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It doesn’t suit you… that mask… The words rang in the back of F’s mind like the echoes in some long-abandoned cave system, ringing in a tinny sort of way. Valco had told her what he thought of the face-covering when she’d first shown it to him on Keelia, and surely enough even then, F considered that he knew her better. He had long been a companion to her master, longer than she had known him, and he was almost everything to her. That was why she left him on Keelia, leaving him in the safety of the village; they were indebted to her, after all.
Still, she kept the daemon mask closed harshly around her jaw and chin, so it wouldn’t give anything away of her face. Under the shroud of her black and red hood only the longest strands of her thick and ebony hair escaped the shadow cast over her visage. She needed anonymity, even here, even with the Empire not knowing who she was. F had lived as a ghost for so long now it felt as if she had really become one, but that was good, at least in her mind it was - despite so long after Order 66, and with the Republic growing in power and spanning more and more of the known galaxy, she still felt like she needed to hide everything of herself. Valco understood, guided her when she needed it, reminding her when it was wise to show and hide her face among other things. Keelia had been a huge reminder of many things; chief among them that she was not yet a Jedi fully grown. F wondered if she would ever become one, and had wondered that for so very long after escaping the Clones. The presence at her side, tucked neatly into its sheath and her utility belt, felt weighty against her hip.
F pressed her fingers to the hilt, just to remind herself it was there as she pressed her body to the right wall of the alley.
Someone came passing by the opening, stark colour escaping through the slits in the tarpaulin roof of the market bazaar beyond. As soon as the white came within a beat of her vision, F bounded. Skirting the wall she quickly tucked herself around the corner and leapt over a doonium canister as quickly as she could. Then she hid, sensing the presence of the intruder coming into the alleyway. There was no mistake - he was searching for her. Why; she couldn’t fathom. She had been careful, more so than she had been on Keelia, and on Nar Shaddaa and before that on Manaan.
“Alright, move it on up!” F heard from around the corner and over her barrel. The contained and metallic pressure surrounding the man’s voice instantly gave away the fact that he was wearing a helmet. Combined with the white, and what she could sense through the Force, there was no mistake who had entered the alley. Stormtroopers . “And fan out… she can’t have gotten too far…”
“Heh, damn right she can’t - where is one little girl gonna hide in a market like this?” Another trooper replied, further behind the one taking point.
F heard wiring, a mild clicking that she knew from experience to be the priming of blaster rifles. She reached out with her senses, pushing out with a wave of feeling bolstered by her spur-of-the-moment meditation. For a brief moment she had to close her eyes, to concentrate, and found her mind and ears wandering as if they could walk. Her mobile team of senses vaulted the doonium barrel and strode around the corner, F coming alive as information threaded into her brain like lines of code bouncing off the wall for her to download faster than the speed of light.
Three… No, four Stormtroopers. One of the rank of Commander. The yellow pauldron made of black and tan leather adorns his right shoulder. He is proud of it, cried under his helmet the day of his promotion. He has no children; a girlfriend back home… Eriadu… no, Prefsbelt IV. He’s a long way from home… Behind him - a female. She doesn’t like the fit of her greaves, because they chafe. She almost walks with a limp, trying not to have the laminate plasteel dig into her upper thigh, but she likes the armour too… two nights ago she took a man home from a bar because of it. He asked her to keep the helmet on after they hit the bed with their clothes on the floor. She liked it… The third is young, maybe too young. He graduated from the academy eighteen months ago and this is his first tour… He’s holding his blaster too firmly, and not using the stock correctly - he’s going to hurt himself if he fires it. He has had to yet, despite how much he talks about hating the Republic. He talked back to his Lieutenant and that’s why he’s here, given his test scores… That’s a shame…
She couldn’t read the fourth before suddenly they were gone. There were four and then there were three before F’s fingers could come alive at her belt’s hilt. A defiant crackling and beaming screech sounded off at the alley’s entrance, muted by the three bodies that were inside it before it could reach her ears. The cadence was unmistakable - a lightsaber.
Within an instant F was vaulting over the doonium barrel to the flagrant swings and humming of a laser far beyond her position. The ringing of a blaster bolt pierced her ears, followed swiftly by the obvious deflection from the enigma’s blade. F heard the bolt bounce and clash against one of the walls before she rounded the corner. The first Stormtrooper swung to meet her heavy footsteps and she cursed herself for entering somebody else’s fray with all the subtlety of a stampeding Reek. He lifted his blaster rifle at her, the orange of his shoulder giving away his stoic conservatism and cool head. F realised where her hands were and the lack of yellow lightsaber in front of her, but trusted her ability.
There wasn’t a question on whether or not she would defend herself - but F was not going to kill him.
A beat passed before he fired his blaster rifle and the bolt came at her seemingly slowed down by her concentration. Less than a foot away from hitting her square in the chest and killing her, F levelled her breathing and shot out the opened palm of her right hand. The bolt paused in the air, shaking under the crippling control she had over it. The Force sang to her, cooling her resolve and calming her mind. It would not fail her, and she would not get hit. The bolt pivoted with her control, barrelling back from where it came and down, hitting the hard durasteel of the ground and phasing into black soot from the disintegration. The Commander took a pause, but couldn’t collect himself before F channelled the Force again, calling on its power to send him flying to the side. He collided with the bulkhead wall with a clean thud, his plasteel armour crushed under the weight of him and F’s power binding him. She sensed his mind aching before the collision took him into unconsciousness and he slid down the durasteel bulkhead.
By the time F came back to herself the young third behind the woman took a slice of what she could see to be a green lightsaber. It was a nasty cut, right across the chest and the young man fell over in a flail, his death cry croaking out from under his helmet in a choked wretch. F felt her body recoiling from the act, the Force wounded around her and she gathered it up once more in a desperate plea.
“No! Don’t kill them!” She cried out through the hard metal of her warrior’s daemon mask.
There was nothing to control. F stretched out with her hands and pulled the female trooper toward her, as if she had tugged hard on her utility belt with a powerful whipcord. She came flying to F’s position, falling onto the floor by her back and hitting her head. Like the commander she blacked out, leaving nothing but the body of a young Stormtrooper between the Jedi and another lightsaber.
The assailant didn’t stop, however. They came charging at F with unparalleled speed, flashing at her with the fatal blur of a green lightsaber. F had barely any time to react, to reach for the left side of her belt with her right hand and prime the hilt. There was barely enough time as it was, and F couldn’t help but close her eyes before she heard the flashing screech of her own yellow lightsaber coming to life. There was a flash from behind her closed eyelids, piercing through the black of all she could see and when she opened them again she saw the furious clash of proud yellow against wise green, and the full face of a girl behind the locked swords. Her eyes were wide and luminous, covered by a tactical visor and surrounded by a cocoa-brown flurry of fur thick and unkempt that surrounded her entire face. No, it surrounded her entirely. F calmed herself and looked at the face of her quarry with the same observant faculties that had read the four Stormtroopers. The woman holding the green lightsaber against her own was a Lepi. She was the first and only one F had ever seen, but she knew of the species from her studies a lifetime ago. With breath back in her lungs she forced strength into her arms and wrist and began to press her will against her opponent.
In the next second, F flicked hard against the Lepi’s stance, and forced their blades apart. The green sword fell from the rabbit-girl’s grasp and retracted right back into its hilt, which clattered against the bulkhead flooring. The Lepi, however, vaulted and tossed her weight into a somersault. Reaching out with the Force the inactive hilt came to her grasp as she landed on both puffed and pawed feet.
“Enough!” F bellowed in an emotive cry, enough to force the Lepi to jump in her fur and stop before she charged again. F ripped her mask off, tossing it to the ground and pulling her hood from over head in a furious display. “Where did you get that lightsaber?” She demanded, her own well-prepared in one hand.
“Who’s asking?” The Lepi practically spat in defiant retort.
“ I am asking,” F pressed, careful enough not to provoke the swordswoman by poking out with her yellow weapon.
“From my father…” her quarry returned, softening before looking at the floor and back to her. The feral fight was slowly breathing itself out of her as her stance slugged and calmed like the rest of her; now she was prime to attack. F could sweep her legs out from under her without the Lepi realising until she was on the floor and weaponless. No; F stayed her hand and kept her legs well-rooted to the floor, immovable with her guard well and truly maintained. “Hmpf… W-Where did you get yours!”
F almost gasped at the Lepi’s struggling tone. She took a half-step back and closed down her lightsaber in an instant, almost regretting having brandished it in the first place. Who was this girl? She couldn’t have been much younger than F herself, save a couple or a few years her junior. And something about the rings of her wide and mellow eyes spoke of previous trauma, and of an aptitude with the Force deeper than she herself realised. F softened still, breaking her own stance and standing normally, focusing all her attention on the calming Lepi, while still keeping her awareness ready for if the commander and his counterpart woke.
“From the Jedi, when I was a youngling… My master helped me construct it when I was twelve… Who was your father? There were no Lepi at the Jedi Temple…”
The Lepi collapsed her father’s blade and stowed it in her belt, standing up straight the same as F before a small and box-like droid came hovering around the corner of the alleyway. Surprisingly, no one had gathered outside of it despite the sound of fired blaster bolts and waving lightsabers. The droid began to speak in binary, low-pitched hums and beeps that sounded flattened and as if the machine had needed repairs some time ago. F understood roughly what it was trying to say, before the Lepi cut it off with a fierce sidestep, her paws into fists close at her collarbone.
“It’s okay Teedee. My father isn’t a Jedi… I come from the Yasaburō Clan, from Tao…”
“Yasaburō Clan? Tao? Can’t say I’ve ever heard of that planet, or your clan. But how did your father come by this lightsaber if he was not a Jedi?” F had to ask, suddenly enamoured by the story of this clan on this planet she hadn’t heard of.
“It’s… It’s none of your business how my father got this! He entrusted this lightsaber to me! And I am its protector… Why did you stop me from dealing with these troops? What are you, Imperial?”
She spoke like a child, younger and more immature than F could have guessed her age at, but she appeared now like a harmless schoolgirl, the visor disappearing to give way to the full scope of her organic optics, wide with passion and fiery with resolve. F had long since discarded her youth, and realised now how much of an old woman she would have seemed next to this defiant excuse for a blademaster. But she had known the techniques of the Force. The ornate hilt of the green lightsaber had drifted effortlessly to her palm as she had somersaulted into the air, reaching for it with all her might. But even F could tell that she was untempered and reckless, thriving off of instinct and feeling, letting her emotions fuel her talent and keen sense of wizardry. She was no Jedi, but F could hardly sense a sinful or bad tendency in this young woman’s bones. Inexperience dominated her weakness, not fear or anger or hate. The toolmarks of the Sith were nowhere to be found within her, and F shook off the need to read her any more than she needed to. Even from the shallows of the Lepi’s mind could F feel the trauma of a past life, and even more, fresher hurt bubbling to the surface.
“No… Unlike you or your father, I am a Jedi. And I was trying to evade these troopers without killing them before you showed up and started killing…” F told her with a voice as hard as durasteel.
The Lepi’s face widened. “But they’re Stormtroopers! They oppress the weak on the orders of the Empire!”
F crossed the short gap between herself and the Stormtrooper Commander, reaching down low and pulling the cowl of his helmet off of his head. She revealed a middle-aged man with a small scar down his left eye, with hair halfway between blonde and auburn and some sort of small burn on his neck. He was miles off of coming round, but F heaved him so that he was sitting on the floor against the wall, with some semblance of comfort. She then approached the woman and did the same, pulling off her helmet to reveal brown skin and black hair in a buzz cut shorter than her commander’s. She was pained but sleeping soundly, a tattoo only slightly darker than her skin decorating her left ear and surrounding space in some ornate yet contemporary fashion. F heaved her too and placed her next to her commander, and then looked at them for a while before turning to the Lepi.
"If you’d have killed them, would you ever think to look at their faces? To study how she has a tattoo or that his hair is that colour?” She asked vacantly to her sudden counterpart. The droid was silent, hovering over the rabbit-girl’s shoulder. F looked to the body of the third she’d read and dismayed, not wanting to remove his helmet. “He’s younger than these two,” she revealed, gesturing to him, to the opened gash splitting his chestplate and pectorals in cleave. “His birthday is in three weeks, he was looking forward to a holo from his girlfriend - she’s got an administration job in an office block on Alsakan…”
“Stop!” The Lepi demanded, too hurt to hear any more. “How do you know all that?”
F looked her hard in the eyes. “I used the Force to read them. Their memories became my wisdom. That’s why I couldn’t bring myself to kill them.” She looked back at the woman next to the commander. “Some of them are as bad as the Emperor was, and some of them are just following orders…”
“Some of them are neither…” The Lepi interrupted.
“What’s your name?”
“Lop. This is Teedee,” she confessed glumly, gesturing to the box-like droid hovering over her shoulder with the nudge of her head. “What’s yours?”
“I am F.”
“F as in… Fuyutsuki? Futabi?”
“Just… F.”
Her senses flared again, and F’s fingers magnetised to her lightsaber as if the hilt had a tractor beam. More contact, coming from the other side of the alleyway; they must have heard the blaster bolts and laser swings. No, both sides. The Force came to her again, her faithful ally and sharp tool to remind her that she was worthy in her monkish regalia - she reached out in another reading pulse to gauge how many were coming. It was too many. She turned to Lop and her eyes darted to the Lepi's borrowed sword at her hip. “You’re going to need that…”
Lop took her advice as the radio chatter of regrouping reinforcements trickled in from either side of the alleyway. F reached out and got a clearer picture, closing her eyes for a second to commune with her senses and the wider universe. She lasted long enough to discern that a full rifle squad were coming, along with a few more - there would be twelve of them, split on either side with another commander heading the squad and more than one of them with special weapons, not use the standard E-11 that F had become so proficient at deflecting. Her heart was racing by the time she opened her eyes and Lop activated the splendid green blade of her father’s lightsaber.
“Don’t kill them,” F told her, trying to tell herself she had a chance with an untempered Force-sensitive Lepi with less experience in the Force than a stunted Padawan. But then again, F was not much better herself. Looking at Lop, she reminded herself that she hadn’t achieved the rank of Jedi Knight before her master’s demise. They were, in essence, the same rank, even if she had far more experience in the Ashla disciplines. “Only dispatch them; they do not deserve to die for following orders.”
Lop looked at her with fuzzy eyebrows like stark knives. “What do you mean? You just said…”
“I know what I said, but I will not let you kill anyone else. It’s unbecoming of you.”
The Lepi grumbled in intense frustration, shifting her weight onto one of her bunny legs and paws, setting her stance next to F before they both shunted back to back at the sound of sprinting feet. “Well, there’s no way I’m going without a fight… These drones aren’t gonna stop me from getting to her!”
Stop. There was something else. F looked up, up at the rafters of the Glavis alleyway where the bulkhead prefabs curved onto their roofs. She was only there for a second but F saw her, eyes stark and glowing in the backdrop of the wider galaxy at large. F didn’t need to reach out to reach this girl, she could see her for what she was before she called down, seconds until blaster fire.
“Hey! If you two ladies are done chit chatting, we can all escape now!” The girl called up from the rafters with her hands covering her mouth to be heard. Both F and Lop heard her loud and clear.
“What the? Who’s that?” Lop asked incredulously just as F collapsed her lightsaber.
“Jump!” F heard herself crying out, not knowing who this third girl was before she flexed her calves and thighs, launching into the air with the Force propelling her heights otherwise unattainable. She cleared the whole structure of the prefab and landed on the roof with a graceful execution, the girl scrawling back in exacerbated splendour and surprise to see her. F quickly studied her saviour in a half-second, noticing first the peach-pink of her hooded jacket and messy hay-like structure of her deep brown hair. She was as small as the Lepi was, and probably of similar age, which made F her senior too. And then she realised that she was standing over the third girl alone, and banked over the lip of the building with a second left. “Lop! Jump, now!”
“Are you crazy? I can’t jump up there!” Lop returned incredulously, her lightsaber still proudly ignited and her stance strong. She was going to get herself killed against a dozen troopers.
The pink girl was leaning over the lip of the building on her belly, animated and desperate to help. “Yes you can! Use the Force!” She cried out in a sincere and youthful tone, middling in tone between Lop and F herself. “Use the Force to clear the building, quick!”
Lop gasped in something near embarrassed dread. “I… I can’t do it! I can’t!”
“Yes you can,” F found herself crying out again. “Hurry, they’re coming! Use the Force and jump, Lop!”
“I can’t !”
“Yes you can,” F demanded defiantly, when she spoke next her voice was echoed by the strangers, their cadences mixing together and sounding like a banshee of some kind. “You’re a Jedi!”
Lop struggled before closing down her father’s blade. She didn’t make one jump, but several. With a nimble agility that F had never seen before, the Lepi bounded into the air as if she’d been shot from the cannon of a star cruiser. She hit the wall of the further building opposite from F and her stranger, feet first and on her large and puffed toes; she pivoted, bouncing to the other wall, and then back with the same tactic, and finally up onto the rafters. F realised when she landed that Lop had performed the whole manoeuvre with her eyes closed, like some kind of circus savant. The Force was with her, F could feel it swiftly before the pink-clothed stranger hit the deck on her back, prompting the older Jedi to do the same, after she’d gripped Lop’s robes at her chest and dragged her down too.
“Hey!” Lop argued, hitting the floor of the roof via her behind and wincing. F shuffled onto her back.
“Shush!” She hissed at the troublesome Lepi. “Get down,” she whispered next.
“Oh, right,” Lop continued to argue. “So what now? We wait here gazing at the stars while the drones clean up our mess and start searching for us?” She asked sarcastically, finally laying on her back.
The stranger turned on the other side of F. She was studying them, before slowly and silently sneaking up onto her feet without a single sound. “What are you doing?” F demanded sternly, reaching to pull for the girl’s feet to pull her back down. She could feel the dozen Stormtroopers down below, inspecting their dead comrades and trying to rouse the commander and woman she’d knocked out. Now she realised that they’d be able to identify both herself and the Lepi who’d killed their squadmates. Already F wanted to abandon whatever this was that she’d landed herself in and try to get offworld while she could, but soon realised that that was probably folly now. She was absent-minded as the pink-dressed girl hopped equally as silently between buildings, skipping the alleyway undetected. F sensed no reprieve from the Stormtroopers. They were too busy inspecting the scene below.
“Come on,” she nudged into Lop, getting to her feet slowly and carefully, then helping her rabbit counterpart. The droid, Teedee, was still practically fully attached to the Lepi, hanging onto her shoulders and back with spindly droid limbs and one wide lens for an eye. “Slowly, use the Force to leap across, don’t let them hear you…”
Teedee whirled something in binary in a low and hushed series of flat beeps, earning a swift hush from his companion. She nodded at F, and did the same as the stranger, not making a sound. That made it F’s turn, and doubt had no place in her mind. She thought back to her heroics on Keelia, and thought of Valco and the Village Bride and her sister. Haku and Saru… F wanted to miss them, and used that passionate emotion to take her from one roof to another. She practically flew effortlessly, using the Force to make her float. Once she was across, all three women nodded and bounded onward until they were fully across the second roof and leaping to the third. They kept their feet light and profiles silent, trying to evade the Imperial cordon before the Stormtroopers could call for backup. The strange took point, leaping over rafters from one prefab to another and then down, sliding down a slope of durasteel utility piping, squared off for a uniform look. F found herself following without question, more focused on keeping her eyes on Lop, adamant to not let her or her little droid out of her sight. She kept up pace with the younger girl clad in the soft pink as she leapt over a durasteel wall and down, down and further down. The passed level upon level in a flood of movement, Lop following close behind until the cemented levels of the general streets turned to access ladders and support walkways. And then, within a few minutes, all three women were out of sight and away from danger. The stranger stopped for a moment to catch her breath and wait for F and Lop to catch up.
“That… was… a good escape! You two should be proud of yourselves for keeping up, not many can,” she panted at first, ending on a cutesy smile for both of her new counterparts. She pulled out a small commlink and turned it on. “Alright Koffee, we’re ready for pick up, you and Gee bring her in smooth, okay? Underneath, nice and slow.”
F tried not to gawp, unlike Lop, thoroughly out of breath and seemingly quiet. She was looking at both of them, F being the only one to notice while she reached for the ribbon clasp of her daemon mask, removing it from her jaw to breathe more clearly.
“Not to sound ungrateful… but who are you?” F asked, her face now unobscured.
The stranger gasped and smiled like a child. “I’m Kara… Lah Kara, actually. And you are? Jedi right, judging by the fact that both of you have lightsabers.”
“Indeed, I am F, and this is Lop,” F introduced, back to her calm and collected demeanour, despite her begrudging vigilance over the Lepi.
“Ooh! Lop, who’s your droid? I’ve never seen one like that before!” Lah Kara beamed, clutching her hands in fists at her collar.
The Lepi seemed to like Kara’s bubbly nature, and relaxed to her interest in the archive droid hovering around her furry shoulders and neck. It made another low beeping and whirring combination, its large and lensed eye zooming in and out of Kara as she leaned over and looked intently at it. “Teedee is a rare droid, he’s been with me since we both escaped the Empire on Tao…” F only just realised how battered and broken the droid looked, with a huge gash down where the wide-eyed lens was. It looked as if it had been slashed by a weapon, a vibroblade or another lightsaber. All of his appendages had been fixed on again, F could see. Just what had this droid been through?
“Kara,” F called, the younger girl humming at her name. “You know enough about Jedi to have identified both of us by our lightsabers. I have to ask, how did you come by yours? Who trained you?” Lop made a face, bewildered as to how F had figured it out. But sure enough, she was right; Lah Kara reached into the fabric pouch at the rear of her utility belt to reveal a stylish and ornate hilt of a quality F had never seen before. The metalwork was far beyond anything the temple smiths could construct, and the golden gilding around the pommel and upper haft of the hilt spoke to a deep-seated pride of the work. “Remarkable,” F found herself whispering to herself as Kara flashed her weapon.
The full vacantness of space opened up below them, a gaping void to swallow them whole if they fell. The atmospheric shell was invisible all around them, containing the ring of Glavis in a tunnel not unlike a particle collider, but etheric and unable to be seen. It was the perfect backdrop as Kara ignited the splendid blue of her ornate lightsaber. It was stunning to F’s eyes, about as much as Lop’s had been upon first viewing, only Lah Kara wasn’t using it to kill people.
“My father used to build lightsabers in his forge out of Hy Izlan… but I was trained in the Force by Margrave Juro…”
“Margrave?” F repeated, not familiar with the name in the archies of the Jedi.
Lah Kara collapsed her majestic lightsaber and stowed the hilt away. “Yeah, he’s trying to contact as many Jedi as he can, well… we can. That’s why I’m here, looking for Jedi!”
“Well, I’d say you’ve found some,” F smiled gingerly, softly.
“Where’s this Margrave Juro now?” Lop asked, suddenly engrossed. “Does he stand against the Empire?”
“I can take you to him and you can ask him for yourself if you wanna,” she told the Lepi, her wrist device beeping suddenly and distracting her. “Right on time!”
Seemingly from nowhere and all at once underneath them, one of the objects in the far distance was suddenly not so distant. F thought it was a star at first before its shape increased in size exponentially, until the whole heaping hulk of a VCX-100 light freighter came staggering to something a halt just underneath the extension walkway just in front of the three women. Lah Kara let out a chipper and cheerful “Let’s go! Teedee can meet Four-Nines!” and took point once again, leading the way down the steps and onto the walkway, eventually down a ladder. The VCX raised itself as much as it could without colliding with parts of the Glavis underbelly and opened up the ventral bow landing ramp, the oxygen bubbles from the ship and Glavis meeting and overlapping. Kara took a hefty jump from the bottom of the ladder and landed on her feet before entering the ship, leaving room on the ladder for her counterparts. F watched it all happen seemlessly and wondered if there was time yet to leave and return to her Headhunter and just forget about Glavis completely. She’d already gotten much more than she bargained for, but what was a little more? It was not every day she met another Jedi, let alone two, even if she had her doubts about the Lepi.
N othing ventured, nothing gained. Master used to say that… once or twice.
She was down the ladder and jumping into the VCX before Lop could do the same, her arms out of the door to catch Teedee as he joined her. The landing ramp closed up and F could feel the lag between the ship waving off and the inertial dampeners coming online. She maintained her stance, but both Lop and Kara swayed with the miniscule motion, and F knew she was now committed.
“Kara, before anything else, do you have somewhere… private?” F had to ask, her feelings felt heavy, making her tired.
“Sure, everything okay?”
“I’m fine, just; I’d like to meditate before anything else if at all possible. I need to… clear my mind.”
“Of course,” Kara agreed sincerely with a twang of compassionate wonder in her youthful voice. “Come on, let me show you.” They were up another ladder into the second story of the VCX-100 and moving around into a living space, then down another corridor with sliding doors on either side. Lah Kara stopped at one in particular and opened the threshold to reveal a chamber that could have been ripped wholesale from any of the Jedi Temples scattered over the galaxy. Kara looked wholesomely at F and gestured inside. “We overhauled some of the sleeping quarters. When one travels with the Margrave, he travels light… Or she travels, in this case. You’re welcome to meditate in here as long as you need to. It’ll be a while before we arrive at the rendezvous with my friends. Come find us when you’re done, okay?” Why was she so sweet? F settled now that Lah Kara, while slightly more immature than F wanted her to be, was downright adorable, oddly charming.
She reached forward instinctively, almost thinking of the sisters from the village on Keelia, yet also not. F didn’t realise she was holding Kara’s hands until she felt the girl’s skin against hers. “Thank you for your hospitality, Lah Kara.”
Kara paused, moonstruck for a long and drawn out moment before she finally came back to herself. She returned the pleasant gesture, covering F’s hands in her own with fluid motion and bowing gracefully at a half-angle. “The honour is mine, to host another Jedi,” she beamed before letting go. “Enjoy,” she beamed again, and closed the door with a woosh.
F was alone, set at ease by the natural affinity and surrounding energies of the oddly perfect meditation suite. She paused before releasing her ebony and red cloak. She heard her counterparts outside - “C’mon, Lop! I want you to meet my friends! Four-Nines, Koffee and Gee, well, I call him Gee, but he’s really an Aigee droid I reprogrammed!” Kara was cooing as she was no doubt dragging the Lepi off to the cockpit. Whoever Four-Nines, Koffee and Gee were, F would find out later, for now, she needed to centre herself and find clarity in the tornado of what had just happened. She dropped her cloak to the floor and glided to the cushions and open space in the middle, taking to it on her knees. Then time dissolved, and she communed to be one with the Force.
The door re-opened a couple of hours later, by which point F came around and realised she had been dozing and had evidently fallen asleep. She scrambled awake as the woosh alerted her, and came to, looking down at her knees. Had she really fallen asleep in the middle of her meditation? She couldn’t even remember clearing her mind and reaching blissful equilibrium with the wider universe. All that settled in her mind was coming into the room, kneeling on the puffy cushions and matted floor then ultimately waking with the opening of the door. Teedee-Four came hovering in, rounding F’s position and zooming in on her face with the twist of his wide-eyed lens. “Lop?” F called out, trying to retreat from the droid’s inquisitive eye.
“Teedee!” The Lepi called out from behind her, prompting the tenacious archive droid to quickly retreat from F’s position, only for another machine to come rolling inside of the meditation room, certainly and finally breaking the spell of tranquillity that F had passively constructed.
The second droid was a smaller model than even the floating box with limbs named Teedee-Four. It was cylindrical with a balled head and small splints of mustard yellow durasteel for arms, four in total. “Four-Nines!” Lah Kara called out from behind the Lepi as F stood up, the numbered droid belonging to the Hy Izlan Jedi suddenly circling around her feet as if it was incredibly happy to see her. Kara came into view behind Lop’s shoulder with something cubed and wrapped up in a fabric shawl of white and blue. F realised Lop was holding something in her hands as well, a plate of what looked like miscellaneous greens with some charred meaty substance in the middle. “F! How did your meditation go?” Kara asked, her voice bereft of any negativity, it was a pure tone of cheerfulness, one that could soften even the most hardy and serious of Jedi.
F was going to chastise them both for their droids interrupting her, but relented at the look of Lah Kara and even of Lop. She hummed and smiled as she closed her eyes wizardly. “It went very well, thank you, Kara. Are you two sitting to eat?”
Kara breathed a tone of excitement. “We were..!”
“Would you… care to join us, F?” Lop interjected, her voice a little softer and not as excitable as her human counterpart. She looked and sensed almost remorseful of how she and F had come to meet. Lop was gifted; could she sense the flagrant animosity F had harboured for her since the alleyway? “There’s more than enough food, and it’d be nice if we all sat down to a meal together… before we complete the journey.”
“I’m still unaware as to where we’re going. I assume to meet this Margrave Juro?” She asked, earning another eager nod and hum from Lah Kara. “Then let us have a meal together. Why don’t we all eat in here, with the droids.”
Lop’s face lit up at the gesture, along with Kara’s behind her. The girl in the pink hooded jacket practically leapt up, shuffling past Lop into the meditation suite. Four-Nines did a cheerful spin, wheeling around F’s feet again as her companions filed into the room. All of them rearranged the cushions and set-up of the chamber, each making herself comfortable in a small circle. Despite their being only three of them, the scene and layout reminded F of the days of the Jedi Council, even with the droids, untouched by the Force. With Lop and Lah Kara sitting on either side of her like this, setting up trays and boxes of splendid-smelling food, F felt an absolute and intrinsic connection to the Force, just and right and majestic in all the ways she had been raised to sense and feel the Ashla. There was no denying it - Lop was just as much a Jedi as she was, Kara too. They all simply came from different corners of the galaxy.
Not long after they had all started eating (Lah Kara having brought enough food in her fabric-wrapped series of bento boxes), Kara shamelessly forced more and more samples of her selection towards F. “Ooh! Try this! The provisions we got… It's a Corellian Snapper! The sushi is amazing from the Core Worlds… Oh and this! Try this! Lop, you want some?” Kara continuously cooed and chirped like a high-octane child enamoured with absolutely everything she had to eat. The portions ended up looking like they favoured F’s plate rather than Kara’s, with Lop denying each sample of anything containing fish of any kind. She was content to carve a warpath through her charred meat substance and mixed greens, making good headway through her plate. “We even have some Sake if you’d prefer a drink,” Lah Kara said to both of her fellow Jedi.
F raised her hand, gingerly wading through her gifted samples of interplanetary sushi and other slices of her companion’s bento. “Not for me, thank you - I tend not to engage with alcohol…”
“Oh no!” Kara cried, stuffing another one-pop of Mon Cala Salmon sushi into her mouth, expanding her cheeks to much like a rodent. “It’s non-alcoholic! The Margrave wouldn’t let me, even despite my age,” she spoke through a full mouth.
“Who is this Margrave exactly? Is he your uncle or something?” Lop asked suddenly, her charred meat gone and Teedee on her shoulders. “Your older brother?”
Kara swallowed her fill. “No, he’s just Margrave Juro. He trained me to use a lightsaber and to trust in the Force all the way through my childhood on Hy Izlan. He contracted my father to build lightsabers from the kyber crystal belt around the planet.”
“Curious,” F sounded, taking another modest bite of suchi out of chopsticks. “I’ve never heard of Hy Izlan, nor of Tao for that matter. You two really do come from different sides of the galaxy I’ve never thought about before. Lop… What made you leave your father? There are not many Lepi outside of the Outer Rim, what brought you to Glavis?”
From the look overtaking Lop’s face, F only now understood what she had stepped in - the rabbit-girl was looking into her plate, toying with the mixed greens with her fork, no doubt wondering what to say next. F knew she shouldn’t, but she needed to know now about who she had thrown her lot in for this Margrave. She breathed calmly into the disguise of another sushi bite. Without the other two registering, she called upon the Force again and reached out with it as her ally to gauge just which parts of Lop’s inherent trauma she’d made swell up. And Lop’s mind was not a hard target to probe - with barely a flex of her prowess, F pierced through the Lepi’s mental fortitude and breached into her relevant memory.
Despite their rich natural resources, the world of Tao struggles to modernise. In exchange for industrial advancement, Tao has welcomed the Galactic Empire, who in turn, plan to capitalise on everything this planet has to offer. However, Imperial industry has proven to be detrimental to Tao’s natural environment, richly steeped in nature and tradition. The people of Tao grow increasingly frustrated with Imperial oppression… Lop - a slave. Tao - under Imperial control. Boss Yasaburō - her adoptive father. But there is more… A sister… lost, forlorn, swayed by the stability and security of… the Empire… Ochō is her name…
“Teedee,” Lop sighed and the droid whirled a sad series of beeps. It hovered from around her shoulders and nestled onto the floor, sprouting a small hologram from its wide lens. F studied the figures in the holo with saddened finality.
“Are they… your family, Lop?” Lah Kara asked.
Lop hummed a defeated affirmative. “The big one’s my father, Boss Yasarburō, he’s back on Tao healing in the care of our clan. The other is…”
“Ochō,” F spoke for her. “She’s your sister… she left you to join the Empire… She thought she was saving Tao and your clan, didn’t she?”
“How did you…” Kara spoke.
“It’s an ability one can use through the Force,” F confessed. “I was only a Padawan when my master first told me of it; he said that he had developed a talent for… reading people. In time, I learnt to use it too; it’s helped me when I’ve needed it, and hurt plenty when I didn’t.” She turned to Lop. “I apologise, Lop.”
The Lepi looked up, a saline film of tears lining her eyes. She wiped them dry with the tuft and soft chocolate-brown of her fur hide, wetting her sleeves - F could see her looking between herself and Lah Kara before Lop pulled out her lightsaber so all could get a better look. The hilt was wrapped up in a blue-purple cloth, almost ceremonial with a small guard atop the short half coloured in a regal gold. The blade hadn’t been crafted by Lop or her father, that much was evidently clear - but it had definitely been expertly crafted by a Jedi, one who had lived a very long time ago, if F had to guess.
“My father gave me this lightsaber before he tried to convince Ochō to come home… so now it falls to me to bring her home, back to Tao,” she confessed whole-heartedly. “If I have to meet the Margrave and learn to become a real Jedi to do so… then so be it.” It was the first time since they had met that F and Lah Kara had both heard such broad passion from the Lepi, she sounded like a true warrior.
In time… we’re going to become a true family!
F closed off her connection to her counterpart as soon as she sensed the tears gently dripping down her cheeks. She hadn’t known, and it explained everything. She stood up and stretched over to Lop, embracing her new companion in a warm and compassionate hug. Lop hesitated for a moment before trembling to return the soft and tender embrace. Lah Kara spoke something about not wanting to be left out, and pounced onto the two women with her own arms wider than a Gundark’s. They were all cuddling as even the droids joined in, Teedee landing on Lop’s furry and full head and Four-Nines whirling around them, embracing them in a circle made of its whole body.
“It’s settled then, it seems,” F finalised. “Let’s meet this Margrave Juro, Kara. And then we’ll go find Ochō and Kara’s father. We’ll find them both and rescue them from the Dark Side.” She may have not had a cause this morning, but F had certainly found it now. “I promise.”