Tesla

Tesla is an Imperial Inquisitor whose hunger to prove himself is sharpened by both failure and exclusion. At Kantaros Station, where Darth Vader keeps Thi Xon Yimmon prisoner, Tesla is close to the authority he serves but barred from the work he most wants to do: interrogating Yimmon. His story turns on that frustrated proximity—to Vader’s power, to the captive’s secrets, and to Jax Pavan, whose survival has already exposed the limits of Tesla’s past service.

Identity and Formation

Tesla trains with disciplined attention to both body and temper. In one private practice, he moves through the forms of Soresu in a belted, sleeveless gray tunic, wielding a lightfoil suited more to ritual combat and practice than to a real fight. He uses the sequence to cool anger that threatens to overwhelm his self-control, moving through the Sith mantra as part of the exercise. The scene presents discipline not as serenity already achieved but as work performed against an active inner pressure.

That effort has a remembered landscape behind it. The muted green-white durasteel corridors of Kantaros Station recall to Tesla the moonlit grain fields near his boyhood home in Corellia’s Denendre Valley. The resemblance is limited: the valley’s air had not possessed the station’s scrubbed, antiseptic, metallic quality. His memory supplies a point of personal reference inside an environment organized around detention and Imperial control, without softening the station’s character or his role within it.

Service to Vader and the Cost of Failure

Tesla regards Darth Vader as the most powerful Force-user he has known and has long considered him a towering genius. That admiration is no longer uncomplicated. Watching Vader allow Jax Pavan to provoke him into irrational acts has led Tesla to question his master’s judgment. He suspects that Vader’s pursuit of Pavan can outweigh even the Emperor’s wishes or the Empire’s campaign against the nascent rebellion: in Tesla’s bleak calculation, Vader might choose to wound Pavan rather than extinguish resistance across every world.

Tesla’s doubts arise within a relationship of dependence, not open defiance. He wants to demonstrate loyalty and ability to Vader, but remembers how poorly he protected his master’s interests on his earlier assignment involving Jax Pavan’s Padawan, Kaj Savaros. Assessing that failure privately, Tesla concedes that he had not been successful. He supposes he should be grateful that Vader did not dismiss him or leave him behind on Coruscant among the least experienced Inquisitors and apprentices. The memory gives his ambition a defensive edge: proving himself matters partly because he knows how easily his record could justify his removal.

The Yimmon Assignment

After the Jedi have been destroyed, Tesla expects Vader to turn in triumph toward eradicating the wider network of freedom fighters. Instead, Vader takes Thi Xon Yimmon alive and insists on conducting the interrogation himself. The Inquisitors are left with surveillance and guard duty, while Vader gives no sign that the destruction of the Jedi Order has been a major accomplishment. To Tesla, this is both a reversal of expectation and a personal rebuke: he longs to interrogate the Whiplash leader, display his powers, and prove his loyalty, but Vader will not let him near the prisoner.

The exclusion stings more because Tesla believes Vader has made no progress with Yimmon—or at least has reported none to the Inquisitorius. When Tesla once asks to assist, Vader makes clear that only he is entitled to work with such a prize. Tesla reads the refusal as carrying an additional insult: the suggestion that he cannot break a prisoner who is not a Force adept. He is therefore not merely denied a task; he is denied the chance to contest the judgment of his own inadequacy through action.

Vader eventually assigns Tesla to attend and observe Yimmon, a duty Tesla had wanted but receives under narrow constraints. The surrounding intelligence also reveals Vader’s selective trust. When Tesla expresses satisfaction with their spy network, Vader dismisses its usual sources as driven by fear and ideology and says the relevant information came from Black Sun, whose greed and opportunism he considers more dependable motives. Tesla leaves the interview proud to have been given access to the assignment, yet perplexed by the limits placed on it. He decides that the way to widen his influence is to find intelligence about Yimmon that Vader has not already uncovered—and intends to do more than observe without making that departure from his instructions apparent.

Jax Pavan and the Unfinished Contest

Tesla’s connection to Jax Pavan is written through recognition, failure, and danger. When Jax searches the Force for Vader, he reasons that the concentration of Inquisitors around the Dark Lord’s prisoner may make them easier to locate, and identifies Tesla as one signature he will never forget. I-Five warns that Tesla may remember Jax just as vividly, making recognition a risk that could alert Vader to the Jedi’s survival.

In another brief contact, Jax senses Tesla’s presence and identifies him through a turbulent mixture of trepidation, relief, and exultation. The emotions are confused, but Tesla’s location and identity are clear; their history is one neither man is likely to forget. Earlier, while probing a vessel, Jax had distinguished an Inquisitor’s taozin-blurred Force signature among the energies aboard. He had hoped desperately that Yimmon would be there, and the scan left him disappointed. These encounters make Tesla more than one of Vader’s subordinates: his recognizable presence can guide Jax toward the Imperial operation while also threatening to expose Jax to Vader.

Tesla’s position remains suspended between obedience and appetite. He accepts the observation duty, but immediately looks for a concealed way to exceed it; he respects Vader’s power, but increasingly distrusts the priorities that power serves. His wish to prove himself thus binds together his private training, his resentment over Yimmon, and his history with Jax Pavan. The evidence leaves him in motion rather than resolved: still serving Vader, still denied the decisive interrogation, and intent on finding a way to make himself indispensable.