Abeloth's Home Planet [several days later, GFFA time]

The journey from Coruscant had taken days and Abeloth had refused to allow her captives either water or food, urging them instead to throw off the shackles of mortality and claim their destiny. Ben, she insisted, was to become the eternal Prince of Light, and he would keep burning the twin flames of justice and forgiveness. Vestara was to become the irresistible Daughter of the Night. She would guard the forbidden mysteries of the Force—and she would bring life to the galaxy by filling dreams with images of beauty and desire. Together, the three of them would become the Ones, and they would live forever and remake the galaxy however it suited them.

Ben and Vestara, naturally, had told her that was, in Ben's Fandom-enhanced vocabulary, "fucking nuts", and now they were standing back-to-back in the yellow fog that surrounded the Font of Power. Their noses and throats were raw from its caustic steam, their eyes were burning, but they were so dehydrated that their bodies were imploring them to drink—and it did not matter that the water was so tainted with dark side energy that it made them shudder inside. Their heads were pounding and their vision was blurring, and their thoughts were coming slow and muddled. They had to drink or die—and when faced with those choices, the body always chose to drink.

( Yeah, this isn't cheery. )

[OOC: Taken and modified from Troy Denning's Apocalypse!]

Aboard the Rude Awakening, in the Maw [three days after leaving Coruscant]

It had been three days since the frigate Redstar had dropped Luke, Jaina and the Fandom folks at the entrance to the Maw, and that meant it had been three days since Luke had first been handed the crumpled flimsi he now held in his hands. On the flimsi was the text of a short S-thread message from Corran Horn, which the Redstar’s communications officer had retrieved as soon as the frigate emerged from hyperspace outside the Maw.

SOLOS OUT SAFE WITH AMELIA.
JEDI WARV KILLED IN SITH AMBUSH LED BY VESTARA KHAI.
FALCON CRIPPLED, BUT TARGET HEALTHY FOR NOW.

The message was only three short lines, but it had done more to incapacitate Luke than any of the wounds he had suffered fighting Abeloth. He had trusted Vestara—had even been the one to persuade the other Masters she would be a valuable asset inside the Temple during the battle against the Sith. He could not have been more wrong. His mistake had cost Bazel Warv his life and—assuming he was correctly interpreting Corran’s conspicuous use of the word “target”—nearly gotten Allana killed.

Now, after three days of meditation, he continued to find himself mired in doubt, wondering what else he might be wrong about, and reluctant to trust his own judgment.

And he was running out of time. The Rude Awakening, a sleek little pinnace infiltrator manufactured for the space marines’ elite Void Jumper units, was already approaching the choke point where Sinkhole Station had once hung suspended in a binary black-hole system. Luke could see the accretion whorls of the two black holes with his naked eye, a pair of fire-rimmed disks centered in the forward viewport, and he could feel Ben ahead, on Abeloth’s hidden planet, reaching out to him in the Force, urging him to hurry.

And still Luke didn’t know what to do, whether he was following the will of the Force by following Ben—or defying it.

( Ender and Luke have a chat about destiny. )

( Luke learns about how Tara's magic works )

( And people check in on Ender. )

[OOC: Preplayed with the fantabulous life_inshadow, endsthegame and hoorayimrich.]

Abeloth's Homeworld [several minutes later]

As the Rude Awakening sped onward, the fire-rimmed orbs ahead rapidly began to swell and drift apart, leaving the area between them webbed with blazing whorls of accretion gas. Against this brilliant backdrop, Ship also began to swell, growing from a propulsion halo the size of a dust mote to a dark sphere as large as Jaina’s thumb.

A constant stream of fire streaked back and forth between the two vessels, cannon bolts from the Awakening and plasma bulbs from Ship. Both vessels were taking the attacks dead center in the forward shields, making no attempt to evade. With the grasping hand of a black hole reaching from both sides of an ever-narrowing safe corridor, there was no room to maneuver or flee. Flying skill and combat training did not matter: pilots had one choice and one choice only: punch it out head-on.

And in that kind of fight, it was usually the pilot who attacked quickest and hardest who survived. Jaina checked the range and, seeing that the two vessels were closing in even faster than she thought, armed the Rude Awakening’s first missile. Jaina had chosen the Rude Awakening for good reason: it was a Void Jumper assault pinnace. That meant it could get in fast, evade detection, take a beating, and deliver a devastating attack. It was one of the most fearsome tactical combat vessels in the galaxy, designed to go head-to-head with a Mandalorian Bes’uliik and be the craft that emerged from the fireball. Jaina could not imagine any better combat transport to fly head-on against Ship—especially not after she had fitted the entire missile magazine with baradium warheads.

Talk about a rude awakening. Heh.

The targeting computer chimed once, announcing that the two crafts had closed to effective missile range. Jaina did not bother to try for a target-lock—Ship would defeat it anyway, and in this fight a quick attack was everything. She simply launched, then pulled the throttles back so the Awakening would not be inside the lethal radius when the baradium detonated. The blazing white disk of a thrust ring appeared in front of the cockpit then, as the missile streaked away, quickly shrank to a white dot. In the next instant a tiny gray dot appeared in front of the Awakening.

In an eyeblink, it expanded into the gray, oblong lump of one of Ship’s Force-hurled stones. Fighting the urge to dodge—a mistake that might well have carried them across a nearby event horizon—Jaina held the pinnace steady and thumbed the intercom pad on her control yoke.

“Brace for impact back there,” she said. “This one is going to take down our shields.”

( This seems like an excellent time to go on a vision quest, doesn't it, Luke? )

( Meanwhile, on Coruscant-- )

( And on Abeloth's home planet, Ben gets a mouthful of tentacle. Seriously. It's nasty. )

( Hooray, we won! What do we do with Vestara? )

[OOC: Troy Denning, THERE IS SO MUCH WRONG WITH YOU. Warnings for torture, violence, and death. Played out with amazing hoorayimrich, life_inshadow, and endsthegame. Done with the spamming for today!]