Chapter Text
BALMORRA, YEARS AGO . . .
Crayce sets the toolbox down as gently as she can. It still clanks and clatters loudly, and the noise echoes around the cavern the Resistance has turned into a halfway functional base. She and the rest of Havoc are supposed to make it fully functional.
This generator, however, is not cooperating. She kneels beside it, pries open the back panel to see what the hell is wrong with its innards, and stares at the mess of wires with a sinking feeling.
"Are you all right, sir?" Dorne calls from an adjoining room, where she's setting up the kolto tanks for the medstation.
"Peachy," says Crayce. She gropes around in the toolbox for a spanner and pokes at the wires. They don't make any more sense with a tool in hand. Crap.
The resistance fighter who met Ravaszhi and escorted him to the base comes to a stop behind the soldier and stands formally with their hands crossed behind their back. "Excuse me, sir," they say, "but the help the Jedi Council have been promising is here."
There's an unmistakable note of irony in their voice, and Ravaszhi senses . . . frustration, tied up in fatigue and resignation and a knot of other emotions Ravaszhi doesn't have the mastery to pick out. But mostly frustration.
They were probably expecting a Master-Padawan pair.
Ravaszhi centers himself and puts that aside, bowing to who he assume to be the resistance fighter's superior. "Padawan Ravaszhi of the Jedi Order, at your service." Soon. The Order would find him a Master soon. "I understand your operation is having mechanical trouble?"
Crayce huffs in frustration at the generator and stands up, flipping the spanner into a reverse grip like it's a knife. She eyes the Jedi for a minute—Sith? That's a new one, but then, so was Dorne—then says, "Commander Serrin Crayce, Havoc Squad. Please tell me you're good with machines. This thing is giving me hell."
Ravaszhi looks up at the generator. He's never seen technology so old, before, but he does have an affinity for machines. It's why he was sent. "I'll do everything I can, Commander. Sometimes generators take a while to get used to me, but as long as none of the parts need to be replaced . . ."
He stretches out his hand for focus, reaching for the generator in the Force. It weighs in his senses as heavily as the stone cavern, stubbornly inert. He lays his palm against the casing and listens, letting the Force guide him.
The thing makes a rumbling whine, not quite a start-up purr but definitely not a dying cough, either.
Oh. He looks up at the Commander. "Do you have any generator oil?"
Crayce blinks. "Uh. Yeah, we should . . . one sec—" She hunts around for the supply crates that arrived just this morning and dives in. Unidentifiable parts, a whole lot of building materials—who fucking packed this shit, it's a mess, and apparently taking inventory wasn't on anyone's to-do list either so that's a whole 'nother heap of fun to look forward to—there.
She retrieves the canister, drags it out from underneath way too much stuff, and lugs it back to Ravaszhi. "Will this work?"
Pan grease would probably work, but that might just irritate the generator in the long run. It used to be a fighter, after all. "This will be perfect, Commander, thank you." Ravaszhi takes off his leather vambraces, slicks his hands, and reaches up into the compartment. "Your generator had a past life as an All Terrain Assault Vehicle." The Force allows him to keep all the little parts in place while he works, and the oil lets him slip his hands through the gears and into the wiring where he needs to go. "It seems like it was incorrectly re-wired when it made the transition."
In a few short minutes, Ravaszhi can feel the problem dissolve.
He stands up as the generator comes to life with a heavy chuffing noise, and smiles. "How else can I help you, Commander?" he asks it as he starts arranging the scattered materials from the supply crates with the Force. He hadn't realized the operation—whatever it is, he hasn't exactly been told—was so . . . new? "Or should I report to your personnel officer?"
Crayce grins at him. "We got some medical machinery in back that needs setup, if you're up for it. Thanks, by the way. You just saved me a headache and a half. They train you to be a grease monkey in addition to all the Force stuff? 'Cause that was damn impressive."
Ravaszhi returns the smile quizzically. He'd only done what he was sent for. "I'm . . . not actually a trained mechanic, no," he says aloud. He isn't really sure how to describe what he does in terms that would resonate with a non-Sensitive, either. It's not . . . exactly telekinesis, even though moving the tiny parts the way they need to be moved has forced him to learn it as a complementary skill. "Sometimes I can sense what's wrong with machines," he says with a shrug, after a moment.
He's been called gifted, but it's not a word Jedi should use to describe themselves.
"Sounds handy," Crayce says lightly. She's not an expert on the Jedi or anything, but they tend to get weird about compliments, so she lets it go. She tilts her head towards the soon-to-be-medbay. "Shall we? My XO's in charge of keeping us all from dying and it's our job to make that as easy on her as possible."
Ravaszhi stretches his senses through the base before responding. Nothing flares with emergency, so it's probably not the gallows humor special military units tend to have. Ravaszhi looks at the unit insignia on Commander Crayce's armor and wonders—
Ravaszhi dismisses the thought. It's duty, not an adventure; if he were supposed to know he would've been briefed. He didn't come here for war stories.
"By all means," he says politely. "Do you have a doctor on staff, or is your med-bay droid run?"
Crayce leads the way across the main room. "On staff. Just so you know, Lieutenant Dorne is former Imperial, but she doesn't bite, promise. Hey, Dorne, our Jedi friend showed up!"
They enter the medbay just as Elara finishes dragging an empty kolto tank into the corner. Breathing hard, she turns to them. She freezes, staring at Ravaszhi. "Sir," she says stiffly. Then: "My lo—Master Jedi."
Crap. Crap. She's a fucking idiot. "Lieutenant Dorne, Jedi Ravaszhi. Ravaszhi, Elara Dorne. The cavalry has arrived and he already got that generator working. What can we do in here?"
Dorne hesitates, then says, "If you could help assemble the monitor arrays, perhaps . . .?"
Lieutenant Dorne's unease isn't exactly new for Ravaszhi, since most of the soldiers he's met have never really interacted with the Order, but this is . . . different. She's looking at him, not at his Padawan braid.
If she used to be Imperial, the last Force wielders she worked with may have been . . . Sith.
That would leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth. Ravaszhi hopes he can leave a good impression of Jedi.
"Please, I'm not actually a Master," he says with a small smile, and doesn't let himself dwell on it too much. Jedi were coming home to Tython from the war fronts all the time. One of them would take him, eventually. "It's just Ravaszhi. Are you having any particular trouble with the monitors?"
". . . Ravaszhi, then. Understood," Dorne says after a minute. She shakes herself a little, then says, "No significant difficulty, but it will speed our progress considerably. And since most of our equipment is secondhand or salvaged . . ."
"It's probably gonna take some fiddling to get it working," Crayce finishes. "C'mon. Let's get this shit hooked up."
They settle in, one person holding pieces in place while another solders, screws, or fastens them. This, at least, is more her element—she's no electrical engineer, but data stations are more or less just really big datapads with more processing power and more shit to connect with. Generators? Nope. Datapads? Sure.
It's fairly easy work—a bit tedious, maybe, but there aren't enough distractions for holding a monitor while levitating the the bolts and fasteners into place to be an issue. Ravaszhi wouldn't think second hand or salvaged materials would be the order of the day for a new installation, but he wouldn't have picked a cave system for a garrison, either. As a forward operating base, though . . . or a bombardment shelter?
Eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him.
It's part of the Code, isn't it? There is no ignorance? It can't hurt to ask. "Are you expecting a lot of combat traffic through your med-bay?"
"Probably," says Crayce, head and shoulders stuffed into the side of the monitoring station. "Resistance takes a lot of casualties. They need a secure base to work out of, and a good medical facility to deal with their wounded."
"One of our goals here is to give them a solid footing in the area," Dorne adds. "I'll be instructing locals in field medicine and triage while the rest of Havoc Squad trains them in more direct combat techniques and tactics."
Crayce extricates herself and sits back. "Whew. Yeah, that's about it. So, uh, how long are you here for? 'Cause if there's time, I guarantee there'll be people who wanna learn anything you can teach 'em about keeping this place running."
How long . . .? The Commander probably has more important things to do than be briefed on every new arrival, though. "A week, unless something changes," Ravaszhi says, biting his tongue on how more than happy he would be to stay, to help. "I'm fluent in binary," he offers, "but I can't actually teach what I do with machines. If any of the soldiers want a Force-wielder to train with, though . . .?"
Crayce smiles. "Plenty of time. And we can work out a fancy syllabus later—long as you're willing to help, there'll be something that needs doing."
o.O.o