Private Why Hermits Don't Go Into Town Unless Absolutely Necessary

[Jend-Ro Quill]

PUBLIC HOUSE​

FERRYMAN'S REACH
PAGODON
AMBIENT TEMPERATURE: SIGNIFICANTLY BELOW FREEZING

The new presence in town crashed over Quill like a breaching ravinak. Worst possible time, too: three drinks down, surrounded by strangers with noisy grubby minds, and no friends in sight.

So much for the weekend.

Nobody else here felt the arrival as such, but attention slipped that way magnetically, pointing back toward the iris door and whoever was coming in. Cold air rushed through the public house, all the way to the bar.

Quill risked a glance over his shoulder. Lady with a staff. Melee weapon. Never a good sign.

Belatedly, hunched over the bar, he scrambled to hide the lightsaber at his belt. How concealed was he in the Force? How concealed could he be, really, after three tall cans of offworld lum?


Loxa Visl

 

[Loxa Visl]

The retreat from the cold was a welcome thing for one not quite so accustomed to such conditions. Loxa stepped inside, her figure draped in a heavy, woolen cloak coated by a fresh dusting of snow. The phrik staff in her bare hand had grown quite frigid, and so was the first thing she sought to set down as she stepped toward the bar where she leaned it against the edge. With a puff of clouded breath, she brought her hands to her lips and blew upon them.

Clearly she'd not been expecting to land in a tundra.

"Hot caff?" the bartender eyed her, the clearest example of an out-of-towner he'd seen in a while.

Loxa nodded. Her Basic may have been broken, but it wasn't so bad she didn't understand those two words, <<"Sante.">> she answered her thanks in Pacean.

In the silence that stretched between order and steaming cup of caff, Loxa noted the presence in the Force just three seats away. It wavered in and out, like a fire sputtering under rain, and drew her saffron gaze sideways like the moon drew the tides. She was not an inherently aggressive creature, but experience had taught her caution. Her hand reached for the staff beside her and took a firm hold, just in case.

Jend-Ro Quill

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

That Dathomiri thank-you inspired a flinch. Of course a Nightsister would come through this town of all towns, this night of all nights. It felt like serendipity, and destiny gave Quill hives.

Well, maybe not a Nightsister per se. Nightsisters thrived on attention and this lady hadn't demanded groveling just yet. Plus she felt...stormy but not outright malevolent.

Quill avoided looking at her. Maybe he could just leave.

Oh dammit, she was gripping that staff, wasn't she. Who held onto a metal bar in cold like this? And was that...alertness? Was she clocking him as a threat? Would she interpret departure as setting up some kind of hostility?

Is the lum making me spiral, or am I just spiralling on general principle?

He cleared his throat.

"Dathomir, eh?"

 

[Loxa Visl]

The old man had grown curiously still. Prickly to her senses, as if he were attempting to ward off evil with a proverbial toss of salt over his shoulder. Loxa wasn't sure if she should take offense ... it was just a simple cup of caff.

Her free hand reached for the mug, warmth suffused through her palm in an instant and the frigid witch briefly dropped her guard to indulge in that relief. Wishing to bask in it and thinking of the hot springs from that far away jungle-covered planet she called home.

As if on cue, the old man spoke its name. A summons of nostalgia, invoking a tidal wave of memories not all of which were her own. Not all of which were Dathomir.

Loxa Visl blinked, just a painful hairsbreadth away from her first sip, and looked to him again. This was quite unusual. The sort of strange happenstance the Elders lauded as strings of fate and chords of destiny. Felt a bit similar to indigestion, truth be told, but maybe that was just the overdrawn hours since her last meal.

"Yes," she replied and was uncertain, "This One is of Dathomir. How does a man know this?"

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

That caf did look good. Sobering up sounded equally good, but adding any volume of liquid to his stomach struck Quill as a terrible idea.

"Y'said thank you, is all. I visited Dathomir a bit, not as the usual, whassit, war tourist or anything. Good ten years back. I said a lot of thank-yous. Never did pick up much spoken Paecean beyond that, never got an ear for it. Reading, sure."

Blink and fifty words came out when he'd meant to stop at five. Maybe he should risk the caf after all.

"I'm Quill."

 

[Loxa Visl]

That was a lot of words spoken with a curious sort of accent she hadn't the ear to place. The witch's eyes squinted, brows faintly furrowed, as she tried to process them as quickly as they slipped from his mouth.

Was that lum she smelled? Didn't need to know Basic to know that distinct mouth aroma.

For now, the cautionary state of her spiritual hackles had begun to smooth over. The man had ... been to Dathomir? Some years ago? Something about war. Paecean ... big ears?

She didn't think he had particularly big ears but she did find his name to be curiously appropriate.

A peaceable, friendly greeting if she did say so herself. It meant the choice between setting aside her mug or her staff was rather more easy to make. So the staff returned to its lean to grant her an empty hand for the customary gesture of greeting, "This One is called Loxa," the witch replied, mug still lingering between her chin and her chest.

"A man has visit Dathomir," she recounted and carefully contemplated her next words, "and not be make dog. A man must be special."

For that was the Dathomiri way - enslave the males and make them your dogs. Or at least, some of the clans still did, others had progressed to more socially acceptable ways.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

"Be make...dog. Oh — the idiom. Eheh. Hahahaha!"

He slapped the bartop. The keeper, a twitchy Talz, twitched.

"Sorry, sorry." Quill wiped his eyes. "Kagrup, you got a notebook or anything I could write on?"

<Quill,> the barkeep gronked, <trying to give that woman your number would be your biggest mistake since moving to Pagodon.> But Kagrup slapped down a notepad and stylo anyway.

Though Quill never did get an ear for Dathomiri Paecean, he had — and frequently referenced — copies of their various scriptures in the original. So while his written Paecean suffered from scriptural formality, it was technically correct. To a fault.

//Welcome to Pagodon! I am Quill. You do not need to fear that I am a Jedi or an enemy. I have no enemies. Where are you traveling?//

He passed the notebook to Loxa.

 

[Loxa Visl]

With how focused she was on mental translations, the slap caught her off-guard. The witch straightened her posture suddenly, gaining an inch or two in height from her previous hunch against the chill of her bones. The exchange between barkeep and man gave her pause - had she said something wrong?

This always happened when her Sisters weren't around. Vamal was so much more fluent in Basic spoken.

Sorry, sorry -

Loxa's eyes hovered questioningly between the pair and she wondered if she aught to make an effort to very quickly enjoy her caff while she could, but the man was scribbling away and passing her a notepad before she could make that decision. The witch eyed the pad and lifted her brows. Eyed the man.

<<"Ahhh, you write it...!">>

She set the caff aside and took up the pad, eyes skating over the strangely formal written word of her home. It was as though he were speaking from ages past. Ye Olde Paecaen, nearly. Her mouth sounded out the name Pah-go-dun and a faint smiling line formed from it. If he was a Jedi, then she held no reservations for the power she thought she sensed from him.

"A man is special," she concluded, thumbing the line of a scar on her chin, "This One follows a memory that does not belong. How does a man learn to write this?" Loxa turned the pad to face him, head tilting in quiet wonder, "A man is ...book master?"

She didn't know the basic word, gestured for the stylo and wrote it in her native instead: scholar.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

In his head, Quill went back and forth between approaches, fumbled some words. He settled on ye olde notepad.

//Yes, I collect many books and objects which are like books. What do you mean that you, coming here, follow a memory that does not belong? Does this memory belong to someone else? Or is it a thing which you have forgotten?//

He had a Paecean/Basic dictionary back home, tucked beside the Dathomiri scriptures. Neither resource conferred much of a knack for colloquial conversation. Quill found he was sweating.

 

[Loxa Visl]

She read, she pondered, she pointed.

"That," Loxa said, her fingertip on the someone else portion of his sentence. It was at this point that she decided there was no further sense in continuing to stand. The conversation had settled enough, so the witch took the seat at the bar once space away. Just enough space to be unintrusive to a stranger but close enough to converse without disrupting the casual din of the locale.

"This One hunts beasts... to make gentle for job," the woman smoothed a hand lightly over the three scars crossing her face for emphasis of what sort of beasts she was referring to, "at a planet many stars away, there is no beast, but ...this."

She reached to pull over her staff, presenting it to the Jedi, <<sleeping soul>> Loxa could have simply called it a staff, but it had felt like so much more when she first picked it up. Like a person and not an object. "It awakened by touch, now This One sees dreams and memories of a life that does not belong."

The staff was special for certain, even if it no longer held the remnants of another's life. Made of solid phrik, it was covered in the sigils and symbols of a religion now many decades since faded. Morossi Aesirs whose names were only murmured by the few remaining devout.

​

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

Long years in the Outer Rim Coalition, once Moross Crusade territory, made the symbolic language familiar. Quill touched the cold phrik gingerly, without grasping the staff.

"Moross," he said, slow and distinct. "It's a thing of Moross gods. Are the memories a problem for you? In your dreams, are you yourself or someone else" He repeated himself in awkwardly pronounced Dathomiri Paecean.

 

[Loxa Visl]

Moross.

Despite the word being completely new to her, it felt like a book she'd read over and over, dog-eared pages in, underlined her favorite passages, and memorized as well. It made his pointed follow-up a curious question for the witch.

"This One ... does not know," she was nothing if not truthful with both herself and others. Lies had only ever brought misfortune.

"They are of another, but ... familiar. This One wishes to know why. Where can find Moross?"

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

To the notepad!

On the bar, Quill sketched the galaxy as a wobbly starfish with the super-hyperlanes as bold double lines. Pagodon was a dot near the Scar Worlds on the right; he wrote 'here' in Paecean as the label. Then he outlined a rough area on the bottom left, a piece of the Outer Rim, Wild Space, and the Kathol Outback.

"The Moross Crusade...leashed this space when I was a young man, about forty years ago. Their leaders said they were gods." Again, slow and careful, he repeated himself in cumbersome Paecean.

 

[Loxa Visl]

It was at this time that she remembered her caff. It had cooled to a just-above-tepid warmth, but tepid still felt good hitting her slowly thawing gut. Loxa watched curiously while the man drew a map of the stars. She was no navigator and she knew very little about getting places, but she'd made it from Dathomir to Pagodon in one piece.

Someone who could navigate would know how to read this, and now she had a word to go with her destination.

But forty years ago was a long time and she had been but a child slave then as well.

"Moross is gone?" she thought she understood his words well enough. They seemed to imply that Moross was, not is.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

Quill nodded. "Long ago, yes. Some stories say the gods got bored. Nobody claims to have killed them."

Far at the edge, he labelled a dot Kal'Shebbol. A convoluted squiggle led farther out to Uukaablis, then Exocron, then a vastly more complicated little squiggle to Demonsgate at the very edge of the galaxy. He called the whole area 'Kathol' because the distinction between Sector and Outback was a granular bridge too far. The Kathol region made up maybe a quarter of the old Moross territories, right at the heart.

"Does this make sense?"

 

[Loxa Visl]

The witch's brow pinched together, head canting to one side as she looked.

"To someone," she replied with a faint smile, <<sante.>>

Then, when he was finished, she gestured for the stylo and pad, flipping the page over to draw out one more symbol that would not appear anywhere in the Morossi pantheon or culture.

"Does a man know this mark?" she asked, turning it to him. It harkened to dark and dangerous days, when Gods and cultists ever so much more dark and dangerous than Moross blazed a path across the stars.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

The sigil sank deep and dredged up bad memory, things that shouldn't be known, eldritch infohazards too horrifyingly wrong to forget. Quill took a sharp breath, almost a gasp, and waved away the Talz barkeep's concern.

Then vomited across the surface of the bar.

A chorus of shouts rose from nearly everyone in sight: disgust, anger, contempt, a little more disgust. "I'm no expert," Quill choked out, mortified, "but that's Primeval. Don't go..."

He accepted a stericloth from the barkeep and started cleaning up his mess numbly.

"Don't do anything about that symbol. Sorry, sorry..."

 

[Loxa Visl]

She almost felt the surge of sickness as if it were her own. Precognizant ... empathetic ... carnal witchy senses ... regardless of the how, it simply wasn't fast enough to avoid the friendly fire of splatter. The witch, the cup of caf, and the notebook all fell victim - the lattermost far worse off than the foremost. Loxa frowned and leaned back reflexively, looking down to find that her cloak had taken most of the yuck.

She accepted a wetcloth from the barkeep and wiped herself up as best she could before turning her attention back to the old Jedi and his words.

Primeval. Don't go. Don't do.

The onus of the mark was clear and perhaps it still carried power wherever it appeared. Enough to sicken a man.

Loxa felt the ugly weight of responsibility but fought the urge to help the man clean himself up and maintained a respectable distance with a respectable nod of understanding. Bad omens tied to dark visions.

<<Samahani,>> she apologized, "This One has not mean to make a man ill. Please, take this," Loxa reached into a pouch at her side and sifted through its contents for a small leather pouch that she offered to him, "they help."

The pouch was full of aromatic herbs and crushed roots. Tea. She'd given him the ingredients for a witch's brew - potent one, too, if the smell was anything to go by.

 

[Jend-Ro Quill]

Puking has a way of dialing your inner life down to silence. Quill, who'd spent the last few minutes at desperate work with sanicloths, was now vomit-free and much diminished. He accepted the tea with unsteady hands. "Lovely tisane," he mumbled, shell-shocked. "Sorry, sorry," he added for the Talz, for at least the hundredth time, and shuffled away as if they hadn't just been in conversation. Coming into town was, as ever, a mistake.

He paused in the iris and mustered himself.

"Don't chase that symbol," he said too loudly, meeting Loxa Visl 's eyes with effort. "If you need to read, find me tomorrow."

He offered no 'how': the barkeep knew where he lived, and anyhow witches had their ways.