Shaed's Training, Part 1

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Deep beneath the castle on Vjun, there lay a series of convoluted and twisted catacombs. They were frequented by the Trickster, and yet perhaps even he had never fully explored their depths.

Somehow Lilaena thought he knew them intimately. His age defied reason, and he had been here the longest of any of them. Perhaps he predated Vader's residence here...

She returned her thoughts to the present, and touched a wall. It was warm from underground lava flows, and slightly damp. Her apprentice would be meeting her soon. She had given him a time, but no meeting place.

Surely he would be able to track her down. It was but a simple test. One of many. De'Ville stood in the total darkness, not attempting to mask her presence, even if she could have.

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

Dank.

Dark.

Most of Bast Castle was like this, but not to such a degree. Shaed felt more comfortable down in this threatening labyrinth than he had felt for some time, above ground. It wasn't a matter of being away from the elements, or even of being out of reach of the light of the cursed stars. It was just dark.

It was just the way he liked things. It was in places like this were he could relax. If he could relax. A nice plus was that there was no need to hide in a place where no one could see you. A place where one could lay aside his protective goggles - or, in this case, slide them up to his forehead as always - and see with completely unobstructed vision with no penalty for it.

He walked through the endless and goalless mazes of the dungeon easily, methodically. And as certain as a vornskyr tracking down a hapless Jedi.

These pathways were old. How old he did not know, did not bother to guess. A little crumbly, a little humid from trapped moisture and underground lava flows, but weathering life on this diseased planet better than the castle up above that was constantly exposed to it.

Shaed easily homed in on De'Ville's presence, though choosing the right path in the maze was not quite as simple and required him to pause several times - to feel out each way with the Force, to determine if it would lead to where he wished to go. Inanimate objects were so much more vexing to scry than the living. The Force flowed through them both, but only one responded to that flow.

He picked up the pace. The Master was near at hand, now.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

De'Ville cut her finger on the wall. Apparently it was tunnelled out of an old lava flow. Volcanic rock could be wickedly sharp.

She felt the blood welling up on her finger, and blinked in the darkness. Blade. Why was she thinking about Blade? Garrett Blade, the insane Sith Master who she had brought back to life with her own blood.

De'Ville returned her thoughts to the moment at hand, sticking her finger in her mouth and sucking on it. Shaed was very close, but...not quite. A few more minutes passed, and the bleeding on her fingertip ceased. She felt, rather than heard, light footsteps approaching her from behind. Shaed's presence was approaching, unmasked.

"I was beginning to think you weren't going to make it."

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

Shaed eyed his Master's back with slight masked apprehention as he approached. He was unsure what to make of De'Ville's comment... after all, a maze was a simple thing to defeat, just time-consuming. He could have hurried more, he supposed...

"It would take more than the bowels of a dead planet to prevent my accomplishing your wishes, Master."

Seemed a suitable enough response. ...Was she sucking on her finger? Shaed wondered once more - he had wondered innumerable times already in the past hour - what she had planned for this little excursion.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Turning around, she faced her apprentice, his white face dimly visible in the darkness. Her hands returned to her sides, and she touched her lightsaber hilt, as if reassuring herself it was there.

"These tunnels are dark, and more suited to your natural eyesight, are they not?" De'Ville didn't wait for him to nod, and picked a pebble off the floor with the Force. Concentrating lightly, she raised it to chest height, and held it there.

"Show me your skills in the Force, Shaed." The pebble dropped the the ground with a slight sound. "Levitate the rock."

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

And he had thought navigating the maze of dungeons down here was easy.

Wariness was called for. Possibilites opened before him with the simple command from De'Ville's lips... move as many loose rocks as he could? Tear some from the walls? Split this one into five parts and raise them? Well... his control was not quite good enough to send a hundred rocks - or even twenty, for that matter - spiralling in an interesting design around their heads.

He discarded all but the simplest and most obvious. Pride never seemed to get him anywhere, though it came naturally enough and he didn't mind it.

Still, to simply obey the command left him with options. There were always options...

Shaed nodded, less incredulous now with the command and more focused. He would show her his skills in the Force.

He grasped the pebble De'Ville had used with invisible fingers, held it with the hand of the Force. It was still slightly amusing to him, but of course they had to start somewhere. Shaed raised his hand, still clenched in the perpetual fist but his palm facing himself. Then flicked his first finger off of his thumb to point at the underground ceiling as he rocketted the stone at it. Using the Force like a slingshot - stretching it, almost; building potential, and then unleashing it - had it's amusements.

CHINK.

The rock sharply hit the rough ceiling, and bounced back off of it a few inches before Shaed could keep it pinned to the ceiling. He should have let the potential build longer for a more impressive effect -

Impressive? Just a pebble... hard to make that impressive...

- but it took some time and he still was unsure whether De'Ville was impatient or not. She only felt calm and sure... like a durasteel wall, in a way... through the Force. As hard to GET through as the wall, at least.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Interesting. He took her command and improved upon it; in his own mind, at least. De'Ville waved her hand, and a torch set into the fall flared up to life.

Shaed blinked painfully in the sudden light. "Moving objects with the Force is a simple procedure. Yet this same technique, on a smaller scale, and you can create something entirely different from practically nothing." As her words faded, so did the light, leaving the pair in a comfortable semi-darkness once more.

De'Ville raised a small rock with the Force, and it hovered between her apprentice and herself. She focused on it, and it slowly shook, and then stilled. As Shaed watched, the tiny pebble began to glow red in the center.

His master's eyes remained fixed on the rock, as she concentrated. Exciting the molecules inside the pebble took some work, but it was pretty simple for her to do, after years of practice.

"Catch." The pebble flipped towards him, and he instinctively opened his hand to it, and closed his fingers proctectively around the tattoos on his hand. The heated rock burned him, and he dropped it quickly. De'Ville smiled a little. "Now you do it. I want to know what you know how to do."

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

Shaed squinted his naturally unnatural eyes in pain and began to water as soon as the unexpected light hit them. By coming so suddenly out of the blessed darkness, even the relatively low light of the torch was nearly blinding.

The Master talked, the light ended and it was dark again. Dark to human eyes.

He eyed her actions carefully... in more than the physical sense. To move the very atoms within an object... Shaed watched closely as he observed her bright little creation... delved deeper, watched the molecules were stirred, nearly into magma.

FRELL. She'd thrown it, and he'd caught it in his keffing hand! Quickly, he dropped it back to the ground as he inhaled sharply in discomfort. It wasn't that he wasn't focused... it was that there was always such a large selection of things to focus on. And, of course, he had not expected that at all. At least his reflexes were always focused on what was most important. Survival...

The Master issued another edict. Him, do this?

Hm.

The pain from the rock already forgotten, Shaed pondered this. He had very rarely delved so microscopically with the Force. But... it was similar to some mind "tricks". The mind was an incredibly convoluted thing. Comparatively, a rock should be simple - you didn't have to UNDERSTAND a rock, just manipulate it.

With his many years of learning to manipulate minds and DOING it, he no longer even had to consciously read them before twisting them.

The rock... Shaed spotted the still-glowing stone near his right foot, levitated it back between himself and De'Ville, and looked... deeper.

De'Ville watched the pebble continue to quickly fade to it's natural dusky grey complexion as it's molecules resumed their normal rate of acceleration - which was basically nill.

Watched it fade very quickly, in fact. The rock looked to be - no pun intended - stone cold, and still Shaed was squinting at it, not moving.

Without warning, her apprentice tossed the pebble to her. De'Ville almost snorted, raised an eyebrow, and caught it.

It stuck to her skin, it was so cold.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

De'Ville turned her hand upside down, and the small rock stuck where it was. She quirked an eyebrow up, and the pebble dropped to the floor again. "It appears you have studied kinetic manipulation before as well. Good."

She walked towards him, and continued almost past him, stopping at his shoulder. Looking over and up at her tall apprentice, De'Ville almost had to crane her neck to look into his un-goggled eyes. He was a full nine inches taller than she, but she managed not to look diminutive in his eyes.

"You did well with the rock. What about this, then?" She held no expression in her face, and made a small motion with her hand.

Shaed turned around as he heard a crumbling sound, and saw a portion of the tunnel wall coming apart. De'Ville tugged at it with the Force, and a bright orange glow appeared at the weakened area. As her apprentice watched, his eyes dilating from the light, lava from an active flow trickled down the wall, heating the tunnel impressively.

If it were not stopped, the lava would break a larger hole than the small one De'Ville had caused, and this part of the catacombs would be enveloped by the burning magma.

Shaed looked at De'Ville. She wasn't even sweating in the sudden heat, but calmly watching him.

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

Shaed would have called the situation intriguing if he hadn't been IN it. Heat started to fan his face... reminding him of how much nicer it was to be cold. The only heat he excepted was that inner one of rage and bitter feelings that the Dark Side fed upon.

He wondered briefly if he could cool such an amount of something THAT hot quickly enough. Quickly he tried stopping up the break in the wall with an unseeable patch of the Force, and slowing the molecules swirling all too angrily behind it.

He could see with his own eyes that it was not enough. The wall would break open, possibly even collapsing that section of passageway. The lava still pushed against the weakened rock wall and it still was giving way... Shaed could not cool a large enough portion of the molten rock fast enough, let alone the entire lava flow...

A canny mind with the Force as his slave and master would not be concerned. Where one way failed, another would eventually succeed.

For a long moment, Shaed remained frozen in place as he pondered the situation quickly. The thought that De'Ville was not likely suicidal did not occur, however. This was a test, he would not leave it to her and be humiliated.

Rock wall slowly turned red near the break point and began to slough away like a child's gelatinous plaything.

Suddenly, Shaed started hurling all the loose rocks and pebbles he could at the exposed lava and surrounding wall. The bigger the better, though they were harder to come by and harder to move.

It was slow going, but hopefully would be faster than the rate at which the opposing wall was giving way...

He started to run out of loose stones. With sudden violent rage, Shaed started to tear pieces loose from the ground beneath them - of course, he had checked to make sure it was stable, first.

The glow dimmed slightly as it was obscured, but the heat did not fade. Then Shaed began to seal the pile of rocks molecularly to the wall they were tossed against, cooling lava in the smaller spots where it hindered this. Rock began to join rock.

His eyes took note, belatedly, that not everything in his haphazard seal looked like rock.

The wall was stablized, for now, but he still had to seal it all up or it wouldn't matter. Sweat popped out of his face, was already drenching his back.

Finally, in what seemed like an age later, it was done. It was dark once more, and Shaed realized that he was on his hands and knees, too weak to stand for the moment. He also noticed a skull, sticking out of the very roughly - and newly - shaped bulge in the wall. Cooled and hardened rock dripped, like a frozen waterfall, from the eye sockets.

Kar't'zhen's eyes glazed over as he drew from the strength of the Dark Side, building himself back up so he could at least stand and breath normally. He'd never done something so physically intensive with the Force before.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

De'Ville turned from the re-formed wall and faced her exhasuted apprentice. Reaching up, she placed her hands on either side of his head, and focused in on him.

She drew on the Force, drawing power from the rocks around them and from herself. The Force was living and breathing around them, even if the planet itself supported no life at all. The castle was seeped with Dark side energies, and she pulled them into her, and then into him.

Shaed stood a little stronger, feeling the benfits of the gift his master was giving him. De'Ville's hands dropped to her sides, and she examined him a little. "You have done well, my apprentice. Return to your quarters and prepare yourself for our next session."

She turned on her heel and strode past the patched wall, heading for her own quarters deep within Bast.

[Kar'h'tzen Shaed]

Shaed stood there, alone in the dark, for a while longer. His breathing quickly became more regular as he continued sucking in the Dark Side energies around him, as De'Ville had just shown him and reminded him.

He took a final breath and then began to stride his way out of the twisted caverns. To everything there was a way. If one way was unreachable, then there was another way... there were ALWAYS possibilities. He would remind himself of this much more often, now.

His footsteps echoed out of hearing. But back in the cavern he and De'Ville had been in, a single pebble dropped to the bare floor from the ceiling - where it had been held by the Force ever since it had been raised there.