"Well," Obi-Wan said, picking himself up and brushing himself off. "That was interesting, wasn't it?"
Silence answered him, and he looked around.
"Anakin?" he asked. "Anakin!"
After a few seconds more silence, he reached for his commlink.
"Anakin, can you hear me?" he asked, flicking the switch to broadcast.
His sixteen-year-old Padawan was a handful at times (the rest of the time he was two), but he was also perhaps the most important thing in Obi-Wan's life, and one thing you wouldn't expect from him was that he'd be quiet.
Especially just after a mural had made a very spirited attempt to fall on both of them. And especially when Anakin had been the one saying that it was a bad idea to be exploring the abandoned Jedi temple on Lothal without backup.
"If you're wondering," Obi-Wan went on, "I'm quite open to being told you told me so, Anakin. It even has the virtue of being true."
"Master?" Anakin asked, and Obi-Wan turned in surprise.
Anakin was walking down a set of stairs – from a completely different section of the abandoned Temple.
"Are you all right, Anakin?" Obi-Wan asked. "How did you get over there?"
"Huh?" Anakin said, then snapped his fingers. "Oh, right, I get it. It's only been, what, twenty seconds… maybe thirty? Could be a minute? I'm not sure how good my aim was."
He looked worried. "I'm not still around, am I?"
"Anakin, if you would kindly begin to make sense?" Obi-Wan requested.
"Right, right," Anakin decided, getting closer.
As he did, Obi-Wan looked at his padawan, then frowned.
Anakin looked… different. His clothes were different, his hair didn't quite look the same – though he still had the same padawan braid – and, the greatest change of all, he had a second weapon at his waist to go with his lightsaber.
A blaster, of all things.
"Anakin, I did request that you make sense," Obi-wan noted. "I can only assume you haven't managed to get around to doing that?"
"Okay, okay, Master, I'll get to it," Anakin said, holding his hands up in a conciliatory fashion. "So… have you heard of this place called the World Between Worlds?"
Obi-Wan thought about it, then shook his head.
"I've never heard of any such thing," he admitted.
Anakin exhaled. "Phew! I was worried I'd just slept through the lesson on it, or something, but I know you would never do that, Master… anyway, the World Between Worlds is sort of, outside space and time. There's gateways to it all over this temple."
He looked at the broken mural. "Or… were? I don't really get it, myself."
"You mean you fell through time?" Obi-Wan asked. "Did you appear before you left?"
The Jedi Knight was not inclined to be calm about the situation.
"But where did you get the blaster?" he added.
"Oh, right," Anakin realized. "So, I ended up in the future, actually! Once they heard my name they didn't say anything in case they broke time, so it's probably the future… and I ended up taken to the Jedi Temple there. Not this one, a different one, I think they said it used to be a temple to some Sith guy before it was a starfighter hangar… anyway, it took a month or so for them to work out how to send me back, and I got some lessons while I was there."
Obi-Wan looked doubtful.
"You got lessons on using a blaster?" he asked.
"And on starfighter maintenance," Anakin replied. "And several different kinds of weapons, and… uh, actually, I taught some classes too, because they were all teaching one another sometimes, and I really got an idea of how hard it is to teach people sometimes. But this guy who was the one the master of the temple assigned to teaching me, he was pretty good at it…"
"All right, Anakin," Kyle said. "From our lessons so far, I've got a good idea of your strengths and weaknesses. In particular I intend to focus on your weaknesses."
"Why?" Anakin asked. "Can't I focus on my strengths?"
"Well, we'll be working on those too," Kyle said, with a shrug. "But you're already good at them, so you don't need as much work."
He sat down. "It's actually a tradeoff, because you've got a point, as well. Sometimes it's better to have a combination of tools that are each good at different things, and sometimes it's good to have a single tool that's very good indeed at something."
"Tools?" Anakin repeated. "We're not supposed to use the Force as a toolkit, right?"
"The way I think of it, you're not supposed to take the Force for granted," Kyle said, in slight correction. "And a good way to avoid taking it for granted is to do things the hard way. But take this as an example."
He put his lightsaber down on the floor. "This is a single tool. It's very good indeed at cutting people up, for example, and it can be used to deflect blaster bolts… it can be used to end an argument just by showing it off. A Jedi needs no other weapon."
Then he put down a blaster pistol next to it. An awkward looking weapon with a pair of huge barrels. A thermal detonator. A gun with a flared nose. And something that Anakin recognized straight away.
"Isn't that a disruptor rifle?" he asked. "Those are illegal, aren't they?"
"So I've heard," Kyle replied, with a wink. "I've never bought one myself, I took this off a Rodian who tried to assassinate me with it on Nar Shadda."
He gestured to the array of weapons. "If I had to pick one weapon, I'd rather have a lightsaber than any of these. But if I had my choice, I'd have all of these, because there are some things that they're simply better at – situations where using a blaster is easier than a lightsaber."
Anakin frowned, thinking about that.
"I think I get it," he said. "Having a blaster doesn't mean I can't use a lightsaber."
"Right," Kyle agreed. "The same is true of the Force. You can be a more well rounded individual by working on your weaknesses."
He moved the weapons to the side. "And, of those, one of them is your temper. I've noticed it, and it's something that you need to watch out for."
"Because it could lead me to the Dark Side, right?" Anakin asked. "That's what my Master says."
"He's not wrong, but there's a different way of thinking about it," Kyle replied. "Take it from me, I've faced it before… the worst thing about the Dark Side is that it tries to pull you in by offering you the chance to do something that matters to you… and then it warps how you think. It makes it so that the very reason you started down the path doesn't matter any more."
He shook his head. "It's like the Dark Side is trying to find a way to get through your defences, to make you do something you wouldn't even want to do otherwise… or afterwards. Your temper is a weakness, and if you get angry it can make you do something. But that doesn't mean you ignore your anger – it means you have to understand why it's there. Make your decisions without your anger getting a say."
Anakin was quiet for several long seconds as he thought about that.
"We're not going to sort the whole thing out today, Anakin," Kyle told him. "For now, I think I'd like to learn something from you – how about we do some sparring?"
"...kept stunning me in the middle of a lesson if I was getting distracted," Anakin said, grinning. "It was really intense training, but like I say, it gave me a better idea of what teaching is even like. And I learned how to meditate, too!"
"Now that is something I would like to see," Obi-Wan said.
Anakin promptly did a handstand, closed his eyes, and Obi-Wan did a double-take.
Because his padawan's force signature was calm, all of a sudden. He really was meditating.
"The Temple Master showed me that," Anakin went on. "He was called Luke. It's a nice name, I'll have to remember it."
AN:
This might not even be the strangest thing the New Jedi Order had to deal with.