#shes an umbaren btw

[biofreak659]

Okay I shall put it here...

My goofy and as of yet unnamed story about Jedi and such

Hehehe

Holche Vro knelt down and placed the transparent gorrick frog into a patch of crystaline grass. Then, she dusted off her hands, walked across the encampment, and retrieved another gorrick frog from the shade of a supply crate. She turned around, and walked back to the edge of the camp, and placed it into another patch of grass.

"You're making me dizzy." A Republic trooper complained, head swiveling as he tracked her across the camp. "Don't have anything better to do than play with toads?"

"These are frogs," she corrected him, "and the only thing I can do until Dorock Vares arrives is pace and become nervous. This is more useful. What are you doing, Seargent Kreel?"

Kreel scoffed. "Resting my ass. They expect us to jump half across the galaxy to grab some Jedi, no offense, and then jump half back to some glittery backwater on a moment's notice and with no fuel. I deserve a sit."

"Then sit, by all means." Holche found the last frog stranded by their sudden presence and returned it to its damp home.

Kreel scoffed. "Yeah. Like that'll last long."

The deafening roar of a drop ship landing overhead drowned out whatever he was complaining about, but his expression was fun to watch.

Holche turned to watch the ship land.

By all rights, she should have been placed in the AgriCorps, she mused as the engines shut off, leaving silence ringing in their wake. It was simply a fluke of luck that she was occasionally gifted with foresight, and a good head for investigation. She could fight too, of course, but combat wasn't what made a Jedi Knight.

"Holche!" A tall Trandoshan man strode out of the shuttle, ignoring the harried troopers trying to force him to follow procedure. He hopped down from the ramp before it was fully extended. He flung his arms out. "I almost couldn't spot you; you were made for this planet. How have you been?"

"Dorock," Holche bowed slightly to him, then accepted his shoulder jarring handshake. "I trust you traveled well?"

"I never do, on Navy ships." Dorock groused, rubbing his back. "They never install the dampeners correctly. Yanked from my life of luxury to play messenger boy on some backwater."

"How will you ever recover?" Holche said drolly. Dorock was, officially, the Jedi liason to the Republic Senate. He represented them as a neutral party in Galatic government affairs. Contrary to his griping, it was far from a glamorous job, and mostly consisted of getting into shouting matches about Mandalorian incursions and catching his daily twenty minutes of sleep in his office chair. This must have felt like a vacation.

"Perhaps I'll finally take time off. I've accumulated enough leave to vanish to Scarif for a year or two." He jerked his head. "Let's take this to the command tent."

"Of course. And then your Scarif vacation."

"I want a tan. My scales are so dull. Coruscant is awful on my skin." Dorock held open the tent flap, and sealed it behind her.

Holche walked over and turned on the old holomap projector. It whirled to life, cranking out heat as it did.

"This won't last long before it overheats and we need to shut it down." She said. "Speak quickly."

"Alright." Dorock tapped a section of the planet, expanding the region. "This is the Gorrick deepwell. It's an unmined crystal field. The way the conflict with the Mandalorians is ramping up, the Republic wants to secure fuel for the Armada."

"And somehow I factor into this?"

"There's a mining operation already in place, but it's been abandoned. I'd like you to look into it; see why no one ever pulled anything out of there."

"You want me to look into it?"

"The Senate does."

"Not the Council?"

"No. This is a favor. A gesture of goodwill." Dorock sighed and rubbed his forehead. "Revan going rogue and leading that little cult against the Mandalorians is making noise. The Senate wants to mobilize the Jedi as a military."

Holche's eyes widened. "We're peacekeepers, not soldiers."

"I know." Dorock shut down the map. "Look, I promised Senator Bak I would get him a fuel deposit. He'll back my vote against militarizing the Jedi, and his backers will back him. It's all politics."

"The Jedi are independent." Holche said. "The Senate can't command that we go to war."

"No," Dorock agreed, "but they can collect rent and tax on the temple on Coruscant. They can remove me from the Senate. They can demand the system of taking younglings be formalized and bog you down in so much bureaucracy that the Order never takes another Padawan. Trust me: we need to stay in their good graces."

Holche nodded. "I understand, but why couldn't this conversation be over holo? I don't see why you had to come in person to tell me to investigate a mine."

Dorock shook his head. "Not just this mine. I'm using this planet as a base of operations. There are a few non-Republic planets in this sector who could be convinced to formally join, especially if we can promise protection from the Mandalorians. That's my half of the favor."

Holche patted his shoulder. It was stiff and very tense under the layers of opulent fabric. "Please try and rest, before you go. It's no use playing diplomat if you collapse from exhaustion midway through your speech."

"I could say the same to you. You look pale." Dorock said, snorting at his own joke.

Holche exhaled and rolled her colorless eyes. "Yes, that's a very original joke. I've never heard it before."

"I'm sure." He handed her a bulky comlink. It weighed about two kilos, and wrapped around her waist like a belt. She tugged the lead up through her tunic and attached the pickup to her neck, and placed the speaker in her ear. She tuned the comlink to the base's operating frequency.

"This is Holche Vro, testing communication, over."

"Holche Vro, this is Seargent Loow at the communication tent, we read you loud and clear. Over."

Loud and clear it was; Holche could hear the woman shouting into the microphone from across the camp.

"Understood. Out." Holche removed her hand from the activator and turned back to Dorock.

"That's high tech," he said, "don't break it."

"I'll do my best. Good luck with your diplomacy."

"Thanks. I figure you'll have an easier time of it getting lost in that old mining complex."

"What, you want to switch?"

Dorock laughed. "Absolutely not."

Holche shook her head and absently waved her hand, then exited the command tent to the small tent she shared with the two female Republic soldiers. Seargent Loow was on duty in communication, but Lieutenant Jormmun was in her bunk. Her eyes flashed open when she heard Holche enter the tent.

"Here for your shuteye?" She mumbled, voice thick with sleep.

"Just my supplies." Holche found her backpack, already packed with rations, water, and a survival kit.

"Too bad." Jormmun rolled over, exposing her bare back. Holche turned away to give her her privacy, and found the glowrod that had rolled under her cot.

She clipped it on her belt beside her lightsaber, then hefted her backpack over her shoulders and exited the tent. She quietly borrowed one of the speeder bikes, and left without telling Dorock. He had his own problems to deal with, and Holche would gladly leave him to his politicians.

She walked the speeder to the edge of the camp before swinging a leg over and gunning the engine. Gorrick was a pale, crystalline planet. Silicone, as opposed to carbon, was the molecule of life. Holche sped past translucent grass fluttering up to her hips, and dodged massive spires of quartz. She emerged from the relatively protected area where they laid camp into an open field.

Exhaling, she flung her arms out to the side and threw her head back, laughing from the exertion of it. Her cloak fluttered madly behind her, and she pulled her hair stick out. Her braid whipped back and forth in the wind.

The speeder jostled under her as it zipped over a rock, so she stopped playing and put both hands back on the controls.

There was a small building in the distance: the mine office. Holche wound her hair back up and parked the speeder bike about thirty meters away from the building. It was about five meters cubed; a neat little building, all things considered. It was blocky and unpleasant next to the wild beauty of Gorrick, but Holche could appreciate the simplicity. She carefully opened the door and stepped inside, shining her glowrod around the building. There was a small control station with a cracked moniter, and a large industrial lift platform, which took up the bulk of the space.

Holche half-heartedly pressed the power switch, and was unsurprised when the system remained dead.

She peered down the lift shaft. Dark. Again, unsurprised. She weighed her options, then went with her gut impulse and dropped her glowrod down the shaft. It illuminated the tunnel as it fell, revealing the jagged cut of the shaft. It hit the ground and bounced, then the light cut out. Holche grimaced, but carefully dropped down the tunnel regardless, concentrating on her feet and legs as she landed, so as not to shatter them on impact. Her commlink didn't pick up signal underground, but she'd expected that. Even if she had been too incompetent to climb the rough cut walls out, she had a grapple attached to her belt.

Holche shook her head and stepped blindly forwards. Her toe kicked the glowrod, and she knelt down to pick it up. It was dead, probably broken, so she clipped it to her belt and instead ignited her lightsaber, holding it in front of her. The tunnel loomed in front of her.

An odd tension twisted in her stomach. Something… was going to happen. Not here. Further in the tunnels.

"As you wish." She muttered to herself, and let her feet follow where the Force led. Holche took a long and twisting path through the tunnels. Solid chunks of crystal jutted out from the walls of the tunnels. This was eventually processed into some component of hypermatter, and by Holche's untrained eye, must have been worth a fortune. The fuel was here, but why had no one ever mined it? And for that matter, where were the miners? Droids were used for the initial extraction, and Holche could see old signs of them, but sentients were better at retrieving the delicate crystal. They were cheaper, too.

Holche put aside her criticisms of the Republic and came to an open chamber. Well, open was a bit of an exaggeration. Massive crystals speared across the room, taller than some of the buildings on Coruscant. A tiny crack at the surface of the cavern let a few thin rays of sunlight filter through the crystals.

Holche's eyes went soft, and her throat went dry at the beauty of it.

The Force twisted her stomach.

She dropped, crouching on her knees.

A slug narrowly flew over her head and shattered a nearby crystal. Holche rolled and twisted, bringing her lightsaber up, then immediately extinguishing it and dropping to her stomach as another slug flew overhead.

Slugthrower. She scrambled behind a crystal and held her breath, listening hard.

Heavy boots crunched over the shattered crystal. Her assailant emptied the shells, which bounced musically across the ground, then reloaded with a solid thunk.

Muffled breathing, the subtle creak of oiled happabore leather, the metal scrape of beskar… A Mandalorian.

Why was there a Mandalorian on Gorrick?

A shard of crystal fell from the cave ceiling and answered her question: obviously, for the same reason she was here.

The Mandalorian silently stepped forwards, just out of sight of her shelter. Of course, the Mandalorian knew she was here. There was nowhere else to go. Getting too close was dangerous. She had a sword. The Mandalorian had a gun. Probably more than one.

Holche palmed a crystal shard, then lunged out from behind the crystal, throwing the shard at the Mandalorian's head and darting further into the cavern.

Some of the crystals brushed the ceiling. If she could make it up, she could escape through the small crack in the ceiling. That, she thought, hurdling over a crystal, or she could double back and exit through the lift shaft.

A shot shattered the crystal next to her face, blocking off her path and forcing her to venture deeper into the cavern.

Or she could get shot. That too.

Holche rounded the next turn and slid under an outcropping. She covered her mouth and nose and waited. Sure enough, the Mandalorian slowly approached.

He was methodical. Unrelenting. Holche reached into the Force. Don't notice me.

The Mandalorian reached her hiding spot, and stilled. Holche projected boredom. Nothing to see here but a few more crystals.

The Mandalorian moved on. Holche ripped herself out of the crevice and hooked the Mandalorian's boot with her foot, sending him toppling to the ground with a grunt. She yanked away the slugthrower with the Force, and tossed it off into the distance.

"Who are you?" She said, trying to hide the adrenaline shake in her voice with the snap-hiss of her lightsaber igniting. The Mandalorian barely shifted, but Holche could feel him glance disdainfully down at the lightsaber at their throat.

"Roll over," she said, pulling a pair of binders from her belt. The Mandalorian's hidden gaze raked over her. Holche felt a curl of disgust. She had been judged, and found wanting. "On your stomach. Put your arms behind your back."

The Mandalorian moved, and for a foolish half-second, Holche actually thought he was complying. Gut instinct slammed her to the ground before the Mandalorian's spiked toe could drive up through her throat. She rolled back, only to catch the Mandalorian's fist with her stomach.

Holche gagged, curling around the Mandalorian's arm. She managed a few, weak blows to the joints of the Mandalorian's armor, but none of it seemed to do much. Holche pushed herself away, one hand cradling her abdomen, and held out her lightsaber.

They circled each other wairily. The Mandalorian blocked her way back to the entrance. Her only exit now was up. Holche's eyes darted past the Mandalorian, eyeing the tunnel that would lead out.

The Mandalorian scoffed, metallic inside his helmet, then dropped and tackled her without warning. The Force screamed the second her back hit the ground. Her lightsaber flew out of her hand, clattering off in the distance.

Holche worked her leg free, and kneed the Mandalorian in the side. The Mandalorian grunted, then wrapped his hands around Holche's throat and squeezed.

Holche's eyes bugged, and she scrabbled at the Mandalorian's hands, trying to break that beskar grip. The hum in her head grew louder, and her vision narrowed in on the Mandalorian.

There was a crack. For a delirious second, Holche thought it was her throat.

Then the ground under her back collapsed, and she realized why the mine was inactive.