Bagsho, Nim Drovis

The rain continued to pour down in heavy sheets, as it had for the last three hours. Standing on the elegant and roofed balcony, Hawk stared out of the windows, observing the rain wash the stony buildings clean by the brute force of the torrent. A scant few kilometers away, the same rains relentlessly tried to invade the tropical forests which covered the bulk of Nim Drovis. Scents of rainfall mixed with those of the rainforest into fragrance which could have seemed to embody paradise. But Kitty ignored the allures of the locale, focusing on a task so mundane that even the simplest laborer took for granted: thinking.

Thinking.

Thinking and thoughts were as common as air, and like the air which people breathed and the food that they ate, provided sustenance to all; regardless of their walk of life. People realized the value of thought; it was what had brought the triumphs and marvels of every great leader; of every great nation; of every great technology. But they took it for granted; perhaps even more so than the food they ate. And why should they not? Thinking and maneuvering through the most simple of mental processes was something people inherently did from the earliest of ages. But after studying under the Saarai-kaar, and with her recent travels aboard, Kitty had lost most of those paradigms. She continued with her exercise.

After having spent several months at the dreary but enlightening Almas Academy, Kitty was finding her travels as Pro-Consul Christina Thorn’s “aide” as a completely opposite and highly enjoyable experience. For three months, the two women had journeyed across the Meridian Sector from planet to planet, cultivating relationships with both the powerful elite and the everyday man. Thus was Thorn’s brand of diplomacy. Rather than relying on grand speeches which could temporary influence thousands of people, she forged relationships that would last lifetimes, and through the people she met, spread a nearly viral influence across entire planets. It was certainly a slower method, but one which established longer-lasting results, particularly loyalty. And it went both ways: the people they influenced had influenced them. Hawk had spent three days hunting on Durren with a man, and she had become so enthralled with the hunting culture and lore, probably because of their shared values of high self-dependence and independence, that she had resolved to spend her vacation there within the forests. And hopefully, with the same hunter she had met.

For the last week, the two had been touring the free port of Bagsho, originally found by Alderaanian colonists nearly four hundred years ago. Through the use of Kashan records and galactic databases, Christina had discovered that she had some distant relatives in Bagsho. As a result, most of the last week was more of a Thorn family reunion than their plebian-style diplomatic mission which had thus far dominated their travels. But for Kitty, it was really just the same as hunting on Durren.

Locations and people changed. Her purpose, her mission, her education, did not. She continued to think, and not in matter than most did.

The eerily glow; the odor of pesticides; the desert; the hardship; the camaraderie; the training; the knowledge… And so an endless stream of random words seemed to flow and slosh through her mind just as the rain being collected in the city’s gutters. But despite the randomness, these were words that all had one thing in common to her: Almas. Before her conversion, if asked by the proper authority where the Academy was, she would have simply stated Almas. Now if asked, a flurry of associative words flooded her mind before resolving themselves into amalgam in the deepest recesses of her mind into the word Almas. It had taken her some time to get use to thinking in such an unorthodox manner, never mind improving its efficiency to the point where she could think as fast as the normal person did.

And Hawk had to agree with the Saarai-kaar. Such a protocol; such a manner of thinking could, and would, be invaluable to an agent of the Confederation; of the Jensaarai. For in doing so, Kitty was completely reorganizing and disciplining how her mind worked. And in doing so, she was almost certainly going to foil her opponents when it came to mind games.

The door behind her creaked open, and Pro-consul Thorn stepped onto the balcony. Kitty slowly shuffled about to face her. Each eyed each other quietly; Perplexation rippled forth from Thorn’s mind and manifested itself readily to the Jensaarai. Kitty, for her part, remained coolly apathetic and unmoved by Christina’s presence. An awkward smile fluttered onto the Kashan woman’s face.

“Ah, well…I just wanted to check up on you,” gently informed Thorn, “the Gerors are about to serve up desert, and I thought I’d let you know. I would appreciate it if you would join us; and well…the Gerors might find it slightly suspicious if you’re continually out of sight, somewhere in the house. I don’t want to give them the wrong impression.”

A weak grin engendered itself on Hawk’s face, and she wryly shook her head. “No, you’re right. I just felt that I needed some air; to sort of get away from it all…I’ll be with you shortly. It’s in the main parlor, right?”

“Yeah,” replied Christina, “I’ll see you in a few minutes?”

“I’ll be there,” agreed Kitty.

It surrounded him; it embraced him; it sought to smother him at every turn: the jungle. Trees shot up from the ground, their branches budded out from the trunks and overlapped, blotting out the sky in nearly perpetual darkness. It was like moving in an artificial cavern, complete with green stalagmites. Only the aroma of trees mixed with that of fresh air brought in by the tropical breezes and the myriad of smaller plants covering the forest floor dispelled any notion of them actually being underground. And it looked so good from the air, from the city. And how that we’re in the depths of it, I want to puke…twice… A droplet fell from a branch and landed on Adrian’s nose. Feeling a slight stinging sensation on his face, the Susevifan frowned. An acid mold. He raised his hand up, and his team of Confederate soldiers and Drovian scouts immediately halted in their tracks. He held out of his hand, and his lightsaber ripped itself from his belt to his hand. With a tap of a button, the cobalt beam slid out. He hacked in front of them, and a branch covered in the acid-producing mold fell to the floor.

“Another one sir?”

Adrian silently nodded, stepping over the diseased branch.

“They got worse the deeper we go,” announced one of the bottom-heavy Drovian scouts, “let us hope that one of them did no get your person.”

His eyes busy searching the upper branches in front of them for more of the mold, Ravenna barely registered the alien’s comment. Yes, let’s hope so. Our spy must be either pretty nuts or pretty confident in his abilities if he’s chosen to rendezvous in the middle of the jungle. This mold is everywhere. Ravenna stopped walking, and dropped into a Jensaarai trance. He let the Force pull out and drag his senses across the rainforest. He felt a strong, vibrant presence of life which seemed to pervade and dull his every sense. A sharp pang of alarm shot up through the surroundings. He heard birds flying away, crooning and cackling warnings. The sense of alarm continued, and he felt a new emotion slowly seeping into the forest: hatred.

Unmistakable sounds, contained by the canopy and bouncing off the trunks of trees, reverberated in the artificial cavern: those of blasters. A flurry of high-pitched shots was interrupted by the roar of a small-scale explosion. Firing ceased, and he heard shouts and cries rising up in their place. One of them seemed to echo with his mind: Where is he? The Jensaarai charged forward towards the sounds, haphazardly hacking away the foliage in front of him with his saber. The staccato thud of booted feet and fleshy thumping of the bare-footed Drovians announced to the Jensaarai that his team was following him as fast as they could run. With a flourish of his blade, a bush collapsed in front of him, leading them into a clearing in the forest. Four men stood in front of him, and another one, wearing the same uniform, lay on the ground; unconscious and bleeding profusely. His mere presence seemed to stain the forest crimson. The four Neo-Grissmath insurgents immediately swore and began to fire their weapons; Ravenna assumed the classical Soresu stance and guard.

The man directly in front of him leveled his carbine and unleashed a trio of crimson bolts. Ravenna whipped his blade forward in a tight arc towards the insurgent. A series of three consecutive zaps indicated that his saber had met and rebounded the blaster fire elsewhere. He neared within a meter of the insurgent. Fumbling with some settings on his weapon, the insurgent frowned and pulled the trigger. A steady, but short-ranged pulse of light emitted from the nozzle of the weapon. He’s set his blaster on burn? Interesting. I suppose that would be hard to deflect…He flicked his wrist to his centerline, and his cobalt blade slashed into the gun’s barrel. Sparks flared briefly, and the charred remains of the weapon crumbled to the ground as ashes. Ravenna let the momentum of his slash carry his right leg forward towards the insurgent. The Jensaarai produced a heavy kick to the opposing soldier’s knee. It crumpled under the impact, and the man fell to the ground in a heap, screaming uncontrollably. He turned about to see the rest of the insurgents fighting his team of Confederate regulars and Drovian Scouts. A gout of flame from one of the Drovians quickly scorched and overran a log that the insurgents had taken cover with; vaguely reminding the Jensaarai of a campfire. Two of them, beginning to burn, rose in a panic to be downed by stun bursts from the Confederate soldiers. The last one crawled away from the log and rose to run away. Adrian stretched out his left hand towards the insurgent. Gripping the insurgent with the Force, he pulled back his hand to his shoulder. The insurgent flew into the air towards the Confederate party. The Neo-Grissmath fighter hit the ground with a thud and a moan. Adrian tapped into the Force’s current and focused it on the downed man’s senses. The insurgent’s senses felt a tingling sensation as they were overwhelmed by the amplified stimuli of the forest. Unable to control or process the flood of information, the insurgent fell unconscious. A Confederation soldier walked up to Adrian, and fired a stun bolt into the first insurgent, whose screams were becoming more hoarse than a Wookiee in the process of losing his voice. The Jensaarai turned his attention to the man which the Confederate team hadn’t rendered unconscious.

“That’s Arnpine Serdor, our agent,” sighed the Jensaarai, lowering his weapon, “that we were supposed to rendezvous with. He’s not dead…but he’s pretty close to it. Lonen, better break out the first aid kit to work on this guy. I will do what I can, but I’m not sure if it’ll be enough…”

“Yes sir.”

Since leaving the balcony and moving towards the parlor, Kitty had noticed, and was mindful of, the change. The scents of rain and flowers had gradually given way to aromas of the decadence of civilization; intoxicating wines and drink; choking perfumes and colognes; and the faintest whiffs of air freshners and cleaning products. And yet the Geror family tried to conceal the artificial dominance and preserve their Alderaanian connection to nature with fake flowers caged in elaborate Vors glass vases and minute moss-paintings sealed and plastered to the gaudy walls of marble and other fine stonework. Kitty glanced at the moss paintings, and felt a thousand diminutive tragedies of the plants’ deaths in the name of art. The stuffy fragrances worn by the Geror family and their friends reeked of forced, unnatural mixture of natural and artificial ingredients which attempted to evolve into something entirely new; but with the sensitivity of Force-enhanced senses, Kitty felt that she was looking at individual shards of glass piece by piece, rather than realizing their combined effect of a wonderfully crafted mosaic. She passed through a pair of doors into the parlor and immersed herself into conversations equally as artificial, despite the pretenses made to their instinctive nature.

Several set of eyes turned her way as she entered. Thorn offered a gracious smile at her supposed aide, and then continued to chatter with the matron of the family over a glass of wine. As she walked over to one of the windows, most of the people turned away and resumed their previous activity. One of the younger men, rather corpulent and probably fresh out of college, swaggered over to Kitty with a pair of stemmed glasses, filled with an amber beverage. He offered one to her.

“Care for a taste of Nim Drovis’ finest?”

She accepted the goblet cautiously, and took a sip of the wine. It was a surprisingly light wine with a flavor which simultaneously soothed and excited its drinker by the simple virtue of its taste, which could be best described as cultivated rainforest. The man smiled.

“Sorry, I didn’t properly introduce myself; I am Loen Geror.”

Hawk offered a polite smile. “Your mother is Sarah Geror?”

He nodded. “Yes, and your name is?”

“Jessica Sermel,” offered the agent.

“So you’re the Pro-Consul’s aide then?”

She nodded.

“What exactly do you do then?”

The Jensaarai kept her lips pressed to the smooth glass, pretending to savor the drink. What to do? Give him a guess of what I think Thorn’s actual aide would do? But he could find out from her mother or some other source about the other aide who’s traveling with us, or even talk to the other one, and find the truth. And lying itself is intentional deceit…do I really deceive my friends, my allies? I’ll just give him something vaguely true, I think. Kitty lowered the glass.

“I’m something of an extra aide to her, so I do random tasks that need to be done and deal with emergency situations as they come up.”

“It must be very interesting.”

“It is,” replied Hawk, only half-agreeing with the man.

The parlor doors swung open again, and most of the room’s guests turned around to face the newcomer. He was a beefy man who looked the every inch of Bludgerball linebacker, and more importantly, he had a limp body dressed in camouflage hoisted over his shoulders. Unabashed by the stares he was receiving, the man strode forward towards Thorn with the confidence and bearing of a Wookiee. Kitty slightly shook her head in admonishment, and muttered a slight apology to Loen before walking up to join Thorn. Oh Adrian, so much strength and innocence, so little finesse. What have you brought us this time? Adrian offered a slight bow to the woman.

“Forgive me madam, Pro-Consul, but I’ve been told that this man is your nephew, Madam Geror. General Kinrall of your defence forces told me to take him here. Something about a personal physician?”

“Arnpine?” queried Sarah, “What…was he doing?”

“I’m afraid some of the insurgents managed to bang him up pretty badly in the jungle,” answered Ravenna, “he was on a special assignment from Kinrall to work with us on this joint operation. I’m afraid that it’s of a sensitive nature, so I really can’t say more…”

“I’ll have Firs come over here quickly to take care of him, you can set him on that couch over there for now.”

Breaking up our little party?

Adrian’s head swiveled around to face Kitty faster than the Millenium Falcon in hyperspace. The man bit his lower lip as his emerald eyes glanced over the other Jensaarai quickly, before flittering over to the designated sofa. Quietly, he lumbered over to it, and carefully lowered Arnpine on it.

Apparently. Don’t worry; I won’t say anything to embarrass you or blow your cover.

He spared a glance at her which turned into a brief stare. She mentally laughed and visibly shook her head, much to Adrian’s chagrin. He opened his mouth and quickly shut it up again, and pretended to tend to Arpine.

That’s pretty flattering. Perhaps I’ll have to start shopping for more fashionable clothing more often. Wear it around the academy.

And by fashionable you mean tight…no seduc…distracting the other trainees. That’s probably one of the last things they need right now. And besides, did I give you permission to probe through my mind?

No, but I did anyways….

She felt a minute push towards her mind, like a needle into an arm. But the syringe seemed to twist and break apart as Adrian’s mind encountered the flurry of shielding thoughts. Hawk strengthened her mental discipline and resolve, and her thoughts hardened and formed up like blood platelets to form a solid defence against Ravenna’s probing. She felt Adrian’s concentration break apart under the unexpected defence of her mind, and particularly in dealing with the thoughts. Some of his thoughts seemed to become embedded in her.

It’s like a Force stun…too many words and thoughts to possibly deal with unless one is highly trained in processing them…

The Pelagon native nodded. I’d say that’s pretty close to it from what I’ve read. So aside from mending this boy up, is there anything I can do of use?

You really want to get out of here?

I don’t know, I just thought I could be of some use to you.

Actually yes…perhaps…question is: Can you actually get out of here without attracting too much attention or disrupting your or Thorn’s diplomacy?

Kitty strolled up to Loen while Adrian and the Geror’s family physician stabilized Serdor’s condition. Sparing a glance downward, she coyly smiled. Hawk looked up to Loen again, her steel blue eyes piercing into the man’s own dusty, brown eyes. A brief blush suffused their cheek for that moment, and they both looked downward. Kitty slowly shook her head.

“Where were we when I left?”

“Uhh…your job, I think.”

She felt a ripple of emotion emanate from the man: a sort of longing. The agent knew the feeling well, though she couldn’t reciprocate it for this man. Their eyes met in unabashed stare; she thrust her will into his mind, felt the tendrils of emotions which wrapped themselves around his mind in a hopelessly, gnarled knot. Hawk quickly felt around them, eventually grasping his desire, and began to twist it into something altogether different; for the sake of both of them. This one was more malleable than the many she had altered before; probably because the impression was still fairly fresh in his mind. Hawk pressed it, unraveled it, and replaced strands of Loen’s memory of her with a more apathetic memory of his, resulting in his desire being tempered with apathy; an amalgam which radiated benign futileness of the possibility of a them. She broke eye contact with the man.

“Speaking of which, my job is calling me away, I’m afraid,” explained Hawk, “I have to go. It was nice meeting you though, Loen. Take care of yourself.”

Kitty slowly spun on her heel, and exited the parlor with the supposed leisure which many of the Gerors put on like their perfumes. As the doors swished behind her, Hawk put the part of a traveling socialite behind her as she assumed her identity: that of a Jensaarai. She paced through the gaudy corridors; up and down the grand staircases; through the garish chambers and rooms before finally exiting the mansion through a pair of elaborate greel wood doors. She stepped into the rainy day. Water droplets slowly drizzled downward in an attempt to rinse of the entrapping scents of civilization.

“Err…Miss?” questioned a dull, gruff voice to her side.

“Mr. Ravenna,” smiled the woman, “it’s Jessica Sermel. What can I do for you?”

Do we have to keep up this charade?

What do you think? I think the Geror’s would be fools not to have holo-cameras around their estate. And I’d rather not like to blow my cover…

“I understand you deal with some of the Pro-Consul’s security arrangements?” questioned the Susevfian.

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Then if you kindly step over to that landspeeder over there, I have some information and advice for you pertaining to her life.”

The two Jensaarai strode over to the military landspeeder, taking pains to maintain an angular distance from each other or show any other degree of familiarity. Reaching the armor-plated side of the vehicle first, Adrian swung open a door, and Hawk stepped inside. Ravenna stepped inside, and closed the door behind them. After Adrian tapped a switch, the dark interior lit up to suffuse the occupants in a healthy glow. Directly across from them, Kitty could make out four figures restrained to the other wall. Two Confederate medics were overlooking them, tending to the wounds of two of them. Adrian sighed.

“These are the insurgents who tried to kill Serdor,” informed Adrian, “and given that Serdor is a little too hurt to talk for the moment, I thought we could interrogate the uninjured ones for a little bit. I’ve never been really good with that, but it seems to be something of your specialty.”

She nodded. “But this is a bit of a different situation; I can try, but I can give it a go if you want. Do you have any equipment or drugs?”

He shook his head. “This wasn’t quite something we were planning on…”

“All right. It’d help if you get the medics and the injured ones out of here if possible; otherwise, we need to move these guys somewhere else. I need them in isolation.”

Kondo Memorial Reserve Base, Bagsho, Nim Drovis

It was a surprisingly cramped prism of duracrete. In most buildings, on most worlds, it could be barely, if it at all, called a room. If anything, most people on first glance would have called it a closet. But at Memorial Base, it was Room 113: Interrogation. Kitty stared at the letters inscribed in a sanguine colour reminiscent of blood. She inserted her code cylinder into a reader, and the door unlocked with a click. Slipping her cylinder into a purse, Hawk swung open the door and stooped inside the dark room. At one end, one of the captured insurgents was bound to a chair with syntherope, with little headroom or side space. She flicked on the light, illuminating the occupants to each other. His bushy eyebrows furrowed and unfurrowed several times as the Neo-Grissmath fighter adjusted to the light, and the newcomer. Puzzlement radiated from the man’s mind. Kitty graciously smiled at him.

No beefy guy with a neuronic whip or collection of syringes. This is probably the last thing he expected. A friendly girl with formal wear. Sometimes it pays to make a good impression, and this is one of those times.

“What’s your name?”

He frowned. “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

Closing her eyes, she applied a feigned smile like her makeup while her mind slowly worked and lost itself to the Force. Hawk stretched out, and felt the man’s presence and focused her attention to his thoughts. She leaned up against the side of the wall, revealing a little bit of her calf muscle.

“I’m Andrea,” she giggled, “What’s your name?”

“Kilroy Arnherst.”

A new twitch of guilt and anxiety floated on top of the man’s thoughts. The Jensaarai pressed against it gently, and received a stronger pulse of the man’s emotions. Kitty cocked her head slightly to the side and shook her head.

“You’re lying. That isn’t very polite.”

The man mumbled. “What’s it to you?”

Hawk chortled gently. “Why do you have to lie? I’m not going to hurt you. Does it look like I’m the torturous type?”

The man frowned. “Well…no…”

He was caught offguard, and as his thoughts became jumbled, Kitty pressed through it. Her will insinuated itself among the workings of his mind, and leeched into it. She only half-listened to the man’s thoughts, preparing her own. But two words seemed to drift up to the surface like the Beskars of Genarius: Morhorn Jiell. She flashed a grin.

“Your name is Morhorn Jiell,” stated the expatriate noble, “Come now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

Jiell attempted to fidget, but being restrained by ropes, only managed to slightly jiggle. Her grin grew broader as she relished in his discomfort. She pressed her will deeper into the man’s mind, to mid-surface. Her spirit wedged itself deeper in Morhorn’s mind and latched itself to his thought processes like a parasite. She licked her chops.

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I…I…fight,” erupted Morhorn, “as a soldier for the Neo-Grissmath Party. Why else would I be here?”

“No need to get so offensive,” the Jensaarai lied, “I thought you could have been a hunter who got caught up or kidnapped by the wrong crowd.”

“I was carrying a frakkin grenade launcher. Who in their right mind uses a grenade launcher to go hunting?”

His confusion and anger boiled from his mind and threatened to flood into her mind through her parasitic connection. She said nothing as she deftly severed and replanted her connections in his mind. Finding the core of his anger, she forced her will to implant serenity and cooperativeness into its midst. He resisted, his anger rising and solidifying from her lack of response.

“I’m sorry,” apologized Hawk, “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic.”

“You legitimately thought that?”

“Yes,” lied the woman again.

His anger lessened and seemed to ooze out in all different directions. Some of it turned into curiosity at who she was; some into hope, thinking that perhaps the agent was gullible enough to somehow work his way into a better situation. The Jensaarai encouraged that false hope, strengthening it with her own will. With a few slight pulls, part of that hope turned to gratitude to her (for her apparent stupidity). And with a few twists of emotions and thoughts by Kitty, Jiell found himself feeling tugs of admiration to her…

As Morhorn’s admiration grew, his mental resistance inversely fell. It had begun with small talk; the drenching rain and hostile humidity of Nim Drovis. One thing led to another, and soon Jiell was reciting his life story to her as if they were old friends catching up on old times. She ignored his rambling, and instead took the opportunity to quietly probe through his mind. As he dredged up old memories, the emotions paired up with them bubbled up; his excitement with his graduation from the Meridian College of Letters and Sciences; the happiness with his marriage to one Sandra Arndarr and the sadness with her subsequent death. And while the content was drier than Tatooine to the Pelagon woman, she found the man’s emotions to be intriguing.

Emotions are a funny thing. They have led and inspired people to the highest of glories, and more often than that, confused and sent them spiraling to the darkest of despairs. Emotions are things that nearly every person experienced, and doing so, people were able to relate to each other in what some called empathy. But empathy itself could be missing or too unrestrained, and as such, presented a whole new set of emotional problems.

As Morhorn talked to her, he thought he was receiving this mutual empathy, and with most people, he probably would have. But Hawk saw not who he was, but shards and chinks in his mind. An emotion activated one area of his mind, and as he freely talked, she freely passed through areas in his mind with memories that had produced similar feelings in the man. The Jensaarai sifted through his memories, felt his recent outburst of anger to her question about his occupation, and felt around it. She felt a pulse leading away from it, to a stronger pulse of anger, and spotted a brief glance of the forest as he hunted Serdor. Grasping the memory, she deftly maneuvered it to the top of his mind; and within a few minutes, Giell was rancorously spitting out everything he knew about the attempt to kill or capture Serdor. And in doing so, he made a mistake: Kitty now knew the location of the Neo-Grissmath Party base on Nim Drovis.



Adrian raised his right hand, and waved it at a meadow clearing surrounded by the towering trees of the rain forest. Several feet behind him, a Confederate sergeant whispered an order to his men, and four gray clouds popped into existence. Mere seconds later, the armor-piercing grenade launcher rounds smashed and buried themselves into the ground, exploding brilliantly in the process. Dust, dirt, and other debris flew into the air. Seeming out of nowhere, Neo-Grissmath insurgents dashed into the field seemingly from the thick soil. Emerald and blue bolts burst from across the edges of the rainforest to converge on the fleeing insurgentsl they fell to the ground in droves. Adrian pressed his hand against the cold, metallic hilt of his lightsaber and sighed. So Kitty got the guy to tell the truth after all. And even with those mental techniques, how? Unless she knew things that I didn’t or didn’t bother to explain to me the full extent of her training… The Susevfian set aside his thoughts as several of the enemy troopers, who having managed to evade Confederate fire by seeking cover in the tall reeds of the meadow, began to charge a Confederate position fifty meters away. He tapped a button on the hilt, and the cobalt blade sprang forth with a zap and a hum. The Jensaarai recklessly charged forward, sweeping his blade in front of him like a sickle; haphazardly slashing through the hampering foliage in front of him.

Just ahead of him, neon bolts spewed out between the trapped Neo-Grissmath insurgents and the Confederate troopers. He heard a yell and a shout, and a single figure emerged from the Confederate line to slash away at their opponent in close-quarters combat with Force Pike. Arpine Serdor handled the pike with exceptional grace, weaving his attacks through dangerous fire vectors into the company of the fighters that he had infiltrated weeks ago. Oddly enough, the four insurgents who had chased and hunted the spy into the forest were not doing so because they thought he was a spy for the Confederation or Nim Drovis, but rather that they thought he was a supporter of Colonel Moxpine Todall, who had created Freedom’s Blades, a splinter group of the Neo-Grissmath Party.

Approaching from behind them, Adrian swung his blade forward, slicing into an upraised barrel of an insurgent’s heavy blaster rifle. Sparks flew, and a charred cylinder plummeted to the ground. The Neo-Grissmath fighter abruptly spun about in bewilderment, only to receive an enhanced punch from Ravenna’s left hand. With his husky build and the aid of the Force, the fist crashed into the unfortunate insurgent’s face, crushing part of the insurgent’s cheekbone in the process. A ripple of intense agony emanated through the Force from the man, and Adrian withdrew his hand; leaving a wave crimson splattered on the man’s face. He teetered for several seconds before collapsing to the ground in a mangled heap. Several of the rear-guard Neo-Grissmath fighters turned about to face the Jensaarai. The man closest to Ravenna fired, and the Jensaarai caught and deflected the bolt into the ground. Wearing a coy smile, Adrian surged towards those men. The first man nervously snapped off a few shots, which had more chance of hitting the native birds than hitting Adrian, while the other insurgents, realizing their situation, dropped their weapons. Ravenna’s lightsaber rushed forward and inserted itself into the front of the blaster’s barrel. The gun turned a glowing white-red color as the internal mechanisms of the blaster were fried by the energy blade. Letting out an inhuman yelp, the insurgent dropped his weapon as it became unbearably hot to wield. Slowly, he too raised his hand to join his comrades in surrender.

Across the battlefield, the last remaining forces of the Neo-Grissmath Party on Nim Drovis either fell forever or raised their hands in defeat. No longer would the beautiful and enticing rainforest shelter the insurgents, nor would the Neo-Grissmath Party establish another permanent presence on the planet. And Adrian smiled.