#sith alchemy

Creel couldn’t guess how many days had passed since the red man had dragged them down to the cargo bay.

The lights in the bay were always on.  Maybe the Jedi couldn’t be bothered to turn them off.  He liked that possibility more than the other that came to mind.  

The officer training manuals described what he could expect during capture or interrogation.  Sleep deprivation and the removal of means to guess the passage of time were standard.  

He tracked time by their bodies.  How often he dribbled water from a torn corner of his shirt into Moakes’ slack mouth.  How often he used the bucket in the corner.  The diminishing intervals between the moments Stelkin surfaced from his shellshock to start crying again, and his diminishing patience for consoling the cadet.  

He tracked time by the effort it took him to unscrew and slowly pry open a panel over a part of the wall that echoed under his fist: an air vent.

And most of all, he tracked time by when the Padawan came for target practice.

The mad Jedi had at least turned down the power on the blaster to a level that merely left blisters, instead of burning through flesh.  The green girl shot like shite.  In three visits, she managed to hit herself and everything in the cargo bay except the target.  He kept Moakes in the safest space, the corner below her platform, and dragged Stelkin there when he heard the door bang open.  

She threw them food and rations before she started firing.  Again, Creel couldn’t decide whether their captors did this out of malicious intent--to make them associate fulfillment of their basic needs with their presence—or simple convenience.

By her fourth visit, her rebound shots had covered his back in blisters, and further reduced Stelkin to a trembling mess.

On her fifth, a wayward shot caught Moakes on the cheek, and Creel had enough.

“Stop,” he bellowed, with all his practice leading a thousand drills through thousand mornings in the GAR Reserves.  Stelkin shrieked, the girl skittered back against the door, and for a moment, he thought he’d gone too far, that she’d go get the Red Man.  

She didn’t.  She watched him from up on the platform like a wary tooka, the blaster swinging from her shaky hand, dark circles under her eyes.  Apparently his men weren’t the only ones not sleeping.

“Pick up the gun in two hands,” he ordered.  “It’s too heavy for you to hold and aim with one hand.”

She curled her lip and shot at him.

She missed.  

“Kark,” he swore.  “Don’t listen to me then.”  He stomped back to the corner.  

His intercession helped somewhat, at least.  Now that she was deliberately trying to hit them with the rebounds, of course, not a damned bolt came near them.

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall and ignored the whine of the blaster above him.  He imagined himself home again, his wife smiling at him from over her sewing, his daughter in his arms.  She’d be about as big now as that little jedi, he thought, stomach turning.  

He wondered if his superiors had declared him dead yet.  

He banished the thought.  It was useless to dwell on that.  He grounded himself with the memory of Corine by candlelight, squinting her way through a difficult bit of embroidery for some offworld client, tired yet pleased with her progress.  He thought of her fingers, stained from her work at the dye manufacture during the day, raw from plying her needle all night long.

He wished he could take a holo of the tunic the little Padawan seemed to live in.  Corine loved textiles from other worlds.  He did his best to collect them for her at every outpost.  He’d seen the Padawan’s tunic in the shop, would have bought it as a gift for both Corine and Rudith, but for the price. The garment, now singed with blasterbolts, had been worth more than he made in a month.

So much for Jedi being above material concerns.

He thought of every garment he’d ever seen pass through Corine’s hands, the colours, the bitter smell of mordant and the sweet scent of the herbs she used to keep the insects out of her stock, and had almost drifted into sleep when something hit him.

“Stang, Stelkin, stop it,” he grumbled, and Stelkin made a sound that wasn’t a word, but something kept bumping against his legs, and he opened his eyes.

Moakes was convulsing.

He scrambled up and ran back out from the corner, even though the girl was still shooting.

“Stop!” he thundered, and the girl flinched back, finger twitching on the trigger and sending another bolt caroming around the room.  “I need help!  One of my men is dying!”

The little bitch shot at him for the third time that day.  “You didn’t stop,” she accused him.  He flashed back to when he’d pulled her from the vents not long ago, screaming and crying and biting.

“I was trying to save you!” he reasoned with her—or tried, dodging a fourth bolt.  Stang, but the girl would decide to follow his advice on how to shoot now, of all times.  “The Jedi are terrible.  They take kids like you—” he dodged the fifth bolt, and rethought explaining the girl’s situation to her just now.  “Please!  Help!”

She didn’t quit shooting.

The door banged open.  The Jedi Master stalked in and laid a hand over the girl’s, where it gripped the gun.  

She stopped firing, but Creel could her breathing from down in the cargo bay, low and fast.

“Apprentice,” the Jedi murmured.  “Gather the med kit and meet me down in the cargo bay.”

Her breathing accelerated.  Rudith always collapsed into hiccoughing sobs after hyperventilating like this.  He expected the Padawan would do the same, but she merely muttered a “Yes, Master,” and hustled back into the galley of the ship.  

The Jedi Master descended in the lift, unhurried, and sauntered over to the still convulsing Moakes.  Stelkin, who had pulled his head out of his ass long enough to check Moakes’ pulse, scrambled back on his hands.  

“You’ll help him,” Creel said.

The red man ignored him, slowly turning rather to the platform.  “Come down, apprentice,” he ordered, kneeling next to Moakes.  

The green girl paused, lips pursed in a way that always preceded a tantrum in Rudith, but she came, stumbling at the weight of the heavy medical kit over her shoulder.  Creel bent to take it from her.  She swerved away from him, glaring, and dropped the bag down by her Master.

“Tell me what you think is wrong with him, Apprentice,” the man asked calmly.

Creel stared in disbelief.  “He’s dying.  He has a head injury, and he’s dying.  Buy the kid a textbook, this isn’t some kind of school exercise—”

The Red Man lifted a hand, and in the space between heartbeats, Creel careened into the backwall, hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs, and slid down to the floor.  

“—not interrupt my lessons again,” the Red Man told him.  “As the man said, it’s a head injury.  It’s a closed head injury.  See how his eyes are dilated, and how he’s having a convulsion?”

The girl nodded.

“Get the drill out of the kit.”  The Jedi Master flipped Moakes over, as casually as Corine shook out her sheets, and held the back of the man’s skull.  “If you ever need to keep someone alive with this condition, you have to relieve the pressure on the brain by drilling a hole for the blood to come out.”

The little Jedi staggered forward, with a drill that, like everything else on this ship, was designed for adults and too heavy for her.  Surely the Jedi wasn’t going to allow…

The Master took the girl’s hand and set it down on the Moakes’ scabbed scalp.  “Close your eyes and reach out—no, not for the man’s mind.  For his body.  <i>Yes</i>.  <i>Feel</i> the little deaths, those cells winking one by one under your hands—where is the greatest number of these?”

The girl’s left hand moved, her right coming forward with the drill.  

“Draw on the Force to steady your hand,” the Master breathed, “let it tell you exactly how deep—”

The drill whirred.  Creel could hardly look until it was over, and bloody fluid trickled out of the messy divot the apprentice had left in Moakes’ skull.  Creel could have thrown up.  

He didn’t.  Even if there was nothing he could do, like hell he’d leave Moakes alone to these witches.

The convulsions lessened, but the little girl breathed in sharply.  “He’s still dying.”

“Good,” the Red Man approved.  <i> Good? </i> Creel raged.  “Feel his pulse.  No, like this,” the man ordered, positioning the girl’s fingers on Moakes’ wrist.  “What do you feel, with your hand?”

“Nothing.”

“Precisely.  Get the injector marked epinephrine out of the case, quickly.”  The girl rummaged through the sack.  The Master flipped Moakes on his back again, then gestured to Creel.  “Start life support on your friend.  I assume the Empire covered that much,” he sneered.  

Head ringing, Creel still rushed to comply while the girl fumbled the injector out the wrapping.  

“What can I do?”

Stelkin.  The pup had discovered some spine.  “Tilt his head back, pinch his nose, and give him two breaths by mouth when I tell you—” Creel huffed as he finished chest compression, “—now!”

Creel glanced up and saw the girl holding the injector.  

“—IM CPR marked on this injector means it can be delivered through muscle to try to restart someone’s heart,” the Jedi Master was saying.

“You don’t have any IV epi in that medkit?”

“Would you like my apprentice to try injecting into a vein?” the Red Man asked, amused, and Creel could have bloodied his fists on the man’s face.  “I would, but we haven’t the time.  Girl, press the plunger against the man’s thigh and hit the button on the side.”

She squeaked as the auto-injector disengaged.  Done.  The epi given, the compressions continued, Stelkin huffing into Moakes’ mouth.

Still, no pulse.  

It was going on too long, Creel knew.  Too long.  Moakes’ eyes bulged glassily out from his skull.  He thought of those eyes, gloating over a hand of sabacc during the games played by flashlight after lights out.  Thought of that great chest, now caved under his hands, heaving with laughter.  Thought of all the infinite small things the clone had taught him—how to guess the distance of a ground battle from the flash and thunder of the guns.  How to pack a kit only with the essentials.  What insects were edible if you had no rations and were starving.

Moakes’ lessons had saved his life.  Would probably keep on saving it, long into the future.  And now, he was to die?

Creel glanced up sideways, through his sweat-slicked bangs to the Red Man.  

He was smiling.

“Do something, dammit,” he snarled at the Jedi, arms still pumping.  “Save him!  You’re a gods-damned Jedi, you have the power—”

The Red Man sneered.  “So now you beg the Jedi for mercy.”  He regarded them all in distaste, his little Padawan hiding behind him once more.  “Where was mercy,” he spat, “when your mobs were piling on half trained children and ripping them limb from limb?  When an Imperial Moff was so afraid of a single Jedi that he ordered an orbital strike to take her out?”

“We had nothing to do with that,” Creel said, and not <i> they deserved what they got </i>, but the Jedi Master heard what he’d left unspoken.

“Oh, they deserved it,” he said, “but not at the hands of their inferiors.”  The Jedi wiped a smudge of blood on a rag he’d floated out of their corner, threw the rag away, and began to rise.  To leave.

“No, please.  Anything.  You can do something,” Creel urged, and then swallowed his pride.  “I’m begging you.  Please.”

“Anything?” the Jedi Master repeated, his strange gold eyes glittering.

“Please,” Creel said again.

A pleased smile passed over the man’s demonic visage.  “I have meant to try something,” he murmured, and Creel felt the hair rise on the nape of his neck.  This was a bad idea.  

“Apprentice?  Hands off the man but reach out.  Feel his life.  His arms, his heart, his brain.  Feel—good,” coaxed the Master.  “Very good.  Now, feel as I seize the life at his very fingertips, and…”

You couldn’t tell at first, through Moakes’ dark skin, as his fingertips turned blue, but they did.  Then they pruned and shrivelled like an old man’s, his hand withering in turn.  The skin on his arm thinned and sagged, even as the flesh of his fingers suddenly dissolved into dust.  The clatter of the small bones on the steel flooring shook Creel from his horror.  Stelkin had long gone back to gibbering in the corner.

“No,” he breathed.  “This isn’t—”

“This is a branch of skill known as energy manipulation,” the man lectured.  “I take the life from his arms and transfer it to his dying heart and brain.  A great deal of energy is lost in the transfer, but there should be just enough from his arms to do—there.”

Moakes’ arms had disintegrated up to the shoulder socket, but his chest rose and fell with regular breaths, and he no longer bled from his scalp.  He didn’t get up though.  He stared vacantly at the ceiling.  

“Come, Apprentice,” the Jedi Master bid his Padawan, who complied, scrambling up onto the platform lift.

“Wait,” Creel said, “he’s still not right.”

“You asked me to do something,” the Jedi Master mocked.  “I have ‘done’ something.  If he’s not as you expected…” he lifted his hands in a parody of a shrug and activated the lift.

The Jedi and the Padawan ascended, leaving Creel alone in the cargo bay with Stelkin, and a living corpse.

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Claws:

Made for fighting, killing, and performing tasks such as helping them climb in their natural environment or dig in the dirt, the light colored claws with the right chemical treatments and trimming can just manage to pass for human nails. Naturally, think something like a wolverine.

Teeth:

Along with sharp, extremely durable teeth lining their mouths, Stewjoni had retractable barbs lining their front teeth that can inject a paralytic venom. In their natural environment, after luring in their prey they would use this to keep them in place (image from cone snails).

Spines:

Along the back of Stewjoni are spines that are also capable of injecting small amounts of the same paralytic agent. These are mostly for protection and not used as an attack mechanism. The spines are sensitive to changes in the air and water, as well as vibrations. When grown naturally, they extend noticeably off a Stewjoni and make it hard to perform any melee attack from behind with something shorter than a spear.

Eyes:

Stereoscopic and capable of viewing multiple wavelengths beyond human sight. Capable of picking out even the slightest changes in color, thus seeing through camouflage and other effects. Stewjon itself is a myriad of colors, most of which human eyes can’t see. Basically mantis shrimp, but set inside a skull.

The Force:

But the most dangerous part of the Stewjoni is not the physical features, but the way they feel in the Force--incapable of the wide range of “Dark” emotions found in many sentient species, they are incredibly alluring and distracting to Force users.