Dromund Kaas: Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own

[Chloe Blake]

Hearing that from [member="Ember Rekali"] was enough to bring a sheepish smile on her lips and that feel good coil of warmth in her belly. The way the deep angles of his face against the backdrop of that scruff broke into a was a good bit of sunshine there. Rare for the man, and all the more special.

"I'll take that as a mighty fine compliment," she said in turn, following him as her legs went widening their stride to keep up with his. Once in the capsule, Chloe had more questions about the curious curios.

"So does there have to be a certain amount of statues?" she would ask, hooking her thumbs into the belt holes of her breeches. "Some specific type of material? Or does that not really matter?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"It's for alchemists and gadgeteers to get hung up on this metal or that kind of bone or special stone whatnot. That's not too close connected with the way I understand the Force. I spent a long time outside the galaxy, raised my kids there, in a place where time runs different. I learned the Force all here or there, but Yavin's one place I remwmber best, training out here under the Solusars. It was a different time. Man could be proud to be a Jedi then. And the way they knnew the Force had nothiijng to do with formulas or rituals or materials."

 

[Chloe Blake]

[member="Ember Rekali"]

It was interesting, hearing about Ember's philosophy in the Force, about his family, and about his past. Little tidbits here and there. Of course, until he mentioned actually training under the Solusars.

Enter a small double take.

"Training under the Solusars?" considering there ain't been much on Yavin for a long ... long while. That brought up an interesting little tidbit from Ember Rekali.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"You've heard of the Tyus Cluster, right? Same deal, star cluster time warp. Nice place. Long story as to why we were there at all, but bottom line, all my kids but Aaralyn were raised outside the galaxy in faster time than ours. Not a story I share much. Anyway -- we got ripped loose, everything about our lives got smacked upside the head realizing that everything would change. We get out here, get back here, and it's eight-thirty ABY or thereabouts, instead of fifteen. So, yeah, I did some of my training under Kam and Tionne and the rest. Good people. He was a little damaged, she was a little ditzy, but good-hearted, competent folks."

The turbolift opened, revealing a green stone entryway and, beyond it, the Yavin jungle.

"They were good years."

 

[Chloe Blake]

Big blue eyes grew wider. Even her jaw fell a bit at the surprised shock. The Tyus Cluster was a well known region of the Mid-Rim for spacers like her. It contained a multitude of black holes, and lore told of an endless amounts of ships disappearing within their depths only to return years later in the exact same condition before they came in.

That... brought everything about the man in front of her into perspective.

"You trained under Kam and Tionne??" there was no denying the bubbling excitement within her voice, nearly pushing herself off from her perch against the turbolift's wall to follow him like a rapt little girl wanting to hear more stories from her father.

"How were they?! What else did you learn? How were things back then? Are you able to go back?" came the series of questions. She didn't mean to pry, but he'd just dropped a bombshell on her. As a loremaster, it brought in to perspective just what she could learn from Ember. Story and myth were one thing, but meeting someone who actually experienced it...

"This is like Je'gan all over again." she said with notable brightening in her eyes, referencing her old master.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"They were -- I learned -- Things -- Feth no-" He caught up with a grin and a laugh, but both faded. "Olra'en, eh? He was born about, mm, a hundred years after me, long after I was gone, but he's lived all this. My family and I, we're not immortals, we didn't get thrown into some tragic time distortion, we're not hard done to by time or cursed or anything. We're not special, it didn't make us special. We're just folks." He'd slipped back into present tense. With a grimace, he moved back to happier things, like her questions.

"Things back then...Jedi weren't a power, they were a resource. They didn't lead armies or go vigilante, they just tried to do what they could within the law. So I get here and spend a few years working for what calls itself the Jedi Order these days, and I realize the Jedi are dead. The ones I knew -- Horn, Katarn, Durron, the early crew -- they wouldn't recognize this. Fething Skywalker sure wouldn't. Good luck convincing Aaralyn of that, o'course. Uh, what else. Things I learned...well, like I said, it was another time. Jedi didn't pick up 'powers' like trading cards."

He ticked things off on his fingers as he examined a green stone statue. "Telekinesis. Feeling people's emotions, shifting them. Jumping higher, running farther. That's how people these days would break it down, anyway, but when I say the greatest Jedi I knew got by fine with just what folks nowadays call the core powers, I mean it. I picked up some White Current because I was curious and Skywalker had just picked up the rudiments." He scratched his head. "And then when I got here, I ran into a couple people who knew more. But anyway. Tionne, Kyle, Streen, Kam, Kyp, Kirana, Dorsk, the old crowd -- what do you want to know? I wasn't here for the early days, for Gantoris and Kun and all that."

 

[Chloe Blake]

[member="Ember Rekali"]


"Wait you know about Je'gan?" would be her first flabbergasted reply, spinning on the balls of her feet as she began to walk backward, just a bit ahead of him. One might think foolish, but the Warden was well used to using her senses to not take a misstep.


The array of emotions sweeping over Chloe's face would certainly be comical. It went from surprise, to excitement, bafflement, and then excitement again.

"Skywalker? Skywalker?! Like Luke?" if her eyes could only get any bigger, they would. It was just quite a bit to process, and her hands would wave a bit in front of her a she paused in her backwards walk, "Tionne, Kyle, Streen, Kam, Kyp,and Kirana?" She came to a stop.

"Well.." another pause, as she went through the ramifications of this. Oh where to start?! Then her ears perked, "You know how to manipulate the currents too?" well that was a tell if anything, if he would pick up on the tone.

Being Je'gan's padawan included some lessons on the ability. She was no Elder, knowing enough to pick up a few things here and there. But it sure came in handy from time to time.

"I.. well.." she began to walk again, keeping up with him, "How were they like?"

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"Yeah, Luke Skywalker. Quiet, gentle, not someone you want to go head to head with. I count myself pretty good at Djem So, but he had it locked down. Never could catch up.

"The White Current world's not that large, an' it gets much smaller off Pydyr and J't'p'tan. If you can feel it, amazed we haven't run into each other before now. That's how Olra'en and I met, but we're way different beasts. I just use it to cloak myself or maybe a little ship, change a few minds, make cards look better than they are when the situation calls for it." He grinned wolfishly. "And there's nothin' quite as fun as pulling an immersion on just your brain. Mentalist sees you, feels you, goes lookin' for your mind, nothin' there to frack.

"Anyway, you wanted to know about the old crowd. I get, I respect, that they're legends an' stories, but imagine I went back to that cluster and people were talkin' about you eight hundred years from now. I'd say 'yeah, I knew her, liked her, useful to have around.' That's about how I feel when it comes to the old crowd. Well, except for Durron. He shaped up well enough, but after I left, it seems the fether didn't behave like someone who'd fixed his life. Then again, Luke was a good man, but between Dolph, Brakiss, and Durron, and the Sith Lord that little nephew of his apparently turned into, he never did quite figure out that you can't polish a turd."

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

Lord Zambrano,

Velok told me once that you had the holocron of Belia Darzu in your care, and that you'd learned much from it. Naturally, I've long wanted it for myself. I've spent a long time preparing to make an item that you would consider a fitting barter for that holocron and a fitting accoutrement to your reign.

I have constructed two swords, one for my associate and one for myself, which have the power to trap spirits, even the souls of those killed by the blades. They are designed to prevent the unwise and inconvenient from finding ways around death, but they will easily hold hundreds or thousands of souls. I suspect you would find creative uses for my sword; I consider it my greatest creation.

Should you find this trade amenable, please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Merrill

 

[Darth Carnifex]

Lady Merrill,

Your offer is acceptable, and I would be extremely pleased to convene with you at your earliest convenience to exchange the holocron for the sword. I have learned all that I could from Belia Darzu's teachings, and it no longer has any use to me.

I do believe that you will find it's teachings to be rather enlightening, Belia was an interesting person indeed, and it is a true shame that she was killed in her prime. Ah, but such is the nature of the Sith.

Relay the coordinates for the designated meeting location, and I will arrive there within' a fortnight.

~Zambrano


[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Darth Vornskr"]

I'm currently engrossed in an archaeological project, and will be visiting Malachor Five quite soon, along with some mutual acquaintances. I'll send you the coordinates and timeframe, and I'll bring the sword. This is the epitome of a perfect deal.

Rave.

 

[Chloe Blake]

[member="Ember Rekali"]

Wouldn’t be too long ‘fore they would reach the front of the temple, but Chloe only paid as much attention to that as needed, the bulk of it was on Ember.

She was delighting in the expressions on his face as he told her of the greats of Old. Lore and stories were as much about the person telling them as the stories themselves. To hear a first hand account was different from one who’d heard it from another.

In this was a rare treat.

Her stride would attempt to match his, walking forward anew a she went musing about all he told her.

“I know a bit here and there, that Old Timer saw fit to teach me a few things.” came her admission, “Ain’t no Elder and I ain’t ever gonna get to his degree, but it suits me fine to feel and use what I can out in the black.

Done saved me and mine a few times.” Memories of one particular station would pop up into her head. Parker. A small grimace would flow over her face.

She continued anyways, going back to the old greats, “ Good to hear they were just regular sentients. Most stories tend to make legends out of them, and to a point, ain’t no legend without some measure of truth,” her smile came back, “And us spacers ain’t known for toning down hyperbole.”

 

[Velok the Younger]

[member="Domino"]

Just keeping you abreast of the dig and my other reclamation efforts. I managed to trade a sword of my own creation for the holocron of Belia Darzu, courtesy of Kaine Zambrano, during a side trip to Malachor Five. Naturally Savan stripped out Malachor, but what she took was sent to Serpena, where a Fringe/Tion/freelancer fleet took everything. I managed to secure some odds and ends, but most of the Malachor shipment was in an armed convoy, which was destroyed when some freelancers went off the reservation. So far I've been unable to recover any of it, though I've got people on it.

Also, the vessel I've contracted from Mandal Hypernautics -- a heavily modified CIS Scion stealth corvette -- seems to be nearing completion despite some conceptual difficulties. At this point I don't even care if Larraq can make it well-armed so long as the cloak still works, the gravitic modulator is solid, the vaults hold what they need to hold, and the anti-intruder defenses do their job. Soon enough I'll have a mobile, invisible container for my archive.

 

[Velok the Younger]

KAAS CITY
HYTHE PARK

These were bitter times and bitter lands. Even Rave, Sith Lord though she was, wrapped herself in an ash-stained cloak when she stepped out of her sealed shuttle to walk the rubble, and the cold took on a different quality, a thing of humidity and Force-carried desperation, when she headed down into Hythe Park. It had been a tent city and then a slum, barely surviving Vornskr's aimless purges. After Larraq brought this world to the metaphorical torch, Hythe Park was all that remained of Kaas City. Six hundred thousand people, a few hundred guards-

And one unexceptional Sith. On paper, anyway, Commander Boudica was nothing special. Her term of foreign service under Moridin and Desmius had ticked off the usual boxes -- Rave had those files. But here in this quasi-medieval ashfall-ridden arctic slum, knowledge lacked relevance. What mattered was competence, and not in Rave's department either. She was keenly aware, here in the gritty streets of Hythe Park, that she was a slim woman in her mid twenties, photogenic, alone, and unarmed. Entropy drew too many eyes, or at least that had been the theory. Her face and the quality of her clothes beneath the cold-robe -- even her fething haircut -- caught eyes more than the sword might have. And of course the one thing that might have endeared a well-fed offworlder to the locals wasn't something one shouted from the rooftops.

I sent you [member="Seydon of Arda"] -- I sent you Seroth Ur-Rahn -- and he killed those sithspawn. He killed Sillian Cassat's work. How did I know to send the Levantine? Why, Cassat was drawing on my work, of course. Oh, he took it in directions I never did, Force alone knows I never thought to turn ribs to vestigial arms or use body cavities as insectoid breeding grounds, but I'm an alchemist. I'm not on speaking terms with my conscience, and when necessary I've gone about as far as Cassat ever did.

I knew to save you, to play damage control, because this is what I do, as much as killing the aftermath is what Seydon does. Oh, and I used his extermination events, with the AEL label on the invoice, to help lobby Ordo and Skirata to let me excavate and catalog what I want, while six hundred thousand civilians huddle in the ashfalls and pray for a thaw.

Such thoughts went unspoken. Imprudence only went so far.

 

[Velok the Younger]

Evil gets defeated, innocents get rescued? Side effect. Byproduct. Welcome to business. I can benefit from anything, and feth, I've been known to benefit from cleaning up my own mistakes, without people learning the mistakes are mine.

And Seydon is something of an ideal instrument. The kicker is, for him, it doesn't even matter that my purposes are so different from his. Because he did do right, he did destroy evil, he did save lives and find meaning. The big picture, my big picture, wouldn't negate that even if he knew.

Force bless willing hands.

A stone-edged shoulder rocked her against the nearest wall. It bowed with her negligible weight, courtesy of decade-old prefab working outside its operational temperature constraints. Plastwall cracked along the line of the stud beneath, and the edge caught her ash-strewn cloak, pulled it away. No, that was the hand attached to the shoulder-

She spun free, not as fast as she'd once been, and emerald radiance flared around her hand. A hulking near-human in stinking furs stared down at her, cloak limp in his hand and ugliness sharp in his eyes. "Don't make me turn this predictable," she said. "Just walk away." Electricity snapped between her fingers with the ratatatatat of a stungun, and the man flinched, eyes narrowing in reevaluation. She caught more eyes between window-slats. It'd be all over Hythe Park by sunrise -- sundown? Old fires still burned in fuel depots and dumps, diffuse orange light turned the ashen sky to livable murk, and she'd lost track of days more than once. Between one blink and the next, the near-human vanished into the repurposed old prefabs, leaving only a shadow's imprint. She was known now; for good or ill, she was marked.

 

[Velok the Younger]

She paused where a sagging terrace-road overlooked one of Hythe Park's shanty-lined hollows, and looked down through the ashen smog. Two, three groups wound their way up toward her from convergent vectors. Eyes half lidded, she stretched out and found hostility, wariness, purpose. Not an ideal mix. Cavill would have butchered them, regardless of their potential affiliations, and marched right down to ask Boudica if she kept this place alive by aid of artifact.

Cavill was a maul. Rave did not do things his way.

She doused herself in Water of Life and slipped between them like cold smoke, caught a thought or two in the process, not that she had much facility in that department. Water of Life might be half spirit ichor, but the corporeal half chilled her through her tunic and breeches. She should have killed the large man, taken back her cloak, but power didn't completely override instinct. She would leave Hythe Park for now, return to her small warm transport pod, check off another box on her to-do list. By all accounts, Seydon had tackled the Sithspawn at the port, on the Scale Mile, out on the frozen marshlands. At a guess, the bodies would still be there.

 

[Velok the Younger]

Her pod settled down with a crack she felt through the landing gear. Dark water pooled around the base of her pod. As the hatch rose, Rave got a grip on the cold metal and swung. Her feet cleared the broken ice and thudded into frozen ground. Marsh grass hissed around her ankles. Cold, but not crippled by it, she moved past the occasional unclaimed hand or jawbone. Dromund Kaas boasted predators that didn't mind their meat frozen, but even hssiss had their limits.

At a grassy hummock she knelt on ground too cold to melt beneath her knee. She'd taken a Derriphan's Eye alchemical longknife from the pod's survival kit, conscious of its lack, and now she used it to pry into a frozen leg. She rose with a handful of teeth from a tuk'ata or a hssiss, some creature that had found its jaws insufficient to the task of chewing frozen sithspawn. A young one, perhaps, though the incisors and canines looked adult enough. She coughed ash and fog as she rose, surveying the swamp. Seydon had been too thorough, or the scavengers after him. There would be no easy reclamation here; she was no Circe Savan, to luck her way into downright apocalyptic discoveries while necking inconsequentially. Forge-taught tapas tutaminis or not, she could only last so long under this cold front. She'd caught it predicted in a street tough's mind, back in Hythe Park. Storms like these, they called them 'larraqs,' no capitalization. Thus did Basic warp with every world.

The intact sithspawn, when she found it, boasted only cursory teeth marks, generally around the place where Seydon's blade had given it rest of a sort. The guts were gone, the intestines anyway, and the soft meats of the liver and kidneys. Heart and lungs remained, and between that an the central nervous system she could find a use for what had once been a stout dark-skinned woman. She pried the body free and dragged it back to the pod, reluctant to use too much in the way of the Force. Not here, not when her connection had so much to do with spirits of every description. Not on Dromund Kaas.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"Tales that'd curl your hair, aye. Trouble is, half of'em are true, and they're tough to sort out from the rest. Not like it matters anymore, 'cept when context gets lost and folks take half-remembered tales as justification for bad behavior. Just like the plural of anecdote ain't data, the plural of tradition ain't conscience." He paused, resting against the green stone wall. Outside the statued aperture, the jungle was growing dark. "Or at least I think that's how it goes. Someone put it better once.

"And nobody's got their heads screwed on more backwards than the Fallanassi, far as that goes. You ever train with a real one? 'We've always been pacifists, never intervened.' Far as I'm concerned the ability to do something more than the common man means you've got the responsibility to at least examine the option of doin' something to help."

With a shrug, he sat down against one green wall, facing a statue of an ancient Jedi. "Anyways, think I'll make a Watcher or two 'fore it gets late. The way I learned it, it's mostly about feeling the statue as a being, or an echo of a being's sense of -- feth, how do I explain this. It's been thirty years since I was taught and I never taught anyone since. Just stick with me in your mind's eye."

He got to work. The process was meant to involve ritual, but he had no need or patience for that.

 

[Chloe Blake]

Chloe would shake her head in the negative at [member="Ember Rekali"] ‘s question of training with a real Fallanassi. Her experience of the White Current lay with Je’gan Olra’en, and he of all people had a knack of at least doing something when a choice was presented to him.

It was something to mull over none the less, but that’s when Ember started talking about making Watchers. Thought tucked in her mental file about Fallanassi for later, Chloe gave all the attention she could to Ember’s instruction.

A small chuckle would escape at his attempt to explain the fine details, blue eyes dancing. “I’m sure I’ll get the gist of it,” she told him confidently, getting in close to get a sense of just what he was doing.

In her mind’s eye it would be.

“Feeling the statute as a being….” a pause then the lighthearted quip, “Ever end up giving it a name?”

 

[Ashin Varanin]

YAVIN IV

[member="Chloe Blake"]

"My kids did, once or twice," he admitted, eyes closed. The old green stone responded naturally to the process, attuned by long years of Jedi presence. The Watcher's incorporeal patterns began to take shape within the stone, woven of this place's memories of behavior and guardianship. "I raised'em on a planet without technology, used to make Watchers to guard our camp against a Dark Side cult. Made'em out of carved living trees. Got pretty decent with a blade in the process."

A general sense grew around the statue, a sense of awareness, a feeling of being watched.

"These things can't do a lot to stop folks, admittedly. They'll knock you back, block your way, but the knowledgeable or determined can do something a lot like a mind trick to get past."