The theme of the day is

[all_too_familiar]

Revan could get used to Coruscant's nice effects. The refresher is glorious, the beds are so soft he thinks they might have found a way to literally let him sleep on clouds, the food is fantastic, and he has a wonderful new set of robes that are completely free of holes, burned bits, and general wear and tear. He is convinced he's being horribly, horribly spoiled, and something will threaten the Republic in a year or two and force him back into living out of a tiny overcrowded starship.

He is even more convinced when he opens a door and it is not a hallway, but instead a bar.

After a few seconds of peering, he calls Canderous on his comm, lets him know that he has found something weird and bizarre instead of the door from his room to the hallway. Canderous comes by with his big gun and informs him that the door is closed, from the other side, and cannot be opened.

Right then. Revan is technically still equipped to kill half of an army, isn't he. Let's see what's in here. He tells Canderous he is going exploring, and Canderous tells him to give them hell if they try to kill him. Proof that he cares.

Inside goes Revan, looking around curiously.

Comments

[greatestgift]

The bar turns out to be... a bar. A weirdly deserted bar, with a vista of exploding stars visible outside its single enormous window. None of the stars are familiar.



A minute or so after Revan walks in, a short human girl wearing white-and-silver armor and an elaborate white-and-silver circlet comes in by the same door. She doesn't seem to have been expecting this place either; she goes on full alert, very much in the attitude of someone holding a deadly weapon at the ready even though she appears to be unarmed.

[all_too_familiar]

Well isn't that a familiar stance. As in, the exact same one Revan has right now, though Revan's a bit more casual about it.

"Hi," he says. "Is this your bar? It seems to have stolen the hallway."

[greatestgift]

"It is not my bar!" she says. "If I've fallen into a strange universe again I'm going to be really annoyed."

[all_too_familiar]

"Again?" wonders Revan. "Is this a common thing for you? Because it's new to me."

[greatestgift]

"The last time, it wasn't a bar, it was a giant snake with a mirror for a face."

She looks around, then cautiously goes back to the door and opens it partway. The very square little room on the other side seems to reassure her.

"At least the bar seems to offer me a way back."

[all_too_familiar]

"Yes. Uh, where are you from?"

[greatestgift]

"Well, that's a question with a highly variable answer. Where are you from?"

[all_too_familiar]

"... Uh. ... Dantooine, tentatively. I'm not really from a specific planet, but I grew up on Dantooine so it counts, I guess. In the Republic, which is the main governing body for the galaxy at large. Not every planet is part of it, but most of the bigger ones are."

[greatestgift]

"I'm originally from the city of Tripoint, in the hinterland of Oleana. But since the mirror snake incident I live on a nameless island in a world that calls itself Terraria. I don't think my original world or my original planet has a name that I know of."

[all_too_familiar]

"Mm. What language are you speaking?" he wonders on a hunch.

[greatestgift]

"...The... only one left? In my world at least."

[all_too_familiar]

"... I'm speaking Basic. I speak others, too. The only one left?"

[greatestgift]

"...You don't have malices in your world, do you."

[all_too_familiar]

"Not that I know of, but it's a big galaxy, we might. What are malices?"

[greatestgift]

"I suppose if they only happened on one planet..." She frowns. "...Okay that's going to haunt me until I have a way to be sure. Just a moment."

And she rummages in her pockets and comes up with a tiny clay pot, which she turns into a rather hefty clay pot and sets down on the nearest table. Then she removes a tiny cheerful yellow flower from the same pocket and plants it in the pot by some unclear means that instantaneously both provides it with previously-nonexistent soil and enlarges it to a more pot-proportionate size.

Then she concentrates on the flower.

First it dies. Then it shrivels. Then the colour drains out of it, and out of the soil underneath it, until it's a curled grey-green husk planted in dry grey dust. All this takes maybe three seconds.

"That," she says, pointing at the contents of the pot, "is what blight looks like. Have you ever seen anything like it?"

[all_too_familiar]

He sees it die. He sees it become empty of the Force. Like a hole, almost like something he's seen before, but not quite. It's kind of horrifying.

"No," he says, shuddering. "I would have remembered. And I have been to a lot of planets and seen a lot of things."

... Or maybe he did encounter it, and he forgot. The thought is - the most terrifying thing he's thought in a long while. He assesses whether or not his memory is so full of holes to forget things that eat the Force.

He's not sure.

[greatestgift]

"Okay, good."

She re-miniaturizes the pot, which becomes a completely normal miniature pot and nothing like a hole in the Force at all, and puts it back in her pocket.

"Malices are creatures that do that wherever they go. They can do it fast on purpose, but they do it slowly to everything near them no matter what. And they can use what they take from things that way to make themselves more powerful. They pop up out of the ground and go around blighting things and killing or mind-slaving everyone they see, and they don't stop until someone manages to kill them, and that's why there's only one language left in my world."

[all_too_familiar]

Polling Revan, is this the kind of enemy you would conquer the fucking galaxy to stop?

... Yes. Yes it is.

"If I am wrong, which I might be, because I haven't been everywhere and I have - some - memory problems, how do you manage to kill them."

[greatestgift]

"...Well... you almost certainly don't," says Sable. "They have - it's hard to explain. They're not physical creatures the way plants and people and animals are. If you kill a malice's body, it just goes off to make itself another one. To properly kill a malice, you need a sharing knife, and those have to be made out of Lakewalker bone and have a Lakewalker's death inside them, and you're not a Lakewalker and I don't have a primed knife to give you."

[all_too_familiar]

"Lakewalker? I'm Force sensitive if that... at all means anything to you. Means I can do this." He picks up his comlink with the Force and floats it in the air, then catches it. "Among other things."

[greatestgift]

"I'm half a Lakewalker, I can tell you're not one," she says. "Whatever being Force sensitive is, it's not groundsense."

[all_too_familiar]

"Okay. So if I fight them, I should consider them impossible to kill. Can they be baited? Lured to some out of the way planet and then we glass the planet and quarantine the place and put up huge warning signs and run?"

[greatestgift]

"'Glass'...? Anyway, I have no idea if you can do anything at all about them because it's possible that if your world has malices but not Lakewalkers then the malices can mind-slave anyone who goes near them. Which would be horrifying and I'm trying to think of clever ways out of it but nothing is springing to mind."

[all_too_familiar]

"Carpet bomb the planet. The term glass is sometimes used because the heat turns sand to glass. And - yes, horrifying. Ugh."

[greatestgift]

"Oh. Well, it would certainly be mightily inconvenient for a malice to have its whole planet scorched to glass - they get the most power from ground-ripping living things. If there weren't any around you'd end up with a very stunted malice."