Private Foresight

[Joycelyn Zambrano]

"Faster!"

Joycelyn yelled at Lord Tooka ordered to run one of several obstacle courses she had planned.

The obstacles ranged between anything from walking blindfolded on tall, narrow poles among which some were sharpened and had to be skipped. or avoiding and heavy mauls swinging from the ceiling and being launched across the room in unpredictable patterns crawning underneath ray shields and blasterfire, all the while avoiding gouts of actual fire coming out of the ceiling, not to mention sudden trap doors that opened and shut quickly like ambush predators seeking to catch the limb of an unwary prey.

The current obstacle was a transparent labyrinth of shifting ray-shields that rearranged every few seconds in a shifting landscape of corridors or death. All the while Tooka was tasked to capture a small, black dodecahedron that fired arcs of electricity at her. Being caught in the ray-shield would, as she had shown with a femur she later fed to her pet vornskrs, remove a limb if they activated across one.

"Don't look at them, feel them."

And yelling advice at her, among other things.

The Princess herself stood on an elevated platform, controlling the intricate switches and sequences. She flicked a switch to make a few of the floor tiles drop down or extend up to make the terrain even more difficult. The deadly walls shifted again, while the little dodecahedron zipped around the obstacles and rode along with one of the ascending platforms to get further away from the Sith knight pursuing it.

"It's getting away from you, pursue!"

Her eyes followed Tooka's steps closely as she judged every movement and every decision. A Knight of the Sith had to master precognition and movement without question, without a thought. Thoughts were slow, but the Force was ever present. Some thought this kind of training was only useful for the Jedi, not finding it aggressive enough for the Sith. Joycelyn disagreed. There was a reason why so many strong Lords of the Sith had come from the ranks of the Jedi: Mastery of fundamental skills. These skills were part of what had made Joycelyn herself into a fierce warrior, yet one many underestimated on sight.

It was why they fell to her sabre.

Behind Joycelyn, Alk and Ilke still chewed on their prize bones, lapping up marrow and tearing off the last strips of flesh while growling at each other intimidatingly.

 

[Lord Tooka]

Lord Tooka´s anger grew with every frustating random movement pattern of the elusive dodecahedron.

The deadly parcour on the other hand was the same old game she knew from the gladiator pits of the Hutts. Not so rustical of course but with the decadence of corrupted hightech. More ray shields slicing your flesh to ribbons, less rusty blades and pits full of rot grubs. But the game was still the same. Only the style has changed. Failure was not an option as always.

The lithe small sith knight trusted her nonhuman reflexes but had still to learn the ropes of the subtiler force powers. Tooka was more like a lightning storm that suddenly had to move tiny leaves in a specific pattern.

She closed indeed her eyes and predicted as usual the set off of the traps by change of air or slight changes of the electrical fields. Sometimes she cheated by using a tiny bit of mind over matter telekinesis. Cheating was never forbidden, but expected she had learned very early in life.

Actually it was fairly easy to follow the lightning fast dodecahedron. The trick was the predicting of its movements without directly interfere with the little training machine.

Hot rage had to be transformed into calm hatred. And calm hatred had to be transformed into raw power. And raw power had only to be used to connect to the force.

Lord Tooka was no jedi and would never be one. A calm analysis of the potential future course of the dodecahedron was out of the question... but to feel where she would be in a few seconds burnt like hot magma in the ocean of possiblities because of her frustation echoing from the future back into the present. She had only to pick the place, where she would be not frustrated!

Sometimes it was ridiciolous easy. She jumped - wider and higher as a normal human or sephi could ever hope - evaded and dodge the crippling and deadly traps of the training ground with pure instinct and reached out with her small delicate hand to grap the dodecahedron.

Dodecahedron in her hand she jumped back und danced in joy through the shifting fields of doom.
She landed before her master, kneeling and presenting the captured dodecahedron to the she-titan of the sith towering over her tiny servant.

Lord Tooka hated to be a slave, but she loved to be the slave of this gorgeous giant of a woman.


Joycelyn Zambrano

 

[Joycelyn Zambrano]

Joycelyn crossed her arms as the small knight knelt before her with the dodecahedron in hand.

With a flick of her fingers, the shields stopped changing, then blinked out existence entirely.

"You caught it, there was never any doubt that you would."

The vahlacanthix inspected the kneeling sephi and her prize, then picked the minute object from her hand with two of her fingers. In the hands of Joycelyn, the shape looked so small as she rolled it between her fingertips. The other arm was still slung across her upper torso, supporting the elbow of the other.

"But you could have done so sooner." She sounded disappointed "You waste time."

She put the dodecahedron on the control panel and crouched down in front of Tooka to get closer. Even when crouching, she was far taller than her apprentice. Her head and shoulders alone would account for most of tooka.

"Why do you think that is?"

She gave the little one some time to answer while she rubbed her chin.

Joycelyn looked down for a second, then set her burning eyes on Tooka again. "Perhaps I have been too easy on you."

"It may be easy for you now, but when it comes to life and death everything changes." "In order to truly master foresight, your life must be in peril." "You need to feel the emotions that assail you when you are injured and your enemies come baring down on you. And in that moment, you must use your emotions, your passions, but be the master of your own fate." "Letting go of control is useful when all bets are off, but before you know how, you must master foresight and control."

Rising up, she put her hands behind her back.

"Close your eyes" "If you open them, I will pluck them out." "Feel, reach out, try to see what is without your eyes."

Lord Tooka

 

[Lord Tooka]

"Because I followed my instincts and because my instincts enjoyed the hunt more than the success, Your Highness", Lord Tooka answered after a short time of musing. "Only after I began to think rational the future became obvious."

As the taskmaster ordered her to close her eyes she obyed and reached out with the force to "see". She cheated of course by enhanching her pointed ears and her cute little nose to inhuman levels. To see possiblities of future events would never be enough for her. She always had a backup plan.

But indeed the selfimposed blindness gave way to the field of the force which surrounded all things and linked all things together.
She was ready for what taske the princess would give her.

Joycelyn Zambrano

 

[Joycelyn Zambrano]

"It is good to follow your instincts, but they must be tempered with purpose."

She pressed four buttons on the board in quick succession.

"Otherwise, you are easily tricked."

Four pairs of feet hit the floor in different corners. Four machines whined as they powered up and activated each their lightfoil; weaker, but still potent facsimilies of true lightsabres.

The machines rushed in toward Tooka. Four opponents four directions.

"Fight, and do not open your eyes."

Two neared first, simply by having started at a closer proximity. One struck down against Tooka's lower, right quadrant from the left. The other struck at the upper left from the right. The other two followed close after, one swinging into a rising cut, and the other into a falling cut. These machines were fast, as fast as most opponents of flesh.

Their movements were copies of observed movements of both Jedi and Sith.

As such, they were no simple task to defeat.

Lord Tooka

 

[Lord Tooka]

Machines! Of course she could not read their minds and predict their movements. That was the strenghts of droids. The weakness was: The combat protocols were extensive but the heuristics were not able to improvise and evolve to adapt organics.

Lord Tooka was hard pressed against war droids of this sophisticated design. She dodged and bent in impossible angles to escape the flurry of lightfoils. She did not ignite her own lightsaber but listened to the humming of the droid weapons and the soft whriling of the servos to predict the attacks.

Her countersattacks were of the Force only: crushing telekinetic bursts sending the droids flying and lightning bolts frying their circuits. Not the precise strikes she would have used with her lightsaber but area of effect attacks.

She jumped high and landed behind the droids taking one down after the other.

The Sephi sith did not like this kind of test. The princess expected perhaps a long clash of blades but Lord Tooka preferred a more tactical approach. She had been a soldier before she became a melee maniac and did not play by the rules of normal jedi and sith knights. Her goal was to win and to survive not to show off. The princess had legions of stupid fanatics going berserk in combat. The sith knight hoped she would enjoy at least one servant who could think before acting.

So she learned to hone her precognition skills and at the same time the positronic heuristics of the droids learned the hard way not all sith were fooled into close combat.