Vahn didn’t know exactly where he was in the Galaxy. He was a guest of the Rangers who had taken custody of the Sith Lords captured at Byblos, and they made sure that he would be incapable of leaking information as to… where-ever the red-haired Sith Lord was being kept. He’d been half-conscious, wracked with illness and nausea from his chronic hyperspace sickness so he’d be hard pressed to even give a time table. Everything he brought with him onto the station had been inspected, scanned, questioned, and sanitized. His lightsaber had been confiscated at the hall to the cell block, and all he had remaining were the few items on a tray held before him and a datapad tucked under his arm. A single masked Ranger guided him and his compatriot through the halls.
The cell block was sparse; all unnatural lighting and durasteel from roof to floor. Vahn could tell only that he was on some sort of starship or station from the fact that each cell seemed to have doubled as a kind of airlock; able to be vented into the vacuum at a moment’s notice. Was this some kind of black site?
Eventually the ranger stopped in front of one cell, and inserted a data cylinder into a lock by the door. It slid open and he gestured for Vahn to enter.
Inside, Vahn found the captured Sith woman. She was bound with stun-cuffs on her wrists and ankles preventing natural movement and would send a debilitating shock through her system the moment she tried anything. In a pinch, they could inject a strong sedative that could probably put down a mudhorn. The room itself was nearly bare; with a bench of sorts on one wall of the room next to a simple wash area, and a durasteel block on the other that served as the base for a thin mattress and bed sheets. In the center of the room, a barren, chrome table, with three chairs arrayed around it sat.
“Would you like some tea?” he asked, and set the soft plastic tray and data pad down onto the table in the center of the room. Three cups, and a tea pot sat atop it, all made from the same sterile clear plastic. “I tried to get some proper ceramics; only real way to drink tea but they denied me. Something about not letting crazy force users kill the guards with tea cups,” Vahn said, shrugging. The data pad was running a loop of footage from Byblos, as well as the few images and videos they’d managed to scavenge out of Denon and other battlefields across the galaxy.
He nudged one of the spartan chairs away from the table and sat down opposite Tiamat before setting about pouring a liberal portion of tea into the three cups.
“I made this from some sun-dried Dravnaran Jeeran leaves. Full bodied, and with a slightly nutty and sweet flavor. Wakes you up almost like a full cup of caff in the morning. Have you ever had this before? It’s a fairly rare species.” Vahn said.
“Fascinating plant. You see, Jeeran only grows on one tidal-locked planet. One half is permanently frigid night, the other blistering day. So there’s really only a narrow habitable zone around the planet’s equator where it’s warm enough to support life, but not so burning hot that it burns all life away."
“You find Jeeran on the very edge of the equator, just tipped to the side of eternal day. It should be impossible but, well, life is pretty amazing sometimes. These little shrubs found a way to survive. The stalks grew to develop extremely thick skins, almost like a rancor’s hide really, This protects against most of the sunlight; but it really can’t get any food energy from it that way. Bit of a paradox there; any other plant would have big leaves to capture the sunlight, but here the amount of sunlight would just kill the plant.”
Vahn leaned back in his seat, blue eyes intensely focused hawk-like on the Sith before him. He sipped quietly, appreciating the flavor momentarily before he continued.
“So, what the Jeeran found out it could do was have leaves that fan out when it’s safe, but when the sunlight grows too strong it has an outer layer of thick, waxy leaves that close up around them,” he squeezed his fingers around into a cone shape that pinched down on an invisible object.
“Bit of a problem there however. Sometimes the leaves don’t close all the way, and one of the leaves inside get exposed to a bit too much sun. The Jeeran is very good at collecting food energy from little bits of light but when they get too much the leaves plump up, and swell so that the protective leaves can’t close up fully. This exposes more of the leaves to dangerous levels of light and start to cause more of the inner leaves to swell up,” Vahn swirled the bit of tea in his plastic cup, before draining it and resting the cup back down.
“Eventually, toxins in the plant’s fibres start to build up and cause the whole Jeeran bush to die. It’s really quite gross to look at. The plant’s only option is to then wither the branch, and kill off the whole process. A complete waste. Now, the job of the harvesters is to go out every day to make sure the leaves have closed up fully to protect all of the leaves before there’s too much light. If they find any leaves are starting to swell up, they clip them out nice and clean. It’s a very labor intensive process; I spent a bit of time doing it myself after my fighter got cooked in a fight and needed repairs.”
He paused then, and folded his arms over his silver-white jedi robes.
“Sorry; I get carried away sometimes."
The cell block was sparse; all unnatural lighting and durasteel from roof to floor. Vahn could tell only that he was on some sort of starship or station from the fact that each cell seemed to have doubled as a kind of airlock; able to be vented into the vacuum at a moment’s notice. Was this some kind of black site?
Eventually the ranger stopped in front of one cell, and inserted a data cylinder into a lock by the door. It slid open and he gestured for Vahn to enter.
Inside, Vahn found the captured Sith woman. She was bound with stun-cuffs on her wrists and ankles preventing natural movement and would send a debilitating shock through her system the moment she tried anything. In a pinch, they could inject a strong sedative that could probably put down a mudhorn. The room itself was nearly bare; with a bench of sorts on one wall of the room next to a simple wash area, and a durasteel block on the other that served as the base for a thin mattress and bed sheets. In the center of the room, a barren, chrome table, with three chairs arrayed around it sat.
“Would you like some tea?” he asked, and set the soft plastic tray and data pad down onto the table in the center of the room. Three cups, and a tea pot sat atop it, all made from the same sterile clear plastic. “I tried to get some proper ceramics; only real way to drink tea but they denied me. Something about not letting crazy force users kill the guards with tea cups,” Vahn said, shrugging. The data pad was running a loop of footage from Byblos, as well as the few images and videos they’d managed to scavenge out of Denon and other battlefields across the galaxy.
He nudged one of the spartan chairs away from the table and sat down opposite Tiamat before setting about pouring a liberal portion of tea into the three cups.
“I made this from some sun-dried Dravnaran Jeeran leaves. Full bodied, and with a slightly nutty and sweet flavor. Wakes you up almost like a full cup of caff in the morning. Have you ever had this before? It’s a fairly rare species.” Vahn said.
“Fascinating plant. You see, Jeeran only grows on one tidal-locked planet. One half is permanently frigid night, the other blistering day. So there’s really only a narrow habitable zone around the planet’s equator where it’s warm enough to support life, but not so burning hot that it burns all life away."
“You find Jeeran on the very edge of the equator, just tipped to the side of eternal day. It should be impossible but, well, life is pretty amazing sometimes. These little shrubs found a way to survive. The stalks grew to develop extremely thick skins, almost like a rancor’s hide really, This protects against most of the sunlight; but it really can’t get any food energy from it that way. Bit of a paradox there; any other plant would have big leaves to capture the sunlight, but here the amount of sunlight would just kill the plant.”
Vahn leaned back in his seat, blue eyes intensely focused hawk-like on the Sith before him. He sipped quietly, appreciating the flavor momentarily before he continued.
“So, what the Jeeran found out it could do was have leaves that fan out when it’s safe, but when the sunlight grows too strong it has an outer layer of thick, waxy leaves that close up around them,” he squeezed his fingers around into a cone shape that pinched down on an invisible object.
“Bit of a problem there however. Sometimes the leaves don’t close all the way, and one of the leaves inside get exposed to a bit too much sun. The Jeeran is very good at collecting food energy from little bits of light but when they get too much the leaves plump up, and swell so that the protective leaves can’t close up fully. This exposes more of the leaves to dangerous levels of light and start to cause more of the inner leaves to swell up,” Vahn swirled the bit of tea in his plastic cup, before draining it and resting the cup back down.
“Eventually, toxins in the plant’s fibres start to build up and cause the whole Jeeran bush to die. It’s really quite gross to look at. The plant’s only option is to then wither the branch, and kill off the whole process. A complete waste. Now, the job of the harvesters is to go out every day to make sure the leaves have closed up fully to protect all of the leaves before there’s too much light. If they find any leaves are starting to swell up, they clip them out nice and clean. It’s a very labor intensive process; I spent a bit of time doing it myself after my fighter got cooked in a fight and needed repairs.”
He paused then, and folded his arms over his silver-white jedi robes.
“Sorry; I get carried away sometimes."
@Sreeya @GABA
