Dominion Shifting Tides | Dominion of Devaron

[Sienna]

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Sienna listened to Tel as they laboured down the overgrown trail. The dead men they'd found had cut the path enough to make it navigable, but their work had been less than thorough. Vines still posed tripping hazards every few steps, leaves and branches obscured the view past a few dozen feet, and the occasional tree trunk forced the pair of Padawan to duck or climb.

At least Tel had decided to choose the easy path and continue his explanation, rather than leave her in the dark about the encounter in the clearing. That rush of adrenaline had left her too exhausted for the needling she'd briefly had to entertain to get more answers out of the other Padawan.

She knew how mind tricks worked in theory. A Jedi could hijack another being's free will and forced them to comply with an order. Often this imposition overrode so much of the target's will that they repeated what the Jedi said, completely robbed of their autonomy. The leap that this same power would nullify an animal's free will seemed valid enough. What concerned her, however, was that he posed these connections could work both ways. The implications of that were dire enough that she made a mental note of studying that aspect in more detail when they returned to the temple.

First, she had a scolding to get to.

Sienna stopped and turned on her heels, jabbing an accusatory finger in Tel's face. She scowled at him, thoroughly unamused by his lighthearted admittance that he'd planned to sacrifice his life.

"You were expecting to sacrifice yourself just like that? Are you utterly devoid of your good senses, Jedi Ahren?" She jabbed his chest with her finger.

"The Jedi still need you alive. You may only be a Padawan like me, but you have many things to accomplish before you can even consider this type of rash foolishness. You're never to consider this course of action again until at least sixty per cent of your natural lifespan has passed. Your life is too valuable to waste on a group of wild animals."

She huffed, hands on her hips, and stared the shorter Padawan down.

Tel Ahren

 

[Valery Noble]

​

Outfit: Combat Jumpsuit | Wedding Ring
Weapons: Blasters | Lightsabers

Valery stood just beyond the threshold of the Temple's command post, arms crossed as she watched the E.O.D. teams finish their sweep under the steady supervision of Omega Squad. The air still smelled of scorched wiring and ancient dust, but for the first time in hours, it was calm.

Safe.

A soft breeze stirred her cloak as she tapped her commlink again.

<Connel,> she said, her voice level but edged with quiet authority. <Good work today.> She let the weight of it hang for a moment. Then she turned her gaze toward the horizon. Clouds rolled over the mountains in the distance, and something in the Force shifted. Subtle, but present. A ripple of unrest.

<I'm getting new reports.> Valery exhaled through her nose, the tension never quite leaving her shoulders. There was always something else waiting. Another fire. Another threat.

<We're done here. > She began to walk down, her silhouette framed in the light filtering through shattered windows. <Let's head back and see where else we're needed.>

(Exit post)
Connel Vanagor ​

 

[Connel Vanagor]

Get out of our House!
Devaron
Objective 4

Sliding up beside her, his tone was that of someone grinning underneath a mask. Sure thing! It was a privilege!

He had heard everything under the comm-link, but tried his hand at masking his aura. Did she still sense him? Maybe, but it was a fun, grounding way to move on.

Valery Noble • TAGS
[Communications through Comms] ~Through the Force]~​

 

[Gress D'ran]

Homecoming
Tag: Koyi Freetaa
Loadout:

Spoiler

Tiger 1 ~ Horned Hellstomper
Tiger 2 ~ Fireball ~ Disabled for a round.
Tiger 3 ~ Perception Check
Tiger 4 ~ Divine Intervention
Tiger 5 ~ (Command Tiger) ~ Golem
Puma 1 ~ Brass Ring
Puma 2 ~ Ice Cream Truck
Puma 3 ~ Short Bus
Puma 4 ~ First Student
Puma 5 ~ Frizzle's Cadets

First came the storm. Roar rounds. Smart. Then ion, and HE.

This kid had been paying attention in class.

"Siege, all of you." Was Gress's only order as the sim rounds began effecting the walkers. The sound of hydraulics and shield generators whirring filled the air, as the rocking of walkers taking simulated damage filled their HUDs. AR tech had come a long way, and Gress was rather impressed by what the GADF had cooked up.

Still, it didn't could without loses. Fireball had been taken temporarily offline by a direct ion hit, but not out of the fight.

"What's the play Bro?"

Gress took a moment, lighting his cigar. "The shields should hold. They're lighting fires to hide their push across. Have the pumas light them up, and tell Frizzle to push around. Flank them. Just like the sith would."

Gress knew better. He could see the play. A potential misdirect, a trap waiting to be sprung? These forests were hell for a walker division, but he wasn't trying to best the newbies. He was trying to teach them. The sith had shown him plenty, Festerruman Sachiel had. Time to show the newbies what he had learned about them.

The sound of autocannons ripping through the burning treeline filled the helms of the men, as Gress watched the plan go into action. A lone puma pushed around the mountain, only to spot one of the enemy pumas in the forest. Laser cannons opened up, firing at one of Koyi's men.

 

[Tel Ahren]

Sienna Jo'Han Felcado

Tel frowned as Sienna glowered at him, doing her best to emphasize the singular inch of height difference between them while trying to brow-beat him into accepting her ideas of what he should and shouldn't be doing. It was nice, in a way, to have someone telling him that he shouldn't be trying to get himself killed, or thinking of ways to sacrifice himself—but the thought wouldn't have come up in the first place if it wasn't a very real necessity if that trick of his hadn't panned out. He stepped back once, straightening his tunic where she'd jabbed at his chest.

"Devaronians don't go into shock like most humanoids do. Did you know that? Most everything native to this planet is a lot hardier than almost everything else out there." He pointed to the blaster rifle that she still held. "They use the Quarra to execute their criminals. Devaronians, one of the most durable species around, fear those things. Do you really think that one blaster rifle and one vibroblade would be enough for a pair of inexperienced Padawans to deal with them and come out successful? Alive at all?"

His pointing finger rose to her. "You're pretty new to all this, right? The Jedi raised me. Sure, we might both be valuable, but if we're comparing someone that made their own way in and is already out doing some of the work to the one that's only ever known the Order and yet is only just starting to take on any of this—you do the math and tell me which one is better picked to do the saving and which one should do the escaping and learning more. We're not supposed to be prioritizing our own necks, anyways, whether we play the utilitarianism game or not."

He started back down the trail, vibroblade out to cut away any overgrowth that was still going to cause them problems, though by now they weren't far from where they'd left it in the first place to circle around what they thought was their quarry. He still felt exhausted after driving the Quarra off, but it had been entirely mental in the first place, and there were few things as good as a small argument or a reminder of where he actually sat in the Order to bring a bit of energy back into his movements.

"I don't think I'm going to wait another six hundred years before I start considering it again, either. Hope you can forgive me for that."

 

[Sienna]

"And despite being the better trained Jedi your first instinct was to get yourself killed rather than attempt a retreat? What kind of backwards logic is that? You can't just shirk responsibility for your own life. I've learned enough to have that talk of "protecting life at all costs" thrown at me, and I'm asking you, why does that protection stop at your own life?"

Sienna groaned in frustration, stomping after Tel as he cleared the path forward. She gripped the blaster rifle tighter, further frustrated by the fact he was right that they would never have beaten the quarra, but she refused to admit that.

"Are all Jedi this dumb about self-sacrifice? What point is there in our power when we're supposed to just throw it all away the moment someone else is in danger. There are strategies! Tactics we could have used to maximize our chances at getting out of there alive. Both of us!"

She settled in next to him with her own vibroblade, cutting the underbrush whenever the branches and leaves became too much to continue.

"What kind of example does it set when one Padawan abandons another to his death anyways? I'm no coward. There's no way in Thyrsus' Night that I would have let you die there alone."

Tel Ahren

 

[Tel Ahren]

Sienna Jo'Han Felcado

"You're jumping between ideas like a Kowakian Monkey-Lizard that ate a box full of Slumm," Tel said as soon as he'd felt that Sienna had gotten herself far enough along that he could get a word in himself. "I took the one chance I thought I had to get us both out of there. I didn't expect it to work, we were both lucky it did. If it hadn't—we were surprised, and not equipped to handle them. It wouldn't be cowardice to take the opportunity I was giving you to get away, it'd be called being a smart Padawan."

It only would have been cruel to dig in deeper to picking apart each thought she'd just expressed—cruel to her to point out that neither of them, unfamiliar with the planet, unsuited to picking their way through the foliage, and underequipped to fight, could manage a retreat from the Quarra where both of them got out unscathed, and nearly every scenario he could come up with ended in one of their deaths, sooner or later. Cruel to the both of them if he had to explain exactly why he'd pointed out how much longer he'd been with the Jedi and the relative levels of training either of them had. But at least those weren't the only topics she'd left him to talk about.

"Sometimes tactics and strategies pan out, like today. Sometimes they don't, and you have to be ready with the next one in line. Given just how we'd ended up there, I didn't have anything else in the backups other than hoping you'd be smart enough to run if what I tried didn't work. Why not just be glad that's not what had to happen?"

He reached down, grabbing a fallen branch that was in the way of the path and heaving it off to the side—freeing up their trail, back in the direction of the temple and the rest of the Jedi they'd come to Devaron with.

"Just don't make me have to try and claim seniority to get you to relax about this."

 

[Sienna]

Sienna grumbled under her breath. She brought the vibroblade down on another branch, where it caught half-way, and she had to break it off with her hands. Tel was lucky she didn't do the same to his neck for the comment comparing her to a monkey-lizard. She didn't want to come back needing to explain why she was dragging a dead Padawan with her, not when she'd already broken the rules by disobeying the Jedi in charge of her expedition at least.

"I guess I still have a lot to learn," she said through grit teeth.

At least they'd found the criminals and a good deal of what had been stolen from the temple. If they'd returned empty-handed, especially after facing that danger, she might have really had to worry about what the Jedi would do about her wandering off.

She stomped on a rotten branch that had fallen directly across the path, breaking it so they didn't have to climb it. At least their march back to the temple wouldn't add to the frustration. Despite their success, she hated that Tel was right about their encounter with the beasts. But she hated that she'd been useless during it even more.

///

Tel Ahren