trans_9 | "This is Siaynoq." She said. "All that remains of the Tyrant's greatest ritual." [OPEN]

Sheeana doesn't like to train in the sensorium. There's something about the guarantee of safety, the artificiality of the sorroundings...It dulls her edge. Her reactions are a fraction of a second too slow.

Instead she's brought her little maker to the park with her. Purple grass. Strange, crystalline trees. Bags of multicolored sand lie in a heap a few meters away, where she's dragged them from the nearby playground.

The sandworm is barely seven feet long on its diet of scraps and sickly from the humid environment. Even still, it rears back and snaps at her with impressive speed on the purple grass. Sheeana dodges back and twists side to side. Each snap of the tripartite jaws closes just a few inches from her. She is a literal blur of motion, dancing evasively then vaulting over it like a naked ancient Greek on a vase.

There is something to this scene of a boy wrestling with his dog. It can be seen on the Dune waif's little crook of a smile.

She draws her crysknife. The bone-white blade is the tooth of an adult maker, and she tells her charge so: "Someday you'll have teeth this big too."

She feints playfully at it, careful to keep her arm from getting caught in it mouth with its rows of little daggers and blazing internal fire.

She doesn't realize she's not alone at first.

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"I wouldn't think so. Attempt to rule and you build up a reservoir of hatred against you. It always fails in the long term." She paused a moment, considering wether to reveal this to him. Odrade-within whispered to her: An outside perspective is a commodity of infinite value.

"We fear that the Honored Matres who now hunt us may be an offshoot of us who did exactly that."

"What would it benefit them if they caught you?" Luke asked. Politics always hinged on who benefited how much and where, at least in his experience. That was the simplest way to think of it.

"They want our abilities to fight whatever it is they're fleeing from. They've forgotten everything about Prana Bindu except the aspects related to killing..." A grudging admission: "Which they've improved upon."

"Seems typical, I bet they grew up with this threat around them and had to adapt." It had been encountered in other races around the galaxy he was familiar with. "But then why would they want knowledge that wouldn't help them survive?"

He was partly asking her, partly thinking out loud, sitting on the ground now with an expression of thought on his face. Being used to constant demands on his time and expertise, even sitting here was making him feel lazy. Not that he hadn't needed a vacation.

"Their enemy apparently can engineer plagues, something they didn't count on. Thus they've come swarming back into the old empire. We've lost so many sisters..."

Add Darwi's name to the list of probable casualties... Her mentor had embarked on a dangerous mission to Spider Queen's lair. She probably wasn't coming back.

She sat across from him and the worm slid into her lap.

Luke shuddered, thinking of the viruses that prevented Boba Fett and his granddaughter from returning to Mandalore, or the ones that had killed during Caedus' civil war. It was so unnatural it made his skin crawl. "They think you have a way to stop these engineered viruses?"

"We can stop it from harming ourselves with our bodily control. They want us to re-teach them that. They've forgotten everything but fighting, ravaging, killing, pillaging, enslaving then moving on." Precious secrets. But a Bene Gesserit would die before revealing them. And with women who could stop their own hearts at any time, that was not an idle threat.

"Why don't you work together to stop the threat at its source?" Luke asked, a little puzzled. Without being there, able to pick up on emotions and read the situation for himself he had no idea if he was getting an objective view. While he implicitly trusted Sheeana, it fell to a Jedi to be as impartial in such things as was possible.

"It sounds like all of you have great ability. Wouldn't it be easier to band together?"

Sheeana inhaled and then exhaled slowly, a technique taught to children to promote calm. Basics. Back to basics. "That was Darwi's plan. She indoctrinated a captured Honored Matre in our ways and set her to assassinate their current leader. We were to teach them, show them balance."

"But I don't trust them. I watched them glass Arrakis in a fit of pique. If our woman is knocked off her throne...They have a tradition of ascension by assassination you see...Then we're all dead. There's twenty of them to one of us and each more deadly. So me and a minority of other dissenters stole a No-ship and a sandworm and fled for the uncharted parts of the universe. I felt...As if I could paint this great blank canvas myself. That was two days before I was captured." She didn't bother to hide from Luke the frustration and pain of being constricted again. Her years of BG training had taught her responsibility but at heart she was a wild thing and chafed at being caged.

"This is Siaynoq." She said. "All that remains of the Tyrant's greatest ritual." [OPEN]

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