Realisation (RP)

Sera shouts, "I gotta get this ship running! Sorry, but you all have to deal with the clones!"

She turns her back on her friends, with some difficulty, and opens a hatch into the engine compartment. She hops down and begins fiddling with things, trying to 'hotwire' the ship.

Brenya will head to the co-pilot's seat of the ship and hope for the best. Maybe someone will step forward to deal with the clone troopers.

If not, the Gungan will probably be cornered and she will surrender. Even with a hydrospanner, she is not much of a fighter, especially against troopers who were bred to go to wars.

Upon entering the ship, Sera slides her hand along the walls and finds her way to an engine access panel. She pops it open and begins to reroute wires, her hands flying over the panels, diodes, knobs, and circuits.

After a short time, the engines begin to cough and hum, thick clouds of black smoke billowing out. "Um... Well, they're started, but they really need to be recalibrated badly!"

The blast of the engines sends supply crates flying as well--the ship was tucked away in a side area of the hangar bay, more in storage than flight ready. The engines blast the crates away, sending them crashing into the hangar bay wall. Alarms begin to sound at the impact, and small fires break out from the heat of the engines hitting the crates.

Sera grunts and calls out, "Didn't someone say they knew this ship? Whose the heck was it? The circuits here are just loaded with traps! I'll route around them, but this stuff is super dangerous!" Fortunately, she is able to see the pitfalls and avoid them, for now.

In short order, the engines are started. It's loud and they've made a mess, but the ship is safe and ready to fly. She runs forward to the cockpit and looks out the front window, as she begins to press buttons on a side console wildly. "Bantha poodoo! The ship isn't validated in the station network, so I can't open the bay doors from here. But look..." She points to a panel outside of the ship and says, "Someone needs to throw that switch."

Sera has her head in a control panel when she feels the ship begin moving. She hops up and looks out the window, shouting, Oh look! Findal's opening the bay doors for us! Wait... why isn't he running to the ship? No! NOO!"

She turns her back to the window and slides down the wall, tears welling up. but then she recalls when her master would say when her emotions got the best of her, and she began to follow her breath, feeling the organic machine that is her own body. After a moment, she gathers her composure, stands up, and heads to the cockpit where Tai'ar and Brenya are, and says, "Findal's... he gone. Let's get out of here--everyone on the station is alerted by now..."

Brenya gave Tai'ar a quick nod and slid out of the pilot’s seat, letting him take control. "Yousa better go ahead. Mesa not ready for dis yet," she muttered, voice low. But as she stepped back, gripping the edge of the console, her jaw tightened. That had to change. She couldn’t keep relying on others when things got tight.

She didn’t let herself look out the viewport just yet. Didn’t want to see the flash of the sabers stop, the slump of his robes on cold durasteel. Brenya closed her eyes for just a second and touched the Force as she felt him gone — grieving, yes, but also grounding. She would honor Findal by surviving—and by learning what she couldn’t do today.

Sera tries to peer through the window for a moment and then shakes her head, remembering sense. She slides into the copilot seat and begins scanning the sensors and trying to familiarize herself with the controls. She understands the functions of the systems displayed and manipulated from here, but she doesn't yet know how many hide booby traps. And she certainly lacks skill with managing all this quickly enough for something like combat!

So instead, she focuses on doing what she can to get them out of the area and away to safety. She locates the hyperspace drive control and says, "Um, I need to plot a jump, which means I need coordinates for a destination. I don't know where to go... I grew up on Coruscant; I trained at the Temple there. My master rarely took me off planet, in fact... he didn't think I was ready."

"Mesa… got just enough juice in da tanks ’fore we had to cut it off." She paused, letting it sink in—that this tiny bit of luck might be their only way forward. "We can’t jump far… just enough to break away… find somewhere close to refuel."Her large Gungan eyes darted over the nav display, then fell upon a single spot—a dim, forgotten world near their current trajectory. She turned back toward the rest of the crew. "Der’s a place we can reach. It’s not much… but it’s someting."

"Der it is… Anselm’s Reefs." She nodded, more to herself than anyone else. "Ocean world… tiny settlements… not much more dan fisher-folk and traders."

Her large Gungan eyes darted back toward the crew. "It was in da Sep’ratist territory… back when… back when war was all ‘round us. But now… war’s gone. Sep’ratists are surrendering… da forts are felling… Anselm’s Reefs should be… quieter. Safe ‘nough for us… we can refuel and regroup."

Brenya turned from the shimmering viewports—the riot of stretched stars slowly calming into a deep blue tunnel—as the ship fell into hyperspace. She pressed herself against the back of her seat, letting the silence of the jump ease the rush of battle from her limbs.

For a moment, there were no blaster reports, no alarm signals, just the rhythmic thrum of the hyperdrive beneath their feet.

"Tai’ar..." Brenya said quietly, choosing her words carefully in her Gungan-tinted voice. "Who… who be you… really? What’s… your story?"

Sera steps away from the hyperspace control panel and slumps back into the copilot chair, her eyes dewy with the threat of tears. She shakes her head and says, "I can't believe we lost ... we lost more Jedi. How many of us have died in this? Why are the Clones doing this?"

Once more she recalls when her master taught her--being in balance with the Force allows her to accept things as they are which in turn allows her to change some small part of things for the better. So she breathes, tries to accept the losses she witnessed, and turns to what she can do in the present. Which means, she can work on this ship.

She stands and says, "I'm gonna work on the ship. Maybe... maybe stay here and don't do anything? At least until I disable those booby traps."

She wanders to an access panel out in the hallway and begins to tinker, communing once again with the ship, trying to make sure they will be able to enter the atmosphere and land safely on Anselm's Reefs. She listens to Brenya and Tai'ar speak as she does so.

A short time later, Sera returns to the copilot chair and says, "We should be good to land, at least. But we will need other refuel and I need to tune up this thing."

Just then the ship drops out of hyperspace and the blue-green sphere of Anselm's Reefs zooms into view. From here, the blue-green look like clouds of oxygen in the high atmosphere being ionized by the radiation from a nearby quasar. The cloud band disrupts communication, which made this an excellent location for the Separatists to situate factories and fuel depots, because they can't be detected from space. Indeed, it is only thanks to a special set of satellite relays that communication can even reach the surface.

As they approach, a tiny orbital station with blinking signal lights spins around the horizon of the planet, and their ship receives a standard hailing message. Small freighter, please identify yourself and your intended destination port.

Sera had explored the ship systems enough to realize this was once a smuggling vessel, probably just the kind of ship that might bring supplies to a Separatist world like this one. Even so, they aren't the original pilots, and have no cargo, so he isn't sure what they should say when they arrive.

Hearing the message, Sera says, "That's automated. We probably have a few minutes before an actual person follows up. So, uh, what are we gonna do?"