Location: Bastion. Capital world of the Galactic Empire
Standing alone in the middle of that foyer, Tenel Ka felt like a dam forced to hold back the ocean. She had known this day would come. There had been dozens of assassination attempts over the years. But the last 4 of those years had been different. The Sith had joined the party. Ever since then, she had been training herself tirelessly for this moment. And now?
As her door was blasted to charred splinters, she reached out with the force through her forearm. Out of the foyer's open closet came...
Her second lightsaber.
Whereas her primary lightsaber, being crafted from a rancor's tooth, spoke to her heritage and personality, this secondary weapon was crafted with pure function in mind.
The hilt was an unusually slender cylinder, measuring half a meter in length. The weapon lacked a "grip" essential to all lightsaber hilts. Instead, it's entire length was smooth, burnished durasteel.
Lastly, the device was one of a kind, due to the fact that it lacked an activation button. The blade could only be activated internally, through the force.
In truth, the entire weapon was never meant for human hands. It was designed to be wielded by the hand of the force alone!
The hilt flew from the closet, and was drawn, as if by magnets, to the warrior queen's forearm; hovering about 10 cm from her stump.
There, it began to spin, slowly, at first, and then it picked up speed.
In Tenel Ka's mind, time stretched out into infinity. Logic, reason, planing; it all fell away. She gave herself over to the force, making it an impulse; an instinct.
"Now!" The force told her, and she obeyed.
Both ends of her second hilt, ignited in a flash of whirring fury. The speed at which the double bladed weapon spun, was sufficient enough to create a veritable shield of deadly green light.
That shield was put to the test, half a heartbeat later, as a steady stream of blasts bolts flew into the room and ricocheted back into their source, which was...
A UVH battle droid. The redirected barrage hammered the droid that unleashed it, melting a large hole in the droids chest. Using the force, she grabbed hold of the wrecked automaton, and threw it at the 2nd droid to emerge from the doorway.
As expected, the thrown droid made impact with the other. Unexpectedly, however, the 1st droid did not drop to the floor. Through the awesome power of the force, the thrown droid began to wrap around the 2nd, like a skeletal cage. A cage the kept on shrinking around it's victim until it was crushed, inadvertently setting off the ordinance stored inside.
Tenel Ka threw up a force bubble just in time to absorb the fire ball with it's accompanying shockwave.
She could scarcely believe the power she was wielding. A UVH droid was the match of most Jedi, and here she had destroyed 2 in less than 10 seconds.
Old anecdotes about fierce mother rancors, and human women lifting landspeeders off of their trapped offspring, came to mind.
But she knew the truth. Love fuelled the light side, just as anger fed the dark. At this moment, she was consumed by love for her daughter and Wynn. Thus, She became the very embodiment of the light side.
The smoke of the explosion hadn't even begun to clear, when the very embodiment of darkness entered into the wrecked foyer.
An abomination!
There, stood a droid with the basic design of a Tendrando arms creation, but so much more. Black plating, made of a plastoid/obsidian compound, covered the droid's skeletal frame. The only splash of color, was the glowing crimson holocron, slightly protruding from the droids chest.
He just stood in the doorway, half covered in smoke, and looking every bit the undead evil he was.
"Where is the girl?" He asked in a voice that was half human and half machine.
"She is safe! I can't say the same for you, Sith!" Tenel Ka answered.
The Sith laughed, a horrible facsimile of a laugh and said: "I sense you are so very strong in the force. In fact, I can sense you are stronger then me... Which will make it that much more humiliating when you fail. And that, my dear, will make your death that much more... delicious."
He barely finished speaking, when 4 YVH droids came up from behind him and stood at either side.
Without further delay, they attacked. Learning from the mistake of their fallen brethren, the droids would fire a few blaster bolts and then dodge as those bolts were ricocheted back at them with her spinning saberstaff. Their attacks were meant to distract and overwhelm her. She tried to prevent them from flanking her but there was too many of them, and their attacks were relentless. Before she knew it, she was having to twirl her body in the same way she was twirling her sabre staff, in order to keep the attacks from penetrating her defences.
That's when the cowardly Sith attacked. While she had her back to him, warding off blaster attacks from flanking droids, he leapt toward her, sabre poised for a lethal forward thrust. At the last minute , however, she tucked her truncated arm with it's accompanying sabre behind her back and deflected those incoming blaster bolts from the two droids still standing on either side of the doorway, right into Vannis's path.
Darth Vannis was forced to catch the Jedi's deflected bolts on his ownlightsaber thus foiling his own attack. In fact, as it was, he had to fight inertia to prevent himself from hurtling directly into the spinning green death. He took a few steps back, and waited for the next opportunity.
While her Sabre staff served as a shield, she struck out with her primary weapon .
Noticing that one of her opponents had caught a deflected bolt on it's robotic leg, she used the minuscule delay it caused to lop off it's blaster equipped arm.
While she still had the initiative, she grabbed the severed arm with the force, even before it hit the floor, and hurtled it toward one of the droids deeper in the room, that was now behind her.
The thrown arm caught a barrage of fire from her target droid, causing the tibanna gas cartridge still attached, to explode. High velocity debris from the explosion damaged the droid's optical sensors, making it's aim much less accurate.
Through her love and the power of the force, she was waging a one woman war, worthy of the annals of the Jedi order. As impossible as it was, she was actually starting to make some offensive gains in this extremely lopsided fight. Unfortunately it was simply too little and too slow.
The opposing force was relentless and they were many. They would win, if only through attrition.
She moved like a dancer caught up in a glitterstim crash. She twirled and leaped; rolled and kicked
Her inner clock told her that she had been fighting for about 50 seconds. In another 10 seconds, exhaustion would begin to eat away at her speed and precision. Then... they would rip her to pieces. But she knew Wynn and her daughter. She knew they were intelligent and resourceful and that extra minute she sacrificed herself for, would not be in vain.
She was about to die, and that knowledge bestowed upon her a certain peace, like it did all Jedi at the end.
At the same time, the terrible Sith machine began to unleash one last attack, she did not shrink back in fear. She ran toward him and leapt feet first. The bold counterstrike caught him by surprise and found his midsection unguarded.
She didn't waste the opportunity. Both of her feet landed squarely in what would've been his gut, if he had been constructed of flesh and bone. The impact sent him flying through the room and back out the door into the hallway
With no chance of accidentally hitting their Sith leader, the UVH's intensified their attack, and two more droids joined the already rigged match.
Then it happened. Weighed down by fatigue and force overload she overextend herself while slashing at a droid's leg.
After successfully severing said leg, she found herself completely unguarded and out of position, just as another droid sighted her up with it's targeting scanners.
Before it was able to fire that fatal shot, the YVH began to shake violently; coronal discharges, erupting all over it's artificial body.
The cause of the droid's destruction, became clear as it toppled forward, revealing a series of blaster bolt holes on its back.
Behind the fallen foe, was the beautiful sight of a GA Security officer, with her weapon raised. Behind the officer, she observed a steady stream of armed GA personal, flowing in from the neighbouring suite's conjoined entrance.
"Wynn!" She mouthed silently. She didn't know whether to follow the explanation with "You dear Man!" Or "You crazy fool!"
She was deeply touched by his thoughtfulness, that had undoubtedly just spared her life. But at the same time, she was deeply frustrated by his reckless action that did nothing to ensure his life and the life of her daughter.
No matter! The point was, because of his action, she had another chance to survive this mess and scold him to his lovely face.
For several moments, Darth Vannis just lay in the hallway where he had landed.
The angry red glow of his Holocron, expressed the rage building within.
His rage was not exactly impotent, but definitely frustrated. Yes, it was true that he now inhabited a functioning (albeit artificial) body. However an artificial body could not call upon the force, which meant, his connection to the force was reliant on the relatively weak power generated by the holocron itself; power captured at the time of the holocron's creation. Malgus, had a plan in the works to change this, but until then, he and the others were vulnerable. The speed and strength, inherent to droid did make up, somewhat, for their lack of the force.
And he used both that speed and strength to leap off his back and on to his feet, which where already in motion, carrying back into the Queen Mother's suite.
The scene that greeted him was radically different from the one he had left mere seconds earlier.
Soldiers had seemed to manifest out of thin air to come to the Queen's rescue, and had defeated 2 of his UVH minions.
The tables had turned, and now time was no longer on his side. Out of all the foes he faced, the Jedi Queen posed the greatest threat. Once she was neutralized, the soldiers would be as good as dead.
She could sense his return to the fight and turned her attention away from the droid she had just quartered, to face him. She had to finish him and finish him now. She ran toward to the Sith ready to do just that when all of a sudden... Darkness.
Although, at the moment, he lacked the awesome power of the force that he wielded in life, the small trace he still retained was enough. He had perfected the subtle yet devastatingly effective "Mind Attack".
In this case he used the force to momentarily shut down the neural connections that were essential to the proper function of Tenal Ka's optical lobe.
Struck with blindness, she froze in mid-run and began to swing her lightsaber in front of her as a last ditch defensive effort. With a little more effort he stimulated a specific region in her temporal lobe, causing the blinded Jedi to hear phantom noises in all direction. In desperation she began to spin around swinging her blades at the empty air.
Vannis stalked toward her, soaking up every bit of fear and confusion emanating from the poor woman; using it as cistern of power. He would need every bit of force power to finish off the guards once he had killed the Jedi. As she flailed about ineffectually, he raised his blade over head and...
Suddenly, a smoking hole appeared were his artificial face had been an eye blink earlier. Tenel Ka's sight came back to her instantly and she didn't waste any time. With one quick thrust, she plunged her green blade through his chest embedded holocron, destroying every trace of Darth Vannis forever.
As the metal hulk keeled over, she saw... Jagged Fel standing there, with a smoking blaster still raised.
"Jag!" She cried out with joy and relief. "I am so glad you decided crash the party"
With a slight grin to his lips he replied: " Can I bring some friends?"
With that, half a dozen stormtroopers came pouring into the suite and within 30 seconds the remaining droids in the room were down.
"Wynn has taken Allana to saftey! We need to find them." She said to Jagged.
"That will have to wait your highness. This room is secure, but the attack isn't over yet." He informed her.
Once they vacated the hotel, she could see the understated truth (a Jag trademark) to his words. Gunships, drones, and star fighters, filled the air. UVH's wrecked havoc in the streets.
She reached out with the force and could sense that her daughter was no longer on the planet. Allana, feeling the brush of her mother's force presence, sent back feelings of reassurance and love.
And to Tenel Ka, that was the most precious thing in the universe.