Log:Jedi Order: Lost Library pt 3

Jedi Order: Lost Library pt 3

OOC Date: June 9, 2020
Location: Halowan
Participants: Jedi Order: Aryn Cole, Liren, and Rey Skywalker, with Ben Solo

The record left behind on Empress Teta directed them here, to Halowan, the supposed destination for all the most important knowledge of the Great Jedi Library destroyed on Ossus, as well as choice tomes from the Silversisi and the Great Library of Cinagar. The Keepers of Knowledge had been prudent and cagey stock, evidently, and although the Jedi have managed to follow the trail thus far, it's slungshot them from one side of the galaxy to the other.

Halowan itself is a dusty ball of grey dirt, unremarkable, small, with no current inhabitants. One of the only marks of civilization left is a broken-down facility squatting on the arid landscape, and that is where the Jedi have gathered to search for the information potentially locked away inside.

Ben swipes at the sweat beading on his forehead as he approaches the door, pushing it open on rusted rollers that creak and groan as the entryway slides back into the wall, revealing the gloomy, dust-encrusted lobby with its cheerful yellow logo for the Holowan Laboratories, and the equally cheerful green slogan underneath it, both covered in a layer of grey. "This is the place," he remarks, surveying the room within, stepping inside over a fallen ceiling tile. "Not quite as friendly as advertised."

Arid climates were becoming a norm for Aryn Cole, who had frequently visited the most extreme desert planets. Preparing for a warm place required only a light cape of dusty tan, with matching clothing that had some dark brown to it (for style), and a wrap the protects her face with tinted goggles to boot.

When making it inside after Ben Solo, the much shorter blonde unwraps her face and lifts her goggles, which simultaneously tames the blonde back from her scarred face. A moment of fidgeting reveals a wrist device with tac-light attached. She switches it on quietly, shining the cone of bright light up toward the slogan and into the space where the ceiling tile had fallen.

"Crypts bare more welcome." Aryn says softly, opposite of Ben, and accented.

Hopeful. That is the stance Liren decides to take in this forsaken landscape where the wind whips the moisture away from your skin. She loosens her fingers from the hood when they enter the old factory lobby, letting it fall backward, the green fabric already sheened with dust. Slapping the dust from her sleeves abstractedly, she looks around the room, an eyebrow lifting at the green slogan.

"Why here, of all places?"

Wearing her hood and a matching mask of the same cut of cloth, a pair of shaded goggles very similar to what she wore once upon a time on Jakku, Rey appears behind the others. "I can see why Threepio was less excited about joining us on this one, compared to Empress Teta." She quietly quips to the others. Her eyes follow after Aryn's light beam, watching what it reveals before they move to the entrance of the structure. With light steps and her hands at her sides, Rey keeps her senses as open as she can.

"Sometimes the worst places are the best places to hide things." Rey replies to Liren. "I'd guess anyway." She'll move to step inside tfhough and pull her mask and goggles aside to reveal her face then once out of the winds, she's no stranger to heat though!

"Why here?" Ben echoes Liren's question, raising a brow as he glances over at the woman. "That reaction is exactly why here. Would you come to a place like this thinking you'd find a secret cache of Jedi secrets?" The question seems rhetorical as he carefully continues through to the main assembly floor, passing through the door below the 'Friendly Technology People' signage. "They wanted to protect it. Secret passages and ciphers aren't always as effective as pure obscurity."

The assembly lines that lie dormant stretch and curve across the factory floor, meant to carry parts along on a winding route but instead collecting dust. Ben's toe catches on something, and a look down causes him to pause. "...oh. So it's a crypt after all." Stooping low, he plucks the object from the floor and straightens up, holding the dull white spheroid out for the others to see, empty sockets and hollow cavities above a row of grinning teeth.

Aryn's light briefly passes over the dead, though her demeanor does not change. She had been around cadivers and dissected bodies much of her life. Empty sockets and grinning teeth were low on the scale of frightening for Aryn. "Charming." Aryn follows along then, content in her silence as their scenery changes to an assembly line. Aided by her light, the young Doctor finds an old broken Blastech DLT-20a after lifting some rubble noisily up. Not much for concealing her presence, the noble seems unbothered my the noise, but she makes a fuss about the dust, covering her face with her wrap while wildly waving her free hand. "*Cough--Cough--Cough*....--Achooooooooooo!" Comes from Aryn, the final portion high pitched and girly as she stoops slightly to lift the weapon by its pistol grip to dangle for her light to pass over it.

Aryn judges by the size of its rusted receiver that perhaps the weapon had been larger at one point. The barrel housing group, or the portion where the barrel screwed into the receiver, was broken clean through. She checks its safety before carefully setting it aside. "Found a weapon of some sort. Large like a rifle or carbine-- **Sneeze**-- I'm not gunnery expert though." Another sneeze and Aryn abandons the broken weapon, stepping lightly to another section.

"Of course," Liren observes to herself. She turns in place, stirring the dust accumulated since the factory closed then follows the others through the doors into the assembly line. There is the mustiness of a room long locked despite its size and the tang of something unpleasant in the air. Stepping carefully, she examines abandoned machinery looking as though it had been shut down in the middle of work. She nearly passes a dust-covered hump in an aisle, her eyes going back to the anomaly to understand the details of what she's seeing. Leaving the others, she takes a few steps to stand over the form. A body, the clothing with singed holes attesting to how they died.

"Someone died defending this place. Maybe," she says, straightening up from her examination. She rejoins the others to continue exploring the vast room.

Rey's eyes look up to Ben, though move away when he starts to speak of the Jedi. As she searches and looks about the interior of this place she takes light breaths and further comments on the initial subject. "The Jedi existed for over twenty five thousand years. Not everyone in this galaxy was eager to brand them traitors and watch as the Empire turned all of their history to ash and cinder. Even the threats that the Emperor could make, weren't enough to scare /everyone/ into submission."

Rey steps up to a droid skeleton of her own and reaches out to pick up the elongated head of an old droid. She raises it up and peers into it's deactivated eye. "Is this a bounty hunter droid?" She asks the others then as she turns to regard them.

Aryn's sneezing draws Rey's attention though, so she sets the droid's head down and starts toward the others, using the light beam to guide her toward them. As she moves she raises her mask back up to cover her own nose again... she doesn't want to have to breath all this in. "We should've brought filtration masks." She quietly comments on her way, not quite happy with seeing /bones/ on the ground. Bones are never good.

Well, bad news, Rey. Ben points across the room. "Look." There's another skeleton, roughly human in shape. "And there." A different one. "And another." The longer one looks around the factory, the more dead bodies peek through the dirt and debris, all staring sightlessly at the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The cylindrical droid head Rey lifts up is covered by a ring of red circles, and Ben stares at it when she sets it aside. "...I don't like this. But we need to find what was left here, even if it's only another clue saying the Keepers moved it again. Keep looking, see if you can find some sort of... I don't know. Secret button. Where would you hide it?"

Aryn's footprint with the force increases for several moments as the blonde seems to walk in a different direction. Tugging a glove free, Aryn's bare hand touches one of the machines and for a moment, her perception was no longer with the dilapidated scene they'd been greeted with. She was viewing this facility at its height, through the eyes of someone who was strong with the Force, devoted to the good 'light side'.

Aryn's motions are no longer her own as she takes from the guidance the history of this place provides. She opens a compartment on a machine, located upon its side. The moment that follows has her drawing in a sharp breath like she'd been cut, and she turns to see a tall droid with a cylindrical head firing a blaster rifle repeatedly.

Fear. Pain. These elements center upon this dark droid figure, and Aryn falls backward out of the intense vision and back into the reality of her current time frame. She lands on a small pile of rubble clutching herself like she'd been shot, only.. she had not been. Wide fearful eyes angle upward to find only swirling dust where the figure had been. No explanation, just the esoteric nature of the Force. A heightened pulse and breath intake severs Aryn's brief connection, but she rises back up on her feet, wrestling with her thoughts, before shining her light into the compartment to see what this vision's echo was reaching for..

Eyes adjusted to the dim light, Liren moves away from the others. Stepping carefully over mounds that appear suspiciously to be bodies, she sees a wall that looks like a mad abstract artist painted it in shades of black, ochre and grey - the remains of a pitched battle leaving its sepulchral marks. A disturbance through the force interrupts her examination.

"Is this a door here?" she asks, before she can stop herself.

Rey walks past Ben and smirks softly at him. "Stop pointing out the dead." She quietly chides him for being macabre. She walks past him then and moves toward where she sees Aryn. She starts sweeping her gaze around the equipment and machinery there, even reaching out her hands to glide her fingertips across it all as she visually - and tactile...y - searches. The former scavenger is almost in her element, having grown up in places not all that unlike this. She'd seen plenty of places like this after all.

Rey crouches down near a gap in the machiner and she turns her body to go right-shoulder-first in between two computer stations, her small form able to slip into such a tight squeeze.

Once there she pauses between it all and slips her hands into an open panel. "I think I found something." Rey quietly says then as he starts to grab hold of loose connection lines, snapping them together and tightening them with locking twists!

When she pulls back, her white clothing is smudged in dark filth she'd rubbed off the sides of the panels, she looks to Aryn then. "Are you okay?" She ask the other before she looks back to Liren. "I think I reconnected the power to this station. It might open now, if it is."

"I'm fine." Aryn replies curtly, though not unfriendly. She was simply conveying that everything was okay. Rey's intervention allowed Aryn to avoid the embarrassment of trying to fix anything. Thus, the sudden shift in machinery is the result, and it spooks Aryn enough that she brushes her cape aside to pull the ornate Westar-34 free from its holster on her hip.

Originally, Aryn had been oriented to peer inside the compartment she opened, and remembering her experience from the vision she'd had moments prior, Aryn is prompted to look inside once more. To the untrained eye, the innards of this compartment might resemble the workings of a machine. To a Jedi, particularly one familiar with the construction of a lightsaber, these innards were much more. Fashioned like a lightsaber, the only missing piece was the crystal; though, in its place was a small power supply that had been placed in a crooked manner. Reaching inside, Aryn adjusted this powercell, and the result brought the factory to life as more machines fired up and began to stir up dust.

Aryn drew her goggles back down over her eyes and wrapped her face to shields herself from the dust, but a sneeze had already formed and executed, a high-pitched girly sound that upended the dust settled upon her cape shoulders. The workings of a second sneeze began as Aryn hid behind something large, paranoid about the sounds of droids and medley of red light boding (potentially) ill for her companions.

"I know not!" Yelled back Aryn's answer to Ben Solo. Her attention had been pre-occupied to this point.

Rey is moving to hop up onto a piece of machinery to get a better look across the room, her clothing whipping around her body as she nimbly darts up to higher and higher ground. Once up there she stops with a graceful control of her own form and her hand dips beneath her hip-slung bag to reach for her lightsaber's hilt. "Droids?" Rey calls out. "I was right, it was a bounty hunter droid, wasn't it!" She almost sounds proud of herself?

But well, it is short lived. Rey jumps off of the vantage point she'd climbed up to and moves toward where Liren was. "All I did was connect the power conduit to the control board. It had been severed in some kind of internal power surge!" She exclaims, her lightsaber hilt held in her left hand now at her side.

Something is happening in the other room. It's not clear what exactly, but the red lights all sort of converge on each other and then divide, moving towards the door before vanishing from view in the blind spots provided by the wall between them and the Jedi. Then a pair of arms stick out from behind the wall on either side of the door, one high and one low and both holding blasters. Then they open fire in unison!

The blaster bolts scorch across the room, red trails lighting up the dim space and tagging Liren, the closest to the door, and Aryn just before she can secure cover behind her large object. Ben's saber crackles to life in his hand, the orange blade flickering persistently. "Bounty hunter droids, battle droids, assassin droids, doesn't make much difference what you call them. I think we've just solved the mystery of all these corpses."

Aryn's reconstructive surgery on the machinery seems to have opened... nothing. Oh wait, no, there it is: a hole in the floor. A literal hole in the floor. It doesn't look like a trapdoor, no stairs down, no ladder down, no nothing. A hole in the floor, down into darkness.

One moment it is the calm of the moldering dead broken only by the Jedi voices muffled by the layers of dust; the next: lights and more action than Liren expected. Danger sense was of no help when the doors on the wall crack open and the red pinpoints of targeting lasers lay their beady little eyes on her and the others. The caroom of a laser blast whips her spinning backwards to land on her behind, clutching her lower left arm.

"Arrrrg," she groans between gritted teeth. Staggering to cover, she sees the hole in time to prepare herself awkwardly for a leap. Bad preparation sends her ass over heels into another body to lay stunned in a heap for a breathless moment.

Rey had been on her way to Liren, but had been too many steps away to help her. "Liren!" She'd called out moments before she saw the youngest to the new Jedi Order take a hit. When she reaches her, she sees said opening in the ground. "We found something!" Rey calls out to Ben and Aryn. "Come on, down here!" To get away from the droids? It's far better than fighting who-knows-how-many of them!

Rey jumps for the darkness below and vanishes down into it! Once at the bottom, her lightsaber is flicked on and acitvated, causing the golden beam to leap forth and help give illumination onto her new surroundings!

As the Jedi begin disappearing down the hole, the target selection dwindles for the IG units that continue to blast away from behind the cover of the door and walls, their robotic hands turned at ninety degree angles from their robotic arms. Ben takes one last long look at that door, considering going after them anyway in spite of Rey's calls that Aryn had revealed a passage. He's rewarded for this delay with a shot across the shoulder that sizzles away at the leather on his jacket. Nice. "This was new," he complains darkly, waving at Aryn. "Come on! Don't stay up here!" Then he hops down after Rey and Liren, landing lightly on his feet.

The space is dark, but the light of his saber illuminates it slightly. The roof is short enough that he has to stoop down, but it is a room, not a cave, and must have been deliberately planned and constructed. It's filled with computer equipment, the old boxy terminals and monochromatic transparent displays especially popular during the height of the Galactic Civil War. "...this looks promising."

Aryn observes Rey and Liren disappearing into a hole. A HOLE?! When did that get there?! In looking at this dynamic change and observing the disappearance of the other ladies, then Ben, Aryn feels a sudden desperation at being alone. It's that moment when she takes another hit, this one impacting her stomach and carrying her backward from the concussive force. "Ooohph!"

Her armor had dispersed the blow again, but a sizzling hole in her shirt, around her navel, was her reward for surviving. "Mother save me..."

Glancing down for a moment, she slides the Westar back into the holster on her hip, then reaches to her lower back and frees the wooden frame of her Theed Arms S-5, switching to cable mode. Aryn moves from her spot of cover, running low and along a bit of machinery. She makes it to the hole, fires the grapple into the ground at her feet and drops into the hole a second later with a sudden flutter of her cape. The cable line grows tight as the shadow of Aryn swings back and forth whilst descending.

A few seconds later, Aryn sets down gently and recalls the line, holstering the S-5 against her lower back once again. A long look is angled above before she reactivates her wrist light and searches for her companions.

After levering herself to her feet, Liren studies the scorched hole in her sleeve, gingerly putting her finger through it. There is no coincidence that it resembles the holes she remarked in the dead looter or soldier she had examined. The burn underneath leaks blood, but as they say in the holofilms: it's only a flesh wound, and she will assuredly stay alive.

Muzzled from the injury, and the fall, she hazily peers at the old fashioned computer consoles greyed by a fine layer of dust. "Not in my purview by a long shot," she mutters. "Who can get these booted up?"

She considers sitting on a crate but curiosity has her levering it open. Notebooks, holopictures that no longer flicker to life, a caf cup blazoned with: I periodically need caf, and a periodic table. The paraphernalia of a researcher's desk. She picks up a notebook with the name Voren Na'al on its cover and begins to flip through its pages. The names of planets seem to leap from the pages: Hoth, Endor, and Yavin among others.

In the darkness of this new area, Rey holds her saber up close to her causing her face to be covered in a golden illumination. She starts to look about the otherwise darkend location. "Something about this is unsettling." She says, in a new way of phrasing a very common saying in the galaxy. Her eyes glance upward, the mask still on over her nose and mouth. "We still have to get out of here too. Maybe we can find another way."

She passes by Liren and glances down at her wounds. "We'll have to get that looked at as soon as we can too." She comments softly about it before stepping onward. "There likely will be more droids around here."

"I can try," Ben offers, stepping up to one of the terminals and giving a few of the keys perfunctory taps. Nothing seems to happen, so he tries a few of the other buttons on offer, pushing here and there, until finally he throws a switch and a dull light begins to glow behind the display. Characters slowly flash across the terminal screen, and he frowns down at them. "It says it's empty. How can it be empty? Look at all these data stacks." While the terminal is alive and lit up, the stacks have remained dark and dead. Liren's discovery gets a side-eye, and with the way these outings have gone, he recommends, "Bring that with you."

Aryn is not the most computer savvy, thus she leaves those musings to her betters. In a quiet perusing manner, Aryn looks over the disorganized nature of this room, eventually detecting a peculiar scent that draws her toward a tipped datastack. Behind this datastack, through a large crack in the wall, Aryn locates another room.

Juding by the tile, and the manner/organization of it (at least what she can see with her light), she determines that it must be some sort of locker room. More importantly, she locates a staircase leading up. "I've found our way out.." She declares, moving the tipped datastack with care to make way for their exit, when the others deem it necessary to leave.

There are three notebooks, remarkably preserved. Liren does the most expedient thing she can think of to carry them. She stuffs them into the front of her robe, cinching the belt tighter to keep them in place, holding them to her with the good side her wounded arm.

Glancing between the other three Jedi, she takes a few steps into the next room, looking for other crates or materials left behind. "Will we be staying, do you think?"

Rey glances to the others as she nears to a computer terminal. It's a terminal that she ... sort've knows how to operate. Her lightsaber is deactivated and her hand comes up to stroke over the screen to clear off some of the accumulated dirt caked on to the monitor. She then drops her eyes down to the keypad and starts to tap away on it. When she's rewarded with a screen coming online she clips her saber to the back of her belt behind her, to focus on tapping away at the terminal keypad.

But after a moment of reading what's displayed, Rey straightens up again and shakes her head. "It's all left here, I think." She exhales lightly before she turns toward Aryn's voice and starts to walk toward her to see this potential way out. As she walks she looks to Liren, and her question... then to Ben. "Only if you think there's more yet to find. But I think what we're looking for was taken from here."

"Wonderful," Ben comments dryly, pursing his lips in a manner that makes it clear that he feels much the opposite. "Another trail to follow. Another relocation. This library has visited more planets than most tourists." His fingers clamp down a bit more tightly around the hilt of the lightsaber in his hand, but there is no fit of rage forthcoming, apparently. YET.

Turning from the terminal, he stalks away towards Aryn's revealed passage, though both his stalking and procedure into the locker room are impeded by the low ceiling and his tall height. At the top of the stairs, he peeks around the corner into the lobby, wary of the IG-88 units they left behind. "...I think they're gone." No longer finding the light useful, he deactivates the weapon in his hand and clips it back to his belt, frowning again. "I'm not sure where they would have /gone./ But they're gone." Just like the library! "We'll take a closer look at these diaries, see where our next path might lead." Sighing, he looks towards off towards the ships, then back into the factory, and the gears turning in his head are almost visible.

"I'll meet you back on the ship. There's something I need to deal with."