[Location: Arrival Plaza] [ETA: Closed] to everything turn, turn, turn

[chainsarebroken]

“Welcome, traveler.”

Waking up in a strange place always begins with an inventory: functioning toes, arms, spine, check. Lightsaber, check. Wits, probably. That’s almost everything. Anakin Skywalker sits up and touches his flesh-and-blood hand to his temple with a grimace and looks around himself, first for dangers, then for Obi-Wan Kenobi. Neither immediately present themselves. It’s just as well, if he’s been captured--again--that his master hasn’t been captured alongside him. Of course, after a fashion, it would also be convenient if he were. But that’s no reason to wish it upon the man.

The tinny droid-sounding voice is still saying something. Anakin’s not really listening; he’s getting to his feet, testing his balance, cracking the knuckles of his left hand. The room has the inoffensive dimensions of a hotel room, not a prison cell, but Anakin’s come to distrust what prison cells do and don’t look like. There are no immediate exits: not even barred ones, just no immediate exits, smooth wall all around. That’s unusual. He powers on his lightsaber--without immediate intent to use it, even, just to see if it works--takes mild, somewhat warlike comfort in its usual hum. Then it occurs to him that someone has knocked him out cold and abducted him (again!) and, again, not bothered to deprive him of his lightsaber.

That’s not comforting, for all the usual reasons. For all that the direct, somewhat Gordian workings of Anakin Skywalker’s mind tempt him to try and cut through the wall of his enclosure, one or two additional thought processes are popping up as well: and one of them says, did that work last time?

He powers it off again. The AI is repeating the same phrase over and over again, which catches his reluctant attention.

”May I have your name?”

That’s odd. Presumably any new captor already knows who he is. Anakin is a Jedi: he’s become somewhat accustomed to people knowing who he is. He frowns at the voice, trying to ascertain where it’s coming from, and instead his eyes alight upon what looks like a comlink on a chair--the room’s only furniture--miniature screen glowing brightly. He gingerly scoops it up with his free hand with the intent of seeing if it has any functionality; his last prison comlink has gone missing, after all. This one looks marginally different: of a slightly more up-to-date tech level, for one. And it’s prompting that he enter his name.

Instead he tests the channel of his Force bond. Nothing. Not nothing nothing--just no useful feedback. Obi-Wan is elsewhere, that’s all.

Anakin’s brow furrows. But he figures: why not? Maybe they do already know. Anakin Skywalker, he enters into the comlink and waits gamely for the rest of the lecture.

It’s short, and seems geared towards how to use the simple device. Obviously Anakin has missed the operative part of the orientation. He tabs through a few screens on the comlink and the AI sounds satisfied. He tunes it out again when it starts abjuring him to introduce himself to the rest of the network, whatever that is. Instead he opens the network on his new comlink and looks for a Contacts section in case a familiar name is already programmed in. No dice.

Across from him--as if in resignation--a door drops open like a hatch. A hatch in what appears to be… stone, stone lacquered over with some kind of insulation and wallpaper. Well, that tells him… virtually nothing, he observes philosophically, but that’s not quite the same as absolutely nothing. He gives up on his excavations, scoops up the comlink, and decides to go exploring.

He’s presented with: a plaza. An atmosphere. A sky? An unfamiliar sky, currently in the grips of something that approaches nighttime. The illumination is all from sources on the ground, anyway; he’s arrested briefly by the sight of what at least looks like a non-dome, non-artificial set of stars before he returns his attention to everything around him.

He’s surrounded by people, bustling. People he doesn’t recognize. Architecture he doesn’t recognize, either, though it’s certainly beautiful--a silvery spire unfolds itself in the near distance, and nearer are a set of cloisters and what appears to be some sort of silent-running tram. None of this does anything to explain what he missed entirely in his orientation, though, so he scans the crowd for familiar faces, not with particularly high hopes. He’s been lucky enough before to be captured alongside friends. It doesn’t seem likely this many times in a row. All the same he looks: and tries to make sense, again, of the world around him.

He doesn’t succeed, but existential dread takes a while to collect in a mind like Anakin’s. For now it occurs to him that he may have a mild concussion.

Comments

[personaldemon]

(Yes, that is quite the lineface at you, Anakin, for all the slow reception it receives.)

Jason purses his lips a moment as the extent of the question registers, on multiple levels: Anakin, the impulsive young super-powered fellow with the supposed dark future ahead of him (Jason has not forgotten Etrigan's initial words; cryptic and maddening as Etrigan's doggerel often is, Jason has learnt the cost of ignoring it), is here without his level-headed mentor.

More pertinently for Jason Blood, Jason himself is here without his-- insurance policy. Hnh.

"No," he says after a few seconds' silence, "but I've also been 'here' for some... five minutes, I think. Yourself?"

[chainsarebroken]

"About the same," Anakin estimates, and uncertainty and hope visibly cross his features. "Well, maybe he's here."

But the static in their Force bond still tells him nothing, even as he sends out a push of inquisitive concern. He wonders if this is what it was like for Obi-Wan the first time before he arrived before remembering--of course. Of course. In Obi-Wan's time, the bond had been severed years ago.

No point in woolgathering. Anakin brings his hands together again and notes absently that Jason and Harry are together, which seems strange. "Did you come the same way I did?" he asks after a moment. "Doorless windowless room, tutorial with the comlink? The last thing I remember before that is working on a car at the garage," he touches his metal hand to his head again, "though my head hurts, and I assume someone hit me. I guess we're prisoners in demand, huh?"

The cheer rings strange and hollow in the absence of anyone else they know. (In the absence of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin is aware--but he would take anyone else right now, too.) For only the second time, Anakin gives his surroundings a proper glance-over: the tessellated floor, the pillars, the spire and the tram, the ridge of what promises to be a miniaturized range of hills silhouetted against the sky. The buildings go on for quite a while--if you can call all of them buildings--but beyond them, he can see bare rock and shadows he assumes are greenery, after a fashion. His bearings are more difficult to acquire here.

So what, he wonders, do they do here? Do they eat? Sleep? Or just wait? The other people look like they've eaten and slept and bathed. That's promising. He looks askance: "I don't suppose the tutorial said anything about what we're doing here, either. I didn't listen to the whole thing."

But he didn't try to cut through the wall, either, and that's something.

[personaldemon]

Skywalker looks quite-- young, with that expression on his face, Jason thinks, and then shelves the thought as being irrelevant; he is not the sort of person to murmur things like I'm sure he'll turn up.

Harry is squirming, again; Jason sighs and turns him right-side-up and facing Anakin rather than the petty punishment of keeping him faced the other direction. Harry offers his usual oversized grin.

"Yeah, yeah, the little room and the blah-blah-blah, we got that too!"

"Yes, thank you Harry," Jason says absently. The "com link" as Anakin calls it has been tucked away in his pocket-- it looks like the mobiles he remembers from when they were rather new-- but that's not something he's thinking terribly much about, Anakin's words having triggered a thoughtful peering at the Jedi's somewhat swollen temple.

Jason raises a hand curiously, remembers that at least one of the two of them has personal boundaries halfway through the motion, and instead touches at his own temple, exploratively-- ah, yes, ouch.

(It is somewhat telling as to the frequencies of migraines in Jason's life that he hadn't properly registered his own matching head pain until Anakin brought up the concept.)

"Hm," says Jason, through a tight grimace as he probes at the tender spot with his fingertips. "I believe I was in bed. One doesn't need to go bludgeoning people who are already unconscious--"

"--feel yours, there is something there," Jason says, his voice sharpening somewhat as he registers the presence of something foreign, beneath his skin.

(Aside from Etrigan.)

[chainsarebroken]

Anakin's skin-and-bone hand immediately goes up; he pokes around at the spot with a growing expression of alarm, which manifests itself as a deeply furrowed brow and a dark cast to his features. "You're right," he says. "Lovely. It's--"

The pain cuts him off when he digs too deeply into his temple with his fingernails, and he winces and shuts his eyes for a moment. Then he goes back to exploring, trying to determine the shape and size of the object by poking around even more, which mostly yields more pain. He tries to feel around with the Force instead, but it's too difficult, too precise, and concentrating on it just worsens his headache.

After enough prodding he eventually just presses his hand to his forehead against the pain, and lets it drop, squinting at Jason.

"Have you got anything sharp?" he says. "And small? Much smaller than a lightsaber?"

A new priority has inserted itself before steal the ship: get rid of this mind control implant. He doesn't question that it is a mind control implant. Obviously it is a mind control implant.

[personaldemon]

Jason unconsciously mirrors Anakin's exploring: they stand there, two tall men in the middle of a plaza with tesselated flooring, poking at their temples with their fingertips and making mutual faces.

The pain is sharp, like a nail driven through the skin and into bone and tissue beneath; Jason stops a few seconds before Anakin. At the question, however, he nods. "Yes, I've a pocketknife, one moment--"

--no, he does not have his pocketknife, he realizes as he pats at his clothes. This realization is disgruntling. "--never mind.

"--anyway, you can't go cutting it open right here, like this," he says crossly. (Note this bit of common sense might not have materialized had the knife actually been available.) "At the least we would need good light, and disinfectants, Skywalker."

In days to come, Jason may regret his use of the 'we.'

[chainsarebroken]

***

The knife turns out to be the easy part. It's not hard to find someone in the crowd willing to part with their pocketknife temporarily, though the man Anakin finds looks leery of what Anakin plans to do with it. Since this is Anakin alone temporarily, though, he lies glibly and pays it altogether no mind.

The disinfectant proves more of a challenge. After a while it occurs to him that the Ship's Services droid said something about asking it for help, and he finds himself redirected to a strange, many-buttoned vending machine of sorts. It's a high chute built into one of the sloping iridescent walls and it has a familiar logo next to it: familiar because Anakin's fairly certain he saw another one of these chutes in his arrival room, although he'd dismissed it as part of the architecture at the time. "First aid," he says clearly and presses the button.

It takes a few tries, but several boxes of Band-Aids later, he emerges with gauze and isopropyl alcohol.

For Jason Blood's part, he's tasked to find a proper room. What he eventually selects looks like a laboratory: or potentially a repurposed lecture hall. It's difficult to tell, but it's bright and spiraling according to some alien understanding of the Golden Ratio and has a number of curved white tables scattered among its steps, with gel-like specimens in pillar display tanks around the room. The tables look clean. Many things look clean here.

Anakin takes a moment to make sense of the room; when this fails, he shrugs it off, sets his supplies down on one table and then hoists himself up to sit on it.

"Why don't you try me," he suggests like they're taking turns on a swingset. "I have a thick skull. --Really, I get the risks," he says in a lower voice when Jason makes a face. "I recognize this kind of thing could go seriously wrong. But so could not getting it out."

[personaldemon]

Jason has no idea what the thing in the nearest translucent tank is. He is still staring at it when Anakin breezes in, contemplating-- vertebrae? cartilage? too many limbs-- with a sort of disjointed curiosity, but he quickly turns to the task at hand.

It had occurred to him, while Anakin was hunting supplies, that in some ways it might be safer for he himself to 'go under the knife.' Ultimately brain injury isn't precisely permanent for him, after all. Then he'd reminded himself that Anakin Skywalker would be the presumed operating surgeon in this scenario, and decided that no, he was not going to volunteer himself as patient.

So he only nods, slowly, at Anakin's off-hand suggestion, taking the knife and the alcohol for some quick-and-dirty field cleaning, as it were. He gazes sidelong at Skywalker as he wipes the blade, with a critically assessing look.

"You should lie down; your head would be steadier that way." Pause. "We do have a pillow."

"No," says Harry from where Jason has propped him. "I don't wanna be bled on. You don't think I got one of these things in me, do you?"

"I checked, Harry," Jason says patiently. "You're fine. Presumably it wouldn't work on you-- whatever 'it' does-- since you do not have a brain."

"Oh, thanks."

"Well, you don't," Jason says with equanimity. "I am ready when you are, Mr. Skywalker."

[chainsarebroken]

Anakin duly swings his legs up onto the table and stretches out. The blitheness has evaporated somewhat, and he is clearly not looking forward to this, though he holds his head immediately still in the service of cooperation. His level of dismay is more akin to 'dental appointment' than 'impromptu brain surgery,' anyway. He may not have a level calibrated for the latter.

He looks up at Jason with the half-gung-ho expression of someone who is fairly certain they are not about to receive a backdoor lobotomy. "Go ahead," he says, and closes his eyes.

[personaldemon]

There are stools-- or, something like them, high chairs with no backs-- though as Jason hooks one with an ankle and pulls it closer he has the slightly discomfiting sensation that it was not exactly designed with the human anatomy in mind. He ignores the situation and considers the task at hand.

It hadn't seemed very deep, when he'd touched his own. And it hadn't seemed anchored, but slightly-loose beneath the skin. Presumably it's not drilled into the bone of the skull, just... subcutaneous, which should make the removal fairly simple. (Optimism seems the way to go here.)

The temple has a lot of blood vessels; this is likely going to bleed like the devil, Jason supposes. Well, they have gauze and he's bound more than a few cuts in his time, at least.

Jason settles his free hand on the other side of Anakin's head, firmly, his callused palm securely cradling the young Jedi's skull. (Jason's touch is disconcertingly warm.)

"Is trepanning a thing, in your home... world, or whatever?" Jason asks with conversational curiosity, bracing the heel of his hand on the table's angular edge. "I've performed a few of those."

The shiny edge of the pocketknife-- and Jason thanks Whoever that its owner keeps it sharp, at least-- touches Anakin's skin, cold steel, and Jason exerts careful pressure as he begins to nick a half-moon slice around the edge of the foreign object. His current plan is to cut a centimeter's exit gap, and then attempt to push the object out the little flap, from the other side, with pressure from his fingers.

That is his plan.

[chainsarebroken]

Trepanning is not a concept known to Coruscant, no. Maybe to Tatooine. But it rings no bells, thankfully--

As soon as the knife makes contact, the color starts to drain out of Anakin's face; as it cuts, his breathing grows shallower and shallower into hyperventilation. He very obviously belabors his breathing a bit then, to try and control it, but to no avail--his chest is seizing up. It is the remarkable silence of someone in extreme pain. His fingers are balled up into fists, even the metal ones, and his feet kick and scuff at the table's surface. But he holds his head still.

His pride is only spared crying out by a second--a second in which he goes slack and still all at once, and Jason has to prop his head up by reflex to keep it from lolling. Anakin's blacked out completely.

That probably makes things easier, for the time being.

Blood is pouring out of the side of his head. Gauze is going to be a temporary solution, at best.

[personaldemon]

Jason had not suggested restraints; this out of some peculiar and stupidly macho sense of.... perhaps respect, for Anakin Skywalker's presumed space monk training which, Jason thinks, has likely included pain endurance training and meditation and the like. Clearly the young man is no stranger to past trauma, if the arm alone is any indication.

He wonders if it was a mistake, that lack of restraints, as Anakin's lungs switch into overdrive, as his booted feet twitch and jerk on the table, but it seems that--

--and he's passed out. Jason frowns, abstractedly, as hot blood starts runneling from the little gash, down over the side of Anakin's face, into his hair, onto Jason's own hands. He frowns because, yes, no doubt it hurts, being cut never feels good, but--

But in the grand scheme of things, the cut is less than a centimeter long. It is bleeding profusely, which will need dealing with, but Jason is honestly surprised that it could make Skywalker actually pass out.

--well, he had better take advantage of this and finish the matter as quickly as possible, Jason supposes. He lets go Anakin's limp head (gingerly, easing it into stable position--). Press here, and tease with the blade's tip to coax the little disc--

White pain explodes across Jason's field of vision. It feels very much as though someone took a sledgehammer to his own little implant. Possibly also a railroad spike. The knife drops from his nerveless fingers to clatter on the table in the sticky growing pool of Anakin's blood.

Jason clutches at his own head on reflex, and that is the last thing he does for a while. Unless one counts actions such as toppling off the stool and slithering down, down, into a pile on the floor.

Harry blinks.

"Uh... guys?"