Cleansing Fire

[Rugs]

The Sith soldier seemed perfectly willing to lead his Force-wielding hostage-takers into the spaceport. What few other Sith they encountered along the way offered no resistance. Whether that was from Visarion’s rank, their attention being elsewhere, or fear for their lives, Tsubasa could not say. Whatever the cause, he was happy to avoid more violence and bloodshed. And more of that perversion, he thought, nose wrinkled as he hurried along behind Visarion.

Below, the spaceport descended into chaos. The Defel pushed through the broken Sith line in a desperate, fearful tide. Tsubasa focused on his every step, on moving through the port and finding his ship. It was the only way to keep the suffering and death down below from overwhelming him.

We will pay a penance after this, Sith, he swore silently as they entered the observation deck. You and I.

The observation deck, or at least the part they reached of it, was clear. What remained of the Sith garrison was forming a line on the far side, weapons pointed at the ground floor. Tsubasa ignored them as he scanned the landing bay for the Vagabond.

“There,” he said, pointing to his ship, on the far side from there present vantage point. It was a sleek ship, silver with blue accents on the hull and two powerful engines jutting out to either side. A hulking Imperial transport sat to one side of it, a boxy freighter of some make Tsubasa couldn’t place, to the other.

A fuel line, snaking out from one of the bulbous tanks along the side of the landing bay, was still connected to the Vagabond’s underbelly.

I hope the refueling finished before this all started. Even if it hadn’t, the ship had enough fuel left to get out of Sith space and to another port. If they could get past the blockade.

“We need to get the fuel line disconnected,” Tsubasa said. “I can do that. You go aboard and get the engines going. You’ll have to take Ifrit with you.”

The cavernous city shook again, rolling thunder as the crust above them inched closer to critical failure. “Time is against us,” Tsubasa said. “We must act now.”

Below, something crashed and the Defel broke through into the spaceport. The Sith soldiers opened fire. Tsubasa’s heart ached, but he knew the opportunity as it presented itself. “Come,” he said, bursting to motion, “this may be our only chance.”

Two of the soldiers thought to turn their rifles on the Matukai barreling toward them. Tsubasa was upon them, sweeping the legs from under one with his wan-shen before he could get a blast off and ducking under the shots of another. A palm heel strike to the man’s chin from below, driven by Tsubasa’s rising motion and the Force, put the soldier on the ground. Tsubassa paid little mind as he vaulted to the ground and hurried on toward his ship. Ifrit took flight and darted toward the loading ramp to make way for Visarion.

[hugo]

Fear.  Frenzy.  Desperation.  Rage.  Visarion could taste it in the air, and it was invigorating.  It fed him, and he fed it.  The world in front of his Hapan eyes seemed dim and distant, a mere shadow of the awful reality behind it.  Destruction and discord abounded in every direction, to every sense.  The stench of corpses, the wrenching cries of the mourning, the violent rumbling of the world's crust above and the city's ground below; all of it a gentle ambiance to Visarion's consciousness.   The soldiers, laying their lives down in service of their Empress, were mannequins on the ends of strings, mere objects puppeted by the Force's terrible will.  The Defel were mites, swarming and furious, but incidental.  All of it was nothing; surviving was everything.

Visarion only nodded at Tsubasa's directions.  

He followed Tsubasa as closely and quickly as his limited athleticism and resurgent pain of his injuries would allow, the ignited blade of his lightsaber providing cover when the remaining troopers took notice of their charge and opened fire.  As Tsubasa struck down a pair of them with his usual grace and precision, Visarion tapped into his newfound wellspring of willpower and summoned forth another torrent of lightning, more terrible than before.  An arc found a third troopers helmet, eliciting a horrible scream.  The Sith tossed her over the railing to the crowd below with all the ceremony afforded the exhausted end of a late night cigarra. 

As useless as his choice power had been against the Archeri, it proved effective enough against his countrymen.  He stunned the remaining two with a light burst of lightning and tugged the light repeaters from their hands.  Visarion all but licked his lips as sickly purple tendrils extended from either hand as before and danced up the helpless soldiers' legs and through their whole body.  He consumed them much as he had their comrades outside.  They withered as every ounce of their being went into his, and he swelled with power.  The soft throbbing that had returned to his left side subsided once more, and he felt whole.  I do wonder if Tsubasa will have anything to say about this, he wondered rhetorically.

As his invaluable if prudish new ally darted to see to the fuel lines, Visarion deactivated his saber and bounded to the boarding ramp of what must have been the Vagabond after the droid.  It lowered as he came closer, at Ifrit's direction if he had to guess.  Tsubasa said he'd need the droid, which was something of a relief as the finer points of takeoffs and landings had never been a strong suit of his.  But before he could board the freighter, he looked over his shoulder to notice a group of the swiftest Defel advancing on their ship.  With a grimace he turned to face them and ignited his crimson blade once more.

There were a half dozen of them armed haphazardly with whatever they managed to pick up along the way--mostly ad hoc clubs or the odd blaster.  They didn't have time for this.  Every second counted. 

"If one of you comes a step closer, I will kill you all." he snarled, his voice amplified by rage.  They froze, sizing up the odds.  Before they could make a decision however, a loud grown above was immediately followed by a deafening explosion that knocked most of them to the ground and caused Visarion to stumble.  Another massive chunk of the rock ceiling had fallen, striking a fuel tank on the opposite end of the circular docking area.  The resulting pressure spread flame in every direction in half an instant, engulfing a nearby troop transport which itself then exploded.  

Once his weak eyes had recovered from the sudden flash, Visarion saw only chaos.  The inferno was growing consuming any nearby flammables.  Even far away and behind his mask, he was sick from the smell of singed fur. 

"Visarion, we do not have much time." the droid chirped from just inside the ship.  He obliged, leaving the ramp open behind him as he boarded the unfamiliar ship.  He followed Ifrit to the cockpit, and together they initiated the launch sequence.  Every second counted now.  He could see the flames growing.  The square freighter nearest them was beginning its takeoff. 

He supposed he could leave Tsubasa for dead, that would be the most Sith-like thing to do.  Despite appearances, Visarion was not always Sith-like.  This perfect stranger had saved his life, and leaving Tsubasa to die and lifting his ship would have been poor recompense.  Besides he was in no mood to fly a ship through a crumbling cave into an impenetrable blockade all on his own.   

The Matukai would have had to be deaf, blind, and stupid not to notice the recent escalation of circumstances around them, so he felt no need to call out to him.  He knew it as well as Visarion did.  Every second counted. 

[Rugs]

Tsubasa smelled starship fuel as he twisted the line’s heavy metal head free of its connection to the Vagabond and tossed it aside. It was an awkward task; the damnable thing had a bent lip that nearly got stuck in the ship until Tsu muscled it free. Drops of the stuff, clear and pungent spilled across the ground, freshly dusted with small rock shards from the crumbling ceiling above.

The Force swirled with chaos. Wild, animalistic rage, bone-deep terror — it assaulted him from every which way, until he felt as a dinghy, tossed about on the waves of a roaring storm with no end in sight. Tsubasa’s tattooed face twisted with effort as he tried to shut out the noise while he closed the Vagabond’s fuel connection port.

His Sith companion, for all the help he’d been, was little aid in calming the situation. Tsubasa heard a shout from Visarion, a threat that carried over the noise and fighting and death, though the ship’s landing struts obscured his view of the situation. He could feel Vasarion, pulsating with malevolent power.

Then, he felt a warning.

A subtle thing, here and gone in the space of a heartbeat as a crashing from overhead announced their time was nearly up. Tsubasa, drilled so thoroughly from his earliest days to trust the Force that doing such as was an instinct, threw his hands up around him. A shimmering blue bubble coalesced the crust slab hit the fuel tanks and an explosion ripped through the spaceport.

The shield, and the happenstance of throwing the fuel line away earlier, were all that kept the flames from consuming him. Flames, pushed up the fuel line from the exploding tank, spewed across the ground like steam from a geyser before the line itself burst into flame. The heavy metal head, connected to his ship only a minute or two prior, melted and fused to the ground.

Tsubasa dropped his shield and staggered against the side of his ship. The barrier protected him from the flames and the worst of the pressure wave, but did nothing for the bone-shaking sound that left him dazed and struggling vainly to find his center or the Force.

Ship... he thought dully, scooping up his wan-shen from the duracrete floor, have to get on the ship.

He stumbled his way aboard the Vagabond, ears ringing. He tried to ignore the charred dead, or the dying, writhing on the ground and cloaked in flame. The smell of burning fur made him want to vomit.

A heavy penance, he thought as he yelled at Ifrit to close the boarding ramp.

He only offered a Visarion a look as he hurried to the cockpit and slumped into the pilot’s seat. “Sit down or strap yourself to something,” he said. He took a deep breath and reached for the Force again. This time, he found it--a tenuous grasp, but it was all he needed. As he sprinted through pre-flight checks — essentially making sure they had enough fuel to get off the ground and into hyperspace — he called on more of the Force and focused it on his body.

By the time the Vagabond cleared the ground, engines roaring, he felt something approaching normal again.

“This will be rough,” he warned Visarion as the ship rose above the doomed city. Ahead and to their right, a huge section of the ceiling broke free and, for the first time, a turbolaser blast followed the crumbling, burning rock. It struck something and exploded, sending flames and smoke and debris soaring into the air. Tsubasa grit his teeth against the wave of frenzied pain and despair that assaulted him anew and gunned the ship into motion. The engines whined against the Af’el’s high gravity.

Above them, the ceiling began to crack and buckle. Another section of crust failed on the far side of the space port behind them and collapsed in a flurry of molten rock and fire.

“Ifrit,” Tsubasa said, voice deceptively calm for the fear that warped his stomach into knots. “Prepare us for a jump as soon as we get above the surface.” The Vagabond hurtled toward the tunnel out of the city. The cavern shook so violently as the cave ins continued that the ship itself shuddered from the shockwaves assaulting the air.

“Tsubasa, such a maneuver carries a significantly heightened likelihood of failure,” Ifrit warned. “The Vagabond is not designed for such stresses, to say nothing of the added strain of this world’s gravity.”

“She’s not designed to run a blockade, either,” Tsubasa shot back as they dove into the tunnel. The Vagabond’s searchlights flickered on, but they offered scant aid, with as hard as Tsubasa pushed the ship. “We’ve got one shot to get out of here.

“The Force has led us this far.” He offered a sidelong glance to Visarion. “It won’t fail us now.”

[hugo]

Visarion yielded instantly once Tsubasa had entered the cockpit.  It was no use slowing him down, as he was the pilot here and the Vagabond was his shit after all.  The Sith hopped to the nearest seat and did what he could to assist the Epicanthix and the droid as they worked earnestly to get the freighter up and out of the blazing spaceport.  From his perch in what was likely the navigator's place, he could see the chaotic scene he'd left only moments before further disintegrating.  They were not alone in their skyward escape; several of the surviving vessels were either rising above them or in one of a few stages of takeoff.  

Now Visarion wasn't sure at all about this atmospheric hyperspace jump business.  Having done what he could at the terminal in front of him, he closed his eyes and searched for calm in the Force.  Reaching beyond his own body and out to his surroundings, he could feel Tsubasa, and something wasn't right.  Perhaps he'd been hit in the preceding engagements and Visarion had missed it, but it seemed more likely that he was caught in one of the several violent explosions that had rocked the area a few seconds before.  He didn't appear injured, only dazed, diminished almost.  That wasn't good.  He was counting on his Matukai collaborator to get him off this Force-forsaken rock in one piece.

He tried to focus, channeling the fear that pervaded both inside and outside the cockpit.  He would do what he could to siphon what energy he had to Tsubasa, hoping he might transfer the last remnants of the life energies the Sith had consumed earlier to Tsubasa in order to blunt the trauma and give them a better chance of making the jump without killing themselves.  He would certainly feel it and might no be so terribly pleased, but at least he could see the Sith were capable of a sort of healing, even if it was perverse for his liking.

It was no easy feat, to use Force Drain and then transfer the resulting energies to another, but it could be done.  Centering his mind, Visarion  sought to touch his.  He was no longer in a flying metal shell encased in a metal suit below a rapidly liquefying planetary crust.  Instead, he was crouched among the black trees, eerie red mist hanging above the pale ground and swirling around him.  It was his grove, his place in the Force.  It had warped and evolved over the years, but it had been with him since his earliest Padawan days.  A refuge to which he could retreat when he needed to douse himself in the Force's raw, cosmic energies.  It was quiet, distant, a place of focus and meditation.  Absently, he eased off his helmet, breathing relatively clean air for the first time in what felt like ages.

As the Vagabond began to whir and hum, and eventually shudder slightly.  He awoke, brought back to grim reality by the ship's lurch.  Visarion watched as the scene underneath seem to descend, growing further steadily as the freighter made its ascent.  Tsubasa piloted the ship to the crumbling mouth of the surface access tunnel, deftly dodging the now raining debris and into the dimness of the long tunnel upward.  Blinded by his Hapan eyes, Visarion returned to his faux forest, reaching as deeply as he could to aid Tsubasa in his maneuvers.

He emerged again as they shot like a hot slug out of the cavern's entrance into Af'El's barren atmosphere.  Turbolaser bolts zoomed by them from above, falling like an angry god's awful vengeance.  He could make out the distant outlines of several Sith battlegroups far above in low-orbit.  It would be no time before they were caught on their sensors and fighters deployed to catch them in the upper atmosphere.  Cue the atmospheric hyperspace jump.  Hopefully, Ifrit was dead wrong, but Visarion's faith was a little shaken as Tsubasa flipped a series of controls, activating the hyperdrive and preparing them to make the risky jump from just above the surface.  It whined, and a vibration, subtle at first but growing quickly, rocked the ship's entirety.  The brown hues of the planet around them. the burning red of the laser fire, and the haze of the sky above began to stretch and bend, the hyperdrive complaining louder than ever.  As the colors turned to blurred lines and the Vagabond shot skyward, Visarion closed his eyes again and returned to the grove to await his fate and trust in the Force, whether it led brought him to oblivion or sanctuary.  

"We have done what we can and we now must place our trust in the Force... friend.  "  Visarion said, with uncharacteristic generosity.