Cina was drawn away from sleep, fitfully, reluctantly.
For long, innumerable moments, she lay there, not truly thinking, not truly anything. She felt all too heavy, all too, too tired. She didn't want to be awake, she really, really didn't.
It was only when, thoughts bouncing idly from thing to thing with no real direction, that she stumbled on the damn Jedi, her scheduled lessons, that she... Well, no, she didn't want to get up, exactly. Some part of her, something dark and seductive and so tired, would be perfectly content to stay here and never, ever get up. (Though, "content" wasn't precisely the right word, but the sentiment was close enough.) But she wouldn't be allowed to. If she didn't show up for her re-education, the Jedi would surely come track her down eventually, and she just knew after that they'd be even more insufferable than they were on an ordinary day. So she had to get up.
Unfortunately.
Her eyes focused rather more slowly than they should, even they were bloody tired. The first thing she saw was Sasha, sleeping curled up against the wall of the ship — that looked rather awkward, actually, Cina couldn't imagine it was in any way comfortable. She almost looked like a normal kid at the moment, cleaned up and the matted mess her hair had been chopped down to a bare couple inches, wearing actual clothes, for once not painfully tense, asleep relaxed in a way Cina hadn't seen her yet.
Only almost: she still had that knife Cina had let her have when she'd been cutting her hair, glinting blade peeking through her folded arms, hugged close to her chest.
This wasn't making Cina feel any less horrid.
Each tiniest movement feeling about ten times more difficult than it should, her own body feeling all too heavy, she was so bloody tired, Cina levered herself out of bed. Slowly, gently, doing her best not to disturb Sasha. Honestly, she didn't expect to succeed — she assumed the girl had been sleeping very lightly for some time, ready to hide herself away again at an instant's notice — but, by some miracle, by the time she was on her feet Sasha was still sleeping. Cina stepped out into the hall to get dressed, so the clinking of her belt wouldn't wake the poor girl up.
Cina wasn't entirely surprised to find, walking into the main body of the ship, that she was apparently the last one up. At least, she was pretty sure those occasional clanks had to be Kandosa poking around in the hold, she couldn't imagine what else. Mission was at the table, tapping away at something — it was impossible to guess what that girl got up to, and honestly it didn't particularly matter, she could just go ahead and entertain herself — Zaalbar doing something in the kitchen — Cina really hadn't the familiarity to tell what he was working on at this stage.
An absent sort of frown pulled at her face. There was an inconsistency in the Cianen Hayal story she hadn't even noticed until now: she was positive someone with her background should know how to cook worth a damn, but Cina really, really didn't. That was a curious oversight, now that she thought about it. Eh, not important.
"What time is it, anyway?"
Mission jumped, something clinking loud enough Cina could hear it from here. "Cina! Uh..." A couple absent blinks, and Mission glanced down at her pad again. "Eight seventeen."
"Shite. I'm supposed to meet Dorak in the library at nine thirty." Grumbling curses under her breath — in Iridon, apparently, which...okay? — Cina made straight for the caf machine, flipping the thing on. Like everything else on this ship, Kang had been considerate enough to have a rather nice one set up and waiting for her. How thoughtful of him.
The grinder was pretty loud, of course. Cina winced, both at the twinge flaring through her head and just the noise in general. She glanced over her shoulder, toward the hall leading to where Sasha was still (hopefully) sleeping. Would she hear that all the way over there? Kandosa wasn't being exactly quiet himself, but he was further away, and this thing was fucking grating, it probably carried better, and the girl was certainly used to living on a hair trigger. If she'd realised she was just going to wake Sasha up anyway she wouldn't have put near as much effort into being quiet...
Hardly twenty seconds later, Sasha came charging into the room. Her wide eyes found Cina immediately, pinning her with an uncomfortably intense stare — but, after a second, the tension bled out of her, seeming to relax (if only marginally).
"Oh, hi there!"
The girl jumped at the surprised shout from Mission, then disappeared again, blink and she was gone.
"It's okay, Sasha." Setting the thing to brew a sizeable mug for her, she stepped away, aiming a beckoning wave in the direction she was nearly positive Sasha was. "Mission won't hurt you. Come over here and introduce yourself."
Mission got up, coming around the table toward Cina, every movement slow and careful, a soft smile on her face. (She wasn't looking anywhere near where Sasha was, but she was trying, anyway.) Zaalbar stayed where he was, which was probably a good idea — Wookiees were far more physically intimidating, it was better he didn't stand up right now. The faint flicker at the edge of her perception that was Sasha curved around the edge of the room, staying nearly as far from Mission as physically possible, then darted in, coming to a stop directly behind Cina.
The sudden flood of light and heat from so nearby made Cina jump — she really hoped she got used to this ridiculous Force-augmented awareness she'd gotten stuck with lately, it could get a bit unnerving. Forcing a smile onto her own face she said, "The blue one is Mission, and the big hairy one is Zaalbar. They're good people, friends of mine." The word Cina used literally meant siblings, not friends, but that was a conscious decision — "vod" could be used for people one wasn't related to, it just implied a closer relationship with a greater degree of mutual trust. "Come on out and say hello, they won't hurt you."
It did take a few seconds more convincing, but Sasha ultimately did stop trying to hide behind her legs. (Sticking behind her like that was kind of silly, she was completely invisible, honestly.) Mission crouched as low as she comfortably could, nearly bringing her down to her knees, her head slightly under Sasha's — Cina was mildly surprised, it seemed Mission had more experience with children than she'd assumed — even stumbling over a little basic Mandoa at Cina's direction. Turned out, Sasha did know a tiny bit of Basic, barely enough to introduce herself. (She started with the full Vesaisa be-Sulem, but amended it with Sasha on her own a second after.) Zaalbar acknowledged her with a nod and a pleasant grumble, but had the grace to stay sitting and keep his response to a couple words — Sasha was very skittish, just those couple words in his deep, rumbling voice already had her diving behind Cina again.
Cina thought this was the longest she'd seen Sasha stay fully visible so far. She stuck around through the entirety of breakfast — though she didn't sit at the table with them, snatching biscuits and ducking back behind Cina's chair. This seemed like something she should be taking as a good sign, but she wasn't entirely sure whether it was significant enough to be considered proper progress.
Now that she thought about it, Sasha spending the night in Cina's bed with her, despite that she'd kept as much distance between them as physically possible, was probably a much bigger deal than this right here. She apparently trusted Cina enough to sleep, and thus leave herself extremely vulnerable, in her immediate presence, not hidden at all. Sure, Sasha had slept with that knife she'd let her have, but still, that seemed like it should be a huge step.
Should, because Cina wasn't positive — she hadn't studied psychology, especially abnormal psychology, very deeply, she was mostly just guessing here.
At least...she didn't think she had, anyway.
Before long, Cina really had to get going, if she didn't want to be late. Ordinarily, she might consider showing up a few minutes late, just to subtly express her disdain for the intellectual footing of the Order in general, but that sounded like a bad idea. An amusing one, yes, but probably not worth it.
It still took some long convincing to get herself to stand up. She was just so tired...
She'd gotten halfway through the little town — this early in the morning, the place was nearly as quiet and empty as it'd been in the middle of the night — before she realised she wasn't alone. Jerking to a halt in the street, Cina turned to stare into the seemingly empty space a few metres behind her. "I can feel you back there, Sasha."
"How do you do that?" The girl's voice drifted out of nothingness, a soft whisper barely above the edge of hearing. "Nobody else can find me."
Cina shrugged. "Jedi things."
"You're not a Jedi."
"Not exactly, no." That was far too complicated to be explaining to a child as young as Sasha in the little time she had...though she did have to wonder why Sasha sounded so sure about that. Maybe she'd just been eavesdropping during that argument with Onasi, whatever the others had said about her when she hadn't been listening. "But that's not important. You should go back and wait on the ship."
Sasha didn't say anything. But she didn't move either, still standing there invisible, just out of arm's reach.
With a heavy sigh, Cina said, "I can tell you're still there, you know."
"You left."
"Yes, well..." She struggled to decided how the fuck she was supposed to respond to that for a few seconds. "I did come back. And I'll come back tonight too. I thought we talked about this."
"Yes. I'm making sure."
Despite herself, Cina couldn't help smiling a little. "You're adorable, really, but I'm not sure that's a good idea. The Jedi are teaching me their magic, that's where I'm going right now. There will be a lot of them around."
"That Jedi on the ship couldn't find me."
That...was a very good point, actually. Not only had Shan not been able to find Sasha, she hadn't even realised she existed, had clearly had serious doubts whether Cina was telling the truth about her. (Which was silly, why would she lie about that?) Shan was supposedly a fully-trained, competent Jedi, and she hadn't felt Sasha at all. She had no idea why not, exactly how whatever Cina was doing to spot her differed from what Jedi normally did, but it was possible all the Jedi at the Enclave would be just as blind to her presence as Shan had been.
Though bringing her along still seemed like a terribly stupid idea.
Or, now that she thought about it, what was so terribly stupid about it? Sure, some of the Jedi might notice Sasha, but surely they wouldn't do anything that bad if they did. It might take some explaining, exactly how they reacted in those first seconds might freak Sasha out a bit, but...
Cina sighed. "Fine, whatever. Let's go, then. I'm going to be late at this rate."
Sasha was still invisible, but Cina was certain she was grinning at her anyway.
"And you realise that doesn't make any bloody sense at all, of course."
Sitting with legs folded on one of the twisting roots of the tree in the middle of the Enclave, Tokare opened one overlarge eye a slit to shoot her a level look. "It is as it is, Apprentice."
Cina barely managed to hold in a scoff.
Many people all around the galaxy had serious issues with the Jedi, the more innocuous ones including their drive to keep their secrets, their tendency toward doublespeak and riddles. It turned out this wasn't just something they did with outsiders, but even their own members. The secret-keeping she'd already run into — beside seriously restricting her access to the library, they wouldn't even tell her her own real name. (She hadn't pressed the point, still wasn't certain she wanted to know, but they had said they would never tell her who she'd been before they'd remade her.) Their inability to speak plainly and get to the bloody point, though, Tokare was giving her a master class in that.
Not trying as hard to keep the derision off her voice as she probably should, Cina drawled, "So, the trick to this Force thing is to just...do nothing." Tokare hadn't put it like that himself, obviously, but that was what he'd meant by that long, directionless, empty ramble.
His expression didn't twitch in the slightest, but it was still clear to her that he didn't much like her characterisation of his 'wisdom'.
Sasha did though, a spot in the empty air behind her and to her right frothing with a sense of low-boiling amusement. Which, inexplicably, Tokare didn't seem to feel at all — he had turned a thoughtful, confused sort of stare in Sasha's general direction when Cina had joined him on the bloody dirt under this damn tree, but he'd ultimately dismissed whatever he might be able to pick up. Which implied he hadn't picked up much at all. None of the Jedi in the Enclave had reacted to Sasha's presence, they'd been here for hours and nobody had noticed, it was really bloody weird.
If Cina wasn't sensing her through the Force, if Sasha's camouflage really was just that good, then how the fuck was she doing it?
But anyway, she was supposed to be meditating. That was pretty much what Tokare's instruction had boiled down to. There'd been a lot of circular babbling about centres and illusions and connectedness and some such nonsense, how she could only hear whispers from the Force when she was quiet herself, she could only touch it when she detached from the physical, could only know its will when her own was suppressed. Blah blah, spiritual nonsense, blah.
Cina had honestly had trouble keeping a straight face. No wonder they insisted on getting them young — nobody used to thinking for themselves could possibly take any of this seriously.
But anyway, she could...try to do that, she guessed. She didn't at all expect to succeed. Maybe there was some kind of trick to it, but she didn't think it was possible to just...shut her brain off. She simply didn't work that way, never had. But she might as well try. Tokare was supposedly an expert in this magic shite, after all.
Cina sat there with her eyes closed, trying to empty herself of all thought and feeling, for maybe two minutes before giving it up as a bad job. She just...couldn't not think about things. If nothing else, she ended up watching the random blotches of moody colour her brain filled her empty sight with, wondering if there were any pattern to it or if it were just random noise from the constant firing of millions of nerve cells. There was no point trying to suppress it, it was simply impossible.
Not to mention, that bleak exhaustion hovering over her took the opportunity of even a moment's quiet to fall all the heavier. So, even if she could stop thinking, she'd just end up feeling instead. Feeling really bloody miserable.
So, no, she wouldn't be doing that.
But she had been able to do all this Jedi shite before. They might have repressed her memory, but it wasn't like they could fundamentally change how her brain worked — according to Lestin, who had known her before, her personality was even more or less the same. The person she'd been before must have had some trick, her own way of doing it. She meant, really, she'd been able to do this Jedi magic shite since she'd been a small child, long before she'd been given away, before she'd known a thing about how the Jedi went about it. There had to be another way.
When she thought about it, it wasn't just her, what Tokare was saying didn't entirely make sense. There was no real reason she should have to be empty or detached or whatever such silliness — wasn't she already connected to the Force just by virtue of...being alive? She was pretty sure that was how this worked. And, she was clearly touching it at some level all the time, what with the uncomfortable sixth sense she'd picked up lately. (Hers didn't seem to work the same as the Jedi's, but it had to be through silly magic shite, how else?) And she certainly hadn't been empty of thought or feeling when she'd squished those four people back on Taris. So, yeah, calling out his shite on that one.
She was pretty sure he was wrong, but that didn't actually help her figure out what the fuck to do. Maybe she should...just...focus on it? And try to... She wasn't sure what, really...
It was sort of a daunting prospect to begin with. The extreme awareness of her surroundings she'd suddenly picked up was...rather uncomfortable at times. At one level, it was just sort of a lot — the brain was designed to process only so much information at once, and she couldn't turn the bloody thing off, it got really distracting. She'd gotten into the habit, very quickly, to just...ignore much of it, most of the time. Like any other sense, she guessed, people didn't actively pay attention to absolutely every little detail they were perceiving at any one time — something might jump out and distract them, but focus was usually selective. The weird picking up feelings thing was much harder to ignore — with Onasi gone, the Hawk was suddenly much quieter, she was far more at ease without his distrust and anger pinching at her skin — but the more tactile angle, the awareness of her physical surroundings, that could be focused as anything else. It was sort of analogous to a long-range sense of touch, after all, and it wasn't like she was entirely aware of the normal one all the time either.
But maybe if she, just, did the exact opposite of ignoring it...
Closing her eyes, her face pulling into a light frown, Cina tried to turn toward that weird sixth sense she still didn't have perfectly adequate language to describe. Just closing her eyes immediately brought it more into focus than it'd been a moment ago. The most intense thing in her immediate surroundings was Tokare himself, hot and pulsing, little sparks of energy running up her ethereal fingers down through her spine, she needed to repress a shiver. Like a bright light in darkness, he spilled out past himself, a cloud of soft power obscuring everything within a couple feet of him, gradually fading away the further she looked. She tried to ignore him — if she focused directly on him she'd probably end up accidentally reading his mind or something, which was not the purpose of this exercise — but it was more difficult than she'd expect, his brilliant warmth drawing the eye.
She finally did manage to turn away, spreading herself out around them. There was the dirt broken by twisting roots, transitioning to grass after a few feet behind her, the tree stretching up, branches weaving together as they stretched overhead, leaves fluttering in the breeze. She did her best not to focus on any one individual blade of grass, any one leaf, instead touching each at one, gripping them from every angle, surrounding it all.
Her left temple starting to throb a bit, biting her lip, she pushed further, extending this odd awareness of hers further out than it naturally sat. She knew the tile of the walkpaths carving through and around the little garden at the centre of the Enclave, flashes of warmth as she spilled over one Jedi and another and another, she pushed further, feeling the outside walls of the structure in all directions, then further, the shape and texture of the inside, the roof, not just the physical but the jittering sparks of electricity rushing through in sparking filaments, all the Jedi, dozens of them, bright and hot and completely impossible to miss, filling the air with a murky glowing soup.
As she pushed further, that whatever the fuck that was only grew brighter, hotter, not just exuded by the Jedi but threaded through them, echoing across them all as though bound together through ties unseen. It wasn't just the Jedi, she noticed as she pushed further, but it burned through the gardens as well, if somewhat less brightly, all the plants and the insects and the more intense flickers of animals of some kind, the same echoes pinging through them, a pulse carried from somewhere outside them all, carried through all all at once, an echo that grew louder and louder the further she pushed herself outward.
She didn't even notice the echo start burning through her before it was too late to do anything about it.
—bucked under her feet, bringing her to her knees, her head nearly slammed into the lip of the table, she pushed herself back up, teetering as the ship tilted around her—
—Lords in their dramatic, absurd, overdone robes, the air about them quivering with hatred and fear in equal measure, but the fear slowly won out, they sank to their knees before her and—
—was laughing, suddenly and sharply, a note of shock in the sound, surprised by himself, but he positively burned to her eyes, his delight overpowering any sense of—
"—can't do this!" the woman shouted, eyes sharp with despair, "It wasn't supposed to end this—"
—breaking up, shuddering and cracking against unrelenting pressure, even as the heat tore into her she was still reaching out—
—smiled at her, the expression rather eerie with the blood splashed across her face, but she didn't care, at the moment she could only feel relieved, she was safe, she'd told the bloody idiot not to follow her, but she was—
—I KNOW YOU—
—up her skirt, and she pulled him closer, fingers tight in his hair, the stiffness of his cock against her hip bringing a smirk to her face—
—burned into her side, but it didn't matter, she'd take him with her, a portion of the energy from the lightsaber transmuted into fire even as it cut into her, bright flames spilling from her fingers, his head and chest vanished in the conflagration—
—tears running down her face, collapsing to her knees, looking somehow smaller in her ridiculous black and silver getup, staring up at her, pleading, "I don't know what to do, I don't know—"
—started to sigh, and she felt the smile touch her lips, it was—
—falling from the sky, red and green and black, the ground shook with each impact, wind burning with—
Cina started back to herself, and was instantly overwhelmed with the blinding agony that had filled her skull, hot and sharp, for long seconds she could only clench her fingers around her own head, shivering with each stuttering breath.
Slowly, the firey knife was pulled away, inch by inch, until she was left with only a tight throbbing over her left ear. Though the by now familiar headache wasn't the only lasting effect of her little episode — she felt oddly shaky, weak, as though she'd just run for miles, flushed and sweaty. It was a few long moments, taking careful breaths through her raw throat, that she finally noticed the smell of bile.
Apparently letting that echo into her gave her a serious bloody headache and made her vomit all over herself. And this was a basic thing Jedi were supposed to do all the time. Awesome.
Still feeling a bit unsteady, her fingers shaking, she pushed herself back upright, the motion making her head swim. Tokare was still sitting exactly where he'd been, a few of the Jedi walking by had stopped to stare, but nobody had done anything about her little episode — not that she expected there was anything anyone could have done about it. (She was a little surprised Sasha had stayed hidden, could still feel her hovering over her shoulder.) That was definitely an expression he was having, though. Cina couldn't say exactly what kind of expression, something heavy, and tight. Something in the family of concern, if not quite the same thing.
It took a couple seconds for Cina to find her voice. "Yeah, let's not do that again." Her voice came out harsh, thin.
For a long moment, Tokare just stared at her, fixing her with unblinking, overlarge eyes. "You had a vision."
"Sort of a lot of them at once, I think." Shaking her head, she rubbed at that spot over her left ear, then jerked her hand away with a wince — that was not making it feel better. "It was bloody confusing. Also, really fucking hurt."
"Mm." Tokare let out a soft sigh, that heavy expression shifting to something softer, more distant. "I had hoped this would not happen."
Cina frowned. "Wait, what?"
"According to your first instructors at the Temple on Coruscant, you never took to meditation well. This is not entirely unheard of — to those more powerful in the Force, looking too deep into it can be overwhelming at times. We're told it only grew worse as you aged, until you began to avoid it whenever possible. Master Zhar claims to be unable to recall the last time he saw you surrender yourself to the Force entirely."
It would have taken more energy to keep her annoyance off her face than she had available at the moment. Tokare knew full well she might have reacted badly to this meditation shite he wanted her to do, but he'd made her do it anyway? Seriously, what the fuck?
He could obviously tell she was annoyed with him, a faintly disapproving look taking over his face. "Do mind yourself, Apprentice."
Of course, she wasn't supposed to actually get annoyed with people doing that kind of thing to her — or anything, really. There is no emotion, and all that. She kept glaring at him anyway.
"It was believed that the ill effects your previous self experienced were largely due to an inability to surrender her ego to the will of the Force, even temporarily, even superficially. We hoped you might have better luck now. It appears we were mistaken."
That wasn't making her any less annoyed. Oh, well, obviously she should have better luck surrendering her ego if she were completely aware her entire identity was fictional — she shouldn't have any attachment to it at all, then, should she? Ignore for the moment this apparently happened to some people just by nature, no, that wasn't a real consideration at all. It certainly couldn't be that she thought the very idea of needing to surrender her ego to do their stupid magic shite was absurd in the first place. It certainly couldn't be that surrendering one's ego was meaningless, spiritualist nonsense, a concept that made absolutely no sense, it was bloody impossible. None of that mattered, it couldn't possibly go wrong this time!
Yes, it would likely end up being one of the most seriously unpleasant experiences of her life, but it was worth it! We might be able to properly brainwash her this time! Have her give it a go, just in case!
Jedi 'compassion' at work. Sadistic bastards...
Cina tried to suppress her anger, at least enough nobody would notice it — Tokare didn't look any more annoyed with her than he'd been a second ago, so it was probably working. "Right, well, let's go ahead and give me a failing grade on the spiritual side of this Jedi magic stuff, and just move on. Because I'm not doing that again."
He did look rather less than happy, but he give her a slow nod, apparently willing to accept that for the moment.
"Okay. I'm going to go clean up."
At least he had the decency to not try to continue the lesson while she was covered in her own sick. She realised she must already have an extremely negative opinion of the Jedi at this point, lower than even she'd thought, to be willing to give Tokare credit for meeting such a low standard of decency. But as far as she was concerned, they really hadn't done anything to redeem themselves to her so far. Which, honestly, was just...
If she were in their position, she would be being as nice and accommodating to the one in her position as possible. Seemed to her, being arses was just making it more likely she'd turn on them again, which, she'd been under the impression that was the exact opposite of what they wanted. Not that she was planning to do a full one-eighty on them, Alek needed to die, she was just saying, their treatment of her certainly appeared to be a strategic error.
They were, plainly, sabotaging themselves. If she didn't think she needed to to secure her future freedom, she wouldn't even bother with this charade, she would have already left. And, so far, these last couple days, they'd somehow only managed to make it worse.
That she was simply never going to become a good little Jedi no matter how nice and accommodating they were was quite beside the point.
Sesai wasn't really listening to whatever it was the Jedi lady was saying. He could feel all the eyes on him, two dozen strangers staring him down, it was hard to focus on anything else. He tried to hold back the urge to cringe away, he could hear his shani telling him he was fine, he was safe, there was nothing to be afraid of, but that didn't help at all, because he'd been taken away, he'd never see them again, and remembering her voice just made him want to cry, but he couldn't, not in front of everyone, and—
Without really meaning to do it, he pushed out of himself, forcing a feeling out into the world. He wasn't interesting, they didn't care, there was no particular reason to pay him any attention, they could just ignore the Jedi lady until the actual lesson started. He didn't matter, they didn't care, they didn't have to look. In a brief handful of seconds, he felt the compulsion take, their attention wandering, most of the eyes on him drifting away. Some of the tension went out of his shoulders, he let out a relieved sigh.
But not all of them. He'd noticed, when the Jedi had been talking to his family, that they didn't have much trouble influencing the Jedi, at least a little bit. Even he could — the older Jedi if they weren't looking for it, and the kids were easy. He didn't know why that was. It was commonly believed that his people's inasi pen shaja worked through the Force somehow, but Jedi stuff... It was almost like it was at a different level, like their stuff went under Jedi stuff, or around it or something, that they didn't directly touch each other. Most Jedi he'd run into so far, they hardly even seemed to notice it was happening, few could shrug it off entirely.
But one of the kids in the classroom, when his compulsion reached their mind, it turned hard and slick, the feeling sliding right off it. And he felt their attention only grow stronger, feeling more like a glare than idle curiosity, irritated even.
He took a moment to spot who this mind belonged to — a human-looking girl, a couple years older than him, toward the back of the class. Staring back at him, her eyes narrowed. He couldn't pick up anything from her directly, her feelings held back from the world, but he could hear the echo around her. Anger and frustration and a pungent hint of hatred, beneath it all a tight thread of hurt, of betrayal. It wasn't pleasant, of course, but...
Sesai smiled.
All through the lesson, he could hardly summon the effort to pay attention. His gaze kept being drawn back to the girl, the one Jedi kid he'd met who could see on his level. (Not to mention she actually felt things, most Jedi didn't seem to feel a whole lot, like droids made of flesh, it was downright creepy.) He kept poking at her mind, pushing in feelings of amusement, of comfort, of glee, but none of it got through, skipping off much as his first compulsion had, only serving to make the girl more and more annoyed with him, glaring back sharper and hotter.
He should probably stop, but he just couldn't help himself. It'd been too long since he'd run into a real person.
When the math class was let out — Sesai hadn't heard a word, which would probably come back to bite him later, but oh well — the girl jumped to her feet, rushed away from him for the door. He noticed their classmates step out of her way, seemingly on reflex, instinctively avoiding the forbidding echo around her. But Sesai didn't mind, he sprang after her, catching up a few meters down the hall.
Coming up behind her, Sesai pounced, taking one of her arms with both of his. A bounce in his voice he'd thought he'd permanently lost, he chirped, "Hi! My name's Sesai, what's yours?"
The girl jerked to a halt, glared down at him. "Let go of me, Rhysa."
He frowned. "Rhysa?"
His confusion just seemed to be making her confused. "Your last name?"
"Um, I don't have a last name." Zeltrosi didn't, as a rule.
The girl stared at him, slowly blinking. Then, the walls holding her mind back slid aside, but it didn't stay put — her thoughts pushed forward, quickly, far too quickly for him to react, and sharp, sliding into his own, cutting deep inside. He flinched at the intrusion, but it didn't hurt really. Felt weird, and it was making him kinda dizzy, and it was hard to think for a moment as he felt the girl go right for his memories, his knowledge of his own language, digging around, looking for—
When the girl abruptly pulled herself away, he went far too lightheaded, knees shaking. If he weren't still holding on to her, he'd probably be on the floor right now.
"Huh. Zeltrosi kinship is damn weird, but alright." She wasn't speaking Basic anymore — she must have copied Anasheja straight from his head, she had the same accent and everything. "Mhe Rhysei, then. Leave me the hell alone, mhe Rhysei."
The girl tried to pull away, but he clung all the harder, a grin pulling at his face. "Did you just copy Anasheja right out of my head? Can Jedi even do that?"
She groaned, eyes tipping up to the ceiling. "I can, so probably. Do you mind?"
"Of course I don't mind, that's just awesome. Besides, nobody here speaks Anasheja, it's nice. Could you teach me how to do that?"
"No, I meant, let go." With the word, Sesai felt the now familiar crackle of power pouring in from nowhere, and his hands were ripped off her arm by invisible claws, pushing him away. The girl turned, started off down the hall.
She'd only made it a few steps before he grabbed her again. "You didn't tell me your name, you know. That's just rude."
"Oh, and clinging all over me isn't?"
Sesai frowned. "Well...no?" Honestly, what the hell kind of crazy person would consider hugging someone rude? Off-worlders were just damn strange sometimes.
"It's Lesami. There, you know my name. Leave me alone now?"
"Nope!" he chirped. She glared at him some more, but he just grinned back. "Your the first Jedi I've met who's actually a real person. Everyone else here is flat and empty and...still. It's damn creepy, is what that is. It's too cold here, but you're warm," he said, shoving his face into her shoulder, "it's nice."
Her frustration set the air to bubbling, but Sesai didn't much care. Because this Lesami was real, he could feel it, she was actually here, he couldn't stop smiling.
Meeting her was totally worth being flung into a wall a few seconds later.
Just off the courtyard in the middle of the Enclave, the one with that bloody tree Tokare always insisted on having their inane lessons under, there was a little refectory. Much of the ceiling and the west wall, looking into the courtyard, was glass, the ceramic tiled surfaces and cheap steel furnishings gleaming in the midday sun. Most of the kitchen staff appeared to be Jedi — mostly younger apprentices, though she caught sight of an adult here or there — a duty she assumed was assigned on rotation or something.
Curiously, the place never did get very full. Cina thought there was maybe enough space to seat sixty or so, but most days they didn't even number twenty (that including the kitchen staff). She knew the Dantooinian Jedi had been hit hard in the Great Sith War — Exar Kun had been trained at this very Enclave, much of his generation leaving with him — but that had been some decades ago now, she'd have thought that was enough to time to recover at least somewhat. Perhaps much of the population was out on the rim, involved in the war with the Empire. She couldn't think of any better explanation.
It was a risk, spending more time around the Jedi than she really had to, every second an opportunity for her control to slip and give away that she wasn't nearly as sanguine about the whole mind rape thing as she was trying to pretend. Not to mention Sasha did sort of need to eat too. But, after a bit of wavering, she'd decided to just take lunch here. Having to trek all the way to the ship and back was a tedious waste of time.
And, well, Sasha could take care of herself just fine. Cina's lessons had started a week ago now, Sasha insisting on tailing her the whole while, but nobody had noticed the sneaky little girl yet, even with her slipping into the kitchens to nick food. Once, Cina had spotted her swiping a roll right off a Jedi's plate, and the woman hadn't even noticed — she'd blinked at her lunch in apparent surprise for a long moment before visibly shrugging it off. Watching these little tricks Sasha played, Cina eventually came to realise she wasn't just making herself and everything she was touching invisible. When she did something big, like stealing that roll, it came with an odd shiver on the air, a sense of nothing to see here, things are as they should be. It only worked on some of the Jedi, the compulsion turned aside, like waves lapping against stone, but even the resistant Jedi didn't seem to find it particularly suspicious. And Sasha remembered who it worked on and who it didn't, never targeted anyone resistant a second time. A week surrounded by Jedi, stealing shite and poking at their heads all the while, and nobody had spotted her yet. Which was just...
It was just bloody impressive, was what that was. Especially since Sasha had never had any sort of proper education in how this Jedi magic shite was supposed to work. (Though she was getting some now, of course, eavesdropping on Cina's lessons.) True, this talent of hers had been developed through trauma, a desperate need to not be found, Cina wouldn't be surprised if people could pull off all kinds of insane things through wild instinct. But it was still impressive.
As usual, once she had her food — invariably simple and bland fare, but she hadn't expected anything else — she found a spot off in a corner, putting as much of the largely empty room between herself and the rest of the Jedi as possible. If she sat too close to anyone they made a point of asking her uncomfortable questions, she'd rather not deal with it.
(Which wasn't their fault, of course — only a tiny handful of them knew she couldn't answer the sort of questions they were wont to ask, because she didn't remember bloody anything. It was still irritating.)
She'd been sitting for maybe two minutes, Sasha still off in the kitchens, when she felt... Well, it was very similar to that compulsion of Sasha's actually. An odd sense of weight crawling across the air, soft and tingling against her skin, rather like a single loud bass note, lingering long after it'd been struck. Cina didn't know what the compulsion was trying to do, exactly, her fist clenching as she braced herself, she just shoved it off without a second of hesitation. And then spent a moment suppressing the anger trying to claw up her throat.
She hated it when people messed with her head. Wonder why.
Instinctively, her eyes flicked up, tracked across the room, tracing that whatever that had been back to its source. Standing only a few paces away from the counter was a Zeltron, probably somewhere around her age. Black-blue hair glimmering and pale robe nearly shining in the sunlight, he was staring right back at her, a crooked grin splitting the blood red of his face nearly in two.
Oh. That hadn't been Jedi magic, then — Zeltrons had their own natural telepathy...thing, he'd probably been using that instead.
Though...Sasha's compulsion felt pretty similar. Huh.
While she was distracted with that interesting thought, the Zeltron had started sashaying his way over toward her, still grinning like a lunatic. Great. While she still had a moment, Cina braced herself, preparing to resist whatever feelings he'd certainly try to slip into her head at some point — not necessarily out of malice, Zeltrons just did that as a part of normal conversation, their innate talents seamlessly integrated into their culture.
Not that Cina had realised she knew that. She could remember meeting Zeltrons before, of course — she'd discovered she could even speak a Zeltrosi language she didn't remember learning back on Coruscant — but she hadn't been at all aware of their compulsions happening then. She could feel the effects, obviously, but...
Blame it on her fucked up memory, move on.
"Hello, there," the Zeltron said, his voice coming in a bouncy chirp. "This seat taken?"
Cina took a second to evaluate the likelihood she could avoid being drawn into a conversation here without getting an annoying lecture for it later. Yeah, zero, fine. "Does it look taken to you?"
"Mm, things don't always look as they are." He flopped down into a seat, smooth and boneless, planted his elbows on the table, slouching over toward her a bit. "My name's Rhysam. You would be?"
"Cina."
His smile tilted into a smirk. Another compulsion leaked out of him, breaking across Cina without any effect — she assumed he was projecting wry amusement to match the smirk. "Just Cina?"
She ticked up an eyebrow. "Zeltrons don't even have last names. Why should you care about mine?"
The smirk reverted back into a grin, Rhysam's dark eyes almost seeming to gleam. "Good point. I suppose I'm just used to humans being such...well, humans."
Despite herself, Cina felt a smile pull at her lips. "I'm told I hardly count." Asyr had made a point of that all the bloody time (hence the smiling). Which was rather silly — she was pretty sure she was just bloody weird, not so entirely strange she shouldn't still count as human. Every group had their own stereotypes about other groups, just a natural consequence of the development of subcultures, and she was well aware she didn't meet the expectations many other species had for what humans were supposed to act like. Of course, stereotypes about humans didn't tend to be at all flattering, so she usually chose to take it as a compliment.
"Mm." Rhysam was mercifully silent a short moment, poking at his stew. "Anyway, what are you doing out here, hiding by yourself off in a corner?"
"I don't suppose if I told you to piss off and mind your own business you actually would."
He smirked. "Probably not, no."
She shook her head, letting out a long, thin sigh. And didn't answer the question. "Did you just land today? I'm pretty sure I haven't seen you here yet. I think I would remember, the only other Zeltron Jedi I can think of is, er..." She abruptly realised that was a very tactless thing to say to someone she'd just met. It would have been nice to have noticed that early, so she didn't go trailing off and staring at him like a bloody idiot.
But he didn't take offense, still smiling at her easy as anything. "I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you mean my cousin Sesai."
Cina nearly asked after that, but caught herself. It wasn't a surprise they'd be related. Zeltrons had always been under-represented among the Jedi — some of their writers even claimed Zeltron users of the Force would inevitably be taken over by the Dark Side, which was quite possibly the most racist thing she'd ever heard from a Jedi — and there was more than enough evidence to suggest Force sensitivity was heritable. No reason to make a big production over it, especially since he surely had to deal with that all the bloody time.
"Anyway, yes, I did just land today. I've been wandering for a few years now, decided it was time for a break. This is the closest enclave to where I happened to be at the time."
Frowning, Cina asked, "Wandering?"
"Yep." Absently chewing at a roll, it took a second for Rhysam to figure out she had no idea what she was talking about. "Never heard of nomadic Jedi before?" He hadn't swallowed before trying to speak, so it came out a bit muffled, but not so much Cina couldn't tell what he was saying.
"No, I don't think so." She could guess at the concept easily enough — Jedi unattached to any specific enclave, or perhaps even the Order at large, just wandering around the galaxy and doing their thing. She simply hadn't heard of any before. "Are there many of those?"
Rhysam shrugged. "More than there used to be. A lot of people were unhappy with the Exis Reformations, and plenty... Well, they sort of quit the Order while remaining Jedi, if that makes any sense. Most of them completely ignore the Council, just go where the Force directs them, do what they feel needs doing. But there is a long tradition of this sort of thing — the regimented Order as we know it didn't truly exist until after the Council established itself on Coruscant, over seven thousand years ago now, before then wandering Jedi performing random acts of service all over the galaxy was the norm. A minority of Jedi kept up the older way of doing things, but they've been small in number ever since.
"My master was one of the Jedi who left in protest after Exis, actually. I've sort of just been following in her footsteps." His lips quirking in a queer little smile, he said, "But, it can get a little lonely, drifting around by yourself, sometimes I feel like dropping in on one enclave or another for a little bit. So, here I am."
"Hmm." Now that she thought about it, this wasn't entirely new information — in the early days of the Republic, Jedi were known to just randomly show up, pull off some impressive bit of heroics or diplomacy, only to vanish again, and it was true that the Council had been formed at the dedication of the Temple on Coruscant upon the defeat of the Pius Dea Republic, more than twenty-thousand years after the (semi-legendary) foundation of the Order. There was even linguistic evidence, various corruptions of jedi appearing in many languages throughout the core as a word for a kind stranger, or serendipity, that sort of thing. It simply hadn't occurred to her to think of the implications of all that before.
Well, the person she'd been before certainly had, which probably explained it being not at all a surprise, but Cianen hadn't in any case.
Anyway, not that important. "I hadn't realised the Exis Reformations were so controversial among the Jedi. I mean, the Order tends to be very good at presenting a united front to the rest of the galaxy, we're hardly aware of internal divisions at all."
Rhysam let out a hum, nodded for a moment as he finished chewing — at least he wasn't trying to talk with his mouth half-full again. "That is by design, of course, and we are taught to keep our disagreements to ourselves. But, like any organisation composed of thousands and thousand of individual beings, there are—" The man broke off, straightening in his seat, the faint smile replaced with a blank sort of focus. His hand snapped toward his waist, where Cina knew his lightsaber was hung.
At the very same moment, the faint tingling of Sasha's presence appeared at the edges of Cina's awareness.
Gritting her teeth at the harsh fear suddenly springing from Sasha's direction, it took a second for Cina to relax her jaw enough to get actual words out — luckily, Rhysam hadn't drawn his weapon in that time. "Calm down, Rhysam. She's with me."
Rhysam blinked. His eyes flicked back to her, staring for a long moment. Slowly, the tension drained from his shoulders, again falling into his careless slouch. "Right. Of course." A grin again splitting his face, he glanced over his shoulder. Directly at where Sasha stood. Pitched in a low whisper, though still with that cheerful bounce to it, he said, "Sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. You startled me there."
"She doesn't speak Basic." Glancing quick out into the rest of the room — good, it didn't look like they'd drawn any attention — Cina beckoned Sasha toward her with a little flick of her fingers. "It's okay, Sasha," she muttered in Mandoa. "He's harmless, you just surprised him." Of course, Cina very much doubted Rhysam was truly harmless, but she also doubted he was the sort to go about stabbing children, no matter how unnerving they were.
"Yes, very surprise. Very sneaky, you are, child."
Cina blinked, staring at Rhysam; Sasha, still a couple metres away, froze as well. That had been Mandoa. Extremely awkward, obviously, but recogniseable. "You speak Mandoa?" In her experience, outsiders who spoke Mandoa were...well, just her, pretty much. She might even wonder if she were originally Mandoade if she couldn't inexplicably speak so many bloody languages Mandoa was just a drop in the bucket.
Shrugging, Rhysam lifted a hand, thumb and finger held a centimetre apart. "Learn little, at war. But not use, very bad."
"You found me." Sasha came to stand behind Cina, peeking at Rhysam over her right shoulder. "Nobody else can find me. Just Cina."
Rhysam grinned, so bright his eyes nearly seemed to sparkle. "Yes, also I am sneaky."
"I'm assuming you can feel her through Zeltron things, not Jedi things. The other Jedi can't spot her at all."
Switching back to Basic, he said, "If we're getting technical about it, what my people do is through the Force, just not the same way Jedi do it. It's sort of like broadcasting on a different frequency, like. Jedi can train themselves to do it, but it's not part of the standard curriculum, they'd have to come into extended contact with Zeltrons to pick it up. Some people do have broader perception naturally, but that's rather rare."
That was probably why she could feel Sasha and pick up on Rhysam's compulsions, now that she thought about it — she'd apparently been one of the original Revanchists, even part of Lesami and Alek's inner circle, so she must have spent some considerable time around Sesai Rhysa.
Which did explain more than just that. It'd been bothering her, since she'd first caught sight of him, a faint sense at first but growing harder and harder to ignore by the second. It was difficult to put words to, exactly. Rhysam just felt...familiar. If the person she'd been before had spent some years in the company of one of Rhysam's relatives, that would make perfect sense — she couldn't remember off hand what exactly Sesai looked like, but she wouldn't be surprised if there was some family resemblence. Especially since people tended to have greater difficulty differentiating members of other species, even between ones so closely related as humans and Zeltrons.
Not that it particularly mattered, it was just interesting to think about.
"So, are you just going around collecting Mandalorian orphans now?"
It took Cina a moment to answer, frowning back at Rhysam. There had been something...odd, on his voice, she couldn't say exactly what. "I didn't do it on purpose. We stole a ship to get off Taris, the kid just happened to be hiding on it at the time. Though, honestly, I really don't know what I'm going to do about her."
One narrow black eyebrow stretched up Rhysam's forehead. "What do you mean?
There were many ways she could answer that question. She knew Sasha was listening in on these ridiculous lessons she was getting, knew she would inevitably start trying things out for herself — Cina was hardly qualified to deal with that sort of thing. She wasn't really qualified to deal with children in general, especially not one so deeply traumatised. (It'd been roughly a week now, and Sasha still didn't let that knife out of her sight, bathed and even slept with it.) She couldn't help the feeling that in just...going along with it, essentially taking responsibility for her and letting everything develop as it may, she was making an enormous mistake that would inevitably lead to some disaster down the line. She couldn't guess exactly what, there was just no way this would end well.
She could say all that, but she really didn't want to. "I don't suppose the Order particularly approve of their members adopting Force-sensitive children," she drawled.
A peculiar look of surprise crossed Rhysam's face, just for a moment before it was wiped away with another painfully buoyant grin. "I don't suppose you particularly care."
Good point. She didn't choose to smirk back at him, but she could feel the expression taking shape on her face, so she must be.
"But, no, you're not wrong — the party line has included a very dim view of that sort of personal relationship since the Exis Reformations. Before than..." With a crooked grimace, Rhysam wiggled a hand in the air. "Jedi were permitted families, before, but we were always meant to be mindful of any selfish corruption of our priorities. So long as our personal lives didn't interfere with our service overmuch, nobody cared.
"Actually," he said, with a sardonic little smile, "the Grandmaster herself has a daughter. Last I heard, Vima has children too, don't know exactly how many. You tend not to hear about Vima very much. When Exis happened she was a teenager, I think, and she never went along with it, she quit the Council within a few months. Gossip about her does crop up every once in a while, more than most nomadic Jedi — I mean, obviously, she's the Grandmaster's daughter — but that sort of detail isn't something Jedi are going to be spreading around. She hasn't fallen to the Dark Side, you see, it's bad for their narrative."
Her smirk stretched itself wider. "Well, you can't let the children hear something like that. If they know it's all shite from the outset, the brainwashing won't stick properly."
"And what a tragedy that would be — if everyone knows too much about these things, you might get a whole generation of Jedi that actually think for themselves!"
"Perish the thought."
Despite the spine-tingling compulsion washing against the edges of her mind, Cina couldn't help smiling back at the ridiculous little man. At least she'd managed to find one Jedi who was actually worth talking to.
"Hey, Boss."
Cina looked up from her datapad, quickly finding Kandosa seated at the game table. "What, Spongecake?"
A grimace pulled at his craggy face, falling into a heavy glare. "Are you ever going to stop calling me that?"
"Until I find something funnier, no, probably not."
From behind the sofa Cina was reclined across came a sudden storm of high giggling. Kandosa tried to look like he was angry with Sasha laughing at him, but he didn't do a very good job of it, his stormy glare twitching at the edges with a poorly-hidden smile. The bloke might like to pretend he was a hard son of a bitch, but it was bloody obvious he had a soft spot for kids — or maybe he just liked Mission and Sasha in particular, she guessed, she hadn't seen him around any others. "I'm bored. Get over here." He poked at the table for a moment, the projector lighting up with words Cina couldn't read from this angle.
She hesitated a brief moment, eyes drifting back to the document she'd been reading. It was an ethics treatise, written by a Jedi Master some millennia dead. Cina might just be spoiled by Alderaanian and Alsakani classics, but she thought it was bloody terrible. Pedantic and preachy, the logic in some the arguments flawed in critical places, the assumptions behind certain premises shockingly naïve — even the writing was shite, dry and opaque and unnecessarily verbose and just plain boring.
Not for the first time, Cina wondered if Dorak were selecting her reading material with the conscious intention of torturing her.
Fuck it. She and Dorak would just get into a circular discussion over trivial nonsense again, he probably wouldn't notice she'd never actually finished it. Tossing the pad aside, she popped up to her feet only to collapse again into the chair across from him. "So, what are we playing?"
It turned out to be a variation on an old grand strategy game. She was completely unfamiliar with this particular iteration, but it didn't matter, they were all functionally similar. They debated briefly on the scenario they'd be starting at — it was possible to start from the very beginning, a civilisation just on the cusp of achieving interstellar space flight, but there was simply no way they'd ever be able to finish one of those tonight. In the end, they agreed that they'd try doing that some other day, if they decided they liked this game enough. Instead, they picked a scenario where the galaxy was divided between several major powers, with a spread of different political systems and resource advantages.
Scrolling through her options, Cina occasionally glanced up to frown at Kandosa through the layers of holograms. She couldn't actually see what he was doing — directional audiovisual media really were neat — but she'd bet he'd pick... Well, this game didn't use familiar names, but one civilisation had obviously been modeled on the Mandoade, another on Atrisia. Kandosa would all but certainly pick one of those two. Given that, she wasn't sure which of the others would give her the best chance.
The Atrisian Commonwealth predated the Republic, and had endured all that time as an independent power. It was still independent, in fact, had rebuffed all offers to join or form any sort of treaty alliance. Even trade was severely limited, to all but the Giju, close neighbours they'd had peaceable relations with for millennia. However, while the Atrisians were a proud, militant society, they weren't expansionist — they were perfectly willing to remain within the borders they'd held for all of recorded history. Very few had ever attempted to invade the Commonwealth, largely because the Atrisians were at least diplomatic enough to avoid offending anyone. All who had had been swiftly crushed through overwhelming tactical superiority — the Atrisians were somewhat behind the rest of the galaxy technologically, were a comparatively small society with limited resources, but they had long ago perfected the art of war, they'd never lost even a single battle to an outside power.
The Mandoade, on the other hand, were...well, the Mandoade. They were just as martial as the Atrisians, though somewhat less authoritarian — most outsiders didn't realise just how democratic Mandoade society was, at least so far as day-to-day domestic affairs went. If Cina had to name the one greatest advantage the Mandoade had over Atrisia, for the purposes of a game like this one, it was their universalism: the Mandoade were a culture, not a race, any being willing to adopt their way of life was welcome. Of course, this did leave them vulnerable to infiltration by outside powers. Not to mention, it was all too easy for their pride to be corrupted into imperialist zeal, inspiring them to conquer faster than they could integrate — that was exactly what had happened before and during the recent war, in fact.
Both civilisations had serious, glaring weaknesses. The problem was, without knowing more details on how this particular iteration of the game worked, she couldn't guess which of the other options would be best suited to take advantage of them. The collectivist mindset of the Alsakani could weaken the authority of the much more elitist Atrisians...if this game handled the subtler shades of power projection well enough. The fluid trade dynamics and alliances of a Corellian-style conglomerate could prove very effective at countering Mandoade aggression...if diplomatic and economic features were designed the way she would do it. Without knowing how the game was put together...
Eh. Cina picked the Corellian stand-in, more out of a lack of more promising options than any real confidence. Corellian diplomacy had historically been very useful against various expansionist powers, and they wouldn't have the military disadvantage the Alderaanian equivalent should. It would do.
After some minutes of the two of them silently poking around, Kandosa asked, "So what do they have you doing over there all day anyway?"
"Reading and sitting under this damn tree slow-thinking, mostly." Mandoa didn't actually have a word for meditate, that was probably close enough. "Apparently, they want me to prove I'm at least marginally trustworthy before moving on to real Jedi things and swordplay."
Kandosa shot her an almost disgusted frown through the haze of holograms. "That sounds horribly boring."
"It is that."
"I think I'd leave and join up with the Sith, if it were me. Say what you want about the Sith, but at least they treat people like people, not damn droids. Seriously, have you ever tried talking to a Jedi about, well, anything?"
"More than I'd like the last few weeks, believe me." Cina frowned at one of her displays, fingers tapping idly at the table. That was a rather aggressive rejection of her offer to open up trade with one of her neighbours — they were going to be a problem. Or perhaps an opportunity, but this early in the game she'd have to be really bloody careful... "Don't get me wrong, sitting around trying to feel the Force flow through me," she said in Basic, just so she wouldn't have to figure out how to say that in Mandoa, "has been surprisingly helpful in learning to focus this shite better, but it is very tedious. And I've been stuck talking ethics with this Dorak arse. You think just an ordinary conversation with a Jedi is trying, you don't even know the shite I've been dealing with lately."
"I didn't think there was anything to talk about." There was a note of irony on Kandosa's voice, but his face was almost impressively blank, not betraying a hint of a smirk. "I thought the Jedi already know everything there is about right and wrong and all that."
"They certainly think so. Dorak does always seem strangely surprised whenever I disagree with him." Which wasn't all the time — Dorak wasn't quite as blindly dogmatic as certain other Jedi — but it was often enough she was gradually learning what sort of thing to avoid saying to prevent a tedious argument. "To be as fair as possible, most Jedi ethics aren't actually that bad. Their philosophy on most things would be reasonable enough if we lived in a perfect world. But..." Cina shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many ways I've found to politely call a man twenty years my senior a naïve child."
"I don't think I would," Kandosa said, a corner of his lips curling. "You have quite the mouth on you."
"Yes. I'm known for it, in fact." Actually, she wasn't, since Cianen Hayal didn't exist, so her students and colleagues she remembered messing with at the University wouldn't remember her (and possibly didn't even exist themselves). Sometimes she forgot for a second — this fake identity shite really was quite confusing.
"Why do you even bother putting up with it? I haven't known you for very long, but I was still sure you would have told them to fuck off and moved on." He said it casually enough, but something on Kandosa's voice told her he was far more interested than he sounded. Probably the reason he'd started up the conversation in the first place.
Cina shrugged. "I didn't have a whole lot of choice in the matter. If I hadn't agreed to submit to their whole ridiculous program they probably wouldn't have let me leave the complex."
A brief flash of hot anger burst from just behind her, where Sasha was watching the game over her shoulder. She didn't say anything though, and it drained away after a second.
It was obvious Sasha believed her just from that, but Kandosa didn't look like he did. "Are the Jedi allowed to just hold random people like that? I'm still not as familiar with Republic law as I should be..."
"By the letter of the law? No." Actually, now that she thought about it, they might. Cianen was an Alderaanian citizen, of course, and couldn't be held against her will, but if they openly claimed she was the person she'd once been she might still count as a Jedi — the Order could do pretty much whatever they wanted with their own members. Not that the distinction really mattered, "But the letter of the law wouldn't necessarily come into play. They'd claim some sort of wartime exception, wouldn't be difficult to argue they should be able to hold an uncooperative Force-sensitive, what with the war with the Sith. And if they're not challenged, they won't even need to make the argument — we are in the middle of nowhere, it's likely no one of importance would find out about it.
"And they are worried I'll leave to join the Sith — I did used to be one before, after all, they'd be idiots to not worry about it. Probably why they're taking everything so infuriatingly slow. So, yeah, they'd probably just lock me up somewhere until I agree to play nice." Or fuck around with her head again to see if it works out better the second time, who knows.
"You were Sith?" Kandosa was staring at her through the array of holograms — she didn't need the itching crawling across the air to be able to tell he was confused, it was clear on his face.
She was confused herself for a moment, before she remembered Kandosa had been in the hold working on the inventory when they'd had that conversation. Oops. It took a few moments to explain the whole ridiculous thing, that she'd been a Revanchist and then a Sith, all of her memories had been forcibly replaced, and now she had to deal with the people who'd done it to her without showing any negative feelings about it, blah blah.
That just seemed to be making Kandosa more confused, the itching growing sharper until it was almost painful. (She still hadn't learned how to turn this damn thing off, because Tokare couldn't possibly teach her something actually useful.) "But there weren't any Mandoade Revanchists."
Cina blinked. "Huh?"
"Aren't you Mandoade? I assumed, you know far more than any outsider I've ever met. You sound like a Vorpayyade farmer."
"Fuck, Kandosa, do you have any idea how many languages I speak?" Of course he didn't, she didn't even know... "I probably used some crazy Jedi thing to pick it up, I don't remember. Sure, I might speak Mandoa like a Vorpayyade farmer, but I also speak Basic like an Alsakani noble — one who's spent far too much time in seedy pubs, but still. Which do you think is more likely?"
Kandosa looked less than convinced, but he just shrugged it off, focused back on their game without another word.
For some reason, Cina found herself smiling. It took her a brief moment to figure out why. Mandoade were a notoriously prickly lot, after all — if Kandosa was going to insist on believing Cina had been one of them, she was just going to take that as a compliment.
Took forever to update, I know. Depression means writer's block, fucking pain. What little I've been able to get out I've been trying to focus on AAtP, though that hasn't been going so well either. Bluh.
Next chapter when I get to it. Bluh.
—Lysandra