Bad Dreams

[Li-An Jinn]

Li-An Jinn awoke with a start, panting, drenched in a cold sweat. The day was different, but the dream was always the same. Li rose from his bed and stepped into the refresher. He, once again, began replaying the troubling events in his head that had haunted his dreams for a century.

They had been running refugees, getting them off planet. Innocent victims caught up in a political struggle they had nothing to do with. The Planet Strasis was unwillingly chosen to be the battle front of a ground struggle by the Imperial Remnant during they're war with the New Republic.

Li and his family had been loading passengers onto a transport. They were just about ready to board themselves, when the transports came under fire. New Republic forces managed to drive the imperials back momentarily, but not before the pilot of the second transport was injured.

Li told Aislinn to take the kids and the passengers and go, that he would pilot the second ship. Aislinn threw herself into the pilot's seat and ignited the engines. The first transport began to pull away, and Li-An Jinn sprinted off, and jumped and dodged blaster fire as he made his way to the other ship. Li powered up the transport and was able to raise Aislinn on the comm. She and the kids had managed to get free from the planet and they were continuing to the rendez-vous point. Li's transport had run into some trouble and was forced to lose a tail before being able to jump to the rendez-vous point.

While en route, Li got a call, laced with static, over the comm from Aislinn. She was reporting a distress signal from a nearby system. Li told her to wait for him to get there, that he was only about an hour away. She argued that by then it might be too late. So she went off to answer the distress.
"Be careful." Li said to her.
"Hey, it's me." she quipped back.

Li-An Jinn left the pilots seat to check on his passengers when a screech garbled in static pierced the air. Li was back in a flash. He turned up the speaker.

"ZZZ...distress call....fake..ZZZ.Imperials.ZZZ..ambush!...ZZZZ"

Li called for her over the comm, but there was no answer, the channel went dead. Li called for her in the force, he could feel that she was frusterated and angry, but for the meantime safe. He pushed every ounce of power he had in the old transport and hoped he wouldnt be too late.

Li-An dropped out of hyperspace at the coordinates of Aislinn's last transmission. There was nothing, no sign of anything or anyone. He reached out in the force again, he felt a cold resilience from his wife, an icy determination that was picked up and amplified by his children. He felt their emotion and their love for him, he let it pour through him. He tried to ask where they were, but all the sudden, they vanished. Just disappeared from the force. Like a single candle illuminating a room suddenly snuffed out. Li groped through the force for them but found no sign. They had simply vanished. Li-An somberly waited for the all-too-familiar feeling associated with the death of a Jedi to wash over him, but it never came. Li-An Jinn knew that his family did not die, yet he could not feel them.

Li spent the next century searching for his family, but to no avail, they were lost. Li relives that day every night in his dreams, and when he closes his eyes he cannot escape that feeling, the sudden rush of emptyness when his family was ripped from him.

Li finished his shower and toweled off. He got dressed in his simple Jedi robes and sat down. He closed his eyes and let out a sigh of a man who has seen far too much in his life.

"Its not your fault, you know." a hazy blue figure shimmered into existence near the door. "There is nothing you could have done."

"I could have been faster." Li replied.

"Now, we both know thats not true." The spectre solidified and the ghoslty figure of Luke Skywalker sat down beside Li. "Come on, old friend. You cant keep blaming yourself. You did everything you could to find them. We had every Jedi in the galaxy searching for months."

"Then why didnt we find them?! If we did everything we could, then why didnt we find them?!"

"Perhaps you might have to deal with the possibilty..."

"Theyre not dead Luke. I would have felt it."

"Its been nearly a century, Li. Aislinn would understand you moving on with your life."

"Then clearly you dont know her very well."

"Regardless, Im still glad you decided to take up a post here at the temple. These kids need a strong foundation from which to build. You provide a wisdom and perspective that is peerless. Li, you are the embodiement of the old ways, you make people remember what it means to be a Jedi. I have a feeling that soon they are all going to be looking to you for guidance in the struggle ahead."

"Oh yah? What struggle might that be?" Li looked up, but the spirit of his friend was gone, once more leaving him with more questions than he had answers.

"...Remember old friend, the force will be with you, always." Li heard the words fade into his thoughts. He decided that he needed to clear his head, so he grabbed his lightsaber and headed for the training hall.

[Li-An Jinn]

(read post in senate first before continuing. knightsandlords.proboards56.com/index.cgi?board=tnrs&action=display&thread=1183413693

Li-An Jinn entered a meditative trance while cycling through his lightsaber exercises. He moved from motion to motion with unending fluidity. His eyes closed, he let his lightsaber dance around his body in a glowing pattern of emerald green. He allowed the force to flow though him, guiding his actions. He moved seamlessly from one form to the next. He felt himself begin the aggressive moves of Vaapad, a dangerous lightsaber form, known to only a few Jedi, for it skates very close to using dark side energy. Li's movements became increasingly rapid. As the Vaapad took hold of him, his body became an instrument, his lightsaber merely an extension of himself. He no longer let the force merely flow through him, he grabbed and harnessed the force, using and twisting it to his own ends. This was the danger of Vaapad, to use the force in this way one had to fuel themselves with emotion. Too little and your Vaapad is uneffective, too much and your emotion can turn to anger and hate and you risk falling to the darkside. Only a true master attempted this form, a true master or a great fool.

Li-An's Practice began to draw a crowd, as it always did. Aside from the shear amazement that the ancient Jedi could move with such speed and grace, students gathered to watch the master train because it gave them a link to their own past. The past of the Jedi. Some said that when they watched the ancient styles performed they could feel the history in the old temple, the walls gave off a warmth and it was like the Jedi masters of old were there teaching them still.

Li-An didnt mind them watching, he ignored them for the most part. Actually he hoped they were taking notes, it would make classes easier if they did. He was deep in his meditative trance when for the briefest of moments he felt a rush of feeling envelope him. It washed over him like a tidal wave and forze him ini place. The students all flashed each other quizzical looks, as the old master waivered on his feet.

Li stood there frozen afraid to move, the sensation had left him almost as soon as it came. But it rocked him to his very core. It was a feeling that he recognized but hadnt felt in a very long time. One of the masters who had been in the crowd, Ruan Thul, eased his way up to Li. He asked him if he was going to be alright. Li just stood there with a blank expression. Finally, before anyone could say anything else, Li-An looked at Ruan and said one word before passing out and collapsing. The other master caught him and called for a medic. One of the other masters asked Ruan, what he had said. Ruan looked up with a stone expression,
"He said, Aislinn."

[Li-An Jinn]

Read this before continuing... knightsandlords.proboards56.com/index.cgi?board=thejeditemple&action=display&thread=1183059765

Back in his quarters Li began pouring over news holos from the last couple of weeks. He was determined to find an answer for what had happened to him while exercising. Why, at that one moment, he could feel his wife's pressence. It was faint, but definately there. He was reliving the sensation of the connection when he came across it, a news blurb about the demolition of Centerpoint station. Their explosive charge went off just minutes before Li's collapse. Li read the article fervently, it said that the blast caused an EMP wave. Li thought on that for a minute, An EMP wave would knock out any electrical systems in its blast radius. Li jumped up from his desk.
"She's alive!" He screamed as he ran to the closet and grabbed a rucksack. He opened it and began packing it with anything he thought he might need: a few extra lightsabers; a handful of adegan crystals; his pair of blaster pistols that he recovered from the battle of geonosis, once belonging to Jango Fett, now in Li's possesion and heavily updated and modified; some clothes; and a few other things that Mara Jade Skywalker had told him to never leave without.

He grabbed the rucksack and threw it over his shoulder. Exiting his chambers, he made his way to the hangar bay and jumped into one of the StealthX's reserved for Jedi use. He powered up the systems and prepared for departure. He was almost free of the atmosphere when he realized that he had forgotton to load an astromech into the fighter. I'll have to do without this time Li thought to himself as he brought up the navi-computer to plot his jump. Li thought it over a second, then shrugging he plotted a course to the space where Centerpoint station used to be. When the course was set, Li primed the hyperdive, then activated it. The stars streaked into long lines as Li successfully made the jump to hyperspeed.