Star Wars Roleplay: Chaos

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Private Lifestyles of the Rich and Alchemical

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
Shock and irritation gave way - a little bit of way - to an unfamiliar and unexpected humility.

"I'll be damned," she said. "Alright, I see your point. Still no idea how to apply it to the stones, but I suppose I'll need to unlearn what I've learned and so forth..."

She trailed off.

"I suppose I never asked the stones what they are, did I. Reached out and just tried to feel it. I'm not much for senses, but it's a Padawan exercise after all, isn't it."

Rune Shamalain Rune Shamalain
 
Rune nodded, "Discovering the stones is an exercise for Acolytes, yes. The ancestors of my family's people did not believe in a Lightside or Darkside. All aspects of Lanu, the Force, were to be learned and understood. Connecting with each of the twelve stones opens the pathways of the mind, body, and soul to better receive the energies of the universe."

"At least that is what my mother told me. Do you remember how you learned to connect with the Force as a Padawan?"
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
Rune Shamalain Rune Shamalain

"No, I don't."

A lot went into that flat answer. Shifts from body to body might have forestalled senior moments, but body-trading also went hand in hand with partial memory loss, in Ashin's experience. All that to say, most of her youth was a featureless blur. A few muddy memories stood out from her Jedi training. Not much.

"I feel like you're circling a point. Angling for a specific answer."
 
Rune's mostly muted expression faltered for a moment, "Not on purpose." The man gently cleared his throat and shifted his stance, thinking over his next words.

"I've never kept pupils of the Force but in this exercise it is easy for someone trained to get in their own way. I think you have it: ask, do not guess; feel, do not project."

At that moment, Gabriel barreled out of the hallway and back into the kitchen, narrowly missing knocking over an island stool as he rounded the corner to fling himself at Rune's waist, "Should I bring my tools?! Am I gonna make things?!"
"Everything you will need for camp will be provided. Are you all packed now?"
"Yeah! Is the camp on the planet?"
"No, it's on the driveyard belt, up in space."
"What! I didn't pack my spacesuit!"

Rune chuckled and watched the boy bomb back down the hallway yelling to his father to find his space suit.

"I would wish you luck with your endeavors, but I feel luck will have very little do to with it," the man offered Ashin another short bow of his head and followed quietly after the child.

Before long the both he and Gabe had bid their farewells and the house was once again quiet and still.

Dissero closed the patio doors as he returned from seeing them off and asked after those items Ashin had brought of Spencer's.
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
She'd packed light, one bag in the speeder. In short order the kitchen island held a decent number of mementos - a small Mimbanese kyber shard they'd used together, a carefully braided lock of hair, an archaic hand mirror, a piece of Echani royal regalia, a rare picture of them with all three daughters.

"All significant things, in their way. I'd hoped you could take an appropriate angle off at least something here."
 
Dissero immediately eyed the kyber shard and collected the lock of hair for use. The picture was given a respectable look and smile, "They're beautiful, your girls. I've not seen any of them."

He inspected the mirror next, "I will need to ... make adjustments to the state of the hair and ... maybe this mirror. I assume all needs are permissible so long as they do not bastardize her memory?" Not that he would do that anyway, but he'd hate to ruin an object of deep sentimental value.
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
"Of course - I trust your judgment. I know you'll come at it with respect."

She ceded the hair and the shard. That was proper Mimbanese kaiburr there, a tiny fragment of the great stone that she and Spencer had used to learn to overcome ysalamiri. The stone had meant more to them than that, but the memory stood out from the fog of the past.

She re-collected the picture. "This is Ibaris, the oldest and the...silly one. Intelligent, but silly. Noelle, the dramatic one. Quinn, who's essentially me in miniature. Pragmatic, ambitious, the closest to the Dark Side of any of them. But Noelle is probably more dangerous. Less predictable. She takes after Spencer a good deal. They all do, but her the most, I think."
 
"Hm," he watched her face as she spoke of the children. He'd never known Ashin to be particularly expressive except for when insulted or angered, but he could see the softening of the lines that framed her eyes. It was good to witness, felt more real than most of his interactions with the Darksiders of the galaxy.

"Multi-faceted children from multi-faceted parents," a smile, he nodded to a picture on the wall in the kitchen, "you've met Gabriel. He is what I imagine I would have been had I grown up with anyone other than the mother I had. The curly-haired one to his left is Magdalena, on his right is her twin Saelia. Verie's holding our youngest, Ivan - he's about two now. Stoic little guy, I fear he is Grandma Lacroix reincarnate. Mags is outgoing curiosity on legs, Saelia is a bit of a prima-donna like her mother and the only one to show a strong connection to the Force thus far."

He pondered the life they would lead if Verie had been taken from him like Spencer had from Ashin. It was a feeling of drowning he didn't wish to dwell on.

"I hope to introduce you, Spencer, and the girls to all of them some day soon," Dissero pushed off the island, lifting a hand to Ashin's shoulder to give it a squeeze, "one big family party." A reality he meant to see through.

"This will be plenty to build the frame and parts of the compass. The heart," he pointed to her, "will come from you once you have finished with the stones."
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
A muscle twitched in Ashin's face. The idea of everyone all together felt distant, implausible - not just because Spencer was dead, but because the Varanins weren't as close as the Shamalain-Lacroixes. Not as...casual, affectionate.

"Speaking of, I should get back to it. Your...cousin? Nephew? I forget - he had some useful insights. He's an odd one. Polished, but odd. I couldn't get a read on him."
 
"Nephew. He's a... shy, quiet sort. Introverted I think is the word. Takes after his mother which I am grateful for. His father made Moridin look like a lost puppy."

He drilled his knuckles along the table, "I will be down in my workshop for a while and then out to my forge in the woods if you need anything. Just, ah, follow the path along the left of the lake. Lunch at noon."
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
Ah, Moridin. Now those memories were still bright and crisp a quarter century later.

"I may drop in; I'd love to see both. I'm not sure I've ever visited one of your workshops. Marrow and Illskins, of course, but not a proper workspace." She got up and sighed. "But business before diversion. I have some stones to befriend."

Ten minutes found her back in the meditation room. This time she sat on the edge of the padded dais instead of kneeling at the centre. She needed to relax, and meditation poses weren't really meant for that.

Feel the Force - wasn't that the old dictum? Though she could feel its energy flow through her as powerfully as ever, she couldn't really feel much beyond herself. Not like most other Masters could, anyway. She knew her influence on the Force was anything but subtle, and her own background noise tended to blind her. That was the tradeoff she'd made when she started taking long walks through Force Storms and along accretion disks and down into volcanoes. Throwing stones, not seeing ripples; shouting, not listening.

In some small measure, she needed to walk that back. Be passive, not aggressive. Action through inaction, as some Jedi would say.

She closed her eyes and stayed there for a very long time.
 
Back to the supply vault, Dissero stood before the shelves of velvet-lined boxes staring at the one inscribed KUNDA. Still pulled forward an inch, he took a moment with his arms folded at his chest and a hand raking through his beard to consider the need. He knew of his own penchant to over-complicate things. He knew in studying the old Masters works and the higher quality works of his associates that sometimes less was more.

He couldn't help but recite Keep It Simple Stupid through his head numerous times - a mantra he'd tried implementing over various projects. If he could managed to repeat it long enough to walk away from another potential ingredient, then he could do without. This time he wasn't so certain. Dissero reached for the box and opened it, pulling out a Kunda Stone he'd honed and polished for a different project only to leave it out at the last moment. It sat between thumb and fore like a gleaming marble and it spoke to him of its many uses, of its high quality, of its nigh pristine clarity.

It joined the other pieces in his pocket.

Vault secured, the man made his way down the hall to his workshop.

He'd never crafted a compass before but he didn't feel it to be a monumental challenge in and of itself. The issue was he wasn't sure he had the right implements to craft something of delicacy - most of those tools he left at the shops where the majority of his private orders were made. The challenge arrived in creating something complex that normally would have taken him months of planning and painstaking actuation in the breadth of a few days. Numerous ideas had already found their way onto paper and that was where he started; at the journal on his desk.

Pulling each item from his pockets he placed them carefully in a holding tray on the side.

1 sentimental mirror.
1 refined Qixoni.
1 Mimban Kyber shard.
1 lock of blond hair (did his heightened senses detect a bit of sweetpea?).
1 refined Kunda Stone.
1 refined blue Kyber crystal.

He stared at them, let his mullings take over, and stayed there for a very long time.
 
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Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
In Ashin's opinion, too many alchemical crafters just started hammering. Her best armor and blades over the years had originated as hours of sketching and basic math - no metalwork involved for quite a while. In a similar way, right now she needed to engage with the task by disengaging with it. Relaxing, listening, letting her mind wander seemed the most practical approach to following Rune's advice.

Time. She'd known it for a possibility, but now she felt relatively certain that one stone meant time, its slow march, its irresistible inevitability, its quirks and wonders. She had no particular relationship with time to draw upon, not at face value. Stone identified; stone far from attuned.
 
He'd lost track of time. Par for the course in the workshop, honestly.

Several pages had been filled with notes, sketches, thoughts, ideas. Nothing in particular struck him but such was the fickle nature of working under a deadline. No pressure. When his rear started to go numb from sitting on the bench he decided it was time to get up and move about - stocked up bloodflow was never good for the creative process. He walked his workshop and put the project from his mind. Instead he spent some time tidying up.

His time in his workshop was erratic at best, especially when the entire family was home. Daytime was for the children and nighttime was for his wife. In his youth he'd never needed much sleep, but he found those hectic hours of the day caught up to him more often than not. Chasing four children about, issuing entertainment and education and playtime and love were remarkably exhausting. So when a few hours or days aligned for free time he much rather not be bothered with keeping things neat down here.

The benches and work tables were littered with tools, notes, tomes, scrolls, pieces and parts - was that a holocron over there? Thank goodness Gabe hadn't figured out how to hack the access panel to anything down here. Yet.

Tools were picked from each surface and returned to their hooks, drawers, and boxes. He collected spare materials and parts, scraps and litter, and divided them out into their own containers. The scrapbox was looking fairly full now, as remiss as he was to discard anything of potential use, perhaps it was time to empty it out. He dropped the remaining detritus of his workspace in and walked the box over to the incinerator chute. In grabbing handfuls and pushing them through the hatch, a glimmer of metal caught his eye. In the box a metal casing of ... well, he couldn't really remember, but for some reason he felt the need to spare it. The rest went in. He set the casing aside near his current project and went about picking up what items from his archive vault needed putting-away.

To the vault he went; down the hall, second door on the left.
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
Moving on from Time felt cowardly. Pure procrastination: no reason not to tackle the task at once. But that was the wrong approach, wasn't it.

She'd spent a long time ignoring time. Some people clawed at the skills she'd mastered - body-shifting, for one; enduring past death entirely, for another - because time terrified them, but her incentive had always been more concrete: not leaving Spencer. Simple as that. Time had never come across as some implacable stalker. The luxury of privilege.

No, the more she thought about it, time was her enemy in an entirely different way: the gentle but inescapable erasure of memory. Oh, once in a while a forgetful moment would jar her, or a lost fact she'd once treasured, but by and large she forgot what she'd forgotten, and only a general ache of loss remained. And then that vanished too, until she didn't know what she didn't know - about her children, about her triumphs, about her long-dead parents.

That was the nature of ageing. Transformative, but also erosive. Maybe she understood time after all, in a way no apprentice could.

She sighed, rubbed at her stinging eyes, and decided to call the Time stone complete.
 
Gone were the days of hoarding all manner of artifact and knowledge - but that didn't mean his hoard wasn't replete with a great many things. The first vault contained the minor things; books and tombs and scrolls. Items of unique but arguably negligible value. The next vault contained items of greater renown; holocrons, datacrons, journals containing a variety of entries both heinous and benign. It was here that a good bulk of Rave Merrill's notes were kept as well as those few items of ill repute that he'd not bothered to part with. Even some of Jared Ovmar's collective had made its way here.

Over there in a heavily armored case sat the Sorkatar Holocron. Next to it that of Vulta Daanat. Xushan's Skull Holocron was given its own compartment and sat staring through the triple-layered duraglass. The Phobis Holocron was on the level below that. To the right were displayed alongside one another Velok's Holocron and Moridin's Holocron, and strangely they seemed to get along well enough. The Record of Festulus Holocron was sitting on an open shelf - Dissero had found very little value in it other than sentimentality, if only for how well it seemed to amuse Velok.

The Datacrons of Je'gan Olra'en perched on two wooden stands behind a study desk. Next to them on matching podiums were the Datacrons containing the Taurannik Codex translations.

On an enclosed bookshelf toward the back were a myriad of tomes - Ostanes' Grimoire of Sith Alchemy and Magic among them. Within the collection Dissero knew there to be several of Rave's more important journals, including that which contained the secrets of the Ankarres. Velok's "To Pass Unchallenged" also resided somewhere .. the third shelf he thought. Further journals detailing sithspawn; map guides of Dromund Kaas and the underground structures; an expedition notebook of the time-sensitive guide that lead Rave and Jared through the monolith of the Chiloon Rift (that was an interesting one); and countless more.

It wasn't as extensive a compilation as he once boasted, but it was enough to cause concern of just who he let down here.

He replaced the wayward holocron from his workshop and took a turn about the assorted artifacts around him. Who in here would have further knowledge of Force Bonds? he wondered. Perhaps Master Olra'en? Or maybe Xushan ... if he could get her to speak again. Back when he'd been deeply invested in the creation of a Phobis Device she'd been far easier to converse with. Over time, as his own affinity began to shift, he sensed a growing hint of discontentment from her and she became more and more reticent.

Olra'en, then. It had been some years since he'd read through the datacrons and he still had two hours to kill before lunch.
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
After a frustrating and fruitless hour, Ashin left the cylindrical stones again. She could, at least, get some traction on the elemental ones. Ideas had percolated through her stray thoughts all day until they'd become plans before she realized.

Air - she'd never been much for using or controlling it, but experiencing it, certainly. She'd spent most of her life on starships that saw real risk and real action - one too many depressurizations and cold-shirt crossings and hull breaches. Air was life as much as water was. And from there memory drifted to the exhilaration of leaping off one of the Spires of Hell, or down a chasm in a moon-sized Abominor, and falling what seemed like forever.
 
LUNCH

Local Nabooian rock played from an antique tuner in the kitchen - another one of Gabe's successful fix-it-and-make-it-work-again projects. Butter hissed in a frying pan. A spread of various sandwich ingredients lined the back kitchen counter. Meats, spreads, fruit, cheese. Dissero worked an expert hand at gourmet grilled cheeses, or so his children told him.

He'd taken a walk after breezing through the contents of the datacrons. A loop around the lake had always helped to clear the fog of too much information, not enough open outlets. Somewhere along the way he remembered Rune had said to him about his late wife Emmerald.

She was my compass. When I felt myself falling from the path I'd set I only needed to look for her.

The idea that Spencer was, in fact, the compass struck him as so logical it only made sense to look at this project backwards. Ashin didn't need a compass to find Spencer, Spencer needed a needle for Ashin to follow. So that is what he would do, he would build Spencer a needle for Ashin to use. The idea was percolating nicely and he felt certain that by the time he finished his lunch he would know what the next step was.
 

Ashin Cardé Varanin

Couple bodies in the garden where the grass grows
Between experience and the fact that this was, in the end, a Padawan exercise that she'd been seriously overthinking, the rest of Air came together with almost disappointing ease once she committed to it. She weighed that mild disappointment against the greater frustration of the stones she couldn't even name yet, let alone connect with. She decided to be satisfied with the former and let the latter keep burning in her belly. She'd achieve nothing by avoiding a challenge.

She nurtured her frustration, drawing deep on the Dark Side, and left the padded central plinth to go scribble in her notepad again.

ATTUNED: Water, Air, Time, Death, Energy
IDENTIFIED: Life, Earth, Fire
UNKNOWN: The four cylinders

Her gaze fixed balefully on the cylindrical stones. Their iconography meant nothing. Her instincts gave her a similar level of data. She really would need to dig deep and listen, feel, ask - things that she did not, as a matter of habit, do. But first, one last exercise in overthinking: standing there with her notepad, she focused again on pneuma, the Sith Force aspect of conscious thought.

This time, three of the four cylinders responded to one extent or another. That didn't exactly narrow it down, but a clue was a clue.
 
He hadn't mind for what Ashin might eat, if anything, but far be he from neglecting a friend and guest. A plate hosting fresh cut fruit and a grilled cheese featuring thin cuts of smoke meat entered through the open doorway to the meditation chamber. Dissero paused a moment to see if she might be amenable to the interruption before speaking, "Lunch," he tipped the plate and moved to set it down on the built-in ledge before the side strip of windows.

"I believe I have my direction for your project, how are you making out here?"
 

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