Arc 2 Chapter 16

As the Resistance made its way back to base, laden with loot, different groups split off to temporarily store their ill-gotten gains in various locations, so they couldn’t be easily tracked. Jorel’s team, however, travelled with their leader, Waleye, the large man having told them that, “You five did the hard part, we’ll take care of the rest!” after talking to Kiri, the Devaronian woman who had, the Padawan only now realized, been his minder on the mission, watching and evaluating him.

On one hand, the obvious approval in the man’s tone made Jorel sit a little straighter, happy that he’d done well, but on the other, it was more attention than he wanted. Jorel was supposed to be an observer, seeing if the rebels were the ones in the right here, not someone who was supposed to be noticed.

Bit too late for that, the Padawan thought grimly, wondering how badly he’d just messed up.

When they’d returned, the Resistance cell leader had ordered the young man to meet him in his office, and only him, something that sent a surge of worry through the Jedi, before he cleared his mind and let it pass. Hisku waited in the hall outside as both men entered the small space, Stelog taking a seat behind his desk, and waving Jorel to sit in one of the chairs opposite, causing the boy to hesitate.

“I’m, um, a little bloody,” he objected, waving to himself. Waleye was a little dirty as well, his armor blackened with soot, and bearing a few scorch marks from deflected blaster shots, but that was nothing on the Padawan, who was covered with a thick paste of blood mixed with enough Ferrocrete dust that it’d started to form a paste. He’d left red-gray marks on the landspeeder’s seat, and the chairs in here were much nicer.

“It’ll wash off,” the older man dismissed the objection easily. “Sit.”

Not really sure what else to say, Jorel did just that.

Waleye gave the Jedi a measuring look, before leaning back and asking a question, but not the one the Padawan was expecting.

“This is the first time you’ve gone out to kill someone, isn’t it?” the cell leader asked seriously.

Jorel blinked. “I, um, what?” He’d expected an accusation of being a Jedi, not, well, that.

The older man shook his head, “I’ve asked about you, Jorel. Like I do anyone that seems. . . more. You’ve killed, that was clear, but from what I heard, it was always in self-defense. This time you went out to kill.”

“But, um, the convoy-” he tried to argue.

“Was a kind of self-defense,” Waleye disagreed. “You knew what would happen if you didn’t. That was clear enough. But you went above and beyond, tonight. All you needed to do was slip in and turn off the power. You could’ve tried to knock the guards out, not spilled a drop of blood. It wouldn’t’ve worked as well, but you could’ve. Instead you killed everyone in your way, and chose a path that meant you’d need to kill a lot more, overdoin’ it like a ge’verd,” he accused, though with a bit of good humor behind his words.

Jorel had no idea what that meant, but, with his ability in the Force, he could get the gist. He wasn’t very good at the technique his Order called ‘Comprehend Speech’, which would allow the user to translate the words of a people they had only just met, but he had the basics, which meant he understood that the man had called him ‘almost a warrior’.

Which almost stung, except for the fact that Jorel knew that, as a Jedi, he already was one, though one dedicated to preserving peace.

“I did what needed to be done,” he answered stiffly, trying to figure out how the person he was pretending to be would answer, and with no time to try and figure it out. “Doing what I did. . . Yeah. I, I killed a lot of people, but those people would’ve killed us, if I’d given them the chance.”

The cell leader nodded. “There’s truth there, but it wasn’t your job. Not sayin’ you were wrong,” he added, before Jorel could object. “Only that no one would’ve blamed you for only doing what I asked you. You could’ve done your job and ran out the back when you were finished, while the Congressional soldiers focused on us. You wouldn’t’ve even needed to worry about your girl, since she was there with you.”

“I’m not doing this just for myself!” the Jedi disagreed vehemently, frowning, trying to think of who would do something like that, fight as little as they could get away with while leaving allies exposed. He was aware that people like that existed, he’d heard about those kinds of people, heck, pirates were almost universally that kind of people, but he’d never thought that others would think of him that way.

However, the older man just laughed. “Udesii,” he urged, making calm down motions. “So that’s how you excuse it. Don’t look at me like that, everyone has a reason. And Hisku?”

“She’s not doing it for herself either,” Jorel stated with conviction.

Waleye nodded. “Just know her reasons might not be yours,” he warned. “But that’s not why I called you here. You went out and killed, today. For a good cause, but you still killed. How are you holding up?”

The honest care the Jedi felt from the other man made him hesitate, before answering, “I’m alright. I wish we could’ve gotten what we needed without having to kill people, but we didn’t start this fight.”

“That we didn’t,” the older man agreed solemnly, hesitating himself. “Jorel, what do you know of the Force?”

The Padawan froze. “I, um, you could say I’ve heard of it. That’s the Jedi magic thing, right?”

“It’s not just the Jedi that have it,” Waleye told him, with the air of someone sharing a secret. “Everyone has a bit of it, Jedi just have the most.”

“Wait, you, you think I have it?” the Force-user asked, as incredulously as he could fake, having no idea how the conversation had turned in this direction but hoping it would go somewhere else soon.

The Resistance leader nodded. “Aye. Not as much as a Jedi, but you do. You and that girl of yours both.”

“I, uh, really?” the Padawan questioned, a little more nervously, not sure how the other man could tell. He’d been using the Force, but Hisku had-

“You ever see that girl miss? Once?” Waleye asked with a chuckle. “She might not be hittin’ center every time, but even I’m not that good with the kind of junk you’ve been using, and my count’s four-thousand.”

“Your. . .count?” Jorel echoed, though he instantly understood what the man was referring to.

“Midichlorians,” the other man supplied, confirming the younger man’s assumptions. “Need seven thousand to be a Jedi, but that don’t mean much. Can’t throw people around, but I get. . . feelings. You ever get feelings like that, where you know something, but you don’t know how you know?”

Listening to the Force, it warned him to be cautious, so the Jedi shrugged, “Yeah, once or twice. Most of the time it’s just a bad feeling before something happens. Is that, you know, magic?”

“It is,” the older man agreed, smiling. “More people have it than ya think, but if you don’t do anything with it, it doesn’t get better. Like a muscle that you never work. When we’re done here, when we’ve won, I’ll make sure to get a pair of tests for you and your girl. Only place that has them on Pengalan is the capitol city. If you’ve got it, and I think ya do, I’ll help the two of you get a handle on it. Robes aren’t my thing, I prefer armor,” he laughed, tapping his scorched breastplate, “But I’ve got a trick or four I could show ya. It’s a gift, son, and not one that should be wasted.”

Is. . . is he offering to take me on as his apprentice? the Padawan thought, surprised. “I’ll, um, yeah, that sounds nice. But we have to win first.”

“That we do, Jorel. That we do,” Waleye agreed with a smile. “Now go take a shower and take the rest of the night off. You and your girl deserve it. You did a good job, tonight, and I look forward to seein’ what else you do.”

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“Thanks,” the Jedi smiled back, getting up and heading out as the Resistance Cell leader turned to his terminal, dismissing the teen.

Hisku was waiting, shooting Jorel a questioning look, but he shook his head as he closed the door, the pair silent until they got back to their room. As soon as he’d put up a sound baffle, she turned on him, asking, “What happened?”

Looking back at her, Jorel struggled mightily to keep a straight face as he told her with utmost seriousness, “Well, Waleye thinks we might have some talent in the Force, not enough to be Jedi, of course, and he wants us to become his apprentices after we win this war.”

“. . . what.”

The full explanation took a bit, and by the time he finished his attaché was not amused. “We should stop,” she declared. “If that man is Force Sensitive, then he knows we’re using it as well.”

“That’s not how it works,” the Padawan disagreed. “You need training to do, well, anything in the Force. Technically even getting feelings from it requires training, it’s just that most people train themselves just by trying to hear what the Force is telling them. Hisku, you absolutely have more potential in the Force than he does, but you didn’t notice when I was using it.”

“But I haven’t been trained, Waleye has,” she disagreed.

“Waleye trained himself,” he immediately countered. “And he already thinks we’re using the Force. Me to have guidance, and you to aim.”

The blue-skinned girl looked at him in confusion. “But, I don’t use the Force to aim,” she objected.

Jorel shrugged. “You might,” he argued, and she glared at him, though it was without heat. “Knights and Masters can tell when the Force is being used around them, and I can tell if it’s something big, like a telekinetic push, but subtle things? Those are hard to see if you’re not looking, even if you’re good at it, and I’m not. Not yet. If someone put up a sound baffle, and I was near it or in it, I could probably feel it, but if someone was just keeping it up, I might miss it.” He paused, offering with a smile, “I could teach you how to sense things in the Force, so you could tell yourself.”

“I’m not using the Force,” she immediately shot back.

“It’s not ‘using the Force’ to just perceive it,” he replied, seeing her response coming a parsec away. “Not anymore than it is using a blaster when you look at one to see what others are doing with theirs.”

“. . . I’ll think about it, now go take a shower. You stink,” she finally replied, pointing him towards their room’s attached fresher, and Jorel, doing his best not to smile at his victory, moved to do just that.

The days moved on, and things started to progress, the Resistance getting used to their new equipment, as everyone waited to hear what their next move would be. No one was sure, and Waleye made it clear that he wasn’t the one that’d make that decision, but the leaders of the Resistance as a whole. They were managing a dozen different groups across Pengalan, of which Waleye’s cell was only one. Their cell had sent half of what they’d captured away, to other cells, which some of the Resistance fighters had complained about, until Stelog had set them all straight.

“We’re not pirates, we’re not raiders, we’re part of the Resistance,” he’d stressed. “That means if we can help our brothers in arms elsewhere, we do that. We’ve got more than enough, so quit your bitchin’ and get back to trainin’, so we can win next time too! Remember, we’re not doin’ this to get rich, we’re doing this to save people, so Kernast doesn’t happen again!”

That had gotten most on track, and Jorel found himself thinking of his Master’s words, of how an orbital bombardment had been stupid, seeing more and more how right the centuries-old Jedi Knight was.

On a more positive note, he’d discovered that Hisku was indeed using the Force when she shot things, having the woman quietly explain to him what she was doing. “It’s something our instructors on- our instructors in the Flock drilled into us. ‘Correct shooting is correct hitting’, which is just, if you shoot the right way, you will hit your target,” she stated, as usual not naming where she was trained. “Which, yes, seems obvious, but it’s really not.”

“Makes sense,” the Padawan shrugged. “You’ve seen me work with, um, Big E, he’s the same way,” he observed, trying not to smile at her look of annoyance when he referred to the General that way. “It’s all ‘to push the world you must first learn to be pushed yourself’, and then I don’t get it and hit the floor.”

Learning how to, when using telekinesis, selectively allowing yourself to be pushed in return, when the normal technique had no such backlash, was something that he was still struggling with. Er’izma had pointed out that doing just that thing was what all Jedi did when they leapt high into the air, but decoupling that from the jumping motion itself and applying it to all things was. . . difficult. Going up, he could kind of use it through his arms, but then when coming down he’d falter, and slam into the pad-covered durasteel.

Learning how to do so was the basis of ‘Floating Meditation’, but that was a Master-level technique. When Jorel had pointed that out, and his master had lifted an eyebrow, rising five feet in the air without moving a muscle, the Padawan had just reaffirmed his claim that the Knight wasn’t really a Knight, anymore than he was a Consular instead of a Guardian, something the man had admitted was correct, but no reason not to try.

“But I’m not-” she started to argue, before sighing. “But I might be using it anyways. Let’s get this over with. When firing, if you do it correctly, what you’re shooting at has already been hit, bolt and target one, you are just doing what is needed to bring that into the world. Which, yes,” she added, annoyed, “sounds exactly like what you’re being taught, Jorel. If I were sniping, there’s an entire thing, but in combat you can’t take your time and maintain perfect stance. But most of the stance is mental anyways, and you can carry that with you to every battlefield.”

Hisku’Biatha’pusi closed her red eyes, and let out a calming breath, her Presence in the Force calming in turn, but not still, like an Initiate trying to meditate. Opening them again, she sighted down her weapon, and Jorel reached his senses out into the Force, trying to see if she was doing anything in that secondary world.

She was.

The disturbances were subtle, incredibly subtle, the Force not actually doing anything in the physical world, but it was doing something. Watching his attaché, both in the Force and in the training room, he saw her shift slightly before her finger pulled the trigger, as simple as breathing, the motion almost serene. A single blaster-bolt came flying across the range and, despite how incredibly inaccurate their guns were, struck the dead-center of the target.

Jorel continued to observe as the Chiss woman took her time, reaching out once more to the target, and shifting slightly, firing once more. This time the bolt came out a bit high from the gun, but Hisku had accounted for the variance before it happened, despite not being able to know it would happen, striking her target dead-center again.

And again.

And again.

Each shot took a solid minute for her to sight in on, an eternity in combat, but the fact that she was at all was damn impressive. On the fifth shot, both of them jumped as Xatra, another of those sent in under-cover from Master Erizma’s legion, spoke up from right behind them.

“That’s some impressive shooting,” the Zabrak observed, a faint note of warning in her voice.

“It is, isn’t it?” Jorel smiled. “Waleye said he thinks we both might be Force sensitive, because of how I pulled off the last mission, and how accurate Hisku is! I mean, it’s not like we’ll ever be Jedi,” he scoffed, the other woman twitching just a little, as the others in the room paid attention, any reason to not train a good reason to most of them. “But we might be good enough to do some special things, isn’t that amazing! And he is too! Probably more than us, though, but still!”

That sent the other Resistance members muttering over the fact that their leader was ‘part-Jedi’, as the Padawan could hear the others whisper to each other. Rather than try and hide this, he was leaning into it, as the person he was pretending to be would have no reason to hide his abilities from his ‘comrades’.

Beside him, the Sergeant blushed a dark blue as her superior officer gave her an unamused look. “I was just explaining to Jorel how I was trained,” she stated stiffly. “And taking my time. I, I wasn’t this accurate in boot camp!” she told the older woman, almost plaintively.

The Lieutenant stared at them both for a moment, then shrugged. “And how long ago was that? You’re getting better, kid. That’s supposed to happen. Nothing to do for it but keep trying to get better.”

The woman’s real meaning was clear: ‘You’ve already outed yourself as something special, don’t try and hide it.’

“So, this is normal?” Hisku asked, off balance, but looking to the woman for guidance.

“Good training’s good training,” Xatra replied easily. “If you got more to use with it, so what? And I’m sure your trainers would agree. Stars,” she smiled, “It might even be why the training’s that way, depending on who set it up.”

The Flock is a Jedi-led military, Jorel realized, some things clicking into place. He’d already met Geist Squadron, each of them with enough Force Sensitivity to probably be Jedi themselves, and they probably recruited from the Flock as a whole. While Hisku had refused to talk about her training, she had defended it by stating that it was a program created by Er’izma, which meant that he’d know how to make it so that it would mesh well with training in the Force.

Stepping to the side, the Lieutenant raised her weapon and sighted in on the target. It was only because the Jedi was paying attention that he felt the Force stir, Xatra’s Presence suddenly reaching out in a way that a normal person’s shouldn’t, just as Hisku’s had, but faster, firming up in a dozen seconds into the same pattern that took the younger woman over a minute to solidify.

Showing far more emotion than the Chiss had, the member of the Flock’s special infiltration group grit her teeth and fired, the blaster-bolt going low and hitting the very edge of the target, exactly where she was aiming.

“Damn,” the Zabrak woman swore, “Wish I could shoot like you.” She looked at those gathered, shaking her head. “Come on, some of us need to practice hitting the broadside of a bantha with these stupid things,” she complained good naturedly, the Resistance fighters smiling and groaning as they got back to work.

“Do, do you think you could show me how to do that?” Jorel asked Hisku, who looked at him, startled by the question. “If I’m a little Force-sensitive too, I could learn, and that seems really useful,” he added.

“I, of course,” his attaché nodded, motioning for him to take a firing stance. She slowly started to explain, and he listened intently, even as a thought niggled at him.

How many Force Adepts are there in the Flock?