Writer

((Done and Done.)) Cargo Hold, Millennial "Thank you, Niera," Visas said softly. Then, her head turned slightly, sensing Juhani's approach. As Juhani knocked, Visas was already moving toward the door. She keyed the door open and then took a step back. "Juhani," she said, nodding her head slightly. "Have we heard back from your apprentice? Or the rest of the strike team?"

((Both of them? If I read you right, Juhani's player hasn't gone MIA? ))

If our former player of Visas and Juhani has vanished, I'd be more than happy to take them on. Me taking Juhani especially would make it easier for us all when Perdy decides to ask Juhani about Arai

Good gracious, WHY? Just a few posts ago, you were calling this EPIC, and quite frankly, I agreed with you. You're going to give up all this awesomeness we've got going because you accidentally put Part III second?

For a moment, Arai could do nothing more than stare at him in amazement. Wrong with him? What could possibly be wrong with him? But her mind refused to cycle through a catalog of possible illnesses he might have contracted that would give him these symptoms. The anger with which he'd replied to her put her on the defensive. Now, she had to defend her argument. "How can you say that?" she asked sharply. "Pauel even said that the only form the stuff isn't toxic in is a gas, which by the way, I can't quite wrap my head around." Her eyes narrowed as she snatched his hand up and stabbed a finger into the tattoo. "And this is not a gas."

It was the coughing fit that finally made Arai turn to see what was happening. They had just entered hyperspace, so there wasn't much for her to do anymore anyway. Dom clearly not in good shape, pale and fumbling with a syringe. As the syringe clattered to the floor, Arai sprang into action, catching it up with the Force. Kolto. "Force, Dom," she breathed, spinning the needle around and pressing it into his neck, gentle but firm. The kolto began working almost instantly, but it took almost a minute for his coughing to subside. When he was finally breathing more easily, Arai turned her chair to face him and sat down again, the syringe still in her hand. "From where I'm sitting, that doesn't look all that good for the Found," she said. Her tone was soft, but the words conveyed a sense of betrayal. This was what he wanted for her, for anyone who was Force-sensitive?

((JP with FFWM)) Arai sensed the change of tone in Dom, but she had no time to consider it yet. They made it to Pauel's ship and Arai used the Force to trigger the ramp open. She ran up the ramp, calling back to Dom, "Hurry! Soldier boy's on our heels." Wordlessly, Dom charged up the ramp behind her and headed for the engine room. During their first trip together to Nar Shaddaa, he'd fumbled with the engine controls. Since then, he'd learned a little more about the controls themselves and was a little pleased to find that this ship wasn't terribly different from most of the others he'd worked with. For all its dangers, bypassing the standard startup procedure was a simple process. Flip this switch, press that button, cross these wires with those wires, type in this little string of code. Once that was done, all systems would read false-positive, allowing whoever was at the controls to fly off without so much as consulting the computers for anything. Admittedly, it was dangerous. There weren't many people who could fly a ship that was only half functional. Thankfully, Arai was one of them. "Ready!" he shouted. Sluggishly, the ship lifted off the ground, its engines screaming in protest at being used before they'd fully warmed up. On the ground, Mica heard the noise, recognized it for what it was, and charged toward it, fishing a tracking device from his bag as he ran. If he couldn't catch the fugitives, at least he could keep track of where they were going. The ship wobbled just a little and as Arai worked hard to steady it, Mica hurled the tracking device. He grinned in satisfaction as it stuck, half a second before the ship lurched skyward. Then his grin faded and he turned back in search of Perdante. Foolish girl, running off after phantoms... -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- In the cockpit of Pauel's ship, Arai fought with the controls, keeping the ship aloft while the computers finished their startup processes. Several long seconds later, the computers seemed to realize the ship was in flight and they began working with Arai; the flight path smoothed significantly and it wasn't long until they left Nar Shaddaa's atmosphere. She cut the engines and checked the navicomputer, only to find that it was still pulling up. As she waited, Dom entered the cockpit and sat down beside her. "Just waiting on the-" she began, but then the navicomputer beeped. "Never mind." She pulled up a list of coordinates the ship had previously flown to. Most of them were easily identifiable. One stood out as utterly unknown to her and she showed it to Dom. "I think that's our heading," she said. She gave the navicomputer instructions to create a safe flight path to those coordinates from their current location and waited. Minutes later, the computer chimed that the course was laid in, and Arai sent the ship into hyperspace. It was only then that she realized that Dom had barely spoken a word to her since they crawled out of the dumpster...

As they ran, Arai laughed softly. "Question what they stand for and every Jedi reacts more or less the same," she said. "She and the soldier are in pursuit." She took the lead, guiding Dom toward Pauel's ship, which she had managed to locate in his mind in spite of the ostanovium haze. They came to an intersection and Arai sent Force projections down one street while turning Dom a completely different direction. With his ostanovium tattoo, he would be harder to pinpoint, so she simply masked her own presence in the Force, leaving the projections behind as a nice distraction. "I've done what I can to throw them off our track," she told Dom, "but it won't last long. We're just under a minute away from Pauel's ship and we'll have to do a cold-start." She grinned. "Just like last time we came to Nar Shaddaa together. Think you can still pull it off?"

"The pleasure is mine, Zen," Arai answered with a faint smile. "Any friend of Dom's is a friend of mine." When Zen asked if they were finished with Pauel, Arai glanced at Dom before turning back to Zen. "No, we're finished with Pauel. The Republic can do as they wish with him now." She shifted and looked back to Dom. "Speaking of which, I think it's time we move out, hey Dom?"

But his moment of hesitation was his undoing. He'd barely aimed his blaster when it was torn forcibly from his hand and compressed to about the size of it's power pack. Indeed, the majority of the blaster had essentially been turned into a fancy metal case for the pack. Arai smiled faintly, tilted her head to one side and shook her head. "Somehow I don't think that worked out quite like you expected," she said softly. "Go your own way, Republic. We're leaving whether you like it or not." She paused, turning to Dom and gesturing to Zen. "So the big guy's a friend of yours?"

Arai's eyes narrowed slightly. To hear the young woman's entire life story hadn't been exactly what Arai had been expecting. Maybe she'd been away from the Jedi too long to fully expect what one of them would do. As the Jedi asked her for her own story, Arai scowled and shook her head. "What's this?" she asked, "pre-spy training? Keep the crooks chit-chatting while your best buds surround them? I don't think. We have a ship to find and I'm not about to let a trigger-happy communications officer and an inexperienced Jedi stall us." She turned to Mica, stared at him for a moment, then said, "Perhaps you'd like to check on Sal. Pauel may not be my caliber of dangerous, but I'm sure you know how dangerous he is." Then turning to Dom, she said, "Come on, let's get out of here."

In one fluid motion, almost too quick to be visible, Arai drew her own lightsaber, the familiar snap-hiss producing an emerald green blade. "I am a threat to you, soldier," she said softly, "just as long as you are threatening my friend." She shifted slightly, moving her lightsaber from one hand to the other as her eyes bored into Mica. "You recognized Dom from a Republic watch-list, I'm sure. Even if they didn't have my image, they'd have my name with how I left the Jedi Order. Roll it around in your head a bit, soldier, see if it rings a bell. It's Arai. Arai Elan." She turned her gaze to the young Jedi. "What of you, Jedi?" she asked. "Did your Masters tell you my story? Did they explain to you how the High Council tried to exile me? Have they admitted that I saw shatterpoints in even the members of the High Council? That I was able to manipulate those points, effectively turning the High Council into quarreling children as I made my escape?" She scowled. "Of course they didn't!" she spat, her tone full of contempt. "My departure from the Order was their greatest failure since they lost the original Dark Siders. They wouldn't tell you my story, or of any other failure lest you begin to believe they are flawed." She shifted again, putting her lightsaber back in her right hand, where it was most comfortable. "Let me ask you one question, Jedi. Do you trust the Order with your life?"

As Arai dropped to the ground behind Dominic, she turned her full attention to the Jedi. When Dom mentioned he'd met the Jedi before, Arai's examination of the woman intensified. The thought that there was a Jedi that Dom knew and Arai didn't struck her as a little surprising, especially since she had been exiled after he left the Order. At the Republic soldier's snarling rebuttal, Arai scowled. "Fugitive or not, this is my best friend you're talking to," she said and though her tone was quiet, there was a distinctly sharp edge to it. "You would do well to remember that, Republic."

((JP with FFWM. Real one this time, with more than a one-liner from her )) Arai laughed softly as they crashed into the garbage bags. She'd been too preoccupied with her sick-act to fully realize what was happening until she was tumbling through the air with Dom. Now that her mind had caught up with her body, she found the situation rather entertaining. Then her mind recalled what had been said and she pushed herself up onto her knees, staring down at Dom with an eyebrow arched in partial amusement. "Republic fugitive?" she asked, the faint trace of a smirk on her lips. "That's an element of your past you hadn't gotten around to mentioning yet." Shaking her head, she went on, "No matter. I'm sure it'd have come up eventually... probably along with my own less-than-sparkling status." Unlike Arai, the tension wasn't broken by their flight through the window. Instead, he became supremely aware of the position that their fall had landed them in - what with her straddling his hips and all. It took him a while to detach that thought from his mind and until he did that, he didn't even register that she had been talking. "Um, yeah, I uh..." What was he trying to say again? Something about 'Republic fugitive...' Hang on a moment. Had she been...laughing? Dominic pushed himself up on his elbows and eyed her suspiciously. "You made a surprisingly quick recovery." As if suddenly realizing how right he was, Arai's smile faded. "I... yeah... a bit of subtle trickery..." Hurriedly, she added, "Had I known I'd need to, I'd have tried to tell you in advance, but... he didn't exactly give me the time." He narrowed his eyes a bit, and began to shift out from underneath her. "You used the Force on me." He said quietly. He knew Arai, and had seen her use the same scheme before - so deducing what she had done was a mere matter of connecting the dots. Her mouth opened and shut at least three times before any noise came out, and then twice more before she got out any words. "It... I, I had to be a bit... imprecise. With both of you in something of a haze put off by that ostanovium, I had to cover both of you or risk failure. Plus, your reaction..." Her cheeks reddened. "Would you have done anything to that level if I hadn't?" He looked at her for a long moment before shaking his head. "Just get up, Arai." He said quietly. "We need to get out of here--" Arai's head swiveled abruptly toward the front of the dumpster. "You're right," she said softly. "We've attracted attention... and one's a Jedi."

Rani was not the greatest writer in the universe. Her spelling was mediocre at best and her grammar was misplaced about seven times out of ten. Her writing came out like her thoughts, including the occasional Spanish word. She knew that if her score was handed back on actual skill, it would be terrible. If someone cared to sift through all the mistakes, they would find exceptional content. Rani was an exceptional critical thinker, and proud of it, and so she chose the more challenging of the two questions presented to her and began typing away, contented. Two seats over, Akeirra couldn't decide whether to feel insulted or completely unknown. There were two questions on her screen and it was evident to her that she was supposed to choose one to answer, but neither of them made much sense. Either they thought she understood their language better than she actually did, or they knew her shortcomings and didn't care. Either way, she picked the choice that made the most sense and made use of as much of her limited vocabulary as she could. All she could do was hope for the best, that they would acknowledge her limited understanding of their language and admit her anyway with the condition that she work extra hard in her intensive English course, which she'd planned to do anyway.

Arai accepted the inhaler without a word, but her mind was racing. She could not give up her only advantage, however slight it might be, and yet she couldn't simply walk away from this chance. With only a slight hesitation, she put the device to her lips and pressed the activation button... or so it seemed. In reality, Arai executed a little "Force trickery", cutting through the ostanovium-induced haze undoubtedly in the room because both Dom and Pauel had used the stuff in one way or another. It was the simplest of mind tricks, just enough to make both of them think she'd done what Pauel wanted her to do as she lifted the inhaler up and ejected its payload over her right shoulder. When it was done and she was satisfied neither of her companions had realized her trick, she dropped the inhaler and put one hand to her stomach as if suddenly sick, and the other to her forehead as if she was fighting a massive hangover. "Feel like I got punched in the gut... and the face," she groaned. "With a hydraulic battering ram or something..." She glanced over at Dom and a twinge of concern entered her already sickened expression. "Is this what it's like?" she gasped. "Loss of Force-sensitivity?"

((Semi-sorta JP with FFWM. She contributed a line )) It wasn't quite the response she was expecting, but Arai could most certainly work with it. She glanced at Dom, reached over and gave his hand a brief squeeze, an unspoken plea for him to trust her... ... but when they were younger, it had communicated a double meaning and the second meaning was that she was probably about to do something incredibly stupid, and she would need his help. Turning back to Pauel, she addressed him as though he'd still been speaking directly to her. "Hey, apostle," she said sharply. "If I'm not mistaken, the term refers to a messenger, a sort of religious ambassador, right? So when it comes to ostanovium, that makes you an expert, right? I'm not talking about the all-consuming fount of knowledge on the stuff. I get that your Prophet has a higher claim to that title. But thus far, you haven't given me anything I can wrap my mind around, so let's try this again, shall we?" She raised her right hand and sparks began to play across her fingertips. "See, I have this little trick at my command. I'm told it doesn't feel all that great..." Glaring across the table at him, she growled softly, "I'm losing control, Pauel and I've already lost patience. Go into as much of the technical detail on ostanovium as you can in ten seconds. At the end of that time, I'll decide whether you've earned freedom from pain or not..." "Raia..." Dominic said quietly, warningly, shifting his hand ever so slightly to touch her arm. Arai jumped as though the sparks on her fingertips shocked her and they vanished. She let her hand fall to her side and closed her eyes as though fighting an intense wave of darkness. In reality, it hadn't been quite that intense, but this was a show for Pauel. When she opened her eyes again, she couldn't look at Pauel. "Oh, Force," she mumbled, staring at her hands as though in disbelief. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry." When she looked back to Pauel, there was no anger in her gaze, but it was extremely intense. "Do you see what I'm dealing with?" she asked him, her tone soft and urgent. "This is how ostanovium has presented itself to me. Damned if I do, damned if I don't. I need reassurance and I'm sorry, but you're not giving me any."

Arai's instincts screamed that she shouldn't accept Pauel's offer, that to do so would change her in ways that would ensure she wasn't herself anymore. She was just preparing to do her worst to Pauel, to find and exploit his most sensitive shatterpoints, but the expression on Dom's face pulled her up short. That had been the information he was hoping for? She didn't even have to go searching for his feelings on the matter. Turning back to Pauel, she changed tactics. She looked into his mind as best she could and caught his mental picture of how a Force-user would act. Comparing it to her own understated behavior to this point, she found that if he'd identified her as a Force-user, he probably thought she was using deathsticks. Time to correct the misconception. "Wow, that's something," she said sarcastically. Crossing her arms over her chest, she shot Dom a smirk before turning back to Pauel. "We haven't been here ten minutes and you're already..." she snapped her fingers and pointed skyward, "... directing us higher up the chain of command?" Looking very unimpressed, she turned back to Dom, ignoring Pauel for the moment. "Dom, I thought you said this guy had all my answers. Is this what you meant? That he knows the one who really does have all the answers?"

Arai was a little put out by the fact that the rented room was in a cantina that served non-alcoholic beverages only. She felt like she could use a drink right about then, but it couldn't be helped. She had decided that her best course of action would be to remain completely silent, focusing all her energy on finding Pauel's shatterpoints and subtly manipulating them as Dom did all the talking. But it was not to be. They had scarcely sat down when Pauel turned directly to her and asked in rather elusive terms what it was she wanted. "Ostanovium," Arai said quietly. She closed her eyes for half a second, trying to see his shatterpoints through the ostanovium-induced haze. "What happened on Coruscant is that all the Found died. Poisoned by ostanovium. Now, Dom suggests that the difference between them and him, and the reason he's none the worse for wear is that they ingested the stuff in capsule form. I need to know if that's the case or if it's dangerous to some extent in any form."

Akeirra almost wanted to cry at the first segment of the test. FedCON knew her English wasn't good; why did they bombard her with the language itself at the beginning of her entrance exam? She bit the inside of her lower lip and plunged on, determined. The reading comprehension questions were only a little better, and then only when she realized most of them had something to do with being a soldier. Her expression changed visibly to one of relief when the vocabulary and reading comprehension was over. She actually looked happy when the test moved her on to dealing with numbers. Though they looked drastically different in her native script, put up three fingers and it was still three units, no matter where you were. She'd mastered English numbers quickly and she dove into the next few sections with a massive grin on her face. She knew this stuff. Rani on the other hand was locked in a tense mood the entire test. She knew more equations than passages of literature, but her knowledge was fairly widespread and she flat-out hated written tests. In her mind, they were only good for telling who was paying attention in class. While that was a decent enough goal and it helped you keep the complete morons out of the vital fleet positions, they always slipped in trick questions here and there. Rani hated tricks and she always distrusted exams for that reason.

"He'll tell me," Arai said simply. "And you'll keep me from taking his head off in the process." Since running into Dom again, Arai's life had become almost ridiculously simple. On the one hand, she loved it. No more worrying about falling completely to the Dark Side; Dom wouldn't let her. It was like she'd stumbled into this odd parallel universe where she always got her way and nothing could possibly go wrong. But on the flip side, the thought terrified her. It was too good to be true, and that left only one question: What would go wrong? And when? But she couldn't focus on that, not now. It would distract her from what she really needed to know. Shrugging her shoulders, she said, "Let's go see whether the man's moved on from this dump or not."

Fifteen minutes with Dom made everything alright again. Arai wasn't sure if it was just that the presence of an old and true friend had a calming effect on her or if it had something to do with being in close proximity to his ostanovium tattoo. She still didn't know quite enough about the material to be entirely comfortable with it... but being around Dom, now that she could get used to. But her fears regarding ostanovium would not let her rest completely, especially not since she'd all but agreed to get a tattoo of the stuff, as Dom had. As they drew nearer to Nar Shaddaa, her discomfort only intensified. When Dom told her they were coming in for a landing where they should be able to find his friend, she felt an involuntary shiver run down her spine. "Dom," she said, her voice wavering. "I don't know..." She trailed off in uncertainty. But he deserved more than that. She frantically tried to put her fears into words. "I have to be honest, Dom. Ostanovium scares the hell out of me, especially after what happened to the Found on Coruscant. I mean... well, you look well enough, so that's point one in its favor, but..." She sighed. "I'd just feel a lot better about all this if I knew what it was about the stuff that made it fatal to so many. We'll still see this Pauel and chances are very good I'll go through with this, but I want my questions answered first. You said Pauel would probably know the answer to anything I want to know?"

At the mention of giving the machine her name, Akeirra stared at it, intrigued. Though speech-driven interfaces were not totally foreign to her, this was certainly the first time she'd seen one used in a classroom environment. Then again, the last time she'd been in a classroom for any extended period of time, her instructor had been an almost nine-hundred-year-old Meinari. He had developed his telepathy to the point of using it as an educational tool, drawing his students into shared dreams where they could experience concepts instead of just reading about them. Shaking her head to clear the memory, she softly spoke her name to the computer. No response. She tried a second time and still nothing. With a faint noise of protest, she lowered her voice, cleared her throat and declared slowly and deliberately, with disgust, "Akira." The computer acknowledged her then and she began, making a mental note to teach at least the computer systems to recognize Meinari speech patterns. To Aruko's right, Rani had no such issues with her name's pronunciation, but she hadn't missed Akeirra's troubles. She glanced around the young man between them and caught Akeirra's glance, offering her an encouraging smile. Akeirra returned it weakly and the two girls turned their focus back to their own screens. It would be a long test; no time to waste.

Dominic's Freighter, en route to Nar Shaddaa Arai rose, stretched, and back down the hall that led to the cockpit. "Food would be good," she said, subconsciously placing a hand on her stomach, which was now complaining to her of how long it had gone without nourishment. "Especially if I've been out for two days." She paused, staring down the hall. "Where's the kitchen?" Another beat. "And can I get you anything?"