An Extension of Will [Ahani Najwa]

[Matsu Xiangu]

Annaj - Midday

Matsu sat in a chair in one of the training rooms, looking down at what remained of her arm and flexing the mechanical half. She'd had ample practice to get good with the arm but sometimes she just liked to listen to the whir when she opened and closed her hand...open...close...open...close...

[SIZE=12pt]Like breathing.[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=12pt]When she opened her eyes, lids lifting in lazy acquiescence to a command they perhaps didn’t see the point of, she smiled.[/SIZE]​

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[SIZE=12pt]She could hear a voice. It spoke to her from beneath a swamp's cold, black water. It was twice as clear as heaven, and twice as loud as reason. It was rich like the riverbed silt. She could feel the marsh below her opening up to swallow her whole, swallow and sweep her away. The voice was so different from the melody she knew before; now it was spider legs picking quick and unnatural across the carpet of the swamp’s willow forest.

It was the spiders side-tracked by the body lying prone and stupid in that forest, arachnid legs arching like bow-strings across a body too weak to defend itself from their tickling advances. But I’m alive, alive I am still alive! Beaten and broken, spine made of strings too weak even in unison to lift her arms and swat away the spiders crawling down her throat and bursting in her stomach acid. Eyes open wide, the dirt and spit of the world level with her sight as she died…[/SIZE]​

She snapped out of her daydream, a habit that was common enough for the girl.

She was there with a purpose. It was her mind that she wanted to strengthen - a sick pool of dreams and half-sane predilections that needed shielding so what had happened to her and caused her to lose her arm would never happen again. She'd heard of [member="Ahani Najwa"]...and only hoped she would answer her request.

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Called for. Ahani Najwa had been called for. Sought out. Needed and wanted by some slip of a girl whose name was so entirely unfamiliar it took Ahani an entire standard day of lying on her belly over top of her yacht's engineering slab to realize she'd never met [member="Matsu Xiangu"]. "And it was okay! It's okay. Of. . f-oh-ovv.. Ov. Ovvvuh! Of." Her fingers twisted in the flooring grate, Ahani bent one leg up till the ball of her foot touched her back and grunted. "WHY AM I GOING!? Let the girl-person-thing burn in a lava flow for all I care, I'm BUSY!!" Screaming and screeching for good measure, Ahani glared at her Handmaiden who waited calmly at the bottom of the scaffolding above the Isdihar's engines. "Matron was requested to teach, what better use of talents than the forming of young minds?"

Flipping her legs up and over, Ahani careened straight off the scaffold and landed in a crouch on the floor to rise slowly, ever slowly shoulder twitching as she put a finger on the elderly woman's lips and pushed till she cracked the skin. The Handmaiden stared back in tranquil resolve, a rock in the trembling waters Ahani quivered within. "Sssshhhhhhhh. Why aren't we there, yet?" Ahani whispered.

The Handmaiden stepped back and nodded to the door. "Matron, we are."

"Oh." And Ahani burst out laughing so hard she fell over and cried.

Once cleaned up, her silver hair braided up in tight coils at the base of her neck and her clothing tidied, Ahani Najwa scoured the Training Rooms till she found a wavelength of 'crazy' she'd sniff out anywhere. As it also happened to be the place she was supposed to meet this Matsu girl at, Ahani skipped the last few steps to burst in the door and grin down at the girl with the robotic hand and twisted sense in the Force.

"That is one heck of a toothpick holder, Raven Head." Brushing off her collar bone, Ahani stood as tall as her six foot frame would allow and tried as she might to look like a respectable Master. Master! She was a Master now. Master, Master... Madame? Matron? No, Master. Master worked. Biting the inside of her lip, Ahani's fingers pushed down her clothing until they fiddled with the sword hilt on her belt.

"Achem!" Ahani's fingers twitched on the hilt, she pressed her lips to the side and waited till she thought she might look regal or mighty or expressive. "I be Master Ahani Najwa, Matron of the House Najwa and Mother of-f-f. M-mother of aw, title schmitle. Haven't had a use for 'em in eight hundred years. You Matsa Ch-x-changuey?"

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

She was pulled from her imagination by the bursting symphony of doors and an entrance that could be missed only by the profoundly asleep. She stood up, fully prepared to nod in deference to the woman when instead…she burst out laughing, her bright red lips peeling back over white teeth, the canines unnaturally pointed. Everything about Matsu was sharp, keen – an edge to snap in half on. “And I don’t even need the toothpick, Silver Fox,” she answered, holding up the mechanical arm briefly to reveal the clawed ends of her replacement.

When the Master introduced herself – and Matsu didn’t balk when she realized this was [member="Ahani Najwa"], the rolling flow of her power choking the Force in the room – she almost got lost again when she mentioned ‘eight hundred years’. Her immediate reaction wasn’t to disbelieve; she’d traveled a huge amount of the Galaxy for someone her age and knew enough to say it’d be foolish to dismiss a life span that long. It was her sudden…fascination. So much time, so many years to see the kinds of things that Matsu could only read about.

She had to swallow all the questions that jumped up behind her teeth. Perhaps it was her own particular brand of madness to speak with the Master with no thought to the fact that the woman was clearly a little unhinged. Reality was relative to the little Sith slip - if Ahani had her own, Matsu could only imagine stepping within it.

Her last name was always a mouthful, a jumble of lilting hushes and biting consonants. But it didn’t matter – no one ever called her by her last name. She was just… “Yes, I’m Matsu. I was told you’re the woman to find for some training in telekinesis. I’m…good. But I want more. Whatever you’re willing to share with me,” she said. And she was good. Truth be told she was an acolyte, just coming in to the power she held, but she’d participated in several dominions for the Confederacy before leaving its ranks and she could still recall using the shards of a broken blast door to impale the guards in her way. She wasn’t one to brag – strange considering her myriad of other undesirable qualities – but honesty was the best policy.

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

Ahani's teeth were not nearly as canine as [member="Matsu Xiangu"]'s smile, but her grin was twice as wide. The girl was laughing, laughter was positive right? "Bless me, your teeth are as wonderful as your toothpicks. . . I'm keeping you, Raven Head." Peering down at the girl, Ahani nodded firmly and sauntered into the centre of the room. Her presence in the Force had awoken with the cursive flickers of a gravitic storm far off from a ship's sensors: colours bursting in infra red and x-ray imaging where to the naked eye there was none but the absence of normal space. The flickering gales within her swirled and slashed at any place in which she found to habitate, and in this the newly minted Master was constant.

Ahani hadn't figured out that she'd grown so, yet. Glaring deeply at Matsu, Ahani's hand snaked out to take the girl's chin. Silver eyes peered inward, lost in a new face. "Quests and questions. Quests are better than questions. Discovery is better than rote knowing. We shall discover you. And you shall discover what you will of me." The woman blinked, her shoulders shuddered and she slowly released Matsu's chin, wiping her hand on her shirt. "S-sorry, no t-you-am I sorry? Should I- NO!"

Flailing her hand to the side, Ahani paced off and sat .... on the air. A disc of telekinetically compressed atmosphere wavered in the room, and Ahani plunked herself down. "Wanting more is valiant. If you didn't want more I'd consider you good for nothing but the compost pile. Maybe feeding a rancour. Step one: do you know physics? Telekinesis isn't a defiance of physics, but the better use of it. The smarter use of it. Oh, sure we get the bashers who throw big blasting waves around like they were in an ocean, but those thundering oafs can meet my blade. They're missing the art. Life's an art. The Dark Side is no different, and I sense much in you. . . which is good, because if I didn't I'd have to . . . to. . . think of something later. Now, Raven Head. I simply must be disappointed. You have yet to telekinetically lift something for me. Chop chop! Oooh, chopping... no I'll show you that later."

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Ahani’s presence in the Force was absolutely electric and Matsu saw her in colors. Silvers, to be sure. But the colors of a storm; not the kind of storm one sat by a window and watched pass by, thinking pleasant thoughts under a dark blue sky. No – this storm was dark purples, violent reds, grays so dark as to be black, shot through with lightning charging the edges of the clouds. She responded in kind, the deep and dark abyss of the Force in her rising to meet Ahani’s.

Inside of Matsu lay the ocean. It was the ocean as no one ever saw it – that one patch that no one flew over, that no species built a civilization within. The waves were constant, hungry, devouring each other. Beneath its surface were creatures of myth and legend, monsters, beasts, hungry. Everything about this representation of the Force within the girl was horrifying, demonic – bloodthirsty. And she was there among them all, long black hair waving in some mocking jest of a halo around a head no one would ever crown with such a thing. Hands outstretched she lets her fingers run along their scales as they come to know her, to greet her, to welcome her.

You belong down here.​

And she thinks… ‘how strange, how perfect’ as Ahani’s strong fingers wrap around her delicate chin: the Master, the glaring, gravitic storm looming as a dark sky above the roiling sea of the girl in her grasp.

Perfect.

She only blinks when Ahani starts muttering half-expressed sorry’s…and she is glad when the idea of an apology is dismissed. Matsu was alive in her off-kilter presence and she would rather feel her jaw snap in the Master’s grip (SET. ME. FREE!) than live in a world of careful tact and walking on eggshells.

She watched as the Master took a seat – made herself a seat, she supposed was more accurate – and spoke of physics. Matsu wasn’t well-versed in those laws, at least not in the way they were typically understood, but she had an innate sense of the world. And she smiled again as Ahani mentioned being disappointed at seeing nothing of Matsu’s skill. She supposed in a lot of ways she wasn’t what one thought of when they thought ‘Sith’. Her power came mostly from a natural predatory violence, she was not always thinking ‘me, me, me’, and her true power wasn’t worn on her sleeve. Keeping her opponents guessing seemed a smart choice. But she would show Ahani.

She could throw a big blasting wave. But art…

She lifted one hand, the natural one tipped in nails almost as sharp as the durasteel claws on her left, and lifted the table that she’d just been sitting at and all the chairs edging it, all the objects beginning to spin end over end at once. She’d learned almost right off the bat that size meant nothing – it was only the will and belief that she could do it. She let them spin faster before pulling them to a complete halt, moving her fingers to place the table back down and stack all the chairs on top of it, balancing all the legs on top of one another until they were all sitting in a strange formation.

It was simple, only a glance of the power she might one day have with the right teaching – but that was why she sought [member="Ahani Najwa"], was it not? The lifting was easy - the finer use of telekinesis, the more creative uses...that she could sense the Master knew in spades, clutched in a mind that seemed despite its scattered qualities to hold its powerful secrets perfectly.

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

A storm howled over the ocean and the storm's eyes shut as she felt the thrill of it, the unendurable fullness of ideal and the passion to fulfill it. Ahani's shoulder popped as she moved, her spine crackling as her body twisted and she sat on the disc of telekinetically willed air. Will, the Force was a quest of wills and becomings. Perhaps that's what had changed. Ahani had gotten her will back. "Advantages, disadvantages, they all work together. We are the predators, the storms and the seas. The Force gives us what we desire, because it admires our want of it. But only to those whose want is dominant, the suffering little Jedi with their submission to the Force, allowing the delicious ichor of peace in their veins are blessed, doted on. But we shape where they are shaped. We taste what they dare not and it's delicious."

This girl [member="Matsu Xiangu"] got it. Without the vast displays of angry power, a finer grasp of the Force could be taken. Matsu's telekinetic sculpture had Ahani clapping her hands and laughing as a child laughed in excitement at the newest carnival act. "How refreshing someone gets it! Smiting a wall with a blasted wave of telekinetic energy is the child's tantrum shouting at mummy for a new can of fizzy drink. Refinement, pristine tact... oh that my Raven, is power." She bit her fingernail, hand tugging away as Ahani stared at it. Had this been the hand which he had held, pulling her from her prison cell? Prison upon prison, life had been a series of vastly propitiating cells and chambers beneath the dirt. As her fingers curled back toward her palm, Ahani let her fist ball until it turned white.

"We Sith must play a longer game. Telekinesis seems such a tactile thing: the movement of objects with minds. What is tactic but a movement of the esoteric with the mind? Take the third chair in, and without dislodging the others turn it on its side. This separation of one mind will give you an advantage over the brute force mongers. Picture all the objects you've got and make strong - make permanent all but that one chair. . . or I'll cut you with my beautiful blade, watch you leak out."

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Matsu felt something like a shiver, like the slight ticking of a spider crawling up her spine when Ahani described want. She could hear every pop of the Master’s body as she shifted on her disc of hair and if Matsu wasn’t mistaken she could feel herself gaining even greater control in her fascination.

That was the key, and that was why Matsu was able to delight [member="Ahani Najwa"] with her art. It had never been anger that had fueled the girl. Sure, her first real and accidental use of the Force had been in a child’s tantrum, and of course anger could be a powerful tool and conduit for the power within her – but it wasn’t anger that made her capable of control. It was fascination, natural violence, a bone-deep ecstasy that overtook her entire body when she was inside of her own head. To channel creation, to feel her will coming from her fingertips, pouring from a masterfully orchestrated mind…

Without control, she could not sit back and enjoy that creation.
And that would be a shame.

She let herself concentrate on the molten excitement of Ahani’s fist curling in on itself, of the flesh white and tense around her knuckles as she taught. (Make strong, make permanent..) and she did, almost hearing the creak of the chairs as they settled in to their positions (and without dislodging the others, turn it on its side) and Matsu took a moment to think, wanting to keep the others exactly as they were but due to their positioning knowing they would move if she rolled the third chair in as it was. So with a small movement of her fingers the legs of the chair popped off, floating piecemeal as she flipped only the base of the chair without disturbing the others and then reattaching the legs, solidifying the entire sculpture for the Master’s enjoyment.

She turned to look at Ahani again. Matsu was a girl of few words in most situations and here was no different. But her mind curled around the threat – not idle, she was certain – and…feasted, imagining what it would feel like.

Maybe you should anyways, she thinks to herself.​

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Matsu was enthralled.​

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

"Keep the middle chair spinning, Raven Head." Taking the legs off to best fit the situation showed mental acuity and a decent tactical sense. The former officer could smell a uniform on [member="Matsu Xiangu"], or better yet the potential for one, which in Ahani's book was better than many of the discipline deficit cures wigging out on Coruscant or some other endangered world with their plenty and their forcefulness and their rage.

Ahani unsheathed Anandi as she walked the step and a half over to her raven haired student-of-the-day and swung it in a cleaving diagonal meant to split the skin of her cheek. The Echani weapons master was precise in every detail, she would only cut skin - enough that the poisons on the blade to work their magic. Glitterstim, deathsticks, they all had Ixetal Cilona - both hallucinogen and psychedelic which in doses begun to mar and dim the user's connection to the Force. "Keep it spinning! That's it, even as the poison takes its hold and dims you. We battle in plenty and in famine. We must prepare ourselves in both. It is to us to take the flagrant destruction of our brothers and sisters and create afresh. Mould in our images that which they topple down. Make the middle chair spin vertically. Add the top right chair spinning counter-clockwise. Do it!"

Until the hit wore off, the drug would surge inside her, growing in the wound. Ahani tapped the sword blade on her own palm until it bled. She flicked her hand at Matsu. "What can I say? You're impressing me."

 

[Matsu Xiangu]

Half of her had expected the blade to come and the other half didn't, a cruel satisfaction leeching at her as she felt the sting of the sword against her cheek.

Matsu felt the poison almost immediately, the effects heightened by the rush of her beating heat and the pounding of her blood through her veins. It took almost no time to feel her power waning. It was not the drastic effect she was sure the Echani was capable of but it still left her reeling, her constant and deep connection to the Force feeling like an electrical short out. The physical sensation of pushing and coming up short was frustrating and for a moment she was sure she might drop every single one of those chairs and take away any potential she might have shown the weapons-master.

But she concentrated on the voice through the fog of the poison, the smell of the thin line of blood the blade had drawn, the passion in the -- and it was then, when in the middle of her thoughts [member="Ahani Najwa"] flung splatters of blood from her palm on Matsu's face that the slip of the girl found how to harness what she could. The strangeness, the audacity of the act that Matsu craved had her pushing harder and then the middle chair was spinning vertically - slowly at first but eventually picking up speed. Once that one was done she pulled on the top right, twisting her fingers slightly in the direction she wanted the chair to start rolling.

The poison was on full tilt but somehow the rolling sensation in her head was helping with the movement. Her eyelids fluttering, concentrating completely on keeping some still and some spinning, Matsu focused her gaze on the Master. "I should hope so. I just let you cut open my face after all," she said, her words slightly blocky and punch-drunk with the effects of what was coursing through her system.

She was cheeky - but she was sure it was obvious she liked Ahani Najwa, missing rocker and all.

 

[Ahani Najwa-Zambrano]

"Hurry up! A Knight would have done it by now, of course they'd also be going weak at the knees." How delightful a thing to see @Matsnu Xiangu struggle. An Acolyte's place was to struggle and work, sometimes failing, toward the goal of becoming great - or dying in the attempt.

"Let me? Dear girl. You don't have the authority to let me do anything." Perhaps the more Sithly option would have been to punish the girl until she understood that force was the right of the Master, but Ahani did not trouble herself with the petty squabbles and sensibilities of one on one domination. It was a weaker form of the Dark Side, an amateur's domain to push will upon another. No, all vehement domination did was create a situation where later the student will want to prove how they've grown - and eventually kill or maim their masters. To Ahani laid another path.

"I'm bored! Put them back, next thing!" Ahani took control of one of the chairs and yanked it firmly away. She held up her hand as the chair lifted then clenched her fingers together. The chair crumbled inward in a wreck of metal and wood and cloth.