I wrote a good portion of this chapter while killing time at Jury Duty. Man, our court system is slow. Makes me wish Trial by Box was a real thing. Any trial could be over in the amount of time it takes to, I don't know, watch one episode of Star Vs The Forces of Evil.
Anyway...
Janna and Tom grit their teeth as the Raventalon broke through the cloud layer on the dark side of the unknown planet's atmosphere, struggling to hold the ship steady. With only one useable the engine, the YV-560 freighter was incredibly unstable, bouncing and shaking as it plunged down out of the sky. Janna watched as Tom's left hand found the throttle, slowly reducing power.
"Stop throttling down!" Janna yelled. "We need more power!" She put her hand on top of his and shoved the lever forward. A massive shove came from the port side engine, and it sent the ship into a lateral spiral. Star and Marco screamed.
"Okay, now I understand why you were backing off," Janna said calmly as she decreased the throttle.
"Yeah, I bet!" Tom grunted.
Through the viewscreen, tall but worn mountain peaks covered the landscape. The spinning Raventalon passed below two thousand meters, streaking ever closer to the ground. The pilots strained as they madly hauled on their control yokes, desperately trying both to correct the spiral and pull the ship up from a direct collision course with the ground.
"The controls are all sluggish!" Tom cried.
"I can see that!" Janna groaned. "I have an idea! Pony! Can you switch only my yoke over to repulorlift control?"
The astromech gave an annoyed beeped.
"Well, try!"
PY-HD twittered indignantly and plugged into the computer terminal. A moment later Janna heard the console chime an alert and felt the ship pulling some alternate forces. The repulsorlifts had been activated, and she alone had control over them.
"There we go! Good job, Pony!"
She twisted her control yoke hard and the Raventalon's spiral began to slow. As it did, Tom found he was able to correct the ship's nose dive by utilizing carefully timed bursts of the throttle. As they reached one thousand meters, the Raventalon finally leveled out, though it was still rapidly losing altitude.
"Got it!" Tom exclaimed happily, passing a glance at his pilot. "Good thinking, Janna!"
"Thanks, Lucy. Not bad flying yourself." For a moment, Janna broke her own rule and looked away from the viewscreen down at the repulorlift monitors to see what kind of strain she was putting on them attempting to keep the ship level.
"Well, I did learn from the bes-"
"MOUNTAIN PEAK!" Marco yelled, pointing out the viewscreen at the towering rise in their path.
All four teenagers screamed in terror, and Tom made a sharp maneuver to port with the control yoke. The quick motion threw the ship off of its delicate balance and instead of turning, the freighter rolled over and, while it missed the mountain peak they were about to collide with, the top starboard edge of the hull made extremely hard contact with the side of the next peak over.
"Whoops," Tom cringed as various alarms began blaring. He and Janna fought the controls to level out again for several intense moments as the ground began rushing up to meet them. PY-HD began bleeping frantically.
"We gotta set her down fast!" Janna cried.
"There's no areas of level ground big enough to gently set down in!" Tom cried. "And my console says the inertial dampers are out! If we reduce power to try to slow down, we'll just fall out of the sky!"
Janna went quiet for a moment. "Hey, that gives me an idea! Tom, give it full power and counter hard starboard to keep it level and bring the nose up, then kill the engines!"
"What?! But that'll make us hit our stall speed even faster!"
"Exactly! Just do it!"
Tom nervously put his hand to the throttle. "Okay," he said slowly. "Here it goes."
He shoved the throttle forward and hauled the control yoke back and over to the right, pulling the nose of the Raventalon toward the dark sky.
"What are they planning on doing?" Star tried to ask Marco quietly.
"I have no idea, but I'm terrified. Hold my hand?"
Star didn't respond, nor did she take Marco's hand. Instead she threw her arms around Marco's neck, and he put his arm around her.
"Ready?" Tom yelled to Janna.
"Yup! Kill it!"
Tom slammed the throttle lever back down to idle speed. The Raventalon's forward momentum plummeted until it came to a nearly dead mid-air stop, at which point, it began to fall straight down, though still level, toward a low spot between the many mountain peaks.
The two Jedi Padawans held onto each other for dear life.
"Jannaaaa!" Marco cried out in panic.
"Pony! On three, give me full repulsorlift thrust!"
PY-HD beeped affirmatively.
"One...!" Janna suddenly realized the ship was already closer to the ground than she thought. "TWOTHREENOW!"
The ship jolted slightly as the repulorlifts kicked in and the Raventalon began to decelerate. Worn down mountain peaks rose up past the viewscreen.
"Everybody hang on!" Janna yelled. "This is gonna be rough!"
"Landing gear!" Tom suddenly yelped. "LANDING GEAR!" He leaned back and reached for the control above his head, flipping the lever down.
The landing gear fully deployed just seconds before the Raventalon slammed into the ground. Each leg of the landing gear was equipped with a massive shock absorber to make landings more comfortable. When the ship crashed down, the hydraulic shocks compressed so far that they popped back up like springs, causing the YV-560 to launch off the ground almost six meters. Had they not been strapped in, it would have caused its occupants to fly up off of their seats. Then it hit the ground for the final time, and that's where it came to rest.
The Jedi and smugglers moaned and unstrapped their emergency belts.
"Is everybody alright?" Star asked.
"I'm good," Janna replied. "Tom?"
"That jolt at the end gave me a headache, but otherwise I'm okay. Marco?"
Marco grunted in pain. "I think my shoulder is dislocated again."
Star shook her head in disappointment. "Oh, Marco. Marco, Marco, Marco. What are we gonna do with you?"
Janna looked over at her copilot. "So, Lucy, what do you think? Does that top the list for our wildest landing ever?"
Tom held his aching head as he slowly rose from the copilot's seat. "Definitely. Weirdest landing ever, too." He felt slightly dizzy and sank back into the seat. "Hey, Pony, do you know if-?" Tom stopped mid-sentence as he looked toward PY-HD's computer terminal and found that the astromech droid was no where to be seen. "Hey, where's Pony Head?"
They looked all around the cockpit. Marco pointed to the ceiling with his good arm. "Found her."
Being significantly lighter than the humanoids on board, PY-HD had launched off the floor when the ship crashed into the ground, and the sharpened spike on atop its dome had pierced the ceiling and become stuck. The astromech was unamused, and gave an annoyed whistle.
"I got her," Star said, raising her arm. Using the Force, she extracted PY-HD's horn from the ceiling and gently lowered the droid to the floor. It beeped appreciatively. Star turned her attention to Marco. "C'mon, Marco, your turn."
Marco turned white in the face. "Oh, no. Please don't-!" He fell out of his seat onto the floor as he tried to back away. "Star! No!"
Star closed her eyes and reached out with both hands. Marco screamed in pain yet again as Star popped his shoulder back in with the Force for the umpteenth time. PY-HD bleeped something that sounded to Marco like amused laughter, and he scowled to himself.
Janna, meanwhile, was looking at the sensor readouts. "Scanners say the atmosphere is breathable. Tom, you and I should get dressed so we can go outside and take a look at what kind of damage we're dealing with, and try to figure out where the heck we are."
"Probably a good idea," Tom agreed, looking down at his nightclothes.
The Raventalon's crew left the cockpit, leaving the two Jedi alone with PY-HD, who was busily checking the sensor readouts for the ship's various systems.
Marcos sat down in the pilot's seat, scanning the landscape outside the ship's forward viewscreen. The entire world as far as he could see was peppered with relatively tall but worn down mountain peaks, the areas between them made of relatively flat igneous rock. Sand drifts lay wherever an abrupt change in the rock height created a backstop to catch it, and clouds of loose dust blew about in the air.
"Star...I don't like this place."
She sat down beside him, observing their surroundings for herself. "Do you feel that?"
Marco breathed in deeply, trying to focus. "I feel something. I don't really know what it is, but I know I do not like it. Why, what's it feel like to you?"
"It feels...cold..." Star said slowly, giving a shiver. "And dark. Reallllllly dark."
Tom suddenly reappeared in the cockpit entrance, dressed in his usual outfit and leather jacket, and looking rather pale in the face. "Been real nice knowing you guys," he said shakily.
Star raised a confused eyebrow. "Why?"
Tom hung his head in despair. "Janna is going to kill me. Remember when I made that stupid move to avoid that mountain and we sort of side-swiped that other mountain?"
"Uh-Huh?" they chorused.
"Well...it kinda...did a lot of damage to the hull."
Marco exchanged a nervous glance with Star before asking, "How much damage?"
"That...that's a lot of damage," said Star, pointing to the area in question.
The group stood on the ground outside the Raventalon, looking up at a gouge that had been torn into the upper edge of the hull on the ship's starboard side, creating a hole that exposed the cabin to the planet's atmosphere.
Janna had not yet said a word. She just stared nonchalantly at her damaged spacecraft through half-closed eyes. PY-HD snickered a few various noises which Tom understood as "You dead, boy."
"Janna, I am so, so, sorry-" Tom began, but Janna held up her hand and cut him off.
"It's not your fault, Tom. If we were flying under normal conditions you never would have made a dumb mistake like that. Heck, I didn't even know if what I was doing was going to work. I could have smashed the ship into a mountain side just as easily as you did." She placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder and smiled at him. He managed a small smile back. "But it is coming out of your paycheck."
"Wait, wha-?!"
"Yeah, hey, not to interrupt," Star cut in, "but are we, like, stranded here now? If we couldn't escape the planet's gravity with just one engine, how are we gonna get off this rock? And is that giant hole even fixable?"
"Sure it's fixable," Janna said. "We just gotta find some durasteel to patch it with. Not a big deal. Just time consuming." She noticed a smooth rock about the size of her palm in the thin layer of silt at her feet and picked it up. She tossed it back and forth between her hands as she continued. "And now that we aren't in space anymore, we should be able to get at least one of the other engines repaired, probably the center one, and that oughta give us enough power to get back in the air." She tossed the rock over her shoulder. "We are definitely going to be stuck here for a while, though."
"Great," Marco said sarcastically. "First lost in space, now stranded on an unknown planet. Just keeps getting better."
About an hour later, Tom and PY-HD joined the others in the galley where the rest of the group was munching on supply bars. "Well, Pony Head finished her scan of the planet surface," he announced.
"And?" Janna urged.
"And I have absolutely no good news. Even without a life-form scanner, there's nothing to suggest anyone actually lives here."
"So it's totally uninhabited?" Marco asked.
"More like abandoned," Tom replied, sitting down beside Janna and grabbing a supply bar. "She picked up a bunch of structures that are definitely not natural formations, suggesting someone lived here at some point, but-" He took a bite of his supply bar and finished his sentence as he chewed. "Not anymore."
"Well, if there are structures of any kind, there might be something we can salvage to use to patch up that giant hole," Janna said.
PY-HD bleeped urgently.
"Oh, right," Tom said. "Thanks, Pony, I did forget. Pony picked up something else, too. There's a big sandstorm coming this way. Won't be too long before it gets here, and it looks like it's probably gonna last ten or twelve hours."
"Hmm...considering the ship isn't airtight, we should probably find some place to take shelter," Janna said.
"Couldn't we just go down in the cargo hold or something?" Marco asked. "The hole only has the upper deck exposed, and the hold has airtight doors, right?"
"Yeah, but this ship doesn't have life support in the cargo hold if the airtight doors are closed," Tom explained. "We'd suffocate."
"Oh."
Janna took another bite of her supply bar. "How far is the closest structure you picked up, Pony?" she asked through the mouthful of food.
The droid bleep-blooped a reply.
"'Couple klicks?" She stood up from the table. "Alright, let's head out then."
They threw some food into the storage compartment of Tom's jumpspeeder and Star, Marco and Janna each held a rolled blanket. Marco held Tom's as well so that the demonicite could drive the speeder bike.
With Tom flying, Janna and Star sat on the back behind him. Marco balanced himself on the front air foil, leaning back against the handlebar for balance. Star lifted PY-HD up with the Force, flipped the droid on its back, and then floated her close enough to the rear of the speeder for the powerful electromagnets on the astromech's feet to attach.
"All set?" Tom asked.
"Not particularly," Marco squeaked from where he balanced on the speeder's front. "This doesn't feel safe at all."
With the bike far over its weight capacity, Tom kept to a moderate pace as they followed the route PY-HD had plotted out for them. Even at a relatively slow speed, their destination was not far, and it did not take them long to arrive.
The structure had been carved into the side of a vertical rock face, an ornate facade bordering the massive hinged double doors that towered over the teen's heads.
"Wowwww," Star marveled as they approached.
Janna was excited. "Being stuck here may actually be pretty interesting after all!"
As Tom slowed the bike to a stop at the foot of the doors, the breeze began to pick up, swirling more dust and sand into the air. The girls climbed off the back, and when Marco looked behind them after hopping down off the front of the speeder, the sky behind them was completely blackened by the dust cloud that was barreling toward them. "C'mon! We gotta get inside!"
"I got the door!" Star yelled, raising her right hand. She pulled open the heavy left door using the Force, and Tom drove the bike inside the structure, the others jogging in behind. When they were all safely in, Star quickly pulled the huge door shut against the impending storm. A loud boom accompanied the closing of the door, reverberating through the inside of the structure, and leaving them in pitch darkness.
"Yikes, it's dark in here!" Tom yelped, his voice echoing in the large space.
"Marco, light!" Star urged, pulling her lightsaber from her bag and igniting it, flooding the chamber with emerald light.
"Right! On it!" Marco ignited his lightsaber, as well, and the two glowing swords together provided a decent amount of illumination.
PY-HD whistle-beeped, a tone followed a moment later by a loud clang as it deactivated its magnetic feet and dropped from the back of the speeder bike onto the rock floor. Tom quickly pulled the droid upright and brushed some dust from its dome. It twittered appreciatively and activated the flashlight in its dome.
Now able to see, the gang left their blankets on the jump speeder's seat and took in their surroundings while the wind howled outside. The chamber in which they stood stretched high above their heads, even taller than the entryway doors, hewn from the rock of the cliff side. Simple but beautifully carved stone columns supported the ceiling, and the stone floor had been etched to resemble tile.
"Whoa...what is this place?" Star wondered aloud.
Janna grinned excitedly. "I don't know, but I love it. This is one of the coolest places I've ever been." She ran a hand over one of the stone support columns. "I might move here."
Star shivered.
"You okay, Star?" Marco asked.
"This place is...cold..."
Marco immediately started to slide an arm out of his hoodie. "You want to wear my hoodie?"
"Not that kind of cold. Like...'Force' cold." Then she quickly added, "As long as you're offering though, I am really regretting this sleeveless dress."
Marco chuckled and handed his lightsaber to Janna as he shed his hoodie and draped it over Star's shoulders. Star then handed her own weapon to Marco so she could slide her arms into the sleeves. "Wow, you weren't kidding! This is cozy!"
It took Marco a moment to tear his gaze away from the sight of his best friend wearing his hoodie, as, despite their situation, he couldn't help but think that she looked absolutely adorable.
When he did, he handed Star's lightsaber back to her and turned to retrieve his own from Janna, but Captain Ordonia was no longer standing behind him. She had wandered off to the deep end of the chamber, using Marco's lightsaber to illuminate something carved into the wall.
"Hey, guys! Check this out!"
Her four companions hurried over to where she stood. Before them was what appeared to be another set of double doors carved into the wall, but far shorter than the entryway doors, only standard size. They were bordered by more intricately carved stone work.
"I can't figure out how they open," Janna said.
"It just looks like part of the wall to me," Tom said.
"Yeah, there's no hinges for them to swing on," Marco added, "and if they were sliding doors they would be recessed into the wall."
Star placed the palm of her unoccupied left hand against the door and closed her eyes, reaching out with the Force to feel the construction. "There's definitely empty space behind it," she said, "like there's another room on the other side."
"Any idea how to open it?" Janna asked.
"Um..." Star's brow furrowed as she concentrated. "I sense something...gears...a counterweight system...there's a mechanism...it's very intricate..." She slid her palm over the cold rock, her eyes still closed, trying to follow the door's inner workings in her mind. Her fingers slowly passed over the door trim and landed on the flat area of the wall beside it. "It's here. Inside the wall." The others watched as her fingers spread out over the stone and her face contorted slightly as she concentrated.
Suddenly the doors slid backward into the wall and folded back, revealing the space behind them. Janna eagerly stepped through the doorway, holding Marco's lightsaber aloft to see. The space was only twice as wide as the doorway and consisted of a short landing before becoming a wall-to-wall set of stairs leading down deeper beneath the mountain. "Awesome! C'mon!" she said excitedly as she started onto the first step.
PY-HD bleeped.
"Yeah, I'm with Pony," Tom said. "No thank you. If you want to go fumbling around in the dark, go right ahead, but we had to wake up in the middle of the night to make an emergency landing and I would like to go back to sleep." He and PY-HD headed back toward where they'd left the speeder bike.
"Be my guest," Janna said, motioning for the two Padawans to follow her with Marco's lightsaber. "C'mon, you two."
"Don't we get a say in this?" Marco asked as she started down the steps.
"Nope."
"Can I at least have my lightsaber back?"
"No."
Marco shook his head as Janna got further down the stairs ahead of them. "Star, I've been meaning to ask you this for a long time: Why do we even hang out with Janna?"
Star placed her lightsaber in Marco's hand. "Just take mine. Consider it a trade for your hoodie."
"Oh." Marco smiled at her. "Thanks, Star."
"You two coming or what?" Janna's voice echoed back up the stairs. She was already twenty steps down.
Star stepped down onto the first stair...
...and then retracted her foot as if she'd been burned. She shivered violently.
"Star? What's wrong?" Marco asked.
"It is realllllly dark down there."
"Well, yeah, I see that, but we have a light."
"Force-dark, Marco! Force-dark!"
"Oh. Right."
"I've never felt anything like it before! It's almost as if-!" She fell silent.
"'As if' what?"
"As if a lot of people...were murdered down there."
"C'mon, guys! Hurry up!" Janna's voice echoed up the stairs once again. They could barely see her, seeming to have reached the bottom of the steps, the green glow of Kit Fisto's former lightsaber in her hand dim in the distance.
The two Padawans exchanged a nervous look before following Janna down the stairs.
"Well, Pony, looks like it's just you and me," Tom said as he laid down on his blanket on the stone floor.
The astromech gave a condescending bleep and then went into low power mode, it's flashlight blinking out as it did, leaving Tom in complete darkness.
"Pony?"
The droid remained silent. The only sound was the wind of the sandstorm howling outside.
"Wow, it's dark."
Janna had disappeared from sight long before Star and Marco reached the bottom of the steps. Fortunately, there was only direction she could have gone. A doorway opened up in the wall to the left. Through it was a small, square room with a much lower ceiling than upstairs. On the opposite side of the room was an identical doorway leading out, and both adjacent walls had shelves carved into them. The shelves were packed with ancient-looking leather-bound books. On the wall beside the doorway they stood in was a small writing desk and chair, both covered with a layer of dust.
Janna was crouched down in front of a bookshelf, holding Marco's lightsaber over her head to illuminate the pages of one such book that she had open on the floor. She looked up when her companions entered. "There you guys are. I was starting to think you'd somehow managed to get lost on the stairs."
"What did you find there, Janna?" Star asked.
"I think these are all old record-keeping books of some kind," she replied, gesturing to the shelves with the blade of Marco's lightsaber, "but I can't read it. It isn't written in Aurebesh or High Galactic. I can't even figure out what language this is."
Before either Jedi Padawan had a chance to inspect the flimsiplast pages of the book for themselves, Janna closed it and pushed it back into its place on the shelf. "Boring. Let's see what else is here." She stood up from the floor and the three walked to the opposite doorway.
Upon seeing the room on the other side of the doorway, Star instantly froze.
The room was easily larger than the one which held the books, and mostly empty, save for a raised alter-like table in the center.
"Star, what's up?" Janna asked, looking at her friend's suddenly pale face. "You look like you've just seen a ghost."
Star swallowed hard. "A lot of people were killed in here."
The two Jedi were certainly not expecting Janna's reaction. "Cool!" She was met with a pair of very confused and somewhat disturbed expressions. "Don't tell me you've never wanted to see the inside of an execution chamber. That's what I'm assuming this is."
"Not particularly, no," Marco said.
Janna snickered and headed into the room. Star looked at Marco uncomfortably before following.
Janna was eagerly searching the floor with the glow from the laser sword.
"Whatcha looking for there?" Star asked.
"Blood," she answered very matter-of-factly.
"Oh, greaaaaat," chuckled Star nervously.
As the girls stuck together near the alter in the center of the space, Marco's attention was drawn to another open doorway at the back of the room, on the far left wall. Holding Star's lightsaber out in front of him, he cautiously entered. A long corridor ran the length the adjoining room, with about ten doors on the right wall. Each door had a tiny square hole for a window. Marco peered through the first one. The lightsaber's emerald glow did not filter in through the small hole very well and he couldn't see much, but the shackles bolted to the stone wall told him all he needed to know.
These are prison cells.
"So Star," Marco could hear Janna saying as he returned to the other room, "how can you tell that people have been killed in here?"
"I have no idea, actually, I just...can feel it."
Something on the wall beside him caught Marco's eye. Something was inscribed on the wall, obscured under the layer of dust that clung to the rock. He brushed the dust away with his hand and held Star's lightsaber close for a good look.
His eyes went wide, and his heart rate quickened. "Staaaaar!" he called, panic in his voice. "We're on Moraband!"
"What?" she called back.
"We're on Moraband!"
"What?"
"We're on-!" He yelled louder.
"Moraband, Marco, I heard you. I meant I wanted you to explain."
"This planet is the birthplace of the Sith!" Marco cried as he hurried over to join them by the alter.
"Awesome!" Janna exclaimed. Once again, Captain Ordonia's exclamation was met with confused looks from her friends. "What? The Sith are so much weirder and creepier than the Jedi, and that makes them super interesting. How do you know that's where we are?"
"The inscription on the wall over there. It's written in Massassi."
"Massawho now?" Star asked.
"Massassi. It's an ancient language that was used by the Sith thousands and thousands of years ago. I bet that's what those books in the other room there are written in."
"You can read it?" Janna asked hopefully.
Marco shook his head. "No, I just know what the letters look like."
"So this is an execution chamber!" Star said.
"There are prison cells on the other side of the wall over there," Marco said, pointing, "So, yeah, definitely."
Star suddenly gasped as an idea stuck her. "That's why I can sense so much death in here! I bet most of the prisoners they were executing were Jedi!"
For a moment, they all fell silent. Too far underground to hear the sandstorm raging outside, the chamber was eerily quiet. The only sound was the soft hum of the lightsabers.
"I, uh, think that's enough exploration for one day, huh?" Star said uncomfortably. "I'd kinda like to get some sleep, too."
"Yeah, you're probably right," Janna said, "I'm tired, too." She sounded disappointed, only reluctantly agreeing. "C'mon, let's go back up."
As Janna led the way out of the chamber, Marco felt Star suddenly take his hand. She said nothing, and so he remained silent, secretly equally as comforted by her hand in his as she was by his in hers.
When they had quietly rolled out their bedding beside Tom and PY-HD and turned on the speeder bike's headlamp to stave off the complete pitch blackness of the room, Janna quickly fell into a deep sleep. Star, meanwhile, was too uneasy to sleep, her mind still fixated on the staggeringly cold Dark Side energy she had felt downstairs. Eventually, she rolled onto her side where she could see Marco's back a few feet away. She remembered she was still wearing his hoodie. She pulled the hood up over her head and wriggled her arms out of the sleeves, pulling them inside the garment close to her body. It gave her a feeling of security, and as she watched Marco's body slowly rise and fall with his steady breathing, her mind was quieted and she dozed off to sleep.
Marco, however, was not sleeping. He was actively trying to stay awake. When the others had fallen silent and Marco lay still on his bed roll, he was suddenly far more cognitive of the Dark Side's presence on this planet. It made him even more afraid to slip into unconsciousness for fear of the recurring dream he knew would invade his mind. He chose a spot on the wall and stared at it, focusing on his breathing. It was a trick Kit Fisto had taught him, a meditation technique to rest one's mind when it was imperative to stay awake and alert. Marco was pretty sure the Jedi Master had meant it to be used in times of battle, when one knew the enemy could attack at any moment but one desperately needed rest, but he figured avoiding a terrifying nightmare was also a good reason to use it.
All through the night, Marco continued his mediation, until he suddenly became aware that the wind's eerie howl had disappeared.
I'm thankful that, as of the time of writing this, Moraband does not have very much content that is considered to be canon, because it allows me to take some material from Legends and blend it to my own uses. The canonical stuff will be utilized in the coming chapters, however.
No one who left a review correctly guessed the planet, but I would just like to say a big thank you to everyone who has left/does leave (a) review(s) on this here story of mine. Knowing that you guys are enjoying my tale keeps me motivated to continue writing it, and I appreciate you taking the time to give feedback.
Anyway, stay tuned for some...stuff...in the next few chapters.