Faction Getaway Getaway (Jedi and independent Forcers)

[Tilon Quill]

DEEP SPACE
TINGEL ARM
JUST OUTSIDE THE BLACKWALL


The ship was quiet just now, the kind of quiet left behind once adrenaline drained away.

Over the last twelve hours, they'd received a quiet, begging call from Swokes Swokes priests — dispossessed by the Imperial assault on the border world of Makem Te and desperate to escape before the Sith fortified those borders tighter. They'd sneaked through chaos and devastation, guided by an ancient compass of a baffling kind. They'd evacuated Swokes Swokes refugees hiding beneath the ruins of an outlying Temple of the Beatific Razor outside Thousand Thousand. They'd hit clear space and set a course for the Levantine Spur.

Now was a time of medpacks and bacta, rations and cold drinks, gear maintenance, debrief, and conversation. Refugees and rescuers filled the stealth ship's corridors. They'd all be in here together for a couple of days, taking a careful indirect route.

The problem Tilon saw coming, and the source of his main curiosity, was the profound difference between Jedi and the sect they'd evacuated. They weren't Darksiders, in his opinion, but they were...unsettling.

The ancient Beatific Razor tradition had begun in radical response to offworld exploitation of spice and ore on Makem Te. Beatific Razor fighters and priests had stood against unthinkable odds — Republic and Separatist and Empire alike, it was said. The Swokes Swokes species had powerful regenerative abilities and some Beatific Razor sects' intense imagistic rituals had involved self-mutilation. And beyond all that, these people were radical resistance fighters in their way. Not all Jedi were comfortable with that. For his part, Tilon privately found their furious resistance to galactic-scale mining and authority...inspiring.

He'd handed off the ship to another navigator. Now, fresh off twelve hours at the helm and a cat nap, he slurped electrolytes and listened to a Swokes Swokes elder record oral histories to an archive droid.


Learn more about the Temple of the Beatific Razor. Some of the priests are Force-sensitive. Characteristic skills include pain control, accelerated healing, assassin's arts that may be useful for Jedi Shadows, and enhancing a body's healthy acceptance of cyborg implants.

Kaia Starchaser
Henna Ashina

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

Anytime people were going around, to learn, or to see, Kaia liked to get involved. So much better if it was closer to home. Not the Corellia home, but the living home of Laekia. While the Core was in its state of turmoil, she let her father and brother take care of the estate. She was going to take care of the profit and the company.

Tilon was the type who she wanted to follow, but she was too much of a Warden, a wanderer. She had received a call from Makeb Te as well, and arrived with her own ship, the Wandering Star. Able to help treat some of the other Swokes Swokes priests. As the time came to leave and head down the Spur, she joined the stealth ship of Quill.

As Tilon came to join the conversation, Kaia slide a bowl of assorted nuts over. “He was just describing the pain tolerance. Its not all due to the Force, though. Part of it is latent…”

Tilon Quill Henna Ashina

 

[Henna Ashina]

“…for swoke swoke developed thick skin to deal with challenges faced by our ancestors. We able amplify this through the force…”

“Fascinating.” Henna murmured softly.

Makem Te had not been where she expected to end up when she had laid aside Atrisian finery for explorer’s synthleather, offering to accompany Tilon on a journey. Yet, the paradoxical contrasts between her order and that of the Beatific Razor led her to believe the force had a hand in it. She recalled some book or another - “Faiths Beyond The Binary”, perhaps - which detailed their early origins. Radical, violent, and religious - words all used to describe herself at some point or another.

Offering a nod to Quill as he joined, Henna’s attention floated back to the priest. The jewel embedded in his chest which only barely peaked out beyond the edge of his shirt caught her attention. Their cultural practices and the ethics had their own questions which weighed heavy on her. So very peculiar, but a practice long observed. The priest seemed to read her mind, moving to expand on a philosophy regarding pain; when experienced, it must be embraced, for it was a the cornerstone of life.

Tilon Quill | Kaia Starchaser

 

[Tilon Quill]

Kaia slide a bowl of assorted nuts over. “He was just describing the pain tolerance. Its not all due to the Force, though. Part of it is latent…”

Offering a nod to Quill as he joined, Henna’s attention floated back to the priest.

You couldn't do a twelve-hour combat navigation shift without a shavitton of snacks. Well, you could but you shouldn't. Snacks contributed to mental sharpness. These ones were totally different from the zero-G-friendly, tightly-packaged, one-hand-operable, stimulant-laden spacer snacks he'd scarfed down in the captain's seat.

He munched thoughtfully and gratefully and tried to get in the appropriate mood for the seriousness of this. Leftover euphoria in a lightheaded sense kept poking at him. He couldn't remember the stakes being higher.

The Swokes Swokes had accepted a destination, safe and quiet and remote: the seventeenth moon of Kyrikal. What he knew and maybe some aboard did too - he wouldn't put it past Starchaser - was that the fifth moon of Kyrikal was secretly a primary home of the Fallanassi remnants, and had been for forty or fifty years. Lots of nature priests in the system, too. A good and healthy place where diverse communities of practice could grow in good and healthy ways. The Temple of the Beatific Razor deserved a break.

To illustrate his point about pain, the old priest moved into an ancient and deeply moving story about an unnaturally silent desert assassin taking down a mining rig. Tilon passed the snacks to Master Ashina.

Down another corridor, Tilon could hear a younger Swokes Swokes arguing with a med droid about treatment of implants. Tilon excused himself to go moderate that, even though he'd have loved to hear more about that unnatural silence.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

As much as she didn't stress learning more Force skills herself; Kaia Starchaser felt it was important to learn all that she could from the others. Perhaps as an 'in case of emergency' situation. Perhaps just to know where to deliver people. There was a part of a holocron from Luke Skywalker that said something akin to the Force being a vast river, and the path of a Jedi was only one cup with which to drink.

She had a sense of where they were going. Even without her implants. Kyrikal. As a child of a Selabite she had an understanding of what was there. Fallanassi. Not that she'd bring it up. Quill most definitely knew. And the Swokes Swokes may have a bone to pick.

The dark haired spacer doubted it.

But as the sound of the word implant crept up, Kaia's attention shifted from Mr. Ibuprofen. "Excuse me a moment…" She whispered as she also got to her feet slowly. Maybe her way towards the hall, the petite spacer stepped into the med bay.

"My body will recover around the implant…" said the patient. Kaia had a head partially full of iBorg equipment.

"Sir. The chances of these implants interfering with your biological system are high after what you went through." Said the robotic voice of the med droid.

"If the implant is undamaged it will be fine!"

Tilon Quill Henna Ashina

 

[Tilon Quill]

"My body will recover around the implant…" said the patient. Kaia had a head partially full of iBorg equipment.

"Sir. The chances of these implants interfering with your biological system are high after what you went through." Said the robotic voice of the med droid.

"If the implant is undamaged it will be fine!"

MED BAY

So as far as Tilon could tell from the further conversation, here we had an injured Swokes Swokes adept — Gurror Shrei was his name, a cyborg scavenger who'd kept underground survivors fed and saved lives on the way out — who strongly objected to some of his implants being removed or deactivated.

The droid, programmed with Swokes Swokes medical data, understood the limits of their regenerative abilities in this kind of situation. What it did not understand, and what unfolded on the monitors, was how unusually rapidly Gurror Shrei's areas of damage began to regulate around the irritated and traumatized implants.

This, Gurror explained in an irritated but validated way, came down to the training practices of the Temple of the Beatific Razor. (Tilon conducted a simple test and found that Gurror was indeed somewhat Force-attuned like him.) Where Jedi healer might have been able to use in-the-moment care to achieve an effect like this, ensuring the body didn't reject implants in a trauma situation, the Swokes Swokes had developed a lasting benefit through specific training cycles.

Without interfering with what care remained, Tilon began to take notes and ask questions. He was especially interested because of his interaction with a benevolent Iskalloni-led cybernetic sect on Vesskyzi. Multiple species' bodies' tolerance of Iskalloni cybernetics had been a major issue. He had a low-profile Iskalloni neural implant under the hair at the nape of his neck; it hadn't given him trouble in this kind of way, but it certainly made the technique especially interesting.

 

[Henna Ashina]

Henna had been left to her own devices. Happily crunching on the snacks offered, her ears piqued, listening to the argument down the hall. A moments consideration was given to offering the heal the wound through the force. She decided against it when she heard of the training cycles. Far be it from her to disregard their traditions or prove more insulting than the droid had managed.

The priest’s story was about it hit its climax as she turned her attention back. His words became more frenzied - devout. After the assassin had walked five days without sustenance through the desert, his tongue burned with a need to wash clean - but he did not falter in his mission. When he single handily took down the mining rig, he lost both arms in a blast. Only one recovered. He was a saint amongst their peoples.

 

[Kaia Starchaser]

There were so many different avenues of the Force, and this one? It was definitely the most unique. Felt to Kaia like something of the Matukai, but at the same time, it definitely wasn’t. It was more control over the body rather than creating something from nothing. Idly, she wondered if the ancient masters of Teras Kasi would find the Swokes Swokes interesting.

This was all on training. It was something… bizarre. Kaia was really curious if it was something she could learn, and was close to asking but then Tilon stepped in. She knew the Quill family was probably the most inquisitive that she knew about. It helped that she was right here listening.

What she did do, was step in to ask if the technique could be learned by non Swokes Swokes. And to her dismay, it could but it would take a long time to master to the extent that they were seeing here. Not something she quite had the time for, sadly.

“It would be something useful for younglings to study…”

Thinking like a Jedi, but acting like a Warden.

Tilon Quill Henna Ashina

 

[Tilon Quill]

Conversation seemed to have taken the edge off the disagreement between Gurror Shrei and the med droid trying to figure out his care. Gurror honestly seemed increasingly fine despite his injuries, courtesy of Swokes Swokes regeneration augmented by the Beatific Razor practices fit for their physiology. Gurror had a point about how long it would take for someone to pick up these abilities: adapting those training regimens to humanoid bodies, let alone the rituals, had no guarantee of being easy. And a decade or two's commitment wasn't an uncommon requirement, galaxy-wide.

Tilon made a note to see where the Swokes Swokes refugees ended up permanently. If somewhere near his usual haunts, dropping in every year or so to invest a week in training might help him improve his pain control, a skill he'd already found useful one time too many. He'd taken that approach with the Order of Shasa for quite a while when he wasn't living in Ahto City full-time. He found himself scratching at the Iskalloni implant back under his hair. The Beatific Razor practices had a lot of utility.

He excused himself, leaving Gurror and Kaia Starchaser and the droid, and headed back out of the medbay to see how that older Beatific Razor priest was doing in the cargo hold.

The priest had attracted a decent crowd of Swokes Swokes and rescuers to hear these stories. Tilon slipped in to rejoin Henna Ashina for stories of miraculous regenerations. One hero was said to have regenerated from just his head when the rest of him was eaten by a sarlacc. That part got some chuckles, but the priest explained the story needed to be taken seriously at face value to understand its meaning.