Ship parking located!
Beta'd by FirstSelector, SpyTheEngineer, and Kinsworth.
Two more minutes of walking led Meetra and Zule to a room with an armored door, secured with an old-fashioned mechanical lock.
Meetra knelt at the door, inspecting the lock, then nodded. "This shouldn't be too big an issue. One moment." Then, instead of pulling out the slivers of metal that she carried for manipulations of fine metal and mechanical setups, she reached into the Force, and a moment later, the lock turned itself, leaving the door to swing open of its own accord.
Beyond the door was a room full of consoles and antennae, blinking lights and Huttese labels for both readouts and controls. Without pause, Meetra made a beeline to one particular readout, one that was displaying a list of numerical designation of some kind with an old-fashioned padlock icon corresponding to each one- one of which was already showing an opened shackle.
"I can't read any of these," said Zule. "Can you?"
"I can get by," Meetra replied, thankful for the half-forgotten Languages of the Outer Rim course that Master Sunrider had made her take years ago- and, more relevantly, the labels in the weather facility being bilingual in both Galactic Basic and Huttese, with occasional additions in Bocce on particularly critical or widely circulated items. Fortunately, the console bore a button labeled "Universal release", which Meetra immediately pressed her thumb to.
As the locks on the console all flashed before opening, Meetra felt the collection of stars shake like someone'd slammed a swoop bike into her soul, jumbling itself up as one of the stars jolted loose and fell.
The word "mechanic" took root in her soul and sprouted, reaching its tendrils out through everything she was. Her senses expanded, and she looked around the console room with fresh eyes, seeing where she could fix things with the application of the right tools, and her fingers itched with the desire to put her new skill (inasmuch as one could call being rewritten from the ground up, the ideal of repair etched into each bone and encoded into each chromosome a skill) to use before she breathed in and out slowly and deliberately, sinking into the Living Force to ground herself in the here and now.
"What was that?" asked Zule, some combination of awe and fear in her voice.
Meetra opened her mouth to answer, but instead of her words, something else, reaching through the Force to speak, took control of her lips and tongue, the weight of its words producing a tangible thrumming in the air even after the sounds had died away. "The Celestial Forge Has Chosen Its Smith."
Zule blinked, then visibly decided to save any further questions for another day, releasing her fear and confusion into the Force.
Meetra, now having a name to put to the field of stars in her spirit, decided that everything else could wait until there was less of an imminent threat.
Then, she sighed. "Damn it. If this had come sooner, I could have actually fixed that lightsaber I took off of that Sith assassin."
"That's your priority?" asked Zule, giving the older Jedi an askance look.
"I mean, kind of? I haven't had a lightsaber in years, and while I managed to save the crystal, and I'm making do with blasters, I'm never gonna be as comfortable with them as I am with a lightsaber." Meetra shrugged. "Come on, if all goes well Yuthura should have handled most of the remaining guards and we can have our slave revolt in peace."
Meetra strode off, Zule following her, and together they returned through the passageway to the throne room, hopeful for a relatively quick resolution to the situation so they could get off the planet, both of them for their own reasons.
Unfortunately, they did not get a quick resolution.
The two of them reemerged into the throne room to see an armored figure, hulking and bristling with enough weaponry to turn a Taung green (well, greener) with envy, dragging the unconscious form of Yuthura behind him, bruised and with a dislocated jaw that Meetra's new instincts told her should be a relatively quick fix, given a moment.
"Well, well, well," the figure said, dropping the leg it was dragging Yuthura with. "If it isn't the Jedi whelp. Managed to trick another foolish sentient to acting as your parent?"
"Not hardly," said Meetra, mind already whirring to life as she calculated her options and weighed risks. "Zule, take Yuthura and get to safety. I'll handle the Mandalorian cosplayer."
"Oh, you are a bold one," chuckled the armored figure, angular eye-apertures irising open for a moment, slitted yellow eyes gazing out in a manner just a little too dispassionate to truly be called baleful. "Very well, then. I am Gorr, of Kalee, and your life may still be spared if you allow me to take the Jedi whelp and claim a trophy from you."
"Not if I had to tear the Maw apart with my bare hands, you honorless cur. I may not have the cultural upbringing that I would have if I remained on Eshan, but I am still a Jedi, and we do not trade children's lives for your own." Meetra drew both vibroblade and slugthrower, choosing the projectile weapon over the blaster on some instinct driven by the Force. "Your fight is with me."
"Oho, another Jedi? Your lightsaber will make a fine addition to my collection." Gorr reached down to his belt and raised a cylinder, one she recognized a bare instant before he ignited the viridian blade as a lightsaber.
"That doesn't belong to you," snarled Zule, blaster pistol rising to point at the Kaleesh. "My master did not die so you could defile his blade with the blood of escaped slaves."
"No, your master died as he lived: weak, serving nothing more than the entertainment of his betters," sneered Gorr.
Zule made to lunge forwards, but Meetra blocked her way. "No. Take Yuthura and go. I've fought worse than a Trandoshan fanboy."
"You will pay for your impertinence, human," snapped Gorr. Then, without warning, he hurled himself forwards, stolen lightsaber humming a pained frequency as it was turned towards the child its partner had given his life to protect.
"Funny," said Meetra, slashing out with the vibroblade to force the Kaleesh warrior to abort his charge. "That's what Mandalore said, and I'm still kriffing here."
After that, though, she had no time for banter in the face of the relentless advance Gorr demonstrated, barely having enough awareness of her surroundings to notice Zule hefting Yuthura over her shoulders and running off.
Part of the challenge was her vastly limited options- her vibroblade wasn't one of the expensive cortosis-laced ones that could stand up to the heat of a lightsaber blade for long, and while she might like the way that slugthrowers couldn't be properly deflected by lightsabers (at least without a technique she'd developed in the Mandalorian Wars and never taught anyone except Revan) in this fight, the coverage of the Kaleesh's armor was extensive enough that she'd be virtually unable to do anything with the splatter of molten metal the slug would deform into, let alone the fact that she didn't have anywhere near as many slugs as she'd prefer, with how many she'd already used and how sloppy she'd been about not reloading the damn thing. Those limits would have been fine in other scenarios, and had been earlier in the day, but that was only because of the hubris of the Sith assassin in not wearing armor and his sloppy technique, both weaknesses that Gorr didn't possess, even if he was wielding the lightsaber like a conventional sword instead of the weightless implement of the Force's will that it was.
The Celestial Forge shifted, dropping a star on her head, and only the warnings of the Force let her dodge a swipe of the Kaleesh's stolen lightsaber with nothing more than a light sear on her arm as an understanding of how to scale technology to any size it might be required threatened to overtake her thoughts.
"Your vaunted Force betrays you, Jedi," crooned the Kaleesh. "Surrender, and I can offer you the privilege and honor of joining Kalee's gods in death."
"Not on your life," replied Meetra, lungs heaving, as she hurled pieces of the fallen guards' armor at Gorr. He slashed through most of them with the lightsaber, but a few got through, staggering him, and Meetra used that time to scramble out of that room, into the more open terrain of the fields where she could more easily take advantage of both the way his armor weighed him down and her stamina and agility.
As she expected, the Kaleesh warrior followed her out of the building, snarling and spitting. "Coward! Where is your honor!"
"You forfeited any chance of a honorable battle when you threatened the life of a child," said Meetra, voice still level. Then, with his blade still down as he cast about for her, Meetra raised the slugthrower and fired.
The sound of the shot sent his head whipping around and blade swinging up, but too late to intercept the slug. Unfortunately (at least for Meetra), the slug was just slightly off target from where she'd have preferred it to be, and while it sent the unbraced warrior staggering, much of the impact force was deflected by the angle, and the slug went careening off of a newly-dented pauldron.
That failing, Meetra hopped to her feet and rabbited, drawing on the Force to guide her feet as much as to enhance her speed. After ten steps (thirty, for a normal person) she dove into a roll for no reason she could determine- that is, until she felt the detonation of a concussion grenade that thanks to her last-minute maneuver only battered her instead of dazing her.
"Stand and fight, you coward!" snarled the Kaleesh warrior, brandishing the lightsaber as he drew a blaster carbine one-handed and fired off a few blasts from the hip. None of them came close to Meetra, but they did come close to the de-collared slaves cowering in the chest-high grains.
"Make me!" snapped Meetra, leaping to somewhere where she couldn't sense fear and hope in equal measure now that she was looking for it and firing off another of her precious slugs to protect the opportunity.
Gorr was fast enough to interpose the lightsaber in between him and the slug this time, but it took a sudden jerk of his whole torso, which left the blaster carbine exposed to a single piece of the grain he'd shot out to punch through the power pack like it had been hurled a once-in-a-century sandstorm, the kind that sent even the krayt dragons scurrying for shelter. It missed his flesh, but the punctured power pack crackled once, and while he tried to hurl it away, it detonated before he'd been fully successful, managing to daze him.
Instead of trying to take advantage, Meetra followed the Force's guidance and sprinted off, remaining in view of the man until he shook himself and started in pursuit of her, drawing and igniting another green lightsaber before diving into what looked like a barn from the outside.
It was not, in fact, a barn- within the hulking building, a wide variety of speeders, hovertractors, bikes, and other land vehicles lay, and it was like someone had hooked Meetra's spirit up to a hypermatter reactor.
With speed borne of both the Force and desperation, Meetra leapt onto one of the speeder bikes with deflector shielding and heavy cannons, hands going through an unfamiliar startup sequence like she'd done it hundreds of times through the years, worn smooth with the weight of habit despite the foreign equipment she was working with.
Once the engine roared to life, Meetra pushed the throttle all the way open and the hoverbike roared like an angry krayt, all but launching her out of the barn with speed she hadn't felt since she'd snuck off to go podracing in the Coruscanti underlevels all those years ago.
Still, once someone familiarized themselves with that kind of speed, it never really left them, and Meetra found herself grinning as she raced back towards the Kaleesh warrior, who was trying to get back inside the building where she couldn't just fire on him with impunity. He was too slow, though, and with just two blasts from the cannons on the bike, the overhang on the throne room's exterior, the one that looked to be a balcony, collapsed, burying the man and sending the lightsabers he was wielding flying off as they deactivated.
Meetra swooped in, spinning the bike a full 360 degrees when she went to scoop up both lightsabers, hair mussed as she returned to vertical, then skidded to a stop in front of the building. She reached out through the Force, trying to feel out where, exactly, Zule and Yuthara were, then reopening the throttle and blasting off.
She caught up with the two women halfway up a gravel path to a spaceport (or, at the very least, a field with a large number of ships, ranging in size from snubfighters to moderately sized cargo freighters), Zule supporting a dazed (but conscious) Yuthara. "I think I'm in love," said Meetra, patting the bike affectionately to show what she meant.
"Glad to see you so chipper," returned Zule, almost in time with the Celestial forge gently shifting. "Any idea where we can find a transmitter?"
"One of the ships. I'd prefer to take my chances with a freighter just in case, but I'd also like to go make sure the slaves know they're free to go and make sure none of the guards are, ah, still factors preventing their escape." Meetra turned the speeder bike around. "Anything you need from me, before I go?"
"...not now, but thanks," said Zule, eyes darting over to the dust cloud settling around where Gorr had been dealt with.
"Alright, then I'll be back soon." With that, Meetra revved the bike and sped away, leaving behind the other Jedi who promptly turned to the ships and started walking faster.
And that's that!
Perks Earned:
Mechanic (Smash Up, 29.0210, 400 CP): You can fix anything. Quite literally. Alien technology, magical artifacts. You may not even understand what they do or how they work, but you can see when they're broken and how to fix it.
They Will Prosper (Marvel Magic, 38.0040, 200 CP): Being able to make fantastical tech that can compete even with magic is all well and good, but is it really being put to optimal use if you're the only one directly benefiting from using it? You will find you have a knack for scaling personal technology to a larger size. Turn a personal shield into something that can protect an entire city or make your particle gun into a weapon of mass destruction. Of course, just because you can figure out the logistics behind increasing the scale of your technology doesn't mean you actually have the resources to make these plans into a reality - and you can bet increasing the scale by a large degree will see a comparative increase in the cost of resources.
If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko (fi) (https (:/) (/) ko (-) fi (/) lucifra) and a Pa tre on (https (:/) pa tre on .com (/) Lucifra), and you can see chapters a week early if you become a patron. (remove spaces and parentheses)
Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin, Mtron, AntaeustheGiant, and Ember for being patrons!
I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff now (as in as of like right now it's going live)- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct, that's another option: https (:/) (/) dis co rd dot com (/) NHRUKz8jyy (remove spaces and parentheses, dot to period)
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!