Brilliant, on a curve of Skywalker

The attack came later than Ben had anticipated--past midnight instead of at sunset--and with a lack of subtlety that spoke of a hurriedly thrown together plan.

But then, Ben reflected, lightsaber glowing as he stared down the cliffs into the forest as they prepared for a third salvo, how subtle could you be when you were attacking with rancors?

"It's unfolding like we thought," he commented to Ender, "no cohesion between the groups. I'm now accepting brilliant suggestions on how to fix that. We're down to half-strength."

( Don't get eaten by rancors, boys )

[Follows this, NFB, NFI, loosely adapted from Aaron's Allston's Backlash and concluding our summer of preplay flist spam! Thank you sooooo much to endsthegame for putting up with my insanity on this!]

Dathomir, Ben thought a little darkly, was picking up where the Maw had left off. First they'd been hassled by a low-level bureaucrat for even being on the planet, then they'd run into one of the Dathomiri witches who'd used Force lightning to short-circuit their lightsabers, comm equipment, and unfortunately, the speeders they'd been riding on.

So now they were tromping through the rain forest on foot, following the blood trail that Luke had put on the Sith girl and trying to avoid the increasingly devious traps the Dathomiri witch was placing in front of them. Ben was currently meditating while Luke and Ender stood watch, trying to get a better idea of where their little shadow was hiding.

He reached into the Force and found...Aunt Leia. He let out a sigh of relief and set her a Force-pulse of reassurance--the mental equivalent of a smile--and then looked around for the Dathomiri witch. He found her nearby: stringing cord to turn a patch of poorly balanced boulders on a hillside into a dangerous deadfall. She was unhappy about it, Ben could tell, upset that this trap was so much more dangerous than the other ones, but she wanted, needed them to go away.

He opened up his eyes again. "We still need to head northwest?" he asked his father, who nodded. "Then we need to watch out for rockfalls." He smiled at Ender. "I have our tactic all prepared: when the rocks fall, we get out of the way."

( The exploits of Ben Skywalker, master tactician, continue! )

[OOC: Taken and tweaked from Aaron Allston's Backlash in the Fate of the Jedi series. NFI, NFB, say hello to Vestara, everyone.]

They were getting close to Dathomir, but Ben, after learning his lesson from the Maw, decided to take a quick detour to a nearby system to top off their fuel and food reserves and to check for any mail they might have received in the past few months.

After so many weeks in the ship and in Sinkhole Station, he was kind of desperate to breathe clean, non-recylced air again too, and maybe get a haircut.

Ben's life of intergalactic intrigue was never-ending thrills, it was true.

[OOC: For phone calls, emails, the boy who travels with him, packages full of Playgirls, Tony...]

A few minutes—or a lifetime—of meditation with Rhondi and Ben felt himself slipping free of his body. He had a thousand questions about what was happening to him, about how long they had been gone and what would happen to his body. But when Rhondi appeared next to him, looking more refreshed and beautiful than she ever had, he had only one thing to ask her: “How do we find my father?”

She extended her hand. “Take my hand and walk with me into the light.”

At any other time, Ben would have had a comment about how walking into the light sounded a bit ominous, but right now Ben did as she instructed, and together they walked into the crackling purple radiance beyond the viewport. He was instantly filled with an eternal, boundless bliss beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He became one with the Force, melted into it and was filled with a calm joy as vast as the galaxy itself. How long he and Rhondi hung there together, Ben would never know. It was less than an eyeblink, long as eternity.

And suddenly Ben was looking out on a narrow black mountain lake with a surface as still as glass. From one shore rose a sheer granite face, sloping toward a domed summit lit with the light of a blue sun. Along the other shore lay a boulder-strewn meadow. Directly ahead was his father standing next to Ryontarr and the Givin, looking toward a half-hidden female form floating in the silver mists that concealed the far end of the lake.

Ben released Rhondi’s hand, no longer consumed by the same sense of urgency that had been troubling him on the station. True, his father had grown perilously weak over the last few weeks, and true his own life was also in peril since the Mind Walkers were still trying to kill them. But Ben had left such mundane worries behind with his body. He’d swum in the incomprehensible infinity of the universe, and now he understood: life and death were the same because moments did not vanish, could not be consumed like air or water or nutripaste. They existed once and forever, spread across the entire continuity of the universe. Just as atoms gathered together to make matter, moments gathered in packets of minutes and hours, which mortals perceived as time passing.

But those packets were no more the essence of time than sunlight was the essence of a star, heat the essence of fire. They were simply the perceptions through which the mind of finite beings experienced the infinite. When he had time to think about it, he wondered how this would change his perceptions of his vision of Jacen, or the view of the future he’d experienced with Ender.

Now—for the given value of now—he had to talk to his father. “That was some trip,” he said with a smile.

( Where Ben and Luke go on an extremely trippy...something )

[OOC: Taken and modified from Abyss by Troy Denning. Contains gratuitous icons of Christian Bale and happens at the same time as this. NFB, NFI, OOC is love.]

It had taken a few days to break free of the Kathol Rift, but the minute the ship cleared the interference, Ben had his comlink out to make a few long-needed calls back to various galaxies.

Ender and his dad had been good to talk to--or not talk to--but he needed to reconnect with some others, too--especially Jaina.

[OOC: If you think you got a call, you did! Ping on back!]

Ben had not been pleased to hear that that place where Aing-Tii artifacts was called the Embrace (a word that was going to be followed by "of Pain", at least for the next little...decade...) and had been even less pleased to learn that Taran'Do's "few kilometer" walk to it was a three day hike up mountains on a planet already too light on oxygen for humans. The rift between Ben and Luke about Ben's flow-walking training had become tense to the point of uncomfortable silence.

Finally they had gotten to the passageway, where their only instructions had been: "Inside, you will find all the artifacts we have painstakingly gathered over many thousands of years. Tread carefully, for this is sacred ground to us. Go to the relics. Be with them. Please...find answers for us that we cannot, so that we might heal this terrible rift that wounds us as a people so deeply."

They had descended into a cavern lit from within by glowing stones in every color along the spectrum and imbued strongly with the Force--not the dark energy Ben had felt on Ziost, but one that refreshed.

...or it had a week ago. Now, as they lifted and stared at relic after relic, no closer to an idea of what they were looking for than when he'd began, Ben wished that the words that reverberated in his head weren't his father commenting that he still had nine years and a few months of his exile to fill.

"They couldn't have narrowed it down to blue things, or something round?" he complained.

( Will they be stuck in a cave FOREVER? )

[OOC: All power and glory to Christie Golden's Omen and preplayed with the amazing endsthegame. NFB, NFI, OOC welcome!]

Ben was grabbing a quick snack as he waited in the galley for his father to finish docking the ship on the first human-majority planet they'd seen in months and taking the chance to catch up on more reading about the Aing-Tii Monks. As soon as they restocked their supplies and checked for physical mail (Ben hoped that Tony's package would catch up with them here), they'd be heading into Aing-Tii space, which was a challenging enough flight that Luke Kriffing Skywalker looked slightly apprehensive about it.

Ben stopped being nervous by remembering that if Jacen had been able to do it, Luke would be able to do it better.

...it had never been said that Ben could not be very petty if the occasion called for it.

[OOC: Open for calls, texts, visits from the boy who's in space with him, care packages from home full of YA gay literature...]

They gathered in the Hidden One's throne chamber, four dozen Kel Dors and three humans. As the last of the Kel Dors, servants who operated the foundries, arrived, conversation dropped off and all the Kel Dors turned toward the Hidden One on his throne.

He gestured to the Skywalkers and Ender, motioning them to approach with a benevolent smile. "It's with a whole heart that I greet you. I understand that you have determined to choose new names, the better to make your way among us."

Ben barely restrained a snort. Despite his astral suggestions of names (his father was definitely a Grand Master Whango Mittphool in his heart), that was not really why the three humans were here.

"I'm sorry, great one," Luke replied, looking surprised. "There has been some misunderstanding. I did ask for a naming ceremony, but I didn't mean it would we will be renaming ourselves. It's my hope that we will be renaming some--or all--of you."

Exclamations of surprise and disapproval filled the room. Ben kept his face impassive but he was grinning on the inside. Much as he liked causing trouble, it was just as much fun watching his father do it. And the Hidden One had been asking for this.

"You have wasted my time," the Hidden One said darkly.

Luke shrugged. "What do the dead have except time? And admit it, as annoying as you find my words, this is going to be the most interesting event you're going to experience all day."

"Why are you doing this?" the Hidden One asked.

Luke turned serious. "Because you're wrong. And if you were only wronging yourself, that would not be so bad. But you are wronging every one of them as well." He gestured at the assembled Kel Dors. "You are a group who study and utilize the Force, yes?"

The Kel Dors looked between Luke and the Hidden One. "Yes," one replied.

"And the Force is the energy of life."

Another Kel Dor said, "Yes."

Luke gave the Hidden One an admonishing look. "Life is risk. Life is energy, vitality. But you've rejected those things, and in rejecting them, reject the Force. In rejecting the Force, you deprive yourself of the right to teach its ways to the living. You have brought nothing to these caverns but your own bodies, and even then you don't have the decency to start moldering like ordinary corpses."

Ben hoped that his father knew what he was doing as the Kel Dors began muttering angrily to themselves.

( With a start like that, clearly things can only get worse. )

After scaling the walls of the temple, the Jedi and Ender stood before the platform where Charsae Saal had said his goodbyes and tried to figure out the trick to the Baran Do sage's disappearance. "If we assume this is the means by which he vanished, there's probably a mechanism somewhere," Luke said thoughtfully. "If he triggered it himself, it was with the Force."

"We would have felt that," Ben pointed out, narrowing his eyes and moving his fingers along the edge of the platform. "Someone else must have helped."

Luke snapped his fingers and a portion of the top platform swung down, leaving a gap easily large enough for a good-sized human or a Kel Dor to fit through. "Shall we?"

"Masters first," Ben replied immediately.

They used the hook and line that Luke had kept on his belt for as long as Ben could remember, repelling 10 meters down a dark hole and found themselves in a storage chamber of some kind, standing on a hydraulic platform that, retracted as it was now, was almost at floor level, but when raised would go to the ceiling and the hidden entrance above.

"Pretty simple," Ben whispered before he and Ender followed Luke through a permacrete-lined corridor towards the living beings Ben could sense through the Force.

"Might as well barge in," Luke said, shrugging.

"They're Baran Do Sages," Ben agreed. "They're not going to try to kill people for prowling through their basement, I hope."

Skywalkers were amazing planners.

( Breaking and Entering for Great Justice! )

[OOC: Taken from Aaron Allston's Outcast, then folded into origami cranes with the help of endsthegame. NFB, NFI, and the guys are kind of incommunicado for the...um, foreseeable future?]

Ben, Ender, and Luke had been in space for almost a week now and Ben was starting to realize what would be the real killer for him for the next decade: nowhere to run. A 55 meter long ship, while equipped to hold up to ten people, wasn't exactly built for laps, and there was only so much treadmill that Ben could deal with in a day.

He settled for tapping his leg as he read up on the planet Dorin on the three-dimensional screen in the shared common area, sipping from a steaming mug of caf as he did so. It was his third run-through of the admittedly limited information on the system. He knew that the planet had been Jacen's first stop on his quest for knowledge away from the Jedi after the Yuuzhan Vong War, but Jacen hadn't added anything to the Jedi archives about what exactly he'd learned from them. The only reference to a Jedi Kel Dor was a Master named Plo Kloon from his grandfather's time, but even that information was patchy.

He was half-tempted to send Anakin a message and ask for information. Surely sending an email to a supposedly dead Jedi wouldn't violate the terms of his father's exile?

...This was also an argument he'd been having with himself for days. He sighed, scrubbed his hands through his hair again and went back to reading.

[OOC: Open for him that is in space with him, as well as calls and emails! NFB due to distance]