Ashi Tevarl - Teardown

[Gallant]

Ashi flopped into her comfortable bed, and stopped only to take her boots off and worm out of the belts that held her various bits of run-around gear, leaving only the white robe and her various body decorations.

She reached up and unclasp her lekku band, then loosened her bra, and then flopped back with a sigh to think.

Kark. Sandra had got demoted. Un-mastered? Ashi hadn’t even realized that Sandra had been a Jedi Master in the first place, anyway, so it wasn’t like that mattered to Ashi. Knight. Master. Whatever. She’d even decided, more or less, not to be too disappointed if Sandra couldn’t test her, or put her in for testing - after all, Ashi knew that she was pretty informal and definitely irregular as far as the whole trained-from-birth thing went.

Plus, she added to the litany, Beryn probably hit all the right marks for knight, or whatever, and Ashi didn’t get the impression lightsabers got handed out like candies to children - even if that kid who’d been reading off the datapad and asking about the Jedi Code had been all ‘when do you use it’ as though his hair weren’t braided.

Ugh. Uuuuunf.

She wrestled with the disappointment for a bit before she sighed and wormed the straps the rest of the way off, bundling both bindings up and tossing them towards the hamper.

She sat up. She rubbed at her face. And then, she went over to her desk, digging her saberstaff foil out of her discarded belt and setting it on the table, beside fresh-purchased fabrication tools, and a new datapad with a bunch of little self-help holovids on it. Tucking her legs beneath her on the cushioned seat, she picked one at random about engineering, and set to watching it.

Schematics. Processes. Helpful explinations in dull, monotonous voices.

Building foils. Ashi didn’t quite understand what the difference was, except foils had this sort of safety, she suspected, to keep students from clipping off their fingers, tchim-tchun, or other extremities. There was probably some sort of regulator or something. And anyway the stuff these got built out of, at least on Viscara, was pretty low quality stuff.

Getting a thin little pry from the box of fresh tools, she began to work her way into the electronics beneath the staff’s housing, taking apart little pieces until she could pull the whole thing apart.

Somehow or other she was going to have to make this foil do some pretty impressive shit. She glanced up at the hovering greenish instructions. Yeah. She could tear it apart, put it back together, if she was really careful. So that is what she set about to do, tonight. Her little engineering project, to take her mind off all the real and annoying problems she couldn’t solve.

Maybe she should just pick up a vibroblade. Or maybe, she should break that blaster rifle out of storage to take along with her to Tatooine. The foil just wasn’t cutting what she needed it to cut anymore and, well, what else was she supposed to do?

Martial arts had been going pretty well though. Alth had given Ashi some pointers, and that yellow twilek she had fought on Corsucant, turns out, had a holovid series stored up on the network. The more she watched Veries’este dancing around and working out, the more lucky Ashi felt that she had been able to touch her at all. Only the Force had kept her upright long enough to knock that girl out. No wonder she’d had such long odds.

Yeah. Martial arts. Ashi nodded to herself. Power glove maybe.

She prodded one of the crystal foci free, and held it up in her hand, listening to the low, steady pulse that had caused her to select it in the first place.

Pulse. Pulse.

[Gallant]

She rolled the little shaped crystal around in her hand. Sandra had made this saberstaff for her and of course this was not Ashi’s original - not the one she had picked up during her initiate trial. Still, it came from the same place. Little shards of red, pieced together to form a whole, half bound up with heat and carved to focus - and alive.

Ashi prised the next one out somewhat more expertly, and set them beside each other on the table, so that she could view them. Like mirror matched pairs, but with those little cracks and flaws marking them seperate from their making.

She rested her chin on her folded arms and closed her eyes. So much trouble had worked it’s way around to her door over these, and they had not been her first pick either. Did her reasons for choosing this gutsy resonance even matter anymore? Zao was a long way off, probably flipping her blue saber around with some Sith by now, if she had kept the color at all. And did she really give a crap about how someone felt if they were so long gone, and on the opposite side of this weird war, anyway?

Everyone who knew Ashi, told her how nice she was, or at least, said that they recognized she wasn’t some sort of secret Sith straight off, but being singled out like this sucked. Ashi betted there were probably dozens of Initiates who might have chosen it if they hadn’t been told it were some sort of evil nasty thing looking to steal their souls or something.

They didn’t seem really bad to her. It was just a different resonance. It was more the meaning people gave to it that seemed troubling, after all. And anyway, nobody could tell her not to use them. Not reasonably, anyway.

She began to fit it all back together, from memory, lacing everything back into it’s place with a careful and delicate hand, though she found her fingers still shook a little with the delicate work and had to take more than one or two steadying breaths when some of the parts got stuck. She had really let this one get beat the kark out of, hadn’t she?

When it was all assembled, she lit it on one end, then the other, to check she had put the coppery conductors right way round, and then turned it off to set it down and lean back.

Okay now what.

Sandra was moping. Obviously. And she had her own problems that had nothing to do at all with Ashi. Mart was on his honorbound, vaguely suicidal mission to challenge the strongest soldier in the universe, or whatever. Alth was on house arrest. Taryn and Ristin were up and gone off somewhere. There was a whole pack of new initiates, in which Ashi, of course, was only one. And not the best one, either, maybe.

And stuff was happening that sort of made all this seem ridiculous, anyway.

[Gallant]

Ashi stretched out, then danced forward barefoot to tap on the holodisk she had set up in her big quasi-temple meditation room. She had pushed the faux statues aside - she’d just put them together from local rock and some patterns - to give the holovid brawler that popped up some space.

Okay, so the twi’lek that popped up full size and waved, cheerily, at her, before giving an introduction, was wearing the same napkins she had been wearing in the Arena back on Corsucant - but Ashi understood from her brief introduction into the sport boxing that this was part of the whole appeal of the flashy stuff.

It had still kicked her ass and made her look like a bantha brained dunce.

“K’thri,” Veri’s holo-recording explained, “is all about the flash.”

Ashi listened for a little while and then stood up to begin copying stances. Eventually she wandered over to pause the recording, overlaying the motions with her own stance, so that she could get a good feel for how the other twi’lek was holding herself at half-speed.

Punch. Like so. From the shoulders? Yeah.

Snap. Shift. Okay.

Snap, snap. Snap.

Ashi started at the very beginning. Could she work this somehow into her Makashi form? She had never actually been taught to fight without a lightsaber, unless she counted the experience with an old blaster pistol she’d bought up on the station she’d been dropped off at. Ashi quickly discovered that, while she was both quick and flexible, all that womanly fat on her former opponent was there for a better reason - this took a lot of karking energy.

By the time the first recording had finished, Ashi had taken several hours to try every basic movement, and found herself soaked with sweat and tired and sore. Kark this. Up yours, she thought, silently, at the still-beautiful picture-perfect fighting slut, before the holo-recording ended, and Ashi found one of her cushions to collapse over.

Well, that’s what the girl had been paid to do, and Ashi already knew it was probably harder than it had looked. Was this what Ko had expected her to know? Suddenly Ashi didn’t feel so good about her weight, even if she were kind of proud of it. This sucked. A lot.

She nursed her wounded and exhausted pride with some water, and then rolled back up to go over the motions all over again. Stance, then strikes. Punch punch punch. Over and over and over. Because it was different from brawling, different from brute strength. There was a right way to punch, that used her shoulders and hips, and she could feel it if she got it right.

It just ached her arms and made her feel too weak.

[Gallant]

Ashi sat down in the pretty house that she had been given, and felt sick.

The candles floated along nicely above the table. The pillows were just where she had left them, tossed around a bit by happenstance, but comfortable. Ashi had really liked this house, but, now she felt kind of weird in it, like she were foreign. She fell into a light self reflection, half awake and half drifting as she sprawled out and watched the light patterns on the ceiling.

What was she feeling? Anger? Yeah. Not hate exactly, but, definitely anger. Uncertainty. Pain, in her lekku, where the throwing knives had bonked her senseless. Betrayed, disrespected. Weak. Really, weak. It had taken a few hits to take her out, sure, but, she hadn’t exactly had a plan for escaping anyway.

She rubbed her face.

Lost too, maybe. She’d wanted to come back home and figured this was home, but, she’d thought she knew these people too. Mart, with his cooking and unrequited love-angst. Kho, who had been friendly and supportive up until like, literally two seconds ago. Sandra who’d always seemed so composed, and a little sad, just seeming sad. Alth, struggling.

Maybe she hadn’t really known anybody very well in the first place. She didn’t know the bounty hunter who had pointed the blaster in her face, anyway. At least he’d said that she had a point.

Ashi couldn’t hold on to the anger very long but the uncertainty rankled. Then the guilt. Then the struggle of seemingly absolute impotence. There had been nothing she could do. Maybe for the Force, in that place, but nothing against the people she’d thought were her friends.

She’d just got done telling Alth that she’d be okay with talking about her experience with abuse, but being whipped senseless and slung underarm by someone she’d thought her friend had shaken her more than a little bit. Ashi picked a pillow, hugged it, and rolled over, willing the force-candles to darkness.

She wouldn’t stay here any longer, that was sure. She might just leave all this stuff behind. Maybe not the pillows, but the rest of it, yeah.

Ashi finally threw up, and then rolled back over to cry.

[Gallant]

Ashi sat back from the last holovid recording of the evening - this one to Sandra. She hoped that she would take this well. It wasn’t in Ashi’s nature to be disloyal. It wasn’t like that anyway. Just, a few things needed to change, she thought, as she looked around at her new apartment. Yeah.

She picked up the two crystals on her end table and held them up in the soft candlelight.

Blue. Well, it had come back to her first pick, after all. Sorry, Zhao. I’m gonna have to move on without you.

It seemed a little bit like a relief. New Master, new crystals, and a new foil to go along with them. She had picked up all her materials, and would now just have to put them together again. Ashi had the chance to reforge something, and it was about time she took hold of it herself and with her own hands. Althea could teach her to do what she did, fighting toe to toe with those Sith, and Ashi was going to soak it in.

Althea had also given her advice on the new foil. If Ashi understood the sketches right, and the talk, there was a way to make one as potent, if not more potent, than an actual lightsaber - though she’d get one of those sooner or later - so Ashi had listened very, very carefully to the instructions.

At her feet was a whole pack of really specific stuff. The saber housing was going to be pretty basic, not even a different style than her former, but the inlay and the electronics were going to be very different. High quality. Yeah, the housing was just some basic local metal - veldium - but the rest of it was going to be almost pure, solid, dense bone, black as onyx and set to a pattern she’d devised, thin as lace, in beautiful shiny silver. Somehow, Ashi felt that was appropriate. Since it was going to be a staff, she could stuff a surprising lot of focusing elements into it, along with an updated regulation system on the emitters and then -

And then, she thought, she’d be holding something that would blaze like an azure beacon, and would cut like a razor, when she turned it on.

[Gallant]

It did, in fact, blaze like a torch.

The first try hadn’t worked, of course - Alth had scolded her, though not seriously, about using the community lathes and fabricators, but Ashi was not about to go back to beg Kho to use his workstations again, so the second time she’d decided to be a little bit less ambitious. Cheaper electronics, for one thing.

But the inlays around the crystals did exactly what she wanted them to do, the second time, and in the center of the quiet, public workshop, she had lit it for the first time.

The light foil curled around and around in a helix, the plasma spinning wildly in the tight confines determined by it’s emitter. She took a tiny needle wrench, and twisted the adjustor on that emitter, until the torch’s blaze coalesced into a tight, swirling vortex, and then into a pure, white-hot, faintly blue visage that almost hurt to look at.

It dimmed the lights a bit, and left a strange after-image in her eyes that she had to blink away until she got used to it.

Test it. Test it. Okay, okay. Giddy, she grasped the long, intricately worked handle, made from Viscara’s own stock, and then realized she didn’t have anything to actually test it on.

Walls. Benches. Ashi glanced from the overclocked foil around, until she lit on the scrap bin and pounced on it. A rustle-around found an old, dense rod, and she set it up on the end of the engineering bench. Thick as her hand, it was heavy, but she wrestled it up, took careful aim, and flicked her wrist.

Vrrrrm. Clank.

“Aw, kark yeah!”