I Know Something About Pain You Don't

Two Jedi, encircled by thirty Yuuzhan Vong warriors moving toward them at a rapid rate -- it didn't take a Givin to know those were bad odds. "Remember, you're supposed to be training me," Tahiri said, turning to stand back-to-back with Corran. "What does the wise Jedi do in a situation like this?"

"The wise Jedi avoids situations like this," Corran said.

"Oh," Tahiri replied dryly. "I guess I don't know any wise Jedi, then. Very disillusioning."

"Right. And that's your lesson for the day-don't hang on to your illusions."

She felt for the power stud of her lightsaber. "I was hoping more for a crash course in 'how to kick butt when you're outnumbered thirty to two.'"

"Well, if you're going to be picky about what I teach . . ."

( Everything happened pretty quickly after that. )

[OOC: Yep, still NFI/NFB/OOC-okay. For the last time, adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes. Yeah, I love that first bit way too much to put it behind a cut. Yes, Friday, shut up. I meant to hit post two hours ago.

. . . and now, straight on to The Unifying Force starting Sunday. I'm so sorry, but there was just no way to break them up.]

Nen Yim had been gone for hours, and Yu'shaa hadn't returned either; Tahiri knew it wasn't just her Yuuzhan Vong paranoia that made her suspicious of the circumstances. The whole incident with the qahsa that had knocked her out for a while could have just been a ruse. So she went looking, drawing on both her Jedi experience as a tracker and her knowledge of Yuuzhan Vong strategies to retrace the shaper's route; above her, the sky was darkening with clouds as the wind whipped up, and the scent of electricity and resin hung in the humid air.

( A trail of blood a few meters long led her to Nen Yim, collapsed in a small clearing . . . )



( She caught up with Corran and Harrar halfway between the camp and the ridge where the hyperdrive unit was, her lightsaber out and ignited and the anger that she couldn't damp down probably broadcasting on a wide Force frequency. )

[OOC: NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, ad nauseam. Still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes, and holy crap this one is long. Adapting starfighter battle campaigns may be a pain, but I maintain trickster_twin has it easier. You try getting stuck with the long, drawn-out ground infiltration missions all the time. One more late tonight to finish this book, so sorry for the spam . . .]

They'd been on Zonama Sekot for several weeks now. Several weeks of Nen Yim and Harrar pretty much geeking out over every possible thing, Yu'shaa's long periods of silence broken by occasional speeches . . . and absolutely no sign of native inhabitants anywhere, despite repeated and farther-ranging expeditions. With limited food supplies, they'd been doing their best to live off the native resources -- Nen Yim had been able to identify a small handful of edible plants. Gathering expeditions to keep themselves fed provided a good excuse for Tahiri and Corran to talk in private, too.

"We can't stay here forever," Corran was saying. "I've been trying to think of a way to attract the attention of that Imperial frigate, if nothing else."

Tahiri turned the pingpear she'd picked over in her hands and looked down at her bare feet, frowning slightly. The trouser cuffs of her flightsuit seemed to be riding a couple of centimeters higher -- had she grown? "Any thoughts on how to go about that?"

He nodded. ( Yes. I'll have to go to the one place I've been avoiding. )



When she found Nen Yim a little while later, the shaper was examining a spherical object that looked like a qahsa but probably wasn't; Tahiri knew, because she'd watched her grow the thing. Tahiri had been watching Nen Yim a lot since they'd been here, which had probably been annoying at least at first.

Sitting down cross-legged near Nen Yim, she queried about this latest experiment -- an elaborate test of Tahiri's theory that the Force was regulating all the life on the planet.

"To explain," Nen Yim began, "I may have to speak of things that will upset you."

She'd wanted to know. And she hadn't. Her stomach twisted in anticipation and apprehension. ( This concerns my own shaping, doesn't it? )

[OOC: Oh, you know the drill. Still, yes, still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes; dialogue mostly intact, with narrative adjustments by me. Tahiri's random growth spurt is the fault of trickster_twin, momslilassassin, and new canon.]

Several days later their situation hadn't improved much, not in a living ship that was already acting up and had been further damaged by a run-in with the gravity well from an Imperial Remnant interdictor, with tension growing between the Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong on board. They'd been jumping from point to point in a largely uncharted region of space, Corran playing headgames with Nen Yim and Harrar about their real destination and Tahiri halfway wanting to knock all their heads together.

( The latest jump had brought them to the fringes of an unnamed star system whose primary planet appeared as a tiny blue sphere haloed by a vast ring that shone as if it were made of a few hundred trillion corusca gems. It was fascinating, and gorgeous, and Tahiri couldn't stop looking at it. )

[OOC: Oh, you so know the acronym drill by now. Also that this is still adapted and in parts just ganked from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes.]

By the time Tahiri finally came to, they were on board the ship, a Sekotan flier that had been damaged and grafted with Yuuzhan Vong biotechnology -- and mechanical controls, too, but Nen Yim had covered them up because they offended her, they'd broken out of the damutek with Nen Yim telling someone, who turned out to be a Yuuzhan Vong priest named Harrar, that she'd be weak for a while and might lose the use of her arm. Kriff that. Not if I have anything to do with it, Tahiri decided, but she was more preoccupied with the significance of Harrar's presence. If the clerical sect was interested in Zonama Sekot too, not just the shapers or the Shamed Ones, this "Jedi Heresy" belief must have really taken root.

That . . . could be a significant advantage.

( She wasn't surprised that being injured didn't give her a free pass out of getting into another argument with Corran . . . )

[OOC: NFI, NFB, OOC-okay, tl;dr, et cetera et cetera and so forth. Still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes, in an oddly continuing trend.]

The infiltration plan they finally went with was almost laughably simple and a lot less dangerous to Yu'shaa's followers than their earlier ideas: they'd harvested some of the glowing plants to fashion fake lightsabers, sending some of the Shamed Ones to masquerade as Jedi as a distraction. It didn't sit entirely well with Corran, who wasn't thrilled with the idea of them dying in this cause especially considering the fifty or so warriors patrolling the plaza outside Supreme Overlord Shimrra's palace.

( It didn't sit well with Tahiri, either, but that took a back seat to her twofold discomfort at the sight of the palace. )



They fought their way into the heart of the damutek. Both Tahiri and Corran had multiple cuts and gashes to show for it by the time they charged into the central laboratory, engaged with eight more warriors. The number wasn't surprising; they were defending a master shaper, after all.

Then one of the warriors shouted a warning to the shaper, and Tahiri's gut went cold.

"Master Yim, flee! There is danger here!"

That warrior, and a second then a third, fell to the shaper herself, impaled through eyes and arteries and hearts by the lethal whiplike stinger of her master's hand; Corran, cutting down the last of his opponents, was left staring at her.

Tahiri was staring too, as the body of the warrior she'd bisected fell to the floor in front of her, but for a completely different reason. She knew this shaper -- had seen her face on the other side of a membrane in a shaper damutek much like this one, every day for weeks on end almost three years ago.

( 'You,' Nen Yim said directly to Tahiri, recognition unmistakable in her eyes. 'You've come to kill me.' )

[OOC: Yup, you guessed it. Still NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes.]

Whenever she got back to Fandom, Tahiri was going to have to thank Master Skywalker for the lesson in crash-landing half a Star Destroyer, because it had not been fun crash-landing their stolen Yuuzhan Vong ship into what used to be Coruscant's Western Sea to the tune of Corran's repeated and acerbic commentary. He'd been needling her the whole time with comments meant to constantly remind her that he didn't trust her, because he didn't know who she was any more. Granted, that Star Destroyer had had standard technological controls and not the living cognition hood she had to wear to fly this ship (and that hadn't been any more fun this time around either), but she felt like the principle was largely the same.

( By the time she'd steered the ship clear of the giant digestive system that the worldshapers had grown to replace the planet's sewage system and brought it to the surface of the liquid (whatever it was, it could digest yorik coral so it wasn't just water) and they were picking their way through the caverns of Coruscant's underlevels, she'd absolutely had enough. )

[OOC: The NFI/NFB/slightly-tl;dr/OOC-okay dance goes on, as does the dance of still-adapted-from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes. I swear, I really did cut this down. It's just there's all this great Tahiri and Corran banter and it's haaaaaaaaard.]

She'd been on Mon Calamari quite a few times, but a year ago Tahiri would never have expected she'd be sitting in Kenth Hamner's office, looking out at the dramatic red, black, and silver landscape -- what there was of it, because there wasn't much that wasn't water -- of the planet. It was, in her opinion, gorgeous. She wouldn't even have expected to be sitting here a couple of months ago, or even a week. ( And yet here she was, contemplating the view outside and wondering if she'd have thought the same thing of that view before she'd faced and melded with Riina. )

[OOC: Still NFI/NFB/OOC-okay, still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes. Y'all's gettin' spammed today. I'm so sorry. This is a lot of catchup. :/]