Dear Ms. Barsen'thor

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Aleidis Zrgaat"]

Still squicky. Nevertheless, still interesting, and the balance was shifting in favor of I want to think about this now.

"But, like..." Mara took a long moment to gather her thoughts. She had pieces of the puzzle from a metric fethton of holocrons and a decidedly wonky and well-travelled family. Puzzle pieces, or at least relevant things. She sort of knew about Transfer Sense or whatever, and the White Current rang a bell what with the illusions and stuff. "So your Master could swap bodies like a Sith, but not Dark-style? I didn't know that was a thing. And if it is and if he's your Master, why are you aiming to get dead ever, when you could just, like, grow a new one that's tougher and go and, like, have...fun with Codi? I don't get it."

 

[Aleidis Zrgaat]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

"Master Olra'en had a long and storied career before he turned to the light, to be sure." Aleidis admitted thoughtfully. "But this wasn't so much swapping as my allowing his displaced soul use of my body for a time. It was an interesting experience, to say the least."

"That said, yes. It is not within my power to do such a thing, but I know of people who can - and have - achieved a sort of discount immortality with such methods." Aleidis explained, deciding that if they were to take a break and talk, she'd at least have herself a cigarette. She quietly lit up, moving to stand near a large, open window. "It rarely works for them in the long run, I know of nobody persuing immortality who can honestly claim that their lives are happier or more fufilled for it. That includes my own Master." Aleidis took a small drag and put a hand over the flat patch where her right arm had once met her shoulder. "Just as I'm sure that I could have easily found or paid someone to graft me a reliable, permenant prosthetic. While I was at it, cybernetic implants to mitigate some of my body's frailty, bone lacings to fortify what durability I have, and any number of small improvements. I could spend centuries perfecting my physical body with technology, but would that make it a good thing to do? Would, having chosen that path, I have the willpower to stop?"

"The answer is complicated, and it varies from person to person." Aleidis sighed quietly. "We are born the way we are because the Force, and fate, deem it so. Our challenges are our own to surmount. I don't aim to die, Mara - in fact, I have spent my whole life succeeding at not dying. But when death comes for me, it will be my time to go: and I will face death with dignity, I will face it with what my birth gave to me. No person should live forever. And filling myself with metal and wire to prolong my days walking the Galaxy simply feels foolish when, upon passing, I will rejoin and become one with the Force."

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Aleidis Zrgaat"]

Olra'en. Now there was a name. Dad had told her about him. He'd straight-up arrested Olra'en once, a long while back during some kind of Jedi crusade. Something about the White Current and a metric ton of baradium...and Zeltros. Something about the Sith, and body-trading, and-

"So you're alright with losing yourself when you go? I mean, you don't think you'll be you afterward, right?" She deactivated the lightfoil belatedly and hooked it to her belt. "But I guess you do, if you're talking about training people afterward. So you know how to keep yourself yourself?" It was, so far as she'd ever heard, a rare ability -- even rarer than body-trading. This was deep water, and that was cool. Even if the whole subject made her feel half a dozen different unpleasant things.

To the best of her knowledge, Dad didn't know how to do that, and Mom couldn't even learn. So when they went, they'd just be, like...part of the sun or the wind or some crappy Sith's Force push. Something like that, anyway. She couldn't quite put it into words, and existential crisis wasn't in her vocabulary. Memento mori wasn't either.

"And back up. You're telling me you wouldn't take, like, an artificial heart or whatever? I mean, slippery slopes are one thing, but there's an awful lotta space between nothing an' full cyborg. Heck, I don't see what's so wrong about cyborging it up a bit anyway, not if there's folks that're counting on you sticking around as you and not, like, some Jedi dick's battery charge."

 

[Aleidis Zrgaat]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

"Language, Mara." Aleidis chastised mildly.

"Why would I need an artificial heart? Anything congenital that could go wrong with my body, I am able to fix myself." She pointed out with a modest smile. "But I understand the point you are trying to make. And I repeat, my answer is not some moral absolute to which I expect all people to live to." The Ghostling repeated, pushing herself off of the wall to stretch her legs. "I am sure that, when I die, there will be some people that survive me, who believe that they need me to go on. They will have to find their own way through that hardship, I'm afraid. If I were to prolong my life, there would be another generation of people who believe that they, too, need me - and so I would be pressed to prolong further, and so on."

"An early death is a cruelty, to be sure - which is why the Jedi are supposed to work to prevent wars, to protect those who have no choice in them, and so on." Aleidis waved vaguely, having chosen her words carefully - specifically the 'supposed to' part. "But a natural death? It is a mercy. The truest joy in life, I've always believed, lays in service to others - but there comes a time when one has to let her life's work stand on it's own merit. A mother smiles as her child goes off on her own, she doesn't spend the rest of her life sheltering that child as she did when she couldn't walk." Aleidis offered.

"I know I'm getting pretty involved in metaphor here. I apologize if I'm failing to convey my thoughts in an understandable way." She hummed thoughtfully, tapping her collar bone.

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Aleidis Zrgaat"]

"Why would you need another heart? The Force ain't something you're necessarily always gonna have. Force severed is a thing; so's burnout."

Mara halted her own momentum and did her level best to listen instead. It seemed like the thing to do. As Aleidis drew to a close, though-

"No, I get the metaphor. So...look, there's a billion star systems with people in'em, most of'em not linked up to lanes or governments. I don't see what's so wrong about never dying if you help one place, then go help another one and another one, before they get depending on you. Like...kark. It's not like any one person does one big thing an' helps the whole galaxy. Even the bad ones that make the big changes -- look at Ashin Varanin. They call her the conqueror of ten thousand worlds. Doubt she conquered half that, but even if she did it all, that's still..." Mara guesstimated furiously. "Like one percent of one percent of planets. So..." She gestured without innate meaning, in search of words. "So go raise another kid. And keep raising more an' more kids forever. Seems to me you'd only get better at it."

 

[Aleidis Zrgaat]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

Aleidis allowed an indulgent smile. "Perhaps I will." She absolutely wouldn't. Someday, Mara might understand - but for now, she was young and full of fire, ready to take on as much of the Galaxy as was within her reach. Aleidis had been there. Somedays, she still felt close to being there. By human standards, Aleidis herself wasn't old - by Ghostling standards, she was about middle aged. When you're built to be pretty and break quite easily, living fast and leaving a beautiful corpse is about the standard. Living fast just dictates how big a forest you live in. "I like your passion, Mara. Let's see about applying it towards these saber forms, hm?"

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Aleidis Zrgaat"]

There was a time to debate and a time to go with the flow of training, and Mara had put a few weeks into figuring out which was which, based on Aleidis' mood and tone. She nodded and resumed the pattern, lightfoil snapping back to life. The ever-present Dayark drizzle crackled and popped on her blade with each movement, adding a sharp edge to the hum. Shelving the discussion as best she could, she worked on duplicating Aleidis' motions. This Makashi variant -- Mara might have said it wasn't clicking for her, except it was; it just didn't fit her expectations, in a dozen tiny ways and some more substantial ones. The stances alone were intensely different from the vanilla Makashi of her experience, but then again, the galaxy was big, with plenty of room for variation. And who was to say the Makashi that she knew was more worthwhile or pure or grounded or effective?

She shelved those issues as soon as she recognized them. Like the immortality debate, this kind of thought was too esoteric to be helpful when it came to actually gaining muscle memory. Training, real training, required serious focus as much as it required emptying oneself of preconceptions, and she had to shoot for both to make this work in a substantive way. There was nothing worse than referring back to another teacher or style with every movement of a newly taught form.

 

[Aleidis Zrgaat]

[member="Mara D'Lessio Merrill"]

And it was this dilligence and acceptance that Aleidis had made it a point to try and convey to her young student. All things were mere stones in the mighty river of the Force, and going with that current was the only truly effective way of accomplishing anything - and that required patience and discipline. Far from the girl who'd come in with her head full of ideas on how things were to be, Aleidis hoped to send home a young woman with a realistic picture of how things were, and what she could do about it. As Mara went through her forms, Aleidis watched with an eye that seemed to miss no toe out of place, no slouch of the shoulders, or brief struggle with balance - all of these things were gently, firmly corrected in a prompt fashion.

Mara was a good student, she'd decided a month ago. Aleidis' primary concern had been proving herself a satisfactory Master.

"En pointe! Thrust! Spin!" Aleidis called out two weeks later, guiding the direction of the lession in both voice and form. She was sparring with Mara - to a point. Codi could handle refining her pupil's actual combat reflexes and such, as she was better suited to the task. Aleidis was concerned with smoothing out Mara's form and technical skill, giving theory to Codi's practical saber lessons. To that end, the two women, master and apprentice, were sparring. The motions seemed more like a dance than combat as the two mirrored each other like a pair of saber-weilding ballerinas, answering thrust with thrust, checking the weaknesses in each other's stance by exploiting it in their partner's - and teaching Mara to pay careful, careful attention to her own motions as well as her opponent's without batting an eye. "Step back - Go!" Aleidis ordered, sweeping onto her back foot, indicating that it was Mara's turn to lead the dance.

 

[Mara D'Lessio Merrill]

[member="Aleidis Zrgaat"]

Two weeks of intensive focus wasn't remotely long enough to acquire Aleidis' competence with this style of combat, not even with Mara's background in fencing and fairly broad lightsabre education. But it was enough to be able to spar and not make a fool out of herself. She'd reached that point a week ago, to the best of her estimation, and now she was comfortably in the zone where she could spar using the full movements of her Master's style. She'd lost track of the weeks she'd been here -- maybe six or seven? Maybe less? Her own fault for not paying attention -- but the last fourteen days were imprinted in her at a fundamental level. More than once she'd wondered what her father had hoped her to learn here. Her opinions on that had changed fairly often, and every time they'd evolved, the transition had been obvious in hindsight. Patience, restraint, the Force, sabre combat in all varieties, humility, how to follow, the Force and the sabre at a higher level.

And, most importantly of all, stillness. How to shove all of those concerns and interests and dissatisfactions aside and fight with mental, not just physical, fluidity.

She took the lead in the dance (not that much of a metaphor, really) and engaged, using smooth but radical balance shifts and deep but transitional stances. In and out like a wave, trying to draw Aleidis too far in or throw off her timing. Rhythm, then broken rhythm.

 

[Aleidis Zrgaat]

TO: Master [member="Jorus Merrill"] - Master of First Knowledge of the Jedi Order, Oswaft Station, Laekia, Levantine Sanctum, Wild Space
FROM: A-Z
Re: Kids

Jorus

Another progress report! I feel that this may be near the final one, if not the last. Mara won't say it, but I feel she's becoming homesick - and she is at the point in her training that I do feel she is ready to sally forward from under my watchful gaze. After I send her home to you, of course. She is grasping Makashi quite well, has learned behaviors appropriate a young Jedi and perhaps a few skills unrelated to that vocation. Codi has ensured that her martial education is quite well-rounded. I take credit for the gardening and first aid, but rest assured that mixed drinks were at no point a part of my curriculum, nor did Mara ever imbibe such.

I digress.

Currently, Mara and I are volunteering at the local walk-in clinic to sharpen her powers of perception and community spirit. She has been working very hard, and I am quite proud of her progress. You've raised a remarkable young woman! While she may not have had the inclination or mentality for healing, Mara makes for a talented diagnostician. I think that, after a quick evaluation, she will be happily packing her things for the journey home in the morning. Don't be afraid to call me if you've specific arrangements to that end in mind. I know that it has been just over a month and a half, and you must be eager to see your little girl! I've gotten quite accustomed to her presence, I will be sad to see her go.

Respectfully yours,
A.

------

Aleidis send the message along and smiled to herself, looking out over the local walk-in clinic - spacers from various corners of nowhere who used Dayark as a base of operations came in seeking treatment for all sorts of things, and Aleidis was happy to spend some time there to help out and lessen the burden of her addiction to civil service. She liked to think Mara liked hearing all the grouchy, grizzled explorers swapping stories and comparing scars, too. But it was about an hour past quitting time. "Mara? Ready to go?" Aleidis asked cheerfully, standing from the front counter as her relief showed up. She shouldered her satchel and went looking for her apprentice, who was likely finding new and exciting 'interdiction' tumors under the watchful eye of a more experienced doctor.