Memento

[Ashin Varanin]

Of all the many things she'd learned in her old life, knowledge that could rend spacetime or repel a turbolaser blast, this technique had been one of the most instinctive. It had, once upon a time, been a minor part of the standard Jedi curriculum, but in Ashin's admittedly patchy experience it qualified as something of a lost art. It led to little, a dead end on the 'skill trees' some Jedi made to chart their course toward minimization-maximization. It was situational, too, and -- sin of sins -- it lacked utility in combat. But this power had always been near and dear to her heart.

Circe Savan had taken her aboard a classified prototype battleship for the Confederacy. She'd given Ashin contractor access, to review the design and its weak points. Ashin, somewhat taken aback -- she could command a ship of the line, but she had little more than a high school education -- had agreed to review various prototypes for Subach-Innes.

Now, swimming deep in her own short-term memory, struggling for clarity, Ashin drew. She was no artist, but even inexpert sketches counted for something when you accompanied them with intimate knowledge of ship systems. She drew her memories, replaying them again and again to catch details she hadn't noticed at the time.

Eventually, the interior and exterior of the Ploutonian-class battleship took form on sheet after sheet of paper. Squeeze-bore hypervelocity guns, power generation problems, hints of an experimental reactor, massive weapons consolidation, a starfighter complement designed to keep off a massed missile/strike craft counterattack -- it was ambitious. It was unnecessary. It was the personification of its creator.

Cater-

In good faith, here's the entirety of something I had the chance to observe recently. There's a very good chance I'll be able to observe other projects in the near future. I'm recently unemployed and my wife has expensive tastes.

-Varanin

[member="Ayden Cater"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The battleship was, all things considered, not the only sellable thing she could glean from her short-term memory, once enhanced. The woman who called herself Enigma was undoubtedly Circe Savan, but this was Savan's third face so far as Ashin was aware, and at this point she had little enough clue which names and faces were known to Cater. And then there was the matter of Savan's associate.

She could sketch technical detail well enough, but a humanoid face was trickier. She ended up erasing many things, crumpling flimsiplast, blanking slatescreens, and using shading to approximate the truth when her first lines proved inaccurate. The first sketch - angular cheekbones, elfin chin, wide eyes, fake lips, and very slightly off, like a living caricature -- was Circe's current face. The second was the woman who Circe had referred to as Alicia Drey. Her features were more natural, still striking -- narrow face, intent eyes, a face of purpose. A face, though Ashin couldn't know it, that would match a certain Alicia Drey of Chandrila DataTech, a Republic businesswoman. The process took hours, even with the Force enhancing her memory.

Cater-

While it's still fresh in memory, I'm sending you a little more that you may find useful. The first is Circe Savan's current face; the other was aboard the battleship with her. Circe introduced her as Alicia Drey. She knew little about the ship, but from context and conversation I believe her to be Circe's Master or Apprentice, as well as her latest lover. I suspect you'll find this useful in putting together a clear picture of the lay of the land.

[member="Ayden Cater"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

There had been a time when this ability was so much second nature to her that she had walked into a Dark Lord's personal library and flipped through a spellbook while talking to him -- flipped through it too fast to read. Later she'd written down pretty much everything, examining the pages in perceptually slowed time. That had been a good day, and Rashael Koss, so far as she knew, had been none the wiser. That spellbook had stood her in good stead for a project or two.

Other faces and forms took form on paper, mostly out of a need to practice. An obsessive need, even -- she had never been one for half measures. This technique worked best on short-term memory, and her expedition to Tatooine had only been a day or two ago. She sketched out the face of the man who'd bought her sword Winterlight from the Dug merchant to whom she'd just traded it. Damien Daemon, Darth Daemos, D-Man -- leader of James Armor Company in the stead of her former friend Zaiden. J.A.C.'s interest in Fringe space had incurred more than a few incidents, some of them suspect or brutal. All things considered, though, Daemon couldn't do anything special with that sword, apart from use it like any other sword. It had no special properties apart from being effectively indestructible.

Once she was satisfied at Daemon's likeness, she switched back to the inanimate, drawing from memory the contents of the Dug's bazaar table, then the amulet she'd obtained from him. One of twenty, it was, made for the Confederate healers from a shattered Healing Crystal of Fire, but the Confederacy had never boasted twenty healers. Nor had most of them stuck around. It had been a stroke of luck to stumble across that amulet, Confederate world or not, and she found herself pondering -- not for the first time -- if the Force had a will of its own.

The amulet took form on paper from Force-enhanced memory, and when she finished she pulled the genuine article out from beneath her shirt to compare. All things considered, she was satisfied.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Dasid Anya ranked among the most populous and economically powerful worlds of the Fringe, its independence respected, its contributions to collective defense acknowledged. The system held a fleet of staggering power, crewed to a significant extent by the Killiks and other races of Dasid Anya. Industry, technology -- feth, even the Fringe's gravitic modulator technology had been obtained from Dasid Anya, whose highest echelons were masters of gravitic technology. The cause, of course, was the mazes, immense three-dimensional constructs with variable-direction gravity and kilometres upon kilometres of corridors. All things considered, the mazes were the highest-drawing sports event in this sector of the Unknown Regions. She'd sent Fringers into the great capital maze once, and they'd emerged after a few days, richer in technology, experience, and local respect. But she'd never found the time to run the maze herself.

The publicly available map was a masterpiece of impermeable complexity, available in holographic form or in many sheets of two-dimensional blueprints. She'd opted for the former. The hologram swirled around her as she moved through it, awkwardly commanded it to adjust to her spoken turns as if she was walking the maze. It could not, of course, account for the randomized gravity shifts. Those who tried to memorize the map usually fell afoul of the maze's other hazards. But with her knee finally fixed, with her Force connection somewhat useable again, and with short-term memory enhancement her first order of business, the maze became her training ground for memory, physicality and instinct.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Memory grew faint, and frighteningly so, by her second day in the capital maze. Being able to access a copy of the map only counted for so much; many had smuggled the map inside, and the maze had still taken them days. Three-dimensional, with apparently random gravitic shifts, its myriad tunnels could turn stable corridors to long falls or unscalable heights, making her wait or backtrack. She'd carried only a foil blanket with her, so far as bedding went, and that only went so far.

Others were in here, possibly dozens, alone or in groups, maze runners or the lost and feral, but the maze was large enough to restrict encounters. It was said that you could run the whole maze, find every major way forward, and still never meet a soul. When her short-term memory began to fade, it was comparable to being left alone, in a way that aloneness had never disturbed her. She wandered from meal to hunger before she found her bearings again, and only because someone had left a misshapen chalk arrow that she recognized from a previous turn. From there, though, she found memory of the trip rather than the map, and moved forward again until something else clicked from her cartographic perusal. Once she'd locked on to the memory of the map, the corridors began to fly by.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Her pace slowed, boots skidding on variable-gravity tile, as instinct whispered in the dark hall. Blasterfire slashed out from a hidden intersection, its twist confusing even on the map she'd memorized, to the point where she hadn't seen it coming, and two bolts slammed into the basic armor she wore over her torso and belly. Stellar-corona plasma blasts chewed into the plate, superheating what survived, and she threw herself into a long skid on her back. Sliding, she spat a curse and ripped off the breastplate.

She arrested her momentum to some extent by throwing the breastplate over her head, quick-release straps giving just so. The ablative plate skidded down the tunnel, then clanged and bashed its way along the ceiling as it entered a new gravitic vector zone. It drew fire and well. The ambush would be upside-down relative to her; more importantly, she would be on their ceiling, in plain sight save for the darkness. For a moment she castigated herself -- a moment she could not afford -- but as a wise man had once said, it was possible to have made no mistakes and still to lose. That was not weakness, but life.

Her momentum died just as she passed over the threshold. Gravity reversed itself, and she landed painfully on hands and knees, looking up at the ambush.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

She struggled with memory as she unslung the heavy tranq rifle from her side and tossed a pair of very expensive darts down the hall. Switching from Force-enhanced memory to Force-enhanced aim had been second nature not long ago; she'd been able to do both at once, even, depending on circumstance. Now the former slowed the latter, and a blaster bolt scorched her thigh, too near a miss. No -- she had to adjust that assumption. She didn't have the wherewithal to shrug off a graze from a blaster bolt, not anymore, and this fething hurt. Her shots had gone wide, and the clip only held six. With a grunt, she seized a scrap of memory and rolled down a small connective tunnel that had been a ceiling aperture ten seconds ago.

She paused at the bend, rifle pointed up the way she'd come, hands shaking. Metal clinked on metal and she scooted back, throwing up a weak Force shield in an attempt to stave off what was pretty certainly a grenade. She caught a glimpse of it, a misshapen thing jury-rigged from power packs and some kind of gas canister, and that did not bode well.

It went off in the tunnel; if it had been a lethal grenade, she'd have been torn to shreds. Her shields just weren't there yet. As it was, part of the casing sheared through her defenses and her suit, but she could handle that with her Heartstone, her personal shard of the Healing Crystals of Fire. In time. For now, the main problem was the gas.

Quicker than she'd thought possible now, her shield shifted from gross telekinetic denial to a more refined intent, an adiabatic shield designed to keep out gases and air contaminants. The faint shimmer closed off the small tunnel-

Right up until the gravity reversed again. She hit the ceiling with head and shoulder, and her adiabatic shield vanished. Her eyes burned as the smoke hit, but it was heavier than air, whatever it was, and the reversed gravity drew it out of what was now a ceiling vent again, albeit one with a conveniently placed handle in the vertical exit. This was, after all, a sporting maze, regardless of whether or not it was a deathtrap.

The critical point here was that she couldn't give the ambushers time to reorient. Various clattering suggested that they'd gathered around the aperture in preparation to take her by force. More profane noises suggested that the plume of smoke and the reversed gravity had put them directly beneath the aperture, or across the hall from it depending on one's perspective.

Eyes closed, she leaned over the edge, got a grip on the handle, and committed herself to the Force.

The tranq rifle spat three times, and the curses grew in volume. Still blind, she slid back into cover and waited, listening, until all grew still. When gravity switched again, and three bodies hit the surface around the aperture, she climbed out and put her last dart into the source of a muffled groan, before moving on.