Mind prison

A Rakatan mind trap was an artifact built by the Rakatan species as a form of imprisonment for criminals who had committed particularly terrible crimes. A prisoner's mind was stripped from his body and locked away within the prison, presumably forever. The only means of escaping the prison was into the body of another who had inadvertently become trapped, although this required the consent of both involved. From the outside, it appeared to be simply a mysterious glowing box with runes carved along the side. For prisoners inside, however, the prison took the form of an infinite expanse of white nothingness, with a small cluster of obelisks and a single bed in the middle. Faint whispering could be heard, possibly the voices of others who had become trapped. The whiteness would drive beings mad if they let it.

Somehow, the Rodian Lurze Kesh acquired one of these prisons and sold it to Motta the Hutt. He hired Revan to serve as courier, with one warning: never to open the box. Lurze did not say what would happen if he did, though, and Revan's curiosity overcame his caution, trapping him in the prison. Two others had also become trapped there in the last month, but they had already gone mad and run off into the white void. Revan met the prison's original occupant, a Rakatan warrior who had been imprisoned for leading a rebellion over 21,000 years ago. After all that time, the warrior could not even remember his own name, but still desired to escape, and so challenged Revan to the only contest that would be fair to both and applicable in a world where neither had a physical body: a game of riddles. After stumping the warrior, Revan was given leave to escape back into his own body. However the box worked, he was unable to activate it again.

Revan then went on to Tatooine as planned and gave it to Motta at the local swoop track. It is unknown what he used it for or if the Rakatan prisoner ever escaped.

It is possible that the technology of the mind trap was somehow related to that of the Holocrons employed by the Rakata for data storage; the Builders attempted to win over the Sith ruler, King Adas, with the gift of holocron construction, and the ancient Sith were known to have subsequently discovered methods by which Sith spirits could be imprisoned inside the crystal matrix. Dark Lord Exar Kun once shattered a Sith holocron to release the ancient spirits trapped within, who would go on to possess the bodies of the assembled Jedi apprentices and send them to slay their former masters.

Behind the scenes
If Revan loses the riddle game against the prisoner, the game ends. The player can also choose not to open the box and merely give it to Motta the Hutt, avoiding the dangers of the prison within.

The riddle competition is almost undoubtedly based on the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter of J.R.R Tolkien's The Hobbit, in which Bilbo Baggins must engage in a similar competition with the creature Gollum. If Bilbo won, Gollum would show him a way out of his cave, and if Gollum won, he would eat Bilbo. The riddles are taken from both The Hobbit and Conquests of Camelot.

The uniformly white universe of the prison may have been inspired by the 'Construct', the environment where Morpheus briefed Neo in the film The Matrix. It may also have been a nod to the white limbo featured in THX-1138, another film by George Lucas. Drawn on the prison is what appears to be faces of humanoids.

Appearances

 * Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Rakata-Gefängnis