Zhiss had gotten rid of her outer robes in the first few minutes of landing on Gthrak-- they were wet, they were in the way, and this place was a hot, steaming mess of a jungle similar to her homeworld, and her ancestry was sufficiently aquatic and reptilian; the water simply didn't bother her that much. She'd taken the equipment harness off one of the enemies. That included some sort of military ration, which she chewed on during the momentary stop for energy purposes, to replace what she'd sweated out, and purified water, which she drank gratefully. There was no telling what sort of alien flora lived in the water, and the basic precaution of not drinking the water.

As she took care of the body's necessities, she looked over the cliff face that the Bothan wanted to climb, her eye finding the handholds and the spots. Certainly, with grappling cords, it was entirely possible. [b]"Grapples won't go that far up. You'll need a lead to drill in anchor points. Once I start, get your next best climbers up there to run the ropes. I suggest you have Jedi do this for your men."[/b] Traest would hate that suggestion, but it made perfect sense to Zhiss -- so much of their training was athletic, and the Force allowed them to feel their way up on a climb in the dark.

The Bothan no doubt intended one of his own to lead the way, but it was Zhiss that got there first. She trained as a guardian her entire waking life, climbed as a matter of athletic training and as one of the few pleasures the Jedi got to enjoy. She knew what she was doing when she fired the grapple to a likely point, just as she clamped the rope to her belt, which became her harness, via carabiners. She scaled quickly, being only lightly encumbered, but wearing gloves and boots suited to the purpose of climbing. As she made the ascent, using the grapple rope as her safety line once she got above the anchor point, she wedged spring-loaded cams into the wedges, or drove plasma-assisted spikes into the rock face itself, often moving laterally over the rock to create multiple anchors for the lines, for the next line of climbers to run rope through -- after all, they'd have to get their wounded up as well as the fit, and that meant a degree of foresight.

Even despite her experience with lead climbing, it was a laborious process that required her concentration. Her muscles burned somewhere around two thirds of the way up, even with the good field boots and the gripper gloves, both broken in from prior use, but the Jedi conditioning held -- she found the places in the rock face to cling to as she managed to finally put fingers on the top of the cliff, and haul herself up carefully, head coming over the top of the cliff face finally...and eye level with the slavering jaws of some sort of [url=http://img2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20101220053025/starwars/images/d/d7/Strill-tur.jpg]slavering beast[/url], a fanged, furless thing whose reek constituted a direct assault on her nostrils even as the drool seemed to drip liberally from its jaws...