Life, Death, and the Force

[Amilthi Camlenn]

The Jedi Order had received reports, or rather complaints, of an altercation on Metalorn. Local security had attempted and failed to apprehend two recently arrived off-worlders as suspects for abduction. Lightsabres had been involved. Representatives of the mining corporation in whose sector this had transpired had presented themselves as rather aggrieved that the Jedi had not kept under control such rogues. And so the order had dispatched two knights to investigate and remedy the situation.

The mission briefing had been the first time Amilthi met the other Jedi, which, given the recency of her own arrival, wasn't to say much. Her first impression had been quite confusing, and she had not yet had the opportunity to deepen it. While Amilthi looked like a mere peasant woman from a poor desert planet such a Tatooine or, indeed, Deneba itself, the other woman cultivated an appearance that was, while not beyond the bounds of tastefulness, apt to make an impression on the wealthier classes of the galaxy, and carried herself in a corresponding way. It was unlikely to be an act, as there would have been no reason to keep it up in the Jedi Enclave, which set Amilthi wondering what mindset the knight had achieved that made this compatible with the ways of a Jedi. Amilthi's own parents had been successful mathematicians in the financial world of Ralltiir, but her spiritual pursuits had transformed her to such an extent that she doubted she could still have passed as someone of corresponding social station. It appeared to her that she had essentially lost the ability to relate to the concerns that drove the lives of the scientific and economic elite of this sort. Her understanding of how such people functioned had been reduced to a purely intellectual level. She could not truly grasp why they cared about the things they cared about. Or so, at least, she thought.

The trip to Metalorn itself would not present her with much opportunity to unravel this mystery. The Jedi Order was apparently short on more traditional personal transports and relied on a fleet of advanced starfighters with hyperspace capability for much of the mobility of its members. Two of these ships had been readied for the knights in the hangar, and upon arrival, Amilthi wasted no time with waiting and busied herself with the pre-flight checks.

[member="Veleera Ta'al"]​

 

[Veleera Ta'al]

There is no Death; There is only the Force.

While the code had never been an education she gripped fervently to, there were times when it became bluntly imperative. When she had received word of the mission that she was to be dispatched on, and the situation involved, her memories of the first days she'd learned the code crashed back as if through a broken floodgate; memories she had traded for ones more independent of her late master. It was easy enough to be lost in thought, but there was no ignoring the plight of a distressed system.

Even before she had been introduced to the knight that she would be attending this mission with, she had taken keen eye to the details on the rogues involved. She was met with a mild, easily suppressed, frustration at the lack of information but quickly made due with the knowledge that they were capable of wielding a Jedi weapon. That in mind she turned her focus to the mission at hand and to learning more about her fellow knight involved. While she had been none to quick to notice an outward difference between she and the other woman, she had been fairly careful to keep any unnecessary opinions to herself. She had no qualms working with others of different social circles, or even societal ranks, for that was hardly something becoming of a Jedi knight. If this mission was to succeed it would come down to their talents as knights of the order and not their places in the galactic society.

As she entered the hangar she could not help but feel a small hint of relief. Perhaps at another time she would have been more than content with traveling in a more publicly acceptable craft to reach the planet of Metalorn, however there was something of a thrill behind using a hyperdrive capable fighter to travel. Even as she began her preparations, however, she could not shake the a lingering curiosity.

"Do you, perhaps, think we will find a peaceable solution?" A simple question really but it was the concern behind it, paired with her accent, that she gave greater emphasis. After all she was no duelist and, if this were to become dangerous, knowing her company was important.

[member="Amilthi Camlenn"]

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

From the corner of her eye, Amilthi spotted Veleera entering the hangar, and so she raised a knee onto the seat to stand a bit higher than the edge of the canopy. Thus peering out from the cockpit, she greeted the fellow Jedi with a friendly smile and a slight nod before she leaned forward towards the instruments again.

She looked up again when she heard Veleera's voice close by. "Maybe", she answered lightly. "I suppose it depends on what their motivations are. They've been abducting people, and not only young women, so I'm guessing they're pursuing some kind of experimentation." It seemed appropriate to share that bit of speculation with her partner in this mission. "Perhaps we will be able to convince them that such experiments are ill-conceived - or that whatever knowledge they see isn't worth getting killed over", she added with a sudden whiff of coldness. It had been a long time since she had last been forced to take a life, and she had no desire to renew the experience. But while she would strive for a solution without violence, she needed to be prepared to kill without hesitation and remorse if the situation necessitated it. If she was not, if she allowed herself hesitation beyond a certain point, she would be liable to fail. It was a precarious balancing act.

And so, her words made it clear that she was quite confident she could kill those Dark Jedi if she wanted to. Convincing them of this was, of course, another problem.

"Ready when you are!" announced Amilthi, the previous hint of coldness gone as suddenly as it had come. With this, she lowered herself into the cockpit and reached for the headset. It wasn't, after all, as if they couldn't keep talking over the radio if there was need for it.

[member="Veleera Ta'al"]​

 

[Veleera Ta'al]

Even as she had listened to her fellow knights answer she began working on prepping her fighter. Something she had become quite familiar with, and as equally capable, was processing information while applying herself to a less pertinent task. Prepping a fighter had become second nature to her in the years since her knighting so it was easy enough for her to maintain her conversation while going through the launch procedure.

What the other Jedi said, however, made her pause in her motions as she attempted to consider just what could possibly drive them to experiments at the possible cost of their lives. Though, even as she wondered, she could settle upon the notion that some were far less concerned with the consequences of their actions should they find a suitable means to evade immediate danger. It was that, perhaps, which had only brought the case to the attention of the Jedi after so long. Turning back to her work, she pondered the details of the mission and what she might say to both calm her nerves and assure her partner of her own ability.

"As much as I would prefer to avoid violence, it is up to the Force to decide if such ends will come to pass." She breathed as she finalized her take off procedure and lowered herself into the cockpit and took the whole of it into perspective. "We have only one way to be sure."

She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath as she let those words sink in. Reaching for the headset and readjusting her robes, she turned her head and glanced towards where the other Jedi's fighter was as she flipped the last few switches into place. She had to remain focused, to mind the Force and it's influence, and the sooner they were on their way to the mission rendezvous the sooner they could cleanly assess the outcome.

"Off we go!" She exclaimed and set the ship into the beginnings of it's take off, setting autopilot to take her off the ground and up through orbit as she took to brief meditation. If her fellow knight wished to discuss strategy she could easily delay her contemplation.

[member="Amilthi Camlenn"]

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

Amilthi was skeptical of the notion of the Will of the Force that was prevalent in Jedi circles. To her it was clear that it was not metaphysically real in any substantive sense, that the Force was not in any way a mind or agent that had such a thing as preferences, even though some Jedi appeared to believe as much. Amilthi thought that this idea was conceptually questionable and empirically untenable. She conceived of this teaching rather as a crutch that indirectly gave rise to principles of thinking and behaviour that could guide the Jedi, without the need to make those entirely explicit. The sentient mind was highly attuned to dealing with agents and agentive metaphors and so a lot of information could be packaged into such a formulation.

But that this was the most effective way of guiding Jedi on the right path was something Amilthi doubted. It seemed dangerously prone to misunderstanding and misapplication. Certainly the idea that a Jedi should serve the Will of the Force was a safeguard against egotism, but why it was so much better than to say that a Jedi should help to improve the universe wasn't clear. The better argument was perhaps that a belief that things were decided by someone else prevented them from being overeager in making their own plans - but was not this counterbalanced by a risk of apathy and inaction?

In the case at hand, for example, it struck Amilthi as very inappropriate to say that the outcome depended on the Will of the Force. It would depend on the circumstances, on her and Veleer's actions, and on the dispositions of whoever it was they were after. These things were amenable to analysis and influence. To be sure, in the face of uncertainty, it was important not to get too attached to one hypothesis, and Amilthi felt the need to provide a counterbalance to the one she had voiced before, even if Veleera hadn't engaged with the speculations. "Another possibility is that they're abducting people because they have an Anzat to feed, or some similarly vampiric being, in which case I have no idea what they might really be after."

"But as you said - only one way to be sure", she affirmed, starting the engines of her ship and activating the repulsorlifts that pushed it off the hangar floor. Unlike her partner, Amilthi did not immediately activate the autopilot. She had not flown a ship in some time and thought it appropriate to get used to it again. Consequently, the horizontal rotation of her fighter in the hangar was not quite as smooth, and the angle at which it penetrated the exit not quite as straight, nor did her ship ascend so evenly. Instead, Amilthi tipped the sideways left and right to allow her to catch a better her a better view of the mountainous desert below. There was something oddly pleasant about gravity tugging at her sides as she looked down. There was something exhilarating about atmospheric flight, it was so much more stimulating and, in some sense, felt more real, than flight in space, which, while sometimes offering magnificent views, had a certain emptiness about it. In space, one felt removed from the world rather than engaged with it.

Eventually, she pulled up rather sharply to catch up with Veleera, exploiting with satisfaction the considerable power of the light starfighter's engines. She watched as the planet behind them slowly became coated in a blueish haze as they approached and passed the edge of its atmosphere. Only then did she activate the autopilot and set about programming the navigation computer for the imminent jump to hyperspace.

[member="Veleera Ta'al"]​

 

[Veleera Ta'al]

The launch had gone smoothly, the conversation smoother and within her meditation Veleera could feel the fighters enter hyperspace. She had never been to the location they were headed to, nor many a place nearby it for that matter either, but there was a darkness that loomed in her mind as she stretched her feelings out to survey just what they were approaching. It was not a pervasive darkness like that which she found when she would dwell on the demise of her master, but rather it was a misguided darkness. One she could not understand but one she could survey without caution.

It wasn't until the fighters exited hyperspace that she began to get a better grasp on the Force around their primary goal. What she hadn't counted on, less of it's presence and more of it's intensity, was the death that permeated the Force in their target's wake. Eyes snapping open, breathing returning to a paced normalcy, the knight drew in and exhaled a breath to compose herself as she took the controls back from auto-pilot. Rather than focusing on what she'd felt, she chose instead to execute a smooth landing; the option to discuss what she'd felt with her mission partner if they were receptive of such an approach.

Turning and looking out the viewport off her fighter, Veleera watched as the other fighter leveled itself for approach to the planet.

"Something doesn't feel right down there," she breathed as she righted the controls and input the command line to search for the nearest safe landing zone. Even if these were simple renegades she couldn't help but feel like the fear and death that followed them made them appear as much more. Lowering her head she drew in a breath and brought the comm line back open. "They're down there somewhere, I feel it, but I don't feel they'll make it easy for us."

She finished and left the communication open, hoping that something her partner might say would make the tensions in her gut fade. The sooner they solved this mystery and quelled the darkness, the better.

[member="Amilthi Camlenn"]

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

Amilthi, too, spent the hyperspace journey in meditation. One of the many advantages of being an advanced practitioner was that there was no longer such a thing as time wasted in idleness. But unlike her companion, Amilthi did not dwell on what lay before them; she retreated to a much more different place inside herself. She focused her attention on the sensation of her breath as it entered and exited her nostrils, and it took no more than a few minutes of this sustained concentration for there to be a suddenly shift in the quality of her experience as she breathed out. A fine smile appeared on her lips as she entered a familiar state of altered consciousness.

Waves of blissful calm began to flow through her body. It wasn't really her body, though - where there would normally have been an awareness of her physical form was now simply a notion of space that was filled with these feelings, but it didn't map to her body in the regular way. Letting go of the breath, Amilthi's awareness descended upon this space in its entirety rather than being focussed on one particular area. There it remained, absorbed in this state and enjoying it, for some considerable time. Eventually, Amilthi's mind too a step back from the phenomenon and, rather than being absorbed in it, came to reflect on it. The waxing and waning of these waves became apparent, and how different flavours of them were in succession. Each wave in itself turned out to be was made up of myriads of little sensations without a constant presence. With this step back, the pleasantness of it changed from fulfilling to just another fact to be observed; something that wasn't in principle so satisfying and that might as well not have been there. There was a sense in which the feelings and sensations that made up this state ceased to be Amilthi's own.

A beeping noise eventually penetrated into her consciousness. It took a moment for Amilthi to come to realise what it was and that it meant it was time to leave: exit from hyperspace was imminent. She opened her eyes and immediately the space that had been filled by sensations fused with her body. She felt energised and for a short time, a tingling sensation remained in various places. But her attention, now razor sharp, was already on the real world situation, the flight instruments, and the procedures to be performed when back in realspace.

The ship dropped out of hyperspace, the planet Metalorn in plain view. Amilthi began scanning the area around the coordinates they had been given for signals from landing platforms. After a few moments, several of them appeared in the sector that was under the control of the company that had contacted the order, and this was where Amilthi directed the ship, again on manual control.

As they approached the atmosphere, her partner broke the silence with sombre thoughts. "Of course not, why would they?" remarked Amilthi simply and seemingly indifferent. She regarded the situation not with indifference, but with an equanimity that was detached from any apprehension or anticipation. Her mind was simply filled with pleasant calm.

They descended into the atmosphere in an area dominated by towering clouds. The pillars of steam that they essentially were extended all the way to the edge of space, forming an impressive sight. Then, once they had dived into them, they were flying blind through the white, guided only by the ship's instruments. Several minutes later, and only a couple of hundred metres above the ground, the clouds finally spit them out. The planet's surface was rocky and barren. In the distance they could already spot the city they were approaching, formed by industrial facilities and the residential areas that had sprung up to support the working population. What they saw was, in truth, only a few structures springing up from beneath the rocks; much of it was located underground.

The landing platforms they had been directed to looked isolated, accessible only from a gate that led underground. Amilthi expected the humid air to be chilly when she opened the canopy and was surprised: it was actually moist and warm, in a way she found quite incongruent with the rocky landscape. She lifted her skirt as she stepped out of the cockpit and descended using the holds that had emerged from the side of the ship. Engineers had finally seen the value of not relying on ground crews to arrive with ladders.

Amilthi walked towards the gate, where the path from the two platforms. "I hope we won't be held up long by the administrators. I don't particularly enjoy pacifying unreasonable people", she remarked with a brief smirk. She remembered from briefing how the company representative had been rather forceful in their demands that the Jedi should resolve this issue that had arisen in their sector, and had given the impression that they blamed the Jedi for its existing in the first place. Though to be fair, one could probably not fault them for not being aware that the Jedi were not a unified organisation and that one group had little control over what members of another did. "Although I suppose we shouldn't be rash, perhaps we'll be met by someone else entirely."

[member="Veleera Ta'al"]​