Revan

I'm not sure how to classify this. It's too big to be a necklace, but it doesn't seem right as a suncatcher. I guess I'll call it a jewelry sculpture for now. That's basically what it is, really. I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and I was inspired to make something in this shape with a yellow gem and twisty silver wire.

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(Major spoilers ahead for pretty much everything KOTOR-related.)


The following was written for the second part of my entry to 's contest: "Your Revan surviving to the events of SWTOR."

I'm currently working on a KotOR comic project so big it has it's own account. Check out for more KotOR goodness!

This story is dedicated to every female Revan who's ever fallen in love with Carth only to mourn her lost happily ever after.

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Brianna, Atton, and the others had been anxious to finally get to Malachor V, but the orderlies kept insisting that the admiral wanted to talk to me about a mutual acquaintance. As soon as the Ebon Hawk landed, they practically dragged me onto the bridge.

Carth stood away from me, staring out the window.

"You wandered past the Outer Rim during your exile," he said. "I ask you... did you find any trace of Revan?"

"No," I said. "I didn't see her again. Did you know her?"

"I served with her, like you did. And we had to part, like you did."

I asked him why.

Carth was silent for a while. Finally, he said, "I think she finally remembered something terrible she had done during the Mandalorian Wars. She said that she believed something else had been behind them. That it hadn't been the Mandalorians' choice to attack the Republic." He paused again, his gaze never leaving the ships gliding past the window...or maybe the stars beyond the ships. "Whatever it was, I think she went off to find it... to fight it."

I was curious. "Where did she go?"

"She didn't say. Only that there were places where she had to walk where I could not go - places that she could not bring those she loved."



***

The exile cut his story short. Revan was staring intently at the patterns of light on the cavern walls. Her expression was much like Carth's had been.

"No," Revan said softly. "Please go on. I'll be all right."

Surik Meetra shrugged. "I asked him why he didn't follow you anyway. He said that you told him--"

"To keep the Republic...strong." Revan finished in a low voice.

"That was the hardest thing of all," Carth had said after that. "I would have done anything she asked. I have waited for her to come back for almost four years. It doesn't get any easier."

Instead, Surik told her, "It sounded as if he'd been expecting you to be on the Ebon Hawk with the rest of us, and that he was very disappointed to learn otherwise. He wanted me to look for you. He reasoned that wherever my... wherever your ship had been, you had also been. 'If you return to that place,' he told me. 'If you find some trace of Revan..."

"He wanted you to tell him what you found?" Revan was looking at Surik now as if she wasn't sure whether she wanted him to answer.

"No. He said to me: 'Simply tell her that Carth Onasi is waiting for her.' He didn't say anything else, wouldn't look at me after that."

Revan turned away sharply, her posture rigid.

"I'll...um, be on the ship," Surik mumbled. He started to leave, paused, and said, "I'm sure the others will...ah...want to meet you later...that is...if..."

Revan choked on a sob and Surik fled the cavern, his footsteps echoing down the tunnel of the asteroid the Ebon Hawk had landed on that morning.

***

"Surik!" Brianna threw her arms around him, but drew back when he winced. "Your shoulder!" she exclaimed, digging in her bag for a medkit.

"I had to fight some kind of creature on the way in." Surik explained. Revan set them up so that nobody could sneak up on her while she was meditating....Ow!"

Brianna stopped rubbing kalto into the long scratches on Surk's shoulder. She was about to say something, but Bao-Dur quickly spoke first.

"Did you find Revan?" he asked impatiently.

"Yeah, I found her." He was still reeling from all he had learned. He winced as Brianna finished with the kalto and applied the bandage. "She'll...uh...be here soon."

"Is she pretty?" asked Atton, raising an eyebrow.

Surik shot him a cautioning look. "I'd stay away from her if I were you. She's still mourning the loss of her fleet admiral."

"Didn't you just meet the fleet admiral last month?" Mira asked. "Has something happened to him?"

Surik scratched the back of his neck. He was going to have to tell them now.

"Actually," he began. "It's something that's happened to her...and us too ever since we passed through that strange light."

The soft hum of the Ebon Hawk's power system was the only thing that broke the short silence. Then everybody started talking at once.

Surik waited, and one by one they fell silent. Brianna squeezed his hand, apprehension in her eyes.

"According to Revan, we're in a hyperspace pocket. It's how she sealed the sith away."

This time nobody said anything right away. HK-47 raised his hand. Surik ignored him, trying to figure out the best way to answer the unspoken questions.

"Can we get out?" Canderous finally asked.

"No. She thought of that, but realized that any opening would eventually let the sith out too.

"So we'll be here forever?" Canderous scowled.

"Not forever. She couldn't maintain it that long. Three hundred years. She's given the Republic three hundred years of peace before the sith are released into the galaxy again."

The news hit most of them as a physical blow. Surik hastily added, "The good news is that time has no meaning here. We don't have to eat or sleep. We won't grow old. And in three hundred years...we'll see what Revan's planning to do about the sith."

Canderous was still scowling.

"Don't worry, Canderous," Atton reassured him. "By the time we get back, you'll be heralded as the Legendary Lost Mandalore or something like that...returning from history to re-unite the tribes against the Sith. You'll be remembered for thousands of years."

"I have a wife," Canderous growled.

The others were lost in their own private reflections.

"Query:" HK finally asked. "Will we be given the chance to blast the sith who are trapped with us? Only to prevent them from blasting us first, of course..."

"The sith are down on the planet." Revan said as she entered the room. "And I had the foresight to tuck it into a deeper layer of the pocket." She sighed. "I'm still curious as to why you followed me." Her eyes locked with Surik's. "I'm grateful for the ship, but I sent you the vision to warn the Republic and give them the chance to make preparations."

Surik's expression told her everything. "Now you've even brought T3! He was supposed to remain outside and monitor the pocket for weaknesses."

T3-M4 gave a low, guilty whine.

"I still don't understand how you did this in the first place," Bao-Dur said.

"I came to realize that Darth Revan had been obsessed with learning lost force secrets." Revan explained. It was clear that if I recovered all my lost memories, I would not only know everything about the true sith, but I would also learn the best way to stop them. Using meditation and saber forms I sank as far into the dark side as I dared. And it worked." She smiled slightly. "Ironically, the key to stopping the true sith had been a neutral force power that Darth Revan had discarded as uninteresting."

"So that's why you had to do this alone," Surik mused.

"Carth never stopped worrying I would turn to the dark side," Revan said softly, "even before we discovered my dark past. Every time I regained a memory of Darth Revan's, it was as if a void between us opened just another..." She stopped.

"But can't he come looking for you now?" Brianna asked "You have all of Darth Revan's memories, and you're still you. What more is there to worry about?"

"I haven't fallen to the dark side, no," Revan said sadly. "But I can feel changes from who I was before. Besides, he doesn't know that. When I left, I told him..."

Revan trailed off again, and Surik hastily changed the subject. The others started telling Revan about how they traced the Ebon Hawk's path to this system, but Revan was barely listening.

She'd never stopped dreaming that someday he would come looking for her anyway. But he'd sent these people instead, just to give her a message. She knew now that he was never going to follow her, and the unspoken message was clear: if she wasn't coming home, he didn't even care where she was.

"Revan?" Mira asked as if for the third or fourth time.

She blinked.

"The flying space creatures I figured out how to sneak past."

"Extra security, of course," Revan answered somewhat dismissively. "They live on the asteroids. The sith used them to guard their homeworld, and I simply left them out of the pocket so they could continue to do so."


***

A sudden explosion broke radio silence.

"All wings report in!" shouted Captain Cede. "What was that?"

Amid the startled rush of speculation, a voice broke out, "Green-9, captain. Couldn't get the natives off in time."

Carth slammed his fist on the radio. "All right! We're done proceeding with caution. Fire at will! I want all ships cleared of those things in two minutes."

"Admiral!" One of the bridge lieutenants looked up from her readings. "We've got three of them on us. They're headed for the starboard engine."

Two more fighters exploded. Everyone on the bridge felt the shock wave. The same voice broke the radio chatter once more: "Admiral, they're all over us! We're not hitting them hard enough. They just keep---"

Explosion four cut him off.

Carth leaped from his chair. "Captain, you have the bridge. Keldo, Treta, Rake, you're with me. We're going to end this!"

The lights flickered and dimmed as the four pilots sprinted to the hangar. No doubt the things were at the engines already. After an 80 second eternity to climb into their fighters, Carth gave Treta the okay to blast open the unresponsive airlock. No more reinforcements would follow.

The situation was bad. Once the certainty of death was known to every pilot who had a creature on his ship, they'd started firing on each other, trying to shake off each other's assailants.

They made short work of the creatures on the flagship, demonstrating that all it took was a clear mind and a steady hand. A cheer went up as the Admiral joined the fight. The fighters rallied around him. Creatures were blasted off fighters. The things took the defensive, then retreated.

"So where are the sith?" The nervous orderly cut the celebration short.

"In a hyperspace pocket somewhere in the asteroid field," Captain Cede drummed his fingers on his console. "It's invisible, but the Ebon Hawk gave us the coordinates along with everything else. Lieutenant, see if we can get a transmission through now."

She looked up after a while and shook her head. Getting closer wasn't helping. It had become obvious that the only way to deliver the Republic's contingency plans was for one of the pilots to deliver it personally. One by one, the ships fell silent.

Carth bit his lip and jerked his hand away from his fighter's flight controls. Anyone else in the squadron would probably jump at the chance to personally help eradicate the sith from the galaxy once and for all...especially if it meant an escape from living out the rest of their lives in uneasy ceasefire. Not to mention the chance to see the universe three hundred years from now. He couldn't do that to his people--snatch this opportunity for himself like a selfish child.

Captain Cede's voice broke the silence that had settled onto the squad. "Well?" He sighed. "Any volunteers? Leave your loved ones behind? Leave three hundred years of peace behind and enter into a new Sith war like we've never seen before?"

Carth's radio crackled as the silence settled down again. Apparently, the situation sounded a lot more dire without someone waiting for you on the other side.

"Admiral Onasi?" Cede asked. "We know you want to go more than anyone. You wrote half of the contingincies. Admiral or not, you're the clear choice to explain them."

Carth found his hand moving to rest on the flight controls again. He clenched it into a fist. There was stil one thing that made any other rationalization meaningless: Revan wasn't waiting for him. She wanted him to stay.

He heard the barely audible voices of Cede talking with his bridge crew in the background. One of them started laughing, and Carth could barely make out what he was saying. "and remember when....poor captain of the Evelyn Hawks...we finally convinced the Admiral...just a coincidence!" The other voices chuckled, joined by the crackling laughter of some of the pilots.

"Look here, Admiral," Captain Cede's voice resolutely broke the chatter that had built up. "Let me put it this way. You're the only one here who even remotely wants to fly into that scary invisible force magic. We would all be eternally grateful if you would make this sacrifice for us all. The Republic needs you at the other end. I really don't know what you're still doing here."

Carth broke out into a cold sweat as, for the first time, he actually pictured himself going through the anomaly. What would Revan say when she saw him? He couldn't imagine existing there for three hundred years if she... His fingers tightened on the controls. He just couldn't imagine it.

"That and we don't want to listen to your lovesick regret all the way back to base."

He finally smiled. Whatever lay before him wasn't nearly as bad as the thought of spending the rest of his life knowing exactly where Revan was, but never again having a ship or a reason to follow her. He'd tried to avoid knowing where she was, but that hadn't worked.

The ship and the reason were here.

Now.



***
Two days earlier...


System: T3-M4;

Program: Internal_Directive_Re-analysis;

Trigger: Conditional Event #39;

BEGIN

Position of Not-Masters AND ship_of_Master is nearly = to position of hyperspace_pocket;

Return unit T3-M4 from hyperspace_pocket=FALSE;

ERROR: Conflict with Directive #5, states unit T3-M4 always monitor statusOfHyperspacePocket AND gather data for Calculation: probability_pocket_collapse. IF (result of Calculation > .60) THEN begin subroutine mission "TransmitWarning";

Potential Solution: begin subroutine mission "TransmitWarning";

ERROR: Calculation: probability_pocket_collapse only .034

Potential Solution: Compose new transmission regarding situation AND transmit to position of Republic Fleet;

ERROR: Conflict with Directive #28, states unit T3-M4 transmit no data regarding True Sith;

Potential Solution: ...

ERROR: Directive Conflict...Solution does not exist;

Potential Solution: Sort conflicting directives by field: "priority" AND attach exception ONTO lesser directive;

SUCCESS: Exception attached ONTO Directive #28;

Re-Evaluating error chain...

Course of action: Compose new transmission regarding situation AND transmit to position of Republic Fleet;


"Credits" Song: [link]
(Imagine any sequence you want )
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Comments:

I gave my female Revan a name, but I didn't share it here because, as I said earlier, this story is not just for my Revan.

Some dialogue is modified from Carth's KOTOR 2 cutscene, but the rest is my own.

A character called Admiral Cede replaces Carth in the KOTOR 2 cutscene in the dark side female Revan storyline. I took that to mean that there was a competent Captain Cede out there to step up to fleet admiral in any situation where Carth wasn't available.

As a Computer Engineering major, I though it would be really neat to write T3-M4's inner monologue in something that looks like a programming language. Since droids are more adavanced than our computers, I blurred the line a little between rigid computer code, and the stream of conciosuness of a sentient being.