Shadows of Bankor

Everyone else seemed to be claiming berths on ships or in the hollowed-out hulk of Varo's Sword, which felt to Sinnya like a waste of a perfectly good tropical island. Sure, it might rain on you unexpectedly, but her little survival tent was water- and wind-tight; as long as it didn't literally blow away or wash out to sea, it was going to be infinitely preferable to sharing a metal box with a half dozen to a few hundred other people.

She'd pitched her campsite within easy reach of the base, not far inland from where some of the Resistance had been swimming earlier. Here she was sitting cross legged where grass met sand, drinking something out of a brightly colored can.

Vaya had been perplexed by Sinnya's desire to sleep in a tent when there was a perfectly good berth on the TBD (The Balosar, Dishonored to her, at least while it was in its post-fleeing-the-authorities berth). Still, having spent her hours since waking in this unexpectedly lovely spot either sneaking through occupied Rygor, or in a ship flying to the moon, she had given in to curiosity and gone to find her.

She arrived with the parts of her crash kit and other luggage that converted easily into beach luxuries (camp chair, ground blanket rainfly-cum-sunshade, the like). After waving hello at first sight she waited until a normal conversational distance to speak and brandish her gift for the hostess of this particular patch of sand.

She held up a flask. "Liven up your beverage?" she offered, and went about making herself comfortable.

Sinnya straightened up a bit and re-oriented toward Vaya. "Depends, what's in there?" She cocked her head, lekku relaxed and still, squinting a bit at the flask.

Regardless, a friendly wave of one hand invited Vaya to join her. It wasn't solitude she was seeking out here, particularly. What she missed down in the base, or onboard the TBD, or even when she was held up in Rygor for more than a few days at a time, was space; the more aware she became of being hemmed in by walls and metal ceilings and property lines, the less she could relax. Individual people came with their own borders and boundaries of a kind, but these were smaller, more porous, and all together less abrasive to her nerves.

“Rygor hyperfuel,” she said, taking Sinnya’s response as an invitation to set up within reaching-over distance. With the skill of someone practiced at setting up outdoor gear, she had soon deployed all of towel, shade, chair, and cooler. She wasn’t dressed for the beach, per se; she’d just traded the plain workingbeing’s clothes that she’d worn in Rygor for the same in shorter cut with fewer layers, and a loose scarf to keep the sun off her head.

She mixed water from a canteen kept in the cooler and the fortified vaguely citrus powder they were issuing to prevent people from sweating out all their vitamins, took a sip, made a face, added a splash from the flash, took another sip, and made a slightly different, more contemplative face.

She held out the flask, then frowned. “Uh, hold old are you again? I’m not violating any local customs or ordinances, am I?”

"Ah." Good old Rygor shine. Mother's milk, practically! Sinnya reached for the flask, fingers already outstretched when Vaya stopped with the prize held just out of reach. "Hey! First off, the whole point of this base is there's no laws out here, isn't it?" She turned her hand palm-upward, ready to receive the prize.

"I'm nineteen, anyway. Legal for everything except voting," she added with a sourish grin. "...Because the last election this planet had was back before the end of the war."

Vaya nodded judiciously and handed over the flask without further objection. She looked around the beach scene. “I don’t know what I would have expected, if I had expected to be run out of Rygor in the middle of the night and to a secret insurgent hideaway, but this wasn’t it.” She gave a sour look upwards, through her sun-shade and at the implied moon overhead. “A lot of that happening lately.”

Sinnya sniffed the contents of the flask, shrugged, and tipped a healthy quantity directly into the brightly colored can she'd been drinking from, stopping just before it threatened to overflow. Generally speaking, she didn't flinch from consuming Rygor's aggressive cactus moonshine undiluted, but it wasn't even dinnertime.

"I never came out here before all this. The islands in this climate zone are empty on the maps, but everybody knows most of them really belong to somebody. Usually somebody you don't mess with." Aggressive fizzing emanated from the little hole on top of the can as she took an impassive sip. "I didn't expect your moon temple would be more of the same, though."

Vaya made a disgusted noise that had nothing to do with the flavor of her military-grade powdered drink mix vitamin supplement and cactus moonshine cocktail. In fact, she took another determined swallow of it. "It's not my moon temple," she said, as that was what Sinnya had meant. "I should be... happy about what we found," said continued. "A living representative of the Order, a holochronicled Master, a hidden training facility, archives. It's beyond the wildest dreams I could have had, in terms of things that could help Petrus and Verse and Qareme and the rest." She drank again, staring moodily at the waves.

"Maybe." Sinnya swirled her drink, causing some more bubbling and hissing. "They were doing okay before, though. Except for being fugitives, and the temple doesn't help much with that." She uncrossed her legs and stretched them out in front of her, wiggling her bare toes into the sand in between the sparse grasses.

"It's just so..." she trailed off, no closer to finding the exact right words than she had been while talking to Jenna on the moon. "It was like a factory dormitory. A real nice one. But there wasn't anything, I don't know, subtle up there. Secret, but not deep, you know?"

"Exactly!” Vaya said emphatically, stabbing an accusing finger up towards the moon, and then self-consciously lowering, it more sedately. “Exactly.” She took another sip. “They say it’s a temple, but it’s just another secret base.” She shook her head. “At least the Pius Dei crusades pretended to put the state in service to the sacred, rather than the other way around. This five and three-quarters line stuff is so ass-backwards I feel like I could get an award in the field of Xenology for discovering a living thing it makes sense to.”

"Pius Day...?" Sinnya gave Vaya a blank look from behind the rim of her can. "Anyway... yeah, it doesn't sound much like the Jedi in the old songs, does it?"

Sometimes Vaya felt an urge to apologize when she unthinkingly made a reference that went over people's heads, but she was out of kriffs to give. For whatever it was worth to Sinnya, she also wasn't condescending about explaining (although maybe overlong). "Religious zealots, took over the Republic a dekamillenium ago. You ever hear of the Ords -- Ord Mantell, Pardron, Gimmel? There's hundreds of 'em. Originally stood for Ordnance/Regional Depot, supplying their crusades." She looked broodingly into her drink. "Took a lot more than a few months of a tin-pot insurgency like this to get rid of the bastards. Funny story, they..." she looked at Sinnya, and cleared her throat self-consciously.

"How do the old songs tell it?" she said, with genuine curiosity. "Do you know any in particular?"

"Oh, huh. They don't teach that in Rygor public creche." Sinnya swirled her can, looking... impressed?

"Yeah, there are a lot of old songs about the Jedi, from back when the people became... the People. The Jedi helped the ones who lived in the forest back then to drive off the Sky Devils who'd invaded Bankor. They helped make the Calm, out of what used to be cursed and poisoned land." Rygor lightning seemed to make the young Twi'lek's language more expansive. She hummed a snatch of something not quite comprehensible in an Aznuri dialect.

"In defense of your creches, it was ten thousand years ago." She sighed, although it was unclear whether it was at the state of the Youth Of Today's historical literacy, her feelings about the Temple, or something else.

She listened to Sinnya's story and song with interest. Perhaps emboldened in her own way by 'Rygor Lightning,' she asked "Have you ever been to the Calm? If that's okay for me to ask," she added hastily.

"No." Sinnya shook her head. "I mean, I don't care if you ask, but I never went there. I don't know if I ever will or not. The ones who live in there don't come out, not very often. And not just anybody can go in whenever they want. I'm of no tribe, so I don't know who'd send me. "

She slurped from her can again, gazing out and down at the water's edge. "Elders and strong spirit touched ones, they're the ones who go there the most. Brother Ru'ni has been there a few times. They want him to stay, he says--become one of the Hidden Ones. It's a great honor, but... it sounds kind of... boring?" She offered this minor sacrilege with a sheepish shrug.

Vaya let out a short, sharp "Hah!" and leaned back in her chair. "Sinnya, out of all the people running around making me feel old, you're more sensible than most. But describing a place of supernatural spiritual tranquility and inner peace as boring might bring your career average up enough you're beating out Verse." She took another sip of her drink, one corner of her mouth pulling up.

"I didn't say it's a boring place!" Sinnya protested, straightening up defensively. "I hope I'm allowed in, some day. To visit. But being one of the Hidden Ones? Never leaving again?" Gradually, she sank back into her former comfortable slouch. "It's important. But you'd miss out on a lot."

Vaya nodded and held out a placating hand. "I guess I agree with you on that. If I'm being honest, even if I had found enlightenment in..." she toasted in the assumed direction of the moon, "I have a hard time imagining I would've just... stopped there." She held out the flask and sloshed its contents around a little in Sinnya's direction, an additional peace offering.