Susevfi Welcomes
----------------------------------------
The Temple of Cast Shadows was a cousin, perhaps, to the Praxeum, if it were a cousin long estranged and aloof of the family, who rarely bothered to heed reunions and had their own particular ideas about the way of things. The Praxeum was monolithic and towering, filled with unused chambers and great, vaulted halls. The Temple was reserved and purposeful, eschewing grandeur, built with specificity and a utilitarian bent. The Praxeum opened up to the sprawling, riotous jungle, full of noise and life and movement. The grounds about it were broad, lawns curated by some droids, the nearby river a strip of glittering silver. The Temple crouched at the end of a switch-back ravine, cutting deep into a table mount. The entrance was unassuming and simple - two sandstone statues, thrice the height of a man, inset into alcoves, hands folded behind their backs. A quite utilitarian and very modern door in between with very real and very nasty turrets nestled in their niches.
Though the rest of the Temple, despite its name, was more similar to the internals of an old Empire outpost (and well it should, since quite a bit of it was made of appropriated materials), there were still concessions here and there to the gravitas and grace their tradition demanded. One such place was the Candle Grotto, where from stories, the first three Jensaarai had made their pact after fleeing the Jedi Order. It was what drew the Saarai-kaar back to this place, after Grenfȃtre Tyros had been slain along with most of his acolytes. That ruin, the first Temple of the Jensaarai, was never to be returned to. Too many old ghosts.
A thousand candles guttered among stalagmites and rounded flowstone, flickering slithering shadows across drapery and columns that soared into the gloom above. Only one being waited for Mei in the Grotto, palms pressed together and thumbs intertwined before her.
Mei sunk to one knee, pressing her fist to her chest, head bowed.
"Grenmȃtre."
She felt eyes on her, hard eyes even through the thin mask the much older woman wore. It was no full helm but a proper masque, shaped serpentine, bound in place by leather thong to let long, silver-grey hair fall in waves over shoulders.
"Rise, child."
Mei stood and the Saarai-kaar paced around her, expression inscrutable and lost behind her mask. The woman, more than twice Mei's age and in truth her aunt, held her presence in the Force tight and close, shuttered up and leaking only the slightest lapping waves of stern judgment.
She fought to stay still and not twitch.
"You have not replaced your limb?"
"The socket is of unfamiliar make - the surgeons of Coruscant were dismayed. They told me they would need to remake it. I denied them."
Both Jensaarai spoke in pidgin Susevfite and Sith, the creole tongue Grenfȃtre Tyros laid down, as cipher and as sect-binding secret. Mei felt her aunt's casual dismissal.
"No matter. In our foundry, you will have all you need."
Mei dipped her head in acknowledgement, expecting the command. To be Jensaarai was to stand on your own feet. Her arm was her responsibility to overcome, either through compensation or replacement - as long as it was Mei that did so.
"Your eye - Imperial as well?"
"It is."
The Saarai-kaar paced back into view, head cocked, glass lenses dark.
"It looks well-made."
"It is," Mei confirmed. She barely felt it and the difference in visual acuity was minimal. The lens was even tinted blue, like her surviving eye, though the clockwork gearing and glassy silicate glass 'sclera' made it obvious at a glance to be false. The Saarai-kaar circled Mei again, one final time.
"The Jedi took much from you."
Mei swallowed, both words and memories.
"I gave much."
Her aunt's judgment swelled, neither affirmative or negative, just a pressing wave of focus. A feeling of being cut and measured and found wanting, of her every secret laid bare. Candles flickered. The grotto darkened. In her youth, her knees might have knocked, but now Mei stood as a rock before the wave.
"I brought a gift."
The Saarai-kaar, hidden in shadow and candlelight, seemed more a statue than being. Even the fine, soft strands of her grey hair did not twitch in the subtle airs of the chamber. Still the woman's presence bore down on Mei. She did not respond; she held her sense of the Force tight and close, metaphysically baring her throat. Accepting judgment.
"You brought back half a woman and little else."
Mei clicked her molars together and spat into her palm. A single tooth shone against her skin, slick with saliva, greyish-white and utterly pristine.
"Ceramite," Mei said. "They replaced my teeth with it."
The Saarai-kaar's regard shifted, peeling away from Mei and she almost sagged in relief. Instead, the old Jensaarai's gaze fell to the tooth.
"I sense it. A complex material. Unique. This is unknown to the Galaxy?"
"It is. It is not my gift." Mei replaced the tooth with a jaw-tickling click, setting her shoulders - shoulder, and blocky facsimile thereof. "My gift is knowledge. An amphistaff took my arm and my eye. It cut my armor as cleanly as it cut any other-"
Her aunt grunted.
"-at first."
Judgment, again. Mei's lungs stuttered as the Saarai-kaar took one step closer. All know of the invaders and their weapons. All had heard of the Jedi who fell to them and how they could match with the ancient weapons of the Jedi and Sith. They heard how the invader's serpentine blades proved as keen as contained plasma. She imagined naked avarice behind the lenses of the Saarai-kaar's mask. She felt her aunt's need in her stifling aura, billowing to snuff out all other senses.
Mei traced the jagged keloid scar up her face.
"I did not see in the moment, but one of the Astartes-" she spoke the unfamiliar word, breathing shallow as the Saarai-kaar stepped closer. "-saw fit to share with the New Republic their own recording of the moment. I saw it, Grenmȃtre. It clove my armor like it cut durasteel, but then it fell unstrung. What struck my face was not the cutting smile but a jagged and ill-formed bludgeon. And after, the biot hung limp."
Her aunt, now close enough that her serpent-mask filled Mei's vision, ran gloved fingers along the metal stump of her niece's shoulder.
"Cortosis…"
Mei nodded, the air thick enough she did not risk speaking. Her aunt retreated. Her aura lessened, turned welcoming and supportive. Familial.
Cortosis. That fragile, worthless metal, so difficult to work, so temperamental to weave. That which ran threads though every Jensaarai's armor, in the hilts of their 'sabres, in the cloth of their tunics. Worthless, crumbly, useless metal.
That stunned a living blade.
"Remake yourself," the Saarai-Kaar commanded. "The Jedi returned you crippled. Rebuild your body and remake your connection. Be Jensaarai again, daughter of my brother." She spun away, pulling her presence in the Force in with her, like the accretion of a black hole.
"I have two shoulders," Mei called after her. "If the Jedi are weak, I will bear their burden on my right. Let the strength of my left bear that of the Jensaarai." Her aunt did not reply. "I'll honor both, grandmother," she murmured in Basic.
----------------------------------------
It had taken a while to work up the courage to finally look herself in the eye in the mirror. It was one thing to know, by touch, by feel, by brief glimpses while dressing, how much she had suffered.
Now in her old chambers, thick with dust, she stood naked in the 'fresher and did not look away. She grit her teeth and wiped away the steam - she swallowed down the acid knot in her throat, ignored the hot-liquid burn behind her right eye.
A sharp white keloid ripped from hairline to jaw, cleaving through her eyebrow, through her clicking eye, across her cheek and lips. Beneath, she knew what lay there. The Imperials saved her, but they didn't do much more. The doctors on Coruscant told her enough. Mei touched the synthflesh that bound to her own living skin, sensation strange as her fingertips felt the convincing texture but those parts of her face felt nothing at all.
Half her jaw was ceramite now. Six teeth replaced ones torn out and left on Obroa-skai. Her ocular orbit, a chunk of her forehead: a silvery, surgical metal similar to duranium. The Imperials hadn't bothered to replace the part of her lips torn away, the ripped meat of her cheek, her forehead. The doctor on Coruscant did and they told her she didn't need to see the holos, but she had to know, she had to see…Mei trembled then, running fingers over her scar, thanking the Force she never had to see it in person, staring back at her.
A glance, but now the image of the grinning, steel skull seeming to push its way clear of her face danced behind her eyelids.
And below her neck…
There the Imperium and the New Republic surgeons had agreed. Until she decided on the state of her arm, there was little point in aesthetic rebuild. Mei could list what was done. A replacement lung, that each time she breathed, she tasted metal. Metal ribs. Her sternum pulled apart and rebuilt to better handle the replacements; a tangle of bone and wiring and plates. Emptiness where her breast had been. A rebuilt scapula. Phantom pain that curled her missing left hand into a claw.
Ports and staples that bonded stretched and red-raw skin to bionics. It itched, always. Constantly. She had regenerative gels that she had to apply along the seam thrice a day, or else rot would set in. It looked like a machine tumor. An eruption of inhumanity, ripping out of her body. From the third rib all the way up to her truncated and shriveled trapezius: dark metals and ribbed cabling. Naked and empty ball-socket. Clavicle wagging in the air. Without the dark wrap she kept around it, during the flight from Coruscant, the naked rawness of her…stump…caught her breath.
Mei shuddered.
Her whole body was unbalanced. She pulled to the left, even without the arm. The metal was lightweight, but not enough. It would be worse once she - if she - replaced the arm.
And with what?
A fake? Like Master Skywalker? A facsimile, that looked pleasant to the world but lied about what lay beneath?
Death danced microns from her. A little closer to the midline, a sharper angle, and her heart would have been torn open. As it was, the doctors told her only the hyperoxygenated serum the Astartes injected into her kept her among the living. And that had done its own damage. She still had a cough that ached, needing to inhale a regenerative bacta infusion each morning to promote regrowth in her remaining lung's alveoli. That serum, and she would continue to consider it serum, had ripped into her respiratory system.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
One doctor had said that if he had to use a metaphor, it had acted like a panicked secretary, making an absolute mess of the office all to find the document they were looking for. Drawers yanked out, desks upended, binders strewn about and datacubes all over, but the 'secretary' had succeeded in finding what it needed. Oxygen, at the cost of ravaging her one lung in its mindless hunger for the life-giving molecule.
That wasn't all. She still had cramps that doubled her over at times, through her guts and leaving knots in her muscles that sometimes took hours to loosen. Since she woke up, Mei kept a passive draw on the Force at all times, relying on it to infuse her body and moderate the worst side-effects. Sometimes her physiology almost felt hungry for the life-giving Force, like an addict that had a taste of the finest spice and now was wracked by the trembles. Whatever that serum had been made of, whatever biology the Astartes had, it wasn't for a normal human to sample.
Mei closed her eyes, blocking off the pale body in the mirror. She reached for a robe, pulling it on and closing it off at her waist with a broad, soft sash. Then she allowed herself to open her eyes again, looking back at the woman with dark rings beneath blue eyes, wet hair falling lank and sticking to neck and pale, half-bare shoulder. She raked fingers through it, gathering her locks back and tying it off in a short tail, squeezing out a bit more water. She'd pay for treating it this way later, but right now she just had no energy at all to worry about her usual routines.
Right now, she had other things on her mind. Her arm could be for another day. The Saarai-kaar instructed her to rebuild herself, but she'd not ordered a timetable nor an order of operations.
In her quarters, leaving the refresher behind, Mei tugged the top off a dull, gunmetal crate. A double headed avian glared at her and she glared right back, tossing it aside. The Imperium had packed this along with her and inside was revealed - Mei swallowed hard - the battered scraps of her armor. Crouching down to a squat, she reached in, running fingers through the gun-smoke and blood stained white fluff of her mantle. The only piece that survived first the killing stroke and then the cutting saws of the Imperial surgeons, she lifted out her short cape and buried her face in it.
"Okay," she said, muffled and speaking Basic. "Mei version 3."
She'd rebuilt herself after Master Horn smacked her down into the dust among the rest of the Jensaarai. She'd rebuilt herself after she found Niko's body, already cold.
Really, this wasn't the worst to come back from. Mei, v3. v2 had been nice, and lasted a while, but the galaxy was calling for an update. She ran a tongue along the backs of six teeth, each a few degrees cooler than the rest of her mouth. Mei could feel them, each one of them, with their complicated, monocrystalline whiskers and fascinating molecular planar-crystallite structure. That - that would be a good way to focus. Telekinesis found her footlocker, pulling out clothes and tossing them onto her bed. She closed the crate, placing her mantle gently on top, covering the Imperial Aquila.
----------------------------------------
The Temple of Cast Shadows didn't have anything as prosaic as a 'forge'. Instead, two of the lower levels were set aside for fabrication and materials study. The rooms were clean, clinical and organized. Rubberized mats were soft underfoot but gave excellent traction. There were chemical stations, datastacks, lathes and droid-brained automat shops. Most was appropriated from former Imperial motorpools on Susevfi, few though they were, and others purchased through business fronts in Yumfla that contracted with offworld shipping. Some were from the days of Leonia Tavira, the warlord giving them like gifts.
Mei attracted glances, always at her empty sleeve, but she paid them no mind. Everyone knew how she'd been hurt and half of them had already asked if she needed anything. Her family didn't mean anything. If the position had been flipped, if maybe Kelbis had lost an arm or perhaps Naimos had lost a leg, Mei would find it hard not to look too.
"If you need anything," her nephew, Cyree, had offered. Mei just smiled. Sukarr, too, had held her close and rocked back and forth, her brother's storm of emotion tangible. She'd had to nearly argue with him that it wasn't his fault; that his leaving the Praxeum wasn't the pebble that started the chain of events that led to now.
They gave her space, now, as she started work. The nice thing about family is that, for better or worse, they knew you. They understood.
Everything stayed on a single datacube that she kept both on hand and tied to her own gene-print. And to her particular touch of the Force. Absent-mindedly prodding at the empty socket with the tip of her tongue, Mei leaned closer to a mass-spectrometer, frowning as it played scanning beams across her molar.
Mei hadn't been joking when she told her aunt that her gift to the Jensaarai wasn't ceramite. Maybe she'd share it, maybe she wouldn't. The way the Jedi acted like a commune was sweet and very endearing, but Mei was Jensaarai. A bit of jealousy was healthy. She adjusted the scanning resolution, chewing on her lip as the hologram refreshed. The properties of ceramite were all over the place. She wanted to call it a boride, but both her sense of the tooth through the Force and what the spectrometer was telling her was there wasn't even a whiff of boron in any of it.
The formation of it was staggeringly regular, even with the impregnated monocrystals, but with the tests she'd done in the thermal kiln she couldn't fathom how they sintered the damn thing. Unless it was deposited…Mei scribbled down another note on her datapad.
That Sergeant's armor parted around an amphistaff just as easily as did durasteel or any other armor Mei could think of - minus one - but that wasn't what ran through her thoughts as she frowned at the final readout of the spectrometer. Hafnium? A trinaric carbonitride? Muttering under her breath about how that's not how that worked, Mei scribbled more notes and transferred the readout to her datacube. All it took was a few commands input and all cached data was wiped from the machine. She wasn't the first to demand privacy around the construction of her armor and she'd certainly not be the last either.
What had her hungry for the Sergeant's plate was watching the bugs hit it. Thudbugs just flattened and their carapace was carbon-woven. Razorbugs shrieked off it and seemed to just scrape off paint. It didn't flake, it didn't chip. And it was ceramic. That she felt from the first time she'd patted his plastron. The thermal kiln only proved what the Force whispered to her. Her molar didn't even care when she cranked the temperatures well past what should've turned other ceramics into a sludge. She pushed the kiln to the maximum; any higher and it would start melting itself.
She could take the tooth out by bare hand afterward.
In the other lab, what everyone mostly called the 'loom', she had several spools of cortosis threading up. With the molecular structure revealed by the spectrograph - confirming her sense of the crystalline whiskers layered through out it - Mei entertained thoughts of trying to replace them with cortosis straws. Bind it right into the matrix of the ceramic. She sat back, rattling the loose tooth around the inside of her cupped hand.
She'd sideline that thought until after she was able to figure out exactly how in the stars the Imperium fabricated ceramite. Figure that out, and then she could see about improving it or at the very least tooling around with it.
Jensaarai always favored lightweight, flexible armors. It was the cortosis woven into it that provided the real defense, as the foes of the Jensaarai were assumed to bear lightsabers. Now they knew the Jedi weren't their fated foes but still her family kept to tradition. Obroa-skai opened her eyes wide. Amphistaves could be stunned by cortosis, it seemed, but as her light armor proved, even insensible, an amphistaff still had an edge. They needed tougher material, they needed heavier armor. You can't dodge bugs all day when in a duel. And if the vong started using man-portable plasma, as nasty as the stuff their ships spit?
She tasked the droid-computer to run cycles on the molecular structure of ceramite to see if it could come up with viable fabrication techniques. While it hummed away, she pulled out sheaves of flimsy, a meter long, laying them out flat on a clean table. Charcoals, ink-stylus she scattered and got to work. Brackardian vraks, her chosen totem, had an interesting behavior. She sketched, humming under her breath. Young vraks were wiry and spindly looking. They were the meanest of their species, always spoiling for fights. Just passing by their webbed bowers was enough to incite a young vraks to fury.
But what brackardian vraks did with their sticky, calcium-rich webs was fascinating. They spun up tangles in their bowers that entrapped limbs of prey or interlopers, but they also spun it onto their own bodies. Vraks silk dessicated over time, becoming hard and stiff, which is why vraks' bowers grew larger and larger, always needing more web added as the old cured and turned stiff. In the same way, the webs woven over their limbs and abdomen hardened, turning into thicker and thicker armor as the years wore on.
A particularly old brackardian vraks would look almost entirely unlike a young one, encased as it was in thick, dense and heavy armor plating. Only their lepidoteran wings they ever left free; a beautiful contrast that led Mei to choosing them as her totem in the first place.
A great old vraks, that Susevfites often called a dorogen, was like a lump of lace-textured armor sprouting broad, multihued wings and vicious claws. They were calm and incredibly unthreatening, even letting beings walk right up to them without so much as a twitch. They knew their invincibility against all other predators on Susevfi and they knew the keen edge of their claws.
Mei drew and sketched, blended with charcoals and smudged with fingertips, never noticing the fingerprints on her forehead and cheek and chin as she pondered and considered and sometimes spent minutes stock-still, head in her hand, only her eyes darting here and there. On the flimsy grew a schematic and work of art both, a suit of armor slender and strong, worked with lace-web designs across sculpted breastplate and sloping, segmented pauldron. High greaves rose over knees and joined to encasing cuisses. About the shoulders was arranged her original mantle, soft and feathery.
If she squinted, she could see the bulk of Ultramarine plate in the added mass of the breastplate and cuisses. Something of the Jedi in spun robes to be worn over the naked plate. A full-mask helm's internals, splayed open and diagrammed out, called for comlink and scanners. She'd never liked wearing a full mask, after she'd gone to study with the Jedi. Her only hand rose, unbidden, and she traced fingers along the cold and nerveless scar down her face.
When she blinked, she was used to the clicking such that it did not register anymore.
A soft beeping alert jolted Mei from her thoughts. The droid was done. Three fabrication options were laid out, along with theory for two others. A slow smile grew as she skimmed them, feeling the tug of the Force deep within her as she read. Catalyzed cold-solute drag creep. It was just so impossible, so tremendously improbable that it sang to her.
It was only step one and she'd have to try Force-knows how many catalyzers as well as substrate wafers, but it was a start. She had faith in the Force. It wouldn't be worth doing if it was easy.
Mei went back to sketching, hand dancing across flimsy as she rebuilt the garb of a Jensaarai.