Star Wars: Tails of the Old Republic

Chapter 021
Upper City Taris – Debriefing

The return flight to the hideout was particularly tiring. The weight of the Sith armor Tails had pilfered wasn't a problem in itself, but rather the nauseating sensation that his payload was going to fling out of his "storage space" as his tails spun. The Mobian fox flew slowly and deliberately, and by one o'clock in the morning, he reached the apartment complex he and Carth Onasi had been staying at. Tails landed on the roof by an access door and slipped inside.

Tails thought about Sarna as he made his way through the building. Beneath the helmet of her Sith armor, Sarna would have been just another faceless mook. In battle, Sarna would likely become just another casualty. If circumstances arranged a no-win scenario unless he took his opponent's life, there would be no way Tails could tell who was behind the mask. This was unacceptable to him, but what was he supposed to do? It pained him to even contemplate killing again, and memories of the Endar Spire once again haunted his mind. After reaching his floor, Tails wearily tapped the control panel to his apartment door.

The door clicked and whizzed open, and the teenager found a gun pointed at his face.

"AAH!"

Tails ducked and heaved himself to one side, scrunching into a defensive posture. But, the fox nearly fell over when he saw it was only Carth.

"You!" the Republic soldier exclaimed, holstering his weapon. "Just where the hell have you been all day?!"

After Tails' heart stopped pounding, he replied, "Nice to see you too, Carth." Tails looked over his shoulder, then added, "Do you want me to explain now, or can the debriefing wait until I'm inside?"

Sighing exasperatedly, Carth waved him inside the apartment.

The door shut and locked behind them. Tails could see Carth was upset. The Human sat down at the small round table in the middle of the room, waiting expectantly.

"Well...?"

Tails crossed his arms behind his back and stood as straight as possible, refusing to be intimidated. At the moment, the Human's attitude reminded him of Princess Sally when a mission didn't go as planned. Sonic usually took the brunt of it, but Tails was more than old enough now to get a verbal butt-chewing when Sally had a mind for it. Especially now that the fox was often openly at odds with her strategies for taking down Robotnik's empire. And given that battlefield conditions often required on-the-fly tactical revisions, Sonic and Tails did what they felt was necessary to get the job done, or failing that, just stay alive.

"I'm sorry, but I lost consciousness after my last battle in the arena," Tails said plainly. "I didn't wake up again until fourteen-thirty hours."

"You lost?" Carth asked.

"No, I succeeded in defeating all three duelists, but the final match drained all my energy, and I passed out. I was able to collect the reward money after regaining consciousness."

"Well, at least that wasn't a total loss," Carth commented. "What happened after that?"

"After recovering from my ordeal in the dueling ring, I searched the cantina for you, but you were nowhere to be found. I remained in the cantina until sixteen-thirty hours, then left and and returned to the hideout here. Following a tip I received in the cantina, I traveled to an apartment complex south of here in search of Sith armor."

Tails thought it best to leave out Sarna, Dia, and the old man in the alley for the moment.

Before Carth could say anything else, Tails then inquired, "Sir, if I may ask, where were you? I was becoming terribly worried..."

Carth groaned. "I had... complications. Suffice it to say that I got shot at repeatedly. I'm actually thankful you insisted on buying that personnel shield. I think its circuits fried, though."

"I'll take a look at it," Tails said.

"You mentioned you attempted to aquire Sith armor... what happened?"

"I successfully obtained one suit of Sith armor that you should be able to fit into," Tails replied.

"You were?"

Carth Onasi looked around the fox, but saw nothing.

"Then where is it?"

"In my possession," the Mobian replied. "Do you want me to show you? I need to take it out anyway; it's weighing me down."

Carth frowned, and said, "Mr. Prower, I do not enjoy being played with. 'Take it out'? Take it out of what, exactly? You're not carrying anything!"

Tails sighed and knelt down on one knee.

"Observe," he said wearily.

Carth stood, trying to find out just what Tails was doing. Tails coiled his tails tightly around each other and shifted them in front of him, and again pumped Chaos energy into his tails until they shimmered and appeared to be melding together.

"You may want to brace yourself," Tails commented.

Focusing his mind on what he intended, the boy reached out with his hand and touched his coiled tails. Then, to Carth's shock, Tails' hand slowly plunged into the fluffy coiled mass, sinking halfway to his elbow.

"What... t-the hell...?" Carth muttered.

Then, with a firm grasp on his cargo, Tails proceeded to pull out the suit of Sith armor. It was slightly easier this time, and Tails managed to extract it in just over two minutes. Once finished, Tails separated and uncoiled his twin tails, and got back up, relieved to be rid of twenty-five kilograms of extraneous mass. Almost.

"Whoops, I left the helmet..."

Still standing, the fox brought up a tail and reached into it. While the full suit of Human-sized armor necessitated a more elaborate procedure, a small item was relatively easy to extract. He pulled it out and held it at arm's length.

"Ta da!"

Carth was visibly stunned, and it took him a few moments to actually form words.

"That... has got to be... the most disturbing thing I've ever seen..."

Tails smirked and shook his head, and said, "Heh heh, sorry. It's kind of a mind-screw when people see it for the first time."

The Human haltingly walked toward the fox and took the silver-colored helmet from Tails' hand, then picked up the bundled suit off the floor. Carth walked over to his bunk and slid it underneath, then sat on the edge, rubbing his eyes.

"Care to explain what the hell I just witnessed?"

"I call it hyperspace inventory, though others call it 'hammerspace'," Tails replied. "All top-tier Chaos adepts have one, in some form or other. In the most non-technical language I can think of, my Chaos affinity allows me to create, maintain, and manipulate a stable, localized subspace bubble inside my tails. Basically, it's like I have access to my own personal storage locker. With practice, this gave me the ability to store inanimate objects inside of them when I have no clothes with pockets in them. Which is most of the time."

Carth just blinked with a stupefied expression on his face. He shook his head, and said, "Wait... chaos? Hyperspace bubbles? Hammerspace? I'm completely lost here..."

"The name for the place our cargo goes was originally called 'hammerspace'," Tails tried to explain, "after my friend Amy's ability to summon her Piko-Piko hammer with a snap of her fingers. But, as I studied the actual physics behind this ability, I renamed it with the slightly more accurate term, 'hyperspace inventory'.

"The matter stored does not simply disappear, however, and the law of conservation of mass is still upheld. That suit of Sith armor weighed about twenty-five kilograms, and I felt appropriately burdened. Fortunately, the additional burden is uniformly distributed throughout my body, which makes lugging the extra weight somewhat easier. All of this mediated by our respective Chaos affinities."

"So... basically, you're telling me you have a portable pocket dimension that you carry around and store all your stuff in?"

Tails blinked, then facepalmed. 'Portable pocket dimension? Damn.'

"Yeah... that's a good way of summing it up."

"What you're describing... is something only a Jedi could possibly do!"

There was that "Jedi" word again. Carth was now the second person to compare him to one. Tails sighed and walked over to his own bunk, hopped on to it, and sat on the edge.

He closed his eyes and just breathed for a few moments. "Carth," Tails began, "I don't know anything about who or what 'Jedi' are, except that I got my fuzzy butt smeared by one back aboard the Endar Spire. Look, I'm a Chaos wielder; on my planet, there are a few dozen Mobians who have the ability to command small quantities of Chaos energy channeled from zero-point space. This is approximately what a Chaos Emerald does, except an emerald's power is scaled up a million-fold.

"I've divided our relative powers into 'ranks' with 'S-rank' being the highest tier, followed by ranks A, B, C, D, and E. Personally, I rate myself as either the lowest A-rank or highest B-rank Chaos adept, depending on which metrics I'm judging myself with. Though, personally, I prefer to call myself an 'A-rank' simply because my friend Sonic is one. But, unlike Sonic and my other friends, the only place I can really manifest this power is in these eight-foot-long appendages you see trailing my rump. This gives me a few specialized abilities, but it's not like I can run faster than sound, pick up ten-ton boulders over my head, or shoot Chaos spears from my fingertips."

Carth closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to assimilate what the adolescent fox was saying. If anything, his 'explanations' had confused him more.

"Why didn't you tell me about any of this before?" asked Carth.

"Huh? Well... you didn't ask. Besides, since the crash, only now have I begun to appreciably recover my Chaos energy," Tails answered.

The Human soldier sighed, and he said, "Fine. So, what else can you do with those tails of yours?"

"You didn't watch my battles in the arena?"

"No, I didn't. I had... other things to attend to."

"Oh," said Tails. "Um, Carth, what exactly does my 'service record' say about me? Does it mention my ability to fly?"

"Your record mentioned you are a fourteen, nearly fifteen year old Mobian well skilled in mechanics, xenolinguistics, and advanced hand-to-hand combat. It did mention you were also a capable pilot."

'Wow, that's awfully sparse', Tails thought.

"Um... yeah," Tails responded. "I can do lots of stuff with my tails, besides just ordinary counterweights. I can use them as weapons, defensive barriers, aircraft propellers, forklifts, and in emergencies, as surgical implements. Again, that's about the full extent of my abilities. Now, if I had some Power Rings, I could generate ring bombs, and -"

"OK, stop. Just stop," Carth said, and he held up his hand. "My brain is overloading here, and I don't care to burn it out at this late hour. While I'm sure you're being honest with me, this is a little much for me to take in a single sitting."

Carth held the side of his head, then continued, "Look, it's a quarter to two in the morning. Sleep now, we'll leave for the elevator to the Lower City at daybreak. We'll discuss the rest of your 'gifts' later."

The Human got up and ambled to the bathroom, and after he was out of sight, Tails wearily removed his clothing and curled into a ball in the center of his bunk, wrapping his tails tightly around his body. The boy was genuinely tired, and by the time Carth returned, Tails was fast asleep.