Nawah and Nomi 3

It's strange for Nomi Amersu to be aboard Rogue Ronto but not under the power of Rogue Ronto. The vibrations in the ship are different and the sounds that come through the hull are not the same as the sounds the ship itself makes when underway. There is less for her to do and check as the captain. With the systems shut down there is a lot less that could change from day to day on the ship. She has only seemed a little agitated or down. Whenever a dark mood seems to start to take hold of her she slips off to meditate by herself, or with Efnir Kis or Somi Amersu. Only a couple of days into the trip she seeks out Nawah Masin.

"Hey Nawah. I know it's your memory and all, so I don't want to push you, but I figure we should give ourselves time to work on figuring out whatever we are going to figure out and not leave things for the last minute, just in case it takes some time. Plus, I need something to do, so are you willing to try and show me now what happened to you? I have never done something like this before - looking at someone's memories, but if you say it can be done, I trust it can be done."

Nawah is in her quarters at the time Nomi finds her. "Oh, hey Nomi," the woman responds. "Now is as good of a time as any. It might take repeated viewings, so to speak, for us to get this down. It isn't exactly a normal way of training someone in a new ability. But if we meditate together and I focus on the memory, we should be able to both view it. Though I should warn you that you'll probably feel it when it happens, as you'll be experiencing my memory as I remember it."

One thing that Nomi might notice is that Nawah is allowing a little more emotion into her voice, as it was clear it was a painful memory from her tone of voice and general body language that she usually kept under much tighter control. "Find yourself somewhere comfortable to sit and settle in."

Nomi and Nawah settle down on the floor of Nawah's room, taking up a comfortable posture for meditation (which has become second nature to Nomi by now, the same as it already was for Nawah). Soon they sense each other's presence in the space through the Force. Nomi feels Nawah's thoughts opening to hers as the memory they seek comes into focus. It's not difficult for Nawah to bring it forward; it seems this is an experience that is never truly far from her thoughts.

Emotionally, the entire memory is overlayed with a sense of general sadness and regret, but of the kind that has had the benefit of time to heal as well as it could be.

The memory opens with a younger version of Nawah, somewhere between fourteen and sixteen years old, and her master, Tasra, returning to a cave on Jakku on foot. Tasra is a Zabrak, and she looks to be somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. Nawah picks up on a very slight movement, and Tasra apparently does as well, as both are able to ignite their lightsabers to defend against a pair of humanoid attackers who come at them with red lightsabers. It is difficult to tell just what species these individuals are aside from humanoid, as they wear sand-colored cloaks that cover their entire bodies with hoods. What looks into the faces one can get show they've been long-twisted by the dark side with the signature yellow eyes and deformed facial features.

The assassins primarily use lightsabers and dark side powers, opening with blasts of Force Lightning. Tasra counters by conjuring up a powerful shield using the Protect power while Nawah reaches out and sprouts a mass of vines and plants in front of her that burst into flame when the Force Lightning strikes them. Nawah and Tasra's fighting styles comfortably mix both the light and dark sides of the Force as necessary, and Nomi gets the sense that internally, the young Nawah's connection to the Force, while it ebbed and flowed between both the dark and the light, stayed fairly balanced, generally tilting perhaps slightly more towards the light side than the dark overall.

The battle continues on until Tasra and one of the assassins strike each other with their lightsabers simultaneously, both unleashing their full strength at the same time. The weapons shatter as each of the combatants breathes their last. Nawah has the upper hand in her battle, though both she and her foe have lost their lightsabers for the moment and are relying purely on the Force. Both are running out of energy, however, from the pitched fight. Nawah knows she only had enough for one big move left, and Nomi feels her reach out with the last of her strength to use the Force to rip the cave out of the ground and hurl it at her foe.

Meanwhile, her foe makes a series of motions and had gone very still, taking advantage of the delay in the fight as Nawah went for her final attack. Paying attention to the opponent's use of the Force, one can sense how it is being shaped into what almost seemed like a guillotine, with a sharp blade of energy at the bottom, but with an impenetrable wall attached at the top. The assassin lets loose the attack, penetrating Nawah's defenses. There is an instant searing pain, both physical and spiritual, as Nawah's link to the Force is severed, instead leaving her with effectively a metaphysical wall between her and the Force. That connection she once had remained an open wound, one that left her with an immediate sense of disconnect and longing for that which she once had. Nomi gets the sense that that wound would remain open up until the moment that Damasa Kovani had restored Nawah's connection to the Force.

Without the use of the Force, the cave continues on course and crashes into her foe, crushing the assassin and sinking deep into the sand, taking the bodies and the lightsabers with it, disappearing for what Nawah believed would be forever. The land remains scarred and burned from the intensity of the battle. The teenage Nawah, perhaps in mental shock and denial, walks the area for a brief period of time, unsuccessfully trying to reach out and touch the Force as she once had, before finally leaving the site of the battle.

At that point, the memory ends, and Nawah pauses to let Nomi take everything in and assess how to proceed. It also gives Nomi a moment to process in the event she needs time to recover.

Nomi is certainly affected. Though the meditative state that she and Nawah share serves to buffer her from the deepest of the feelings of loss, it is a difficult memory to experience. As she was not open to the Force when the artifact shared Firith Mobak's memories, there has been only one other time that she experienced a memory through the Force and the ghost who had shared that with her had shielded her from much of the feelings associated - she had only seen the images. Nomi re-centers herself, trying to be a beacon of peace and turns her attention to the moments before and during the time that Nawah had her link to the Force severed. As it is Nawah's memory, it's not like Nomi can step into the mind of the other and see exactly what he or she was doing with the Force, but she can possibly re-examine the moment and get a better feel for it. Nomi feels a small knot of dread forming in her stomach. She hasn't previously realized that this action would be tied to the dark side, but feeling Nawah's despair and loss over what was done to her, there is no other way that you could consider it. It doesn't matter if the person is a user of the Dark or someone dead and gone or someone who would use their Force powers to kill stars, separating a person from the Force is an act of cruelty possibly worse than killing and this is not something that Nomi thinks, now, can be done using the Light Side of the Force.

Nomi wonders if this was a power that the person had or a ritual of some kind and so tries to watch what he or she was doing as much as she can, focusing outside of the memories toward the peripheral where these details are stored.

Nawah gives Nomi the time to process it before effectively "restarting" the memory at the point of the severing happening to let Nomi properly study it. For her part, Nawah is also doing her best to mentally detach and analyze the moment, something that she wasn't easily able to do in the past while she was severed, as it was just another painful memory at that time. For now, Nawah doesn't speak, as the connection needed to be maintained and this wasn't the easiest memory. While the assassin certainly used the dark side, the power wasn't technically a dark side Force power. But that was something they'd need to converse about after the meditative analysis. She waits for Nomi to signal that she was finished with watching the memory, however, and simply focuses on recalling the memory.

Nawah and Nomi re-center themselves and immerse back into the memory. Nawah replays it, doing her best to summon as many details as possible without allowing her brain to fabricate anything that might have been blurred by distance and time. Nomi, for her part, keeps her focus on Nawah's opponent, not letting herself become distracted by the other participants in the battle. As she studies the dark Force user's technique, using both her physical senses and the echoes of the Force carried along with the memory, she senses many commonalities with her own ability to suppress another's use of the Force. This is indeed a very similar method, but amplified and twisted to become more violent and permanent than anything Nomi has done in the past. She's confident, now, that her first impressions are accurate: While historically this practice may not have been the domain of the Sith alone, she doubts she'd be able to pull it off herself without drawing at least a little on the dark side.

Deliberately reliving a memory like this over and over is an experience with the potential for added trauma. However, that's not what happens to Nawah and Nomi. The two of them work together to focus on the important benefits they stand to gain from doing this, pushing aside the pain and fear of the past and not allowing it to overwhelm them. Despite their old disagreements and differences of philosophy, at least in this time and place there is more that unites them than divides them.

At last Nomi feels that she is approaching a tipping point, or a breakthrough. Though she doubts she could perform an exact reproduction of what was done to Nawah (and she's not sure she'd want to anyway), she's starting to grasp the principle behind it thoroughly enough to attempt it on her own. She just wants to watch one more time to be sure she has the gist of it.

The memory begins again, just as it has more than a dozen times before. But this time, in the heartbeat before Tasra's lightsaber clashes against her opponent's, everything freezes - Nawah and Nomi included. For the moment, they can't move, or even break out of the memory, despite their best efforts. They hear a rustle of cloth and the crunch of footsteps on Jakku's sandy ground, and Tasra (still holding her ignited lightsaber) steps into their field of vision. She looks at Nawah and says softly, "What are you trying to do, my apprentice?"

Nawah credits her old training and the fact that time can dull certain sensitivity to past events to a degree. However, her concentration is spent on both watching the event and replaying the memory as needed.

At first, she thinks that maybe she hit a limit somehow. Maybe the meditation has just gotten too intense, but no. That is her master, speaking to her, addressing her directly. "Master Tasra. I am pleased to see you. But because of the nature of what we currently face, I must ask you the circumstances of how we met."

There had been just a little too much possession and raising of dead bodies for Nawah to not verify first. Besides, it's really how Tasra would expect her to respond, given the nature of how they worked together and how Nawah was trained. Nawah also reaches out with the Force for any familiar sense of her old master. The bond between a master and apprentice is one that can't be easily faked, even under these circumstances.

"We met when you were a child," Tasra says. Her tone and demeanor are calm, clearly unbothered by Nawah's questioning (or by the pitched battle that moments ago was raging around her). "A vision led me to you. The first time we spoke, you conjured a little boat with the Force and gave it to me." Nawah remembers this incident vividly - a moment she's never told anyone else about, and that only she, her parents, and Tasra were present for.

Opening her senses, Nawah can perceive another presence there with herself and Nomi (who can sense this too, as she observes). No taint of the dark side is apparent in it. It doesn't feel like another Force user or any sort of conscious entity - it's something much closer to the Firith interface in the artifact than it is to a lingering spirit like Bara Exana or Alashaa Sanu. Nawah's knowledge of lore and legend reminds her of the existence of echoes in the Force, which can form around places where great power was unleashed. Usually she's heard of these being tied to physical locations, but with all the weird and unprecedented stuff that she's experienced lately, who's to say they can't be tied to vivid memories too?

This was likely an echo in the Force. That was Nawah's conclusion. Which means, at the very least, it isn't going to turn on them like a spirit like Alashaa Sanu. She nods to her master, satisfied with the answer. She expected her old master would have been pleased at her diligence in not simply trusting everything she saw with her eyes. "We are trying to understand how the ones who attacked us that day were able to sever my connection to the Force. There is a lingering spirit that is extremely dangerous that needs to be contained, and our hope is that this may give us an edge, either in containing it, weakening, or defeating it." Nawah also gives Tasra an overview of what they knew to give her appropriate context.

Tasra turns her attention to Nomi as Nawah explains the situation with Alashaa Sanu. "You would have me teach this one as well, apprentice?" she says, her voice still soft and thoughtful. "And she wishes to be taught by me?"

Nomi waits for Nawah to respond to her master, but figures that Nawah will leave the question of Nomi's wishes up to her. When the moment comes, she responds calmly, the peace of meditation lending to her lack of fear or negativity. "I have no master, but that also means I have no teacher when I need one. If you can teach me what it is that I am trying to learn, then I am open to that knowledge. Seth Iscandar claimed that you were Sith. But from what I have observed in Nawah's memories, I think it is a bit more complicated than that and I am not afraid you will attempt to corrupt me if Nawah was so long with you and she is no user solely of the Dark."

Unsurprisingly, Tasra (or the memory of her) shows no sign of recognition when Iscandar's name is mentioned. But she nods as Nomi speaks her piece. "I was trained in the ways of the Force by evil men," she says. "The strong held the threat of severing over the weak as a method of control. They used it as a punishment against those who failed to serve them. But as I grew, I came to see that there was more to the Force than what I had been taught. I broke away." She turns her gaze back to Nawah. "I wanted to ensure that the legacy I left this galaxy would not only be one of destruction.

"The act of severing is...unnatural. The Jedi renounced its use in their halls of justice for a reason. I had always hoped the practice would die with me - and with those we hunted. But I taught you to choose for yourself what right and wrong meant, not to mindlessly follow the Jedi or the Sith - knowing this meant your choices might differ from mine." Tasra shuts off her lightsaber, fastens it to her belt, and extends one hand to Nomi and the other to Nawah. "I will teach you what I can. Take my hand."

There was always a way to find out lost knowledge. Nawah never believed for a moment that anything known in the past was ever truly gone forever. But that was really a debate for another day. Instead, she listens to her former master's words about her past. That tracked, especially with the incomplete information that Iscandar had. She reaches out to take her master's hand. The experience of seeing her master and interacting with her, even as an echo, is enough for her to remain silent as she waits to be instructed once more.

Nomi watches Nawah take Tasra's hand and then reaches out herself and takes the other. "I don't wish to inflict this pain on anyone. But the being we are trying to stop maintains her connection to the Dark beyond death of the flesh and she intends evil beyond the severing of one being. She intends the death of Star systems with a weapon powerful enough to carry it out."

Tasra grimaces at Nomi's words as she clasps her hand firmly. A powerful surge of the Force flows from her and into Nomi and Nawah, filling both of their minds with images and sensations of exactly what it would feel like to perform the process of severing. Nomi is confident that she could do this with the tools already at her disposal. It would be the largest and most complex working she has yet attempted with the Force, and it would take a lot out of her, but she knows could do it - once. The methods are less familiar to Nawah, and she thinks she'd need to study a little more before she could pull it off. However, she's left with the distinct impression that Tasra's last teaching can still help her in some way.

As the echo of Nawah's memory begins to fade away around them, Nomi and Nawah hear Tasra's voice once more time. "Keep choosing your own path, apprentice. I have always trusted you to find the right one." Then the meditation ends and they find themselves back in Nawah's quarters once more.

Once they are fully out of meditation, Nomi leans forward and grasps Nawah's hand. "I am glad that you are once again connected to the Force."

After experiencing the Severing from both sides, knowing it is not something she will ever really want to do, but also pragmatically confronting the situation as necessary, Nomi is sobered. She also feels closer to Nawah than she ever has, having shared such an intimate moment of her history.

"I like Tasra. I think she seems like a good mentor, no matter who trained her originally. She shows that one can make their own choices."

Nawah remains quiet for a moment after the meditation ends, still aware of what is going on around her but also holding briefly to her memories. She returns Nomi's clasp and nods to her. "Thank you. For that and for accepting this task. Things of this nature are not light burdens to carry. Master Tasra would like you as well, I suspect."

She stood up. "I think I need to get something to eat after that. Long meditations always leave me famished. You're free to join me, of course". As they were in Nawah's quarters, presumably both of them would be leaving regardless of Nomi's decision.