It's one of those moments in every person's life when they know they'll forever remember where they were and what they were doing. Loneva Delban was meeting with her cousin and two friends on Tatooine, discussing...well, the thing that happened almost the exact moment their meeting ended. The whole incident had turned her, in a little over a month's time, from a scared, clingy little girl just barely out of Padawan's robes into a resilient, resourceful survivalist. She didn't even have time to retrieve her personal belongings from her quarters on Tython after the Eternal Fleet hit. The very thought of those filthy Zakuulan Knights rummaging through her personal journals, reading her private thoughts, handling her stuffed nerf, made her skin crawl. People who did not treat life as sacred usually did not treat property as sacred, either.
The first hyperspace jump she made was to Nar Shaddaa, where she finally picked up the software upgrade she'd been eyeing for months. If she ever needed to upgrade her cortical implant, now was the time. She outfitted it with a multi-layered encryption router protocol to keep her from being discovered on the holonet. After this, she bought a star chart of the Distant Outer Rim, looking for habitable planets. She discovered one in the Cauldron Nebula, a planet with wildlife and volcanic activity, but no sentient life forms. She bought a subspace transponder as well, and set off for this planet, to make it her base of operations, to prepare herself mentally and physically for the eventual day when she would face the Eternal Empire. True, she knew she would be alone, but she was prepared for that. Funny how things turn out.
For Jori Kanath, it was also a day she'd never forget. She was in her private study on Dromund Kaas, ten kilometers outside of Kaas City, when the Fleet came. Her holonet connection had been shut off to prevent any distractions while she wrote her reflections on the positive and negative points of Darth Marr's legal policies-encrypted merely out of habit since Marr had yet to order any political dissidents imprisoned. That was why her first warning of the attack wasn't a news report or a siren, but a jolt through the Force. She felt the bond she had developed with her master, Darth Vargra, being disrupted. It was more alarming than any news report would have been, since the emotional distance from the reporters made the stories less personal. Though Vargra shared few of her views, he had been kind to her. He encouraged her to think for herself, never physically disciplined her, and never made sexual advances toward her-not that she would have objected. Without context, her immediate concern was for him. She wanted to deny it on an intellectual level, but the gap left by the severed Force bond was incontrovertible. When she got the holonet back online, her question was answered: the orbital station where Vargra was at a summit of Sith Lords plotting Force-knows-what was destroyed.
She had always been far more of a philosopher than a warrior, and knew she would not stand against the invaders. This made her glad she'd nearly emptied her personal coffers getting her ship retrofitted with an Isotope 5 engine. The moment the last of her camping supplies was loaded into her ship, she took off for a world in the Outer Rim. Nobody else had accessed what little information there was on this world. To her, that was sufficient reason to believe she'd be spending a good deal of time in the solitude she found so delicious. That was when she discovered that the Force has a strange sense of humor.