Transfer essence

"The dying is painful. The transition is not an enjoyable experience. But it is all a small price to pay... for eternal life."

- Emperor Palpatine

Transfer essence, or transfer life, was a radical dark side Force power used to transfer a person's consciousness into another body, or in some cases an inanimate object.

Overview
The power enabled the wielder's spirit to survive the death of their organic body by usurping control of a suitable receptacle. If the invading consciousness was powerful enough, they could override and destroy the spirit of the body that was invaded. However, the practitioner's own body disintegrated in the attempt (much like a Jedi Master becoming one with the Force). If the target resisted the possession attempt, or if the user failed in their attempt to bond with the object, their disembodied spirit, with nowhere else to go, was consigned to Chaos. Given the power's inherent difficulty, its unpredictable nature, and the unspeakable consequences of failure, most would-be practitioners chose to have their bodies cloned by trained technicians and kept in a hidden safehouse, unconscious in stasis tanks until they were needed. The clones, lacking life experiences or a sense of self, were each little more than a blank slate, upon which the original could imprint their consciousness with ease.

Emperor Palpatine was the most famous practitioner of this esoteric technique, surviving his first death at the hands of his own apprentice, then his second at the hands of his children, by transferring his spirit into fresh clone bodies. However, Palpatine's strength in the dark side of the Force caused each clone to degenerate at an accelerated rate, forcing him to take new clone bodies periodically. The clones' rate of degeneration was increased further by sabotage. Additionally, he used this power to torture Bevel Lemelisk after the destruction of the first and second Death Stars, among other occasions. In total, Lemelisk was killed and resurrected seven times&mdash;usually when one of the Imperial engineer's superweapon designs failed. Each time, Lemelisk died in agony, only to awaken in a fresh clone. His last words, when faced with a New Republic firing squad in 16 ABY, were "At least make sure you do it right this time."

Set Harth, a Dark Jedi from the era of the New Sith Wars, learned this technique some time in the decades after the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, using it to shuttle his consciousness through a series of cloned bodies in much the same matter as Palpatine would, nearly a millennium later. However, Set Harth's clones were provided by discreet third-party technicians, and never displayed degradation of the kind experienced by Palpatine. Nevertheless, Harth tended to discard them around their 30th year. Unconfirmed reports suggest that he persists to this day&mdash;if true, he must have gone through dozens of clones over the intervening centuries.

Unlike his spiritual descendants, Exar Kun, Dark Lord of the Sith during the era of the Great Sith War, used this power not to possess another body but to anchor his spirit to the Massassi Temples on Yavin IV. When his apprentice Ulic Qel-Droma betrayed him to the Jedi, Kun called all of his Massassi followers into the Temple of Fire, then used their life force (and the alchemical apparatus left by his predecessor Naga Sadow) to abandon his body, drawing on the remarkable focusing energies of the Massassi Temples to anchor himself to the physical world. Kun's spirit would remain in hiding on Yavin IV for over four thousand years, driven slowly mad by his bodiless existence and the unthinkable isolation of the jungle moon. His spirit was finally vanquished by the students at Luke Skywalker's Jedi academy, seven years after the Battle of Endor. Whether it was simply consigned to Chaos or obliterated entirely remains an unanswered&mdash;and possibly unanswerable&mdash;question.

Perhaps one of the most unusual examples of this technique in practice occurred in 12 ABY, when Jedi Knight Callista Ming made use of the power to transfer her soul into the mainframe of the Imperial battlestation Eye of Palpatine. She was able to "inhabit" the gunnery computer of the dreadnought for some three decades before swapping her essence with the willing Cray Mingla, although this came at the cost of her ability to use the Light side of the Force.

This incident differs from nearly all other reported examples of spirit transference in several ways. First, Callista was able to use this predominately dark side ability, usually applied by powerful Sith Lords, to transfer her consciousness into an inanimate object, despite her commitment to the light side of the Force. Nor did she require alchemical apparati or additional life energy. Second, rather than becoming a disembodied shade, Callista became part of the Eye's gunnery mainframe, acting more like a self-aware computer program than a manifest presence. Thirdly, when she transferred her spirit into the body of Jedi trainee Cray Mingla, she could only touch the dark side of the Force. This was unusual, since both Callista and Cray were Force-sensitive. Since she remained committed to the Jedi way (even going so far as to help Luke Skywalker train new Jedi at the Yavin IV academy), she was essentially cut off from the Force, unlike Palpatine, Set Harth, or Exar Kun. (Of course, none of the latter had any compunctions about using the dark side, and remained fully in its grip even after death, so this 'handicap', if they possessed it, was essentially meaningless). Since spirit transference is technically a dark side power, the act of transferring into a host body (even if the host provides consent, as in the case of Cray Mingla) may be enough to cause separation from the light side regardless of the practitioner's original force affiliation.

Behind the scenes
In the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, this ability was represented by the skill Transfer Essence. Unlike the ability described above (such as in the example of Emperor Palpatine), the Transfer Essence skill required the player to make a conscious effort while still living and had a maximum range of 10 meters. Furthermore, a target who successfully resisted possession was forevermore immune to further attempts by that character. Activating the ability was extremely taxing, and if the first few attempts failed, the character's consciousness was dragged screaming into the yawning abyss of Chaos. Even if they successfully usurped control of another character, that character had a chance to reassert itself whenever the possessor called particularly heavily on the Force. The ability exemplified by Palpatine, however, had no range limit and functioned even if death caught Palpatine by surprise, as it did aboard the Eclipse.

The object transfer version of the skill required that the player also have ranks in the Alchemy skill (the in-game representation of the dark art of Sith alchemy) and expend the life force of other willing beings in order to power the transfer (as with Exar Kun and the Massassi). To take ranks in either Transfer Essence or Alchemy, the player had to possess the Sith Sorcery feat, which allowed the player to call upon the spirits of long-dead Sith Lords to improve their offensive and defensive capabilities as well as their skill with the dark side of the Force. However, the ability lasted only for a short time, and each use allowed the Sith Lords a chance to escape their imprisonment in Chaos by possessing the player character.

Appearances

 * Dark Empire
 * Dark Empire II
 * Empire's End
 * Children of the Jedi
 * Darksaber
 * Tales of the Jedi: The Sith War 6: Dark Lord
 * Dark Apprentice
 * Champions of the Force
 * I, Jedi