I Know Something About Pain You Don't

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 . . .]

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.]

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.]

Tahiri's plan to take her X-Wing straight back to Fandom had been derailed in a pretty dramatic fashion, and boy, was she getting yelled at for it now.

"Kid," Han was saying, shaking a finger at her, "I hope you aren't counting on another lucky break your whole life, because you've just used up whatever you may have had coming."

She really did feel bad about worrying them, so Tahiri was relieved when Leia jumped in on her behalf, maybe more relieved than she should have been considering a memory of Leia hitting her with Force-lightning was still far too fresh. Still, the obvious concern both Solos showed -- mostly in the form of Han yelling about how she'd been insane to jump out of the Dagobah system past a pair of Yuuzhan Vong frigate analogs with her engines half-slagged from a close call with their plasma cannons, and she was lucky she hadn't ended up on opposite sides of the Outer Rim all at once, and she'd better not be thinking of telling any of the kids in Flight Club that this was a good idea, and why making a promise to a Shamed One was so important that she'd been in such a hurry to get away instead of waiting for the Yuuzhan Vong to leave -- made her feel a little better.

( Eventually Han calmed down enough to stop yelling . . . )

[OOC: And again, NFI/NFB, OOC okay. Still adapted from The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes. I kind of adore this book, in no small part because of this bit.]