death was, for lack of a better term, inexorable. Analogous to his fated confrontation with the Woebegone crew, the moment of death appeared to be somehow fixed in space and time. According to his Sith education, since Captain Lah and the others had been in some sense dead from the moment Plagueis’s gaze had alighted on the freighter, it followed that the midi-chlorians that resided in alleged symbiosis with them must have been preparing to be subsumed into the reservoir of life energy that was the Force long before Plagueis had stowed away. His attempts to save them—to prolong that state of symbiosis—were comparable to using a sponge to dam a raging river.

Darth Plagueis

Thus describing the breakthrough as ‘galactonic’:

His election seven years earlier had been one of the signs Plagueis had been waiting for—the return to power of a Valorum—and had followed on the heels of a remarkable breakthrough Plagueis and Sidious had engineered in manipulating midi-chlorians. A breakthrough the Muun had described as “galactonic.” Both of them suspected that the Jedi had sensed it as well, light-years distant on Coruscant.

Darth Plagueis

And in this way achieving the transformative leap he had foreseen the Sith would undergo by bridging the gap between organic life and the Force, and so mastering death:

Only the Sith understood that sentient life was on the verge of a transformative leap; that through the manipulation of midi-chlorians—or the overthrow of the Forceful group that supervised them—the divide between organic life and the Force could be bridged, and death could be erased from the continuum.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis could use this same technique to prevent others from dying altogether:

Sidious knew that his own powers had increased tenfold over the decades, but he couldn’t be certain he had learned all of Plagueis’s secrets—“his sorcerer’s ways,” as the Sun Guards referred to them—including the ability to prevent beings from dying.

Darth Plagueis

A mystic obsessed with eternal life, Plagueis is believed to have possessed knowledge that could sustain those who were dying

Star Wars: The New Essential Chronology

Plagueis internalises this ability to reverse his own aging, his body rejuvenating itself as a result, leading Plagueis to predict that in time he would cease to age entirely:

But having gained the power to keep another alive hadn’t been enough for him. And so after Sidious had returned to Coruscant, he had devoted himself to internalizing that ability, by manipulating the midi-chlorians that animated him. For several months he made no progress, but ultimately he began to perceive a measured change. The scars that had grown over his wounds had abruptly begun to soften and fade, and he had begun to breathe more freely than he had in twenty years. He began to sense that not only were his damaged tissues healing, but his entire body was rejuvinating itself. Beneath the transpirator, areas of his skin were smooth and youthful, and he knew that eventually he would cease to age altogether.

Darth Plagueis

In this way achieving what he had speculated on decades earlier, inducing his midi-chlorians to create new cells, serving the needs of his body to enhance his strength, overcome injury and prevent existing cells from reaching senescence:

Extending life, then, could hinge on something as simple as being able to induce midi-chlorians to create new cells; to subdivide at will, increasing their numbers into the tens of thousands to heal or replace damaged, aging, or metastatic cells. Midi-chlorians had to be compelled to serve the needs of the body; to bestow strength when needed; to overcome physical insult, or prevent cells from reaching senescence.

Darth Plagueis

And over the course of which seemingly engineered an increase in his own midi-chlorian count:

Plagueis remained convinced that he was on the verge of absolute success. The evidence was in his own increased midi-chlorian count; and in the power he sensed in Sidious when he had finally returned to Sojourn. The dark side of the Force was theirs to command, and in partnership they would someday be able to keep each other alive, and to rule the galaxy for as long as they saw fit.

Darth Plagueis

As a result, Palpatine observes that Plagueis’ age had reversed by some thirty years to resemble when he had first met him:

“Master,” Sidious said, interlocking his hands in front of him and bowing his head. Plagueis lowered his head in a gesture of mutual respect. “Welcome, Darth Sidious. It’s good to see you.” As the room was the opposite of the one he had often confined himself to on Sojourn, Plagueis no longer looked like the wide-eyed mystic he had seemed only months earlier. Except for having to wear the breathing device, he struck Palpatine as a slightly older version of the Muun who had visited him on Naboo so many decades before.

Darth Plagueis

Wary of approaching the corpse of his former Master, he called on the Force to roll the aged Muun over onto his back. From that angle Plagueis looked almost as he had when Sidious first met him, decades earlier: smooth, hairless cranium; humped nose, with its bridge flattened as if from a shock-ball blow and its sharp tip pressed almost to his upper lip; jutting lower jaw; sunken eyes still brimming with menace—a physical characteristic rarely encountered in a Muun. But then Plagueis had never been an ordinary Muun, nor an ordinary being of any sort.

Darth Plagueis

Musing that Plagueis may have lived for another century unchanged, if not lived forever:

This was no Sith trick. Not an instance of feigning death, but one of succumbing to its cold embrace. The being who had guided him to power was gone. Wry amusement narrowed his eyes. The Muun might have lived another hundred years unchanged. He might have lived forever had he succeeded fully in his quest.

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis was capable of inducing immortality in other beings as well, first with small creatures and then with sentient beings, a power he planned to share with a select few of the galactic populace:

I began with experiments on scurriers and other small creatures. I used my will, amplified through my body’s own midi-chlorians, to override the lesser concentrated midi-chlorian voices of the test subjects. This proved more challenging than I predicted. Because midi-chlorians are linked by a universal mind, the ones in my own cells seem to resist this imposition upon their fellows. But eventually I succeeded, first with small creatures, then with slaves purchased from the Hutts. I forced midi-chlorians to override their natural life cycles.

What I discovered is that these midi-chlorians would not die. Instead they drew upon sustaining Force energy, which acted on a microscopic level to halt tissue decay in their host, putting an end to aging and disease.

The Science of Creating Life, Book of Sith

The secrets of immortality are not meant for common beings. If all knew these truths, it would destabilise the structure of civilisation. I do not wish to live in a galaxy where any fool can perpetuate his ignorance for eternity.

Life is not mystical. Like Tibanna gas or nova crystals, life is a resource to be exploited. It is unique in that those who possess it find it priceless; yet, in aggregate, it is so common that it is functionally worthless. Billions of beings come into existence every day, and billions more die. We should preserve only those who advance our goals or whose work is complimentary to our own. Under my Grand Plan, this list will include apprentices, researchers, and credit-worshipping corporate executives.

The Science of Creating Life, Book of Sith

Experimenting with the extent of his own power, Plagueis attempts to thwart Palpatine’s attempt to kill him by mobilising his midi-chlorians alone, seemingly withstanding his Force lightning:

Crackling from his fingertips, a web of blue lightning ground itself on the Muun’s breathing device. Plagueis’s eyes snapped open, the Force gathering in him like a storm, but he stopped short of defending himself. This being who had survived assassinations and killed countless opponents merely gazed at Sidious, until it struck him that Plagueis was challenging him! Confident that he couldn’t be killed, and in denial that he was slowly suffocating, he might have been simply experimenting with himself, actually courting death to put it in its place. Momentarily taken aback, Sidious stood absolutely still. Was Plagueis so self-deluded as to believe that he had achieved immortality? The question lingered for only a moment, then Sidious unleashed another tangle of lightning, drawing more deeply on the dark side than he ever had.

Darth Plagueis

Sidious peered at Plagueis through the Force. “Oh, yes, by all means gather your midi-chlorians, Plagueis.” He held his thumb and forefinger close together. “Try to keep yourself alive while I choke the life out of you.”

Darth Plagueis

Plagueis could trigger a mass die off of a target’s midi-chlorians and in this way sever them from the Force, something he considered much easier than creating life:

To sever the Force is to trigger a mass die-off of a victim’s midi-chlorians – not enough to kill, but enough to take a Jedi’s power. It could be that the Jedi of old knew this feat, but if so they did not understand its underpinnings. Severing the Force is the inverse of what I have done when inducing midi-chlorians to create life. It is far easier to achieve.

The Science of Creating Life, Book of Sith

Using this technique kills King Veruna, causing his midi-chlorians to vacate his body:

“Let me explain what is happening to you,” Plagueis said. “The cells that make up all living things contain within them organelles known as midi-chlorians. They are, in addition to being the basis for life, the elements that enable beings like me to perceive and use the Force. As the result of a lifetime of study, I have learned how to manipulate midi-chlorians, and I have instructed the limited number you possess to return to their source. In plain Basic, Veruna, I am killing you.”

Darth Plagueis

After triggering the die-off, there was no need for Plagueis to continue to exert himself, able to observe his victim expire at his leisure:

Plagueis placed his hand atop Veruna’s. “I’ll remain with you for a while as you meld with the Force. But at some point, I will have to leave you at the threshold to continue on your own.”

Darth Plagueis

Cosmic Mastery

By applying the power of will, Plagueis, in concert with his apprentice, engineer an unprecedented and permanent imbalance in the Force, causing a cosmic shift to the dark side:

The question of whether he and Sidious had discovered something new or rediscovered something ancient was beside the point. All that mattered was that, almost a decade earlier, they had succeeded in willing the Force to shift and tip irrevocably to the dark side. Not a mere paradigm shift, but a tangible alteration that could be felt by anyone strong in the Force, and whether or not trained in the Sith or Jedi arts.

The shift had been the outcome of months of intense meditation, during which Plagueis and Sidious had sought to challenge the Force for sovereignty and suffuse the galaxy with the power of the dark side. Brazen and shameless, and at their own mortal peril, they had waged etheric war, anticipating that their own midi-chlorians, the Force’s proxy army, might marshal to boil their blood or stop the beating of their hearts. Risen out of themselves, discorporate and as a single entity, they had brought the power of their will to bear, asserting their sovereignty over the Force. No counterforce had risen against them. In what amounted to a state of rapture they knew that the Force had yielded, as if some deity had been tipped from its throne. On the fulcrum they had fashioned, the light side had dipped and the dark side had ascended.

Darth Plagueis

"No Sith have ever been in the position in which we now find ourselves, Darth Sidious: in step with the reemergence of the dark side, fortified by the signs and omens, certain that revenge and victory are near at hand."

Plagueis, Darth Plagueis

“Only by making the Force serve us have we prevailed. Eight years ago we shifted the galaxy, Darth Sidious, and that shift is now irreversible.”

Plagueis, Darth Plagueis

As result the Jedi found their ability to sense the future crippled, despite having fashioned a galaxy-spanning cosmic Force bubble that protected them from the dark side's influence:

Yoda and the rest of the Council members will double their meditation sessions in an effort to peer into the future, only to discover it clouded and unknowable. Only to discover that complacency has opened the door to catastrophe.

Darth Plagueis

Where an extremely low midi-chlorian count might have bolstered the odds of survival, nature had instead made the ysalimir species strong in the Force. So strong, in fact, that several of the creatures acting in concert could create a Force bubble encompassing kilometers rather than meters. In a sense, the Jedi Order had done the same on a galactic scale, Plagueis believed, by bathing the galaxy in the energy of the light side of the Force; or more accurately by fashioning a Force bubble that had prevented infiltration by the dark side

Darth Plagueis

With Plagueis describing the light side of the Force as having been 'extinguished', therefore it should be assumed the bubble had, by their actions, been completely destroyed:

To be sure, the light had been extinguished, but for how long and at what cost?

Darth Plagueis

In transubstantiated form, Plagueis stretches out across the entire galaxy to inform every living thing of his presence, causing the Force to retreat as if in flight from him, rebuking his efforts by instigating horrifying diseases in his test subjects:

And so he had stretched out—indeed, as if invisible, transubstantiated—to inform every being of his existence, and impact all of them: Muunoid or insectoid, secure or dispossessed, free or enslaved. A warrior waving a banner in triumph on a battlefield. A ghost infiltrating a dream.

But ultimately to no end. The Force grew silent, as if in flight from him, and many of the animals in his laboratory succumbed to horrifying diseases.

Darth Plagueis

In response to the cosmic shift to the dark side, and the unnatural powers Plagueis achieved in the wake of it, the Force conceives the prophesised Chosen One to oppose them, a being of pure Force destined to destroy the Sith and restore balance:

Ignoring the reactions of apprehensive residents and wary security personnel, Plagueis hastened along a plush corridor in 500 Republica toward Palpatine’s suite of crimson rooms. He had planned to be at the Senate Building to hear Amidala’s call for a vote of no-confidence in Valorum, which would strike the first death knell for the Republic. At the last moment, however, Palpatine had contacted him to recount a conversation he had had with Dooku. The fact that Qui-Gon Jinn had identified Maul as a Sith was to be expected; but Dooku’s news about a human boy at the center of a vergence of the Force had come as a shock. More, Qui-Gon saw the boy as the Jedi’s prophesied Chosen One! He had to see this Anakin Skywalker for himself; had to sense him for himself. He had to know if the Force had struck back again, nine years earlier, by conceiving a human being to restore balance to the galaxy…

Darth Plagueis

Sidious recalled the desperate return trip to Coruscant; recalled using all his powers, and all the potions and devices contained in his medkit, to minister to Anakin's hopelessly blistered body and truncated limbs.

He recalled thinking: What if Anakin should die?

How many years would he have had to search for an apprentice even half as powerful in the Force, let alone one created by the Force itself to restore balance, by allowing the dark side to percolate fully to the surface after a millennium of being stifled?

Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader

Fully defeated by just anyone, the dark side cannot be, but only by the Chosen One. And who might be this Jedi? Know I do not, but not yet born is he or she. This much, sense I can. A vessel of pure Force the Chosen One will be, more powerful than any Jedi in history.

Yoda, Jedi vs Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force

“As we attempt to wrest the powers of life and death from the Force, as we seek to tip the balance, the Force resists our efforts. Action and reaction, Sidious. Something akin to the laws of thermodynamics.”

Plagueis, Darth Plagueis

An unprecedented act that confirmed Plagueis & Sidious to be an equally unprecedented threat.

And so ends my respect thread, I hope you enjoyed it and may it serve you well.

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