Aelyn

While Dante got to work on his alternate solution, Aelyn busied herself as much as she could by interacting with the CoreSec officers. Unfortunately other than getting her telling of events down in the mine, they mostly seemed to want her to wait around. Whatever they thought of the trustworthiness of a Jedi Knight, it was clear they wanted to hear each individual's telling of the event individually to make sure they got the most accurate version of it. The prisoner himself was whisked off to some other part of the precinct when they arrived, still unconscious from the stun blast or just starting to come around. Aelyn was confident that justice would eventually find its way to him, but the law was slow and her matter was urgent. And so when an officer finally came down the hallway to where she was sitting, she immediately perked up. "Can I see him now?" she asked. The officer nodded. "You and your associates are cleared to question him, Knight Talis," he responded. "But he hasn't been the most forthcoming. Please come this way." The cop led the way to a part of the hallway with two adjacent doors. He opened one of them, showing that it led to an observation area with a one-way pane for viewing into what was behind the second door -- a small room with a table and a stun-cuffed Skakoan sitting stoically behind it, another one standing behind him equally stoically. "That's his legal counsel," the officer stated, pointing at the standing one through the pane. "I'll be watching in here. You might consider not all going in at once." Mellanie offered to play bad cop, and Aelyn shrugged. "Um, okay," she said, thinking about the holofilms where she'd seen this done. "Maybe you two observe with the officer here. If I'm not getting anywhere, I'll make up an excuse to step out for a moment and we can switch." A moment later she opened the door and tried to look confident. "Hi there," she said lightly to the two aliens inside as she moved to sit down. "We met down in the mines but I'm afraid we didn't get to introductions. I'm Jedi Knight Aelyn Talis, and I have a few questions."

Aelyn shrugged. "A holding cell should be fine, but interrogation is a harsh word," she said. "The Governor has her own agenda, but CoreSec won't deny us a chance to talk to the prisoner." At least she didn't think they would. So far governments seemed only too happy to work with her as a Jedi, and the Governor had requested all three of them get involved here. As the lift arrived, it turned out that Dante's estimate of how long it would take CoreSec to get on site was way off and they wouldn't have a choice anyway. The place was already swarming with uniforms. Aelyn stepped forward, pointing down at the incapacitated alien at her feet, her Jedi robes brushing past him. "Here's the casualty," she called out to the officers. "See if you can get him help. This other Skakoan is the one who shot him." There was a medical team on hand and they swept in to the injured being. Other officers moved to remand the prisoner, and a captain approached Aelyn. "I assume you're Knight Talis?" When she nodded, he continued. "If you don't mind, can I ask you to come with us to the station, ma'am? We need to hear your account of what happened in the mine." "Of course," Aelyn answered. "I'm happy to cooperate. But I have my own investigation as well. I would like to talk to the prisoner as soon as he is in custody." "I can permit you to question him once we've initially processed him," the officer answered. Aelyn glanced at Dante and Mellanie. "That's fine. Let's go."

"We need to get out of here," Aelyn said when everyone looked to her for a decision. She indicated the Skakoan with a scorch mark in his back. "I don't even know for sure if this one is dead. If someone can carry the stunned one back to the lift, I should be able to float the other one there with the Force. We need to get them both to the local authorities and question the assassin." She looked between the two of them. "Let's move," she urged them, calling on the Force to lift the injured-or-dead being off the ground and move him back towards the elevator down as fast as she could manage. It was admittedly a bit difficult to concentrate on the task with the threat of impending danger, but this kind of application of the Force came easier to her each time she used it. They managed to make the lift before the droids came back online. As soon as Aelyn set the alien down and started the lift ride back up, she pulled her commlink and called the local authorities. "This is Knight Talis. We have a casualty and an unconscious prisoner who shot him. We need an ambulance and law enforcement at shaft Besh at the quarry immediately." She cut the call once they'd acknowledged. "I think our best plan is to try to question the prisoner," she told Mellanie and Dante. "In the mine the Force showed me an echo of an event where two Skakoans were talking about the recent rash of workplace accidents and how one of their agents is behind it," she explained. "They seemed afraid we would find a place they called the Foundry. I have a strong feeling that if we can find whatever that is, we will start getting some answers." The lift continued up and Aelyn resisted the urge to pace anxiously, instead trying to remain calm so she could focus on what the Force was guiding her to do. It was just hard with this much on the line.

The droids proved to be no match for Mellanie and the Ensign thanks to some precision shooting and Aelyn realized they probably hadn't even needed her help to fend off the attack. For some reason one of the drones was still standing though when it suddenly ground to a halt and a Skakoan ran up. Aelyn squinted at him, trying to make out what he was shouting and if he could be one of the aliens she'd seen in her vision when abruptly he crumpled. "Kriff!" she exclaimed when she realized what had happened, raising her lightsaber blade again and preparing to chase down a murderer for the second time in one day. There had been so much death surrounding this already... what was happening here was spiraling out of control rapidly. She considered it her foremost responsibility as a Jedi Knight to guard life, and the fact that two people had been cut down in front of her in just a few short hours made her feel maddeningly helpless. But there was still something she could do. There was still justice. Mellanie seemed even more on top of it than she was. Even as she moved after the cloaked assailant, the Mandalorian planted a stun bolt on his back with yet another impressive shot. Aelyn quickly caught up with her, closing down her lightsaber blade but keeping the weapon in her right hand as she used her left to draw back the being's hood and check for signs of consciousness.

As Aelyn moved back up the tunnel the way she'd come down, her strides lengthened. The general foreboding she'd felt during the vision had blossomed into a very present sense of danger. A little bit diffuse, maybe not focused on her directly, but it was building fast. It was like an itch, persistent, demanding attention. She shrugged her cloak off her shoulders and suddenly the distinctive report of blaster fire echoed up the stone hallway. She took a deep breath and her lightsaber leaped to her hand, pulsating power and confidence that she still didn't feel absent its comforting weight in her hand, turning a frightened girl into a Knight. Suddenly she was upon them, azure blade springing to life, the Force carrying her in a mighty bounding leap towards what appeared to be half a dozen load lifters bearing ominously down on the relatively-small forms of Mellanie and Dante, some of which were already weathering a crimson barrage from the Mandalorian's blaster pistols. No longer thinking but giving herself over to instinct and the guiding hand of the Force, she struck. Two slashes in an x-pattern executed mid-leap. They were met by a thick armor plate, and though the blade found purchase, it did not give as much as she had anticipated and the target both withstood it and retaliated with mechanical precision, swinging a large gripper-claw at her place in the air. But she foresaw the attack and bounced herself to the side, narrowly clearing what would have been a bone-shattering impact. Aelyn landed, lightsaber flashing back around to her fighting stance as though she'd been doing it her whole life. She stood apart from Dante and Mellanie, forcing each droid to prioritize a target and hopefully split their numbers. "The Skakoans are behind this!" she called out to them. "We're no longer safe on Talus."

The tunnels seemed to grow darker around Aelyn as she walked. Her eyes drifted closed and yet as in tune with the Force around her as she was, she had no problem navigating. She was following a current. It took her a few minutes to reach where it was leading her, but she could feel it strongly by the time she got there. An item, sitting on top of something about waist high. She grasped it, her eyes still closed... a smooth duraplast surface caked with the dirt of the mine. There was a slight dampness to it. But in the Force there was a story there, the impression left by an event. She focused and it expanded to fill her mind.... ------ "He had to intervene again. Eventually it's going to draw the wrong kind of attention." Two Skakoans walked down the tunnel. The speaker was holding something but Aelyn from her cloudy perspective couldn't make it out. "He knows what he's doing," the other responded. "Mining sites are dangerous places. We can handle the attention if it comes down to it." "What if someone finds the Foundry?" the first asked. "Not a chance. It will soon be too late for that anyway. You worry too much. Why are you carrying that thing around anyway? It makes you look like you had something to do with it. Put it down and let's get back to work." ------ Aelyn opened her eyes. She was holding a dusty and cracked mining helmet. She flipped it over and saw that there was a splash of red that had trickled out onto her hands. Gasping and recoiling in disgust, she dropped the helmet and it clattered onto the tunnel floor. She searched desperately for a moment and found an oil rag sitting on a mining machine nearby and she used it to wipe her hands off, smearing them with black but getting the blood off. She stood for a moment, the sound of her quick breathing filling the tunnel around her until she got it under control. The Skakoans were behind the disappearances, and they were hiding something at a place called... the Foundry? Where was that? The Jedi Knight turned around and hurried back up the tunnel to find Dante and Mellanie.

"If you send me a copy of the image, I can check them against the Jedi archives," Aelyn suggested. "They might have something the GA doesn't." She brushed a stray lock of her long red hair back away from her face. "Might be best to split up. I won't be much help with the technical stuff, so I'll leave that to you. On the other hand, the Force allows me in some cases to get a sense for past events that happened in a location or with regards to a specific object, so if I do a quick lap around the mine I might be able to pick something up that someone else would miss," she stated. The Jedi glanced at the Mandalorian. "Mellanie, your choice who you want to go with." That settled, Aelyn picked a tunnel and started off down it, beginning to stretch out with her senses. The world around her seemed to slow as she drifted into a trance-like state so she could focus on what the Force was telling her. She began by listening with her ears, picking apart the layers of what she could hear -- first, the scuff of her footsteps and rustle of her robes; then the quiet hum of idle machinery; the gentle buzz of electric lights. The air was close in the mine and there was a profound silence once she peeled away those layers, but then far underneath was what she was seeking: the constant deep tone that she could have been imagining entirely. The background noise of the universe existing. Within that note was the Force, expanding to fill her awareness and then projecting far around her. Everything her eyes could perceive about the mine was just a shadow of all that there was to know of it. She quickly received an impression of the emotional character of the place, imprints left there by the people who worked on it. Humans and aliens, men and women and droids. The sense of routine... but at times with undercurrents of other things, even urgency and workplace stress. She continued to walk and listen, waiting to see if the Force had a more specific tale to tell her.

Aelyn twisted her lip. "Well, actually, the dark side has a way of clouding a Jedi's perception of the Force," she said thoughtfully. "Think of it like something on a river bed stirring up a cloud of mud and silt -- you can tell that there's a disturbance there, but can't necessarily see what's causing it." She was experiencing all kinds of unusual things with her senses so far today. Not only had the Skakoan delegation been equipped with something that had completely blocked her ability to read them with the Force, but since then things had gotten murky. "I do sense danger here," she said. "But if it's caused by a Sith Lord I couldn't say." The idea was decidedly alarming. She'd had to contend with the dark side before, especially on Naboo, but encountering a Sith Lord that was her equal or greater in experience and training would make this way more dangerous than the mining dispute she'd been told to expect. Simply put, it was a possibility she didn't know if she was equipped to handle. "What makes you think one might be here?" she asked.

Bowing in greeting like most Jedi did, Aelyn introduced herself. "I'm Knight Aelyn Talis," she said before indicating the Mandalorian. "This is Mellanie Vevut." She studied the Ensign for a brief moment. Human or close, his most remarkable features were his prosthetic eyes which betrayed neither any emotion at their arrival nor any clear indication of where he was looking, which was mildly unsettling since she couldn't make eye contact with him. There were no immediately visible clues as to why he had prosthetic eyes -- no obvious scarring around them, for example. That plus the fact that both eyes had been replaced probably meant that he had gone blind at some point in a way that wasn't fixable by bacta, which was rare, or he'd opted to have them installed because he liked them better than normal eyes. In any case they made him difficult to read and his terseness didn't help either. "Certainly," she said, taking it in stride and keeping her usual casual tone in her Coruscanti-accented Basic. "Before you fill us in on your leads, though, can I ask how long you've been looking into the case? We just came from a meeting with the Governor and she didn't indicate that the Galactic Alliance had already sent someone down."

Aelyn smiled pleasantly. "Thank you, Foreman, we will," she affirmed. Heading back outside, the young Jedi tried to orient herself. She'd never been on a mining site before, but at first it didn't look that different from a construction site, and she'd seen plenty of those back home on Coruscant. The ground was unpaved and there was a whole lot of heavy and unfamiliar equipment lying about loosely organized. Large floodlamps dotted the area, hunched over as though examining anyone that walked beneath them into the broad swaths of the site each illuminated. Under some of these lamps lay stacked crates of what Aelyn assumed was the actual product -- the ore that was being dug up. A bit curious since no one had seemed to mention just what the whole pursuit of this mining endeavor was that had the Skakoans so eager, Aelyn walked over to one of the long black crates. As she did so, she was startled to note that whatever was inside seemed in tune with the Force. She could actually sense whatever was in there. She glanced over her shoulder back at the office, considering asking permission to open the crate, but she decided not to bother the foreman and pried the lid open herself just for a peek. Inside were neat rows of long, slender, carefully-packed clear crystals that practically buzzed in the back of her mind in a way that was intensely familiar. "Oh," she said, placing the sensation. "Kyber crystals." The Techno Union's greed made a little more sense now. Kyber crystals like the one in her lightsaber she had claimed on Dantooine were very rare and extremely valuable. The sheer number of credits that had to have been changing hands for the rights to mine this deposit had to be astronomical. Suddenly she wondered if they already had buyers, and if it was a military contract related to the brewing conflict going on in the galaxy. Shutting the case again, Aelyn tilted her head toward the mine shaft ahead of them through a permacrete archway emblazoned with a reddish block Besh. "Shall we?" Beyond the arch was a box of helmets and a sign with instructions to take one with which Aelyn complied, then a long elevator shaft down into Talus' crust. Beside the enormous hole was one of the prodigious machines that had bored it, itself a droid of some kind that was currently powered down and being recharged from a field generator. Another droid stood on the elevator, and Aelyn showed it the badge the Foreman had given her. "Can you take us down? I'm looking for the Ensign that came this way recently." The droid beeped an acknowledgement and pulled a lever and the lift started down into the darkened shaft below them, which was sporadically lit by rings of lights tacked onto the metal lattice that maintained the tunnel's structure. "I guess we'll know him when we see him," Aelyn said to Mellanie with a shrug.

"Those poor families..." Aelyn said. There was so much death and talk of death and it was a constant reminder to how comfortable her upbringing had been even with all the travel and uncertainty of the war. "I'm sure you're doing everything you can to increase safety around the dig site. "It's actually that mysterious signature that put me on this trail," she continued. She hesitated for a split second. "I'm sorry, did you say someone else was here asking about Jarett? The Governor didn't tell me that she had anyone else looking into this. Is this person still here, or perhaps did they leave you with a name?" It was kind of suspicious. It wasn't likely that Aiwah had just forgotten to mention she already had someone looking into what Aelyn had directly expressed her intention to pursue. Unless there was some kind of mix-up, whoever it was that had just been asking about Jarett had been lying about whose authority they were acting on. The Jedi Knight touched the Force, quietly reaching out around her, seeking any sense of danger or deception.

Small galaxy, Aelyn thought with a start when the Mandalorian turned out to be Sabian Devanus' daughter. Not only did her father have a long history with Devanus during his days as the political head of the Rebellion before his eventual assumption of the role of Supreme Chancellor for the Galactic Alliance, but she had recently gotten the chance to meet Sabian herself in person with Aira. This gave Mellanie and herself much more in common than she'd anticipated, even though their paths had diverged dramatically. She wanted to talk a bit more about it, but the speeder had arrived and it was back to the investigation. It did make her feel better about the situation now that she knew that she and her escort were somewhat alike. It didn't change the fact that the Mandalorian was working for Aiwah, though, and they both had their own goals which didn't necessarily align all the way. "Excuse me," Aelyn said as they entered the office to find a man in dirty, comfortable clothes staring at a well-worn datapad looking thoroughly vexed by either the device itself or what was displayed on it. "I'm Jedi Knight Aelyn Talis and this is Mellanie Vevut. We're here on behalf of the governor, looking into a case of a missing person, who I'm told was her liaison with this site. Are you familiar with the situation?"

"This is literally my first full mission as a Knight," Aelyn admitted. She was surprised that Mellanie seemed to open up a bit instead of continuing to play the part of the unreadable professional behind her helmet. It would make working together easier for however long it took to get to the bottom of this. "And as for the path... I was offered a chance to walk it by my Master, Aira Cadan -- to become more than I was and maybe do some real good in the universe. It's not a chance many people get and I couldn't turn it down." It was a curious thing, when she thought about it. She'd basically won the lottery to even have the potential to use the Force. She'd won it again when she'd chanced upon Aira Cadan on Chandrila. That, or the whole thing was sort of predestined or prearragned by some sort of cosmic will, an idea that until she'd started studying the Force she would have rejected out of hand. Now she could see that the Force had a direction to its flow and she knew that by opening herself to it she could follow it to be where she needed to be. When Aira had done the same thing, it had opened new worlds of possibilities for Aelyn and now she was sitting in a speeder, a Jedi Knight responsible for unraveling a plot that already involved one dead body and two missing people. "Vevut sounds Mandalorian, but Devanus certainly doesn't," she observed. "I'm sure you used to get asked all the time if you're related to the former Supreme Chancellor at all. How did you come upon the path you now follow?"

Aelyn nodded. "I appreciate it," she said. "I'm going to head for the mining site first, try to get a feel for if something happened. I may need to visit the fiancee if nothing obvious turns up, see if she knows where he is." Honestly she wasn't sure if that was doing it in the right order, but she was kind of making this up. She had no history of investigations like these prior to doing fieldwork with Aira and by herself on Naboo. But this way seemed to make sense, and she was really hoping that the Force would lead her to where she needed to be at the right time to pick up on something. She had special senses that most investigators didn't have, and they could potentially turn what looked like a dead end into a breakthrough. Maybe that kind of thing could make up for her lack of investigative training. She glanced at Mellanie expectantly and then headed back up the hallway the way they'd come in. "You're a bounty hunter or something, right?" she asked. "I have no problem admitting you're probably better at finding people than I am. Don't hesitate to set me straight."

Lips pursed, Aelyn continued to eye the black goop. It didn't feel like the Force had been at work here. She thought if it had been she would sense the dark side lingering on the Skakoan's remains. She wasn't sure the Force could even do that anyway. But maybe some really sophisticated technology, like HRD-level stuff that could actually fool humans into believing it was a living being.... The reality was more grotesque, as there was still some part of Sobek there in front of her, murdered by some at-large agent who-knew-how long ago. With a twinge of unease Aelyn realized she might be able to gather some clues about that, but maybe she would shelve the approach she had in mind as a last resort. For now she turned her attention back to those who were speaking to her. Although the Mandalorian, Mellanie, was innocent of murder, she had still performed an illegal hit and she had been working for Aiwah. Keeping the mercenary around under contract didn't make her a third-party agent -- Aelyn herself as a Jedi Knight not being bankrolled by any involved faction was the only one who could fill that role. Aiwah had just proven that she was willing to go to unethical lengths to resolve this situation in a way she found favorable, and her assigning a guard to Aelyn was at worst an attempt to keep tabs on or even control the Jedi's investigation. Aelyn wasn't sure she was willing to make that judgment yet however. Even if Aiwah was unscrupulous, she had asked the Jedi to send a representative and she had to know what she was getting. "Knight Aelyn Talis," she finally said, introducing herself to Mellanie. "I'm happy to have extra help along, but I want you to understand that I'm here to find the truth in this situation and to do the right thing -- however that looks." She looked back at the mortician. "I'd like to be kept in the loop if anything else is found out about the remains. Any information could help the investigation." Then she turned to the Governor. "I think the other prong of this that we need to follow up on -- and maybe the most pressing -- is your missing deputies. Who can I talk to in order to get me started? Who might know where they were last seen?" This whole thing stunk, and there was a lot of work to do. This was probably the best starting place.