I have become a lot more concerned about what I’m doing lately. Mostly I am concerned that I am doing something wrong and will get a great many people killed if I do or say the wrong thing.

It doesn’t help that I managed to alienate a set of allies. Then again, the sense of things with their group and the reaction I got when I questioned it ... my view on it is that if anyone with whom you’re allied would be willing to shoot you for any reason beyond outright treachery, they were never truly your allies to begin with. Maybe things will change, but ... for now, much like the last time we lost allies, five years ago ... we need to carry on with what we have.

It seems to be enough, at least to a degree. The Serendipity has helped immeasurably, though the discussions of what exactly to do with the vessel have been ... an education. Everyone has ideas of what to do and how to handle the situation, and they all have sufficient merit to be getting on with, but ... there’s only one Serendipity. We can’t use all of those ideas just on one ship. I am very much not used to my words carrying most of the weight in any given discussion, either. Still ... when the ideas start flying thick and fast, someone has to grab the reins and pull until everyone starts putting their considerable talents to one goal. ...I’m not used to being the one doing that.

That hasn’t stopped me, at least. Do, or do not - there is no ‘try’. Maybe I’ll make mistakes, maybe I’ll fail - but I’ll learn, and I’ll do better. There is no ‘try’ - there is doing it well, or doing it poorly, or somewhere in between, but there is doing it, or there is not doing it. So in the end, the Serendipity will be a sort of combination hospital ship and carrier, from which our haphazard fleet will strike at various targets from all angles, and then scatter to the four winds, to be picked up by the Serendipity later. We’ll be everywhere and nowhere all at once.

...Like that holovid says. I haven’t seen it for obvious reasons, but everyone else has given me a summary. Apparently someone was taking holovid of our excursion on Corellia, and it made the ‘grey market’. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised - it must have looked fairly impressive from an outside perspective. Between X’antho’s rallying cry and the dispatching of the skytroopers and Master Sortek deflecting blaster fire from the roof of a moving medical transport... As I understand it, my own contribution to that whole affair got a ‘wow’. Then again, the only people I’ve ever known to deflect that level of fire in my presence ... well, that was Ihlrath, and I’m not sure that was ‘deflection’ so much as ‘withstanding’. I think Nyomi did that once or twice as well. In any case, it’s not something I’ve witnessed anyone but the strongest do. I suppose that says something. Though I should consider bringing my helmet the next time I strap myself to a transport that is going to be making a dash through hostile territory. Concussions are not fun. Everything goes faintly wobbly.

In any case, the holovid. Srina’idash added a bit of personal flavour and sent it back out again. There’s a little resistance symbol, apparently - the Alderaanian symbol for healing, apparently leftover from days when they worshipped various intellectual aspects. Srina’idash has been considering seeding a few holovids around as well - some of our smugglers’ raids on Zakuul transports and the distribution of their cargoes to the needy in our own sectors, rescues, things like that. It’s an improvement over slicing the Holonet, anyway ... particularly nicer than slicing the Holonet for the kinds of terrorist manifestos that have been plaguing it lately. It’s nice to at least show that resistance doesn’t have to be slaughter.

That’s a lesson all sides need to learn. Five planets bombed to dust. Five. I felt them scream. I think we all did, the Jedi of Port Knowhere. Even Mae, even without overspill through the Force-bond ... and Sense is not her primary sphere by any means. There may be more. It may get worse. I don’t think anyone is going to back down. The Sith tend to be believers in collateral damage to the point of lunacy. Mandalorians ... win or lose, all they really want is a glorious fight. I accept that people are going to die in this, but ... there’s death and there’s meaningless slaughter. This is the latter.

We can’t stop it, but we can save who we can. Someone must have managed to get off those planets. Maybe there are still survivors - if there’s one thing the initial Zakuul invasion taught us, it’s that people can survive nearly anything. We’ll have to check, when things have settled a little.

PERSONAL LOG - MASTER FYET-GREYSTORM BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

I finally heard about the Battle of Kuat. I'm not entirely sure how I missed that news before, except for the fact that up until recently, I've been in and out of places so quickly, and there's been such chaos when I have been, that no one ever recognises me particularly until I've been and gone. By the time someone finally identified me as Marran and decided to ask how I'd escaped Kuat...

They can't all be dead. I'd know, surely. I just ... I can't look for them. I don't have the equipment, I don't have the contacts, I ... I don't have the time. I can't even get to the Nexus as things stand; the MeepMobile has never been geared for getting through the Nexus, there are no comms... They can't all be dead, but I have to carry on as if they were, because I can't see any way of tracking them down as things stand. Or the means to help them if I could find them. And they probably think Mae and I died when our own comms went dead; if they didn't have the resources to try to make sure one way or another before, it's even less likely that anyone's looking for us now, in the wake of Kuat.

I have to carry on doing what I can. There's no other option. If the Force wills it, we'll find each other again. Some of us, at least. Right now I can't dwell because I'm too busy trying to figure out desert agriculture and sorting through the last supply cache we set up before everything went to nerf. We have enough supplies to last us a little while, if nothing goes wrong. We have to assume that something will, though - preparing for the worst is how we managed as well as we have this far, after all.

...They can't all be dead...

AUDIO LOG - RESISTANCE CELL HIDEOUT, TATOOINE BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

"So ... yeah, thanks for the shrapnel removal and all. Other guy tells me I'd have lost the leg."

"It's sort of my job. In any case, I owe you at least that much after the Dromund Kaas incident."

*pfft* "Shit we've gone through, mini-medic, you kinda gotta stop keeping score or else you end up obsessing over what you're paying back. ...Or forward."

"Still no sign of Aurrin?"

*sigh* "No. Guess I gotta accept that he's gone. If he survived this - and I'd give even odds he did, I guess, so that's something - he doesn't wanna be found. Right now, too busy running blockades to really dwell. Which I guess is a good thing, if you don't count shrapnel wounds and that. ...What about you? Any word? I heard about Kuat, so..."

"I wasn't at Kuat. I lost contact with everyone while escaping Rylan III."

"Ouch."

"Something like that. At least we evacuated some survivors. But since then ... no. Mae was with me, and I ran into Caer and Raiyden, but ... we got involved in some things - establishing a refugee settlement in between helping the resistance cells we manage to find. This one, I admit, was an accident - we were just looking for parts to see if we could get our vaporator fixed. With all that, I'm not really in any position to go searching just now. Or even go back to the Nexus. ...I ... don't suppose..."

"Sorry, mini-medic. I might owe you but you know why I'm not touching the place. I should've stayed gone in the first place; it was only gonna be a way station anyway. Bad call on my part to stay as long as I did. But hey; you and I are good. So ... I'll see if I can get you those parts, and if I trip over supplies, you get first refusal, 'kay?"

"That's ... very kind. Thank you."

"Just give me a place to refuel and crash out once in awhile and we're more than good. ...And if I run into anyone ... I'll at least talk to 'em long enough to point 'em at you."

"Thank you, Mychae."

"No problem, mi-- Jallira."

PERSONAL LOG - MASTER FYET-GREYSTORM BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

There is worse news. But it is leavened with better news. I suppose the Force has more or less decided that I needed something.

The bad news: the Council has gone silent. Comms are dead, and the few bits of news we get indicate that no one else has heard from them either, so it's not just a distance issue. I was hoping for just a distance issue, if I'm honest, even if the comm unit Raiyden gave me does have a wider range than the one in the MeepMobile. Currently all I can hope is that the Council has just ... scattered. But when even Grandmaster Shan is off grid ... I may not have turned to the Council for guidance much, but what of the younglings strong in the Force? What happens to them now? Where are the younglings and padawans on Tython going to go now?

Well ... if any of them find their way here, I'll find a way to train them. It's about all I can do.

The good news ... Mychae had originally commed saying that she had come into some supplies we were after, including some bahat-mint. No, the headaches have not stopped, though they've eased a little now that Port Knowhere is a little more established. Having people around me who are a little more at ease helps immeasurably.

The supplies were good ... but Mychae didn't bring them. She sent them with Alti. Apparently, Alti decided to search the galaxy for me and Mae, so she threw everything we cared about from the Nexus that would fit into her ship and has been looking for me for just over a year now.

...'Everything we care about' included Rilus. He ... he spent over a year in close quarters with Alti, searching for us. For me. And one of the first things he did was present me with the ring he hadn't had time to find between my proposing to him and my falling off-grid.

There are no words. There's just the first decent night's sleep I've had in over a year, with my head on Rilus' chest and his empathic resonance being an island of peace in a galaxy on fire. And past that, the cheerful chaotic relief of Alti as she sets up what she can of my old lab equipment and looks at all the things around here that need a technician and...

Yes, there she goes. I can hear her shouting 'I can fix that!' and--

...that was an explosion that was a nerfing explosion ALTI WHAT THE NERF DID YOU-- *clik*

INTERNAL COMMS LOG, PORT KNOWHERE BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

"Understood. Prep for landing while we clear the hangar bay for your ship. Alti, move the MeepFleet to the secondary landing pad; Rilus, prep for treatment of mild to moderate wounds and moderate to severe malnutrition."

"Gotcha, doll."

"...Hey, wait, that means-- BEARDY! You came back!"

"Alti, why do you call him that? Rilus also has a beard!"

"Yeah, but he's not Beardy! It's not the Magical Power of Beards!"

"He's strong in the Force because of midichlorians, not facial hair."

"Yeah, but it's the beard that makes it. He has the power to make Orange fleeeeeeee for his life!"

"Stop scaring Aranar with beard stories! You know how--"

*ahem*

"...erm. Sorry, Master Sortek. Activating landing beacon now. ...I'll put on some tea--" *clik*

PERSONAL LOG - MASTER GREYSTORM-HARRIDIN BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

The last few months have been quietly rebuilding a family. Master Sortek has turned up at enough of our various resistance missions to count him as being a part of things, even if he does spend nearly no time at Port Knowhere at the moment. The last one ... well, we both ran into Ahri on that one. Somehow, this one little resistance cell managed to assign me and Master Sortek as backup to Ahri - the only Greystorm we hadn't been able to find. I suppose actively trying to find Shadows is difficult owing to their very nature. I just thank the Force for its guidance ... or the coincidence, whichever.

We're still building on this little settlement, but it's easier now. Alti and Mychae fix things where they're not upgrading them, and bring in supplies, as do Aranar and Srina'idash when Srina'idash isn't away in one of her safehouses trying to open virtual backdoors into Zakuul databases. A small market has sprung up as people trade things they know how to make for things they can't obtain - mostly what might be considered luxuries, but either way, it ensures that even those not best suited to agriculture or engineering work feel better for contributing. Rilus is happy; it may not be the 'new start' he had in mind, but I think he's reasonably pleased at a return to being a 'simple country doctor' with only occasional forays into the more taxing sorts of surgical cases one pulls off a battlefield. We have a few dairy nerfs, there are wild banthas, we raise gizkas and keep orobirds for eggs... It's a very odd farming community but we somehow make it work.

That's when we're not in the field, anyway. Resistance cells are harder to find these days, but there's always someone who needs help as the Zakuul finish the job of beating the Republic and Empire into some semblance of submission. We've shut down one slave auction house and at least three slaver operations, liberated a POW camp and ... well, the less said about the incident with the Zakuul walker and Alti's micromissile skirt, the better. Leave us simply say that when Mychae says that a dance should end with a bang, that is probably not the bang she should have been striving for. In any case, we find homes for whatever survivors still have one but a fair few end up here at Port Knowhere, as do several of the slaves Master Sortek rescues on his own. We've stopped being just a little way station and started to become a functioning community.

Jallira boarded the transport carefully, mindful of her footing. Any other species would think that miraluka wouldn’t have the issue of being blinded by tears, but they lacked imagination. Plus it wasn’t tears as much as an empathic echo of a type she hadn’t felt directed at her by anyone but her eldest sister in far too long.

Protectiveness. Concern. Recognition, not only of what she was but of who she was; not just Jedi but Jallira.

The MeepMobile had lost comms first. After the Marran missions exploring the then-mysterious attacks on Outer Rim outposts, Jallira went out not just to provide supplies and medical treatment but warning, and evacuation if anyone agreed. No one did until the mystery fleet appeared out of near-literal nowhere above a pretty little jungle planet and the droids came down. That day, ten people escaped the attack - barely. Jallira and Maelana included. Between them, they left with eight survivors, five severe wounds, a comms system damaged by whatever technology the invaders were using … and a glimpse of one of the twins Akaira saw once.

A glimpse was all she needed. She was sorry to have had that much.

After that, much of the next year was a blur of resistance groups, supply cache raids, healing, cooking and the empathic screams of a whole galaxy in flames. She’d known what it would feel like in theory from when she’d seen it with Alendar and Jai-din. Nothing could have prepared her for the reality, however. She spent a great deal of time forcing back headaches and trying not to dwell, not to worry … not to mourn the losses that might not be permanent.

She wanted Nyomi, wanted to tell her that there was no ‘hurry up and wait’ for a healer in a war zone, or at least discuss their new set of experiences on the matter. She wanted her sisters, the ones left behind; she wanted her friends. Most of all she wanted Rilus. She and Mae had gone silent barely a week before what would have been the wedding and for all she knew the dress Alasha had helped her choose still hung in her lab to keep the groom from seeing it before the ceremony. She wanted to be providing therapy sessions for Brom and discussing philosophy with Nyomi and Jai-din and offering snacks to Corrinna and pulling her cat out of Rilus' armour and going into battle with more backup than her newly knighted sister and whoever they could gather on next to no notice. She missed her family, formally adopted or otherwise. But they had neither the means nor the time to look, not with damaged comms and a short range shuttle with a galaxy in need all around. Still, there had once been a time when solitude was all Jallira knew, and now she knew what 'lonely' meant, all the way down to her bones.

When they stopped running to and from war zones, it was because they had to. The Jedi Council was silent, the resistance smaller and more battered, and Jallira herself at the end of her endurance. An assault on a slaver vessel had left scars on the MeepMobile and all those who sailed her, but they managed to find one of the locations Jallira asked Jai-din to scout so many months ago. A desert moon on the cusp of Wild Space, formerly inhabited, too long abandoned to be a stop on a patrol route. They stopped to rest, to heal and to take stock. The home they built would be crude at first but it would be a home, with time and effort. A refuge, a place of healing and salvation in a broken galaxy. If they survived the first year, there was hope.

Hope took the shape of old familiar faces in an Outer Rim cantina, the very people she’d been thinking of when she’d packed a food delivery with what supplies they could spare. The Estherian twins - some of the first of her own species she had ever called friends. Seeing them, re-establishing contact, it all helped. Jallira and Maelana weren’t alone. Sometimes severed connections could be repaired. Maybe the rumours of the odd Jedi pairing of miraluka and pureblood healing their way through refuges and resistance camps would reach the right ears. Maybe anyone who really knew them, and was looking, would have a trail to follow to find them.

PERSONAL LOG - KEEPER FYET-GREYSTORM

BEGIN AUDIO PLAYBACK

It has been a week or so of conversations that were probably long overdue.

The first one was with Rilus. Given some of the ... things I’ve seen - things that have seemed no less looming and imminent than they did when I first saw them, with Alendar and Master Sortek - I had concerns about being parted from the Marran. Through disaster or through choice, no matter what Mae said, I refused to assume that Rilus would stay with me if pressed on the matter. For all our relationship has lasted two years now, we made no promises beyond ‘duty first’, and he’s highly reluctant to make any. So no; I was not about to assume that he would go with me, stay with me, if I had to be somewhere else. I also refused to press him on the matter or ... be invasive to find out for sure, because that’s not right or fair. Mae, however ... Mae has no such compunctions, so she shook him for awhile until he initiated the conversation himself. To her credit, the shaking was entirely verbal; she’s doing very well. ...In any case, Rilus reassured me that he would stay with me wherever I went, no matter what. I ... am gratified by this. Although I have a feeling that Maetra is going to get wind of this and send him a selection of engagement rings. My adoptive family has a history of never leaving well enough alone.

Mae, as I said, is doing very well. Arbiter Nyomi and Master Sortek concur. The Archon ... well, he had a word with me a few weeks ago about my taking Mae as my padawan, voicing nothing but concerns. He asked if I’d asked the Council, what we were doing about the Force-bond between us ... the fact that he hadn’t even realised that one formed betwen us two years ago and that the Primatrix would have told him as much in any report that involved Moyval Gesh’s holocron... It’s troubling. In any case, he said he would be keeping a close eye on the situation. I ... just hope it’s not a lack of trust.

I suppose some of my worries on that score have been mitigated, as the Archon apparently suggested to the Primatrix that she come to see me for a physical, just to ensure that all medics in her immediate vicinities had a full understanding of her current condition. She said that she had just wanted to be left alone, and not be poked and prodded. I wish she had told me that before, but what’s done is done. I don’t know if the distance that grew between us can ever be entirely bridged. I am not so far along that I even know how to try to do something like that. It ... it doesn’t help that she’s so excited about her pregnancy at the moment that it often comes up in conversation. In medbay, it’s all filtered in my head - it’s assessing a patient’s condition from a medical standpoint and that’s all. In a social context ... it’s something I can never have. Even if Rilus wanted to, even if I could try surrogacy ... the Primatrix knows why my ova aren’t viable. It’s a literal impossibility for me. It saddens me a little. But I can’t just tell her not to talk about it. She’s bottled it up for so long and she is so excited about it. I think I can manage. After all, emotional control is something I seem to excel at.

Beyond that, the cure for the Doom was implemented a few weeks ago and according to reports and data forwarded from the garhoon homeworld, it’s working exactly as intended. I anticipate that we’ll be receiving reports of new conceptions amongst the garhoon within the month. Meantime, we’re working on restoring Srina’idash’s memory, and I’ve managed to convince her to consent to what I have merely termed ‘a procedure to prevent further seizures like the one she had in the brig’, which is technically true. Additionally, the MeepMobile missions are going well and I’ve managed to isolate a vaccine for a particularly nasty and virulent strain of Corellian flu that has been spreading like wildfire through various Republic outposts. I don’t imagine the Empire is faring much better so while I probably shouldn’t, I hope they have someone working on a similar vaccine.

And still the rumours and sightings come - attacks on Outer Rim outposts, with both Republic and Empire being targeted. The Primatrix says we will probably look into it soon.