#except small

The dripping of water and gently whistling draft echo through the caves and break through the silence. Marii had spent the prior three hours roaming the caves, trying to keep focused and calm, but her hope was failing. She feels no call to the force, here; no song or harmony, drawing her to the crystals around her; no amount of warmth in these cold crystal caves. Eventually, she could feel their impatience from outside the cave and sighed, rising to her feet and turning towards the entrance. She steels herself before walking out, making sure that her face doesn’t betray her disappointment as she steps out of the cave, empty-handed, again. Her eyes cannot meet her master’s or the other Jedi waiting for her, as she stares at a particularly interesting mound on the ground behind them.

“Empty handed, again, you come out. Simply, not your time to find a crystal, it seems to be. Nothing against you, this means.” A green hand gently takes hers and Marii’s eyes are drawn to her master, Yaddle’s. Her gentle smile is blurred by the tears Marii didn’t know she was holding back. She tries to blink them away, but a few leak through and warm her cold cheeks.

She musters her ability to speak again after a shaky breath, “But what if I don’t ever get a crystal? What if I can’t ever become a jedi?” Marii starts to shake a bit as if her body were only now recognizing the cold air around them.

Yaddle simply tuts and pulls her into a hug. Gently rubbing into her back, she begins her lecture, “More than our weapons, Jedi are. Our hearts, our actions, we are. Understand?” She waits until she feels the girl nod, before continuing, “Besides…. Mastered your training saber, you have. Completed all your trials, you have. Something special in mind, The Force must have.” As soon as she’s finished, Yaddle hears a soft growl from her padawan’s stomach. “Ohoho! Back to the ship, we must get. A disturbance in the force, you must feel.” This brightens Marii’s spirits as they both laugh and start toward the shuttle. The Jedi accompanying them trade glances before following, as well.

 As their shuttle returns to their escort ship, Marii is greeted with an entire crew’s worth of nearly identical faces, almost all filled with some form of hope or excitement. She shyly looks down, unable to face them as she disappoints them again. She feels as their excitement is replaced with disappointment and pity. Before she has the chance to push past them, and hide away in her cot, Yaddle gently takes her by the hand, “Remember, Padawan. Have a meeting on a far planet, we have. Safe with the stormtroopers, you will be.” Marii simply nods before gently pushing past the clones and returning to her room on the ship.

That evening, after Yaddle stops by to say their goodbyes, Marii falls into a deep sleep and finds herself in an extraordinarily vivid dream.

Marii sits in the pilot’s seat of an old republic fighter, unpowered and drifting around in space. In her lap, was a little, red lizard, laying on its side and looking up at her with five of its ten legs raised and exposing its belly to her, as if asking her for something. She gently strokes its stomach back and forth and it eventually coughs up a little red insect with spots on its back. The insect flies onto her hand and sits there, tickling her fingers. The lizard scurries away and climbs onto the dashboard.

The ship suddenly whirrs into life as some of the lights weakly blink on, illuminating the inside of the ship and bringing her attention to a familiar shape. It looks like a lightsaber handle, built into a lever. She takes it by the hand and pushes it forwards. The old fighter’s engine grinds itself to life, leaving Marii to gaze forward as the light from the stars begin to distort as if she were going into warp, but instead of passing forward, through the stars, the stars seem to be passing by her, or more accurately, she seemed to be flying backwards.

 If there were five things that Coast disliked more than anything, it was Jedi, boring trips through space, failures, children, and most of all, protection detail. Now, here he is, watching a child, a failure of a Jedi Padawan, furiously grind away at a workbench, in the armory. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do, on this ship, than protect her. He swears that the order was punishing him for something; once he finds out what, he’ll surely be able to make an appeal and get assigned someplace more exciting, or perhaps even tropical. Until then, he’s stuck here, with her.

He doesn’t notice the footsteps coming up beside him to say, “You’re brooding at her again.” Coast jumps in surprise and silently curses as he turns to face the other storm trooper. Unfazed by Coast’s startlement, he continues, “You know she can feel your emotions, right? If she weren’t so absorbed in… whatever she’s doing, this time, she’d either apologize or snap at you.” The trooper lifts his helmet off and sits at a nearby bench and begins to clean his armor.

He holds back his retort when he notices something about what he said. Coast leans against the bench and peers at him. “’This time’? She’s done…” He gestures to her as she carves into a cylindrical, metal pipe with a laser filing tool, half-way through carving the lizard’s head from her dream, onto the edge of the pipe so that it looks like its mouth is wide open. Her face was lax and expressionless and, she seemed to be in a sort of a trance as she worked. If he could see her eyes behind those tinted goggles of hers, he assumes that they’d be glossed over. “… that, before? Does it happen often?”

At this the other trooper nods and grabs a buffer cloth and begins to polish his shoulder pads, responding, “Yeah. The first time I saw this happen, she brought along a broken hyperdrive chassis, for no reason, and fully repaired it into working order. Guess what happened during our trip back to the Jedi temple.” Coast is about to guess, but he is interrupted, “Our hyperdrive forcibly ejected itself into the engine room, when its chassis melted and warped. If it weren’t for her, we’d still probably be lost in space a thousand times over.”

This earns a scoff from Coast as he crosses his arms over his chest. “So, not only can she read my mind without permission, but she can also see into the future. Just fantastic.” The sarcasm dripped from his lips like venom, as he checks again at her work.

She had just finished carving and polishing the head and is now starting to assemble the pieces together. As she finishes, what she assembles look like a pair of lightsaber handles. The first seems rather standard in appearance, if a bit fancier with the choice black and reflective bronze materials and unusually shaped pommel. The other is very unusual, peculiarly designed as if it were a pipe that has been cut diagonally, and a lizard, made from a dyed-red metal, had decided to sit along the opening and finish the pipe, gripping onto the edges with its ten little claws and opening its mouth wide to finish the end. The lizard’s tail wraps around the hollow pommel and it clicks in Coast’s mind, why the pommels are so unusually shaped, when she pushes the two pommels together and gently twists. At the click she lets go of one side and spins the handles, now one handle, in her hands.

She admires her work for a little while before cleaning up after herself and stepping out, headed back for her room, paying the two troopers watching her no mind. The two troopers pause, for a moment before the sitting trooper looks up at Coast, “Looks like she’s getting her lightsabers soon. Emphasis on the ‘s’, because there’s two of them.” He chuckles for a second before returning to his cleaning.

Coast shivers from a chill going up his spine, unnoticed by his squad mate, he responds simply, “Why do I have a bad feeling about this?”

 He shakes the chill off and puts his helmet back on, opting to return to his post in the ship’s dormitories, slowly walking around, finding particular interest a stain on the floor that seemed to be coming from a maintenance panel, next to Marii’s door. He unlatches the panel and pulls it open to inspect it, mumbling to himself, “Thermal circulator’s leaking again. Going to have to replace the pump at our next stop.” He hears shuffling in the distance and feels the ship begin to jostle, he grabs the panel to keep it from swinging around.