A brief question (before I start reading your drafts), does Rey remain a Palpatine in this edition? It would be a nice balance if her ascendancy was kept the same, but her parents were terrible people anyways.
Yup, you definitely don’t have to, but if you read my previous conversation with Testing that’s actually what I’m going for (Rey Palpatine with terrible parents).
They still ditched her and sold her into slavery because her father wanted nothing to do with the Force after everything he experiences on Exegol. He becomes SUPER scared when he sees that little Rey is Force-sensitive. He left Exegol because he never wanted to return there, and she is reminding him of Palps. He just wanted to live a normal life with the woman he fell in love with on Jakku.
Then Ochi comes under the order of Palpatine to force them to live on Exegol for the rest of their lives because he sees that they can produce Force-sensitive offspring. He’ll only let them live to do that if they reveal Rey’s location. Her father doesn’t want to go back to Exegol, so they decide to not reveal her location purely to spite Palpatine. He would rather die than go back to a planet that is essentially hell to him.