Ask Ajan Kloss A Spark of Hope

[Vayla Mirana]

Music/Ambience

Spoiler

​

It was the dawn of a new day at the Jedi Temple of Ajan Kloss, and as a number of Jedi were rising from their beds at the early morning mark, others had already been up and about. Throughout the vast variety of individuals within the Order, from ages to backgrounds and beyond, each member was further specialized with the gifts that they brought to one another and the galaxy itself. Some had been in the kitchens before the light had even touched the sky, preparing breakfast for the standard shifts, while others would be arriving on the planet in their ships that reached down upon the docking grounds.

Vayla Mirana was one person who had not been gifted with enough sleep to worry about waking up. A recent bout of insomnia had been keeping her eyes open for longer than desired. She spent last night keeping busy, trimming her bonsai tree, burying her nose in her books, playing brain games on her datapad, meditating for the Force to put her to sleep and cleaning her room after cleaning her room. The activity didn’t end there but had only taken her outside to the open yard where a couple of the ships were landing intermittently.

She watched each one come down, wondering where the pilots had been and whatever information they carried with them. Ever since Knight Ky Maryk had called for another meeting, handing out datacards to report findings under codename ‘Fulcrum’ (which in turn resounded for the collective commission as ‘Operation: Fulcrum’), many Jedi did not hesitate to go out and to act. Action came in a number of forms: building relationships with communities, cooperating with the Sector Rangers, hunting for the truth behind the barbaric attacks instigated by these ‘darksiders’, and showing the galaxy that they were yet not the members of the Jedi Order.

Vayla was no exception to this effort, having returned to Ajan Kloss some days after that gathering in the glad, but her mind was a mess at present. It was difficult enough to sleep, no less hard to come to terms with her feelings, and fear was at the top. It was to good fortune that there was always work to be done at the Jedi’s headquarters, granting her some much needed distraction, so there she was in yesterday’s T-shirt and trousers, kneeling at the yard’s perimeter with a building at her back and the forest to her right. In one hand was a wrench and in the other was the surface of a shut down black and green R3 astromech droid, tinkering with a stubborn bolt as she worked her way inside the torso diagnostic unit.

“Blasted bugger!” She tutted to herself, leveraging with all her might. “Come on, you!” The wrench jerked but the bolt didn’t budge. Instead, her knuckle flew toward a metal edge of the rectangular hole, producing more annoyance than pain.

“Stars above!” She let the tool drop from her hand to the ground with a resonating thud. “I will fix you, my metallic friend!” Vayla blinked at the unaware droid. “You’ll not escape the wrath of my repair!” Or...something that sounds remotely more successful than that sentence just did.



@Ginger @Dandead10

 

[Hal Mikko]

"Need a hand?"

The Force coalesced around the fallen wrench, lifting it into the air and gently back into Vayla's grasp. From the forest approached a Jedi Knight wearing a dark flight suit, slightly disheveled from exercise but otherwise looking to be in good spirits. Hal wasn't personally familiar with many other members of the Order due to how often he was out undertaking missions, but he'd seen Vayla around the temple in the past, and upon seeing her struggling with the droid figured that he could do with some camaraderie.

Hal knelt beside her to gaze at the inert droid, his pale blue eyes scanning it over for any signs of exterior damage. As with many Jedi, his aptitude with the Force was manifested in his affinity for repairing things, droids being no exception. A 4EY-Scout Droid emerged from behind his back and perched up on Hal's shoulder, glancing over at Vaylin briefly before turning its own attention to the R3 unit. It chirped to Hal in binary, and the Knight nodded in response.

"He says there's something obstructing the bolt." Hal squinted at the stuck bolt, before reaching out his hand and tugging on it with his telekinesis. There was a sharp grinding noise for a moment, but soon a small chunk of debris flew out from the hole, and the bolt followed suit afterwards. The Knight levitated the bolt gently off to the side, before turning his attention back towards Vaylin. "By the way, I'm Hal, Hal Mikko, and this here -" He gestured towards the droid on his shoulder, " - is Em-One. I don't believe we've met."

 

[Vayla Mirana]

Ambience [Recurring]

Spoiler

​

When the wrench lifted up from the ground, it was all Vayla could do to blink at it. Maybe she was so deprived of sleep that her first thought wasn’t even the Force at work but simply the undeniable observation that a wrench was there floating in midair. Realizing the truth, she opened her fingers and let the tool fit snugly back into her grip. From the corner of her eye she caught the movement of a figure, though with his own manipulation of the Force he was just as much sensed. Then her eyes went to his own droid and its message, though it was the man’s that she attended to first.

“I know. I speak binary.” She grinned, now focusing on just what might be the root cause of her problem. Well, she didn’t see any obstruction, but probably because it wasn’t obvious. All of a sudden, some foreign power entered her field of vision once again just as she went to lean in toward the droid, instead keeping back as the bolt grinded around.

“Hey!” She called out to the culprit beside her. “What are you—” The bolt flew out along with debris, the latter plummeting to the ground and the former hovering beside her as though to laugh at the simplicity of it all. Right. Lesson learned, Vayla—the Force is a far superior tool than a wrench. Instead of frowning at her misfortune, she chuckled at it. Fortune had found her in the end thanks to her fellow Jedi.

“Thank you, Hal Mikko,” Vayla stood up straight to properly receive her helpful friends. “You too, Em-One.” She gave a small bow to both individuals, passing her wrench into her left hand so that she could extend her right hand toward the man. “Vayla Mirana. Our first introduction, I do believe. It will be one to remember.”

She smiled and looked away toward the R3 unit. “I’m ashamed to say that I’m not sure how much frustration I might have ended up enduring before figuring out the debris… Good thing you came along, on that note.” In fact, I might just have beaten the poor droid till the bolt came out.


@Ginger

 

[Hal Mikko]

Hal rose to his feet in response, wrapping his hand around hers in a firm handshake, accompanied with a winning smile. The corners of his mouth tugged at the scar that ran along the left side of his face as he grinned - it looked like a vibroblade had once grazed his face, but it was hard to determine for sure. "Well I'll certainly remember it." Hal replied confidently, with Em-One chirped his agreement in Binary. The Knight gave Vaylin an easygoing shrug as she admitted her earlier frustrations. "Hey, the Force works in mysterious ways." Hal said, half-joking and half-serious. "I'm sure you would've figured it out yourself, but maybe there's a reason why our paths crossed."

In truth, while Hal wasn't positive about that last part, he certainly preferred a pleasant interaction like this over another large gathering. Knight Aamaw's meditation was fine, save for Ash's childish outburst, but the recent discussions on the Knights of Ren had bothered Hal more than he cared to admit. He'd always despised subtlety - it wasn't that he lacked the intellect for it, but he'd always prefer an enemy that faced him head-on rather than one that lurked in the shadows, shrouded in mystery. Practical solutions for practical problems, much like the stuck bolt.

"In any case," Hal continued, "I think I've been stuck on Ajan Kloss for too long. I haven't been out in the field in weeks because -" (the Council won't assign you on missions because they know you're reckless) " - of recent events, but I've been dying to get back out there. In the meantime though," he crouched down beside the droid again, "mind if I help you with the astromech?"

@Die Shize

 

[Vayla Mirana]

Ambience [Recurring]

Spoiler

Vayla nodded at Hal’s optimism, half-believing in it as much as believing he was just being polite. The Force, though, worked in as mysterious ways as it worked in funny ways, and this little encounter had proven to be amusing if nothing else. If Hal Mikko’s paths had crossed with Vayla Mirana’s so that he could help her repair an astromech droid then she wasn’t one to laugh at the Force.

The two Jedi shared something in common when it came to being stuck here, or at least feeling like it. In Vayla’s case, she could attribute much and more to her insomnia, a plague that stretched nights into days and days into nights, and felt like one week became two. The Jedi haven on Ajan Kloss was just so, but sometimes the walls felt like they were closing in around her, and her quarters became that much smaller.

“Be my guest,” she obliged her helper as he offered to do exactly that. He seemed to know more about droids than she did and laughing help away would be like laughing the Force away. While he crouched, Vayla remained standing, looking from him to the R3 unit.

“Our little friend is part of a malfunctioning lineup that I figured I’d dirty my hands with helping. He, or she, is the first. Owner supposedly left the planet as soon as setting down and dropping the sleeping tin off. Got the chart right here.”

Vayla picked up a datapad and started reading off some of the information. “One Jos Zingwa, Nautolan, Jedi Knight… Got stuck in some nebula, ship malfunctions, got that back in working order but his mech, the aptly named ‘R-U-K’, is apparently not okay enough to wake up.”

She shrugged and offered Hal the datapad if he wanted it. Maybe he could make more sense of what the core issues were. Beside the torso diagnostic unit, it looked like the power recharge coupler might have needed some tuning, maybe even a battery overhaul, but Vayla was an armchair mechanic at best and a sleepless one at worst. Now, however, she had a partner.



@Ginger

 

[Hal Mikko]

"Thanks." Hal said as he received the datapad, and briefly skimmed over the diagnostics. From what Vaylin had described, it seemed as if there'd been some kind of electromagnetic interference that fried the droid's internals. Hal was a gifted mechanic, but he was no miracle worker. Placing the datapad to the side, he wrapped his knuckles against the torso of the astromech lightly, as if doing so would somehow reveal hidden information about its status. It didn't.

"Wish our friend Jos could've been stranded somewhere nicer." Hal brushed metal flakes and rust off of his uniform as he stood up once more. He pressed his lips together, slightly irked by the fact that he couldn't simply solve all of his problems with a cosmowrench. "I can fix the power recharge coupler, but I'd completely need to overhaul the battery and the processing unit if you wanna reactivate the droid." Hal hesitated. "I could also just fish around in its memory banks, see if he has any worthwhile data, but that'd mean taking apart its brain." The droid didn't belong to Vaylin, but some beings were very attached to their mechanical buddies nevertheless. Perhaps she didn't want to see this R3 unit dismantled, not if there was still a chance to salvage him.

@Die Shize

 

[Vayla Mirana]

Ambience [Recurring]

Spoiler

​

"Wish our friend Jos could've been stranded somewhere nicer."

Vayla chuckled behind her lips at that. Like so many others, she had been treated to her fair share of nebulae. They were generally prettier from far away. And all but disorienting up close. At her companion’s analysis, she nodded her head without dispute; the assessment of the droid’s condition was right off the datapad, which was nothing if not a good sign. The last thing that either of them needed was some hidden problem to tinker with. Vayla was an okay mechanic, but she was not a gifted one.

“Hmm,” she deliberated on how to proceed. Whether it was the nebula that had done the droid in or not, Jos Zingwa had relinquished his unit to the maintenance crew for it to be dealt with appropriately, whether salvaged or scrapped. His signature said as much. Still, no sense in any premature deaths. “I think at this point we should try to repair the poor thing. I don’t think the pad says anything about vital data—probably the owner has it backed up—but, if all else fails, we can take a peek just in case.”

With that, Vayla slapped her thighs with renewed vigor. Perhaps all she had needed was a helping hand to remind her that she was not as alone as she felt. “Right! Just tell this gal what you need and consider it done! Tools, components, schematics—tea! Name it!”


@Ginger