Day 11 - Sensory Deprivation - Star Wars

The master in charge of the Jedi Academy’s bacta facilities looked like something that had spilled out of one of the tanks one day and simply been appointed department head based on proximity. He was a semi-amorphous mass of fleshy pink with a couple different faces and a whole mess of arms and legs which seemed to have their own distinct goals in ambulation. When he saw Ahsoka, he settled into a roughly-human shaped form, though it was only convincing if you didn’t look at it for very long and didn’t notice the way that the eyes seemed to be hidden a few inches further back into the skull than you expect. Ahsoka sneezed.

“Padawan Tano,” It wheezed in a voice like air passing through a mine shaft, “I hear you are feeling unwell after your trip to Strega.”

“Yeah, I caught something there,” She coughed into her mask.

“Other than the runaway droid science probe, I assume.” It chuckled in a way that felt like somebody trying to push your eardrums toward each other, “You won’t be needing that mask. No known germ or virus can harm me.”

“What about unknown ones?”

“If one existed in creation, it would not come from Strega.” It chuckled again, “Tell me what happened while you were planetside.”

“On the mission?” She decided to give it a select version of the story, the one that didn’t involve her emotions almost getting them killed. If Anakin got to do that with the council, she could do that with the doctor. “We found the science probe not far from one of the farming villages, but the population had already stolen some of the parts for local repairs. Anakin wanted to force them to give the parts back so we could get the encryption key, but I argued that it wouldn’t be right, since the parts they had taken were being used for life-sustaining facilities. He agreed, since we had the data stores, but he warned that without the encryption key, we might not be able to decipher the findings soon enough to help, and that I may have to live with my decision to save lives today resulting in lives being lost down the road.”

“I see,” The doctor sounded almost disinterested, “And this sickness of yours, where do you suspect you got it? When did you start showing symptoms?”

“When did I get it? Probably in the village, a few of the farmers there said that a seasonal cold was going around.” She sneezed, “I started sneezing on the ride back, and by the time we landed at the temple my throat had started hurting and my nose was all stuffy.”

“Yes, seasonal cold indeed, most likely.” The doctor pressed a few buttons and one of the ports in the floor of the chamber slid open, “An hour in the tank should clear your symptoms completely.”

Ahsoka glanced at the “tank” in question, being little more than a dark, metallic hole in the ground with several little pipes leading into it from all sides.

“Aren’t bacta tanks usually… not a hole?”

“Being that the user needs to be undressed for the bacta to take effect, above-ground tanks are going out of style, and only used in desperate situations or ones where a better tank is not available.” The doctor explained, “I am sure the padawan will appreciate the privacy.”

“Oh? Sure.” Ahsoka looked down into the tank and then sat on the ledge, “I’ve just never used one before, so being down in the dark is a little… intimidating.”

“It is simple, you needn’t do anything once the process is underway.” The doctor explained, “Once you are down in the tank, you will remove your clothing and place it either up above or in one of the marked dry compartments. Then you will put the mask on and the tank will fill with bacta. From that point, you may do whatever you wish for the next hour. Sleep, meditate, or communicate with others through the force. So long as you aren’t thrashing about or trying to leave the tank, nothing bad will happen.”

“Right, okay.” Ahsoka slid down from the lip.

She slid out of her uniform and put it in the dry compartment in front of her, then closed it. She picked the mask up from the wall and slipped it on over her nose and mouth, then hit the ready button. The tank gave a series of beeps and the roof closed over her, shutting her in complete darkness for a moment before a soft blue light came on. Blue liquid, thicker than water but that felt like cool, wet air on the skin, started to pump into the tank from the holes all around her. It quickly came over her head and Ahsoka found herself floating in it, an odd weightlessness that didn’t feel like she was floating in any liquid. In fact, for the first time since realizing she had caught something, she was surprised to feel nothing at all. None of the slight aches, none of the stuffiness, nothing. If all she had to do to feel this wonderfully not crappy any time she was hurt or sick was to sit in a blue metal tube for an hour, she started to wonder why anybody chose to nurse their injuries the old-fashioned way.

Then the lights of the tank blinked off completely and left her floating in the dark. It took her by surprise, but after a moment she tried closing and opening her eyes. Realizing there was no difference. That explained why the doctor had said sleeping or meditating was generally the way to go while inside.

Ahsoka closed her eyes and took a slow breath in and out, not so much getting into a meditation pose as letting the lack of any real sense or another aide in her relaxation and focus on the space between the thoughts which served as the space to let the force in. She realized how much, every other time she’d meditated, she’d had to be aware of something or another. The sound of speeders passing by, the heat or the cold, even just the feeling of her seat pressing up into her butt from below and her legs growing numb. At first her mind was quiet, receptive to the nothing around her, but then her thoughts started to race a little more. She didn’t fight it, the thoughts would come as they wanted. Your mind was only perfectly clear some days, and the goal of meditation wasn’t to quiet the voices, just to see where they went without influence.

They went back to the mission. Strega had been a lot like home, what little she remembered of it. It was hot, the air dense and wet in a way that seemed to trap the heat and make it even worse. Sweat had been a constant factor, and every time she found herself somewhere that was the case, she found her mind a little harder to control than usual. Anakin had said that was natural, that he was the same way in dry places, but the line between the mind and the hormones… it was less thin so much as it didn’t exist. One of the boys in the village had smiled at her, something in his face hard to dig back out of her mind. Plump lips, big eyes, rosy color in his cheeks. The face had been popping up in her head ever since, even when she was trying to focus on something else. Even when she was dreaming. She remembered waking up one morning out of breath, her body weirdly hot, her head swimming. Anakin had said meditation wasn’t how one conquered emotion, but how one rationalized it. She had also seen the way that Anakin looked at Padme, so maybe he didn’t know everything about rationalization.

She jerked suddenly in the tank, an involuntary twitch of the muscle, perhaps, but she had felt with near certainty like something had brushed her leg in the dark. Her mind immediately went back to the holes which had pumped in the bacta. Wider around than a fist, more than wide enough to allow one of those slithering anemone things that had been down in the salt mine where the villagers had stashed the science probe. The ones that looked like a handful of grass tied together in the middle, that crawled on you when you weren’t looking like giant bugs, all slime but no malice. She remembered how Anakin had shrugged about them and casually brushed them off even when they prodded their feelers at his mouth and his ears, how he’d laughed but scorned her when she flung one off and stamped on another. Sure, all things were one in the force, but some things should be one on the other side of a pane of glass from the others.

There, again. Maybe it was just her skin crawling, likely she was just working herself up thinking about the creepy little things, but she swore something brushed her stomach this time, the pin-prick feeling of her skin breaking out in goosebumps. She tried to do the mental math. How many of them, in the space in the tank that she didn’t take up, could fit in with her without constantly brushing against her? The biggest one, the mother, would have to be pressed pretty tightly to the wall to not draw attention, but the smaller ones could have fit in the dozens if not the hundreds. The mental image of hundreds of little floating feelers in the dark around her was bad enough that she shivered and tried to think of anything else. She tried to think of the boy again, nameless but not faceless. They’d never even exchanged a word, she wondered if she stayed in his mind remotely the same way.

Ahsoka only realized that her whole body was tense like she was about to get into a fight when her neck started to ache. She forced herself to relax, stretching out in the tank until her foot accidentally brushed one of the walls and her heart jumped into her throat. She could hear her pulse thudding in her ears, seemingly loud as a drum without anything else to combat the sound of it. Forcing herself to extend her leg out, she brushed it against the same spot as before, reassuring herself that it was just a cold metal wall, even if it was the only thing present to her senses and she hadn’t been expecting it. Sometimes you jump over your own imagination.

Something definitely brushed her leg when she brought it back up. She was certain she could feel it, floating in the bacta right next to the inside of her thigh when she moved it around. Her movements felt heavier and slower than before, like whatever was in the tank with her was polluting the bacta and thickening it. It still didn’t feel like anything more than air against her skin, but air with something in it now. She tried to reach out and feel for what it was, even knowing the answer wouldn’t be good. She couldn’t find it. But now she swore she felt something brushing against the back of her other calf. She kicked her leg, but the bacta felt even thicker now around her, truly like water, so much so that the kick wasn’t strong enough to hit the wall. Both brushed her at the same time and she yelped into the mask, then another one brushed right around her stomach. There was no way all of these were isolated imagined things. She tried to push the notion of the tank swimming with hundreds of little unseen things from her mind and reached up to pound on the lid, but her arm couldn’t find it. She couldn’t find any of the walls around her either. She could have been upside-down, floating on her side. The tank could have opened to drain and sucked her down into a deep, dark pit of used bacta and she wouldn’t have noticed. She started to mutter, just trying to hear something even if it was only her own voice, but the mask swallowed it and left her in the silence. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or closed, not that she had been able to before.

Then a real touch came, not the glancing wisps from before but the feeling of something dextrous, warm, real against the inside of her thigh. She wished very badly for some kind of clock inside the tank that would tell her how long she still had left to go. But even if there had been one, would she still have been able to see it? How did she know she hadn’t been flushed down with all the other things now making contact with her in the dark? If she had been able to look over and saw she still had over fifty minutes left to go, would that have really made her life easier? Whatever was against her thigh squirmed, hard to feel the full shape of but definitely not a hand of any kind. It writhed and moved upward, brushing against her pussy. She tried to close her legs, but it had already wormed its way in there and wasn’t coming back out. Others seemed to be coming out of the dark toward her, crawling all over her and around her. Little writhing tendrils on her legs and face, her lekku and her arms, and worst of all her chest and between her legs. Tickling, wriggling, seeking. Covering her whole body now, no inch of it free of them, like the whole of her skin was in contact with thousands of slithering tongues that made her tingle where they touched. It was beyond writing now, beyond trying to swim away or bring them off, she simply tried to hold as still as possible and hoped they would pass her by. Think pleasant thoughts, try to picture the face of the boy. She couldn’t, all she could think about now was hanging naked, alone, in the dark, covered with impossible wholeness in the cave bugs from Strega. How their little feelers had probed at Anakin’s mouth when he spoke, how he’d jumped and pried them off when they would reach for his ears or his nose. The mask which covered most of her head protected her from that, but there were worse things still in their power to do.

And they did them. No sooner had she thought about it then she felt the little worming things on her body start to brush and feel at her navel, her exposed ears, her pussy and her asshole. They found no success with her stomach or her ears, but the ones which had sought further down grew increasingly bold as her body’s natural dimensions couldn't stop them. Little things, not even so large as a finger, started to work their way inside of her. Making up in quantity what they lacked in size, starting to trickle in by dozens when the first ones went uncontested. Suddenly the inside of her body was alive with them, constantly squirming, rubbing against things which made her breath come shallow and quick. The sensitive bud above her slit started to throb and swell, covered in them and constantly being moved past as the things made their way inside of her. She felt like she was filling, her stomach starting to come alive with the same intense tingling and shivering as between her legs and where they gathered at her nipples. She couldn’t help but picture them, when they had filled her pussy entirely, continuing to arrive at her ass, slowly filling her belly and continuing up into her throat. Would they overflow and fill her mask? Would there be enough of them? Would she still be able to breathe when they did?

With her guts churning she could feel pressure between her legs which she thought at first might be her pussy having been completely full, but it continued to grow, becoming desperate in its intensity. She wanted anything to do to relieve it. She tried to meditate, but it was too strong now to just go away. Her heart was pounding faster and louder now in her ears than before, like she had just run around the whole of the temple, like her life was in peril.

Suddenly something snapped, some point of no return was reached and the tension uncoiled in her like a spring breaking. Ahsoka’s eyes shot open, she hadn’t realized they’d been closed, and caught the blue lights of the tank from before back on around her as her body twitched and her legs clamped shut. Her cunt was throbbing, burning like she had a fever. A complete bliss, a pleasure like she hadn’t felt before, was rocking up from between her legs and through her body, making her eyes roll back into her head. She was whimpering into the mask, voice trapped for only her to listen to, before letting out a final relieved groan. The very real pressure from her dream abating slowly, messily, from between her legs. Leaving only the conspicuous absence of the things that had caused it. Had she slept, had she dreamed, or had the return of the light simply scared the creatures back into the pipes from which they had entered the tank? The pressure had been real, the bliss of its release had been real. Now with her senses back, she could only guess at what had happened in the long dark.

The tank began to drain, bringing gravity and noise back with it. There was a tired weight in her body that told her she would sleep well when she returned to her chambers, barring any other nightmares.

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