westwhere | the weather vane will say it smells like rain today

Magic. Either the translator was still on the fritz, or she really was talking about magic. Which usually would've meant it was complete slight-of-hand sleenshit, but she had been using the thing when she didn't know anybody had been watching.

And people did refer to what Jedi did as magic, sometimes.

"Well, there's nothing like that where I'm from." Hopefully. It was worth checking, though. He was trying to stay casual, but he wasn't quite managing to hide the tension. He seemed wary of coming any closer. "What else does it do? Move things by wishing it, read minds, that sort of thing?"

Part of her expected that any conversation about magic with someone who hadn't known of its existence prior would not be without some form of nervousness on the as yet uninformed side - but she was rattled by being here already, and really didn't want to scare the guy.

"I couldn't read minds," Lily said quickly. She knew it was theoretically possible (and suspected her old Headmaster very capable of it) but hadn't done more than casually research Legilimency for the occasional term paper.

"I can fix things? Protect myself if I have to, though," she gestured down at the satchel at her feet. "Not as effectively as I had hoped when taken by surprise." Shaking her head at the very unpleasant thought, she looked back to the stranger, realizing he had seen her at work and knew more about her than she did about him.

"Where do you come from?"

Did he believe that denial? Maybe. Reading non-clones was difficult. But most kids out of their element would have a harder time being convincing. And he'd seen no indication that she knew what he was, which was the important part. A padawan would've known, she would've been commanding troops already. She wasn't one of them.

Alright. That meant he could answer her question without things getting bad.

"Kamino. It's a backwater place, out in the Rishi Maze." Which was highly classified, but he had no reason not to say it. It wasn't much of a home anyway, just a place where you got made and trained.

"Sorry for being on edge, kid. I've seen something like magic before, getting used by some terrible people. Just wanted to make sure you weren't one of them." He should've figured it out quicker, but he was off his game right now. Seemed like they all were.

"My name's Slick. What's yours?"

"Kamino?" Lily had never heard of such a place. It sounded like something out of a book, as did the Rishi Maze. "Where is that? Is it in Europe?" He certainly didn't sound like an American, anyway.

"I'm Lily," she brightened, relieved that he finally gave his name and held out her wandless hand for him to shake. "I come from England, the Midlands specifically, it's also a backwater place." She paused, considering briefly before continuing. "And it's alright. I'm on edge too, coming here was not pleasant." To say the very least.

"No, it's--" Probably the translator again. "Kamino's in the little satellite galaxy just off galactic north, whatever you'd call it." It was probably visible in the night sky, if they were facing the right direction. That'd be one way to figure out what region this system was in, and keep his bearings on-planet at night. Look for the galactic center and one of the two big companions, then try and find some of the other five small ones. Basic night sky navigation, worked on just about any planet anywhere.

"Good to meet you, Lily." He reached out with a black gloved hand to shake. "Never heard of England either, but I'm guessing it's better than here." That was a low bar, sure, but this place was better than where he'd been.

Galaxies? That sort of talk was right out of the Barsoom novels, and it definitely wasn't what she expected to hear. She breathed a quiet laugh at the remark, looking around the storage barn as she nodded in agreement.

"Anything's better than here, at least back home there aren't people in the forests trying to do you harm." Which was, based on the explanation Karsa gave her, one among many of the big problems here.

Edited 2021-06-07 02:01 (UTC)

Would be nice to think this was the worst it could get. "Figures," he sighs. Hostiles in the forest sounded normal to him--clones didn't get sent to peaceful planets, after all.

"We should have somebody on watch, then, especially at night. Has anyone gotten a roster set up?" And could he be put at the bottom of it? Guard duty was the most boring thing in the universe. It needed to be done, though.

Lily blinked at the talk of rosters and shook her head. "Nobody's told me much of anything, apart from don't go outside at night no matter what. If there is a roster, I don't think I'm on it."

Her eyes narrowed, considering. She appreciated that at least Slick was being productive in his thinking. A sense of purpose was a valuable thing to have, especially as adrift as she'd felt since arrival.

"I'll help you. I stood guard at school, after a fashion." She'd walked around after hours issuing detentions to students out of their rooms. Not the same thing. "How did you come to be here?"

"You're a cadet, then?" That'd count for something, at least. That and, y'know. The magic.

As to the question... should he answer that? Nobody knew who or what he was here. He could just be what he wanted to be.

And what he wanted to be was somebody who stood up to the Republic for what they'd done. Hells, he was just going to say it, and nobody could stop him. "I was a slave, made to fight for the Republic. I was working on a plan to free myself and my brothers when I got caught." He gestured to some fading bruises on his face. "I took a couple knocks to the head, don't remember much after that." Honestly he wasn't sure how many of his injuries were from the fight, or the jail once he'd been dumped on-planet.

But more importantly, this was only the second time he'd just come out and said it all, ever. He'd had to pretend to be loyal when he was still in the army. Here, he didn't have to hide it anymore. This was a random kid with a magic wand he'd met couple of minutes ago, and he could just come out and admit to hating the Republic.

That by itself was enough to make him feel a little giddy, despite all the crap that'd been shoveled into his life recently. "So as far as I'm concerned, this place is better. Still terrible, but better."

"Not exactly, I didn't go to military school or anything like that. I went to one to study magic." She had a feeling that explanation would be as lost on Slick as her referencing the Midlands when she told him where she'd come from, but she was doing what she could.

When he called himself a slave Lily looked unabashedly aghast that such a thing could even still exist. Never mind that she had no idea what the Republic was, the situation sounded horrible, and Lily was nothing without that innate, trusting compassionate streak.

"How many brothers do you have? What will happen to them if you're here?"

That knocked down the good feeling he'd had there. Though maybe it should--for a moment there, it'd all been about just him. That wasn't how it was supposed to be.

"They're going to keep dying. We're clones, hundreds of thousands of us made to order and indoctrinated to fight for the Republic. Didn't work on me, for some reason." And he wished he knew why.

"I'm not sure the rest even understand it. We're supposed to think the whole mess is good." He'd wanted to try and convince his squad, but all of the ones that survived Geonosis just doubled down on believing it all. He'd had nowhere to turn but to the Separatists.

"They probably hate me now, but I had to do it."

The more Slick spoke, the more he really did sound like something out of an early 19th century novel about outer space. Clones? Galaxies? The nature of his predicament, while rather unfathomable given the context of the life she'd come from was unmistakably dire, and the concerned look on her face spoke volumes.

"What did you have to do?" Certain that it would make about as much sense as the talk of his hundreds of thousands of brothers, and the Republic, she still wanted to give him the space to talk if he needed to. Based on her observations, he seemed like he could do with talking out what he'd gone through.

"Are you hungry? I've got a flattened bag of crisps I can repair for you, they're sealed, but I'm afraid they spent the night at the bottom of the lake." Along with her, and the rest of her possessions.

"Undermine the Republic, and the religious fanatics they put in charge of us. It put clones in danger, but nothing would be better for us in the long run than the Republic losing their war, as fast as possible." The more Jedi died, the less their powers could be used to control clones, either directly or by reputation. They'd been told for all ten years of their training that Jedi were the best, most infallible beings in the galaxy. Watch more of them fail and die, and maybe his brothers would've come around.

It'd been the only plan he really had. It'd been stupid, dangerous--hell, just days ago he'd deliberately put himself in the crosshairs of a Separatist ambush he'd help organize, to make sure the Seps got their best shot at the Jedi. It'd failed, and men had died for it, but it had to be done.

This was probably too heavy for some civvie cadet. "You ask a soldier if he wants food and the answer's pretty much always going to be yes. But it's yours, kid. Keep it in case you need it. Had some trouble there?" He gestures to the book she'd been trying to dry out.

Still thunderstruck and trying to imagine the scale of Slick's ordeal, Lily's frown deepened, looking down at the wet bag. "Were they the terrible people you mentioned? Who used something like magic where you come from?"

She had a sneaking suspicion that it would be the case. Magic, or things like it, were a powerful tool of oppression in the wrong hands - fanatical hands especially.

"Not all magic users have the best intentions," she added in a slightly softer voice, shaking her head to rid her thoughts of the war back home and the terrible things that had begun to happen.

Looking back up at him when he asked her about her soggy things, she nodded. "I don't know how it happened. I spent the night in the lake, the thing in it kept me down there until dawn when I could swim free. I'm lucky my wand and all my things made it, I just have to dry them."

And never ever think about that thing in the bottom of the lake again.

"Got it in one." Lily might not be from the Republic, but it looked like she understood. No convincing required. That was... a much bigger relief than he'd anticipated. It probably showed.

"Anybody calling themselves a Jedi comes down here? Don't trust them. Beings in brown and tan robes, mostly, armed with lightsabers. They pretend to be all about peace and justice, but it's a lie. They're deadly, and they can get into your head and start changing things if they really want to." Best to make sure people here knew, even if he wasn't sure how much of his knowledge of Jedi was their own propaganda about themselves.

It still felt unreal, being able to talk about the whole thing, like something he still shouldn't be doing if he wanted to keep safe. But if they showed up here? Nobody would believe him over them, if they got the first word on the subject. They were all serene mystical authority, and he was just a sergeant.

Just a sergeant, stuck on a planet that was getting weirder by the second. "In the lake?" He'd heard that right? In the lake.

"Guess you're lucky to have that magic, then." And he was staying away from any and all lakes until he got properly armed. The kid looked like it'd put her through a lot, magic or no. "Do you remember where you encountered this thing?" He needed to start drawing up maps or something, pull together the basic intel about what in the hells was going on here.

"Jedi?" A beat pause. "What's a lightsaber?" The mental feats he described sounded far too much like the dark arts for her taste, and the thought of encountering someone who could get inside her head and change her thoughts, or her memories was chilling.

"It wasn't magic, it was," huffing out a determined sigh she pulled the arm of her sweater up to reveal the handprint-shaped bruise around her wrist. "There's something, someone maybe, at the bottom of that lake and they know how to hurt someone." Dropping her arm she looked back up at Slick and shook her head. "I don't know how it is I didn't drown, it's all so hazy, but I remember the way it held my arm while I drifted down there."

"It's a plasma sword, cuts through just about anything." Before he'd seen one, it had never made sense why the Jedi used them. But then it made sense: Lightsabers worked for them, and nobody else.

He wanted to ask her what it was she'd seen, back on--Ingland, was that the name of her planet? Wherever that was, it seemed like it'd taught her to think about these things in a way the Republic didn't allow. But the kid had enough on her plate already. It could wait a moment.

He raised an eyebrow at the bruise. "Well that's a new one." And disturbing. "No swimming for me, then. Any other injuries?" She seemed tough enough for a civvie, but there was no point letting someone limp around for no reason when--

Well, he didn't have a medkit with him, but he at least knew some basic field medicine and how to rough it through injuries without breaking yourself more, for whatever little that was worth.

His description left her with the image of robed, severe people with glowing swords, bursting into rooms and seizing control of one's thoughts. It sounded very familiar to Lily, who frowned thoughtfully at the ground while she considered.

"No," she shook her head and let her hand fall back to her side, looking down at herself as if she were making a last-minute check for any damage.

"And you?" Still appearing very concerned for Slick and the plight of his absolutely massive family she looked back up at him. "How did you come to be here?"

"Good." And surprising, given, y'know, night in a lake. "I'd say you got lucky."

He didn't, though. "I messed up. A couple of officers found me out, and I got captured." There's bits of it that he can remember distinctly, but there's more that the head injury's muddled into a haze of half-formed memories and raw anger.

"The last thing I knew, I was getting shipped away to somewhere. And then," he waves a hand vaguely toward Sa-Hareth. "Just woke up in the prison down by the settlement there. Don't remember what happened in between. I guess they dumped me here. Don't know why. I was pretty sure they were just going to shoot me." He was a traitor. As far as he knew, that was a capital offense.

"What about you? I can almost make sense of why I'm here, but you seem like a good kid."

Hearing that Slick's arrival was as hazy to him as a good part of hers still was, was almost a relief. That she still couldn't recall how she came to be at the hands of the people in the forest was just beyond the reach of her mind unsettled Lily greatly, it was reassuring that she wasn't the only one confused arriving here.

While he had gotten away with it a few times, being called a good kid finally caught her attention, and Lily's narrowed her eyes at him, suddenly amused.

"How old are you? How old do you think I am? You talk as though you were twice my age." It certainly sounded like he had been through quite a lot, regardless of how old he was, but the way he referred to her as though he were twice her age struck her as somewhat odd, and a little funny.

"I'm ten." Which was a whole other bucket of slime the Republic and Kaminoans had dumped on them, but at moments like this, it could be funny. "And I'm a sergeant, which is the part that matters. Everyone corporal and below is a kid."

"At least, that's how it is in the army." And technically, that wasn't him anymore. "I've got a lot of habits to break," He pauses for a moment, smirking. "Though I'm not sure I'm going to work too hard on that one. What d'you think?"

the weather vane will say it smells like rain today

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