Tythonic resonator

Tythonic resonators were small, spherical communication devices utilized by the old Jedi Order. With the help of a tythonic resonator, force-sensitives were able to communicate with distant beings across the galaxy by channeling the Force, but the usage was rather painful and ineffective.

Long before the High Republic Era, tythonic resonators were used by the Jedi for communication. The Order stopped utilizing those devices because using them caused the user to bleed out of their ears and nose, but blueprints of the tythonic resonator still existed in the Jedi Temple Archives on Coruscant at least a thousand years after the last one was constructed.

After the Fall of Starlight Beacon, the Eye of the Nihil Marchion Ro deployed hundreds of Stormseeds in the Outer Rim Territories establishing a Nihil controlled space that was cut off from the Galactic Republic. Jedi Master Avar Kriss got trapped in this so called Occlusion Zone. When Elzar Mann found out about his friend beeing standed in Nihil territory, he did everything he could to communicate with her and other Jedi trapped behind the Stormwall. He had broadcast a message on a repeating loop, using many different methods and a broad spectrum of comm channels.

But after he failed to get through the Stormwall through ordinary communication devices, he spent weeks in the Jedi Archives researching obsolete technology and arcane and ancient techniques of force projection. There he found blueprints of the tythonic resonator and attempted to build one four months after Starlight Beacon's destruction with the help of JJ-5145, a droid he gave to his friend and fellow Jedi Master Stellan Gios before Gios' death aboard Starlight Beacon. While attempting to use the tythonic resonator to reach Avar Kriss directly, Mann was able to sense something through the Force, but the device exploded before he was able to reach Kriss. JJ-5145 assured Mann that it was his first attempt and that Gios would have never given up after only one attempt, but Mann got angry and yelled at the droid that he is not Stellan Gios.

After his failed first attempt to use the tythonic resonator, Elzar Mann gave up trying to communicate with Avar Kriss and instead tried to reach Kriss by breaking through the Stormwall. Seven months after the Fall of Starlight Beacon, he and JJ-5145 travelled to the edge of the Occlusion Zone to jump into hyperspace from inside the Stormwall. Knowing how dangerous this mission was, JJ-5145 grabbed Stellan Gios's lightsaber and destroyed the activation lever for the starship's hyperspace engine. The droid explained that it did what Gios would have done in this situation.

JJ-5145 then revealed that in its efford to behave as Gios would when possible it had rebuilt the tythonic resonator. Elzar Mann took the tythonic resonator and tried to communicate with Avar Kriss again. This time he succeded. Kriss, who was hiding from General Abediah Viess' army on the planet inside the Occlusion Zone was able to hear Elzar Mann saying her name. Hearing her friend's voice again gave her strenth and she confronted the Nihil mercenaries to stop them from destroying a nearby in search for Kriss. Bleeding from his ears and nose, Elzar Mann fell to the floor and dropped the tythonic resonator, breaking it into pieces. Although he didn't know if it worked, he told JJ-5145 that he won't stop searching for Avar Kriss, because that is what Stellan Gios would do.

In 229 BBY, Jedi Master Elzar Mann and Supreme Chancellor Lina Soh talked about the Occlusion Zone and all the people trapped behind the Stormwall. In an attempt to lighten the mood, Soh assured Mann that one of his attempts to send messages through the Stormwall might have been successful.

During his year trapped behind the Stormwall, the Ikkrukkian Jedi Master Porter Engle had received one of Elzar Mann's messages. It was sent on old and long obsolete frequency that hadn't been in commission for over a century using a established by Pathfinder and communications teams. Engle had remembered it due to his old age. He then got an idea to get a message out of the Occlusion Zone by using an EX droid, a model of communications droid that was used by the Republic Pathfinders to send messages through unexplored parts of the Galactic Frontier. So Engle reassembled an EX droid he called EX-1. At the same time, after the reporter Rhil Dairo had sent secret messages to all the Jedi trapped in Nihil space, Dairo, Engle and Avar Kriss teamed up. Engle told Kriss about his plan and that he had gotten the idea from Elzar Mann. Kriss was surprised that Mann had send multiple messages for she had only heared him once calling out to her through the Force five months earlier.

The tythonic resonator first appeared in the second issue of the Shadows of Starlight comic series published as part of Phase III of Star Wars: The High Republic. The comic issue was released on November 8, 2023 and it was written by Charles Soule and pencilled by Marika Cresta.