trans_9 | Meet-n-Greet

"Choas is the best description of this madness," Arha said, gliding away with a rueful smile. Her feet made no sound as she wandered away, leading them from the noise and confusion, until it was nothing more than a dull, distant sound. It was to the Sensoriums she lead them, resigned about the use of the thing. It helped when the noise of the ship became too much for her. Now, she had the hang of creating anything, and it was her cave with its cache of water lapping in the distance that formed. Two pallets as well, simple, comfortable, appeared.

It was preferable to the the claustrophobic mess Stacy had in store for them elsewhere.

The sound of the desert wind rushing and the familiar sweet sharp scent of cinnamon were comforting things of a world that no longer was. Somewhere in the distance there was the distant roar of Shai-Hulud. The spice cakes were not truly spice cakes, but they were better to look at than the things the ship gave them. With familiar ease, she moved to dip a small bowl into the water. This she offered to him and then gestured to a pallet.

"Rest. I shall remain watchful," Arha said, her tone solemn, but soft. "There is no quieter place than in the arms of my desert."

Luke's eyes widened as they apparently walked into a desert. He could taste the dry, dusty tang in his mouth that had been so familiar back on Tatooine, and that he was sure would follow him for the rest of his life. The air had that desert stillness, too; every sound he made, every scrape of foot on stone or sand, seemed oddly magnified to him. It made him miss Tatooine (purely for its familiarity) intensely.

"This is your home planet, then?" he asked, accepting the bowl with a soft word of thanks and drinking it. "This is where you are from?" He sat on the pallet, looking up at her with his own very blue eyes. It had to be; it smelled the same as she did.

"It is," she said, her voice echoing, though hushed. One of them. Chapterhouse had been her own for sixteen years, though she lived in the desert environs that were a mimic of Arrakis as close as possible. Arha counted the desert her home and nothing ever felt more of a thing than Dune. It was truth.

"As close to it as this place will allow, at any rate. This cave was my home for a year. Beyond, the deep desert with many creatures." It came again, the roar. "That is Shai-Hulud, a Great Maker. A Maker of Spice. It is not real, though, but I hear them once and awhile. They are sensitive to motion and are quite territorial, but we have an understanding, Shai-Hulud and I."

It was not something she could explain, it just was.

"A Maker of Spice? It sounds like a krayt dragon to me." Luke lay back on the pallet, staring up at the dark ceiling of the cave and listening to the silence. "This place--the desert--reminds me a little of where I grew up."

"You are a little desert rat, too, then?" Arha said, her eyes sparkling with good humor. "Desert creatures find desert creatures. It is fact, so say we Fremen. I know not of your dragons, but the worms are bigger than any creature I have seen. The biggest I've seen make a man look like a grain of sand. Rows and rows of teeth and deep down nothing but heat and fire. Little will hurt a worm, save water. Water, that is poison."

"Krayt dragons aren't that big, but they make a racket." Luke smiled, remembering how Obi-Wan Kenobi had used the roar of a krayt dragon to scare the sandpeople off him, and how that had begun everything. He felt like a different person. "Not much in the deserts of Tatooine will mess with one."

He pondered what she'd said about water for a little while though, that it was anathema to the worms. It was an unusual thing, because he knew that the body was made up mostly of water; for something so essential to be a poison went against what Luke had come to accept as a rule of nature. "Water is poison to a sandworm? How can that be?"

"All the water on Arrakis lies beneath its surface in caches. Some are large, some small. Think of a world where there has not been a drop of rain for thousands and thousands of years. Think of the ecology changing to fit that moment after moment, generation after generation. The desert sands are merciless, the storms fierce enough to pick a man clean to the bone, to rend metal from the sky. The only thing that does not fear a sandstorm is Shai-Hulud...and perhaps me, but even I will not walk into one. I am, sadly, flesh and bone. But yes. Water is poison and water is life."

She held out her hand, palm up.

"Let me show you a glimpse of my desert sands. This cave is well enough, but dusk and wormsign? It is a sight."

Luke looked at her steadily a moment, then swung his legs over and took her hand. It was warm and strong, as he somehow knew it would be--the desert didn't allow weakness to survive very long. It wore away or buried everything that stood still for too long or wasn't sturdy enough to stand up to it; he'd dug enough sand from around the moisture collectors to know.

"Sure," he said, and stood, keeping hold of her hand for a moment longer. "Lead the way."

Her palm was suffused with the same lingering buzz she'd felt before and she flashed a neat smile that wasted as little water as possible wih the action, and lead him out into the darkening world. The sky was a blaze of red and gold, cloudless and crystal clear. Out here, her eyes were ever more alien, almost a solid blue-white. Her fingertips brushed his as the wind rose and whipped at her hair.

"Stay to the rocks," she hummed, leaning to be heard above the wind. "Move as I do."

Nimble as a mountain goat and far smoother, she moved among the rocks without dislodging a single grain of windblown sand. When she got to a flat expanse, she found a place to sit near the edge. The whole area was lit in the dying glow of the fierce sun and the sand glittered from dark tan dunes, to cinnamon red, to pristine whites.

She leaned back, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughed; moisture preservation.

"Wormsign!" she called.

Luke followed her, using the Force to aid his movements and move almost without touching the cliff face. The whole place had the smell of cinnamon strongly about it, moreso out here than in the cave. It was a place of stark beauty that only someone raised in a place like it could appreciate, the way the sand dunes fair glowed in the dying sunlight and the heat that radiated from the rock beneath his feet.

"What's wormsign?" he asked, sitting neatly beside her as though meditating.

"Do you see the way the sand is shifting in a long ripple?" She pointed at the surface of the sand where it was, indeed, rippling and dust was bleeding into the air. "When the workers of a spice harvester are out on the sand, their spotter looks for such disturbances. Shai-Hulud is very territorial about Spice. The harvesting must be done as quickly as possible. It is hazardous, many have died doing that work. When a worm comes like that, there is little chance for escape."

She canted her head slightly.

"If he were a real worm, I would sense him." Arha laugh again, the old habit of covering her mouth still deeply ingrained. "In fact, I would be able to call out to him, though whether he would come is another matter entirely. The big ones generally do not." She watched the worm's progress for awhile and then lay back against the hot rock. This had been her favorite nighttime spot.

Well into the darkness before the first cold hit, she could lay back and watch the stars. The sun was disappearing, now, moment by moment, and the brightest stars had just begun to show. It made her miss Arrakis fiercely, though Sheeana assured her the desert planet was gone.

"Why would you call out to a sandworm?" He watched how she slipped into habits that must have developed on this world. "I thought you said they were territorial. I thought that they might kill people who disturb them."

On instinct--or perhaps a nudge from the Force, he could rarely tell the two apart anymore--Luke stretched out on the warm rock, folding his hands behind his head and feeling the suit shifting against his skin. It seemed to normalize the temperature of the rock, even though he knew none of their surroundings were real. If he thought about it, he could feel smooth floor under him--but it was so much more relaxing to think that he was on a shelf of rock in a place that reminded him greatly of Tatooine.

"I like them," Arha said absently. "I grew up with one, a younger, smaller one." This room made pretty lights of things, but it was not real, she knew this. Still, it was close to being home. "He was not where he was supposed to be, trapped, alone, far from his own kind and begged me to free him. I did so, but at a great cost to myself. I slept for a week after I used my hands on him, so I was told. He gave me desert knowledge and a safe passage of sorts. He also gave me a tooth from which I made two crysknives. They cannot be sheathed unless they draw blood. One must not draw one's weapon lightly."

Her fingers rested against her stomach and she breathed slowly.

"I have never been attacked by Shai-Hulud. I suppose, as the Fremen have said, I am a...worm-friend. I do not command them, but should they choose, they listen to me."

"They're sentient and can communicate, then?" Luke asked, turning his head to look at Arha. She was now little more than a silhouette against the growing darkness. Soon enough his eyes would adjust to the nighttime; so for the present Luke stared up at the emerging stars, ones that he didn't know. Was it possible, he thought idly, that the galaxy containing his home was somewhere out in that void? Or was it completely separate from the real version of this place?

His head spun with those questions; and Luke sensed that if he weren't careful he could get into a very sticky place in philosophy and astronomy, and he really wasn't either, not even a philosopher. In any case, he didn't need the Force eddying around in his mind to know that soon enough he would have many more questions of greater import than this.

"To some degree," she said softly. "It's all image and...and song. Like the wind, the land. Scents. It's an art to interpret, really. I grew up with it, I know the language, so to speak. It's a different sort of communication."

Her smile was a soft curl, now almost lost to the night. She was silent for a long while, tracing familiar constellations that were nothing but Thinking Machine generated.

"Nothing is familiar outside," Arha said, closing her eyes wearily. "I think we are between between realities. I think this is truth because there are so many who come from different places with different rules in their Universes."

Luke nodded in understanding. He couldn't hear these sandworms 'speaking'; Arha couldn't hear the Force as he could. In this strange place where every universe seemed thrown together and told to survive, it made sense.

"It seems that way," he replied. "I've met people who know me but who aren't from any planet in the galaxy that I know, and there are others with abilities that I've never seen. Then there are some that seem to have powers that are similar enough to the Force for me to feel--but it's like yelling down Beggar's Canyon to the other end, I can tell that someone's speaking but I can't make out the words. It doesn't make any sense."

He sighed; he could feel the frustration mounting in him and worked to calm it. That wouldn't do for the Grandmaster of the Order to lose himself.

"I feel it, too," Arha said, letting her fingers curl against his arm. "It is frustrating to feel and not interpret, to be aware and unknowing when all you wish to do is understand." Her thumb brushed out soothingly, absently. For no reason she could understand, she felt a surge build, the kind that came when she was healing. It was prickly, buzzing like the thing she sensed coming from him. She could almost touch it, now, the effect stronger with touch.

Arha could sense frustration and knew it was not her own. The prickling that shot up her arms smoothed and became a flow, soft, reassuring as it flowed through her fingers. Calming, easing, kneading the emotional knots away like her fingers would have done to muscle. She was meant to help.

This was the way of things.

Luke could feel it now, radiating outward from her touch. It was that same feeling he got from the others--that sense of an echo of power, and in that same breath, he felt something--the first sip of caf in the morning, the one that made all the cells in the body align perfectly, perhaps. It seemed to soothe and relax him, as if she were pouring calm into the Force just as he had done to all those who had seemed to despairing in the other rooms they'd just left.

Arha, though not Force-sensitive or even knowing what the Force was, seemed nonetheless to serve it as he did. "All I really wish to do is sleep," he said with a laugh. "I think things will be come more clear if I'm not covered in alien goo and breaking my concentration every time this strange suit has a particularly strong heartbeat."

He smiled up at her, grateful that he'd found someone so good. She reminded him a bit of Teneniel Djo, the Dathomiri Force-sensitive who had married Prince Isolder of Hapes, or their daughter Tenel Ka, now Queen Mother. It was in the way she spoke and the quiet dignity she had about her.

"It has been an effort," she said, leaving her fingers against his arm as she let out a breath, "to synchronize myself with it so it no longer bothers me, but it can be done." Weariness pressed spots against her vision and she felt the beginning swirls of hunger. It took a half second to suppress it, a slight narrowing and focusing of her eyes the only indication she'd had to expend effort at all.

That she blamed on tiredness in general.

Her answering smile, though, was small if warm.

"I'm sure it can. It's just very new right now, I'm used to more loose-fitting clothing." Luke stared up at the sky; nightfall in a desert was sudden and complete. The stars were bright, as he hadn't seen in many years. Coruscant's lights drowned them out there, and when he was in a StealthX he didn't often concentrate on the beauty of the stars, just picked one as a reference point.

It was her red hair that reminded him of Tenel Ka too; and of his beloved Mara, with her flaming-red hair that had been passed down to their son. The old sorrow hit him still, making the smile slowly fade from his lips. Luke doubted anyone would ever take Mara's place in his heart.

A wave of exhaustion hit him suddenly, making it difficult to keep his eyelids open. "We should rest like we said we were going to," he murmured; the desert stillness wasn't to be broken for anything.

"Then it is time to sleep," she said. "It has been a long day and much has become unfamiliar." Arha rose and offered him a hand up, politely, her movements fluid and easy. She caught the way his face changed and acknowledged the sorrow. Loss. Such a thing was unavoidable in the Universe and it was nothing she could soothe.

Still, Arha found herself wishing to anyway, before she cast it aside as foolishness.

"When you wake," she murmured, "I will show you what parts of this place I have discovered. There is time."

He took her hand up--again getting that sense that she could 'hear' echoes of what he was feeling--and stood, brushing grains of sand from his suit (it pulsed beneath his palms, definitely too much like an ooglith masquer) and eyed the lip just beyond the cave entrance. He hadn't tried to make a leap like this in some time, and he wasn't as young as he'd been when he'd made the jump from the speeder onto Jabba's sand barge, but...

With a gathering of the Force, Luke sprang lightly off the ground and, in two smooth leaps, made it to the ledge where the cave was and turned to look back down at Arha.

Amused, she watched the leap, tilting her chin up at him. Interesting. Feeling a touch playful, rare enough for her, she flashed a grin and moved. There was a blur and she seemed to appear next to him, two fingers on his shoulder and soft laughter on her lips.

"It is The Weirding Way," she whispered and moved soundlessly back into the cave, not a single stone disturbed.

Luke followed her, contemplating the surge of energy he'd felt when she'd... moved as she did. It had come to him, in its echoing way, still more wild than the Force was. Not more primitive... but less controllable.

Laying down on the pallet that he'd chosen before, Luke rolled into the blanket and listened to the silence, a blessed relief after the din of the weapons and possessions lockers and the Observation Deck after that. He was tired, exhausted to the core of himself. He missed Ben deeply, missed his sister and Han and even the droids.

With a sigh, Luke sought to quiet his mind in preparation for sleep. It wouldn't be very restful if all that came to him were nightmares.

Arha ate a spice cake, which ostensibly was the protein mash spat out by the ship, and felt better for it. She made little sound as she moved to cover the luminescent moss filled baskets (they were not real either, but it felt familiar and right) to do so. After drawing the door flap down and securing it tightly so the sand wouldn't leak in, she sat cross legged, close enough to be a comforting presence.

She could feel it, still, the lingering sense of energy or power, like a thing half glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Something silvery, possibly blue. Her palms itched with residual energy, like the calming she'd done wasn't enough. Arha massaged her palm with a thumb and frowned gently. She was the Watcher this night.

Meet-n-Greet

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