Kaska Arden
black holes, solid ground
The shuttle rattled and juked as the automated droid guided them through the rat race that was Coruscant during rush hour, clearly delighting in being able to skip through the normal lanes of traffic under the authority of its passengers. A happy binary weeble escaping it every time it narrowly brought them within a few meters of a deadly traffic collision only to veer off at the last second.
While hardly new to the planet, Kaska had never been below the first few hundred before. Never had reason to drop below the ivory tower that was the Temple. Judging from how quickly the atmosphere changed, with the wealth and opulence quickly fading with each successive level they descended through, she could understand why Coruscant was so quick to gloss them over in the travel brochure.
She glanced at the holopad sitting in her lap, an urgent bulletin from the Order open from the inbox she had synched from her palm communicator, re-reading the details of the assignment what seemed like the millionth time over the course of the last hour.
It seemed in the world’s constant need to reinvent itself, a construction droid had finally gone a little too far and razed one of the venerable cloudcutters that had marked the ecumenopolis’ historic Petrax quarter for the better part of a millennia. While urban renewal was hardly a normal interest for the New Jedi Order, what the ground crew had discovered when they had gone in to reassess the ancient foundations certainly was. It seemed that at some point in the distant past, some several centuries before the fall of the Old Republic, the site had once been home to an ancient and apparently forgotten Jedi storehouse. One that had survived the ensuing purge simply by virtue of having been built over in Coruscant’s eternal quest to bury the past. Presenting as an untapped treasure trove of Jedi lore and relics, unseen for countless generations, untouched and unscathed by the ravages of the Sith, it was a find hard to ignore.
A team of researchers had been dispatched. Wide eyed, eager and excited to discover what awaited them in the store room, they had descended down to the lower levels and attempted to breach the outer shell. A flurry of reports bouncing back as they made steady progress. Exhilaration building with each and every find they made, no matter how small or trivial, as they pressed further into the dusty catacomb.
Then twenty seven hours ago, all communication with the team had simply stopped.
Attempts to raise the support team had similarly gone unanswered. The line nothing but empty holo-static. Concerned, but not unduly so, the Order had seen fit to dispatch a Jedi padawan to investigate further, assuming the issue was likely to be a technical fault or interference from the surrounding renovations.
They’d never checked in.
“And that is where we come in, I guess.” The Nyriaanan voiced aloud, glancing at the other occupant to this death ride to the lower levels and whatever mystery had waylaid the padawan and the research team. Both in his more traditional choice of Jedi attire and overall outlook, Ilian Kastle served as a stark contrast to the scruffy and more brash spacer archetype that the New Jedi Order had embraced in recent years. An archetype Kaska herself certainly seemed to exemplify om spades. “What do you think we will find down there?”
She didn't really expect an answer. It was anyone’s guess, really. Before their extermination and the attempted erasure, the Jedi Order of the Old Republic had been pack rats. Collecting treasures from all corners of the galaxy and squirrelling them away for supposed safety. Although it was often unclear whose safety that happened to be.
The droid whirbled once more, this time more reserved and with a twinge of sadness as it began to slow down to a more reasonable, less terminal velocity as the researcher’s camp came into view. The speeder floating the last dozen or so meters down to rest just beyond the small village of grey tents that had been hastily assembled to house both the scientists and whatever finds they managed to retrieve from storehouse. Save for a faint rippling of the tents by an unseen wind, it was eerily quiet.
Deathly quiet.
“Guess we will find out either way soon enough.”