The Dark-Side marauder's lightsaber started to spin in his hand, a double-bladed chakram that created a circle of crimson plasma in front of him as he stepped through the threshold.  Ismail backed up to protect her companions as he brought his whirling blades down upon her.  She blocked, stopping his blades in a lightsaber lock.  Ismail saw that her adversary had webbed fingers -- a Hydrasian!  She taunted him that he was from a dead world captured by the Empire, and he faltered, seemingly moved by her insight.  Breaking the lightsaber lock, he pushed her backwards through a doorway that opened onto an outdoor catwalk suspended over the molten lava.  She feinted a leap off the catwalk, but surreptitiously grabbed the bottom of the deck, clinging underneath.  Quinn charged at the marauder, shouting a Hydrasian battle cry, and the two faced each other down.  Quinn noticed the man's webbed fingers as well, and beseeched him to stop the fight, as they were countrymen.  The marauder lowered and extinguished his lightsaber blades, eager to learn of this world his adversary spoke of.  Quinn identified himself as the Prince of House Alger of Hydraulis, in exile and in search of his lost compatriots.  The marauder turned his wrath toward his fellow darksider, whom he identified as "Rumina Vitrix," and asked her why she never told him of his origins.  Quinn, Ismail and the marauder charged the shadowy Vitrix, and slew her.  The marauder, Kaala Talavaar, then made short work of the magma troopers, slaying them where they stood, though not before they managed to blow T-101 apart into pieces.  Kaala Talavaar bent a knee to Quinn and pledged his loyalty to his new liege, who renamed him "Tonn Aráis," Hydrasian for "returning wave," instead of his Dark Side moniker.  Quinn then relieved the corpse of Rumina Vitrix of her pristine lightsaber.

 

Meanwhile, inside the Crucible facility, Choree Kie noticed on a computer console an incoming starship identified by the sensors, and warned his companions they were about to have company.  Tonn Aráis informed them that he had a shuttle on the landing platform, and they all ran for the ship.  Quinn took a slight detour to free the fettered lava flea from her tether.  As the door opened to the docking platform and they ran through the volcanic gas in the direction of Aráis's shuttle, they were intercepted by a single red blade appearing through the haze.  Tonn Aráis stumbled backwards in fear, and when Quinn inquired who the wielder was, Aráis sputtered, "Vader!"  The group turned and ran back toward the facility's interior, but Vader used the Force to close the door, trapping them on the platform with him.  Quinn unwittingly reached out with the Force in his regret for having set the lava flea free, and the creature returned as if summoned, interposing its huge, chitin-armored form between Vader and the rest.  Quinn jumped on the creature's dorsal thorax and the others followed suit, save Ismail, who stood her ground and used the Force to rip the landing platform from its struts.  The shuttle and Vader's TIE fighter began sliding into the lava, and Vader leapt for the facility as Aráis swiped up at the Sith Lord with his lightsaber.  Vader deflected Aráis's strike with such force, that he knocked the marauder off the back of the mount, sending him sliding toward the lava.  Quinn grabbed Ismail and set their mount on a tack after the grasping Aráis, who, only with Ismail's help, managed to grab hold of the flea, but not before the heat of the magma set his legs on fire.  The creature leapt over the lava moat with all its riders clutching for their lives, and landed on the other side near the waiting Nerio.  Vash beckoned them inside as a starfighter-scale blast of plasma blew him off his feet.  All dismounted and boarded the ship, Quinn carrying the crippled Aráis, Choree Kie carrying the fragmented T-101, and Ismail carrying the unconscious Vash.

 

Inside the ship, Ismail took the co-pilot's seat and reached out with the Force to Hattori, her sapient lightsaber crystal, to help plot a quick jump.  Quinn took to the guns to lay down suppression fire as Vader closed in on them in his hobbled TIE fighter.  Ismail used the Force to crush what was left of the solar panels on Vader's starfighter, and the Dark Lord fired on them, scoring their hull, but ultimately losing them and they jumped to hyperspace.  Once safely away, they tended to Aráis.  Ismail put him in a Force trance and treated his burned legs as best she could.  When he finally awoke, he asked her to "use the Force" to help him find out who he was.  Unsure how she could help, she reached into his mind, with the help of Hattori and even Quinn!  Their combined efforts revealed, deep in the man's subconscious, a nascent memory of being nursed by a woman with a bindi on her forehead in the shape of the symbol of House Alger of Hydraulis:  a handmaiden of Queen Gish!  They wondered if the woman was but the nursemaid or the child's mother, though they could not say for certain.  Either way, the vision proved that Quinn and Tonn Aráis were related somehow, however tangentially.  Aráis, in his gratitude, pledged himself as Quinn's brother, "in blood or in water," and promised to teach him the ways of the Force.