Faction Issue # 1: A Question of Balance [NJP + Open to All Jedi]

[Kitter Bitters]

Location: New Jedi Praxeum on Chalacta


The desert valley surrounding the New Jedi Praxeum was quiet in the early hours. Not silent. Chalacta's wind moved constantly through the canyon, slipping between weathered stone formations and carrying thin trails of sand across the valley floor. Somewhere in the distance, the sandstone walls groaned beneath the heat of the rising sun. The Praxeum itself sat farther back against the rock, its pale stone walls almost disappearing into the surrounding landscape.

Out here, however, there were no walls. No training remotes. No practice sabers. Only students, sand, and stones. They had been arranged in a loose semicircle across the valley floor, each student given enough space that they would not interfere with the others. In front of every participant rested a collection of stones.

Some were hardly larger than a thumb. Others were broad, awkward chunks of rock that looked heavy enough to require both hands to lift. None of them matched. That was intentional. The task appeared simple enough. Using only the Force, each student was to stack the stones. There was no required height. No prescribed order. No demonstration of the "correct" method. They had merely been told to use every stone placed before them and build until nothing remained upon the ground.

For some, the smallest stones would likely prove easy. A gentle pull through the Force, a little concentration, and the rock would rise obediently from the sand. The larger stones presented another problem entirely. Yet weight was only part of the lesson. Smooth stones shifted. Flat stones tempted the student into choosing the easiest foundation. Jagged stones refused to sit comfortably upon anything. One badly chosen placement could send an entire tower collapsing into the sand.

The desert wind did not help. A stronger gust swept through the assembled students, catching robes and hair alike before scattering another veil of sand across the training ground. Still, the stones waited. There was no race. No prize for the tallest tower. No punishment for failure. Only a simple instruction left hanging in the dry Chalactan air.

Stack the stones.

Perhaps more importantly, discover what happened within yourself when they refused to stay where you wanted them.

Join the New Jedi Praxeum today! ​

 

[Kuhbee]

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Location: Chalacta
Equipment: Translation Droid | Lightsaber | Jedi Robes |
Tags: Open

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Kuhbee settled cross-legged in the sand, staring at the collection of stones in front of him with considerably more suspicion than the exercise probably warranted. The first few rose easily enough, trembling slightly as he guided them into place. The next was larger, uneven, and apparently determined to ruin everything.

His brow furrowed. The stone shifted. Kuhbee immediately steadied it through the Force, tongue poking slightly from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated. Slowly, carefully, he lowered another stone on top.

For three glorious seconds, the tower stood.

Then the entire thing toppled into the sand.

Kuhbee stared at the rubble. "Grarrii Arggiii!!"

<I don't like this lesson> the translation droid wheezed from the cubs belt.

 

[Katarine Ryiah]

"Never Hide Your Heart"
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Katarine Ryiah sat beneath the shade of a rocky outcrop overlooking the training grounds, one knee drawn loosely toward her chest as she watched the students below struggle with their stones. Some approached the exercise with patience, carefully lifting each piece through the Force and setting it into place. Others were already discovering that frustration was an excellent way to send several rocks tumbling back into the sand.

Normally, Katarine might have been watching with the critical eye of a teacher. Today, she was smiling. Actually smiling.

There was something almost embarrassingly giddy about her lately, and she knew exactly who was responsible for it. Ellion Corsair . After centuries of loss, exile, mistakes, and ghosts that refused to stay buried, somehow Eli had wandered back into her life and made everything feel new again. She had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be this happy. She felt absurdly young, as though she were falling in love for the first time instead of rediscovering someone her heart had never truly stopped belonging to.

Leaving New Genesis had been considerably harder than she cared to admit. A rather large part of her had wanted to remain there with him and forget the rest of the galaxy existed. But the New Jedi Praxeum mattered. So Katarine had come to Chalacta to oversee the training, to help nurture something she genuinely believed could become important for the scattered Jedi.

Her smile faded only briefly. Deep beneath her happiness was the constant reminder that everything was not fixed. The biot remained inside her. Even now, the Devil's foul blood coursed through her system, an unwanted presence she could feel with every passing day. Eventually, she would have to return to Him. She knew that. Whatever temporary freedom she had found could not last forever.

But that problem belonged to another day. For now, Katarine watched one of the students finally balance a third stone atop the others. Her green eyes brightened. The smile returned immediately. For perhaps the first time in centuries, Katarine Ryiah looked genuinely, undeniably happy.

Tags: Open For Interaction​

 

[Daro-Gah Renada]

“You can say that again,” Daro echoed the young wookiee’s sentiments as his own rock stack came crumbling down just a half second later. He took a second to wonder what the consequences of chucking a few of the rocks as far as he could would be, but he decided against actually doing it. Since choosing to return to the Jedi after the latest Purge and death of his late master, Daro had made an effort to keep a lid on his impatience, frustration, and extraordinarily high level of teen angst. Still he refused the Jedi robes in favor of his technician’s uniform but that wouldn’t make him any less of a Jedi.

“But that’s part of the lesson, I think.” He sighed in the direction of the Wookiee youngling he was sat next to. “We were told to stack stones but being a Jedi is never that simple, is it? It’s good practice but there’s got to be a deeper meaning here. There always is with these lessons.” He remembered from his last stint with the Order. As he spoke, Daro turned and looked at the Instructor sat beneath the shade. He was almost sizing her up, comparing her to his late master.

“Let’s try it again, maybe we’ll figure it out.” He’d almost turned back to his stones before turning back to the Wookiee. “I’m Daro-Gah by the way. You can just call me, Daro. What’s your name?”

Tags: Kuhbee
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[Kuhbee]

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Location: Chalacta
Equipment: Translation Droid | Lightsaber | Jedi Robes |
Tags: Daro-Gah Renada

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"I'm Daro-Gah by the way. You can just call me, Daro. What's your name?"​

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"Garrwwrrr" Kuhbee growled and waved at his new friend. The droid on his belt gave a wheezy, dying sort of voice when it spoke, as if it was bored. <My name is Kuhbee.>

Kuhbee motioned with the Force to stack another stone on top of his pile but it quickly fell down. He felt himself get angry and picked up the rock and threw it out into the desert beyond. Then he felt guilty at his anger and his ears perked down.

"Garr Arrgg Rwrrriii."

<Why can't being a Jedi be easy Daro?">

 

[Sian Sestoi]

Sian leaned her shoulder against a tall sandstone rock, crossing her arms as she waited for the Praxeum's supply officer to finish his work. She'd found a lead on a used freighter power converter at the local market, but the trader told her the shipment was delayed on a temple transport. Going straight to the source seemed like the quickest way to get answers, but now she was stuck at the edge of the valley watching a group of kids struggle with a pile of rocks.

She pulled a toothpick from her pocket and chewed on it, watching a teenage girl a few steps away. The girl had her eyes shut tight, sweating in the growing heat while three small pebbles floated an inch above the sand. She was trying too hard, forcing the rocks into the air through pure willpower. A sudden gust of wind blew through the canyon and the pebbles fell right back down into the dirt.

Sian shifted her position, her eyes on Kuhbee and Daro-Gah Renada to see if they were learning the lesson. These were the future Jedi Knights, and they would struggle against a Dark Lord of the Sith if they couldn't even handle the basics. Sian herself had been inactive for a while since the New Jedi Order fell apart.

She pushed away thoughts of her own weakness, spitting the toothpick into the dust and looking toward the main building. The supply officer was taking his time, but until he arrived, she was happy to stay in the shade and watch the kids knock their towers down.​

 

[Zanig’lad’evuno]

The stone slowly rose from the sand. It was just big enough to fit in her hand but it wasn’t her fingers that lifted it, not really. The wind blew, a whisper at first, then grew bigger, moved faster and hit harder as if to whip her. Fortunately, the hood of her cloak amid a black robe was pulled up, keeping her hair secure and the sunlight at her back. On the sand is where she sat, cross-legged, facing a flat slab of rock that served as the base of Glade’s structure.

Others, from student to master, shared the Padawan’s presence but were not her focus. Her eyes were open only to that singular stone at the moment. Though, she didn’t place it. She turned it, this way and that way, observing the shape and feeling the weight. She studied in silence, with her eyes and the Force combined.

Highly irregular and angular. Serrated edge at nine degrees. She shifted the figure into her gaze just enough to look past and do the math. May be a match for my previous placement. Same circular shape and just as jagged at that chord. It would sit atop a short stack of more.

At that, calculations intact, Glade reached with her hand and breathed easily. The rock drifted from her grip, gently balancing atop another in similar structure, with a heavier piece beneath. The wind purred like some beast with a whimper, and the sand danced between the cracks, but the Force seemed to be with her.

She released her fingers and, just like that, the top rocks collapsed. The Chiss blinked and began to think. Wrong side or wrong size? Where had she gone wrong? Had she miscalculated the weight distribution? Did the wind create the slightest vibration? Stack the stones. So, showing no emotion or hesitation, Glade gave it only a moment and grabbed another stone. She began to stack.

 

[Lumiya Dara]

Lumiya sat a short distance from the semi-circle of students, her medkit resting beside her in the sand. She wasn't here to teach. Her purpose was considerably more simpler; to make sure that a lesson involving pebbles and large rocks didn't somehow end with someone needing medical attention.

Her gaze moved quietly from one student to another. A young Wookiee sat among them, along with a Chiss and several teenagers, all apparently engaged in the task of carefully piling stones into towers. Lumiya watched with quiet interest, occasionally offering an encouraging smile whenever one of the structures managed to remain upright.

She kept her hands folded loosely in her lap, deliberately keeping her own connection to the Force subdued. There were things that she had learned to keep private. The strange bond she shared with Vendryn Del'therak was one of them. She had no intention of allowing it to become a subject of curiosity, particularly not around other Force-sensitive students. Whatever existed between them was complicated enough without someone else noticing that she sometimes felt emotions or sensations that didn't originate from her. More importantly, she had no desire to expose Vendryn to whatever consequences might follow if the wrong person discovered their connection.

So she simply remained Lumiya. A healer. An observer. Someone who happened to be sitting nearby with a medkit while a group of Padawans attempted to convince gravity that their increasingly ambitious towers should remain standing.

Her attention lingered on one particularly precarious stack of rocks. Lumiya tilted her head slightly. That one probably wasn't going to last. She shifted just enough to be ready to move if necessary, though she didn't interfere. Falling stones were part of learning, after all. She would only step in if someone was actually in danger. Until then, she was content to watch, quietly amused by the seriousness with which the students approached their unusual exercise. After all, if they were going to learn, they might as well have someone nearby who knew what to do when learning inevitably resulted in someone getting a pebble stuck somewhere it really shouldn't be.

 

[Daro-Gah Renada]

Daro nodded, and smiled, and watched the Wookiee as he stacked, just so he could get a break from his own. As he watched Daro tried to figure the Wookiee out. To Daro, Kuhbee seemed young. It was hard to tell with wookiees, but Daro thought he might've been older than his fellow learner. They were about the same size but he thought a Wookiee the same age as him would've been at least six foot, and quite a bit burlier. Daro wondered if maybe Kuhbee was the runt of his family. Then he wondered if he even had a family. The villains of the galaxy weren't very kind to Wookiees or at least that's what Daro had heard.

It didn't seem long after his new acquaintance began to stack that it all seemed to come back down. Then he blew up and sent the rock flying, which is exactly what Daro had considered doing just a few moments ago. As he watched the expression on the Wookiee's face change from anger to what he thought was shame, Daro decided Kuhbee was definitely younger than him and maybe in need of an older brother type.

"I think it can be, Kuhbee. That might be what we're out here trying to figure out in a way. It's abstract. Y'know? Patience, practice, the force. These things don't come without effort." Daro said, astounded by the possible wisdom in his words. He almost sounded like his late Master, and that realization brought with it some complicated feelings. Anybody especially tuned in would sense his grief and loss and pain, however brief it was, as Daro blinked the possibility of a tear from his eyes, before closing them and focusing.

After watching Kuhbee's blow up, Daro thought he might've been ready to start stacking again. So he closed his eyes and began to reach out with the force. Before he had been trying to navigate a balancing act and that didn't work, so like his late master would always tell him he would trust in the force, and let it guide his instincts without forcing his will. When he did that, or at least attempted it, the stones started to levitate. One was up first, then two more, then three more, until all of the stones before him hovered in place. They danced in between one another and clicked into place like puzzle pieces finding their matching partner slowly yet instinctually. Daro could feel his success on its way but in the moment it was not enough to feel it. He needed to see it. So he opened a single eye and when he did he saw an almost finished stack. "I'm doing it! I'm doing it, Kuhbee." Daro said excitedly. And the second he opened his mouth it all went wrong as he willed the stones to join before they toppled. Their pace hurried and stones began to slam into one another. A few wayward stones clashed and were sent flying in different directions and toward the other students present, one of them being the young Wookiee. What was left of the stack toppled over into a pile once again as Daro lost focus.

"So close." He said before looking toward the other students his stones had hit or nearly missed. "Sorry, guys. Sorry Kuhbee." He turned to the Wookiee hoping the wayward stones hadn't caused him any harm.

Tags: Kuhbee Katarine Ryiah Sian Sestoi Lumiya Dara Zanig’lad’evuno
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[Tessari Keln]

OBJECTIVE: A Question of Balance
LOCATION: New Jedi Praxeum
OUTFIT: Jedi attire
TAGS: Daro-Gah Renada | Open

Tessari had been told where she was supposed to go. Finding it had been the easy part. Understanding what everyone was doing when she got there was proving considerably harder. The young Kuranu lingered near the edge of the gathering for a few moments, blue eyes moving from student to student and then toward the assorted piles of stones. There were no training remotes. No equipment that she could see. No machinery humming away somewhere beneath the exercise. Just Jedi, rocks, and what appeared to be varying degrees of success.

Tessari's brow furrowed. Then something inside her screamed. Move. She did. Tessari dropped sideways without thinking, one hand catching against the ground as a stone sailed through the space her head had occupied a heartbeat earlier. Another bounced somewhere behind her. Only then did she look toward the source. Daro. And considerably more rocks than he seemed to have intended.

Tessari slowly straightened, brushing her palm against her trousers. Her eyes went from the stone behind her, back to Daro, and then toward the rest of his scattered project. "So..." she began, allowing the word to hang for a second. "Is dodging part of the lesson, or did I arrive at an especially interesting time?" There was enough of a grin behind the question to make it clear she wasn't upset.

If anything, the near miss had made her curious. That sensation had happened again. There hadn't been time to see the rock and decide to move. She had simply known. The same strange certainty that had been appearing more frequently lately. Tessari glanced back at the stone for another moment before filing the experience away with all the others she still didn't understand. Apparently that was why she was here.

She moved farther into the gathering and found an unclaimed collection of stones. Tessari lowered herself beside them, studying the mismatched shapes. Stack them. Using the Force. Her eyes narrowed.

The first part wasn't particularly complicated. Tessari reached for one of the stones, then stopped just before her fingers touched it. Her hand hovered there. They were only rocks. She knew that. Still, knowing something was harmless and convincing herself to put her bare hand on an unfamiliar object were not always the same thing. Her eyes flicked toward the others. Everyone else seemed perfectly content handling them. That helped. A little.

Tessari finally touched the first stone with the tips of her fingers. Nothing happened. Of course nothing happened. She released a quiet breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding, then picked it up properly. The second came easier. Tessari turned both stones over, tested where their surfaces met, and set them down again. One was an obvious base. Another had a shallow depression that would help stabilize the next piece if she rotated it perhaps twenty degrees. The narrow one shouldn't go anywhere near the bottom. Weight distribution would become increasingly important as the tower grew taller, particularly with—Tessari stopped.

She looked toward the others. Then down at the stones in her hands. Right. Using the Force. She reluctantly returned both rocks to the ground. "I could have this done in about thirty seconds the normal way," she muttered. Which, she suspected, was exactly why she wasn't supposed to do it the normal way.

Tessari drew in a breath and focused on the broadest stone. She knew where she wanted it. She knew how heavy it should be. She understood precisely what needed to happen. Up. Nothing happened. Tessari stared at it. Her lips pressed together. Perhaps she was thinking about it incorrectly.

She tried to recall what she had been told about reaching for the Force. Not grabbing. Not forcing. Feeling what was already there. Tessari closed her eyes, concentrated again, and—The stone trembled. Her eyes snapped open. It stopped. A smile immediately spread across Tessari's face. "Oh." That was new.

She leaned forward, suddenly far more interested than frustrated. Tessari tried again. The stone trembled harder this time, lifted perhaps the width of a finger from the ground, tipped violently to one side and dropped with a dull clack. The smile disappeared. Tessari tilted her head. That hadn't worked. Why?

She shifted where she was sitting and stared at the stone as though it were a malfunctioning piece of machinery that had just personally challenged her. "All right," she whispered to it. "Let's figure out what I did wrong." The tower could wait. Now she had an experiment.