Forests Surrounding the Jedi Temple, Shedu Maad; 44 ABY
It felt like they were back on Abeloth's planet, though it was not quite as humid. The Jedi Academy on Shedu Maad, now turned full-fledged Temple, had been erected in an isolated location to prevent unwanted attention towards the students. For many kilometers around the sanctuary, a dense coniferous forest had been cultivated as a natural shield. It was in that forest that Ben and Vestara now found themselves an hour after leaving the Temple. They had purposely deviated their course after hiding themselves to prevent the Jedi from tracking them. They had several things in their favor. The Masters wouldn't send out anyone less than a knight, and only those in groups, no doubt as a result of their bout with Octa Ramis and Seha Dorvald. That limited the resources the Temple could muster at the moment. They could only hope to have made it to the spaceport before too long.
Arm slung over Vestara's shoulder for balance, Ben felt a shock of pain race up his leg when he accidentally put too much pressure on his sprained ankle. "You know, we could have gotten a speeder before we left," he said it knowing she'd have a snappy comeback. At least repartee made the journey go more quickly.
"Yeah, and I'm sure the rest of the Jedi would have patiently waited while we took our pick of the motor pool."
He couldn't help it, the response had left his lips as soon and it popped into his mind and he knew it was the wrong thing to say. "I don't know, you could have always smiled and said please. It is the magic word."
Her outer bravado seemed to slip, her mouth couldn't really do anything other than smile, but it thinned. The tip of her tentacle, which had been holding him up, bowed in agitation. "I suppose I could have," her choir voice took on a dull edge.
"Hey," he said, slowing them down to a more leisurely gait by taking smaller hops. "You know I didn't mean it that way. Why don't we take a rest, no sense burning ourselves out before we get to the port."
They'd arrived in a small clearing. Gingerly setting Ben down on a fallen log, Vestara started looking around the ground for something. "Ves?" He asked, she was apparently taking the transformation harder than he'd thought. "What are you doing?"
"As long as we're stopping, we may as well take the time to make you a splint."
Other than a few rotten chunks of bark, there was nothing. Deciding that 'make' would be the operative word here, Vestara drew her stolen lightsaber and took a chunk out of the fallen tree. She made short work of the newly cut stump and sliced two thin boards out of it for either side of his ankle. Ben watched silently, she didn't look like she wanted to talk, and such a person wielding a laser-sword was a pretty good deterrent.
She ripped a strip of homespun fabric off of Ben's cloak to tie the splint to his ankle and found the flaw in her plan. Try as she might, she couldn't manage to tie a knot with one hand and a worm-like appendage. She'd tried and failed a couple times, growing increasingly frustrated each time and spurning Ben's help, before roaring in rage and taking her anger out on one of the still-standing pines. A rain of needles fell over them and Ben decided silence wasn't doing any good.
"Ves," he said it softly, she reluctantly turned. If her eyes had still held irises, he knew they'd be yellow. "Come here, please."
He patted the spot next to him on the log, and after a pause she joined him. "Is this what she went through?" She asked, they both knew who they were talking about.
"Perhaps," Ben admitted, though they had no real way of knowing, "but there's a lot of differences, differences that I think mean that you won't become her."
"Such as?"
"She was alone, she had to live by herself for who knows how long. You've got me." He said the last part on a lighter note, with an overly smug smile to try an add an air of levity to the conversation.
Her body stayed completely still, but her eyes found his. "How could you still want that, look at me!" Her palp arched in revulsion. "I'm a monster."
"You think I fell for a pretty face?" Ben asked, "You're more than that, Ves. Always have been."
He reached over and cupped her cheek, though it was split with her enlarged maw. She wasn't sure what to say, so she didn't.
"Now, why don't you hold the sides while I tie it?" Ben invited. In no time at all, the splint had been tightened and tied in place. "You don't have to do everything alone, you know. I'll be there, to do the things together that we couldn't apart."
She still wasn't quite used to hearing that. In the Tribe, no one else would help you, usually they'd try to undermine for their own gain. "I—thanks, Ben."
"Now that we've gotten a chance to rest, I think we'd better get going. There's a few things we need to do before we get off this planet." Ben used the Force to break off a branch of medium thickness and a split at the end to use as a make-shift crutch. He shrugged off his cloak and stood. "Wrap this around yourself. Until we find a way to undo it, we need to be as inconspicuous as possible."
Vestara donned the dark brown robe and raised the hood over her head. "I think 'inconspicuous' is a relative term here, it's not like the son of Grand Master Skywalker can go slumming without someone noticing. Especially with your own distinct look."
They both knew she meant the eyes, they were quite unique now, and a real problem with it would come to interacting with other people. Something like that would really stick in someone's memory and they couldn't stop people from noticing forever, they still needed to hide their presence. "That's the first thing we need to do. We need clothing. And glareshades, that'll at least let us fit in. They we can get a transport off planet."
"And we pay for all that how?" Vestara asked. She let him put his arm over her shoulder again and they started walking more easily now that Ben didn't need to focus so much on not moving his ankle.
"Um, make that the second thing we do, number one is now 'get money.'"
"And food?"
Ben groaned. "Are you enjoying this?"
"Just a bit."
Council Chambers, Jedi Temple; 44 ABY
It had been a disaster. No one had been killed, a miracle considering how easily Vestara had fought her way through to Ben once she'd gotten out of the Ysalamiri influence of the holding cells. Octa Ramis had taken the worst damage of anyone, but that was limited to a concussion. When she had woken up, she was quite dismayed to find out that if she and Seha had been able to hold Ben and Vestara a few additional minutes, more Knights had been headed their way.
"We must find them." Saba said, after the Council had convened. Knights had been sent out into the forest surrounding the Temple, but had thus far been unable to locate either of them. "Hunterz catch prey by knowing where they will be, so where are they headed?"
"Assuming what they were telling us before they escaped is true, then some way to stop Abeloth." Cilghal said, "but that is somewhat vague, not an actual destination."
"Could they know about the Ten Knights?" Kyp Durron asked. After the assault on the Abeloth avatars had been successful and Luke had recovered, the Council had tasked ten Jedi Knights to scour the galaxy for the Mortis Monolith, a gateway they could use to recover a dagger reputed to be able to kill powerful Force entities.
"I never told them," Luke said, "I felt it wouldn't be a good idea given the situation."
The Yuzzem Master, Barratk'l furrowed her furred brow. "But if they had truly entered the Pool of Knowledge, we can't really know what they do or do not."
There it was, the uneasiness that had prompted the Council to separate and confine the pair. To have seen the future was dangerous, to act on that knowledge was even worse. Luke folded his hands and looked around. Both his son and the girl had expressed their intent to do just that and it could only bring trouble.
"What we need to do is prevent them from getting off Shedu Maad," Jaina said, once again in holographic form from her honeymoon, which at this point probably wasn't much of one. Luke had a feeling Jag would be asking for a second one once this whole business was over, and he couldn't really blame the newlywed.
"I've already contacted Tenel Ka," Luke said, "and she's set up stricter enforcement in customs, but we all know that will only slow them down."
"Perhaps we can exploit that," Cilghal looked thoughtful. "If we know they're trying to get off planet, we just need to have Jedi sentinels stationed around the spaceport."
"We can't cover them all," Kyle Katarn said, "we simply don't have the Jedi to do it."
"We don't have to. The extra security will slow them down, just as Master Skywalker said," Cilghal explained. "So if you're in a hurry and the transports take too long, where do you go to procure a ship?"
Katarn nodded, "The private berthing hanger, they could steal a ship. All we need to do is set an ambush up there."
"Exactly."
Corran Horn shook his head. "Except they could take countermeasures against that. What if they went on to another spaceport. They have to know we're going to guard Feshr, it's too obvious."
"Under normal circumstances," Cilghal acknowledged, "but they're in a hurry. To travel to another port would take time. They need to get off planet before we could have the Hapans blockade the system, which we can set in motion if they do decide to take the safe route and head to another port anyway."
Horn considered it, "I think you're right. We need to move now."
Feshr Spaceport, Shedu Maad; 44 ABY
Acquiring the necessary funding for what they needed had proved rather easy, at least as far as obtaining the credits. Ben was still uncomfortable to resort to stealing, but desperate times and all. They now donned new clothing, the kind one would expect to find on tourists, and reflective glareshades. The young couple sat in a small cantina on the very edge of the spaceport, the kind that often catered to the less savory of clientele, in a darkened corner.
"I feel them, Ben," Vestara said. She'd kept the Jedi over-cloak, as such an item was common across the galaxy, and more simply she needed a way to hide her arms. Her eyes covered and with a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, she could easily pass for an eccentric recluse. The only line between 'eccentric recluse' and 'crazy' lay in the fact they still had money to spend.
"I know, but we knew they would be here." Ben whispered. He'd traded out his Jedi linen for a silken shirt and caplet with a hood, the latter now raised to hide the color of his hair. A matching pair to Vestara's own glareshades created a infinite series of reflections when they met. "We just need to use the crowds to board one of the commercial transports. In them, we'll blend in."
"We need a back-up plan, they could have Jedi inspectors in place by now."
Ben thought about it, there really wasn't all that much choice. "We've got to get off this rock as soon as we can," he said, to which Vestara gave a confirming nod, "so we can't afford to hike to the next spaceport. Stealing a speeder would be too high profile."
"You're just a blinding ray of optimism today, aren't you, Ben?" Vestara was smiling beneath her mask. Whether it was real or just an effect of her mouth, Ben couldn't tell without reaching out in the Force, a bad idea this close to Jedi hunters. "So if we have to, we'll just commandeer a private ship."
"You mean steal."
"No, I mean 'commandeer,' we'll bring it back . . . eventually." Vestara said the last part, knowing full well they'd probably never see Shedu Maad again now they were on the run.
"Semantics." Ben said.
"You didn't have all that many qualms about getting the money," she pointed out, "And by the way, you look rather dashing in that shirt, I'm sure Calrissian approves."
Ben couldn't help but feel a bit smug, despite the back-handed compliment. "That was an emergency, we had no choice."
"And so is this, we don't have a choice here, either." Vestara reached out her hand, normally shaped, to Ben. "I know this goes against your grain, but please don't fight me on this one. The longer we're here, the more likely they'll get us, and I can't lose you again."
Ben intertwine their fingers. "I know—I know that things have to change, but I'm still having a hard time adjusting."
"I don't want you to change, Ben, I want you to fight me for every lapse in ethics."
"Why?" Ben asked, confused, "I'd think it would make your life easier if I agreed with you."
"I wished more than once that you'd been born like me, so we could have started out our relationship more smoothly," she admitted, "but that's not really what I want. If you weren't so sickeningly moral, you wouldn't be Ben Skywalker and if you weren't, then you wouldn't be the man I love."
The words had left her mouth before they were fully processed by her brain. They'd flowed effortlessly and from the heart, but it was, she realized, the first time either of them had said that aloud. They'd both felt how the other did in the Pool, but they'd never gotten a chance to actually talk about it. Things had moved too quickly for them. But now she had said it, did it change anything? Everything?
Ben stopped, stock still, when she said it. He knew what he felt for her and how much she cared about him, but this was a first. He felt a warm glow flow outward from his center, not unlike the feeling he'd gotten from the Font's pure waters. He couldn't stop himself from smiling, it just felt so right. That was when the first itching started. Ben's smile vanished and reached up to his cheek. He could feel the thin line running from the corner of his mouth up to his ear. It felt like a fresh scar, but he knew what it was, and that was a problem. They needed to get out of here, preferably to a different planet, all the sooner if he was undergoing the changes Vestara already had.
Vestara had been elated when she'd seen the smile, he looked so happy. The thought that she could give that feeling to him was empowering. And just like that, it all collapsed in on itself. She saw the thin lines along his cheek and the reality of their situation came back. They were definitely made for one another now, that couldn't be denied, but what kind of lives would they have? No matter what Ben said about seeing past the grotesque exterior, the galaxy at large wasn't known to be so forgiving. Was that their future, to be ostracized and alone because of what they were becoming? They certainly weren't human anymore, but what they were becoming, Vestara didn't know.
"We need to go." Ben said carefully, so not to break the seams of his newly expanded jaw in public view.
Author's Note: And so continues the story. I did feel I should kind of explain my rationale behind Vestara a bit here. The Lost Tribe is very much obsessed with physical beauty, and from what I've read in the series so far, Vestara shares this. Perhaps not completely, but she definitely doesn't like her scar. With that kind of mentality, I could see her taking a transformation like that pretty hard.
As far as why Ben took longer to change, I don't explicitly state it in the story, but I'm linking it to strong emotion. I am planning on playing a bit with the rules as far as how the Font of Power and Pool of Knowledge affects people, tying in a bit to how Abeloth came to be how she is.