Forever in a Day

The pod had been designed as a panic room, she was an intruder in it, but it had not been designed to understand that. It hadn’t been designed to do a great many things.

If the fight had happened a week earlier, the pod wouldn’t have been capable of initiating stasis. If the fight had happened a week later, the pod would have been programmed with the hard limits that would have allowed for internal overrides or scheduled off-cycling. Neither of these things came to pass.

Because of this, she was undisturbed even as scavengers year after year came and picked the building clean of most everything with value. The looting of credits and technology turned to stripping wire and scrapping holocrons in the blank time between the processes enacting and the day they finally stopped. In that time, some scavenger stripped a wire out from a panel and began the emergency winding down of the sealant.

It wasn't a system that considered a high number of failure states. If the planet were stripped away and the pod was left floating into the heart of a star, it would fail physically before mechanically, leaving the inhabitant dead long before they woke up. If it were at the bottom of an ocean or buried in rock and unable to release the person inside, it would simply have kept working under emergency power, feeding off of the inhabitant on a low level until it registered that it would be safe to release or eventually simply euthanized them. However, neither of these things came to pass. In actuality, a scavenger stripped just the right wire to begin the emergency shutdown without triggering any of the neutralization protocols or causing an actual internal failure. It was a machine designed to do a hundred things to keep the routine going, but it had been unplugged. One can design a machine in spite of any number of variables, but one can't design a machine to work in spite of itself. The credits earned from selling the wire would be lost in a game of Pazaak intentionally thrown to keep a wookie from injuring the smuggler. In this way, the universe did not change entirely while Pip was away from it.

And so a long and slow process of thawing began. In retrospect, Pip might not have called it freezing. It wasn't cold. It didn't freeze a person, it stopped their perception. When the lock on her mind finally released it was as if no time had passed. But, for the next several weeks as it started to pulse the various life signs back to independent livability, she hung in a dreamlike hazy state that she might have confused for **** if she could remember how she entered it. However, after the first kick, dreamlike remained the operative word for it.

She remembered the first summer on Ryloth where she had been old enough to enjoy the hours in the higher caves where the heat reached through the mantle of the rock and brought on the breeding frenzy. How the sweet ecstasy of mating warmed the skin and sunk the heat deeper into the body. How only the night's cold air would **** the pile of exhausted Twi'lek from their nest and back into the deeper dens. They had to live in the caves once the winter ended. In the cold, they could function as normal above ground. But when the temperature began to rise the heat came on. It was either go into the caves or be caught by predators while indulging in bodily needs. If evolution hadn't brought the Gutkurrs up to the size where Twi'lek made good prey, her race might still have been wandering about the surface of Ryloth in the summers like they once had. Naked and unafraid, partaking in the communion of bodies as their biology motivated. It was something most other species couldn't understand. Mating, like motions of Lekku, was a language. There wasn't a cultural-biological reality of sexuality to any other race.

They didn't sweat, that was how a librarian at the temple had explained it once. Every race took in heat, most needed ways to cool themselves. Humans sweat, wookies panted, but the Twi'lek didn't have any sort of way to cool down. The tradeoff was that they rivaled only the Hutts in terms of how hard it was for one to dehydrate. It was useful to have, but a Hutt in the sun dried slowly until only a crusty shell remained. For the Twi'lek, the heat pooled, sent them into the breeding rut. They traded fluids, passing body heat back and forth all the while only raising their own internal temperature until, exhausted, they slept until it cooled or their needs woke them again. It explained the local legends which made the volcano the home of lustful spirits. It also made living off of Ryloth hard. If you couldn't find a planet which was cool all year round, you risked going into heat at any given time. Too cold, like Hoth, and you still froze to **** anyway. Her master had compared Twi'lek to temperamental tropical fish.

She remembered her master in something like a dream. She didn't think often about the time between coming of age and the first time she touched her mind against the ****, Dao Li had supplanted most of it. She remembered the training and the unity equally. The first time she'd learned to meditate and make contact with the will of the **** and the first time she'd told her master about her unique needs. Dao Li had been hesitant, suspicious even. Then she'd gone to the archives, learned how things were. This was a lesson of the **** that even the wisest masters needed sometimes to relearn. Even looking into the ****, one looked with eyes made of matter and minds carved by experience. Life was larger than you learned it. For Twi'lek, intimacy was as real as food and drink. Dao Li had come to it only slowly, like for her kind it was something fragile.

When she'd finally started to help, it was all one-sided at first. The master aiding the Padawan as she might give a pupil aid in an exercise. No communication in it, no ritual of it. Slowly, she had started to open her mind. When they were unified in the ****, it had been something beautiful.

The first thing she started to process again outside of the pod was the beeping of the failsafe system. Considering how slow the thawing process was, it was genuinely inhumane to have a warning bell that an immobile user would have to hear. It gave the suspended animation something new, it gave it time. The steady boo-womp of the alarm measured two and a half second spans that stretched out to measure minutes and then hours without break. If she could have moved, could have reached out with the **** to turn it off, she would have done so. But her mind had re-materialized before her body. It made everything real, gave it length, and let her count how long she was stuck like this.

Too long, it turned out.

The next thing to come, after a few thousand boo-womps, was her vision. It was limited. It was less that she could make out the things around her, more that she could make out just that there were things around her. It wasn't much, but she could make out a red light directly across from her in the enclosed space that flashed in time with the boo-womps. That, she reasoned, was likely the shutoff switch that would stop the noise. Movement in her arms or feeling in her body were still not there enough to do so. She could focus her mind as much as she wanted, but every time she tried to summon the **** it would wave down through her mind and into her body, sending the pins-and-needles sensations in her lekku and her stomach back up at her and hitting her with a wave of nausea. You reached out at the **** through yourself, made of matter, fumbling.

When she could see and hear and think, she was pragmatically alive again, just not enough to affect meaningful change. What fragments of the dreamlike state that had lingered were gone. She was a head, more specifically a set of eyes and ears, with skin she couldn't feel. Her body and limbs felt weightless and stiff at the same time, like she'd been resting in one spot for too long and was going numb and seizing up. She tried to move things, small and large alike, but it was a non-starter. Her lekku were numb, but if she focused, she could wiggle them and that was about it. Hers were also not flexible enough to reach the button. Some of her tribespeople had been quite talented that way. She had other talents.

It gave her time to think, if nothing else. Not that thinking was productive. She wondered if this was ****, if not, how effective actual **** would have been against her in comparison. She compartmentalized what had happened before her freezing, putting the image mostly together in her mind. She reached out as best she could for her master with the ****, but expected nothing and got nothing. If her master had won, she would have looked for her for as long as the mission allowed and then returned to the temple. Pip didn't hold any grudge about it, they'd been trained to do so since training had started. If her master was dead and the Sith lived, she was in some form of captivity. Maybe just imprisonment, maybe ****. She'd heard tale of Sith **** methods before, but all of them were a lot more direct than this. If her master and the Sith were both dead...

She made peace early on with the notion that she might have been in the pod for a very long time, but she considered it a worst-case scenario. She would either mourn her master or mourn their separation exactly when she felt there was time to do so, not a moment before.

Sleeping and waking started to blend together, her mind disconnected from the measure of days and her body too numb to give off hunger or thirst sensations. It couldn't have been that long, all things considered, but time dragged slowly and she simply closed her eyes again and tried to doze whenever she could, sometimes humming to try to drive away the steady boo-womp of the alarm. What was shocking was how quickly it became easy to sleep even as it droned on. What was more shocking was how that didn't dampen the raw agony of it when she woke up again.

And then suddenly, or perhaps it had gotten a little closer every day for a long time, she was able to feel her lekku, to move them a little more, to curl and uncurl her fingers weakly. She may have gotten impatient, pushed too far and too quickly, but she couldn't stand it any longer. She reached out with the **** and pushed the big red button, the noise went away.

The feeling of relief that washed over her... well it wasn't exactly orgasmic, but she had experienced less satisfying orgasms. As she reveled in it she heard the environment around her hissing and shifting. For a moment, she asked herself deep down if it had actually been a good idea to push a large, red, flashing button. That usually was how you coded buttons which were not meant to be pushed. However, she also reasoned on some level that, even if in the next few moments she died in a very painful way, it might ultimately have been worth it to make the noise go away.

What happened instead was that the hissing and popping around her rose to a cacophony and then dropped away as suddenly as they'd started. For a few moments, she experienced the first prolonged stretch of silence she could remember in a very long time, then the front hatch of whatever it was that was holding her popped from its hinges with a blast that couldn't have been that loud but which revealed just how quiet the alarm had actually been. She was suddenly standing in low light, standing being an operative word. Her mind had time to process that she still couldn't feel the legs that she was expecting to hold her weight before she toppled forward, barely managing to throw her arms out in front of her to stop herself from cracking her nose on the floor. She landed in a limp heap at the base of whatever isolation chamber she'd been in before.

She was alive. That or the afterlife was a little more complex than she'd been told.

Life was sensations, however muted and minor the ones she was able to feel from her place on the floor were. A light but noticeable breeze rich with the smell of sulfur, a lifetime of experience told her it was a cave wind. The air in a cave trying to match the pressure of the air above ground. A very low flicker of light, almost nothing but not nothing. She was either deep or far in. If she'd opened the chamber to find herself in a lake or in the middle of a jungle, she wouldn't have been as equipped to read her surroundings. Although, in her current state, if she'd opened the chamber in either of those places, she'd have had bigger problems. That was assuming of course that there wasn't a bigger problem right around the corner in the dark come to eat her or inject paralyzing venom into her. Reaching out with the ****, she couldn't feel anything that seemed like imminent **** nearby, but there were always limitations.

Feeling drained down into her slowly and with some degree of pain and discomfort. Without the alarm, it got harder to measure how long it took her to get feeling back, but it felt longer. Perhaps because she was closer now to something like being able to function again, perhaps just because it took longer. It was hard to say, she only had a patch of ground and the geothermal behavior around her to go off of.

When her arms were strong enough, she pushed lightly and managed to flip over onto her back. The rocks were not comfortable, but the fact that she could tell that was a sign of progress. If she really tried now, she could wiggle her big toe very slightly. There had been a fear that she might not walk again. There had been a lot of fears. She had controlled them. That was part of her training. But it also helped to have something to focus her mind on that wasn't her fear. For a while, that hadn't been a possibility. Now, she reached out with the **** and pulled a small piece of one of the stalactites from the ceiling, holding it in the air and pulling it down to look at. She could make out little streaks of iron bacteria running through it, like veins jutting up through fleshy bodies descending in hundreds from the looming roof of rock. The planet was alive, not just in the way in which all things live through the ****, but in the sense that it still had an atmosphere and could support some manner of life. In a thousand little ways, she could overcome the limitations of her situation. She could learn, make observations, and she could plan.

The feeling was almost fully back in her arms now, even if the burning, itching pain of the thaw still lingered. She drew a hand up to her chest and felt the weight on her body as her breath rose and fell in her chest. Beyond that, the fabric of her robe, how she could pull it up to her mouth and not just feel it but smell it and even taste it too. The smell was slightly stale after however long in suspended animation, but the fabric was just as soft as it had been the day she got it. Jedi robes, warmer than polar gear when it was cold out and more breathable than tuskan garb in the heat. Below that...

More of what had come before came back to her. The disguise, the plan, the chase, and the fight. She had spent however long now in a **** uniform, and when she remembered she was wearing it her body woke to the sensation of the strings and the metal. She could feel the slight pinch of the top around her back as it hugged her chest to her body, she could almost **** herself to feel the ride up of the bottom too. Almost.

Wherever she was, she would need to replace the costume as soon as possible as a first priority. Beyond any sort of indignity of it was the notion that she might be actually mistaken for one and taken into custody. Outer Rim planets like Denton, if she was still on Denton anyway, usually still recognized slavery. That was if it wasn’t Mandalorian or Hutt controlled, meaning slavery was actively enforced. If she was lucky, she'd be seen as a runaway and left to her own business. That also was extremely unlikely. Hutts loved Twi'lek slaves and nature supported them enough to almost qualify the slugs as a predator race. The temperature which was most aligned to keep a Twi'lek dumb and subserviently horny was almost exactly the one that Hutts lived comfortably at. And anything a Mando didn't understand, it tended to shoot.

So the plan started to take shape. When she could move, she would leave the cave and establish where she was. Whether it was a place which would be conducive for her survival or not didn't matter, her next priority was to replace her outfit. Naked was not an option, **** gear was possibly a worse option, and forever wrapping herself in her Jedi robes and just hoping for the best was not a smart option.

They trained for things like this, not this exact situation maybe, but survival situations both in the pure wilderness and marooned on a foreign world or station. There were levels of difficulty to it. Some places would have Jedi temples, most places would have people with some loyalty to the Jedi order, and everywhere had places where the name Jedi meant something. Whether or not that was something good was another matter. She just couldn't know what difficulty level she was working under until her legs worked again.

She was starting to run over the realistic possibilities of where she was when the sensation started to creep back into her legs. It was almost like waking up from anesthetics, suddenly realizing not that she felt any sort of way in the numbed area, but realizing that the numbed areas did in fact exist and could, in fact, feel things.

She managed to pull herself up to seated and started massaging her thighs to help circulation when her body remembered how needy she'd been when she was frozen. It wasn't the same, the time away from herself had dulled the hunger at least a little, but she felt her cheeks going flush. Something in the back of her mind pointed out that while she had been given an unspecified amount of time to compose herself, she'd also spent at least that long being blue balled in some form. It was hardly at the top of her list of problems, but it still made her mind a little more sluggish, a little harder to focus. She could feel it happening to herself, that was the training against the bodily instincts working against the actual form for you. On some level, the matter still won out. Always would if it was hot enough outside.

She tried to rise and fell back down before she got fully to her feet. She focused again on bringing back motion to her legs, trying to make sure she could manage the full range of motion in her hips and then in her knees. As much as the numbness had started to subside top-down it also seemed to be moving skin-inward. One didn't really think about the fact that they could feel their organs until they did so again after an extended period of it not happening. She wasn't hungry or thirsty, her stomach likely still containing the preserved food and drink she'd had at the Split Rivers. That erased one problem, or at least delayed having to solve it. Hypothetically, if she was still on Denton, it would be a long walk back into town, following the river the whole way. She'd be victim to Blood Biters and Bulgeworms the whole way, there would be spaces where the hard rain would reach her, and it would be hot enough to make her condition worse no matter what time of day it was. But at the very least, she'd know where she was.

Her eyes had adjusted enough to the cave lighting to make out where the brightest light was coming from. She started out almost dragging herself, trying more and more to wake up her legs until she was almost crawling. Finally, after a great amount of effort, she stood up, took a step, and then collapsed against the cave wall.

She was upright at the very least. Reaching out for support she shuffled along slowly, letting the process flow naturally as the motions grew easier. Finally she let go of the wall and took a breath, moving under her own power again. In this, there was victory. She spoke just to hear her own voice, finding her throat less dry than she expected.

As she moved the air grew warmer, starting to near the levels she could bear comfortably. While her mind was still focused she committed the path she had taken to memory for if she needed to reverse it. She also made note of her surroundings, how the stone of the cave grew softer and sandier, how along the walls at times could be seen the slots where globe lights would have been set in the past. When her mind started to get fuzzy around the edges, as the early signs of heat started to show up, she let her mouth hang open to breathe to try to cool herself. She muttered the stages of her plan to herself, burning them into an **** space of her mind like leaving herself a note.

And then she turned a corner and the light of the outside world shone in on her, suddenly bright and overwhelming. Without fully thinking it through she dashed out through the cave entrance.

The sun beat down from above like an angry god, bringing with it a scorching dry heat on levels she'd never experienced before. Her legs wobbled weakly as she staggered out of the cave, one of her boots catching softly on a hunk of metal buried in the sand around her. The temperature was beyond summer, beyond environmental systems failing. Like being caught on a flat pan of rock frying under a microscope. What scanty breeze rolled by only pushed waves of grit into the air. She bent and brushed the sand from the metal that had caught her foot, then moved five paces to the side of it and brushed to expose the other hunk laying rotting and long stripped of usable parts. Like two sets of bones lying bleached in the sun, one a beast meant for a single rider and the other for a pair.

Denton then, just with some changes.

Between the rolling dunes to either side were decaying canyons of sheet rock which had once been the river bed they had followed to the Sith temple, now itself little more than disheveled and bleached rocks in the middle of nowhere. She started along the bed, trying when she could to walk in the meager shade the rock walls would provide, but finding most of it to be directly exposed. The walls on each side were piling sand and uneven rock, while the absolute riverbed was covered in flat cracked mud slowly giving way to soft sand. Water had run here at least in the past year, if it would run again was a different question. She needed very badly to be touched. She focused on trying not to step on the lightning-bolt jagged cracks in the mud as she walked the bed of the river. Some mixture of old cultural ethos and pure primal brain still remaining.

There was, of course, some current of fear in the back of her mind that she had woken up on a dead world. Scattered salt brush argued against it at least a little. Small patches of green and auburn in the blaring blonde of the desert. Things adapted to live even in a place like this, some twisted amalgam of what they had been before. The long walk back to town wasn't eventful, but when she would find her mind wandering to bodily desires she would refocus herself and have momentary glimpses of focus and attentiveness. Things that did and didn't matter. It passed the time.

If somebody had asked, she couldn’t have pinpointed the exact moment that the salt brush had shifted in her mind from scientific names to “scratchy plants.” Perhaps it happened slowly, perhaps it had simply been the difference between two breaths. She spoke to hear herself again, feeling the heat haze in her head. Her words were slower, higher pitch, squeaks and whimpers. Her narration shifted from the mantras of her training to what she wanted to do when she got back to town. What she’d eat when she was back at the temple. How she would make Dao Li feel bad about leaving her behind at least for a short while before they kissed and made up.

Once, when she’d been young, there had been a sort of horror to feeling the change roll over her. Especially when she’d been early on in her Jedi training, when she still thought to some extent that her natural impulses might be something wrong and not something that could be beautiful. Feeling the pathways of her mind shifting had stopped being scary after a while, just the way things were, just how they would be. Maybe that had also been all at once or over the course of a while.

She had trouble describing it at the best of times. On the most basic level, it was like losing the voice in her head that talked about memories and feelings. In its place thinking about them in colors and emotions and sensations. Dao Li had talked about something like that once… how had she said it?

“Smart and dumb aren’t really real, silly. Some people are just more influenced by what they’re experiencing and one is more influenced by what they’ve experienced. You can be just as smart of a girl when you’ve got a dummy brain.”

She probably hadn’t phrased it like that. Impulsive and compulsive were words that existed somewhere in her mind, she just couldn’t have said which was which.

It wasn’t a perfect switch to flip either. Every now and then, some compulsion would come over her to stop walking, to sit down and touch herself to at least bring the edge down off of the intensity. Each time, a booming voice somewhere between her rational brain and pure evolutionary instinct would scream back at her.

“If you do it now, you won’t stop until nightfall. You don’t know when that is. You don’t know if one is even coming.”

There were planets that didn’t have night. She’d learned that in the library. There were also planets that got hotter at night than they were in the day. The voices both existed, it was just about which one was louder.

She heard the speeder long before she saw it. She considered doing something to flag it down, but when she leaned to the canyon wall and heard the sound bouncing off of the rock back and forth to either side she sighed and kept trudging along, waiting for it to come her way. When it finally rumbled to a stop behind her, she turned and shielded her eyes against the sun. It was already fairly crowded, three people to a four-seater. All of their armor looked super familiar. She tensed slightly, but she was only a Jedi so far as she gave them reason to think she was.

"Hey, you!"

Not the kind of words which should have had any significance. It was also the first words she'd heard in a long time. They sounded almost musical, her own voice sounded rough in her ears. The squeakiness and girliness turned up to eleven even beyond what she had thought she sounded like.

"Me?"

The armored man who had stepped out of the vehicle looked to either side of her confusedly. The other two in the speeder sat a little uneasily. She had definitely seen armor like that before. It wasn’t the same, stuff was different about it, but it looked like the same person had made it.

"Uh.. yeah, you.” The armored man twitched his arms awkwardly at his sides, “What are you doing out here? You're a long way from civilization."

"I'm trying to get to Pome, what about you?"

The man in the armor looked at her for a moment and tilted his head before raising a hand to his ear. Even if he was whispering inside his armor, she could make out his voice.

"Checkpoint Bolus, walker is potentially delirious."

"Roger, continue assistance but be prepared to apply sedation if the situation deteriorates."

"Roger."

She held back on telling them that she was fine, that her type didn't dry out like most others. Most people found it uncomfortable when you could hear something they didn't mean you to.

"We're on a patrol run up to Central Base. You should come with us, it'll be a much quicker walk from there to Pome. We just need to take you in for questioning, nothing serious."

The name suddenly clicked into place in her mind. Before she could stop herself, her lips were moving.

"You guys look like Mandolorians! If you guys were Mandos, I don't suppose you'd be nice enough to tell me, would you?"

Apparently this was funny enough to prompt a look between the three of them.

"Mandos? No, lady. We're Empire Patrol. Are you feeling alright? We have water and food rations in the speeder if you need some."

Something about the way they talked both in general and on the radio made her stiffen slightly. She didn't know what Empire they were talking about, and she suspected it might be a while before she did. What they were was armed, armed and speaking in the sort of **** calm of soldiers. The distinction was that they were reigned in somewhat by the brutality of the environment around them. Mercs and slavers... well you needed a certain base level of cruelty to do those jobs. Professional soldier types, even the meatheads, there was usually some shred of humanity in them that the institutions had to beat out. On a barren, cooking rock like this, the complete inhospitality of nature was a common ground. The concern seemed genuine. For the time being, she could be the dumb, helpless Twi'lek stranded in the desert. It wasn't even completely wrong.

"I'm fine, I'd be happy to come with you." She stepped forward slowly and raised her empty hands into the air for them to show she wasn't carrying any weapons. "Just some questions back at base, right? I know how it works. You guys will be gentle with me, right?"

One of them in the back reached up and tapped a button on the side of his helmet but didn't say anything. As she stepped closer the self-appointed leader held up a hand to stop her.

"Just a second, we need to do a quick search to make sure you aren't carrying anything illegal."

"If you want," Pip held her hands out at her sides and nodded. “But I promise I’m not.”

The leader nodded to one of the ones in the back and that soldier hopped out and sauntered over to her lazily. He craned his neck to either side, looking at her face from behind his mask before reaching out and lifting her lekku. She shuddered and sucked in air sharply, causing him to take a step back in confusion. She cleared her throat and looked at him apologetically and he continued. He clapped his hands down her arms gently, then under her arms and down her sides. When he reached to pat her legs he slipped his hand into her robe and tugged it to either side and then froze, then stood up and pulled her robe down around her shoulders. She shrugged out of it and focused, getting ready for things to get bad.

"Shit," The searching trooper grunted before he turned to his leader, "I think we've got a runaway **** here."

The leader stepped over while the third got out of the speeder slowly.

"You, are you one of Teeka's girls?"

"Who's Teeka?"

The leader turned to the pat down man and gestured.

"Check her back, Teeka likes to give his slaves tattoos."

The pat down man circled behind her and Pip felt his hands on her shoulders pushing her before they slid down and untied the knot holding her top together. She didn't bother trying to keep it from falling off. With her chest exposed the leader reached out and brushed his hand over one breast and then the other, lifting and prodding each to check the area under and around them. It had the framing and outward appearance of a professional check, but the man's hands lingered a little more than they perhaps needed to, his gaze not so much searching her as enjoying watching her.

"I could be chipped or something, you should give them a squeeze to be sure." She smiled at the leader.

She heard a breathy, dismissive sound under his breath in response.

"Nothing back here, but I should take off the rest to be sure." The pat down man chuckled.

"I don't think we want to be out here for the rest of the day." The leader grunted.

"No, we don't." The third, a female voice, finally spoke. She immediately stepped in front of the leader and spoke in a far more authoritative voice. "If you aren't one of Teeka's, who do you belong to?"

Pip hesitated for a moment before taking a slight risk. She took a slow breath and waved her hand slightly, throwing an extra depth to her voice.

"I'm not actually a ****, me wearing this is just a funny accident."

It wasn’t even wrong, but without a mind trick her chances of being believed were slim. If she wanted to be sure they weren't Mandos, she'd have to try the risky stuff eventually.

That she hadn’t aimed it at any of them in particular only occurred to her a moment later. Maybe it affected all of them, maybe none of them. It was hard to tell with their faces obscured, and the verbal responses always came on a delay. The one behind her didn’t comment, squeezing her ass idly. The leader’s hands went fairly limp and the girl’s helmet dropped slightly.

“It’s just an odd coincidence,” The girl finally responded in confused agreement.

“Stranger things have happened,” The leader added.

“I don’t know, maybe we should do a more thorough check,” The one behind her snorted.

The leader shook his head, “We really can’t afford to be out here the rest of the day. We take her back to Pome HQ and let them sort her out.”

“And if we decide the speeder broke down and we’re a bit late coming back?”

“We’re taking Gunney’s medication back with us, if we’re late and he dies it’s on our ass.”

“Don’t we hate Gunney?”

The female shrugged, “We might, but his dad the commander doesn’t. You like getting court martialed?”

Both of the men seemed to shudder.

The pat down man grumbled and bent to pick Pip’s robes and top up off of the ground and handed them to her.

“I’ll never forgive Gunney for this one.”

“Seek your stress relief on shore leave, private. Besides, you probably don’t want Twi’lek girls, this one looks sketchy.”

“You may not want Twi’lek girls,” the pat down man sulked his way back to the speeder. “But you’ve also got dry ice between your legs.”

“All of my girlfriends have been sketchy, and I’m doing great.” The leader scoffed.

Pip slipped the robe back around her shoulders and didn’t bother with the top, slipping it into her pocket instead. The woman gestured for her to climb into the back of the speeder and Pip followed.

“Will I be able to make contact with the Republic from your HQ?” Pip risked asking.

All three helmeted faces turned to her wordlessly and stared in silence for a moment.

“Told you she was sketchy.” The woman muttered under her breath.

“Pardon me, I may have been… wandering the desert for some time.” Pip squeaked with embarrassment.

“If you’re talking about some kind of Twi’lek group, you’ll have to take that up with HQ. If you’re talking about The Republic as in the galactic senate, you just missed them by a few dozen years.”

Pip smacked her head in fake embarrassment, “Forgive me, I was referring to a group among the Twi’leks, I often forget that the term can be confusing to those of other races.”

The leader shrugged, “As I said, take it up with HQ.”

A moment later, the speeder hummed to life and shot across the canyon floor. Despite how long it felt like she had walked, the sun was still just as high in the sky as it had been since she left the cave. It took a moment for it to dawn on her that letting herself be taken back to base might not be the best path forward, but the canyon rocks were already whipping past fast enough that bailing out wasn't an option, even if the troopers all hadn't been armed.