Alys’anthra
Handmaiden
Care to share another bottle of whyren?
That was all the message read.
As far as coded messages went this was either fantastic or foolish.
What if she didn't remember sharing that bottle with him? What if she remembered but did not understand? What if she understood but did not care?
Really, who would believe a man like that would've shared a bottle let alone a bed with the Grand Master of the Jedi order?
Nothing could be done for it but hope.
Hope. It was a small thing. Incredibly easy to do in principle and yet in practice it was often unbearably difficult.
It was all they had unless she came, hope, and if she did they would have something more.
A chance.
The Grand Master would find this message to have come from a lone moon on the edge of the republic. The planet it belonged to having been caught in whatever event was afflicting the galaxy. Whether the planet had called away or the moon brought here it was not for them to say.
This moon was nothing truly. A place none would think to go for none would be thought to be there.
Any analysis of the moon would show that once, a thousand thousand millennia before today it had been a thriving habitat, green and blue and red, teeming with life. Some lifetimes though it had become barren and cold and dead but underneath the surface all that life had become fuel and once that was known it again had life but without the color. Blue and green and red had gone. Replaced it was with grey. All shades of it but yet still no matter how many shades it was still grey. Save for the places it were black. That was a hundred lifetimes ago yet. Now the moon has no fuel and it had no life. None save for a handful of vermin who scuttled and scurried about inside and out as they try hide from light.
An ancient fuel repository on the moon had been chosen for their hidey-hole. The vermin did not hide themselves well enough however and were found by one of their own. One who sought to return color to this moon, and oh what colors they had brought.
They left a convenient trail for the grand master to follow if she chose from the entrance of the refinery on the surface down to where the vermin had scurried below.
Her path through would be relatively empty. Perhaps a rodent or two would try their luck, so desperate to flee that they would bare their teeth at her in an attempt so futile they may as well cut their own throats.
Fight or no, if she chose to make her presence here and follow the path below the surface she would not long find a room newer than all the rest.
It was a stark contrast from the cold black dead husk in which it sat. This room was washed in light and held no color but white. A lab. Built in the last decade, a place the vermin came to craft their villainy. Were the Grand Master the find this room, painting colors of her own along the way she would find not what she expected perhaps though the unexpected may be exactly what she sought to find.
When the Grand Master arrived the unexpected is exactly what she would find but not quite the unfamiliar.
In the sterile, white light of the laboratory, she would find what one would in a laboratory. Consoles, equipment, machinery, all filled the room but that was not all. Life was there too and death was shoving its way in as well.
On the ground there were three bodies. Two corpses with ugly fatal wounds, long beyond saving. A third body there was too, with a face as familiar to her as one of her family. The very same man who had once shared that bottle of whyren. He lay in a pool of blood, his own and that which once had belonged in the body of the two dead men. An ugly terrifying wheezed emanated from this man she knew every time he managed a shallow painful breath which came increasingly infrequently.
Knelt over this man that she knew, covered in blood up to elbows, was another man that she had met before, though doubtlessly he had never been long in her mind and the years may have allowed her to forget him completely though he never forgot her. The kneeling man was Korunai and he owed his life to her for she had saved him once and when he laid eyes on her he would pray to the most that she could save this other man who was dying.
In the room with the dead, dying and praying men was another the Grandmaster knew but never met. Her hunt from over a year ago now complete under the most unlikely cicrumstance.
She had finally found the vermin Xia Li. Kaminoan scientist and member of The Unblessed.
Briana Sal-Soren
That was all the message read.
As far as coded messages went this was either fantastic or foolish.
What if she didn't remember sharing that bottle with him? What if she remembered but did not understand? What if she understood but did not care?
Really, who would believe a man like that would've shared a bottle let alone a bed with the Grand Master of the Jedi order?
Nothing could be done for it but hope.
Hope. It was a small thing. Incredibly easy to do in principle and yet in practice it was often unbearably difficult.
It was all they had unless she came, hope, and if she did they would have something more.
A chance.
The Grand Master would find this message to have come from a lone moon on the edge of the republic. The planet it belonged to having been caught in whatever event was afflicting the galaxy. Whether the planet had called away or the moon brought here it was not for them to say.
This moon was nothing truly. A place none would think to go for none would be thought to be there.
Any analysis of the moon would show that once, a thousand thousand millennia before today it had been a thriving habitat, green and blue and red, teeming with life. Some lifetimes though it had become barren and cold and dead but underneath the surface all that life had become fuel and once that was known it again had life but without the color. Blue and green and red had gone. Replaced it was with grey. All shades of it but yet still no matter how many shades it was still grey. Save for the places it were black. That was a hundred lifetimes ago yet. Now the moon has no fuel and it had no life. None save for a handful of vermin who scuttled and scurried about inside and out as they try hide from light.
An ancient fuel repository on the moon had been chosen for their hidey-hole. The vermin did not hide themselves well enough however and were found by one of their own. One who sought to return color to this moon, and oh what colors they had brought.
They left a convenient trail for the grand master to follow if she chose from the entrance of the refinery on the surface down to where the vermin had scurried below.
Her path through would be relatively empty. Perhaps a rodent or two would try their luck, so desperate to flee that they would bare their teeth at her in an attempt so futile they may as well cut their own throats.
Fight or no, if she chose to make her presence here and follow the path below the surface she would not long find a room newer than all the rest.
It was a stark contrast from the cold black dead husk in which it sat. This room was washed in light and held no color but white. A lab. Built in the last decade, a place the vermin came to craft their villainy. Were the Grand Master the find this room, painting colors of her own along the way she would find not what she expected perhaps though the unexpected may be exactly what she sought to find.
When the Grand Master arrived the unexpected is exactly what she would find but not quite the unfamiliar.
In the sterile, white light of the laboratory, she would find what one would in a laboratory. Consoles, equipment, machinery, all filled the room but that was not all. Life was there too and death was shoving its way in as well.
On the ground there were three bodies. Two corpses with ugly fatal wounds, long beyond saving. A third body there was too, with a face as familiar to her as one of her family. The very same man who had once shared that bottle of whyren. He lay in a pool of blood, his own and that which once had belonged in the body of the two dead men. An ugly terrifying wheezed emanated from this man she knew every time he managed a shallow painful breath which came increasingly infrequently.
Knelt over this man that she knew, covered in blood up to elbows, was another man that she had met before, though doubtlessly he had never been long in her mind and the years may have allowed her to forget him completely though he never forgot her. The kneeling man was Korunai and he owed his life to her for she had saved him once and when he laid eyes on her he would pray to the most that she could save this other man who was dying.
In the room with the dead, dying and praying men was another the Grandmaster knew but never met. Her hunt from over a year ago now complete under the most unlikely cicrumstance.
She had finally found the vermin Xia Li. Kaminoan scientist and member of The Unblessed.
Briana Sal-Soren