She's an Akarn, a species I made up that has 4 ears, 3 eyes, fur, and an exoskeleton on their hands. With their third eye, they can see in the dark. She is based on my sister's Neopet, a white Acara named Zlinky, and both of them are based on our childhood cat, Lily.
She is one of my most heroic OCs. Though she faces many dangers in her life of knightly service, her greatest stuggle is with doubt: in the Order, the Republic, the Force, and herself.
Knightkiller: Anakin and Obi-Wan’s First Adventure
Chapter 2: Zlinkgwal Zalt
Word Count: 1481
Links: Chapter 1, Table of Contents
* * *
Anakin wakes up in a dim, small room. The brightest light comes from the red sparks of the electrobars on one side. His head is aching, especially behind his right temple, the large, ropey scar still pink from where they removed his trackerbomb just three months ago. Swallowing the pain, he sits up and sees a woman sitting a few feet away, her hair in long, brown braids.
“Mom?”
The person turns to look at him, and Anakin flushes in embarrassment. She is not a woman; she is only a girl, thirteen at the most. And judging by the fur and the number of eyes, she's not a human either.
“Did you just say ‘Mom?’”
“... Uh... No.”
She looks unimpressed.
“I'm Anakin Skywalker. I'm a Jedi Padawan.”
“You are? I'm a Padawan too!”
“Oh! Are you Zlinkgwal Zalt, Padawan of Master Juna?”
“Yes. You can call me Zlinky.”
“Great.” He smiles at her. “Me and my master came to rescue you.”
Zlinky raises her brows. Anakin frowns.
“Hey, we will rescue you... eventually.”
“Oh, well, in that case, thanks in advance.”
Anakin glares at her and rubs his face. She is fiddling with something shiny.
“Skywalker... Aren't you the boy Master Jinn found?”
“Yes.”
She looks back at him, all three of her eyes downcast. “What a terrible fate.”
Anakin looks away. “Yeah.”
She sighs. “And now, I'm afraid, my master will soon meet her end, too.”
“Where are we? What happened?”
“You went to the Liberated Comet?”
“Yes. And then I heard a voice. But only I could hear it, Obi-Wan couldn’t. And it was telling me to come to it, and of course I wasn't gonna do that. But then... something changed about it. It got really weird. And... I did what it told me to.” He feels ashamed. “I obeyed it... It must have used the Force on me. I'm not very strong of mind, yet.”
“Well, if it's any consolation, the same thing happened to me. As soon as my master turned her back on me, I ran straight to that voice and got conked on the head.”
“Then what happened? Why do you think we’re gonna die?”
“This is a secret death match base. It's a ghoulish old sport, and the prizefighters all want to face Jedi. They think that's the most impressive fight possible.”
“They're right.”
“But Jedi don't fight for sport. Certainly, they don't kill for sport...unless they're baited.”
“Oh... and that's us.”
“Yup.”
“How…”
“They tie you up and put a bunch of blasters on you. You sit at the edge of the fighting ring, where your master can see you. Then you watch them fight, and kill, someone. Or else, I guess, get killed. But Tila hasn't been defeated yet.”
“Tila?”
“Tila Juna, my master.”
Right, first names, our Padawan privilege, thinks Anakin. It always feels great when other people have to say “Kenobi,” and he doesn't.
“That's not so bad. I bet we can figure out a way out of here.”
Zlinky takes a deep breath. “Our fate shall be the will of the Force.”
“Yeah, that too.”
The children fall into silence.
“What are you working on?” Anakin asks.
“I picked up this scrap of metal in the arena. I'm trying to whittle it down, so it's thin enough to slip between those plates on the wall, maybe loosen them a little.”
“What are you using to whittle it?”
Zlinky holds up her hand and shows him a hard, boney ridge along her alien fingers.
“Whoa. Cool. Does it hurt?”
“It's fine.”
Anakin pats himself down; of course they took his lightsaber and emptied his pockets, but they didn't take everything. He feels around the seam of his pants, and locates a small lump; he scratches his seam open, and withdraws a two-inch-long, very thin white package. He tears the adhesive off with his teeth and unrolls the layers of white cloth to reveal a small durasteel screwdriver.
“Do you think this could help?”
“Where did you...?”
“I sewed it into my pants.”
“That's... very smart. Did you master tell you to?”
“Uh, no. I learned this trick from a pilot back home.”
Zlinky regards Anakin with suspicion, but she takes the screwdriver from him and looks at it in the light from the bars.
“I can think of a few ways we can use this. I've examined this cell very carefully. I bet I could slip up the wall plates with this…” She holds up her hand and makes the screwdriver float a few inches. “Maybe even... deactivate the bar--”
“Anakin,” a familar voice interrupts them.
The Padawans look at each other in fear. Zlinky hides the screwdriver in her hands. A shadow passes over them as Knightkiller fills the area in front of their cell. The bars deactivate and the room becomes even darker. Anakin glares up at her.
“Come with me, child,” she says out loud.
Anakin senses her voice doing the same thing it did to him back on the Comet. He grips the edge of his metal cot.
“Don't try to resist, Anakin.”
She waves one of her arms as she speaks, just as Obi-Wan does when he's mind-tricking someone. Anakin feels awful. It's one thing to obey commands as a Padawan. It's another to obey them as a slave. And this is something else again -- an eerie, unnatural compulsion. He always feels rather proud when his master mind-tricks other people. But now that it's happening to him --
Is there anything worse one person could do to another? Even at his lowest, most miserable moments on Tatooine, when he was trapped or filthy or in pain, when he learned the price of each tooth in his head, when he would look at his hands and think, “These are not my hands” -- even when he felt torn from his own body, he still had his mind. If that is gone too, if that can be taken too -- where else is there to hide?
Anakin feels himself stand.
No. He won't. He is a Jedi. He cannot be mind-tricked. The Force is too strong with him.
“Fighting back, are you?” She waves her hand again. “Come on, sweetheart. Come to me. Don't hurt yourself in this silly rebellion.”
Zlinky speaks up, “Just do it, Anakin. Tila says you can die if you try to resist a mind-trick. Or more likely, go completely nuts.”
Anakin is breathing hard. “You'll have to drag me out of here, my lady.”
“I could. Or you could walk yourself out.”
Anakin shakes his head ... leans back against his cot … and sits back down.
“Anakin!” Zlinky whispers, “It's not worth it!”
“No.” He feels his head aching harder and harder as his mind resists the trick. “Never again.”
“Come here. It is only three steps.”
He meets her eyes and sees the slave-traders back home in them. He shakes his head.
“Your mind is not that strong. I could snap it right here.”
“Do it.”
“ANAKIN?!” Zlinky shouts.
Anakin sees spots in his vision and he feels his thoughts careening to the side and upside-down. Watto. Yoda. Mom. Sand. Cold. Jedi. Slave. Walk. No. Come. No! His mind is his own -- if it falls apart now -- at least it will fall apart in his own possession. They can take away everything, his mother, his feelings, but they can't take away his mind, his ability to make decisions, to think his own thoughts and move his own way. He is a Jedi -- he has no one, he cannot -- but he has himself -- and he is the only one who does -- this property is not for sharing.
Knightkiller watches the little boy sit back down on his cot disobediently. She growls in annoyance, but she doesn't want to waste more time; she wants to see what this new knight Kenobi is made of. She enters the cell, grabs Anakin's shoulder, yanks him off the cot, and drags him out the cell and down the hall. Guards reactivate the bars; Zlinky hears a pop as Anakin's arm dislocates. She is relieved to hear him scream in pain, a sign that he has not turned into a vegetable or lost his senses.
Zlinky shouts after him, “Cooperate, Anakin! We've got to survive!”
Anakin calls back, “Okay, Zlinky!”
He stumbles to a better walking position, trying to keep up with the multi-legged alien woman. He feels his head returning to normal; the pain in his shoulder gives him something else to focus on. He won the fight. He beat her. If he can do it, it will be easy for Obi-Wan.
