But it is not solely Darth Chataris who is making the decisions, here.  It is Ophelia Vaudelle, for all that she wears the bronzium mask of the dark lady she holds herself out to be.  And Ophelia Vaudelle has opinions about the Sith Empire that no self-respecting Darth would voice.  So, despite knowing what awaits her here, she comes ever closer, leading the Jedi behind her on a breakneck chase through hyperspace and realspace, the small starcraft's hyperdrive burning out on this last jump with an acrid tang that makes her glad of the respiratory filter in her mask.  The Force whispers in her ear as she spins her ship backwards in mid-flight and plots a firing solution, turbolasers barking even as she deflects an asteroid with a telekinetic anchor, swinging it Just So - if her goals are to be met, then neither this Jedi that pursues her, nor herself, can have a hope of leaving here.  Well, no.  They can have no hope of leaving... on their own.  If they one day leave together...

She likes that future much better.

Maya does not have detailed plans. She will go where the Force demands — her ship twists just so, weaving between the pulses of turbolaser fire, drifting across on an intercept and firing heavy, precise shots across the black at Darth Chataris' ship — and hope to find a clue to the mystery that has lingered in her heart her whole life. In the meantime, depriving the Sith of a relic feels wise. 

She keeps up the chase through every flicker and swerve, leaning heavily on battle meditation.

There are futures that could not possibly be, that still receive weight in the balance of the Force between Maya's battle meditation and Darth Chataris'....  Eerier-than-usual ways of knowing things about the future and the past.  One such blatant impossibility rests its hands on Maya's future self's shoulders, squeezed in behind her in the cockpit, and purrs into her ear.  "That's it, you're doing the right thing.  Chase your destiny.  Chase your passion.  Your heart cries out under the weight of your need - and you know you'll find it here.  I do.  It's why I came, after all.  You're cute together, and I'm a Sith.  (I can't not set you up to follow your passions, darling - I'd hardly be myself, otherwise~)"

In the present, though, Darth Chataris is busy.  Juke left, spin to starboard, blast, ride the power surge in engine three, pull the heat of reentry into the generator with the Force --

The chase breaks into the atmosphere of the desolate planet beneath them, dancing between the ribbons of aurorae flickering in the solar wind as long-abandoned structures make themselves evident beneath the obscuring clouds.

Maya's harvesting all the heat of reentry similarly, she does not have the time to let something as trivial as atmospheric friction degrade her shields. Sweep overtop the Sith ship's turn and then burn all the captured heat at once for an enormous downward thrust, outrunning the trajectory of Chataris' blast and rushing closer to an intercept.

Good, good.  Come closer.  You don't need the high ground here.

She has a surprise for you; would you like to know what it is?

(Maya can almost see her beckoning, through the transparisteel of their cockpits.)

An asteroid descends from space like the fist of an angry god, even as she scrambles to keep out of Maya's trajectory for just long enough, vessel swaying almost drunkenly in its flight, like a leaf on the wind, as more and more of the parts she's had to push to come this far start to give out.  She needs them to hold on for just...long...enough...

Belōs is close enough that she can see the whites of her eyes through the transparisteel, as the Jedi's ship streaks down towards the planet's surface, and also herself.

Blasts impact.

T -5, 4, 3, 2...

She grasps the detonator.

She leaps.

The grappling cord loosed from her belt splays out and catches, the explosion of her vessel's superfluous structure saturating shields for one critical moment to allow her to pass, even as she draws the Force tightly into herself to force her body to keep functioning despite the sudden yank blanking her vision - though not her visions.  (It is through their aid that she reels herself in, swiftly and silently, pulling her Force presence tight to pass beneath notice in the aftermath of this new faked death.  It's fooled a surprising number of people who thought to try and stab her in the back; it should work now, she trusts.)

Maya weaves around the explosion, carefully dodging any shrapnel in the flow of her meditation.

That... was much too easy for Darth Chataris to go out. If she knows her at all — and Maya has spent quite a bit of time researching the Sith relic hunter before starting this mission — she wouldn't be caught by such misadventure.

There's no sign of the other woman, though, so all she can do for the moment is bring her ship down for a landing and be ready for a surprise.

What, an entire running battle through hyper- and realspace in a ship that was slowly breaking down the whole time?

...No, the Jedi's absolutely right, she wouldn't believe herself to be dead to that cause either.  It would be altogether too boring.

And as Darth Chataris' lightsaber - interestingly much more orange than the usual Sith red - slices across the main thrusters of Maya's vehicle just after it sets down, the wielder subsequently breaking off into the ruins, she supposes she can appreciate a competent maybe-foe.

Maya sighs, shaking her head with a bit of amusement as she feels the thunk of a piece falling off her thrusters. She checks her gear as she walks to the exit: saber, blaster, portable scanner, small pouch of rations, a few other supplies, all present and accounted for. 

With a sharp nod, she casts her senses wide as she steps out of the ship.

Aha. Into the ruins, then. She kicks off hard, employing Force-assisted leaps and dashes to close the distance.

The Darth moves with a dancer's grace into the ruins, keeping ahead of Maya with an oddly serene Force echo, for all that her presence still thrums like a live wire.

When Maya catches up with her, she's positively lounging dramatically into some strange piece of...

The device in pride of place in the room looks all too like a holocron the size of a grown woman, in a shape stranger than both Jedi and Sith equivalents - yes, it's still a Platonic solid, but they usually aren't dodecahedral - but what the Darth's hands are caressing seems to be a control panel made of variously colored kyber inset in inscribed circles, where more sensible devices would have buttons, switches, and dials.

"Well, hello there, Lady Belōs.  I could apologize for the rough journey, but I couldn't allow you the leisure of immediate flight from here.  Not with your destiny awaiting us."

Maya cocks an eyebrow, a hand resting against the bronzium-wrapped hilt of her saber on her right hip, staring down the Sith before her.

"And what would a relic-hunter for the most hate-poisoned empire in the galaxy know about my destiny?"

"Who says that's what I am?   Surely you've noticed the focus of mine on, hmm, internal strife; you've been watching me.  The secrets of the universe are merely a quite interesting hobby.

"Though, truly, you would never believe me, if I told you what I've seen.  If I told you what I know of you.  If I told you of what will happen when you strike me down.  You're quite formidable, you know.  You could do it, fairly.  Though that's not normally the sort of fight I pick."

"Still, beneath Darth Chataris...  Well, there's a woman who didn't fall for the Empire's utterly banthashit Force philosophy."

"Sure, I draw upon their resources...  But have you ever noticed, Lady Belōs, how often the relics my travels turn up lead to the Sith that receive them, mm, fatally overextending?  I daresay I despise the average Sith as much as you.  Let alone the less average Sith.  Their focus on fear and hatred as the only passions worth pursuing is so...  Limiting.  And, oh, how it will be their downfall."

Her own hands have drifted to where weapons rest on her hips...  Though with the way she rests them there, one almost cannot tell if she is more preparing to fight, or preparing to flirt.  Perhaps it's both.

"But you would hardly believe me, if I told you that this whole scheme with you is my own knife aimed at the Empire's heart.  The weave of the future is a thing even I do not fully understand, to tell you truly.  But the present form of the Sith Empire...  It sha'n't last much longer than our generation, betrayed from within by an utter idiot who thinks he's the Sith'ari - or that he knows how to make one - as they all wish to.  Pfah.  That prophecy is uselessly vague, and even as I almost feel I could fit that mask if I tried, I know better than to be that arrogant.

"But enough about me.  Let's talk about you, Maya Belōs, and the truth of that hole in your heart.  The thing that sucks all passion from your life, leaving only the palest emulation of duty in its place.

"The truth of it is, you were born a thousand years too soon to fill it - because the women who will find their hearts call them to you will not be born for a millennium.  And thus, the Force contrives."

There is a moment in which the universe seems to hold its breath, for the oracle preparing to speak her prophecy.

"The first thing we both shall have to do before we leave here, is to die."

Something about that feels like the Force rang her heart like a bell. She barely stifles a gasp as her breath catches in her throat.

She draws her saber, blade appearing in vibrant indigo with a snap-hiss, leveled at Darth Chataris in a guard position.

"Would that I could trust your words, Chataris. Would that I could trust you to be more than a Sith. As it is, however, either you surrender, or we fight."

"While I'm surely not going to object to that fight, Lady Belōs, should you wish to press it..."  Her own saber ignites with a soft vwoorph, the orange of sunrise, trailing an edge of magenta as she lifts the twin blades of what she, in a fit of whimsy, once called viper's fangs to the point the name has since stuck, into her own guard, and hefts a cortosis-weave grappling cord in her other hand. "I'll admit to some curiosity what you could even do should I place myself at your mercy.  You would not trust my word, and rightly so given how many of my nominal peers would spit on the very concept of honoring theirs as something the Force 'should' free them from - but you can hardly keep me as I am, standing as peer in the Force to you, to say nothing of how I'd hardly submit to the fate of Revan as your next best option.  Breaking myself free of fetters upon my mind would be such a pain, if they could even be laid in such less already-fraught circumstances.  Revan had already been mind-warped, after all, and I have not.

"...Honestly, I'm rather amazed that any Jedi Council could have possibly considered that an appropriate action," she pontificates, slowly pacing a bit of distance as she does; "- it smacks more of the ruthless weaponization of the Force that Sith lords prize than of your Order's vaunted compassion.  ...To say nothing of what yet awaits in your future - the Order of a thousand years from now will still have failed to recognize that souls with thoughts, opinions, beliefs, even needs, can arise within steel and circuits by any means.

"I suppose we'll have plenty of time to talk about philosophy, anyway; the Force isn't remotely done with us yet."

Maya's expression softens. "No, I would not put you through Revan's fate, even if I could. Such a thing is a cruelty none deserve. Finding a way to take you in safely would be a challenge, to be sure, but I would attempt it."

She shakes her head.

"I do not expect you to give me the chance to try, however."

"There is always, however slim, a chance of anything, if the Force wills it.  But you are correct that the chances of my submission unto the Order are indeed too slim to count in human scales.  Perhaps, if we'd made different choices - perhaps, if we'd been different people - perhaps, if the weave of fate was a different tapestry entire.  But it is not, and we have not, and so we sha'n't.  Not in this life, at least.

"En garde, Lady Belōs.  And while it truly has little meaning, with the die already cast - please know that my enemy you are not."

With that said, she opens with a one-two punch of a ranged attack, her sword arm lashing a crackling wave of purple-orange lightning towards the Jedi that is followed by her cortosis-weave grappling cord.  The lightning to snarl a blade, (or a person, but the possibility that this will not be blocked or dodged by this woman simply bears no consideration -) the cord to snare it - if, of course, Maya Belōs does not have her own tricks.

Maya twists her free hand sharply, and the lightning bends, its path curving to meet the arc of the cortosis whip as gravity foreshortens its path. Her blade snaps out in a jab at her opponent's hip, a twisting lunge past Chataris' side crossing the distance.

Darth Chataris' Force presence radiates a surprisingly uncomplicated joy at seeing such a novel and well-refined technique, even as the loop of lightning Maya made curves back around her body as it reaches her skin once more, passed into a momentary, whirlwind stormshield that allows her to launch a pointed jab without worrying about the immediate threat of Maya's blade coming the other way, the electric counterpressure expended in pushing the indigo blade aside for just long enough to sidestep around the not!holocron and re-establish her guard, whether her own strike succeeds or not.

The grapple-cord reels in from any significant extension in almost an instant, as it's far more liability than benefit to have swinging wide with this technique in play, though she does not drop it from her off (right) hand, still valuing the threat-in-being to her opponent's lightsaber it represents.

Maya flicks out a swift parry and darts back, smoothly falling back into a guard stance. "How many fights has that cortosis cord won you, Chataris?"

"I've rather lost count," she says with quite some amusement.  "Though it's not like that's my only trick."

Indeed, it's not even her only use of cortosis equipment - as Maya's parry whiffs past where one of the twin blades would have been had it been on at the time, the Force warns her away from attempting to turn that into a strike at the Darth's saber hand, and it's only thanks to that and the incredibly quick withdrawal that the just as quickly reignited blade doesn't snare Maya's in a twisting motion that would surely have disarmed her.

"How many times has your gravity manipulation done the same, for you?  I'm not sure I've known anyone to have pursued that power before, but it would absolutely throw off most telekinetics."

She almost idly throws another slash of lightning at Maya, not precisely expecting it to do anything but continue to engage her - though there are futures where she's surprised to find it did work as a snare this time.

"Enough to put a stop to countless of your colleagues."

This is not one of those futures. Maya negligently deflects it, then feints to her right (Chataris' left) before lunging left and slashing at her — only that too is a feint, and a subtler one, catching the Sith's footing in a patch of amplified gravity when she moves to parry.

That rather supposes that she needs to do more than shift her weight and let the cortosis grapple cord play out across her, crossing the arc of Maya's strike at precisely the right time, to defend against the attack she sees coming.  That said, she believes in defense in depth; she turns her slight lean backwards into the start of a backflip right over Lady Belōs' gravity tricks, covering for the move with another pulse of lightning from her saber hand.

It's nice when someone can actually fight. Maya dodges the lightning, evading Chataris' predictable follow-up as well. At the same time, she telekinetically flings a large piece of debris at Chataris' back, with a precise gravitational warp primed to help redirect it far sharper than it normally could when the Sith inevitably dodges it.

Inevitably dodges it?  Hmm, no.  She will be turning into it and cutting it in two with her 'saber, diving through the attack with a telekinetic wedge and leaving Maya to deal with the pieces she's, by simple geometry, thrown at herself.

Even better. Maya cracks a rare smile, and the two chunks whip past her on either side and orbit behind her before curving back at Chataris.

My, my.  A clever technique.  But can she make it work while also defending against, you guessed it, more lightning?

She can. If simple absurd quantities of lightning were enough to catch her, she would have died several Sith ago. The lightning deflects off her 'saber somehow, rather than merely being caught by it as most Jedi manage.

Clever girl.

Unfortunately, the force of that deflected lightning, spun by Chataris, knocks one of the rocks off-trajectory enough that she is able to dodge between them in a way she shouldn't have been able to otherwise, as she lunges forward saber-first!

Maya steps to the side, parrying Chataris' lunge and waving a hand to pull the Sith off course, further away from her. The rubble curves tightly around behind her and sweeps toward her back.

"Really, now," she says as she spins into the landing, riding Maya's Force technique, keeping her blade between herself and the Jedi at all times - and shatters the incoming rubble apart upon a telekinetic spike, grabbing a few pieces and whipping them at the Jedi at speed - "the same trick used thrice will hardly help more than the trick used twice did, Lady Belōs!"

Maya's not known for subtlety in combat. She's known for telekinetic bombardment, gravitic might, and unassailable defense, but not subtlety.

It might then come as something of a surprise that a delicately concealed loop of telekinetic force has built up around the Sith Lady's feet, and it suddenly tugs toward Maya as the Jedi lunges toward her in an aggressive strike.

Clever girl.

It's not enough, mind you, but she's very obviously impressed.

(Of course you wouldn't be known for subtlety in combat if you could help it!)

However, Darth Chataris is very much known for turning anything into an advantage, even disadvantages - and as she drops low to slip under Maya's strike for just long enough, letting the telekinetic force pull her closer in a way she couldn't manage to move with her legs, one might think that she had planned for this to happen the entire time.

(This time, she very much hasn't!)

The fact that this is a very awkward position to find herself in does not prevent her from taking every opportunity to reach her goals; a deft telekinetic flick of her own has the grappling cord - released from the hand she's now braced herself against the ground with (and the hand that she might soon launch herself up with, carried by the plasmatic crackle of Force Lightning) - swiping across the planes of Maya's possible strikes.

One could be forgiven for thinking Maya had expected that, from the way she deftly hooks a particularly sturdy bar of rubble through the cord and sweeps it further from Chataris' grasp, twisting gravity to hurl herself over the Sith's head and far past her range, with a parting slash as she passes, another few chunks of rubble following behind her to hammer at Chataris' defenses.

Her saber swipes up, allowing her to sever the bar just so as to ensure the grapple will not catch as it reels back in, even as lightning once more lashes out at Maya, rippling out from between the twin blades.  The ensuing rubble...  Well, that, she is in a relatively poor position to dodge, but not so poor a position as to prevent her from flipping over with a touch of Force into a sprinter's start and lunging, even as she is clipped by the edges of the waves of rubble coming and going, into a roll that brings her to her feet quite close to the Mysterious Force Device that is this room's centerpiece...  Which is starting to do something more than glow in prismatic colors.

The Mysterious Force Device opens, panels floating upwards and outwards like a flowerbud blooming, layer by layer; the Force ripples with promise at its center.

Maya parries Chataris' swipe, and catches most of the lightning on her saber, but a bit of it carries through to her, and she's surprised to find amidst the shock that rather than hate as she'd expect, the attack carries wry resignation instead, under a surprisingly amiable sense of battle-thrill. In her shock, her leap carries her farther than she expects — a rarity, given her mastery of trajectory — directly toward the unknown machine.

She's not where she would need to be, to actually trigger the machine, so she doesn't rush for it.  The Force has plans, she's sure - and she has dignity.

"Tell me, Lady Belōs," she says, blade drawn into a defensive guard now that she stands upright once again, "that you feel nothing from the heart of this machine.  That it is not calling to you.  That it is not where your future lies.  Tell me that, and tell me true, and I will let you strike me down.  But I can feel the weight of history, here, the nexus of possibilities unrealized - and so, I believe, can you."

Maya opens her senses to the Force, listening to her feelings, listening to this place.

Her connection to the Force rings like a cathedral bell, echoing richly through and around her.

She's not normally a seer, but brief flashes of visions overtake her for a moment.

A short girl, grinning playfully, pink and brown hair tumbling down her back, white streak curling past her face, fingers flying across the controls of a small ship.

A young human girl with short hair and a confident smile, unusual-looking saber hilts at her hips, beskar'gam around her body.

A smirking, black-haired human girl wearing Jedi robes, a brilliant green lightsaber in her hands as she spars with another Knight.

A lavender-skinned Twi'lek in snug-fitting leathers with a warm, open smile, lekku draping behind her, saber at her hip.

Maya gasps, hand clutched to her heart.

"What is this? Who are those girls?"

She catches only the edges of that vision - but that is enough to know.

"Your future, Lady Belōs.  The people who will find us, a millennium from now.  The people who will be yours, as you are theirs.  But I'm sure that you know your lifespan does not permit you to wait a millennium on its own; neither does mine.  Which is why the Force has brought us here."

She should not trust a Sith, but the Force rings with truth at Darth Chataris' words.

"No, at best I could make it little more than a tenth of the way there, mayhap an eighth. Which brings us to this place. This machine. What is it, how do you expect it to help us survive a millennium, and why are you helping me reach these people? Why do you plan to undertake this journey to the future alongside me? What is your game, Sith?"

Something is very suspicious here.

"In truth, there is a not insignificant streak of petty vindictiveness at the Sith Empire that has motivated me to this particular plan.  To see them try to rise again, from the bits and pieces that the internecine infighting of Darth Bane's line will have brought upon themselves, and to cut them down like the betrayers they are.  Not that I hold any loyalty whatsoever to the Empire myself, but...  It would be rather poetic.  And someone has to deal with all of its leavings properly.  Stars know the Jedi will fail.

"But that is not all of it.  That is not even half of it.

"I suppose I am here because the Force wills it so, if nothing else - but...

"A Sith is driven by their passions.  And my passion is compassion.

"Yes, what heresy this is, the Empire would hate it - and yet, I do not lie.

"I think you would have found your way here, with or without me.  But without me, you would have been alone in the dark.

"I can, at least, set up holonet taps."

"As for this machine?  It is...

"You have surely noticed, by now, the similarity of the structure here to holocrons.  That is not a coincidence.

"I know not why nor how this construction came to exist.  I certainly have not the slightest clue as to how I would replicate it, save the vaguest speculation that Force Alchemy must be involved somehow.  But I can, in fact, tell you what it does.

"You know that holocrons are often enough left with engrams of their creators - static, unchanging guardians of their techniques.

"This machine does something almost entirely unlike that, save that the result is, in fact, a holocron with a person inside.  A holocron...  With a living person's connection to the Force, and an animating intelligence."

A deeply bizarre idea, but the Force sings to her with how clearly this is the next step in her journey to filling the hole in her heart.

For that, she would do a great deal.

"A fully-sapient holocron, still in tune with the Force? Amazing. And that would provide a way to survive the intervening centuries. But you mean for me to believe your participation in this is just to spite your fellows and keep me company?" 

...If there is any time to do this, that time is most likely now, when the gesture can still matter.  When there is a true vulnerability to reveal by making it.

Darth Chataris takes off her mask.  The mask, it must be noted, that she is never seen without.

"You are correct, in a sense, that Darth Chataris has no reason to even want to do this.  However...  Darth Chataris has always been a mask."

She casts the mask aside in a single sharp gesture, the metal clattering against the ancient stone, as her Force presence, pulled so tightly to herself, slackens.  Maya can feel the torrent of emotions running beneath the surface as she almost absentmindedly damps her 'saber.  "And I am asking of you something that I would have hesitated to ask of myself.  It is the least I owe you to see this through."

"Oh," Maya replies softly. Her eyes play across Chataris' delicate orange scales, sleekly refined features, even while she feels out the other woman's more-open Force presence. 

What she feels of her emotions bears out her words.

Not Chataris, though.

"What should I call you, then, if we are to pass a millennium together until this future you are so intent on us seeing? And what do you aim to do when we get there?"

"...The name I have kept for myself, despite the Empire's ardent desire to erase it with the rest of what I can never reclaim, is Ophelia Vaudelle - though it is also not entirely wrong to say that Chataris is also my name.  I chose it, even if to have to choose it was not, in some senses, my choice.  It was...  Self-defense.  And...  It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Maya Belōs.

"As for my plans...

"The future is always in motion, and I cannot place the time of half the things I See in this far future to decades, let alone years.  Not yet.  But what I do see...

"There is, or there will be, a war.

"The war is a distraction.  The war is a trap.  The war hides the Sith that puppets it, secure in his masquerade of haplessness as he tries to corrupt a child of the Force itself.

"The Jedi will be called upon to fight the war, but they will be no Army of Light; not anymore, not after a millennium of seeming peace.

"Well.  'Seeming peace'," she huffs.  "If you call 'a low simmer of planetary civil wars and tacitly-condoned genocides and slaving bastards taking de facto control of much of the Outer Rim,' peace on the galactic scale.  ...Not to mention the glassing of Mandalore because the Republic thought it was scary.  Will have thought, it was scary.  And this is the government the Jedi will tie themselves to, without visible Sith?  I suppose it was rather the only available option.

"...I couldn't change that future.  I tried.  But I couldn't.  There were little things I could shift - carefully planted time capsules, holocrons left to wash up somewhere they'll find the ones they need to teach - but at a certain scale, if you manipulate one fool away from disaster, or one opportunist away from atrocity, another one will gladly stumble into the newly opened place.

"...But I digress.

"I intend to bring Bane's lineage's so-called Grand Plan, their work of a thousand years, crashing down around their ears by whatever means are expedient - though, unfortunately, just killing them outright would...  Be insufficient proof that I am not the Sith they're looking for.  I intend to teach a grand heresy against both Bane's and the Empire's philosophy of Sithness, given the opportunity, because - though you wouldn't know it, to look at what now is - the Sith Code was born from a slave revolt, no matter how the chains they broke were recast into the Empire's tyranny."

The Force continues to sing.

It sings of ending tyranny, of both the Jedi and what replaces the Sith finding more balance through the heresies Ophelia plans to spread.

It sings of unnecessary bloodshed that could be lessened, of Jedi that die or fall, of a horrible puppeteer walking the entire galaxy toward an empire built on an ocean of blood and misery.

It sings of friendship she could find here, now, with this woman who chooses to stand beside her as they face the distant future.

It sings of hope.

"Ophelia, are you telling me that these missing pieces of my heart, along with the whole galaxy, will face war and massacre and this awful Sith puppet master, and you are choosing to stand beside me in an attempt to change those horrors?"

"...I...  Yes.  Yes, I am.  ...I would stand against this with or without you, if I could."

And her Force presence rings clarion with resolve and this-is-truth.

Maya closes her eyes and lets out a slow sigh.

"I cannot believe I am about to submit myself to a probably-lethal ancient relic as a last-ditch attempt to reach my lost girls in their hour of need, and I am facing this thing alongside a Sith."

"...I can't believe I'm about to do this either, if I'm honest, and I've seen myself do it.  ...Are you - well.  Ready might be asking too much, but are you?"

"No. But I do not think I will get much readier. Nothing for it."

"...Then here we go."

She plays a hand over the controls - a needless somaticism, but it helps.  The panels close, the glow brightens to a blinding white, and Maya feels -

POWER!  UNLIMITED POWER!!!! --

I am one with the Force and the Force is with me --

Second star to the left and straight on til morning --

A brief discontinuity.

The core in the receptacle, a smaller dodecahedron, set into a layer of interface hardware, pulses brightly - the same indigo as Maya's lightsaber.

A holocron already has an impressive amount of input-output capability, as it happens.  They can see, they can hear, they can project.  They can open and shut.  Sometimes different pieces of a holocron can communicate with eachother across large distances; this one can.  And as Maya finds herself inside a holocron, looking out, she finds that this holocron does all those things and more - to wit, she has an almost proprioceptive sense of the cradle of interface ports she's resting in (save for one open face).  There is a sense that those ports would know how to process many forms of data input into a form that a transplanted soul could understand without personally decoding whatever file format it is by hand.

Her Force senses haven't changed at all - save that they are now anchored to the holocron, jointly and separately, instead of a fleshy body, and that they - like every other sense that is not taste nor smell, for which she lacks hardware at present - have sharpened somewhat in the transfer.  (Her sense of elapsed time is very much sharper.  She can count the passing milliseconds, let alone seconds.)

Oh my. She rather expected that to hurt more than it did. The process was just briefly intense, and now she is this.

She gradually feels out her new state: Force, sight, sound, dataports, proprioception of her folds and panels, the ticking of time as it passes. 

After quite the extended pause by her own experience, but what her internal chronometer reports as merely three hundred and twenty-two milliseconds, she projects a form, glaring angrily at Ophelia. 

"I cannot believe this. That experience was—"

"—surprisingly pleasant, actually," she finishes, projected expression warming into a smile. "It feels as though there is more room to think and process and perceive, like this. Every sense that remains — and only scent and taste seem to be missing — seems sharper, as well."

"That's...  That's good.  That's very good.  Let me just plug you in to the holonet, shall I?  And then it will be my turn."

The wreckage of her ship is quite firmly embedded into the ground after that battle ended, but she packed the actually important supplies to survive such a lithobraking maneuver; it takes but minutes to retrieve both the holonet downlink - a rugged piece of gear, with what it sacrifices in bandwidth more than made up for by the fact that it ought to still work a millennium from now - and the second viable upload core that she needs, to make it to the future the long way around.

Maya laughs lightly, smiling, at Ophelia's reaction. "Are we going to become holodrama connoisseurs, over our centuries stuck like this?"

"Quite probably; that, and archivists.  Much that is known will likely be lost in the Empire's collapse, and in other disasters, in the centuries to come - and I would rather preserve such knowledge, as best I can," she almost idly declaims as she connects her own core to the machine and the holonet link - if one fails to note the firm resolve in her Force presence.  "Not only is knowledge worth having for its own sake, it may be needful in the future.

"...I can't actually activate the transference if I am its target, incidentally.  There are safeties set up against it; my Force presence needs to be, physically, localized inside the boundary of the isolation chamber.  Therefore, I will need to ask that of you.  You close it with this control, and this is the button you press to activate it," she projects in the Force as she speaks.

Maya pays careful attention to the instructions, noting which controls she will need, and readying her telekinetic grasp. "Are you ready, Ophelia?"

"I am as ready as I think I can be, Lady Belōs, for all that that is, substantively, a quantity that rounds off to 'not particularly ready at all'."

She makes sure that everything left of Maya's effects that she desires to preserve is carefully packed away, and does much the same with what will remain of hers, before she primes the machine for another transference, and steps inside.

"...I'm ready when you are, Maya."

"I understand precisely what you mean, Ophelia."

With gentle telekinesis and a soft click that somehow feels heavier in the room and the Force than the sound itself should allow, the machine activates once more, powerful energies tearing Ophelia from her body with surprising gentleness and depositing her within the new core.

Within the core, a thousand fragments of attention spread wide - adjusting their default projection from the nothing-but-herself they arrived in the core with, pinging the holonet, running all sorts of self-checks and establishing organizational structures - but that takes mere seconds of time, her body glowing in the colors of sunrise, before she speaks to Maya.

"Well.  Now we wait for a thousand years."