Great Balls of Plasma

[Marque]

After weeks of working on the idea, Marque had made one incredibly important discovery. Failure had a sound. In this case, it was the sickening whine of the machinery around him failing as the power went out, abruptly cut short by the output of the electromagnetic pulse from his device. As he traipsed down the hall to reset the power, the Zeltron boy made a mental note that test three-hundred-and-sixty-five was not a working solution, either.

It all began as a simple examination of the newly-resurrected Intervention, a Clone Wars-era starship that Corellia Digital had discovered and raised from purgatory on Boz Pity. The ship's stores had contained a few old weapons left behind, several of which were based on EMP technology. Having been originally designed to work on droids, it was practically useless to their modern counterparts. Yet the tech did serve to give the young slicer an idea.

With some insight from Jon-Jon Nemo about his home planet's version of the droid busters, Marque set out to create an updated version of the weapons. At first, his focus was on droids. Even if they were no longer a predominant fighting force in the galaxy, security droids, like the ones being developed at Corellia Defense, were still in use in places and facing them would be a real concern. Finding a way to make Corellia Defense's droids immune would give them a serious edge. But a visit from Sor-Jan Xantha one day inspired the change.

His new weapon would target lightsabers.

Marque had nothing against Jedi. His boss was one, and they got along just fine. And despite the crumbling of the Sith empire, saber-wielding opponents were still rampant throughout the galaxy. Normal denizens had no practical defense against the insane power of a lightsaber, and the only another combatant with a lightsaber could properly fight one without heavy armor or high-powered ranged weapons. This would be the equalizer of armies. The democratization of war.

If only Marque could get it to work.

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[member="Sor-Jan Xantha"] [member="Aisha Marc"]​

 

[Zak Dymo]

She'd been told that she'd find the Zeltron in the R&D lab.

That was interesting. From what she understood of the kid's portfolio, he was more of a software engineer. So what was he fabricating?

As one of the newer additions to the Corellia Digital family, and with the unique goal of leading their military defense contracting, the Corellian-born Levantine was still sorting through the who's who of the company. But one thing was clear. This Zeltron was the tech genius behind most of what had made the company successful.

Making her way into the R&D lab, the woman observed where the pink-skinned teen seemed to be brooding. Dangerous habit. One she was known to indulge in, as well. But it suited him all the same.

He was a thinker.

"Something troubling you?" the woman asked, making her presence known as she made her way down to the laboratory floor.

[member="Marque"]​

 

[Marque]

The first indication that he was not alone in the lab came only as a voice. Marque spun around to face the newcomer, trying to mask his surprise with a casual look. The voice belonged to a woman, shock-white hair, thin figure and an aged defined by wrinkles. She would have been a total stranger had the teen not looked up her name on a holonet profile site shortly after the news of Corellia Defense' new leadership came down.

Aisha Marc. A longtime naval commander for the Levantine Sanctum, now president of Corellia Defense, the new subsidiary of Corellia Digital aimed at, well, defense contracts. A soldier playing businessbeing. Digital seemed to attract those types, no doubt she found common cause with Xantha. Marque himself wondered how he might get along with her.

The simple answer to that was just fine, so long as he could work in peace.

The interruption had come at an opportune time for the woman, anyway. Marque was stuck. Like massively stuck. A bantha in quicksand stuck. A starship in nebulous soup stuck. A slicer with a bricked datapad stuck. A Jedi—well, the point was made. Marque was stuck.

The brown-haired Zeltron gestured back at the machine behind him, a patchwork of resistors, capacitors, generators, wiring and pulsing blue plasma that sparked white lightning as it contacted the sides of its containment field. "It's this plasma," Marque explained. The Nabooian plasma had been a gift of sorts from Digital's outgoing president, Nemo's name had opened doors that made acquiring it possible. The same plasma powered the boomas of Naboo's aquatic species, a machine-disabling power that Marque was hoping to harness for his own means. "Somehow, planet-bound Gungans figured this out, but I can't get it to play nice."

As if to emphasize his point, the plasma crackled and whipped towards the room's occupants, stopped short as it collided with an invisible force in a shower of sparks. Marque flinched involuntarily at the plasma's outburst, spinning around to check the power levels on the containment field. The logs showed a 0.001 percent fluctuation, enough to cause the plasma to go haywire for a split second. He made a mental note to increase the power requirements, and to look into a distributed power solution. Keeping containment was not supposed to be the hardest thing about this project.

"It's just too powerful," the teen complained, his back still to the woman. "All it wants to do is shut down everything. I need it to be more precise, but it's like trying to turn a vibrosword into a scalpel."

[member="Aisha Marc"]​

 

[Zak Dymo]

Plasma.

A loose assortment of high energy particles that was going haywire within a magnetic confinement.

If that was supposed to be doing something short of just flying all over the place, it was less the art of physics and more of a technological miracle. And it seemed that the Zeltron was all out of miracles at the moment.

[color=#FF3399"]"If what you're doing isn't achieving the desired results, then you need to change your play,"[/color] the woman noted evenly. She didn't understand the science behind what was going on here, but she could at least profess some familiarity with the reference that the Zeltron provided. [color=#FF3399"]"Gungan technology is very low-powered,"[/color] the lady commented.

During her Antarian Ranger days, she'd had occasion to run an operation on Naboo. This was back before the Techno Union's so-called 'digital curtain,' but it still hadn't been a place friendly to Jedi. [color=#FF3399"]"So much so that our com-scan had difficulty picking them up, except for very localized, close-range interactions. It's how they avoided attention for so long,"[/color] the woman recalled, looking over at the teen.

[member="Marque"]​