Private Many Kinds of Strangeness

[Romi Jade]

JAKKU JEDI ENCLAVE
Old Living Quarters

---​

She'd split her time between Olega, and Naboo, but she never felt more at home than here.

Secretly, she is a Keeper with the Order of the Selab, and her personal and private library she built over the years was here, in her old quarters -- still. In reality, she felt like this was the only academy she ever experienced that had an openness to the study of diverse interpretations of the Force with a Jedi lens, seeking to understand it exoterically and esoterically; this made it the perfect place to study....especially things beyond the scope of what the Jedi have been known or cared to do.

She had been struggling to adjust to being on a council again, if anything her career has shown them to be useless....it was too much red tape and bureaucracy for her liking, and not enough doing the work. History and experience had shown many things to be repeatedly true, and a few of those things were that the Jedi were always slow to act, always limited in their thinking, and always looking for hope in places that were consistently dark and horrifying. But they were not a monolith by any means. Nowadays, the Jedi were few in number, and scattered across the universe in small groups. She knew this would happen, had told them this would happen, and as of late, she felt they were on the verge of losing this war...and maybe they should.

She had given enough already.

She sat there now more so to provide clarity on the Force, stay in the loop on things and others, and to honor her apprentices Briana Sal-Soren & Lossa Aureus , but of course her being herself she couldn't not not have a plan, some sort of contingency...or hell maybe she'd take what she learned and journey off into the stars on her own.

Romi had once been apart of an elite task force of Jedi sent out to hunt Ashin Varanin and bring her to justice, she was even apart of her trial as a judge. She'd been aboard the Pomojema, and had confiscated many items, from books, to trinkets, etc all to be secured for later use in the trial. Afterwards, she saw to their overall protection, some had been kept here on Jakku with the Eremite Anchorites for study and safe keeping, and others had been sent to Ferryman's Reach.

This Sith scroll in particular was an earlier draft, concepts, thoughts, and a blueprint...mostly writers had them or an unedited version before the official version. She had many journals before producing Jade's Anthology -- but back then she hadn't quite had the time to dig in and understand it.

The scroll wasn't treated like an artifact.

Romi had already removed it from its casing, unrolled across a cleared surface, weighted at the corners to keep it flat. She didn't linger on the opening sections, blood quantities, warnings, authorial tone. That wasn't what she was looking for.

Her focus settled on the diagrams and symbols; that's where her eyes went immediately. Totem placement. Spacing. Deployment patterns.

Her eyes tracked the geometry first, then the symbols, and later the language. Lines intersecting at deliberate intervals. Rotational symmetry. Planar and volumetric configurations depending on scale. She adjusted the scroll slightly, rotating it a few degrees to follow the structure more cleanly.

"Anchors of some kind," she muttered under her breath. And they had been placed, or distributed somehow.

Her gaze moved to the next section, scaling notes, behavior variation. Interdiction strength wasn't fixed. It could pull, slow, disrupt. Tunable. That meant thresholds. That meant control.

Romi leaned back slightly, eyes still on the scroll.

"This isn't just a spell," she said quietly.

One of the Eremite Anchorites had approached, and her head whipped around, "Were you able to identify the language within this?" she asked, running a finger over the inscribed text next to the geometric figures,

"All efforts point it towards the Massassi." the Anchorite revealed.

Her expression tightened, attention returning to the text. To herself, "Then this is older than it looks…" she said quietly.

A beat.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she studied the structure again.

"Or closer to the source."

---​

 

[Romi Jade]

JAKKU JEDI ENCLAVE
Old Living Quarters

---​

The Anchorite stepped away. Romi hadn't even acknowledge it, her attention had already shifted.

She rose from her seat and moved to the adjacent wall, activating a projection surface. A faint grid flickered to life, it was empty at first, waiting. With a subtle motion of her hand, she began reconstructing the diagram from the scroll.

Not necessarily copying it, more so translating it.

Points appeared first. Then some lines. Then some arcs. She spaced them deliberately, adjusting distances, rotating the structure until the symmetry aligned. Once complete, the lattice hovered in front of her, cleaner than the parchment, stripped of alien language and ornament.

"Not planar by default…" she murmured.

With another gesture, the lattice expanded, lifting into a three-dimensional configuration. The arcs bent, and nodes shifted. What had been a flat pattern became full of volume. It was stable, and perhaps that was the intent.

She circled it slowly, and then said under her breath, "The totems are anchors..." The energy didn't originate from them, it seemed to pass through them. Defined by them, and that was a very important distinction, it mattered.

Her hand moved through the projection, isolating one node, then another, watching how the structure held when one point was removed, then how it strained when spacing shifted too far from symmetry.

It didn't just collapse immediately, there was resistance, and then it warped...

Romi stopped.

A beat.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she adjusted the spacing again, this time not evenly, but deliberately offset. The lattice didn't break, it twisted. Just a subtle shift in the arcs... and then a redistribution of tension across the structure.

She exhaled quietly. "The geometry isn't fixed, its responsive." Her gaze held on the projection, mind already moving ahead.

"If this scales…" she said softly, almost to herself, "then it doesn't just block movement…it'd more so define where movement is allowed."

Her study into Bendu Warding allowed her to understand some of the mathematics behind this, there were mystical relationships between numbers and metaphysical phenomena or ideas -- so she was seeing some of the layers here, the spiritual equations... But the Sith used a different system...and so she needed to break this down and then translate it....and that was just the geometry behind this.

The language within the incantation and the ritual itself would be other tasks on their own.

---​

 

[Romi Jade]

JAKKU JEDI ENCLAVE
Old Living Quarters

---​

Romi didn't stay with the projection.

She cleared a section of the table and set three objects down -- dense, unremarkable pieces of stone taken from the surrounding grounds. No carvings. No preparation. Just mass and placement. She arranged them according to the lattice she had mapped, adjusting their spacing until it matched the proportions she'd studied.

Not perfect, but it was close enough.

She didn't touch the incantation, not yet.

Instead, she extended her awareness outward, threading the Force through each point -- not to empower them, but to connect them. A line formed between the first two, then the third. The space between them shifted subtly, a faint distortion settling into place like heat bending air.

She held it there, watching. Adjusting. Measuring. The structure didn't stabilize...it resisted.

The lines between the anchors pulled unevenly, tension gathering at one point before redistributing across the others. The distortion tightened, then warped, folding inward before snapping apart entirely. The field collapsed, leaving the space empty again.

Romi reset the stones without hesitation. Same placement, and same spacing. But, this time with a different input. The distortion formed again, wider this time, less controlled. It pulsed once, briefly holding shape before breaking apart, dispersing before it could anchor itself into anything stable.

She exhaled slowly, steady. "The structure's right," she said quietly, more to herself than anything else. "It's just not holding..."

Her eyes flicked back to the projection on the wall, then down to the stones in front of her.

"The ritual isn't building this…" she murmured.

A brief pause. "It's stabilizing it."

---​