And then...between "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith"...
"Classical Conditioning"
by Great Materia Hunter Yuffie
Chapter 1:Battle ofHypori
"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant."
-William Shakespeare
The Jedi fought on Hypori, entombed beneath the triangular gravestone of a fallen starship. General Grievous had killed the padawanandK'Kruhk effortlessly, andthen he had gripped Tarr Seirr and Aayla Secura within his clawed extremities and flipped, hurling them into the ceiling as if they were cloth dolls.
Two master Jedi, Shaak Ti and Ki-Adi-Mundi, were left to fight the monstrous cyborg. He let them come, whirling and dodging and dealing blows, the battle made more terrible by the deadpan visage of his death mask. They felt overwhelmed against the towering being that was so much droid and yet guided by a terrible intuitive stratagem that could not be programmed. Grievous was undoubtablya sentient creature, yet stripped of all redeeming qualities and more ruthless than instinct.
With one swift kick, General Grievous disposed of Ki-Adi, sending him twirling into a pile of wreckage. Without pausing, he turned on Shaak Ti, expressionless and soundless except for the shrieking of gears and the drone of twin lightsabers.
Hammer blows fell on her; desperately she blocked, searching for some semblance of sympathy in the cyborg's abhorrent countenance. It was in vain - the cold mask could show no emotions apart from the hatred and anger initially carved into it.
Left, right, left, both at once - the strikes were fiercer now; the general seemed to sense her weakness and pressed forward wordlessly, the blows so hard they made her hands numb. Out of the corner of her vision, she saw movement and a small hope blossomed in her chest.
"Ki-Adi!" she cried desperately.
More sledgehammer strikes on her lightsaber. She saw nothing but whirling blues and greens.
"Hurry!" Frantically, she blocked, the Force guiding her hands and yet only barely keeping up with the lightning general.
A swift chopping stroke and Grievous disarmed her; he pulled back, pistons firing, to strike the final blow.
She flinched, unable to look away.
The general moved, and the world tilted and screeched -
And then a strange thing happened...
General Grievous paused.
The lightsabers hummed an inch away from Shaak Ti's trembling hands. In that split fraction of a second, she didn't know whether Grievous was actually sparing her life or she was somehow protecting herself with the Force. Then, in the next moment, whatever had prevented Grievous from impaling her ricocheted back into Shaak Ti, bashing her into a mound of rock and knocking her insentient.
Before oblivion completely took over dark edges of her mind, she had time for one scattered thought/feeling. With the image of General Grievous' cadaverous mask filling her vision, she felt death and pain and fear...
She woke; the Force filtered through and wavered sickeningly around everything.
She felt pain throughout her whole body. Her three striped lekku were sore from their roots to their tips; it hurt to move her eyeballs in their sockets, as if someone had thrown sand in them.
Without opening her eyes, she stretched her uncomfortable fingers and tried to remember the battle on Hypori. It was difficult to concentrate on any one memory. The face of Ki-Adi would blend with the orange sky and helplessness, the pain and fear would melt into a mask like a skull with yellow, hate-filled eyes and a whirring of too-fast lightsabers.
When she realized that they had lost, the blood rushed from her face and her body began to tremble without her consent. Ki-Adi-Mundi...Daakman Barrek...Aayla Secura...K'Kruhk...Tarr Seirr...the padawan, Sha'a Gi...
All gone.
Her eyes opened slowly; she saw gray.
She was on a durasteel platform in the center of a rectangular room. It was very near the floor, like a dais and completely undecorated, lit vaguely from overhead.
There was a blast door to her left. She blinked and the door wavered, as if it were a tree in the wind. She closed her eyes again, confused and disoriented.
Shaak Ti moved her head and finally felt it - a durasteel collar fitted chokingly tight around her neck. Another three were fixed around her hypersensitive lekku. Two pressed against her cheeks; she felt the third push coldly against her spine.
Horrified tears filled her eyes and dread gripped her heart. What are they? she thought, distraught. Her hand quickly came up for reconnaissance, to discover the awful truth, whatever it was, but she couldn't touch them, and not for lack of trying. Something was keeping her from investigating the bands; something was shorting out the synapses that sparked the exploration. She would forget what she was doing, or her hand would move in a completely different direction than she'd intended. She couldn't control it.
After a few moments of desperately struggling against herself, her hand slumped to her side and she attempted meditation. Shaak Ti tried to let the Force fill her, to show her the way, to guide her next actions. She tried to feed her fears to the Force like a sacrifice, to give it all her doubts and terror.
Shaak Ti was a powerful Jedi, but as with all the Jedi, she had a weakness. She was full of emotion. Normally, the Jedi used her weakness to her advantage by surrendering her feelings to the altar of the Force, letting it consume her and flow through her like glass.
But something was wrong. The Togruta woman could feel the Force, singing around the edges, but a barrier of haziness separated her from it. The Force wouldn't fill her with its light.
The feelings came rushing back, and she sobbed dryly until she began to hyperventilate. Then, she calmed herself slowly, breathing deliberately through her nose.
She was a prisoner, captured by the droid general. She accepted that as her destiny.
Her Jedi companions were now one with the Force. She accepted that as their destiny.
But if the Force itself was barred to her...if she was forced to feel it, but not to use it...
Suddenly, the lights turned off and she gasped. Shaak Ti felt the interlocking teeth of the door shift and pull apart. Wind rushed into the room and light spilled through the doorway. Her black eyes squinted at the brightly silhouetted figure there, knowing who it would be before he spoke.
"Ah, the Jedi is awake," came the gravelly voice of General Grievous.
Grievous! she said, or tried to say. When she opened her mouth, no sound emerged except for a murmuring breath.
"There is no use trying, Jedi. You have been injected with tanith, and you are bound with the mind-control rings developed on Istar. There is no escape."
He said it so matter-of-factly that she knew it was the truth. Her feelings welled up inside her, black and palpable and inexorable. The Jedi's mind was fuzzy, and it suddenly made sense - tanith, a drug that numbed the mind, making it impossible to channel the Force.
And the rings...again, her hand twitched to touch them and immediately the rings responded, sending electrical currents through her synapses and changing her thought. Her mind went blank and her hand twitched again.
I will escape! she cried, or tried to cry.
"No escape..." the rings changed her statement subtly. She shook her head, dazed and confused.
"I see the rings are working perfectly," Grievous muttered, almost pleased. "Stand up, Jedi scum. You will follow me."
And he turned, his thick cape fluttering after him, and didn't look to see if she would follow.
Before she knew it she was on her feet, stumbling to keep up with him. Her mind was fluttering to understand what was happening. Magna guards flanked her, silent, unsympathetic and deadly. She caught up and slowed, forcing her hands to her sides. Shaak Ti struggled against the rings, stretching the limits of her control. Nerves in her fingers and face responded, and convulsed, but no more.
They emerged in the main control bay and Shaak Ti realized that they must be on the Invisible Hand, General Grievous' flagship. Droids were everywhere. The sound of their mechanical movements permeated the air, but none spoke. It was surreal, as if the ship was a dead thing, with droid-insects clamoring silently in its empty skull. Through the transparisteel view port was the looming mass of a planet, pale as a wedding scarf and impossibly virgin.
Shaak Ti concentrated and opened her mouth to say something, anything...
"Why have you done this?" she asked, and it came out of her mouth as a whisper, striped of emotion like a droid's. It was a start.
Grievous turned to consider her. "I will tell you nothing, Jedi. You are to follow my command without question and without fail. That is all you need to know." And then he ignored her completely, gazing out the view port with a singularity of interest.
Anger boiled inside her, but her face wouldn't mirror her emotions, nor could she use the Force to hurl him through the transparisteel and out into space, as she desperately wanted to do. The mind control rings instantaneously fed the feeling back to her, this time through emotional means. They turned her anger into depression, her rage into melancholy, emotions deemed less damaging toward the general.
"General Grievous," she said sadly, and, because the name had no real meaning, the rings allowed her to say it normally. The cyborg general turned impatiently to glare at her.
Suddenly, she realized that her hand was stroking the metal clasp around her right lekku. Without thinking, she pulled at it.
The mind control rings instantly overrode her, shooting an electrical current through all her synapses at once, making her fall into a faint on the durasteel floor.
When Shaak Ti regained consciousness, she was startled by an extremely close view of General Grievous' death mask. She would have gasped or screamed, but was only allowed to open her black eyes wide to display her shock.
"Shaak Ti," Grievous pronounced, and the Jedi felt a jolt of alarm that such an individual would know her name, and keep it in his memory, "do not excite the mind control rings with such foolish decisions. It would be a waste if you became brain-dead."
And he stood up and turned again, his cloak hitting her face and dragging over it.
She stayed there for a few seconds, and then stood up slowly. The Magna guards were nearby, never looking at anything and hardly moving at all. The general stood in front of her with his back turned.
A battle droid approached the general, breaking the silence. "General, we have arrived at Serizad VII. Awaiting your orders."
She saw the back of his unnatural head tilt contemplatively, and the raspy voice say, "Land the fleet and engage a direct assault. Open a com-link to all ships."
Shaak Ti moved forward, not thinking specifically about what she was doing. The rings allowed her to move. The Jedi reached his side and turned, reaching out with her hand to strike at him. When her fist reached within a foot of his white cloak, the rings shorted out her mind and the Togruta woman fell into a heap on the durasteel floor once again.
The Jedi gained consciousness again. This time, Grievous was not looking at her. He was giving instructions to the fleet through the com connecting the ships. "...pattern aurek, then cresh, then jenth. There are no Jedi stationed on Serizad; the priority files and strategy apply to non-Jedi attack situations, as usual. Local access decisions applicable to local droid officers, large-scale judgments are to come from myself only. Understood?"
Hundreds of screens filled with the heads of battle droids nodded simultaneously. "Roger-roger," came the unemotional response, and the com-links disconnected in chorus.
Then, he turned to her again, stepping over her prone form and almost spitting with rage. "What did I just tell you, Jedi? If you do that again, I will kill you!"
"Yes," she croaked perfunctorily.
The eyes in the bone mask narrowed. Faster than her eyes could follow, he gripped her neck in one six-fingered hand and lifted her off the floor. "You are too useful of a tool to be stupidly wasted by your Jedi sense of righteousness. You will do as I say, and you will be silent as you do it!"
Her mouth opened, but the only sound that emerged was a keening cry, a single note that reverberated through her bones and the general's metal arm.
His eyes were yellow slits. "I will have no more from you!"
And he threw her.
She landed in a bundle near a blue, white-cloaked Magna guard, who turned mechanically to determine whether she was a threat. When the Togruta woman remained motionless, blinking away at the pain, it turned wordlessly back to its vigil.
A.N. This is a work in progress and more chapters are to come.Only review if you want to.