Merrin is laughing at him.
Not out loud—no, she'd stopped doing that a few minutes ago, her face now set in a little smirk—but in the Force, her amusement is blatantly projecting in ringing waves.
"It wasn't that funny," Cal protests in exasperation as he reaches the top of another pile of rubble. He's also fighting a small smile—Merrin doesn't laugh enough, even though she laughs bounds more now than when she'd first joined the Mantis' crew a year ago.
"It was," Merrin replies simply from behind him, amusement curling through her voice.
"What was?" Cere asks over the comms. Neither Cal nor Merrin jump at the unannounced return of contact with the Mantis, far too used to the comms cutting in and out everywhere they go.
Cal sighs. He might as well tell her himself. "I ran into a wall."
There's a moment of silence. "I'm sorry, did you just say that you ran into a wall?"
Great, now Cere's laughing at him too.
"It's not that funny. Right, BD-1?" Cal asks, glancing at the droid on his back as he reaches the bottom of the pile.
Beedee happily chirps his agreement.
"Oh, well, I guess if the droid says so . . ." Merrin drawls.
Cal shoots her a lighthearted glare, poking at her through their bond. Merrin simply pokes him back, sending another wave of amusement.
Beedee beeps in offense.
"Sorry, Beedee, you know I didn't mean it," Merrin says to the little droid.
Beedee huffs, but seems to accept the apology, settling.
Cal bites back a smile.
"We're about to reach the back hallway," Cal reports a moment later. They've been picking their way through what was once some type of large room, the ceiling long since collapsed into rubble now half-buried in vegetation, but the rest of the building stands more or less intact further back, the pale grey stone eye-catching amidst the jungle of deep blue and green.
When Cere doesn't respond, Cal stops, tapping his comm. It's still on, and Merrin wordlessly confirms the same for her own when he turns back to her. They share an eye roll—they really need to get more powerful hardware.
They come to a stop in front of the entrance to the hallway, Merrin stepping up to Cal's side. Beedee readjusts his stance on Cal's back, head lifting a little higher as he takes a curious look down the dark corridor.
"What do you think, buddy?" Cal murmurs.
Beedee whistles a neutral tone, which matches what Cal's picking up. These ruins, having once belonged to yet another ancient Force sect, have a sort of resonance in the Force that Cal has long since associated with echoes that have faded too much to convey information but aren't quite gone, but other than that, they don't seem particularly special. There's no encompassing Darkness like on Dathomir, no reverent stillness like on Bogano, no thrum of ancient wisdom like in the Zeffo tombs. There's not really even a particular lean toward Light or Dark. The Force is just . . . stronger than usual.
Of course, to an archeologist, these ruins are likely both significant and unique. But unfortunately, none of the Mantis' crew are archeologists.
"Are you picking anything up?" Cal asks Merrin.
Merrin shakes her head. "Everything seems ordinary."
"Yeah, that's what I'm getting, too."
There's a moment where they just stare into the dark. Then Cal shakes his head. "Right. Well. Onward, I guess. Beedee, can you give us some light?"
Beedee chirps and a moment later, a wide beam of light is piercing the gloom of the hallway over Cal's shoulder. From what Cal can see, there's a lot less rubble on the floor, and the walls are covered in some sort of faded paint that detail . . . scenes of the jungle? There seems to be a lot of faded green and blue, but from this angle Cal can't really make anything out.
"Thanks, buddy," Cal murmurs as he and Merrin step into the hallway.
They spend the next hour or so exploring the labyrinth of hallways and empty rooms. It doesn't actually end up being all that interesting. This place has obviously been looted dozens of times, not even something as simple as old pottery shards left behind. There's only the faded paint on the walls and the occasional impression in the Force—a pulse of overwhelming boredom that hints at some sort of children's classroom, or a clamor of overlapping voices at the edge of Cal's hearing and a wisp of savory smells that marks some sort of cafeteria.
It's a little bit disappointing—Cal really doesn't think the tip that they were following about some sort of sealed Force-vault being here is going to pan out—but it's also kind of relaxing. It's just him and Merrin—and Cere, sort of, when they actually get comm signal—exploring, and only doing that. There's been no booby traps, no aggressive fauna, and no Imps. They can breathe easy.
"Are you doing alright, Cal?" Merrin asks as they step out of what Cal thinks was once some sort of storage room.
"What?" Cal asks, pulled out of his thoughts. "Uh, yeah. Yeah, I'm good." He glances at her curiously. "Why wouldn't I be?"
Merrin purses her lips. "There's no point in pretending that we haven't noticed."
Cal stares. "Noticed . . . ?"
Merrin stops, turning to him with raised eyebrows. "That you've been waking up half-screaming every night? It's been almost two weeks now, Cal."
Oh. That. "It's nothing, Merrin," Cal says, looking away and forcibly clamping down on the fear-pain-grief that tries to blossom in his chest. "Just nightmares. You know how it is."
For a moment, Cal thinks that he's convinced Merrin to leave it alone, her determination faltering.
But she regathers it and presses on. "I thought that talking with Fulcrum was supposed to help you heal, not make things worse."
"It did help," Cal immediately rebukes. Commander Tano had been able to explain so much about the Purge, things that he'd never let himself think about, even when he'd decided to move on. He'd known—he'd always known, even as he and his Master had been fleeing the Albedo Brave—that the clones' betrayal hadn't made any sort of sense, but he'd had to accept it as the new way of the world simply to survive. Finding out that the clones hadn't chosen to betray them, that the Sith's scheming had run deeper than anybody had known, that there are kriffing slave chips stealing the clones' autonomy even now, was both a relief that Cal hadn't realized he'd needed desperately and a whole new flavor of nightmare.
Because it turns out, the Jedi had been doomed at the start of the Clone Wars, not the end of it. Unless a hypothetical miracle had occurred—which it obviously hadn't—the destruction of the Jedi Order had been guaranteed as soon as they'd allowed the clones into the Temple.
Cal hadn't even gone on his Gathering by then.
So, yeah. Talking with Commander Tano—or Fulcrum, now, though that name still feels unfamiliar on Cal's tongue—had helped, because she'd been able to explain the road that had led to the downfall of the Jedi. Cal had been able to put to rest those questions that had clung to the back of his mind and stabbed at his heart on the harder nights, the ones that he'd been trying to shake off since he decided to move on.
But at the same time, he'd suddenly had a lot more material for his nightmares to pull from. He hasn't slept this bad since maybe a year into his stay on Bracca. And evidently, the others have noticed.
"Sorry," Cal apologizes after a moment. "I shouldn't have snapped at you, it's just . . ." He breathes out. How is he supposed to put words to this?
"It's alright," Merrin says quietly. "I think I understand."
Swallowing dryly, Cal nods his thanks, pressing the feeling through their bond. Merrin's lips quirk into a half-smile, a soft wave of understanding-I'm sorry-it's okay pulsing back.
As they start moving again, Beedee trills softly.
"I'm okay, bud."
It's maybe fifteen minutes later that Cal starts wondering if they should call this search a bust.
And of course, that's the moment that the Force rings with warning and the ground drops out from underneath Cal's feet.
Cal barely has time to yelp before he's slamming into stone, his shoulder twinging painfully. "Ow."
"Cal, are you alright?" Merrin calls urgently, her voice echoing unnaturally. Beedeee is similarly beeping in Cal's ear.
Groaning, Cal rolls onto his back to find Merrin looking down at him worriedly through the square hole of a trapdoor, eyes glowing slightly and green sparks flickering around her fingers. After a moment, Cal can feel the writhing pulse of her magick twisting above him.
"I'm fine," Cal confirms, pushing himself to his feet. Standing up, he finds that he only fell about twice the length of his height—he would have been able to land on his feet if the ground wasn't sloped so steeply, or if he'd actually kept his guard up.
Beedee trills from by Cal's feet, so Cal crouches so that the little droid can hop up his arm. Beedee gets himself situated with a happy beep, then returns to his role as a flashlight, eagerly sweeping his light around them.
Cal rolls his shoulder, pulling on the Force to sooth the small twinges of pain, and scans his surroundings. "It looks like some sort of cave."
"Should I come down?" Merrin asks.
"Sure," Cal answers, eyes fixed on the tunnel that Beedee's light has fallen on. There's waves of something pulsing from it in the Force, the small disturbances making the hair on the back of Cal's neck stand up.
Whatever Cal's picking up feels wrong. Not Sith-wrong, there's no cloying, suffocating Dark power, and it's not the unique brand of Dark that Merrin's Nightsister magick is. It's not Dark at all—but it doesn't feel Light, either. It's just . . . wrong.
Cal doesn't realize that he's moved to the entrance of the tunnel until Merrin steps up behind him, a breath hissing between her teeth.
"Something vital has been broken down there," Merrin murmurs.
Cal can't tear his gaze from the darkness of the tunnel. "'Something vital'?"
"Even Nightsister magick has its limits, because the universe has rules. Only a fool tries to break those rules . . . and only a large group of fools actually succeeds." Merrin squeezes Cal's forearm as she steps around him, stopping only once stone frames her shoulders, Beedee's light falling squarely on her back. "Whatever the people living here did, they undoubtedly paid for it with their lives."
"Pleasant," Cal comments dryly. It would certainly explain the vague legends of whoever once lived here completely vanishing overnight.
Cal feels more than sees Merrin's grimace.
Right. Well. "So, should we not check it out, then? I mean," he edges forward, "it's not likely that a Force-vault is hidden down there, right?" The further he goes down the tunnel—and he's only gone inches, so far—the stronger the wrongness feels, Cal's instincts lighting up with the need to run. At the same time, though, something in the Force seems to be pulling him towards it, like something's tugging at the center of his chest.
Cal has no idea if that's normal or not.
Merrin hums. "It'd be a clever place to hide one, considering that no one who was capable of opening it would want to go anywhere near it, and even most who couldn't open it would be subconsciously driven off."
Wait, "But if creating whatever this is killed all of them—"
"The contact said that the vault is built differently than the ruins, remember? Someone else—"
"—could have found this place after," Cal finishes. "Right."
Hesitantly, they start moving down the tunnel, Cal once again taking the lead so that Beedee's light can shine relatively unobstructed.
The tunnel is a natural one, the walls rough, the occasionally protruding stone obscuring the way as the path twists and turns. The sounds of their footsteps and Beedee's gentle whirring echo back to them as they move, but that's in no way near as ominous as the way the unnatural pulses in the Force swell with every step they take—pulses turn into ripples which turn into waves, each washing over Cal with the comfort of being doused with a bucket of ice water, making Cal's breaths stutter. Cal's instincts are well and truly screaming now—run, get away, not right—and his hand is gripped so tightly around his lightsaber that it's starting to hurt, but the tugging in his chest has intensified into a full-out pull, as if someone had tied a cord around his breastbone and started dragging him forward.
Merrin mutters a curse in her native tongue, her voice sounding small under the onslaught of wrongness, and Cal silently agrees.
Another few steps later, Cal stumbles slightly when he realizes that he can hear the waves of wrongness, the bases of his ears throbbing—
The tunnel widens into a cavern abruptly after a sharp twist, and Cal's eyes widen.
There's—Cal doesn't know what it is. It looks like a tear in the fabric of the air itself, and it feels like a rupture in the Force. It's large and pulsing and every color of light Cal could imagine is spilling out from it in every direction along with that same sense of wrongness that's now crashing against Cal's shields like a hailstorm.
What in the karking kriff—
"There!" Merrin shouts—and she does have to shout, because the tear is loud, a throbbing clamor of a thousand unidentifiable sounds echoing through the cavern—pointing a little to the left and past the tear. Cal has to squint against the barrage of light, but he can just make out what looks like some sort of carved archway set into the stone.
Carefully, Cal takes one step into the cavern—
Only to be yanked forward by an invisible rope, twisting through the air as he grasps for the Force with a shout—
The last thing Cal registers before he collides with the light is Merrin's scream.
Notes:So I vaguely remember Force vaults, as in vaults that were created by and can only be opened by trained Force sensitives (not necessarily Jedi), being an actual thing in Star Wars but I can't actually remember any details.
I've got the next chapter ready to go and will post it based on the interest in this I get :)
Cal wakes up like a loth-cat emerging from water—which is to say, completely disoriented and not at all happy. The first thing he registers is that most of the pulsing wrongness is gone, and the remnants of it are quickly fading. The second thing he registers is that the sky is pink. There's not really a third thing he registers, as he ends up registering a whole lot all at once.
"Kark."
Cal scrambles to his feet, spinning. He's outside—how is he outside?—on a hill covered in thigh-high, obnoxiously yellow grass that smells oddly fruity where Cal's body has crushed it. There's a range of blue mountains for off on one side, a forest of purple and orange trees starting at the bottom of the hill on another, and what looks like a medium-sized town, several fields of different-colored grass away, that seems to be straddling a river that flows out of (or into?) the forest. The sky is a vivid pink, two suns—one large and rimmed with red and a smaller one rimmed with yellow—shining between the occasional white cloud, and a soft breeze carries the fruity scent of the grass as well as the scent of rich soil, ruffling Cal's hair.
It's all pretty idyllic, but Cal would appreciate it a lot more if he actually knew how he got here. The last thing he remembers is looking at the—whatever that light-thing was—
Kark.
And he'd been pulled into it. By the same thing that had been tugging at his chest. What—?!
"Alright, calm down," Cal says, ignoring the way his voice shakes. "I'm alright. I've just—just got to figure out where I am." But something tells him that it's going to be a lot more complicated than just "where"—
Kriff, the way Merrin had screamed—
Cal reaches for his bond with her and sighs in relief when he finds it still anchored firmly in his mind. But then he reaches for Merrin, and—
Nothing.
There's nothing.
Cal has always been the type to freeze when he panics, though his time on Bracca had ingrained the instinct that usually kicks him into motion a second or two later if he's in danger. As far as he can tell, he's not currently in danger, which is why his body locks up completely, the air leaving his lungs.
He can't feel Merrin. The bond is still there in his mind, gently humming with life—nothing like the torn, burnt stump of a bond that was left behind when his bond with his Master snapped and still aches sharply sometimes—but once it stretches past his shields it just vanishes. Cal can't even feel if Merrin is still alive.
"She's alive," Cal says out loud. "She has to be alive—otherwise the bond would have snapped. That's how it works, right?"
The open air doesn't answer, but Cal doesn't expect it to. Doing this, speaking his thoughts out loud—it's not quite talking to himself like Greez says it is—is a habit he'd gotten into on Bracca. It'd been useful to help himself focus when he'd first been teaching himself the different sorts of mechanical skills needed to break down ships without losing a finger—or his life—in the process, and after that he'd kept it up because it had filled some of the silence that had threatened to drag him back into the nightmarish memory of sitting in a crashed escape pod with his Master's corpse for endless hours. Later on he'd managed to save up enough credits to get himself a music player to do that job, but he'd kept talking to the open air anyway, the sound of his own voice one of the few things he'd learned he could rely on.
He's done it less since joining the Mantis crew—there's less space to talk to nothing when he's constantly surrounded by people, even if there's only three of them—but he definitely still does it. The others have all noticed at one point or another, but only Greez had decided to say anything, simply commenting that it was an endearing little quirk. Cal had gotten him back good for that, with Merrin's help.
Cal turns around again, and this time he notices a divot in the grass just off to the side of where he'd originally crushed it upon landing(?) here. It looks just the right size to be—
"Beedee!"
The little droid is on his side in the grass, completely motionless and his lights dark. Cal swears, pulling BD-1 into his lap and looking him over. He doesn't look damaged, but he's not even in charging mode—Beedee is completely powered off.
Cal reaches for his power tools, pulling out the one that he uses to remove Beedee's main panel—
It's not working, either, dead in his hand.
"Well, that's just great." Cal checks his other tools as well as his comm.
They're all dead.
The only mechanical item that seems to have any sort of power is Cal's lightsaber, the twin crystals humming quietly where it leans against Cal's leg, awkwardly propped up by its holster on the crushed grass.
Cal swears again. "Whatever that thing was must have drained everything." That likely means that as soon as Cal can get Beedee recharged, he'll be fine. Hopefully.
Standing, Beedee cradled in his arms, Cal turns back towards the town he'd noticed earlier. From what he can make out from this distance—maybe a forty-five minute walk?—it looks like it has modern technology, the glint of refined metal interspersed among the orange and brown buildings and multicolored roofs. If Cal focuses, closing his eyes, he thinks that he can make out the whine of ground-speeders, the sound carried by the wind.
"Let's hope that they've got what I need."
~
The town is larger than Cal had first thought, but that's a good thing, because it helps Cal blend in. The population seems to be an even split between what Cal assumes is the local species—tall, slender, hairless humanoids whose skin either match the colors of the forest or of the mountains in the distance, with four fingers on each of four hands—and a mixture of species from the wider galaxy, Twi'leks and Iktotchis and Humans and Cereans and dozens more all intermingling.
Cal asks for and receives directions to a shop that allows him to plug in Beedee and purchase new power packs for the rest of his stuff—well, most of it; they don't have the right type of packs for two of Cal's power tools. It's run by a very chatty Rodian who's happy to give Cal a rundown of the town's history while he waits for Beedee to recharge. The town is called Al'chei'vachduln'xilnchai—which takes Cal five tries to say correctly—a name that translates roughly into Basic as 'a place of life-chaos along the vein of the golden sister's left arm.'
Apparently, the mythology of the local species—the Chiavel'tach—is quite extensive.
Beedee reactivates once he reaches half power, to Cal's relief, and immediately asks to join the conversation. The good-natured shopkeeper allows Cal to move Beedee from the charging station to the purchasing counter and plug him into an extension cord—and then promptly engages in a fully-binary conversation with Cal's droid.
Cal understands binary, but he definitely can't speak it, so for a solid twenty seconds all he does is stare and wonder how the Rodian can possibly be making those noises with their mouth.
When the conversation concludes—Beedee and the shopkeeper agreeing on the classification of some element that Cal's never heard of—the shopkeeper turns to Cal with the Rodian version of a grin. "An excellent droid you have here."
Cal smiles. "Yeah, he's the best. Aren't you, bud?"
Beedee chirps his agreement, bouncing in place.
"He's saved my life, actually," Cal tells the shopkeeper. "More than once."
"Ah, a very excellent droid." The shopkeeper's emotion shifts, though, to something more . . . put-out? Their gaze has gone far away.
After a moment, Cal asks, "Is, er, everything alright?"
The Rodian shakes their head a little, then waves a dismissive hand. "Fine, fine. Well, as fine as it can be with the war on, obviously."
Ice runs down Cal's spine, but he doesn't let the sudden swell of dread show. "Obviously," he echoes, glancing down at Beedee. Beedee looks back up at him with a confused tilt to his head.
The shopkeeper, fortunately, doesn't seem to notice. Instead, they scoff at something only they can see. "Although, I'd appreciate it if the Seps wouldn't give droids such a bad name. Do you know how much business I've lost since Geonosis? Almost fifty percent, and that's after less than three years—how much more will I lose before this war ends?"
What. The. Kriff.
"What's the latest word on the war, anyway?" Cal asks, although his voice sounds far away to his own ears. Distantly, he registers Beedee beeping in confusion.
He cannot be having this conversation, not really. He can't. Because that'd mean—
But all things are possible through the Force, aren't they?
"Oh, I don't know the specifics. I've never much been into following all of—" the shopkeeper flicks a hand, "—that very closely." They pause. "Although, I did hear that General Kenobi is actually still alive."
"He was dead?" comes out of Cal's mouth before he can stop it, and Cal prays that it didn't sound as shocked as it seemed like it had.
"Mm-hm. He faked his death, you see, in order to foil an assassination attempt on the Chancellor."
Oh. Oh. Right. Cal had forgotten about that. He shouldn't have—General Kenobi's "death" had happened barely a week after Master Tapal had asked Cal to be his Padawan—but it hadn't really seemed all that important in hindsight.
Although, it had been horribly ironic.
Cal swallows dryly. "That's interesting."
Beedee beeps his agreement, but with the way he keeps sneaking glances at Cal, Cal can tell that he's still pretty confused.
"What's the galactic date, by the way?" Cal asks the shopkeeper, not-really changing the topic. "I lost track of the numbers a few weeks ago."
The shopkeeper shakes their head in exasperation, pointing to a digital calendar on the wall. Cal looks over, heart pounding in his throat, and—
A different day.
A different month.
A different year.
To be specific, that date is almost exactly a month after Cal became a Padawan.
If that's today's date, then the Clone Wars aren't over.
Well.
Karking kriff.
Notes:So, sorry that this is a bit of a filler chapter, but it's important for establishing some stuff. Next chapter is when Cal processes the implications of where he is, and the one after that is when he reaches Coruscant, so things will start picking up soon :)
This chapter also has my headcanon that incorporates the video game mechanic of Cal always speaking his thoughts out loud so the player knows stuff into Cal's actual character. My boy's a bit of a dork, I love him.
Notes:Comments/questions make my day! :D