Post
by Vaya Mer'darrow » Thu Feb 06, 2020 8:40 pm
Vaya, who had had no idea where it was going when she leaned in to match the smiling Juri, smirked like she had just made a dirty joke. This was one part artifice, in case anyone was spying on them (in the middle of a disaster zone?). The rest was genuine amusement that Juri was basically acting like she was asking if Vaya had noticed the posterior on the cute so-and-so nearby. She’s also using the past tense. She gestured to a fallen chunk of masonry wide enough for two, and sat.
She spoke in a quiet voice. “I didn’t really think about them at all, for most of my life. Never met a Jedi Knight.” A careful half-truth, there, less because she didn’t trust Juri and more because it wasn’t her secret to share. “They guarded the Republic, I guess, but what had the Republic ever done for me?
“At the University, you specialize a lot. People have been picking at history for so long that it’s like people who keep on cutting a pastry in half over and over because they don’t want to take the last piece.” She made a mincing gesture, one hand’s edge towards the other’s palm. “I ended up picking a sub-field, and then a sub-sub-field, because that’s where the grants and the least obnoxious PI’s were.” As is usually the case with Juri, she doesn’t stop to explain maybe-obscure terms, trusting her to pick it up from context or ask. Also, she was rambling because of the damned heat, and apparently comfortable enough with Juri to let herself.
“Anyway, that led me to my current interest, in things,” she dropped her voice a little lower, and said the words with the exact same intonation she might name some kind of feitsh, ”ancient and mystical.” She continued, still quiet but normal. “Doing that I mostly got the sense that the Jedi were real pains in the ‘palps. Both personally -- I’ve been told to back off culturally sensitive materials on more planets than you have fingers, but the Jedi act like they’re cosmopolitan beings of the Galaxy. Then all of a sudden you have a librarian with a laser sword telling you they can’t let you read their stuff because it’s ‘forbidden.’” She made air quotes with her fingers and her antennapalps simultaneously.
“But they also were just so… monolithic! There’s other traditions out there that speak of something like…” she had briefly let herself get more engaged, realized she was getting too animated for this sort of public conversation, and leaned back with a smile. “... the, you know, whatever. But the Jedi have been… were so big for so long, it’s hard to find them in all the noise.”
She grew more subdued. “Now, though… historians read a lot of narratives manufactured by people with power. They’re the ones most likely to survive for millenia, after all. And I can see the story changing in front of my eyes. The day before the Clone Wars ended, they were heroes who could fling around starships with their minds. The day after, they were sorcerous traitors who almost took over the Galaxy and had to die. You still hear that on places like Bankor where they’re being hunted.
“Other planets, though?” She took on a mock-officious tone. “‘Oh, the Jedi? Weird old religious order. There were only ever 10,000 of them. How odd that such a relic was part of government.’” She frowned. “In ten years? It’ll probably be ‘Jedi who?’”
~Human (er, Balosar) | Antiquarian (whatever that means) (probably something sketchy) | Keen eye, sharp tongue | Dressed for fieldwork
Usually carrying: banal clothing, comlink, ascension gun, (concealed carry?) | In action: also A/KT tracker vest, infrabinoculars
Profile | Suspicion: 1.7