Slowly But Surely Moving

“...and that… is… that,” Nyavi mumbled. She detached the sealer that had just permanently fused the cybernetic hand socket to Issac’s arm. “Alright, kid. You’re all set. Now you can pick whatever limb is compatible with this socket but I recommend just going with a matching five-fingered hand. Party tricks with opposite oriented hands can wait until we no longer have that fucking ship hoovering up our energy like a fucking vampire.”

The Swamp Hag was completely dark now aside from the floodlights from Nyavi’s chair. The vessel was hovering aimlessly in the general vicinity of the ship containing Nan and the Twins. The array of buttons and dials in front of the empty pilot seats was eerily quiet and still, and every sound seemed amplified in the perfect silence.

Nyavi reached behind her and handed Issac a fairly simple cybernetic hand. “Try this on for size,” she said as she looked around. The silence was giving her paranoid shivers. “Just kinda… lock that rod into that slot, shove it in, twist and click, and it’s gonna feel like your arm is getting electrocuted for like two seconds and then it’ll work. It’s just gonna feel like the worst muscle pain you ever had with every movement.”

Grimacing from the discomfort of his body getting accustomed to his new appendage, Issac sat up and inspected the robotic arm. Flexing the fingers and feeling the spikes of pain from the movement, he clenched his fist as he looked up at Nyavi. “I have dealt with worse pains before, thank you.” As Issac stood up he took another look at the powered off systems. “We should find out what has happened...I’m guessing life support is down so we should find a way to get the power back, that is probably more your area than mine.”

"Yeah, but to do that we gotta figure out how it's being drained," she said as the multitude of tools deposited themselves neatly in a portable toolkit. The box snapped shut, hovered off the table and latched into the back of Nyavi's chair with a click. "Now, it's not affecting my seat, which could be line of sight, or I've just got better shielding… Tractor beams usually cancel out the engines but that's different… hmm…"

Leaving the medical bay, Issac left Nyavi to her muttering and walked around the ship, feeling out with the force, trying to locate the source of the dark presence he felt. Finally finding a window with a view to the dark ship, he reached out to the vessel, trying to discern its nature. Feeling and barely resisting the pull from whatever was in this ship, he almost missed the rage of the beings on the vessel.

Suddenly, he heard an electric POP, and Nyavi’s voice came from the other room: “AHA!” Finding his way back to Nyavi, he sat down and rubbed his temple. “There is a ship out there, something on it is killing our power, there also seems to be a lot of angry creatures onboard, though I don’t imagine they will be too much of a problem.” Looking up at her, he asked with a slight sense of dread. “Do we have a way of getting over to the ship?”

Nyavi nodded, her good lekku jumping back and forth in an agitated wave. “Yeah, yeah we do. I had a hunch, you see, and just dry-fired my plasma beam, which is the highest energy system I got in my chair, and it failed! But everything else on my chair still works. There’s a threshold energy where whatever they got can cancel it out entirely, like a manipulate field that can adjust to whatever it picks up and perform at counter-frequency.” She ran a hand across her head, trailing her lekku to the tip. The shadows around them were pitch black, everything outside the line of the high beams in stark contrast. Their voices clanged like metal through the hollow, silent interior. “Which means that anything low-energy should work.”

She lowered her head and closed her eyes. She raised her arms and spread her fingers. She let her spirit flow into the machine around them, feeling with endless tendrils, exploring every cable and connection, every pipe and plug. Relays flicked and clicked, opening pathways with tiny amounts of power. Small lights blinked into life, a single dial jumped and fell back. A whisper of energy sighed through the ship, and the engines yawned awake, their valves opened less than a sliver, their output too little to even lift off from the smallest moon. But it was enough to set the ship in motion, revolving slowly to face the hulking ship and breezing forth silently.

“It’ll take a little while,” she said, dropping her arms and opening her eyes, “but we’ll get there. Think you can drop the others a line?”

Letting out a faint whistle as he sensed the ships movement, impressed at the Twi’leks ingenuity, he snapped back to the situation at hand. “Yea sure, I’ll get right on that, though I am not sure what they can do.” Remembering what he had been told about the nature of this jamming field, he decided to try his personal com.

Finding an isolated spot so as to not disturb Nyavi, Issac hit the transmit button on an open frequency. “This is Issac, if any of you can hear this, we have regained limited control of our ship and are attempting to close with the unknown vessel. Though I’m sure some of you have figured it out, there is something on that ship draining all of our power.” Taking a moment to sigh, not being entirely on board with helping his new ‘companions’, he eventually continued. “It seems that if you keep devices on low power they will work, only failing if they are on too high of a setting, Issac out.” With that done he made his way back to Nyavi. “The message is out, how’s it going?”

She was scribbling on a piece of paper, looking thoughtful. "I can't risk anything that's not vital," she said quietly. "It's gonna take about twenty minutes to get to their ship. The passive shielding on this one and the oxygen supply are enough to leave the life support off for now. It'll get cold though, the heat radiation insulation is garbage." Sure enough, as she spoke, puffs of vapor trailed into the light. "Come sit at the controls, we'll be able to see the approach. I'll grab blankets from the med bay."

Sitting down at the controls, Issac felt a sense of weariness settle over him, his body protesting the pain and trauma it had faced in the last few days. Looking to Nyavi, he quipped back. “Don’t worry, the Jedi were good at making us uncomfortable.” Watching the Twi’lek as she left, he turned his attention back to the ship and whatever it contained, still feeling the dark pull. He tried to focus on it again but tore himself away before it pulled him in along with their power. Instead he tried to learn more about whatever these other blips on the ship were, small nodes of pure rage it seemed, something they would have to deal with before leaving.

Nyavi emerged from the med bay clutching blankets lined with a reflective foil. The chair hummed softly as she glided over to where Issac sat. Without a warning, she clambered out of her seat and sat down in his lap. As she draped the blankets around the pair of them, the crinkling of the foil seemed loud in the stillness of the ship. "That'll definitely keep us toasty," she said as she rested her head on his chest, her undamaged head tentacle draping over his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around herself and he felt the muscles shift underneath her skin. "Twenty minutes rest. I feel like I could do with twenty weeks right now." Her voice was little more than a murmur.

A bit too deep in his thoughts to notice Nyavi’s return, Issac jumped when she appeared in his lap and threw a blanket around them. Fighting against his initial instinct to throw her off, he eventually calmed down. Looking down at her curling in his lap he couldn’t help but let the smallest of smiles creep onto his face, finding himself increasingly liking his new companion despite himself. After a few moments of hesitation he wrapped his arms around Nyavi, resting his head on top of hers, and as he closed his eyes to rest, he felt any discomfort melt away and a strange sense of peace overcame him.