Tentacles of the Vaapad

[Ashin Varanin]

Long years of training, after his rebirth, had made Rach Kol-Rekali accustomed to this form. Its bulk promoted stability, enhancing his already significant Djem So prowess but rendering him less able to dazzle with Sokan or Ataru.

Now, the ground of Nal Hutta turned to mud beneath him as he heaved his mass back and forth. Juyo, even Vaapad, had been part of his education as a high-level Jedi Knight. But only now, with assorted Nikto, Gran, and Kowakian monkeylizards looking on, did he begin to understand.

A pre-Great Darkness holocron shimmered near his ruts, its Togruta gatekeeper urging him on to greater heights and depths and speeds and strengths. Vaapad was a mental thing as much as a physical one, suitable only for high-level practitioners of multiple forms.

At a guess, no Hutt had ever become a master of Vaapad before.

Soon.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

In his days as a Jedi Knight, and later as a Dark Master, Rasho had begun to comprehend why Juyo was considered an unfinished style. It was the kind of thing only a competent martial artist could understand, and he prided himself on being more than competent even now. And yet he hadn't come to this realization as a lean, wiry humanoid with decades' experience in half the classic Forms. It had only been in the handful of years since his death and subsequent return to life, in this body, that he had acquired such...wisdom in regards to Vaapad.

Probably, he mused to himself as he lolled and spun and danced through velocities, probably because he had been forced to re-learn all his muscle memory. The part of him that had remained a duellist in the interim, however, carried enough over that the holocron's ministrations helped. It was an unexceptional thing, the diary-holocron of a Jedi who had learned Vaapad in the aftermath of Darth Krayt's regime. One of hundreds lost to the Dark Ages, and recovered only at great cost.

Part of Velok's stash, after the heist. It had been Velok, after all, who brought Rach back as the Hutt -- Rach's skills lent in other directions, and he couldn't have done it alone.

There were days when the twisting, chopping, lunging Hutt missed being a Jedi almost as much as he had missed his old self in the first days. The sheer power and versatility of this body, however, validated Velok's choice, which Rasho had considered a cruel prank for at least the first year. But being a Jedi would have given him access to Darron Wraith, Kiskla Grayson, the other Vaapad masters. He was keenly aware that Juyo experience plus an incomplete holocron could only get him so far.

There was, however, no point in not trying.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

The focus of his training had rested on Djem So, Ataru, and Juyo, in that order. As the holocron adjusted his Juyo stances and movements into the Vaapad ideal, Rasho the Hutt -- that was how he thought about himself now -- couldn't help but compare these new patterns of thought and action to the patterns he'd known before.

Compared to Djem So, Vaapad was deliberate and yet fleeting, perhaps a touch less committed. Where Djem So taught to break and batter defenses, Vaapad -- at least, as he was learning it -- would do that just enough until the enemy fell into the beginnings of a pattern. And then go fluid, quick, sneak around like Makashi or something -- though Rasho had only the loosest and most fundamental familiarity with Makashi. Vaapad was more about creating and exploiting weaknesses than about crashing through regardless, or about technique, even.

It was about -- or so he'd always understood -- a state of mind. The Vaapad he'd learned as a Knight had been purely fundamental, mostly Juyo, but even then he'd gotten the hint: One could not become a Vaapad practitioner without understanding the jungle, deep in one's bones. That...ferocity, really, was one factor which separated the more kinetic and maneuverable aspects of Vaapad from Ataru. There were others, of course. For one, no amount of experimentation with Vaapad's principles could transform it into the turn-your-back, spin-in-place, expose-yourself crap that the less professional kind of Ataru entailed.

Then again, the idiocy of poor-form Ataru was beyond his current stature. The tail alone caused complications -- and every god knew he'd had to spend long months of training to get his body into shape for Sokan principles. And Vaapad was a step up from that.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Temptation arose, as it always did. A humidor of fine cigarras, a tumbler of firewhiskey, both in the lands of Rutian Twi'leks. Rasho salivated furiously in all directions.

He did not, however, slow down. That much he had made his rule ever since his days as the Order's worst Jedi. Discipline seventy-five percent of the time, do whatever and whomever he wanted twenty-five percent of the time. A balance like that had served him well, especially since that twenty-five percent of the time had generally still involved pushing himself to, and beyond, his physical limits. As a Hutt, he allowed himself ten percent leisure time, and another twenty percent with the girls. Exercise was exercise, and deserved to be counted as such.

So he pressed on after merely a taste of firewhiskey, a dalliance of a minute or less. With renewed vigor, he pursued the velocities of Vaapad in what was rapidly becoming a mud wallow.

"Time to shift venues," he grumbled to himself at last. "A harder surface. Tyree, Cavilla, you can get your mud wrestling in later."

The new setting was a ruin, cast down by a wayward Republic gunship during the recent battle. His blubber pulsed with rage each time he looked up at the moon Nar Shaddaa. Some things just Ought Not To Be. Whatever the justice of the cause, however, this recently ruined bunker had a surface of permacrete suitable for more gruelling training. His associates and servants set up an awning to keep the sun off his drink trolly. Manfully, he persisted in his velocities on the sunbaked permacrete, without the cool and revitalizing mud. His crimson sabrestaff whirled and chopped and flicked around him.

He hadn't felt this young since he died.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

He reached a crux point, and slowed to a halt. One fat hand gestured peremptorily, and a tankard of water sloshed its way through the air into his grip. He drank it all, conscious that his Hutt body needed libation for hydration's sake as well as for ease of movement. He did, after all, excrete many things.

"The vaapad. Are any of you familiar with it?"

His associates shared confused looks. This was, as it happened, the first time they'd heard the term save by overhearing the holocron. The holocron hadn't yet mentioned the actual animal.

"The vaapad," said Rasho after a patient moment, "is the namesake of the Form. It's a creature with so many quick and deadly tentacles that they cannot be counted until the creature is dead. I must understand tentacles. You, you, you, and you. I need the most vigorous dance imaginable, as if you're fighting with your lekku and tentacles."

He reclined under the awning with his cold drinks bar, and guzzled mineral water furiously. Two Twi'leks and two Nautolans, all female and all scantily clad as was his due, shared looks of immense and poorly hidden confusion, then began doing their best to follow his orders. His reddening eyes flicked from tentacle to tentacle, observing how they moved in relation to each other, how they responded to impact, how they could hit or wrap depending on angle and relative motion and follow-through.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Matters of substance consumed the rest of the afternoon - nay, devoured it - apart from a brief and pleasant interlude involving the Nautolans and the Twi’leks. Later days saw even further training, because this Hutt simply would not be deterred. In fact he was forced to schedule himself, to his annoyance.

Rach Kol-Rekali had hated scheduling. He had loved, for example, sleeping in late with Anaya Fen.

Rasho the Hutt was, by all accounts, a more driven individual than his prior self. Ascetic, even, he mused as he slurped down spiced bedjies and prepared for yet another rigorous training session.

A training session against a vaapad. What better way to learn? A gesture of condescension and grandeur signalled two lithe Epicanthix girls to open a cage, and a three-limbed multi-tentacled predator roared out. For purposes of prolonging the fight, Rasho did not use a lightsabre or a vibrosword, merely an edged blade with a heavy pommel-weight to partially simulate lightsabre balance.

The starving vaapad lunged and stomped and wheeled and spun. Tentacles lashed out, leaving welts on Rasho’s skin or slamming against his sword. His stance-analogue held, but only for the moment. The creature was just so terribly fast.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

Tentacle after tentacle slammed against the blade - the flat, the edge. Rasho met the strikes one-handed, as if deflecting powerful blasterfire. Vaapad blood sprayed on the permacrete, but the starving brute was undaunted even as tentacle-tips began to fall. This had been easier, he groused, when it was just Twi'lek and Nautolan slave girls simulating a fight with their lekku and relevant apprendages.

But 'easy' and 'vaapad' did not belong in the same train of thought. His cogitations stilled, and he pressed back against the vaapad's charge, using his immense ability to become immobile. Force grounding was something he only ever used sparingly; he didn't need it.

Usually.

This vaapad hit him hard, and he pushed back as best he could, his sword flickering and chopping in Form Seven's ways. Each impact threatened to smash the weapon from his muscular hand-

And then it did. He scooted back, and a staff flickered out of the dark corners of the bunker. A long piece of rebar, really. He clutched it as he would a lightstaff as the vaapad bore down on him.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

A forehand chop with a lightstaff was an interesting thing, he mused, as just such a chop pulped a tentacle tip. Some stances required the hands to curl in the same direction, some opposite. Being able to switch between them lent versatility, and his powerful Hutt grip didn't really allow a same-direction hold to fall prey to a downward disarming move. When he'd first begun learning an ancient Vaapad variant from Darius Malakai's associates -- including one memorable woman who had worn only alchemical beads (her name escaped him) -- he hadn't been so confident with the lightstaff. Not even after a childhood on a low-tech planet with only simple blades, staves, bows and spears. Malakai's associates had streamlined things for him, battered competence into him.

The piece of rebar whispered and slammed through echoes of velocities, using components of preset exercises. Any training regimen that respected velocities had his attention, though it did tend to predispose one toward certain combinations. Those predispositions, he discovered (as whipcracking vaapad tentacles left weals and welts on his sacred flesh, to his fury), were showing through. All true training required a sparring partner just as much as it required time alone, and in this latest bout of Vaapad training, he had made the mistake of prioritizing one over the other.

Frustration overpowered wisdom for a moment, recognition that he only had one vaapad to study. He half-rolled and spun, spearing the rebar through the tentacular mass in frustration. The wounded vaapad backed off.

"Borgrim. Urshkilak. FIght it, stun batons only. I think I need to watch."