— Sheila The Sixth, ? —
"Hmmm…"
I scratch my chin and ponder the huge ass blue star still filling Sheila's front viewport for a moment before coming to a decision.
"Hey, Shmi?" I call back down the stairs leading to the rest of the ship. "Can you come up here for a second?"
I tried leaving her largely to her own devices for the first few legs of our trip, but that just seemed to put Shmi even more on edge as she waited for the proverbial shoe to drop. Giving her more specific assigned tasks seems to have helped, and she eventually seemed to accept that I'm not planning to force myself on her or… whatever. Or even force her to do much of anything beyond take care of her own needs really. She also eventually accepted that I was being serious about not needing to eat because I could subsist off the ship reactor's excess power. Thank you, Myhnegon.
Weirdly, it was only after determining that I actually did want something from her that she finally calmed down properly. A little bit anyway. She seems to find my desire to be 'adopted' as a name-carrying member of the Skywalker clan pretty baffling.
But that's only because despite taking out a "battleship" in a fighter at the age of 8, Anakin hasn't had a chance to properly build up his reputation for the absurd yet. Once is just random happenstance, twice is coincidence, and only at three times is it a pattern and whatnot. Or the force playing silly buggers.
Hmmm… that does mean that I'm a full battleship behind my brother on the shenanigans front. I'll have to look into fixing that.
But either way… Soon! Soon the cries of, "oh gods, there's two of them!?" will fill the air.
Assuming the next 10 minutes doesn't kill us all at least.
On the plus side, I suspect today may actually help alleviate some of Shmi's fear of me given that, well…
On the down side…
"You see that star?" I ask as she climbs into the cockpit with me, pointing at the offending celestial body in question.
Shmi glances from me to the star and back again in confusion before offering a hesitant, "Yes..?"
"It's not supposed to be there."
"It isn't?"
"Nope!" I pause. "Well, I mean, it's a star. It can be wherever it wants I suppose, but it being there to pull us out of hyperspace means that… uh… astrogation isn't as easy as I thought it was?" I shrug. "So yeah, I guess we made a wrong turn at space-Albuquerque."
"...We're lost?"
"Very!" I nod, before snapping my fingers. "But!" Rotating Sheila away from the star, I fire up the sublight engines and push them to full so we can get out of its gravity well. "Fortunately, we're Skywalkers. So unlike for plebeian mortals, being lost doesn't mean we're stuck. It just means we're going to do something… unusual."
Something I maybe should have done back as soon as I stopped being able to cheat by just reusing the hyperspace navigation calculations saved in the navicomp's recent history courtesy of Maul rather than assuming I could read a star chart. I probably would have too if relying on potentially-semi-sentient narrativium didn't give me a serious case of the wiggins. And… Now I'm going to be stuck forever wondering if said narrativium did something to cause this.
Aw well. Needs must when the devil drives and yadda yadda, but even if the Force is playing silly buggers we can still try to weight the odds in our favor as much as possible. I'm sure as fuck not going to let the dark side play navigator-slash-travel-agent.
"So!" I gesture at the co-pilot's seat next to me. "Take a seat and repeat after me: I am one with the force."
"I am one with the force?"
"The force is with me."
"The force is with me?"
"Great!" I nod agreeably and give her a thumbs up. "Now just keep repeating those two lines over and over again while picturing yourself meeting Anakin again. Really focus on the feeling of joy in that moment and how much you love him and…" I trail off as the force swirls, however slightly, around her. "Yeah, that. Keep doing that."
Shmi isn't really force sensitive, or at least she's about as much of a force sensitive as Bats back home was a mage. Which is to say she's stronger in the force than the general population by enough to be statistically noteworthy, and should probably avoid speaking Latin in front of the books, but not strong enough to be meaningfully useful to her on an individual level.
But with me providing the mystical finesse and the Hyperdrive doing the heavy lifting? This should work.
Charging up the hyperdrive without bothering to enter any calculations, I magically twist the emerging hyperspace bubble until it resembles Amy's teleportation spell as closely as possible, using Shmi's desires to 'aim' us.
And… ugh… trusting in the Force to see us through, I pull the lever.
Naturally, this results in a number of Sheila's warning klaxons immediately blaring in my ear, followed closely by Shmi vomiting up her lunch into my lap.
But, good news! We successfully teleported interstellar distances! Also, we brought the whole ship with us.
Bad news! We're in atmo, nose down, with the sublights at full. Also, despite having a great view of the rapidly approaching ground, I still have no idea where we are beyond the obvious 'not wherever we were.'
Pull up! Pull up! PULL UP! Wait no! Too much up!
Wrenching the thing I think is called a yoke backwards, the view through the front window-thing shifts rapidly, sky replacing the ground only to start being replaced by ground again before I manage to ease off and get us more or less pointed away from the planet.
Taking a moment to thank Eris for the existence of inertial compensators, Shmi not having her seat belt on and all, I glare balefully at the couple of alerts that are still blinking at me.
Sadly, tapping the leftmost one just pops up a red box full of Aurebeshi gibberish. I recognize maybe half the words, and those are the smaller ones. Damn you, George Lucas! Even if they call it Galactic Basic, everyone speaks fucking English! Why does the written version need to be some 34 letter abomination? Reaching out through the force to ask the ship what's wrong more directly gives me a vague impression of emptiness I assume means I'm getting somewhat low on fuel.
Right. Add 'find a space gas station' to the to do list. Next error message? Wait, I know this one. That's the same 'the hyperdrive went into emergency shutdown because of an unexpected gravity well' error I got last time. Dismiss.
Next error-
The incessant whispering of the Force in the back of my mind that I spent ages learning to filter out spikes sharply in volume the way it does whenever it thinks it has something materially useful to share and I reach out blindly to flick the switch that feels 'right' and… turn on the repulsor coils?
I have maybe half a second to wonder why before there's a loud popping noise like a blown fuse as one of the shield emitters overloads catastrophically followed by a loud thump that reverberates through the entire hull as we hit the ground tail first. This in turn causes the nose of the ship to slam downward abruptly, and only the cushion of the repulsor coils keeps us from completing the act of plowing into the ground and going ass over teakettle. Which leaves us skipping across a field like a well tossed stone minus some paint instead as I frantically try to cut the engines before one of the low hills can force us to repeat our 'landing' process.
I manage it, but only after Sheila's left wing-thing clips what I think may have once been a barn— It already being on fire before we hit it makes it hard to say for sure— completes our skipping stone impression by adding some enthusiastically out of control spinning to our movements until we slowly drift to a stop.
"Well! We're not dead. Not bad for my second ever landing." I nod to myself before looking over at Shmi.
She doesn't appear to agree with my assessment. Not that she voices her disagreement, mind you, or even looks at me, but I feel pretty safe judging her opinion by way of her pale face, white knuckled grip on her armrests, and the rapidfire panicked breathing she's still doing even now that we're on the ground.
"Right." I glance down at myself. "I'm going to go get cleaned up." I manage to get as far as unbuckling my seatbelt and standing up before another murmur from the Force calls my attention to a rapidly approaching Force user and what feels like a bunch of grumpy mooks. "Oh fine. I guess I could go see what the natives want." Or, more likely, what the Force wants with the natives.
Dropping the ramp and tromping on down, I'm just in time to watch a Jedi, blue lightsaber lit and the Force swirling around them, sprint over the crest of the nearest hill with a small child in his arms. A Force-augmented spinning leap allows him to swat a pair of blaster bolts back at the crowd of mooks I can sense but not yet see, but has the hilarious side-effect of him landing practically at my feet before he finally spots me and I realize who he is.
"Hello there!" The startled look on his face almost makes me break from my impromptu script to burst out laughing, but I manage to limit myself to an unreasonably broad grin as I wave at him. "Need some help, Obi Wan?"
You know, this would be perfect if he weren't holding what is obviously the wrong child, given that my brother Anakin is neither a redhead, nor a girl.