AN:
if we get to 100 power stones in the next 24h I will release another chapter.
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"Turns out, space wizards are tricky to hold captive. Who knew?"
There were some who would see surrendering to a group of space pirates as the ultimate shame. How dare someone not be the pinnacle of alpha mentality! How dare someone not dominate every single conversation and encounter!
Those same people clearly had never been on the wrong side of a turbo laser barrage. Or the threat of one. Or a tractor beam, for that matter.
Said tractor beam made any action other than surrender rather less than practical. Well, it might have let me die with my spine stiff and unbending and vaporized along with the rest of me, true, but I rather liked living. Most of the time. When I was not part of a racist theocracy.
Where was I?
Oh, right, getting slapped with a shock collar and literally dragged off. A pair of Weequay pirates – presumably pirates, anyways – each had an arm beneath my armpit and were dragging my unresisting body from the docking tube down a very short corridor until we reached a broad door that slid open without protest, revealing… well, a bit of a mess, really.
Prisoner pens. What any civilized navy would have called the brig. Except no brig was this big, this heavily guarded, and this full. Full of people, full of stink, full of… well, just about anything you could think of. Except for other guards, apparently. Just the two who were dragging me.
My captors found a cell meant for one person occupied by three and decided it could take one more.
They threw me in, landing me on the floor.
On my neck, the weight of the shock collar was a constant reminder of the fate that I could expect: slavery. Perfectly legal within the Empire, of course, and Hutt Space, too. And since I had not publicly broadcast my true identity as a Sith to all who could hear it, I had been identified as a common spacer.
A common spacer with a ship that had almost certainly been stolen, mind you, but a normal person all the same.
"New meat, eh?" one of my fellow captives and slaves-to-be asked. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with dark hair and eyes, and the build of a man who had spent most of his adulthood doing physical labor. "Welcome to Hell."
"For now," I allowed, my voice sounding very different from how I had spoken for the past months. The Mid-Atlantic accent had been abandoned, and the generic American accent was back in all its glory. Of course, the accent was not the only thing I had abandoned. My mask, my coat, and my waistcoat had all been discarded before I had been brought into pirate captivity, all stowed beneath a deck panel along with my prop lightsaber.
"An optimist?" Another of the prisoners asked. A woman, reasonably attractive and not too old, sitting in what passed for a private corner in this overly cramped cell. I did not envy her fate should the pirates be allowed to bring their plans to the obivous conclusion. "Bet you five credits he won't make it a week before he breaks."
I did not bother involving myself in that particular conversation. There were better uses of my time; Who knew when this ship might make it to a port where I could get sold off? Or worse, recognized? I mean, it was incredibly unlikely. There was a grand total of… one person? Yeah, one person who could link this face with the identity of Nestor, Sith Apprentice.
And she was heading back towards the Core Worlds.
Naturally, my focus went to the cell door. It was an almost stereotypical affair, metal bars on a metal frame that moved on runners set into the floor. The lock itself, however, was undeniably modern. Or modern to this galaxy, at least, with its glowing keypad. I had gotten a glimpse of it, and several glimpses of the keypads of the dozens of other cells aboard this ship, as I had been delivered to the cell. The core, however, had escaped me.
Easy enough to deal with, as far as obstacles went. The collar on my neck, however…
"How do these collars work?" I asked one of my cellmates. "They aren't linked one-to-one with a specific remote, are they?" That would have been a bit too much to hope for, but it was worth asking.
"Proximity triggered," the working man answered. "One guard hits a button on a remote, and everyone within a couple of meters gets zapped."
"Nasty bit of work," I muttered, glancing at a third cellmate. He was leaning against the cell door, staring blankly into space, but he gave me a clear view of his shock collar. The broad metal band wrapped perhaps a third of the way around the back of his neck. Two tall metal bumps protruded several inches from the collar itself tipped with glowing red indicators. The standard model of shock collar, with all that implied.
Like the mechanical backup release catch hidden inside.
"Right," I declared, rolling my shoulders for a bit of theatricality. Oh, it was going to be nice to be able to stretch those metaphorical muscles. "I must say, this vacation has lost its charm. Who wants out?"
"Out?" The working man asked. "There is no 'out' of here. Even if we get out of the locked cell and find a way to get out of these collars, there is no way we can deal with armed pirates."
"Fair point," I conceded. "However, and counterpoint…" I trailed off, reaching out with the Force. Nonliving objects left no imprint on the Force but could be manipulated with far greater ease. A simple mechanical lock was simple enough to force open with a bit of precision telekinesis. Depress a few pins, quick spin, and just like that, the whole mechanism disengaged.
Prisoner Three did not even react as the metal collar fell off his neck, revealing a long strip of slightly paler flesh where grime had not been able to accumulate. Wow, he really was broken, wasn't he? Maybe Prisoner Two had had good reason to believe her bet could work.
"What was that?" Said prisoner asked, not believing her eyes. "How did you…"
"How silly of me to not explain," I said, repeating the unlocking technique a few more times. The working man and Prisoner Two were freed of their collars in short order, and I only slightly after them. "Rest assured, you will have your answers once we're in a bit less of a bind."
"Can- can you do the door as well?" Prisoner Two asked.
The cell door was, if anything, even less of an obstacle. A larger mechanism with larger parts designed to take much more wear and tear. There was no need for even an attempt at subtlety; I could have torn out the lock for all that it mattered, but I preferred a gentler approach. A wave of the hand, a bit of telekinetic encouragement, and the bolt slid right open.
And the door right with it.
"A- are you a Jedi?" the working man asked.
"Just a man with the most interesting luck in the galaxy," I answered, stepping through the newly opened cell. "Now then. I do believe we have a ship to liberate."
"Just the three of us?" Prisoner Two asked. "Or can you…" She gestured inarticulately at the remaining cells. Their occupants had all noticed what I had done, of course, and were reacting with the levels of disbelief one might expect.
"A prison break tends to be more effective when you have all the prisoners on your side," I said, reaching out with the Force. All at once, the keypads sputtered in their mountings as their internals were manipulated without any apparent input. No doubt they were sending out no small amount of error messages, but I wasn't paying them any attention.
No more than three seconds later, the cell doors slid open. The collars were a bit more of a hassle, requiring far more intricate work, but they fell to the ground in due course. Less than five minutes after getting taken prisoner by these pirates, I was already in a far better position than I had started in. Oh, how I loved to be on the advantageous side of information asymmetry.
"Now then," I said, once the other prisoners had been relieved of their literal and metaphorical shackles. Perhaps a third of the prisoners were in no shape to fight or assist, either physically or mentally. They would... I'd find a way to help them. After we had taken the ship. "Has anyone here ever taken over a ship?"
As might be expected, what these people lacked in experience they made up for in enthusiasm. They streamed out of the brig, into the main corridor of the ship. At its core, it was a modified freighter, most of the interior reserved for cargo. In this case, it had taken the form of a series of six cargo bays, three on each side of a central corridor. The bridge was at the front of that corridor, and the brig at the back with the docking tubes.
Put simply, taking over the ships was a simple task of walking along a hallway.
Until the pirates showed their faces, anyway. Thankfully, it appeared that the crew quarters were up front, near the bridge, giving me plenty of time to figure out what to do when the pirates decided to intervene. When. Not if. I knew perfectly well that they would try something.
Turns out, throwing a wave of telekinetic energy at them worked wonders.
One second, they were standing and running towards me, the next they were on the ground getting their metaphorical and literal crap kicked in by a few dozen very angry escaped prisoners.
Of course, once I got to the bridge, things were only very slightly different. At least, when I got to the bridge doors. The mechanism for opening the door was right there, right in the open, without any kind of lock on it. But something about it felt... wrong, like touching it would be a bad idea. No, not simply a bad idea, but a Bad Idea.
"Why're we stopping?" one of the escaped prisoners asked.
"Boss man probably sensed a trap on the bridge," another answered. The second had almost certainly hit the nail on the head, there. The crew of the ship was almost certainly planning something. No doubt the moment I opened those doors, they'd start shooting. And I would be among the first to die. Or, knowing my luck, among the last but with a front-row seat of the entire thing, unable to intervene.
So, I didn't reach out to slap open the door release.
With the Force, however, I did reach out.
It had been pure chance that I had been able to sense Lord Egatio's passing, back on Chembau. The natural result of having spent months around the man, no doubt. But since then, having sensed a mind or its absence even by pure accident, I knew what to look for. I knew how to find another mind.
And there were seventeen of them just beyond that door.
Seventeen souls with murder on their minds.
"On my command, go," I said, my voice oddly flat to my ears. "Rush the bridge. Do not hesitate. I do not know how long I can hold them."
Maybe it was because I was ordering people to kill. Was condemning seventeen souls to die.
With a mental heave, those seventeen people were hoisted into the air.
And blessedly, the escaped prisoners did not hesitate.
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Hey guys I would really appreciate it if you could throw some power stones to help elevate the ranking.
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