Nathema, Tuesday
May. 19th, 2015 10:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suitably_heroicHonestly, after whatever the hell the weekend had been, spending some time with his baby - the Ebon Hawk - by himself was exactly what Atton had needed. He had at least four more days before avoiding Coruscant would get suspicious; he could take the time to take the scenic road, hit the throttle until he saw lines, and mess around with the Hawk's non-essential internal systems.
He was no mechanics junkie the way Skywalker was, but there was something really soothing about poking around the wiring and hitting things with a hydrospanner that any kind of sentient interaction just didn't live up to. Especially when the T3-unit on board had been meticulously memory wiped and put into storage when it wasn't needed, so he didn't have anyone whistling into his ear, either.
The general peace of mind he had going on lasted right up until he actually hit the Nathema system. And then it took a dive. Fast.
As the Hawk approached Nathema-the-planet, the vague sense of unease Atton had been feeling was quickly warping into discomfort. It kind of reminded him of the approach to Malachor that way, so it shouldn't have gotten to him so much. But for some reason he found himself snagging his Jedi robes and wrapping them around himself, like that could somehow stave off the coldness he was feeling.
"Okay," he muttered. "Now if I was Meetra, where would I have landed...?"
Running a scan didn't help him much. Nothing but dead things down there, dead cities. He ran another search through the Hawk's databanks in hopes of finding some scrap of information about Meetra's flight path when she'd been here, but the drives remained disappointingly wiped.
Okay. So maybe he was going to need these four days after all. He'd have to hit every one of these cities and figure out if there was anything of note there. Anything-- something. A body. A flight path.
Space. He'd set himself up for something impossible.
"Well, I have to start somewhere," he sighed, as he hit a couple of switches and brought the T3-unit back on line. He picked a city at random, and began the Hawk's descent down to the planet.
At least nobody was shooting at him. That was something. The last thing he needed was to crash-land on this heap of bad feelings.
Atton's body gave him a warning shiver as the ship broke atmosphere. Space. Okay. Not like Malachor V, then. Malachor had been this hungry, malevolent thing filled with death. A bleeding wound in the Force. This? This wasn't even a thing; this was just empty.
And discomfort was turning to nausea pretty quickly.
The droid let loose a complicated string of beeps and whistles, and Atton rolled his eyes. "Suck it up," he said irritably. "I'm trying to focus here. You, concentrate on checking the radiation levels, will you?"
It'd suck if he came all this way just to find out Meetra and Revan had died of radiation poisoning, or something.
But ten minutes later, the droid had given him the all-clear, and he was almost wishing it hadn't. This world wasn't just dead, it was unnatural: a regular person might not have been able to tell, but he could feel it in every fiber. He had to put in intense effort not to throw up on the spot. What the hell had happened here?
The first thing he did when he left the ship was check the ground nearby for the markings of a starship landing site. This plane seemed perfect for that kind of thing; he had this vague hope maybe he'd find ones identical to the Hawk's, because then at least he'd have something to go with.
But there was nothing.
Just the void of this place, which was becoming less a simple fact and more a pressing weight with every step he took. It made parts of his mind blank out, and he had to struggle at times to put one foot before the other, but he kept going.
There had to be something, here, right, besides ruined buildings and broken-down speeders? Some evidence of... something.
What was he looking for, again?
It was sheer stubbornness that kept him going-- if he had stopped to think about the void, he would have just stopped. But eventually the futility of throwing a dart at a random haystack and looking around hoping to find a needle hit home, and he did have to stop, for just a second, his shoulder leaning against a nearby wall.
And there it was again. Needy. Greedy. Like a hundred thousand hands of just-- void, clawing at him, demanding parts of him, and suddenly he just couldn't do it anymore, his head spinning, his stomach crawling up through his throat and spewing its contents all over the floor. It was coming for him, the void, emptier and needier than Gaunt or Malachor had ever been, pulling and yanking and trying to fill itself with the everything inside Atton--
He wanted to fight it, but there was nothing to fight. Just plain, oppressive air, rooting his feet to the ground and sending his mind spinning.
On the edge of his consciousness, he could hear bleeps and beeps and spitting noises, cleaving through the silence.
And then the edge slipped away from him, too.
[[ nfb, nfi, referencing the book that shall not be named. ]]
He was no mechanics junkie the way Skywalker was, but there was something really soothing about poking around the wiring and hitting things with a hydrospanner that any kind of sentient interaction just didn't live up to. Especially when the T3-unit on board had been meticulously memory wiped and put into storage when it wasn't needed, so he didn't have anyone whistling into his ear, either.
The general peace of mind he had going on lasted right up until he actually hit the Nathema system. And then it took a dive. Fast.
As the Hawk approached Nathema-the-planet, the vague sense of unease Atton had been feeling was quickly warping into discomfort. It kind of reminded him of the approach to Malachor that way, so it shouldn't have gotten to him so much. But for some reason he found himself snagging his Jedi robes and wrapping them around himself, like that could somehow stave off the coldness he was feeling.
"Okay," he muttered. "Now if I was Meetra, where would I have landed...?"
Running a scan didn't help him much. Nothing but dead things down there, dead cities. He ran another search through the Hawk's databanks in hopes of finding some scrap of information about Meetra's flight path when she'd been here, but the drives remained disappointingly wiped.
Okay. So maybe he was going to need these four days after all. He'd have to hit every one of these cities and figure out if there was anything of note there. Anything-- something. A body. A flight path.
Space. He'd set himself up for something impossible.
"Well, I have to start somewhere," he sighed, as he hit a couple of switches and brought the T3-unit back on line. He picked a city at random, and began the Hawk's descent down to the planet.
At least nobody was shooting at him. That was something. The last thing he needed was to crash-land on this heap of bad feelings.
Atton's body gave him a warning shiver as the ship broke atmosphere. Space. Okay. Not like Malachor V, then. Malachor had been this hungry, malevolent thing filled with death. A bleeding wound in the Force. This? This wasn't even a thing; this was just empty.
And discomfort was turning to nausea pretty quickly.
The droid let loose a complicated string of beeps and whistles, and Atton rolled his eyes. "Suck it up," he said irritably. "I'm trying to focus here. You, concentrate on checking the radiation levels, will you?"
It'd suck if he came all this way just to find out Meetra and Revan had died of radiation poisoning, or something.
But ten minutes later, the droid had given him the all-clear, and he was almost wishing it hadn't. This world wasn't just dead, it was unnatural: a regular person might not have been able to tell, but he could feel it in every fiber. He had to put in intense effort not to throw up on the spot. What the hell had happened here?
The first thing he did when he left the ship was check the ground nearby for the markings of a starship landing site. This plane seemed perfect for that kind of thing; he had this vague hope maybe he'd find ones identical to the Hawk's, because then at least he'd have something to go with.
But there was nothing.
Just the void of this place, which was becoming less a simple fact and more a pressing weight with every step he took. It made parts of his mind blank out, and he had to struggle at times to put one foot before the other, but he kept going.
There had to be something, here, right, besides ruined buildings and broken-down speeders? Some evidence of... something.
What was he looking for, again?
It was sheer stubbornness that kept him going-- if he had stopped to think about the void, he would have just stopped. But eventually the futility of throwing a dart at a random haystack and looking around hoping to find a needle hit home, and he did have to stop, for just a second, his shoulder leaning against a nearby wall.
And there it was again. Needy. Greedy. Like a hundred thousand hands of just-- void, clawing at him, demanding parts of him, and suddenly he just couldn't do it anymore, his head spinning, his stomach crawling up through his throat and spewing its contents all over the floor. It was coming for him, the void, emptier and needier than Gaunt or Malachor had ever been, pulling and yanking and trying to fill itself with the everything inside Atton--
He wanted to fight it, but there was nothing to fight. Just plain, oppressive air, rooting his feet to the ground and sending his mind spinning.
On the edge of his consciousness, he could hear bleeps and beeps and spitting noises, cleaving through the silence.
And then the edge slipped away from him, too.
[[ nfb, nfi, referencing the book that shall not be named. ]]
no subject
Date: 2015-05-19 12:12 pm (UTC)