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| {{WIP}}
| | #REDIRECT [[Revan Saga]] |
| {{Universe|Xanadu}}
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| {{title
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| |name=Revan in Xanadu Part Four
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| |author=Joysweeper
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| |user=Joysweeper}}
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| "It’s okay. Calm down, alright?" I croaked at the hyperventilating orange-skinned girl wedged into the corner of the janitor closet. She nodded frantically, tears rolling down her cheeks. I would have tried harder to soothe her, but my throat was swollen into a raw mass. Breathing things not meant for human lungs does that. I knew that it would get better. Eventually.
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| When I had returned to the place where I had left him, the one who looked like Malak had been gone. I understood roughly ''why'' - perhaps this David had persuaded him away – but it was still irksome. Being alone without a purpose of some kind alway lead to pointless, aimless wandering, and generally a total waste of time, too. Like now! Trying to talk to hysterical idiots was ''not'' my idea of productive.
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| ''I can’t handle all this.''
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| At the moment I could have used a bit of direction. My Force-given sense of purpose seemed to have deserted me completely after I left the scene of the lava boss - there were unpleasant things going on around me, yes, but nothing that called to me specifically. Other than the occasional faint ''go this way'', I was on my own. I kept thinking that I was being watched. Silly, because not only where there people in all directions who might be staring at me – and even given the oddity of my mask, I wasn’t the most gawkeable creature in any given room, either, given the number of monstrous oddities and extraordinarily buxom women - ''why'' would someone just watch and not ''do'' something about me by now?
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| ''Of course, I might be going crazy. This is certainly the ideal day for it. I’m not running about like a headless fowl, but that doesn’t exactly indicate sanity. After all, I’m trying to talk to a hysteric, and I *know* that won’t work. She's obviously not going to do anything. At all.''
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| The hysteric in question made an incoherent mewling sound, but didn’t seem inclined to violence, and I had the distinct impression that I wasn’t going to have the desired effect, so I rasped "Shhh. It’ll be fine." and turned away. The sense of where to go and what to do seemed to fade in and out annoyingly. It had led me in this direction, but-
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| ''Ah. Someone approaches.'' I felt this as a sort of jolt before my ears picked up the sound of rapid footsteps. Even so, it took a moment to find whomever it was through my visor.
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| ''This mask is getting annoying. Sometimes I can use it easily, at other times I’m waving my head about trying to see.'' It was almost enough to make me remove it here and now, but I resisted the impulse. The helmet would stay on until I found somewhere private to remove it.
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| ''There-'' the humanoid had stopped before me, rather close for my comfort. I locked my visor on a pair of blue, sharply-angled eyes. There was a moment of disorientation, and then-
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| Sudden shock, then looking up at someone else who had ''not been like that'', the urge to fight, the urge to flee, flight won. Running away. Sense returning, trying to speak to the first calm-looking person, but being ''completely unable to.'' Mouth opens; voice comes, but only in wordless cries. Ran again, saw dark shape, came to it, not knowing why.
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| ''Huh. What’s the right response?'' I wondered as the sending faded, shaking the confusion from my head. Stalling for time, I examined the... man.
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| I panned my visor down the green tunic, noted a leather strap, tan leggings and brown leather boots, then panned back up to see a sword hilt, then the triangular face, the pleading large eyes, the elongated pointed ears pierced by blueish rings, and the long green cap. There was something familiar here- ah yes; this was that mute, androgynously pretty protagonist of the Legend of Zelda series. What was his name? Connect? No, that couldn’t be right - Link, that was it.
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| ''Hmm.'' I distinctly remembered holding an adolescent crush on the elf, or Hylian, whatever he was. There was a poster from "Ocarina of Time" still hanging in my dormroom, as a matter of fact. Several images of the infamously good cosplayer "Pikmin Link" were saved on my laptop, never mind that I'd known when saving the images that PL was crossdressing. Odd, that despite looking exactly the same this young man had no such effect on me.
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| ''No, it's not odd. I like a pretty face and form as much as anyone else, but training killed any carnal urges before they could develop. Thank the Living Force for that. The three things that motivate most beings to do the most hideous things are power, religion, and sex, after all. I have enough to worry about already without my mind being befuddled by a comely body.''
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| ''Wha? ... I can’t handle this.''
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| "Okay... okay, you’re fine," I got out. The words seemed to have no effect. Maybe he didn’t speak Basic. Or English. Or whatever.
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| I found myself wincing beneath my mask at the sore twinge in my throat. But at least I could speak, unlike him. As far as I could recall, outside of that ''terrible'' cartoon none of Link’s incarnations could talk, though they had always gotten their points across.
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| ''So. How can he communicate at all?'' With that thought, I found myself remembering that I too could send information without words. ''Would that work here?''
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| ''Of course not. That’s ridiculous.''
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| ''Ridiculous? How so? I may not be skilled in its use, but I have never doubted the existence of telepathy.''
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| The stubborn, nagging thought had no response more advanced than its standard ''I can’t deal with this.''
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| ''Well, nothing to do but try.''
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| I focused on those angular blue eyes through the mask’s narrow visor and concentrated on the urge to calm, to stillness. The attempt made me realize that it was very warm under my robes, but I chose to ignore the observation. Why had this been so much easier when I hadn’t been thinking about it?
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| ''Ahhhh. Now I remember.''
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| Link’s head snapped back slightly as he felt what I had told him. He blinked repeatedly and stumbled back, consciously taking deeper breaths. ''Good. What now?''
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| ''Take him with me? Why would I do that? What would I do with a follower, anyway?''
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| Another little anticipatory jolt shocked my nerve endings and made me turn to face in a specific direction. In the next instant, from that specific direction, came a roar that anyone who’s ever seen a monster movie would be familiar with. Godzilla’s inimitable cry has ''always'' been instantly recognizable.
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| It sounded close. Acting according to instinct, I ran towards it, mentally reviewing a map that I’d seen on a wall. It was the second-largest room in this section, probably possessing a skylight, and filled with little stalls. That map had indicated that there was a concentration of all things Godzilla in it, which made sense. There were plenty of people in varying degrees of panic clogging the hall, probably looking for the exits, but a dark figure charging forward with purpose made most of them fall back. I had to elbow a man in a trenchcoat aside, but he didn’t seem to notice.
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| I felt Link running in my wake. Well, he probably wouldn’t be of much use, but at least he wasn’t using that sword or any other weapons on passersby.
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| I shoved open the double doors rather melodramatically and slowed, belatedly cautious. What could I do about giant monsters with breath rays? After all, I remembered now with an odd, disjointed feeling, as a child I’d seen the movies- humans were ''never'' able to stop them. Even when equipped with tanks. Only other giant monsters, sometimes including giant robots and Spandexy heroes, can beat giant monster. I was not any of those. Still, it was rather late to back away without at least getting a look. I edged sideways around the "Who Would Win: Mothra Or Rodan" posterboard and there, framed in my visor, were Classic Godzilla and the more saurian "Zilla" from the badly-reviewed American-made movie, fanged maws half-opened.
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| Except that Classic Godzilla couldn’t have been more than six feet tall, and while "Zilla" was longer, it wasn’t any taller. And while there were some highly visible scorch marks on the white walls, the ambient Force energy didn’t quite suggest a rampage. Why hadn’t I tried focusing on the room before entering?
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| Now one of the giant lizards had swung its craggy head in my direction and was staring at me. The thought occurred to me that I certainly dressed the part of a villain, so I stepped hastily back besides Link, who gave me an annoyingly superior look that I could feel through the hood - wow, he had recovered fast - and guided me back out, closing the double doors again.
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| I took a deep, shuddering breath, suddenly hot and dizzy. Events were catching up to me, and questions were surfacing that should have come up earlier. How could I talk - ''at all'' - without opening my mouth? Why had I been running around like an action hero? I could remember, vaguely, explaining that to someone, but it was hazy. What the hell had I been doing running ''towards'' Godzilla? And what about all the weird people I’d just seen?
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| And how could I think of any of that except perhaps the weird people as particularly unusual? Why was my thinking starting to go in circles? What had happened?
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| ''Surely this isn’t normal.'' Kublai Con, even this year, was by no means the largest convention in the world, it had perhaps a third of the attendees of DragonCon and far, far fewer than ComicCon, but - ''maybe I should have started smaller. First con experiences are always supposed to be overwhelming, but this is a bit much.''
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| The understatement almost made me laugh, except for the notion that if I started, I might never stop.
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| Consulting my mental map again, I took a right-angle turn in the direction of the room that Dana had rented earlier in the week. There was a hallway connecting the convention center to the hotel, but I had come in through the main entrance. That room would hopefully serve to let me some privacy.
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| I felt more than heard Link following, probably not having any more idea of what to do than I did, and paused long enough to turn and glare at him through the visor slit before wheeling and moving off. It was irresponsible of me, not getting any kind of help for the boy, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly. After that, events blurred for a while.
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| I walked for what felt like a long time, detouring frequently to try and shake any watchers, passing beings who were doing anything from being unconscious to playing cards. I passed a lot of people, from those who looked like enemies but weren’t to those who were angry at the world. I was only challenged once, but holding out a lightsaber, unignited, was enough to make the fool back down.
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| ''Room one sixteen.'' That was mine, I realized as I stopped before it, staring blankly at the numbers. Now, where was my card key... still in the pocket of my hakama, the wide "samurai pants". Well, ''something'' had gone right.
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| When I had shut the door, I let myself collapse onto the narrow mattress with my black cape puddling over like an ink spill. For a while I kept my eyes shut and just breathed, trying to keep some unnameable stew of emotions under control.
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| During that time, the phone shrilled loudly a total of five times. Although it was sharing space with a lamp on the pathetic square snub of a nightstand by the head of the bed, within easy reach, I did not bother to answer. I really wasn’t sure what I would have said.
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| After a time I shook off this lethargy to sit up. Faintly through the wall I could hear a deep male voice demanding something to do with the word "cortana", but I tuned it out. Lacking any real sense of what I wanted to do, I levered myself back to my feet and unsteadily came to the tiny cell of a bathroom.
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| There I closed my eyes and hesitantly removed my mask, reaching carefully within my hood back to ear level, finding the clasps, undoing them, then tugging the curved surface away from my face. The inside of it hugged the curves of my face closely, with only a minute space between it and my skin. The clasps weren't Velcro. No hot-glue overflow, either. One gloved hand set that mask on the counter besides the sink; the other pushed the hood back so that it fell to my shoulders. I savored the surplus light and air for a moment before opening my eyes and facing the mirror.
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| The face that met my eyes looked, at first blush, rather like the one I remembered, the one on my campus I.D., a blend of Filipino and Caucasian. But after a moment, I saw the differences - wider nose, grayish eyes instead of brown, a sharper, squarer chin and protruding cheekbones. It was... gaunter, harsher, older. More serious. Not to the point where it would get odd looks, let alone the kind of face that would scare children, but... I’ve never dared call myself beautiful, but I hadn’t hesitated to claim "sometimes pretty" or "sometimes cute." This face was neither. There was a certain elegance to it, but... this was a face that wouldn’t be smiled at easily.
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| ''And why would that matter to me? A pretty face doesn’t get taken seriously.''
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| ''No, of course not. But... it was nice to have...''
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| There were myriad tiny differences that told me that this was not my own face; it was only the same in general configuration and skin tone. Subtle changes, but they had an effect. If someone had shown me this face and claimed that it belonged to a cousin, I would have believed them. In low light no one would notice... maybe.
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| There was a high, stiff collar of some sort - ''a gorget. Protects my throat'' - around my neck; it had attached somehow to my mask. In back, it was connected to a sort of half-helmet that protected everything that the mask hadn't. It was that which the mask had been clasped to.
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| I remembered making that mask. It had stayed on because of Velcro and synthetic straps which had wrapped around the back of my head, with two from each ear and one from the top. They intersected in a way that looked like an upside-down capital T.
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| ''That doesn't work well, though. Helmets are more practical; a mask by itself has no life support for when the unthinkable happens.''
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| ''I remember writing about that... Mandalorian-inspired. Yeah. Ten minutes of breathable atmosphere, an air filter, a system to heat or cool the air. But I didn't make it. I'm not that good.''
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| I did not touch the back half of the helmet. At the sides, my hair was just barely visible. It was hard to tell, but it had to be longer. Maybe much longer; when I thought about it, I could feel a tightness in my scalp. Presumably there was more hair, pulled back and kept close to my skull.
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| I then bared my teeth and ran my tongue over them. They were still yellowish and very straight, and I could feel the three incisors of my lower jaw. But my four upper incisors had shortened slightly, and a flaring of my canines somehow made my mouth feel alien despite looking much as it always has.
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| Despite a feeling that I wouldn’t like what I was finding, I focused in on my lower lip. There was still a miniscule white scar from my childhood, but there was also a slight, notchlike depression where the skin seemed paler- an old burn? It was barely visible even this close, yet I stared as if they were feathers sprouting out of my skin. '' I haven’t been burned... I would have remembered getting burned there.''
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| ''It’s an old wound, of course. Healed well, but there’s a bit of scar tissue left. I could have had that removed with a few hundred credits and some kolto therapy, but why? It's inconspicuous, doesn't impede me, and helps to remind me of what happens when I assume an opponent is dead.''
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| Reaching up to touch it I saw an armored black glove in the mirror. I tried to tear both off, and ended up feeling for catches around my wrists to peel the things away, then shucking Revan’s extended armbands so I could roll up the pleated, thick sleeves.
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| I'd imagined Revan’s outfit to be this complicated. I'd spent a long, long time thinking about it. But I hadn't been able to reproduce it with anywhere near this level of detail. That’s what finally hit the reality home to me.
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| Well, that and the ugly, long lightsaber score that ran from just above the elbow to just below my wrist, fresh enough that it was red, not entirely healed. The memory of exactly how I’d gotten it hovered at the very edge of consciousness, but I pushed it and all it entailed away, suddenly desperate.
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| The next thing I knew I was kneeling crumpled on the linoleum with a sharp pain like chopsticks driving into my temples and a thousand thoughts racing through my head. ''I've got friends who came here yesterday or before that - what happened to them? Mom and Dad are going to kill me, and Kris already thinks I'm a freak. Eh. My little brother will just have to handle it. Oh God, what happened back there! I couldn't really have ... Wow, the floor is a lot cleaner than the rate suggested, I guess those renovations a few years back really made a difference. God. Why? Why now? Why me, why did I decide to go this year? My nails are still trimmed to the quick, but oh, my hands! I have calluses. There's no ink on them. Ohhh, Midtral is not going to be happy with me. Don't they have policies against tattoos and piercings? This is a lot bigger than that. It's a private college, too, and I'm not the one paying. I'm ''dead''. So dead. This is completely impossible.''
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| On the heels of that flood of thoughts, as the pain peaked and made all other thoughts moot, came one more, a thought that had crossed my mind several times before, but never with such ardor.
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| ''I can’t handle this.''
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| And so... I didn’t. I fell into a sort of blank stupor. But the rest of me had no intention of doing that.
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| I didn’t notice that one of my hands had reached back up until it snapped Revan’s helmlike mask over my face as the other hand whipped the strap in place and flicked the catches down with practiced, casual familiarity.
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| {{Separator|stars}}
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| As I dismissed the headache I stood again, wound my sleeves back around my forearms and replaced my armbands and gloves with their gleaming metal plates. Drawing my hood back up, I flicked my gaze across my reflection and started to pace. Despite the visor’s limits, I stepped lightly over the lintel and back into the tiny room reserved earlier. I could sense other presences through the thin walls - wood, plaster, insulation, paint - but they were not a threat. I could ignore them, for the moment.
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| Drawing a long breath in through my nose, I held it for several seconds before exhaling. The situation was complicated, clearly. I was not where I should be, although I could not quite place where ''that'' was. Not home; that much was clear. Neither Jedi nor Sith can afford to ''have'' a static home, not in such turbulent times. ''No, I should be doing - something. ''But what?'' One way or another, Daritha Malak no longer heads the Sith, and the Star Forge has been destroyed. My departure left a power void, true, that was filled. But Sith are always infighting; perhaps she will be deposed. There is still time. Admiral Dodonna survived and is competent enough for now, and I can't do much right now. Maybe not for years, not openly, anyway.''
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| I had to go somewhere... do something. It was urgent- something only I could do. I did not know where, or what, or when, but it would be good to do it. Once and for all. It wasn’t ''here'', it wasn’t ''now'', it was very, ''very'' distant. I wasn’t called to go do something ''this instant''. But it still needed doing.
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| First things first. Why was I here, and where was here? ''I have no idea what this planet is called, if it might actually be a large station instead, what star it orbits, which sector it's in...'' The air, clearly, was human-friendly, and although I spent several minutes tasting it I found no odors to help me identify anything. It was neutral, not thick or thin enough to make breathing more difficult, with a fairly average amount of oxygen. Gravity, as far as I could tell, was pretty close to Coruscant-standard.
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| ''And this is obviously a gathering of some sort. Very disorganized, too. I ... don't suppose I volunteered to help out?''
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| I might have accepted that theory, but as comforting as it was, I knew it wasn’t true. I would remember something like that. And even the worst spaceport on Nar Shadda the night before a planetwide festival was as chaotic as what I had seen. ''Not unless you threw in a bunch of bounty hunters and perhaps some Hutt's escaped 'pets', anyway.''
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| How did I get here? On one hand- blank. On the other- had I paid for tickets or something? Yes... I remembered coming in...
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| That memory seemed slow. Just for something to do, I checked my inventory. Four lightsabers that I had built and modified for my own use(One double-bladed green, one single red, two purple), three more looted off of opponents, an assortment of lightsaber crystals and the tools used on them, various vibroblades, an array of blasters, a quarterstaff, two stun batons, a huge number of scrounged grenades, all too many mines, two sonic emitters, a pressure suit made for deep sea and deep space, some powered Mandalorian armor, some light battle armor, Darth Bandon’s fiber armor, a Zabrak combat suit, some Republic Mod. Armor, a set of shiny black-and-silver Sith armor, four sets of Sand People robes, a number of sets of practical Jedi and Sith fighting robes, the Circlet of Saresh, Marko Ragnos’s Mask, various less identifiable headgear, a regenerative implant, Sith Power Gauntlets, about nine belts with varied properties, a number of energy shields, thirty security spikes, twenty-nine computer spikes, thirty-one sets of repair parts, a whole case of adrenal stimulants, medpacks, two tach glands, a datapad of Manaan tourist attractions....
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| At around the point where I pulled out the body of a whole viper kinrath that weighed as much as I did, I realized that I had been carrying hundreds of kilos of equipment and oddments, but hadn’t felt a gram of it. Nor was I carrying a bag of any sort. I just reached instinctively in no particular direction and found it. It was just... ''there.'' I looked at the mound of items covering the bed and spilling onto the floor, knew that I was carrying much more with me, and was suddenly bewildered.
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| All this time I had carried at least a ton and never thought about it?
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| ''How in the Force is that possible?'' I could make myself temporarily stronger, faster, more sensitive. '' But carrying equipment as if... as if... I don't know, as if I've got an invisible room at my fingertips... This makes no sense.''
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| Cautiously, I moved the dead kinrath, swinging it out of my field of view by two of its hard-enameled legs. Nothing. The body swung back in front of me, dripping ichor as if I'd only just killed it. I tried this several times to no avail, becoming quite frustrated.
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| After a time, when I was deciding that this wasn't worth it, I quit. With a grimace of distaste I put the thing back in my Inventory -
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| ''How did I do that?'' I hadn't been thinking about it at all. Was that it? Sometimes, with the Force - but this was not the Force. Not quite.
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| Carefully, I reached behind myself and picked up a belt. ''Okay. How did I do that last time?''
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| It took a fairly long time before I was confident in my ability to move items in and out of my Inventory, at which point I packed away all of the things that I had absentmindedly removed. I still had no idea where it all went, but the fact that I didn't understand how it worked had never stopped me from using anything before. ''Why start now?''
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| ''I'm still wearing my war robes. Why am I doing that? I'm not Sith anymore. Why am I wearing them at all? They give away who I am. I can't afford that.'' Beneath my warmask I pursed my lips - my war robes, as signature as they are, still serve to remind me of my past. Of ''why'' I did what I did. ''When my mind was wiped, I lost everything. It's starting to come back now, but there's still a long period, the most essential period, that stays blank.''
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| ''Then again, I can just bring them out and wear them later. Better than being recognized.'' I shrugged and stripped off my war robes, opting for a very neutral set of Jedi robes. Conveniently, I had quite a few just folded up in my Inventory. Perfect for roving aimlessly.
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| ''Now, perhaps, I'll find someone who can tell me just what is happening here. If not, I can certainly amuse myself.''
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| {{series bar
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| |series=Revan in Xanadu
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| |previous=[[Revan in Xanadu (Part 3)]]
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| |next=[[Revan in Xanadu: Big Change (Interlude)]]}}
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| [[Category:Story]] [[Category:Joysweeper]] [[Category:Xanadu]] [[Category:Alien]]
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