Breathing. Breathing had been the only other sound in the small room, aside from the constant hum of the servers lining the walls of the room, since Kresst received the news. He was almost grateful for the white noise that the computers created, else he would have been alone with only his own breaths, and his ever-quickening heartbeat. Outside of sleeping, this was likely the longest period of time that the Mrlssi had spent alone in the room without working on [i]something[/i]. No inspecting artifacts, no cataloguing, no meditating, just his own thoughts. He was sat in his hammock, which was strung up near the top of two servers just to the right of the door. His large eyes were half closed, and looking down blankly at the hard floor that he was suspended above. 

For a Jedi Knight with his years of experience, Kresst’s response may have been seen as odd. As opposed to being meditative, he was emotional. He felt the sadness, the loss, sharply in his chest. He had the capacity to rid himself of it, certainly. Like every Jedi on the ship, he had went through all of the same training to be able to center himself in peace, and to detach himself from pain, fear, and anything else that could draw out his emotions. However, that was not his choice. He allowed himself to feel what his mind naturally wanted him to feel. It was anger at the betrayal of the Republic, sadness at the loss of the Order he had known for all of his conscious life, and fear of the unknown to come. That was the natural order of his mind, and he was certain he had never felt anything so intense before. 

Again, Kresst played the message aloud through his datapad. The voice of Master Kenobi filled the small room completely, with each word holding a kind of weight that Kresst had never felt in a simple recording. In his research, he had found similar recordings given by important men and women of long-dead civilizations. He had catalogued recordings of powerful warriors and inspiring leaders giving hope to their subjects. Sometimes they were successful, and many more were failures. For a moment, he wondered what some future scholar a few hundred years in the future might make of the recording he was hearing. Would it be another tale of the Jedi’s brush with extinction, or the final words of a dead Order?

He took another breath, in, and out. Kresst closed his eyes and, for a moment, had to make the conscious effort to clear his mind. Even he realized that the strength of his emotions in this moment were becoming worrying. Kresst did not fear emotion, but even he did not give into it unrestricted. He focused on another word of the message as Master Kenobi spoke it: hope. In such a dark time, the idea of hope almost sounded ridiculous. The Jedi Order that had existed for the last millennia had, by everything he knew at the moment, had been almost extinguished, along with the Republic it supported. But, perhaps somewhat ironically, Kresst felt that he could believe in the idea of hope even more strongly than most Jedi. He did not believe that it was the will of the Force for darkness to overtake the galaxy. Such a fate would upset the balance of the Force just as much as the light controlling the galaxy in its entirety. If darkness was rising now, then Kresst was confident that the light would have to rise to meet it in time. They needed only survive until that time could come. 

Azure’s voice came over the intercom at seemingly just the right time. Kresst doubted that he, or any of the other Jedi would fully recover from what happened in any short amount of time, but right now, he understood the importance of action. Their new enemies would not allow them to wait around and grieve. 

Kresst dropped down from his hammock, his claws tapping lightly against the floor as he used the Force to soften his fall. With a wave of his hand, he opened up the server room door and walked out down the hall, towards the main room. Despite his light frame, it was easy to hear him coming down the hall due to his claws tapping against the metal floor with every step that he took. By the time he reached the room and joined Azure, he had cleared his mind of the emotions that had filled his thoughts just minutes ago. 

“Master Azure.” Kresst greeted, his tone serious and solemn. The texture of his voice was a bit harsh, since the vocalizations of Basic did not feel natural to produce through his physiology, but all the same, he was perfectly capable of conveying the full range of emotions through it.