First Reply Getting Back Into It

[Iris Arani]

How long had it been since she last held a lightsaber?

Iris stared at the hilt in her hand, frowning deeply as she did. The hilt was as simple as it could get, just smooth metal plates to house the intricate parts that made her blade. That housed the crystal she'd been given by her closest friend. Domxite was there with her, of course, on her shoulder, watching. Waiting. They knew just as well as she how important it was that she figured out how to ignite the blade. Especially here on Denon. It was a dangerous planet, more than most in this supposedly civilized space, but she couldn't leave it be.

She wanted to make a difference here again. But she'd need to be able to ignite her blade to do so.

With a breath she squeezed it on. The blade erupted, pink in color as it always had been. A healer's blade, at least based on what the crystal could do. The familiar hum normally would've put her at ease, even in this abandoned courtyard. It should've put her at ease.

It didn't. The longer she stared at the blade, the louder the hum got until that hum drowned out all other sounds. It filled her mind, shook her very core. Then, the screech of a saber clashing against another. The sound of the plasma blade cutting through durasteel. Armor. Flesh. Color bled out around her as she stared deeper into the pink blade. All color until only red remained. Panic came next. Panic, then the gentle nudge of the droid on her shoulder as she hurriedly shut the blade down.

".. Not yet, I guess." She smiled after a moment, reaching up to gently pat the top of the droids head. "We'll get there."

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

Even as Iris faced her lightsaber-related trauma, Eocin was working on a very different problem.

Using a crystal of dubious provenance acquired from a 'friend', he had set about assembling a lightsaber from a combination of second-hand lightsaber components and components intended for entirely different tools or weapons.

The end result was bulky and unwieldy, but theoretically functional. Without any further ado, he had brought it to an unofficial testing facility, strapped it into a holder, turned it towards a durasteel plate, and flipped the switch remotely. It had activated, but instead of a stable beam the plasma had shot outwards in a luminous stream of destruction.

He had no clue how far it had travelled because the 'lightsaber' had exploded outright moments later.

"Bloody... fething... oww." Sitting up with a groan, he looked himself over for injuries, wincing when he beheld his left arm and the shards of Kyber embedded within. He was not a crystal expert, but he was fairly sure it was not supposed to look like that to his sight. The damnable crystal almost seemed to be vibrating angrily.

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

It wasn't often the colors bled a screaming sort of color.

Iris blinked in surprise as she looked up, just to watch the flow. There was pain, but there was something more to it that she hadn't expected or really could comprehend. It had to be pain, right? Without even thinking about it she was already running towards it, but even now as she sprinted down the street to the source she was trying to figure it out. The source? She paused as she stood in the doorway she'd opened, stared down at the figure within.

Kyber. It was Kyber. Exploded Kyber.

".. What did you do?"

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

By the time Iris made it inside, Eocin had not gotten any further than examining his hand with a pained expression.

"How did..." Blank mask swivelling to the door, then the surrounding wall, the question died on his lips. Fail safe, not fail secure, and the detonation wreaked havoc on the building's power supply. The lights above him were... flickering. That was easy to overlook, but he must be more out of it than he thought to not notice the power failures. "... nevermind."

Attention returning to the speaker, he noted the brightness of her aura and the lightsaber on her person. Force User. Jedi? Jedi. Unlikely to approve, but more concerned than hostile, if he was not mistaken. He was fairly sure she was a human(ish) woman, but his attention quickly started drifting towards the fascinating automaton containing her blade.

"Research and development. I was testing a prototype with explosive results."

A sweeping gesture drew her attention to the wreckage left behind by the testing mount and another directed her gaze towards an uneven hole in the wall. Deliciously destructive, but impractically volatile.

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

She stared at him for a moment longer before looking to the hole. Something clearly went wrong. What exactly, she really wasn't sure. If she was going to hazard a guess though, something to do with the Kyber in his arm. She huffed before pointing towards the wounds. "I can see that. The Kyber called out, so just hold still. You can't keep that in your arm if you don't want to get an infection."

She looked around again before reaching up to Domxite, who hopped down her arm. She'd retrofitted the little BD unit to hold medical equipment for her as needed. Which, it seemed like it was needed now. Iris wasn't taking no for an answer, either.

"You have a sterile environment somewhere?"

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

Definitely a Jedi - and a healer at that. Lucky, that.

"It called out? I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense." He knew the crystals resonated within the Force. It stood to reason that a crystal's destruction could create a feedback loop - was that what left him disorientated?

It seemed plausible; he had not lost much blood, after all.

"Not as such," Eocin replied, using his uninjured arm to point towards a nearby table. "Heat ray. Much less experimental. It was mostly meant as a comparison point to the, ah, lightsaber. The lowest setting should burn away any germs."

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

Heat ray.

Iris stared at it, then him, and let out a rather exhausted sounding sigh before motioning for him to lay his arm out on the table. Domxite hopped up shortly after as she herself sat down. Helping a stranger was the typical thing for a Jedi to do, so for her she didn't even think about it. Instead, she just got right to work getting the shards out of his arm. Domxite played nurse for her, helping to seal the wounds once they were clear.

The advantage was she could at least sense the kyber and get all the shards out without fear of missing something too small. The Force certainly helped with it too.

"What was the experiment?"

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

Evidently the whole sterility thing was of secondary importance. Why else wouldn't she use the heat ray?

He would wince a few times as she got to work, but the opportunity to study her droid was distraction aplenty. How could he focus on something as trivial as pain when he had a fusion of technology and something else tending to his wounds? Was it perhaps a Force-based cognitive construct of some sort? A (super)naturally occurring nonbiological organism?

"Oh, I was trying to make a lightsaber. I hear they're all the rage." The roguish smile that accompanied the statement was ruined by a pained wince as she removed a particularly large shard of sundered Kyber.

"I'm sure I could improve yours if you let me take a look," He offered, though the odds of her accepting were low given what she'd seen so far. A shame, given that such incidents were very rare indeed with him at the wheel.

He had a knack for correcting his work before things started going wrong, but nobody's perfect.

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

"I'm fairly good at piercings, would you like me to add some to your chest?"

She didn't skip a beat. Most people would be pretty adamant against that, especially from a stranger. Most people cared about their bodies and didn't want someone to fill it full of holes or modify it in strange, unknown ways. It basically summed up how she felt about letting him see her lightsaber. Especially given the fact she was currently pulling pieces of his own failed attempt from his arm.

"Lightsabers aren't toys for people to play around with, you know. You're lucky this is all that happened. The Kyber not so much."

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

Eocin could have taken the opportunity to humbly acknowledge the uniquely personal relationship between a Jedi and their lightsaber. Emphasis on could. "Chest piercings are in fashion among the Jedi? Colour me surprised."

The statement was accompanied by an amused chuckle.

Eocin pursed his lips as his attention returned to the pieces being pulled from his arm. "Right, you are. Terribly wasteful, I know; it was anything but easy to get my hands on that crystal." His lips returned to the mischievous smile that seemed to be their natural state. "... but just because something's dangerous doesn't mean it's not fun. Bombs are a great example."

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

"It was a figure of speech." She sighed before shaking her head. Bit by bit his wound was cleared out, then all that was left was just bandaging up his arm. He either didn't get it, or she was still terrible at making figures of speech. Conversations were still the worst for her.

".. That's true, though I wouldn't recommend holding the bomb as it goes off next time." Did she grin? Was she teasing him back? Impossible to tell by the almost blank expression on her face.

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

"A shame," Eocin said with another easy grin.

Was that a bit of uncertainty in her presence? If so, that was a surprise. If anyone ought to be uncertain here it was him; the ability to heal could presumably be used to harm with equal ease. That was how his connection with machinery worked, anyway. He saw no reason why manipulating fleshy bits through the Force would work any differently.

"A reasonable suggestion," Eocin remarked with a smile. "Especially given how rare your kind of Healer is." Was that genuine gratitude? For once, yes. He was not terribly eager to see whether Kyber-chunk-lacerations had any difficult-to-diagnose side effects.

"What brings someone like you to somewhere like this? Cleaning the streets?"

It seemed unlikely, given her disposition, but who knows. Perhaps there was a ruthless core to her. Perhaps she would happily mow down criminals with that concealed lightsaber or hers. If that was it, she was in for a rude awakening. Handling Denonese crime was akin to trying to keep a leaking boat afloat by removing water with a kitchen sieve.

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

"Rarer than you think."

She wasn't shy about just how good of a healer she was. That sort of pride was instilled in her in medical school. She was a doctor, damnit. She would've grinned, but his next question only soured and stilled her expression entirely. She shook her head, once.

"No. I tried that when I was a girl, and I only made things far worse. I'm just here to help where I can as a doctor, and occasionally take down a crime ring that left itself too exposed for too long."

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

Eocin eyed his arm through the bandage at her remark.

Based on what he was seeing, her pride was wholly warranted.

As she elaborated on her past, Eocin 'eyed' her assessingly. "Denon is chaos. Even the CAD doesn't control it. Not truly. Still, I suppose your new goal is much more achievable." He waved his hand to stress the point, a wry smile on his lips. "Kill a thug and another will take his place. Save someone's life and who knows what they'll do with it."

It was noble. Far nobler than what he spent his time working towards, but it was what it was.

Glancing down at the extracted Kyber shards, he spotted something odd. "Their resonance is off. Can you tell? Do you reckon it's due to my experiment, or is Kyber shape-dependent?" If so, was Kyber-gemcutting a thing?

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

"Yeah."

She couldn't bring herself to say anything more on it. She didn't want to. That'd mean accepting some pretty dark things about herself, which she was already struggling to do so. No, not accepting. Just.. Facing it. Right now, she didn't want to do that.

Then she blinked. Glanced from him to the Kyber. And immediately frowned. "Kyber is as alive as you or me. Imagine your body shattered and scattered apart but you're unable to die, and you feel every part of you still. That's what it's going through. It'll harmonize, though. Each part will becomes it's own person in a way. But what you did certainly hurt it bad."

Eocin Chiyat

 

[Eocin Chiyat]

There were flickers of darkness of in her aura. Sorrow, perhaps? Regret?

That and her succinct response gave him the impression that her vigilante efforts had been less than successful.

"Excuse me?" Tilting his head in confusion, he studied her appraisingly. She seemed like she was telling the truth. After a moment his attention turned to the shards of Kyber before flickering towards her droid. "Alive, you say? In what sense and to what degree?" There was an ocean of differences between, say, a songbird and a person.

Iris Arani​

 

[Iris Arani]

"More or less. It's not like you or me, but they are alive. Jedi bond with them even before they make a lightsaber, and that's how it gives it's power." She wasn't too sure how to explain it, given how her face scrunched up in thought. "They feel, they hurt. So I guess in that form they're very much alive."

Eocin Chiyat