(Otoh Gunga, 21.9 BBY, 5 minutes later)
"You want me to do what, Master?" Ahsoka cried. Momentarily neglecting the proprieties, as she stared at me incredulously.
"It's not a matter of want, Apprentice. I need you to pilot a submersible through the labyrinth core of Naboo," I reiterated for my disbelief-stricken apprentice in my most encouraging tone of voice. I'd already opened the anti-flooding bulkheads, so Padme and Assistant Nuri were already engaged on my behalf with the commander of Boss Lyonie's personal detail of the militiagung. The latter was receiving medical attention for her relatively minor wound, even as she quite emphatically expressed her displeasure with Rish Loo and, to a lesser extent, Ventress.
While that was going on, Lyonie hoarsely confirmed some of the more difficult to believe portions of recent events for his initially skeptical head of security. This convinced the Gungans to finally stop trying to forcibly deactivate the battle-droid who'd just handily thrashed a few dozen of their best, most heavily armed soldiers, even while tightly constrained by the need to cause his opponents no lasting harm. IG-1's chassis now sported a few unsightly scuffs from the several dozen plasma discharges he'd been unable to dodge while laying down suppressive fire. Fortunately, the militiagung had been ordered to stand down before the anti-megafauna weaponry could be transferred from the city's outskirts and redeployed to this interior corridor.
My anxious Padawan was about to begin voicing her objections anew, so I chose to preempt them and save her the wasted breath, "Ahsoka, we have less than two hours to stop this war from happening. That's not nearly enough time to hop from one narrow passage to another following one of the safe routes, so I'm going to be fully occupied pacifying all the dangerous aquatic megafauna we're sure to encounter, crossing the caverns between the larger tunnels. Whenever I'm not occupied with that, the whole of my attention is going to be given over to divining the most direct survivable route through the core, so you see, there's really no other alternative."
Looking at me with large cyan eyes grown more than a little wild, the willowy young Togruta abandoned any pretense of Jedi calm. Exclaiming in a voice as loud as it was shrill, "No other alternative? NO OTHER ALTERNATIVE? HOW ABOUT I CAN'T POSSIBLY DO THAT? HOW'S THAT FOR AN ALTERNATIVE, MASTER?"
Padme, Nuri, Lyonie, plus all of the many other Gungans presently crammed into the Boss's private chamber; they all stopped what they were saying or doing, to stare in our direction at this outburst. Smiling benignly back at them, I reassured everyone it was nothing but a simple misunderstanding.
Taking my stricken apprentice by the elbow, I led her out into the corridor where we could speak more privately. The two guards standing watch outside Lyonie's door took one look at me, then they both fell in. Continuing their vigil to either side of the door's interior.
Once the door had hissed closed behind the two guards, I gave my apprentice a few moments to calm down, then began again in a calmer, more reasonable manner, "Ahsoka, I've seen your piloting scores. Not only are you one of the twenty highest-scoring Initiates overall since Master Tiin was an Initiate in Clan Thranta, there was also next to no fall-off in your simulator marks, when you were suddenly required to transition from the Delta-7 to the Eta-2. Factually, there is nothing stopping you from being part of saving the Force alone knows how many lives here. Nothing but your fear of failure."
Looking her directly in the eye, I finished very softly, "Fear isn't actually real, Padawan. It exists only in your thoughts of the future, and only so long as you're willing to feed it with your self-doubt. I tell you this as someone who can remember quite clearly just how insane these words sounded, when my Master first said them to me. Fear isn't the Great Enemy that many a Jedi would have you believe it is. It's nothing more, and nothing less, than the lie we tell ourselves to justify the times we failed to bring our full resources to bear because of our doubts."
Still maintaining eye contact, I finished by asking, "Now, with all that in mind, are you willing to confront your fear of failing with everything you have? If you can drive your fear back into unbeing here, it very well could mean saving a great many innocent people from dying senselessly."
Dropping her eyes to avoid meeting mine any longer, the scared young woman murmured bleakly, "What if I do my best, and it's just not good enough?"
Laying a hand on her shoulder, I replied with gentle conviction, "Then you fail, deal with the consequences of failure as best you can, then make the memory of your failure into fuel to improve. You'll find yourself repeating that cycle throughout your life, until you won't fail again under a given set of circumstances. We call the cycle in question courage, for short. Fear will never stop trying to convince you to give it life, but not only can you learn to deny it, every denial will make you stronger and your self-doubt weaker, this I promise you."
Ahsoka remained silent for several moments, then, just as it began to seem like I was going to need to prompt her about the running clock, she gave a single sharp nod and said, "OK, show me this submersible. Sooner begun, sooner done, right Master?"
Smiling as I nodded my agreement with one of Master Koon's favorite sayings, I was about to turn and reenter the room to retrieve Padme, when the Force sang out to me concerning a number of intense spikes of fear and concern that continued their chiming discordance. All of them alive somewhere inside my new apprentice. Already buried quite deeply within the teen's emotional and psychological landscape by a determined effort of will, it was only the abrupt shift in her feelings as this ongoing process of smothering certain emotions continued which had allowed me to snag a strong hint as to their existence. Her shields, basic as they are in their construction, were proving themselves surprisingly effective.
Shifting my attention back to Ahsoka for a moment, I quietly observed, "If something, anything, is bothering you, Ahsoka, I hope you know that you can always talk to me about it. Time may be short at the moment, but there will never be a time I won't be willing to help you. Even if the only thing I can do is make sure you feel heard, I'll do that, OK?"
I keep my eyes on her, despite the press of time I can feel slipping away from us, but a sudden frown and muttered, "I, I don't think I'm ready to talk about that. Not just yet, anyways, Master," is all I get from her just then. All the positivity of a moment ago has bled away. In its place, there's a purposeful resolve coming from my Padawan. It's a rather somber refrain in the Force, with transitory overtones I dislike immediately, for all that I can make nothing of them at the moment.
Unable to simply stand there and try to wait this inexplicable hesitance out, I offer, "When you're ready, then," before turning away to depress the appropriate pad to open the Boss's door and collect our charge. Finding Padme standing there as the door hisses open is a bit more of a surprise than I had imagined it would be, but then it shouldn't come as a shocker that one of the most capable women in the history of the galaxy is finding her way around the nuances of a Force Bond a bit faster than I am.
I do have a lot on my mind, after all. Savior of the galaxy, what did I ever do to deserve that mindfuck?
For the first time in a great many years, I find myself asking that question again. Only for the closest thing I have to an answer to come rushing back to me, until it feels like I'm going to throw up for a second.
Padme's smile upon seeing me dimmed, as my suddenly tumultuous emotions washed over her, so I forced the most genuine smile I could muster back onto my face, and ask in a teasing tone, "Ready to be put in peril of being devoured by the horrors of the deep, so we can go on protecting you from the nefarious Dark Side assassins, Senator?"
Bobbing her head slightly, the lovely brunette gives me a look equal parts amusement and determination, before replying, "I have every confidence in you and Ahsoka, so why should I worry, Knight Skywalker? Assistant Nuri seems to have everything in hand here, while Boss Lyonie recovers, so I'm ready whenever you are."
A young male Otolla Gungan, who could best be described as a floppy-eared scarecrow, chose that moment to skip up to our small group. His uniform appears to have been taken in more than once, but it looks like it could have borne at least one more iteration of the process. Tossing us all an enthusiastic salute, he announced in a high, oddly breathy tone, "Mesa bein Soldier Rin Rin. I'sa bein ordered tosa taking yousa to there main pooling, so yousa bein taking one of the scouting bongos. It'sa bein boom-bad timing for yousa to be setting out, but you'sa is Jedi Knighting Skywalker, so you'sa should bein all-right-y."
Thanking the young soldier graciously, I made an "After you" gesture. Said gesture netted me an extremely abrupt about-face, which had me ducking flying ears. As soon as Padme, Ahsoka, and IG-1 began to move, I started off after our excitable guide. Taking a moment for a final word with a more senior member of the militiagung as I pass by, during which I advised them in the most strenuous terms to keep Ventress drugged into insensibility, until the Shadows could arrive to retrieve her.
Privately, I only gave the Gungans even odds of holding Ventress long enough for my fellow Jedi to arrive, but short of maiming or killing her in cold blood, the current circumstances didn't offer me any better alternatives. At least not any that complied with the Code. Deciding it did me no good to dwell on things that were now beyond my power to affect, I dismissed the question of Ventress for the time being. Focusing instead on the trial ahead of us.
Taking a Gungan sub into deep water, just as the onset of evening announced the beginning of the nocturnal feeding cycle. The very idea was enough to have me checking in with the song of creation, as I sought to discern any discordant notes indicative of my having diverged at some point from the will of the Living Force.
Nothing. The Force seemed neither for nor against my plan to serve us up as sea monster-bait while in search of a shortcut. Its song simply continued without pause. Offering me no more insight than my actions, as always, still somehow remain in accord with my "destiny."
Taking a deep breath, as we jogged along behind Rin Rin, I released my doubts into the Force with one long exhalation. Consciously bringing to mind other "crazy" plans I'd implemented in the past.
"You carried each of those off, and they were all riskier than this. It's just Ahsoka and Padme being along for this one that's trying to throw you," I found myself thinking. At least until I returned to considering my various successes. Remembering the trust both of them had placed in me recently, during the run on the Malevolence, I forcibly shake off the doubts trying to cling to me. Wordlessly pointing out to my inner critic just how much circumstances had changed, now that I was no longer Dim.
The main pool proved a surprisingly short walk from the Boss's chambers. More than four hundred meters across, and perhaps half that wide, it was essentially a large spherical chamber bisected by a series of flat walkways. Each walkway intersected with one or more other metallic paths, all of them just above the surface of the pool. Ringing its edges were a number of sizable devices. Machines I immediately understood to be part of some sort of gravity-lift system, due to one large submersible that already hung in the air perhaps five meters above the pool.
Surrounding us were Gungan workers wearing three distinct sorts of uniforms. All of them were either swarming the vast majority of the craft, overseeing said swarming, or moving in and out of the chamber conveying tools and components of all kinds. The movements of each individual team seemed a swirl of uncontrolled chaos, until one viewed the activity as a whole. Activity which showed no signs of slowing with the increasingly late hour of the surface day.
Down at the far end of the immense chamber, I could see a half-dozen smaller, sleeker, manta-shaped submersibles. All of them similar in appearance to the one I'd seen utilized by Master Jinn and Obi-Wan in another life. When Soldier Rin Rin led us speedily to the walkway adjoining the craft furthest from the passageway we'd entered by, I finally saw what I was asking of my apprentice in another light.
Not that the sight made any material difference in my thinking, of course. Not when set against the press of necessity. This was the job, and if I felt a bit more sympathy for just how deep the water I had flung my Padawan into on her first mission was proving to be, what did it matter? A Jedi was regularly called upon to do the impossible. If I were to make the grave mistake of leaving my apprentice with the impression that the demands made upon her abilities would always be reasonable ones, I would only be leaving her cruelly unprepared for, well, days exactly like today.
"What happened to remembering your apprentice would have limits different than yours?" A traitorously reasonable voice inquired inside of me.
"I have to push her, if I'm to find those limits. I can't set an upper bar on my expectations until I hit her limit," I doggedly responded. Knowing Dark Woman would already be accusing me of coddling, I pushed the doubts out of my mind. Ahsoka was an incredibly gifted young woman, and it was my responsibility to see to it those gifts were fully realized.
Feeling the pulses of unease keeping to a staccato beat inside my Padawan, I watched as she strode up to the open bubble of the submersible. Her expression and stride were as confident as she could manage, but the seesawing of doubt and confidence within her continued as she clambered inside the craft. Padme gave me a brief look, as if checking to make sure I was aware of what was going on with Ahsoka, but the real surprise was IG-1.
Trooping past me to stand beside the entrance to the submersible, the droid slowly turned to fix me with a long, considering look, then pointed with one long metallic digit in my apprentice's direction. A long moment passed, before IG-1 pointed the same finger directly at me.
Tilting my head in Ahsoka's direction for a moment, I returned my gaze to the droid's photoreceptors, but it wasn't until Padme slipped past me to seat herself in the space behind the pilot and co-pilot's chairs, that I quietly whispered to the droid, "It's better for Ahsoka that she begins confronting her doubts now, while I'm right here, than sometime when she's on her own. I am prepared to handle the entire situation myself, if it comes to that, but Ahsoka's success here would really be for the best."
Tilting his head up and down a few centimeters in a subtle gesture of qualified agreement, the droid turned far more quickly this time, then climbed into the bongo in complete silence. The entire incident seemed to me a good sign, though, for multiple reasons. IG-1's personality was coming along, slowly but surely, and it appeared he'd added Ahsoka to the vanishingly short list of things he considered worth paying much attention to outside combat. A list which, up until now, only had mine, Seraph's, and Dark Woman's names on it.
Climbing into the empty seat beside my Padawan, I turned and thanked a hovering Rin Rin for his assistance. Then, when he showed no sign of moving off of his own volition, gently informed him Ahsoka was about the engage the canopy bubble-shields.
Startled into action, the young Gungan fired off a sudden salute I had a sneaking suspicion wasn't really a thing that members of the militiagung generally did, before whirling into another ear-whippingly quick about-face, and skip-dashing off back the way we'd come.
A blue and purple wash of color began to ripple upwards from the bottom of the spherical openings positioned at the front of the submersible. Next, a clear and curved surface rose like a pair of windows within the arcing forcefields of the bongo. Finally, a low thrumming sound accompanied a vibration that could barely be felt, as the intensifying thrum grew lower in pitch, and the vibration that had passed front to back finally fell off to nothing. Announcing the readiness of the bongo's strange aft-mounted engines.
Depressing a couple of illuminated pads next to the sub's control-yoke, Ahsoka took hold of said yoke, muttered "Here goes, something," then pushed the yoke forward and down in one quick movement.
Nosing down sharply, the submersible shot forward as if fired from an anti-orbital emplacement. Below the pool was a considerably narrower tunnel that arced gradually downward and out for perhaps three hundred meters. Ahsoka shot through its entirety in one continuous surge of acceleration. Arrowing downwards even further the moment we were in open water, the young Jedi tapped a blinking pad beside the yoke as if that was the obvious next step in piloting the craft. Only to seem more than a little surprised, when the crystal canopy in front of us suddenly began displaying what I quickly guessed was a high-resolution rendering of our immediate environs.
"That's odd, I was sure the Force was guiding me to the button for the sub's external lights. Thought I was going to be stuck maneuvering by instrumentation alone for a moment there. No thanks," Ahsoka muttered to herself. She seemed a bit shaken by the misunderstanding, so now looked like a good time to provide a bit of assistance.
"You weren't wrong, Ahsoka. It's just, Gungan submersibles don't have external lights. When you're piloting a craft that can be swallowed by more than one species of local predator without your vessel touching the sides of a beast's mouth, you don't add anything to the design that's liable to announce 'Free food! Just follow the eye-catching illumination back to its source!' You can trust the Force about things like this," I explained in a calm tone meant to be encouraging.
My explanation must have provided some reassurance, because she flashed me a quick smile of thanks, then turned her full attention back to keeping us headed downwards.
Checking the chronometer a little while later, I was surprised to see only four minutes had passed since we left Otoh Gunga, yet we'd already traveled a little more than six kilometers.
"Ninety kilometers an hour is an absolutely blistering pace underwater. I wonder how the Gungans managed to design a faster submersible than the Mon Cala," I thought. My innate curiosity concerning any sort of novel technology an itch I wanted to scratch in the worst way. Setting the thought aside with some difficulty, I studied a compilation of sonar returns taken of the environs around Otoh Gunga. Judging by those, it seemed we'd have to slow down in another few kilometers, as we neared the tunnels leading to the core. For now, though, the Force seemed to be telling my Padawan the same thing it was telling me.
Go. Faster.
The thrumming coming from the rear of the bongo increased for several seconds, then the sub began trying to shimmy off the line of descent Ahsoka had chosen, as we continued our downward plunge. My apprentice was having none of it, though. She smoothly corrected her course with small, steady nudges to the control-yoke, rather than risk overcorrecting with one big adjustment. Having been back-seated by Master Koon more than once while hunting the Piloting bead I'd so coveted, I thought I detected something of his favored methodology in his protege's command of the craft. Filing the thought away to share with the Jedi Master later, I couldn't help but be pleased with how my student was handling the situation. This was obviously the easiest leg of the journey we were on, but Ahsoka's earlier anxiety seemed nowhere in evidence, now that she was actually behind the wheel, so to speak.
Seeing the readings indicated we were only a little more than fifteen hundred meters from the bottom, I realized it was time I started doing my part. Dropping into a light trance-state, I carefully opened myself to the nearest possibilities we could act to realize.
What looked like a tunnel twenty-five degrees to port and five hundred meters down was actually an unusually deep overhang in the rock formations jutting upward from the bed of the sea-sized lake. When that possibility abruptly ended in a blackness that was total, I thought that was a rather eloquent way for the Force to communicate, "Not that one, you ninny."
Thirty-plus degrees to starboard was a bit more promising, but the vague impression of increasingly jarring impacts from above sounded a lot like the irregular striking of a snare drum in the Force. Not just overt danger, then, but some kind of negative knock-on result, assuming we took that tunnel.
Forty degrees starboard, after covering most of the five hundred meters remaining until we hit bottom, the vision in my head opened up into a veritable flip-book of shifting possibilities. Bingo.
Communicating this development to Ahsoka in a quick, clipped tone, I felt the bongo shudder slightly, as she sawed on the yoke to get us lined up. Easing off on the engine output to avoid spreading us along one side of the tunnel or the other. The passage through the dark rock shelf ran in an odd "C" that had been rotated forty-five degrees counterclockwise, so we were forced to creep along at 8-10Kph for several minutes, before the far end of the "C" deposited us in a tunnel so straight as we nosed up and straightened out, it could have been mistaken for a sapient-fashioned thoroughfare. The walls of the tunnel here appeared to be made of several different types of rock, but all of them were worn smooth as glass, and looked polished almost to a mirror sheen in the little light the canopy-shields cast on our surroundings. It wasn't hard to determine the flow of water was rushing our way, because Ahsoka had to keep backing off on the speed without a noticeable decrease in our rate of progress.
For the first time since she'd actually begun piloting the bongo, I felt a strong spike of unease from my Padawan. Without taking her eyes from the canopy rendering of our environs, she murmured her concerns with the tension clear in her voice, "Master, if this tunnel was to come to a dead end abruptly, I wouldn't be able to stop us from crashing. The water-flow pushing us is fluctuating between eighteen and twenty Kph, so..."
"That's not going to happen, Ahsoka. For decisions this sequential, with a very limited number of possible variables, precognition lets me see the results of taking each of the paths open to us for a couple hundred meters with a very high degree of accuracy. When you're a bit further along in your understanding of the Sense fundamentals, I'll teach you how to use precognition and the enhancement of your short-term memory together, so you can plot out prediction-chains. It's an extremely niche skill, but immensely useful in situations like this, where you're seeking to process an extremely large number of very similar possibilities for the immediate future, so you can actually utilize your predictions to best effect. Hard to starboard NOW, please," I finished with confidence.
Once the bongo had straightened out after the sudden turn, the canopy rendering showed we'd just entered our first large cavern. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all too far away for the sensors wired into the submersible's canopy to compile readings for visual rendering, but it only took Ahsoka a few seconds to find the right control to send out an active sonar ping. The return was quickly displayed on the canopy as ghostly outlines tagged with distance-to-object figures. Figures which revealed the nearest wall was on our port side, more than twenty-four hundred meters away, the "floor" almost nineteen hundred meters below us, and the "ceiling" simply too distant for the sonar to garner an accurate return.
Studying those figures, I looked deep into our immediate future for the presence of any unwanted kaiju in our path. Finding, to my great relief, that the largest inhabitants of this cavern appeared to be odd turtle-like creatures perhaps half the size of our sub. The speeder-sized shellbacks seemed to be exclusively bottom-dwelling creatures, because each one I saw in visions of descending to the hug the bottom of the cavern was performing a slight variation on the mouth-continually-open-and-ready-to-snap-shut hunting method I remembered snapping turtles using in another time and place. These dull blue and gray shellbacks had bioluminescent tongue-tips to aid them in their hunting of curious fish, but they seemed harmless enough to us. Especially since we never came close enough to physically see any of the creatures.
"You're going to want to angle to port gradually, and slow down, Ahsoka. The tunnel mouth we're looking for isn't much wider than the bongo to begin with, but it will widen quite a bit within a few sub-lengths," I reported in a matter-of-fact tone. My series of accurate predictions seemed to have aroused Padme's curiosity, but she didn't voice her interest. Probably out of a concern that she'd distract me.
Guiding the submersible as I'd requested, Ahsoka suddenly spoke up. The tension clear in her voice, as she admitted, "I'm trying to remember what you said, Master. About fear not being real and all. I just feel like I could slam us into a rock face any second now."
"I know this isn't easy, Ahsoka. I promise you, though, we wouldn't be doing this if there was any real chance of my not being able to easily find a navigable path through the core. Avoiding hazards to navigation is the easy part, believe me," I replied in what I hoped was a reassuring manner. My young apprentice didn't say anything else, but I didn't know if that was because she'd been at least partially reassured, or if she was just unwilling to make any more uncomfortable admissions right now. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking how frustrating it was, when other people had the kind of shields I relied on so heavily.
Another few directions given, and several more short tunnels or cracks in rock formations later, we found ourselves in a cavern so immense, it seemed we were floating in the blackness of deep space. Ahsoka was already reaching for the pad that would have sent out an active sonar ping, when my hand flashed over to grasp her wrist without warning.
"Not a good idea, Padawan. There are at least two Opee Sea Killers maneuvering far enough below us, neither has seen the light of our canopy. One of them is several meters larger than the other, so right now, they're engaged in a rousing game of Will the Smaller Opee Get Eaten. You press that button though, and our circumstances change to include a not-insignificant possibility we either get swallowed whole, or the pursuing Opee does enough damage to the bongo, that we end up choosing between being crushed by the pressure quickly, or drowning a little more slowly," I explained in a low voice. Releasing her hand as soon as I was done, I waited for her to say something.
"Should I slow down, ascend, or..." Ahsoka trailed off. The near-whisper she was speaking in made it seem like she was afraid the sea monsters presently playing hide-and-seek in the darkness below might hear us.
"Just maintain our current speed and heading. Sizable chunks of jetsam get flushed through these openings by strong currents all the time, so as long as they don't get close enough to see the force-field's light, and we don't make any novel sounds or inconstant movements, we're just another semi-buoyant piece of the environment floating on by. For such a large life-form, Opees are incredibly dimwitted. They are, however, absolutely relentless, once they identify a possible meal. They'll even rush straight into the path of one of their four natural predators, rather than break off a pursuit," The instructions I provided were delivered in a clinical manner I hoped would downplay the danger we were in, and Padme seemed to sense this.
"Anakin's not wrong. When I was a bit younger than you are, Ahsoka, my father arranged for me to accompany a group of marine biologists who were headed out to study the ecosystem of an underwater valley about three kilometers offshore. We came upon the buoyant carcass of a Sando Aqua Monster, and watched at least a dozen Opees rise to feed on the immense corpse. This was despite the fact the last five of them to do so were plucked from the water by circling Titavians within seconds of becoming visible at the surface. I don't know about the first two or three before the remaining giant birds actually began to circle overhead, but the last three Opees must have been able to see what happened to each of their predecessors, as quickly as the next to be snatched up arrived. Among Naboo sailors, 'Dumb as a hungry Opee' is a serious enough insult to be considered fighting words," Padme spoke up from behind us, in a similarly lecturing tone.
Nothing more was said for a while, as the submersible continued its steady progress through the total blackness all around us, but when an immense, deeply pitted rock face covered in blue-green bioluminescent algae loomed out of the darkness directly ahead of us, there were distinctly audible sighs of relief, as the natural illumination revealed a crevice maybe a third of a kilometer wide.
Checking the chronometer, as we finally traveled to the end of the glowing crevice and into a tunnel where the bone-white stone around us all had an odd clockwise-spiral indentation in its surface, I saw that we'd already traveled an amazing two hundred and two kilometers in fifty-three minutes. Thinking the figure had to be wrong, I double checked with Ahsoka.
Looking at me in astonishment, she quickly exclaimed, "That's what I was talking about, before! Several times now, while we've been traveling through a long straight passageway, the water reached speeds upward of ninety or a hundred Kph, with us already going a little faster than ninety Kph. At that kind of speed, no one's reflexes are good enough to avoid a sudden collision, if something cropped up in our path. You told me 'This is the easy part,' so I thought you at least knew what was bothering me, Master!"
Sharp, clanging, clamorous notes in the Force were banging all about Ahsoka's presence in the Force, now. They would have made it obvious to all but the youngest Initiates that my apprentice was angry, near to the point of being furious, and she wasn't even trying to rein those feelings in.
"Ahsoka, you need to calm down, now. I'm sorry I let myself get too caught up with the future to remain sufficiently mindful of the present, but I wasn't trying to deceive you. I simply didn't foresee any obstacles along any part of the path we took. Speaking of which, our next turnoff is coming up in about six hundred meters, approximately ten degrees to port, now" My apology was a sincere one, and I hated having to interrupt it to give another order, but it was obvious the circumstances were taking a toll on my Padawan. I'd failed to recognize how serious her anxiety and frustration were becoming, but rather than focus uselessly on that detail, I turned my attention to helping her recover her equilibrium.
"We're nearly halfway to the Solleu river. Do you want me to take over piloting for now? If you want a break, just say the word," I tried in a quiet, gentle tone. The angry glare I received in response wasn't very encouraging, but I still shouldn't have been surprised by her reply.
"I don't want a break. What I want is to know there's some kind of method to this madness. You aren't exactly inspiring a lot of trust. Not when you don't know something as basic as our current speed while doing all the navigating, Master," There was more than a bit of bite to the young woman's snarkiness, but I thought it was fairly justified, so I simply nodded.
"I overlooked something, Padawan, but there were exactly zero seconds I wasn't watching our possible immediate futures. Call me out on my mistakes by all means, whenever we're not in public, at least, but I advise you to think long, think hard, then think again, apprentice mine, before you so much as sidle up next to accusing me of ever being derelict in my duty to keep you whole and alive," If there was a little bit of bite to my reply, well, I thought that was fairly justified too.
Looking like she'd been shocked out of her snit by the very first hint of temper she'd seen from me, Ahsoka let out a long sigh, paused for an even longer moment, then quietly apologized, "I'm sorry about letting my feelings run away with me, Master. It's hard to believe I'm already making such a mess of things."
Listening to her miserable sigh, it was hard not to notice she was flushing that odd shade of off-mauve Togruta did when embarrassed or self-conscious.
"Twenty degrees to starboard, then start bringing the nose up, until I signal you to level off, please," I calmly ordered, as if we weren't in the middle of a serious exchange. Seeing that she'd complied with my directives a few seconds later, I checked our speed, found we were once more traveling well over a hundred and seventy-five kilometers per hour, then let the moment stretch out a bit further.
When my apprentice's self-consciousness started to increase again, I broke my silence, "You're not wrong about the dangers of allowing one negative emotion to begin feeding into another, Ahsoka. Especially when you let matters reach the point those feelings are all but stopping you from considering the decisions you're making critically. Down that steep, easy to find descent lays one of the quickest paths to the Dark Side."
"As for making a mess of things, I believe your performance so far has been exceptional. We aren't even into day three of your apprenticeship yet, and you're already making real contributions to more than one important mission. You're going to make mistakes, of course, but that's partly what this time in your life is for. Not simply to learn how to be a Jedi Knight, but learning how not to be one.'
Sensing my Padawan was struggling to divide her attention between an important conversation and her piloting, I moved on quickly, and as kindly as I could manage, "We'll talk about all of that later. Right now, you haven't wrecked anything, but our attention needs to be on helping the Gungans and Naboo. All right?"
Without turning from the rendering in front of her, my apprentice nodded a bit hesitantly, but she did seem somewhat relieved, so I was willing to call that a win.
Until the wall of the thirty-to-thirty-five-meter-wide tunnel we were currently in suddenly dissolved like fast running wax, as a huge and formless Thing oozed into the tunnel like half-frozen sludge.
Caught completely off-guard by something that hadn't even been obliquely hinted at by my foresight, it was only the fact I'd been using the Force to accelerate my thought processes in tandem with precognition that kept me from gaping uselessly as that immense Thing abruptly thrashed to an awful sort of life. Forcing its way further into our passageway, and through a wall I knew for a fact was at least a hundred meters thick.
"Roll left and dive!" I barked after only the briefest hesitation. It was good to see that quick reflexes and excellent training had caused Ahsoka to anticipate the first part of my order, yet frustrating that her bias toward starfighter piloting had nudged her to ascend in an attempt to open the distance between her and the hostile now on her six-o'-clock due to our continuing forward motion. Her correction was quick, but not quick enough to serve.
The mental exertion on my part bled over into equally great strain on my body, but the results of that exertion were immediate. Despite the intervening distance, and the way water altered sounds generated within it, the whump behind us was clearly audible. The real event, however, was the sudden incandescent flash to our rear. One so bright, it revealed every detail of both walls, floor, and the ceiling of our passageway. A moment more, and a roar I could only call cataclysmic rocked the bongo, as if a giant had taken the submersible in hand, shook it violently up and down, then flung it away in furious disgust.
Another passage-shaking, rock-dislodging vocalization ignored the fact we were thousands of feet underwater. The enormous monstrosity making its roaring heard as clearly as if its outburst had been made in the open air.
A roar that was followed by a wave of frustrated fury so intense, I could have cut it with my lightsaber, washed over us like a whirlwind of psychic razorblades. For me, it was distinctly uncomfortable, as some part of that unholy rage still managed to penetrate my formidable layers of psychic shields.
Ahsoka's drawn out screech of pain announced the experience was a good deal more intense than "uncomfortable" from her perspective. As if I wouldn't have noticed, when she slumped forward in her seat and the control-yoke slipped from her grasp.
Focusing on keeping my wanting-to-double vision a blurry-but-singular field of view, I reached over and slapped the actuator that transferred primary control to the co-pilot's control yoke, then spun the sub back the other way before I'd even settled back into my seat. Pushing hard to the right on the yoke, I forced it all the way forward, just in time to dive-slalom the spinning submersible into a side-tunnel perhaps half a meter wider than the bongo's "wingtips."
Metal ground alarmingly against stone first on the starboard side of the sub, then the roof, but I was too busy with the blaring proximity warning, caused by the "Unknown object of indeterminate mass and dimensions" we'd just dodged by threading the needle, however haphazardly, into this narrow passage.
"Any-, anyone catch the model of the speeder that just hit me?" Ahsoka blearily questioned from the seat to my left. I opened my mouth to respond, but the sudden grinding of enormous amounts of rock collapsing and smashing into the floor of the tunnel we'd just left caught and held my attention, as I urged the submersible to comply with the Force's initial suggestion concerning this trip.
Go. Faster.
Watching the speedometer readout climb past two hundred Kph, without the still-angry horror on our six appearing to lose any ground, I glanced at the readings from the aft sensors. It was chilling to see the stone of the tunnel appearing to simply dissolve as the creature reached it, before tons of now unstable rock above the disintegrated portions collapsed in the constantly fluxing Thing's wake. For all its unthinkably vast size, and immeasurable destructive potential, it was impossible to determine even a vague outline of the Thing's body. Constantly shifting from a serpentine shape to a vast writhing sphere, absolutely nothing appeared to be an impeding factor in its pursuit of us, because everything in the shapeless monster's way simply ceased to be, the moment it became an inconvenience for the Thing. I hadn't noticed at first, the discordance in well, everything around us, having begun so softly, yet not even the Force's connection to all this matter seemed proof against this unspeakable dissolution.
When the crystal, stone, coral, what have you went away? So did whatever strains of the Force which resonated within them. At least that's what it felt like was happening, though I did allow for the possibility the Thing was simply such an intense Dark Side locus, it contaminated anything it touched so quickly, that those things seemed to disappear from my perspective.
Skewing the bongo into another tunnel even narrower than the first, my next move was to plunge into a purely vertical shaft some two hundred meters on with a frightening scrape of the canopy protecting this compartment across the roof of the shaft. Trying to lose the thing by moving from what had been an X-and-Y-axis chase into a (hopefully) unanticipated plunge along the z-axis seemed worth a try.
Grimly studying the readings, I digested the revelation that the Thing's ability to unmake intervening matter seemed appallingly profound. The only thing that had seemed to even slow it had been that first incandescent flash I'd created via my neophyte fumbling-about with altering a substantial volume of lake water into something markedly more combustible. There was a hint of something momentous on the edges of how I perceived the Force, now, though. Something about the way that one sort of energy could be transmuted into another, and how energy could be redirected for a variety of purposes. Unfortunately, I was simply too swamped to pursue that tantalizing revelation, coming up with desperate piloting-tricks. Anything to keep us ahead of a monster that flowed as the hawkbat flew through anything and everything.
My heart felt like I'd just run thirty kilometers while using the Force to speed my movements the entire way, and the pressure in my head felt as if someone was using a grav-press to compress the matter my brain was made of into a hyper-dense fissile material, but I'd finally found the "bow wave" of the Thing's non-presence in the Force. A sudden flash of useful memory clicked into place without warning, as an even more useful bit of unlooked-for revelation began to demand my attention. Finding the non-presence wasn't a thing of precision, but it was just accurate enough to suggest when the part of the nameless horror that was making these sudden changes in direction to pursue us would be less than a few dozen meters aft.
WHUMP! The ten-meter-wide zone where all the energy in the water behind us for a good distance was shunted finally did as I'd hoped it would. The temperature within the bubble suddenly rising by one order of magnitude, and then another.
Who knew a fondness for watching nature documentaries in another galaxy would one day inspire a long-shot attempt at stymieing a nameless Horror of the Deep on a supposed-to-be-paradise world?
"An-, Knight Skywalker, what was that teeth-jarring blast of sound, and why was it followed by what I'm sure would have been a blindness-inducing flash of light, if it hadn't occurred directly aft of us?" Padme's question was shockingly germane, given that many people would have been more preoccupied with unanswerable questions concerning the pursuing horror, but then, the ex-queen's mind always did focus on solutions rather than problems.
"Noth-, nothing to be alarmed about. I-, I'm just, juuust using my grasp of physics and an admittedly incom-, incomplete understanding of one p-, part of the Force. What was it I was saying again? Oh yes, I'm persuading the Force to move a lot of energy from all around, into one itty-bitty spot. That's why the water behind us keeps freezing. Hope that was enough plasma," My explanation was perfectly comprehensible, so why did Padme feel so alarmed?
Frowning, I noticed my tunic was so wet, it seemed as if I'd just taken a swim outside. "I wonder when that happened?" I mused in a fuzzy, lackadaisical manner.
Well-honed reflex was all that forced the control yoke forward and right, before I finally hauled back on the yoke and leveled the sub off in a truly strange tunnel. One made entirely of a blue crystal that bounced the light of my creation back at me, like terrible radiant spears that stabbed my eyes.
The sounds caused by unthinkably large chunks of stone collapsing over a not-insignificant fraction of the tunnel we'd just been in abruptly caught up to us. They were a weirdly delayed sequence of prolonged rumbles and groans. These were followed by what sounded for all the galaxy like the rolling of thunder, as superheated rock cracked, fell, or fell beneath heavier deposits above in rapid succession. The bongo wouldn't stop fighting the yoke, as it shook, shook, and shook some more, yet all of that suddenly felt so very far away.
Faintly, I heard someone say, "He did something with the Force, trying to drive that Thing off. I can't be sure, but if I'm reading this right, I think he just created quite a lot of plasma. The aftereffects of doing so have brought down almost a kilometer of tunnel behind us, but I think my Master has overdone it. We should have been vaporized outright, but, how would he say this? He persuaded the Force to protect us, by shunting most all the consequences of the blast back that Thing's way."
Padme's voice came to me, then, as if she were yelling down the far end of a long tunnel to me at the other end, "Is something like that even possible? Jedi can do amazing things, certainly, but create and control the stuff from which the stars are made? I've never heard a story like that, Ahsoka."
Pausing for a moment, as if deciding whether or not she should say more, I heard my Padawan continue through ears that persisted in ringing ever more maddeningly, "I, that is, a friend of mine, she showed me some stories about events like this. Times where a trained Force Sensitive did something that seemed impossible. The histories said it can happen when a powerful Force Adept knew they were fighting for their life, when they were protecting others from being killed, or while they were facing a massive disaster."
The Padawan's voice sounded impossibly distant, despite my straining to hear every word, but I did manage to hear what she said when she continued a moment later, "The Jedi who recorded the stories thought the process likely had something to do with the Force Sensitive being pushed to the absolute limits of their abilities. Whatever the trigger, the result was the same. The Jedi or Sith experienced a sudden leap forward in their understanding of some aspect of the Force. In the stories that I read, it was always something that would allow the Jedi or Adept to overcome the impossible situation they found themselves in. It's all ancient history, though. The most recent story I was told about came from the time of the Great Galactic War, if that gives you any idea how old those stories are."
"Did I really do that?" I asked myself confusedly. Finally getting an inkling that something wasn't right. I would have loved to hear more about these ancient accounts, but a dull, distant impact suggested my head might have just hit something.
Trying to figure out if my head had just hit something, my awareness was suddenly and painfully hurled into a frozen-treacle-thick frustration, then thrust into the hot-coppery fury, and-frozen-old-rot hate of the Nameless Thing. It was throwing a tantrum of literally earthshaking proportions at having lost its prey. I knew that much like I knew my name.
Far hazier was the faint impression that said prey had nothing to do with the sub, and everything to do with me.
I was Dim no longer, after all.
That was the thought that dogged me, down into the warm, waiting oblivion.
--------------------
"Anakin? Can you hear-," A woman started to say. The sound of the speaker's voice instantly thrust me into razor-edged yet fractured memories. Images and impressions of our sub being chased by a nightmare that should not be, all of them flooding into the forefront of my thoughts. Genuine fear prompted me to bolt upright from wherever it was I'd been laying. Only to bang my head painfully against what turned out to be IG-1's torso.
Starry white pinpoints blossomed behind my eyes, in a head already pounding like Sith war-beasts were waging a slash-and-burn campaign through the misty reaches of my gray matter. Pain which prompted me to start swearing in ways Dark Woman definitely wouldn't have approved of.
When I could see again, albeit with a fuzzy halo surrounding everything that didn't stay completely still, I found my droid companion had scooted back a bit, but he was still scanning me with a sensor array built into the underside of his right arm. He was in the process of displaying a basic resonance-scan of my cranial cavity, but it took me a moment to place who he might be displaying it for.
My thought processes immediately screeched to a stop, because I'd known who everyone within ten meters of me was since I was six, and right now, I was getting absolutely nothing from the Force.
A familiar feminine voice, Ahsoka's, I placed after a second, seemed to anticipate my straits, "Field Aid wasn't my strong suit, Master, but if I'm reading the-, reading IG-1's scans right, I think you're suffering from Force-exhaustion. There's good news, though! The systemic distress you're experiencing appears to be surprisingly minor, so, unless I'm completely misremembering things, you should be able to place your presence in the Force within two or three hours!"
My Padawan was stating I would regain the most elementary level of "equilibrium" any half-trained Force-sensitive would possess almost instinctively, an hour and change after the Gungan military committed an act of war against the Naboo, or at least that's what I wanted our as yet nameless eavesdropper to believe.
Ahsoka's acting was really quite good, for a complete neophyte. There was no question about my being quite a ways from my best after that madcap struggle not to become the foundation of the local food-chain, but complete Force-exhaustion wasn't too unbelievable an exaggeration, I hoped. I had my suspicions as to the identity of the individual who'd purloined my dormant-scanner-with-biometrics-reader-activation-mechanism trick, but that's all they were right now. Suspicions.
"Luck, thy name is Anakin Skywalker," I silently groused, the pain in my head and my temporary difficulties with the Force making me more than a little ungrateful and sullen. The fact was, we were lucky to be alive. If that revelation about the Force as it related to redirecting energy hadn't already been percolating in my subconscious somewhere, the three of us would likely be receiving the Sarlacc Treatment right about now. The Thing's interest in me as a Force Sensitive was entirely too focused in all the most unwholesome ways for me to believe we'd have been anything so fortunate as to be immediately dissolved.
Gathering my focus, I answered in a voice that sounded distressingly raspy and weak, "That's good news, Padawan. I should probably, (intense coughing fit), probably be grateful I didn't deafen myself to the Force. Permanently, I mean." That might be laying it on a little thick, if our spy was the being I believed him to be, but I knew from experience that when someone really wanted something to be true, there was a strong tendency to believe in the possibilities that aligned most closely with that desire.
Looking about the area behind the pilot's and co-pilot's seats where they'd stretched me out flat, I was about to ask where we were, when Padme spoke up from behind me. For the first time since I'd known her, she sounded afraid and not at all in control of herself.
"What by the Seven Gates of Chaos was that, that Thing? Why did it try to ambush us, and what was it you did to drive it off? Ahsoka has this absurd theory about a Force-conjured plasma eruption, and to hear her tell it, we're supposed to have survived being within a few hundred meters of that eruption. That's clearly impossible, so I'm afraid I must insist upon a rational explanation."
Swaying a bit as I propped myself fully upright, I waved off IG-1's offer of a supportive limb to ensure I stayed propped up, then began reviewing my memories. The recollection of what had happened was clearing up almost unnaturally fast, given I couldn't presently call on the Force without significant difficulty, and the continued terror-campaign of the imagined war-beasts in my gray matter. Whatever the reason, there was in fact an answer for the upset former monarch contained within my memories of what just happened.
"Tutaminis" I offered, encouraged by the fact my voice sounded fairly normal this time. The name of the broad designation for an entire discipline of Force-abilities did nothing to assuage Padme's distress, of course, so I tried to explain in more conventional terms.
"When that Thing was almost on top of us? I had a sudden flash of inspiration from the Force. It was suddenly obvious to me that, whichever Gungan made that thing, and it was a Gungan Dark Sider who gave that Thing a parody of life, they incorporated some kind of, forgive the apparent oxymoron, natural dissonance into the horror's most basic structure. A dissonance in total opposition to everything natural, which only grows stronger with every century that passes for that undying Thing," My latest attempt to elaborate didn't seem to be doing the trick, either, but I motioned for her to give me one more minute before resuming her inquisition.
"In any case, the Force showed me something I can't really put into words, but it convinced me that a sufficiently dynamic natural process might at least deter the Thing. I had no idea how to make something like that happen under the circumstances, but just giving up and letting that Thing eat us wasn't an option, so I just kept working the problem. All the while doing everything I could to keep us ahead of the Thing. It wasn't long after that, while I was cursing the limited command of Tutaminis stopping me from generating such a process, when that earlier bit of inspiration sort of slotted itself into place. It was like placing the last missing piece in a gigantic mental puzzle, and all of a sudden, something that had seemed impossibly complex only a moment earlier now seemed, well, not easy, but not impossible, either. Then I just, did what needed to be done," The explanation coming out of my mouth sounded even to my ears like the most fanciful, convenient, utterly implausible bit of mysticism ever spoken in my hearing, but it also happened to be the truth.
Crossing her arms over her chest, Padme looked down at me with a skepticism which reminded me professional liars spent entire days trying to convince her up was down and wrong was right. When she spoke up again, her voice absolutely brimmed with that skepticism.
"And just what was it, according to you, that needed to be done?" I'd never seen this hard, skeptical, pointedly determined side of Padme before, and given my present condition, I could have gone a while longer without the dubious pleasure. Sighing, I struggled to find words that would convince her.
"I used the Force to shift a large amount of energy from the surrounding environment into the smallest possible point I could sense in the Thing's path. The resulting reaction created enough plasma to drive the Thing back, before the rapidly expanding volume of superheated steam that had been a great many tons of solid ice a moment earlier caused a large section of the tunnel we'd just vacated to collapse. At least that's what the evidence indicates happened after I passed out."
Another thought occurred to me, and I gave voice to it before Padme could respond, "I think it's been a very, very long time, since the Thing's been hurt, if it ever has been. That, more than anything, is probably why we're still alive."
Maybe it was the matter-of-fact way that I'd answered, all the previous times I'd been honest with her paying dividends, or something else altogether. Whatever it was, the hard glint in Padme's dark eyes faded, and her harshly skeptical expression softened into the warm composure more usual for her.
Taking a moment to finger-comb hair that had become more than a little disheveled during all of the sub's extreme maneuvers, she considered me for a moment. Letting me see her search for the right words. When she finally did reply, her tone contained a touch of apology, "I'm sorry for interrogating you so harshly, Anakin. This entire situation has simply been so far outside my experience, I'm having a difficult time accepting everything that's happened, and all that I've been told. A desperate journey through perilous territory, an ancient horror lurking in one of the world's dark places, and a Jedi conjuring star-stuff to drive off that monster? It all sounds like the makings of a holo-novel's plot, you must admit."
Tilting my head to look up at her, I ignored the dizziness that only grew worse when I shrugged, then answered, "I've made my peace with a life that seems more like a progression of holo-novels than anything else. As for what just happened, believe me, I wish there'd been no need for anything so dramatic, if for no other reason than my current condition makes finding an upward passage connecting to the Solleu the next thing to impossible."
A chill went through the compartment at this statement. Ahsoka announcing how long his connection to the Force would remain out of commission had made them all aware of this latest problem, but no one had addressed it. Not until his admission made the problem real.
It was a bit of a shock, realizing from the way both women were looking at him that they nevertheless expected the next thing to impossible from him as a matter of course. A shock, and a burden, like the weight of a heavy pack settling into place across his chest and shoulders.
"I suppose it's fortunate, then, that during our desperate flight from the Thing, I cast my awareness far enough ahead to See a path to the surface. I'd thought for a moment that we might use the sunlight to drive the Thing back into the depths, but as soon as I saw that slowing down enough to negotiate some of the necessary turns would get us killed, I gave up on the idea." It was gratifying, seeing the relieved smiles on my listeners' faces. Unfortunately, the moment only lasted a moment, as Padme was much too canny to believe our problems would be resolved as easily as my announcement might have suggested.
"Judging by the seriousness of your expression and the lack of smile, Knight Skywalker, I find myself thinking it likely there is one or more complication tied up with using the route in question. Would I be correct in assuming this is in fact the case?" The incisive question posed by the ex-ruler confirmed my own assessment of her perceptiveness, and prompted me to nod my agreement, albeit slowly enough my head wouldn't feel like it was trying to tumble free of my neck.
Holding up a fist, I extended my index-finger, then answered, "First, there's the fact I had nothing like the time to See more than the path in question being safe to traverse during that particular moment. I'm reasonably sure I would have seen hints of anything imminent that affected the caverns and passages in a lasting way, like an underwater earthquake or core-surge triggering a structural collapse, but the same cannot be said for more transient hazards. If a twenty-meter-long juvenile Colo Claw Fish has since wandered into one of the caverns we need to pass through, we'd have no idea it was present and in search of dinner until we encountered it. Should an unstable rock-shelf be one minor impact from collapse, you get the idea."
Unfolding my middle finger to lay beside my other digit, I ticked off the second point for my audience, "Even assuming we avoid any intervening perils to reach the surface, I'm not by any means positive of where precisely we'll be topside. Somewhere off the coast north and west of Theed, I'm reasonably sure, but whether that's five or fifty kilometers from the mouth of the Solleu? Your guess is nearly as good as mine."
Pausing because I could see from Padme's frown she had something to add, it quickly became clear I wasn't the only bearer of bad tidings, as she pointed out seriously, "The aquatic division of the RNSF tries to keep this quiet, but there's an old, very visibly scarred Sando Aqua Monster that sleeps on and irregular prowls the drop-off of the continental shelf, approximately thirty-five kilometers north by northwest of the mouth of the Solleu River. It hasn't attacked any shipping or commercial fishing vessels in my father's lifetime, but my grandfather was a marine biologist, and he was fond of telling the story of how, when he was a boy, the then-unscarred Monster came up the Solleu more than three kilometers inland. It wrecked and devoured the contents of several very large aquaculture operations, before finally being driven back out to sea with repurposed demolition-charges and dozens of sonic grenades. The year I was born, it tried to repeat the feat, but King Veruna's predecessor had in the interim overseen the construction of a sonic-deterrent system at the Solleu's mouth to protect Theed's riverfront and the aquaculture pens."
Sensing there was more, I wagged a finger at Ahsoka to forestall the obvious 'What does this have to do with anything?' and waited to hear Padma provide the answer to just that question.
"Knight Skywalker, no one except the big commercial fishing-skimmers, the equally large and well-protected container-ships, and the shielded Royal Fishery cutters, goes out of sight of land anywhere within the fifty kilometers north and south of the mouth of the Solleu. Private boats used to disappear in the area, again during my father's day, but that nonsense was made strictly illegal, after a Fishery cutter that had its primary power knocked out by a freak lightning strike limped back into port. The way the report reads, and keep in mind many of these men were ex-RNSF, the cutter was attacked less than five minutes after its shield-emitter spun down. I hesitate to ascribe intelligence, let alone malice, to such a beast, but consider the logistics of leaving the ocean bed to attack a target on the surface, for whatever reason. A bottom-dwelling predator, one which is by no stretch of the imagination fast, swam the five miles straight up, right as a normally impregnable vessel lost its defense. That is, at the very least, cause for some concern, given our present situation, I think."
It sounded like an old wives tale. Then again, I'd actually seen what a Sando Aqua Monster on the hunt was like, for individuals traveling by bongo. The memory of that sight on the big screen was surprisingly crisp, and it filled me with a touch of foreboding.
Nodding to show I wasn't dismissing her concerns, I unfolded my ring-finger to count off my third point, and went on, "Even assuming that both our ascent, and our progress inland to reach the good General's present position happen without further incident, our plan to reach the Gungans without being detected is a wash. My backup plan for our being spotted by the Gungans early was to rush the General using the Force, before anything unfortunate could kick off. Delivering the Boss's new orders to defuse the situation. Given my present condition, however, that plan is a wash, as well."
Looking at my three companions, I spread my hands and invited rather hopefully, "I'm quite open to suggestions. Any suggestions."
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**A/N: Got this one out as quickly as I could. I would have liked to move things further along, but the concept of the Thing, the ensuing complications, and other things just took hold of me. I pledge the next chapter will definitely get the party out of the sub, into some resolution of the present conflict, and well, onwards.
I wish I had more time to write, honestly. I do my editing as I go to save time, but that's a flawed methodology to begin with. Even so, it means a lot to me when someone reaches out because Reddit redirected them here in search of an SW SI, or someone gets enthusiastic to see a new chapter go up. Please, don't mistake the low post-volume for a lack of interest or uncertainty as to where the plot's going.
Anyways, hope this one was fun for all of you. I'll see you all again as soon as my boring WoT-Jumpchain-fic gets its new chapter.