[member="Spencer Jacobs"]
"Or maybe," Ashin continued after a long moment, "it really is just a matter of mortal limits. Ysalamiri are good at what they do, but do we even know if they're doing it consciously? I know that moron Reyven Samoth tried extracting organs-" She snapped her fingers. "Hold on."
She returned from the ship a few minutes later, brandishing a syringe. "From the medkit," she said. "Seemed better than lobotomy." She injected the nearest ysalamir and sat back to watch.
"Ixetal cilona," she said. "Forcebreaker strength. Ixetal cilona has no direct impact on the Force; it just makes you high, and numbs the parts of your brain that have to do with conscious Force access. Not exactly rigorous experimentation, but..."
The Force flooded back into her, and she nodded. "There we go. They project the bubble when they're awake, too, which is weaker evidence but helpful. And if the bubble is something the ysalamiri do consciously, then we need to stop looking at it as an immutable law and start looking at it as...just another Force power, used by a single-ability specialist. Force lightning, drain, kinetite, the lot -- they won't get through, or I'd just try Force-draining the bubble itself. If it was that simple, people would have done it by now." A scattering of reddish lightning snapped out and swirled around the invisible perimeter of the next ysalamiri test subject. "Verified. I'm getting no purchase here. But again, I think it comes back to mortal limits."
With a grimace, she placed her hand on the Kaiburr crystal and did it again. Force Drain linkages exploded from her, surrounding the ysalamir bubble with strength she couldn't remotely channel on her own steam. She focused not on trying to drain the Force or life from the lizard, but the energy from the bubble.
And slowly, that bubble began to shrink. She got its radius to about half, meaning about an eighth of its original volume, then let off the pressure. Very, very slowly, the bubble began to expand back to its full size. The ysalamir was shivering.
"Satisfying. This can't be Skywalker's solution, though. He'd never have drained life, not even from a non-sentient animal. He killed a lot of people, but he preferred to kill cleanly. Bear with me while I think this through. I doubt his solution involved harming or killing them. It might be a matter of adjusting the web of the Force around the edges so that the edges are not longer recognized -- but doing that quickly enough? For every single Force power coming in? And doing that when you're already cut off? No, it has to be..." Her eyes went wide. "It has to be internal. And that means there's only one thing it can be.
"This isn't about the right combination of techniques. This is about centeredness. This is about nurturing your Force connection, not in the sense of strength but in the sense of clarity, to the point that you can sit in a ysalamiri field and touch it anyway. Get a transmission past the jamming. Hear past the sound-dampening. Whatever analogy you pick -- noise or silence, or noise that feels like silence. It's about...learning to listen, and everything else goes from there. How immensely Skywalker. I mean, look at it, Spencer. This is Yoda 101. What has every Forcer ever been told about ysalamiri? That they win, every time. 'I can't do it, it's impossible.' 'That is why you fail.' This is just another size-matters-not exercise, another test in really believing the impossible, even if it's one that took a Grandmaster to beat." Her eyes narrowed as she stood. "Well, I've beaten Grandmasters in every way imaginable. I think...I'm going to go meditate."
She arranged four ysalamiri in a rough circle so that their spheres went from overlap to amplification. Then, without the Kaiburr crystal, she sat in the middle and closed her eyes.
