KAYWANTHA
by Vicki Vance
Summary: A light mission for Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan turns out to require more involvement than originally planned. Ranges from deep drama to quip humor.
Rated PG-13
Disclaimer: I own nothing, so I am making no profit from this.
Author's note: You get a golden balloon if you can tell me what the meaning of a certain planet's name is. Here's a clue: it has nothing to do with Star Wars.
Pikinel Roemohn tapped a bass beat with the toe of her boot as the turbolift dropped into the lower levels of Coruscant. She hummed the part of the modified kloo horn for a few moments before she realized she was annoying the Hell out of the looming cloaked Twi'lek beside her. She stopped, missing the music with all her heart.
She was nervous, also. She didn't know if she'd run into the Jedi as she went back to the Back Beat Rock Club to find Kaywantha. She knew there was no way she could explain herself if they caught her and she knew she could never outrun them. She prayed to the elders for a safe deliverance to her place of work.
All this trouble, she thought angrily, and I didn't even do anything! As far as she was concerned, it was all her father's fault. Deep down inside her heart, the part she refused to see and make public, she was sorry for endangering her father. Consciously, she couldn't believe he could be so impossibly stupid and not see what the rebels saw. Honestly, he was denser than five cubic centimeters of durasteel.
She stuck her hand inside her fur-lined designer jacket and felt the hold-out blaster strapped to her thigh. She watched the Twi'lek leave into the dark mists of the underworld of Coruscant that literally hadn't seen daylight for centuries. The door slid shut and continued to take her down, down, down, into the bowels of the planet.
She felt the first grip of fear chilling her like a badly-flavored juri juice smoothie. She pulled her furs closer against her body and sang the first verse of "When Dreamers Awaken" and tapped her foot.
Being late in the night, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan didn't have to deal with the guard they didn't like as they went to the senator's quarters. They knocked on the doors and waited. There was no answer.
Qui-Gon tapped the opening command into the panel and found it wasn't locked. The door slid open and the Jedi peered in cautiously. Everything seemed to be in order, except for Rebine Roemohn huddled on the floor by the wide windows, gazing dumbly at the twinkling lights of the city.
"Senator," Qui-Gon called, thinking he was having a medical emergency, and walked quickly into the room with Obi-Wan close at his heels. "What's happened?"
"My baby's gone," he said softly.
Qui-Gon studied him for a moment, reaching out with the Force. He felt no presence other than the senator's. He turned to Obi-Wan.
"She's gone back to the club," he said quietly.
"The jewel was there all along," Obi-Wan said. "That's why she's left again."
"But if the jewel was there and hidden all along why did she go back tonight?" Qui-Gon asked. "Why the rush?"
"She hates me," Roemohn said to himself. "My own child hates me deeper than the very depths of this cold, dead planet."
The Jedi stared at him for a few moments, suddenly realizing what they hadn't noticed earlier.
"Why does she hate you so?" Qui-Gon asked.
"Do they need a reason?" he asked bitterly. "Teenagers will effortlessly rip out your heart and tromp on it for all the galaxy to see."
"She needs a reason to hate you," Obi-Wan said defensively. "Surely, you can think of something."
The senator cocked his head in thought, staring out the window. He shrugged and said, "Maybe my child despises me because I tried to discover if Kaywantha was real or not."
"What does Kaywantha mean again?" Qui-Gon asked. He knew that whether the jewel was genuine or not wasn't the problem.
"Well, in present-day Mebyli it means 'jewel of the community'," he said. "In an older dialect it meant 'jewel of the universal peace'. Much like your Force, in a sense. I mean, I suppose I really don't know, not being a Jedi and all-"
"We're going to go get your daughter back," Qui-Gon said quickly. He sensed a distant prickly feeling, like a dark foreshadowing he could make about someone else. Someone like Pikinel.
He turned and began to leave. Obi-Wan offered a hand to the senator and helped him up.
"We'll bring her back," he assured him, walking him to a couch.
"Obi-Wan!" Qui-Gon called rather sharply. Obi-Wan jogged after him. Qui-Gon was eager to get going and was somewhat impatient.
"I sense a far away but rapidly approaching danger," he told Obi-Wan, not slowing his brisk walk.
Obi-Wan stretched his senses out far and felt a gentle tingle of moving danger.
"Pikinel may be in trouble," he said, breaking into a run after Qui-Gon. "What am I saying 'may'?"
The neon lights that boasted the title Bass Beat Rock Club weren't on. There was no sound emitting from the building. No one was there. It was dark, quiet and still.
Pikinel opened the squeaky back door and stepped into the backstage area. It was completely dark inside and slightly creepy. She sang a couple lines of "If You're Going to Kill Yourself, Please Make it Easy to Clean Up" to cheer herself up. The verses from the humorously morbid song did not cheer her up as much as she had hoped.
She flipped on the light and the main dance room was illuminated. It was still odd because the room was usually swamped with teens and dark with flashing lights. Her steps echoed through the empty air as she struggled with a ladder. She hefted it over to the middle of the floor and set it up. She climbed carefully up, up to the hanging mirror-covered globe next to the ceiling. It was pretty big, slightly larger than the size of a computer monitor and covered in little mosaic pieces of mirror. She flipped open a little area of it that was loose and reached inside and her fingers closed around a smooth, cold rock.
She pulled Kaywantha out of its hiding place and studied the gem. Somewhat heavy and bright green like emerald, it was nicely faceted and pretty to look at.
Pikinel licked her lower lip. All she had to do now was climb down the ladder and run away again. Maybe to another club, or to a bar; someplace so grubby her father's search party would never like to find her.
The very first part of her plan, getting down the ladder, went very awry. Pikinel got the sensation of going down a very bumpy turbo lift. She instinctively grabbed the the globe for support and the ladder crashed to the floor. Kaywantha slipped from her fingers like wet noodles and she looked down to see seven Mebyli rebels, all armed with blasters. One picked up the jewel from the floor and pocketed it. He grinned up at her.
"Thank you for relinquishing Kaywantha," he said smugly, watching amusedly as Pikinel clambered onto the globe so she could sit on it. "You could have just done it earlier and we wouldn't have had to-"
Pikinel whipped out her own blaster and pointed it at the ingrown hair between his eyebrows. He froze and the painful growth on his face suddenly became the least of his worries.
"You know, Geff," a rebel said quickly, his eyes fixed on Pikinel. "She can take out one, maybe two of us before we can take her down."
"You knew going into this that there'd be risk," the rebel with the ingrown hair said.
"Is it worth it, though?"
"Vichnar!" he snapped, slapping the coward across the face, taking his eyes off Pikinel. She knew what he'd just said and it was a naughty thing indeed.
"You are not worthy to be part of this retrieval!" he barked at the other. He returned his attention to Pikinel, his blaster drawn.
"Here's what we'll do," he said calmly. "We will leave with the jewel and no injuries, Hell, we'll even put the ladder back up, or we will leave and you will be dead. You are standing in the way of peace and we will kill you for it."
A voice, one the coward recognized easily as the voice that haunted his nightmares, spoke from behind them.
"Lower your weapons," it said.
Qui-Gon felt the power cells of his lightsaber humming beneath his fingertips. He saw in the corner of his eye Obi-Wan's blue lightsaber powered up and ready.
He sensed surprise, recognition, fear and stubbornness from the rebels. In some he felt confidence which he naturally assumed was because there was now seven of them, not three.
The two parties and Pikinel at the ceiling just stared at one another until Qui-Gon said, "I repeat: lower your weapons."
There was a brief pause and then the leader yelled, "For peace and elders!" and opened fire on them.
Like a coordinated, free-flowing dance, Qui-Gon blocked the blaster bolts. He ducked and spun, returning one to it's shooter and catching him on his hand. He yelped and dropped his blaster, muttering "Not again." Repetition of injury didn't amuse him.
Qui-Gon senses warned him of all danger well in advance and he wasn't touched at all by the blaster fire and neither was Obi-Wan. They were well-accustomed to fighting and compared to their last mission this was a piece of Squib pta and juri fruit cake with lots of Bakuran whipped cream on top.
But there was someone else who was against the rebels that wasn't accustomed to fighting. Pikinel thought the Jedi were doing pretty well, but she didn't know how well they could handle the fight; she didn't know their limits. Besides, she had become rather fond of them. It'd be heart-breaking, she imagined, to witness that big, tall, strong and graceful man fall with a life-stopping blaster wound or to see the young man with his whole future ahead of him to crumple to the floor and not get up.
She took careful aim and fired her blaster.
The rebel she shot jerked and screamed, sinking to his knees and clutching the wound in his shoulder. Another rebel noticed she had joined the fight and returned fire.
Obi-Wan heard Pikinel scream and saw her slip off the globe and thud to the floor. He sucked in a breath and circled the rebels, towards where Pikinel lay.
In a single, elegant stroke, Qui-Gon destroyed the remaining blasters. The rebels, realizing one of their own was down and they were defenseless, tried to make a break for the door. Qui-Gon reached out to the Force and the door slammed shut and the lock clicked. He stood over them and gazed down at them with his piercing blue eyes.
"Who has the jewel?" he asked coolly.
All five rebels pointed to Geff, who, looking like he was disgracing the elders he so worshipped, handed the jewel to him. Qui-Gon put it in one of the pouches on his utility belt.
"Pikinel," Obi-Wan said over her. She was awake, her face twisted in pain. She clutched her thigh and whined softly. Obi-Wan quickly ripped open a sealed packet of bacta and poured it onto the charred flesh.
Qui-Gon knelt beside the fallen rebel while his comrades looked untrustingly on. Blood oozed from the wound on his left shoulder. Qui-Gon gently examined it, assessing damage and proceeded to treat it. The rebel's breathing was heavy and he looked at Qui-Gon with sick, horrified eyes.
"I won't hurt you," he assured him as he squeezed bacta into the hole. He put gauze and bandage on it, pressing firmly on the wound, bringing the Force to bear. He calmed the rebel, clotted the blood and finally withdrew from him.
"He'll be all right," he told the other rebels as they hovered beside their friend. "Considering he gets to a hospital as soon as possible. He'll need treatment and- Give him air, please." he said as his friends crowded around him.
He shook his head and then walked over to Pikinel and Obi-Wan. He'd helped her to sit and had just finished wrapping bandages around her thigh. Qui-Gon felt the ripples in the Force as Obi-Wan did on Pikinel what Qui-Gon had done on the rebel. Pikinel was in shock, but much better than the rebel on the floor.
Qui-Gon took out his comlink and dialed up the emergency number.
"Nine-nine-nine emergency," a woman on the other end of the line sounded calm. "What is the emergency?"
"A man of about late twenties had been shot in the shoulder and a girl of sixteen has also sustained blaster injury to the thigh. We are in the Bass Beat Rock Club. We will remain calm until an ambulance arrives."
The woman on the other end of the line, somewhere between being surprised and thankful for his unusual calmness, said, "Of course. Help is on the way."
To Be Concluded…