Star Wars: I havent decided what to call this story Episode 312(take 5. Let's get it right this time! That means you, Terry!) by Caleb "Ravager" Parks, the VRwizard You may submit your homage and sacrafices at VRwizard@Hotmail.com Part I Through the darkness, the far-off sound of an iron hinge-style door swinging open ripped into the dead silence and woke the ragged man from his haunted slumber. The distant, echoed screams of tormented and starving thousands had stopped days earlier. Only hours before, noises of clanging cell doors, the rustling of feet, and undistinct voices could be heard. Slowly the sounds advanced down the long, labyrinth corridors. The man in the cell huddled in the corner of his stone prison by the small heap of gnawed bones and braced for another beating. The men in shining white armor. The men with the lightning arrows. He hated them. They would yell at him, and he could not understand them. Then they would beat him and thunder more gibberish speech at him. Sometimes they would stop bringing him food. Like now. But what had he done THIS time? Food had not been brought to him in nearly three weeks now. He lived off the meat and marrow outside and within the bones. Bad-tasting water had once drizzled from a half broken pipe protruding out of the ceiling and left his cell through the tiny drain below it. It was bathing water but the man also used it for drinking. It tasted terribly bitter, but he found that the water that the white-armored men sometimes brought him was not enough and his body ached without it. This was where he had grown up. This was how he believed all life was. The distant iron cell door clanged shut. It was distant but the man knew that the bricks encircling him within his 'room' often distorted noises so that they were closer than they seemed. His stomach growled and his muscles were so weak. The bones were devoid of any edible peices for the last several days, though he ate what he could find on or in them. All the bones had been cracked in two and stripped clean with the help from the man's long fangs, and his razor claws. Although they were just bones, completely inedible, he still gnawed away at them, eating the small bits. The cyberlock to his cell door strained with pressure and surrendered, tumbling to the stone ground outside. The iron hatch, partly rusted and warped from centuries of constant use and neglect, was shoved from the outside, letting dim light stream in. The man didn't even notice the light, for his visual sense had dulled over the years of near-endless pitch-darkness. Seeing nothing especially from his right eye, which had long ago fallen blind to the senseless almost daily beatings. The whip lashing across his face, had left it's permanent mark. Tiny ridges and canyons on the right side of his face from the scars reflected his soul. The thick metal door was pushed aside and hung precariously by it's bottom hinge. He extended his claws, that small action alone, stinging his brain and aggravated the pain all around his body. His head became light, his hearing dulled and what he could see blurred before him when he finally tumbled once again into sleep. . . . . . Drowsy and bleary eyed, the man awoke slowly, his stomach no longer demanding food. He felt cold, metal felt hands across his arms, handling some sort of fabric. Against his back, he rested upon the softest, most comfortable material he had ever dreamed possible. A faint beeping sound in the backround told him that he was somewhere he had never been before. He opened his still functioning eye and was greeted by a blindingly bright, white room. His eye adjusted slightly, and he could almost discern shapes within the light. First, A glossy metal wall with darker, closer shapes. A man made from pastelish green and dull white steel stood over him, it's servo-grippers tugging a strange brown cloth over him. A pleasant warmth surged through him, as the man suddenly realized the air was stiffly cold, the blanket providing comfortable heat. He thought that his safest bet was to get up and survey his full surroundings, but decided against it when his body out-voted his mind in sleepiness. Again, he dozed off. He came around to find a woman, clad in a gentle white doctor's coat sitting beside his bed. His eye still blurry, he noticed an empty mech-syringe she tucked away into a pocket when she saw his eye open. He had seen mech-syringes before, but they bit him when someone pressed on it's other end. "Hey there. How are you feeling?" she said. Hearing what she said as a sharp, undecipherable echo, he simply stared at her, thinking she was there to hurt him like all the white-armored men did. "Don't be frightened. We are all here to help." Unanwsering, He just gazed at her through his one operating eye. "Can you hear me?" the woman inquired. He answered in silence. "Do you speak Basic?" Still, no answer. "I suppose you would want to rest and get to know your surroundings before talking," she settled. "First. You are onboard the Calamarian Medical Cruiser Crusader, orbiting Naala in the Gahgus system. You have been unconcious for several days now. We had you floating in a bacta tank for a while to treat all those wounds," she gestured toward his bare chest, now uncovered from the blanket, littered with miscellanoues scars and bandages. "We have several medical tests to conduct still. Do you think you can stand?" He still silently gazed at the woman. She gestured upward with her hands and the man knew what that meant. Pulling the blnket up, he attempted to rise. Her hands went to free the sheet and he pulled back. "Shhh. It's alright. I'm not going to hurt you," she soothed. Still not understanding her, he let the doctor help him, constantly keeping a wary eye on her. When he stood, she gave him suitable clothing. And, because he had never dressed in any appropriate attire, if not even medical robes, she helped him dress. From an opening hatch on the far side of the room, the metal man rolled in. This noise and sudden change in the wall's shape with another person entering, scared the man, though he remained somewhat stubborn to show his emotions. "Too-thirty three, will you please accompany us to the medi-lab?" "But of course, Mistress Yaru," the metal figure replied. The bald doctor peering into right his eye with a lumaprobe "Hmmmmm"ed as he made his conclusions. The surrounding doctors had taken it upon them- -selves to name the fanged, unknown man Danath, becuase he would not tell them his name, if he had one, and no official record of him existed. "Well, Danath's right eye seems to have been penetrated, though the Aquious humor has not bled. At least not too much, anyway," the doctor explained to doctor Yaru, as she observed from behind him. "It appears to have been ruptured and healed over with a makeshift bio-sealant. My guess is that the lenses to his functional eye, his left one, have been thinned over the years. He is probably used to the dark." "Is it reversable, general Taggrinn?" she asked, concerned. "Yeah. For both eyes. It's nothing really TOO serious that a little optical lasurgery won't patch up. But without treatment, he would have gone through life like this, permanently. Blind in one eye, and blurry and over- sensitive in the other." Taggrinn looked up from his quiet patient and turned to a screen displaying a image from the ANI-scan from his thoat. "His throat and vocal cords are fine. There is no reason why he can't talk. Everything in his throat seems to be in place. Yes, it's just fine..." he trailed off as he studied the picture. "Open your mouth please," the dentist off to the side said as he bent over the sitting Danath. From his place on the cold medical examination table, Danath stared at the dental doctor, not sure of what he wanted him to do. The Doctor opened his mouth repeatidly to give Danath the idea. Maybe he wants me to open my mouth, Danath thought. Though not in any known language. The undistinct language of his mind. He yawned his mouth open so the doctor could poke around with a specialized dental lumaprobe. The Dentist poked the lengthy canines and his surrounding, smaller fangs. Noting their size, shape, and all other attributes. "His fangs look fine for a Xhallite," he announced to Yaru. "Venom glands should begin to develop fully within a few months. Calling it pretty close, I must say." The general doctor Taggrinn looked away from his x-rayish medical picture of his patient's esophagus and turned his attention to Danath's hands. Danath guessed correctly that this man wanted him to extend his claws. Taggrinn analyzed the razor talons. "These seem normal as well. Their venom should begin at about the same time as the fangs? That's right, doctor?" he asked as he glanced to the dentist. When the Taggrinn looked away, Danath considered slashing the man to peices, though decided against it. These people, after all, had taken care of him and made his body better. The dentist nodded. Rotating the chair he sat in to the computer monitor, he tapped a few buttons in a keyboard beside it, and the screen winked out for a few seconds, returning with an ANI-scan display of Danath's brain. Yaru peered at the screen from behind and concluded, "the medula opperation seems to have been successful." "Yes," the general doctor agreed. "But the slight damage that WAS there, should have only affected visual coordination, not speech." "Oh well. At any rate, the brain is now completely repaired of any injury," the other said. Satisfied, Taggrinn flicked off the system from a back power port. "What about his hair? I'm not too familiar with Xhallite's special qualities," Yaru said. "Well, just like any other Xhallite's, it changes color, corrusponding to his vision. Pretty handy for different enviroments, I must say." Danath looked at the general doctor's coat, the strange tools and medical gadgets sticking out of pockets scattered across it's front. His recently trimmed hair, his eyebrows, and even his eyelashes gradually faded from silver while staring at the walls and ceiling, to white, with random patches of metallic gray across it to accomodate the tiny gizmos protruding from Taggrinn's coat. "Generally, his bodily wounds are healed. Though mentally, he may have much deeper scars than that," the general doctor Taggrinn indicated Danath's scars spread across the right side of his face. "I'm afraid there are things that medicine just can't heal." Doctor Yaru nodded, and with a slight sigh. gestured Danath to follow as she walked to the door. "Thank you, doctors," she said. Danath scooted off the table and shuffled hesitantly to Yaru. As they left the examination room, 233 followed them out. Over the next weeks, physcologists proved useless, without having any way of communicating deeply with Danath. The adolescent seemed mentally unable or, perhaps unwilling, to speak. They tried a wide number of languages varying from his thought-to-be native Xhallite tounge. Basic, many versions of gesture languages. Growling languages, as his people were some- times credited for using. But all to no avail. Danath became depressed that he couldn't speak with the others. He had so many questions that he wanted to ask for years before then: Who locked me in a cell? Why did they torture me? What is all this strange metal equipment? Where am I? On his planet, his people's technology was scarce. It was still in it's mid-medieval stage of civilization when the Empire discovered it. It quickly became a remote outpost along the Empire's hold of the Outer Rim. The Xhallite's were eventually labeled as sub-sentient by the Empire. Too animal-like to be intelligent. No slavery was enacted. The Empire considered it an objective to, instead, destory the Xhallite species. They had assembled a vast campaign on Xhall to eradicate the people as if they were vermin, who had infested a home. They were systematically executed in mass numbers, either through spacing, biological weapons testing, or several other cruel, excruciating methods of execution. The holocaust had only been unearthed weeks before Danath's rescue. By that time, it was too late. Imperial warlords who had been responsible for these inhuman crimes had already pulled opperations out from Xhall and abandoned it. For the few thousands of Xhallites that had not been killed, they were locked in their cells and left to starve. Within six years of sluaghter, a civilization had sunken from nearly a half billion in population to one--Danath. He had killed his cell mate in primal rage and rationed the meat to last him many weeks, feeding off the flesh outside the bones and the marrow within. Doctors also discovered that Danath had a rare condition in which his Xhallite venomous glands would sometimes, though very rarely, excrete a hormone into the blood stream called Primalious, in which the hormone would reach the brain and cause it to involuntarily commands it's body to violently, uncontrollabley lash out at any thing nearby. This hormone, however could easily be neutralized through simple chemical injections. Danath found it strange to eventually realize that he was floating in space on a giant ship. He had seen the stars once. Although he, at the time did not know what they were, he was curious to travel among them. He enjoyed simply gazing out the viewports along the ship, watching other ships pass by. Watching the stars and the crescent planets. Though he felt lonely that he could not communicate with others. Even telepaths proved useless. They could only communicate in known languages. So still, he could not talk. At one of the many, useless meetings with the phsyciatrist, Danath gazed at the desk with his head resting on his folded arms, his hair morphing a sandy brown, reflecting the desk's surface. Pressure-pen sat a few inches away from him. He gazed at the pen, imagining it lift, and quickly rotate as he had done so many times with the bones of his cell. As he had sometimes choked the white-armored men by just thinking about it... The pen slowly rose from the table, guided into mid-air by an unseen force, as it began to spiral. Faster and faster it spun. The phsyciatrist holding the datapad, while jotting down Danath's reactions to questions he did not understand, looked up in astonishment. "D-d-doctor Yaru..." he stammered. the doctor, examining another patience's medical record at a console at the corner of the room. "Yes?" she look up. "By the stars. How is he doing that?" She jumped from the computer and rushed to the table. Doctor Taggrinn, who had stood beside her to help, followed, wearing a perplexed facial cast. All of the sudden comotion around him, cause Danath to loose his concentration on the pen and it fell to the desk. General Taggrinn, Doctor Yaru, and the phyciatrist all stared, dumbfounded at him. Did I do something wrong? he asked himself. Taggrinn picked up the pen and turned it over in his hand, as if to find an answer written on it. "Here, let me handle this," the phyciatrist insisted as he snatched the pen from the doctor's hand and set it down in front of Danath. The three stood, just watching for several minutes, fascinated. Danath, still nervous and slightly suspicious, tried to relieve his boredom once again. He put his focus on the pen and watched it obey his thoughts. It slowly rose and twirled around. The three exchanged looks, and all tried to look for strings, or any devices that might create such an illusion. They studied it from different angles, and reluctantly concluded that the pen was suspended with no visible support. The pysciatrist finished filing a huge report on this wierd occurence and set the datapad on the table. He slowly grasped the pen and gently pulled it down to the desktop. Danath, still slightly confused as to what was so interesting, tried another object. His train of thought centered somewhat on the glossy data- pad. He lifted it with ease, barely having to even think about it. "What do you think, doctor Yaru?," Taggrinn asked, his expression filled with disbelief. "I'm not sure. Perhaps he is familiar with the Force!" Jedi Master Luke Skywalker was greeted by a contingent of New Republic gaurds and military officers alike after stepping off the ramp to the Lambda- Class shuttle. A woman dressed in gentle violet and blue Medical Officer's clothing introduced herself. "Greetings, Master Skywalker. I am Doctor Yaru, Medical Cheif here, aboard the Crusader. This is General Doctor Taggrinn, my assistant," she indicated the balding man beside her. Bowing slightly, Luke opened "Hello. Let's get down to bussiness. I understand you have a patient on board with possible Force potential." "That's right," the other replied. "Right this way, please." Luke placed his hand to Danath's forehead. Danath, confused as to what was happening, let this man in dark robes continue. "Yes, I can sense incredible potential," Luke said, his eyes closed, concentrating on his subject. After several minutes of silent mind-probing through the Force, Luke relaxed in his seat facing Danath. His eyes slowly fluttered open and he concluded in a whisper, "His name is Exar Kun. Exar Kun XVII." The physciatrist suddenly leaped up. "I knew it! I knew I had seen Danath's face somewhere before. He looks just like Exar Kun from some ancient video recordings I have seen. I had recognized him, but I couldn't remember from where." "His family has been Xhallite for seventeen generations, than?" Yaru asked "I suppose so," Luke returned. We have been calling him Danath for some time now. Save for extermin- -ation papers, he didn't have any Imperial records," 233 said form behind them. "Master Skywalker, can you tell us why he does not speak?" For a long moment, Luke hesitated but finally began, "It appears that he was abandoned as an infant. He had spent his life living in the city streets of Xhall. Meanwhile, having no one to parent him or teach him, he grew up not knowing how to talk. His mind is very active. He seems to hold mental entire conversations with himself becuase he is the only one that he understands." He stopped. "Please continue, Master Skywalker," she urged him. "Another major contributer to this problem is that...he is telepathic." "But the telepaths we brought in to speak with him said that he wasn't," doctor Taggrinn pointed out. "That's becuase, on some level, telepaths communicate with known language. Not only does he NOT know any languages, but he does not fully understand how to use his telepathic ability. Another main problem connected to his telepathy is the way his mind processes speech. Becuase of so many years of mentally speaking with himself, his processing of speech became distorted, thus preventing him, even more so, from understanding speech. I believe I can teach him how to speak and how to process speach normaly." "That would be most appreciated," the Medical Cheif said. Luke clapped his hands together. "Well, let's get at it then." For the next few weeks afterward, Luke Skywalker stayed on the Crusader, communicating with Exar through the Force. Working to teach him Basic. He was a fast learner. In two weeks time, he possesed a strong command of the Basic vocabulary. With his spare time, Exar took it upon himself to master the gutteral Xhallite language as well. After he became fluent in his native tounge, he ushered himself onto learning several other languages. Nine in all: Corellian(which was used less and less frequently throughout the galaxy), Huttese, Byssian, Trandoshan, Bocce(a mechanical language), Rodian, he even famailiarized himself with much of the Wookie vocabulary, and of course, Basic and Xhallite. He could not speak many of the languages himself, yet he understood them. However, becuase of his people's animal-like bodies, his throat was more than capable of growling and grunting just as the Wookies do. Though his knowledge of words were many, it was scarce when he said any. Instead, he expressed his words only on paper, or computer within the writing that he took up. An intense craving for knowledge led Exar to have all of his questions answered. From his simplest: What are stars? To his more advanced inquiries: How can intensified quasi-plasma discharge be converted to a safe level, and then harnessed for sublight speed usage? Holographic encyclopedias provided answers to all of his bruning questions. Though still shy and incredibly silent, Master Skywalker finally thought it was best for Exar to enroll at the Jedi Praxeum on Yavin IV. Exar knew all about the Yavin system. Mono solar system. 3 planets. 2 gas giants, one of which called Yavin, entrapping eighteen moons in its pull. three of which were habitable. "Do I really have to go, Master Skywalker?" He timidly asked his mentor as they were leaving the hangar bay of the Crusader in the sleek Shadow Chaser. "Now, of course not. You don't really have to go. But you want to become a Jedi Knight, don't you?" "Well, yes. But isn't there another way?" "Come now," Luke smiled. "What do you have against my Academy?" "Nothing. It's just...I feel uncomfortable. Moving around and all." Luke was silent, considering Exar's feelings. "You enjoy your music generator, right?" Over time, Exar had developed a love for computerized music of his own making. He enjoyed writing, as well as computers. Exar was fluent in most computer programs by now and could just as easily write his own. All of these things he was mostly too shy to show to anyone, let alone brag about. During his stay on the Crusader, as much as its top pilots hated to admit, he had also shown great potential as an ace starfighter pilot. Under- standing the advantages, flaws, and workings of most starfighters came to Exar naturally. He had outgunned several top aces both in the Calamarian Cruiser's simulators, as well as in actual flight(using ion cannons, of course). Some of the toughest simulated battles in the Crusader's Simulation Archive proved to appear as simple training excersizes to him. He often flew without wingmen while in the emulated combat. He relied only on himself as he took down ace TIE pilots of all sorts. From Fighter, to TIE Defender, they were all simply moving targets to him. He had been known to tackle whole squadrons at a time, singlehandedly. As a record-breaker through the Crusader, he had even once, managed to do-in a Warrior Star Destroyer with no support. Just incredible, Luke mused mentally. He was by far the best fighter pilot this side of the galaxy, though wished not to involve himself in wars between the New Republic and its persistant enemies. Exar nodded, staring off into space through the cockpit viewportal, his hair fading from gray to jet black with odd patches of white, imitading the mix of blackness and sizzling white stars. "Yavin IV is tranquil. You have all the time in the galaxy to create your music and tinker around with the hordes of electronics that the New Republic defense forces brought with them." "I suppose your right...," the other trailed off. Exar kept his long, venomous fangs out, exposing them to whoever saw. He gnawed nervously on a toothquid, soothing his natural urges to bite. Seeing him gnaw away at the peice of dura-wood reminded Luke of his own late Jedi Master Yoda. He remembered the green-skinned dwarf, instructing him with the knowledge of eight hundred years of his own experience, while perched atop a fallen log, chewing idly on a gimmer stick. "Besides, I have a neice and nephew I'd like you to meet." The other merely nodded blankly, as usual, lost in thought. Perhaps his silence in the last few days was brought on by the fact that he now knew that he was the last of his species, Luke contemplated. As the lines of stars trailed beyond vision and the mottled wormhole of hyperspace appeared, Luke looked over at the other. "Maybe you should get some sleep. There will be about a Standard day's worth of traveling."