"It's not my fault," Palpatine babbles. "They threatened me, they said they'd kill me if I didn't - and Naboo! I was trying to save Naboo - surely you understand, I was just - I..." He's not really making much sense, but the whole point of this act is to confuse them.

Now the droidekas show up! They're not really doing much, but they hold off the Jedi for long enough for Jango to flee through the halls of the Senate.

"Yeah, right.  That totally explains everything ever."

She shoots the blaster.  It's set to stun.  Then, seeing Jango recover, she throws her lightsaber, veering it out in front of him as she starts pulling plugs on the droidekas as fast as she can!  She has gotten a lot of practice with fiddling with electronics recently!

Ooh, a lightsaber! Jango always wanted one of those.

...OW. That was his SHOULDER. Does his shoulder still work? Eh, close enough. He'll keep running.

Palpatine lets himself get hit. It's very risky, but hopefully his allies will be able to handle this until he wakes up. First Jango, then the droids - there should be more droids soon, right? - and the third person he contacted should be showing up right about now.

"Hello, Master Mundi! I have some business here, if you don't mind." Dooku pushes him out of the way with the Force, and marches into the Senate building.

Uh-oh. The Council members start entering the building.

Oh, how cute, he thought that grabbing her lightsaber would help him.  No, Jango, it just lets her use leverage to try and break you.

(She's still unplugging the droidekas.)

It doesn't take long to handle the droidekas. Jango and Dooku seem to have both disappeared, and most of the Jedi are still searching for them, but the remainder join Yoda, Windu, and Kina in Palpatine's office.

"Should we kill him?" voices Eeth Koth.

"Arrest him.  Very, very carefully.  Killing him is disproportionate to what we can presently prove.  However...we have that lightsaber.  And if Dooku barged in...He's definitely also a Sith.  Drat.  I rather appreciated the fellow, even if I thought his mere example was dangerous.  Anyway, Palpatine wanted protective custody..."

"He's too dangerous to be kept alive," Windu hisses. His lightsaber's still on. "You really think he doesn't have some more tricks up his sleeve? Dooku - he could be here to break Palpatine out, even if he's asleep - is he asleep? What if he's disguising himself, somehow? And yes, he wanted to be locked up! We'd be playing into his plan if we don't kill him now."

"We have enough to prove our case. I'm sorry about this, Kina, but we can't afford to arrest him. We'll find a reasonable defense for this."

"We can arrest him and then execute him.  Think of our public image.  The man's a politician.  He planned this.  He knows how Jedi think."

"He's absolutely trying to make a martyr of himself, I have no doubt.  So we do not let him do that.  We vanish him into a deep dark Sith-proof hole, especially since he did do crimes, and let the Judicial bureaucracy grind him to dust in a faceless anonymous trial that he can't deny wanting."

"What?! Of course he doesn't want to be a martyr! He's trying to escape, and he's banking on us not killing him!"

Windu sighs.

"Yoda, back me up here. Do we kill him?"

On Dathomir, the clan of the Nightsisters begins their ritual.

On a vessel rocketing through lightspeed, Darth Plagueis begins his.

Master Yoda is perhaps the most powerful of the Jedi Order, if you don't count Kina, and no one really does. That doesn't mean his mind can't be controlled, but it means they can't use the normal methods, even those that are theoretically capable of controlling Jedi. They have to be a little more cautious.

When he sent his instructions, Palpatine had considered trying to force Yoda to turn on his allies. Kill Windu, kill Kina, kill the rest of the Order, and get Palpatine to safety. The trouble was, though, that just wasn't something Yoda would do. If the thought entered his head, he would recognize it as alien, and then he would be on guard. Everything would break. There are plenty of people in the galaxy weak enough to fall for that, but Yoda isn't exactly the type to let someone else's ideas influence his head.

His own ideas, though...

Plagueis and the Nightsisters can't force Yoda to be someone other than Yoda. What they can do, though, is be selective over which parts of Yoda are more active. There's a part of Yoda that knows they have to present a public face of protectors who would never kill anyone innocent, who knows that they still don't have complete, undeniable proof, and it's saying to keep Palpatine alive. There's another part of Yoda that knows Palpatine is dangerous, who knows that leaving him alive will be too dangerous and give him opportunities to escape, who knows that Palpatine might have plans in motion that account for his unconsciousness. Normally, it would be a tough decision.

Today, Yoda is sure of himself. One part of him just happens to be a little louder than the other, that's all. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And so he shakes his head, and he puts both lightsabers into his pockets.

"There's three Sith, Master Windu.  If he dies here, now, I think he wins something for the remaining two.  If he dies elsewhere, elsewhen, then we cannot be accused of trying to do a coup.  Now let's get him the kriff somewhere he's not planned being."

Kina hauls Palpatine into her hovercar's trunk, stunning him again.  "Master Windu, Master Yoda, with me; the rest of you, keep the Senate safe."

Yoda and Windu hop into the hovercar. The other Jedi leave the room, and patrol the halls some more.

...and yes, the Senate needs to be kept safe! There's now a wave of battle droids coming in! Through the wall!

Further away, the sixth message arrives, forwarded through an anonymous address.

And Kina swears something incredibly creative in Huttese, double-bladed saber whirling in a telekinetic arc through the droids as the hovercar swoops low and flies slow enough for Kina to scoop up one of the carcasses' radios and jam its receiver into a tracking unit - "How the kriff did all these things even get here?!"

(Incidentally, is Padmé somewhere convenient?)

She's watching the events through a Senator's monitor. This is beginning to get crazy.

The Jedi see Dooku now. He's at the center of the Senate, standing next to the Senator from Serenno and... giving a speech? "The Republic has shown itself time and time again to be far too inept and corrupt to handle an actual crisis. The people of countless worlds are forced into a horrible state of oppression as the Republic stifles production and takes our wealth for no good cause other than buying mansions for its own people! We now find that a Sith Lord has manipulated us from the center of the Republic - yes, Chancellor Palpatine himself, a Sith Lord! The Jedi Order are smuggling him away, and I know not of their purposes, but I suspect they plan to use this gap in the system to take control of the galaxy for their own cause!"

"My friends, I spent time learning the ways of the Force - yes, from both the Jedi and the Sith. And what I have learned is that the Jedi are just as corrupt as the Sith, as all of the enemies they claim to protect us from! We now have seen the deadly power of putting the galaxy under the control of such a horrible excuse for a government as the Republic, especially with the Jedi backing them up. I think we are now prepared to move on from this, from both the Republic itself and from all of the bribery, and the uncaring, selfish methods that it uses! Today, Serenno secedes from the Republic, and we shall be the first in a vast Confederacy of Independent Systems!"

This is absolutely not what Palpatine called him here to do. This isn't even close to what Palpatine called him here to do. But Palpatine's a liability, at this point. He might be better than the Jedi, but he's not substantially so. He'll now serve as nothing but the perfect enemy for the new order to rally against.

Plagueis is a little busy at the moment, but he isn't entirely upset about what Dooku's doing. Still, he is upset that Dooku isn't helping protect Palpatine. Looking through Yoda's eyes, it looks like the hovercar is getting a little too far away.

Well, here's something that might draw them back into the fight! Saesee Tiin's dead!

"Oh for kriff's sake.  Masters Yoda, Windu, out, defense."  How'd he even --

Fine then!  She'll cheat too!

The sound of a yellow lightsaber cutting a hole in the Senate's roof is audible for a minute, and then a hovercar flies through the gap.

"It's a bit rude to send the opposition to your plans haring around saving lives you endangered in the first place while you exploit their absence to score political points, Count Dooku!  Would you like your boss back?  Since I sure didn't see the Senator for Serenno send any messages before a certain bounty hunter cut communications, and yet you somehow knew just the time to arrive!"

At which point she dumps a still-stunned Palpatine on Dooku's pod.

"And if you think that the Jedi Order is a willing tool of Republic oppression, I'd like to draw your attention to the recent Naboo debacle, where Jedi had to do something that almost certainly scraped the bounds of Republic law regarding their ability to act, if not outright broke it, because they wanted to save several million lives the Republic would have written off as a trade dispute!  Did you know that Jedi are legally forbidden from rescuing certain victims of slavery, under Republic law?  I do, because when they secured my freedom, I had to sneak behind their back to save my friends, solely for plausible deniability!  I don't even disagree that almost all of the people in this very room are self-centered, corrupt, money-grubbing egotists.  But.

"We can do better than that."