Jaina Solo (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sticksofthejedi) wrote2012-06-26 04:44 pm
sticksofthejedi) wrote2012-06-26 04:44 pm
Entry tags:
Memory 37
Memory: Jaina snaps, abandons her mission, and goes on a Vong killing spree.
Received: Day 152, late afternoon.
Form: Warm miniature pie.
Summary: Picking up shortly after the memory of little bro Anakin's death on the mission to Myrkr, this memory covers Jaina and four of the strike team members breaking off from the mission to kill the source of the Jedi-hunting Voxyn. Jaina's going dark side in her anger and grief at Anakin's death, and starts acting in the manner that inflicts the most damage on the Yuuzhan Vong -- even non-combatants. Highlights of terrible behavior include exposing a mortuary full of mourners to the vacuum of space, blowing a hole in a Vong warrior's chest with Force lightning, and commandeering a Vong ship to go on a ruthless attack run.
--
After Anakin sacrifices himself, the Myrkr strike team has retreated again and found a place to hide and figure out what to do next. As a reminder, the team of Jedi are in a Yuuzhan Vong worldship; everything is disgusting biotech and structures are made of something like coral. All things Yuuzhan Vong come across on Force senses as a void, except for the Voxyn, which were genetically engineered to hunt and kill Jedi. The last surviving Barabel on the team, Tesar, is out trying to figure out where the Voxyn queen has retreated to. The team appears to have set up shop in a one-room living quarter, taking captive the worker-caste Vong that was there.
Twi'lekk Jedi Alema Rar made the worker get food, since the mission is running way longer than it should have and the team needs to get some strength back. It's a tasteless pulp. Jaina doesn't feel like eating -- too shook up from Anakin's death. Jacen tries giving her a bowl, telling her he doesn't feel like eating either, but they need to. She throws the bowl against the wall. Narrative tells us how Jacen can feel her guilt and anger through the twinbond. He tries laying a hand on her knee as a comfort, and reminds her they have to keep going and destroy the Voxyn queen.
Jaina accuses him of leaving Anakin to his death. Jacen takes it, preferring to bear the burden of blame than leave her struggling with her guilt. He reminds her that the team had to retreat, they couldn't save him. She pushes his hand off her leg, and accuses him again -- Anakin put Jacen in charge and Jacen chose to leave him behind. Tenel Ka interjects, because she likes Jacen. She says to disregard Anakin's command to go would have been to dishonor Anakin's memory and dismiss his sacrifice. Jaina asserts Tenel Ka has the emotional depth of a ronto; Tenel Ka gets in Jaina's face and stares her down. Tenel Ka points out that everyone's hurting, including Jacen, prompting Jaina to stand up. Zekk steps between them in case someone's thinking of throwing blows. He tells them to calm down, and the two women stare at each other and wait for an apology that won't be coming.
Awkward silence, broken by Lowbacca calling on their commlinks. He'd been missing, so the team is glad to hear from him. Lowie apologies for losing their escape ship, and he reveals that he's happened across where the Vong have taken Anakin's body. They're going to incinerate it; Jacen wonders why, but Jaina just tells him to stay there. She's coming to get her brother's body back. Tahiri, Alema Rar and Zekk decide to go with her.
Jacen argues they need to stick to the mission. Anakin wanted them to destroy the queen. Jaina pulls away from him again and tells Jacen to do it, because she's doing her thing. She takes her saber off her belt and leads the others off.
They enter the mortuary facility. There's a funeral pyre setup, with a valve system to pump the smoke out of the worldship. The place reeks of burned flesh and bones, and there's ash everywhere. Jaina's using her commlink to track down Lowie's signal. They meet up and she's trying not to think of the fact the ashes mean she's moving around in the incinerated remains of who knows how many Vong. It's a large facility, and there's a lot of Vong mourners. Jaina takes some pleasure in the thought that the number of Vong mourning is in part due to the large number of Vong the strike team has killed along the way. She wants the Vong to hurt.
There's five grottos in the mortuary. Priests chant prayers to their gods, and mourners, one group at a time, step forward to throw a piece of a body into a pyre -- skin goes in one grotto, bones another, blood, skull, and hands. Jaina's chilled at the thought they'll do that to Anakin's body. Lowie points to where Anakin is -- there's a group of Vong warriors entertaining themselves while waiting for the body to be taken from them. They're ... playing a game where you kick a snarling spiny creature at each other and try to get it to stick in their chest. While they're busy, bird-like alien Vergere is playing with Anakin's lightsaber. The group has a shuttle waiting outside a nearby airlock.
The Jedi put vacuum suits back on, and camouflage themselves in the ashes. They end up watching and waiting the mortuary an hour, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Two of the Vong group get pulled away for business, and Jaina readies her blaster, ordering the others to blast them, she'll grab Anakin and the others should commandeer the shuttle.
The ranking Vong and two warrior start carrying Anakin's body. Alema asks to take the leader as her target, and the others decide to take targets, too. Jaina's target will be Vergere. They fire, except Zekk, who knocks Jaina's blaster off-target to spare Vergere (who secretly knows how to use a saber correctly and was going to deflect the shot, and turns her motion into a fumble when the shot goes wide). Jaina yells at Zekk; he says he's not sure she's an enemy, and Jaina retorts that the company Vergere keeps is bad enough, and he'd better not stand in Jaina's way again.
The mourners, generally not warriors, are mostly just shocked that there's an attack going on. Jaina switches to her saber and uses acrobatics on down to the enemy. The warrior that was supposed to be Zekk's target has drawn a knife and is using Anakin's body as a shield against the attackers. Jaina sends Lowie and Tahiri to secure the shuttle, while she and Alema will get Anakin from the warrior. The warrior puts his knife to Anakin's cheek, since it's clear the body is important to the Jedi.
Alema shoots just to the side of the Vong, who flinches, but reacts by moving the knife toward Anakin's eye. Jaina's MAD. She tears Anakin's body away with telekinesis and floats him over to Alema. The warrior tries taking the opportunity to attack her, throwing the knife -- and Jaina just bats the weapon aside with her hand, then uses Force lightning to blast a hole through the warrior's chest, killing him. She notices Vergere hiding nearby, staring; Jaina sneers and moves to blast her, too. Vergere activates Anakin's saber and moves to block a potential attack, and retreats. Alema catch's Jaina's attention by taking an arm -- they need to get going. Jaina notices that the priests are working up the mourners into a frenzy; they may not be warriors, but they're becoming a problem. Jaina and Alema seal their suits, and head for the airlock. Jaina drops a thermal detonator at the airlock on the way out; she's going to blow them all into the vacuum of space. "The vac breach that leaves ought to burst a few scarhead lungs."
A note: Vong ships involve putting on a cognition hood to see what the ship senses. All the controls are very biotech and it's nothing like handling a regular ship for Jaina.
The narrative goes to Jacen's half of the strike team for a while, following their attempt to kill the Voxyn queen. They've found a frigate-class Vong ship along the way, missing its shuttle (which happens to be the ship Jaina and her team are stealing). It seems the Voxyn queen safely guarded by the warriors of that ship. Spying on the enemy, Jacen overhears the three in charge of the enemy warriors that have been hounding the strike team. He doesn't understand the Vong language, but the three are yelling and arguing, and he catches the words Jeedai, Anakin and Jaina. It seems while Jacen's half of the team are tracking down the queen, Jaina's been busy. Tenel Ka figures that frigate will complicate things for them, and Jacen observes that it won't for long, an observation based on what he feels through the twin bond.
He could feel something in the Jaina-place inside him, something angry and dark coming their way.
The team can't engage the ship and its warrior complement, so Jacen has them waiting. He figures he'll wait as long as necessary for an opportunity to destroy the queen -- but he won't have to wait too long, because Jaina's flying in and launching an attack. Jacen tries reaching out to Jaina in the Force, and what he senses isn't good.
Jacen reached out to his sister through the Force, found only the same cold anger that he had felt since Anakin's death, and tried to break through to some vestige of the Jaina he had known all his life. He touched only swirling darkness, stormy and unreasoning and full of hate.
Tenel Ka suggests Jaina's attack will help the team -- the attack caught the frigate off guard, and may help out with the team escaping in the grand scheme of things. The narrative switches to Tesar's perspective, since he's watching Jaina's attack firsthand. Jaina makes three passes on the frigate. Tesar decides she must be in a killing frenzy, because she should have broke off after the first two passes failed to destroy the frigate. She's starting her fourth run, and the frigate finally fires back, badly damaging the shuttle. She manages a landing.
Jacen can sense that after the shuttle gets shot down, she's not frightened -- just angry and focused on accomplishing destruction. Instead of taking the frigate up to finish destroying Jaina, Nom Anor leads his warriors to assault Jaina's crashed shuttle; they want to capture the twins alive. The Jedi aren't obliging the Vong, using the shuttle's weapons and their own blasters to fight off the attackers.
Jacen has the rest of his half of the strike team go steal the frigate from the remaining skeleton crew, while he'll continue trying to finish off the queen. The frigate, once secured, picks up Jaina and her portion of the team. Zekk takes the pilot's chair, Jaina takes one of the gunner's stations. By now, more ships are arriving in the area, and the team is attempting to defend against coralskippers, the Vong equivalent of starfighters. They head to try picking Jacen up as he kills the queen. Jaina tries getting her brother on his commlink, but Jacen's injured and Vergere has come and taken it. Vergere tells Jaina she can do nothing for her twin, and the team should save themselves, then the bird throws the commlink away.
Jaina's getting mad at Zekk, because he starts maneuvering away from Jacen; too many ships are getting in their way and he's flying defensively. Lowie interrupts the two of them in their piloting and shooting to point out that there's pretty much an entire fleet coming in for them by now. Zekk asks her what she wants to do, and she realizes there's only one option. If the team tries another run to save Jacen, they'll never make it back out. The frigate takes another hit, she fires back, and Zekk yells at her for an answer. She tries, but chokes up.
Tenel Ka proposes they flee; maybe if the Vong only have one of the twins, they'll delay sacrificing Jacen. They'll have time to organize a rescue. Jaina thinks to herself that the Jedi have lost too much on this mission; Luke will never risk more just to save Jacen. Nobody would. Zekk asks Jaina again, because it's her brother they're talking about leaving behind. Jaina thinks: Just do it. Don't make me say it.
Eventually, Zekk says he thinks he understands, and turns the ship to retreat. Tesar says he thinks he understands, too -- that they all understand.
Jaina's beginning to cry in the cognition hood, and she thinks it's not possible for them to understand. She concentrates on the twin bond as they fly away.
She closed her eyes, concentrated on that place in her chest that had always belonged to Jacen. She felt him there, just a flicker for just an instant, and then she lost him, then she could feel nothing except her own anger and hatred and despair.
"We'll be back, Jacen," she said, finding the strength to speak. "You hold on. We'll come for you."
Received: Day 152, late afternoon.
Form: Warm miniature pie.
Summary: Picking up shortly after the memory of little bro Anakin's death on the mission to Myrkr, this memory covers Jaina and four of the strike team members breaking off from the mission to kill the source of the Jedi-hunting Voxyn. Jaina's going dark side in her anger and grief at Anakin's death, and starts acting in the manner that inflicts the most damage on the Yuuzhan Vong -- even non-combatants. Highlights of terrible behavior include exposing a mortuary full of mourners to the vacuum of space, blowing a hole in a Vong warrior's chest with Force lightning, and commandeering a Vong ship to go on a ruthless attack run.
--
After Anakin sacrifices himself, the Myrkr strike team has retreated again and found a place to hide and figure out what to do next. As a reminder, the team of Jedi are in a Yuuzhan Vong worldship; everything is disgusting biotech and structures are made of something like coral. All things Yuuzhan Vong come across on Force senses as a void, except for the Voxyn, which were genetically engineered to hunt and kill Jedi. The last surviving Barabel on the team, Tesar, is out trying to figure out where the Voxyn queen has retreated to. The team appears to have set up shop in a one-room living quarter, taking captive the worker-caste Vong that was there.
Twi'lekk Jedi Alema Rar made the worker get food, since the mission is running way longer than it should have and the team needs to get some strength back. It's a tasteless pulp. Jaina doesn't feel like eating -- too shook up from Anakin's death. Jacen tries giving her a bowl, telling her he doesn't feel like eating either, but they need to. She throws the bowl against the wall. Narrative tells us how Jacen can feel her guilt and anger through the twinbond. He tries laying a hand on her knee as a comfort, and reminds her they have to keep going and destroy the Voxyn queen.
Jaina accuses him of leaving Anakin to his death. Jacen takes it, preferring to bear the burden of blame than leave her struggling with her guilt. He reminds her that the team had to retreat, they couldn't save him. She pushes his hand off her leg, and accuses him again -- Anakin put Jacen in charge and Jacen chose to leave him behind. Tenel Ka interjects, because she likes Jacen. She says to disregard Anakin's command to go would have been to dishonor Anakin's memory and dismiss his sacrifice. Jaina asserts Tenel Ka has the emotional depth of a ronto; Tenel Ka gets in Jaina's face and stares her down. Tenel Ka points out that everyone's hurting, including Jacen, prompting Jaina to stand up. Zekk steps between them in case someone's thinking of throwing blows. He tells them to calm down, and the two women stare at each other and wait for an apology that won't be coming.
Awkward silence, broken by Lowbacca calling on their commlinks. He'd been missing, so the team is glad to hear from him. Lowie apologies for losing their escape ship, and he reveals that he's happened across where the Vong have taken Anakin's body. They're going to incinerate it; Jacen wonders why, but Jaina just tells him to stay there. She's coming to get her brother's body back. Tahiri, Alema Rar and Zekk decide to go with her.
Jacen argues they need to stick to the mission. Anakin wanted them to destroy the queen. Jaina pulls away from him again and tells Jacen to do it, because she's doing her thing. She takes her saber off her belt and leads the others off.
They enter the mortuary facility. There's a funeral pyre setup, with a valve system to pump the smoke out of the worldship. The place reeks of burned flesh and bones, and there's ash everywhere. Jaina's using her commlink to track down Lowie's signal. They meet up and she's trying not to think of the fact the ashes mean she's moving around in the incinerated remains of who knows how many Vong. It's a large facility, and there's a lot of Vong mourners. Jaina takes some pleasure in the thought that the number of Vong mourning is in part due to the large number of Vong the strike team has killed along the way. She wants the Vong to hurt.
There's five grottos in the mortuary. Priests chant prayers to their gods, and mourners, one group at a time, step forward to throw a piece of a body into a pyre -- skin goes in one grotto, bones another, blood, skull, and hands. Jaina's chilled at the thought they'll do that to Anakin's body. Lowie points to where Anakin is -- there's a group of Vong warriors entertaining themselves while waiting for the body to be taken from them. They're ... playing a game where you kick a snarling spiny creature at each other and try to get it to stick in their chest. While they're busy, bird-like alien Vergere is playing with Anakin's lightsaber. The group has a shuttle waiting outside a nearby airlock.
The Jedi put vacuum suits back on, and camouflage themselves in the ashes. They end up watching and waiting the mortuary an hour, waiting for an opportunity to strike. Two of the Vong group get pulled away for business, and Jaina readies her blaster, ordering the others to blast them, she'll grab Anakin and the others should commandeer the shuttle.
The ranking Vong and two warrior start carrying Anakin's body. Alema asks to take the leader as her target, and the others decide to take targets, too. Jaina's target will be Vergere. They fire, except Zekk, who knocks Jaina's blaster off-target to spare Vergere (who secretly knows how to use a saber correctly and was going to deflect the shot, and turns her motion into a fumble when the shot goes wide). Jaina yells at Zekk; he says he's not sure she's an enemy, and Jaina retorts that the company Vergere keeps is bad enough, and he'd better not stand in Jaina's way again.
The mourners, generally not warriors, are mostly just shocked that there's an attack going on. Jaina switches to her saber and uses acrobatics on down to the enemy. The warrior that was supposed to be Zekk's target has drawn a knife and is using Anakin's body as a shield against the attackers. Jaina sends Lowie and Tahiri to secure the shuttle, while she and Alema will get Anakin from the warrior. The warrior puts his knife to Anakin's cheek, since it's clear the body is important to the Jedi.
Alema shoots just to the side of the Vong, who flinches, but reacts by moving the knife toward Anakin's eye. Jaina's MAD. She tears Anakin's body away with telekinesis and floats him over to Alema. The warrior tries taking the opportunity to attack her, throwing the knife -- and Jaina just bats the weapon aside with her hand, then uses Force lightning to blast a hole through the warrior's chest, killing him. She notices Vergere hiding nearby, staring; Jaina sneers and moves to blast her, too. Vergere activates Anakin's saber and moves to block a potential attack, and retreats. Alema catch's Jaina's attention by taking an arm -- they need to get going. Jaina notices that the priests are working up the mourners into a frenzy; they may not be warriors, but they're becoming a problem. Jaina and Alema seal their suits, and head for the airlock. Jaina drops a thermal detonator at the airlock on the way out; she's going to blow them all into the vacuum of space. "The vac breach that leaves ought to burst a few scarhead lungs."
A note: Vong ships involve putting on a cognition hood to see what the ship senses. All the controls are very biotech and it's nothing like handling a regular ship for Jaina.
The narrative goes to Jacen's half of the strike team for a while, following their attempt to kill the Voxyn queen. They've found a frigate-class Vong ship along the way, missing its shuttle (which happens to be the ship Jaina and her team are stealing). It seems the Voxyn queen safely guarded by the warriors of that ship. Spying on the enemy, Jacen overhears the three in charge of the enemy warriors that have been hounding the strike team. He doesn't understand the Vong language, but the three are yelling and arguing, and he catches the words Jeedai, Anakin and Jaina. It seems while Jacen's half of the team are tracking down the queen, Jaina's been busy. Tenel Ka figures that frigate will complicate things for them, and Jacen observes that it won't for long, an observation based on what he feels through the twin bond.
He could feel something in the Jaina-place inside him, something angry and dark coming their way.
The team can't engage the ship and its warrior complement, so Jacen has them waiting. He figures he'll wait as long as necessary for an opportunity to destroy the queen -- but he won't have to wait too long, because Jaina's flying in and launching an attack. Jacen tries reaching out to Jaina in the Force, and what he senses isn't good.
Jacen reached out to his sister through the Force, found only the same cold anger that he had felt since Anakin's death, and tried to break through to some vestige of the Jaina he had known all his life. He touched only swirling darkness, stormy and unreasoning and full of hate.
Tenel Ka suggests Jaina's attack will help the team -- the attack caught the frigate off guard, and may help out with the team escaping in the grand scheme of things. The narrative switches to Tesar's perspective, since he's watching Jaina's attack firsthand. Jaina makes three passes on the frigate. Tesar decides she must be in a killing frenzy, because she should have broke off after the first two passes failed to destroy the frigate. She's starting her fourth run, and the frigate finally fires back, badly damaging the shuttle. She manages a landing.
Jacen can sense that after the shuttle gets shot down, she's not frightened -- just angry and focused on accomplishing destruction. Instead of taking the frigate up to finish destroying Jaina, Nom Anor leads his warriors to assault Jaina's crashed shuttle; they want to capture the twins alive. The Jedi aren't obliging the Vong, using the shuttle's weapons and their own blasters to fight off the attackers.
Jacen has the rest of his half of the strike team go steal the frigate from the remaining skeleton crew, while he'll continue trying to finish off the queen. The frigate, once secured, picks up Jaina and her portion of the team. Zekk takes the pilot's chair, Jaina takes one of the gunner's stations. By now, more ships are arriving in the area, and the team is attempting to defend against coralskippers, the Vong equivalent of starfighters. They head to try picking Jacen up as he kills the queen. Jaina tries getting her brother on his commlink, but Jacen's injured and Vergere has come and taken it. Vergere tells Jaina she can do nothing for her twin, and the team should save themselves, then the bird throws the commlink away.
Jaina's getting mad at Zekk, because he starts maneuvering away from Jacen; too many ships are getting in their way and he's flying defensively. Lowie interrupts the two of them in their piloting and shooting to point out that there's pretty much an entire fleet coming in for them by now. Zekk asks her what she wants to do, and she realizes there's only one option. If the team tries another run to save Jacen, they'll never make it back out. The frigate takes another hit, she fires back, and Zekk yells at her for an answer. She tries, but chokes up.
Tenel Ka proposes they flee; maybe if the Vong only have one of the twins, they'll delay sacrificing Jacen. They'll have time to organize a rescue. Jaina thinks to herself that the Jedi have lost too much on this mission; Luke will never risk more just to save Jacen. Nobody would. Zekk asks Jaina again, because it's her brother they're talking about leaving behind. Jaina thinks: Just do it. Don't make me say it.
Eventually, Zekk says he thinks he understands, and turns the ship to retreat. Tesar says he thinks he understands, too -- that they all understand.
Jaina's beginning to cry in the cognition hood, and she thinks it's not possible for them to understand. She concentrates on the twin bond as they fly away.
She closed her eyes, concentrated on that place in her chest that had always belonged to Jacen. She felt him there, just a flicker for just an instant, and then she lost him, then she could feel nothing except her own anger and hatred and despair.
"We'll be back, Jacen," she said, finding the strength to speak. "You hold on. We'll come for you."