Xandri always hated this part of these expeditions. Well, he hated a lot of parts of these expeditions, mainly because they involved a lot of sitting around and waiting. He didn't like sitting around and waiting, especially if there was stuff that needed doing. But climbing slowly down a lit stone slide was about as time-wasting as it got, since he couldn't do anything but walk slowly backwards and look at the glorious stratification of the rock. And the people, of course. They were all dressed sensibly, with lots of rugged fabric in the places not covered by armor. The glaring exception was the princess, who seemed insistent on wearing that bright blue dress everywhere she could, to the point of even having a custom harness that buckled around her torso as opposed to around her legs like everyone else. Xandri would bet money on the spot she'd get whiplash and break her neck if someone jerked her line back up the tunnel.

Xandri wasn't sure if he'd said something or made excessive noise or what, but as soon as the thought went through his head, the princess turned and levelled him with a glare with all the warmth and forgiving nature of an iceberg. He couldn't be arsed to deal with her shit -- he'd been putting up with for five goddamn years and long since given up trying to stop it -- so he turned to look back down the tunnel and see how far away from the end they were. After a moment, he could feel his face going numb as though the air temperature had dropped by about twenty degrees. But he shouldn't have noticed because his armor--

That train of thought stopped dead as his facial nerves broke their silence to report that his eyelids were screaming under some sort of pressure, like someone had shoved a bunch of tiny hydraulic jacks into them. Trying to keep his footing on the sloped floor of the tunnel in his pained and startled state, he ripped off his helmet and rubbed his fingers against his eyelids, trying to wipe them clear of whatever had latched onto them. Once it felt like he'd gotten most of it -- by which he meant his eyelids were no longer crying bloody murder -- he pulled his hand away from his face and looked closely at the fingertips of his gloves. Ice. Fucking ice had formed on his eyelashes. No, closer inspection showed some of the ice that hadn't melted had similar shapes: long and thin, like short hairs. Ice hadn't just collected on his eyelashes, somehow. His eyelashes had frozen solid. What the fuck? Well, it had given him something to chew on just what the hell that meant for them for the rest of the trip down.

Xandri had managed to get his helmet back on by the time they reached the bottom of the tunnel. The Legionnaires had tossed out emergency glowsticks so everyone could get a feel for the size of the pitch-black room the tunnel opened into, but Xandri flicked on the low-light optics in his helmet and gave the place a look anyway. It was empty. Empty and huge. A hundred meters back by seventy meters across by ten meters up of absolutely fuck-all. About the only things of note, aside from the sound of more people coming down the tunnel behind them, were half a ship tucked into a corner of the cavernous room and a couple cargo bay doors on the far side.

"First things first," the boss rumbled from the middle of the crowd. "Figuring out where we are."

"Shuttle bay," Xandri responded immediately, pointing to the scrapped ship in the corner. And, maybe because the universe had decided flash-freezing his eyelashes wasn't enough of a freak occurrence for the day, the princess gave the exact same answer at the exact same time. There was a tense silence, broken only by the shuffling of equipment harnesses as people looked around nervously.

"Okay...now that that's resolved, we need to determine our way forward while the supplies are arriving. Xandri, do you have anything?"

The whole "mind-opening" thing all the old space-wizard texts Xandri had read never made much sense. That's all they said: "Open your mind." Xandri wasn't exactly keen on cracking open his skull, so he just stuck to focusing on the world around him to amp up his senses. One of the things the magical mumbo-jumbo he'd been fiddling with had done for him was giving some cool buffs to his vision and hearing. He'd already been able to pick out small details or quiet conversations if he focused on the senses. Skill or talent he didn't know, but it'd been useful in the past. Recently, the acts had allowed him to see and hear things that weren't light and sound. The best way he could put it was he could hear computers rattling off their operations and see electrical currents race around like speeders on a track. He wasn't quite sure how he did it, but it basically turned him into a mobile technology sensor. Not a bad deal.

So, he tuned up those senses, listening closely and peering into the darkness, trying to pick up any trace of active electronics. The area around him was lit up like a city square and filled with concert-hall murmurings. The shield generators on the Munifex armor alone would set off his tech-senses from thirty meters off. He had to try to narrow his focus to the wall on the far side of the hangar to block out the cruft from all the tech they'd brought down with them. Turned out he was just wasting his time. Whole area beyond the wall was dark and silent as the grave to his eyes and ears.

"Uh, no, but I recommend we start with one of those doors."

Everyone had learned by now that making smart-ass comments was Xandri's thing. It was nothing new and what he said was rarely as simple as he stated it. So to watch the princess start wandering off towards the cargo doors like she was in some kind of voodoo trance wasn't exactly what Xandri had seen coming.

"Oh, for the love of..." he muttered. "What's she on about now?"

Karin followed the specters across the hangar floor, displaced projections of people wandering back and forth, fading in and out of her perception like insects on the march. Though many had passed through this room in its time, those she was interested in were those operating hovercarts or other cargo vehicles. They trundled back and forth in a solid stream of memories, moving through each other where their paths crossed in this confluence of past actions, linking landing stalls marked on the hangar floor with the center door.

Much to her embarrassment, it took Karin a conscious effort to remember the door was sealed in reality, despite its appearance in her psychometric visions, and avoid walking into it. She stopped short, placing her palm on the door to narrow her queries of the Force to it and it alone.

"This is the main thoroughfare," she called out behind her, her voice echoing strong and clear in the cavernous room. "What we seek can be found beyond."

Ignoring Xandri's muttering and commentary, Kar'Avan followed after Karin with most of the expedition team in-now. Truthfully, it was grating on everyone's patience the way Karin and Xandri treated one-another. While at least one of them is renowned for composure, the two of them had an uncanny way of getting on each-others' nerves. While it was easy to say, "I wish those two would stop fighting," Kar'Avan less minded the fact that they had a disdain for one-another and more minded the fact that neither party could set it aside for the sake of the mission and everyone else around them.

With another projection into Karin's mind, Kar'Avan simply popped in to let her know that he was opening the door.

"Karin, I suggest you stand clear," he stated, "I'm opening the door now."

After the noblewoman stood back far enough, Kar'Avan turned his attention to the door. Through his mastery of Telekinesis, he hardly had to even cast a thought towards the door as its mechanisms bent to his will. The door was forced open, groaning, and whining in protest as both doors were gradually forced apart.

"The way is clear, we press on."

Concrete. Endless walls of concrete. The soullessness of this place was obvious and apparent as they continued walking through the echoing, pitch-black halls. The illumination from the Legionnaires' helmet lights and Kar'Avan's own expanded awareness hardly made their field of vision dark, but it was also eerily quiet for a moment... Right up until a storm of activity alerted the lot of them. Something way coming.

"Boss, droids!" Xandri called right as Kar'Avan felt a jolt run through not only his body, but also his mind. His Battle Precognition tipped off an attack.

Good thing, too. A series of blaster bolts flew through the air towards the party. Kar'Avan's lightsaber was already in his hand before the attack had even begun. He activated both blades and deflected a torrent of plasma. The bolts were coming from somewhere unseen down the hall in the dark. The sound of blasters firing, and the clanging of metal feet alerted the party as a horde of Sentinel Droids came charging down the hall. Some of them took up cover at the corners of the intersection the expedition team was approaching. Others charged to close the distance to them. Either way, Kar'Avan never even needed to order the Legion to open fire.

Many of those charging droids carried heftier weapons, Kar'Avan recognized them as some kind of assault cannon, given by the fact that they were carried with top-mounted handles. That inference was wrong. Those five droids that made it to within fifteen meters of the group had powerful shield units affixed to their backs, and the expedition team soon found out why.

The droids clenched their mechanical fingers down on the triggers of their weapons and the hall immediately lit up with brilliant white-orange gouts of fire. Flamethrowers. These droids were carrying flamethrowers. The Legionnaires at the front briefly panicked a moment at the approaching wall of liquid inferno. They staggered back as a formation, but Kar'Avan stood in front and willed this fire to cease. In a cinematic fashion, the napalm acted as if it had struck a spherical shield two meters in front of Kar'Avan. The fire deflected around and over the expedition team, burning the walls and shooting five meters into the ceiling. Kar'Avan stared defiantly with a hand outstretched to deflect the fire.

"Keep firing!" he ordered.

The Legionnaires quickly reformed their formation and continued shooting passed Kar'Avan. The Sith sent a wave of telekinesis down the hall, sending the Sentinel Droids flying backwards towards their comrades. A Paladin levels its own rifle-- a laser cannon by "normal-person" strength and size constraints-- and gunned down the five Fire Droids as they landed.

With them out of the way, the other thirty-five Sentinel Droids were taken care of easily by the expedition team. As everything calmed down, the formation continued moving.

"Oh, we are off to a -great- start. Abso-fucking-lutely -wonderful-," Xandri commented as a Legionnaire blew the head off of one of the now-disabled Sentinel Droids.

"They're Sentinel Droids," Kar'Avan calmly stated, "Antiquated even by the Cold War. The situation is less dire than you think."

"What about those fire droids, boss?" Captain Irza asked, the aging Zabrak rolling a shoulder to warm up his joints.

"That was... Unexpected. Darth Mehkis was hardly a sane one, keep on the lookout for any droids that look like they have special instrumentation attached and focus your fire on them."

"Aye aye, boss."