The room smelled cold. Cold, with an antiseptic tang. He worked quietly, the heat of his own breath bouncing off of the mask as he used the tools. At least the cold would keep the sweat from his brow.

He held his breath as he connected the last bit, the sinew charring underneath the hardpoint installation.

There wasn't any noise, save for the sizzle of cauterizing flesh.

The patient should have screamed. He had specifically requested no sedation. The man who brought him there, was his name Cloud or Clod or something like that, had tried to suggest otherwise, but the older man snarled at him in response. A literal snarl, like a Nexu with a toothache. He knew better than to even suggest it further, although the pain... He had seen soldiers pass out, screaming so loud that they had to do work on their vocal cords later.

Not this man.

He just stared at the ceiling as he worked.

He should be screaming.

---

He let his eyes slide over the beacon satellite, the last repeater for the Antei Holonet serving as almost a signpost for where the Shroud started. Scholars int he Core called it the 'Stygian Caldera', the thing that hid the ancient Sith Empire from view. He went over the mission in his head again, the destinations, the people he had to meet.

The docket was full. It had been a full year since he had been to the core, and new contracts were needed. The Herald had his duties outside of Brotherhood space, and the recent wars and politickal machinations have kept him from that work.

It was easier, no doubt. Easier to not have to hide his power, to swallow his true nature among those who could not know, among those that must not know. The repercussions would be swift and final, even if not delivered to him by te Son of Skywalker.

But first, the Shroud.

He held the control yoke almost casually, bringing the ship ever closer to the swirling debris and stardust. It was time.

I'm about due for a new header. It kinda sucks and I halfa%$ed it back when I first got GM. So yeah.

REPORT TIME.

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There's a couple things I wanted to bring up today.

The first thing is something I have discussed a couple times with various DC members. What we're going to be expecting out of members that are in positions, be it Battleteam Leaders all the way up to Grand Master is that they participate in at least one competition monthly (preferably weekly).

What does this solve?

First and foremost, It helps deal with 'Leadership burnout'. Once someone steps up into leadership, we often get bogged down into the other stuff: the busywork of creating spreadsheets, running competitions, brainstorming and otherwise working our fingers off to try to make things better. That's all awesome and cool, but we often lose sight of what made the club so fun for us to begin with. We often make excuses for not participating. We're too busy with administrative details, too busy running competitions to do them, nothing interests us, we don't want to take medals away from other members.

These are really just excuses. If we participate in competitions (obviously not the ones we run ourselves), we will get the chance to impact what kind of competitions that run. If we make time to participate in competitions, we be able to use ourselves as examples, to 'lead from the trenches' as I have said probably a thousand times in the last three years.

I'll use a personal example. Strap in for an old-guy rant.

When I first joined the Brotherhood, I joined as a Sith in House Ludo Kressh under Quaestor Manesh. This was back when houses were divided by orders (so HLK was Sith-only) and Sith pretty much only did flight simulators...games that I didn't have. I was in that order for a few months until Xanos's Sith Rite of Supremacy (back when those events were only able to be done by members of that order) and it became glaringly obvious that being in an Order that I had nothing in common with was a bad call. So, I transferred into House Marka Ragnos (a Krath House) and started writing.

It was there that I met Korras, Manji, Beowulf and Kali. We all wrote each other into our fictions, copying each other ont he fictions that we all did, showing off our stories and adding to each other's personal lore. As we grew through the ranks, we played off of each other, becoming pretty good friends, each of us inspiring each other to be better, to do more, to get higher in the club. It was also one of the most stand-out fun times I have had in the club. This kind of relationship is one that I have still with Korras and Manji, even though Kali and Beowulf aren't around anymore. Back then, before the internets. They just couldn't handle wearing their onions on their belts, as was the fashion at the time. Uphill. Both ways. In the snow. And we were lucky to have shoes, which were made from two liter bottles tied to your feet with twine, back then.

So, what's the lesson behind that rambling? The Dark Brotherhood is a Social club. It's the friendships we make here,t he people we meet and befriend that make it cool. Everything I do, everything that the Dark Council does, everything the Summits do, is just to provide something to do with your friends. The character sheets, the ACC, the dossiers, the forums, the vendettas and everything we do is to provide something cool for you to do with your friends, to make new friends.

And that's one of the reasons I'm going with this new 'Leaders must compete' missive. To get those leaders back into the fun parts. There's a bevy of other benefits, too. It will help get the people that are running competitions to think outside the box and produce competitions that they actually like to play in. It also will help increase participation overall, as most leaders currently don't bother with comps. Speaking from personal experience, nothing is quite so demoralizing as running a comp and having less people submit to it than you have medals to award. While I'm sure that it will still happen, it should be happening less with this...if only because people will be running competitions that are a bit more different and more fun to do as time goes by.

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Some cool things that we are working on:

• Herald Style Hannukah - New members may not be aware, but every December, the Herald's office (including some former Heralds) comes up with a bunch of cool dossier perks to chose from. Even though Herald Shikyo is currently on deployment in the Pacific, he has already gotten me his work for this event and I'm working on adding to it, as is Ekeia. Keep an eye on the news page as we get closer to the holidays for details.

• Grind Path/Shadow Academy - Taigikori and Ronovi have been working extra hard on what we've been calling the 'Grind Path'. To lay a few details out there, the Grind Path will be the default way for members to join, and they'll be able to progress through the Journeyman ranks at their own speed, since it'll be automated. There will be a number of courses, seamlessly integrated into the new and revised join form. Most interesting is that people will go through courses about what the Orders mean and are about before they choose what order that they want to be a part of (as opposed to picking whatever order has their favorite color, or sounds cool, like they do now in the Join Form). There's also similar stuff for clans and houses, the idea being that people who go through the Grind Path will not only be at a reasonable rank, but also have a decent amount of information behind them and have reasons for their choices...making them more invested in their order, their clan or house, and have a decent understanding of how the brotherhood works. Also, because the new members won't be joining the clans at young ranks, there is no chance that a new member can be accidentally overlooked as happens occasionally now.

On top of that, there's also a fair bit of work being made to create a 'society' within the Shadow Academy that allows a member to unlock cool stuff for their dossier as they progress through the various degress of the Shadow Academy.

• Gaming - With TOR's release less than a week away, Fremoc and crew have been ramping up work in getting us set up as a guild and to get things set to hopefully recruit a few new members from this game. As we all know, MMOs are pretty self-sufficient and rarely new members come to us from them, but we're setting up to take good advantage of this potential recruitment tool for us, despite that. That said, we learned a lot from how SWG was handled, so steps have been taken to avoid the kind of madness that plagued our Player's Association. Even the Great and mighty Jac has resurfaced, helping set up a new join form for recruits from TOR.

• Plot Arc - Vodo has been working on bridging the storyline from where the GJW ended to the next Vendetta and beyond, laying the groundwork for future wars. Incorporating a lot of 'current events' into the storyline is no small task, and I'm quite proud of how Vodo has been doing with this. Please take the time to read up on his fictional updates as he puts them out. The storyline may give clues to where we're going with the plot, and could get you a bit of an advantage come vendetta time.

• Codex work - Since moving the Codex to the Wiki, there's been some work to get the information up to date. Halc and crew have been working on that, as well as a project regarding fictional background of our 'custom' ships and their statistics (mad shoutout to Solus Gar).

• Coding - Orv has been working on getting new staffers up to speed using video tutorials and such so that new coders can easily understand exactly what and how things are done code-wise. He's also been working on some fixes to the join process that have been a major pain in the arse lately.

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<center></center><p> Soccora asks: What about DB is so awesome to you that you spend your freetime here day after day? What do you like about it / What keeps you coming back? Masochism?

No, not really. I actually enjoy the club, from the ACC to Wiki, I actually dig a lot of things about how we interact. We get to tell our own story, and if we work hard enough, there's really no limit to what that story can be. On top of all that, I actually have a plan to try to make this place better, and I'm one of those perfectionist ovefocus people that have an insane drive to see it through. But a key thing is the people I get to work with. I consider almost all of them to be friends, and since we all have this common thing to wrench on, it makes it easy to want to come back.

Great question, though. I'll invite anyone else to comment here and put in what keeps them coming back.

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So that's about all for this time. If I can help with anything, feel free to shoot over an email or catch me on IRC.

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