Miss'arare'nuosho - To Be Jedi

[Sara]

His footsteps were heavy in the darkness as he breathed the thick, sulfur rich air into his lungs with a low cough, a frantic flapping of wings from within the cave as he disturbed their nest. He dropped the flare he was carrying to the cave floor and readied his blade to defend himself, the echoes of chattering teeth closing in from all sides. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes over, stepping forward and thrusting up into the darkness, a sickening screech emitted from the shyrack he impaled, quickly dumping it into the cave floor and executing it with a stomp to the head. The black-clad Chiss waved his lightfoil through the darkness, warding off the swarm as they passed around him, the blue glow of his blade lighting the way forward. He deactivated his blade as the sea of purple swarmed towards the cave mouth and left him to explore, his footsteps softer upon the rock now as he proceeded with his wits about him.

"Hsss-ssss-ssss…~"

A shiver ran down his spine as he heard a sound unlike anything he had heard before, like a hundred tongues hissing in unison, the sound carried and echoed through the caverns around him as thick smoke obscured his sight. He stopped in his tracks as a large, formless black mass of writhing bodies blocked his path and began to rise from the floor, looking over him as a red-eyed head formed around the tip of it’s body, a thousand squirming limbs wriggled unsettlingly as the creature pressed one beady eye close up upon the Chiss.

"What sssort of Sssith is thisss-ssss?~"

The creature coiled around him before seeming to answer it’s own question in another hissing voice.

"In disssguissse thisss one isss-ssss~"

His own crimson gazed tracked that of the Sith beast as it circled him like a predator, poised and ready to strike, his fingers twitching down by his side as he awaited the inevitable.

"Your fear is ssso… deliciousss-ssss~"

The creature mused as he loomed in close to him, it’s ‘mouth’ squirming and slithering open to reveal the head of a single large snake extending like a tongue, its beady red eyes glimmering as it’s own tongue extended to taste him. In the next instant he extended his free hand towards the base of the serpent’s body, a sudden boom popping his ears as he hit it with a force push, scattering the individual serpents that made up it’s form with a sudden flash of light, a pained scream fading away into the darkness as they scattered away from the conflict, the large snake contained within the center of the mass lunging for the young Chiss as he raised a hand to protect his neck, howling in pain as the serpent plunged it’s fangs into the palm of his hand. He roared through grit teeth, gripping the snake’s bottom jaw and tearing it in half down the middle as it’s fangs remained lodged in his hand, dropping the flayed corpse on the ground as he shook his hand and inspected the wound, a sickly yellow pus already seeping from two holes in his open palm as he suddenly felt a bit faint, wobbling against a stalagmite and hugging it for support.

He staggered through the darkness until he came across… a familiar sight. A small ring of mushrooms identical to one he had seen below the Jedi Temple on Viscara. No doubt a hallucination of his venom addled mind, he nonetheless fell upon his knees in the circle, panting for breath as he started to foam at the mouth. He rested his hands upon his knees and closed his eyes over, beginning to focus on the internals of his body, recalling his training and he tried to locate the poison within him and begin pushing it out, expelling it from his body through conscious effort and awareness of the force. As the shadows of his mind were pushed back he saw a small, diminutive figure standing over a fire, his flame. He tried to emit words but only managed a pained gurgle, a shrill chuckle echoing through his mind as the figure knelt before him and took him by the hands, a firm squeeze as he leaned forward and felt his sweat-slick forehead press against theirs, a stillness and peace washing over him like a wave as he breathed in their scent so vividly.

His eyes snapped open as a light panic set in, darting from left to right, up and then down again, at his hands, he blinked a few times in the low-light conditions before raising his hand up in the weird glow of the caverns, inspecting the pink, half-closed bite wounds that seemed to have dripped and expelled the poison all down his arms. He tore off a scrap of his cloak to wipe it up, wincing lightly before tying a makeshift bandage around his palm, a low growl as he rose to his feet again and begun to wander his way back home again.

[Sara]

Vibe

The Chiss whistled a jaunty tune as he descended a sheer cliff face at a steady pace, moving methodically and purposefully as he made his way down towards Veles Colony. He leaned out from the rock and gazed down the last fifteen feet or so, sighing softly as he kept descending a few more feet before leaping and twisting mid-air, landing low with a quiet huff as he surveyed the wall of the colony before him. He slipped out his datapad and pulled up a schematic of the settlement, patrolling a hundred meters or so along the perimeter before stashing it again and taking a running jump at the wall in a spot where the barbed wire along the top had flopped over to the side a little, skillfully avoiding it and vaulting over to the other side, landing within the north-eastern industrial sector. His head bopped as he glanced to the left and then to the right again, nodding to himself and proceeding straight to the closest sewer access and descending down the hole.

He padded through the dark, damp sewer tunnels on his way towards the starport, slinking by the maintenance station with hardly a sound before pausing by an innocuous drain pipe. He reached up inside it and withdrew a wrapped package, checking over the contents. A change of clothes, dark jacket and a clean pair of trousers. Very nice, those were rolled back up for later. A pistol, a veritable hand cannon, the Peregrine. He withdrew it from the bag and aimed it down the hall, closing over eye over and he peeked down the sights before stuffing it back in, the metal of the barrel clinking off something as he peered all the way in and pulled out a grenade, tossing it up into the air haphazardly and catching it before stashing the package back from whence it came and spinning on the spot, proceeding back down the same tunnel until he surfaced near Jim’s Cantina in a back alley.

Sara pulled a long jacket over himself and flicked his hood up as he walked out into the hazy street, quickly making his way towards the starport itself through the streets of the Colony. He posted up near the entrance and peeked a corner to check the situation. Heightened Republic presence, precisely the sort of thing honest, hard-working people come to the Outer Rim to get away from, he thought to himself. A group of ruffians playing in the street, chasing an unusually large rodent between a stack of shipping crates caught his attention and he approached them.

"Hey, you know what we used to do for fun around here, back in the good old days?"

The gang of scruffy youths all turned to the black-clad stranger who’d walked up to them, regarding him with some suspicion but one of the braver ones spoke up.

"Nah, what’s that?"

"Getting a chase off the guards." He shared with a broad grin.

"How’s we supposed to do that?"

"Come on, that’s hardly my job." He tutted, shaking his head a bit.

"What if we went over and picked our noses and flicked it at him, that’d do it right?" Another one piped up.

"Probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life."

"Alright then, blue boy, what would you do?"

"Well… I mean, back in the day, anyway…" He flashed a toothy grin. "We’d probably just walk past, give him the old salute, you know?"

"What’s the salute?"

"Oh, you guys don’t know the salute?" He huffed a bit before demonstrating it to them, thrusting his right arm up in the air for a spell. "Then you give him a… ‘Hail Malak!’ to get the chase going. We’d always shout ‘Mandalore’, or something."

The group started laughing amongst themselves, throwing each other salutes and larking around a bit.

"Well, don’t get into too much trouble now. Rats spread disease, you know." He imparted his final words of wisdom to them before departing to loiter nearby, leaning against someone’s speeder as his hood dipped over his red eyes, watching the circle of life unfold.

Within mere minutes the youngsters had gathered across the street from the starport and were giggling and debating amongst themselves while staring at the Republic Troopers on guard. The Troopers stopped to ask a young woman for her papers, checking her identification without incident until the bravest of the local toerags ran up alongside him and shouted out abruptly.

"Hail Malak!" With an accompanying salute, pausing there for a minute as all three adults just stared at him in shock, the Troopers looking at one another with their mouths lightly agape.

As soon as he had arrived, the scamp scarpered with the rest of his friends, the others feeling emboldened now to start shouting their own jeers at the guards as they leapt about and climbed over each other to make their escape.

"Hey! Stop right there yo-- guh! We’ll see if you’re still so funny once I catch you!"

One of the troopers shouted after them as he ran off to give chase, his partner rolling his eyes and handing the lady back her identification before taking off in support and leaving the door temporarily unguarded. The Chiss picked his moment with a sly grin and made his way into the lobby, approaching the desk and handing over a few hundred credits.

"Ticket to Ryloth, please."

"Sure, that’s three hundred credits, and I’ll need a name. Heightened security measures."

"Oh? I mean, I was just accosted by the guards outside."

"I know, I know… Czerka Management offers their sincerest apologies, it’s not really the way we’d prefer to do things either."

"Well, I understand. It’s Aiven Crawford… no, all one word, it’s a Chiss name." He clarified with a smirk, pointing over the desk as the concierge wrote into their computer. "That’s right, put your little marks there, there and there… perfect. My friends just call me Craw." He smiled charismatically over the desk at the lady as he received his ticket.

"Thank you for flying with Czerka today, Mr Craw. I hope you enjoy your trip."

"You know what they say, there’s only two things on Ryloth. And I’m not going for the sand." He tipped his head to her and departed towards his shuttle with a grin.

[Intrepid42]

"Crudding Kids"

Dace muttered, as he retrieved his wayward Private from an alley. The bulk of the kids seemed to have performed an Escape and Evasion maneuver via a mess of pipework along one far wall.

He’d seen enough mass mind control during the Vellen crisis to feel a shiver of fear down his spine, but the way they’d scattered looked rather unlike a repeat of that particular nastiness. Worth calling in anyway? Probably not.

Civilian cooperation had been high thus far, but this sort of thing was only a matter of time. He’d hand over to the Rangers as soon as he could and get out. But in the meantime, he had some instructing to do.

//posted with permission//

[Sara]

Vibe

"Wake up, lazybones." A voice softly whispered in his ear.

His eyes fluttered open and he turned to look upon his wife with a broad smile, rolling onto his side in a bed that must have been at least ten feet across and at least as long, covered in luxurious red silken sheets.

"Do you know how many days off I’ve had in the last six years?" He retorted with a cheeky smirk.

"Probably more than the days you’ve spent with me." She teased back, prompting a low chuckle from him.

He pulled the covers back and went to climb out of bed, stumbling as he went to plant his left hand on the mattress, falling out of the bed with a loud scream onto the white marble floor.

"Aauh… AAAGH!"

"What’s the matter Sara? Dragon got your hand?" A shrill cackle filled his mind.

He began to hyperventilate, staring at the bloody stump where his left hand used to be, trying to crawl as he slipped into the floor itself, bowing under his wait, slipping between a gap in the tiles down into a dark abyss, falling…

---

He awoke, slick with sweat and trembling in the medical bay of the Jedi Temple on Viscara, struggling against the IV hooked up to his arm for a moment as he looked around in shock, panting for breath still. He lifted his left arm off the bed and stared down at it with a pained growl, beholding the bandage wrapped lump, trying to wiggle his fingers with a plaintive moan.

His gaze rose to look around the room, quiet at this hour with the lights dimmed low, the whir of medical equipment filling the silence as a droid began to make it’s way over to him.

"Initiate Miss’arare’nuosho, it is currently oh-four-hundred hours local time, you should go back to sleep." The Nurse droid suggested in a monotone but lightly feminine voice to him.

He eyed the droid without a word, a low growl escaping him as his disdainful gaze relaxed slightly with a heavy sigh.

"This is when I rise… nnh… what is my status?"

"I am pleased to inform you that your surgery was a resounding success and you are currently stable. However you still need rest and it will be some time before you have fully healed."

He swung his battle weary legs out of the bed, bare feet thudding on the floor as he released a quiet groan.

"Initiate Miss’arare’nuosho, please return to your bed."

The droids protests went unheeded as he grimaced and plucked the IV needle from his arm with a withering moan and rose up while holding onto the wall, his head swimming as he tried to shake off the medication.

"Initiate Miss’arare’nuosho, I really must insist that you rest."

"I… I will. Just not here. I will return later." He informed the droid before staggering out of the medbay and down the hall, slowly regaining his faculties as he held the wall with his right hand for support.

[Sara]

The days turned to weeks as the he settled into his new life in the temple, the disciplined structure and strict regimentations of it. It was something that had been missing from his life and he welcomed it, slipped into it like an old glove, it became him. The Initiate.

Meditations had become deeply philosophical, inward looking, dealing with the abstract and the what-if’s as he broke down his past, present and future. His successes and his failures, the flow of the force and the nature of destiny, of fate itself. The deep irony that he, once such a great warrior, a veteran of many campaigns, one who would be Blademaster, now left one handed.

His concentration was broken as his datapad flashed to life next to him and let out a high pitched beeping notification, demanding attention. With a quiet sigh he opened his eyes, blinking a few times as the light flooded into them, turning his gaze upon his pad and lifting it up to inspect it. Another reminder that they were ready to assess him for his prosthetic. A low rumble escaped the Chiss as he rose to his feet and tucked the device into his robes, reaching behind his back and going to clasp his hands but failing in the endeavour, his stump nestled against the small of his back as he stared out over the great in-land lake of Viscara in contemplation.

Why had he avoided the procedure thus far? Others had suffered far greater injuries in his presence and they were fine, running around with their new mechanical limbs. Though to him it was somehow… wrong. If there is no chaos in the universe, if all is the will of the force made manifest, then he lost his hand for a reason. Perhaps to teach him humility, to reign in the hubris he himself often fell victim to, indeed the reason he lost it in the first place. Perhaps to strengthen his connection to the force, to rely upon it more. It certainly challenged his personal philosophy about what makes strength. It didn’t take long for him to realise the loss of a hand, for a Jedi, was no major loss at all. What he could not do with one hand, he could do with the Force, something which he had eschewed before became a necessity.

Fighting was another matter entirely. While banned from training he hadn’t much cause to lift a blade, bar from during milk runs to Veles to fend off the occasional bandit or kinrath, but truly he never needed a blade to dispatch of them to begin with. When he tried he was off-balance, he never realised how much of his forms required both hands, it truly was… a learning experience. A difficulty to be overcome. Not something that needed to be rectified by sullying his perfect form with the addition of a subpar mechanical attachment.

Perhaps that was the reason.

[Sara]

This must be the place…

He rested a small, ornate wooden box upon his knee and opened it up carefully, the weight of whatever was contained inside rocking the box on the uneven surface as he steadied it with his hand. Marbles rattled as he pushed them aside, clicking and clacking against one another before he pulled a picture free, brushing some dust from it’s surface with his thumb as he turned his crimson gaze on it for the last time.

A surge of emotions overtook him as he ruminated upon his memories, a long, low growl escaping his lips as he grit his teeth, feeling the swell in his core as he tightened his grip, deforming the photograph slightly. The sharp spark of pain shot through his left arm as he tensed around the stump, a throaty, gurgled sigh escaping him as the moo of a bantha echoed through the canyon, exhaling sharply and panting a few deep breaths as he looked over his shoulder at the beast, giant head lolling from side to side as it took notice of his presence, walking up behind him and chomping on a few herbs growing beside a rock in the middle of the pass.

The box of marbles tilted to one side and rolled off his knee, hitting the sands and scattering it’s payload as his attention snapped towards it with a light sigh, extending his right hand with the picture pinched between his thumb and palm, encapsulating the whole group and raising them with the force, one at a time letting them fall into the box with a set of hollow clunks. He set the open box down inside a small hole in the sand and took another look at the photograph, his brows rising in the middle as a smile slowly crept onto his features, bringing his thumb over the paper to flatten it back out and smooth it over again before placing it down inside the box and closing the lid, flicking a small metal clasp over and filling in the hole with sand.

[Sara]

Just one thing before I go…

The blue digits of his right hand traced the dull silver hilt in his lap, brushing over the inscription ‘Tundramos’ along the grip before taking it in hand and igniting it in front of himself, raising it up and admiring the crisp, narrow blue blade of the lightfoil before deactivating it and reaching to place it upon the small forest shrine, steadying it and preventing it rolling off as he returned his hand to his lap, dipping his head in contemplation for a few moments longer before rising to his feet.

He lingered a while longer by the shrine, folding his arms as the thumb of his right hand circled the stump of his left wrist incessantly, massaging the lightly wrapped nub as he stared unblinkingly forward, snapping his head around to the howl of a kath hound echoing around the trees, lips curling into a slight frown as he turned to leave.

Before too long he thudded through the streets of Veles, the miasmic haze that enveloped the settlement filling his lungs as he made his way past the food stalls, the aroma of hotdogs and nerf meat replacing it for a few brief moments before he was finally upon the starport, walking past the guards with a frown as he boarded his ship and made ready to depart.

[Sara]

Hello darkness, my old friend…

The journey across the frozen tundra was comparatively easy compared to the trek through the snow-filled mountain passages, each step laboured as he pushed aside reams of snow in his path. Within the hour he had reached the valley, rolling back his hood to take a look around, eyes narrowing on the horizon as he saw glimmers of life through the impending snowstorm, tugging his hood back up and plotting a course to avoid them.

Before too long he arrived at the mouth of the cave that had been home, a blizzard now whipping up around him as the bone-chilling winds whipped at his back, pushing him the last few paces as he descended into the darkness, squinting as his eyes adapted to it. He descended through the dark, twisting tunnels before entering the central chamber, still flooded with light even as snow fell through the crack in the top. A smile crossed his lips as he climbed the great ramp, pausing half way and staring into the abyss below. The Chiss reached into his pack and produced the bleached skull of a Tusken, kneeling by the edge and placing it down, facing into the darkness, a hand resting atop the skull as sat down beside it there, staring into the blackness.

His gaze traced up towards the roof of the cave, beholding the raging blizzard with a soft sigh, as it became apparent he would be spending the night there.

[Sara]

So goodbye yellow brick road…

"Penthouse Suite, one night." He growled across the desk in a husky voice to the Mon Calamari attendant who smiled sweetly and tapped on their terminal before looking back at him.

"That’ll be 30900 credits with tax, sir."

"Come again?"

"Ah yes, we’ve had to increase some of our prices due to the ongoing war. Seeing as you are a return customer I am authorized to grant you a discount."

"Go on."

"Ok so with the discount applied the new total comes out to 30128 credits."

He tilted his head to the side slightly, blinking a few times as a broad, toothy grin covered his face. His mind drifted, imagining a scenario wherein he grabbed the disgusting fish-creature by it’s big, bulbous head and thrust his thumbs into those bulging eyes, hot blood squirting into his face like a chocolate fountain, snapping out of it finally as he shook his head a little bit, hiding his fangs.

"I don’t think I’ll be taking the room, thank you."

He waved her off and exited the city, ascending to the surface on the elevator with a weary sigh, reaching up to rub his brow with his left hand, grimacing a little and doing it again with his right instead as the doors opened to the beach. His footsteps sunk into the sand lightly as he growled under his breath, approaching the waterside and running his tongue around the inside of his mouth before spitting into the ocean, turning on his heels and returning to his ship.

---

The Chiss sighed to himself as he walked onto the bridge, picking up his datapad and checking for any activity. One message. It was from Weilliln, he opened it up.

“Hello friend, long time no speak! I heard you joined the Jedi Order. Does that mean no more saber lessons?”

He glanced down at his missing left hand with a ragged groan, setting the datapad down as he typed a one-fingered response.

“Hello Weilliln, yes, no more saber lessons I’m afraid.”