(no subject)

[burnsbright]

WHO || Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy
WHAT || What Scout was up to since... god, that was in July? Big fat summary.
WHERE || Mostly the Research and Development Lab.
WHEN || See 'What'.
HOW || Prose

While in the field for her one mission to date, Scout had obtained a small, polished quartz crystal. Nothing special about it, it definitely hadn't been stolen or anything. But she’d known when she had seen it that it could be incorporated into her project, and on returning to the castle she had devoted an increasing amount of time into that task.

Scout had never had the chance to learn the accelerated method, the one that took two days to go from basic parts into adjusted parts that could be assembled and activated in minutes. No, she only knew the way that took a month to get to that same point.

Reaching that point had been harder than she'd hoped. It was damaged enough that she could only salvage parts of it, and technology here was, when she got right down to it, laughably primitive. Scout had been so afraid of losing the parts she’d salvaged that she had tested every individual component and how each interacted with others, multiple times.

Just as well, things had blown up in her face at various points. Not literally. Well, sort of, once. No serious damage - she'd protected her eyes and put the fire out quickly. Still, after that she had been... strongly encouraged to take her project into the research and development lab.

That had helped. No one there knew what dimetris circuitry was, when she asked about flux apertures she got jokes about time travel, she was sure she was being spied on the whole time. But they gave her space to work and test and had suggestions, when she described what the various components she needed actually did, and helped her modify and make things.

They also sometimes kicked her out and told her to sleep or eat, which was frustrating, but she knew she could forget those things and skimping consistently on either didn’t help. It would have been impossible to hide just what she wanted to make, and she had to constantly correct people who called it a “laser sword”.

Over the months Scout filled notebooks with diagrams and rambling notes on half-remembered technology. Maybe she’d never been a technician specifically, but this was the clearest symbol of her Order. In the Temple she had applied herself to it like she had applied herself to anything - wholeheartedly, with a bloody-minded determination that had made some people uneasy.

Notes led to proofs-of-concept which failed catastrophically less and less often, which led to development and refinement and prototypes, eventually. Which also sometimes failed, but damned if Scout didn’t find out how and change things.

She did have some concerns about people duplicating her work, and some advancements in the field of cutting devices were going to be inevitable, the idea of these Earth people, even the Knights of the Silver Dragon, having her Order’s symbols and no concept of what they meant was... bad. Dismaying. That would cheapen it, she thought.

So Scout kept her notes in Aurebesh script, and when she had to translate she made sure to paraphrase. She found ways around cameras, blocking or covering any she saw. She was cagy and secretive about some of the things she did and tried. She dismantled or destroyed prototypes when she was done with them. All this... well, it meant she didn’t make as many friends as she might have otherwise, and it might have slowed progress.

But that was how it had to be.

And the day did come when she had an argument about finishing in her room versus in the lab and reluctantly backed down to spend that time in the lab, though she curtained herself off with repeated warnings that she was not to be disturbed.

What Scout did then took three days, though it felt like less to her. On the most basic level, she put the pieces together and called on the Force to help her charge the power cell and bind the components together on a scale that was hard to gauge or measure. Really it was personal. Private. Not something she wished to share.

She came out dazed, dehydrated, yet calmly elated. The reborn hilt of her lightsaber was clutched tight in a nerveless hand, as if she’d never let it go.

So. Now what?