Pilots' Quarters

[Dav Man'Sell]

He could sense the tension in Jago's voice, could feel the sense of loss in his emotions. He understood it. The loss of soldiers in war, whether they fought under your command or simply at your side,it was hard. Hard because it was horrifying to see just how badly injured someone could be before they died. Hard because the pain of others became your own, especially when you were a Jedi. Hard because it was inevitable, because you knew that walking into each battle was someone, someone on your side, who would not be walking out again.

He took a deep breath in, dipped his chin.

"The gun's down. But ah..." He hated this part. In some way it was reassuring. Every time he worried he found death a little to easy to accept, every time he was concerned he bounced back from a loss too quickly, something like this came back and hit him hard. "...we lost Zak. A shot to the back as we were making the repulsor jump over the cliff."

He looked to Jago, and then Tebana. He could see their equal sense of loss. Zak had been their student, the Praxeum's student. He'd studied under all three of them at some point or another, and they'd all helped him to become a Jedi Knight. It was a hard loss to suffer.

[Tebana Sor]

Jago’s feeling were etched into his face and into his aura and she was sensitive enough to immediately hone in on it. The grim reality of war would weigh them down one by one, and expressing it would go a long way to alleviate the emotional pain. As the Academy’s healer, the emotional welfare of the Jedi under her care and protection was just as important as any physical ailment that had to be tended to. It was something she would have to keep an eye on…

“His body….?”

She slowly shook her head at Dav ever so lightly, already suggesting she knew the answer and closed her eyes.

A Jedi dying was one thing, his circle not being able to administer the last rites of passage was another. It would make the hole he left so much bigger.

[Dav Man'Sell]

He shook his head, slow and reluctantly. Lifted his hands up to begin detaching the repulsor pack from his armour.

"Fell into the river. He was in the air when he was hit." He sighed, looked back to Jago. Dav had only witnessed the tidal wave from the air, supported by the repulsor pack as he and Lita had crossed above the river. He knew that Jago and Zuli had been down there, seen it's effects close hand. "He could be anywhere in the river within... hell, I don't know. Fifty kilometers? More?"

He finished removing the pack, lowering it to the floor. Took a breath in, and exhaled it again as he was running a hand through his saturated hair, a drawn out, weary sigh.

"I think we're going to have a lot of this. A lot of unrecovered. There's... so many, so many in orbit alone."

The Jedi Master swallowed, looked off into nothing. Shook his head, again.

"We'll have to work something out about that later. Like so much else."

There was a peak on the edge of his Force senses; Zuli Madoon approached.

[Zuli Madoon]

"It is good to see you all.." "Sorry for the delay, I got back as quick as I could.."

[Dav Man'Sell]

He nodded, looked around, and then made a small gesture, triggering the door lock with the Force.

"Alright, so... I'm going to cut straight to it." The Jedi Battlemaster felt suddenly rather weary, not wanting to have to address the truth he'd discovered, and the implications. He worked his jaw. "During the battle for the Siege cannon, I recognised the face of one of the soldiers in the Mandalorian squads protecting it. Ali Hadrix."

He didn't know if the others remembered Hadrix. But despite the years, her name had come to him almost instantly.

"She used to be stationed with the Galactic Alliance Seventh Fleet when they were based in this sector, before the formation of the Peacekeeping Taskforce." He looked up at them. "Today she was fighting for the Mandalorians. And she was wearing the insignia of GALSAF."

Dav focused on Tebana, repeating what he had said to her.

"GALSAF is commanded by Ander Tagira. And they're here fighting for the Mandalorians." He looked to Jago, then Zuli, as he finished the thought. "Which means that he's almost certainly here. On this moon. Fighting against us."

[Tebana Sor]

Tebana’s usually composed traits first changed into an expression first of utter disbelief, then indignation before it settled somewhere between concerned and distressed.
She instinctively bolstered mental defenses, a futile attempt to hide her emotions to the three men in the room.

Ander had built the base of what the Praxeum was today. Without him not half of them would be there today, calling it home. He had called each and every one of the leading Jedi of Yavin his brother, had named her his sister… and it made the betrayal that more obvious, even logical.

“Back to claim what he considers his…?”

But logic didn’t make either betrayal or the potential catastrophic consequences easier to accept.

[Jago]

~ Unlike Tebana, Jago could not hide his feelings on the matter. A side-effect of being connected to The Force in such a way that it was impossible to separate the body from the soul. There was one emotion, one overwhelming part of his pure self that was boiling to the surface.

Anger.

Ander Tagira, the former leader of this little slice of The Galaxy.

The man who had killed him.

His hands flexed and curled into tight fists, even as he willed the feeling to the darker corners of his mind. It took him a moment before he could speak, the thought of facing Tagira in battle keeping him mumb, though whether it was from dread or the thrill at the chance of defeating him ... he wasn't sure. He hoped it was from the former.

" We can't sit around, then. We need to move," he declared, looking at the other three gathered.

" If he's here, nothing is safe. Nothing, he knows of most of our static defenses, what we would normally do in defending the Praxeum: we need to get him and his mercenary kriffers off of Yavin Four as fast as possible."

So. This is what it had come to, then. Formerly a Jedi, a Master, the head of the Praxeum here that they had called home ... now here to attack it. To maim and slaughter.

He almost couldn't conceive of it, the idea of Ander being here with the death of the Jedi in mind. Had he fallen so far?

" None of this makes sense ... Even if Ander was here to fight us, why would GALSAF join him? Most of them came from the Alliance, I fought alongside most of the Seventh, we all did! Why would they be here to fight us!?"

Did any remnants of loyalty, or even respect, have no place in this Galaxy anymore ..? ~

[Dav Man'Sell]

The Jedi Battlemaster exhaled slowly, silently. He could as good as hear the thoughts in each of their heads, even without the Force. Keen eye and trained mind and old soul, picking out all of the subtle and not-so-subtle expressions that played their emotions across their features like a Hologram. He could see Tebana's wash of concern, shock, disbelief, in the tightening of her brow, in the twitch in her jaw. He could see Jago's anger in the flaring of nostrils, the widening of eyes, the squeezing of fists. In the way he retreated into himself for a few moments. And in Zuli's silence, even in that stoic, shape-changer's face which was normally unmoved to display anything but the most unflappable serenity, he saw echoes of his own feelings of alarm. His own urgency.

He shook his head to both Tebana and Jago's questions.

"I don't know. I don't know. I can't work out anything for sure yet."

He looked away from them, up into the corner of the room, as though he were staring through the duracrete and the stone walls and out into very fabric of the cosmos itself. In a very real sense, he was, looking to the Force for answers. He shook his head again, and gave a deep sigh.

"There's something else to this. There must be. Something.... elusive."

Dav's eyes returned to them.

"The question is... how do we respond to this?"

[Tebana Sor]

Whatever it was that shied away from Dav Man’Sell’s scrutiny through Force and intellect, it set him on edge. And in turn it made Tebana uneasy. Together with Jago’s reflection on missing loyalty and a very deep set sense of betrayal, it made of a clear change in temperature. Where before - through long exposition to suffering, pain and injury - a warm presence offered calm and respite from a heated battle, was now a cold and set reflection of deep conviction and icy calculation.

No, the question is how can we respond…?

She corrected Dav in her mind, keeping her semantics for herself as a simple practical sense of the latest development won her over. They would have to go over every strategical weakness of the Academy, their evacuation protocols, their calculations on prisoner’s, wounded and their dead waiting for burial, the planned destruction of vital assets, information and infrastructure… everything would have to account for them being overrun at a moment’s notice.

“There is no way that we can anticipate the invaders’ next move or Ander’s motivation, so I prefer we didn’t try.”

Pure calculation reflected in her voice, her healer self had completely retreated and made place for the leader faced with impossible choices.

“We need to reinforce our weak points as if they had been exposed by any ordinary intel breach and move on. Ander’s choices are his own and not ours to lose time or effort with.”

And even worse truths.

“And we need help."

[Zuli Madoon]

"Ander's reasons for coming back with an invasion force cannot be good. If he had wished to return as normal he would have been welcomed as any other guest.." "Whatever his reasons are, we cannot sit idle.."



"He may know the layout of the Praxeum, but the systems have been updated and upgraded in the years he's been away. He cannot know the current strength of our defenses for that same reason too.." "As Tebana said, we should work on fortifying any weaknesses that he would know about.."