User:Chauvelin2000/Sandbox

The Mission to Typha-Dor took place in 25 BBY.

Soon after their mission to Mawan, Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and his sixteen-year-old Padawan Anakin Skywalker were assigned a new mission by Jedi High Council member Master Mace Windu to the planet Typha-Dor, whose rulers had pleaded for the Galactic Senate's help.

Prelude to peace
Vanqor—the largest planet in the Uziel system—was, in 25 BBY, aggressively pursuing an expansionist policy of invasion. Vanqor was poised to attack and invade Uziel's last free planet, Typha-Dor. The system's resistance fighters, having pooled together a coalition from the ranks of its worlds, were able to find refuge on Typha-Dor and were staunchly determined to 'hold out' against Vanqor's colonization efforts—its imminent, though unwarranted, invasion.

To assist in reconnoitering the enemy fleet's secret movements, Typha-Dor had set up a surveillance outpost at an obscure location, upon a remote and nameless moon—known only by its coordinates, TY44. The satellite's packed snow and ice made it almost impossible, however, to get crews in and out. The resistance fighters knew that the Vanqors were close to discovering the crew's hidden post. It was therefore critical that news of the enemy's plans and the orders to abandon the post reach the crew, which had not been heard from in weeks. Their comm units were perhaps down—or worse, they'd already been attacked.

It thus became the Jedi team's mission to ascertain the situation as well as the threat and, if possible, to rescue the ten-member TY44 outpost crew, and return them safely back home.

Kenobi and Skywalker had been dispatched by the Jedi Council alone in this endeavor, as the Order's ranks were being stretched ever thinner by the mounting crises and threats to peace that were developing throughout the galaxy. Anakin, moreover, was still trying to recover emotionally and spiritually from the death of Master Yaddle on Mawan. He had last seen her held tightly by the Force, suspended above him in a night crowded with stars. Having absorbed the power of a bomb with her body, she'd saved an entire population—and was now one with the Force.

Skywalker had attended Yaddle's memorial service in the Great Hall of the Jedi Temple, and at that time the enormity of her absence threatened to swallow him whole. He had blamed himself for Yaddle's death, and he could not reveal to those present the emotion of his grief, which seemed to coil about his chest like a great serpent, squeezing the air from his lungs. Neither could Anakin forgive himself for the mistakes he'd made. Indeed, he didn't know how he ever might get to a place where he could forgive himself. Unlike his Master, Anakin had not been able to find a way to live comfortably with grief. Somehow after Qui-Gon's death, Obi-Wan had been able to continue steadily on. Anakin felt that, because of this, perhaps his Master didn't feel things as deeply as he did; that he perhaps felt far too much to ever be a Jedi. For he hadn't yet been able to achieve the distance from the Living Force that other Jedi were able to maintain. Anakin felt therefore that he needed to find a way to shut out his feelings, to seal off or close a door on them, and then possibly be able to press forward.

Arrival on Typha-Dor
Throughout their hyperspace journey, ever since they'd left the Core in a Galan starfighter, the Master-Padawan team were silent. They hadn't spoken, as they flew on navcomputer, headed for the Outer Rim sector of Sertar. Their muted companionship and thoughtful reflection emanated, in part, from Yaddle's deeply felt passing; in part, from the widening expanse of a relationship marred by loss of trust. Though Obi-Wan, through gentle humor and small gestures of encouragement, sought to help Anakin, his Padawan spurned that help. And Anakin himself did not know why. Now, as they approached the gray, clouded satellite-moon above Typha-Dor, Anakin looked forward to what promised to be a difficult mission—one he could "lose himself in."

Easing out of hyperspace, the small starfighter was almost immediately detected by the radar of a large gunship fitted with quad-laser cannons and concussion missiles. Evading the turbolaser cannonfire and tracking missiles, the Jedi dropped through heavy cloud cover to the moon. Landing among its snowy glaciers, they fitted themselves with survival gear, stepped out into the silent cold and wrapped their ship in a camouflage of white tarp.

They started out over the frozen landscape covered in thin ice. Obi-Wan's mind wandered to brood on the tall, silent boy at his side: when he was Anakin's age, the death of a Jedi Master had seemed to him inconceivable. One so strong in the Force as Qui-Gon Jinn he believed could cheat death. He knew better now, of course, having seen Jedi Masters fall. Yarael Poof had recently been lost to the Jedi Council, and now Yaddle (who, Kenobi was convinced, had foreseen her own death). Growing lawlessness in the galaxy had made it a rougher and harder place. Obi-Wan's own growing caution, he could sense, would one day conflict with the desires of his headstrong apprentice, but he could not stop what he saw would be inevitable. Yaddle's death had increased the distance between him and his Padawan, had changed them both. At the same time, Anakin's pure connection to the Force meant that Obi-Wan, in some ways, had little that he could teach him.

In other ways, there was still so much that he could offer his young, powerful apprentice. For being a Jedi was far more than commanding the Force—it demanded the inner serenity needed to access it in the best way. Yaddle's death had shaken Kenobi to the core: was it possible that Anakin had too much power? But Obi-Wan could not give up on his Padawan, nor on trying to find a moment to address the tension between them; he would not allow this concern to get lost in the galaxy's teeming troubles or the chaos that surrounded them.

Outpost saboteur
"We are Jedi, sent by Typha-Dor ... You must be Shalini." "So our leaders have remembered we exist..." "But where are the rest? There are supposed to be ten of you." "Not anymore ... We had a saboteur in our midst."

- Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and Shalini, crew leader of the TY44 outpost.

Having walked silently through kilometers of icy snow, Anakin and Obi-Wan felt like frozen jujasickles. But through the wind-ruffled snowflakes their electrobinoculars could at last make out the mountain-range outpost rising from the moon's glaciers. And while they took great care to avoid detection by the Vanqors, that the outpost's location stay hidden from enemy eyes, they suddenly heard a distant explosion behind them: the enemy had blown up their starship. Now the Jedi's stay on the moon might be much longer than they'd hoped. Through blizzard and deepening shadows, Kenobi and Skywalker made the punishing trek up the glaciers toward the outpost as temperatures began to fall with the coming night. Cable launchers, thermal gloves and gear were indispensable, but their limbs still felt frozen by the time they reached what should have been the holdout coordinates. Anakin was the first to perceive the location of the hidden base. Covered in ice, its outer fascade made of thick white material that could withstand extreme cold without cracking, the TY44 surveillance outpost appeared at first as nothing more than a massive ice wall. But then the ice groaned, and there appeared out of the glacier-face opening a slender human female with silvery eyes holding a well-aimed blaster—Shalini, the crew leader.

As the Jedi were led by Shalini into the holdout, Kenobi advised her that the leaders of Typha-Dor had tried to reach them but that the surveillance group's comm unit was down. It had been down for over a month, Shalini confirmed, because of a saboteur among them. With lights illuminating at half-power, the Jedi soon beheld a room of weapons racks, surveillance and data equipment, a blaster-fire damaged communications console—and four other blaster-wielding crew members aiming their weapons their way. Setting them at ease, Shalini introduced her crew to the Jedi: Mezdec, husband of Shalini and first officer, but now also comm officer (after Samdew, the alleged saboteur, had been shot and killed when Mezdec discovered him attempting to transmit intelligence to the Vanqor fleet); Thik, a weak-looking man; Rajana, a muscular woman; and Olanz, a tall, balding man. Kenobi and Skywalker shared with the crew, who were almost out of provisions, the extra protein pack rations they'd brought with them as they listened to the rest of Mezdec and Shalini's story.

Mezdec explained that Samdew—their crucial, but now traitorous, senior information systems analyst—had destroyed their comm system right after the crew had discovered the Vanqor invasion plans. He'd also sabotaged their transport. It was in the middle of the night that Mezdec caught the saboteur, who was at the comm console, attempting to send his first treacherous communication to the Vanqor fleet (before then, he'd strictly been in "deep cover," just until the crew had learned something vital by cracking Vanqor's code). Realizing he was a spy, Mezdec said he blasted the console, not wanting to kill the man, but when Samdew turned toward him, he blasted him in the chest. Rajana and Thik, hearing the shots, next rushed in, whereupon Samdew, who'd fallen, shot Thik in the knee. Rajana then entered and fired the fatal shot, killing Samdew. What none of them knew was that, before he died, the saboteur activated the fire system, which put it into lockdown and sucked all the oxygen out of the sleeping quarters. He'd disabled the warning siren but not the procedure, which killed the other sleeping members of the crew, who all suffocated (for, with Samdew's undercover mission ended, it was easiest for him just to eliminate the crew). They were dead before anyone knew what had happened; all the crew members, of course, were meant to have been targeted—all originally were meant to die in their beds.

Shalini handed Kenobi a small disk to momentarily look at: it contained the details of the enemy's plans—troop movements, coordinates, invasion sites. Getting the information to Typha-Dor was now critical. Having destroyed the Jedi starship, it was only a matter of time before the Vanqors found the surveillance outpost. Mezdec, a good mechanic, had yet been unable to fix their sabotaged transport. "Let me try," offered Anakin—a genius at fixing the unfixable.

Precarious partings
"We don't have much [fuel]. I ran our options through the computer. The only way to get to Typha-Dor is by the shortest route. That's going to bring us right into Vanqor airspace." "This just keeps getting better ... We'll have to risk it."

- 16-year-old Jedi Padawan Anakin Skywalker and his Master Obi-Wan Kenobi at the TY44 satellite surveillance outpost. Despite the crew's lack of confidence in Kenobi's Padawan to fix a ship that the very competent Mezdec could not fix in the more than six weeks he worked on it, Obi-Wan would not lose faith. They ignored his attempts to instill hope and make more positive the outpost ambient as they argued among themselves about what (with the probable failure of the transport repair) should be their next best step. They suggested arming themselves and returning to the site of the Jedi transport explosion to check for salvageable parts or supplies; they briefly considered splitting up, with half going to the transport and the rest staying behind. But the risks of ambush and capture, or starvation and death, were too great. With the crew's long duration of more than a year spent cooped up together—with the Vanqors hunting them, a saboteur in their midst, and the fear of not making it off-moon—Obi-Wan could understand the tension and the testiness of 'short fuses' among them, but he wasn't too keen on having to listen to it.

He excused himself to check on Anakin's repair progress in the back hangar. His Padawan had pinpointed the transport's problem in a failed power generator: transfer wires from the sublight engine had fused together, completely blowing the fusion system. While he could replace the transfer wires, doing so would trigger a response—the ship would explode. But Anakin was stumped: after all, why would Samdew disable the ship completely, not allowing himself an 'escape hatch,' as it were? If he killed all the crew, how would he get off-moon? A competent spy would never just assume rescue by those whom he worked for, that everything would go as planned. The Jedi deduced, therefore, that he had to have rigged a repair solution for the ship—they just didn't know yet what it was. But Kenobi admired Anakin's prodigious skills and focus as they worked together to find it: it was as if the engine were an ailing organism that Anakin was coaxing back to life.

Medzec had come in to converse with Anakin briefly about the repairs before the young Jedi tested the outcome of his labors: the transport roared to life again. But starting it was just the beginning—he couldn't restore full power. Skywalker had to juice up the generator by bypassing the deflector shields and weapons delivery system. Their defenses, including turbolasers, were incapacitated. Their journey would be slow, rough, and exposed. And they were low on fuel, too, which would force them to take the shortest route to Typha-Dor through Vanqor airspace, unfortunately.

Even with the odds stacked against them, Obi-Wan marveled at his Padwan's good humor and smile, at being challenged: joking together, the mischief seen in the young man's eyes lightened Obi-Wan's heart. It was a glimpse of the boy he once knew—who could fix things, who had yet to understand and was untroubled by his great personal gifts, who believed in a galaxy of dreams that could come true. "I can't let him lose that spirit. I can't let him lose the boy he was." Their tension eased just a bit in that light moment, but when he saw sadness again in Anakin's eyes, Kenobi realized that the 'fix' had only been momentary. Things ran too deep now to hope for a more permanent fix between them; such was no longer possible, it seemed.

The shelter now empty, its comm and surveillance suites destroyed, along with their files, to deny any use they might be to the Vanqors, the crew was ready for takeoff. But it was one that would not be smooth. The ship shook as it rose through the hangar's retractable roof, then it shuddered over the icy wasteland before shooting into the upper atmosphere.

Crash of treachery
"If [Mezdec] was close enough to blast the panel to leave scorch marks, wouldn't you think he'd be close enough to stop Samdew without shooting? Why did he have a blaster, anyway? He said he'd been sleeping, and it was the middle of the night ... Anyway, the point is that he lied..." "So Samdew could have been shooting at Mezdec because Mezdec was the spy. But what about Samdew activating the fire system?" "We only have Mezdec's word for that, too ... We only have Mezdec's word for everything, including the disabled transport."

- Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Padawan Anakin Skywalker discuss treachery while flying in Uziel airspace in the TY44 outpost crew's repaired transport.

Looking at the ship's radar, they were safe so far. But Anakin wanted a closer look at the instruments, and so left Rajana at the controls. Mezdec, at the navigation console, sat next to her. Anakin wanted to run a full status check, including a manual one, as takeoff had pulled power from key systems and he wanted to avoid malfunctions. Oddly enough, in running the manual check, he found an indicator green on three power feeds on the escape pod, which showed, moreover, as having two anti-grav generators. In asking Mezdec about it, he said that the pod was upgraded with an extra anti-grav to serve, should the need arise, as a primary transport back to Typha-Dor, and that Samdew had sabotaged it as well. But his 'explanation' still didn't explain the extra generator and three power feeds, or why there was no console indicator of these things on the auto-check. Mezdec's response was that the feed indicators were in the pod itself. Nodding, and promising to check it out, then, Anakin retired to the rear of the ship, to discuss the matter with his Master.

Easing into the seat next to Obi-Wan, he told him he'd found Samdew's back door: the pod was double-boosted, something very unusual for this model of ship, and the indicators didn't run through the main cabin's sensor array. Anakin told Kenobi, too, that there wouldn't have been any takeoff problem to begin with if he had checked the pod, for he could have rewired the ship by sucking power from the pod to the transport, then lifted off with full power. Nothing could be done now that they were in flight, but why hadn't Mezdec caught this? He was a skilled mechanic with more than a month to fix it. Obi-Wan responded that something else had bothered him as well: Mezdec's blast at the comm console was from such a distance that it couldn't have left scorch marks on the panel. When Anakin countered with the spoken testimony of the other crew members and pointed out that Samdew shot Thik, his Master reminded Anakin that he was giving his impression of events, not what was actually ''said. ''Anakin, in reviewing the precise conversation of the sequence of events with his Jedi-mind, realized then that a dying Samdew was actually shooting at Mezdec when he shot Thik, who had merely gotten in the way. What's more, they really only had Mezdec's word, Kenobi told him, about virtually everything connected with the story. None of the crew witnessed anything beyond Thik's wounding.

Suddenly Shalini had joined them, asking if all was well. She became defensive, however, when Obi-Wan suggested that there was no real evidence that Samdew was the saboteur or that he'd killed the other crew members, and—rather inefficient for a spy—apparently left no means for his own escape. And when Kenobi suggested to her that there could be another spy, that Samdew might have been innocent for he didn't have the chance to defend himself, Shalini's incredulity was tinged with hostility. But Thik and Olanz, who'd now joined them, having caught the gist of the conversation, agreed with the Jedi: that they were all relying solely on Mezdec for their proof.

After Obi-Wan requested to see Shalini's information disk again, she complied, but it was found to be blank when Kenobi accessed it on his datapad. A shocked Shalini was then urgently asked by Kenobi if the disk had ever been out of her sight. She recalled that Mezdec had wanted, for her safety, to pre-flight check her blaster, emergency supplies, and utility belt (in which she kept the disk). But Shalini told the Jedi of a second disk she'd not mentioned to Mezdec and that the invasion plans were yet safe. At that moment, Rajana's voice announced radar activity of an approaching enemy destroyer. Mezdec, however, had disappeared from the cockpit. Kenobi and Skywalker raced to the emergency pod at the rear of the ship as laser cannonfire erupted—the ship was under attack by a monster assault vessel clad in black and silver. By the time the Jedi lightsabers had peeled the emergency-door metal back, Mezdec had already blasted out into space. Even so, Anakin had disabled half of the pod's power and cut its comm unit, so that the traitor wouldn't get very far very fast. The Jedi charged back to the cockpit to steer clear of the Vanqor bombardment.

Dodging torpedos, Skywalker put the transport into a dive. It trembled horribly under its weakened power, and Kenobi, glancing at the starmaps, realized that the closest planet on which to land was Vanqor itself. Suddenly, they were hit by an ion blast, which caused them to lose most of their computer systems. Resolutely the crew opted to risk capture by crash-landing on Vanqor. Obi-Wan suggested they attempt to land on the outskirts of the Tomo Craters, rugged terrain in which they might lose the pursuing enemy. As cockpit alarms sounded and red warning lights flashed, indicating the ship's failure, the crew strapped themselves in. Anakin accelerated to get to the planet's surface as quickly as possible, but the ship's frame shook violently. Red dust was kicked up by the turbulence and the ship slammed into the unforgiving ground, skidding across its surface toward the edge of a high plateau. Barely escaping its careening off into a deep canyon, the embattled ship finally crashed against a giant boulder which brought it to a jolting stop.

The crew, though shaken, had sustained only a few cuts, and no major injuries. With the landing ramp damaged, the Jedi used their lightsabers to extricate the crew. Anakin complied with his Master's request to turn on his tracking device in case they were separated. All then donned air masks and threw out smoke grenades to give themselves cover as they attempted to race toward the plateau's edge, to launch down the canyon on cables. But they realized, too late, that they wouldn't make it before the enemy destroyers appeared and began shooting through the smoke. They were forced to turn about when explosions erupted in front of them, racing back towards the ship to secure a measure of cover. Obi-Wan, in rescuing the slow-moving Thik and getting him under cover of a small protective cubbyhole, was separated from the others and forced to take cover in a cavelike opening hidden just under the closed-in wedge-space between two huge boulders. He watched helplessly through a slit in the rock as the others, including his Padawan, were captured by a squad of Vanqor troops and herded onto their starships. As the enemy vessels blasted away, Kenobi calmed his thoughts in the Force, turning them soon towards rescue.

Into the Tomo Craters
"Do not fear. You will not be harmed. On the contrary, you are about to enjoy the experience for which we have chosen you. Welcome to the Zone of Self-Containment. A doctor will be with you shortly to explain. In the meantime, relax..." "The room is filled with some kind of gas. They've drugged us."

- Anakin Skywalker responds to the Tomo Camp "sweep" holo image introduction.





Appearances

 * Jedi Quest: The Moment of Truth