Private Foundations Beneath Ash

[Meri Vale]

Meri considered his answer for a few moments as they stood over the fallen droid. It was difficult to know what to make of House Del'therak. The picture he painted was certainly appealing: a place devoted to learning rather than politics, one that invested in talented students regardless of where they came from. It sounded almost too ideal to exist for as long as he claimed. Still, she found herself wondering what sort of entrance examinations could possibly measure curiosity or determination. "I suppose that's reassuring," she said thoughtfully. "Although I admit I'm still not entirely convinced I'd pass. I tend to wander into old ruins simply because they're there. I'm not sure whether that speaks well of my character or very poorly of my judgment." The corner of her mouth lifted ever so slightly.

His sudden frustration toward the droid, however, caught her completely off guard. She had expected annoyance, perhaps caution. What emerged instead sounded remarkably like long familiarity. As he cataloged every irritating habit of combat droids with increasingly animated exasperation, she found herself listening less to the complaints themselves and more to the experience behind them. These were not assumptions. They were memories. Enough of them that he could predict almost exactly how an encounter would unfold before it happened.

Her gray eyes drifted from Vendryn to the ruined machine slumped against the wall. "You make them sound less like machines and more like particularly stubborn colleagues," she observed, a faint note of amusement softening her voice. "I'm beginning to suspect you've had this exact argument with combat droids more than once." She knelt beside the wreckage, careful not to disturb the dust more than necessary, studying the carbon scoring and the scattered debris with the same patience she afforded every artifact. "If this was the archivist's doing, I'd almost feel sorry for him. Fighting even one military droid in a confined corridor would be difficult enough. More than one..." She let the thought trail away as she examined the damage. "It would explain why everything here feels so...hurried."

Only then did she notice him pause. His attention had shifted from the droid to the corridor ahead, then quietly back toward her. It was subtle enough that many people might have overlooked it entirely, but Meri had spent years observing people almost as closely as ruins. Beneath the curiosity and philosophical conversation sat something else: caution. Not for himself, she realized, but for her. The discovery surprised her more than she expected. She said nothing about it. Instead, she rose to her feet, brushed a little dust from her hands, and looked toward the passage disappearing into the darkness. "I think," she said quietly, "our archivist may have left us just enough clues that we no longer have the luxury of assuming we're alone."

Vendryn Del'therak

 

[Vendryn Del'therak]

"This is not a forgiving galaxy, Meri Vale," he told her, his tone faintly chiding. "If you were able to merely wander into old ruins and still lived this long, then you're much smarter than the average..." He peered at her for a moment. He didn't want to call her a child. Or a... teenager? Or... Ugh. It was so hard to tell apart the juveniles. "... Person."

He made a small, dismissive gesture. "I think if our Archivist had the numbers to take on a combat droid like this he wouldn't have run. I mean, it'd be much easier at that point to..." He paused, thoughtfully, "...Vanish into the depths and wage a guerilla fight, using his knowledge of the tunnels and likely the patrols of the droids. Using the droids to weaken his pursuers." He inspected the fight with a fresh gaze, curiously. "If that was his plan, I would imagine it's a very good way to dissuade dedicated pursuit. Nothing like a handful of grouchy old droids to make you think twice about poking around. Having to stay together would also mean their search would take much longer. Assuming he has a steady supply of food and drink from somewhere, he could probably hold up in here for quite a while."

Unconsciously, his lower left hand shifted to his hip, lightly tracing the metallic edge of the shape concealed beneath, before seeming to realize what he was doing and return to crossing his arms instead. "Well!" He stated after a moment. "Left, or right, Meri Vale? Truthfully, either passage holds the same merits to my mind; I see nothing especially to distinguish them. Perhaps we will encounter more of my-" He chuckled, "-particularly stubborn colleagues along the way."

Meri Vale

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri couldn't help but smile when he settled on person. It was an oddly thoughtful hesitation, and somehow it softened the gentle chiding that came with it.

"I think I've just been lucky," she admitted. "There have been plenty of times I've realized afterward that I probably shouldn't have gone somewhere." A sheepish laugh escaped her. "Usually by the time I realize that, I'm already on my way back out."

His explanation drew her attention back toward the battered remains of the droid. Whatever Vendryn was, he had a way of looking at problems from an angle she would never have considered. Rather than simply seeing a battle, he saw the strategy behind it. As she followed his reasoning, the scene around them began to shift in her imagination. The ruined machine became less a victory and more a warning left behind by someone who understood these tunnels intimately.

"That would make chasing him expensive," she murmured thoughtfully. "Every encounter costs time, equipment...people."

Her flashlight drifted between the two corridors, lingering on each without any real preference. Both disappeared into darkness, their walls scarred by age and neglect. She crouched briefly, studying the floor where dust had settled in uneven patches, before slowly standing again.

"I'm not sure I'd try to predict where the archivist went," she admitted. "If he knows these tunnels, he'd expect someone to do exactly that."

She tilted her head, considering the passages for another moment.

"I'd probably choose whichever route looked like it carried the most traffic before the station was abandoned. Maintenance crews, supply carts...places that were built to keep everything running usually connect to more of the facility."

Her gaze settled on the passage to the left, though only after a moment's hesitation.

"So..." A small, uncertain smile crossed her face. "I'd try the left. Not because I'm convinced he's there." She glanced over at Vendryn. "Just because if we don't know where we're going, it seems more useful to learn how the station was meant to work than to guess how one person might have used it."

Vendryn Del'therak

 

[Vendryn Del'therak]

He inclined his head to her, conceding her argument. "That is very astute. He is more likely to be able to conceal and sustain himself in maintenance spaces. I agree with your supposition, but place before you another question: Should we be pursuing him at all? Clearly, he is both expecting and prepared for violence, and even if we locate the correct path it is likely that those hunting him will have gone before us. Should we be pursuing him, and thus pursuing his clearly armed and dangerous hunters?"

He tilted his head at her, eyes curious as if he were simply a tutor posing a theoretical question. Despite his words, his lips curled upward at the corners, and he turned to face the left-hand passageway, beginning his long, but slow steps - clearly intended for her to be able to keep up. "Of course," he stated after a few moments, "The question is purely academic: My curiosity outweighs my concern." He seemed awfully unconcerned for someone who just admitted that they must be numerous and well-armed in order to take on such combat droids with any degree of reliability.

"Do you know what the maintenance schedule for a Jedi Civil War-era patrol droid is?" He clearly didn't expect her to have the answer. "Generally speaking, every six hours of operation requires one hour of maintenance, not including charging time. Most combat droids have a longer battery life but require more maintenance per operational hour, because they are made to operate at such high levels. Patrol droids, on the other hand, are a practice in economy. Economy of time, economy of effort; simple to operate, simple to repair, because unlike combat droids they will not be tended by experienced technicians, it will most likely be civilian workers of varying... aptitude." He seemed to ponder where to continue, for a moment, before he sketched out a box in the air before him. "Normal security operations for a facility of this size - going by the visible aboveground footprint - would indicate probably a dozen patrol droids for normal operation. Add in overage for unexpected failures, plus comp for maintenance time... and you end up with likely somewhere around sixteen to eighteen droids. After this amount of time without human maintenance, I would assume approximately thirty to fifty percent attrition, leaving us with somewhere between eight and ten functioning droids... minus one, because that one," he gestured behind them, "clearly wasn't a maintenance failure."

His lower hands shifted upward in a broad shrug. "So, statistically speaking, most likely seven to nine patrol droids active throughout the facility. Higher than I'd like, but manageable." He gestured ahead. "Would maintenance or the archives themselves be a higher priority patrol area, do you think? Reduced patrol availability would require re-prioritization of available resources, after all." He practice of thinking seemed to be his focus; he seemed less concerned with her answers than with how she arrived at them.

Despite the danger - and clear evidence of danger - he seemed oddly unconcerned with the state of the ruins. In fact... he almost seemed to be enjoying himself.

Meri Vale

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri had opened her mouth to answer his first question before Vendryn promptly admitted that her answer wasn't going to change anything. She closed it again, watching him turn toward the left passage with an expression somewhere between amusement and disbelief. Apparently the possibility of armed pursuers and several functioning patrol droids was interesting enough to outweigh the sensible option of leaving. She couldn't criticize him too much for that when she was already following. "I'm starting to think curiosity might be a dangerous personality trait," she observed, falling into step beside him. "For both of us."

His sudden lesson on patrol droids caught her attention almost immediately. Meri hadn't known their maintenance schedule, which she suspected had been the point of asking, and she listened closely as Vendryn worked his way from the original security complement to an estimate of what might still be functioning. Seven to nine sounded considerably less reassuring to her than it apparently did to him. "You and I have very different definitions of manageable," she said, casting him a sideways glance before directing her light farther down the passage. There was humor in the comment, but not entirely. She had no desire to discover exactly what an ancient patrol droid considered an appropriate response to trespassers.

The next question made her slow slightly. Her first instinct was the archives. They were presumably the important part of the complex, and therefore the obvious thing to protect, but Vendryn had been asking her to think beyond the obvious answer since they started down here. "The archives, if everything was still working normally," she decided after a moment. "But it isn't. If there are only seven or nine left, I'd protect whatever keeps those seven or nine working." She glanced toward the walls as they walked, trying to imagine the facility not as a ruin but as an operating system of corridors, machinery, workers, and security. "If they lose access to charging stations or maintenance areas, eventually they can't patrol anything. So I'd keep at least some of them near the infrastructure they depend on and put the rest around whatever they were originally ordered to protect."

Meri worried briefly at her lower lip before another thought occurred to her. "Unless they can't change their priorities." That possibility seemed important enough that she looked up at Vendryn. "They're ancient. If nobody has been giving them new instructions, wouldn't they still be following whatever orders they had when this place was abandoned?" Her curiosity was beginning to overcome some of her concern despite herself, and she looked farther into the darkened passage ahead. "If that's true, figuring out what they're guarding might tell us what the people who built this place thought was most important."

Vendryn Del'therak

 

[Vendryn Del'therak]

Vendryn was positively beaming. This Meri girl was exceptionally astute. He'd had a good feeling from her first little ramble about the structural design indicating the presence of an Archive, rather than the surface-level assumption other scholars had come at it with. See religious-looking iconography, obviously it's a religious structure. Certainly it was, but she had the aptitude to dig deeper and look for its origin instead.

"Just because a question is academic, does not mean it is irrelevant." He did pause to turn and look at her. "What do you think, Meri Vale? Should we continue our pursuit to satisfy our curiosity, or do you feel that the risks outweigh the admittedly slim prospects of closure? While I am most curious to determine what, exactly, this man might have been seeking here, and any clue as to his ultimate fate, it is true that whatever events transpired have long since found their conclusions... and given the ferocity of his pursuers, I doubt it was a happy ending at all."

He clasped his upper hands over his stomach, though his lower hands seemed to fidget more; his lower left hung near his hip, and his right rested upon his sash, prepared as if to grab something from within his robes at a moment's alarm. "Give the word, and we shall turn back. Perhaps I will organize an expedition to return and plumb these depths more thoroughly if so; you will certainly receive an invitation to accompany us at such time if you would desire, or else I will ensure we send you our findings. A healthy sense of caution is important," his tone sounded otherwise, and his outer eyes kept glancing down the hallway as if trying to drag him onward by force of will, "Especially in our line of work, Meri Vale. To risk one's life carelessly is to put an end to all the explorations we might yet do."

"What is your answer?" His expression was carefully neutral, with a small, bemused smile on his lips.

Meri Vale

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri had been prepared to follow him. That realization came almost embarrassingly quickly when Vendryn stopped and made it clear that the decision was actually hers. Until then, some part of her had assumed they would simply keep going because there was still a mystery ahead of them, and mysteries were supposed to be followed until there was nothing left to find. Now that he had placed the choice directly in her hands, however, she found herself looking into the darkened passage with considerably more seriousness than she had a moment before.

There were good reasons to turn around. Someone had destroyed the droid behind them, and whoever had done it might still be somewhere ahead. Vendryn's estimate left several more patrol droids wandering the facility, any one of which could decide they weren't supposed to be here. Worse, they had no idea what had happened to the archivist or the people pursuing him. Meri worried at her lower lip as she considered all of it, trying very hard not to let the unanswered questions make the decision for her. Curiosity was not the same thing as a good reason to put themselves in danger, no matter how badly she wanted to know what had happened.

Still, turning around now meant leaving with nothing but guesses. They knew the archivist had come this way. They knew someone had followed him. They had evidence of a fight, and somewhere deeper in the complex there might still be enough left behind to explain why any of it had happened. The thought tugged at her relentlessly. Meri looked toward Vendryn and then back down the corridor, drawing a slow breath before finally making up her mind. "I think we should keep going." She paused, then added with considerably less certainty, "But carefully."

Her hands tightened briefly around her flashlight as she tried to put the reason into words. "If we hadn't found the droid, I think I'd say we're only following a story because we want to know how it ends. But we did find it. Something happened down here, and now we know enough to know that we don't understand it." Her gaze wandered toward the darkness ahead again, curiosity plainly winning its familiar battle against caution. "I don't think I'm ready to leave without trying to understand a little more." A small, almost sheepish smile appeared as she glanced up at Vendryn. "Besides, if we turn around every time archaeology gets dangerous, I think I'm going to have to reconsider my choice of career."

Vendryn Del'therak

 

[Vendryn Del'therak]

Vendryn's pearly white grin was stunning in its ferocity and breadth. His chest swelled with pride and indrawn breath, and he stood a little straighter. As he turned around, he muttered to himself, "Very good, Meri Vale. I knew I was right to trust you." He set off at a slow walk to ensure the smaller woman could keep up with him, and then tugged lightly at the sash belting his robes, loosening them a little. He still would prefer she didn't find out that he was a Sith - there was something permanent about the feeling of that discovery, as if admitting he was a lightsaber-carrying member of the Sith Order who had killed before, and would kill again, would change the fundamentals of their relationship.

His lower hands assumed defensive positions at his sides, hands drawn into flat planes for channeling defensive fields of energy, though his upper hands remained clasped behind his back as if he had not a worry in the world.

Facing away from her, his lower hand gently lifted and checked the outline of the lightsaber beneath his robes, the reassuring weight of it setting him at ease, even as he smoothed away the wrinkles forming around the hefty hilt.

"I will admit... I would have been quite disappointed to have the conclusion of our investigation delayed. I must confess that curious burns in me with a passion I allow little else... But!" He paused, lifting a hand with a finger raised to underline the importance of his statement. "To temper that curiosity requires an honest assessment of risk, and the ability to step away when it is required. It is important to remember that. There is always a choice, even when it seems the weight of mystery has a gravity of its own and escape feels impossible... You must always be prepared to drop everything and escape with your life. There is no cause worth your death." These last words seemed... heavier than they should be. As if he had a specific situation - a specific person - in mind when he said these words. As if it were merely the latest volley in a long-running argument.

Meri Vale

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri couldn't help the small smile that appeared at his praise, though she wasn't entirely certain what she had done to earn quite so much enthusiasm. She had simply answered his question. Still, hearing that Vendryn trusted her judgment meant more than she expected, especially when she was painfully aware that he had considerably more experience with places like this than she did. "Well, now I'm glad I didn't say we should turn around," she replied, a little teasingly, before following after him. His longer stride meant she still had to put some effort into keeping pace even with him deliberately slowing down, but she had long since decided not to complain about it.

She listened as he spoke, her attention divided between his lesson and the corridor stretching ahead of them. At first, she nodded along readily enough. Curiosity absolutely had a gravity of its own. She knew that feeling far too well, especially when one discovery led to another and suddenly just one more room became three more rooms and another hour spent somewhere she probably shouldn't be. Yet his final statement made her look up at him. Something about the way he said it didn't sound like another lesson delivered for her benefit. The words had weight behind them, enough that her curiosity shifted away from the mystery ahead and settled briefly upon Vendryn himself.

"There isn't?" Meri asked before she could stop herself. She wasn't challenging him so much as genuinely thinking about what he'd said. At sixteen, death still felt like something impossibly final that belonged more comfortably in the histories she studied than in her own future, but even she could think of reasons someone might decide running wasn't an option. "What if leaving means somebody else gets hurt?" Her brow furrowed as she considered it. "Or you know you could help them, but you'd have to put yourself in danger to do it? I don't think I could just leave someone behind because staying might get me killed."

She was quiet for another few steps, turning his advice over in her head before glancing up at him again. "I understand what you mean about ruins, though," she added, because that part seemed much easier. "Finding out what happened to someone who died a long time ago isn't worth becoming another person somebody has to investigate later." A faint smile tugged at her lips, but her curiosity hadn't entirely released the odd heaviness she'd heard in his voice. She hesitated, wondering whether she should ask, before being Meri inevitably won. "Did somebody not listen when you told them that?"

Vendryn Del'therak

 

[Vendryn Del'therak]

Vendryn's stride did not falter, but the easy lecture-tone that had carried him through patrol schedules and risk assessments thinned into something quieter. He did not look at her at once. The corridor ahead received the whole of his attention, as though the question itself were a structural fault that required careful mapping before it could be touched.


Wreckage. The smell of scorched plating and his own blood. A voice telling him he was alive. Hands that did not belong to his crew, that should have been an enemy's, settling against the metal driven through his chest. She had come into a dying ship for a stranger. He had almost taken her for it. Instinct had risen first—recognition of what she was, the old reflex to close a threat before it closed on him—and only the fog of dying had kept that reflex from becoming a killing blow. She had risked her life to pull him off the railing. He had nearly repaid it by ending her.


The silence stretched longer than courtesy required. When he did speak, the words arrived slowly, each one weighed as if he were translating from a language he no longer trusted.


"That is not a simple equation, Meri Vale."


He walked a few more steps before continuing, lower hands still held in that quiet defensive readiness, upper pair remaining clasped behind his back. "You ask whether a life is worth another's death. The difficulty is that no one holds both sides of the scale at once. The person who runs and the person who stays are measuring different things. One is measuring what they might still do with the years they keep. The other is measuring what they could not live with if they left."


A faint crease appeared between his brows. He seemed, for a moment, almost irritated with himself for how much the question had cost him.


"I have seen both choices made. I have made both, in different hours, and I cannot tell you which was the more honest. A life's worth is not a fixed value. It is decided by the one who holds it—and sometimes by the one who chooses to spend their own in its defense. That decision cannot be outsourced. Not to doctrine. Not to sentiment. Not even to aspirations of nobility of spirit."


He glanced down at her then, four eyes unreadable in the shifting beam of the headlamp. There was no rebuke in the look, only the careful distance of a man who had found the edge of a private wound and elected not to name it.


"If leaving means another is harmed, then you are no longer weighing curiosity against caution. You are weighing two lives against each other, and pretending the arithmetic is clean. It is not. It never is. The person who stays may save someone. They may also create a second body that need not have existed. The person who leaves may live to act again. They may also carry the knowledge of what they abandoned until it hollows them." His mouth tightened, then eased. "I will not tell you which of those is correct. I do not know. I only know that each of us answers it alone, and that the answer we give is the measure of what we believe our own life is for."


The last of her questions reached him a moment later. He shook his head once, a small, precise motion.


"No," he said. "But there are others I wish I had told."


He let that stand. No elaboration followed. After a few more steps he returned, almost gratefully, to the work of the corridor—the dust, the older footprints layered beneath newer ones, the faint mechanical hush that still lived in the walls. Curiosity had not left him. It had only been made to wait.

Meri Vale

 

[Meri Vale]

Meri grew quieter as Vendryn answered her. She had expected something simpler when she'd asked the question, perhaps another rule to remember alongside everything else he had been teaching her about ruins, patrol routes, and knowing when curiosity had become dangerous. Instead, she found herself listening with a slight crease between her brows, trying to follow an answer that seemed to become less certain the longer he spoke. That wasn't usually how lessons worked. Usually there was something she was eventually supposed to understand. Vendryn seemed to be telling her that sometimes understanding meant accepting that there wasn't a single correct answer.

"I still think I'd stay," she admitted after a moment. The answer came more softly than before, without the certainty she'd had when first challenging him. "If somebody was right there and I thought I could help them, I don't know if I could make myself leave." Meri glanced toward him before looking ahead again. "But I suppose that's easy for me to say when nobody's actually asking me to choose." She didn't like that realization very much. Imagining herself doing the right thing was simple. Knowing what the right thing was while frightened, hurt, or responsible for someone else's life sounded considerably harder.

His final answer made her look back at him. There are others I wish I had told. The obvious questions immediately gathered in her mind. Who? What had happened to them? Had they died because nobody had told them to leave? Meri nearly asked before noticing the way Vendryn simply returned his attention to the corridor. For once, curiosity met something stronger than itself. Whatever memory had been behind those words didn't sound like one she had any right to dig into simply because she wanted to understand it.

"Okay," she said instead, and left it there.

Her attention returned to the floor as they continued, following the overlapping impressions in the dust. After several steps, Meri crouched slightly to get a better look without stopping entirely. The older tracks beneath the newer ones caught her attention again, and the familiarity of the problem was almost a relief after everything Vendryn had just given her to think about. "If those newer prints belong to whoever destroyed the droid, they might tell us which direction they went afterward," she said, studying where the cleaner impressions interrupted the older dust. Then, because his lesson hadn't vanished from her thoughts quite as easily as she'd hoped, she added, "And if they lead somewhere that looks like a terrible idea, I promise I'll at least consider running away."

The small smile she gave him was restrained, but genuine. It wasn't a joke meant to dismiss what he'd said. If anything, it was Meri's way of letting him know she'd listened.

Vendryn Del'therak