#calltomuster

The day Mace gets back from a relatively simple diplomatic mission, he pulls Plo aside into a spare meditation room and asks, “What have you been teaching your Padawan?”

“A great many things, hopefully,” Plo replies. “Why? I thought you said Ahsoka did well on the mission.”

“She did do very well. She’d be an honor to any Master,” Mace agrees. As far as Padawans with no diplomatic experience at all, Ahsoka had done wonderfully, charming the dignitaries they’d been sent to negotiate with and keenly observing the proceedings while drawing insightful conclusions. While she didn’t seem to find diplomacy very interesting, she certainly had the skills and temperament to do very well as a diplomat. “However, she is also fourteen. She should not be able to, completely unprompted, immediately identify sniper vantage points.”

Plo clasps his claws together. “That...is interesting. I certainly did not teach her that. What exactly happened?”

There’s not a lot to recount. Mace had been reviewing the palace’s security for the upcoming parade and Ahsoka had mentioned, apropos of nothing, that the palace’s antechamber was extremely vulnerable to snipers.

“What--why do you say that?” Mace had asked.

Ahsoka had, with some minor stammering, pointed out the tall windows, which had not been treated with a blaster-deflecting coat, then to the emergency comm towers some half a kilometer off which had a clear line of sight to large parts of the antechamber, and the lack of cover in the event someone did decide to snipe an official or anyone else.

She was, of course, correct. Upon inspection, the antechamber would be a prime location for sniping a target if an assassin were lying in wait, and the relatively unsecured comm towers--the only nearby structure built taller than the palace--would have been the prime location to undertake such a kill.

Fortunately, in this case, there was nobody trying to assassinate the royal party--that would have certainly made the diplomatic mission significantly less simple. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Ahsoka had accurately evaluated a sniper risk without being prompted to, something that would be challenging even for many new Knights, much less a junior Padawan.

“Why does she even know it wasn’t blaster-deflection glass?” Mace asks. “I’ve seen deflection glass and normal glass side by side before. You really can’t tell them apart just by looking.”

Plo hums to himself, clearly concerned by this development. “I do not know--it’s certainly not something we’ve encountered together. Maybe it was something she learned on the war front?”

Mace crosses his arms. “She was only out there for a month or two, and the Separatists didn’t really use snipers.”

“That is also true,” Plo says. “Maybe we should simply ask her. That seems to be the most straightforward solution.”

Fortunately, it’s not difficult to find Ahsoka--she’s studying in her quarters for an upcoming mechanics evaluation. When the two of them arrive, Mace notes Ahsoka’s quarters are sparse, probably due to having an entire suite to herself where most Padawans only have the Padawan room in their Master’s suite. Due to Plo’s quarters being set up with his native atmosphere, Ahsoka had needed to move into the suite next door, which had a double airlock directly connecting the two to prevent any risk of either Padawan or Master getting poisoned. Mace notes a pile of rolled-up sleeping bags against the wall--for when Plo’s Wolfpack wants to stay the night in the Temple, most likely.

“Master Windu? Master Plo?” Ahsoka says, looking up from where she’s working at the dining table. “Do you need me? Did something happen?”

“No, nothing happened,” Plo says. “We just wanted to ask a couple of questions, if you’re not busy.”

Ahsoka shoves her datapads to the side and says, “No, I’m not busy! I can answer whatever you need!”

“Relax, Padawan,” Plo replies. “You’re not in trouble. We were just curious about a few things. Such as how you were able to tell the difference between blaster-deflection glass and normal glass.”

“Huh? That’s easy,” Ahsoka says, relaxing in her chair somewhat. “When light goes through deflection glass it scatters weird. It makes shadows do a funky fuzzy-looking thing and if you look through it, stuff that’s close by looks normal, but stuff that’s far away always looks kind of blurry.”

Mace has no way to know if that’s true, but it sounds like it could be. “Where did you learn that from, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Ahsoka’s brows draw together. “Obi-Wan taught me.”

Mace pauses. Obi-Wan, apparently, knows an alarming amount about snipers and decided to impart that knowledge to a fourteen-year-old youngling? “Why, exactly, was Obi-Wan teaching you about deflection glass?”

“Oh, he wasn’t,” Ahsoka replies. “I mean, it wasn’t like one of his lessons or anything, he was just talking about it. He likes to bring up fun facts a lot when he’s talking, you know? And I told him that maybe we could try one of those observatory deck places for lunch sometime and he told me about how he doesn’t like those sorts of places where it’s glass all the way around--they can’t use deflection glass for those kinds of places because it gives people headaches and anyways it’s not a very good observatory deck if they can’t actually see everything. So I asked about deflection glass and he told me about it.”

Plo nods. “Do you know if Obi-Wan has...a lot of experience with that sort of thing? Snipers?”

“He got sniped a couple times when he was fifteen,” Ahsoka says. “He says the first time, someone shot him in the side while he was transporting supplies, and the second time, someone tried assassinating him in a medcenter or something--don’t know what asshole would want to assassinate a fifteen-year-old, though. And I guess he did some kind of bounty hunting related stuff later on, which also involved sniping. Did you know you can get sniped from nearly five kilometers off? I mean, it depends on the size of the planet obviously, but that’s still crazy.”

Mace takes a deep breath. That is something Obi-Wan very much did not report about his past. When Luminara had taken Obi-Wan to the Mid-Rim, she had reported that Obi-Wan showed signs of agoraphobia upon reaching the flagship--possibly due to its massive size--and he had additionally become agitated when people looked directly at him for an extended time. This would probably partially explain that. “I...see. Ahsoka, do you do these safety checks frequently? For lines of sight and defensible cover?”

“Um,” Ahsoka says. “I mean, sometimes. Like down in the lower levels, there’s a lot more machines, and they’re kind of loud, so it’s, uh, hard to focus...” Machinery, Mace notes, that can sound quite similar to droids and artillery at a cursory listen. “And then when I’m with Obi-Wan, I’ll do it sometimes then, too, because he gets nervous and that makes me nervous and knowing where I can run for cover if shit--I mean, uh, stuff, happens. I feel better if I know where I can run and hide. But that’s, like, normal, right? Rex and the Wolfpack do it too. It’s just personal safety stuff.”

“Ahsoka,” Plo says, “that’s...not really normal. Rex and the Wolfpack and Obi-Wan do that because they’ve lived through very violent environments.”

“I was in a war, too,” Ahsoka points out, so matter-of-factly that Mace wishes, not for the first time, that he could have killed Palpatine sooner.

“Yes, you were,” Plo says, his sorrow as clear through the Force as it ever could be. He takes the seat beside Ahsoka and pulls her into a sideways hug, then looks up to Mace and says, “Mace, I told Savage I’d meet him by the Archives to help him with his research project--could you let him know I may be a bit late?”

Mace knows a dismissal when he hears one. He nods and lets Plo have some privacy to have some long-overdue conversations about the war and Ahsoka’s part in it.

Mace heads back to the Archives and wonders, even for how swiftly the war ended and how much they’ve tried to support each other in the tumultuous times following it, how many people have still fallen through the cracks. He knows entire swathes of Padawans who go scared-still when they hear loud noises and blaster discharge. The Temple’s Force hasn’t recovered from those dead and lost and likely never will. Even now, he sometimes wakes in a cold sweat from nightmares of battlefields and red lightsabers.

The war ended over two months ago.