FANFIC QUESTION: Where has Snoke been all this time?

Okay, I'll bite.

Darth Plagueis' plan, like every Banite before him, was to upend the Republic, terminate the Jedi for good and establish a Sith Empire. Keep that in mind. Those are the three tenants of the Banite Sith plan. Although Plagueis respected and admired some of the qualities and work put in by the Sith Lords that preceded him, he felt as if the only way to sustain the Sith Empire over the long haul was to in turn sustain his own life. For only he was wise enough to maintain power. From the moment he met and apprenticed Sheev Palpatine, he relegated the Banite tenants to his apprentice and chose to focus his attentions on immortality and midi-chlorian manipulation. He had two paths he could follow: self-regeneration through manipulation of midi-chlorians or essence transference. He loathed the idea of the latter. He felt that a being as powerful as he should not have to rent the bodies of inferior beings, so he chose the former method, although he had perfected the latter just in case.

His experiments, however, were mixed. While he discovered that he could kill and revitalize humanoids, he also found out that each death left its mark. With each regeneration, cells and tissue tumbled further down the path of degeneration, until, after resurrecting his test subjects dozens of times, they would eventually be irreparable.

It was during this time that an assassination attempt was made on Plagueis' life. Finding himself unarmed and surrounded by dozens of the galaxy's most highly-trained assassins in a closed environment, Plagueis was gravely injured, but managed to slay his enemies. The surprise attack had begun with a chorus of lethal projectiles. Lacking foresight, even Plagueis' high level sensory skills and agility were not enough to avoid all harm. A lone vibro disc found its mark and removed half of his chin and part of his neck.

It was at this time that Plagueis discovered another limitation to his power: while he could apply the same midi-chlorian manipulation to his own body that he used to heal and resurrect others, the process was excruciatingly slow. Decades went by and his neck and jaw were only partially healed.

Palpatine was close to correct when he suggested in ROTS that Plagueis could save others, but not himself.

With this disheartening revelation, Plagueis became resolved to move forward with plan B: essence transference.

But Plagueis was far too powerful and far too high-minded to transfer into just any body. He needed the ultimate host with ultimate Force potential. And the host could not be guided by the Light side of the Force. Using a mixture of ancient sorcery, meditation and sheer dark side force, he spread his spiritual seed into the galaxy in hopes of creating one or more potential dark side hosts (this event, by the way, is the event that caused the imbalance in the Force that guides the plots of all seven episodic films). The child who emerged from this unnatural coupling was Anakin Skywalker. With unlimited Force potential and innate characteristics that made him vulnerable to the dark side, Skywalker became Plagueis' ultimate plan. The Skywalker line would supply an endless chain of worthy hosts.

It is during Anakin's first visit to Coruscant (as seen in The Phantom Menace), that Plagueis first spies his dark creation, and, in this important moment, his long-lost foresight ability returned for one final glimpse into the future. It was a mixture of success and tragedy. The Sith Empire would come to fruition, the Jedi would be purged and the Republic would fall. But his future host would be mutilated in the process. The perfect body for Plagueis' future dominance would become a shell of what it should have been.

Plagueis would be forced yet again to seek an alternative.

Palpatine didn't intend to give him much time to consider. Within days of Plagueis' final and greatest vision of foresight, Palpatine saw his chance to turn on his weakened master and supplant him in true Banite fashion. Plagueis found himself with a conundrum: he had trained his apprentice well, had helped him become Chancellor while Plagueis himself remained hidden as Master and was a pariah in public as his alter ego, Hego Damask. Plagueis found himself in a situation where this traitorous apprentice was publicly acknowledged and had gained legal authority. While he could have fought Palpatine and won, he knew doing so would put an abrupt halt on the years of preparations he had made. From the rabble rousing in the outer rim, to the idea to create a clone army, to the work spent training Palpatine, to the political pay-offs and favors, to the engineering of the Clone Wars, the tricky yet successful manipulations of Sifo Dyas and Count Dooku, all of it....decades of planning and execution would be gone and the Sith's legitimate rule would be over before it started. No, Plagueis, thought, there is another way.

His idea to keep his body intact forever was gone anyway and the Force had granted him the foresight to see that his perfect host would no longer work. When Palpatine unleashed his violent torrid of lightning on Plagueis' already old and decrepit body, Plagueis realized that the only way forward was to "die." He made no effort to fight back and was overwhelmed by Palpatine's power. Burning streaks racked his body, particularly one large crater on his skull near which the barrage of lighting had been focused. And just as Plagueis' body finally gave out and realized mortality, his spirit transferred to the slobbering and power-high Palpatine. There it resided, biding its time until the moment was right to rejoin the center of galactic affairs. After all, Palpatine had achieved the three main tenants of the Sith plan. So although Plagueis could have found a new host and unleashed his revenge against Palpatine, doing so would only wound Plagueis' own aspirations. No, it was better for him to remain hidden and allow things to play out. Time was on his side.

We can actually hear Plagueis' voice coming through on top of Palpatine's voice in ROTS during Vader's coronation.

We then see evidence of his presence one last time in ROTJ in Palpatine's thrown room. As Vader launches Palpatine down the energy well, we see a strange blue energy recoiling up the shaft from Palpatine's body towards Vader's. As a sidebar, it is important to understand that Plagueis had, in general, lost his foresight shortly after killing his master. This was explicitly owed to the fact that Tenebrous had also mastered essence transference and had entered his apprentice's body shortly after Plagueis killed him. Thus, Plagueis was not aware that Vader would turn back to the Light side and kill Palpatine. Coincidentally, Palpatine's own foresight of this event was kept from him due to Plagueis' spiritual presence within his body. Having not foreseen this treachery by Vader, Plagueis panics and tries to jump into Vader's body. However, in ROTJ, we see that the blue energy rushes up, but just as quickly retreats back down. Not only would Vader's body perish, but Vader could no longer host Plagueis' spirt. Because there was no Vader anymore. Only Anakin. And a spirit immersed in the dark side has no harbor in a vessel surrounded in the Light side.

Now Plagueis' spirit was trapped back in Palpatine's body, which would perish in moments. It looked like the Force had finally stricken back at Plagueis for good. His unholy imbalancing of the Force had brought him to this punishment. It was over.

Except it wasn't.

If there was one thing Plagueis knew, it was Sith history. Although he could be called a master, a warrior, a ruler, a teacher and a galactic engineer, at heart, Plagueis was a scholar. And in his studies, he learned that ancient Sith Lords had used more than flesh and blood to contain their spirits. Sometimes objects - imbued with power - were used as hosts. And it is in this desperate moment that Plagueis' spirit notices one item of interest in the hellish spot that Palpatine's body had ended up. Was it extreme fortune? Or was the Force acknowledging him and letting him know that he was still the favored Sith to lead the charge in representation of the dark side? Either way, there sat Darth Vader's freshly severed hand and beside it, a still operational light saber. Using the same technique that his predecessors used thousands of years previously to store their souls within powerful objects like talismans and holocrons, Plagueis did what he had to do and stored his spirit in the Sith vessel.

Using his power from within the vessel, Plagueis kept it from disintegrating. It eventually fell out of orbit and onto the surface moon of Endor.

How it was found is still a mystery, but indeed, it was found and eventually ended up in the hands of a Kubaz merchant, who in turn sold it to a mysterious cult called The Acolytes of the Beyond. These creeps would eventually be renamed The Knights of Ren when their eponymous leader emerged. But back then, Kylo Ren was still a Jedi in training and not yet turned to the dark side, although he was both obsessed and depressed by the monstrous legacy his grandfather had left him. Seeking answers, a young Kylo began uncovering secrets and acquiring old artifacts that led him closer to understanding who Vader was and, in turn, who he himself was. It was at this time that Plagueis' spirit tempted him to discover the secret whereabouts of Palpatine's dead master's body. Once the lightsaber was brought into proximity with the Wise Sith Lord's sarcophagus, Plagueis was able to complete the transference of his essence into his former body.

And although it was old and still in disrepair from his many battles and near-death experiences, the very ability to "resurrect" himself in front of an astonished Kylo was all it took to persuade the insecure boy down the path to the dark side. Thus began the very real beginning of Kylo Ren's fall and "Snoke's" manipulation. And Snoke it was, for, after all, "Darth Plagueis" and "Hego Damask" were names forever recorded in infamy. Too weak still to forcefully rule the galaxy, Plagueis created a new alias in order to keep his future plans secret.

Having watched from the sidelines as his previous apprentice achieved and then lost everything, Plagueis knows now that victory can only be sustained if he himself calls all the shots. He rallies the remnants of the fallen Empire and uses Hux to be the human and military face of his new First Order, while Kylo Ren sees to all the dirty dark side business.

Only one problem remains and it's the same one he's had since Anakin's failings: who is the ultimate host? Kylo still has light in him, and as long as that's the case, the spell will not work. Ultimately, he'd love to have Luke. He knows that Luke is susceptible to the dark side and so much of his planning has focused around beating Luke up psychologically. And it appears to be working since Luke has isolated himself away from everyone and everything. Perhaps he can yet be turned.

And then there's this new girl? She'd make a fine host if she could be turned. In fact, is it possible that she herself is a Skywalker? Or is it possible that Palpatine followed in his master's footsteps and sent his own dark seeds out into the galaxy? Could this girl be yet another dark creation, yet another potential perfect host?

"We shall see...."