When Jacen awakened, the first sensation that he felt was that there was something metal and uncomfortable all along his neck. He felt for it and found that there was some kind of metal brace there. He yanked both hands on it, only to receive a painful electric jolt that caused him to scream for a second and flinch his hands away from the device.
He then tried to access the Force...
And received an even more painful electric jolt that brought him to his back.
Jacen breathed in for a few moments before allowing himself to stand back up and finally see where he was.
At least it's not a Sith Temple this time, he thought ruefully. And at least he had been clothed with a pure white tunic and matching trousers, with brown sandals for footwear; it was better than just being in his underwear like he was with the Sith.
He found himself in what seemed to be a low-tech village that was located in the epicenter of a vast canyon; the canyon itself was surfaced by lush green grass, indicating to Jacen that he was in a very temperate environment that was probably in the middle of a spring season. The huts around him were made of some strong wooden material, but Jacen noticed something about them that wasn't typical of societies like this: their roofs weren't triangular-shaped, but rather, they were as rectangular as the small buildings upon which they topped.
Jacen understood that, in an environment like this, precipitation like rain and snow (when it came to winter, of course) would likely collapse these flat roofs. So why weren't these huts built for precipitation?
Maybe he could ask one of the locals for an answer to that question; and afterwards, hopefully, they could tell him what planet he was on. Jacen just hoped that they could speak Basic, if not some other alien language with which he was familiar.
He approached the nearest hut and knocked on the door. He received no response for several seconds. Jacen thought about trying to sense if there were any presences behind that door, but he remembered that that would only gain him another electric jolt that would bring him to his back again. So he decided to hold off on that—at least until he could find some other way of getting this damn thing off his neck and subsequently find some way off of whatever world he was on right now—and simply knocked again.
After the second knock, the door was swung open inside, and a mean-looking Trandoshan male, who also happened to have a neck-brace similar to Jacen's, hissed at him. Jacen also noticed that his lizard-like counterpart wore white clothes and brown sandals like him; however, the Trandoshan's attire was blackened at various points with dirt and grime.
"Mind what business you still have, human," the Trandoshan intoned, "before they come for us today."
Jacen was about to ask who "they" were before the lizard-like being slammed the door in his face. He looked at his surroundings again to see if anyone had now emerged from their respective huts and give him some answers when he noticed something approaching from the peak of one of the valley's sides.
It appeared to be a massive transport vehicle that gleamed a shiny chrome; to Jacen, who had been shown holos of Tatooine from his Uncle Luke, the vehicle looked like the sandcrawler of a group of Jawa junk traders, except this vehicle relied on some pretty powerful repulsorlifts instead of conventional wheels.
The sandcrawler-like vehicle was now sailing down toward the village at a brisk rate, and it stopped several meters away from the outermost hut on that side of the valley. Once the vehicle had halted and hovered in place, it was only then that Jacen noticed that people of various different species—including the Trandoshan whom he encountered moments before—had finally appeared around him.
Jacen saw on each face in the gathering that they were all miserable, and similarly collared as he and the Trandoshan; their clothing was also about as dirty, if not more or less so, than the Trandoshan's. Jacen looked back at the halted vehicle, which was only a little over a dozen meters away from him.
The side of the vehicle that was facing the village unfolded before the crowd, and stepping out from it was a tall female Chiss who was dressed in typical blue-black Ascendancy military attire. Two shorter, but more muscular, male Chiss who were dressed the same accompanied her from behind, each brandishing a carbine across their middles. However, Jacen saw that, on the tunic of each of their uniforms, there were two blood-red slashes spaced out from each other like eyes.
Like Chiss eyes.
The blue-skinned, red-eyed woman held up a remote in one hand and, in accented Basic, called out, "Line up!"
Everyone in the crowd proceeded to do so without hesitation, assuming positions as if this were routine.
Which was because it was routine, Jacen deduced with some horror.
Once the line had been formed, and almost everyone was in position, that left only one awkward factor in the arrangement: Jacen himself.
"You, human!" the Chiss woman declared, pointing at Jacen with the hand that wasn't holding the remote. "You are between that Gungun and that Twi'lek!"
When Jacen hesitated for a few seconds, dumbfounded by a terrifying realization, the Chiss raised the remote and pressed one of its slew of buttons.
Predictably, Jacen fell to his side as powerful electric jolts shocked his system, leaving him a convulsing heap on the dirt-filled ground.
The pain stopped after five seconds, and it was immediately followed by the Chiss woman yelling, "Now!"
Jacen held up a hand in acquiescence as he stood up carefully and assumed position behind the earlier indicated Gungun and Twi'lek.
Once that was done, the Chiss declared, "Time to go to work. And, remember, no talking amongst yourselves."
Before the procession started their short trek to the sandcrawler-like transport vehicle, a brief shimmer appeared in the space between the Chiss and the village inhabitants. Then the line began toward the vehicle.
As Jacen and the rest of the crowd were marched into the massive barge, the full horror of the situation had hit him.
He was enslaved.
...
And for nine long and grueling years, he was enslaved.
In that time, he never learned who his captors were; the idea that they were a legitimate part of the Chiss Ascendancy was something that Jacen concluded was ridiculous. While he may have been ignorant of their customs—his brief time on Csilla during the search for the living world of Zonama Sekot during the Yuuzhan Vong War not being enough to get a really good idea of their society—he somehow doubted that they condoned slavery. And he thought that, if not the Galactic Alliance, then the Jedi Order would have investigated the abductions of certain members of species that belonged to the jurisdiction of the GA and the rest of the known galaxy.
But then again, it was a big galaxy; Jacen shouldn't have been surprised if a number of missing persons were simply never found for reasons like this.
The duties that Jacen found himself performing varied from mining some kind of ore in the deep caverns of whatever the planet he was on—he came to call it Planet Hell for obvious reasons—to working in one of the many processing factories scattered across the globe. There was never a day when he didn't receive at least one electric jolt; he wouldn't even have to have done anything wrong, he would have just been shocked for no other apparent reason than the amusement of that vile Chiss woman whose name he never learned.
Nor could he even guess at what was being produced by his unwilling and unpaid labor. Early on in his slavery, he made the mistake of asking the Chiss woman as to what he and his fellow slaves were helping to make; he was then immediately sent to a dark room where he endured a gnashing, gnawing kind of pain that enveloped his whole body; it was certainly a new experience of agony for him. He wondered if this kind of pain was what certain animals at the lower end of a natural food chain suffered before they died in the clutches of the predator that ate them.
It was rare when he was later sent to that dark room throughout the years; and it was for no apparent reason either. It was as if the sadistic Chiss woman wanted to keep the gnashing, gnawing pain a special kind of agony just for Jacen; he had no idea if anyone else among his fellow slaves was ever subjected to similar torment.
At the end of each sixteen-hour work day, Jacen was brought back to the village in which he had first found himself with many of the other slaves. He had been assigned a hut after the end of his first day of work, and he would barely get a decent eight hours of sleep before the next shift; it all ran into what could be called a years-long day for Jacen, if that made any sense.
Jacen had long ago deduced that the village in which he lived had been protected by a force-field from the elements; this explained why the roofs of the huts were flat instead of triangular, since no rain or snow could get through the shield. It also explained the brief shimmer that appeared on that first day, and which had appeared at the start of every day afterwards; that was the shield being routinely activated and deactivated for the slaves to get to and from that damn barge.
But what Jacen could never find out was to how to get that damn shock-collar off. Even thinking about taking it off would give him electric shocks.
And so did thoughts about committing suicide.
Thus, for those nine long, Force-less years, he had given up hope, something that he never thought he would do since he returned to the Jedi and New Republic after his time with Vergere, and resigned himself to this life of servitude, hoping for the day he died.
But at the end of those years, something happened that Jacen would later wish had come so much sooner; and not just so that he could be spared the hardship of slavery.
One day, when he and his fellow slaves—several of whom were the latest replacements for those who had died from either natural causes, overwork, complications from their shock-collars' effects, etc.-were being lined up for their next shift, a blessed sight appeared in the sky overhead.
Organically-produced starfighters from Zonama Sekot soared down from the heavily-clouded sky, firing upon the shield that covered the village. It quickly shimmered out of existence while the vile Chiss woman and her two flunkies hurried back in their slave transport vehicle. However, before it had a chance to begin its travel up the valley, two of the Sekotan fighters pummeled it with volleys from their lava cannons that engulfed the vehicle in a large mushroom of fire.
And just like that, the shock-collars fell away from the necks of Jacen and all of the other slaves present in the village.
For several moments afterwards, the now-former slaves stood dumbfounded in place as they looked down at what had given them so much pain for so long (or for so short a time, as it was for the new "recruits"). Then they all erupted in cheer, embracing each other in the process, with Jacen being no exception as he even hugged the Trandoshan whom he met on his first day of slavery.
But then the cheer fell away from Jacen after he stopped hugging the Trandoshan, as he had suddenly felt a deep, profoundly grave weight settle throughout his very soul. He didn't know what it was, but he knew the source of the weight: the Force had returned to him.
And whatever vague notions the Force was trying to tell him, he knew that he had to find out right away by returning to the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi Order, just as he tried to do all those years before when he had escaped from the Sith.
While the unknown heaviness still lingered in his very being, Jacen was at least able to shunt some of it out as he started to gain an awareness of his environment outside of the cheering going on among the recently-freed slaves. It had started raining now, the first time any of the slaves had felt the sensation since they were captured, and several Sekotan fighters had landed around the village perimeter.
Accompanying the landed fighters were about a dozen shuttles that also appeared to be organically produced. Disembarking from each shuttle was a team of Ferroans who were dressed up in white uniforms; upon the approach of those teams, the cheering from the freed crowd died out as they eyed the new arrivals with suspicion. The only one in the crowd who didn't view them with that level of hostility was Jacen himself, given his own familiarity with the Ferroans about a decade and a half earlier.
Each team of Ferroans stopped in their tracks exactly where the transport vehicle had stopped every day for the past nine years for Jacen. Then the Ferroan at the center of his own group's gathering called out, "We are here to help you! We, the Ferroans of Zonama Sekot, have arrived to take you back to your homes and bring you away from the forced servitude from which each of you has been placed! If you will please come with us..."
"It's okay, everyone," Jacen said to the crowd. "We can trust them. I've met them before!"
"They look like Chiss!" someone in the freed crowd pointed out. "How can you be so sure to trust them?"
"They just freed us from those blasted shock-collars, you dolt!" the Trandoshan Jacen had embraced replied. "What more evidence do you need?"
"And how do we know we won't just be placed into other shock-collars?" a Gran had asked. "We'd be trading one line of slavery for another!"
After about an hour of what Jacen ultimately knew was a pointless debate between those in the freed crowd who were suspicious of the Ferroans and those who weren't, the latter crowd inevitably won the debate. And it wasn't long before they were all loaded onto the transport shuttles and taken up into the skies of Planet Hell.
In the shuttle that he was placed into, Jacen, who had a blanket around him and a cup of water in his hand courtesy of the Ferroans, had a seat by a viewport. Thus, he was able to see from his left side when they left Planet Hell's atmosphere; a number of Imperial-looking Star Destroyers and a couple of Interdictors lay in floating ruins in space. Debris from other metal ships, namely TIE fighters, also scattered the space around them; less common was the debris of Sekotan fighters, while active fighters from the living planet guarded the space around Planet Hell like systemwide sentries.
"Jacen Solo?" a male voice asked from Jacen's right side.
He looked up and to the right; a male Ferroan was holding out an organic Sekotan commlink to him.
"This is for you," the Ferroan said.
"Thank you," Jacen replied as he accepted the yellow-light blinking Sekotan comm in his free hand. The Ferroan then walked away elsewhere in the shuttle to attend some other duty.
He pressed a button on the comm and said, "Hello?"
"Jacen, is that really you?" a familiar feminine voice responded.
For a few seconds, Jacen struggled to remember who was on the other line. Then he recalled: "Danni? Danni Quee?"
"It is you!" Danni exclaimed with a simultaneously disbelieving tone. "I can feel your presence through the Force!"
"And I you," Jacen said. "You're on one of the shuttles in this system?"
"Yes, I'm helping out with the relief effort for the slaves," Danni confirmed. "I'll explain everything to you when we meet, but... after everything I'd heard after I took on this mission..."
"What are you trying to say, Danni?" Jacen asked.
"Jacen.. something happened in the past few years, something that happened in the Galactic Alliance. And the Jedi..."
"What happened?" Jacen asked. Did this have anything to do with the grave weight that he felt back when he was freed on Planet Hell?
"When we meet... I'll show you."