Swordguy
2009-08-02, 03:35 PM
So, I drove over to visit some acting friends Friday night. When I got there, they mentioned that it had been a while since they had done any RP, and so, in my absence, they volunteered me to run them through a one-shot Star Wars game. They had characters mostly created, and wanted to play an Old Republic game with all of them being senior Padawan Jedi.
As it happened, the session turned out pretty interesting, especially for an adventure I got to run on 15 minutes notice. Just for the heck of it, I've been writing it out as a fiction piece, and thought you people might get a kick out of the story. The fiction is about half-done, so it'll be serialized as I get it finished (hopefully done by tomorrow night). Dialogue is as close to verbatim as I recall.
The date is roughly 4,000 years before the events in EpI, and very shortly before the events in KOTOR1. The characters are:
Cordon - Human Male Jedi Guardian 5
Aiden - Human Male Jedi Consular 4, Jedi Warrior 1
Akiva - Human Female Jedi Consular 5
A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
The commlink sounded a strident tone, breaking the Padawans out of their blissful meditation. They looked around their circle for a moment, none willing at first to leave the comfortable padded couches upon which they sat cross-legged. The commlink beeped a third time, and Aiden sighed, looked askance at his friends, and hopped off his couch to grab the persistent device. He hit the "receive" switch, and the sonorous tones of Master Ultan Bahs filled the meditation chamber.
"Padawans, please report to my chambers at your earliest convenience." The commlink shut off, and silence once again filled the domed room.
Akiva unfolded her lithe frame from her meditation posture. "What do you think he wants now? Another lecture on how we shouldn't play pranks on the Younglings here?"
"Perhaps you should reflect on the idea of the three of us playing pranks on the Younglings and compare it to why we're the oldest students in this Temple who haven't yet found a Master." Cordon's voice held a disapproving note, and he continued with his eyes shut. "We have perhaps a year to convince a Master to take us as Padawan learners before we're sent away to join the AgriCorps as official Jedi rejects. Why you insist on involving us in your pranks when we're already on such thin ice with the Masters is completely beyond me."
"Hey now, you thought replacing their food with - " Akiva began, but Aiden's cool tenor cut her off mid-rant.
"We should probably discuss this later. 'Earliest convenience' for a Jedi Master means 'right now" for we lowly Padawans, remember? We won't help ourselves to find a Master by keeping the senior Master on Vitiria waiting."
Akiva grimaced and jumped down from the two-meter high couch, followed quickly by Cordon. Aiden led the procession into the hall. The door, recognizing their passage, began to hiss shut, interrupted briefly by Akiva's arm reaching back through the frame and summoning the metal cylinder of her lightsabre from her couch where it had lain momentarily forgotten. With her arm gone, the door closed at last, and darkness and silence returned to the Vitirian Jedi Temple Meditation chamber.
* * *
The three Padawans halted just inside Master Bahs's office while their eyes adjusted to the dim light. Taking a moment, they strode forward to stand in front of the large Teryak-wood desk that dominated Bahs's office. The chair on the other side of the desk faced away from them, though they could certainly feel the cool, placid presence of the Jedi Master who occupied the padded seat. They waited in silence. Patience was a virtue to any Jedi, be he Jedi Master or mere Padawan, and while they certainly wouldn't dream of keeping a real Jedi waiting on them, sadly, the reverse seemed to never be true. After ten, maybe fifteen minutes in which the only sound in the room was their steady breathing and the moist sound of Master Bahs's gills, the chair finally rotated around to let them see Master Bahs's face-to-squid-face. The Quarren stared back at them unblinkingly.
"Padawans, it has come to my attention that there is an issue between one of the grain farmer clans northeast of here and one of the light bulk cruiser crews that haul the grain off-world. From what I understand, the threat of violence between them is very real, and the local magistrate is barely keeping things in check. Since the more I keep the three of you occupied the less...interesting....events seem to happen around here, I believe I will send you out to mediate between the aggrieved parties. Both sides have agreed to Jedi mediation, and they await the arrival of a Jedi to settle this. I trust this is within your capabilities?" The young Padawans nodded silently. "Good. Take your regular day-gear, a landspeeder from the hangar, and, of course, your lightsabres. There have been reports of crazed Brax in the area, so be on your guard. This dataslate has the coordinates of the landing site in question. Be about it."
The chair rotated back around to face the shuttered windows - a clear dismissal from the Master. Aiden nodded to the other two, and led the group out of the office into the bright light of the Temple's center courtyard.
* * *
"Stars, I'm glad to be out of the Temple for a while!" Akiva stretched back in her seat and let the wind rip through her hair. Cordon glanced over at her from the driver's seat, an eyebrow raised, and she laughed. "Don't look at me in that tone of voice, Cord. I know, I know - peaceful meditation, reflection on the Force, and so on and so forth. You can't tell me that you aren't excited to actually be outside the compound actually doing something. We've been on the same schedule for four months. What is it Master Ikara keeps saying? 'Feel, don't think'? Well, I'm trying to lean back and feel good here."
Cordon chuckled softly, the sound nearly lost in the wind roaring around the rocketing landspeeder. "I'll admit we could be on a more exciting planet, true. But we're trying to be Jedi - aren't we supposed to shun adventure and excitement? Deal with it when it comes to you, sure. Not seek it out."
Aiden sat back in the landspeeder's back seat and let his two friends bicker in their friendly way. An hour and eighty kilometers out of the Temple and the conversation had looped back around twice now. It was always the same, Akiva, raised on adventure tales in her youth, and found that her Force talents led her down the path of the Consular, the Jedi Diplomat. Her predictive abilities, especially, had caught the testers by surprise. But she longed to go out into the galaxy and make a difference, and had never quite outgrown those adventure tales. Privately, Aiden surmised that was why she'd not yet been picked by a Master for further study, she was, according to the tenets of the Jedi Order, too eager.
Cordon, naturally, was the opposite. Laid-back, soft-spoken (f not outright taciturn), and easy-going, the massive man was one of the most naturally gifted pure warrior the Masters had ever seen. His problem was the opposite - in the tests given by Knights and Masters, he was too willing to sit back and let the issue sort itself out, failing to develop the instinct for when direct intervention was needed.
As for Aiden himself, well, he just got bored easily. Talked down to too many ranking Jedi when they proved themselves to be...less than intelligent. Of course, on a planet as boring as Vitiria, it's not like there was a whole lot of mental stimulation out there.
Vitiria lay on the inner edge of the Outer Rim Territories, a part of the Galactic Republic only because of a salient gifted the Republic by a particularly far-ranging Hutt who controlled near-on twenty systems, and willingly gave nineteen of them over to the Republic in exchange for no questions being asked about said Hutt's involvement in supplying arms to the enemies of the Republic during the Great Hyperspace War some thousand years ago. Considered a "breadbasket world" Vitiria boasted a pleasant and temperate climate, with rich, fertile soils over nearly three-quarters of its overall land surface, though not developed or colonized in any way until the Republic had taken over the planet. Massive farms covered swaths of the surface, usually twenty kilometers square and each farm run by a family or clan of settlers. The mutual intersection of every four square farms boasted a small landing pad for the light bulk freighters that moved the grains offworld. It had been figured years ago that a decentralized system was more cost-effective that having to build the infrastructure to store and transport the grains to the planetary capital and its large spaceport. Aside from the capital, the only other installation of note on Vitiria was the Jedi Temple.
The Jedi Temple was a relatively new facility, only a hundred and fifty-odd years old, built as a subsidiary unit to the primary temple in the sector. The theory mandated by the Jedi Council was that it was more effective to build many, smaller temples throughout Republic-controlled space, as opposed to transporting the many force-sensitive Jedi hopefuls all the way to the temple on Coruscant for testing, and then transporting them all the way back out of the Core to the MediCorps or AgriCorps bases if they failed their testing. Which would be fine, except it meant that Aiden and the others were stuck on this backwater world with nothing to do. Day in and day out, they meditated, or trained, or meditated, or trained. The tedium was...tedious. Aiden snapped out of his funk and sat up on the landspeeder's back seat. The bickering the in the front seat had stopped, and Akiva had her head in her hands, shoulders shaking.
"Akvia, are you alright?"
"I feel something. It's...dark. Slimy. It makes my mind feel vile." She raised her head from her hands and looked wide-eyed back at Aiden. "I feel something terrible is about to happen. I-" She stopped and cocked her head. "Do you hear that?"
Aiden and Cordon both strained their ears, but the roar of the wind proved too much to overcome. Cordon slammed the reverse thrusters, and for a moment all three were deafened by the engine's shrill whine as the landspeeder shuddered to a stop. Cordon frowned for a moment and turned to Akiva. "Yeah, I hear it too. Thunder, you think?"
Aiden concentrated and in the silence the sound came to him as well. Crump. Crump. Crump. A sound like distant thunder came rolling back across the verdant fields. "Couldn't be thunder, Cord. Not a cloud in the sky" Crump. Crump. Aiden stood up and let the Force flow through him, letting it heighten his senses. He could smell the soil, the scents on the breeze. He could hear perfectly now the sound Akiva had caught. It wasn't thunder anymore. He lifted his eyes, and far above the ground, back in the direction they had come, he could see tiny, box-like shapes orbiting the ground in the upper atmosphere. Below them, he saw what looked like tiny droplets of green rain falling to the earth. He stood uncomprehending for a moment then noticed, just at the edge of the horizon, a tiny plume of black smoke from where the raindrops met the ground. Then it hit him, and he collapsed hard back into his seat. Cordon and Akiva stared at him.
Cordon leaned forward. "What is it? What did you see?"
Aiden closed his eyes. "Turbolaser fire. Attacking the Temple. We have to get back."
The landspeeder was already swinging around as Aiden ground out his words, and he felt the g-forces push him back into the couch as Cordon took the speeder to full power. He reopened his eyes to see Akvia staring at him, wide-eyed and frightened. "Aiden, what's happening? What's going to happen to us?"
He could only shake his head unknowingly as the speeder thundered on towards the horizon. And home.
* * *
As it happened, the session turned out pretty interesting, especially for an adventure I got to run on 15 minutes notice. Just for the heck of it, I've been writing it out as a fiction piece, and thought you people might get a kick out of the story. The fiction is about half-done, so it'll be serialized as I get it finished (hopefully done by tomorrow night). Dialogue is as close to verbatim as I recall.
The date is roughly 4,000 years before the events in EpI, and very shortly before the events in KOTOR1. The characters are:
Cordon - Human Male Jedi Guardian 5
Aiden - Human Male Jedi Consular 4, Jedi Warrior 1
Akiva - Human Female Jedi Consular 5
A LONG TIME AGO, IN A GALAXY FAR, FAR AWAY...
The commlink sounded a strident tone, breaking the Padawans out of their blissful meditation. They looked around their circle for a moment, none willing at first to leave the comfortable padded couches upon which they sat cross-legged. The commlink beeped a third time, and Aiden sighed, looked askance at his friends, and hopped off his couch to grab the persistent device. He hit the "receive" switch, and the sonorous tones of Master Ultan Bahs filled the meditation chamber.
"Padawans, please report to my chambers at your earliest convenience." The commlink shut off, and silence once again filled the domed room.
Akiva unfolded her lithe frame from her meditation posture. "What do you think he wants now? Another lecture on how we shouldn't play pranks on the Younglings here?"
"Perhaps you should reflect on the idea of the three of us playing pranks on the Younglings and compare it to why we're the oldest students in this Temple who haven't yet found a Master." Cordon's voice held a disapproving note, and he continued with his eyes shut. "We have perhaps a year to convince a Master to take us as Padawan learners before we're sent away to join the AgriCorps as official Jedi rejects. Why you insist on involving us in your pranks when we're already on such thin ice with the Masters is completely beyond me."
"Hey now, you thought replacing their food with - " Akiva began, but Aiden's cool tenor cut her off mid-rant.
"We should probably discuss this later. 'Earliest convenience' for a Jedi Master means 'right now" for we lowly Padawans, remember? We won't help ourselves to find a Master by keeping the senior Master on Vitiria waiting."
Akiva grimaced and jumped down from the two-meter high couch, followed quickly by Cordon. Aiden led the procession into the hall. The door, recognizing their passage, began to hiss shut, interrupted briefly by Akiva's arm reaching back through the frame and summoning the metal cylinder of her lightsabre from her couch where it had lain momentarily forgotten. With her arm gone, the door closed at last, and darkness and silence returned to the Vitirian Jedi Temple Meditation chamber.
* * *
The three Padawans halted just inside Master Bahs's office while their eyes adjusted to the dim light. Taking a moment, they strode forward to stand in front of the large Teryak-wood desk that dominated Bahs's office. The chair on the other side of the desk faced away from them, though they could certainly feel the cool, placid presence of the Jedi Master who occupied the padded seat. They waited in silence. Patience was a virtue to any Jedi, be he Jedi Master or mere Padawan, and while they certainly wouldn't dream of keeping a real Jedi waiting on them, sadly, the reverse seemed to never be true. After ten, maybe fifteen minutes in which the only sound in the room was their steady breathing and the moist sound of Master Bahs's gills, the chair finally rotated around to let them see Master Bahs's face-to-squid-face. The Quarren stared back at them unblinkingly.
"Padawans, it has come to my attention that there is an issue between one of the grain farmer clans northeast of here and one of the light bulk cruiser crews that haul the grain off-world. From what I understand, the threat of violence between them is very real, and the local magistrate is barely keeping things in check. Since the more I keep the three of you occupied the less...interesting....events seem to happen around here, I believe I will send you out to mediate between the aggrieved parties. Both sides have agreed to Jedi mediation, and they await the arrival of a Jedi to settle this. I trust this is within your capabilities?" The young Padawans nodded silently. "Good. Take your regular day-gear, a landspeeder from the hangar, and, of course, your lightsabres. There have been reports of crazed Brax in the area, so be on your guard. This dataslate has the coordinates of the landing site in question. Be about it."
The chair rotated back around to face the shuttered windows - a clear dismissal from the Master. Aiden nodded to the other two, and led the group out of the office into the bright light of the Temple's center courtyard.
* * *
"Stars, I'm glad to be out of the Temple for a while!" Akiva stretched back in her seat and let the wind rip through her hair. Cordon glanced over at her from the driver's seat, an eyebrow raised, and she laughed. "Don't look at me in that tone of voice, Cord. I know, I know - peaceful meditation, reflection on the Force, and so on and so forth. You can't tell me that you aren't excited to actually be outside the compound actually doing something. We've been on the same schedule for four months. What is it Master Ikara keeps saying? 'Feel, don't think'? Well, I'm trying to lean back and feel good here."
Cordon chuckled softly, the sound nearly lost in the wind roaring around the rocketing landspeeder. "I'll admit we could be on a more exciting planet, true. But we're trying to be Jedi - aren't we supposed to shun adventure and excitement? Deal with it when it comes to you, sure. Not seek it out."
Aiden sat back in the landspeeder's back seat and let his two friends bicker in their friendly way. An hour and eighty kilometers out of the Temple and the conversation had looped back around twice now. It was always the same, Akiva, raised on adventure tales in her youth, and found that her Force talents led her down the path of the Consular, the Jedi Diplomat. Her predictive abilities, especially, had caught the testers by surprise. But she longed to go out into the galaxy and make a difference, and had never quite outgrown those adventure tales. Privately, Aiden surmised that was why she'd not yet been picked by a Master for further study, she was, according to the tenets of the Jedi Order, too eager.
Cordon, naturally, was the opposite. Laid-back, soft-spoken (f not outright taciturn), and easy-going, the massive man was one of the most naturally gifted pure warrior the Masters had ever seen. His problem was the opposite - in the tests given by Knights and Masters, he was too willing to sit back and let the issue sort itself out, failing to develop the instinct for when direct intervention was needed.
As for Aiden himself, well, he just got bored easily. Talked down to too many ranking Jedi when they proved themselves to be...less than intelligent. Of course, on a planet as boring as Vitiria, it's not like there was a whole lot of mental stimulation out there.
Vitiria lay on the inner edge of the Outer Rim Territories, a part of the Galactic Republic only because of a salient gifted the Republic by a particularly far-ranging Hutt who controlled near-on twenty systems, and willingly gave nineteen of them over to the Republic in exchange for no questions being asked about said Hutt's involvement in supplying arms to the enemies of the Republic during the Great Hyperspace War some thousand years ago. Considered a "breadbasket world" Vitiria boasted a pleasant and temperate climate, with rich, fertile soils over nearly three-quarters of its overall land surface, though not developed or colonized in any way until the Republic had taken over the planet. Massive farms covered swaths of the surface, usually twenty kilometers square and each farm run by a family or clan of settlers. The mutual intersection of every four square farms boasted a small landing pad for the light bulk freighters that moved the grains offworld. It had been figured years ago that a decentralized system was more cost-effective that having to build the infrastructure to store and transport the grains to the planetary capital and its large spaceport. Aside from the capital, the only other installation of note on Vitiria was the Jedi Temple.
The Jedi Temple was a relatively new facility, only a hundred and fifty-odd years old, built as a subsidiary unit to the primary temple in the sector. The theory mandated by the Jedi Council was that it was more effective to build many, smaller temples throughout Republic-controlled space, as opposed to transporting the many force-sensitive Jedi hopefuls all the way to the temple on Coruscant for testing, and then transporting them all the way back out of the Core to the MediCorps or AgriCorps bases if they failed their testing. Which would be fine, except it meant that Aiden and the others were stuck on this backwater world with nothing to do. Day in and day out, they meditated, or trained, or meditated, or trained. The tedium was...tedious. Aiden snapped out of his funk and sat up on the landspeeder's back seat. The bickering the in the front seat had stopped, and Akiva had her head in her hands, shoulders shaking.
"Akvia, are you alright?"
"I feel something. It's...dark. Slimy. It makes my mind feel vile." She raised her head from her hands and looked wide-eyed back at Aiden. "I feel something terrible is about to happen. I-" She stopped and cocked her head. "Do you hear that?"
Aiden and Cordon both strained their ears, but the roar of the wind proved too much to overcome. Cordon slammed the reverse thrusters, and for a moment all three were deafened by the engine's shrill whine as the landspeeder shuddered to a stop. Cordon frowned for a moment and turned to Akiva. "Yeah, I hear it too. Thunder, you think?"
Aiden concentrated and in the silence the sound came to him as well. Crump. Crump. Crump. A sound like distant thunder came rolling back across the verdant fields. "Couldn't be thunder, Cord. Not a cloud in the sky" Crump. Crump. Aiden stood up and let the Force flow through him, letting it heighten his senses. He could smell the soil, the scents on the breeze. He could hear perfectly now the sound Akiva had caught. It wasn't thunder anymore. He lifted his eyes, and far above the ground, back in the direction they had come, he could see tiny, box-like shapes orbiting the ground in the upper atmosphere. Below them, he saw what looked like tiny droplets of green rain falling to the earth. He stood uncomprehending for a moment then noticed, just at the edge of the horizon, a tiny plume of black smoke from where the raindrops met the ground. Then it hit him, and he collapsed hard back into his seat. Cordon and Akiva stared at him.
Cordon leaned forward. "What is it? What did you see?"
Aiden closed his eyes. "Turbolaser fire. Attacking the Temple. We have to get back."
The landspeeder was already swinging around as Aiden ground out his words, and he felt the g-forces push him back into the couch as Cordon took the speeder to full power. He reopened his eyes to see Akvia staring at him, wide-eyed and frightened. "Aiden, what's happening? What's going to happen to us?"
He could only shake his head unknowingly as the speeder thundered on towards the horizon. And home.
* * *