Dark Phalomir remained obstinately silent, and with each passing moment something deep within Shayla became increasingly aware of the fact that they were lost in the galaxy, speeding through hyperspace on a course to...

...well, nowhere specifically. And, despite the fact that they were lost in unknown recesses of the universe, this Dark one was asking her to find a child, in the Elseness of all places.

"Very well, then," Shayla said then. "You would ask me to reach out and find a child in the vasteness of the Elseness, as though you know exactly where he is...

...when you also claim to not know where we are either?"

She quieted, watching the Dark one intently. "I don't believe you. After all, you appeared out of nowhere, upon our own lost ship...

...as though you knew we would be there all along."

Saying nothing further, Shayla turned back to the navigation board...

...and before Dark Phalomir could so much as blink she grasped the hyperspace lever and pulled back, and the swirl of hyperspace smoothed out into starlines, and then into stars...

...stars seemingly devoid of the pollution of space traffic. But Shayla knew deep in her heart that things were never what they seemed.

(((OCC: Shayla's initial thought is cross-posted to Event Horizon in the CSWU.)))

--------------------

“I can watch that all day,” he said. “It never ceases to amaze me how technology makes things so… convenient. It’s amazing how we have tapped into the natural things around us, things we never knew existed until some super intelligent being figured it out. Or stumbled upon it, as is the case of hyperspace.”

He folded his hands behind his head and then turned to face Shayla.

“Or the Elseness, for that matter,” he smiled. “Funny how everything ties together. All so random, yet so… well, not random. You worlds here, the Darker Realms, the Elseness, and who really knows what else? And always there is the tiny membrane that separates it all, invisible yet persevering, keeping it all separated by an impenetrable skin.”

He paused, then pursing his lips and sitting straight once again.

“Oh, but is it really? No, actually, for we punch holes in it, portals, and move between the realms. And we leave a trail, my dear. A track. A way to trace where we’ve been. I can teach you this power, as a reward for helping me. One of the rewards…”

A dry smile crossed his lips and his eyes grew into slits.

“And the other,” he said. “Oh my, yes, the other. You must remember who I am, what my realm is… and why it exists. You witnessed a fair trade once before, given to the sister of your beloved Dark Lady. Oh yes, I know these things. Another fair trade can be arranged. Anyone you wish… old, young, or very, very young.”

“Oh by the way,” he said, “Where did these stars come from?”

And tired of her own indecisiveness, of the emotions waging within her.

So she allowed her eyes to defocus and turn vague, using a simple calming technique to seperate emotion from logic...

...and view everything in a much more calculated manner once more.

“My son is dead,” she then said, her throat constricting even as she spoke the words. Even so, she pressed on. “To bring him back in such a manner would break the Natural Order...

...and I am not so vain as to believe that my petty wishes justify bringing him back.”

She paused once more. “It is what it is. You need not use bribery to bend my wishes to your own.”

Quieting, she let that particular statement linger a few moments as she pinned the Dark one with a rather cool greeny-blue stare. A vision swam in her mind's eye once more...

...and pieces were beginning to fit together to form a potential solution.

“As for where these stars came from,” Shayla continued then, turning back to the navboard even as curiosity took hold of her and she reached for the navcomputer to see if it recognized any of the formations. As it did its work of trying to make sense of it all...

...which was taking far, far, too long...

...the icy feeling returned to Shayla's veins. The computer's work came to a damning halt as the words “NO KNOWN STARS OR SYSTEMS” flashed up on the central monitor. “I have no idea where they came from, and nither does this ship,” Shayla answered the Dark One.

Funny thing was, she had an eerie feeling she had been here before...

[ 08-13-2010 09:15 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by Shayla Stargazer Petrolu ]

--------------------

He then stood, his interest once again returning to his face.

“But more importantly,” he peered, “you really think I am trying to bribe you? No, no, no! I already told you, I cannot, I will not do that. I am offering a reward – your deepest desires, that which you wish. And you will be helping a helpless child, freeing it from an eternal prison which no being deserves. And you will be restoring balance to our realms, freeing us all from chaos.”

Indeed, it never once crossed her mind that there might possibly be others in this great vast nothingness they now found themselves in.

She frowned a little, pulling her claw from between her lips in puzzlement over where to drop anchor. Then--

"Why don't you decide that, love," she said as she abruptly whirled about to face her betrothed, throwing her arms giddily about his neck. The motion might appear to be oddly out of place to those watching, but the halfling found her actions to be the most natural ones in the world, so natural in fact that she didn't even waste a moment's thought on them...

[ 08-18-2010 01:36 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by ShaRhylla ]

--------------------

She paused, shaking her head. "There is something familiar about this place. I feel like..."

She trailed momentarily. "...like I've been here before."

Quieting for few seconds more, Shayla regarded the stars shining in the viewscreen once more, trying to place them. Although she couldn't, a memory slowly surfaced, one which seemed so very long ago...

...yet remained fresh in Shayla's mind.

"Another fair exchange was made once, one which dealt with replacing one being--willing to sacrifice her life--for another who was willing to do exactly the same. This exchange was made across galaxies, leaving one at the mercies of being discovered by a Dark unknown, one incoming to her own galaxy. I was the one, and I was discovered...

...but not by the Dark unknown."

Pausing again, Shayla pinned Dark Phalomir with her eyes. She arched an eyebrow. "But you know about this...?"

--------------------

“All right,” he said. “If you would rather focus on our precarious situation than discuss the terms of our agreement, fine.”

He looked at the viewscreen and studied the stars, his eyes darkening.

“If you think you’ve been here before then you’re quite the little traveler. It’s probably best we leave here as soon as we can, though. This isn’t our place, we really don’t belong here. In fact, I’m a little worried about how we came to be here.”

A thought crossed his mind, and he looked at Shayla dubiously.

Then she quieted a moment, pursing her lips...

...and thinking.

Her eyes grew dim, almost moist, as she redirected her attentions to Dark Phalomir. "You said we could travel from place to place, through dimensions." Another shiver. "Get us out of here, now, and I will help you retrieve the child."

If a child indeed he is, came a mental addendum.

--------------------

He then laughed at his own speculation.

“But even if I didn’t think we were stuck for that reason,” he continued, “I would need my powers back. But you, through your own abilities, have somehow blocked my ability to remove us from this realm. If only I could wave my hand like so and open a doorway to my own land…”

As his hand waved through the air, a shimmering circle appeared directly in front of the ship. The motion of the ship carried its bow into the portal as a snicker smirked its way across the dark one’s face. He flashed a twinkling eye at Shayla, then glanced at the viewscreen to see the image of the strange star patterns a final time before they would fade from view.

Why indeed were we brought here, and by what? Perhaps the answer will lie within the recorded scannings of this ship.

The image on the viewscreen faded and flashed as the ship passed through the portal. It was quickly replaced by a darkness so dense it seemed to suck the very light from within the ship. Yet the space around was a surreal pulsing, as if a desolate landscape of otherness lay just below. The dark one’s smirk became a full smile, and the brows above his eyes folded together into a sinister stare as the rainbow shimmering of the portal echoed away into nothing.

...one that she knew she had to completely ignore, placing all of her own feelings aside.

"Very well," she said, meeting his sinister glare without so much as a flinch. Then she closed her eyes, stretching out to the All, knowing that she had only successfully attempted anything close to what she was trying to do now once before, in a time of desperation when Galen had been taken by Roan. Two major differences existed between this time and the last, however: Before she had known Galen, and known her life signature, and before she had only opened a portal between two locations within real spacetime. This time, she was being asked to find a small life--if he could be called that at all--whose only link to her was the signature of Jharmeen's love, which she admittedly knew very well. And this time, she was being asked to open a portal between demensions of realtime and the Elseness. But Shayla really didn't have time or the option to dwell on these things, so she let them fade into the recesses of her mind as well.

She opened herself up as a vessel to be used, mentally aware that there are two sides to every coin...

...and accepting that.

What if in protecting her child, Jharmeen had broken the Natural Order? What if this child was needed to serve as a balance point betweent he realms of the Living and the Dead?

And then again, what if there was something more than even that?

Shayla had had her visions, and she had been brought to this time and place for one reason or another. And she fully believed that regardless of what she decided to do, her own feelings regarding her actions should have nothing to do with it.

The needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few...

...and most certainly the feelings of a mere One.

Shayla continued to stretch outward, into the very fabric of All that Was, seeking the familiarity of Jharmeen's great passion and love outside of Jharmeen herself...

...knowing that when she succeeded she would find exactly what the Dark One wanted.

--------------------

But there was something here in this vast emptiness, something that had to be investigated. There was a reason they were brought here, to this most unlikely of places, and his mind forced his heart to comply.

“The Temple,” he spoke up. “We should go to the Temple of the Armorers.”

Whether or not it was real, he felt as if all eyes were suddenly watching him.

“If we were brought here for a reason,” he continued, “it is there we will find our answers. But again, be wary, for the last time we set foot there was under an oath that no outsiders would find it. So you must go there with reverence and with the assumption that we were called here. There is no room for haughtiness nor temper. So act with purpose, and set a course for the Temple, please.”

--------------------

"Of course!" she interjected in something approaching an overly loud tone of voice.

"To the Temple of the Armorers! Where else would we go upon this world, hidden in this place, but to the very heart of savagery and warfare?

"I LIKE IT!"

She spread her arms out like the wings of a mynock, tossed back her head, and let loose a laugh of delight, lifting one dainty foot to spin about on the other as she did so.

--------------------

...so she sought beyond that. After all, Jharmeen told Shayla that she had surrounded the child with her love then placed it within the Elseness to protect it and keep it from dying. The problem was, however, that Shayla had not been taught how to breach the barrier between spacetime and the Elseness yet...

...and at the moment, she was not about to tell Dark Phalomir that. She was also fairly certain that if she told the Dark One she could not find the child, he would not believe her. He was so very, very eager to get to this child, and while the claim that he was doing this to achieve balance between the Living and the Dead was logical, there still could be something else, and with each passing moment Shayla began to formulate yet another scenario.

After all he, like many, was just another in search of Power, no matter what he claimed.

These thoughts passed through Shayla's mind in but moments, even as she continued her search in earnest. Even so, Shayla came up with no results. Finally she opened her eyes, shaking her head at the eagerly waiting Dark One.

"I can't find him," she said. "At least, not within the Elseness," she added. This of course was true enough. "Maybe you are mistaken and the child is not where you think he is," she then suggested, her eyes then moistening slightly. "Or perhaps he did not survive after all."

[ 09-04-2010 10:23 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by Shayla Stargazer Petrolu ]

--------------------

"He survived, I am sure of it," he said at length, "Is it that you cannot find him... or that he is not in the Elseness?"

He stroked his chin, his skin seeming to turn darker with every downward motion of his hand. Indeed, the power of the realm in which he now found himself fed his own.

Not that it was necessarily an unwelcome change, but it was a rather curious change of character.

"The temple of the armorers..." That would actually be a new one for me, now that I thought about it. I had spent a great deal of time in the Temples of the Warrior and Sorcerer clans respectively, but the armorers?

Of course, that made it Phalomir's home turf, didn't it?

"What is it like?" I asked, raising an eyebrow, my tone only that of casual curiosity- though my mind did wander to how Phalomir had only recently come out as more of an ally rather than prisoner or 'third party'.

--------------------

The halfling brought her giddy whirling to an abrupt halt, and faced Rykoungain. However, if any had been bothering to notice her suddenly escalated behavior, they would now be seeing that the sparkle in her eye was being caused by pupils dilated too greatly, that there was the slightest bit of trembling throughout her willowy frame, that the merest droplets of sweat now beaded her brow. She tossed her head, letting her hair fall across her forehead, masking the droplets in curling flame.

"It is-- it is--" she tried to continue with anything she knew of regarding this place where Sith magicks were incorporated into devices of wonder and awe, but fell short of the task. Truth be told, she had never been there in her short life, although her father had once mentioned somewhat obliquely of it and the Armorers who lived and worked there.

All she knew was that she had to go there.

She had to go there...

--------------------

"Come, why don't you have a seat or lie down? Perhaps something to drink would be called for?" I asked, raising an eyebrow at her, wondering what it was exactly that had forced this drastic change.

--------------------

The Temple was Phalomir’s connection to this time, to this Sith civilization. It was a source of his power, and he felt at home there. If something was amiss, he would surely feel it, would he not?

Then he realized the sickness that welled from deep within. It was a slight nausea, with a distinct lump in his throat.

“The Temple is in ruins,” he said. “I will warn you of that. There is nothing to be excited about from its appearance, so do not be disappointed. It is a special place, to be sure, but the land outside the Temple is owned by wild Tuk’ata.”

And it will be good to see one in particular!

“And the temple itself holds many mysteries, and will not so easily reveal its secrets. So please, calm yourself and be prepared for danger.”

--------------------

--------------------

...but perhaps not just because she was considering the Dark One's words. In that split second, another myriad of thoughts presented themselves as possibilities.

She nodded once. "Perhaps," she then responded to his query. Then she pinned him with her greeny blue eyes, which were still somewhat moist, and deep as the ocean. "But what if it doesn't?"

--------------------

She? The Daughter of Roan, the Heiress Apparent to the title of Dark Lady of the Warriors? She, bedrest?

Inconceivable!

In whirling, she shot her betrothed a scathing look, one muted a bit perhaps by the inexplicable fever now raging within her. Turning from him then, she draped herself over Panthar's shoulder.

"Oh here, let me!" she interjected smoothly as in one swift and unexpected motion she reached out around him to punch a button on the nav-board.

Momentum took hold of them all then, reminding them of the mastery of gravity, sending them all crashing willy-nilly as the ship yawed and pitched and proceeded to scream downward toward...

Whatever awaited them.

"Oh, goody!" ShaRhylla burst forth from her rather unladyline position on the deck.

"We're going home!"

--------------------

"Fine," she stated softly, but darkly. "I have offered you my assistance, and you have stated how desperate the situation is...

...and yet you sit here and twiddle your thumbs, waiting."

She quieted, her greeny-blue eyes locking on his. "What are you waiting for? For me to do something, something which I have the distinct feeling you know I cannot do?"

She quieted a moment, cocking her head, and moving closer. "If you are so certain of my abilities, then why don't you teach me?"

As Shayla's last statement trailed off into silence, she moved in even closer, her greeny-blue eyes boring holes in those of the Dark One's, something in them seeming to soften...

...yet growing more firm and certain at the same time.

--------------------

“I feel a concern,” he said, his voice steady. “If I take you into the Elseness, there is a chance we may not return from it. I have memories of it, strange images of being there – in nothing – yet I cannot reach for this and pull it forward to share. But to take you there, to place you in that peril…”

His hand reached out, upwards towards her face. It paused, hovering in the air a mere inch from Shayla’s cheek.

The Dark One closed his eyes and shook his head quickly, visibly clearing a thought. When his gaze returned to Shayla’s it was again filled with the mix of merriment and calm that had emanated forth since his encounter with Shayla.

...and more than that, by the One who had chosen to take her as a Sister.

Two sides...

Shayla tilted her head slightly, cocking one brow, her eyes yet focused omn Dark Phalomir as though she was looking deep within his very soul.

"A glimpse?" she queried then, her tone seeming somewhat nonchalant.

The truth was she was anything but. "And if the child is of the importance you state, and has been denied the right to live...

...the risk you speak of is worth taking."

She paused then, the look in her eyes only intensifying more. "I do not fear the Elseness; I have been there before."

And I do not fear the Darkness any longer either... came a final, if somewhat shocking, addendum to those words.

[ 10-25-2010 09:33 PM: Message edited 1 time, lastly by Shayla Stargazer Petrolu ]

--------------------

“Gaze out into the realm before you,” he said. “Peer out into all that I command. I may frighten you, but fear not at the moment, for I control it all and no harm shall come to you unless I will it. At the moment, I do not, my lady.”

He inhaled deeply, breathing in a sigh. Something played at the edge of his mind, and he longed now to return to the non-soil of his realm.