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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ankh-Morpork Guard" data-source="post: 2914862" data-attributes="member: 10079">Chapter 322Shadow looked up the long turbolift tube before giving one last glance down to the actual lift below her. She had opened up the emergency hatch on top and begun to climb up after having deactivated the lift(just in case). Somehow, using the thing and having the doors slide open right when expected just seemed like asking for trouble to her. And this was not something she was just coming up with on the spot, either...thanks to a few rather ugly encounters that began just that way, Shadow had gotten into the habit of climbing. Sure, it was far, but of all people, she could handle it.    As she made the climb, Shadow began to very slowly and carefully open herself up to both the link and the Force again. The link came easily, as it was literally a part of herself and harder to ignore than it was to get back. Doing her best not to let Jyren’s stray thoughts distract her, she then put her focus on the Force. It was almost hard to climb from the overbearing strength of the Dark Side that permeated the ship. The Force was not inherently Dark or Light, no, but the darkness of living things had a way of tainting an entire area. If Darkwings, the thought of which made her shudder, not to mention the thought of it being plural, were anything, they were the ultimate incarnation of the Dark Side in an equally powerful physical form.    And they were all around her.    She could feel them searching through the Force...a familiar and yet all too alien presence hunting in the Force. Deep down, Shadow knew that those Darkwings were more of her...her clones at least. But that fact was kept buried deep below any conscious thought. The idea of clones was bad enough, and the thought of having to fight her own even worse...but Darkwings? Herself? No. That was one of the few things that was simply beyond Shadow’s ability to accept, and so she simply pushed it aside and ignored it.    Attention returning back to her physical senses, her eyes searched up before finding the label for whatever level she had climbed up to.    Deck twenty.    That would work...or at least, it felt like the right place to be.    So, once she was at the door, she reached over, strained a moment and cursed the fact that being short meant shorter arms, before managing to hit the emergency release switch. There was a slight pause, then a hiss as the circular door slid away. By the time it was open, Shadow was already in and surveying the area. There was an empty desk about two meters in front of her and a set of open lockers to the right...and behind the desk was a large, slightly blue-tinted transparasteel window. Through it, she could see a series of tanks and a few empty beds.    Medical ward.    Why here...?    A few soft steps forward and she knew exactly why. The door to the side of the medical ward that was on the other side of the window had a series of very large, and very...unique looking claw marks across them. She knew the source immediately, and stepped over and hit the switch to open the door a second later. It creaked, hissed, and then only made it halfway before stopping and leaving her with a very small amount of space to slip through. Shadow turned and did her best to slide through, silently cursing whoever designed the female form in the process.    Once inside, she saw that the room was actually much larger than it had appeared to be at first. There were at least fifteen tanks across the far left side of the wall, which had all been impossible to see upon exiting the turbolift tube. Two of them were filled with a soft, pinkish coloured liquid that had to be bacta, but the others...    Three were cracked, broken, and empty. The remaining ten were very much full. She’d seen this before...not long ago at all. Back on Hoth, the tanks had looked like this. Completely filled with black, nearly indistinguishable forms...but when you knew what to look for, it was easy to spot the long, sharp-toothed jaws, the powerful claws, the tail wrapped around the midsection and the massive wings that encompassed the majority of the tank.    But these Darkwings were different than the ones on Hoth.    Here, they watched. Twenty deadly, predatory eyes stared straight into hers, and when Shadow moved...the eyes did, too. But somehow, the usual horrible presence did not follow the deadly eyes...even their presences in the Force felt contained within the tanks. So much so that when Shadow reached out to them in the Force, she was nearly thrown back by the strength of the Dark Side that was forced into such a small area.    And yet they didn’t move.    Run.    No! No. She couldn’t run. Shadow wanted to run so badly...to hide from this until it was gone and then never speak of it again. But Marix...Marix stood strong to what the child could not stand against. She held her feet in place and peeled her eyes away from the ones that watched her and waited for their chance to be free of the confining prisons. And soon, her eyes found what they were looking for.    Getting her feet to move was an...interesting exercise, but Marix pushed through the fear attempting to grip her and walked over to a small console on the wall. There was a series of medical reading being displayed for each tank, and while she didn’t understand a damned thing about what it was trying to tell her, she did have an idea. Her arms reached up and her hands changed their shape so that her claws could shift into view. Marix dug the sharp claws deep into the panel’s edge before pulling the entire casing off of the wall in a short, but over dramatic, shower of sparks.    The mess of wires and small circuits within was not anything that she was an expert on...at least, not on fixing it. She could put two things together and hope they worked without too much trouble, but that was only thanks to the basic information on starship repair that Max had instilled in her not long after the two of them had met. But what she needed to do was the exact opposite of repair. She needed to do things Jyren’s way and break things...well, not Jyren’s way, she didn’t bring her lightsaber and wasn’t exactly about to cut things up. There was always that off chance that the Darkwings would be released if she did something wrong.    And so her hands(now back to their normal form) searched through the web of wires to the circuit boards in the back. She carefully reached around a small last clump of...something, before finding what she hoped it was that she was looking for. Carefully, Shadow put her fingertips to the board, then let out a silent prayer that all the Imperial training as an assassin she’d been instilled with was correct....before her claws returned. There was a loud crushing sound as the claws immediately dug straight through the circuit board and into the durasteel panel behind.    At the same time, the lights in the room flickered off before the emergency power cut on.    Then nothing.    Shadow’s eyes stayed focused forward, looking into the mass of wires that her arm was lost in, and forcing herself not to turn to look behind her to the now dimly lit room. She couldn’t look. She didn’t trust her eyes. Not now, at least...not in the near darkness. And so she trusted another sense. Very slowly, and very carefully, she reached out towards the tanks on the side of the room...and felt nothing.    Nothing.    Emptiness.    It took her a moment, but soon she was sure of it. At that second, Shadow retrieved her hand from the wires and then turned to look. The series of eyes that sat in the tanks were still watching her with the same intensity as before. It hadn’t worked?! She’d destroyed the entire power to the room, including any connections that the backup systems would have had!    The fear taking its grip again, Shadow couldn’t stop herself from taking a few steps back.    The eyes didn’t move.    Shadow bit her lower lip and stared at the eyes that...were facing where she’d been.    She took another few steps away.    The eyes still stayed focused on the spot she’d been in before.    A smile began to form on her face, and the slightest of nervous laughs escaped her. Finally letting out a long sigh of relief, Shadow turned to head out of this part of the ship and actually find where Jen was hiding.    But just as she pivoted around, the transparasteel window that allowed a view into the main medical room from the section with the desk exploded inwards at her.</blockquote>

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