Nawah's First Impressions

It was the first evening of their trip to Nar Shaddaa and Nawah was restless. Sure, she had spent most of the trip from Coruscant a bit on the agitated side and less social than she normally was, but plenty of that could be chalked up to her mother’s disappearance. Now, however, they had another problem. A serial killer was after them, or at least some of them. The Force Sensitives and Padawans, most likely. That meant the Nightsister and the three students.

Also, they knew who she used to be.

Nawah found a certain degree of comfort in Master Tasra’s training methods when she was feeling conflicted like this. There was a certain meditative quality that came with pushing your body past its physical limits in training and, while she wasn’t as strong or agile as she was during her time under Master Tasra, she remembered the training techniques. Given her room wasn’t huge, she was limited in what she could do, but what exactly she was doing mattered less than the mental state it put her in.

The first point of conflict she had was with telling the group what she knew. The broken mirror had already thrown confusion into the mix as Brawln had said the killer’s calling card was an intact mirror for most people and a broken mirror for Jedi. Sure, she could play this off as it must have been broken when fleeing the Jedi Temple on Coruscant or on the ship or any other number of places. After all, it wasn’t like she’d yet been attacked. Her home had only been ransacked and looted of nearly everything of value. That didn’t take into account the non-functional lightsaber that had been returned to her and even now sat hidden away. It was reasonable to assume the killer may know about her inability to access the Force. Otherwise, they would have waited for her and engaged her in battle instead of leaving her with a weapon to fight with. She also knew this foe was strong enough to retrieve the weapon from under the literal cave that it had been buried under. When she told the group they weren’t ready to face this foe yet, she had spoken not from observation of their group but rather from extrapolating just what must have been done to retrieve her old weapon.

This teased another question to Nawah’s mind. Did the killer require their Jedi victims to engage with them in face-to-face battle? Was that why Vesper hadn’t been shot dead by the killer? Because they knew Vesper was able to use the Force and their own code required them to engage them in some sort of duel? This would certainly track with most of the Darkside Force users she had encountered in her lifetime. Most of them had a need to engage in a face-to-face confrontation rather than setting elaborate traps or shooting their enemies from a distance. They wanted to feed off that fear. Perhaps that was an aspect of falling that Nawah hadn’t considered before.

Perhaps that was something to speak with Rhen about. The Nightsister was likely to be the most familiar with that aspect of the Force compared to everyone else on the ship. It wasn’t fully accurate to label them as such, but the way they made use of the Force certainly fell far from the way the Jedi used it. Nawah was more familiar with such tactics and, while she inherently didn’t believe either side of the Force to be better or worse than the other, it was certainly better to be too far to the Light side than the Dark. The Zabrak certainly wasn’t Master Tasra, but Nawah was familiar enough with the species and its tendencies that she wasn’t intimidated by the presence of such an individual. Lots of people found them off-putting, but between Master Tasra and Master Zernvik, she had considerable exposure to members of that species.

None of this took into account her missing mother. But Nawah had started to suspect that her mother had been taken by whoever was behind this Mirror character coming after them. She may be wrong about that, but there were only so many leads they could chase at a time, and it was important she stay with this group for now. Following this trail would lead her to answers about her mother’s disappearance, of that she was certain. And to that end, she had to figure out exactly how to contribute what insight she had without giving away the exact details of her past to the rest of the group. That would just put them in more danger than they were already in. There were plenty of fallen Force users who may have found sanctuary with the Sith and were happily working with them. If word got out about who she was and who she was with, that would put a potential priority target on all of them. Three padawans weren’t going to command the entire Empire’s focus, not in these early days, even if having a serial killer to deal with wasn’t exactly optimal. Three padawans, a Nightsister, and a former Force User and Dark Jedi (for lack of a great term) hunter, however, would cause their new group a great deal of problems. The group still couldn’t work well together as a unit, as the actions of the Padawans had already demonstrated in escalating issues with the Jawas and the killer.

But tell them, eventually, she would need to do. If they were going to stick together, she’d need to tell them at some point something about her past. But that might not be best until a certain level of discretion in the group had been established. For all she knew, some of the others might set out on their own course at any time still, and letting this information leak out would be potentially catastrophic.

The woman collapsed softly to the ground, having physically exhausted herself. She’d stopped counting several thoughts ago and her body had finally given in. She’d done a great job of justifying her silence so far on the matter of her past. Now all she had to do was figure out how to deal with the crushing waves of problems that seemed to be heading their way without burdening the others with details of how she’d lost her connection to the Force.