Meetra finds something- but it's not a ship off planet.
Beta'd by FirstSelector, SpyTheEngineer, and Kinsworth.
Meetra found herself abnormally glad about the fact that, as far as she could tell, the assassins hadn't tossed her room.
She hadn't quite been on Klatooine a month, and hadn't planned to spend more than another two on planet, but this had been the nicest room she'd had in a while, and she was loath to leave it behind even in the wake of the nearly-successful assassination mission.
Needs must, though, and within half a standard hour, everything she owned was either within the rucksack on her back or the holdall in her hand. After a moment, she decided to test out the ability of the odd star-key-thing and the room it opened into to store things. A scrap of leather was the first thing she offered up in sacrifice to the room, and it was in exactly the same place it had been when she reopened the room. More incremental tests, up to the slugthrower the assassin had tried to use to kill her and the chrono that came with the room, showed that whatever she put into the room was placed into essentially a stasis when it was closed, and nothing seemed to disappear when left in there, so she emptied out the rucksack except for a change of clothes and left everything else, save for a datapad, vibroknife, and both slugthrowers and the blaster in the odd workshop.
That done, she left her room- it was only paid up for the rest of the week, and if she never came back, the owner wouldn't try and claim she'd stiffed him- at least, based on bounty hunter rumors, which were about as reliable as things got for that kind of thing.
The trek back to the weather facility, now that she didn't have the distraction of worrying about her room, seemed to go slower with all of the uncertainty she could afford to let her mind go haring off after.
The Sith had returned to the galaxy.
She couldn't say that that had been unexpected, per se- Jedi more strongly connected to the Unifying Force had been prophesying about the return of the Sith for centuries, if not since the end of the Great Hyperspace War, and everyone had known it would happen eventually. That didn't, however, mean that anyone had expected them to return- which was why Exar Kun's claim to the title had caught the entire Order by surprise. Still, that was before her time, and everyone had thought the Sith would stay gone for another millennium despite the rising tension among Masters of the Unifying Force.
Revan was one of those few who had thought that the Sith were making immediate overtures to return to the galaxy through the Mandalorians, which was why they had gone to the effort to rally so many Jedi to stand and fight with the Republic against the warriors of Mandalore.
Not that that had stopped them from claiming the Sith title, according to what rumors made it out to Hutt space.
Moving more on the Force's urging than on any conscious thought, Meetra leapt forwards, hurling herself under a tree, and was rewarded with the sounds of a ship's poorly-maintained engines lifting off and clawing their way skywards. Moments later, Meetra was rewarded with the sight of the same shoddy freighter that the Sith assassins had presumably used flying off, and she mentally cursed whatever thought told her that she should return to her room for her effects first.
Then, rational thought returned, and she cursed herself for not thinking about trackers. They really could have built almost anything into that ship, perhaps even a self-destruct, that could be used against her.
She cursed aloud at the time of relative peace- she'd spent too much time as an anonymous spacer and worker drifting around, and she'd lost the keen edge of her instincts that had helped keep her alive throughout the Mandalorian Wars.
Then, she opened herself to the Force and let it guide her.
For as much as she was more closely linked to the Living Force, her talent with bonds did have roots in the Unifying Force, even if it didn't come with the talent for prescience that others like Bandon leaned so heavily on. However, that didn't mean that she couldn't rely on guidance on the future from the Force- she just had to be a little bit more oblique with how she sought it out.
The starscape shifted with even more intensity than it had last time, but once that was done, it wasn't too hard to reach out and see what bonds she would form in the future and seeking guidance for how to do so.
Meetra settled back in her physical form with a direction to walk in and little else. With nothing else to really do, she started walking through the shrubland and let herself fall into a more ordinary meditative state, reaching out and immersing herself in all of the life on this planet.
Meetra was dragged out of her meditative state by sour fear leaching its way into the Force, pungent enough that her senses picked up on it. Moments later, she felt the despair and physical pain that accompanied that pain, all from the same source.
Following the Force's whispers, Meetra blurred forwards, reinforcing her body to survive speeds far beyond those that any human was meant to endure, and within mere moments arrived at the source of these emotions.
As it turned out, she (and it was a she- her clothes were sticking to her well enough to tell that much) was a Twi'lek, with deep purple lekku and a purple cast behind her otherwise-white skin, with a pinkish-red tattoo around the edges of her face and running down the sides of her neck. She was slim, somewhere between the build of a Jedi Consular and a slave dancer, and her clothes were soaking with a slowly-expanding bloodstain in her side.
"Don't try to move," said Meetra, kneeling down over the woman and reaching out into the Force to try and sense the extent of the injury.
The Twi'lek groaned in pain, but otherwise didn't move.
Meetra felt cold metal embedded in the woman's stomach, and the shape of the injury, and made her best guess as to the cause. "Slugthrower?"
"Hutt enforcers left me out here to die," she rasped, voice rough from both pain and dryness of throat.
"I can help," said Meetra- and she could, after seeing so many similar injuries on campaign- "but it will hurt."
"I'll take whatever I can get," she responded.
"Hold still, then."
Meetra focused her mind, wrapping her presence around the woman and the slug inside her alike, and then began exerting her will. Immediately, the woman went rigid with pain, but Meetra had anticipated that, and held her as still as she could, breathing excepted. Once she had a measure of how the Twi'lek's wound was situated, she let out a breath of relief. "You're lucky," she said, starting to gently reshape the slug within the wound.
"How's that?" wheezed the woman.
"You got hit with an old kyr'gaat round." Seeing the confusion in the woman's eyes, she continued. "A Mandalorian mushroom round. It's made to deform when it hits flesh. Tears you up inside more, but that means it stays inside more often than not. This one missed anything severely fatal, and was about half a centimeter short of your spine when it stopped. Looks like the only thing you really have to worry about is the blood loss."
"I'd say-" she grunted in pain. "I'd say that the lump of lead in my back is something I have to worry about."
"Oh, you mean this lump of lead?" asked Meetra, pulling the slug, as spherical as she'd deformed it, out of the wound and presenting it to the woman.
"I- damn. You work fast."
"I've had practice. Now, give me a moment. I need to focus on this one."
Healing, directly exerting the Force to knit the flesh of another (or even oneself), had always been Revan's stronger suit, not hers. She'd made it through some classes held by those few healers that Revan had managed to recruit to fight with them, but not much more than that- meanwhile Revan themselves had ended up teaching a couple of the basics classes on healing. Still, Meetra was better at it than Alek ever had been- his affinity for the Physical Force didn't lend itself nearly as much to healing as her roots in the Living Force, even if Revan, walking among the stars in the Cosmic Force, had been a better healer than both of them combined.
All this to say that, while it wasn't the cleanest healing that anyone'd ever done, it was still far beyond what most would ever have access to, if they didn't have the chance to languish in a tank full of kolto or make a pilgrimage to one of the Jedi enclaves.
Meetra stayed there, eyes closed, until she felt the Force… spill over, almost, and she knew that she'd done all she could for the injury.
"You're also a Jedi," said the woman, half reverence and half suspicion.
"I'm not so sure that that applies now, but… yes, I was." Meetra moved the hand that had made its way to cover the wound, revealing an angry blue scar that was nonetheless well-sealed.
"Why did you leave?"
"The first time, it was to stand in defense of the Republic. The second time…" Meetra's mind flashed back to the Council meeting that had precipitated her exile, the way that Atris' apologetic glance made the space where she once could feel her fellow Jedi hurt all the more. "Well, let's just say that not all of us came back from the Wars whole."
Whatever the Twi'lek was expecting, it clearly wasn't that. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I knew what I was getting into, what I was condemning people to. If not from the beginning, then by the point when it mattered." There was an awkward pause. "I'm sorry, I've been rude. My name is Meetra Surik."
"Yuthura Ban. A pleasure, and thank you for saving my life."
Meetra opened her mouth to respond, but felt the stars within her shake, even fiercer than before- fierce enough that she could feel it resonate against Yuthura's spirit, as a star descended and landed on Meetra's head.
Despite the star feeling larger than the last one, it didn't feel nearly as bad as it had- probably as a result of the fact that it wasn't unprecedented, and Meetra knowing how to brace for it.
This time, when Meetra returned to herself, the skills were relatively limited- she could do work on ships, speeders, and other vehicles, and she could control them beyond even the most skilled civilian pilots.
"What was that?" asked Yuthura, eyes wide. "It felt like… hope, and a cool breeze, and every time I've ever been around someone having a vision."
"I have no idea what causes it, or what it actually is," said Meetra. "What I do know is that… well, I severed myself from the Force after the end of the War. This phenomenon, whatever it is, it bridged my connection back to the Force, and saved my life from Sith assassins today. What it does is, apparently, teach me how to do things. Last time, it was how to… how to improvise technical things, I suppose, and this time it showed me how best to be a mechanic."
Yuthura frowned. "What… what are your plans?"
"Immediately? I need to get off planet, before the assassin that survived comes back with reinforcements. Longer order, I suspect I'll be doing my level best to throw a hydrospanner into whatever engines the Sith who tried to have me killed are working." Meetra looked down at the Twi'lek, who was sitting up now. "Why?"
"How do you feel about stealing a ship, and some… ah, some 'cargo' from the Hutts like the Council was too cowardly to do?" asked Yuthura.
"Not cowardly, pragmatic." Seeing Yuthura bristle, Meetra continued. "Look, I don't like the Hutts any more than you do, but take a step back and think about things more critically. Places like Dantooine… they don't have nearly the support that Coruscant does. The Enclave on Dantooine is somewhere that the Hutts could hire mercenaries to raid for, ah, cargo, as you say-" Yuthura's eyes widened, she clearly hadn't thought about that angle- "and there's no way to guarantee that we get them back, especially if they're too young to make their own escape. But, since I'm not associated with the Council… well, I do believe I could be persuaded."
Yuthura's lips pulled back slowly into something that was far more in line with a Bothan's smile than anything a human would associate with the idea. "Could you now. Well then, what do you think about…"
And that's that!
Perks Earned:
Vehicular Skills (Generic Zombie Apocalypse, 4.0090, 200 CP): In addition to being a frankly amazing mechanic, you're also great behind the wheel you can avoid any avoidable accidents, you're quite apt at upgrading vehicle into mobile death machine.
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