And With Strange Aeons [Rave]

[Fabula Caromed]

Corbos wastelands, middle-o-nowhere
When she faced the scorching volcano-pitch of the atmosphere and had to fight through dust storms, sharp crags, and roiling magma to find a place to set down her Bloody Pilgrim, Fabula knew that Corbos was exactly the kind of planet she was looking for. The average person might not have taken staring a thousand kinds of death in the face quite so calmly, but she had just returned from subsistence-camping on Vendaxa for a few galactic weeks. It was safe to assume that she wasn't "average."

Even so, Fabula made a point not to go about this one without her gear. That gear amounted to Alna Merrill's punished old toolbelt, a hydrospanner that she'd never find a use for on Corbos, and a couple of lightsabers that had lived a more colorful life than the most recent graduating class of the Jedi Academy put together. At least this time she'd managed to remember a weather-resistant datapad that she could fit into one of the treated pockets of that toolbelt. Always helped to be able to look things up without having your computer's circuits fry when it was exposed to rolling lava.

With her final preparations in order, Fabs opened the boarding ramp of her Pilgrim with a hiss and leapt out onto the surface of one of the least hospitable planets she'd been to in...quite some time. The time-lock on the door closed after she was out, properly sealing it against the poisonous air of a volcanic world.

Fabula didn't seem to notice that "poisonous air" thing. Or the "volcanic world." When she landed, she stood up in a dramatic stretch and fluffed her hair out behind her. Unlike with Tatooine, she'd prepared herself properly with meditation on the world's conditions, charged her blood, her skin, even her lungs with the Force in ways that no Jedi could possibly hope to understand. She wasn't just using the Force to cool herself, or "joined with" the Force in some sort of half-assed placation of proper meditation.

She was the Force, and the Force could not be so easily inconvenienced by a hot day and a little dust.

When she finished her stretch, Fabula looked around and started walking towards the edge of the plateau she'd landed on. A dangerous planet like this would be plenty of a workout on its own, but she hoped she'd at least find one or two monsters that were insane enough to have attempted to evolve on a desolate rock like this. If not...well, she could probably find a good rock island in the middle of a lava river to meditate in. Or maybe she'd go fight a kung-fu duel with a rockslide. That sounded fun.
@[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

@[member="Fabula Cavataio"]

Rave Merrill was not the Force.

In point of fact, even using and feeling the Force were beyond her sometimes. Nor was she anywhere near as accomplished as Fabula at what Jedi called Control -- bringing one's body into line with the needs of one's mind. Instead, Rave's talents lay in bringing the bodies of others into line with the needs of her mind. Sith alchemy, Nightsister crafting, that sort of thing. Monster making.

The Dark Jedi who had made the Leviathans of Corbos left her greatest work in the dust. She'd stood on the shoulders of those giants when she made the Akure Leviathans, a refinement but not, strictly speaking, an improvement in the grand scheme of things. And nothing she'd made on her own, not even the Second Skin armor forged from the living carapace of Klaxxi, could approach the Leviathans for complexity and strength. She studied the Leviathans to the limits of her understanding.

But today had little to do with education. Today was about raw materials, and subcontractors.

Clad in a sleek Iron Skin bodysuit -- armorweave of high enough grade to stop a lightsabre -- she loped across the ashen, rugged landscape. Her Force senses, such as they were, interpreted Fabula's highly active presence like a beacon, which simplified matters considerably. Jedi teams and mining crews had operated on Corbos without breath masks in the past; it technically qualified as a Type Two atmosphere. Recent ashfalls hadn't done much for air quality, though, and she hated hacking things up, so she wore a simple rebreather mask.

A leap and a flip took her to the top of a shallow plateau, and there stood one of the most ridiculously over-endowed women Rave had ever seen. The lean alchemist grimaced, but kept it out of her voice. This kind of job didn't lend itself well to people knowing other people's names. She hadn't given hers. So far as Fabula knew, she was just the company rep. "Lovely morning," she said, deadpan. "You ready to hunt?"

 

[Fabula Caromed]

The Force aura on the ground below Fabula's landing clearing gave her a hard enough mental slap to remind her that she had a purpose on this planet. 'Hunting.' Right. She'd agreed to this little outing not because of any kind of reward that she might get from it, but for the experience of testing herself against a planet of molten rock and billowing clouds of ash where the very environment seemed to have evolved to kill humans. She cared almost nothing for the pay she was being offered to retrieve what this woman might want; all she cared for was the act of getting that thing. It wasn't every day she was offered an excuse to fight a creature that was alchemically engineered to be a living weapon.

'Not at all dissimilar from me.'

Regardless of her thoughts, Fabula needed to be polite to whoever her employer had sent. "Lovely indeed, Miss." She was just lucky the wind was dying down. Most of the time people had a hard time hearing her in tempestuous weather. "I'm ready whenever you are." She ducked into a quick, curt bow, her hands folded in front of her like an attentive maid.

Her companion was armored head-to-toe and had a rebreather. Probably not the durable type, then. That suited Fabula just fine. She wanted to be the one up in this monster's face, and this would ensure that no one tried to get in her way. It also gave her the bonus of having someone to protect, which was spectacular motivation during combat. Then again, it was fun to let loose on occasion...but she really couldn't afford to let that happen on a planet with such a Dark spirit as this one. The taint might overwhelm her if she let herself give into the rush.

She idly wondered whether or not this Force-attuned woman would be affected by that taint. It would be terribly inconvenient for Fabula to have to scrap this whole experience just to remove a Sith tumor from the galaxy. Externally, she showed none of her trepidation, instead offering her employer only a soft smile and a tilt of her head. "Please lead the way, Miss. The faster we get there, the faster we can get you off of this planet."
@[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

@[member="Fabula Cavataio"]

If Fabula expected to see the Dark Side as gleeful malevolence, that wasn't Rave's style, but faint Nightsister bruises on her face would start acquiring obvious meaning pretty quickly once she began using the Force in a serious way. That wasn't Rave's style in general, though, and she didn't have the strength to sustain it anyway.

Derriphan's Eye long knives, curved and crossed at the small of her back, and a BRKR-12 taserblade strapped to each thigh -- that was all she'd brought along, apart from the skintight armorweave. Most of the time she carried an assault rifle, but against a Leviathan that was laughable.

Besides. She'd been assured that this particular fighter could do the job, without the damaged hide you tended to get from the more reliable things, like baradium.

"My orbital watch tagged a leviathan on the move just after a cargo ship went down. Search and rescue found no survivors. As of twenty minutes ago, the critter was about five klicks to the north of this position, and moving east. I'd ask if you're ready for a run, but..." With a shrug, the Nightsister hopped off the edge of the plateau and set off northeast.

 

[Fabula Caromed]

Fabula's eyes followed Rave as she started off, and she quickly followed suit. With a few steps to build up momentum and start the buzzing, electric life of the Force into her legs, she launched herself into the air. A few hundred feet later she landed down on the hot, rocky ground, carefully just behind the woman she was supposed to be following. There was little need for theatrics or exertion right now. If a "leviathan" was as large as its name indicated, it would probably have quite a bit of trouble working its way around the rocky terrain and might move quite slowly. Easy prey to catch.

As she followed, though, she considered the situation. The atmosphere was definitely rough enough to bring down a cargo ship, but any cargo ship that had been flying over a given area probably had business in that area. Even discounting the casualties of the crew (which was pretty much a wash) there might be dozens of other lives nearby that could be quite easily snuffed out by a rampaging monster. More motivation, but that really didn't help her when she had to follow someone who was being quite careful not to get burned to death, slip and fall, or get caught in a rock slide. Fabs would have to stomach the inevitability that she might not be able to protect everyone and use that failure as fuel to go forward.

The young Witchling really wasn't keeping track of how far they had run. Her private meditation on the implications of even a few deaths on a dark world like Corbos was interrupted only by geographical features. Rock outcropping. Lava pool. Dust storm. Small things to avoid. Eventually - she really had no frame of reference as to when - her eyes remembered that there was a world around them and that, in front of her, that world included a huge stone overhang that looked more like a cliff face than one of the jutting plateaus they'd been passing over.

Fabula shook her head to clear out the cobwebs of her thoughts and took a deep breath. As she did, she felt herself touch the ground with each step, concentrated hard on the feeling of her feet beating into the rock. She focused on the ripples it created in the Force, invisible to the mortal eye but not to the immortal soul. Each ripple echoed out into the world around her, then back into her own legs, her own body, where it was reflected perfectly. Her spirit was its own internal landscape, her body its own "planet," mimicking the rhythm of the Force in the rock beneath her, the air around her.

She picked up her pace a bit. Her legs had more spring in them now that she was bounding against the earth, and just a few strides brought her to its base. She had to skid to a stop, and waited for her employer before she decided to try anything. "Do you need help getting to the top, Miss?" The Force hummed within her, lighting her spirit like a beacon as her body could have practically rippled at the seams from anticipation. "If not, I'll wait for you there." It was only through enforcing patience in herself that she managed to keep herself from simply exploding and leaping into the air for nothing other than the thrill of forsaking the ground of her own will.
@[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

@[member="Fabula Cavataio"]

"Not at all, go right ah-"

It seemed appropriate at that particular moment for Fabula to take off. Regardless, Rave jumped as high as she could, a moderate and respectable distance, and murmured the Dathomiri spell Touch of the Kiin'dray. Her hand slapped against the rock face and adhered there, as did her knees. The spell bound her to the flat stone, and she climbed the rest of the way up the overhang, easily enough. She clambered over the edge without ceremony, breathing heavy but not all that tired. Fabula had been waiting perhaps thirty seconds, but the woman's peculiar energy still thrummed through the Force with what Rave could only call impatience.

As the climbing spell wore off, her alchemist's senses came to life. "I feel sithspawn. Big. Definitely the leviathan -- just over that rise." She kept low ascending the ridge, and looked down on the wandering monster. Big enough to put Imperial walkers to shame, rotund, evading cladistics, the gigantic pseudoreptile paced across jagged earth uncaring. Feet the size of repulsortanks passed through rocky outcroppings without slowing down.

"They're vulnerable to electricity-" She winced as the first of the telepathic screams caught her attention. "-and they have a powerful mental influence, close to what some call Force Horror. Hides can shrug off lava, and it takes quite a bit of doing to get through it with a lightsabre. Six limbs, breathe fire, watch for the tentacles around the mouth. Oh, and the whole time it'll be trying to suck your soul into one of those blister traps. Good luck."

 

[Fabula Caromed]

Well, one can't properly have a dramatic takeoff without interrupting someone mid-sentence. Fabula got only the faintest hint of an answer before she crouched down and jettisoned herself into the air. Her body hurtled up like she'd been shot out of a cannon, the wind rushing past her face in a roar. Eventually, the Force-accented leap gave out of momentum, and Fabula looked below her for a mild ledge to land on. When she did, her sneakers (how had those things not melted yet?) tapped it only for long enough to coil her leg muscles again, to spur the Force through her body again. Then she bolted up into the air, far over the lip of the cliffside. She landed in a crouch, then stood back up and fixed her hair.

That wasn't to say she was done. The jump hadn't drained her, but instead invigorated her. She could still feel the thrumming life of the Force buzzing around inside her. She could contain herself, if she needed to, but she was attempting to keep ready for-

"Aaigh!" Oh the sweet irony of Fabula finally learning how to keep her mind open to her surroundings, and immediately being shown how that was a bad thing. She swore she could hear the screams of the damned in her head, and there was simply nothing to do about it. She had to shut herself off, concentrate solely on her body instead of the world around her. This was a double disadvantage: she forsook her connection to her surroundings, and in such a way dampened herself in the Force overall. Before she'd even struck a blow against this creature, she was already weakened.

Her companion had joined her as she was dealing with the pain of the monster's presence. Fabs followed the woman's eyes to where the big beastie was, trying to shake the pain out of her skull. "I may have become aware of that ability." She stared down for a few more seconds before taking a deep breath. This was going to be one hell of a test. Maybe she'd decided to hit above her weight this time...no, that wasn't anything new. She'd started above her weight. Now she was hitting at a weight that usually took an artillery platoon.

Sucking her soul out. "I'm afraid that's where you're wrong, Miss." She exhaled and walked to the edge of the cliff. That was a helluva drop, but the leviathan didn't seem to have noticed them yet, and wasn't exactly eager to move along before it was done with whatever it had decided to do around here. Fabula waited by the cliff's edge, closing her eyes to properly focus. The trickle of Force energy inside her was all of the strength she needed now. She couldn't rely on the currents, couldn't borrow strength from the world, or hope for the guidance of the greater Force. But...that trickle would be all she'd need. She pressed her hands tightly together, bringing up her arms in a strict prayer motion to fuel her own focus. A prayer to herself, to the Force, maybe to the abomination she was about to destroy. Whatever it was, its true purpose was to fuel her own power. She could feel the dam inside herself break, the trickle turning into a torrent, simply from self-amplification.

When she finished, she turned around to look at the woman behind her with an expression of calm, a tiny, sad smile on her face. "This isn't my soul."

With no further exposition, she crouched again and lurched into another high leap. Rise, hang, fall...Fabula clenched her fist. Gravity would lend power to her attack, but she would need more than that. She angled her body just a bit, attempting to send herself hurtling towards one of the glowing circles on the beast's back that she could only assume were quite vulnerable. That tended to be how these things went, after all; hit the big glowing thingie until it explodes.

She clenched her fist harder, the Force inside her body practically burning her muscles with the sheer concentration she was forcing it to have in her arm. 'Too much power.' She saw the woman on the cliff pass by in a blur, but didn't pay much attention. Her target was below her. As before, the wind roared past her head, and in sympathy, the Force roared within her body. 'Too much power.' There was a Leviathan in front of her face. Fabula thrust her arm out, the sheer strength behind it making it feel to her muscles as if she were punching in a still pool. 'Too much power.'

There was a sound of thunder.

Fabula stood again, this time on the back of a leviathan. The glowing thingie was still glowing, and not broken, even though it seemed to be quite strained and had a neat indention of her fist up to about three inches. She removed her fist from its indented hide and shook it out. More importantly, Fabula could feel herself tiring, which was a very alien sensation to her. Also, the monster was still very much alive, and seemed to currently be quite aware of her presence. "...Not enough power."
@[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

@[member="Fabula Cavataio"]

Rave unzipped her armorweave to her belly and pulled out a flat, thin package that had been pressed up against her ribs. She re-zipped the bodysuit modestly, all the way up, then shook the thin plast bag and grinned at the rattle. A minor incantation grew within her, spilled out verbally. "Or vyl ri'qen ba qurr."

The popcorn began to pop. Finding a rocky protrusion, Rave sat down and watched Fabula Cavataio punch a leviathan.

 

[Fabula Caromed]

It was in that moment that Fabula decided to make use of her ancient and forbidden martial arts technique, "Get Smashed Into A Stone Wall By The Full Mass Of An Alchemical Behemoth." It's a pretty obscure technique. You probably haven't heard of it.

The beast reared up and shook her off, bashing her against the nearby cliff face with all of its weight. In response, Fabula grunted in pain. She didn't splat, though every molecule of her body was screaming that she should have. Instead, the rocks were threatening to bury her in an avalanche from the pure force of a leviathan's weight ramming up against them. Fabs looked up, then back down to the creature's plated carapace. She squirmed a bit, tightened her muscles, and kicked.

From the way the monster reacted, you'd think it had been blasted in the flank with an artillery barrage.

Fabs took that moment to right herself in the her-shaped crater she'd caused by not pasting like a swatted insect, orienting her sneakers on the cracked stone and giving a mighty leap. She hung in the air a few seconds too long, though, and was quickly offered a gout of flame. "Nngh!" Her skin was the Force, but...so was this. Dark and sinister. It scorched her more than she appreciated, and Fabula's little jump-kick was interrupted. She was going for the blister-trap. Instead, she wound up falling towards its mouth. While on fire.

As she neared it, Fabula curled her legs in toward her stomach, then kicked out. There was an audible, wet cracking sound. Its teeth shattered around her feet, two of them breaking off into bony slivers as the splintered monster-fiber flew up past her face, shredding her skin on the way. She probably could have resisted it properly if she hadn't just been set on fire by Alchemical magic. As it was, she was in nasty shape.

Falling past its lip, Fabula caught the skin of the creature's chin and grabbed with a grip that could crush steel. She hefted herself up once again, landing on the leviathan's head with a pained little gasp. Without taking any time to bother with the draining feeling by being so near the blister traps, Fabula dropped to a kneel and pressed her hands together in prayer, as before. And as before, the motion set her soul aflame, the Force within her flesh redirecting itself inward for healing. Her burns and cuts didn't last but a few moments, even if the blood and ash stayed splattered across her skin.

She stood again and glared down at the beast, her fists clenched to charge herself once again with Force power. "...Round three, then?"
@[member="Rave Merrill"]

 

[Velok the Younger]

@[member="Fabula Cavataio"]

Rave finished the small bag of popcorn, apart from the few nibblets still mixed in with the unpopped kernels at the bottom of the bag. Corbos being unaffiliated with environmentalist movements or, indeed, people, she crumpled the bag up and tossed it aside. She brushed off her hands against her armorweave jumpsuit and stood.

All things considered, there wasn't much she could do. Oh, a BRKR-12 taserblade would play into its engineered weakness for electrical shock well enough, but somehow she suspected that Fabula wanted to do this herself.

Don't ask me how she knew. Maybe something to do with not using a lightsabre, or weapons, or armor. Rave strongly suspected that, were it physically possible, Fabula would be trying to arm-wrestle the leviathan right about now.

Issues.