They have three key items on their docket: the Chancellor's office, his apartment in the 500 Republica building, and his pod in the Senate rotunda. After that? An examination of the physical evidence collected by the Coruscanti chief police department and the Senate guards, as well as the reports on the various effects strange items in the Chancellor's office had on preliminary investigations. Because, Lana reflects, there's nothing that quite says kriff you like a bust of your own head that propels people away from the tapestry behind it.
Master Kenobi—Obi-Wan—glances at her, amused, and Lana tries to smile through her embarrassment. Right. Shields. She's used to mostly being around the various nonhuman denizens of the fifteenth floor, all Knights or Masters, who don't give a flying kark about her whimsicality or her way of communing with the Force, so long as it doesn't keep them up during their sleep cycles.
Stars, she hasn't taken enough out-of-Temple missions. Hard to believe all that time has really passed in the Archives—hard to believe that the light cycle still exists the same way, but then, it's hard to ignore light levels in the Temple, either.
"It's a nice day, isn't it, Master Kenobi?" Lana asks, summoning her Jedi calm. There is one, no, there are two things she is absolutely certain of in this moment: the Force is with her, and she has absolutely no idea what she's doing. "Smells like repulsorlift exhaust and sublight drifters. The quintessential essence of Coruscant."
"Oh, yes, naturally," Obi-Wan says, because what else do you say to that, really?
Lana shifts. Her secondary datapad, tiny and old, fitted with a cantankerous AI, chugging on stubbornly despite all the projections of the Temple technicians, buzzes in protest. She ignores it. The outer tunic muffles it, anyway. "Speaking of sublight drifters—did the Chancellor have his own personal ship?"
Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow. "It's very probable—we may certainly check. Any particular reason why?"
"Might've possibly had a vision, maybe, and Master Yoda told me to investigate the one I told the Council about. Can't be sure unless it's a heavily modified Lambda-class T-4a shuttle with an invisishield and tint-on-command transparisteel windows."
"Aren't those still in the design phase? Under discreet supervision?"
"How'd you know that?"
"Knight Skywalker keeps up with starship theory in his free time." Obi-Wan tucks his arms into his voluminous sleeves. "How did you know that?"
Lana shrugs. "I hear voices," she says dryly, and is rewarded with a snort as Obi-Wan steps off the Temple transport and onto the landing platform of the Senate rotunda.
"I assure you, Senator, you are a witness," Obi-Wan is saying calmly, to all the world absolutely unruffled by the flushed, angry visage of Senator Echellin of the Venaarian sector. Considering that Senator Echellin is a rather gruesome-looking man with one of the most suspicious scars Lana has ever seen, this is more impressive than one might think; Lana stands back, conscious of her quiet decision to let the Senators think what they want about her Padawanship. Obfuscation can be useful, after all. "Not a target. We are not searching for targets at this juncture—merely attempting to get a better picture of what has occurred."
Echellin leans back in his seat, jaw set, and his discontent roils in the Force. "My apologies, Master Jedi," says the man, completely insincere. "I merely find this investigation… superfluous."
The Venaarian sector, Lana recalls, had been among those that often curried favor with the Supreme Chancellor—particularly in recent years, with the ascendancy of Sheev Palpatine to the Chancellorship. It could mean nothing. It could mean everything.
But she's also heard that the Senator had been among those in the Senate most virulently opposed to the involvement of the Jedi in this affair. The Jedi have been in a tenuous position with the Senate since the disappearance of Count Dooku from the Invisible Hand two years ago, despite widespread support among most of the populace of the Mid-Rim. The Venaarian sector is an exception; there are a handful of others, but with how Master Kenobi's latest deployment with Knight Skywalker had gone, many of the most vocal sectors have been far quieter.
That Venaari has not been quiet speaks more to Senator Echellin's personal stance on the matter of Jedi involvement in the war than it does to the feelings of the sector he represents—and isn't it curious that the tax benefits to Venaari's trading regulations have fallen back to below pre-war levels without the Chancellor to weigh in on it? Not only that, but speedily, too—far speedier than the Senate's usual pace, which is somewhere between the length of time it takes Bantooine pudding to ferment on Dantooine (there'd been a group of curious Padawans, once) and a couple trips back and forth to either rim of the known galaxy.
To her credit, she doesn't jump when Obi-Wan's presence brushes against her in the Force, an approving feeling emanating from him even as Echellin begins to start in on a decidedly undiplomatic rant about the Jedi. She hadn't realized she was broadcasting, but it could prove useful for things like this… provided their witnesses aren't Force-sensitive as well. Life can be surprising, sometimes.
Obi-Wan bows, cutting him off before he gets too far in. "On behalf of the Jedi, Senator Echellin, we wish you an excellent day. Come, Padawan."
Lana trots behind him as he exits, thrilled with the small show of defiance. They've been at this all day, and Lana is capable of behaving in a diplomatic manner, but she and Master Keera had been slated to take on investigations before the war—not negotiate with politicians, though she supposes she probably ought to have expected that given the predilection politicians seem to have for getting involved in funny business. That her mission partner is famed for the very thing she detests is fortuitous indeed. If she's lucky, the only time she'll have to speak to someone is when the Force guides her to do so.
"A credit for your thoughts," Obi-Wan says as they round the corner and make their way into the winding interior of the Senate building.
Lana considers, tucking her hands into her robes. "It is remarkably interesting that the Senator remains staunch in his position given the recent offensive, Master."
"Ah, yes. The offensive." Obi-Wan lets out a breath of air that could've been a chuckle in another life. Lana carefully refrains from glancing at the brace on his leg. "The Senator is primarily disappointed that measures have not been taken to assure him of any continued supply drops for his sector—understandable, given that the main route to Venaari is currently skirting a thin line between accessible and inaccessible with the positions that have been taken by its neighbors. He is concerned that his proposed extension of the program is taking too long in the Senate, where before its three previous allowances had gone through quite speedily."
"Interesting," Lana says again as they step into the turbolift that will take them to the Supreme Chancellor's office—or, former office, probably. "And he blames the Jedi for this?"
Obi-Wan leans back against the wall of the lift and strokes his beard in thought. "Not exactly," he says after a moment. "He isn't wrong about the investigation, leastwise in regards to the Chancellor's death. The Chancellor was old, by Human standards. But the Senate as a whole agreed when Bail Organa called for Jedi involvement in it. They all saw what happened to the poor man who touched that statue of King Jafan."
"It's a real shame that Force-based evidence is only barely accepted in the courts. That entire incident screamed Force-based disaster," Lana murmurs, frowning.
Obi-Wan straightens as the lift dings and the door slides open. "Speaking of Force-based disasters—we're entering a zone with known Force-suffused objects. Exercise discretion, Padawan. If you feel something in the Force, trust your instincts and move as it commands you. This part of the investigation will be of particular interest to the Shadows."
"Understood. Shall I take notes?" Lana asks, prepared to whip out her handy-dandy datapad should the need arise.
He considers her for a moment. "Yes," he decides, looking pleasantly surprised. After living with Knight Skywalker for eleven years, her lack of recalcitrance must be some kind of relief. "That would be very helpful indeed."
Lana tries not to grin.
Master Kenobi said she'd be helpful! Master Kenobi! Ha!
If she trots into the room with a rather cheerful step, well, nobody has to know about that.
A dream:
Diaphanous beams connect hearts and minds across time and space; somewhere near hopelessness, a heartbroken man spins his ship around and puts off exile for another year. He always comes back to this desert, back to the place where the sands shaped a girl who became a warrior became a legend, but she is never here.
He didn't expect her to be. Nobody knows where she has gone, least of all him, and the silence in the back of his mind is as voluminous as the planet full of dry bones he has been orbiting around for three standard days.
But she could have left a clue, he thinks. He is nothing without her. They are two halves of a whole, one person, two bodies, and kriff it all—he misses her. He misses her, because the darkness is back, and it is threatening to swallow him whole once more.
Lana Viszka Ruhr opens her eyes to the dark ceiling of her apartment in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. She is ostensibly twenty standard years of age, her heart beats in a frenetic rhythm full of an ageless terror, and she traps every secret she sees behind her mouth. The Force thrums with her when she reaches for it and curls in the direction of the wall, breathes out one shaky sigh and then another, reminds herself again that time is not linear and nothing is impossible with the Force.
"I didn't sign up for this," Lana says, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall. Somewhere several floors below her, a Padawan has just learned that their Master has passed into the Force; the mirror shard-sharp splinter of grief and agony pulses in time, embedding itself in the Force's loving veils, ebbs into a slow mourning that clouds the entire Temple and undoubtedly wakes the younglings up. It wasn't always this way—there was once a time when it would have spread fully into the Force, quelled by the Light, but the war has wrought havoc on the universe at a fundamental level that is horrifying to contemplate. So Lana doesn't.
Unsettled though she is, her own borrowed grief does not reverberate so. She has the questionable benefit of having inherited from her time with Master Keera what had once been the Jinn-Kenobi team's apartments, and the combined weight of the twin legacies she finds herself living under blunts the rawness of her visions. Like shadows, the Force echoes what once was: nearly invisible now, austerity and a numbness that slows courage; slightly less so, cool acumen and aching kept under the tightest of wraps. They linger despite their former owners having moved on, half-companions she never asked for in an isolation she chose.
There are many things she never signed up for. Her path as a Jedi, despite everything she's told herself since the day she set out on it, has always been chief among the manifold decisions she had no part in.
I know, the silence whispers back, nameless. I know.
Are you an I? Is that a thing? Lana asks. She might as well—she isn't getting back to sleep, not tonight.
Light unfurls, seeps into her soul, a slow drip meant to heal, not to burn. It is as much of an answer as anything is.
"So, Master, I found several reports on the kinds of objects we found in the Chancellor's office." Lana settles on the other end of the table from Obi-Wan, pulling out her datapad; she taps a few times until she pulls up the folder she created while Master Nu wasn't looking. Obi-Wan, for his part, is the picture of polite, rapt attention. Lana slides the 'pad over to him, opening a particular file as she does so. "My conclusion: If not Sith, at the very least immersed in Darkness. Remember the way that pen on his desk radiated… well… nothingness? The feeling matched up with that description, in particular."
Obi-Wan scans the 'pad, absently sliding a cup of tea over to her in return. Lana had watched him prepare it earlier; sapir tea is harder and harder to get in Republic space these days, and she's not sure she wants to know how he manages to keep sufficient quantities of it in his apartments when he's drunk two cups already and she suspects that's him holding back more than anything. His eyebrows raise. Probably found the information about the touch-activated Force-draining components. "Oh my."
"Yeah." Lana sips her tea. It's some damn good tea. Letting it go to waste wouldn't be taking care of the resources the Force has apportioned to all Jedi; she also doesn't feel like being the one to bring up how insanely suspicious it is that the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic just so happens to be in possession of so many Dark objects—objects he left out in plain sight. Objects she knows for a fact were out in plain sight when Jedi walked past them.
If Lana is the one to point out what many legions of Jedi seem to have missed, or the troubling implications of that many Jedi having missed it in the first place, it's not going to get her or the investigation very far. Three years Temple-bound and immersed in the Force or no, she's still only a Padawan with a dead Master. If there was anything Barriss Offee's actions ever did for her fellow Padawans, it was to establish that they ought not be listened to in these trying times.
"Admittedly, I hadn't had the pleasure of visiting the Chancellor in his office for some time before his death," Obi-Wan is saying thoughtfully, one hand propping up the 'pad and the other stroking his beard in thought, "but I do seem to recall that he had… rather less in the way of furnishings on display in his office. It is quite unusual for a politician, much less a Senator, to be lacking in worldly trappings."
"He was lauded for that, wasn't he?" She phrases it like a question, but it's not. Sheev Palpatine built his reputation on humility and a concern for the wider galaxy.
Obi-Wan nods. "Indeed. It is very curious that he would be in possession of all those things and only begin to bring them out as the war ground to a standstill."
Things weren't going the way he wanted, Lana thinks, but doesn't voice it. Accusations cannot be made without proof; they can't be accusations in the first place, really, no matter how substantial the most heavily-encrypted folder on her datapad happens to be. Instead: "There are rumors on the HoloNet that his body has disappeared from the coroners' halls in the police headquarters."
"Baseless or standing on any form of evidence?" Obi-Wan is scanning further down the list, and she can sense his distaste through the Force—a very distinct, posh, palpable ugh that is inextricably intertwined with his Light, one of the most hilarious dichotomies the Force has seen fit to gift her with.
A Jedi must be beyond humanity—thus had Kolasi Selook said in her Meditations, a remarkably species-exclusive claim she was qualified to make only because she herself had been a Human at a time that the Jedi Order was largely dominated by them, and even then Lana knows the scholars among their number today (like the one across from her, who, if he hadn't taken up Generalship, probably could've taught the advanced philosophy courses available for Knights to partake of) consider Selook's justification for the exclusivity of the statement shaky. Extremely shaky. Would later suggest systematic culling as a method of eugenic study shaky. Still, the concept remains, and it's almost a relief to see that Obi-Wan still retains that element of humanity.
It means he's not untouchable. Not the perfect paragon the younger Knights and Padawans would paint him as.
"Hard to tell. Most of it is on the deep HoloNet, and most Jedi terminals disallow access. But I came across something from someone going by the codename of Fulcrum—here, let me see it—there." She pokes until the snapshot of Fulcrum's forum profile appears on the screen, accompanied by the post, seemingly queued up to go public in the dead of the Coruscanti night. Do not make the mistake of thinking this is over, the post says. There was more to that man than anyone in the galaxy wants to admit. That's why the body disappeared.
Attached to the post is a single grainy holo—an image of the head coroner wringing his hands over an empty table.
"That's what caught my attention," Lana says, leaning back in her seat and tucking her feet up onto the chair. He has very nice chairs, standard-issue or not. Like most Jedi, Obi-Wan's aesthetic taste looks to lean toward the minimalist, though she did spot a rather nice bowl with pretty rocks in it tucked away next to the windows when she came in. "I wouldn't have paid it any mind otherwise—but the image itself was heavily encrypted. Breaking through it took time, work, and a Jedi passcode I know for a fact hasn't been used in-Temple since the days when Master Windu was a Padawan. I'm reluctant to pass it off as nothing. There are few people who would know that—I only do because someone horribly mismanaged the class schedules one day and my Junior Padawan Core Diplomacy class was taught to do… things… that are probably illegal on several Core world planets by Master Tholme."
"Wait, really?" Obi-Wan asks, caught off-guard. Then his brow furrows. "Come to think of it, I do remember something about that…"
Lana shrugs. Pointing out that Ahsoka Tano had also been in her class that day, an Initiate delivering messages who had lingered around a little while longer than was strictly necessary, would only serve to bring up memories that she's sure are delicate for him. "That incident might be why Master Tholme is still off in the Unknown Regions. The Council was displeased. Us Padawans less so—but anyways, the point is, there's deliberation in the choice of encryption. It was a message for the Jedi, unless Archivist Nu's cabal of archive junkies are secretly masterminding a secondary organization beneath the modern wings of the Temple…"
Obi-Wan snorts—actually snorts, honest-to-the-Force. "I think we may be quite certain that no such thing is at play in all this, Padawan."
"The Force works in mysterious ways," Lana says, prim but for the wicked curve of one side of her smile. "So, how do you weigh it?"
"It's difficult to base any solid facts on a single piece of rather grainy evidence," Obi-Wan muses. He takes a sip of his tea, then pauses. A small smile curls his lips up. "But I know someone who may be able to give us a further lead—see if there's any veracity to the claim. How do you feel about jawa juice and indigestion?"
Lana schools her face into a mask of serenity. "I've never experienced indigestion a day in my life," she declares. "Never ever. Certainly not at the hands of the Temple refectory staff."
"Ah. A dab hand already, I see." Obi-Wan stands with some visible stiffness in his left leg; as subtly as she can, Lana keeps an eye on how heavily he leans his weight on his right. He raises an eyebrow at her. "Well, then. Let's see what we can find out."