#ellekai

Do kisses always make you laugh, Master Jedi?

Sorry, Baron von Heartthrob!  Your mustache is very handsome but it also tickles!

Okay so I guess OC Kiss Week 2018 has become OC Kiss Month 2018. This one features @juczerro‘s delightful Agent Zaharian Kavok, who is in his undercover look that @amarearts designed for this piece here.  I loved it so much I had to draw it!  Here he’s smooching my jedi knight Eli’Zan Luz, who is most succinctly described as “Kaylee Frye with lightsabers.”  This might be a bad move, though, because the Eli’Zan defense squad zooms in immediately at the first sign of duplicitous agent smooches.  Accidentally kind of hilarious, since as imperial agents go Zah is about as sweet as you can get.

Eli’Zan Defense Squad, clockwise from the left:

Angry Balmorran Mother, Sabine Traken-Luz (mine)

@catpella‘s delightful twi’lek shadow Karreja

@nerdlordholocron‘s looming and disapproving Michaeli 

Older sister who Won’t Hesitate, Bitch, Guileta Luz (mine)

@kotorswtor‘s Nauri Massani (right) and Ellekai Massani (bottom), who are on to you, Zah.

I really felt like drawing fancy robes and strong lights, so who better than the robe princess Ellekai?

For most people, this probably will be a perfectly pleasant update leading to a presumed future expansion where we resolve the issue with Undead Malgus. Unfortunately I read Deceived, the terrible tie-in novel that explains the cinematic with the same title and some background info on said Malgus.  It features the first appearance of Terrible Jedi Aryn Leneer and the family she mentions, retired Havoc Squad operative Zeerid “Z” Korr and his daughter Arra.  I liveblogged it here back in the day, so check out this tag if you are entertained by snarky hate-reading.

Pretty much, just imagine Ellekai cold-reading Aryn, and the dialog in story mode all consisting of tense-to-borderline-hostile dialectic, and you’ve got a fair idea of what was happening in my head.

Aryn: “A lot of awful, painful things happened here, including the Council wiping the memories of people who left the Order.”

Ellekai: “It’s pertinent to mention that that procedure wasn’t routine protocol for all people who chose to exit the Order. It was deployed once ever, on a Super War Criminal presently leading a catastrophically bloody, destructive offensive against the Republic, as a last-ditch alternative to execution. It was attempted or proposed twice more, on another Super War Criminal- you know I’ve talked to both of them, right? -and a suspected mass-murderer of children respectively.  Specificity matters.”

...

Aryn: “Malgus went this way”

Ellekai: “How do you know?”

Aryn: “Because I’m a Force-Empath and you’re not”

Ellekai:

Aryn:

Ellekai: *a solid two minutes of ugly, barking laughter*

...

Aryn: “So if we find Malgus down here, I’m gonna kill him. Heh, I maybe should have mentioned that before, I guess.”

Ellekai: ...

Ellekai: “25 years, a job change, and nothing’s changed for you, has it? You haven’t learned. You’re still weaponizing other people’s good will, without their informed consent, for emotionally-incontinent, selfish, vengeful ends. You may think you loved Master Zallow, but you never listened to him.”

...

On the debrief, one of the other masters, via SpaceZoom: “In the interest of operational security, we should pause while non-members of the Jedi Order exit the conversation.”

Arn: *bows up*

Ellekai: “Hrrrm, how do I put this diplomatically? Your son is a dangerous idiot, and his idea of ‘good work’ usually has a higher casualty count than a cruiser crash.”

Satele: “That was the diplomatic version?”

"That's weird. Are we expecting a solar storm or- Oh. Crap." Ellekai folded up like a maintenance pit droid and hit the deck.

She awoke cradled against Ishev's chest. He rocked back and forth in a manner that might have been proprioceptive, self-comforting or some mix of both.

There you are.

How long was I out?

Two minutes, tops. Probably less.

So brain damage isn’t a foregone conclusion. That’s good. She started taking inventory. Respiration worked, fingers and toes responded. Ferocious headache, which made sense  under the circumstances. Vision was a blurry, erratically-tilting mess that made her stomach turn. It was hard to tell whether the nausea was hers or his.

Both. She smelled bile; he’d kept his head, but not his most recent meal. 

No one else injured? The Ensign knew his way around the triage process, and professionalism dictated that they keep their public physical contact to a minimum.

No surveillance equipment but hers. Good to go at will. Don’t suppose you could get a holo of her face when we roll it out.

“Everything check out, Master Jedi?”

That would be rude. 

She gave a single, sharp nod.

“One more parcel for you.” He thumbed the switch on his droid-caller.  Now he was the object of inspection. He felt a twinge of sympathy for every crate that passed through the scanner back on base. A loader unit rolled down the ramp, towing a blanket-bound carbonite slab.

“Exciting run through customs, Commander?” The Jedi took occasional refugees from Imperial space in addition to her standing reorder of sharps, sterile saline, and kolto. Risky cargo, but well worth the medical services his troops received in trade.

"No worse than usual."

It’s ok, you can just have them follow Khes, she’s more than willing to leap out front into danger :D

Right, Khes has the badass martial chops. You generally don’t want Ellekai in offensive mode unless the situation is already too bad to salvage.