Private Publication Bias

[Neriamel Loraya]

Nexus Biotech Laboratory, Daro, Ojoster Sector

It was not every day that one could see a pair of Jedi walk down the ramp of a shuttle in yellow hazmat gear. But when they were sent to answer a distress signal that originated from a laboratory that was supposedly studying pathogens, that was how anyone in their right mind would have showed up. What was most curious was that there was no evidence that anybody at this laboratory actually did any research. Neriamel had taken care to investigate and had not been able to find a single publication in which anybody affiliated with this laboratory had participated, nor mention of a single study having taken place here. That meant that either the people here were sitting around all day drinking stimcaf, or they were studying something they didn't want the galaxy to know about. And the first one was not distressing.

No other ship was to be seen anywhere near, which meant that if anyone else had answered the distress call, they were long gone. That was a possibility, but how many people would actually dare to approach a supposed biohazard like this? Most likely they were the first and only help to come.

But nobody had answered any communications, and nobody was there to meet them as they approached the gate that led into the research complex. The door was sealed, as probably it should have been, presumably in consequence of the facility's safety protocol. Not, in principle, an obstacle to a Jedi.

Neriamel looked at her Master.

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

The filtered breath inside the hazmat helmet was steady—steady like the practiced rhythm of meditation or the moment between saber strikes. Razh Sho stood motionless at the gate, its metallic face streaked with dust and time, as silence pressed in from all sides. The Nexus Biotech facility was too quiet—not the sterile quiet of laboratories, but the hollow kind—the kind born of absence.

His gloved hands remained at his sides, one resting lightly on the emitter of his curved hilted saber through the thick yellow gloves, the other clenched with quiet restraint. The wind on Daro stirred no leaves. No animals moved in the distance. He turned slightly, his visor catching a faint reflection of Neriamel, standing alert beside him. The girl was sharp, inquisitive, and grounded—good traits. Better instincts. Her silence wasn't hesitation—it was discipline.

He nodded once.

"The front gate is locked. That's a gesture." His voice crackled through the helmet's vox system, calm and even, as though narrating a lecture hall demonstration. "Whoever was here either wants to keep something out… or something in."

He stepped forward, gloved fingers running lightly across the edge of the security console beside the door—just enough pressure to gauge wear. The panel was cold, untouched, and recently powered down.

"No publications. No public work. No staff records. Yet they called for help."He looked again at the gate. The locks were solid, but nothing extraordinary. The kind that could be bypassed with the right tools—or the right will. "This isn't science. This is secrecy."

He turned his helmet slightly toward her.

"I'll open it. Stay close. And when we step inside..." a pause, soft but deliberate "Breathe with your thoughts, not your lungs."

Then he knelt, began to unhook the side panel, and reached into the Force—not to break the door but to slip through its doubts, like a duelist slipping through an opponent's guard. The force helped him manipulate the mechanical locks to release.

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

Neriamel received the confirmation she had waited for. She felt no apprehension at the prospect of opening the door, and her master evidently shared that assessment. Even if something dangerous was contained within the laboratory, Daro did not have a significant population, which had made it a natural choice for such an installation - or should one say, a plausible choice, given that this research facility was very possibly not doing what the public records indicated it should be?

She had been prepared to tackle this obstacle in a straightforward manner: to simply melt down the door. But Master Sho took an entirely different approach as his Padawan looked on in wonder.

The door opened upwards and revealed an entrance hall reminiscent of a hospital in character, with a beige floor and white walls and ceiling. The overhead lighting was completely functional. There weren't any signs. The place was not set up to receive visitors, and the permanent wouldn't have needed them to find the living quarters, mess area, offices, and the actual laboratory, which, if it even existed, was doubt contained inside with further isolation measures.

"How did you do that, Master?" asked Neriamel as the two Jedi stepped into the building.

You couldn't use the Force to manipulate electronics or computer systems. Those things did not live and did not have intent, it was why you could not implant a thought in the 'mind', such as it was, of a droid. You could interact with such things only in a purely mechanical way. So what was it that Master Sho had done here, exactly? If he had somehow moved something within the door, how had he known that it was there and what it was?

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

Razh Sho stepped through the threshold without haste, his boots gliding silently over the pristine beige tile. The sudden sterility of the place, the untouched orderliness, only deepened the unease. No signage. No personal effects. Not even the usual mess of a disorganized mind at work. The entrance hall felt less like the gateway to a research facility and more like the waiting breath before a lie reveals itself.

His saber remained at his hip, untouched. His hands were behind his back now, fingers interlaced in calm. When Neriamel spoke, he didn't answer immediately. He allowed the silence to stretch, not as evasion, but as an extension of the lesson.

"How did you do that, Master?"

He turned to her, face angled slightly under the cowl of his hazmat hood. The glow from the overhead panels gave his lekku a muted sheen and caught faint reflections in his silver-grey eyes.

"By asking the door what it feared," he said at last.

Her brow furrowed. It was not mockery—it was curiosity. Good. He stepped forward again, moving deeper into the sterile atrium.

"You're correct that we cannot bend electronics with thought. But even machines," he gestured gently to the control panel beside the door, "are constructed by hands. And those hands leave patterns. Intent. Logic."

He knelt beside a second panel recessed in the wall, examining a faint scuff where a cover had been removed recently. His gloved fingers brushed the edge, feeling for magnetic pull.

"I felt for pressure points. For fatigue in the metal. For minute inconsistencies in the panel's frame—where it had been opened, reprogrammed, or tampered with. The Force didn't unlock the door for me, Neriamel." He stood, brushing dust from his knee. "But it told me where to press. And how hard."

He began walking again, this time slower, more alert. His voice grew quieter, though no less certain.

"The Force does not make tools of machines. But it can make tools of us. If we listen." Then he glanced at her, eyes sharp but not unkind."Most students reach for fire first. I prefer to see whether the door was asking to be opened."

The corridor ahead yawned in sterile silence. Razh's pace did not quicken. But his hand, slowly, drifted to rest near his saber's hilt.

"Come. Let's see what kind of silence this place is built to keep."

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

Neriamel considered the explanation. She nodded slightly in conclusion, but the protective suit probably prevented the gesture from being perceived.

"I see, Master."

And indeed she did. That didn't mean that she could have replicated the feat, she had no illusions about that. But the Force did have a way of telling you to do what it was that you needed to do, and so Master Sho had given her a mechanism she could comprehend: it was ultimately about him more than the door, his rhetorical flourish notwithstanding. The key element was that he had had an intuition about where to manipulate the door.

Thus satisfied, she turned her attention to the situation at hand. Her gaze drifted from one door to the next as she tried to feel, not think, waiting for one of them to simply strike her fancy without reason. None did. She found herself simply staring at them without seeing a distinction. She grew frustrated, and after a moment stormed off to approach a random one of them.

The door was off to the side from the entrance. It was unlocked and opened without issue. It revealed a sort of lounge with glass tables, benches and chairs, from which a corridor led further into the building. The corridor itself had doors on both sides. The floor was not the same beige tiles as before, but a sort of carpet of a dark, greyish-turquoise colour. Structurally, this was likely to be some kind of residential tract.

Except one of the glass tables was smashed, its remnants smeared with blood, and the lifeless body of a duros lay amidst the shards. Neriamel's gaze swept over it and to a spot on a nearby wall that showed a red sheen. She approached the body. This was most certainly not the victim of some sort of biohazard accident. This person had been killed with blunt force, there were no traces even of weapons. Presumably his head had been bashed against the wall first.

"He was killed without the use of weapons. An internal conflict, perhaps", remarked Neriamel. It was clear that she was merely speculating, floating a hypothesis, not yet coming to a conclusion.

Suddenly, a man emerged from the corridor, human. His face was battered, and he was limping, clearly couldn't run, but tried to nonetheless. "Thank the stars! Help! They're behind me!" He was still hurrying towards the two Jedi.

Neriamel peered past him. She noticed that she felt puzzled, not threatened. The corridor behind the man was completely empty. "They're not. You're safe", she stated, with more conviction than was perhaps warranted, but not least to reassure the man, who was clearly in distress.

"Oh? Oh." The man turned around, stumbled over his own feet - and fell prostrate before the Jedi. "Oh, good." He looked up at them, and for a moment his eyes seemed to light up. "Bel Arven, technician. This -" he waved at them clumsily with a limp wrist without picking him up from the floor, wincing in pain as he did so - "the suits, you don't need. No pathogen hazard."

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

Razh Sho stood just behind his Padawan, framed by the flickering artificial light above, his posture as composed as the stone columns of a long-buried temple. He had said nothing at first—not when the door revealed the carnage, nor when Neriamel calmly offered her assessment. She had read the scene well. Not perfectly, not deeply, but honestly. That was more valuable.

Then came the technician, stumbling, desperate, collapsing like a dying breath before them. Razh watched him without blinking, his expression unreadable behind the mask of the hazmat helmet. Only his eyes betrayed the slow, subtle narrowing of focus.

When the man gestured and muttered the news—no pathogen hazard—Razh Sho finally moved. He stepped forward in silence, the fabric of his protective suit whispering against itself, and crouched low, not to help the man rise, but to see him clearly.

"Bel Arven," he repeated, tone low and smooth, "you will tell us everything."

A pause. Then, more softly, "Slowly. Truthfully." His gaze lingered on the bruises, the fatigue, the panic behind the man's eyes. And yet…

No fear in the Force. Not real fear.
Panic, yes. But not terror.

Razh's fingers drifted briefly across the edge of a shattered glass table. Violence without weapons. A place engineered in silence. A man too eager to claim safety. He rose again, slowly, letting his hands fall behind his back.

"I have only recently emerged from four hundred seventy-seven years of carbonite." He said it with no pride, no bitterness—only fact."The galaxy I knew is dust. But deception…" He turned his eyes back to Bel. "…deception remains unchanged."

He glanced once to Neriamel, his voice now directed toward her.

"You were right to doubt the absence of danger. Doubt, when tempered, is a form of clarity."

Then back to Bel Arven, a single word:

"Begin."

The tone was soft.

But it was not a request.

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

"I don't know what you know. We don't study pathogens here. The air is the same as outside. It's not even filtered."

Neriamel tried to come up with a scenario under which it would have made sense for the man to be dishonest on this point and couldn't develop anything coherent. Deception would just not have served any purpose. And she didn't feel that he was being deceptive, either. Neither was it realistic that a lab technician wouldn't know anything about the nature of the experiments conducted here. After all, he would be concerned exactly with the relevant tools and devices. Caution was a virtue, but the inability to arrive at conclusions and act on them was not.

"Vessa... Dr. Lin—the director—"

The Padawan interrupted him matter-of-factly. "You're in pain. Is there a medicine cabinet somewhere?" They appeared to be in a sort of common room. That was a natural place to store basic medical supplies.

"Yes." Arven pointed at a panel on the wall, his hand oddly hanging on his wrist, clearly injured.

Neriamel was already peeling herself out of the yellow suit. If there was a real danger here, it was violence, and she would be better able to defend herself against that without such hindrance. Not to mention that the gloves, though they were well-made, did somewhat impede dexterity and would not make it easier to manipulate a medpack.

And a medpack did indeed turn out to be stored in the compartment. She retrieved it and kneeled down next to Arven, then she loaded an airhypo with painkillers and administered it to his neck. Who could know how many injuries he had, a topical application would clearly be insufficient.

Arven waited patiently. She remained at his side, but strengthened by the relief from his pain, he looked past her at Master Sho, whom he perceived to be the more menacing presence.

"Vessa is a geneticist, she used to do viruses. But what's happening here is some sort of gene therapy. I can't say I know the details, you have to ask her. If you can find her. She got cut off from us—locked herself in the office, if she's lucky. But you'll have to go through them", he said with a shudder, nodding with his head towards the corridor from which he had come.

"Whom—your colleagues? These are the living quarters, aren't they?"

"No, the—" He almost whispered: "—subjects."

"The subjects of your trials attacked you?"

Arven nodded.

"They are not armed, are they?"

"They don't need to be."

Neriamel turned her head and looked up at her master. She didn't need to say it out loud for him to guess what she probably thought. No problem, then.

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

Razh Sho watched without intervening as Neriamel shed her hazmat suit and moved to treat the wounded man. She had done so with admirable economy—no hesitation, no indulgent commentary, simply action in service of need. He approved. Still, his stance at the edge of the common room remained as composed as ever, hands folded calmly behind his back, a silent sentinel. His silver-grey eyes tracked every tremor in Bel Arven's broken posture, every faltering cadence in his voice.

Pain could cloud a mind.
But pain could also peel it bare.

When Arven finally turned toward him—halting, cowed—Razh inclined his head slightly, an acknowledgment rather than a comfort. The words spilled forth: gene therapy, subjects, trials gone wrong. And then—fear. True, uncoached fear. Not of the Jedi. Of what waited deeper inside the facility.

Razh shifted at last, stepping forward from the wall, the soles of his boots silent on the too-clean floor. His cloak brushed the carpet with a whisper as he came to stand beside Neriamel, looking down at the technician, who shrank instinctively under his gaze.

"You speak as if your guilt were a contagion," Razh said softly. "But ignorance is not innocence."

He turned his attention to the corridor, where shadows thickened and the air felt heavier, as if memory itself recoiled. Subjects, indeed. Twisted by design or desperation. Perhaps both.

Neriamel turned her face up toward him then, a silent question in her young features: no weapons? No problem? He met her gaze with a slight narrowing of his own. Not disapproving—merely assessing. She was ready. Or, at least, ready enough to walk into uncertainty.

"Unarmed does not mean harmless," Razh said, his voice low but unshaken, a ripple of authority passing into the room. "Desperation sharpens instincts more cruelly than any blade."

He turned, letting his words settle into the space between them.

"But we will meet them without fear. Without hatred. If they have fallen beyond reason, we will act. If they have not..."He tilted his head slightly, lekku shifting. "...then the choice will be theirs to stand down."

He looked back at Arven one last time, and his final words to the technician were not heated but truthful.

"The damage done in ignorance must still be faced with open eyes."

With that, Razh Sho turned to the corridor—and the uncertain justice waiting in the dark—and moved forward with a saber yet unlit, but a will sharp and ready.

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

Neriamel wasn't about to stride out into the unknown like this and proceeded to question Arven on the approximate layout of the facility, at least insofar as the path to the office where he suspected Vessa was concerned. It turned out that people who knew how to navigate a space didn't necessarily know how to describe it, and extracting intelligible information on this point that could actually help navigate the place from his addled brain was like pulling teeth, and she grew increasingly impatient. More than once did she interrupt him, not angrily, but with a single-minded focus on clarity and efficiency, to point out that what he had said was confused or inconsistent.

Eventually, she got up from the floor, satisfied, or at least satisfied that nothing more was to be gained here.

"Alright." She considered for a moment what to do with him, since he had now turned from a resource into an inconvenience. To carry him outside and to the ship right away would be safest for him, but lose them a lot of time, and she wasn't very much inclined to do it, or suggest it to Master Sho. She decided to treat Arven as a somewhat autonomous individual and give him a choice. "Our shuttle is on the landing pad. We just came in and up the stairs and encountered nothing. You can make your way there—or you wait here for us to return." Somehow, she didn't exactly sound comforting. If anything, Arven might have got the impression that he was going to be judged for whatever choice he would make, little sense as that made.

Like her master, she took her lightsaber in hand to save herself that split-second in a moment of need, but did not ignite it.

The corridor was well-lit and ended in a gull-wing door. There were four rooms on one side and five on the other. Neriamel tried to open the first door they passed, but it was looked. She stood there for a moment, trying to decide whether to open it or not. Eventually, she decided to leave it be—not on reasoning, but on instinct.

She tried the door opposite and found that it led into a small kitchen. Slumped against a cupboard was the body of a chagrian female whose head had clearly been bashed in on the countertop. Neriamel surveyed the space impassively and then closed the door again. The gave her master a look that communicated all he needed to be told. Nothing to see here.

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

Razh Sho led them down the corridor, his boots soundless against the flooring. The corridor narrowed ahead, the air growing heavier with each step, despite the mechanical hum of the life-support systems. The Force thickened around them—not with darkness in the Sith sense, but with pain. Like walking into the edge of a storm. Fractured presences lurked beyond the thin barriers of walls and doors.

They were close.

Razh extended his senses carefully, the way one might ease a hand into turbulent water. What he found was not silence. It was anguish. Not focused. Not articulate. Just raw, splintered psychic noise — terror, confusion, rage. The kind of pain that bends minds until they break and leaves the wreckage flailing, desperate.

The first door on the left shuddered faintly. There was no sound beyond it—just a vibration, a subtle percussion against the floor. Something was waiting. Razh caught Neriamel glancing at him again, hesitation flickering just at the edge of her control. It was not fear—tactical uncertainty.

He raised a hand in a silent signal: wait.

Then, with two fingers extended, he gestured to the door. He felt it. A presence just behind it. Fast. Restless.

He spoke quietly, voice a soft current beneath the hum of the hallway lights. "We are not facing soldiers or beasts," he said. "Their minds are shattered. Their bodies... weaponized."

A low creak answered him from beyond the door, as if in affirmation.

"Expect speed. Strength. Madness." He turned slightly toward her, his expression utterly composed. "Use the Force to anticipate their motion, not their thought. You will find little logic there."

His hand hovered near the panel. His body shifted—shoulders square, weight balanced like a duelist at center ring.

Without further warning, he triggered the door.

It slid open with a mechanical sigh.

What waited beyond was a man—outwardly unremarkable. Mid-thirties. Human. Short, cropped hair. Plain clothes stained by blood, his own or another's Razh could not tell. But the moment the door opened, the man moved. Faster than a normal human could. Faster than even many Force sensitives would expect. His hands clawed forward not for a weapon, but for Razh's throat—an attack borne not of hatred, but of screaming, mindless anguish.

Razh Sho pivoted sideways with effortless grace, his body flowing around the charge, saber still unlit. One hand intercepted the attacker's wrist, the other pressed lightly against the man's shoulder, redirecting, letting the man's momentum throw him past. The attacker stumbled, hitting the far wall with a sickening thud—but he was already trying to recover, scrambling back to his feet, animalistic, eyes wide and glassy.

Razh's voice remained calm, even as he shifted into a low guard.

"This is no malice," he said to Neriamel, softly, "only the ruin of what once was reason."

The man lunged again.

This time, Razh ignited his saber with a snap-hiss, the blue blade hissing into existence just long enough to intercept, not to kill — a short, crisp slash at the man's legs, severing tendon and dropping him to the ground harmlessly but permanently disabled without taking his life. The man fell, gasping, sobbing now—not from pain, but from something deeper. A fractured spirit struggling to remember what dignity felt like.

Razh stood over him, saber low, expression carved from stone.

"Some will fight," he murmured, voice carrying only to Neriamel. "Some will beg. None are whole."

His gaze lifted toward the long hall ahead. And deeper inside, more presences shifted — some with rage, others with grief — all moving now, drawn by the scent of hope or destruction. Razh Sho tightened his grip on his saber.

"Come," he said, stepping forward into the shadowed corridor. "This will be a mercy few will understand."

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

Neriamel ignited her lightsaber on instinct when Master Sho opened the door, even before she saw the assailant. But she had no occasion to swing it: the creature—person?—showed no interest in her, deceived perhaps by her master's apparent lack of weapons.

Only when the man lay on the floor moments later, immobilised and bereft of his legs, moaning in pain, could she get a proper look at him. At not point had she felt fear—but she was horrified. The agony that had warped his mind was palpable, and now augmented by the pain of his loss of limbs.

"End it!" he demanded. Was he asking for a cure for whatever ailed him, or for death?

Neriamel switched off her lightsaber, but did not move to follow Master Sho down the corridor. She had a feeling about this—not a bad feeing, per se, beyond the fact that the whole situation was pretty bad. But not for her—at least it was not a feeling of danger. It was the feeling that something was about to happen.

At the same time, this man's fate was still decidedly unresolved. What were they to do with him? Killing him to end his suffering was certainly on the table. On the other hand, it was, in principle, unclear whether a cure might be developed for whatever happened to him. They hadn't yet spoken to anyone who really knew what had gone on here. Perhaps the problem was the violence, not the impossibility of a cure—although Neriamel couldn't help but feel that she was looking at rather remote eventualities here.

"Master", she said, and pointed at the man with her gaze. It wasn't to say that she didn't have an opinion on the question. But she wanted to hear his. It was almost a challenge.

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

Razh Sho stopped mid-step, the hum of his saber lowering to a muted thrum in his hand. He turned — not sharply, not impatiently — but with the deliberateness of a man who knew that choices made at crossroads like these would echo long beyond the walls that contained them. Neriamel stood by the broken figure, her saber deactivated but her posture strong. She had not flinched. She had not acted without thought. Good.

Her gaze caught his — not pleading, not uncertain. Simply waiting. A Padawan's deference mixed with the quiet insistence of someone beginning to weigh her own judgments. She pointed with her eyes to the man who lay there, broken and bleeding, his pain writ in every line of his mangled body.

"Master."

The title was not a crutch.
It was a summons.

Razh approached, his boots whispering across the corridor's sterile flooring. The Force pressed around them — not in violence, but in anguish. Tangled. Bleeding into the air. He looked down at the man he had cut down. Saw not just the ruin of flesh, but the deeper wound beneath: a spirit snapped under unbearable pressure, thrashing now at its own existence.

The man's voice broke again:

"End it."

Razh's expression remained unreadable. His curved saber remained in hand but angled low, its light reflecting in brief flickers across the blood-smeared floor. He knelt, lowering himself to the man's eye level.

"You suffer," Razh said quietly, his voice a stillness amid the echoing hum of broken machinery. "Not because you are weak. But because what was done to you was wrong."

The man's breathing hitched, a broken sob clawing out of him.

Razh's silver-grey eyes, clear and unblinking, held his. "There may be no cure for what was carved into your body." A pause, like the breath before a blade falls."But there is still a choice for how you face the end of it."

He shifted slightly, speaking not to the man now, but to Neriamel, his voice deliberate and calm; "A Jedi is not a weapon for mercy or for wrath. We are a witness to suffering—and a guide to those trapped within it."

He rose smoothly, deactivating his saber with a sharp hiss. Turning again to Neriamel, he added, more quietly, "Killing him now would be an act of kindness. But it would also be an assumption: that his fate must be sealed because we cannot yet see another path." He gestured subtly to the corridor ahead. "Until we have exhausted the possibility of salvation, we must not claim the right to decide who lives and who dies."

Then, facing the broken man once more, Razh Sho spoke with finality, "You have strength enough to endure a little longer. Endure it. If healing is beyond reach..." his voice dropped softer, almost like a hand laid gently on a closing door "...then we will grant you the peace you are owed."

He turned, his cloak drawing a line through the blood and debris, and began to walk forward into the haunted hall. A final word tossed back over his shoulder — not cold, but unyielding. "Hope may be a thin thread, Neriamel. But a Jedi does not cut it lightly."

The corridor breathed.

Razh Sho felt it before he saw it — a subtle tremor in the floor, a shift in the air, as if the very walls had taken in a new rhythm. Not coordinated, not disciplined — but wild. Desperate.

Ahead, they emerged from the shadows at the far end of the hall.

Figures, stumbling, sprinting, lurching. Humans, or at least they once had been. Their faces twisted in raw anguish, teeth bared not in rage but in confused agony. Their bodies moved wrong — too fast, too sharp, as if their minds struggled to keep up with the strength that now dragged them forward.

Razh lifted his saber again, the curved hilt fitting easily into his palm, its emitter angled downward in a guard position. The blue blade ignited with a clean snap-hiss, casting harsh light over the stained floor.

Five… six… seven of them, pouring down the hall, their hands clawed, eyes hollow.

He did not tense.
He did not shout.

He simply shifted his weight back onto his rear foot — a duelist's stance — and spoke, voice cutting through the onrushing madness like a line drawn in sand.

"Prepare yourself, Neriamel." Another step forward. His blade rose, elegant, steady. "We will meet them with precision. Not hate."

And then they were upon them, and the spiral of the storm broke around their steady flame.

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

"Killing him now would be an act of kindness. But it would also be an assumption: that his fate must be sealed because we cannot yet see another path."

The whole scene was sickening, but it made Neriamel feel better to hear these words. It was comforting to be in the company of someone who understood her thinking without the need for many words. At least for many words on her part—Master Sho himself was more given to rhetorical flourish.

There was no time for further contemplation. Neriamel's feelings reminded her that events were going to proceed with or without her consent—which right now she would very much not have given. Door swung open, and Neriamel's lightsaber sprang into existence, humming softly beside her, held low as was the custom, ready to slice. It was a disturbing and absurd situation. Not even at their group size could these people hope to do any harm to a Jedi.

"We will meet them with precision."

Was he saying he was planning to merely disable all of them? It might be just like him to turn a slaughter into a challenge of swordsmanship.

It would have been wrong to say that all hell broke loose. By the end of it, neither Jedi had moved from their original position by more than one step. Four bodies lay on the ground, not all of them alive, one of them, indeed, more properly described as two half-bodies. Neriamel had prioritised her own safety. A fifth body was still very much alive, circling Master Sho at some distance, ready to pounce, but held at bay by his lightsaber for the moment, assessing, but not yet subdued.

But the most remarkable thing was further down the corridor: one of the men held another by his hair, restraining him, preventing him from joining the others in their assault on the Jedi. "Idiots!" he cried. The other struggled: "No, don't you see, they can kill us, they can end it for us! Let me go!"

Razh Sho​

 

[Razh Sho]

The air smelled of blood and scorched ozone, thick and heavy in Razh Sho's senses. He barely registered it. His focus was narrower and sharper, attuned not to the chaos of movement but to the quiet underlying it: the ripple of life, of pain, of broken purpose moving through the corridor.

The circling man lunged, desperate and wild. Razh moved without haste. A slight turn of his wrist and a subtle ripple in the Force unbalanced the man mid-spring, sending him crashing hard onto the cold floor. No saber stroke needed. Only the weight of his own momentum and Razh's control.

One threat — neutralized.

He took a measured step forward, robes brushing the scorched ground. Behind him, he felt it — the aftermath of Neriamel's strike. The severed halves of the fallen man still twitched faintly, the Force around the corpse fluttering like a torn banner in the wind.

No anger rose within Razh.
No censure.
Only the quiet acknowledgment of choice.
Survival first. Reflection later.

The two figures struggling further down the corridor — the captor and the pleading man — caught his eye next.
Their cries laced the air:

"Let me go!"
"They can end it for us!"

The larger one, restraining the desperate one, glanced up — just as Razh moved. One graceful, gliding step. The curved saber flicked outward — not to kill, but to cut the captor's footing away. A circular sweep at the backs of the knees dropped the man hard, the smaller figure wriggling free in a gasp of panic. The freed man stumbled toward him. Razh lifted his free hand, fingers splayed. A controlled Force-push, shaped like a wall rather than a blast, caught the man across the chest and pinned him gently but unyieldingly to the corridor wall. The man slumped, stunned but alive.

In the fading echoes of motion, Razh Sho stood alone at the center of it all:
One body severed.
Others broken but breathing.
Pain woven into the air like smoke.

His saber remained lit for a breath longer, its hum a steady heartbeat in the stillness. Then, slowly, he deactivated it. The silence that followed was not peace. It was mourning. He turned his head toward Neriamel — not with reproach, but with the full weight of a master's understanding gaze.

"You chose survival. As you must." A pause. Then, lower. "But a Jedi carries every life taken, even those struck in necessity."

He did not linger on judgment. There would be time enough for reflection later — when the corridors no longer bled. Moving forward, Razh knelt by one of the subdued men, checking his injuries with swift, efficient hands. His voice drifted back to Neriamel — low, rough with the gravel of age and quiet sadness:

"Stun them if you must. Bind them if you can. But never forget the weight of the blade once it is drawn."

He walked over to the two who were last to be subdued. They had said words that had caught Razh Sho's attention, and he wanted to investigate their meaning. He stood over the one slumped against the wall and asked, "What did you mean?" He paused, "They can end it for us?"

Neriamel Loraya

 

[Neriamel Loraya]

"He means you're going to kill him", came a voice from behind Master Sho. The man tried to get up from the floor, but his injured leg prevented him. "What did you do that for, anyway?!" he protested briefly, but then kept a stiff upper lip. "No matter. You see, we've had a bit of a disagreement. Jol here wants to off himself, but hasn't worked out how to." The man was surprisingly—surprisingly?—articulate, but he was far from alright. His mind was under a lot of strain, he was suffering just like the others, but he was, through some herculean effort of will, capable of keeping some manner of façade together. "You are now obviously a means. I think one or two of those guys"—he pointed at those lying on the floor down the corridor after their encounter with the Jedi—"were in his camp. The others are afraid you'll just re-establish the procedures and everything will go on, they actually did try to kill you. Me—well, I was hoping... I don't know what I was hoping—that you'd help? Maybe it's me who is delusional."

"You are not delusional. Help with what, precisely? What are your symptoms?" inquired Neriamel bluntly.

"You know that feeling where it seems that things are just not alright? That the universe is a really terrible place? It's like... you feel the suffering of all beings. Do you understand?" He looked at her pleadingly. She nodded sagely. She did, in fact, think that she understood. When something really terrible happened, what she had just heard sounded like a fair description of how the Force let a Jedi feel it. "There is that—and the paranoia. Or maybe the paranoia because of that."

"Do you know what was done to you?"

"That depends on the level of description." Neriamel tilted her head slightly and looked at the tall, gaunt man with interest. His hair was a matte, grey-ish brown, his face long and forehead high. He was clearly intelligent, not the sort of person you would expect to end up participating in a study of novel treatments out of desperation.

"Don't mistake me, we're all volunteers here. Well, we're supposed to get paid, too, but that's hardly any good if we go insane. We signed up for trials of a novel gene treatment. It was supposed to improve our strength and reflexes. And, well, you can see that it did."

"Except nobody told you about the side effects?"

"Well, they told us there could be all sorts of unpredictable side effects, they didn't know. If you ask me—I even believe them!"

Neriamel looked at the man thoughtfully and said nothing for a while. There was the remote possibility that a medical reversal of the treatment could be developed. The researchers surely had a duty to try under these circumstances—if they survived, that was. And the more psychotic and violent individuals would surely need drugs to treat those symptoms. But there were no drugs to treat the pain the man had described, at least no drugs that would constitute a treatment and that would enable them to live in more than a vegetative, if perhaps blissful, state. But the nature of the man's description, the way it echoed in her mind, led her to consider that perhaps the Jedi were uniquely positioned to offer an alternative.

Razh Sho​