Yavin 4, Thursday Fandom Time
Apr. 18th, 2013 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelikemesinceAnyone who'd ever had to deal with Anakin in some teaching capacity over the years would be justified in thinking there was some kind of poetic justice in the fact that what he felt was the most urgent mission he'd ever been on was the one that demanded the most patience.
Anakin could still sense Tahiri's presence in the Force. It was faint, sometimes fading out altogether, and he was aware of a constant sense of darkness and pain. Once he distinctly felt her calling his name in the Force and got the equivalent of her clinging to him desperately when he reached out to her in reassurance. He sensed Jaina out there somewhere, too, and that was a tiny bit of consolation.
The thing he had welded together and called a speeder really didn't live up to its name, but he hadn't had much to work with. He'd gone for at least two weeks, flying above the treetops, only stopping for water and drawing on the Force to sustain him otherwise. It was better than walking, but it was too easy to calculate the amount of time he was losing, and he couldn't stop himself from trying to will the thing to go a little faster.
Until he crashed it trying to shake the Yuuzhan Vong craft tailing him, and fell all the way to the jungle floor. If that wasn't bad enough, using his lightsaber to destroy the dovin basal powering the craft worked, but at the expense of -- well, his lightsaber. The hilt was intact, but the gravitic anomaly generated by the dovin basal had destroyed the crystal, which left him completely unarmed and traveling on foot. The only upside to that was that it was easier to avoid Yuuzhan Vong scouts -- and that was probably his fault, too, since the one he'd brought down would have raised an alarm -- that way.
It took several more days to reach the abandoned temple that had housed the academy, by which point he was at least armed with a sharpened staff and some explosive fungi he'd found on the way. He'd thought he was managing fairly well under the circumstances, until he was hit in the back with what turned out to be an insect. A thud bug, according to the Yuuzhan Vong who'd rescued him, and that was an eye-opening new experience: unlike all the others he'd seen so far, Vua Rapuung didn't bear any of the implants or scars that were a mark of rank among his people. He looked like all his attempts at it had failed, or been rejected, because his wounds hadn't healed properly into scars and his implants all looked like they were dying -- not to mention he smelled like rotting flesh.
Anakin didn't like him that much, but it seemed to be mutual: Vua Rapuung had his own reasons for helping Anakin's attempt to infiltrate the shaper compound where he suspected Tahiri was being held, but he was firmly of the opinion that trying to rescue Tahiri was a stupid goal, the Jedi were abominations, and none of Anakin's plans were very good.
"Understand, the shapers make our worldships," Rapuung told him when he demanded to know what they were. "They make the yammosk. They will not try to break your Jeedai -- they will remake her."
His vision of the dark Tahiri, then, and he wasn't about to let that happen so he'd take the help -- even if Rapuung's motive was revenge.
***
Traveling with Rapuung was an exercise in frustration. If whatever Anakin did wasn't an abomination according to his companion, it was stupid, and he wasn't quite sure what Rapuung meant when he said Anakin was thinking with something other than his brain.
Rapuung's insistence on taking a longer, more circuitous route was annoying too, as was his constant commentary on Anakin's plans being too simplistic -- possibly, all of this was most annoying every time Anakin realized he was right.
The worst incident was when, in trying to escape a giant trap woven by netting beetles all around them by igniting it with flares, Anakin accidentally set the jungle on fire when the wind shifted. Afterward, he'd never be able to explain how he'd done it, but he managed to create a sort of Force bubble around both of them, pulling oxygen down from the sky above the smoke and somehow forcing the fire's heat down into the moon's surface.
It was only after the fact, when a tidal wave of agony coming from the jungle itself hit him through the Force, that he realized how much life he'd destroyed in order to survive long enough to save Tahiri.
"If you could reach her only by filling in a chasm with corpses to walk over, you would do it," Rapuung told him, and Anakin argued that he wouldn't kill that indiscriminately to do it; Rapuung countered by pointing out that Anakin's use of the flares was an abomination by Yuuzhan Vong standards (what wasn't?) but he'd done it anyway, so why shouldn't they kill if they had to even if Anakin had moral objections to it?
That was something to think about on the way to the shaper compound, though Anakin couldn't decide whether it was more or less pleasant to brood over that than it was to focus on the fact that he was traveling down the river in the stomach of a giant carnivorous fish, wearing a (live) gnullith breather that kept twitching in his nostrils and throat but did absolutely nothing to mask the smell of the vangaak's half-digested previous meals.
***
Once they reached the shaper compound (and were vomited up by the vangaak), he still couldn't charge in to the rescue. There were at least a thousand Yuuzhan Vong warriors on the surface, his lightsaber was still in need of repair, and Vua Rapuung was right. He'd be noticed too easily if he didn't disguise himself.
His pride objected to being deflated so often, but . . . he was a Jedi. He shouldn't need it anyway.
It would have been hard to retain anyway, when he had to hide his broken lightsaber in a pool of water and let Rapuung embed a fake yorik coral slave implant in his neck, and feel the thing take root in his flesh just so he could go disguised as a slave. In a loincloth, or the living equivalent of one that kept sealing itself to his skin, and treated with the same kind of contempt that the Yuuzhan Vong treated the Shamed Ones -- those Yuuzhan Vong whose implants and attempts at mutilation failed, which was understood to be their rejection by the gods. And there really wasn't any room for pride when he had to spend a week pulling weeds with nothing but his hands, having to fall to the ground and pretend to writhe in agony every time one of the guards tried to activate the slave implant.
Sometimes that wasn't hard, because every now and then he could feel Tahiri's pain. Once, he felt it so clearly that it dropped him to his knees, holding his forehead, and then pulled his hands away and was honestly surprised that he wasn't bleeding. It was, in a strange way, the closest he'd felt to her in a long time. He'd never wanted to drop everything and charge to the rescue as badly as he did then, but he was unarmed and (much as he hated to admit it) dependent on Rapuung if he had any hope of infiltrating the completely unfamiliar compound further, and it would be days before Rapuung could get away to meet him without suspicion.
He wasn't worried (much) about Rapuung leaving him behind; the former warrior, who insisted he wasn't truly one of the Shamed Ones, was as singlemindedly determined to get into the compound as Anakin was. What worried Anakin was Rapuung's intent. He was adamant that he was not dishonored by the gods, that one of the shapers was responsible for his condition -- and he planned to get his revenge on her. By working with him, Anakin was abetting something he should frown upon, as a Jedi . . . but if he didn't, he wouldn't stand a chance of saving Tahiri. He reached out to her in the Force from time to time, but she was fading, and occasionally she tried to resist the contact. That was a bad sign, which only amplified Anakin's resolve to rescue her, despite the precarious moral position it put him in. He'd walk that vibroblade's edge. For her, it was worth the risk.
***
The manual labor turned out to be worth it, too, once he learned how to harvest the lambents in the fields he'd been weeding. Each lambent flower, as it turned out, contained a crystal that, once attuned to a user, emitted a light that could be controlled by will.
A living crystal that fed on the bioelectrical fields of the living things around them.
It would take him at least a day to rebuild the lightsaber, maybe two, and Vua Rapuung wasn't thrilled about that. Still, as Anakin reminded him, the entire reason he'd wanted this partnership was because Anakin's lightsaber would be useful.
They'd have to hide, though, which meant crawling down the roots of the shaper damutek to the caverns underneath, and that was unpleasant: once again he was crawling through some living organism's guts. As they crept along (too slowly for his liking) he kept reaching out for Tahiri in the Force; the times that she recognized him she was still resisting, and their connection was much weaker than before, but it was enough for him to get a very clear mental image of the cell where she was being held, one of several in a circular chamber, though the others were empty, presumably awaiting the capture of more Jedi.
Which wasn't going to happen if he could help it. He wasn't going to fail everyone again.
Vua Rapuung was distinctly less than thrilled to hear that Anakin planned to use the lambent crystal to rebuild his lightsaber, which Anakin had expected. He expected the ensuing argument, too, when he tried to explain the nature of the Force and how a lightsaber was more than just a collection of inanimate parts, and he wasn't particularly surprised when Rapuung rejected his explanation.
"I can admit that what my senses tell me is true without believing your delirious justification of it. Your weapon may be acceptable to the gods; your heresy is not. Build your blade," Rapuung told him, and stalked off.
Another thing he didn't expect was for the lambent not to cooperate. Maybe he should have expected that; it wasn't as if they could feel anything else about the Yuuzhan Vong in the Force, so maybe it made sense that it would be the only part of his lightsaber that he couldn't feel in the Force either. There had to be a way to link them, but what?
When he was a little kid and under pressure to make Centerpoint Station work the first time, he'd gone off and sulked until Jacen talked him out of it. Every other time he'd been in a pressure situation he'd always had someone around who had his back; family, fellow Jedi, Fandom students. But Rapuung wasn't going to be any help, he was rapidly running out of time, and he was not going to break down now.
Then he finally got it -- after all the arguments he and Rapuung had had during the journey, all the back-and-forth about morality and abomination, it finally sank in. If the Force wasn't in everything like he'd always believed, like all of them had always believed, then maybe he needed to look beyond it. Right and wrong weren't concepts that revolved around the Force; the lack of it didn't make the Yuuzhan Vong evil by default any more than it made any Force-user in this galaxy good by default.
The lambent crystal didn't exist in the Force, but it was attuned to him -- which meant he was the link. He understood, now: the Force was just one aspect of what he'd sworn to uphold, and that encompassed the Yuuzhan Vong as well as the beings of this galaxy.
Feeling more sure of himself than he had in a long time, he thumbed his lightsaber on and heard the familiar snap-hiss. He grinned into the purple glow bathing the cavern, so elated that Vua Rapuung couldn't ruin it when he stormed back in and demanded impatiently, "Two cycles have come and gone. Your abominable weapon works, it seems. Are we done with skulking? May we at last embrace our foes?"
Anakin snorted. "You embrace them. I'm going to knock them down. Your shapers want Jedi? One is coming to them."
[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, let's pretend I didn'tget distracted by the pictures of Samantha Barks at the Iron Man 3 premiere forget to hit post on this hours ago and then realize I managed to delete half the saved file so I had to rewrite it all over again. There is way too much introspection and philosophical debating going on in this book (which is still Edge of Victory 1: Conquest by Greg Keyes), I swear. Seriously, it's like chapters and chapters of Anakin and Vua Rapuung arguing while they traipse through the jungle. TBC and stuff. Tomorrow.]
Anakin could still sense Tahiri's presence in the Force. It was faint, sometimes fading out altogether, and he was aware of a constant sense of darkness and pain. Once he distinctly felt her calling his name in the Force and got the equivalent of her clinging to him desperately when he reached out to her in reassurance. He sensed Jaina out there somewhere, too, and that was a tiny bit of consolation.
The thing he had welded together and called a speeder really didn't live up to its name, but he hadn't had much to work with. He'd gone for at least two weeks, flying above the treetops, only stopping for water and drawing on the Force to sustain him otherwise. It was better than walking, but it was too easy to calculate the amount of time he was losing, and he couldn't stop himself from trying to will the thing to go a little faster.
Until he crashed it trying to shake the Yuuzhan Vong craft tailing him, and fell all the way to the jungle floor. If that wasn't bad enough, using his lightsaber to destroy the dovin basal powering the craft worked, but at the expense of -- well, his lightsaber. The hilt was intact, but the gravitic anomaly generated by the dovin basal had destroyed the crystal, which left him completely unarmed and traveling on foot. The only upside to that was that it was easier to avoid Yuuzhan Vong scouts -- and that was probably his fault, too, since the one he'd brought down would have raised an alarm -- that way.
It took several more days to reach the abandoned temple that had housed the academy, by which point he was at least armed with a sharpened staff and some explosive fungi he'd found on the way. He'd thought he was managing fairly well under the circumstances, until he was hit in the back with what turned out to be an insect. A thud bug, according to the Yuuzhan Vong who'd rescued him, and that was an eye-opening new experience: unlike all the others he'd seen so far, Vua Rapuung didn't bear any of the implants or scars that were a mark of rank among his people. He looked like all his attempts at it had failed, or been rejected, because his wounds hadn't healed properly into scars and his implants all looked like they were dying -- not to mention he smelled like rotting flesh.
Anakin didn't like him that much, but it seemed to be mutual: Vua Rapuung had his own reasons for helping Anakin's attempt to infiltrate the shaper compound where he suspected Tahiri was being held, but he was firmly of the opinion that trying to rescue Tahiri was a stupid goal, the Jedi were abominations, and none of Anakin's plans were very good.
"Understand, the shapers make our worldships," Rapuung told him when he demanded to know what they were. "They make the yammosk. They will not try to break your Jeedai -- they will remake her."
His vision of the dark Tahiri, then, and he wasn't about to let that happen so he'd take the help -- even if Rapuung's motive was revenge.
***
Traveling with Rapuung was an exercise in frustration. If whatever Anakin did wasn't an abomination according to his companion, it was stupid, and he wasn't quite sure what Rapuung meant when he said Anakin was thinking with something other than his brain.
Rapuung's insistence on taking a longer, more circuitous route was annoying too, as was his constant commentary on Anakin's plans being too simplistic -- possibly, all of this was most annoying every time Anakin realized he was right.
The worst incident was when, in trying to escape a giant trap woven by netting beetles all around them by igniting it with flares, Anakin accidentally set the jungle on fire when the wind shifted. Afterward, he'd never be able to explain how he'd done it, but he managed to create a sort of Force bubble around both of them, pulling oxygen down from the sky above the smoke and somehow forcing the fire's heat down into the moon's surface.
It was only after the fact, when a tidal wave of agony coming from the jungle itself hit him through the Force, that he realized how much life he'd destroyed in order to survive long enough to save Tahiri.
"If you could reach her only by filling in a chasm with corpses to walk over, you would do it," Rapuung told him, and Anakin argued that he wouldn't kill that indiscriminately to do it; Rapuung countered by pointing out that Anakin's use of the flares was an abomination by Yuuzhan Vong standards (what wasn't?) but he'd done it anyway, so why shouldn't they kill if they had to even if Anakin had moral objections to it?
That was something to think about on the way to the shaper compound, though Anakin couldn't decide whether it was more or less pleasant to brood over that than it was to focus on the fact that he was traveling down the river in the stomach of a giant carnivorous fish, wearing a (live) gnullith breather that kept twitching in his nostrils and throat but did absolutely nothing to mask the smell of the vangaak's half-digested previous meals.
***
Once they reached the shaper compound (and were vomited up by the vangaak), he still couldn't charge in to the rescue. There were at least a thousand Yuuzhan Vong warriors on the surface, his lightsaber was still in need of repair, and Vua Rapuung was right. He'd be noticed too easily if he didn't disguise himself.
His pride objected to being deflated so often, but . . . he was a Jedi. He shouldn't need it anyway.
It would have been hard to retain anyway, when he had to hide his broken lightsaber in a pool of water and let Rapuung embed a fake yorik coral slave implant in his neck, and feel the thing take root in his flesh just so he could go disguised as a slave. In a loincloth, or the living equivalent of one that kept sealing itself to his skin, and treated with the same kind of contempt that the Yuuzhan Vong treated the Shamed Ones -- those Yuuzhan Vong whose implants and attempts at mutilation failed, which was understood to be their rejection by the gods. And there really wasn't any room for pride when he had to spend a week pulling weeds with nothing but his hands, having to fall to the ground and pretend to writhe in agony every time one of the guards tried to activate the slave implant.
Sometimes that wasn't hard, because every now and then he could feel Tahiri's pain. Once, he felt it so clearly that it dropped him to his knees, holding his forehead, and then pulled his hands away and was honestly surprised that he wasn't bleeding. It was, in a strange way, the closest he'd felt to her in a long time. He'd never wanted to drop everything and charge to the rescue as badly as he did then, but he was unarmed and (much as he hated to admit it) dependent on Rapuung if he had any hope of infiltrating the completely unfamiliar compound further, and it would be days before Rapuung could get away to meet him without suspicion.
He wasn't worried (much) about Rapuung leaving him behind; the former warrior, who insisted he wasn't truly one of the Shamed Ones, was as singlemindedly determined to get into the compound as Anakin was. What worried Anakin was Rapuung's intent. He was adamant that he was not dishonored by the gods, that one of the shapers was responsible for his condition -- and he planned to get his revenge on her. By working with him, Anakin was abetting something he should frown upon, as a Jedi . . . but if he didn't, he wouldn't stand a chance of saving Tahiri. He reached out to her in the Force from time to time, but she was fading, and occasionally she tried to resist the contact. That was a bad sign, which only amplified Anakin's resolve to rescue her, despite the precarious moral position it put him in. He'd walk that vibroblade's edge. For her, it was worth the risk.
***
The manual labor turned out to be worth it, too, once he learned how to harvest the lambents in the fields he'd been weeding. Each lambent flower, as it turned out, contained a crystal that, once attuned to a user, emitted a light that could be controlled by will.
A living crystal that fed on the bioelectrical fields of the living things around them.
It would take him at least a day to rebuild the lightsaber, maybe two, and Vua Rapuung wasn't thrilled about that. Still, as Anakin reminded him, the entire reason he'd wanted this partnership was because Anakin's lightsaber would be useful.
They'd have to hide, though, which meant crawling down the roots of the shaper damutek to the caverns underneath, and that was unpleasant: once again he was crawling through some living organism's guts. As they crept along (too slowly for his liking) he kept reaching out for Tahiri in the Force; the times that she recognized him she was still resisting, and their connection was much weaker than before, but it was enough for him to get a very clear mental image of the cell where she was being held, one of several in a circular chamber, though the others were empty, presumably awaiting the capture of more Jedi.
Which wasn't going to happen if he could help it. He wasn't going to fail everyone again.
Vua Rapuung was distinctly less than thrilled to hear that Anakin planned to use the lambent crystal to rebuild his lightsaber, which Anakin had expected. He expected the ensuing argument, too, when he tried to explain the nature of the Force and how a lightsaber was more than just a collection of inanimate parts, and he wasn't particularly surprised when Rapuung rejected his explanation.
"I can admit that what my senses tell me is true without believing your delirious justification of it. Your weapon may be acceptable to the gods; your heresy is not. Build your blade," Rapuung told him, and stalked off.
Another thing he didn't expect was for the lambent not to cooperate. Maybe he should have expected that; it wasn't as if they could feel anything else about the Yuuzhan Vong in the Force, so maybe it made sense that it would be the only part of his lightsaber that he couldn't feel in the Force either. There had to be a way to link them, but what?
When he was a little kid and under pressure to make Centerpoint Station work the first time, he'd gone off and sulked until Jacen talked him out of it. Every other time he'd been in a pressure situation he'd always had someone around who had his back; family, fellow Jedi, Fandom students. But Rapuung wasn't going to be any help, he was rapidly running out of time, and he was not going to break down now.
Then he finally got it -- after all the arguments he and Rapuung had had during the journey, all the back-and-forth about morality and abomination, it finally sank in. If the Force wasn't in everything like he'd always believed, like all of them had always believed, then maybe he needed to look beyond it. Right and wrong weren't concepts that revolved around the Force; the lack of it didn't make the Yuuzhan Vong evil by default any more than it made any Force-user in this galaxy good by default.
The lambent crystal didn't exist in the Force, but it was attuned to him -- which meant he was the link. He understood, now: the Force was just one aspect of what he'd sworn to uphold, and that encompassed the Yuuzhan Vong as well as the beings of this galaxy.
Feeling more sure of himself than he had in a long time, he thumbed his lightsaber on and heard the familiar snap-hiss. He grinned into the purple glow bathing the cavern, so elated that Vua Rapuung couldn't ruin it when he stormed back in and demanded impatiently, "Two cycles have come and gone. Your abominable weapon works, it seems. Are we done with skulking? May we at last embrace our foes?"
Anakin snorted. "You embrace them. I'm going to knock them down. Your shapers want Jedi? One is coming to them."
[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, let's pretend I didn't
