First Reply Stuck In A Sarlacc In Grek

[Tilon Quill]

The worst part wasn't the air so bad it left him lightheaded, or the guts' tendrilled and iron-hard grip on him, or the stomach acid biting his skin, or the psychic murmurs of all the people the Sarlacc had absorbed over the centuries. The worst part was probably the sound, just this persistent squelch. He could hold perfectly still and yet the walls would squelch around him as if he was still throwing all his strength against them. The squelch was unending.

Worse, it interrupted the only bright side of any of this: those murmuring voices were in many Unknown Regions languages, including trade languages he knew. He felt surrounded by interesting people even though they were probably all sludge in the next stomach over.

Well, maybe not all. The squelching shifted, suggesting a new arrival, a fellow meal.

 

[Arris Windrun]

Well.

Well.

Why was it that word of all words? 'Well' was the only thing that seemed to bounce around her mind. She didn't even notice the smell at first, no, she was more concerned with the sudden sense of claustrophobia. This feeling was that the more she struggled, the worse it got. Rationally, she knew it probably made more sense to sit still. But then... How does she get out?

That was the annoying part of rationality. Knowing what not to do, but still being absolutely stuck.

"Chit."

The acid, the tension, the squealing of instincts she did not know she had. Her cybernetics were confused too, and began to overload her system with everything it could. Uncertain if she was being shot, stabbed, crushed, or what. Just that she was in danger, judging by all those fear signals.

The Cyborg began to squirm, just a little, enough to test how much she could move--if at all. She began to slide, slowly but surely, as the walls now crushed down around her, and it was then she wondered if this was it, until her feet hit something below her.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

As a recent arrival, Tilon realized a couple of boot impacts too late, he really should have expected to be right underneath the next in line.

The Sarlacc's internals held him too tight to move away or to get a feel for the boots in question. Through the Force he caught a bright flare of fear-laced overstimulation. He did not want to get kicked in the dark of the gut.

"Breathe," he said in Sy Bisti to whoever was trapped above him. "It won't suffocate or crush you." Sy Bisti was this remote area's most common trade language; Basic and Rammocate were close seconds, so far as he'd heard yet.
Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris felt a sharp, sudden, and intense shudder at the sounds that came from below her. She realized quickly that someone else was below her, but she did not understand the language. She was a galactic basic bi---

"Wait, what!?" She exclaimed. "I don't understand."

The cyborg's artificial heart kept pounding as a near-lethal cocktail of stimulants coursed through her bloodstream. Her cybernetics snapped into action with audible mechanics, like a prize fighter about to deliver the money shot, only...

SNAP!

One of her servos completely lost it, and then she lost it. The panic began to double, then triple, and her tongue played curse words roulette. Thankfully, her cybernetics could sense these signals too, and now it was time to dope her. Mood stabilizers, and a hefty dose of hormones typically reserved for a thrice-divorced magnate in The Slice.

It certainly kicked things into gear. She hoped being digested by a Sarlaac wouldn't become something weird for her later.

A mild psychedelic on top.

What a day.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

That was either I don't understand in Basic or get me out of here in Meese Caulf, another popular trade language. As secondhand panic flooded Tilon's sense of the person thrashing above him, he didn't parse that clearly, just repeated himself in his own main language, Basic. "Breathe! It won't suffocate or crush us! Stop thrashing up there!"

Decay-tainted acid stung his mouth and tongue. He normally kept his mouth shut down here.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

"Huh?"

She took a moment to process his words. It wasn't so easy with all the juice in her bloodstream, but she managed to understand enough. Arris began to inhale, exhale, inhale... She knew how to breathe. Good. Her enhanced lungs were still working. She felt good, too, no longer so panicked, just... Relaxed, a little energetic, but no longer panicked.

The cyborg stopped struggling, for the most part. It was hard to stay completely still, though.

"So... are we gonna die?" She chuckled. Legit question, though.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

"From a certain point of view, never. Maybe not even in here."

Keep her talking, keep her calm—

"My name's Tilon Quill. I'm a commscan specialist and a Jedi. My talent is languages. The sarlacc is semi-sapient and it absorbs parts of the personalities of the people it ate over the centuries. So I'm trying to talk to them, talk my way out in all the languages they know, or I guess the languages it half-remembers.

"What do you have to work with? Any weapons or a comlink? Can you see the sky?"

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

Comm... What?

"Sorry, I'm not very politica--"

Oh, a Jedi? Languages? This guy had a lot to say. Or at least, it was more of a conversation than she expected down here, if she expected anything at all.

What he mentioned about the sarlacc, well, that was new. "This thing thinks?" Wait. "This thing talks!?" No way.

Arris was unfortunately unarmed, aside from her cybernetic arms themselves. Great in a fistfight, but probably not so much down here. Not by any angle she could see, however. The cyborg looked up at the mention of sky. Nothing. Just the same sort of meaty darkness as she saw all around her.

A comlink though... "I do have comms, yeah... Built into my skull, actually."

"Also, um, I'm Arris." About the last place she expected to make introductions.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

"An implanted comlink? That's a best case scenario. Can't drop it and it's insulated from the stomach acid."

Excitement rose, maybe even hope.

"We're underground, but this planet has some satellites and orbiting ships that could pass overhead. I have a Jedi utility belt with a cable launcher...not enough to do much in here, but it could be an antenna to boost your range."

Arms pinned awkwardly against the squelching wall, he could just barely dig into the belt pouches.

"Does your...skull have an...antenna jack?"

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

"No, but my right hand has a built-in cyberjack. Should work with any universal connector."

Again. This was not the conversation she expected to be having. Arris did her best to stay as still as possible; the cocktail helped, but so did the company, oddly enough.

She could hear Tilon rummaging below her. "Oh, uh... You'll need to take my glove off first. Then I can open the panel for you."

There would be a complication once the two of them made contact, however. Her comlink was rigged with a tracker, and that might draw unwanted attention depending on how far the boosted signal would carry. She kept that detail to herself for now.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

Android? Cyborg? Shard? Sapient droid with a Force presence and the ability to panic?

"I can't reach high enough to get your glove," Tilon said, and spat tingling acid as the stomach wall lurched in tighter, "but the Force can if I focus well enough. Give me a moment. Uh, try not to move your boots." Nothing would interrupt tranquility like getting kicked in the head.

The sarlacc gurgled around them and grew tighter.

"This sounds...silly," he said, somewhat struggling to breathe, "but describe your glove. What it's...made of, why you have it."

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

"My boots? Yeah, no problem."

Stay still. Stay still. Stay still. She did her best to comply, keeping as still as possible, despite the sheer unpleasantness of it all. It helped to stay distracted. She thought about the speeder bike she had last worked on. How the parts were all wrong. The wiring, amateurish. The engine--

"Sorry, describe it?" An odd request.

At this point, however, Arris didn't really want to doubt a request. She needed to get out of here, and he at least seemed competent.

"Um... Brown, leather, fitted... They were a gift from a friend, after I won a fight on Masterra." She had forgotten about that until now. It was the fight that started it all. The reason why she was on the run. "Keeps the joints on my fingers clean. Otherwise, they tend to lock up between greasings."

Dirt, grime, blood, and other fluids and particulates did tend to find their way between the seams. It didn't degrade performance entirely, but it was noticeable, and that meant it was annoying.

"Why... Does it help to know?"

She had to ask.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

"The Force is in nearly everyone and nearly everything. Connection matters, and why things matter to us matters too. But most of it's about a nice clear mental image that's strengthened by your mental image."

The glove slid off her hand and flopped onto Tilon's shoulder.

"Bear with me. You're going to feel something like a Sarlacc tendril coming up your right leg. It's the fibercord, and you'll know it's the fibercord because it's going to tap twice in your ankle first, alright?"

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

The Force... The cyborg had heard of it, but she didn't really get it. It still felt like something from the holoflicks. Though she did once upon a time meet another Jedi, under similarly chitty circumstances. To hear Tilon explain it, though, it felt... fragile? She wasn't sure. But for once, it struck her different than just superhuman mind powers and the like.

Her fingers locked up as soon as the glove came off. Despite all that metal, she did experience sensations, at least the ones her cybernetics allowed her to experience. Which was to say more dulled than a flesh'n'blood hand.

Arris would have shuddered at the thought of a tendril, but thankfully, she was still quite doped. However, unlike an organic's system, hers would not stay that way for long. Not with an artificial heart and liver.

"Yeah... Got it." She answered.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

The half-metallic fibercord and its little grapnel proved much easier to control: they were in contact with him, he knew them and what they looked like, he'd trained to manipulate every gadget in his utility belt with his eyes closed, and — most importantly — he'd spent half a day fishing around up there for some kind of anchor point. He slithered it up past her as far as it would go, then looped the grapnel down to hand level so she could plug it into the port.

"There we go, you should have a good antenna now. I'll keep quiet. Let me know if you hear anything or get through to anyone, alright?"

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

A bit of fiddling and... done!

She turned the comlink on with but a thought, and began to scan for open ports. Pinging anything that might be in range of their signal. Some automated signals here and there, navigation data, a weather satellite... and. What's this?

She connected the signal to a receiver built into her jacket.

"So anyway, Connie threatened to--" Static. "--and then... [more static]... all over the floor."

Arris paused, then wondered. "Freighter, maybe? Just at the edge of our range, I think."

Surprisingly, the bit of dialogue and wrestling with a signal boost provided a much-needed reprieve from the otherwise dire circumstances. Which proved particularly helpful given that the initial surge of her high started to wear off.

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

Tilon felt a surge of anger and wondered why. No, wait, that wasn't his anger or hers, it was the Sarlacc's, filtered through one of the more dominant personalities, a Chiss control freak. There'd been a handful of Chiss eaten, centuries ago, and his Cheunh hadn't been good enough to get traction on their clade. Now their voices rushed into his head overwhelmingly. He got the clearest sense of the control freak in question, some kind of caretaker, and her charge, a child. A...navigator. There was kinship of a kind. Some potential angle for getting the sarlacc to relent.

All of this was in his head.

"Keep going," he said, chest tight and tendril-crushed. "Dealing with something down here."

There were Jedi techniques for comprehending language temporarily and higher skills for doing it permanently. This kind of thing was his specialty, but so far the Chiss personality fragments — or rather the Sarlacc — had resisted. But now that side of the Sarlacc was willing to talk, if just to yell. That changed things. Maybe.

Arris Windrun

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris did not feel this surge of anger. The most her latent perceptions could grasp at was an uneasy feeling in the air, but that could also be attributed to all sorts of things. The highs and lows of her hormonal 'regulation' for one, but chief among them, the meat cage that was slowly digesting her.

Suffice it to say, she remained woefully ignorant as the Jedi wrestled with ghosts, or at least the neat biological facilitation of personality capture.

"On it!" She needn't be reminded.

The cyborg continued to hone in on the freighter's signal, doing her best to clean up the noise.

"Anyway, tell Connie I said hello, and that she still owes me that mutrox." Said whoever the freighter spoke with.

It sounded much cleaner. Good. That meant they weren't moving away, for now.

"Hello?" She broke the ice. "Can you read me?"

Nothing from the other side. The port was still open; they should be receiving her. Ignoring, then? "Hello! This is uh..." Arris realized she had never been in a situation like this before. Did her best to emulate a holoflick. "This is an S.O.S., we are in urgent need of rescue!"

"Who the hell is this?" The voice replied. A gruff woman's voice, by the sound of it. Same as before. "Yun, if this is some kind of prank..."

"No prank!" Arris barked back. "We're in serious trouble. A sarlacc ate us and--"

"Sarlacc," the woman could be heard spitting out the word like spoiled milk. Then the channel disconnected. Port closed.

"Um... Hello?"

Tilon Quill

 

[Tilon Quill]

Tilon caught a whiff of disappointment or frustration, but between the digestive tendrils crushing his chest and multiple Chiss yelling in his head, he just didn't have the bandwidth.

The Cheunh clicked and clicked hard, but comprehension switched from a language problem to a chaos one. Five, six adult voices and behind it all a kid, surrounded but alone. Someone worth talking to.

From Arris Windrun 's perspective, Tilon started talking loudly, frantically, in another language, half of a conversation.

 

[Arris Windrun]

Arris squirmed a little, unaware of how much movement her body had been generating in all the disappointment. Renewed anxiety was brought on by the blunder. She cursed several times under her breath and kicked a little atop Tilon.

"Why did I say we're in a sarlacc!?" She chewed herself out.

She immediately returned to scanning the channels. Trying to find anything. Any open port that wasn't an automated signal. Some more static. Either too far or too much interference. She made note of the channel, but it wouldn't do for now. She kept going. And going. And...

"Aha!"

This one seemed a winner.

"Hello? This is Arris Windrun. We are trapped and need immediate assistance!" She projected over her comlink.

The answer came back through the speaker on her jacket. "Trapped? Trapped where?" Asked a stranger.

She didn't respond. Not now that Tilon had started to spout--at least to what she could figure--a whole lot of nonsense. "Are you okay?"

Tilon Quill