Clumsily, shyly, Madalee squeezed her eyes closed and reached out with her mind to see if the creature really was there. Her eyes shot open with a gasp, when she felt it curiously brush up against her. Her jaw dropped, and she looked at Tan'ya, gasping excitedly. "I felt it!"
"See? It's real."
...
But Madalee was no longer paying attention to her, pressing her head up against the egg and trying again. "Is it a boy or a girl?" She asked.
"We'll find out when it's hatched."
"What's her name?" Madalee asked.
"...Uh, what do you think it should be named?" Tan'ya hadn't even considered that.
"...Eggy!" Madalee burst out excitedly.
…No, Tan'ya definitely would not allow her sister to name it that. Tan'ya resolved herself to find a good name for it.
Tan'ya tried to teach her sister to read to it, though unfortunately she didn't take much interest in Master Sifo's history books or any other work of decent literature. Eventually, Tan'ya had to give up on developing her sister's tastes, and went with the market demand to read from a variety of colorful picture books.
Of course, her sister was still a very young child, and easily distracted. But when the egg cried out in the Force, Madalaee would rush off up the stairs to grab one of her favorite picture books and start reading it to the beast to help it. Of course she hadn't learned to read nearly as quickly as Tan'ya did, and mostly just made up her own stories to go with the pictures.
Whatever. As long as the egg was satisfied, Tan'ya was happy to let it be.
Eventually, Tan'ya finally found a name she was satisfied with during her studies. A name in the now lost dialect of the ancient jungle kings.
"Marnaidu Morma." Tan'ya finally settled on. "If your mother was the Beast that Holds the World Together, you'll be Wings of the Dawn."
Eventually, after a month of delay, they were able to say with confidence that the site was safe. No one who had been there when the experiment victims were uncovered had fallen ill. Tan'ya had probed the area with her mind to make sure nothing seemed strange, and though the whole research center left an unnerving chill in the force, nothing about the bodies in particular felt different at all from the rest of the place.
Slowly but surely, they unearthed the whole facility piece by piece, one careful shovel full of dirt at a time. Their progress was helped by the discovery of a map of the facility, secured in a safe in what seemed like the main security station, pinned underneath several bars of aurodium. Whoever the head of security had been, he was either well paid, or possibly planning his life as a fugitive.
The security station was directly connected to the armory, which at the time this place had been buried seemed to have been mostly emptied. Their main reserves of tibanna gas were down to their last quarter, which meant either they hadn't been restocked in a while, or they'd been engaged in heavy combat right up to the last minute.
With the map of the facility in hand, Tan'ya made the decision that they would focus their efforts on uncovering what seemed like the most promising room in the facility, the data storage backup. According to the map, all data gathered by the researchers was backed up into a main datacron at the very bottom of the facility, in a small room jutting off the central turbo lift.
The turbolift shaft itself proved to be the most difficult part of the dig. Much of it was filled in with dirt, and the shaft had been mangled out of shape as the building fell. Going carefully, using only hydrochisels and vibrohammers, Tan'ya's crew were able to gradually break up any rocks or pieces of concrete, and transport them up the elevator shaft one hover dolly at a time, each crew member fastened to the shaft wall with climbing harnesses in case the rubble at their feet gave away and they fell through.
Finally, at the bottom of the shaft they found the turbolift itself. With an ion torch, they were able to cut through its access hatch and climb inside, finally finding a sealed durasteel door. It was clearly heavy duty, with interlocking teeth, and worse still had been bent out of shape by the weight of the building. Cutting the lock to force it open wouldn't help, they couldn't move any heavy machinery down there either with turbo lift in the way.
"For goodness sake!" Tan'ya snarled. She turned to regard her work crew and ordered them, "Wait here, don't do anything, I'll be back in an hour. Take an early lunch break."
Tan'ya ordered her chauffeur to take her home. She had her own key to her father's office, and found the disassembled lightsaber of the ancient sith inside his personal vault. It wasn't hard to quickly clean it up and swap out the power pack, before turning it on experimentally. The red beam of energy rose from the handle, and Tan'ya smiled, before sending her father a text letting him know she'd borrowed it.
He hadn't seen the text by the time she returned to the digsite, presumably busy with something or asleep. At the bottom of the shaft again, Tan'ya ordered the construction crew to stand back as she ignited the blade, and carefully pushed it through the durasteel door. The steel glowed and burned as she cut, and Tan'ya had to borrow one of the men's goggles to protect her eyes. Carefully, she cut two lines to form a triangle shape in the door large enough for an adult to pass through, before turning the lightsaber off and stepping back.
The lines she cut were hardly straight, leaving a semi rectangular gap in the doorframe, but when she pulled on the glowing steel with the force she was easily able to remove the heavy block, and set it aside.
"There." Tan'ya gave a satisfied huff, and a wide smile to her men. "We'll give the durasteel thirty minutes to cool, then we'll finally see if the backups are intact." She hooked the lightsaber on her belt, and went to go find her own lunch.
After a nice little picnic overseeing the digsite, and checking her holocom to discover her father still hadn't checked his messages, Tan'ya made her way back down the shaft to at last see if she could finally claim the prize she had been seeking for so long, a sith primary source.
"I'm sorry, your Highness." One of the men explained, shuffling his feet nervously. "But there doesn't seem to be a data backup down here at all."
He was right. Apparently, at the bottom of this massive facility was some kind of safe room for a Sith VIP. It had half a dozen rooms, one was clearly for cleaning clothes, another dedicated exclusively to racks of expensive wine that now lay shattered, a cage with the remains of a juvenile Tirra'taka inside, a walk-in closet full of rotten robes and formal wear and a mannequin with a suit of golden armor, and a multitude of dead slave girls. They all wore explosive collars, and seemed to have been sealed inside when the building collapsed.
Tan'ya felt her excitement grow when she found a library. It had a multitude of datacrons, a veritable jackpot of information that Tan'ya found herself eager to dig through. Even if most of them were intended only for entertainment, even a glimpse of the culture and history of the Sith, as well as how they viewed themselves could be valuable.
"Your Highness, you need to come see this!" A workman called from another room.
Tan'ya stepped inside to find her crew surrounding a man frozen in carbonite. He stood there, encased in his block with his hands at his hips, an elaborate spined crown around his head and a heavy pendant at his neck. Most telling of all was the lightsaber on his hip.
His pose and weapon made it clear, this man wasn't a prisoner. He was the Sith whom this safe house was constructed for. Even with the floor of his resting place tilted at an odd angle due to the ground moving, his carbonite container wasn't damaged, though it had tipped over at some point in the past.
...
Apparently, chapters write themselves faster when Power Stones are involved. Who knew? Feel free to test the theory go ahead, toss a few my way.
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