"Prov-i-dential this find is," Yoda said. "Many, many things we can use. Much to carry home we have."
The younglings nodded their agreement eyeing the rather large pile of swag. "I think we'll have to make more than one trip, Master," said Tam.
"Yes, yes," Yoda agreed, many trips we will make but all this we will take now with us."
Five children turned to stare at their mentor. "You mean with the Force?" Vita asked uncertainly.
Yoda chuckled. "The Force we need not," he tapped Vita's nose gently with the end of his gimmerstick. "Have ve-hi-cle we do!"
"Oh yeah - the speeder," Tam histrionically slapped his forehead.
"I never thought of that," Vita admitted.
"See that I can! Come, come!" The younglings obediently followed their Master through the tubular tunnels and domes back to the overgrown speeder. Yoda gave the greenery still mostly concealing the vehicle a long look then threw a wink over his shoulder at his pupils. "Vines and mud and mushrooms, oh my! A long time to clear by hand it would take, cheat a little we will, eh?" They grinned, knowing what that meant. "Uthr and Aiolian on this side stay. Tam, Vita and Keri to other side you will go." The children arranged themselves as directed. "Now," said the Master, "together all, lift!"
His five padawans closed their eyes, Yoda felt them draw on the Force around them and direct it through their outstretched hands towards the buried speeder. The green vines quivered, stretched and finally snapped with a series of sharp retorts. Slowly eight meters of extremely dirty ceramoid plating dotted with clearsteel windows rose from its green grave shedding mud and bits of plants.
"Where do you want it, Master?" Uthr asked, still in rapport with his classmates, his voice showing only the slightest traces of strain.
"Where ground is flat place it please," Yoda ordered, pointing with his gimmerstick. Slowly, majestically the speeder glided over the heads of Keri and Tam to settle onto the slightly squishy ground of a large mud slick.
The children lowered their arms and drooped a little, clearly tired, but perked up quickly as their Master beamed upon them. "Good! Very, very Good! Talented Padawans I have. Come, come. Breakfast we will eat and then load the speeder and home go."
….
Yoda was not at all pleased with the speeder's performance as the steady stream of grumbles from the oversized pilot's seat made crystal clear to his acolytes. The long vehicle maneuvered gingerly through the densely forested swamp, clearing massive gnarl tree trunks by centimeters and nearly colliding with a flock of astonished bogwings before settling finally on a small rocky knoll on the edge of Dragonsnake bog. Yoda killed the systems and frowned fiercely at the pilot console. "Sluggish it is, too large, not maneuverable. Much work we must do to make it acceptable."
The younglings nodded eagerly. Rebuilding a speeder would be fun. Learning to pilot would be fun too. They would have been learning and doing things like that all the time if they were still in the Temple, if Master Skywalker hadn't turned, if everything hadn't gone hopelessly wrong. Maybe Master Yoda sensed the direction their thoughts were turning because he suddenly became very urgent to get their spoils back to the house, not all of course, there wouldn't be room. In fact there was barely room for what they did bring.
"Crowded this house is getting. Too large you are growing. Time houses of your own you had!"
Bad memories and inchoate regrets for might-have-beens vanished utterly, "Really?" Tam asked eagerly.
"You mean it, Master?" said Uthr.
Yoda snorted. "In habit of saying what I do not mean am I not.
…..
Each of the younglings already had a private place for meditation, sulking, and keeping those things that grown-ups, even eight hundred year old Jedi Masters, never understand about. Turning Uthr and Vita's hideaways, tiny snuggeries hollowed in the root systems of nearby gnarl trees, into houses was easy as they'd all been through this once before when they built Yoda's house. This time they used floor panels from the settlements modular domes for a waterproof foundation and door and window frames from the same source.
"Remember, tall you will grow," Yoda reminded them, so they made the ceilings six feet high instead of four. Vita's house was divided into three bays; one was her kitchen with a little clay fireplace and stove, another was her bed place and the third her workspace. Uthr decided to have storage bins all around the perimeter of his house with his bed platform, made of more floor plates, above two of them and his stove tucked into a nook right next to the door.
Aiolian's private place was a vine hammock dangling between two vestigial branches about eight meters up Vita's gnarl tree, building a house up there was much more of a challenge. Using the light plasmeld and plasmetal building components from the scientists' settlement the younglings created under Yoda's direction three living floors suspended by heavy blackvines from the stubby branches and further supported by pegs hammered into the calcified bark of the tree beneath the plates. More vines were woven into walls and waterproofed with resin mixed with mud. A rift in the trunk was widened and deepened becoming a small fireplace flanked by benches or counters carved into the rocklike wood. More pegs created a sort of ladder for the others. Aiolian herself of course could just fly up.
Keri's refuge was a nest in middle of a tangled thicket of sohrli bushes and galla vines. Clearing a suitably large space in the middle of the almost solid mass of vegetation was hard work but gave them plenty of material for the wattle-and-daub necessary to fill in the spaces between support ribs taken from two or three of the small habitation domes and they used some of the exterior plating for the roofs. The doorway was small and low but the ceilings inside were high enough for a grown humanoid except for the storage space under under the sleep loft.
Tam's favorite spot was a little islet just a good force jump into Dragonsnake bog with a young gnarl tree at one end and a sickle tree at the other leaning out over the dark water which he liked to use as a fishing perch. Tam's hut just fit onto the high dry ground between the two trees and was even bigger than Keri's because Yoda said he would grow very tall. They used building modules from the domes to make a long house and pegged the hide of the dragonsnake the younglings had had to kill over the barrel roof, extending it into an awning for a front porch formed like the floor of half-fired clay tiles.
Building the houses was fun and challenging, especially Aiolian's, and planning and furnishing them an absorbing pastime but when it came time to actually move into them – suddenly it stopped being fun.
"A long time building these houses we have been," Yoda declaimed, waving his short arms. "Worked hard we have for a purpose. Crowded my home is. Room to swing a cat I have not!" The ancient master was not exaggerating by much. The six of them did fill his hut near to bursting.
"But, but-" Tam stuttered.
"Won't you be lonely, Master?" Aiolian asked.
"Lonely…" the centuries of his age and a sorrow almost beyond human comprehension settled on Yoda's small, wrinkled face as his big pointed ears drooped. "Yes. Lonely I will be. But alone – never! The Force is with me. With you too it is. Bring you here to keep me company I did not. Last of the Jedi you are. Work the Force has for you. Take you far It will, alone but for It you will be. Such is your destiny." Gooseberry green eyes stared past them into a future only Yoda could see. "Yes, yes, far away will you go. Find others you will and pass on what you have learned. Long the Sith lived in hiding, so too can the Jedi if we must!" He pulled his gaze back from those distant vistas to focus again on the awed and apprehensive younglings around him. "Learn to be alone, you must," he said gently, "To rely only on the Force. First step this is."
….
Aiolian fluttered up the front door of her new house. The gravity on Dagobah was in fact too heavy for her to fly properly she had to use the Force to assist. From the outside it looked very much like an oversized Jubba bird colony nest. Inside a plasmeld table top was set into a niche in the trunk and a shelf carved above it both filled with tools and equipment from the settlement and there was a seat cushion from the speeder tucked under the table. Her vertical loom had been set up in the next room with skeins of yarn hanging from the walls and folded cloth piled in a corner. The final room held the fireplace with dishes and bowls stacked on the counters and supplies hanging from the ceiling in hollowed gourds. Her big vine hammock occupied a bay in the opposite wall and she crawled into it, curling into an unhappy little ball.
'Master Yoda would have died of grief if he didn't have you to teach,' Mistress Skywalker had said. And Aiolian was very much afraid that was true. The look on his face when he'd told them he meant to send them away…. She didn't want Master Yoda to die, too many had died already! But she knew too that death was a natural and necessary part of the Living Force.
"You are focusing on your anxieties, little one," Master Qui-Gon's kindly voice said in her mind.
"I know," she answered, "but –"
"I will have no buts," he interrupted, gently and teasingly but with an underlying firmness. "Leave the future to Master Yoda. Focus on the present, Padawan, you have more than enough to occupy you here and now."
"Yes, Master."
….
Vita put her double handful of leaftail pups down on the thick springy reed mat covering her bed platform then went to the storage bin in the next bay for a similar double handful of berries and nuts which she carried outside to place in front of the indignantly protesting spade headed smooka dangling by its prehensile tail from a fall of vine. It immediately stopped its angry chattering and dropped lower to gather in the offering with its fore claws.
"There you go," Vita told it, "a fair trade." She went back inside to examine the two pups by the artificial light from energy cells taken out of the escape pods' gravity compensators and embedded in the walls. The poor little things were more scared then hurt and cheered up considerably when she offered them some cyanoberries.
Vita lay down beside the replete pups and pulled a blanket over them all. "At least I'm not all alone." She muttered to herself.
…
Uthr poked up the fire in his little stove for light and heat, he'd already eaten with the others back at the Master's house. He climbed into a chair salvaged from the speeder. So they were going to be Jedi Knights after all, they should have known that Yoda wasn't just teaching them to pass the time. Jedi in a galaxy ruled by the Sith. Uthr shivered. The dark cloaked form of Master Skywalker, Darth Vader as he was now, took shape in Uthr mind's eye bringing with it a deeper chill. The boy huddled in his chair hugging his knees.
"Don't frighten yourself, young one," Qui-Gon burst into his mind, an explosion of warm green Living Force.
"Sorry, Master," Uthr muttered clutching the warmth to him.
"Remember by the time you leave this place you will be a Jedi Master, and a most formidable opponent for any Sith."
"I will?" Uthr was dubious.
"I am certain of it," Qui-Gon smiled.
…
Tam's house was too big. Maybe he'd grow into it like Yoda had said but just now it seemed huge and echoing compared to the coziness of the Master's house. A stove, flanked by boxes and shelves, stood against one wall and his workbench against the other piled high with droid parts with the soundest of the A9G frames slumped beside a couple of R5 chassis near the door. The far bay held a bed frame from the domes, a table top with a stump base and two of the speeder seats – all of them too big.
Tam turned to the workbench and started sorting through the droid bits. How could they be Jedi Knights? They didn't even have lightsabres! And how were they supposed to get off Dagobah without a ship? But suppose they could….suppose he did become a Knight…. He could confront Master Skywalker – Darth Vader – make him pay for what he'd done…. Tam was a Jedi Initiate he could recognize Dark thoughts when he had them, and this one wasn't new to him. He tried to distract himself with the droid part in his hands, a vocoder. Only a few bad components if he could find replacements for them he'd have somebody to talk to.
….
Keri was quite pleased with her house. She had more of an aesthetic sense than the others and had given both care and thought to looks as well as function. Her window spaces were filled with pieces of colored glassite filters set in resin glazed vine lattices. Lacy vine screens shielded kitchen and work spaces. A lahdia plant grew in a yellow clay planter at the edge of the sleeping loft, displaying its colorful flower-fruits in the warm yellow light of the energy cells clustered in the high domed ceiling. She had a table top of greenish ceramoid plate from the roof of the speeder and a sort of lounge made up of parts of several broken chairs from the domes and covered with shaggy sloth furs. After a moments' hesitation Keri settled herself on the lounge rather than climbing up to her bed. It was pretty inside her house – and there wasn't much that was pretty on Dagobah – but it was also lonely without Master Yoda, without the others. If being a Jedi Knight meant being lonely Keri was sure she wasn't going to like it at all.
…
Yoda woke, shortly before dawn, in his little sleep loft pulled on his robes and dropped the vine rope ladder intending to make himself a cup of Yarum tea before beginning his private mediations. He descended and stepped off – right onto Uthr's stomach. The little Zabrak woke with an oof as a startled Yoda lost his footing and fell hard onto his backside looking around the Master saw two more of his pupils sitting up in nests of slothhair blankets Aiolian in the kitchen area and Keri in the washing cubicle.
"What is this? In your own houses you were to sleep!"
The younglings exchanged guilty looks. "We did Master, for part of the night anyway," said Uthr.
"Most of it," added Keri.
"We got lonely," Aiolian admitted.
Yoda blew out a long sigh but before he could say any of the things he was thinking Qui-Gon's voice intervened. "It was only their first night, Yoda, you must be patient."
The Ancient Master all but choked on indignation and laughter, "My line that is!"
No words but warm amusement from Qui-Gon, who had been a frequent recipient of those words. Yoda gave in and smiled at his relieved Padawans. "Yes, Master, patient I will be. And try harder our learners will?"
"Yes, Master," they agreed.