I think there was, somewhere along the line, the thought that possibly being absent from the Marran meant being exempted from some of the more esoteric Dark Side problems. While there is certainly less of it - no eldritch horrors or dark god-princes or anything of that nature - we do still trip across it from time to time. Unfortunately, particularly from the perspective of our large contingent of non-Force-users, it’s enough to cause significant damage, at least on a psychological level.
Trying to get close to Rosfren to hopefully convince him to back off, we played at taking a job to curry some favour. The job was to seek out whatever relics we could find from a site on Darvannis which was once the lair of a Dread Master. ...I honestly should have known. Then again, I suppose I did. I took as many precautions as I could to keep the others out of any direct line of interference. The problem was, I knew they’d never be comfortable with letting me go on my own, even if I am largely immune to that sort of nerfery. I had to bring the others with me at least part of the way. I did at least try to keep them out of the temple proper, once we got there. They weren’t happy about that either so I hate to think what they would have said if I’d suggested just going by myself, even with the guardianship of the Mandalorian clan Aranar and I befriended when we made a supply drop there.
I did not count on the relics in that temple - enhancements for and extensions of the Phobis devices that made the Dread Masters such a threat, in the main; far less powerful but still problematic on a number of levels - being able to affect the others while they were still outside, but they did. That only got worse when ... well, I wasn’t entirely clear on what happened exactly but largely what I got was “spiders with acidic blood and Mandalorians with explosives”. Either way, the others were forced to fall back into the temple ... and that was where all the nonsense really got horrible.
X’antho got it worst, from a psychological perspective. I could feel his sanity start tilting. Aranar ... I’ve never felt such a combination of sadness, resignation and rage before. Kaelira was just angry ... and sick. Very very sick. She apparently got dosed with the ‘acidic blood’. (Side note: I need to remind Rilus of the difference between ‘acidic’ and ‘venomous’. I mean, all right, it was moderately low on the pH scale but all the same...)
Rilus was ... interesting. I mean, he was ... I suppose the best term is ‘creeped out’, but there was more than that. I’m not entirely sure what it was doing to him, but he had probably the least trying time of all of them, one way or another. The worst he got was the isolation, the misdirection ... and, oddly, some sense of other people’s emotional states. I’m not entirely sure why experiencing the world at least in part the way I do would be considered something to ... erm, ‘creep him out’, but I suspect it was something to do with the fact that he’s never been entirely comfortable with ‘that Forcey stuff’, as he puts it. Honestly, while I regret the discomfort that must have caused him ... I can’t help but think it would be interesting to ask, when things have died down, what he makes of my day-to-day input.
I think the worst part for me was not being able to help them. I could sense their emotional states, yes, but I couldn’t pinpoint them to a location. Also, I was busy. I found the artefact storage room easily enough but every time I managed to cleanse and destroy an artefact, another two started to ... well, wake up. They were feeding off the emotional imbalance of the others. It was a bit of a quandary, I have to admit - I wanted to help them, and needed to help them if I was going to actually keep ahead of the artefacts’ nerfery ... but if I left to find them, more would be waking up and increasing the head-nerfing and it would be even harder to actually help them. So I was stuck more or less burning myself out to at least keep a sort of status quo, hoping that someone would get free.
Turned out that Rilus did. I don’t know if I’ve formed some kind of connection to him over the years or if it was just that I was putting out so much cleansing energy that even being in my vicinity broke through the hallucinations and Dark Side influence. It might have been both for all I know. All I know for sure is that Rilus managed to get through on comms, found my medkit and dosed himself with that Flames serum I came up with all those years ago. I keep some handy just in case, as it’s proved to be very multipurpose. Rilus administered it to the others and we finished the job of destroying the artefacts.
...Yes, I know we were tasked to retrieve them for Rosfren. I don’t nerfing care. I didn’t care when we got the assignment beyond being grateful that I’d been pointed to some Dark Side artefacts to take out of working order, and I don’t care now. He’ll just have to learn to deal with disappointment.
In any case, once I finally recovered from the level of burnout that had me not even knowing which end of an injector vial was up, I set to work on an antivenin for Kaelira. Rilus managed to keep her stable with a standard antivenin, but she did need something a little more tailored. It was sort of nice to get back to biochemistry again; it’s been awhile. We have a meeting with Lord Rosfren soon, and we’ll be trying to get him to back off. I’m hoping this can be resolved peacefully and that we can set him and his considerable resources against the Zakuul, rather than against us ... but I’m not counting on it. I am still taking the bahat-mint tea in unreasonable quantities against the headache that comes from quite that level of ... *ahem* ... ‘I WANT HIS FACE’ ... hitting me in the head from all angles.
After that, though ... I intend to try to find something a little more ... sensible than the standard combat stim. Combat stims work to a point, but I think I can do better. I just need to do some significant research and get the right materials together. Yes, the right materials are probably a little scarce and hard to get hold of right now ... but that’s why we have smugglers. That and the fact that they’re lovely people. Which reminds me; I have some snacks to bring over to X’antho.
It was ... a bit of a hard day for people the other day.
We were trying to track down this Lord Rosfren who Mae and the others encountered at that Jedi temple last month. Investigation led to a not-very-pleasant cantina in the middle of virtual nowhere, mostly populated by the less pleasant sort of mercenary. ...Yes, I know how that sounds, but Alti and Mychae and even X’antho to a point qualify as mercenaries, the former two have worked as bounty hunters in the past and it does no good to be judgemental of an entire profession. There are some mercenaries who stay on the right side of the line - for example, Mychae not being very pleased when we promised the unpleasant devaronian bartender some of her contraband ‘Meltdown Special’ grenades.
Then there were those nerfs.
It turned out that some of the mercenaries had taken younglings from a settlement they’d robbed and razed. Those younglings had been traded to the bartender to settle their bar tab. One of the younglings is mildly Force-sensitive. Most of the five were quite young, with one seventeen-year-old twi’lek as sort of a guardian. The sort of work it seems she was put to... In any case, we had to do something about that, obviously. So we went back with intent to get the information we came for, free the younglings and get out.
...Unfortunately, there was a minor problem. Neither X’antho, Kaelira nor Rilus actually wore face-covering headgear on our first trip. And the place was full of bounty hunters who didn’t care who they were working for as long as credits were involved. They apparently followed the Zakuul bounty boards. Apparently there were enough mercenary groups wanting a share of the bounty that they started something that was less a cantina brawl and more a tiny war. The emotional backlash from that was still strong on the cantina when we got there, and I was rendered largely blind from it. Still, it seems that two groups came out triumphant - a group of eight humans, and one largely comprised of houk and wookie.
In retrospect, the way we handled it wasn’t ... ideal. Mae insisted on staying in the cantina, where the bartender had set the young twi’lek - Estie, I’m told her name was - to mind the bar. A Gamorrean bouncer was set to watch her. Unfortunately, the group of six stayed out in the cantina, and the rest of us ... well, Rilus, X’antho, Kaelira and I went to talk to the bartender, and the group of eight followed. It was bad conditions. I could sense a certain amount of frustration from Kaelira and X’antho both - I think X’antho had a thought to use a flashbang grenade, and Kaelira’s path would have been suppressive fire, but in such a small space ... it wasn’t viable. Rilus threatened the bartender ... but I don’t think the bartender was really in charge. Not enough to call off the mercenaries, anyway. I mostly dealt with the situation by throwing the lot of them at the walls.
Mae ... tried to attack the Gamorrean holding Estie. Apparently disregarding the six armed beings at her back. On the other hand, as I told Kaelira later, if she hadn’t, the Gamorrean might well have taken Estie hostage for Mae’s good behaviour and she’d have been no better off because someone might have killed Estie - and Mae - once Mae was disarmed. Instead, the six mercenaries opened fire. Mae did very well and dodged or deflected everything. The Gamorrean did not do nearly so well. ...Neither did Estie. She died in the crossfire.
When I felt that happen, there ... wasn’t really a great deal I could do. Rilus had the bartender, but Mae was still in trouble and the other four younglings ... I was in touch with the Force-sensitive one, and got them to take an alternate route out through the ventilation shafts. I needed X’antho to rendezvous with them and get his ship ready for take-off ... without getting angry or sidetracked by Estie’s death. I ... was a little abrupt about giving orders to him in that regard, but I did apologise later, and explained - he thought it was because I was still rattled from the empathic backlash. Which I suppose proves he doesn’t know me as well as all that yet. In any case, I sent Kaelira out to help Mae with the remaining mercenaries after we restrained the eight that came after us.
I’m ... not sure if I’m proud of what we did next or not. I had Srina place an anonymous call to Zakuul authorities, providing proof that the bartender was selling contraband weapons to resistance fighters. Then we took everything of value in the cantina - Rilus took a terrible lot of credits and some very pricey medications that I’ve been having trouble synthesising with the materials on hand. Rilus also ... well ... he told the bartender to give him the code for the safe or he’d shoot the bartender’s kneecap. This is not a side of Rilus I am used to seeing.
Mae’s upset, but handling things as well as can be expected. I keep reminding her that it’s a learning experience, telling her that it should improve her rather than define her. I suppose it’s a more explanatory way of saying it than Nyomi would - she’d just tell Mae not to dwell. I don’t find negatives helpful because the brain doesn’t process ‘no’ and ‘not’. She’s taking the ‘learn from this’ to heart and the last couple of days we’ve largely been working on Soresu. I think she’s beginning to understand that sometimes the best way to protect someone is to be the shield between that someone and harm, rather than just eliminating the most immediate threat. I’m obviously sad that it had to be this way, that it ended so poorly ... that Estie’s life had to end so soon ... but if there’s any good to come from the situation as a whole, we have to at least try to look at it. Otherwise, despair sets in and that’s just ... a poor way to cope.
We do have that meeting, though. We need to speak to the intermediary first, to make sure it’s genuine. She’s a twi’lek cantina dancer of some standing, or so we’re told - Amber Gloss is her stage name, apparently. X’antho and Srina will be trying to get information on her. Mychae will be trying to hire her for that cantina she runs on Nar Shaddaa. We don’t want another meeting in a kill-box of a bar. One casualty is quite enough.
.....*giggle* I ... should probably go. X’antho seems to be trying to lead the new younglings around on Muffin and Muffin is far more interested in chewing on his ponytail. I’m sure I’ll get him to see reason and let X’antho lead him if I promise those tauntaun treats I came up with last year...
When we first landed at Port Knowhere, I’m not sure what Mae and I expected it to turn into. Maybe something like this small refuge and supply drop that Kaelira told us about, that we’ll be investigating in a few days. I think the last thing that we expected was for it to be the core settlement of a community spread in little unconsidered spots throughout a sector or two. But there it is.
First, Fort Motley. Rilus and I got the medbay sorted out, and Edvar managed to keep Alti’s ... erm, science-ing ... from getting out of hand. I’m not sure what she wanted to do with Fort Motley’s droids, but given the emotional resonance coming off her when she looked at them, I honestly don’t want to know. Instead, Edvar set her to making a hydroponics bay that mimics the light levels of Alpheridies in various climates, so we can grow things from our species homeworld. He’s curious to try more of those recipes that Tomuraan and Raiyden gave me some time ago, and it’s not as though we can afford to trade for such relative luxuries.
Then the temple. For reasons I’ll go into in a moment, Mae took Srina, Kaelira and X’antho to a Jedi temple abandoned during the Zakuul occupation. It turned out that a Sith lord had been making attempts to pillage the place and Mae declared the entire temple under our protection. I think she’s made an enemy; then again, this Lord Rosfren is a pureblood and it likely offends his sensibilities to see a pureblood Jedi, no matter what the reasons. There’s a report in the offing, but Srina apparently wants to check a few of her sources before producing it. Given the lengths to which we’ve gone to be difficult to find, I imagine we have time. In any case, between the Republic soldiers who have been watching the temple in the absence of Jedi, and Ahri’s own efforts in trying to get Jedi who actually want to rebuild the Order at least in part together to occupy the temple properly, we seem to have adopted the temple, military settlement and soldiers all.
But that’s Mae. She’ll adopt nearly anyone.
So ... now we come to the reason that Mae put together a team to poke around an abandoned Jedi temple not far from Alpheridies. It turns out ... well, we were talking about holocrons a few years ago and I explained that actually putting one together would be a bit tricky; there are meditative rituals and special materials and it’s even more complicated for a miraluka, as to get a proper gatekeeper construct who can address the person accessing the holocron, there needs to be some capacity for limited Force-sight. Those things were rare but accessible before the occupation; after the occupation, they were nearly impossible to find and it wasn’t a priority anyway.
Mae ... tends to make things a priority according to what she feels at any given moment. And in this case, she decided that my having what I needed to make a holocron took priority. So she sent Ahri on preliminary scouting runs for the things I’d need, and then set up the retrieval mission for when Rilus and I were otherwise occupied. I think she’d have brought Rilus along except for the fact that a non-Force-sensitive with a secret and/or surprise doesn’t keep that secret and/or surprise a mystery for very long around a miraluka empath, so they arranged it while we were otherwise engaged with Fort Motley’s medical facilities.
I ... was more than a little overwhelmed, and I still am. X’antho outright said that he didn’t care what it was he was even doing when Mae asked him; that all he needed to hear was that it was doing something nice for me. Srina got shot when they encountered Lord Rosfren. ...I have to admit that I am desperately proud of Mae. Rosfren taunted her, and I felt her anger ... but she didn’t attack. Aurrin always used to say that Mae ‘acts with the speed of emotion’. When I sensed what she did, and heard about it later, I wished he could have seen her...
Speaking of Aurrin, he always accused me of obfuscating, and I’m doing it again. What I am avoiding saying is that I had a significant moment of doubt that I had anything to say worth storing in a holocron, to be preserved for the ages. That doubt still assails me from time to time. But ... then again... Jokes about the recipes and cooking lore aside, I guess I do have some things that should be preserved in more than bits and pieces in a computer database. All the medical lore I’ve compiled over the years, including the extensive research on the rakghoul plague and various cures for some truly horrible diseases. Jedi philosophy - more important than ever when even Grandmaster Shan has reportedly abandoned the teachings of the Order. The ways to build a settlement. A fair bit of history. ...And yes, the cookery things too.
But most of all ... the stories, I suppose. I said once that if I had the lifespan of a Garhoon, I would engage with everyone I could, so that the galaxy could remember them when they were gone. To be their immortality. I suppose a construct of me in a holocron can literally be their immortality. I want them to know that there was a pureblood who struggled against prejudice and her own low self-esteem to finally find her place in the galaxy, a human who built the impossible out of love of her freedom. I want the galaxy to hear of two Jedi of various species who found that love and duty can coexist. I want the galaxy to know about the soldier who fought as hard to make a home for people as she did to destroy those people’s enemies, and the zabrak who flew the length of the galaxy and never wanted a nest until he found one that loved him back ... and the doctor who dropped everything to find the woman he loved.
A holocron is a piece of immortality. No one ever said it had to be mine alone. There are so many people who made me what I am today, and will continue to do so. Their presence may not be seen or heard, exactly, but the stories will be there, and their essence will be felt in any representation of me, as much as my own. Those with me now, and those I’ve lost... The Force provides its own immortality when we return to it, in the end, but for those of a less ... Jedi bent, I suppose ... they say that a person only truly dies when their name is no longer spoken.
It was impossible for Jallira not to know that X’antho was curious. For him, the story was all, and hearing a good one was nearly as important to him as telling a good one. She sensed that about him - the need to make his chosen profession something more than prosaic cargo transport from point A to point B, saying anything and everything to keep alive and get a better deal, maybe killing people somewhere along the way. X’antho, by contrast, wanted the ideal of spacer life, the dashing silver-tongued noble rogue. And part of that was the stories - not just the ones he lived through, but those of his companions. “Look who I know; look who calls me friend. Imagine what adventures I will have with someone who did that.”
She’d had to discuss the matter with her sisters before she undertook her own tale-telling. Between Jedi modesty, the poor training she would probably be shaking off her whole life and the fact that most of what she’d done in her life seemed pretty prosaic compared to her former companions, Jallira had no idea which stories were actually worth telling. The conversation with the Greystorms took the best part of a family lunch, with Alti squawking about ‘SITHSPAWN PANCAKES!’ until tempted to relative silence with pie so that the other two could get a word in edgewise. So it was that Jallira, armed with a moderate assortment of tales, came aboard the Tragic Understatement with a packed lunch, supplies for the Bolthole, and a reasonable way of spending the trip through hyperspace.
She began with the Sacking.
“I remember thinking ... well, it was complicated, for someone so young. It was so many different kinds of ... scary, I suppose. On one hand, it was ‘I am about to have an exciting adventure’ scary - the good kind. But there was something else. I didn’t really recognise it, so I just carried on, really. What else was there? I waved my parents farewell, I think ... and then I went in with ... I think a nice Togruta gentleman; I’m not really sure. He didn’t make it out, I don’t think.
“It was when I got into the Temple that things felt ... properly wrong, I think. There was something in there - a wrong note. I didn’t recognise the resonance I was getting at the time. Looking back, it was ... not eagerness, but close. Bloodlust. Itching for a fight. Rage. Hate. Darkness. I hadn’t felt anything like it in my life. I suppose that sort of thing isn’t exactly common on small Dantooine farmsteads ... though I recognise it well enough now.
“At any rate ... it was just a small ... flicker, at first. Somewhere up high. And it was more pride than anything else. A challenge. A good fight. Battle glory. What I recognise now as a fairly Mandalorian way to feel. Having read the histories, that would have been Vizla. I sensed that something else was coming, something darker, but ... the whole place was so new. I’d never been to a city. I didn’t know how they were supposed to feel. It was awkward; it all felt ... wrong, but I couldn’t tell what was just ... strange emotional resonances that only city people feel and what was ... something else.
"...Even a farm girl knows what someone dying feels like. The Togruta ... I think it was a Togruta ... was about to introduce me to someone in the hall, but ... maybe he felt something to, because he came up short. I just felt death, and not the kind I was used to - I’d felt sentients die before, sort of, from accidents or old age, but ... I’d never felt a sentient mind snuffed out so deliberately, like livestock to the slaughter, but worse because it wasn’t necessity in the way I understood it. There was enjoyment in it. ...That ... that was when I started screaming. I suppose at least it sounded an alarm.
“The Togruta tried to hand me off to ... someone younger, I think. There was this noise - lightsabers igniting, though I didn’t really notice at the time - and the emotional noise got ... very, very loud. Protectiveness, determination, confusion, that sort of high alert you get when you have maybe a few minutes to prepare for an attack but you don’t know what direction it’s coming from? Again, most of these I didn’t recognise then the way I do now. At the time, it was just a jumble of noise that ... well, either I hadn’t been taught to mute my empathy at all or it was just too much to block out. In the end it made no difference; what matters is that there was a lot of noise and it made no sense and it hurt. The hurt only got worse when I felt something ... rage and hate and bloodlust and darkness ... approaching at high speed. I don’t think I gave any kind of verbal warning. I was fairly far beyond that. Though I think anyone trained as a Jedi would have felt that coming, at least a little.
“Of course, everyone noticed when the shuttle came through the wall. Honestly, I only know from the histories. To me, it was like half the world was caving in, with auditory and empathic noise everywhere. There was a sense of being protected - I think the ‘someone younger’ was trying to shield me from falling debris. I ... reached for my parents. It was hard, through all the noise, but I ... I’d like to say that I just wanted to know that they were alright, and in retrospect it was probably partly that, but ... mostly I was young and frightened and I wanted my parents. I hadn’t even started Jedi training on dealing with attachments, after all.
“...That’s how ... well ... I reached them, but outside was even worse than in the Temple. At least in there, everyone knew how to control their emotions, whether it was processing them to deal with them or channeling them into just another weapon. Outside ... the Sacking had begun in earnest, and the terror and pain and confusion ... so many innocent people having their lives ripped apart or just plain taken ... I don’t think I could describe it, even to another miraluka. And I wouldn’t wish the feeling on anyone. That was bad enough, but ... I did manage, to find the impressions of my parents. For a moment. I ... felt them die. Somewhere out in the nicer parts of Coruscant, I just ... felt them die. I don’t really know how to describe that, either.
“That ... was essentially the end of it; of what I remember of it, at least. That was all I could process; everything was just too much. I suppose I must have lost consciousness, and honestly spent most of my life after that not remembering very much of it ... or anything else. Traumatic amnesia, they said. It turned out that the few in the entry hall who’d heard my name had either died or only heard it ... garbled, I suppose. Or didn’t remember it very well themselves. Someone must have heard Aefyet, but ... somehow it came out as ‘a Fyet’, so that ended up my family name. Jallira ... I’m told I gave them that one myself. I didn’t remember the name I was born with, but I managed to hold on to the nickname that, according to Edvar, I’d had since I could talk. I held onto something, at least, though it was a long time before I realised how much.
“That ... was the Sacking. From the point of view of a small child caught in the middle, anyway. I suppose the story isn’t very coherent; I’m sorry about that. I’m sure I can find a better one...”
“...It’s a complicated story but some very large and powerful Force-being was invading our compound, and we were trying to thin the ranks of the monsters before they got to our defenses. We’d separated into teams of two in entrenched positions - I was with the Major on top of this small hill by a cliff face, and we were getting more or less swarmed. Trying to take the creatures one or two at a time was ... not going well. Leave us simply say that that was my first lesson about wearing white - and skirts - on a battlefield. In any event, we were close to getting overwhelmed and it seemed best to end the fight quickly, so ... I brought down part of the cliff face. I think there were near on a hundred of the creatures underneath that pile of rubble when it came down ... which is why Alti keeps shouting about Sithspawn pancakes. And ... I’m not generally telepathic - I get emotions more than thoughts most of the time - but I could almost hear him deciding that he was never ever going to argue with me about taking his squad members out of drills for medical matters ever again because getting on my bad side suddenly looked like a very bad idea...”
“Keep in mind that a lot of my stories are medical and it’s probably not exactly interesting to hear about cures for-- Oh. Really? All right. Um ... there was the time I ended up learning nearly everything there is to know about the rakghoul plague from a telepathic holocron that, while causing me some psychological problems for awhile, enabled me to find a treatment for the primary stage of rakghoul plague so that soldiers in the field don’t end up with their only option being a blaster bolt to the head... Yes, I’m not surprised THORN all but mugged you on Tatooine that time; every time a resurgence happens, my holocomm ends up flooded with calls from them to show me new samples so I can tweak the treatment, and they always hand the resulting treatment to the nearest spacers looking to make a few credits to get it dispersed before people go past the point of no return. I’d apologise but honestly, it’s saving lives. I just hope they paid you reasonably, when-- oh. ...oh nerf. ...I will make it up to you with cookery.”
“...so this Moff or mayor or whatever he was says that he’ll surrender so long as we promise not to rape or murder any of the people in there. To a group of Jedi and assorted military, he is saying this. Honestly, by this point I had crushed half a war droid, not to mention the skull of an Imperial Guardsman, but that was all self-defense, and I honestly found the implication a little insulting. So I said, ‘We’re Jedi. We don’t do that. And even if we did, you’re not my type’. ...What?!? He wasn’t! He felt officious and hard and slightly greasy on the empathic scale! And dry humour sometimes relieves tension! ...You can stop laughing any time now... *sigh* Oh well, at least you’re enjoying yourself...”
“Yes, a crotch-mounted blaster pistol. He called it the Groinling Gun. He tested the prototype in medbay. A week’s worth of research on a more refined blend of kolto and it ended up splattered all over the walls while he made jokes about ‘blowing his load’. We had to write up rules about what did and did not happen in medbay after that. Although Nake always managed to find ways around it by rearranging the furniture whenever I went away for more than five minutes. I don’t think she grasped the limitations of my sense of vision very well. But at least that was better than Katrai, who once announced over comms that she was sorry for the sexual bluntness of her species and that she hoped I got laid subtly... Oh, she was zabrak. ...Stop apologising for your species, X’antho; she was just a little ... troubled. Mentally. Which I suppose is my lead-in to tell you about the time a group of us had to go and kill some experiment of hers that got thrown out and gained sentient independent life in our trash chute... Oh, Mychae’s told you about that one. I suppose she would - as I understand it, she ended up hanging upside down from a garbage chute watching Alti use cryo-grenades and a flamethrower in an enclosed space and doing more damage to us than to the former egg salad. ...Yes, I said egg salad.”
"...two weeks in a house of negotiable affection on Nar Shaddaa. It was owned by a ... friend of a friend who got poisoned with something that her brother’s husband had come up with, had no antidote for and left lying around when he left the Empire so that his brother ended up picking it up and... You keep talking about these holodramas and it makes me glad I can’t see them. Anyway, the first three days was spent trying to convert a spice lab into a halfway respectable medically-oriented biochemistry set-up. It didn’t really work, but I did at least help forward their research. And made friends with nearly every ... lady of the evening ... in the place because I basically shoved the kitchen droids in a closet and took over the cooking myself. ...Oh, yes, they did find another way after I got called back to help fight walking dead people. ...Yes, walking dead people. We got those a lot. ...And we’re back to holodramas again; holodramas sound like nerf...
“Yes, a cult. Blame Aranar. He was trying to do something nice by getting the spice-addicted folks in some of the lower sectors of Nar Shaddaa more interested in good food than they were in spice. But since their thought processes were ... chemically skewed, they took a throwaway comment about me being a ‘cooking deity’ to heart ... and describing the cookbook one of my friends made me publish for charity as ‘holy writ’ just made it worse... Long story short, people on Nar Shaddaa were worshipping me for awhile-- I think I’ll wait for you to stop laughing yourself into an aneurysm before I even try to explain the whole ‘tauntaun sacred animal schism’ issue...”
“...she unfortunately seemed to think that Gamorrean sausage could be made from actual sentient Gamorreans, rather than the non-sentient porcine creatures on Gamorrea. So the net result of her hunting trip was that I ended up with the corpse of a Gamorrean stuffed in the walk-in fridge in the bistro. I considered myself an accessory to murder at that point and actually confined myself to quarters until Nyomi came to explain that I wasn’t to blame for someone taking the first answer that came to mind rather than even trying to clear up ambiguities. Still, Tlari was trying so hard...”
“...and by that point it was fairly clear that nothing was going to change unless I made it so, and the Council had approved such things before, so I just rummaged a lightsaber ring component out of my pocket, went down on one knee as I understand it’s done in those holodramas you keep invoking and said, ‘Oh, nerf this. Will you marry me?’ There was a very long pause and I could nearly hear him get his thoughts in order because mostly it was just this ... ‘hooooooooly neeeeeeerf’ coming off Rilus for about ... forty seconds, by the chrono? Anyway, I remember exactly; his response was, ‘oh, kark, ‘course I will’. And then there was this squee noise from up a tree that was cut off very abruptly with ‘onerf’ and a thud. Ahri was doing her usual upside-down meditation in a nearby tree and had clearly heard everything. And there’s Rilus staring at her and her in this sheepish but joyful heap on the floor and all I could say was, ‘...I think the in-laws know’...”
By the end of the trip, Jallira still hadn’t run out of stories. But she had enough to give X’antho at least some idea of who this little miraluka he’d adopted as his ‘little big sister’ was.
I don’t know what it is about my little sister. It’s like ... she has that Jedi thing about attachments, but attachments find her anyway and she ends up with the most loyal friends-family in the galaxy and I end up with a smuggler-type who’d take a blaster bolt for her turning up at my metaphorical door saying “Hey, your little sister’s still alive after an impossible situation, so you know, and Things Happened”.
The last time, it was, “Your sister survived the Sacking of Coruscant and now she’s a Jedi Knight and joined some ultra-heroic subsect that keeps its own paramilitary unit” coming from this cyborg PI. This time, this Zabrak guy turns up going, “Your sister survived the assault on Kuat - well, the assault on Rylan III because she wasn’t at Kuat, but same difference - after becoming a Jedi Master and is now running her own little resistance group and refugee settlement and setting up a second settlement and oh yeah she’s married now”.
Y’know, I think everyone expected me to be more surprised than I was. But, see, last time? My brave and gregarious little sister meeping and hiding behind people? That surprised me. But I remember the little girl who lectured someone twice her size for pushing me down in a playground, who hugged a wild kath hound, who could always talk me into her little adventures as a toddler. Her leading a group? My only reaction was ‘about kriffing time’. It’s good to see her closer to whole.
So these people have been good for her, not just good to her. Though they’ve been that too. Her sisters - I don’t know what that makes me to them, but they’ve got that plotting feel about them that makes me think someone’s going to throw adoption papers at me - welcomed me with open arms. Literally. Ever been hugged by three people at once, all of them apparently determined to squeeze your brains out your ears? I actually needed bruise salve and Lira tells me that I’m lucky Al-- Altay-- kriff it; ALTI - didn’t launch herself at me with a jetpack. They all started talking at once after that and it finally came out that they’d split into teams to set me up my own quarters on this desert settlement they call Port Knowhere and the new one they’re looking for new settlers for that doesn’t have a name yet. “So you’ll always have a home to go to with us”, they said. I guess I wouldn’t mind adoption papers if someone flings them at my head. Don’t think there are better sisters, except the one blood-related to me.
One better sibling (except the one blood-related to me), though. Rilus Harridin. No longer a corporal, still a doctor, now my brother-in-law. Lira told me that when she went missing after the Zakuul attacked Rylan III, Rilus never gave up on her. Alti I understand - she’s the type who gets an idea into her head and never lets go. But this guy ... not a smuggler or a bounty hunter or a pirate, but fell in with this excitable lunatic for a whole year, looking for his ‘doll’. Never gave up. Never got disheartened. Put up with the weirdness and helped with conflict resolution and translated ‘excitable Alti’ to Basic. It paid off, obviously, and now I have a brother-in-law. Guess I don’t have to tell him that I have a blaster and have learned how to use it.
...I probably should anyway. Brother’s job, and all.
Then there’s these others. The Zabrak, X’antho ... this guy is made of wonder. Literally. All I get from him is “Wow; how’d I get this lucky?” and this growing sense of wanting to do nice things for people. It’s like my sister threw a switch in him somehow, nudged him into his place in the galaxy, where he’s happy and feeling like he’s doing what he’s been put here to do, and I think he knows it. Plus watching a Zabrak, even if he wasn’t ever the stereotypical Zabrak, leading little kids around on the back of a tauntaun is probably one of the cutest things I’ve ever witnessed.
Kaelira Lakara and Jai-din Sortek are more reserved, but Kaelira, at least, is noticeably happy I’m around for what I mean to Lira rather than my way with plants. Then again, I try to keep clear of Sortek, mostly because he’s one of the former Marran I never really sussed out. Kaelira, though ... the stories I’ve heard. Saved my sister’s sanity. Unleashed assault cannon nightmare retribution on a droid that gut-shot my sister. For that alone, I like her. She reminds me of a younger, less disapproving version of that Jedi Master Lira always talked about - the one with the cybernetic arm who hauled me out of the Rokhans’ burning farmhouse that one time. Not exactly given to obvious gestures of affection, but mess with the people she’s sworn to protect and she will mess with your face.
The weird thing is my sister’s influence on them, in the small things. Almost all of them use ‘nerf’ as a swear word. Even the former Republic military and the smuggler. The only ones who don’t are Rilus, Sortek and the Chiss, that I’ve met so far. Even the Mandalorian. Aranar’aliit. He found out I could grow red gourds out here, given seeds enough, and he went Alti levels of excitable. I can about forgive him for starting a cult with my sister as its deity figure. Plus it’s funny to hear this stream of Mando’a swearing interspersed with ‘nerf’ when he drops a supply crate on his foot.
So I’m going to spend a few weeks here, making some tweaks to their irrigation systems - they’ve been doing pretty well, but there’s room for improvement. After that, I’ll probably spend most of my time on this other settlement, the jungle one. It’s going to be the source of most of their produce, after all. I’ll come back often when I bring and collect supplies, and to visit, but ... my sister has her own life. I'm glad to be a part of it, and I’ll keep being part of it, but ... I don’t have to be right on top of her all the time. She’s got her own life. I can let her live it. But I can be part of it, and I’ve got this bunch of well-meaning lunatics to thank for it.
...Plus I have a couple of weeks to hear all the stories. And tell them. Really looking forward to the reactions to the one about her deciding to tour Dantooine on nerfback when she was four...
Things are getting gradually back to some semblance of normal after the incident on Zakuul. Honestly, it could have been worse. I wish I had been conscious when Master Sortek took his wound but at least he was mobile and nothing life-threatening was going on. Rilus looked after him and all was well, and no one else got seriously hurt.
...Well. Except for me. Still, Rilus did a wonderful job of the surgery given that replacing damaged intestines with cybernetics was not an option. Still, I am a little concerned about how many scars my internal organs have at the moment. Between the scattergun and the PX-133, my insides are nearly as scarred as Mychae’s outsides. I’m studying the best ways to minimise the impact that may have on my general vital functions, and it doesn’t seem to be overly problematic as it stands, but it’s a thing to keep watch over.
I think the worst of it was actually the week of enforced bedrest. I did a fair bit of healing meditation to minimise the time I would spend bedridden (and the surgical scars) but apparently one week was the absolute minimum. Having gone over the medical report, Rilus was right. That does not mean that it was easy.
I have to thank my colleagues for trying to make it easier on me. Mae brought distractions - apparently Srina loaded a couple of research papers I wanted to listen to onto a datapad for me, and she brought those, and she brought Yvrais in to tap-dance for me. Something about, “You can’t see her dance but you can see her being happy, so that’s okay”. Alti did her part by trying to keep Sparkles entertained. Sparkles apparently missed me and was bellowing (or, as Alti puts it, ‘singing the song of his people’) on and off for days. X’antho asked for stories, being particularly interested in my perspective of the Sacking, and brought a few of his own. It could have been a great deal worse, even if I did get excruciatingly bored. Still, I think I’ve gained enough wisdom to know that the harder I push, the greater the risk that I end up bedridden for even longer, unable to do anything. Or worse, in a kolto tank.
I’ve been back up and about for a week or so, and a lot of that has been spent going over various plant and soil samples brought by Mae, Aranar and Mychae when they went to investigate the potential secondary settlement on Sagrai. I may have to go along on the more in-depth scouting mission, if only to identify some of these. One’s a variant of something I use for antibiotic ointment. One’s a deadly neurotoxin. And there’s this fruit thing that--
--is apparently very good in pie. But of course I can’t actually describe any of it to people and apparently the scouting party’s idea of getting samples is ‘pick something off a bush and bring it home’ without actually documenting anything like what the bush looked like. But I heard something about a cave and things that look like nexu but with more teeth and razorlike prehensile tongues so I suppose they can be forgiven for not taking the kind of time they should have to document their findings.
I think X’antho is planning something. He’s got that happy-nervous anticipatory feel to him. I think it’s meant to be a surprise, though, so I’m not going to pry. He’s got enough on his mind anyway, as he’s one of the main folk trying to figure out what the repercussions are to that stopover at the Zakuulan research facility. Master Sortek tried to offer advice to the more underworld-connected of us about how to obtain that information, which ... well, I imagine Master Sortek knows more about that world than I do, but I doubt he knows as much about it as the people who live and die by their wits in it, so I thought it best to just tell them to do their jobs as they saw fit. I like to think I’m wise enough to render unto smugglers the things that are smugglers’, so to speak. I got the idea that wisdom begins with knowing how much you don’t know, and acknowledging that others know more than you do, and learning from those people - not to mention trusting them to take care of matters in which they are far better versed. I’m honestly content to figure out what we want our end goals to be and let the people who actually know how to achieve them figure out the means. It seems only fair. People don’t tell me how to practice medicine.
...Well. Except that once. But at least it gave me practice in telling people whose opinion I respect that they do not know what they’re talking about.
In the crate, Jallira paused a moment to get her breath and take stock. Ignoring the twinges in a right knee she suspected was sprained and the various bruises left by suppressive fire, she used one of the few advantages she had - the fact that being locked in a crate was not much of an impediment to seeing what was going on around her, given her species.
The others had not been quite so questionably ‘lucky’ as she had been when everything went to nerf. Instead of having a glimmer of something calling them in the Force that ended with them having a preparatory moment in a packing crate, they had ended up sprawled on the floor and summarily subdued. They had set out to be the distraction for the team doing what they thought was the really dangerous mission, and stumbled onto something they hadn’t remotely expected. It was difficult to tell whether their distraction gambit had even worked; it was almost entirely droids out there, but what little she could hear from outside the packing crate didn’t suggest that they were calling for backup from the Enforcers. The intercept was a little too clean for that kind of necessity.
They were captives. Srina and Ahri were waiting for a distraction that wasn’t coming. And one of those droids had mentioned vivisection.
All right, she thought. None of that is very helpful. Now find something that is.
After reaching out through the Force for a moment, she found what she was looking for.
The droid set the packing crate down and undid the latches, preparing to move the captive into more secure circumstances. It didn’t have time to open the lid, however; the lid ripped off the crate of its own accord and smashed the droid’s face in. That done, Jallira didn’t even bother trying to clamber out of the crate; instead, she cut it open, her lightsaber seeing use for perhaps the first time in her life.
She took two running steps away from the gutted crate ... and then turned back, rummaging through the packing material that had cushioned her fall for the items that had called to her through the Force. The holocron was small, but warm in its emotional resonance. The crystal was cool and somehow sharp, in its resonance if not in its contours. Neither were much, but they had called, and she wasn’t going to just leave them there for Zakuul to paw at. Part of being Jedi was preserving the lore. Holocrons more than qualified.
Unfortunately, the moment it took to locate and pocket the two items gave time for another one of the strangely heavily armed cargo hauler droids to turn up in the doorway, opening fire. She deflected everything, much as Jai-din had done on the top of a medical transport some weeks before, and then hit it with her lightsaber, weighted with all the added power the Force could give her. The droid hit the opposite wall in pieces, but Jallira was left panting and leaning in the doorway, having pushed things a bit too far. Unfortunately, she hadn’t had much choice. She was alone, small, not very physically strong and host to half a dozen health issues. In those circumstances, the only way to get through a fight was to end it as quickly as possible.
She wouldn’t survive ten minutes on her own if it came to stand-up fights every time. Still ignoring the sprained knee and the bruises, she moved further down the corridor, hoping to the Force there would be no more droids until she reached her destination.
She almost made it. The little chute stained around the edges with organic materials was too small for most humanoids to fit through. This was the one place where her size was an advantage. She could sense it - the chunks of waste meat and smears of blood, the incoherent dispirited rage beyond it ... and then she heard the sound of servos behind her. Deflection wasn’t an option; all she could do was run, and hope she hit the chute before the droids hit her.
As it happened, the two things happened simultaneously, and she took two blaster bolts - one graze to the right hip, one full-on bolt to the left shoulder - that knocked her into the chute. She slid down it and landed badly in what sounded like some kind of metal trough ... and the acklay with whom she now shared the space peered at her, grumbling in an inquisitive, hungry sort of way.
Jallira reacted the only way she knew how. “...oh you poor thing; they’ve been starving you, haven’t they. I think I have some meat pasties in here somewhere. X’antho won’t mind...” With that, she rummaged in her medkit and then offered the bewildered-looking predator a perilously small meat pasty, putting her hand in close proximity to its teeth with no apparent concern.
After a moment, the acklay carefully, gently ate the pasty, avoiding the hand entirely. Then it gave Jallira a friendly nudge.
“...I think I’ll call you Sparkles.”
Jallira had no answer for the question of why animals liked her so very much. Her old foster, Sedryn, could have explained it to her ... and in a roundabout way, he had. When he’d first encountered the tiny, shy, retiring, terrified meeping mess of a miraluka, Sedryn - an empath himself - had sidled over to her as non-threateningly as he knew how and told her, gently enough, “You’re thinking too loud”. Jallira literally wore her emotions on her sleeve - she didn’t just receive on an empathic level but transmitted to an extent as well. It wasn’t intentional and certainly wasn’t meant to influence others to any undue extent; in fact, it wasn’t conscious at all. Some sentients didn’t trust it and others took it as a sign of weakness, but everyone mistook it for reading facial expressions that a species without eyes couldn’t manage.
Animals, however, went with their instincts, and these days Jallira’s empathic resonance was less about distress and ‘leave me alone’. These days, it was pure compassion, an unspoken ‘I want to help you if I can’. All Sparkles the acklay and the myriad other animals being held in the Zakuulan test subject menagerie knew was that here was someone who was on their side. That made her part of the pack.
The fact that she had food didn’t hurt, either.
Once she and Sparkles had disabled what of the interior beast pens they could, letting out an assortment of nexu, ferrazid hounds, mynocks, khor’slugs, gundarks and other, stranger things, Jallira addressed them all. She knew they couldn’t speak or understand Basic, really, but words helped focus intent.
“I ... can’t promise that you’ll all get out of here. I wish I could. I don’t know how this is going to go. I just ... know you deserve better than to die a piece at a time. No one should be locked up, starved and used as an experiment ... or a weapon. I’ll try, if I can, to get you an escape route. Just ... if nothing else, you deserve a fighting chance. Will you take it? ...Would you please help me?”
The rumbling, squawking roar that followed from a dozen different species was as close to ‘yes’ as they could come. Jallira sighed, shook her head and said, “Well, I imagine you’ll find something to eat anyway, one way or another. Just ... not my friends, alright?” With that, she started cutting a hole in the nearest wall, occasionally clambering on top of Sparkles to get sufficient height. This makeshift door, she sensed, would lead to where her friends were being held.
She gave the creatures a chance to disperse, and the alarms to start sounding in earnest, before heading to the nearest familiar resonance pattern. She hadn’t got far before a friendly nudge between the shoulder blades nearly knocked her over. She didn’t turn; she didn’t have to in order to see Sparkles standing behind her.
“...All right, come on. Rilus will do that head-shake thing but Alti will adore you.”
Growling happily, the acklay followed the little miraluka down the corridor, slowing its pace as best it could to stay level with Jallira given her short legs and minor limp.
After that, it was all a haze of pain.
The destruction of the droid between her and the corridor to the beast pens had left Jallira running on nearly empty; even when Force-healing became less a convenience and more a life-or-death necessity, it wasn’t an option. She had a hard enough time trying to dampen her empathy sense, which always ran riot when she didn’t have it in her to keep her walls up. X’antho’s guilt over not having distracted the droid that had eventually taken Jallira down with a scattergun blast to the gut. Alti’s mind outracing its own panic in a recursive loop of mental and emotional noise. Kaelira was easier, but bouts of frustration, anger and vengeful satisfaction blared out of a comfortable hum of military discipline every now and then. Rilus was probably the worst of them; anger, fear, panic ... though the determination holding it all together comforted Jallira more than she was literally capable of saying at that point.
After helping take down the Enforcers at the comm station, Jallira didn’t have it in her to say anything at all, or even stay conscious. All she could do was hold on as best she could, using the tethers of her friends’ emotions and the Force-bond with Mae to stay as connected to the physical as she could. She had no fear of death; she was too Jedi for that, and had faced the possibility too many times. She held on not out of fear, but out of determination. She still had things to do ... and it went against her very nature to hurt her friends that way.
I did what I could, was the last thing she remembered thinking. I gave them the last thing I could - a chance. That’s all they need to get out. It was a comfort, anyway. If it had to be her last thought, it wasn’t a bad one to go out on, in her opinion.
Jallira had never had much to do with making those sorts of deals. Second-hand ships of dubious pedigree, anything that touched on the underworld ... if there was one thing Jallira didn’t entirely understand, it was duplicity. She knew it wasn’t entirely fair - for most of the galaxy, emotions were easy to hide, and they could make their bodies and faces and words all match up to what they wanted to say. She still didn’t understand it. There was no context for it. Facial expression was a mystery to her, something as far out of reach for her as Force-healing was to X’antho. All she saw was a person’s presence in the Force - who they were, or at least who they made their Force pattern show themselves to be. People were a presence beyond the physical to her, and her sense of vision combined with her overly attuned empathy sense made prevarication confusing, frustrating and almost painful to her, like heavily juxtaposed background noise while one tries to concentrate on something else. While she intellectually understood why people didn’t say what they felt, she didn’t understand why people insisted on prevaricating with colleagues, allies and friends. Reticence was one thing, but straightforwardness was all she knew. She’d never known anything else.
Honesty had served them well with the Serendipity. They’d had to ferret out each and every piece of the truth to sway the deal in their favour, though Jallira had seen in X’antho that a lot of the deal was about timing. She’d seen the houk get more and more nervous, knowing that something was going on behind the scenes but not having the wit to determine what it was. If the timing hadn’t been right, the bargain would have been less in their favour. She hadn’t had to tell X’antho any of that, though - he’d had his own ways of knowing. Still, he’d won that battle with honesty, in a way. He’d shown that they didn’t honestly care that the ship used to be Cartel property but that anyone else might give him a significant problem over it, making it in the houk’s interest to get rid of the ship as quickly as possible. He’d shown that they didn’t honestly care about the mynocks and spiderling creatures infesting the lower levels of the ship but that they’d leave him to hire an expensive exterminator if they weren’t sold the ship at the price they wanted. He’d flagged up in no uncertain terms that the three Jedi in their group and the two men who allied themselves with said Jedi would never oblige a woman to have relations with someone as currency. Though Kaelira had done her part in that - she could have shut down the houk’s interest in no uncertain terms, but she hadn’t, seeing his leering for the distraction it was.
The ship would pay for itself, between the prototype engine about which Mychae was still making pleased squee noises and the ludicrous amounts of cargo in a hidden bay somewhere belowdecks. ‘Serendipity’ indeed.
She sometimes felt bad about her way of seeing. With Zach, for instance, she felt bad. Looking at him was a morass of things she didn’t understand but partly recognised, through old friends who’d been hurt too much and vanished because of it, though not without leaving damage in their wake. She’d been very ... direct, with him. She hadn’t thought anything else would get through. She had the feeling, ‘watching’ him leave, that this would cause worse problems later on ... but she still didn’t regret it. Sometimes people needed a push, and if it took a brief spate of problems to clear the air ... well, it might work. Stranger things had happened.
But with X’antho...
The offer he’d made, of the expensive whiskey, if they needed to sweeten the deal ... it had been generous, but she’d experienced what came off of him before. Spacers had people like that - a large Devaronian, an elderly twi’lek... Spacer lives were often brief, and ended too soon to say good-bye. Jedi, much the same. Though she supposed that the prevailing wisdom was that a Jedi, with their warnings about attachments, knew nothing about the need for mementos.
But she had hers, and after the business with Zach, and thinking of X’antho with his costly whiskey, she went over them in her mind. A necklace of feathers and beads. Another, a simple pendant with a green crystal she could see in the Force. The simple band with the small, flat-cut stone she always wore on the third finger of her left hand, under her glove. The datapad primer of saber form theory, that they’d never been able to return to Mae’s first duelling tutor. The cookery datapad. A small pouch of 'sand’ made from ground Force-crystal. A holocron from Alpherides. A pair of boots with knives in the toes. A knife with a carved wooden blade. Her little droid, who now served food but was once a seeing-eye droid. A knitted sweater with too many arms whose hem came past her knees.
She thought of them - the lost and the found, the dead and the missing, the ones she’d return home to that evening and the ones she’d never see again ... and ignoring the tea and the caff laid out, she poured herself a shot of whiskey, as she’d recommended X’antho do for the captain he’d lost, and missed still. The same way she missed her lost. She took a breath and raised the glass. I will not dwell, she told herself, but I will not forget. Touchstones never hurt anyone.
She drank the shot and set the glass back down. People came and went from others’ lives so quickly. Small wonder she didn’t believe in maintaining distance from others through prevarication and confusion-spawned contradictions. Life is too short, and sometimes empathy is all we have, and the thing we need most.
