Rei dreamed again, awaking with a bit more memory of what it was.

It'd been days since she'd arrived here, and each day brought less hope of exploration and greater dissatisfaction with explanations. Luke Skywalker, palace cronies everywhere - even with initial exposure only through nigh-fictional propaganda holos, she knew the type - claimed he was the one who'd destroyed the Death Star, brought down both the Emperor and his enforcer Vader, turned the tide of the Rebellion with his band of merry misfits and criminals. But all she could see was a robed man waving the glow-stick that had brought her closer to death than she'd ever like to be. And who had loaded her broken body up in an X-Wing manned by one like the two she'd lost after Net Station.

She simply laid in bed a while, hoping there was something else today. Not more poor attempts at something she could only guess at, something involving her feelings. Heh. Most of her feelings were things she didn't want much to do with. It was like burning: the only relief was the absence of feeling for her, always had been. And she didn't feel nothing, she felt annoyance. In more pragmatic terms, she observed something like what Jakkui economists called "doija fvou" - "the feeling of happening twice at once." She had left the complex readings to Unkar, a self-proclaimed seer, but now she saw the doija radiating off him in waves, splashing everything around him with the stuff.

Somewhat reluctantly, naked as the day she assumed she was born, she climbed up from the bed assigned to her. With minimal light as she wanted, she maneuvered primarily by the sensations from her arms and feet. Her eyes would adjust, but she wouldn't like what she saw. From here shuffling across the floor she found the bundle she'd laid her clothes in, and...

Pyijexa!

They felt different. Running two fingers over the surface of the bundle confirmed a change in texture: softer, more give, no hinting of the spent cyclesuit beneath. Different clothes. Obviously from this place, same stuff Luke wore.

He was consistent, it seemed. The swear subsided into a Jakkui sigh.

("He will open. Prepare.")

It wasn't her voice, or one from the 'Gut' she'd heard speak of on Jakku. Again, it was Mother's voice. She listened as best she could, reaching for the bundle and untying it.

That was when the door opened, and gelden-naran light from outside shot it's way in, exposing the interior of the room to the view of the outside corridor. And who else would stand in the doorway but him.

Luke didn't care that she was naked, either, that was simply a fact of the situation. He'd come to get her, begin today's training. He'd seen far worse, including the insides of people. Compared to that, the outside was of little importance. Just another layer. She was already getting dressed, he'd told her everything without opening his mouth. With his message delivered, he stepped outside the doorway and waited for her to come out.

Less than a minute later she did, dressed in the paler grey-white shades of the robes he'd given her. Somehow she paled with them, and there was some metallic firmness in her face. How old would she be now, how long since then?

Tatooine's two suns were famous for their aging effects on inhabitants, rendering the young as sad old men hardly out of adulthood. His uncle, how long had it been since he remembered his uncle Owen? Aunt Beru? Their bodies, laid bare like meat to dry under those suns. Old Ben, whose years always escaped Luke, even after becoming one with... It. What was the Jakkui sun like, its incredible magnic pull from two sides of the planet, the day-to-day stresses?

He knew not of their sun, the thing they rightly called Hel. But he knew of how they'd been vaporized, frozen, ripped apart as powerful magnets folded the remains of the planet into one. He'd felt that from every living being as one. He'd had his Alderaan after all this time.

'You're losing thought again." She'd noticed. It seemed harder and harder not to these days.

"Oh?" He kept his voice low as they walked, trying to keep the shuffling of crimson carpeting on feet audible to his human ears.

"Yar, 'tis - "

Luke had to stop her there, holding out an arm in front of her, turning to face the child forced to grow up. He shot a couple looks around the corridor, pointing out the window to Rey's right. If she remembered correctly, that was Noulr-true.

"Listen, Rey: people here don't take kindly to Outerbase. That's what the First Order speaks, and if it reaches here, it's like they've won. Do you understand?"

Beat. When she spoke, it was slower than normal, quieter.

"Well enough. Can we get where we're going, Brillgoori?"

"Shashkaii goldxi smogolo 'bv feiro, Gron-blijattané."

She'd never heard that one before, but it was clearly a Jakkui tongue. It had Speaking Teedo licked all over it, she could hear that and know it was true. Luke continued in Standard Basic:

"The First Order's too illiterate to learn where their Supreme Lekksiker comes from, apparently."

"What?" Luke resumed his pace.

"Never mind, just keep walking. We have more important things to learn."

"Like?"

"What you can do."


...


The training room made Rey almost nauseous. The mats on the floor and slightly angled stripes on the walls reflected horrifyingly into a mirrored ceiling. One door in, same door led out. Spacious enough to feel uncannily like "home," without ever truly being. No source of light she could see, yet everything cast a shadow in some different direction.

On the other side of the room, Luke faced her. By each foot was a small, black, almost yatser-shaped cup. His eyes never moved from her, she never saw him blink. She looked down: the same cups, same position around her feet.

There was no sound here. When he spoke, it was like speaking into a cup and having your own voice ring back into your skull. Distorted, tinny, small, tight, muffled save the cutting consonants.

"Pick them up."

She bent first to reach the one on her right.

He moved without sound across the whole floor to meet her, stuck forth a forbidding arm to block the motion.

"What? You ask me to pick it up."

"Not with your hands."

"Then what, my bjiones?"

"You mean to tell me you don't feel it?"

Rey was, of course, confused. And this old brill Luke was, again, speaking yet another language. How is anyone supposed to respond to something like that, except with what they knew? What she knew was what her senses said.

"Feel what? What I feel right now, that's you radiating frustration. And this place is radiating murder like... touch like Jakku."

Luke had to pause at that. Rey looked at the upside-down image of the two of them on the ceiling - shimmering, almost liquid now, and she couldn't say why.

"So you do feel it."

"You don't?"

The old brill needed another moment, she could tell his mind was trying to race, and it was working. The solid image over their heads had adopted something like water, or what she'd seen of such reflective fluids. The image was distorting in waves, pulsing and throbbing like thoughts of a living being.

Luke was somehow connected to it, and that's what this place was: a way to reflect not just images, but thoughts. A place if meditation.

Luke was a warrior monk. Like the old heroes of the Clone Wars turned traitors, the legendary Anakin and Kenobi. And now, it seemed, turned heroic again. That's what Luke was.

And he was trying to teach her his ways.

Trying to force a smile down into a smirk only widens the grin. A little childlike chuckle escaped, and she found herself surprised at that.

"You're a Jedi. You're training me."

Not the whole truth. But, at least, testing her. Seeing what she could do. He'd even said as much earlier. Her smirk settled itself into the usual neutral.

"Train me."

She was only vaguely sure what he could do. In the old holos, Jedi were fast, she had to struggle to follow them even in slow motion replays, the awkwardly dramatic ones meant to convey power. Their blades were fiery and could cut cleanly through anything they touched. They could manipulate objects with their thoughts. She'd felt Luke keeping her body from crossing her into the river, that's what it was.

Luke nodded. A nod did mean here what it did on her late homeworld, yar?

"Then pick it up."

"I can't."

"You feel the cup there?" Rey nodded. "Then speak to it. It'll listen, and it's open to suggestion." She had to point, knowing what she'd heard and not understanding fully.

"That cup 'tis?" Luke nodded.

"If you can speak to it, and you can listen, everything that is will offer you help. Do you know what that's called?"

She shook her head. She might've heard something like it before, but knew his answer would be different. Over their heads, the mirrored surface was hardly a flat surface, it was a perfectly reflective fluid bending, rippling, forming a simple over the head of the older brill. Her presence on that surface could only be described as... well, touch different. Neither weaker nor stronger, more registering to her as a texture it seemed the thing couldn't fully compute.

"We call it the Force. It's the network that keeps this universe together. Some living things can do what I described: talking and listening to all of it. That's how..." He raised a gloved hand, twitched his fingers ever so slightly, and raised the cup at her side, along with his own. Their presences represented new dimples in the ceiling that Rey could see. Was that what it was - an indicator, monitor? Mirror of something the oyo could not see?

The angled stripes on the walls twisted. She took a step to her left, and the reflections moved. Shadows, too. Two steps right, changed again. She returned to the center and watched the cups go.

They rose to eye level, then closed towards one another, picking up speed until they collided. With a hollow and anticlimactic clink they both clattered to the ground. Rolled in perfect parallel away from one another, back to their respective owners.

Rey watched as Luke must've told both cups to stand themselves upright again. The one to the left foot of each person was standing on end now.

"So I can do that, too?"

Luke's hand went slack, and the black cans dropped to a more stable state.

He looked up at her register on that strange liquid ceiling. She could make out the warped blob of her own reflection, slowly realized why it looked so odd:

It wasn't a dimple reaching upward. It was a stalactite, a mound reaching down from the ceiling to her. She pointed to it.

"How ds'that mean?"

"It's broken. It wasn't the last time I was in here."

"You're lying." He shook his head.

"You broke it. You've - ..."

[... - done that before.]

He trailed off. She saw the weapon again on his belt, the robes. She had those robes, just not that belt: a hilt for the silver handle dangling on his right side. The kind like the one on the holos, used by Skywalker and Kenobi. And by the two on Jakku. One who'd hunted her, the other who'd let her go free.

"When do I handle a glo-stick like yon on that belt?"

He motioned with his gloved hand and the ceiling froze, flattened out. Her reflection was proper again. Those damned perfect slanted stripes were back.

"When you're ready. But we're done here."