User:Nayayen/Workbench

 Jedi Tower

"I wonder if any of my stuff's here.''" "You, uh, know this room?" "''Know it? For five years, this building was home."

- Zayne Carrick and Shel Jelavan.

The Jedi Tower, also referred to as the Tarisian Jedi Temple or Taris Academy, was a satellite academy for Jedi training built in Highport on the Outer Rim world of Taris. It was used by the Jedi Order prior to and during the Mandalorian Wars, a conflict between the Galactic Republic and the Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders. Isolated from other structures by a skybridge, the Tower was a tall, tapering building with the council chamber at the pinacle. Adjoining the main structure was a smaller, vertical tower that contained a ventilation shaft and a turbolift to access different levels of the Tower via walkways between the two. Surrounding the base of the Tower was a landing bay and a garden plaza.

In 3,964 BBY, the Tower was operated by the First WatchCircle of the Jedi Covenant who killed their students in the Padawan Massacre of Taris. However, one of the Padawans, a Human called Zayne Carrick, escaped the Masters' trap and was forced to flee offworld with the Snivvian Marn Hierogryph after being falsely labeled as the culprit of the Massacre. After the Masters' efforts to track Carrick down failed&mdash;with the Padawan even contacting them to say that he would track down and kill each Master until his name was cleared&mdash;and the resultant discontent across Taris, the council was recalled to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. Carrick returned to Taris later to assist Marn Hierogryph and the Taris Resistance. Also with the Resistance was the Togruta Raana Tey, one of the Masters responsible for the Padawan Massacre, but she and Carrick cooperated to aid the Resistance. The Resistance planned to assassinate Cassus Fett, the leader of the Mandalorian forces&mdash;who had taken the Tower as his own&mdash;by blowing up the Tower along with Fett inside. Tey, Carrick and Shel Jelavan were to enter the Tower beforehand to see if Fett was still inside but, simultaneously, a paranoid Tey planned to kill Carrick before he killed her as he had warned. When the plan was enacted, Carrick discovered that the Mandalorian leader was not in the Tower and was confronted by Tey. They dueled before the Human managed to convince Tey to stop. Hierogryph arrived to evacuate them by airspeeder but Tey became stuck and used her lightsaber to free herself. Perceiving this as a threat, the Snivvian overhead prematurely detonated the explosives and Tey was killed in the destruction of the Tower.

Foundations
The Jedi Tower was built before the Mandalorian Wars&mdash;a war fought between the Galactic Republic and the Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders&mdash;in Highport on Taris, a then-unaffiliated planet in the Outer Rim Territories of the galaxy.

The foundation of the Tower was part of a disused atmosphere control complex that once recycled the polluted air in the deeper Tarisian streets to remove the contaminants. A ventilation shaft ran vertically down from the storage level of the Tower into the foundations where other shafts opened out to the exterior. The atmosphere control complex was set away from the nearby residential buildings and other structures which meant that, to access the Tower, a skybridge was also built. The skybridge, which spanned the gap between a Highport plaza and the base of the Tower, was wide enough to accommodate a Mandalorian artillery cannon and was adorned by a colonnade consisting of six individual columns with a statue of a Jedi Knight at its end. Visitors using the skybridge would arrive at an entrance to the Tower that went below the landing area above.

Tower
On the floor above the skybridge entrance was the landing area. Shuttlebuses, airspeeders and other vessels would land here. The apron was staffed by labor droids to assist loading and unloading of cargo. The storage floor was accessible from this level.

Running parallel to the tower was a slimmer tower that held the turbolift that ran to the peak servicing all of the floors of the tower. Connected to the tower-proper by several hallways; the turbolift tower had a radio antenna at its peak. The very last stop for the lift was the hall connected to the Council Chambers. A droid waited at the entrance and performed retinal and full-body scans; checking identity and if they possessed any weapons.

Inside, the first layers of the circular base consisted of several classrooms and the dormitories for the Padawans. The Tower was equipped with many droids that were used for moving holoprojectors and other equipment. The halls often led to small open chambers and meditation lounges where the Jedi seers could focus on their visions.

The Council Chambers were similar to its counterpart on Coruscant, yet it lacked windows and had only five chairs. The walls had a gray and red design built into it and the chairs were in a similar color scheme. The ceiling was made of transparisteel and allowed light to shower the room in the day, and moonlight to bath it by night. It was in this chamber that the council member, the members of the First WatchCircle executed their Padawans on the grounds that they were protecting the galaxy from the Sith. Zayne Carrick, the only Padawan to escape would flee this room and dove down the turbolift tower to escape from the landing pad.



After the apprentice's bodies had been removed by coroner droids, Valius Ying brought Zayne before the council to be judged; though Ying would be the only one to die. After hearing the real story of the massacre, the accused apprentice was rescued from certain death when Arkanian Jarael shattered the ceiling and absconded with the Jedi prisoner.

After repairing the ceiling, the council was pulled off Taris because their superiors felt they were making the situation worse. With the Jedi gone, the invading fleet of Mandalorian warriors were free to make it their headquarters. Converted into a holocom strategy center, the chairs were filled with machinery and the sunken floor covered in holoimages.

The room would be left empty when the Mandalorians fled, though the chamber was destroyed when Marn Hierogryph detonated explosives in the lower levels.

History
The Jedi Tower was constructed some time prior to the Mandalorian Wars on top of a disused atmosphere control complex. Before the breakout of the war, the Jedi Order bought the Tower to set up a Jedi academy, choosing the building due to it being set back from residential blocks.

During the Mandalorian Wars, the Jedi Tower's Masters included Feln, Q'Anilia, Raana Tey, Xamar, and Lucien Draay, who was its head. The members of the First WatchCircle, a branch of the secret Jedi Covenant, used this as their base of operations as they searched for the Sith treasure, the Muur Talisman.

Draay was the only one of the five Masters stationed at the Tower not to be a Jedi Consular, and he served as the academy's head. It was unusual for a Jedi academy to have so many seers in one place because of the shortage in candidates; something the Coruscant Council was suspicious of. The masters were forced to disguise their movements in the Covenant by helping with Taris' crime and other issues.

The Jedi Tower of Taris was most notable as the site for the Padawan Massacre of Taris before the climax of the Mandalorian Wars. In 3,964 BBY, following Zayne Carrick's second escape from the academy, the Masters were recalled to Coruscant by the Dantooine Enclave, resulting in the Tower being abandoned. Raana Tey envisioned that the Temple would be destroyed by the Sith, possibly with the help of the Mandalorians.

During the First Battle of Taris, the area around the Tower took heavy damage, but the structure itself appeared to still be stable. It would later become the headquarters of Cassus Fett.

The resistance forces on Taris planned a mission to kill Fett by toppling the Tower with explosives placed at its base. Members of the mission to destroy the tower included Zayne Carrick, Shel Jelavan, Raana Tey, Gadon Thek, and Marn Hierogryph, along with members of the Hidden Beks. Carrick, Jelavan, and Tey would infiltrate the Tower to confirm Fett's presence, Thek would control the detonator, and Hierogryph would run the comlink connecting the two groups. However, at about the same time that Carrick learned that Fett had left, the main resistance base came under attack, and the plan was abandoned as the Beks rushed back to the fighting.

However, Thek and Hierogryph remained behind to extract Carrick and the others. They arrived in time to rescue Carrick and Jelavan, but Tey did not survive. When Carrick suddenly tried to rescue her, she attempted to cut herself free from the Tower, where she had become trapped. Seeing the raised weapon as an attack, unarmed, and too far away to help by any other means, Hierogryph detonated the explosives at the Tower's base. The Tower collapsed, taking Raana Tey with it.

Behind the scenes
The Jedi Tower first appeared in Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1: Commencement, Part 1, the opening issue of the Knights of the Old Republic comic series written by John Jackson Miller. The Tower served as the location for the initiation of the main plot of the series and the penciler for Commencement, Part 1, Brian Ching, even managed to include it in the very first panel.

The number of skybridges joining the main tower and the smaller, vertical tower varies between the appearances in the  Commencement arc pencilled by Ching, and the  Knights of Suffering arc pencilled by Dustin Weaver. The former clearly shows only four skybridges whereas in the latter, the Tower has five. It is unknown whether the number actually varied or if this is simply an error on the part of the artists.

Whilst writing Commencement, Miller sent rough schematics of the Tower to Ching due to the fact that every detail of the Tower had to be situated with the action scenes in the story arc in mind. Miller took a careful approach to writing Knights of Suffering, Part 2 with regards to the destruction of the Tower and stated on his website that "after September 11, 2001, I felt the proposed destruction of a skyscraper — even a fictional one during wartime — was not something I should approach lightly." He felt that Carrick's concern for civilians in the vicinity of the Tower was an appropriate reaction for a Jedi.

Appearances

 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 0: Crossroads
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 1: Commencement, Part 1
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: Commencement, Part 2
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 3: Commencement, Part 3
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 4: Commencement, Part 4
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 6: Commencement, Part 6
 * The Taris Holofeed: Siege Edition
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 16: Nights of Anger, Part 1
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 20: Daze of Hate, Part 2
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 23: Knights of Suffering, Part 2
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 24: Knights of Suffering, Part 3
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 26: Vector, Part 2
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 34: Vindication, Part 3
 * Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 40: Dueling Ambitions, Part 2