Disclaimer: We ( zazabelle and draksisreborn) own nothing but our OCs. Star Wars belongs to Lucasfilm and Disney. Please review and enjoy this latest installment.
It had been nearly two hours in Nar'Shaada time since Soron and Cenden had left on their mission from Beebs. The sky had opened up in those hours and raindrops fell steadily across the hull of the Raving Titan where Soron's crew waited patiently for their return.
Nek and Vis sat in the lower engine room of the ship listening placidly to their own thoughts while Nek began laying out the pieces for the data table they'd gone to Tiss'sharl to collect. Near him, Vis sat on the floor with her eyes closed, mumbling to herself. Scrolls with notes and lightsabers lay strewn around her with the orb placed in her lap.
Nek stood back for a moment to examine his work. He'd mostly bought parts needed to build a targeting computer on an old Republic warship; metal casings, crystalline screens, and bundles upon bundles of wires were placed in piles on the floor.
"The pieces are all there, I just need to figure out in what order to put them together." Nek's mumble to himself was nearly lost in the hiss of the rain battering the walls around them.
"I get that." Vis finally sighed and opened her eyes, "I have all these notes and theories about what in the world this orb thingy could be for… But nothing makes sense."
"Kid, nothing's made sense since Cenden joined this crew, and things just got even more confusing with you being here. I feel like I'm just along for the ride at this point." Nek said in a similarly down-trodden tone.
"Well, you're here for a reason. We all have a part to play in this, I just wish I could more about what this is." Vis grumbled holding up the orb, "Any ideas?"
Nek wasn't sure if she was talking to him on that last part but he decided to respond anyway, "If I actually manage to build this data table we can access information from your temple anytime so... that'd be helpful right?"
"But look at all this stuff we figured out back at the temple!" She said picking up one of her many scroll pieces covered it nearly unreadable handwriting, "You said, as playing the part of the orb, 'I try to pick up the data from incoming holocrons but I have no antenna.'" Vis read off the scroll, her freckles shifting to the same deep orange as Nek's eyes, "You continued on to say 'So it can't pick up anything because it hasn't been given the ability to hear the message yet! But once the antennas are installed we could pick up on the data of any holocron in the galaxy!' That sounds so smart doesn't it!?"
"You… Recorded our conversation?" Nek responded hesitantly.
"Yeah! What do you guys think I'm normally doing writing in all these blank scrolls?" Vis asked with a tilt of her head.
"I guess I don't normally pay attention to people unless they're talking to me directly." Nek laughed.
"I think I do that too, so it's ok!" Vis responded jovially.
"But you do have a point. We did figure out a lot from just being in the temple for a few days." Nek pointed out.
"Exactly! And now everything's gone stagnant!" Vis sighed, her freckles growing brighter orange.
Holding the white crystalline orb close to her face, she took a breath.
"Soron's kinda put a lot of faith in me and I act like I know a lot but none of this is an exact science, and I THOUGHT that my mind would be 'opened more to the Force' or something through training with Cenden, but he hasn't even started that, and I've just been feeling really weird since our fight on the train, like there's somewhere I need to be, or something I need to be doing, but I don't know where to go next, and-"
"Vis?" Nek cut her off.
Vis' word cut short, she realized she was rambling and fell silent.
"Let's just uh, focus on what we can do right now, ok?" Nek suggested. The Devaronian stood awkwardly like he didn't quite know what to say, but knew he had to say something.
The girl's freckles shifted to blue as she let out a breath and nodded. Nek moved to sit on the floor near the schematics he'd drawn up for the data table's parts. Vis crawled across the room and plopped down next to him, the orb still in her hand. Looking over the paper, her eyes narrowed.
"What's that part do?" Vis said pointing with her free hand to a central chamber in the data table's main body piece.
"That, in a normal targeting computer, is where the main circuit board for the computer is stored and operates off of the ship's power supply. But sometimes they'd put a power-cell in there for backup power," Nek explained as he held up the blueprints so Vis could get a better look, "But as for what it's used for here, I won't know until-"
The echoing of metallic footsteps cut off Nek's sentence as the tall thin form of BX entered the lower engine room. "Hey! Perfect timing!" Nek proclaimed to the droid before turning back to Vis, "I won't know what's stored in that chamber until BX gets here and shows me some of his scans of the table."
Nek motioned for the droid to come and stand near them. BX silently complied and stood over the pile of parts before projecting data on the scan he'd run back at the temple. The blue transparent light of the hologram unfolded into view from the droid's eyes, displaying an x-rayed scan of the inner workings of the data table with some parts labeled to show they'd been identified, with other pieces flashing red to depict they were foreign objects to the robot's memory banks. One of those pieces flashing in red was the centralized chamber.
Nek noticed this and cursed under his breath, running his red-taloned hand over one of the horns on his head, his finger hesitating to scratch along a chip in his horn, "This is going to make things more difficult." Reaching forward he touched the flashing red image of the hologram to enhance it.
The chamber was the same wide rectangular shape of the targeting system in Nek's schematics, but there wasn't a circuit board or a power cell in there. Instead, there was a cylindrical shape, like some sort of pipe lodged in the chamber's space. "See if I knew what that was, I'd know what's powering this thing. My guess is that this actually was a Republic warship targeting computer that someone scraped together to open holocrons, which is really impressive, don't get me wrong, but that makes the design… difficult to replicate when it seemed the original mechanic was just running off of trial and error testing."
Nek went quiet in thought as he stepped back to examine the piece as a whole. The three in the room thought for a moment while the rain still drummed away outside, the noise reaching a crescendo in the quiet.
BX suddenly made a move. Still projecting the hologram of schematics, the droid bent into Nek's pile and began rearranging the parts to align more symmetrically.
"Hey guys…?" Vis responded to the droid's movement, her spots growing purple, "If the person who made this thing could open holocrons, then why build it at all? What were they trying to do?"
"Maybe they couldn't open holocrons." BX's deep metallic voice suggested, the droid still focused on organizing.
"And not only that but from what I've seen, this thing doesn't just open holocrons, it organizes them by what the original user placed in them." Nek continued, "Those things can hold infinite information from the Force, right? But info can also be placed inside of them. So this table seems to bring up the actual data that was stored in the holocron, not just floating around in its infinite hard drive space… Or something."
Vis' looked wide-eyed at the two, her mouth agape, "You guys are geniuses." She marveled.
"I guess we are," Nek replied.
"I have to write this down!" Vis said nearly belly flopping onto her pile of paper where she began to scribble furiously while mumbling to herself.
The girl lost in her flurry of activity and Nek moving on to begin making notes of his own on his schematics. BX finished his organization of the parts, his gaze looking up to the glowing red projection of the unidentified object.
The old commando droid's circuits began to click. Dropping the data table scan, his attention turned to the girl surrounded by paper and lightsabers. BX bent down, his metal claw-like hand reached and grabbed one of the lightsabers just as a voice from a level up called out,
"HEY! LOOK SHARP! TRANSMISSION COMING THROUGH FROM SORON!" Lerti commanded loudly as the hatch installed above the lower engine room flew open.
The Mandalorian slid down the ladder, and whiter light from the main hall of the ship flooded down in a beam into the dimmer red light the engine room supplied.
BX rose, the lightsaber still in his hand.
At Lerti's order, Nek and Vis stood from their writings hastily and gathered around BX who stood at their attention.
"Alright, connect the transmission BX," Lerti said as she pressed a flashing indicator on her comlink.
They heard the blaster fire before Soron's holographic form even had a chance to come into view.
The Shistavanen captain crouched behind what looked to be metal shipping containers that were serving as cover against the actual rain and the rain of blaster fire bearing down on him.
"HI SORON!" Vis' erupted loudly.
"HI VIS!" Soron yelled back with as big a smile as he could manage while he stood from his cover for a moment to return a few rounds of fire before crouching back, blaster bolts ripping through the air around him, "So! The mission is taking a LOT longer than expected!"
Soron shrank back. Two shot flew by, he just barely dodged them. "How are you all doing?" Soron's voice battered against the explosion of activity around him as he repeatedly blinked the downpour out of his eyes.
Lerti let out a humored scoff, "Did you call just to check up on us? Or was there actually a reason for you calling?"
"Oh, does a captain really need a reason to call his favorite crew members?" Soron said with a smile in his voice as his now stone-cold face turned and focused fire against something that could be heard crying out in pain.
"You need backup, don't you?" Lerti guessed, voice dropping to a complete deadpan tone.
"Well, the mission is a bit more… Complicated! Than expected!" Soron mused, pausing in between certain words to fire a few more rounds.
"ZHIS WOULD BE OVER A LOT SOONER IF I COULD GET A DECENT SHOT IN!" Cenden's angry accent shot into the audio feed.
The old temple guard suddenly backed into view holding his blaster close to his chest. Cenden's blonde hair plastered to his forehead, both he and Soron looked like battered wet rags. Cenden attempted to look over the crate to his back before ducking under a bolt that nearly replaced where his head used to be.
"Soron, Nek and I will be there soon, just send over your location," Lerti interjected.
"Ooo! Cenden! Just use your lightsaber to deflect the bolts!" Vis added.
"I know how sabers work-!"
"Cenden!" Soron cut him off, "Just do it! It's Nar'Shaada! Who's going to care!?" Soron yelled above the storm.
"No one'll care as long as you make sure Grakkus the Hutt doesn't hear about it." Nek pointed out with a smile on his lips. With a silent sneer, Cenden reached into the sopping folds of his armored tunic and produced the severed lightsaber the old Jedi still carried with him.
Flipping the opening backwards, the blade ignited in the gloom. The yellow light shining off the raindrops around them gave the appearance of sunlight from between the clouds. Cenden stood from their hiding spot with the blade running along his forearm in a reverse-grip. The blaster bolts began to deflect off of the saber's yellow light and Cenden crouched, readying himself to launch forward into the fray once more.
"WAIT WAIT! THIS CAN BE LIKE REMOTE TRAINING SESSION!" Vis shouted her suggestion as she watched Cenden seem to jettison into the air and out of the hologram's line of sight. "Dangit! Soron! Tell Cenden to come back and do that again! I wanna try and copy him!" Without waiting for a response Vis spun to grab her saber off the floor, tossing the orb into BX's other free hand.
POP!
With an enormous crackling sound and a flurry of sparks, the message projecting from BX's eyes burst to nothingness.
Vis and Nek screamed and Lerti retreated with raised fists, but all they saw was smoke coming off of his metallic body. The droid went suddenly limp, and fell with a lifeless crash to the ground, the orb and lightsaber still locked in his hands.
All was quiet save for the battering of the rain while the three stood in bewildered silence.
Lerti's comlink suddenly began to blink again, but she made no move to answer it, her eyes making only a sharp glance in Vis' direction. Wide-eyed, the girl slowly shrugged, her freckles changing to the same bright yellow as Cenden's lightsaber, "It wasn't my fault…? I think?"
Lerti's hand went to the comlink, just Soron's voice came through this time. "WHAT HAPPENED!?" Soron yelled, voice still spitting rainwater.
"I think... Vis just broke BX." Lerti responded slowly.
"Sorry!" Vis almost yelped, her hand flying to her mouth for her teeth to munch on.
"WHAT!? Did you just say-" He fired three shots, "BX is broken!? AGAIN?!"
"Wait, something's happening." Nek said as he kneeled down next to BX. The droid's body began to twitch, a few more sparks sputtering out before his eyes exploded with a green light like he was projecting a holo-message.
"Whoa!" Nek jumped back as the light began to take shape.
The green light formed into a perfect sphere which shook and glitched a bit with each jolt of BX's body. The orb seemed to be spinning slowly, like a planet in orbit. It spun only for a few moments before a white dot appeared on one side of the surface. The dot began to blink and spark. BX's deep metallic voice caused the crew's insides to jump as he began to speak, deeper and more machine-like than usual as he started repeating a sequence of numbers and letters.
"Grid Coordinate: S-12, Sectors: 33.4484° N, 112.0740° W…"
"What is going on!? Is something important happening!?" Soron spat over what sounded to be static building up between the comlinks.
"Soron? I'm not sure what's going on, BX is relaying coordinates- Can you hear me? Soron?" Lerti attempted to speak.
"I- Hear- Lert-?" Static consumed the rest of his words. That's when Vis noticed the glow of the orb in BX's hand. Her eyes also shifting over to see the lightsaber in the other. It was far older than any of the others she had seen, even in the temple, covered in rust so its key components were almost entirely obscured.
Freckles shifting to the same bright green of the hologram, Vis gasped and began to shake her hands excitedly as she spun in a circle, "Oh my gosh, OH MY GOSH! It's the orb! It's the kyber crystal! AAHHH! WE CRACKED IT! NEK!"
"That's what's powering the data table," Nek said piecing together Vis' fragmented sentences, "That's the power conduit BX couldn't identify! So, the orb's extracting coordinates off of the kybercrystal in the saber!?"
"I don't know how that's possible but we are back in the game! Thank you, my guide!" Nek and Vis high-fived over BX's twitching body before Lerti cut in, motioning for them to be quiet as she listened intently,
"S-12… These coordinates are on Nar'Shaada." Just as the words left Lerti's mouth, her comlink began blinking again. This time she answered right away, Soron's voice coming through loud and clear this time.
"We got-" He suddenly yelled as the sound of a fist connecting with someone's face could be heard, "Cut off back there. I think the storm is messing with the SIGNAL!" The sound of Soron's fist slamming across another jaw again came over the audio.
Lerti was quiet for a moment. Her eyes shifted thoughtfully to Vis who had bent down to examine the glowing orb before Lerti let her own spheres turn to examine the glowing green image still emitting coordinates in front of them. Her face scrunched thoughtfully before she leaned her finger into the comlink's mic,
"Soron... are you still needing that backup?" Lerti asked tactfully.
"We seem to be doing BETTER at the MOMENT!" Soron said, still fist fighting.
"That's good because I think we have a heading for one of those 'Force mission' things, and it's only a few city blocks away from here."
Soron's struggle continued for a moment before he finally responded back, "Wait, really!? Of course, this happens when I'm NOT there." Soron sighed, "I'll ask how this happened- When I get back- But for now you- Nek, and BX go- Check it out… If you can get him operational that is." Soron spoke very quickly in between huffs as it sounded like he was running.
Lerti eyed the smoke coming off the droid, "We'll see."
"And let me make this clear; no matter what, DO NOT BRING VIS THIS TIME. We don't know where those coordinates lead, I just want you three to scout out what we'll be walking into when we do it for real." Soron instructed rapid fire.
"Aww… I wanna come on a Force mission…" Vis pouted to herself.
Whether Soron could hear it or not, he added, "And Vis. I need you to stay behind and run further examinations on the kyber orb and figure out how these coordinates are being transmitted and why."
Vis instantly brightened up, "Can do!" A pressure built up in the room as Vis reached forward and the orb was wrenched from BX's hand, the Force gently guiding it into her grasp.
"Why thank you." Vis curtsied with her enormous coat to the invisible energy field. Only a moment after the orb left the droid's metal claw, the smoke rising from BX's hull died down enormously, but the droid still lay unmoving.
Noticing the levels of smoke drop, Lerti leaned back to the comlink, "You sure you want us to head somewhere without you? Shouldn't we wait?"
"As much as I'd normally agree with you, Cenden and I have only just made it on location and secured it." Soron explained through suppressed huffing. The static noise that came through the comlink's background had gone silent save for the rain. The fighting had come to a close for now. "The more we place our immediate focus on what it is that we're supposed to be doing with all of this new information the faster we're going to get answers that give us context."
"Alrighty then, as soon as we see if we can get BX up and moving we'll head out-"
As if to the que of Lerti's words, BX's hull suddenly gave another loud "POP!" and Nek that had leaned in to examine the droid nearly jumped to the ceiling in surprise as BX shot into sitting position.
"UNKNOWN ERROR. DIAGNOSTICS INCONCLUSIVE. POSSIBLE MALWARE DETECTED." BX announced, his voice slowly rising in pitch back to it's usual level as the droid's systems restarted.
Lerti smiled, "And we're set to go! We'll keep you updated."
"WHOOP WHOOP! BX is NOT DEAD! Up top!" Vis cheered as she high fived the orb this time.
Another voice suddenly came over the comlink, "Wait, did I just hear that we're not getting backup?"
"Beebs is sending her guys to help us from here, we just needed to secure the tunnel's opening…"
The crew didn't hear the rest as Lerti released her thumb from the cylindrical device's sensor.
"You heard the mission; Nek, BX? You two and I are going to that set of coordinates. Vis, you're staying here to… do whatever it is that you do."
"Yeah I am!" Vis replied as she spun and began collecting her papers and lightsabers off the ground.
A slight whirring could be heard as BX raised his arm to call attention to Lerti, "I actually did not hear my mission statement, I think I may have experienced a glitch in my system… What coordinates are we proceeding to?"
Nek glanced down thoughtfully at the lightsaber still clutched in the droid's hand.
"So… we can only see the coordinates when BX is holding the orb…" Nek gasped, "I just had an idea."
"That's a first. Tell me on the way." Lerti said impatiently, pushing forward as she grabbed Nek and hauled BX to his feet as the three left the dim red light of the engine room, leaving Vis to hum to herself a song that didn't exist.