EPISODE III

Harsh Realities

Luke could have never imagined a world like Coruscant. To go from Tatooine, where everything was synthstone and no building was taller than two stories, to this was disorienting. Gleaming, glistening towers of durasteel and transparisteel that disappeared into the clouds and stretched down to the cavernous depths of the planet's surface; speeders that filled the air and zipped in every possible direction; and more people than Luke could ever even conceive of all being in one place at the same time. He didn't want to look like some slack-jawed, backwater yokel but he couldn't help but stare at it all a little open-mouthed. It was all he could do to follow the crowd of other prospective applicants that had been on the transport with him or he would have easily gotten swallowed up in the mob and gotten completely lost.

Soon enough, though, Luke realized they were getting closer to the Royal Imperial Academy. The triumphant sounds of the Imperial March blared from speakers and made Luke's chest swell with pride as he grew closer and the song grew louder. An imposing building of alabaster and ebony durasteel with several black spires reaching up into the sky, the Royal Imperial Academy was nearly as large as the Emperor's palace and brought to mind the image of a Stormtrooper's hand reaching out toward the stars. It was a warning to all enemies of the Empire both from within and without. Luke's whole body seemed to tingle with excitement as he walked past holovid posters of AT-ATs, TIE Fighters, Stormtroopers charging into battle, Grand Admirals and Moffs cutting imposing figures, and even Darth Vader himself! He couldn't help the small smile that crept across his lips. He was really here!

The crowd of recruits was then properly marshaled into application lines for the sake of expediency. If everyone had to stand in a single line then it would have taken all day for them to get through! There were those who intended to serve the Empire as bureaucrats or administrators, as scientists, or to operate directly in the field. Well, Luke hadn't come all the way from the Outer Rim to learn botany or legal jargon. He hoped more than anything that he might become a TIE Pilot or a Stormtrooper of some kind. He wanted to see some action! Which was the exact opposite of what Luke was seeing now as the line seemed to move with interminable slowness.

When Luke finally made it to the front of the line, the man behind the counter seemed to occupy the exact opposite end of the spectrum of enthusiasm as Luke. He was a serious-looking, pale-skinned older human male with a stern expression on his face. It was a face that said he'd like to be anywhere else in the galaxy but that also said he was not putting up with any shenanigans. Like all Imperial Officers, he wore a green-gray suit with black gloves and a matching green-gray cap. There was a badge on his chest with three blue squares beside three red squares. Luke assumed that meant… something. Probably important.

"Name?" the man asked. He wore a clear look of disdain for Luke's sandfaring garb that made Luke feel self-conscious about his appearance in a way he really hadn't before this exact moment.

"Luke Starkiller," Luke replied without hesitation. It was an idea that he'd pondered the whole way here; taking a new name. Why not? He was done with the name "Skywalker." What had it ever done for anybody? Nothing except for one Podracing champion who grew up to work on a spice freighter of all things. A common criminal. Luke had much bigger ambitions than that.

"Where are you from, Starkiller?" the man asked as he tapped away at his keypad.

"Tatooine," Luke answered. "On the Outer Rim," he added helpfully. The man gave him another stern look.

"Stand up straighter if you're going to be in the Academy, boy," he told Luke, who did so promptly. It seemed like that was another thing he was going to have to be more aware of about himself going forward. "How do you expect to serve your Empire, Starkiller?" he asked.

"With a blaster in my hand," Luke told him proudly. "Or a TIE Fighter's controls."

The officer nodded and pressed a few more keys. Honestly, he hadn't really cared what Luke's answer would be. He had just been making idle talk while waiting for the next screen to load on his console. There was a loud "Beep!" and he handed Luke a red card of translucent plastic.

"We'll see if the entrance exam bares you out, then," he said. "Through the front gate," he explained, "Follow the signs for the first examination room. Someone will take your… things," he gestured to Luke's bag, "And you'll receive them upon completion of the exam. Good luck to you, Starkiller. Next!" he barked and Luke shuffled out of line, following the crowd once again. He did his best to be mindful of his posture as he walked and, when he saw how some of the cadets who'd completed the exams walked across the grounds, did his best to copy their marching stride.

First, there was the medical screening. He was stripped down to his underwear to make sure that he wasn't carrying any contraband, listening devices, or anything else that might be used to aid the Rebel Alliance. Then the physician checked Luke's heart rate, pulse, his lungs, his eyes, his ears, and made sure he had all his teeth. Then Luke was scanned once over to make sure he was not carrying any known parasites or pathogens and he was sent on his way in a form-fitting gray athletic bodysuit emblazoned with the Imperial sigil rather than being given back the clothes he'd been wearing before. Like the Officer at the front gate, the physician gave him a look of disdain when Luke told him he was from Tatooine. Rather than getting angry at them, Luke only felt further shame for his home. How pitiful must its reputation be if this was the regular reaction to it? Did the Core Worlds think that the entire planet was like Mos Eisley? He would have to work that much harder than everyone else to prove that he was good enough.

Which was more than a bit of a problem when the very next step of the exam had Luke being shuffled into a room with a hundred other applicants for a written test. While Luke was hardly illiterate or innumerate, there were other matters where he struggled, when it came to Core World history, or the sciences, or about the Empire itself. He knew just enough to make a passing grade but that only fueled the frustration he felt about how incomplete his life on Tatooine had been, and how much he still had to learn. How wasted his life would have been had he never escaped.

After that embarrassment, Luke was eager for the chance to excel when the physical portion of the exam came. Though he had grown to resent his life as a moisture farmer, the hours of physical labor and working on machines had naturally built up his muscles while also making his hands careful and dextrous. He managed to stay at or near the head of the pack when it came to lifting weights, scaling walls, scuttling under stunning trip lasers, climbing ropes, or running and vaulting over obstacles. There were also multiple shooting ranges at points along the course to test the applicants' accuracy and speed with a blaster under varying levels of adrenaline, physical exertion, and exhaustion. Having been trained with blasters by his aunt and uncle from a young age, Luke aced every shooting exercise put in front of him. He was flying through the physical course… until…

"What… is this?" Luke asked, staring at a large square hole in front of him full of water. It was much too long to jump across and there was no equipment to vault over it or swing across. What was he meant to do?

"What's the matter, boy?" the Imperial officer monitoring the section of the course asked. "You've never seen a pool before?"

"No, sir," Luke answered. "I-I'm from Tatooine. It's a desert planet. This is the largest body of water I've ever seen."

"Hmm," was all the officer said. Without another word, he kicked Luke hard in the chest to send him flailing backward into the water.

Luke gasped and spluttered, flailing his limbs to try and stay above the surface. "W-wait! I don't know how to swim!"

"The Empire has no use for the incompetent, boy!" the officer snapped harshly down at him. "Either figure it out or hurry up and drown! Either way, you're wasting my time!" Then he stepped away from the edge of the pool and watched Luke begin to sink.

The pool had just enough lighting for Luke to be able to see his hands in front of his face but even that was difficult with the water blurring his vision. In his panic, Luke opened his mouth to take a breath and gulped in a mouthful of water. His body convulsed and he managed to bring himself back up to the surface, coughing and gagging as he wiped water from his face and discovered to his horror that he'd lost his lead and several other applicants had gotten out in front of him. He hadn't come all this way to lose to water. Luke went back under the surface and laid himself flat, doing his best to stay calm. He kicked his legs and swung his arms, trying to flail a little less desperately and copy the motions he'd been able to see from those who had gotten ahead of him. Mercifully, he started to make progress through the water as he intensified his focus on moving forward. Soon enough, Luke was moving through the water with ease, as if something were helping to guide and control his movements. Luke sliced through the water like a knife and pulled himself quickly up and out once he came through on the other side. His movements were still a little shaky as he reached the final shooting range, not to mention the water still in his eyes, so he missed the centers of the first two targets. He swore, fixed his vision, and focused himself again, drawing on his frustration and anger at himself to strengthen his resolve. He struck every remaining target dead center from there and all that remained was a dead sprint to the finish line. There were five people ahead of Luke and he knew that getting ahead of them all was incredibly unlikely. But he was not giving up now. He ran as fast as he could, his arms pumping and his legs pistoning as he caught up to the pack. Once again, fueled by his aggression and his furious resolve, some thing seemed to be guiding his movements and pushing him along. Before Luke knew it he was running faster than he ever had in his life, swiftly gaining on and then passing those who had gotten ahead of him while he'd been drowning like an idiot. There was a loud klaxon blare as he sped past the finish line of the course just behind one other person. Considering the ground he'd had to recover, Luke was pleased with that but knew he would need to work harder in the future.

Luke eagerly turned his head up toward the massive holoscreen against the far wall with the names and times of the fastest applicants and beamed at the fact that he had come second overall. If he'd been born on a planet where it would have made sense to learn how to swim, he knew he would have come in first. The name of the person who actually did come in first was Lancer Creel. Luke looked back down from the leaderboard and looked at Lancer, who seemed none too pleased that Luke even existed, never mind having come so close to beating him.

If Luke had to guess, Lancer was a Correlian. He'd seen more than a few passing through Mos Espa Spaceport and picking up equipment at Toshi Station. His silvery-white hair clung to the back of his neck from the water and he had the palest skin that Luke had ever seen. Then again, most humans that Luke had seen since arriving on Coruscant were far paler than he was used to. On a planet with two suns, you either tanned or you burned to death. Indigo eyes burned with surprising vehemence as Lancer gave Luke a disapproving once-over.

Luke still smiled at him despite all of this. "Look at that," he remarked. "Guess we're pretty much guaranteed to get in, huh? I look forward to working together." He put out his hand for Lancer to shake. "For the Empire."

Lancer looked down at Luke's hand and seemed to consider the prospect for a moment before gripping Luke's hand aggressively and shaking it twice. "For the Empire," he agreed with an angry breath that flared his nostrils and a voice as cold as interstellar space.

Once everyone who had arrived today for enrollment had completed the exercise course, only those with the top 100 best times remained. Those times were then calculated with the total scores of the various marksmanship tests throughout the course, as well as the scores on the knowledge portion of the exam. As Luke stood and waited for final scores to be tallied, he shifted from foot to foot while MSE-6 "Mouse" cleaning droids zipped around and wicked away the water everyone was dripping onto the floor. When the final scores came, everyone who made it into the top fifty was enrolled into the Royal Imperial Academy. It had once been the top twenty but with the active threat of the Rebel Alliance, parameters had been expanded to increase recruitment. Luke let out a sigh of relief when he saw his own name just cracking the top ten. That had been close. Too close. He had to work harder! For his part, Lancer Creel had come in first place overall.

Once the top fifty had been confirmed, they were all assembled into a single file line while the rest of the applicants were shown the door. The newest recruits were marched through a door and into a long hallway where they were handed towels to dry off any remaining water as well as full sets of gray-and-white Academy bodysuits. As Luke was wondering when exactly he was supposed to change, privacy walls popped up around him. So, right now, apparently. He shrugged, stripped out of his damp suit, and quickly dried off any remaining water before he started getting dressed again. As he got into the bodysuit, Luke couldn't help but wonder when exactly he was getting his bag back. Not that he really had much in it, but still. The walls came down just as Luke had pulled up his last zipper and then they began to march again. Some people weren't quite the speedy dresser Luke was, so they were hopping into their clothes as they marched. They marched through several more hallways, past rooms full of their now-fellow cadets studying in classes, sparring on combat decks, or training in the flight simulators, before they finally came into an assembly hall where they were made to stand shoulder-to-shoulder across the width of the room. The top ten applicants were separate from the other forty, though it took Luke a moment to realize before he quickly joined the other nine.

The assembly room was a large, stark white, circular space with large red banners stamped with the Imperial sigil stretching from floor to ceiling adorning the walls, with an absolutely massive banner at the front of the room. In front of that banner, there was a raised dais in front of them where several of the officers they'd be training under stood with an empty space in the middle. That empty space was quickly filled as an authoritative-looking figure marched out. He was a bald human man, older-looking with a sharp gray goatee surrounding his mouth. He wore a green uniform with enough red and blue squares on his badge to denote the rank of Commandant. Between his stern gaze and the hard line of his mouth, he looked like he wanted to take out a blaster and open fire on all fifty of them.

"My name is Commandant Deenlark," the man announced with a harsh voice that boomed off the walls. "For the next three months, I am as close to the Emperor as any of you miserable lot are likely to get in your lives. If you expect me to be impressed by how well you were able to run, or shoot, or read facts off a datapad, then you are dead wrong. You are all soft! Weak! You are children! But you will be beaten into shape to serve the glory of the Empire! The pressure I put you under will either fashion you into diamonds or crush you into carbon powder. I will not tolerate weakness! I will not give you special treatment because of who your father or mother is and I will not take pity on you for being an Outer Rim evolutionary quagmire or a nonhuman sent to this fine institution as a joke at my expense. If you excel then you will be rewarded. If you fall behind, you will be jettisoned like so much flotsam and jetsam. Is that perfectly clear?" he demanded.

A unanimous roar of "Yes, sir!" echoed through the room, the reverberations off the wall raising the sound to deafening levels. This earned a single curt nod of approval.

"Report to your dormitories," he ordered them, "And say goodbye to whatever remains of your normal lives. Tomorrow, you will enter the mouth of hell."

Luke Starkiller couldn't be happier.