The tower of rock is farther away than it looks - he grew up on a desert world for a good portion of his life, but he had forgotten how distance could be distorted out here. He'd been walking for nearly half a day, but he had seemed to get no closer to the tower. He can sense something ahead, though - the Force is strong out there at the rock, and after a while of walking toward it he realizes that, somehow, he's been guided here.

Anger...fear...aggresion...the dark side are they.

The lesson comes to him out of his past, a lesson his master had taught to him as the legendary Jedi Master Yoda had taught his own students.

Briefly, he wondered what side curiousity served.

He tops a shallow rise, and is granted a breathtaking view of the valley below that leads up to the tower - well, actually, more of a basin, now that he thinks of it. As he looks around, he feels that strange tingling in his senses again, guiding his eyes. He lets himself go, letting himself be guided by the Force, and finds his eyes come to rest at the base of the shelf he stands on. Below him, maybe a hundred feet down, he sees something that looks like the wreckage of a ship.

A crash landing"

He contemplates this thought for a moment and then shakes his head to himself. No, not a crashed ship - it looks as if it landed there. And the design is ages old - a few millenia, if he had to guess, at the very least. And yet, something about the ship seems...familiar...as if he's seen this particular design before. He's certain he's never seen anything like it anywhere else. The ship is a semicircular saucer design, with a long, rectangular extension out the front that must be the flight deck, and two huge engines in the back. He wracks his brain, trying to match the unique design to a ship manufacturer that seems familiar, but comes up with none.

All right then...let's get a closer look.

He looks down, feeling out the distance, and leaps into space, letting gravity take over and falling straight down. He watches the ground come closer...closer...and, with only feet to spare, reaches out to the Force to slow his fall, landing nimbly and lightly on his feet a mere fifty feet away from the ship. He looks around, seeing if any of the crew is in sight, but as his eyes rest on the ship, he stops. This ship didn't just land here - judging by the condition of the ship, it must have been here since maybe a hundred years after it was made.

He looks the ship over closely, and that nebulous feeling of familiarity is even stronger, more intense than ever. The Force is strong in this place. He notices then that the ship's entrance ramp is down, leaving an open entrance into the ship itself.

Who lands a ship here and then leaves it this way' No one came back for it' Or perhaps there was no one to return to it...

Compelled by curiousity as much as the strong tingling in his senses, he walked to the ship and stretches out with his feelings, alert to any danger that may be waiting inside of it. He drops a hand to his hip and pulls one of his lightsabers from it, igniting it as he steps into the shadows of the ship. The lightsaber springs forth from the hilt, casting coppery light into the shadows of the landing ramp. Nothing moves from inside of it, and he steps into the ship itself. Immediately to the side as he ascends the ramp, a placard sits.

The Ebon Hawk - Registry: Transel.

The name sounds vaguely failiar to him, but he can't place it, and so continues on, ending up in what looks like a mainanence bay. It has the feel of a ghost ship, and the nebulous, Force-strong feeling of the place is so intense inside it is nearly overwhelming. A lot of emotion has run through this place - feelings of familiarity, recognition, love, anger, passion, and fear. The work bench in this bay is littered with various components - most notably among them, lightsaber parts. Crystals, wiring, pieces from casing, various parts all gathered here, as if several lightsabers were made, adjusted and repaired here.

A Jedi ship"

This place seems more and more familiar by the moment. Still, the memory doesn't come, but he can feel it dancing at the edge of his conciousness, like some secret knowledge just waiting for the moment of revelation. He walks on, eventually finding himself in the main hold. By the coppery light of the saber, he can see that this was made into a crew area with extensive information databases and display systems for strategy and planning.

He walks over to one of the panels and taps a few keys, but none of the displays work - there's no power to them. Continuing on, he walks through the ship, arriving in the engine room. The engine appears to be intact, but the power and fuel cells are completely drained. there's nothing else for him here, it looks like, and so he leaves the ship.

He gets a few hundred feet before looking back at the ship, searching for the memory. for a long time, he stares at it, trying to will the memory to come, but it dances maddeningly out of his reach. Finally, he sighs and continues on, heading for the tower and clipping the now-extinguished lightsaber to his belt once again. He's been a Jedi long enough to know that if it is meant to come to him, it will.

The coppery light from the lightsaber shows more evidence of a battle the further into the cave he goes - blaster marks, cuts into the stone from a lightsaber. Or several lightsabers, judging from the number of scars in the cave wall. The battle must have been a hell of a fight...and yet the cave is oddly clear of any wreckage or debris.

Like it was swept clean afterwards...

He looks closer at the cave as he walks deeper in, raising the lightsaber to get a better look. There are no obvious footprints in the dust gathered on the cave floor, nothing to indicate that anyone has been here recently at all. Still, better safe than sorry. He reaches out to the Force, stretching out with his senses and feeling for danger as he walks further in.

It isn't long - he's gone no further than a hundred yards when his senses flare with danger. Blaster bolts flash in from nowhere ahead, and he moves automatically, saber flashing to intersect three shots fired in rapid succession and deflecting them easily into the walls, and doing the same for three more that follow right on the heels of the first. The flashes from the bolts impacting the stone light up the dark interior of the cave, revealing their source - two ancient-looking battle droids, rifles raised and firing again. He dodges this time, the shots missing close enough that he can feel the heat of their passing. Advancing, he keeps the saber up, batting aside shots with balletic ease. He catches two of them and sends them back at the droids, only to see them spatter off shields - the dorids are protected by what appears to be personal energy shielding, and he smiles grimly.

All right then...let's see how those old shields hold up.

He draws on the Force and runs diagonally, hitting the wall of the cave and running up and along it, closing the distance with the droids rapidly, Force-enhanced muscles giving him greater speed than any normal person could hope to achieve. The droids are good - their aim is nearly dead on, and if he were any normal person they could hope to keep up, but the wear of age shows, and they start to fall behind. He draws the second lightsaber from his belt, adding its coppery glow to the light of the first as he ignites it and runs further up the wall. As he draws even with the droids, at the height of his run, he leaps outward into space, sailing over the droids and flipping over to come feet down on the shield of the first droid, driving the points of his saber downward towards its head. The shielding pops like an egg under the force of the twin points of energy driving downward through it, into the droids head and down into its body cavity as Aquil descends onto it, driving his wieght onto its shoulders and flipping the sabers out, effectively slicing the droid in half longways. In a single fluid motion, he spins and slices outward with both lightsabers, bringing them sidelong into the shields of the second droid. They prove to be more resilient than the first, or maybe they resist better to the broader line of impact, and the sabers bounce off. The droid fires back, and he just barely manages to twist away - the last shot scorches a line along his cloak and singes his skin.

Ouch. Bet that leaves a mark...

He stretches out to the droid with the Force and telekinetically gets a grip on it, hauling it bodily off of its feet and using all the strength he possesses to whip it into the wall behind him. The shield, already significantly weakened by the strike from two lightsabers, shatters under the impact and the droid is driven into the wall with sufficient force to crumple it like a can and leave an impression of itself in the wall.

He remains in a ready stance, both lightsabers held up, waiting for any further assault, but none comes. For a moment, he is confused -

That's all?

- and as he relaxes from his tense fighting stance, he looks around again. The walls just ahead are lined with droids - at least a couple hundred or more, at a quick estimate. But it looks as if the power cells for these were drained long ago, and he realizes that the surviving two must have been using these to keep themselves running, as well as cannibalizing parts - nearly all of the droids show evidence of removed parts.

Interesting.

He looks ahead, walking along the line of droids, and just ahead, he can see what looks to be a huge door. Something about the design of the door and the droids strikes him as being, in a vague way, familiar, in some way he can't quite put his finger on. He stops here for a moment, both to rest and to examine these things further, before proceeding on.