Alternate Star Wars Episode VII-IX: The Chiss Ascendant

At this point I've read 4 of Timothy Zahn's six prequel books about Grand Admiral Thrawn, before he was a Grand Admiral.  I'd read the others if they weren't so expensive.  Anyway, in those books it explains that Thrawn is from outside the Outer Rim in "wild space."  He comes from a sort of empire in itself called the Chiss Ascendancy.  Since they put Thrawn in canon in Rebels, it would have been awesome if he could have been the villain in the sequel movies.

When my idea starts out, the New Republic is generally at peace.  Ben Solo is taking the tests to become a Jedi Knight on some world in the Outer Rim.  And that's when the vanguard of the Chiss fleet shows up.  They have some Force-suppressing ysalimari with them that allows them to kill Luke Skywalker--because how fucking epic would it have been to kill Luke off in the first 10 minutes of the first episode?  Yeah, we're not messing around here.

Luke buys time for Ben to escape into the wilderness, where he meets Rey.  He needs her help to elude capture by the Chiss and get back to the New Republic to tell them what's going on.  As they tramp through the wilderness or whatever, he starts to realize that Rey has Force abilities and maybe they start to fall in love and stuff.  He gives her a little training and Luke's green lightsaber.

In the meantime, Luke and Ben are way overdue and Leia, Han, and Chewie are worried.  While Leia would like to send a New Republic task force out there, that would probably be overkill, so Han and Chewie agree to take the Falcon out to the Rim to see if they can make contact.  Poe and a couple of X-Wings go with them as well.

Eventually Ben & Rey reach a city to find the Chiss are taking full control of it as a staging area.  They try to sneak onto a ship but get caught and taken up into space, where they see an armada of modified Star Destroyer-type ships.  They're taken to the Chimaera, where they meet Thrawn.  Maybe he has an eye patch or scars or something.

He sees a necklace Rey is wearing that she got from her mother years ago just before her mother died.  He studies it because of the intricate details but that's not all!  The necklace is actually a map to a secret Empire facility.  Putting it in a holographic projector, it brings up a location.  Then Thrawn has Ben and Rey sent to the brig.  There are ysalimari on the ship so they can't use the Force or anything.  

Meanwhile, Han, Chewie, and Poe continue trying to make contact, until they're met by some of Thrawn's forces.  They barely escape somewhere to regroup and try to figure out what's going on.

Of course Ben & Rey find some way to escape the brig and get to the hangar to steal a ship.  They have to dodge some TIE Defender-type fighters and turbolasers and shit and then the Falcon and Poe's X-Wings show up to help them escape.

Thrawn's XO laments the escape but Thrawn just shrugs and says it was inevitable that their invasion would be revealed.

In the next part, Rey and Ben meet Han, Chewie, and Poe and he delivers the bad news that Luke is dead.  Then they head back to Coruscant to give Leia the bad news.  She puts her grief aside to start assembling some forces to find the planet Thrawn is interested in, including Finn as a captain of some ground troops.

Meanwhile, Thrawn's fleet comes out of hyperspace at a remote planet.  There's a dormant volcano thing, inside which is the Emperor's "storehouse" of technologies he didn't want the rest of the galaxy to have--such as cloning tanks.  Thrawn begins cloning legions of Chiss troops--and something else.  There are also some interesting Doomsday-type prototypes the Emperor never had the chance to use, but Thrawn will now.

Our heroes find the planet and Han, Finn, Ben, and Rey lead a detachment of troops to scout the place while Poe and Leia oversee the ships and fighters.  There's soon a battle in space while on the surface, our heroes find the entrance to the storehouse.  There they run into Chiss warriors--and a clone of Luke Skywalker!  Ben and Rey have to battle Luke's clone while Han, Finn, and the others try to defeat the Chiss.

In orbit the battle goes sideways for the New Republic when Thrawn uses some kind of ion bomb or something to cripple most of the New Republic ships.  Soon, Leia has to order a retreat, leaving her husband, son, and the others.

They get word on the surface and manage to fight their way back to their shuttle and escape into hyperspace.  Thrawn orders everything dismantled to be moved before the New Republic shows up.  Then he uses some ysalimari to make sure clone Luke can't use the Force against him.

In the final part Thrawn is on the offensive--and winning thanks to his clone army and Doomsday weapons.  There would be some big battle over the New Republic capital planet while Ben and Rey get on Thrawn's ship to take on Luke's clone, who maybe turns to help them..  In the end, clone Luke does like his father did and destroys his master while the good guys escape.  Or whatever.

It occurs to me later I never said who Rey's mother was or why she had that necklace.  Maybe her grandmother was a mistress to the Emperor and gave that to her so she could rebuild the Empire should it become necessary.  She got pregnant and, rightly sensing Palpatine would be a shitty father, fled to the planet at the beginning before the Empire fell.  She met a dude and they raised her daughter who then had Rey and the necklace was just handed down from one generation to another as a pretty piece of jewelry.  So Rey would still be Palpatine's granddaughter, but in maybe a more sensible way than...however they did it in Episode IX.

I think I've milked the alternate Star Wars for all its worth.  Let me know which--if any--you actually liked and would pay to see.  We're going to finish out the year with some Transformers movie ideas that are all instantly better than anything Michael Bay has done.