Prelude: New Digs - Chapter I

The pair of Jedi had retired to their camp after a day spent traveling through a harsh desert climate and carefully exchanging words - fortunately, only words - with the area's denizens. Akea Oahu and Lilandra Asgarde had spent their first day on Teloc Ol-sen speaking to important members of local hunter community. Although Lilandra, by her own admission, was not always enticed by Akea's community-building endeavors, she was impressed by the tact and understanding with which her master had addressed the fearsome Teloc Hunters in their village. They hadn't made much progress in recovering the Jedi signet ring they'd come to retrieve, but they did manage to obtain permission from the local tribe to explore the ancient caves where they believed the ring to be lost.

For all of the complaining she'd done about the day's earlier heat, Lilandra missed it now. The dry, unshaded climate cooled drastically during the nighttime hours, leaving the sweltering daytime temperatures a distant, fond memory. The two had built a fire and sat close to it, absorbing what heat they could. The cold-blooded Dur Sabon Jedi Knight had coiled himself around the fire, heating nearly the entire length of his body. In lieu of a log or stump, of which there were none in this stretch of desert, Lilandra simply sat in the sand, leaning back into a section of Akea's coiled body trunk. Akea found the arrangement a tad awkward at first, but conceded it was better than the alternatives. Lilandra had joked that Akea was really getting the better deal of the two of them, able to leech heat off of the warm-blooded member of the duo.

They'd stared silently into the flames for some time, exhausted by their first day in the desert and contemplating their own mysteries. A nagging question prompted Lilandra to break the silence.

"Master, would we still go into these caves had we not obtained permission from the hunters?"