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There was no time in the present emergency to make a visit to Ilum or Dantooine. At the moment, Armiena would have to rely on the kindness of strangers for her equipment. From McShipface’s armory, the veteran Jedi had retrieved a small metal box and placed its contents in front of her as she sat cross-legged in the workshop. She unrolled a length of soft microfiber towel, revealing a fire-scarred lightsaber hilt. This one once had ornate, almost feminine engravings wrapping around the hilt, but the oxidation and fire of the detonation of its own battery had scarred them beyond repair. It was a pity that the damage seemed permanent. She had been given that lightsaber by a Sith during a desperate moment, during the failed attempt to halt the fall of Hesperidium and prevent the ruin of the capital of the Galactic Alliance. The two had never met before. There was no conceivable reason for a Sith to loan a stranger--and a Jedi stranger--a weapon. Armiena thought of that day frequently. Even if the weapon was irrevocably damaged, its destruction had at least been in the course of saving billions. Armiena took another gulp of water and breathed deeply. She laid her space-pale hands on both ends of the weapon and gently turned it over in her fingers. Crystalline deposits had built up around the clasps and welds that held the weapon together--probably residue from its battery, highly toxic. Restoring this weapon was likely to require a full day of work, if not more. “Mother. Shut the boarding ramp. Don’t let anyone interrupt me… unless… the Sith fleet is in orbit or the sun is exploding or something of that nature. Imminent death and destruction, that kind of crisis.” She called out into her ship. She closed her eyes and just felt the weapon--not the grimy deposits of battery waste and the ragged scarring of oxidation around the blade emitter, but really felt the weapon. Almost immediately she gasped and doubled over, tears leaking from her eyes in shared pain. This woman had known horrible trauma, recent tragedy--something so horrible that touching it threatened to tear at scars within herself. Was she healing from that trauma? Was it even possible to heal from an experience that had left an impression like this on her weapon? Armiena pushed herself away from that pain and forced her attention into the innards of the weapon. Ruined. All that remained was a mass of melted plastic, metal, and smoke. The solitary crystal, however… was intact. Its heart was at least functional. “‘m alright,” she heard herself croaking. “Need parts, scouring brush. Oxy-Aurek torch--the little one, the one with the adjustable head. Right. Never built one. Let you know.” The handheld torch soon arrived and the younger Draygo began making a delicate pass over the surface of the weapon with the scouring brush. To her relief, much of the carbon buildup simply fell away from the weapon in ashen clouds--and with a curious sense of prickling that travelled up her right arm, Armiena realized that she was scraping away at the charred remains of her own right hand, from another body and another life. The plasticky, oily grime simply fell away, revealing the curved engravings. Her fingers travelled over the length of the hilt--there was no detectable seam between smooth metal and the etchings. They had been etched into the hilt with acid. She smiled--that was technical, delicate, and dangerous work. Gripping the weapon with The Force like a vise, Armiena pulled the hilt apart at its seams. A melted mass of batteries, insulation, circuitry, and wiring fell out and landed with a thud on the deckplates. Armiena gave it a nudge with her finger. It did not move--it had stuck to the metal. It also stuck to her finger, and the veteran Jedi had to grip the wad of material with a rag and fling it into the unseen distance. She heard only one impact. She made another pass on the inside of the hollowed hilt with the scouring brush and a second with the oxy-aurek torch. Something liquefied and spilled out in a black sludge. A single crystal shone out from that puddle. Armiena called out for parts. Circuit boards. Superconducting fiber. Insulator strips. Capacitors. Magnetic stabilizers. plasma focus matrix. Power cell. Flux aperture. Field energizer. Hands moving in well-practiced motions, she gradually assembled the parts into a shape resembling a lightsaber. She breathed in the fumes of the oxy-aurek torch as greedily as though they were the scent of a pleasant tea.That single crystal fit neatly into the focusing chamber. Curiously, she felt no hesitation in building this weapon, unlike Dantooine--restoring it didn’t feel merely instinctive to her, it felt right. All that was left was the microfusing of the hilt. Armiena took another long sip of water. The cup of caf--when had it become caf?--refreshed the dryness in her throat after days of delicate work. Armiena lifted the weapon with her hands and took a long look at its entirely in The Force. Again, she had made… minor errors in its construction, requiring a longer trance than was typically necessary. The focusing crystal was perhaps a micrometer out of alignment and the insulating strips had not been perfectly sealed--an easy error to make, but one that would turn the weapon into a fireball in her hand upon its first ignition. Armiena took the weapon to her breastbone and let herself lose her awareness into the study of the weapon. The woman who had given her this weapon had known agony unlike anything she had ever felt, and hopefully would never feel. The veteran Jedi had known the death of her friends, the vaporization of her home, torture at the hands of the Sith, and the ruin of everything she had built, and this was still a new pain. She could not even identify its source. Despite the freshness of the pain, despite the fact that Armiena was a complete stranger to her, despite the fact that she had every right to remain as armed as possible during an emergency of historical proportions, she had given her that weapon… almost without hesitation. Armiena decided that she would cherish that memory and carry it with her. There was a microscopic shift, one that could not be detected with the naked eye. There was a brief sensation of warmth against her breastbone. And then it was done. Armiena rose from the deckplates. She gave a few weak coughs and blinked slowly, rolling the tension out of her shoulders knees. The veteran Jedi lifted the silvery-grey hilt to her gaze and pushed sweaty black hair out of her face. It was no longer stained with oxidation and burned carbon, but as polished and smoothed as though it had just been constructed by its first owner. No, not its first owner. Its only owner, Armiena decided. She would merely safe-keep the weapon and return it at first opportunity. Until then… Her finger found the ignition switch, a little round protrusion on the side of the hilt, and pressed it to give life to a brilliant bronze blade. Armiena regarded the white-hot core of the blade and held her left hand close to the edge of the unshrouded emitter. “I hope you understand,” she whispered to The Force alone. “Emily Zsahra.”