#greystorms

I don’t know what it is about my little sister. It’s like ... she has that Jedi thing about attachments, but attachments find her anyway and she ends up with the most loyal friends-family in the galaxy and I end up with a smuggler-type who’d take a blaster bolt for her turning up at my metaphorical door saying “Hey, your little sister’s still alive after an impossible situation, so you know, and Things Happened”.

The last time, it was, “Your sister survived the Sacking of Coruscant and now she’s a Jedi Knight and joined some ultra-heroic subsect that keeps its own paramilitary unit” coming from this cyborg PI. This time, this Zabrak guy turns up going, “Your sister survived the assault on Kuat - well, the assault on Rylan III because she wasn’t at Kuat, but same difference - after becoming a Jedi Master and is now running her own little resistance group and refugee settlement and setting up a second settlement and oh yeah she’s married now”.

Y’know, I think everyone expected me to be more surprised than I was. But, see, last time? My brave and gregarious little sister meeping and hiding behind people? That surprised me. But I remember the little girl who lectured someone twice her size for pushing me down in a playground, who hugged a wild kath hound, who could always talk me into her little adventures as a toddler. Her leading a group? My only reaction was ‘about kriffing time’. It’s good to see her closer to whole.

So these people have been good for her, not just good to her. Though they’ve been that too. Her sisters - I don’t know what that makes me to them, but they’ve got that plotting feel about them that makes me think someone’s going to throw adoption papers at me - welcomed me with open arms. Literally. Ever been hugged by three people at once, all of them apparently determined to squeeze your brains out your ears? I actually needed bruise salve and Lira tells me that I’m lucky Al-- Altay-- kriff it; ALTI - didn’t launch herself at me with a jetpack. They all started talking at once after that and it finally came out that they’d split into teams to set me up my own quarters on this desert settlement they call Port Knowhere and the new one they’re looking for new settlers for that doesn’t have a name yet. “So you’ll always have a home to go to with us”, they said. I guess I wouldn’t mind adoption papers if someone flings them at my head. Don’t think there are better sisters, except the one blood-related to me.

One better sibling (except the one blood-related to me), though. Rilus Harridin. No longer a corporal, still a doctor, now my brother-in-law. Lira told me that when she went missing after the Zakuul attacked Rylan III, Rilus never gave up on her. Alti I understand - she’s the type who gets an idea into her head and never lets go. But this guy ... not a smuggler or a bounty hunter or a pirate, but fell in with this excitable lunatic for a whole year, looking for his ‘doll’. Never gave up. Never got disheartened. Put up with the weirdness and helped with conflict resolution and translated ‘excitable Alti’ to Basic. It paid off, obviously, and now I have a brother-in-law. Guess I don’t have to tell him that I have a blaster and have learned how to use it.

...I probably should anyway. Brother’s job, and all.

Then there’s these others. The Zabrak, X’antho ... this guy is made of wonder. Literally. All I get from him is “Wow; how’d I get this lucky?” and this growing sense of wanting to do nice things for people. It’s like my sister threw a switch in him somehow, nudged him into his place in the galaxy, where he’s happy and feeling like he’s doing what he’s been put here to do, and I think he knows it. Plus watching a Zabrak, even if he wasn’t ever the stereotypical Zabrak, leading little kids around on the back of a tauntaun is probably one of the cutest things I’ve ever witnessed.

Kaelira Lakara and Jai-din Sortek are more reserved, but Kaelira, at least, is noticeably happy I’m around for what I mean to Lira rather than my way with plants. Then again, I try to keep clear of Sortek, mostly because he’s one of the former Marran I never really sussed out. Kaelira, though ... the stories I’ve heard. Saved my sister’s sanity. Unleashed assault cannon nightmare retribution on a droid that gut-shot my sister. For that alone, I like her. She reminds me of a younger, less disapproving version of that Jedi Master Lira always talked about - the one with the cybernetic arm who hauled me out of the Rokhans’ burning farmhouse that one time. Not exactly given to obvious gestures of affection, but mess with the people she’s sworn to protect and she will mess with your face.

The weird thing is my sister’s influence on them, in the small things. Almost all of them use ‘nerf’ as a swear word. Even the former Republic military and the smuggler. The only ones who don’t are Rilus, Sortek and the Chiss, that I’ve met so far. Even the Mandalorian. Aranar’aliit. He found out I could grow red gourds out here, given seeds enough, and he went Alti levels of excitable. I can about forgive him for starting a cult with my sister as its deity figure. Plus it’s funny to hear this stream of Mando’a swearing interspersed with ‘nerf’ when he drops a supply crate on his foot.

So I’m going to spend a few weeks here, making some tweaks to their irrigation systems - they’ve been doing pretty well, but there’s room for improvement. After that, I’ll probably spend most of my time on this other settlement, the jungle one. It’s going to be the source of most of their produce, after all. I’ll come back often when I bring and collect supplies, and to visit, but ... my sister has her own life. I'm glad to be a part of it, and I’ll keep being part of it, but ... I don’t have to be right on top of her all the time. She’s got her own life. I can let her live it. But I can be part of it, and I’ve got this bunch of well-meaning lunatics to thank for it.

Jallira switched off the datapad containing that month’s census numbers and pulled the earbud out of her ear with a sigh. Nearly five years after the Zakuul invasion, Port Knowhere was doing better than most, and better than those who found their way there dared dream. Comfortable place to live, decent food, no Zakuul tributes and no Zakuul patrols. There had been a few minor issues in the third year, but nothing that required overmuch in the way of intervention. Something about having three Jedi on premises, and a fourth visiting on a semi-regular basis, tended to ensure neighbourly behaviour all on its own. If that didn’t, the near-invisible Chiss who knew what you were doing before you did and had no qualms about reporting things to superiors did. There was no dedicated security force; there didn’t need to be. The settlement was largely self-policing, partly because Jedi but mostly because they had a good thing going and didn’t want some opportunist nerfing it up for them.

Port Knowhere was doing well. Their agricultural areas were blossoming despite the arid conditions, thanks to a fair few farm refugees and Alti’s work with the irrigation system. What they couldn’t grow on their own was brought in by their ‘acquisitions experts’; the amount of supplies they received at least more than covered injuries at least one of them came in with on a regular basis. Even if Jallira was hearing “TOTALLY WORTH IT--owowow!” in her less grim nightmares these days.

Still ... that was the problem. Port Knowhere was doing almost too well. More people meant more strain on resources, and while those either skilled in construction or willing to learn had unearthed and repaired a few more habitations around the central Port Knowhere ‘town’, they were going to run out of space soon. Resources would get problematic next; their acquisitions force was spread too thin as it was. Alti might want to ‘HALP’, and Mychae was always after the next big distracting adventure, but even the combined energy of those two dynamos wasn’t going to be enough.

Easing up on the rescues wasn’t an option either. There were fewer refugees to evacuate from war zones than there used to be, but that didn’t mean that people weren’t still in danger. This last year, most of the refugees had been political prisoners of sorts - they’d either spoken out against their Zakuul ‘overlords’ or they’d refused to pay their tributes. They couldn’t leave people to this Arcann’s nonexistent mercy just because they’d wanted to keep enough resources to feed their families, or refused to ignore the fact that there had been a time before the Skytroopers and the Knights of Zakuul...

So we sat down ... and had a talk ... about life was like ... before the Sith in towers, the troopers in the streets, the ‘obey or die’ ... and he told me why he thought that it was worth dying to have his homeworld back that way again.

Before the dark times. Before the Empire.

Remembering the words of an old friend, Jallira had a fair idea of what to do next.

“VIVA LA REVOLUTION!”

Ahri chuckled and shook her head at her next-oldest sister. “Eat your pie, Alti; I think Force-sensitives from here to Hutta can guess your vote.” Then she turned to Mae, who was radiating a pride that was an odd combination of ‘big sister watching Little Sis grow up’ and ‘grown padawan beaming that this was the little slip of awesome that trained her; wasn’t she lucky’. “And yours.” Then she smiled at Jallira. “I’m in. I think it sounds fantastic. Where do we start?”

Jallira meeped and started passing out plates. The traditional weekly Greystorm lunches had returned as a tradition almost immediately when Ahri found them again, like they’d never stopped, and a Greystorm lunch seemed the best place to announce her intentions. Still, the reaction was a little unexpected. “Wait ... since when am I in charge of this?”

“Since it was your idea,” Mae pointed out, drawing her plate of roast gorak bird towards her with a little squawk of glee.

Alti swallowed a bite of pie long enough to speak, “Also since you’re, like, crazy smart with the logic. ALL HAIL LOGIC! And pie.” Which she then went back to devouring.

Ahri shrugged sympathetically at the adopted sister who’d taken the ‘baby of the family’ tag away from her. “I’m a Master, but I’m also a Shadow. We work alone. We do what makes sense in the context of our orders, but we don’t ... organise people much. You ran medbay for years.”

“But...” Jallira sighed. “I ... do have some ideas, but ... I’m not that much of a fighter and--” She stopped dead as all three of her sisters started laughing - Alti so hard she nearly choked on her pie. “...What?”

That earned Jallira a ruffle of the hair from a still-laughing Mae. “Sis, you’ve fought everything that ever looked at you funny since you were a kid! Mental and Forcey trauma from the Sacking? Fought it and won. Garr’s nerfshit training? Fought it and won. Sithspawn? Drop a mountain on ‘em.”

Alti looked up from her pie long enough to shout, “SITHSPAWN PANCAKES!”

Ahri joined in at that point. “Everything from incurable diseases to eldritch horrors to bits of Sith stuck in your own head. You’re a healer, sure, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a fighter too. Plus you’ve been standing at the elbow of some of the greatest tactical minds the Jedi produced for years, and you actually stay quiet and listen when they plan. I think you’ll be better at this than you think.” With a grin, she added, “So must you, or you’d have meeped more when you brought this up.”

After a long moment in which Jallira processed that, she sighed, with a smile that said, ‘okay, okay, I give in’. “All right then. The first thing we’re going to need is more allies.” She tilted her head Alti’s way; the hyperactive Greystorm chewed on pie for another twenty seconds before she looked up with a perplexed expression. “Get hold of Mychae and Srina’idash; between you, work out the best way of sending a message that won’t be traced back here. There are some people who have our comms frequency and the decryption codes to use it. ...I think it’s time to reach out.”

Alti looked excited for a moment, then whimpered. “But ... pie...”