A Jedi in Azeroth: The Past Returns

Prelude: New Arrivals

Smuggler captain and Republic privateer Olivaw's head pounded. Something bright was trying to intrude into his consciousness, and he squinted hard due to the pain that increased his headache. His left arm was under something heavy, every muscle in his body ached, and every joint throbbed. He thought back to his last memories trying to determine where he was and how he got here. Last thing he remembered was sitting at the controls of his ship. With him were two jedi, Kai'moira and Dorak, and they were following the course of a long lost friend. Then the visage of the colorfully violent maelstrom entered his mind. It was a gravitic anomaly that pulled them from hyperspace. The ship strained and buckled from the stresses of the spatial rift, and in an act of desperation, Dorak had used a rare and dangerous technique of the Force. The jedi pinched his nose and then…

"My ship!" Olivaw yelled as his eyes popped open. He immediately regretted this as bright light assaulted his vision increasing the pounding in his skull. But he remembered. "Dorak! What happened to my ship?"

"Stop yelling, Ollie," he heard Kai'moira say to his left.

He turned his head to see where she was located. What he thought was a heavy weight on his arm was actually her slender frame. If she weighed fifty kilos it was while wearing full body armor and soaking wet. Even with her dark blue complexion he could see the bruise on her forehead. A small cut left a trickle of blood that ran along the edge of her straight black hair. He would have preferred to see her open her red eyes, but they remained shut as she brought her right arm up to block the light of the sun bearing down on them. She was lying angled across him with their waists even with each other. Her right leg was on top of his while her left one was bent under his left knee. Such a pose meant that her full length blue and white dress had been torn. It was just such a position he had always imagined sharing with her, but not quite under the same circumstances or with so many clothes and not so painful.

"You know, Kai," he said with a chuckle that hurt in his chest. He coughed as she opened her eyes and turned her head to look at him. "This position is usually more fun without clothing."

The jedi closed her eyes and sighed. "I hurt too much right now to even care about responding to that."

"You have a nasty cut on your head," he said seriously. "How about the rest of you? Anything feel broken?"

"Nothing but aches and soreness and something poking me in the back that better not be you," she replied. She turned her head to look at him again. "It's not you…right?"

"You know me better than that, sister," he said with a grin.

"I do. You've wanted to get me in a position like this for years so I'll ask again…it's not you…right?"

"Trust me we'd both be feeling a lot better if it was me, and you'd be participating and not just waking up. As much as I'd love to make you scream my name in ecstasy, I'd never take advantage of you like that," he replied. "Any sign of Dorak?"

The jedi turned her head to the other side and then lifted it. She groaned with the last movement. After a couple of seconds she lowered her head and looked back at the smuggler. "I don't see him. Is he on the other side?"

Olivaw tried to turn his head to the right, but stopped when he felt something snag one of his vestigial horns. Like most zabrak, he had several horns on top of his head ranging from two to four centimeters in length. Something was hooked onto one or more of his horns barring him from looking for the other jedi.

"No use, I can't turn my head to see," he told Kai'moira. "Can you move and maybe stand up?"

"I think so," she answered. With another groan she strained to sit up, and braced herself with her right arm. She saw the light gray and gold-trimmed robes of the other jedi some ten meters from them. He was lying on his side facing away from her. The braid that held his long auburn hair had been cut by something and blew in the breeze she now felt on her face. "I see him over there," she told the smuggler. "Dorak? Dorak…are you awake?" she yelled, but he did not respond or move. "He's not moving," she said to Olivaw. "He might be hurt worse than us or even…"

"He's just knocked out cold, that's all," the captain said trying to reassure her. "He's tough…I mean…he took on the emperor and won…so I'm sure he's alright." Although he knew that the emperor was not a spatial anomaly capable of pulling a starship out of hyperspace and crushing it. "Let's get up and check on him, and then we can figure out where in the galaxy we are."

Leaves rustled as Kai'moira moved, and after a minute of effort she was standing with her back to the zabrak. They had landed, or arrived, on some bushes, and what had been poking the jedi in the back was a branch that had broken upon their arrival and ran just beside the smuggler's torso. Olivaw suddenly felt very lucky that it had not impaled him. There was a three centimeter hole torn in her dress near the small of her back, and Olivaw winced seeing the deep bruise that even with her dark blue skin was reddish in color. The skirt had been ripped along the back from the bottom up past her knees. The chiss woman moaned as she took a step and placed her hand over the hole. She raised her head and sighed deeply.

"That looks bad, Kai," Olivaw said as he freed his horns from the vine branches hooked to them.

"Trust me…it hurts worse than it looks I am certain," she said without looking at him.

"I don't know. It's dark and kinda reddish…I don't think that's good…right?"

"Ok…it looks as bad as it feels," she answered with a groan. "How about you? Anything broken?"

"Just a massive headache," he answered as he struggled to stand. Pain shot up his left leg from his ankle to his hip. "Take that back…I think I sprained my ankle."

"How bad?"

"I can walk on it, so nothing major," he replied as he looked at the fallen jedi. "Let's see how Dorak is."

Kai'moira nodded as they limped to where the other lay on the ground. Once they saw his face they could see the cut along its left side. The goggles he normally wore were also cut by something in line with the wound, and the front had fallen free from his face exposing bruising along the bridge of his nose and his eyes. The rise and fall of his chest indicated that his breathing was labored and one of his lungs was possibly severely injured if the small trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth was any indication. They also noticed blood on his right arm that was tucked under his body, and his left ankle was twisted in the wrong direction. Kai'moira, being a master of the healing arts, knelt next to Dorak's comatose form and held her hands above him. A golden glow formed just below them and enveloped the jedi's body. Olivaw did not react when the cut visibly healed…he had seen Kai'moira do this before on numerous occasions…even on his own body when they were fighting alongside other Republic soldiers on Corellia. He worked the ankle back in the correct direction when the master healer indicated for him to do so, and soon Dorak's breathing stabilized as Kai'moira ended her trance. She looked up at the smuggler and pointed to the ground next to Dorak.

"You next, sit there and let me see what I can do with that ankle," she said in a tone Olivaw knew better than to argue with. He did as she commanded, and again she performed the same trance for him as she had for Dorak. After a minute she opened her eyes and looked at the smuggler. "Better?" she asked.

"Much better," he answered. "Now do that for yourself."

"I would have to enter a deeper trance to heal myself," she replied. "We need to stay awake until he recovers in case of any danger. We don't know where we are or who might be around."

Olivaw pulled his two blasters from their holsters on each hip. "I'll keep watch. That bruise on your back looked pretty nasty so no arguing with me. Healer…heal thyself."

Kai'moira argued no further as she placed her hands on her knees with her palms facing upwards and closed her eyes. After a few seconds a golden glow enveloped her body indicating she had entered her healing trance. Olivaw gave a slight nod of approval as he holstered his blaster pistols and removed a small device from one of the pockets of his black duster. He poked a couple of the control contacts and ran a diagnostic to ascertain it still functioned. They were on a world he was not familiar with and first order of business was survival. That meant finding food and water for the three of them, and he smiled as the diagnostics returned with a fully functional reading. This little device he could use to scan water and food sources to test if they were safe for them. One could never be too careful as he thought back to a world he once visited with a member of his crew…a wookiee. After they scrambled from the wreckage they had discovered their comm still functioned and sent a call for help, but it would be two weeks before it could arrive. The cargo hold of the ship was damaged while still in space and all of its contents probably still floated in the vacuum of space above that planet. That meant they had to scavenge for their sustenance, and the only food they could find were berries that grew on bushes, and while the wookiee only suffered from excess gas, Olivaw had worse problems and took medication for two months before the more frequent than normal visits to the head ended. He did not plan to have another case of the shits again, and he really didn't want to deal with two jedi if they also fell ill because he failed to check the compatibility of the local food sources with their metabolisms.

The smuggler looked up and examined their surroundings more closely than before. Now that Dorak had been saved and they were all unharmed, at least for the most part, it was time to see where they were. The foliage around him consisted of various violet hues on the leaves and trees that rose high into the air. He whistled as he imagined the canopy was probably as high or higher than those on the forest moon of Endor, and those rose high into the clouds where air was so thin people needed masks and tanks to assist in breathing. This place was not familiar to him and he had visited many different worlds. Beams of light were visible everywhere as the sun's rays penetrated through the forest. After sunset he figured this would be a very dark place. 'Second order of business,' he thought to himself, 'we need some sort of defensible shelter.'

He turned as he heard the sound of running water somewhere close by. With the luck he was having lately, the spatial anomaly that more than likely destroyed his beloved ship and waking up on this strange world, he was surprised they were so close to water. The jedi would claim all that was happening was the will of the Force. He wouldn't go that far. Sure it was some sort of power he never really understood, he had witnessed jedi and sith alike perform incredibly amazing and sometimes terrifying feats so he couldn't say it didn't exist. But that it governed all their lives and propelled them on some unseen path of destiny? Banthashit. He made his own destiny. Carefully stepping through the foliage he approached the sound of the stream or river. As he rounded one of the giant trees he stopped. About twenty meters ahead of him stood a quadruped. The animal had light brown fur on most of its body with a white underside. Atop its head was a massive arrangement of horns and after taking a couple more careful steps Olivaw saw that it was standing at the edge of a small stream. The creature bent its head forward and plucked a small plant and chewed it as it raised its head. Inwardly the smuggler sighed and relaxed a little. It was an herbivore and so no threat of eating the three of them in their sleep. Suddenly the animal tensed before bolting away from him. He hadn't made a sound.

"Stop where you are, stranger," he heard from what sounded like a feminine voice. He hesitated to move his head to see where it came from. "Slowly turn around and keep your hands where I can see them."

The smuggler obeyed the command and turned to see a tall being with violet skin, green hair, and long pointed ears. He hoped it was female because it wore armor plating of a metal he was certain looked like steel, and formed around breasts that made him drool just a little. She held a weapon in both hands that he thought looked like a bow of a wookiee bowcaster but much more primitive because it held a visible projectile with a sharp point aimed at his chest.

"You're…tall," he said with a smile. Another joined her holding a similar weapon. Unlike the first one this one had blue hair pulled back into a ponytail. "You're both tall."

"What are you doing here," the first one asked him.

"That's a long story that, quite frankly, I'm certain you wouldn't believe," he answered.

The second one growled…or its pet did as it moved into Olivaw's view. It was feline with long fangs and a blue and white striped fur coat. "This way," she said using her weapon to indicate where she wanted him to walk. "The others have found your friends. Maybe they have better answers than you."

He hesitated trying to think if he could draw his blasters faster than they could shoot him with their weapons, but being that the one said they had found Dorak and Kai'moira, he decided to obey them…for now. He walked where she indicated, and he could swear the big cat sniffed him as he walked past. They followed closely behind with their weapons trained on him the entire distance. When they rounded a tree near where he left the two jedi, he saw that they were surrounded by more of these beings and their big cats. All of them wore armoring except for a few that stood to the rear and away from the rest. They didn't appear armed to Olivaw and wore simple clothing made of animal hide…probably leather. At least one looked like it was of a different gender and, he hoped, was a male. It didn't have breasts like the rest for one thing, Olivaw was a breast man and loved women no matter what bipedal species, and wore its dark violet hair long over its shoulders. Kai'moira was seated next to Dorak who was still lying on the ground and unconscious. A poke in the back prodded him to join the jedi seated on the ground.

"Wake the human," the first woman began. "I would like to hear what he has to say. You two are unfamiliar to us, but his race is allied to ours."

Kai'moira and Olivaw looked at each other. "We can't wake him," the smuggler replied.

"You can understand them?" the jedi asked him. "How is that possible? I only hear them speaking a language that sounds like no other that I have heard."

Olivaw pointed to his left wrist. "Subdermal translator…I never liked Huttese enough to learn it. I thought all you jedi had these?" She shook her head at him, and he looked back at who he considered was the leader of their captors. "We can't wake him. He's been injured and is sleeping while he heals." He leaned over to the jedi. "I count six that are armed," he whispered. "Think you could take out half while I take out the other half?"

"There's no need for violence," she whispered back. "If they wanted to just kill us they could have done so already."

Olivaw sighed and addressed the leader again. "Mind if we stand, at least?" he asked. "You are all very tall and I'm developing a crick in my neck. I feel like I'm on Kashyyk surrounded by angry wookiees…but with a lot less hair and definitely much prettier."

"Tell us what happened to the human first," one of the other women said. "I would like to know what you did to him. Is he your prisoner?"

Kai'moira began to stand even without permission. When their captors didn't respond the smuggler joined her. By now her use of the Force had enabled her to understand the language spoken to them. "Master Dorak is no prisoner…" she began.

"The woman…she has a weapon on her hip," the one male said. The leader cocked her head at him and then looked at Kai'moira's waist as she examined the metal cylinder roughly the same size as a sword hilt but with no visible blade. "I know of only two others who carry such weapons. The one called jedi that healed Aeyrn in Astranaar...he possesses such a weapon as did his apprentice…the small human girl with yellow hair." The jedi and smuggler exchanged glances.

"Are you certain?" the leader asked him.

"I was there with the general when he healed Aeyrn with the draenei shaman and one of our own…a druid. I saw the girl's weapon and what it can do. I am positive it is the same kind."

"You have seen a lightsaber?" Kai'moira asked the man. He nodded. "Where? What was the name of this person called jedi? Did he wear a visor over his eyes? What was his name?"

Olivaw looked at the jedi. "You don't actually think that…that they have seen Daneel?"

"Why would two beings, who appear to be demons, have a desire to see this man?" the leader asked.

Olivaw's head snapped to look at the leader. "Demons? What do you mean?"

"She has unusual red eyes like a demon," one of the others said. "And I have never seen someone with horns like you."

"And the human is lying unconscious at your feet. Are you his minions?" another asked. "Are you protecting your warlock master?"

"Look lady," Olivaw said to the leader. "I am no demon…whatever that is. I am a zabrak…say it with me…za-brak." He pointed at the other. "Za-brak…and all my species have horns on our heads." He reached up and touched one on the left side of his head. "And I have some of the best…" he stopped when his fingers touched the tip and he looked at Kai'moira. "It's been chipped! My horn has been chipped! You know how long it takes to polish each one to a high sheen?"

"Not now, Ollie," she said and then looked at the leader of their captors. Some of the bows had been relaxed at the smuggler's outburst…and a few chuckles were heard. "I am a chiss," she began. "Was the jedi called Daneel? Have you seen him?" She pointed to Dorak, Olivaw, and herself. "We are friends of his from years ago. The human, Dorak, and I trained with him as jedi on the world called Tython."

"You…are also a jedi?" the leader asked her. She looked at the others with her, and they all shared the same quizzical expression as she did.

Kai'moira judged by their expressions that they indeed did know Daneel. She felt a joy in her heart that they had found where he disappeared to, and at least that was a start and a bright spot on an otherwise dismal day. They knew him which meant that he was still alive. "I am as also is this man," she replied pointing to Dorak. "Ollie is a friend from the war. He fought with us and Daneel in many battles against the Empire." She looked at the smuggler who was now examining all of his horns with his fingers. "He is not a jedi like us, but he is a friend nonetheless."

"This could be a trick," one of the others said to the leader. "The jedi is a friend of the kaldorei, and he warned us of potential enemies who could pose as friends. The ones he called sith." Several nodded in agreement as their bowlines stretched.

"I swear to you we are friends of Daneel's and not sith," Kai'moira repeated. "I know that Ollie acts differently," she said with a sidelong glare at him. She pointed to Dorak. "But this one was married to his sister. We have come a long way to find him and tell him about her." She held her hands before her. "Take us as prisoners until you are satisfied, but at least let Daneel know that we are here. Tell him that Kai'moira, Dorak, and Olivaw have come looking for him. Tell him we have news about Zufa."

The leader scratched her head. "I do not know the jedi personally," she said. "But our general does. You will come to Astranaar with us…as guests…and we will let Shandris decide if you are friend or foe. She knows the jedi and has fought beside him. She will know whether or not you speak the truth."