The Menagerie (Rhea, Kale, closed)

[Keeper]

Contact.

Scout-sized vessel. Life forms: Two. Humanoid.

Contact trajectory?

One-zero-nine mark zero-seven-one. Contact will pass out of range in three minutes.

Other contacts in area?

Negative. No active sensor signals detected within a five-parsec radius. Probability of detection 0.8%.

Humanoids. Low-interest targets. Too common.

Metasensors show unusual spikes on the psychic plane, sir.

A significant anomaly. Manipulators?

Probability 87%.

We must investigate to be sure. Prepare a level-one spatial insertion.

Manipulators may anticipate a direct attack.

Of course. Power the stasis beam and prepare a firing solution. Broadcast surveillance file 1038412-B8329.

Bothan distress signal, sir?

They will downthrust from hyperspace to investigate. It is consistent with the habits of the species.

Of course, sir. Message transmitting.

Secure all biopods for dimensional phasing. Insertion on my command.

ENGAGE.

[Rhea Kaylen]

"Oooohh..."

A soft groan emanated from the blackness. The dark was thick, sluggish, heavy--unnatural. And it was troubled, too, almost guilty. She kept trying to wake herself up. She shouldn't be asleep, shouldn't be...

"Mmmf."

Who was making noises? Frowning, she tried to turn her head, and found she could not. Oh, this accursed absence of light, she couldn't see a thing! Someone was sick, or in pain, or something, but she couldn't move to find them, and wouldn't have been able to see her way, even if she could.

A third, irritated rasp mumbled out of the endless dark, again, and suddenly Rhea Kaylen was aware of who was making the sounds. She was. Surprised by this, she blinked her eyes, only to find they hadn't been open in the first place, and when she cracked them open, the sudden burst of golden light made her squint.

Rhea's mind was a weird haze of fluttering shapes and colors for several seconds, and bright spots burst before her slowly opening eyes. She was lying flat on her back, staring upwards at...well, nothing, really. A plain, light-colored ceiling was out of reach above her, and she couldn't see anything more out of the corners of her eyes.

There was no sound; this place was comfortably temperate, and peacefully quiet. The silence did not seem empty, or oppressive, but suggested life all around.

It was all pleasant, to be sure, but...Rhea frowned deeply, still staring sightlessly upward, lost in her deep thoughts. Pleasant, but wrong. None of this seemed right, but...oh, she just couldn't figure out why.

She sighed deeply, realizing as her torso rose and fell that her hands were resting on her chest. That's something, she thought suddenly. Since when do I sleep on my back like this? Ouch; as a matter of fact, this is quite uncomfortable...

Feeling inexplicably stiff, Rhea pushed herself up on her elbows, looking around. She didn't get too far in her investigation; there was someone lying right beside her. A boy, teenager, thin and stern-looking, with rough coppery hair...

Rhea gasped as her mind's floodgate suddenly splintered and memory came rushing back. Kale! It was her seventeen-year-old co-learner, her fellow Padawan under Master Pierce Tondry, who she and the boy had been flying out to meet on a planet in the Mid-Rim when...when...

Rhea blinked furiously as her recall hit a snag. She remembered, they'd been on a ship, she'd been piloting, and then...

Astrel, she was drawing a blank, here. But Rhea knew now for certain that, wherever she was--rather, they were--that she'd no idea how they got there, why they were there at all...

"Kale!" she burst out, her addled mind tripping over itself in haste. She reached out and squeezed the boy's shoulder, trying to rouse him. "Kale, wake up."

[Kale]

Kale's cheek twitched, and he mumbled something unintelligible. Then, slowly, he began coming to himself--his hands, resting on his stomach, curled and uncurled, and his brow furrowed, but his eyes were still squeezed shut.

"Few more... minutes... Where... whozzat..."

Then his eyes snapped open, and he bolted upright. "What the frelling dren--Ooooooohhh!"

Almost immediately, he bent down and put his head between his knees, clutching his throbbing temples.

[Rhea Kaylen]

"Careful!" Rhea put her hands on his shoulders and leaned over him. "Easy, easy. We...we must have gotten hurt, or something..."

She belatedly raised her eyes again, absently patting Kale's back placatingly as she tried to take in her surroundings. But there was little to see. The room was four plain walls the same light stone as the ceiling, with minimal furnishings--small wooden table at the side of the low pedestal bed, with a large wooden chest at the foot. A table across the room was set with a basin and pitcher, a towel folded next to them.

Other than this and the nondescript archway leading out of the room in the upper left corner of the space, there was nothing notable, and nothing that provided even the slightest clue as to where they were.

[Kale]

Kale barely felt Rhea's hand on his back. He squeezed his eyes shut again until the pain in his head cleared.

Finally, he lifted his head again and tried to take stock of their surroundings. He'd never been in this sort of room before--way too rustic to be anything on Coruscant, way too cozy to be anything on Kuwaruk Re. The cognitive dissonance was so harsh he didn't even have the presence of mind to feel frightened.

"Where are we?" he mumbled. "What's goin' on? The last thing I remember is--"

Suddenly he realized that he was in a bed. Well, on it, anyway, since the covers weren't even turned down. And he was fully clothed--robes, tunic, jeans, and boots.

He pivoted in his seat to plant his feet on the floor--there was a rougspun rug there. "I feel like I've been sleepin' for a week."

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea nodded, feeling the same way. She stood unsteadily and watched her feet. Her limbs all felt a bit disassociated from her body and brain. Nervously she smoothed out her rumpled tunic and tucked her hands inside the voluminous sleeves of her Jedi robe, wrapping her arms around herself.

Now that her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, she was aware that the room was actually ill-lit, the illumination filtered and secondhand from the rooms beyond the doorway. But it seemed to be sunlight, and not the brash, raw sun of Coruscant's upper levels, either, but pastoral, golden, and somehow so familiar, but so strange.

She knew the logical thing to do now was leave the room, try to find whoever owned this house, or hovel, or whatever-it-was, discover what had happened. Her memory was so foggy...But she was just too afraid of passing beyond that archway, for some reason. She felt silly for it, but she couldn't bring herself to overcome the sentiment. So she turned back to her companion.

"What happened, Kale? Do you remember how we got here?"

[Kale]

"No," Kale replied glumly. "We were on our way to Ord Mantell... This don't look like Mantell."

He cautiously rose to his feet, careful not to bring on another painful headrush. Then he dug his hands into his pockets and paced around the room.

"Not a bad place, I guess. Maybe a little drab."

Kale glanced about and couldn't find anything that looked familiar--no equipment from their ship, none of their belongings except the clothes they were wearing.

On second thought, there was his borrowed lightsaber. That expressed the dull ache in his thigh where the cylinder had been pressing against it.

He stretched out his stiff legs, rolled his head, then strode for the curtain in the doorway. "Well, let's see if anybody's home," he said.

[Rhea Kaylen]

"Right."

Kale had pushed aside the drape hanging across the archway, and light was flooding in more brightly, now, so Rhea shook off her sudden spasm of uneasiness and stepped out.

Just as she passed through the archway, pushing back the cloth hanging, she felt a powerful wave of familiarity swell in her. Something about this place seemed so like a place she had been before, like surroundings she had known, loved, even.

It wasn't until she glanced down to see a crescent-moon design woven into the fabric of the drape slipping past her hand that she realized what she was reminded of. Imran, her home planet.

This house...she did not know it, but it was familiar in build and style. The light-colored stone, golden sunlight streaming through an overhead skylight, colorful blankets hung in the doorways to other rooms branching off the hall. All of this fit the world on which Rhea had grown up.

"Kale," she murmured, feeling suddenly overwhelmingly relieved. They...they were on Imran! Perhaps their ship had malfunctioned or become lost, and they had been discovered by an Imrani transport. Though, really, they hadn't been that close to Imrani travel lanes, or to the Aranio system at all, had they? They shouldn't have been, unless they'd veered badly off-course. Maybe they had lost control of the ship and crashed somewhere...

It didn't make a lot of sense, but Imran was Imran, and Rhea felt she was the luckiest person alive. What amazing coincidence, that they would have managed to wash ashore on a familiar world.

More confidently, now, Rhea moved down the hall. "Hello?" she called brightly. "Ieyae! Ad'gani? Im'gani?"

[Kale]

When Rhea shifted to an unfamiliar language, Kale gave her a questioning look, but he didn't say anything. He slowly stepped under the skylight and looked up, shading his eyes against the bright blue sky.

Rhea's voice reverberated against the terra cotta walls of the house, then fell silent. There was no answer except the whistling of the wind kiting across an open window somewhere.

"I don't think anyone's around," Kale said uneasily.

He walked through the desolate living room and spun to see the place--there was a tiled kitchen in an alcove to one side and four hallways off the main room, one of which led upstairs and outside, judging from the light against the walls. Maybe at another time, Kale would have drummed up the aesthetic appreciation to find it charming, but, contrary to Rhea's sudden lift in spirits, Kale was starting to feel agitated--something just wasn't right about this place.

[Rhea Kaylen]

The woman frowned. It was odd that no one seemed to be around. The lady of the house should have been, in any case--though perhaps she was out tending to the garden, or visiting a friend.

Rhea was heading for the front entrance, which was open to the fresh, cool air outside, and she glanced back to see Kale hanging a little behind. He was frowning, looking a little worried.

"You coming?" Rhea asked him, then suddenly realized why he was looking so troubled. In her relief, she had momentarily forgotten; Kale had never been to Imran. He still didn't know where he was.

"Oh, I'm sorry, ad-gan'da. I should have told you--we must have been picked up by Calovian or Imrani traders. We're on Imran, I believe. At least, this is certainly an Imrani dwelling, so I can't think of anywhere else we could be. In any case, I'm sure the mother of the house will be outside, or perhaps another villager, so we'd do best to look out there." She smiled at him reassuringly and beckoned.

[Kale]

Imran... Kale didn't know much stellar cartography, but he knew enough to know they hadn't even been in the same galactic quadrant as Imran. So unless Calovian and Imrani traders regularly crossed the galaxy for milk and bread....

"I dunno," Kale muttered. "Look at the place. It's spotless. No, Rhea, it ain't just clean. There's no wear on the rug. No creases in the pillows on the chairs. This lady of yours must be the queen of neat freaks."

He wasn't sure what he was leading to... he still felt groggy, and the house wasn't yielding any clues. Scratching his neck, he lumbered after Rhea up the front stairs to the door and outside.

Kale stepped out of the darkened doorway and stared apprehensively at the vista. "Um... okay. Do Imrani usually build their houses out in the sticks?"

They stood on nearly an acre of vacant, grassy lawn surrounding the sunken house--beyond the lawn were rolling thickets, and beyond the thicket was a circle of rocky hills covered in evergreens, and no sign of any other living creature.

[Rhea Kaylen]

The sunlight was warm and rich, the air crisp, the scenery beautiful. And as Rhea stepped into the midst of it, she felt her heart suddenly skip a beat and sink precipitously.

"N-no," she murmured, half in response to Kale, half in a mumble of shock. "No, wait...this can't be right. Imrani build villages for protection from large predators, and for companionship. No one would build his house this far from other people, it doesn't make sense." Rhea's tanned brow creased in genuine worry as she realized she had already been aware that their chances of really being on Imran were quite remote. She had managed to convince herself it was not only possible, but the only explanation, but she knew, and had known even when she suggested it, that they'd been much too far from the Unknown Regions to really have been picked up by Aranians. No Imrani or Calovian ships had need to come out that far, and couldn't even if they did have reason--the pirates saw to that.

And Rhea knew it, too. But, still--the house. It was Imrani, no question. The designs in the blankets were all traditional Imrani patterns, the style of the archways and room layouts could be found in any home on Imran, and there had even been Imrani runes carved into the walls. They had to be somewhere on Imran.

"Well, wait, wait a minute," she finally burst out, looking around again in confusion. "Look, we're on Imran, we have to be. There was writing on the walls in the house, all in Imrani. So...maybe this is just an outlying house, and the village is past those trees." She pointed optimistically toward a stand of evergreens and one or two gnarly low-lyers that screened off a clear view of the lawn beyond a few yards away. "I'm sure that must be it. There's just no way..."

Rhea trailed off, distracted and unwilling to finish the thought.

[Kale]

Kale shied back against the doorframe. He didn't have a lot of experience with nature--there was very little left of it on Coruscant, and on Kuwaruk Re, it could kill you. But he still wasn't sure he could accept the place as natural. He'd been conscious of a sixth sense before he joined the Jedi; he knew enough to listen to it even when the other five were fooled.

"You, uh... you wanna check it out?"

He pulled away from the house and ventured onto the springy turf.

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea watched Kale's nervous movements, noting with a frown the way the boy's face seemed almost drained of color. His steps onto the lawn were cautious, and he looked vastly out of place among the grass and plants and trees--almost lost. Rhea'd never seen him look so uncomfortable.

But she knew that tone in his voice. Beneath the light tremor of unease, his voice was hard with the chary suspicion that meant his "sixth sense," as he called it, was twingeing him. Rhea had come to learn, especially over the several months they'd been training together, that when Kale's danger sense got pinged, she'd better duck. He had never been wrong yet.

So no matter how hard the little voice in Rhea's head tried to soothe her, tell her that, in this case, Kale simply must be mistaken--It's Imran, Rhea, what have you got to be afraid of?--she just couldn't give it her full attention. The unsettled feeling she'd so flippantly managed to push away before would not be ignored, now.

She saw Kale eye her, waiting for her to go find the village she'd predicted was hidden by the trees, and knew he had no interest in accompanying her. So she nodded shortly and set out across the turf with deliberate step that belied her own uncertainty.

Yet, despite her misgivings, twenty-seven-year-old Rhea Kaylen felt comfortable here, at home, regardless of the fact that she had spent most of the last seven years of her life on Coruscant. She had grown up traipsing countryside very much like this, was used to the way grass felt underfoot and trees looked overhead. She couldn't ignore her mind's insistent whisperings that all was not as it seemed, but she still felt entirely comfortable striking out through the trees.

This place even felt like Imran, the sun warm and the air delicious. Rhea shrugged off her itchy Temple-issue robe, letting the top half drape over the belt where it was secured. Much better.

The gnarly deciduous that marked the edge of the copse was little taller than Rhea herself, and as she glanced over at it, she thought for a fleeting moment she saw a small flicker of movement. But when she looked more closely, nothing was there. Must have just been the light.

Rhea looked briefly back at Kale, who was watching her, then turned her eyes forward again, her black-and-white ponytail swinging. The copse became very dense very quickly; it hadn't looked this expansive from the outside. But Rhea pressed on, now ignoring the trees she had previously been taking passing note of, and becoming more and more concerned that this was no grove but a real, honest-to-goodness forest.

Well, one thing was for sure: there was no village this direction. Just as Rhea slowed to turn and head back, she suddenly tripped, catching herself on a tree at her right elbow. Immediately she was seized by a wave of dizziness that passed nearly as soon as it came. Rhea blinked in confusion. That had been odd. But when she raised her head again, careful in case the sudden vertigo decided to return, she saw the forest floor becoming lighter a few feet further on as the trees started to thin out, and forgot her dizziness. Sunlight glimmered just ahead, so she righted herself and continued forward, taking greater care of her feet so as not to stumble, again.

The trees became sparse and scrawny as she walked, and soon grass was growing beneath her feet again. Rhea smiled. A few more feet, and she would be out of these trees. Maybe she'd find a village, after all...

Then, as the trees and growth thinned to nearly nothing, Rhea felt her stomach start to twist. The grass she was walking on stretched away across a tidy lawn, wherein sat the lone dome-like entryway to an underground dwelling. The dome was plain off-white stone, the front was unadorned, and in the middle of the yard stood a single figure--a short, wiry boy with ruddy hair, wearing a long black robe.

For a second Rhea was too confused to even think. She looked behind her, looked back at the boy, who was moving nervously about the yard, poking at the turf with the toe of his boot.

Then, bewildered, she found her voice. "Kale?"

[Kale]

He almost started after her, but he didn't like the idea of walking under all those trees--anyway, it made sense to hang back in case someone did return. So Kale paced aimlessly in the yard, trying to get a fix on this creeping suspicion that was making his neck hairs rise.

After five minutes, he was starting to think it had been a mistake to split up--he was just about to run to catch up with Rhea when he heard her voice--behind him.

He wheeled around. "Very funny. I was wonderin' what was takin' you so long--but why'd you loop clear around me?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

"I--I didn't." She looked behind her again for a long moment, then turned back and squinted across the lawn. "I didn't. At least...I don't think I did..."

Rhea was not known for a highly acute sense of direction. She could get lost in the Temple archives; in fact, she had gotten lost in the Archives before. But, even so, she was quite sure she hadn't made any turns, not enough to have sent her all the way around behind the little house, anyway.

Oh, she hoped she hadn't. Surely she hadn't gotten that dizzy...

Befuddled, she looked back and forth again, totally confused.

"Maybe I did..."

[Kale]

At another time, Kale probably would have snapped off a smart remark about Rhea's legendary sense of direction. But he was too spooked to be sarcastic. He didn't like the feeling inside the innocuous little dome-house, and he didn't like how it felt under the open air on the lawn. The thicket and forests surrounding them didn't look any more inviting--he'd never been among trees that weren't surrounded by fences or parkways.

"Maybe?" he repeated incredulously. "You musta walked about half a klick; that's awful hard to do by accident--"

He halted himself there. No good snapping at her when she was clearly as befuddled as he was.

"Listen, maybe we should take a look around together. I don't want to split up again if we don't have to. Come on."

Swallowing his reservations about the forest, he followed Rhea's path back under the trees, taking careful glances behind him to make sure she was keeping up. There was little wind in the trees, but it was cooler, and damp. Kale pulled his cloak tighter around himself.

"I don't see anything that looks like a village," he muttered. "Maybe--"

He felt himself grow dizzy, and he grabbed a tree limb to keep himself steady. He turned to Rhea, who seemed to have the same problem.

The forest brightened ahead. Kale and Rhea glanced wordlessly at one another and marched on. They emerged onto a familiar lawn staring at a very familiar house.

"No way," Kale gasped. He ran to the doorway and clattered down the steps--it looked exactly the same. He bolted to the bedroom and saw the depressions in the bedclothes where the two of them had awakened. He ran a hand through his hair, bewildered.

"What... what the frell is goin' on here?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea limply dragged her heavy heart and leaden limbs down into the house after Kale. By the time she got back to the bedroom, the boy was standing with wide eyes and one hand clamped into his hair.

She barely had the presence of mind to stagger to the bed before she collapsed, both from confused shock and from a bit of residual dizziness, which seemed to cling to her more tenaciously, this time. Rhea shook her head faintly.

"This...I don't think this," she glanced around her at the dim room. "Is real, Kale."

[Kale]

Kale stared at her incredulously.

"Not real? Then what the frell is it? I mean, one moment we're flyin' through hyperspace, and the next--"

His eyes suddenly unfocused, and he held his breath--as if he were seeing something played back on a vidscreen over Rhea's shoulder.

"The distress call," he murmured. "We got a distress call. And when we dropped to sublight, there was nothin' there..."

[Rhea Kaylen]

Kale's voice jarred something in Rhea's brain, and she blinked rapidly as the black fog hanging over that piece of her memory dissolved.

"Yes, there was...there was something there. A ship, one of the biggest I've ever seen. It fired at us..." Rhea's voice was becoming stronger, the words coming faster, as fear chased her tone up a few notches. "But we missed it--you missed it." In fact, he'd scared her to death at the time by lunging for the ship's controls, wresting them from her hands, and banking the ship so sharply the stabilizers in the small Temple transport had groaned.

Agitated, Rhea rose from the bed, stalking a few paces first one way, then another, her face clouded in thought as she struggled with her bad memory to recall what had happened before the blackout.

"But it fired again..."

[Kale]

He remembered the ship now--huge, huge, impossibly huge, like the Super Star Destroyers he'd read about from during the Empire's heyday. But it hadn't been imperial--hadn't been anything he recognized.

And then his memory flashed forward.

"It hit us," he said. "I remember the cockpit fillin' with light--blinded me. And then..."

He shook his head. "That's all. That's all I remember. We got hit..."

A look of terror filled his eyes. "Rhea, you don't think... you don't think we're dead, do you?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

The Imrani woman blinked, stunned by the question. It had never occurred to her. Though...she couldn't think of any really compelling evidence to debunk the theory...

But no. Something inside Rhea told her it couldn't be true, that it was absurd--and besides that, a terrific cop-out. No, she could think of no way to reassure Kale that they were not, in fact, dead, but she knew it for herself, all the same.

So she shook her head and kept her voice calm. "No, Kale, I don't think we're dead. At least, let's continue operating under the assumption that we are not, until we are proven otherwise." Her eyes raked over the plain room again, looking now for signs of something amiss. "Besides," she added, "why would your spirit end up in an afterlife that looked like my home planet? I suppose I might be dead, after all..." Her musing voice trailed off at the wild look she received from Kale.

"Sorry, kidding. Okay, so, if we don't remember what happened after we got hit, and we're not dead...what's the next option? I'm sure that ship wouldn't have attacked us for nothing, so I'm sure they at least came aboard. Whoever they are.

"Only...that doesn't make much sense. Since when do most pirates actively nail a small, unmarked vessel--an ambassador ship? For that matter, since when do pirates have frigates as big as that monster?"

[Kale]

Kale felt a little sheepish. But... well... they had to cover all the bases.

"That was no pirate," he said. "Rhea, there ain't nothin' that big except... maybe some of the biggest Republic capships. I didn't get a great look at it, but..."

His mind reeled. What if it was Imperial? Some new design--something they couldn't detect? It could be heading to the core worlds that moment--

Which still didn't explain what they were doing here.

"Rhea--what if we were captured? Maybe this is some sorta prison--"

He glanced up nervously at the ceiling, as if he expected someone to be listening.

[Rhea Kaylen]

His anxiety was catching; Rhea had to stop herself following his glance.

Actually, she had been following a similar line of thinking. She nodded. "I think that's exactly what this is," she replied stonily, bristling at the idea of being a prisoner. Again. "I think this is some kind of...I don't know, holographic environment." She touched the nightstand, but was disappointed to find it really did fell solid and real. "Well, something like that. But it's like a cell--it is a cell--so there have to be boundaries of some kind. Our boundary must just be the forest, and when we come to the limit of that boundary, we're somehow removed to the opposite boundary. Or...or maybe the holographic image projects itself again in front of us, always in front of us. Kind of like the vid that plays on the Temple caf vidscreens--you know, the flying Temple logo and the pictures of the Senate and the Temple and the big war memorial. The vid just repeats, over and over. Maybe...this is just a vid that repeats, over and over."

Kale looked bewildered, and Rhea trailed off, abashed. "Or...something like that."

[Kale]

Kale leaned against the wall with a deep sigh. He wasn't sure he'd quite followed Rhea, but he had an idea of what she was getting at--like the old 2-D vid game he'd seen in a bar once where a little disk-creature munched its way through a repeating maze. Whenever it went out one side, it always came back in the other.

"Krasst... we might be on that ship right now. Maybe they were afraid we'd expose them. Rhea, we might be in a lot of trouble--what if they're attacking the NR? What if--"

Rhea had sat down on the edge of the bed, her eyes softly closed, breathing steadily as if she were asleep.

"Rhea, are you even listening to me?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

She was, barely.

"Shh. Quiet, now. I'm listening to something else. Help me."

Then Rhea slid out of conscious perception altogether, relaxing into the liquid embrace of the Force. If they were indeed prisoners of some strange and unknown antagonist, then Rhea knew she needed to be as calm as she could make herself. Also, she needed information that sensory perception alone could not give her.

The Force eddied uneasily around her, whispering distractedly as if stirred up, unable or disallowed to flow naturally. It spun in tiny currents around the room, shying from the walls, and Rhea tried to soothe its disruption a little, pushing her perception outward, like an expanding balloon. She felt it bump the boundaries of their prison and keep growing, filling corridors and pushing into doorways. Eventually, she felt other boundaries like theirs. Excited, Rhea reached out gentle probing thoughts to investigate these other places.

The first return she got was the cool shady neutrality of plant life. Lots of it. She adjusted her mental tuning knobs so that the plants were a gentle hum of life that would not muddy her perception and keep her from sensing other things. Soon those other things skittered across her mental vision, small life-forces which registered weakly in her mind. Animals, little ones, mostly, though a few lumbered on the edge of her mind that were substantially larger.

However, pinpointing them made little sense to the logical part of Rhea's brain, which couldn't make sense of the abundant life readings. This was very, painfully obviously a ship's layout, but there were masses of growing, creeping things inhabiting its halls. Why would there be such massive animal life-sign readings on a spacecraft?

Suddenly, a bright streak dashed across Rhea's thoughts, and the murmur of an intelligent mind echoed after. Rhea looked wildly for the now-eclipsed being, a thinking, sentient life form. But it was gone. Disappointed, she kept slowly following the current of the Force, her senses wide, wide open for any and all spikes in the steady thrum of the Force.

In her mind Rhea turned a corner from a wide hallway, and suddenly something assaulted her senses. An enormous presence, with a strange, disturbing, alien mind, so alien it was shut to her. All she could tell was that it was big, whatever it was, and that it was very, dangerously intelligent. And that it was watching.

Watching them.

[Keeper]

Fascinating...

What is, sir?

Activity on the psychic plane. The female. A sensory technique of some sort.

She is probing outward. Might it be dangerous?

Nonsense, it is a passive scan. Curious... as she extends her perception, her individual life signature is merging with the ambient psychokinetic field. How marvelous.

Metasensors barely registering her presence, sir. Is she still there?

Yes, indeed. I see her clearly. I wonder what she is thinking now.

They both seem skittish, sir. Would not a full memory wipe help them acclimate to their environment?

Drastic. Defeats the purpose. I should like to study their instinct patterns. Look at them--they seem almost sentient.

But they are dangerous. We could at least deprive them of their plasma weapons.

An integral asset to the species. Should we pull the rancor's teeth? Or cut the horns off the gundark?

As you wish, sir. What is the female doing now?

She is searching. I believe she has become aware of me. I must back away now, lest I frighten her. Pity...

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea jumped and her eyes flew open, her concentration broken. She blinked several times, her heart racing.

It was gone. Whatever it was had seemed to realize it wasn't the only one watching and disappeared. She hadn't found it again, and honestly hadn't wanted to.

Never before had Rhea encountered a mind so wholly alien that she was incapable of understanding it, at least on some level. Even animal minds could be communicated with--usually they responded to mere feelings, like fear, which would trigger their instinct to run, or placidity, which would soothe and calm them.

But this...this was so different. Utterly inhuman, but not an animal by any means. It was far too intelligent. Somehow above her mind, perhaps closed to it. It was difficult for her to tell; she was too inexperienced.

Whatever that mind was, Rhea had the disturbing impression that it held power, authority. And it had seemed, in that brief moment, completely devoid of emotion, though Rhea was sure that was only because she couldn't connect with the thing's mind.

She took a deep breath and shook her head. The thing was gone, now, and had been nowhere close to the enclosure, or cell, or whatever, in which Kale and Rhea were being kept, so she pushed it to the back of her mind for the time being. There was so much else in this ship, all around them. Maybe...maybe this was a science vessel of some kind, and was carrying animal and plant specimens. There had been so many of them...

[Kale]

"Animals?"

Kale gaped at Rhea, waiting for some confirmation that he'd heard her correctly.

They were back in the house's common room--both Padawans had found themselves ravenously hungry, and, as luck would have it, the pantry in the kitchen was well-stocked with non-perishables. Preserved cereal and dried meat made for a bland breakfast, but it was the best they could find.

"Why in the frell would a ship the size of a Super Star Destroyer be haulin' a load of animals? And why would it attack and capture a Jedi transport?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea munched the grain-from-a-box that humans called "cereal." She had long since resigned herself to chewing bad food automatically and appreciate the fact that it took the edge off her hunger.

This place may have looked and sounded like Imran, but the pantry had been disappointingly bare of anything Imrani.

Rhea shrugged in response to her compatriot. "It doesn't make any sense. The best guess I can make is that this is a research or science vessel--probably illegal. Maybe smugglers, depending on the kind of animals they're transporting. If that's the case, then the certainly wouldn't want Jedi discovering the nature of their ship."

[Kale]

"Then why keep us around at all, if they've got that kind of power?" Kale said. "Nah, never mind, I don't know, either. None of this makes any sense."

He shook his head and poked around his bowl of dry cereal. He'd tried meditating himself to get a read on their situation, but he'd never been as sensitive as Rhea.

"We're on a ship... a huge one... with some sorta weapon that can knock people out but not kill them. We're stuck inside a holographic prison that looks like your home planet but loops on top of itself. But we've still got our sabers."

He hesitated, then pulled his saber from his belt. "I think."

Giving Rhea a warning glance, he thumbed the power switch on his saber, and the blue-white blade throbbed to life, bleeding the smell of ozone into the holographic atmosphere.

Kale killed the blade and clipped the saber back onto his belt. "None of it adds up. You sure you didn't get anything on that... thing... you say you sensed? Intentions? Emotions?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

She had given up on the food, satisfied that she wouldn't starve and needing no other reassurances. She shook her head.

"Nothing. Its mind was closed to me, but I'm not sure if it was a deliberate act, suggesting sentience, or simply because it was so alien. It's intelligent, though, much too intelligent to be any animal I've ever encountered. I got nothing from it--no feelings, no thoughts, no surprise to find me watching it. And it knew I was watching it, too; it looked--well, okay, "looked" in the telepathic sense--right at me, then moved away where I could not find it again."

She looked at Kale and through him, thinking hard. "Kale...it wasn't alarmed at my presence. It was...expecting me, or something. So, it wasn't just watching me then; it must have been watching me beforehand, somehow."

[Kale]

Kale furrowed his brow. He wasn't sure he really understood--but then, he'd always scored low on telepathic aptitude. He was awfully fuzzy on the whole process of mindscanning.

"It's gotta be a clue. But about wha..."

He was interrupted by a large yawn.

"What... I dunno."

He glanced up at the skylight. The sky was fading, and he could see the light of a few stars flickering overhead.

"You as sleepy as I am all of a sudden? That stun-ray must've done a real number."

[Rhea Kaylen]

Kale's yawn made Rhea have to stifle one of her own. She didn't think she'd been so tired, but now he mentioned it, she realized that the pinch between her eyebrows was threatening to become a headache, and the disassociation she'd first felt in her arms and legs was turning into a leaden sort of ache. Adrenaline was flowing out of her system and in its place came weary resignation to the situation as it stood.

So she nodded, then turned to walk down the short hallway, looking for a second bedroom.

After she'd looked in all of the three archways, however, she was stumped. One of the rooms had been a sittingroom, another a lav, and the third a storage space in which she found more food and lots of empty room on shelves and on the floor--but nothing resembling a cot, trundle bed, or rough bunk.

She returned to the bedroom--the sole bedroom--and leaned in the doorway, frowning at Kale who was kicking off his boots, again.

"There's nowhere else to sleep," she muttered, annoyed. "And this is the only room with any rugs on the floor. You mind if I sleep next to the bed? I don't snore, or anything...at least, I don't think so."

[Kale]

Kale blinked in confusion. "Nowhere else? That's... weird."

Especially if the place was holographically generated--if whoever made this went to the trouble of replicating an imrani house, why not make it big enough for two?

He noticed in passing that the bed was big enough, but that was just... ahem.

"Y' know what, you're the one who took the last shift at the controls on the ship," he said. "Just give me a blanket, an' I can sleep on the floor; I've slept on worse. If we're here another night, we can switch. Besides... I don't want to sleep too deep. Night, Rhea."

Taking a pillow and one of the brightly patterned blankets in tow, he coccooned himself on the rug by the foot of the bed. He didn't like the idea of sleeping in such a strange place with so few answers, but he was too tired to argue with his body.

But no sense in letting his guard down completely. As he began to drift away, he flushed out his mind and opened his senses to the Force. He'd wake with a headache from the extra input, he knew, but the connection would rejuvenate his body twice as fast as sleeping regularly, and he'd be alert in case anything strange happened in the night.