Previously on Star Wars: Exile's Journey
Ahsoka Tano, in her guise as bounty hunter Riella Masso, tracked down a mad Jedi on the planet Susevfi. Reports of people being hurt and killed in the capital city of Yumfla caught her eye, and she tracked down the killer.
Meeting up with another Jedi, a Caamasi named Ylenic It'kla, they hunted for a missing Jedi Padawan named Mirian Varos, and found that while the murders were done with her lightsaber, she was not the culprit.
Driven nearly mad herself, she was infected by a shard of an ancient Sith holocron. The true culprit of the attacks was a fallen Jedi named Kan'to Kree who had studied the Sith ways, and in the end Ahsoka was forced to end his life.
Chapter 25
Arrival
Mirian Varos opened her eyes. She was in an unfamiliar medbay. It was small and cramped, so it must have been a ship's medbay. To her right, a strange insectiod alien was poking tools inside the cybernetic arm of a clone.
"Where..." Mirian tried to push herself up on her arm, but a sharp pain in her palm and shoulder prevented her. "Ow. Where am I?"
"You're on the Red Drexl. She's just a freighter, but you're safe here."
"I thought... Sithspit... my head..."
"Are you all right? Do you need something for pain?"
"No, no pain. My head is just fuzzy. I don't remember how I got here."
The clone shook his head, and Mirian could see that half of his face was badly scarred and partly covered by more cybernetics. "Yeah, we're a little fuzzy on how you got here too. I mean, we dragged you into the medbay. But the last time anyone heard from you, you and your master were in Lofla, twenty kilometers south of here."
Mirian tried to sit up, pulling herself up with her uninjured arm. "I... Master Shadaarwin... we came here on a mission," she said as she nearly collapsed.
"Hang on a minute, kid. I'll help you sit up as soon as my hand is free."
The insectiod alien clicked his mandibles together, "This is very delicate work. Please do not move for the next three seconds." He continued doing whatever delicate work he was doing inside the clone's cybernetic hand, then there was a flash of light and the sound of metal fusing together. "Finished. You may move now."
The clone wiggled his metal fingers. "Thank you, Xho. I don't know if I'd trust it to contact juggle a thermal det, but it's certainly more agile than it was off the shelf."
"Medical experts and engineers don't communicate well enough. Good design from both directions. Bad implementation. Need a middleman for best results."
The clone turned and offered his flesh and blood hand to Mirian. She pulled herself up into a sitting position. "My name's Arc, by the way."
"Padawan Mirian Varos." She paused and asked, "Is Master It'kla here? I think I remember seeing him."
"Yes, he's here," a voice from the doorway said. Mirian turned to see a familiar face.
"I know you... you're Padawan Tano."
"Well, I'm glad to see that your long term memory is okay. You can call me Ahsoka. These days you don't want to use terms like Padawan. It's not safe."
Ylenic It'kla appeared behind Ahsoka in the doorway. "It is good to see you awake, child."
"Master It'kla! I'm so glad you're here. I... I think... I think Master Shadaarwin is dead. I don't remember exactly what happened, but..."
"Relax, Mirian. Let it come back to you in your own time." The Caamasi Jedi's voice soothed her almost as much as his presence did. "When you are ready to tell us what you remember, we are here."
"I remember..."
The Delta-12 Skysprite emerged from hyperspace in high orbit over Susevfi. Mirian Varos flipped a set of switches to recycle the fuel from the hyperdrive ring, and once she got a confirmation bleep from the computer, she hit the release clamp. There was a faint clang that reverberated through the ship, and Mirian announced, "Docking ring is free and in geosynchronous orbit."
"Good. The other Jedi should arrive in a few hours. Keep an open mind, and an open eye. We don't know what to expect when we get there."
"Of course, Master."
Master Tarya-Lotell Shadaarwin eased the ship away from the docking hyperdrive ring and towards the planet below. "R5, prepare the ship for reentry and landing cycle."
R5-V8 twittered in response, and the ship entered the outer edge of Susevfi's atmosphere. A curved red line on Master Shadaarwin's monitor showed the course to land in the spaceport outside of Lofla.
A few minutes later, she opened the cockpit and the two Jedi breathed the salt-tinged air of the Susevfi coast. Master Shadaarwin shook her shaggy hair free of her helmet. "We can find a hotel later. For now, I would like to get straight to work. There are several ruins outside of Lofla that have been excavated lately, and from some of the images the Jedi Council have seen, the script carved on the walls appears to be ancient Sith writing."
"That sounds like a good lead, if we're looking for workings of the dark side. How far is it, Master?"
"Not far. There should be a speeder rental kiosk somewhere here in the spaceport. Stay with R5 and finish locking down the Skysprite. I'll rent us a speeder."
After a brief wait, Mirian found herself sitting in a small speeder, her Padawan braid whipping in the wind. She looked over at her Master's short shaggy hair with some amount of jealousy. Somehow Master Shadaarwin's hair was the perfect texture to stand out enough that it never got in her eyes, even in the hundred kilometer per hour wind of an open air speeder. And yet it never tangled or matted. Neither Human nor Etti hair had those traits, but the combination of the two made for an unexpected side effect.
Mirian, on the other hand, had to tie her hair back tightly to avoid the entangling and blinding effect of the high-speed wind.
The war was far from Susevfi. For once, Mirian Varos was taking a speeder ride, feeling the wind in her hair, and there weren't battle droids firing at her. Hair tangles were the worst of her worries today.
And that made for a pretty good day.
But once the two Jedi got close to the temple, she could feel the darkness inside. This wasn't going to be a fun archeological field trip. This was going to be something else entirely.
But at least there weren't any battle droids shooting at her. She was using her Jedi reflexes to avoid taking a flying bug to the face instead of a blaster bolt. That made today a better than average day.
Author's note: On the suggestion of a reader, I decided to add a little introduction blurb before each 'episode'. E.g., every 4 chapters. That way there's a recap at the beginning of every week. And since it's Star Wars, of course I have to do it as a centered text crawl style. :P
Also, as of last week I am officially a published author! I have a silly little Christmas themed serial running. Yes, something else to distract me from my fan fiction. C'est la guerre. It's called Saving Christmas: Slay Bells. It's an action/adventure kind of written in the style of over the top 80s action movies, and the basic plot is that it's 24 hours before Christmas, and Santa's Sleigh gets stolen. It's up to Blip 'Wiry' Skipperson and his elite team of special forces black ops Christmas elves to recover it in time.
I'm actually recording audiobook chapters along with that one, so even though I have four chapters written, I only have one posted on the site because I haven't had time to record the second chapter yet. It's at JukePop Serials, and if you're curious you can either look it up there, or you can look at my profile and I'll put a link there. It's a little less character driven than this fic is, and a lot more goofy.
-Tirade