Arkanian Lightsworn Jedi
“The Dais recognizes, Guildmaster Brivaug Permunum,” shouted the Chairman of the Guildmasters’ Hansraad with a thundering clap of his gavel. The stern looking Balosar nodded to Brivaug and motioned for him to rise. “If you would, Guildmaster Permunum,” said the Chairman.
Brivaug Permunum, Guildmaster of the Hyperspace Route Megacorporation known as The Royal Tapani Trust, rose slowly but gracefully from his curule seat. His tall and stocky frame was draped in a finely blue, body-length, and long-sleeved tunic with shimmering gilt auropyle trim. Hung around and over him was an ornate sash vestment that marked his rank in Eufornis as a Guildmaster. The purple dyed cloth was wrapped around his waist, then crossed over his chest, and thrown over his shoulder so that its very edges looped around and off his slightly raised right arm. Brivaug strolled forward into the center of the Hansraad’s Council Chamber, beating out the strides of his approach with a polished, chrome cane.
“Esteemed Colleagues,” began Brivaug, just as he reached the rim of a massive holoprojector panel-disc embedded in the checkered black and white marble floor. “Decades ago our Monarch, Aria Annix, saw fit for us to emerge from the dominations of the One Sith into the prosperity of the Galactic Alliance,” continued Brivaug, stacking his beringed fingers on the top of his cane. “Since thence, the Alliance had swollen beyond the Inner Rim, and under its protection, so had the Hansraad’s reach across the intersections of the Hyperspace Routes.”
Bivaurg stomped the end of his cane and shook his vestment burdened right hand in a balled fist. “But now the Alliance can not even protect itself!” growled the Guildmaster. He thrust his fist at the enormous suspended holoprojection that consumed all the open space between the Guildmasters’ curule seats and the Council Chamber’s high and cavernous dome ceiling. “The Alliance has lost the Deep Core. Worse yet it has lost the termini of many of the Hyperspace Routes. Centers of commerce and the fonts of our wealth! Coruscant, Empress Tetta, Metellos, Brentaal IV, and not to mention its previous relinquishment of the Balmorran and Kuat industrial worlds,” said Brivaug.
Above him and the rest of the Guildmasters, the holoprojected map of the Deep Core and Core began to flash red in gridded lattices that marked all the regions and planets Brivaug listed as lost. Brivaug lowered his fist and this time shook his head. Another tap of his cane announced his renewed movement, as he contemplatively paced around the holoprojector orb.
“Granted, trade still flows,” said Brivaug. “But satisfying commerce does not. The Alliance places onerous restrictions, taxes, and even denials, upon trade with the lost Deep Core Worlds. And then there is this Galactic Empire. It does not deal in a single unitarian Imperial Commerce Authority, but instead our Guilds are left to conduct laborious trade deals with every Moff and Admiral our ships pass by. Each demanding their own negotiated bounty in exhortative payments and placating tributes! This does not include the depleting costs of the extra security hired in the way of mercenary ships to guide our trade fleets! ”
As Brivaug paced, murmurs of a hundred side conversations spoke in hushed arguments between the other seated Guildmasters. They all sat in curule seats carved into the benches of tall and arched alcove spaces that lined the walls of the octagonal Council Chamber. Some held datapads in their hands, others smoked from tabac pipes, and many more were glaring up at the galactic map. They all wore the Guildmaster’s draping vestment and they all wore suspicious glances, side eyeing each other, and at Brivaug. But none dared speak up against him. While the Dais Chairman was the official moderator of the Hansraad, the Megacorporation Corporate Council that brought them together, Birvaug Permunum was no doubt a principle first-among-equals.
“So what course are we to take here?” asked Brivaug, awaiting no answer and continued haughtily. “Shall we place blind faith in fanciful reconquest by an Alliance consumed by feckless Senators and befuddled by a disorientated Jedi Order, vacant of a Grandmaster?”
“Secession!” one of the Guildmasters cried out of turn. “There must be total severance with this failing power!” Several other Guildmasters rattled off the same slogan in support.
The Dais Chairman smashed his gavel and silenced the chorus of demands for leaving the Galactic Alliance. “Order!” the Chairman bellowed between strikes of the gavel. “I will have order and decorum in this Chamber!”
Brivaug nodded sympathetically at the crying demands of secession and awaited the Guildmasters to fall silent once more. He changed his nods into a curt shake of his head and shook his cane in a wagging dismissal of the idea. “No, no,” he said. “Seceed, and become what? An independent system, but now isolated and hampered by both the Galactic Alliance and Galactic Empire’s economic retaliation? No, Great Sirs, no. Secession is the action of politicians and tyrants. We are businessmen. We look for opportunity and exploitation of circumstance.”
Brivaug halted his pacing by the Dais, a towering marble lectern where the lavishly berobed Dais Chairman sat in a high backed throne hewn right out the marble. Brivaug looked up to the Dais Chairman and then over his shoulder at the Guildmasters. Then he turned fully and raised his head to beam at the hovering map.
“Diversification, Great Sirs. Diversification and demonstration,” proclaimed Brivaug. “Diversification away from the Galactic Alliance abroad, and demonstration of our wealth and power to more closely guide our home.”
A slight grin etched across his lips belying plots within plots that swam in between the lines of Brivaug’s speech. “Great Sirs,” said Brivaug. “It is time the Hansraad finally makes good on its ancient promise of a Margravian Republic.”
“Emergency Sessions in Fondor continue to produce no policy answers weeks after the occupation of Arkania, Champala, & Ord Lithone by the Galactic Empire. No statement has been released from the Office of the Chancellor. But a Representative of the Guildmasters’ Hansraad stated that they would meet today to--” the Holonet Newscaster was blinked away by Garzant Voidsfarer’s stabbing finger.
The miniature holoprojection was being beamed from a projector embedded in the back of the head rest of the seat in front. When the Newscaster vanished, Garzant tilted his head to the side so it rested on his black gloved fist, propped up by his elbow planted on the sill of the luxury limospeeder’s tinted windows. The Chamberlain to the Monarch of Eufornis stared into his own grim reflection. Drifting by his narrowed grey eyes, trimmed auburn beard and flecked gray moustache, were the constellatory lights of the grand superskytowers of the ecumenopolis’ “Little Coruscant” district.
The spectral lights reminded Garzant back to a time when he was among actual stars as a Warden of the Sky and fellow wayfarer of the Spacer’s Guilds. Back then it was just him, his starship, the open expanse of the Hyperspace Routes, and a bunch of close calls he couldn’t begin to properly count. Before then, he was reaping a meager existence as a lowlife pirate.
In fact one of his daringly foolish raids was along the Rimma Hyperspace Route into the Giju Run tributary lanes near Eufornis. He was caught by the then Inner Rim Wardens of the Sky on the route. But it was the mediation of the Warden’s associate, a Rogue Jedi Arkanian Jedi who went by the Spacer Handle - Starhaven. It was by her appeal he was allowed to redeem himself first as a Marshal under the Warden, then a Warden himself, and then somehow, by the mercy of the prior Monarch Aria Annix, a Chamberlain to the Monarch himself.
How did you get here you old bastard, Garzant laughed at his reflection. You’re in over your head. Politics, Noble Houses, the fat Landsraad, and those farking Hansraad Oligarchs, you’re up against everyone. Garzant smirks, those odds reminded him of the old days; outgunned and outmatched against pirates, mercenary privateers, and smugglers. But even back then he had help - the Jedi Starhaven. His sources still in the Wardens of the Sky and the Spacers Guild had told him she was going by the name Jedi Lightsworn Kylass Starhaven nowadays. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s gone all reputable and stand-up-citizen in their path, thought Garzant.
“Arriving at the Maintenance Mooring Tower in five minutes, Lord Chamberlain,” said the Robovalet Droid driving the limospeeder.
Garzant lifted his head from his fist perch and looked onto the driver’s seat head and the Robovalet. “Thanks,” he said.
Garzant reached into his overcoat’s inner pocket and removed his personal imagecaster. Holding up the palmsized holoprojector and commlink blinked on with a press of his thumb. A wavy distorted image ballooned above the small round body of the device. As it refined the connection, the visage of a 3D-4X Attendant Droid focused into view. The droid bowed its tall cylindrical head towards Garzant’s feed.
“Status on our guests, Tri-D?” asked Garzant.
“The Jedi Master and her companions have successfully made their way to the Maintenance Mooring Tower Waiting Lobby,” replied Tri-D.
“Are they displeased?” said Garzant.
“On the contrary Lord Chamberlain, the Jedi Master seems…well…serene and reserved at the less than hospitable accommodations,” answered Tri-D. “Quite a standard reaction in my experience with veteran Jedi such as Master Starhaven.”
Garzant let out a short chuckle. “Not standard Tri-D. That’s just how Starhaven is,” he said. “I’ll be arriving soon enough. You had no stalkers on the way over?”
Tri-D pivoted his cylindrical head to mimic the best it could of a human shake of the head. “No Sir,” he continued. “The camouflaged ferrying of the guests via a Maintenance Crew Freight Transport did indeed garner no interloping by the Hansraad.”
Garzant let out a sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “Prepare our guests for my arrival. We have a lot of work to do before the meeting.”
“At once Lord Chamberlain,” said Tri-D before his feed was cut and the image blinked away.
Garzant reclined his head into the head rest of his seat and pocket the imagecaster. He let out a long dragging sigh. Come on Starhaven. I need you more than ever.
Jedi Lightsworn Kylass Starhaven stood quietly in the corner of the austerely furnished and grey plated lobby of the Maintenance Mooring Tower, pondering the message she received once more. It had been weeks after the damaging battle on Arkania, and not days long after other Lightsworn Jedi Strike Team missions, that she received an encrypted message by way of old Spacer guild contacts.
The message was signed with an old Spacer distress code, ‘No Moons, All Angels Home’. The code meant someone was flying alone and needed escort back to a safe port. It was a call for protection. But it was the last bit of the signature that struck deep into Kylass - Warden Voidsfarer - it was Garzant. It had been decades since she had seen him. To think he would end up Chamberlain to the Monarch of Eufornis, the young and regency guided Markkenn Annix.
Something was going on, she could feel, and not just in the Force, but in the circuitous way they travelled across the ecumenopolis to the Monarch’s Palace. First they directed
Pak Jaehyun
and
Jin Taeyang
to land far off in the Industrial Exporters Spaceport and then they were hidden away in a rough and hulking Maintenance Crew Freight Transport, the kind cleaning crews and mechanics used to travel to the Palace.
They were being smuggled into the Palace, hidden from the obvious sight of formally invited diplomats. This would be no normal Jedi Mediation. Especially so since Garzant had passed on the official help of the Galactic Alliance New Jedi Order and had gone to the Lightsworn. Whether he reached out to her as an old friend, or to the Lightsworn to avoid the official eyes of the Alliance, she wasn’t sure; perhaps both.
Kylass turned away from the small port window she was looking out from and eyed her two companions whom she roped into being her ferrymen and escorts to Eufornis. With her arms crossed over her grey Jedi Lightsworn robes and her twin pale white braided tails draped over her elbows, she held a pensive posture as she strolled over to them.
“I suppose I owe you two an apology,” said Kylass with a twitch of her lips in a small apologetic grin. “When I said you’d be attending a Jedi Mediation Mission to the Monarch of Eufornis, I hadn’t expected this sort of blunt espionage.”
Brivaug Permunum, Guildmaster of the Hyperspace Route Megacorporation known as The Royal Tapani Trust, rose slowly but gracefully from his curule seat. His tall and stocky frame was draped in a finely blue, body-length, and long-sleeved tunic with shimmering gilt auropyle trim. Hung around and over him was an ornate sash vestment that marked his rank in Eufornis as a Guildmaster. The purple dyed cloth was wrapped around his waist, then crossed over his chest, and thrown over his shoulder so that its very edges looped around and off his slightly raised right arm. Brivaug strolled forward into the center of the Hansraad’s Council Chamber, beating out the strides of his approach with a polished, chrome cane.
“Esteemed Colleagues,” began Brivaug, just as he reached the rim of a massive holoprojector panel-disc embedded in the checkered black and white marble floor. “Decades ago our Monarch, Aria Annix, saw fit for us to emerge from the dominations of the One Sith into the prosperity of the Galactic Alliance,” continued Brivaug, stacking his beringed fingers on the top of his cane. “Since thence, the Alliance had swollen beyond the Inner Rim, and under its protection, so had the Hansraad’s reach across the intersections of the Hyperspace Routes.”
Bivaurg stomped the end of his cane and shook his vestment burdened right hand in a balled fist. “But now the Alliance can not even protect itself!” growled the Guildmaster. He thrust his fist at the enormous suspended holoprojection that consumed all the open space between the Guildmasters’ curule seats and the Council Chamber’s high and cavernous dome ceiling. “The Alliance has lost the Deep Core. Worse yet it has lost the termini of many of the Hyperspace Routes. Centers of commerce and the fonts of our wealth! Coruscant, Empress Tetta, Metellos, Brentaal IV, and not to mention its previous relinquishment of the Balmorran and Kuat industrial worlds,” said Brivaug.
Above him and the rest of the Guildmasters, the holoprojected map of the Deep Core and Core began to flash red in gridded lattices that marked all the regions and planets Brivaug listed as lost. Brivaug lowered his fist and this time shook his head. Another tap of his cane announced his renewed movement, as he contemplatively paced around the holoprojector orb.
“Granted, trade still flows,” said Brivaug. “But satisfying commerce does not. The Alliance places onerous restrictions, taxes, and even denials, upon trade with the lost Deep Core Worlds. And then there is this Galactic Empire. It does not deal in a single unitarian Imperial Commerce Authority, but instead our Guilds are left to conduct laborious trade deals with every Moff and Admiral our ships pass by. Each demanding their own negotiated bounty in exhortative payments and placating tributes! This does not include the depleting costs of the extra security hired in the way of mercenary ships to guide our trade fleets! ”
As Brivaug paced, murmurs of a hundred side conversations spoke in hushed arguments between the other seated Guildmasters. They all sat in curule seats carved into the benches of tall and arched alcove spaces that lined the walls of the octagonal Council Chamber. Some held datapads in their hands, others smoked from tabac pipes, and many more were glaring up at the galactic map. They all wore the Guildmaster’s draping vestment and they all wore suspicious glances, side eyeing each other, and at Brivaug. But none dared speak up against him. While the Dais Chairman was the official moderator of the Hansraad, the Megacorporation Corporate Council that brought them together, Birvaug Permunum was no doubt a principle first-among-equals.
“So what course are we to take here?” asked Brivaug, awaiting no answer and continued haughtily. “Shall we place blind faith in fanciful reconquest by an Alliance consumed by feckless Senators and befuddled by a disorientated Jedi Order, vacant of a Grandmaster?”
“Secession!” one of the Guildmasters cried out of turn. “There must be total severance with this failing power!” Several other Guildmasters rattled off the same slogan in support.
The Dais Chairman smashed his gavel and silenced the chorus of demands for leaving the Galactic Alliance. “Order!” the Chairman bellowed between strikes of the gavel. “I will have order and decorum in this Chamber!”
Brivaug nodded sympathetically at the crying demands of secession and awaited the Guildmasters to fall silent once more. He changed his nods into a curt shake of his head and shook his cane in a wagging dismissal of the idea. “No, no,” he said. “Seceed, and become what? An independent system, but now isolated and hampered by both the Galactic Alliance and Galactic Empire’s economic retaliation? No, Great Sirs, no. Secession is the action of politicians and tyrants. We are businessmen. We look for opportunity and exploitation of circumstance.”
Brivaug halted his pacing by the Dais, a towering marble lectern where the lavishly berobed Dais Chairman sat in a high backed throne hewn right out the marble. Brivaug looked up to the Dais Chairman and then over his shoulder at the Guildmasters. Then he turned fully and raised his head to beam at the hovering map.
“Diversification, Great Sirs. Diversification and demonstration,” proclaimed Brivaug. “Diversification away from the Galactic Alliance abroad, and demonstration of our wealth and power to more closely guide our home.”
A slight grin etched across his lips belying plots within plots that swam in between the lines of Brivaug’s speech. “Great Sirs,” said Brivaug. “It is time the Hansraad finally makes good on its ancient promise of a Margravian Republic.”
…MEANWHILE…
“Emergency Sessions in Fondor continue to produce no policy answers weeks after the occupation of Arkania, Champala, & Ord Lithone by the Galactic Empire. No statement has been released from the Office of the Chancellor. But a Representative of the Guildmasters’ Hansraad stated that they would meet today to--” the Holonet Newscaster was blinked away by Garzant Voidsfarer’s stabbing finger.
The miniature holoprojection was being beamed from a projector embedded in the back of the head rest of the seat in front. When the Newscaster vanished, Garzant tilted his head to the side so it rested on his black gloved fist, propped up by his elbow planted on the sill of the luxury limospeeder’s tinted windows. The Chamberlain to the Monarch of Eufornis stared into his own grim reflection. Drifting by his narrowed grey eyes, trimmed auburn beard and flecked gray moustache, were the constellatory lights of the grand superskytowers of the ecumenopolis’ “Little Coruscant” district.
The spectral lights reminded Garzant back to a time when he was among actual stars as a Warden of the Sky and fellow wayfarer of the Spacer’s Guilds. Back then it was just him, his starship, the open expanse of the Hyperspace Routes, and a bunch of close calls he couldn’t begin to properly count. Before then, he was reaping a meager existence as a lowlife pirate.
In fact one of his daringly foolish raids was along the Rimma Hyperspace Route into the Giju Run tributary lanes near Eufornis. He was caught by the then Inner Rim Wardens of the Sky on the route. But it was the mediation of the Warden’s associate, a Rogue Jedi Arkanian Jedi who went by the Spacer Handle - Starhaven. It was by her appeal he was allowed to redeem himself first as a Marshal under the Warden, then a Warden himself, and then somehow, by the mercy of the prior Monarch Aria Annix, a Chamberlain to the Monarch himself.
How did you get here you old bastard, Garzant laughed at his reflection. You’re in over your head. Politics, Noble Houses, the fat Landsraad, and those farking Hansraad Oligarchs, you’re up against everyone. Garzant smirks, those odds reminded him of the old days; outgunned and outmatched against pirates, mercenary privateers, and smugglers. But even back then he had help - the Jedi Starhaven. His sources still in the Wardens of the Sky and the Spacers Guild had told him she was going by the name Jedi Lightsworn Kylass Starhaven nowadays. Looks like I’m not the only one who’s gone all reputable and stand-up-citizen in their path, thought Garzant.
“Arriving at the Maintenance Mooring Tower in five minutes, Lord Chamberlain,” said the Robovalet Droid driving the limospeeder.
Garzant lifted his head from his fist perch and looked onto the driver’s seat head and the Robovalet. “Thanks,” he said.
Garzant reached into his overcoat’s inner pocket and removed his personal imagecaster. Holding up the palmsized holoprojector and commlink blinked on with a press of his thumb. A wavy distorted image ballooned above the small round body of the device. As it refined the connection, the visage of a 3D-4X Attendant Droid focused into view. The droid bowed its tall cylindrical head towards Garzant’s feed.
“Status on our guests, Tri-D?” asked Garzant.
“The Jedi Master and her companions have successfully made their way to the Maintenance Mooring Tower Waiting Lobby,” replied Tri-D.
“Are they displeased?” said Garzant.
“On the contrary Lord Chamberlain, the Jedi Master seems…well…serene and reserved at the less than hospitable accommodations,” answered Tri-D. “Quite a standard reaction in my experience with veteran Jedi such as Master Starhaven.”
Garzant let out a short chuckle. “Not standard Tri-D. That’s just how Starhaven is,” he said. “I’ll be arriving soon enough. You had no stalkers on the way over?”
Tri-D pivoted his cylindrical head to mimic the best it could of a human shake of the head. “No Sir,” he continued. “The camouflaged ferrying of the guests via a Maintenance Crew Freight Transport did indeed garner no interloping by the Hansraad.”
Garzant let out a sigh of relief. “Good,” he said. “Prepare our guests for my arrival. We have a lot of work to do before the meeting.”
“At once Lord Chamberlain,” said Tri-D before his feed was cut and the image blinked away.
Garzant reclined his head into the head rest of his seat and pocket the imagecaster. He let out a long dragging sigh. Come on Starhaven. I need you more than ever.
ELSEWHERE…
Jedi Lightsworn Kylass Starhaven stood quietly in the corner of the austerely furnished and grey plated lobby of the Maintenance Mooring Tower, pondering the message she received once more. It had been weeks after the damaging battle on Arkania, and not days long after other Lightsworn Jedi Strike Team missions, that she received an encrypted message by way of old Spacer guild contacts.
The message was signed with an old Spacer distress code, ‘No Moons, All Angels Home’. The code meant someone was flying alone and needed escort back to a safe port. It was a call for protection. But it was the last bit of the signature that struck deep into Kylass - Warden Voidsfarer - it was Garzant. It had been decades since she had seen him. To think he would end up Chamberlain to the Monarch of Eufornis, the young and regency guided Markkenn Annix.
Something was going on, she could feel, and not just in the Force, but in the circuitous way they travelled across the ecumenopolis to the Monarch’s Palace. First they directed
Pak Jaehyun
and
Jin Taeyang
to land far off in the Industrial Exporters Spaceport and then they were hidden away in a rough and hulking Maintenance Crew Freight Transport, the kind cleaning crews and mechanics used to travel to the Palace.They were being smuggled into the Palace, hidden from the obvious sight of formally invited diplomats. This would be no normal Jedi Mediation. Especially so since Garzant had passed on the official help of the Galactic Alliance New Jedi Order and had gone to the Lightsworn. Whether he reached out to her as an old friend, or to the Lightsworn to avoid the official eyes of the Alliance, she wasn’t sure; perhaps both.
Kylass turned away from the small port window she was looking out from and eyed her two companions whom she roped into being her ferrymen and escorts to Eufornis. With her arms crossed over her grey Jedi Lightsworn robes and her twin pale white braided tails draped over her elbows, she held a pensive posture as she strolled over to them.
“I suppose I owe you two an apology,” said Kylass with a twitch of her lips in a small apologetic grin. “When I said you’d be attending a Jedi Mediation Mission to the Monarch of Eufornis, I hadn’t expected this sort of blunt espionage.”
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