Listening to the blaster fire, explosions and shrieking of monsters from outside, Harridin reflected that at least the commander of the Republic base on Ord Mantell had been telling the truth when he’d said that this posting would be mostly ship- or base-bound. Of course, no one had ever said anything about Sith monster nerfshit dropping out of the sky to engage the base directly, but that part of it had even managed to throw the eclectic bunch of Forceys who ran the place off their stride a bit. Fighting eldritch horrors might be the average day for most of these people, but usually the horrors didn’t come to them.
Harridin also hadn’t expected to be quite as in-charge as he ended up being. This, he reflected in a quiet ‘hurry up and wait’ moment in the fortified medbay, was what happened when your chief medical officer was also your field medic, a Force-healer and a Flame-wielding Jedi. It helped, though, from his perspective; with a healer like that in the field, while enough cases came in needing a surgeon, most had at least had some preliminary treatment, leaving them in a state where one less-than-perfect move wouldn’t be the difference between life and death.
Most. Not all.
When a soldier came in on a hoverstretcher with the Lead Apothecary refusing to budge further than arm’s length from him, a trembling hand hovered over the man’s heavily bruised head, Harridin could tell where his primary focus had to be. He strode over as med techs lifted the patient onto a surgical table and barked, “Status.”
He hadn’t known Apothecary Fyet-Greystorm for very long, but he knew that normally she would have meeped when snapped at. Still, when it came to matters medical, all that shy stuff got shoved to one side, so she gave as good as she got. “Severe concussion and subarachnoid haemorrhage resulting in obstructive hydrocephalus”, she told him, hand still poised over the man’s head. “I can keep the damage to a minimum for a time, but I can’t do any kind of repair with the increased intracranial pressure.”
Harridin winced a bit. “Cranial shunt?”
Jallira shook her head. “EVD is the safer procedure since the haemorrhage can be repaired.”
That got Harridin to relax a little, if not by much. External ventricular drains were one thing. Permanent drainage tubes in someone’s head were something else again. Still, both involved him pointing precision laser saws at someone’s skull, and while he would be the first to admit that he was a damn fine surgeon in general, he was no neurosurgeon. He was going to have to be incredibly on-game for this...
“You can do this.”
The little Jedi’s voice was somewhat strained - no surprise, given her current exertions - but kind and supportive as it knew how to be, and it was the most he’d heard her say without meeping or hesitating that didn’t involve a direct diagnosis since they’d met. It helped. Seeing that she wasn’t going to be able to do whatever Forcey hoodoo she was doing to keep the patient alive much longer helped more.
No pressure, Harridin thought. Nooooooo pressure. With that, he picked up the laser saw and got started.
Several hours later, Harridin stepped out of medbay with a mug in each hand and a medkit over his shoulder. They’d done good work, all told. The drain had gone in with no problem, the private’s subarachnoid haemorrhage repaired, and both Corporal and Jedi had moved on without a hitch. She always knew where she was needed, and seemed to use recognised medical techniques as well as her Forcey stuff. Whatever biochemistry background she had made her a fine anaesthetist too - the kind he wished he’d had in his residency.
It was only after the last of the patients were treated and Jallira had gone out to get some air that he actually registered the Lead Apothecary’s shredded robes, bruises and mild limp. Now that he had, he figured that his duty wasn’t quite done yet. His time on Ord Mantell had taught him that anyone who was upright and able to get the job done shouldn’t be turned away in an emergency, so he’d ignored her injuries for a time. Still, the healer in him wasn’t going to let that fly for long.
Jallira sat on a rock outside medbay, indulging in that deep, controlled breathing he recognised well enough from his own experience dealing with stress, post-traumatic or otherwise. He sat down beside her, not too close, and handed over one of the mugs. “Alright over there?”
She nodded, taking the mug with a grateful little smile. “I ... just needed a moment, was all,” she explained. “My empathy gifts ... it gets ... overwhelming, sometimes.” Not wanting to touch the idea of trying to deal with critically injured patients when you could theoretically feel all of their pain, Harridin scooted a little further away, just in case he was hurting her by accident. To his surprise, he got a tiny little squeak of a giggle and a shake of her head. “You ... this is fine. You emanate calm, for the most part. In a storm of ... emotional input, it is...” She hesitated a long moment, blushing as red as her hair and clearly having no idea why, before finishing with, “.............nice.”
Since he didn’t want to touch that either, for various reasons he wasn’t in any mental state to cope with yet, Harridin just nodded. “Good, ‘cos I also brought kolto patches and such. You might be able to heal all Forcey but takes less out of you to do it the old-fashioned way, yeah?”
He’d almost expected an argument, given what he knew of her medical history. To his surprise, he didn’t get one. Instead, he got a nod and a tiny Jedi tentatively scooting over closer to him before removing her outer robe to show some fairly impressive claw marks and a painful-looking set of bruises. Wincing, Harridin got to work.
“...How do Sand People find their way around the Dune Sea?”
Harridin paused, trying to figure out if it was a serious question or not. With Jallira, it was hard to tell. Since he didn’t know what she was getting at either way, he just asked, “How?”
“...........tusken radar.”
While his amusement didn’t stop him from treating his patient, Rilus Harridin grinned, with the occasional chuckle, through the entire rest of the treatment.
The first Life Day came only a few months after their separation from their home, family and everything they knew, just as the Zakuul invasion was beginning in earnest. Bouncing between settlements, desperately trying to reach supply caches before the areas in which they were hidden became occupied, Jallira and Maelana barely had time to breathe most days, let alone stop for anything but a few days of hardcore combat medicine and holding the line against waves of skytroopers.
That did not, however, stop Jallira from believing that Life Day was important.
They were between outposts on the day, picking up a supply cache on a largely unremarkable and unpopulated planet some systems over from Belsavis, and they overnighted in the cave in which the cache had been hidden. Jallira raided the supplies for a decent meal and provided Mae with a gift - three pairs of warm socks bartered from a Republic soldier who had no need of them since she was never going to see Hoth again. Maelana’s Pureblood physiology meant she loved heat but did not cope well with cold; the socks were a blessing. Maelana, for her part, had done much the same, having managed to get hold of an extra pillow for her sister, whose somewhat scarred lungs meant she slept better when propped up a bit.
It wasn’t much of a Life Day, but they made do; with a good meal and thoughtful gifts and a night of Life Day carols and reminiscences. They had such a long way to go, and such a lot of darkness to fight through; they needed - and deserved - one night of light.
By the second Life Day, they had moved into Port Knowhere. While they had something one might call a home, they were still a little too busy to stop for very long. The vaporators and hydroponics bays were set up thanks to the farmer they’d rescued from their last trip, but none of the plants were bearing yet. The MeepMobile had been patched up, but they’d only had time to go out for half of the remaining supply caches ... not that there had been many left, no matter how overzealous Alti got. No one was hungry, or injured, or ill, or without a roof over their heads, but in those first days, Port Knowhere was perched on the ragged edge of break-even.
That did not, however, stop Jallira from believing that Life Day was important. She stinted herself mercilessly for the best part of two months, keeping various food supplies aside for something closer to a feast than Port Knowhere usually had. There were only two dozen people, but supplies had to stretch, and she had the Force to sustain her. Maelana found out about it sooner than Jallira would have liked, given the Force-bond, and only stopped nagging when Jallira suggested a compromise - share the duty; each only skimped a little with the same effect as one of them skimping a lot. This kept them both healthy enough to carry on without using the Force as a crutch overmuch.
One of the trees they’d planted in the refugee area for shade was suddenly designated “the Life Day Tree”. Lacking for ornaments, Jallira decorated the tree with fragments of Force-crystal, remnants of old projects and smashed bits found on battlefields that she hadn’t had the heart to leave as someone’s war trophy. She hoped that the fallen didn’t mind the use to which she’d put what were probably pieces of their saber crystals, but in their place, she would be glad that the broken weapon of war could bring some light, somewhere along the way. Others at Port Knowhere got into the spirit of things fairly quickly, once they saw what she was doing. One of the soldiers they’d evacuated had turned glassblowing into something of a hobby, and took a break from creating vials and drinking vessels to make some proper ornaments. A farmer who did pottery made some clay ones as well, and the fragments of Force-crystal soon gained a whole slew of ornaments to keep them company.
The gifts were also a little better, since they had at least some time and tools to make it happen. Mae had convinced the potter to teach her enough to make her sister a teacup, for when they could find some of that mint for her headache-tea again. It was lumpy and lopsided and looked horrible, but Jallira loved it. She, for her part, presented Mae with a hair tie that had started life as a fragment of greatcoat lining, dyed and elasticated to make a sort of scrunchie.
That year, the sisters presided over a good meal, if not precisely a feast, and when the rest of Port Knowhere’s settlers had gone to their quarters, they stayed up. They set out small bantha-tallow candles under the tree and lit them, one by one, and with each they spoke a name. Ahri and Alti. Rilus. Ami and Laurent. Aranar. Mychae. Sedryn. Aurrin. Jai-din. Nyomi. There were more names than candles, but the candles remained all night - tiny beacons for the lost, lit as if they could somehow beckon their loved ones home.
The third year was a banner year, for their tiny beacons had somehow, against all odds, worked. Well ... some of them, at least. They’d discovered Mychae while trying to get parts to fix their ancient vaporators. Mychae in turn had led Alti and Harridin right to them. Aranar had turned up three galactic standard weeks before Life Day, with Srina in tow and a cargo hold full of extra supplies, most of it food for ‘the cookery goddess’.
While useful, the new supplies weren’t as necessary as they’d been the previous year; the plants in the hydroponics bays were bearing, the gizka breeding programme was going nicely, they had more able bodies to hunt wild bantha and forage in the nearby oasis, and Alti had even managed to finish the ‘nerf lawn’ upon which their dairy nerfs grazed. That year, they did manage a Life Day feast, and it was nothing short of epic by the standards of previous years.
There were traders at the market by then, and gifts were easier to come by. Most did still tend towards the useful, though, with at least three people providing the mint that made up the base of the medicinal tea Jallira took for empathy headaches. That year, though, at least the useful could tend towards the special, with Jallira going all out on herbal soaps for companions who’d been dealing with whatever skin-scouring military issue soap they could trip over for Force knew how long.
Thanks to Alti, they actually managed a toast with wine that year. “To absent friends, and the ones who made it back to us”.
The fourth and fifth years followed heavily from the pattern of the third. The meals were better, the gifts were more along the lines of ‘something special’, and each year there was a new addition to the ‘family unit’. The fourth year, it was Jai-din Sortek, needing a place to bring a group of refugees. The fifth year, it was Ahri, brought together with Jallira on a run the Alliance specifically needed a small group of unobtrusive Jedi, one with some knowledge of biochemistry, to complete.
Jallira built on every successful Life Day celebration. She tended the ‘official Life Day Tree’ and ran competitions for the younglings of the settlement to choose who would help to decorate it. She encouraged a market faire, and a sort of pot luck Life Day feast to go with it, with everyone bringing a favoured dish to share, not to mention a tale for around the Life Day tree. She felt it established a sense of community, and helped improve morale. She wasn’t wrong. In fact, in the fifth year, she was confident enough in the community that she mentioned to a couple of trusted souls that if they had anyone who might be willing to be more ... proactive ... in defending the galaxy and rehoming refugees, they might want to come visit around then, and see what they’d be fighting for.
Which is why, in their sixth Life Day celebration, the ‘command crew’ of Port Knowhere changed the toast: “To absent friends, the ones who made it back to us ... and the new arrivals - welcome to the family”.
It’s been a very busy little while - hence having less time to update my personal log. So we begin with the Battle of Odessen and work our way out from there.
On the whole, we largely stayed out of the Battle of Odessen. So, to be fair, did nearly everyone beyond the one dubbed ‘the Outlander’. I’ve seen the reports of exactly what happened on that end but ... honestly, it doesn’t have a great deal to do with us beyond repercussions later on (which I’ll go into soon). Essentially it’s the status quo - there is an insane Zakuulan empire-leader who is very very angry with us all and wants us dead. Though in this case we’re adding sentient droids commanding fleets, some of whom are under this Vaylin’s command, some who aren’t. Not much has actually changed beyond the names and faces of the conquerors.
As I said, we largely stayed out of the Battle of Odessen, but some of it found its way to our doorstep regardless. Some of the space battle came a little closer than we’d like to Jadvyga - and by extension Port Knowhere - so we had to lock down very quickly. Srina locked down comms so we couldn’t call for help conventionally. However (and I am sure that Srina was aware of this; she always did read every mission report with the intensity that I study the latest medical and biochemistry journals), I did have the means to contact one individual who largely connects to the Alliance. I’ve been in enough mental contact with Nyomi that it was fairly easy to mentally contact her and ask if she could speak to people about maybe keeping ships as far from us as possible. I did not expect her to turn up in person, but she did, with an entire squad. Between the comms lockdown, Alti keeping the civilians behind shield generators and Nyomi’s reinforcements, we managed to turn back the invaders with no one the wiser. I imagine they just assumed their ships were destroyed in space. I imagine Srina had a lot to do with that.
Some other issues came up after that, but the largest of them was the business on Alderaan. Maetra and Paetra came to visit and they insisted that we come and have Rilus properly presented to the family. They then declared us heirs, and then a fringe member of the family tried to poison Maetra and kill the lot of us. They’d sold out to the Zakuul and were trying to sell out the entire family. We did put a stop to that, at least. Handing over a cousin to the Alliance judicial system is not one of life’s great joys. At least Mae didn’t punch him. She badly wanted to punch him, but didn’t. Her self-restraint is greatly improved.
After that, Nyomi commed us about a vision Sana-Rae had that led to some Force-gifted intuition that something was wrong with the bacta supply coming out of the Vratix colony on Ulinth. Sith alchemy; it’s always Sith alchemy. Though I suppose the biochemical perspective on Sith alchemy is my speciality if I specifically have one beyond ‘healing’, and I’ve cured so many Sith alchemical bits of nonsense by now that of course it came to me. We eventually had to go to Ulinth to find out what was going on and fix it because without that bacta, the expanding Alliance was nerfed. After an unfortunate encounter with a marsh haunt, we found a Zakuulan exarch who had tripped over a Sith holocron and was using it to taint the entire area - the oorxzi fungus, the vratix themselves, everything. Apparently he also had a certain amount of necromancy at his disposal, as X’antho got attacked by a creature made of leftover limbs and viscera. I left the exarch to Nyomi; I am told she cut him down most impressively. I, meanwhile...
...I communed with the Force-pattern of Ulinth. As a whole. I came a little close to being lost in it at one point, but the Force-bond with Mae kept me tethered well enough. It’s hard to miss the beacon of confused screaming in one’s own head. I cleansed the marsh (this apparently destabilised the flesh construct, so that’s alright) and Nyomi destroyed the holocron and then I had to recover from all but being a planet to heal Nyomi of most of her extensive injuries and put a kolto pack on the rest. Since we weren’t trusting bacta at the time. Things are resolved there, and Rilus is glad he didn’t have to stagger around swamps. Well, someone had to be in charge while I was gone that long...
We’ve made some plans of what to do next. We’re looking at opportunities for medevacs, families that need relocating and new suppliers. This is largely because the Alliance is growing and more people means more supplies needed and more battlegrounds, thus more wounded. We’re also looking for a new settlement site, because we don’t want Port Knowhere to get crowded again and Fort Motley’s more for the military.
Still, we will have our anniversary celebrations soon. I suppose we’re doing well if we’ve been in the same place, and growing, for five years now. One year and some with our current team. It’s been a good one, for all its trials. We’re doing good, as a family-we-chose. I can’t imagine better.
The business with Rosfren is concluded. Not quite in the way I would have expected, but all clinging to expectations in situations like this gets me is a headache.
Aches were involved, don’t get me wrong. How by the Force all the larger people can avoid getting hit by quasi-random blaster fire into a smoke-bomb generated cloud, and I’m the only one who gets shot? In all fairness, I’d prefer I get shot than any of the others. They, however, do not share my preference and they were all incredibly upset by the mercenaries this Freem individual hired to kill us all and take the artefacts ... which we didn’t have anyway. That seems something of a ridiculous way to take credit for someone else’s work even if we had done the retrieval, mind you. ...But honestly, later events proved that he was ... well, I was going to say ‘sharp enough to cut himself or just a complete nerf-burger of idiocy’, but ... given what happened next, it really was just trying to decide which flavour of stupid he was.
Yes, ‘was’. Rosfren killed him. ...To be fair, we actually talked him into it. Most of us, anyway. I just ... couldn’t confirm or deny whether Freem was just stupid enough to let the Flame-wielding sister of the individual Rosfren wanted to kill or convert know the location of artefacts he wanted and walk into the same room as him, or whether he was actually trying to orchestrate me setting Rosfren on fire. I think the reputation of the Marran trumped any knowledge of what I as a person am like. Yes, I did make a threatening display, but that was only to stop Freem from Force-choking X’antho any more. Even I know that Freem can’t hire muscle worth nerf. One little handful of Flames that wouldn’t hurt them anyway and all of the guards just fled. I’m not that scary!
In any case, we ended up convincing Rosfren that Freem must have orchestrated our meeting to see Rosfren killed, possibly to let Freem take his place. He was too frightened for me to get any details about the nature of the fear - whether of being baselessly accused or being found out, I couldn’t tell - so I had to admit as such. What Rosfren did to him ... and even after that, X’antho tried to steal some of Rosfren’s whiskey. I had to explain the nature of Force lightning to X’antho to get him to back off. I wish I hadn’t had to. I get the impression that X’antho has enough nightmare fuel as it is without knowing that Force lightning is the will to do harm made manifest.
In any case, the Flames display and the apparent willingness to throw Freem under the hoverbus (as I heard Aurrin say once) convinced Rosfren that he should take the idea of devoting his resources to fighting the Zakuul ‘under advisement’. I checked in at Odessen, and Rosfren was true to his word. He’s sent supplies and while he didn’t send his own people, he did hire a fair few mercenaries. I hope they’re better than the ones Freem sent, for the sake of the Alliance.
I had a fair few reasons to be on Odessen - the usual supply drop to the Alliance, seeing if they had a particular component to a transfer protein I’m going to want to use in this idea I had for a less detrimental combat stim, checking on the wounded, that sort of thing. There was, however, something - or rather someone - that I didn’t expect, though I was more glad than I could say about it. I felt some familiar presence around the place but didn’t pay it that much mind until Nyomi of all people called out my name from the other side of the hangar. Five years since I’ve seen her and I knew I missed her but ... nerf, it was good to see her. She hasn’t changed in any meaningful way - all right, there’s more cybernetics than there used to be and her hair’s changed in colour, but even with all she went through, she’s still essentially head-butting the problem before her and trusting in the rest of us to deal with the more esoteric concerns. I forgot how much I appreciate that; how much trust it indicates.
She’s said she might come visit Port Knowhere. I know Ahri and Alti and particularly Mae would love to see her. Mae, I can tell, wants to thank Nyomi for the saber training the only way she knows how - by showing how much she’s benefited from it. I also think that Kaelira in particular would get along with Nyomi, and ... well, alright, X’antho, but it’s not as though Nyomi isn’t used to somewhat mouthy spacers, and X’antho is a little better at knowing when to stop than some of the ones Nyomi’s used to.
...But first I really do need to speak to X’antho. He hasn’t been dealing well with things since the incident on Darvannis. Plus I admit that Rilus would be cross if he knew I’d gone back to ‘spending all day in a lab just because he’s not around to stop me’. I do think he forgets, if he ever knew, how much of labwork can’t just be set aside until a convenient moment, though. In any case, however much the Alliance would benefit from an improved combat stim, some things matter more. Some people matter more. And X’antho is one of them. So I’m going to produce some of those little meat snack things he likes and a good calming zabrak-friendly tea and I am going to track him down.
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...
Jallira backed away from the holocron with a sigh. It was the last one she had on matters pertaining to anything that could cause an entire settlement to walk into the jungle, probably to be devoured in one sense or another, and she was still no closer to what could cause that sort of thing. The problem was the residual feeling of foreboding all around the abandoned settlement; artefact or creature, the sense of ‘something wrong’ was not a part of any such power at work. Such a feeling left behind would simply drive away any being that might make a good meal for it, after all. None of it fit.
She wished for Jai-din Sortek’s expertise, but he was busy on other matters, it appeared, and felt it to be outside his area of expertise. Ahrianna hadn’t been there, and describing ‘a feeling of foreboding’ was too vague to help her in what research she could do. As for Maelana, she was no researcher and the only materials she had access to were the ones that Jallira had herself. Jallira was more or less on her own.
She did, however, have one more potential source of information. She just didn’t like to use it. Still, preference took a back seat when necessity drove, so after a moment spent gathering herself, she opened a tiny biometrically locked panel at the bottom of the desk where her small collection of holocrons sat.
Inside was an amulet about the size of Jallira’s hand, inscribed with clumsy runes. The last of the Covenant artefacts - or at least the last that she could access. Of the ones keyed to her bloodline, this was the only one she could truly use that still had any significant effect. The saber was ill suited to her in terms of its balance. The gauntlets were too large. The mask was destroyed. And all three were locked in the Marran’s archives, likely to be rendered powerless when she, last of her bloodline due to her own sterility, eventually died. But the amulet had been in her possession when it had been fully cleansed, and no one had ever asked for it back to be locked up with the rest. It had returned to her via Alti, who had been entirely indiscriminate about packing up everything that mattered to Jallira from the Nexus world.
She slipped the amulet’s chain over her head, sat down and meditated. It didn’t take long before the whispers and sighs of dozens of her ancestors filled her head. Once, back when it was a tainted remnant of her ancestors’ ties to the Sith, this amulet had controlled people’s minds. Now, it was a repository of knowledge. It wasn’t always accurate, because many of the dozens of Force-imprints locked away in the amulet had been insane when they died. But when it was, it was the best source of Sith lore anyone could ask for. No one guarded their secrets around a slave that badly beaten down.
This is what I felt, she told the amulet. Do you know what it means?
She had been meditating for an hour before she got anything useful. At first, Jallira just got noise - pain and misery, screaming and fear, self-loathing and despair. It was only the most recent of the imprints - her own mother - who knew anything but abuse ... and her mother was too recent an addition to the ‘collection’ to help. Still, true to her nature, Jallira did not give up; she’d known all those emotions from her own abusive training, and could endure them again if she had to. She would have the answers she needed. The settlement was too good a prospect not to fight for.
Eventually, a slightly unsure bit of empathic feedback cut through the mess. Warning. Echo. Everything dies.
When she was sure that there was nothing else, Jallira took off the amulet and returned it to its hiding place. Then she went back to meditating, this time on the riddle that had just been posed to her. The amulet never gave anything clearly; the impressions left by her ancestors were too vague for that. After half the day spent in meditation, she took a break for a sandwich and a cup of bahat-mint tea from her recently replenished supply, just to get herself back on an even keel. Old habits died hard, but they did eventually die, and Jallira recognised that success at this depended on her being at her best.
(Besides, she felt Mae nagging in her head. Still, she used to ignore it a lot more often than she did these days.)
Eventually, she got some idea of what she might actually want to research, and turned back to her collection of holocrons for something more concrete. Then, mindful of delegation and her own dwindling energy levels, she turned to her transcription machine instead. She could probably find out what sort of thing could do what her ancestors suggested had been done on her own, but right now what she needed most was a good night’s sleep.
“They’re rubbing off on me,” she sighed once she’d dictated her letter to the comms system. She wasn’t entirely chagrined by the whole thing, though. Doctors should take doses of their own medicine without too much complaint before they expected their patients to do the same.
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.
I have become a lot more concerned about what I’m doing lately. Mostly I am concerned that I am doing something wrong and will get a great many people killed if I do or say the wrong thing.
It doesn’t help that I managed to alienate a set of allies. Then again, the sense of things with their group and the reaction I got when I questioned it ... my view on it is that if anyone with whom you’re allied would be willing to shoot you for any reason beyond outright treachery, they were never truly your allies to begin with. Maybe things will change, but ... for now, much like the last time we lost allies, five years ago ... we need to carry on with what we have.
It seems to be enough, at least to a degree. The Serendipity has helped immeasurably, though the discussions of what exactly to do with the vessel have been ... an education. Everyone has ideas of what to do and how to handle the situation, and they all have sufficient merit to be getting on with, but ... there’s only one Serendipity. We can’t use all of those ideas just on one ship. I am very much not used to my words carrying most of the weight in any given discussion, either. Still ... when the ideas start flying thick and fast, someone has to grab the reins and pull until everyone starts putting their considerable talents to one goal. ...I’m not used to being the one doing that.
That hasn’t stopped me, at least. Do, or do not - there is no ‘try’. Maybe I’ll make mistakes, maybe I’ll fail - but I’ll learn, and I’ll do better. There is no ‘try’ - there is doing it well, or doing it poorly, or somewhere in between, but there is doing it, or there is not doing it. So in the end, the Serendipity will be a sort of combination hospital ship and carrier, from which our haphazard fleet will strike at various targets from all angles, and then scatter to the four winds, to be picked up by the Serendipity later. We’ll be everywhere and nowhere all at once.
...Like that holovid says. I haven’t seen it for obvious reasons, but everyone else has given me a summary. Apparently someone was taking holovid of our excursion on Corellia, and it made the ‘grey market’. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised - it must have looked fairly impressive from an outside perspective. Between X’antho’s rallying cry and the dispatching of the skytroopers and Master Sortek deflecting blaster fire from the roof of a moving medical transport... As I understand it, my own contribution to that whole affair got a ‘wow’. Then again, the only people I’ve ever known to deflect that level of fire in my presence ... well, that was Ihlrath, and I’m not sure that was ‘deflection’ so much as ‘withstanding’. I think Nyomi did that once or twice as well. In any case, it’s not something I’ve witnessed anyone but the strongest do. I suppose that says something. Though I should consider bringing my helmet the next time I strap myself to a transport that is going to be making a dash through hostile territory. Concussions are not fun. Everything goes faintly wobbly.
In any case, the holovid. Srina’idash added a bit of personal flavour and sent it back out again. There’s a little resistance symbol, apparently - the Alderaanian symbol for healing, apparently leftover from days when they worshipped various intellectual aspects. Srina’idash has been considering seeding a few holovids around as well - some of our smugglers’ raids on Zakuul transports and the distribution of their cargoes to the needy in our own sectors, rescues, things like that. It’s an improvement over slicing the Holonet, anyway ... particularly nicer than slicing the Holonet for the kinds of terrorist manifestos that have been plaguing it lately. It’s nice to at least show that resistance doesn’t have to be slaughter.
That’s a lesson all sides need to learn. Five planets bombed to dust. Five. I felt them scream. I think we all did, the Jedi of Port Knowhere. Even Mae, even without overspill through the Force-bond ... and Sense is not her primary sphere by any means. There may be more. It may get worse. I don’t think anyone is going to back down. The Sith tend to be believers in collateral damage to the point of lunacy. Mandalorians ... win or lose, all they really want is a glorious fight. I accept that people are going to die in this, but ... there’s death and there’s meaningless slaughter. This is the latter.
We can’t stop it, but we can save who we can. Someone must have managed to get off those planets. Maybe there are still survivors - if there’s one thing the initial Zakuul invasion taught us, it’s that people can survive nearly anything. We’ll have to check, when things have settled a little.
If this keeps up, the Serendipity is going to end up full of refugees. Port Knowhere’s nearly at capacity as it is. We need to investigate that second potential settlement Master Sortek found us. There was mention about having to clear wildlife out. I wonder if the wildlife can be reasoned with. I’ve always been good with animals ... maybe I can at least try before we have to go slaughtering more manka cats.
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.
The market fair went well. Even if I did have to make a speech. I had been hoping to avoid it but Master Sortek was right - a few words did need to be said, all things considered. I just hope they were the right ones. They seem to have gone over well, at least. I hope so, because fairly soon we’re going to need all the boosts to morale that we can get.
The nerfery on the Holonet isn’t getting any better, particularly. After discussion with Shay, we’ve decided to try to accelerate some plans we already had in place - mobile base of operations and a new settlement. Master Sortek is doing some preliminary work on both as we speak, as Mychae is currently locked in the workshop with Alti, building mining drones and torpedoes. X’antho, I imagine, is doing the same...
...I should be kinder. Or at least less dismissive. I just ... have very strong feelings about biological warfare. It’s messy, it’s indiscriminate, it’s too easy to turn back on its creator, it’s just plain wrong ... I will not be Book. More, I will not be what Garr always said I was - nothing more than a weapon. I will not turn something that is for healing and life into yet another instrument of death. I have seen too many good things be reduced to nothing but weapons. I won’t add to that list. I’ll forgive him, probably - I won’t be less likely to provide snacks either - but X’antho’s total lack of understanding of why his casual suggestion of tailoring a horrible disease to attack only Zakuul was so abhorrent to me just ... stings. I suppose my role is to make him understand, if he doesn’t at this point.
There’s a right and wrong way to fight a war, and too many people are fighting this one the wrong way. I know that people say “it’s what works”, but ... does it, in the long run? Demoralisation and fear will eventually leave people with nothing left to lose. People that desperate do some fairly horrible things. I get the impression that Zakuul treats its native people a great deal better than it does its conquered, though. I sometimes wonder what the reaction would be if they offered their vanquished comfort and the benefits of the Zakuulan people, instead of putting a boot to our collective throat. Still, I know it’ll keep happening...
...There has to be a way to get a message out. Not ... quite like the speech I gave the other day, but ... similar. I said to Shay not long ago that being the example is what being Jedi is about.
I ... think I have an idea. I’m not sure it’s the best idea, but it achieves several of our goals at once. Including taking attention away from Shay’s insurgency actions. I just want to ensure the safety of Port Knowhere as much as possible before we begin. Even if we start by taking refuge on a tertiary world while setting up a secondary base, even if we travel largely by stealth vessel ... ships are difficult to track once they’ve reached hyperspace, I know that much. Not impossible, but ... difficult. There’s nothing to be gained from impatience, but ... I’ll see what our intel acquisitions people have to say about potential targets.
I am a healer - a medic. I suppose it’s only fair that a healer and medic be the example of the concept of a ‘surgical strike’. People seem to have forgotten the meaning of the term. It’s time to remind them.
Long after I had any hope or expectation of such a thing, an old friend returned to our lives. I was checking through some supplies we were going to send to the first people in need we found on our travels when Master Marin - Shay - came through on comms with the passphrase to let us know she’s a friendly. She’d heard the rumours about Port Knowhere and thought it sounded like the sort of thing I would be running. The passphrase more or less solidified her suspicions into certainty, which is good because it was exactly what I intended.
Most everyone else was in the middle of something - mostly icebloom collection and attempting to build droids and torpedoes and such - so I took Shay on the tour of Port Knowhere. She availed herself of Doo’kreeg’s herb stall - apparently she has someone on her end working on medicinal herbs. I hope she brings him along to the market fair, as anyone who deals with herbal remedies as much as I do is someone I really need to speak to. New outlooks and ideas are always beneficial. In any case, after that we retired to the library for a ... well, a discussion.
The less said about one aspect of it, the better. I always promised Nyomi that I wouldn’t dwell. Besides, there are some conversations I don’t want to go into with my friends. They end up circular and frustrating for all concerned. Leave us simply say that it’s five years gone and the entire thing was, from an empath’s perspective, an utter nerfing mess and it’s best not to be dwelt on.
Besides, there’s no time to dwell. On top of the work we’re already having to do in terms of the nanobe, the Holonet is an absolute mess right now. People keep hijacking it for terrorist broadcasts, slaughtering people in the name of their cause and threatening and boasting and ... one of them is what Aranar’aliit would call worse than dar’manda because he doesn’t care if women and children die. Most of the people hijacking the Holonet don’t seem to care who dies.
...I care. We need that mobile base of operations and we need it now. Families, children, the infirm and elderly ... they shouldn’t be used this way. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right. Port Knowhere can’t take them all, but there are other places. We have safehouses, there’s the Greystorm holdings so long as Maetra’s still adept at forging papers, we were going to start another settlement anyway...
Plus we can be helping Shay. Her insurgency group could use some ... direct action in order to distract the Eternal Empire from their more covert operations. If it’s in line with what we were going to do anyway, I see no harm in it, and if it helps without having to be a bloodthirsty killer, I see nothing but good in it. Dangerous, yes, and hence waiting for the mobile base of operations to be complete before we start, so that we don’t draw attention to Port Knowhere, but... We want to help. And we will.
We’ve helped some anyway. First of all was feeding Shay, in part - she subsists on ration bars more often than I tend to like, which is to say at all, so I ensured that she got a consignment of fresh food and the occasional treat that we had just been looking for a needy person to whom to donate it. Her group qualifies. But that’s just the short-term. Long-term, they could use a regular source of supplies, medical care, and a place to run if they need to. That’s what Port Knowhere is for. We’d have done it even without the promises of help ... or rather, I would have; thankfully Shay plays fair and Master Sortek is a harder bargainer than I will ever be anyhow so any issues there would have been sorted out tomorrow when she and the leader of the insurgent group came to the market fair. But as it is, they’ve offered to trade the things we can’t produce ourselves for the goods and services we can provide. And Mychae, who met with that leader just yesterday, said something about Shay having flour and maybe even some kolto, and that we can supplement the non-kolto medicinals we could offer as payment with some credits.
Mychae ... feels guilty. Determined, but guilty. She said something that was taken badly, but has made her determined. I think it involves an old friend, but I won’t press. Not yet, anyway. I have a feeling that more missions might be in the offing as regards this, but I’ll leave it be for now.
Right now I have enough to occupy my mind. One of the possible guests for tomorrow’s market fair may be a botanist, and I am looking forward to a discussion about herbal medicine. Raiyden may come along; I have so missed him and it would do me good to know he’s well - I can never tell through a comm line. I think the ‘flower torpedoes’ are nearly done and the compound that will be needed to eliminate the nanobe is ready for testing. We’ll just need to launch a test probe. ...Also at the market fair they might want me to make a speech.
The good thing about having a varied group of active individuals is that some people find commonplace the things that others find decidedly unnerving. Though I wonder what it says about me that I find parasitic extragalactic nanobes with psychopathic tendencies that pilot droids and corpses around with equal ease ‘commonplace’. Well. Besides ‘Jedi’ and ‘former Marran’, I suppose. But Rilus was Marran same as I was and he still finds these things unnerving. Then again, he didn’t go on as many field missions as I did. I suppose when you’re mostly in medbay, you get used to things behaving a certain way. Corpses in particular. Whereas I’ve been on more than a few excursions involving ambulatory corpses and extragalactic intelligences and on the whole, at least these are manageable in ways that don’t involve the Flames. Good thing, really - I am still capable of using them but it’s more draining these days, and I tend to reserve it for channeling into vaccines and similar, and even then only when necessary.
Communication is a problem with this thing, though. When we went back to the orbital station whose name I still can’t pronounce properly, the entity was interested in communicating, and it was able to at least broadcast through our internal comms. Unsure as to whether it was also listening to our internal comms, I had issues warning Master Sortek that I was going to attempt to introduce the entity to the concept of empathy. I did, however, manage to get across the fact that I was going to be trying something on that end of the spectrum, because he did serve as an anchor. Which, I believe, is the only reason I’m still alive. I am in no position to judge whether he had to throw a computer terminal through the observation window of the command deck, as I was at least mentally elsewhere, but ... well, leave us simply say that dying of exposure to the vacuum of space is not an experience I ever wanted even at second-hand. It was ... part of it was being cybernetic. The strangest part was that those pieces - the bits of droid the entity used to build its spokesbeing - actually felt physical pain, although pain of a type I am at a loss to describe. It was foreign and alien and cold. Much like the entity itself, come to think. Strange to say that the sensation of one’s blood boiling was actually an improvement on anything, but at least it was a visceral reality I could understand. In any case, trying to shield both Master Sortek and Mae from that set of sensations was probably a mistake, as I nearly completely lost any sense of what was going on with my own body in the psychic backlash of it all and spent an indeterminate amount of time with my brain in self-protective shutdown mode and my body, operating on its last input, unsure as to whether or not I was dead. That got sorted out in the end, but it ... could have gone badly.
All that to say that I need to find a way to communicate with Master Sortek what I am trying to do without using comms, if we have to go through something like that again. If I’d been able to tell him how deep I was going, maybe he wouldn’t have Force-thrown that computer terminal out the window. It could have been avoided, perhaps. Still, no one got hurt but me, so that’s alright. ...Though I think Rilus and Alti disagree. Mae certainly does.
At the very least we came away from that with some new hydroponics equipment and some seeds that should come in quite useful. Still no bahat-mint, but there are a few other medicinal tea staples in amongst the seeds. Given how things have been going lately, having anything we can use as trade is going to be vital. And that is the part that I find unnerving that others find commonplace - trade. I’ve never been very good at that sort of thing, but there’s all this discussion about finding a ship now that the Chiss research vessel is decidedly out of the running and ‘creative financial redistribution’ and things. It’s good to know that they know what they’re doing. I’ll just generate things that might be worth trading and hope that will prevent us from having to steal too many things. Even if it is taking from the Zakuul tribute convoys, I feel like we should be giving it back to the people from whom it was taken. Then again, not stealing at all would probably disappoint Alti, who’s looking forward to the rather larger piracy-related excursions than the occasional raid for pie crust ingredients.
Don’t ask about the flour raids. Really. I would rather not even think about it.
We’re letting Master Sortek, Mychae and X’antho handle the search for a mobile base of operations from here on out. Master Sortek and Mychae for being shipwrights, all three having various contacts and connections (although in all fairness I imagine that it will be Mychae and X’antho who manage best there). That’s after Mychae and Alti are finished with the ‘flower torpedo’ and a great many injection mining droids. We need to get rid of that asteroid field of planetesimals containing that nanobe, as well as the orbital station, the research vessel and the long-range shuttle. I’m still having nightmares of what would happen if the nanobe arrived on Belsavis, or the Star Fortress orbiting Belsavis, or both. Which is why I will be busy producing concentrated forms of the icebloom compound in both aerosol and liquid form. Rilus has started setting me time limits on my lab work and we’re still in the negotiation stages on that. We will at some stage find a happy medium between full days locked in the lab and ‘a couple of hours’, which is nowhere near long enough for decent research. I think about seven hours is the maximum limit before a meal break. I’ll set eight as my upper limit and six as my lower, though. Marriage is about compromise and flexibility, after all.
I can’t blame him for being worried, though. As I said, he’s been on so few away missions with me that while he’s patched me up after I’ve had first aid the times I’ve been injured on a mission, he’s never actually had to drag me off a battlefield before. And the last time I had that much trouble breathing, it was the PX-133 incident. Plus even five years down the line, having lost contact after Rylan III probably still resonates with him. So I have actually been going easy on myself the last couple of days. I ... just can’t afford to do it for much longer. We’re few, and we have a big undertaking ahead of us. ...But he’s right; that means we need us all at our best.
One interesting side note - the Port Knowhere market is having a three-year anniversary celebration. While Port Knowhere has been here for longer, the market is relatively recent. Now the settlers here want to celebrate it. And us. I may have to make a speech. This is not something I necessarily want to do but I suppose I’d best get used to it. I should really contact Caer and Raiyden and Tomuraan, see if they’d like to come. With the destruction of the Palace, they could probably use some home comforts. Caer says she likes Yavin IV, and I believe her, but ... I like Port Knowhere too. It's home now. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t take a long time to start considering it home, and to stop mourning the home I made on the Nexus world. Having the people I love around me helped, though, so I’m hoping it will help Caer and Raiyden and maybe even Vaulk too.
