Arc 2 Chapter Three

“Master Lucian, are we going to at least land on this planet?” Anaïs asked, as their ship dropped out of hyperspace in yet another system, seemingly without rhyme or reason. After leaving the planet of the slug-like-sensitives, they’d just kind of. . . wandered, from sector to sector, in a way that defied any known hyperspace routes.

Or common sense.

Bouncing from planet to planet, the last few weeks had started to blend together. She’d kept up with her training, but they’d come out in a system, move over to whichever planet was the most populated, Master Lucian would meditate, do something, and then they’d jump right back into hyperspace.

Sometimes all the centuries old Jedi would do was nod to himself, or he’d send a message off, or, a couple of times, they’d buzzed close to a planet, fired a torpedo, blown something up, and then ran off as authorities scrambled at the surprise attack.

What they hadn’t done was land.

They hadn’t needed to, they had the supplies, but, big as their unnamed corvette was, Anaïs was looking forward to being somewhere else, if only for a few hours.

The Temple on Coruscant was huge, and even her Master’s hidden training complex/hideout in the Uphrades system had been sizeable, but she was going a bit stir crazy here on the ship, which wasn’t befitting a Jedi, she knew. Worst part was, he didn’t even need to say it.

“Most likely not. Lavisar’s normally good at policing their own,” Lucian shrugged. “Martial cultures mean there’s a certain amount of discipline. That also means that when they go wrong, they go really wrong, in which case it’s not something that I am going to fix.”

That caused her to blink, her Master’s capabilities seemingly limitless. The man had led an army around by the nose, for Force’s sake! “You wouldn’t be able to?” she asked incredulously.

That got a chuckle out of the man, who looked to be in his twenties, but was far, far older, even if it was often hard to remember at times, his demeanor so often lacking the normal markings of age. “No, Padawan, I could, but not without a great deal of bloodshed. A culture like this, with their leaders gone, would turn to the next in line with barely an issue, and even the ones who might be free of corruption would still feel the need to continue their predecessor’s work, even if they didn’t know why. No, a blade in the dark wouldn’t be what’s required, but a much less subtle approach. A boot to the face, if you will.”

“So, you’d contact the Temple?” she questioned. “But Master Halrol thought you were. . . one with the Force. Do you just not ask for help that often?”

Again, a chuckle, “Oh, I wouldn’t ask them. The various ‘councils’ wouldn’t have the knowledge I do, and would be inclined to make decisions based on what they wanted things to be instead of what I said they were, ignoring my suggestions. They’ve done so enough times already. No, I’ve found it far more useful to contact other Jedi directly, and let them handle it. Now, let’s see how things are on the ground.”

Lucian brought the ship into orbit over the large world, which slowly spun in tandem orbit with another, less populated planet. Settling in his chair, he closed his eyes, falling into meditation, and, since she’d already started asking questions, she asked another: “What are you doing?”

The pointy-eared man opened one eye. “Checking.”

“Yeah, checking ‘how they are’, but, what are you doing?” she clarified, trying not to roll her eyes, and mostly succeeding. “You just kind of sit there, I can’t feel anything in the Force!” And she’d tried. Every time.

“Ah, that is because I am not actually doing anything. Come with me,” he announced, standing and walking off the bridge. “We don’t need to see the planet to do this.”

Intrigued, she followed her Master through the corridors back to their meditation room, the dark-aligned lightsaber that she’d been using to practice resisting the Dark in its neutralizing box, the space currently peaceful in the Force. With a slight tug, two cushions pulled themselves from their position against the wall, Master Lucian sitting on one, facing the other, which he gestured for the padawan to take.

She did.

“Alright, to start with, how is your Force Sense coming along?” he asked, and she knew he meant Force Sense in his sense, back when there were six powers Padawans had to learn four of, instead of nine, and Padawans had to be proficient in one and competent in two others, the ‘new’ ones made by splitting up different aspects of the original set.

“My combat precognition has gotten better,” she told him. “I can dodge the fire of three training drones without my saber, five with it. My ability to sense things from afar is a little better, but I haven’t had space to train,” she resisted the urge to look around their ship meaningfully. “And my ability to sense emotions has. . . atrophied. I’m sorry,” she apologized, flushing in shame despite herself, only to have a bit of Telekinesis flick her on the nose just hard enough to smart.

“Only apologize when you’ve done something wrong, I warned you that might happen,” Lucian reminded her. “When you first came with me you had no mental shields, which is what made others think you better in that subskill than you were. Now, with your mental shielding, you’re probably in the top ten percent of Padawans.”

She felt her hopes rise, “So, you would say I’m Padawan-Grade?” she asked, knowing that, by her Master’s estimations, a majority of Knights were ‘Padawan-Grade’ in most things, her shields originally ‘not even Initiate-Grade’ when they’d started training.

“Yes,” he nodded, and she felt herself smile, which caused him to frown, “Which means you’d last about fifteen minutes on Oricon before you went mad, maybe an hour on Moraband if you were careful. It means an actual Dark Adept couldn’t render you defenseless just by flexing her, or his, power, and it means the number of places I can take you have almost doubled, but if something truly pressing arises I’m still going to need to leave you behind.”

Way to rain on my parade, Master, she thought, instead asking, “And Jorel? How would he place?”

That got her a raised eyebrow. “What did I tell you about measuring yourself based on others?”

This time she did roll her eyes, “That the galaxy is large, and there will always be a large number of people that are better than me in everything I do, but it’s by using my many skills together, along with my intelligence and determination, that I succeed.” Despite the man’s dislike of Temple Doctrine, that would’ve fit right in, though, in retrospect, it was something that she couldn’t remember actually hearing from them.

“Good. And he was better than you are now when we left, months ago,” he told her. “I’m not sure his ability with all of the Central Six, but you are likely at, or above, Padawan Jorel’s ability with Force Control, at least the level of ability he displayed shortly before you went your separate ways. My style of training focuses greatly on using that power to enhance one’s physique, while the Little One is more about complex, external use. Your boyfriend’s Telekinesis likely far outstrips your own,” he remarked, smirking.

“He’s not-we’re not allowed-he’s just a friend!” the teenage girl sputtered, blushing for reasons she didn’t understand. She’d never thought of him that way, or, if she had, she’d known nothing could happen because, as a Jedi, attachments were detrimental and that was about as attached as people could get!

“Whatever you say, Padawan Anaïs,” the Jedi Master replied indulgently, which just caused her to glare at him in annoyance. “However, for what we are doing now, it is your Force Sense that is of greatest importance. You have gained in skill, able to switch between uses on the fly when. . . properly motivated-”

Anaïs glared again, harder. “Trying not to get trampled or gored isn’t ‘properly motivated’, Master.”

Lucian just laughed, “I’d say if that didn’t motivate you, we’d need to have some very different discussions, and you made a breakthrough, so I’d say it worked ‘properly’. Regardless, this is the inverse. You’re not blindly throwing your senses forward, you aren’t even pushing yourself out at all, at least at first, you are instead listening very, very closely. Close your eyes, but do not reach out. Instead, still yourself, and let the Force make itself known.”

Nodding, she did so, reflexively starting to reach out through the Force, but pulling herself back before her teacher can do more than inhale. Okay. Galaxy. It exists. That’s fine, she thought falling back on her Temple training, clearing her mind, before. . . blunting her approach, not forcing herself to be calm, but just. . . being.

It was harder than it sounded.

“Alright, not bad,” Master Lucian remarked, and she could feel him, as he always was, a typhoon of black clouds on the horizon, but calm, static, restrained, and non-threatening, even as the barest glimpses of gold can be barely seen where the whisps of obsidian cloud thin for a fleeting moment. “Now, without reaching, look down.”

She did so, physically, which was dumb because she’s not looking with her eyes, but it’s something she’ll work on later. Doing so, she could get a vague sense of the planet below. Of life, and, as she did her hardest to not focus, slight patterns in the Force. In a way, it reminded her of the club on Fabrin that she’d almost been swamped in, carried away by the intense mix of the dancer’s emotions, but at a distance. There was some good, some bad, but there was nothing that really stood out to her. Nothing that truly resonated with the Light, but nothing that reeked of the Dark either.

“Okay. I see it. I think. But. . . what am I looking for?” she asked.

From her Master came a thing tendril of gold-tinged shadow, that wrapped around her, not tightly, but enough to draw her attention as the entire thing, very slowly, seemed to come into focus. The swirls of vague patterns become clearer, hints of larger networks forming into fractal patterns of emotion, and life, and death, and everything that sent ripples through the Force. “This. And now comes the more difficult part. Take this, and try to apply our ability to see possibility to it.”

She did, and the pattern gained a little. . . depth was the word, but it wasn’t enough. The slow flow of emotions, the tiny shifts in the network, broadened out, narrowing down to the point of now in a constant stream, and Anaïs felt her focus start to break, but leaned on her Master’s presence to give her a bit of form to the seeming chaos before her. “I. . . I don’t see it,” she finally admitted, not understanding what she was supposed to be able to glean from this.

“That’s because you’re not looking far enough,” the ancient Jedi noted, but there was no recrimination in his Presence or tone. “Watch.”

Her vision rippled, as the comforting bands of darkness around her became almost restraining, and the shifting chaos of a billion lives exploded, possibilities stretching outwards in every direction, overlapping each other into an incomprehensible prismatic kaleidoscope of possibility that looped in on itself, and stretched in and out, flowing on and off planet, those sections becoming storms of possibility that defied explanation, while the world itself built out, and around, and up and down, until, with no warning it stopped.

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And then it made sense.

The possibilities, the ‘what ifs’ of the ‘what ifs’ of the ‘what ifs’ arranged themselves into hundreds upon hundreds of possibilities, too many to count, or understand, but each of those possibilities had a. . . flavor. A tint. Some were better, some were worse, but only in a general sense. She couldn’t see what happened, only that, for each, it would create patterns in the force, but every possibility had an anchor point, a moment that would render it possible, or deny it from ever coming to pass.

Reaching out, despite herself, she found the best one, and tried to trace it, tried to find what would destroy it, so as to avoid it. There was something on one continent, something that led to dozens of other possibilities, none quite so good, but if she tried to trace those to eliminate them until only the good was left then it’d work, but it got harder and harder to see, but if she just pushed harder-

No.

Her Master guided her away from looking at the best outcome, instead looking to the worst, one that festered, and rotted, and oozed Dark across the world. That one had a different anchor point, one she could trace to a different continent, to a handful of towns, but one more than others, and one house in particular. The location seemed to fix itself in her mind as her Master’s presence retreated, and the vision instantly started to come apart before her.

No! she thought, trying to reach out, to hold it in place, but that just made it shatter all the more quickly, until she was once again looking down at the world as it was not as it could be, until even that faded.

Opening her eyes, she found herself looking at the ceiling, the taste of metal in her mouth. Trying to sit up, a spike of pain and tiredness ran through her, as she called upon Force Control to bolster herself.

“What?” she asked the room at large, which was now empty. She felt weak, not injured, but like she’d run herself ragged in training, as she had a few times before Master Lucian gave her a very detailed lecture on rates of learning, recovery time, and efficiency.

The door opened, and Lucian walked in, offering her a glass of water, which she tried to drink too fast, coughed, and, under the reproachful eye of her teacher, gently sipped.

“You are aware that your body has natural limiters on what you can do, yes?” he asked, taking a seat opposite her, and she blinked as she noticed the sandwiches off to the side. Had she passed out?

“You said the Dark version of Force Control turns those off,” she said. “But, I was using the Light-”

“Which means it’s harder to hurt yourself, not impossible, but with me here you were in no danger,” he replied, he smiled comfortingly, before tilting his head to the side in a gesture of ‘counterpoint’. “Though me being here is also why you were able to hurt yourself in the first place.”

That made no sense whatsoever, and from her Master’s sigh, it was obvious she was missing something.

“If I lift a weight you cannot lift, and hand it to you, but you try to lift it, you very well might injure something,” he explained. “Only it wasn’t muscles you strained, it was, well, your soul. Also, you might want this.” Reaching over, he picked up a damp cloth and handed it to her. motioning towards her face.

Pressing it to her face, it came away red.

She looked up at him, worried, but able to tell her concerns he shook his head. “You’re fine. You’re not the first one I’ve helped reach beyond their grasp, and we didn’t go that far. However, knowing that a thing is possible, having done it yourself, can help you get there much easier than flying blind. Now,” he said, handing her a sandwich, “take your time recovering. The future isn’t going anywhere.”

Eating helped, as did using the Force to heal herself. She was worried that using the Force to heal damage to herself by using the Force would just make things worse, but Master Lucian had shaken his head. “Healing is just that, healing. Healing others I wouldn’t advise, but the strain you’d feel in healing is more than outweighed by the fact that it and the damage you’ve suffered is already being undone by the healing. Just. . . don’t use the Force for anything else today.”

So now, an hour later, they were back in the bridge of their unnamed corvette as the Jedi Master took it down into atmosphere, over the continent she’d seen, over the town she’d seen.

“The future I saw, the good one. Why did you push me away from it?” she asked. “Shouldn’t we make sure that one happens?”

Her Master smiled ruefully. “No, for a number of reasons. You weren’t able to see how it happened, did you?”

She frowned, shaking her head.

“That’s because it’s far easier to see how to break something, than to create it,” he told her.

“But, isn’t breaking things Dark?” she asked, confused, but, now knowing what to look for, felt no trace of that energy’s insidious corruption.

“It’s neither, it just is, in the same way that Telekinesis is neither Light nor Dark. If I was more skilled, I might be able to do just that but. . . trying what your suggesting? It rarely ends well,” he sighed, seemingly from experience. “Too many factors, and the more you try to control it, the more the best results slip through your fingers. Which, given the nature of the Light Side, makes a certain amount of sense. Cooperation, unity, and freedom don’t lend themselves to direct authoritarian rule, after all,” he pointed out dryly.

Anaïs looked down at the familiar looking home they descended towards. “But eliminating bad options. . .”

“Much easier,” he smiled. “Like a gardener, pruning a malformed bud.”

“But,” she said, as the other Jedi primed the ship’s weapons. “But whoever we’re going to kill, they haven’t done anything yet.”

Lucian paused, “Twenty-four times out of twenty-five, they have. They only haven’t done whatever will lead to that future yet. People rarely start genocidal regimes out of nowhere, Padawan Anaïs. More than that, looking forward like we did, it isn’t perfect. If a group was completely predictable, and isolated, and had no particularly strong Force users, you could determine them with complete accuracy, but,” he tapped the console in front of him, “Predicting the galaxy and everything in it, and a good portion that’s also trying to predict you? Good luck. There’s a reason that Force-Visions are vague, and not just because they’re hard to understand. There are aspects to it that just cannot be determined yet.”

“So. . . sometimes we kill the wrong people?” she asked, full of trepidation. The other Jedi nodded. “And that’s okay?” There were sometimes casualties, and collateral damage, but this wasn’t accidental. If she didn’t know better, she’d say it was murder.

“The galaxy is large, and there are only so many Jedi,” he shook his head, gesturing out the front window. “We could stay on this world, try to guide it, but even then we might make mistakes, might, in our haste, kill the wrong person. So, instead, we do our best, and move on. However, in these kinds of preventative actions, one must keep the damage one does in mind, lest there one commit another Padawan Massacre.”

“Padawan Massacre?” she echoed. It was obviously a named event, but she’d never heard of it.

Lucian shook his head, shifting the ship so the main guns were trained on the home. “Not the point. Prophecies are poisoned things, and you should never take actions that, were it not for them, you would regret. Wait a moment.”

The guns fired, the house collapsing, and several someones died, their sudden, violent deaths sending Dark ripples in the Force.

“Lifting up and. . .” the Jedi Master’s eyes closed for a moment. “Yes, that’s closed that possibility. Time to leave.”

Anaïs wanted to say ‘that’s it?’, but, having seen this over and over, she knew it was. Instead, she asked, “Can we go somewhere that we can land?”

Her Master glanced over to her, staring at her for a long moment, and then nodded. “Okay.”

. . . What.

“Just, ‘okay’?” the Padawan asked, unsure. “Aren’t we busy doing. . . this?”

“Not particularly. We’ve gotten through a good bit of my backlog from the time spent during your training and neither of us have gotten any direction through the Force. . .” he shrugged. “We’ve doing what we can, but nothing is urgent.” Reading her expression, Lucian smiled. “Did you think we were going to jump from adventure to adventure, the Force leading us by the nose into one situation after another, with nary a moment to rest?”

She knew the answer was wrong, but Lucian had talked, at length, about the need for honesty in training. “Yes,” Anaïs admitted. “That’s the impression I got from the Jedi Knights I talked to. And the Masters. And the archives. And really everyone I talked to.”

Not judging, the Jedi Master sitting next to her nodded. “And what’s a reason as to why they would believe that?”

“I don’t know!” the Padawan snapped, because how could she, but that did get her a bit of a reproachful look. He wasn’t asking for the answer, but a answer. Not for the Truth, but for her to consider a problem. Thinking about it, she cast her mind to when the Force had directed her, with a passing thought, that, while it seemed like it was her own, absolutely wasn’t. But that hadn’t been the Force directing her ex nihilo, out of nowhere, that was her looking for guidance with a specific task. The only time she’d sensed the Force directing someone was. . .

She glanced at her Master, who’d had the Force direct him to Noonar, for a mission that’d saved lives that would’ve absolutely been lost without them, without him ever asking it for guidance, and whose knock-on effects were probably far greater than she could understand.

But, as she was coming to realize, perhaps not greater than Lucian could understand.

But even then, she hadn’t felt the Force, she’d felt something interact with Lucian’s enormous Presence, only able to detect it by its secondary effects. Something that she knew was rare in the extreme.

So why had she thought the Force directed Jedi on every adventure they had?

Her training kicked in, used to examining the thoughts that exposure to the Dark created, but while there were no corrosive suggestions to look out for, the skills were the same. The Force did direct Jedi while they were in the middle of a task, but the kind of ‘go here now!’, on anything more than a system-wide scale, was almost unheard of if it didn’t involve some kind of personal connection, like a Padawan Bond, and even then that wasn’t common.

“They. . . they investigate things. Sometimes they’re called directly. But if they don’t they go looking. Poke around. And when they find something, because there’s usually something to find, they think the Force sent them there, instead of just helping them do what they already wanted to do? Find trouble in order stop it?” she asked, which would be in line with her Master’s borderline heretical view that the Force had no Will of its own, only the desires of its users reflected back on them. “So to justify what happened, they explain it backwards, because they want to be right, so the Force shows them they are?”

“Indeed,” Lucian nodded. “Or the Force is unusually silent around me and the thousands of reports and hundred of Jedi I’ve talked to were all lying.” She shot him an incredulous stare. “It’s possible, just not probable, but you must keep in mind that you might be wrong. However, just because you are wrong, doesn’t mean that the person who has proved that to be the case is inherently right.”

Their ship, which had left atmosphere, as patrol speeders converged on the position of the destroyed property far below, wheeled around and started to head out of the system. “So,” her Master asked, rubbing his hands together. “What do you want to do, Padawan?”

That was certainly a question. Did she want to stop pirates, like Jorel always wanted? No, that’d mean a lot of killing. She knew it was part of the job, but it wasn’t part of the job she liked. Humanitarian mission? No, that’d mean a lot of suffering. They’d be helping, of course, but her Force Healing wasn’t nearly good enough to help on that scale, and it’d just depress her. Negotiate some dispute as the neutral third party, as Jedi were often called to do?

She glanced over to her expectant Master.

No.

With their luck one side would’ve done something really bad, so he’d just kill them, and she wouldn’t be able to blame him once she found out, but that’s really not what she wanted right now.

“A. . . another Force using Sect. Like the slugman tribe. But one that doesn’t use the Dark!” she quickly added.

“Most touch upon it with some of their techniques, but the low-tech level and tribal nature of that group meant they used the Dark more stridently than most I wouldn’t kill on sight,” Lucian warned, confirming her fears about the ‘diplomatic’ option. “But. . . . there’s a group over in Oricho sector, a few days Northwest of here. It’s in the Outer Rim, but barely, like Noonar was. Actually, Noonar’s not that far away in case you want to swing by and see. . .” he trailed off, reading her trepidation.

“Actually, lets let that settle a bit more,” he decided, and she let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “Same rules apply though. Learn, but create your own techniques in accordance with Jedi ideals. Don’t copy. The Circle’s techniques aren’t terrible, and don’t have nearly as many of the Tribe’s dangerous practices, and when they do get even close there’s a great deal of warning that they’re about to occur, but it’ll be a good learning opportunity.”

“Circle?” she echoed, the name oddly simple, though, from what she’d learned, simple, humble names tended to be a good indication that the Force Sect was Light aligned.

Master Lucian grinned, and she couldn’t help but worry. “Oh yes, Padawan Anaïs, we’re going to go talk to the Circle of Magic on Bhoyaria! Didn’t you know? We’re apparently Wizards!”