JEDI HoloNet

A young Keshiri girl was born in 260.01 ABY in Kerebba on Alanciar, one of two major continents of Kesh, the traditional homeworld of the Keshiri in Wild Space. She was the firstborn daughter of a local governor in the province, raised in the traditions of Alanciarian warrior culture by her father, who was a believer in the old ways of their heritage, starting her training in the old legends and basic conditioning nearly as soon as she could walk.

When she was seven years old, a Jedi Master came to her village, investigating a disturbance in the catacombs at the Eskellon Mountains to the southeast. Although Jedi were not unheard of, visits from them were quite uncommon and only tended to occur when the affairs of Kesh intertwined with the political concerns of other governments. Intelligence from the capital indicated possible meetings of a Sith cult in the region – not an uncommon occurance at all on Kesh, which had a long history as servants and allies of the traditional Sith people according to traditional religious beliefs. This was one reason that Jedi rarely visited. Due to this, Force-sensitives tended to be kept on the homeworld to perform various duties, and the Keshiri were rarely if ever taken as Jedi.

However, the Council at Sus’mintri had convened with the elders from Keshtah on the other side of Kesh, and learned that at least three ancient shrines had already been activated on that continent, in addition to a number. After a new kidnapping around the Six Claws on Alanciar, two separate units were dispatched to investigate the activity and never appeared again, so Jedi were called in to thwart whatever activity was going on. This was a common precaution in those times, as Lord Rishi had just fallen and various Sith fanatics were emerging throughout the Galaxy, stirring up knowledge that had been long buried away, and for good reason.

Shortly after the Master arrived, a group of cloaked strangers came in the night and broke into her home, stealing the girl from her bed before she could even scream. Her father awoke the next morning to find his daughter missing, and immediately raised the alarm, gathering together a small troop of soldiers and townspeople to look in the nearby hills and mountains for any sign of the kidnappers. After three days and three nights of searching, the exhausted search party was unable to continue the trail, concluding that either the girl had been taken deeper into the mountains or was long gone by now. They returned home for some rest, to find that the Jedi Master had also returned from the catacombs. After informing the Master what had happened to the governor’s daughter, the Jedi set out at once to try to trace her dissapearance and hopefully resolve the mystery of the cult members.

It was just two nights later that the Master located the girl, bound up tightly at an encampment deep in the Catacombs, in a cave in the Eskellon Mountains known only as the Gaping Maw. It was rumoured that all who entered the Maw would surely perish. The girl was surely there, but heavily guarded, so without a second thought, the Jedi pushed deeper into the Maw, searching for a way to cause a suitable distraction. It was at this point that he discovered – to his horror – an altar room, with a large stone sacrificial table in the centre and in a pile to the side, the charred remains of two other girls, with no identification between them. Harnessing the Force, he carved a side tunnel through the bare rock to provide an escape from the altar room, and then collapsed the ceiling down in a mighty cave-in, sending a large tremor through the mountainside. Guards and cult members came running from every direction, some heading upwards out of the Maw in panic, others down towards the altar room to discover what had happened.

Cloaking himself with the Force and melding into the shadows, he slipped out the escape tunnel he had created, sealing it behind him, and made his way back up towards the chamber in which the girl was being held. There were only two guards left here, but they were both crumpled on the floor, surrounded by rocks and dust – in the process of creating a distraction, had he accidentally caused a collapse of the cave system further up? Upon shoving aside the debris, he discovered that this chamber, too, had been exploded. She was unconscious on the floor, but safe. The Master at once felt a strong affinity in the Force eminating from her, and realized at this moment that it was not directly his own actions that had destroyed this cavern, but rather some sort of innate defensive mechanism of the girl that had reacted when he set off the disruption below. She had not managed to control this energy, however, and did not retain consciousness to escape.

Scooping her in his arms, he rushed out the ruined cavern and into the main passageway that led out of the maw. Halfway up the passageway he was met by a pair of opponents, who each drew blood-orange lightsabers and leapt at the man. Setting her aside now, he parried their attack, attacking with a whirlwind of speed and a justified fury that surprised even his opponents. With a blinding flash and the whir of a lightsaber, he dispatched of both opponents in a few easy strokes, letting the heat of his blade set their bodies alight, just as their cult had done to the two other girls who had been abducted; the battle was practically over before it had even begun. The other cult members, now arriving up behind him, saw the fallen, mutilated bodies of their compatriots and realized they were hopelessly outmatched by this Master, and retreated into the Maw. He was able to return unopposed towards the village. Once the Maw had been compromised, the cult was constantly on the run, unable to carry out many further kidnappings. This failure for the cult would be the first in many losses for their number, and they were ultimately defeated by the government within the year, their plan to reactivate an ancient Sith holocron never to be realized.

Halfway to the village, the Master made a sudden decision not to return the girl to her father. Although it would be devastating news to the village, the Keshiri would never yield one of their force-sensitives to the Jedi Order, especially after such a traumatic kidnapping. But she was young and could still be molded into a great Jedi, and she clearly possessed the raw power to succeed. It was a difficult lie to swallow, but the Master justified it as firmly as possible to himself, even as he sat through the somber memorial service at the town gardens in Kerebba.

The girl was thus taken offworld and back to Coruscant to be reviewed by the Council. When she awoke from unconsciousness in the Temple medbay a cycle later, she was informed that it was no longer safe for her on her homeworld, and her father had elected it best for her to be taken by the Jedi for training, as she was actually a force-sensitive. She was shortly initiated and ingratiated into Temple life among her peers. Her name was Saeri Falynn.

Having been raised with a healthy respect of warrior cultures, young Saeri fit in nicely with the Jedi of the time on Coruscant, who had just been through a long war against the Sith and were once again somewhat more militarized than was the convention during times of peace. Although what she had been told about her father’s acceptance of this path was a lie, the lie comforted her, and it would be many years before she discovered the truth about what had happened. Her early training and mentality primed her to excel in the variety of exercises she was pushed through as an Initiate, and her progress led her to be selected by one of the battlemasters of the Temple, Master Merie Jeanor, for further instruction as a Padawan Learner.

Her master was known for being severe, but was a compassionate Jedi, focused on her art as a saberist and defender of the Order. She had even refused a Council position to remain dedicated to her role as an instructor. Her expectations were necessarily high for her apprentices, but Saeri was able to meet each one of them, and progressed well through her training. As she neared her nineteenth birthday, however, she was sent to Keshiri on a routine mission, which had been designed as a Trial to force her to confront her past, and the lie that had been told when she was only seven, and had been kidnapped by the cultists. This discovery greatly conflicted her, especially when she saw her own grave and learned that her father had passed away only a few years ago, without any surviving children to carry his name. Yet she had created a new life as a Jedi, one she believed purposefully in, and reasoned the actions of the Master many years back were, while somewhat immoral, not unreasonable. Returning back to Coruscant shaken but undeterred, she proceeded to one of the final important steps in her training before she would be ready for the last trials of Knighthood.

The next year, on a routine mission to Ilum, everything would change. The year was 279 ABY and the joint Mandalorian-Chiss invasion of the Galaxy was well underway. It was still two or three years before the tide of the war would begin to change, and all across the Mid Rim fronts, the Alliance had been losing ground to the marauding forces. Saeri had been sent alone by her Master to retrieve her crystal for her own lightsaber, who had seen fit even to abandon her post at the Temple for a year to try to make a difference on the battlefield for the Coalition. Upon arriving on the icy planet, she was supposed to have made a rendevous with the Temple Watchman on Ilum, but apparently no Watchman had been on duty for some time due to the shortage of Jedi during the war, and so she proceeded alone – and without record of her visit – into the caverns.

The young woman now wandered deep into the crystal-laden caverns, guided only by instinct in a dazed Force meditation. In such a peaceful, hallowed place, and perhaps a bit naive of possible dangers that could visit her at anytime, she was taken by surprise by a group of rogue Jedi, who had been sent personally by Eseleno to purge the cavern of its most powerful focusing crystals. Unaware at first that these were not Jedi from the Ilum Temple, but enemies who would not hesistate to destroy her, she approached them to extend a friendly greeting. In response, they attacked, and she was quickly overcome by her attackers and cornered, her old lightsaber destroyed and useless, charred and ruined in the cold snow below. Faced with certain death, Saeri concentrated within to summon the Force to her for a last desperate effort to repel the rogue Jedi – then the explosion happened. In a moment that seemed to last an age yet probably only lasted two and a half seconds, she felt a great cold envelop her body, a blinding blizzard of white flash before her eyes, and she knew no more.

During the year 321 ABY, a pair of Jedi Knights with their Padawans, all hailing from the Ilum Temple, stumbled upon a great block of ice blocking their path into the deepest crystal caverns. When they were preparing to blast it away, one of the apprentices noticed with alarm that a slight figure, ressembling a person, seemed to be encased within the ice itself! The Jedi reached out with the Force to whatever…or whoever…was in the ice, and at this moment the ice began to glow fiercely, and with a terrible sound, the ice gave away, melting from around a body, which soon collapsed to the floor. This was Saeri Falynn, still healthy and nineteen years old, and not a single day older than when she arrived on Ilum forty-two years earlier.

After the tremors faded and all the ice was gone, the Jedi rushed to the help of the girl, who was on the verge of shock from sudden exposure, but was otherwise in quite good shape. After realizing that she had been rescued from some Jedi from the Ilum Temple, she insisted on walking on her own feet out of the caverns despite some residual weakness from the Force stasis that she had accidentally triggered and been trapped in for some time. Yet no amount of steely determination would prepare her to realize what had happened to the Galaxy in the time that she had been imprisoned.

The girl was brought before the Council at Ilum, who were nothing short of astonished at the story of her survival, if not skeptical that such a stasis was even possible. Yet her first-hand knowledge of the events of the Attrition Wars and the aftermath of the conflict with Rishi’s Sith were so convincing that the Council reinstated her as an Adept – normally a rank reserved for former Knights, but occasionally used for students who were advanced but had lost their Masters. Given that the Ilum Temple was already exceeding its capacity, she was sent to the Temple on Alzoc to complete her training and reacclimatize to the current time period, and to find a way to continue a life that did not exist anymore.