trans_9 | My Lunch Turned Invisible. [ Open ]

Jacen Solo was seated in the mess hall, yes, but did he have some sort of sustenance in front of him to go along with the place he was seated in? No. He was just sitting at a table, staring blankly to the surface with his hands clasped in his lap and eyes faintly glazed over. No matter where he had been since he arrived here, this was usually how he looked. Completely and utterly lost in thought.

Why had he been brought here? And why had he been brought so soon after he fought for the right to finally relax? It was only days after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong ended. Days.

He had been thinking of traveling around the galaxy, maybe making a stop by Hapes to visit an old friend, maybe stopping by Yavin 4 for a quick round of meditation techniques in the now-ruined Jedi Temple, but no. Not anymore. Now Jacen was left to ponder once more. He was here now. He had met new people (which was usually a plus to him) and he had seen his Aunt and Uncle (he still wondered why they were here too -- and why there had been vague sparks of discomfort when he spoke to them) and he had heard other members of his family were here. Why hadn't he found them?

Jacen didn't want to admit that he probably hadn't found them yet because he was too busy sitting around ~~moping~~ brooding.

His stomach growled at him quite loudly but he was too busy listening to the never-ending chatter of his own thoughts. Just like usual.

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He thought about what she had said, nodding slowly and pondering the words. They made sense -- a lot of sense, especially to Jacen. He watched her retrieve the bowl and felt his eyebrows raise at her next words. "I haven't met Master Kenobi here yet, but I am very interested to hear about your order."

Jacen was always interested in learning new things, especially about other ways of life and orders of people.

Sheeana took it as a challenge to be concise, compressing thousands of years of Bene Gesserit history down to the most essential parts.

"We are one of the oldest of the schools founded in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad. With thinking machines gone from our universe, it was imperative that humanity be able to not just survive but mature as a species without them. That was and is our mission: to create a humanity that is mature, no longer manipulated by demagogues, afraid of their own natures, or imprisoned in the patterns of rigid, black and white thinking. "

She drank with a thoroughness unseen in those who hadn't grown up with the moisture discipline of the desert.

"The masses, however, usually think of us for what it is we outwardly do, rather than our inward goals, the things we teach our students. And there is much we teach too: Prana Bindu which is the art of total bodily control down to the cellular level, the Voice of Command, the Weirding Way of battle, the arts of manipulating individuals and changing societies...Some of us, through judicious application of Spice Melange and Prana Bindu, open up the gates to Other Memory. Those of us who do are called Reverend Mothers. A Reverend Mother has access not just to the standard Bene Gesserit skills, but also Other Memory...That is, the complete memory-lives of all our female ancestors and whichever Reverend Mothers have Shared with us before we died."

A beat and she studied his face for signs of an overload of information.

"Was that too much?"

He sat silently, watching Sheeana as she spoke and compared the two in his head. Just about everything she was going over, Jacen could find a link to the Jedi Order somehow. She wasn't overloading him with information, but he was getting overloaded with his own questions. He had the urge to go find these schools and people and learn from them.

Of course, now that he seemed to be stuck here, he knew that it wouldn't be happening. He didn't even know where most of these people and beings had come from, he had never heard of their homeworlds.

"No, no. Definitely not too much. Just enough to make me even more curious." Jacen brushed his hair out of his face and leaned forward. "How much did my Uncle tell you about the Jedi?"

"Enough to take the edge off my curiosity...but not enough to satisfy me." She didn't mean it to come out that way. OK, maybe a little. But she wasn't seriously hitting on him, more leaving him little hooks he could snag onto if he wished. "I know the external details, manipulation of the force, fighting with the lightsaber. I know less of the esoteric things, the central philosophy. You have the overarching goal of doing good for your universe as a whole, but I mostly haven't been told what that entails or the finer points of your philosophy." For instance, she had no idea if the Je'dai had ever had an equivalent to the Jessica conflict, the Honored Matre invasion or Darwi's heresy.

"The thing with the philosophy of our Order is that it seems different to each person who is a part of it. They each look at it differently and use their skills in different fashions."

The old Order, from what he learned when he was little, wasn't really like that. Everyone was taught the same thing and learned the same skills. This was one of the reasons Jacen wanted to meet Obi-Wan Kenobi. He wanted to learn more about the old Jedi Order from someone who was there. Where he came from though, every Jedi he knew seemed to be a part of the Order for the same reason, but had different ways of achieveing their goals. They all honed different skills and looked at the Force with different eyes and different minds. Jacen knew this firsthand from the arguments he had with his own brother, Anakin, over reasons to use the Force.

"If I was to share the finer points of the philosophy of the Jedi Order, I'd technically be telling you my opinion on the finer points of the philosophy of the Jedi Order." Jacen smiled and tilted his neck, an audible crack sounding.

A stress crack. Early onset arthritis if he keeps this up. She thought. "I know pressure points that could be helpful for that..." Sheeana offered. "But alright, you have a point. Tell me your opinion. In the end that's all any of us can give. Even a Reverend Mother can do no more than try to divine truth from a multitude of opinions."

"For what?" He hesitated for a moment before realizing what she was speaking of. "Oh," he said, pointing to his neck. "Yeah, I need to do something about that. I always figured I just got creaky joints from my dad though. You could always tell when he was coming down the hallway at the apartment when I was little. His knee cracks."

Jacen stared at the table for a few moments before inhaling deeply and looking back to Sheeana.

"My opinion?" He knew if he started rambling that he wouldn't stop, and this was a topic he could definitely talk (and talk and talk) about. "My stance on our Order and what we do with the Force usually concerns one's inner peace and strength and what they think is right. My brother always thought we should seek out problems and force ourselves in to fix them because we were given access to this 'power' -- I always felt that when an injustice showed itself, we help to fix it. Very recently, before..." He waved his hand around to the mess hall, "...all this, I decided that when injustices showed themselves, I had to choose and act right then and there, I could never sit and think on it... which is what I was usually good at."

He shrugged, knowing he had rambled when he didn't mean to.

"I guess my philosophy concerning our Order and our power is basically that we should use them only when needed to keep things peaceful and settled. We don't force our way into anything and help when help is truly needed. I always act at the first sign of a wrongdoing though. I've always been the peacekeeper in the family." Jacen felt a weak grin forming as his mind went back to the rest of the Solo clan.

Sheeana stood and crossed over to him. If he acceded, he'd feel her fingertips press spots on the back of his neck and shoulders which would make the muscles release their tension immediately. It was a good thing she liked to listen to philosophy as much as she liked to expound on it.
"What we must strive for always! is to find the natural flow and go with it." Sheeana quoted Taraza, the Mother Superior before her own predecessor. "But is keeping things peaceful and ordered always the best idea though? Do humans progress as a species fastest when they are secure or when in crisis? We have a saying where I come from: Beware the safe path. Follow it and it will lead you to stagnation." Leto the Tyrant had shown her universe that lesson by example.

My Lunch Turned Invisible. [ Open ]

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