Damasa and Rhen

During the several days that Damasa Kovani spends investigating the artifact, there are plenty of moments when she isn't actively working on her project that invite conversation. One of them comes while Rhen is gathering fruit from some of the trees that grow on the steep sides of the island's central peak (Rhen, having probably the best survival skills of anyone staying on the island who isn't Damasa, is often called upon to help in this way). Rhen is contemplating her path to one such tree (perhaps choosing the best angle for a Force-enhanced jump) when the jagged rocks in front of her shift, shaping themselves into a smooth ramp leading up to the base of the tree. Rhen looks up to see Damasa perched on a boulder above her, deliberately peeling one of the red-orange fruits. "You keep staring at me," she says, without preamble. "Down on the beach. You're not looking for a master like some of the others are. But there is something you want to ask me, isn't there?"

Rhen walks calmly up the newly opened path before her, nodding. "It is just so, though I am always ready to learn from those who know more than I."

She sits down on a boulder near Damasa. "There are many questions, but perhaps I should say something of myself first. I ... lost faith with my own people--with our strongest leader, before she brought ruin upon us. I trusted the visions of another, who saw the darkness for what it was, and I opposed the will of many of my people. Later, I sought the Jedi, in the hope they had the strength to save those who were left...but they were unable to save themselves. Except for those I now travel with, I suppose. In the end I wasn't able to do really anything to save my people, yet I found purpose in surviving, and later in saving the two I could.

"I will not claim understanding, but when I see you I feel as though I recognize something about your path. Yet you have wandered so far, and seen so many remote places. So I wonder, why here?"

Damasa nods as Rhen tells her story. "It's an ugly thing when powerful leaders clash and battle lines get drawn. I'm hard on the Jedi, but they definitely weren't the only ones who turned their backs on what was really happening, like it sounds like some of your people did. Truth be told, I can't say I fault all of them. When the darkness that's coming is so immense, so overwhelming, who wouldn't want to pretend it wasn't real?

"I'm glad you found your people, and that they helped you make a difference. That's really all any of us can do - save what we can. And that pretty much answers your question, doesn't it?"

Damasa smiles and drops one of the segments of fruit into her mouth. When she sees that Rhen isn't going anywhere, she says around the mouthful of food, "Oh, you're not going to let me get away with that, are you? Fine." She swallows and goes back to work on the thick peel, looking down at her hands instead of at Rhen. "You're right, I have been to a lot of places. Some of them I barely even remember anymore. But this place...I never had that problem. Sure, they say a Jedi Knight never forgets their first solo mission, but it was something more than that. Here, there was work I knew I'd left undone - work that no one else but me can do. This is where I know I'm supposed to be." There's a ring of prophecy about those lasts few words.

Rhen nods to Damasa's proclaimation. "Such clarity is to be treasured, I think." Rhen takes a fruit and begins to peel it slowly. "My Mother--that is, my mentor--had many points of clarity like yours, but I observed there to be much undefined space between the points of clarity. Is it so with you? I heard the ring of prophecy in your words, but do you also know why are to be here?"

Rhen carefully extracts a segment of fruit and considers it. "I wonder, also, about something you said eariler. That we can all only save what we can.

"What are you saving here?" Rhen pops the fruit into her mouth and chews slowly, savoring the flavor while waiting for an answer.

"It's never all in a straight line. The things I see, I mean. I knew somebody would come looking for me after the fall. I didn't know when, or what you'd want, or even that it would be you. Anyway. Do you do puzzles on Dathomir or is it more like all ichor, all the time? You know, cute little pictures cut up into a bunch of wiggly pieces? They had a bunch of them for the younglings at the temple. Helps to practice fine control with the Force. They'd had the same ones for a long time so a bunch of the pieces are missing. But once you fit enough other ones in around the gap, you could always tell what the picture was supposed to be even if you lost some of the bits."

She thinks for a little longer about Rhen's other question, rolling a piece of the fruit peel into a little cylinder between her fingers. Then she flicks it to the side and looks up to stare Rhen in the eyes.

"What am I saving here? A people's right to decide for themselves what happens to them. To understand the tools they have at their disposal, and to use them to the fullest extent they choose. Don't get me wrong - the Sindonese are smart people. I'm sure eventually they would have all found their own way to the Force without me. But when I first came here, I already knew the shape of what was coming. I didn't think they had that kind of time. For the Council to write them off, to say they weren't worth training..." She shakes her head. "So you see why it had to be me."

Rhen considers Damasa's words for a moment. "I suppose I do see." She eats another piece of her fruit before looking back at Damasa. "Still, I cannot help but wonder, is there something else? A people should have the right to decide for themselves. This is part of the basis for the disagreements between my people and the Jedi...or what used to be their disagreements, anyway. But what are they deciding? Have you seen a threat? If the Jedi didn't consider this place important, do you have reason to think the Empire will?"

Rhen pauses for a moment, as if a thought has occurred to her. "Do you foresee the Sith coming here?"

Damasa barks out a harsh laugh. "Who knows what the Empire thinks is important? But the Sith are coming everywhere, eventually. Them, or someone or something serving them. I didn't come back to Sura Sindo because I thought I'd be safe from them here. I mean, those idiots living over in the crater think they're being really secretive holed up in their little spaceport, but that whole operation is anything but airtight. It's only a matter of time until they bring something nasty down on this whole place. We'll all need to be ready when they do." Rhen can't be sure if this assertion is prophecy, opinion, or a messy mixture of both.

"I make it sound really noble, being out here, but it's selfish too. When I realized the Council wasn't going to listen to anything I had to say, I figured, why hang around here trying to fix other people's mess for them when they don't want me to do and anyhow I'd rather be fixing my own? I made a lot of mistakes the first time I was on Sura Sindo. I want to do right by the Sindonese, sure, but I also wanted a do-over." She shrugs.

Rhen nods. "I see. I have discovered the Sith to be behind so many of the tragedies in my life I am perhaps a little too quick to see them at the root everything." Rhen sighs, closing her eyes as she exhales. After a moment she opens them again, and looks at Damasa.

"Looking back it is easy to judge mistakes in a way that was never clear at the time. We seem to be living in a time forged by great mistakes, mistakes so big they crush us even though we may have made good choices ourselves." She pauses a moment, considering her next words. "May I ask about the mistakes made on your first trip here? Does it give you back some...power, some...control, some...balance to right them?"

"Sure, I'll tell you about that - if you'll tell me about you and the Sith. I spent a long time digging around in the places where they used to be, but I never saw any of them for myself. I knew they were still around, of course, pulling strings behind the scenes, but the visions never bothered to tell me exactly who or where they might be." Damasa rolls her eyes and shrugs. "Guess I'm curious to find out where they were actually hiding all these years."

"The Sith, huh?" Rhen leans back and considers for a moment. "They weren't hiding at the edges. They were hiding in the middle of everything. The Separatist leader, Dooku, the ex-Jedi? He was actually Darth Tyranus. His master, Darth Sidious, is the one behind behind everything. Mother Talzin, the most powerful Nightsister leader, made a deal with him." Rhen voice grows heavy with sarcasm. "In a shocking turn of events that no one could have predicted, the Sith betrayed us." Rhen breathes deeply and her voice returns to normal. "Mother Talzin was not entirely blind to this possibility, and tried to use her sorcery to kill Dooku for his betrayal. Before she was able to accomplish this, Dooku's droid forces," here Rhen face becomes stiffly blank, "destroyed us."

Rhen is silent for a few moments, before continuing. "Darth Maul, Sidious's apprentice before Dooku, came from Dathomir. He was from Mother Talzin's territory, so I never knew the exact details, but I suspect she was involved in him joining the Sith. You should understand, I do not mean the Sith were hiding on Dathomir. They weren't. But Sidious did recruit from there."

Rhen sits quietly for a moment, then turns back to Damasa. "I still want to know about, well, the mistakes, but... Did you know Dooku, before he left the order? I can't tell you if he became a Sith while still at the order, but perhaps you know a little more than you realize."

"Dooku was a Sith Lord?! That guy? Holy shit! I don't know what a Separatist is but I'm guessing you mean those people who are going to build a droid army? Built a droid army, sorry. That sounds like the kind of thing he'd be into.

"Yeah, I knew Dooku before he left the Order, but not very well. He was really tight with my master back in the day. Bailed me and Sifo-Dyas out of jail on Alderaan this one time. Then I almost got all three of us sent back to jail when this guy in a cantina - " Damasa cuts herself off. "Sorry. That's not what you asked about, is it? You want to know if I picked up on him being evil, not about stupid drunk padawans doing stupid drunk padawan things." (Rhen gets the distinct sense that Damasa would really prefer to talk about the latter topic.)

"The thing you've got to understand is, Dooku was a Jedi Master already when I was a padawan, and on the Jedi Council besides. You've never been a Jedi, so I'm not sure you fully appreciate how hard it is - was - to get any of the Masters on the Council to give you the time of day if they're not your master. And lately it sounds like it even take some doing when they are your Master, if your buddy Efnir's experience with Saesee Tiin is anything to go by. To me, Dooku was just this weird guy my master knew. To him, I was just his friend's latest annoying padawan. We had no real reason to pay each other any mind - even before you consider that Dooku had his foot halfway out the Jedi Order's door by then. He wasn't exactly making an effort to get to know his fellow Jedi.

"I never had a vision about him, if that's what you're wondering. Sifo-Dyas never did either, at least not one that he ever shared with me. Your artifact thingy told you that's why he took me as his padawan, right? Because we both could see the future. We both knew the 'how' of it, but never the 'who.'" Damasa takes another big bite of fruit and pauses to spit out a seed, launching it an impressive distance toward the shore. "Dooku and Sifo-Dyas knew each other since they were younglings, like me and Firith and Lilikai. You'd think Sifo-Dyas would have seen something about Dooku, like I did about Lilikai. I guess not." She shrugs. "Visions. They don't make sense. Or maybe the Sith have just gotten really good at covering their tracks."

"I'm sorry your people got caught in the middle of all this. I've never been to Dathomir myself. Everything I ever learned about the Nightsisters suggested to me that you mostly just wanted to be left alone. I never felt the need to interfere with that, personally."

Rhen absorbs this information intently, and without expression. After a moment, she sighs and looks Damasa directly in the eye. "I'm sorry to tell you this, but Dooku almost certainly killed Sifo-Dyas. It's possible it was Sidious...but the Sith way is corruption from within, as far as I can tell. I think it would have been Dooku. So perhaps your master did see something about him, but it was not in time."

"As for the Nightsisters...if we had truly been content to keep to ourselves, we would not be here. Make no mistake, it was Mother Talzin--and her supporters--who brought the Sith to our world, and thereby our defeat."

Rhen offers Damasa a one-sided grin. "I thank you for the insight into Dooku, but I think you have...forgotten...to tell me about the mistakes you mentioned, on this world. What happened here?"

"Oh." It's hard to read Damasa's reaction to this information. "Resigned" might come the closest to covering it. It seems like it's new information to her, albeit not exactly unexpected news. "Fuck that guy, then. He's dead, right? I think he was supposed to get his head chopped off. The Separatist leader, I mean, and you said that was Dooku, so...Anyway, good riddance to bad rubbish.

"I didn't forget what you asked me, it's just...Idiot drunken shenanigans where nobody really got hurt are a lot more fun to reminisce about than times when someone actually paid the price for what I didn't know. I didn't know anything the first time I came here - though, in fairness, the Jedi Council didn't either. The information they gave me on this place when they sent me here was ridiculously sparse. They'd been sending Jedi Knights out here every 50 years for so long without finding anything of interest that it seemed like they'd forgotten why they wanted anyone to go to Sura Sindo in the first place. Seemed like just the kind of pointless, low-stakes errand you'd want to send a newly minted Knight on the first time you turn her loose on her own, though, right?

"I don't know why no one found the Sindonese before me. Maybe they gave up sooner than I did, or maybe they just weren't looking in the right place. Or maybe the Sindonese were finally ready to be found. Whatever. When I met them, when I got to know them...the way forward was clear. Or at least I thought it was. I thought I had to bring them into the Jedi Order for training - or bring the Order to them, if that proved easier.

"I had a student here, back then. Not a padawan - I wasn't anywhere close to being approved to take one on yet - but they might have been, in a different kind of life. Incredibly strong in the Force. I've never felt potential like that from anyone else, before or since. I was young then - idealistic. I talked the Order up to them like it was the greatest thing that had ever existed in the galaxy. Maybe back then I thought it was. So when I told them I had to go back and plead Sura Sindo's case to the Order, I don't know why it came as a surprise to me that they insisted on coming along to prove what I'd been saying.

"You came out here, so you know how long the journey back to Coruscant is. It was fine at first. We rigged my ship up with a saltwater tank for them to rest in, laid in a bunch of fish in barrels. But about a week into the trip, something went wrong. They just kept getting weaker and weaker no matter what I did. There wasn't an injury or any infection that I could detect. Little by little they just...wasted away before my eyes. I've never understood it. I know how to fix machines, but not living beings. I tried to help them hold out until Coruscant, to get to the Temple's healers, but...There was nothing either of us could do."

Abruptly, Damasa turns and lobs the remainder of the fruit in her hand over Rhen's head, out toward the ocean. There's more than a hint of the Force behind the motion, and the pulpy mess travels a long way. Rhen thinks she hears a faint splash far below in the lagoon. Damasa wipes her sticky hand on the rock she's sitting on and takes a breath to collect herself.

"The Council wasn't exactly thrilled when I showed up with a corpse and a bunch of demands. I tried to convince them to go to the Sindonese instead, since it looked like it was too far for the Sindonese to safely come to them. Establish a satellite temple, or something. They've done it lots of other places. They refused. Said it was a 'misuse of limited resources' and that their historical records urged a policy of non-interference with regards to Sura Sindo. Might have been nice to know that before they sent me all the way out here."

Damasa grimaces, shaking her head. Her gaze tracks down the rocky hillside and toward the beach, and Rhen realizes she's looking at Green Coral, who's poking at the datapad Vic Dantor gave them while resting half-in and half-out of the surf. "Deep Light wouldn't have died if I hadn't convinced them the Jedi Order was the only way," she says. "The Sindonese deserve to know the Force if they want to, the same as every other living being. But on their own terms. Not the Jedi's."

Rhen absorbs this new knowledge silently for a time, then replies, "Facing loss is something we confront early, on Dathomir. But to return home to find that loss isn't valued..." Rhen shakes her head. "That sounds awful, and like a great blow to trust."

Rhen allows the silence to gather for a while, as if she's sharing a funeral observance with Damasa. Eventually, after the atmosphere has altered, she ventures, "It is a very strange thing, that Deep Light could not survive away from Sura Sindo. We do not speak much about this to outsiders, but I will tell you that, as a Nightsister, I draw some of my strength from Dathomir. Distance does not diminish my connection, however."

To demonstrate her point Rhen reaches out a hand and calls her sword. Flickering green light coalesces and becomes solid, before fading away and leaving behind her blade. She holds it before her for a moment, allowing Damasa to clearly see it solidity, before summoning the green light away to take it away,

Rhen then pauses, and says, "I'm sorry. It is my habit to find meaning from loss, but it is not my place here. I meant only to show how very strange and unforeseeable Deep Light's situation was. I am not sure that travel is a...problem to be solved, but know that I would help, if I can."

Damasa reacts to the appearance of the ichor blade with intense curiosity. Efnir has shown plenty of interest in it, but this is something different - a tight uncompromising focus on every step of the process, as if Damasa is trying to reverse engineer how it's done. Rhen can tell she's taking it with the Force as well as with all of her other senses. "Feels like conjuration," she says, more to herself than to Rhen, "but that's a real sword, not an illusion. You're storing it somewhere and retrieving it later. Dathomir? How does that work? I wonder if any of the Nightsisters have ever tried that with another planet. You say distance doesn't matter but maybe the quality of the Cosmic Force around the planet does. If we got some more Nightsisters in here we could design an experiment and see whether - "

She cuts herself off, seeming to realize that this isn't what Rhen wants to talk about. "Sorry. Deep Light. Yeah. You're on to something there. I've noticed, since I've been here, that the Sindonese don't eat nearly enough to keep beings of their size alive. They're definitely getting a lot of their sustenance from some other source. I don't know where, and they don't seem like they ever think about it. Why would they? It's not like most of them ever plan on leaving this moon.

"It's nice of you to say what happened was unforeseeable. It's not true, though. I'd rather know that my apprentice was going to die if I let them leave the planet than know that a bug's going to sting you behind your second horn from the right, but I don't get to pick and choose. Or I could have stuck around long enough to understand what the Sindonese need to survive, instead of rushing through my mission. It's a hard habit to break, leaping before you look. I guess I used to figure that if a vision didn't warn me not to do something, how bad could it actually be?" She shrugs. "Pretty bad, as it turns out."

As if to punctuate Damasa's monologue, Rhen feels a slight tickle on the top of her head.

Rhen's hand shoots up and she smashes the insect just before it bites her. She contemplates its smashed body for a moment before wiping it off on a rock. "Now that would be useful... Still, I think I see what you mean about the dangers of relying on something that isn't consistent. It...helps me to understand some of Mother Lampir's actions that I didn't at the time."

Rhen is silent as she reminisces for a time. Then she leans back and sighs. "I thank you for your story, Damasa."

Damasa looks please - relieved, almost - when Rhen swats the insect in time. "Don't mention it," she says with a smile. "It's...not a story I've told a lot, outside of the report I made to the Jedi Council. Now that I have, I'm not really sure why I didn't. Huh."

She stands up, looking back down at the beach where Vic is not-so-patiently waiting for her next to the artifact and all the equipment attached to it. "Anyway, I better stop messing with your Skakoan friend and get back to work. Good talking to you, Rhen." She leaps away without waiting for a reply.