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WHO: Mal Durrish and YOU
WHEN: Early May
WHERE: Various
WHAT: Mal keeping up and meeting people - open to all new/existing interactions! Happy to build on existing CR or meet new people!
NOTES\WARNINGS: Will add if needed.

(Meeting your friendly neighbourhood Jedi...)

Target Practice - Open!

She kept to the outskirts for this part of her training, certainly. It wasn't that it was necessary, per se. Military service and then Jedi training had kept her weapons skills pretty sharp. And Jedi from the older versions of the Order might find the idea of a Jedi doing blaster practice to be a bit...gauche, or at the very least unusual - but practice definitely made perfect. Especially here, where she didn't know she could count on much of anything.

At one end of the clearing she'd set up a few cans at various distances. She stood at the other, checking over her trusty Bryar pistol. It was the sidearm of choice of the Jedi Master Kyle Katarn - whom she had a little bit of hero worship for, all things said and done. But it also was just a damn good choice, quite frankly. Not as powerful as a BlasTech, and not as flashy - but it'd be accurate and reliable.

She had made sure it was cleaned, readied - and took aim at the first can, standing firmly. There was a light choom sound, the blaster bucked slightly, and a yellow bolt of energy shot out across the clearing, blasting the first can off of its resting place. Ok, not so bad.

She nodded, approving, and set her sights for the next shot.

Saber Practice - Open!

Nearer in to the Apartments, she found the first open ground she could. Slowly she drew out a circle in the dirt with a boot, then settled herself in the center of it. The heavy cylinder of her lightsaber was taken from her hip, held in front of her. She took a deep breath, centered herself in the Force, and in the moment, and then ignited the weapon.

With a snap-hiss and a slight hint of ozone on the air, the blue blade shone in the light of the early morning. She settled into the first form, and for a moment, she stilled. Then, slowly at first, she began to move through each of the positions. Whatever doubts she had disappeared in these moments. This she could do, this she could always rely on - moving with precision from step to step, saber moving from place to place.

Then the movements became more elaborate; practice cuts and parries, shifting from movement to movement with quick ease. The lightsaber made its unique sounds as it cut through the air - and to anybody observing, it would appear to be a matter of grace. Her movements are smooth, seemingly easy - and gaining complexity by the moment.

Exercise - Open!

She could also be found in workout clothes, for once actually disposing of the hooded jacket, long sleeves, and gloves that seemed to be an absolute uniform for her. The lightsaber remained at her hip, because some things were universal, but the black exercise shirt was new. The bare arms revealed scars, here and there - signs that her life had certainly not been one in which the word softness had featured.

But it might not be noticeable since she'd be jogging when someone ran into her, or at best stretching before doing so - she wasn't pushing herself for speed, not this time, but she was aiming for endurance.

She followed a route that wound through most of this strange place; controlling her breathing and coming to a stop once after every lap of her circulating.

Maybe you are doing similar, or run into her when she stops to drink from a canteen, or grabbing a towel from her small pack to wipe off her face and neck.

Diner - Open!

Of course, a woman has to eat - and the diner has become a favourite haunt of hers. In part because the caf - or coffee, as other universes seem to call it - is excellent to her taste buds. But also because there's so much food there that is both tasty but also that she's never seen before.

She has a little sheet of paper on the table next to her - the menu is written out on it, with check boxes next to every item. One by one, she's trying everything, and a good number are checked off already. The problem being that she's discovered a few favourites, which keep tempting her back.

First and foremost? Waffles. What universe came up with these? Fluffy and crunchy at the same time; can be topped with nearly everything - though this Maple syrup is just...wonderful.

She may be on her second helping.

CYA!

[Always happy to open up custom prompts! Drop me a PM or contact me on plurk if you have an idea!]

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"Good shot," she comments with a nod. "Y'got some good experience to make that work on the first go."

But there's more to talk about, really.

"Depends on the person for what model people go for. Me, I picked up this idea from a more famous Jedi...this actually started life as a rifle, but actually works better when you break it down. Other people go for other ideas. And some people specialize, going with all sorts of things. Some like sonic weapons, others go for heavy-duty disruptors...which are pretty much illegal everywhere, and most of the time are back-room jobs as likely to explode in your hands as do the job."

She continues. "Some people, for specialization or for cultural reasons, still use slugthrowers like yours. Now that Jedi like me are turning up again, I'll bet we see more of them."

"I'd better be a good shot. That's, like, my whole thing."

He has only a few jobs as the Rogue of the party: he has to be good at dealing with traps, with sneaking through any areas that need a deft hand, hone his investigative skills, and be able to shoot things with relatively good accuracy. He's less impressive than his friends. No super-strength on his side, no incredible feats of faith and magic, no ability to inspire or destroy with a single word. It's just him, his gun, and the infernal engine that is his brain.

If he doesn't have that, he's nothing. He hands the blaster back to Mal, still looking pleased at having had the chance to shoot it; as much as he'd like to shoot it more, he's too cognizant of its limited charges to feel justified in doing so.

"I've never heard of a Jedi before. What is that? And why're, um, slugthrowers so effective against them?" He scratches his cheek. "Do you guys have ways to guard against blasters, but not actual bullets?"

That seems like a huge oversight.

She chuckles.

"I keep telling people we're warrior monks just to save time, but...we're kind of defenders of the weak and protectors of life. And, well..."

She unclips the lightsaber and takes two steps back.

"This is our primary means of defence."

The lightsaber ignites with a snap-hiss, the blue blade thrumming constantly.

"In a universe with ninety-nine percent blasters? All great. I can deflect that all day. The rarer stuff is a lot more dangerous, and relatively few of us have come up against it."

The implication that her skill with the blade is quick enough to intercept light beams being the buried lede in all that.

Riz takes a small step back as Mal unsheaths - no, activates - her sword, humming with an energy that he has to correct himself on not being arcane in nature. In front of his eyes, it feels absolutely insane to call it anything but magic, but he's rapidly learning that other places don't rely on arcanotech -- all it is is tech, plain and simple. It's a little harder for him to wrap his head around defenders of the weak and protectors of life thing, less because he's not on board with the mission statement (nobody in their right mind would argue against that sort of thing, only against who constitutes as innocent), but because of how truly general that statement is.

And that it requires cleaving through people with petrifying energy-swords, apparently. "You know, where I'm from, monks do strictly hand-to-hand. You've kind of left that part aside," Riz says with a flash of a grin. His eyes aren't on her, but remain on the blade, blue energy reflecting off of his large yellow eyes. To deflect bullets isn't such a surprise (that is the whole monk thing in a nutshell, after all), but doing it with a sword... that's different.

"What is it that you do? Like, what are you guys fighting? Is there some head monk that tells you guys where to go and what to do? Not that I'm not on board with your mission statement. It just sounds complicated when guns and swords get involved."

Not that what he's training to do is much different, but adventurers have much less lofty claims. Nobody is in denial about just the sort of violent maniacs all adventurers are, Riz included.

"I mean, I can, but when you've got a universe in which everybody and their brother has blasters...gotta have an advantage, right?"

She slowly brings the saber around in an arc. "And trust me, it takes a lot to get good at this thing. And as for what we're fighting..." She sighed.

"That's a very long story. The idea is to defend people, keep them safe wherever we go across the galaxy. And we try to fight the things that are out there which are legitimately evil." A slight pause. "And that probably sounds super sketchy to anybody not from our galaxy, but trust me, evil is...pretty straightforward where I'm from. At least the kind we tend to deal with. Warlords, criminal empires, dark force users - it's all in a day's work, you know?"

She de-activates the lightsaber, reclipping it to her belt.

"It is complicated. In some ways. In others, it's really simple. A statement that may or may not help make any sense out of anything else I've said."

"There is such a thing as people being objectively evil. I do believe that. I guess... it's just harder to figure out people being objectively good."

It's a deeply cynical statement from a young man, but it comes from a place of honest self-reflection after spending a couple of years surrounded by incredible violence. When he looks back at his own participation, there's nothing that he regrets. Not really. There's a couple of times he thinks that he'd perhaps gone a little overboard with things, but not so much so that it keeps him up at night. But can he truly call it good to shoot off a guy's fingers, even if he was a complete piece of shit? Or to kill all those pirates, even though they'd come after them first? Sometimes it feels as though once you have a gun or a sword in-hand, there's a limit to the objective morality of your actions in favour of the desire to stay alive.

People who can confidently say that they fight only for the greater good are, Riz thinks, probably a lot more dangerous than anyone else. Not that he can argue against killing a bunch of warlords. He shrugs. "I've killed a bunch of evil people too, don't get me wrong. It's just -- complicated? It's complicated. Are people, like, generally cool with you guys? Warlords aside?"

"Oh, I hear you. My fellow Jedi are...I don't know how they're real, sometimes, but they are."

If he were to voice his feelings, she'd understand them. The thing about a Jedi is that they live in certainty. They are guided by the Force, guided by their code, their morality - and the foes of that are always so clear. When the moment comes, the question of whether or not to take a life is...frighteningly simple.

She looks to Luke Skywalker, for instance. A man who would do everything in his power to avoid a fight. But once it became inevitable, once there were the lives of innocents on the line - he could efficiently and without any hesitation dismantle armies. But he'd also brought down the Empire by remembering how important love was.

How fearful was such a man, to an opponent? To someone who didn't know the peace, inside, that drove him? It's one reason she's so open about the weapons she carries. It's a dictum he's passed on - a Jedi should be open, should be honest. They have to be. They have to be honest, above board. Otherwise it was all too easy to appear to be a threat - the thing of nightmares.

"Yeah, it is, sometimes. Other times we get lucky, I suppose. And honestly, once? Once Jedi were the keepers of justice in the universe. People could depend on the fact that the Jedi would be there to help when they needed it. To end famines, end plagues - tear down warlords and oppressors. Us, we're...well, we're rebuilding. There's only a few hundred of us. We're doing our best in a galaxy where a lot of people aren't sure we were just...tales."

She shrugs.

"So yeah, complicated in my time, at least. And people know we're a lot more mortal than they used to, which...heh, again, complications."

Riz doesn't buy what she's selling. But, Riz thinks, he wouldn't buy what she's selling from anyone. It's not the messenger, it's the message. Maybe that makes him a pessimist, he doesn't know, but he doesn't believe he's ever lost out on anything by being too careful.

(He doesn't know what he's missed out on -- he's been too careful to stick around and find out.)

But Mal doesn't need to know that. Going ahead and saying it out loud would just be needlessly rude, a little like going up to someone religious and loudly arguing about them about their god. It's just something you don't do. And like religion, if it gives this woman a sense of purpose and comfort, then that's that.

The history of it all is much more interesting to him than choosing to poke holes in a story he'd really like to be true. "People think you might not even exist?" That, at least, piques his interest. That's..."

Yeah. He can connect the dots. "That's not a case of people leaving your um, your Order, is it? Something awful happened."

Not that she wouldn't be used to it - it's a big galaxy with a lot of strange opinions out there.

She nods. "We got...well, wiped out, really. Jedi have an ancient enemy called the Sith. An inversion in almost every way, we've been ranged against them for, like tens of thousands of years. It gets pretty complicated, but they basically finally figured out a stealth approach and one of their number took over the galactic government and purged the Jedi."

She sighs.

"In the intervening decades, he used just plain old imperial power and his own abilities to wipe out all knowledge of the Jedi he could. In a couple decades, we went from a regular sight to a legend. Oh, and as a nice little sting in the tail, he also left behind trapped knowledge - in case force-users sought it out, so they'd fall into the dark side and he might get a new tool out of it."

"I'm part of the return," she said, leaving out a lot. "There were a few survivors, and we've recaptured a lot of hidden knowledge. But there were once tens of thousands of us - there's barely a a few hundred Jedi and trainees these days. Nothing like what we once were. Or will be for a long time."

This sort of tale is -- while not good, it is at least familiar, albeit on a much larger scale than anything gets in Riz's own word. A noble monastic order pitted against a great evil (fiendish in nature, he'd imagine) and wiped out, only for its remainders to continue fighting for their cause. If they had a God, it's the sort of thing that would make a God beguilingly powerful, the incredible devotion of few occasionally capable of more spectacular things than the mild devotion of many.

Riz knows it's not that simple, and that Mal's world is entirely different from his own, but it's much easier for him to make sense of it if he puts it in his own words. Considering Mal's age - she can't be past her late twenties, by Riz's estimation - she didn't live through any of it. Just stories, told by the survivors.

Sometimes people just nod passively along to make it look like they're paying attention. With Riz, even if he doesn't move or talk at all during this story, it's abundantly clear that she has the weight of all of his attention on her, a heavy thing that some of his peers have historically found a bit unnerving. He has a tendency to stare.

"I'm sorry that happened," he says plainly, but not disingenuously. That's, uh -- that's a lot." What else can be said about something that tragic, really? "That must have been a while before your time, though, right? Were you raised by one of the survivors, or something?"

It's a bit unusual, but only because she's not used to people weighing it so carefully. It's a good thing. Probably.

"Oh, wow, heh, no, I wish I were. It was...a lot stranger for me. No, I grew up a street kid on a crime-riddled hellhole. Joined up with the bad guy's space navy when I was sixteen - kinda lied about my age - because, hey, square meals, right?"

She shook her head.

"Turned out I had what they call a marginal Force talent - just enough that I was great at piloting troop transports to assault spots and coming out alive. Then...a lot of history happened, really. I-"

She pauses.

"Look, it was all part of the secrets that got blathered about the place...I don't want to just drop a ton of things on you, really. You've already taken on a lot, and I'm thankful for that much."

"It's okay. I'm the one who asked. And I asked because I'm interested. It's all pretty, um, heavy? Personal?" He flashes her an uneasy grin, all sharp teeth and pink tongue curled up behind them, though it couldn't look any less predatory. He's aware that sometimes he asks too much. He wants to know anything and everything about everyone, and without a good place to begin his other independent investigations, sometimes that energy gets redirected elsewhere.

Still. He is functionally aware that he's been going around asking people increasingly prying questions about their traumatic pasts, which is generally not something people enjoy. "I get not wanting to talk about it forever. But it doesn't bother me, is all I'm saying." He hooks his thumb into his pocket, now equipped with more knowledge of Mal's world than he had before. He has other thoughts - is this Force talent thing a prerequisite of joining this monastic order? - but he can tell that she's trying to change the subject, so he'll respect that. For now.

"And for the record? One of my friends also worked with a big old baddie for probably way worse reasons than just needing a square meal? But we're cool now. So. I figure that kind of thing is pretty okay."

He won't tell Ragh's story for him, of course - that's Ragh's to tell - but he's pretty sure that being told by your football coach to help end the world while battling internalized homophobia is what some may consider a little less forgivable than the starving orphan excuse.

She nods, taking a seat with a sigh.

"Well, there was this battle. Long ways away from anything I was dealing with - but the Emperor and most of his best officers went up in a big huge Rebel victory. Empire fractured into warlords as all his henchpeople started jockeying for position. My unit ended up as part of something called the Empire Reborn faction."

She pauses, trying to think how to summarize a lot of history.

"Weird force cult people, willing to embrace some pretty kooky ideas, even by galactic standards. But one offshoot was run by a Dark Jedi named Desann - a Jedi who falls to evil - and this scientist guy named Fyyar. Between them, they figured out how to artificially infuse force abilities into people. Grabbed everyone they could under their command who had even the most marginal talent and...well, suddenly they had a dark force army."

She looks around a bit, shaking her head.

"Nowhere near as good as the returning Jedi, but the idea was make us by the tens of thousands. Didn't work out, thankfully. But I was...definitely one of them. And hoo boy did I carry out my orders with glee. Until one fateful night where I ran into a real Jedi, betrayal, and being on the receiving end of an exploding fuel refinery."

She smiled, looking out into the distance.

"The Jedi nursed me back to health. Took me in, even. Explained what had been done to me, gave me a life and a choice. And I've never looked back."

Though the idea that she's an imposter in their ranks is very, very hard to kill.

"Huh. Okay. I think I've got it." It's a lot of foreign terminology, a lot of history and big concepts consolidated into a tidy little package that Riz knows damn well is much more complicated and difficult to live through than it is to give the very basic run-down.

"I think I can see why you have such a high opinion of these people now."

He's still not a believer, per se, on account of being naturally suspicious -- but he gets it. He gets it the same way that he gets it when he meets any Cleric of any deity, turning their eyes towards the light of their god and their beliefs. Faith always requires that extra leap, doesn't it?

It also requires extenuating circumstances, like the fact that Mal probably had nowhere else to go afterwards. It doesn't make their generosity any less generous. But it doesn't erase her circumstances either.

"How long ago was that? I mean, how long have you been one of them?"

"Oh, about...four, five years now? Honestly, it's hard to keep track - I was in and out of consciousness for the first couple weeks."

She shivered a bit.

"Never want to see the inside of a bacta healing tank again, I'll tell you that much. But you've put up with everything I've had to say - I know far less about you. What's the essential Riz?"

Four or five years? That's long enough to get a good picture of what an organization is all about, Riz thinks. Long enough for the shine to wear off, but not so long that she's a member of the old guard. He wonders if she misses them. She must.

"Me?" He blinks at her, not having considered someone would reciprocate his interest. "I don't really have a story as interesting as yours to share. It's just kind of normal?"

His lip curls in a wry smile. The situation with his Dad isn't normal, he knows, but compared to everyone else? It's not all that exceptional. They've got their own stuff going on. Your dead Dad secretly being much cooler than you thought pales in comparison to your Dad being the ruler of the pits of Hell. "Back home, it's just me and my mom in our apartment in Elmville, the town I'm from, which is kind of small. And I go to Aguefort's Adventuring Academy, which is where they train the next generation of Adventurers. Half of my party's actually here with me, which is nice. But that's most of it. I've barely even left Elmville, except for once or twice, and not for very long."

In all, Elmville is a pretty idyllic place, if you ignore all of the religious conspiracies, threats to the world, and other such nonsense. But that's normal for Spyre, and for the rest of the year, it's all ice cream sundaes and hanging out at the mall and loitering in the library.

"Oh!" He digs around in his pocket and unearths a business card to hand to her. RIZ GUKGAK: LICENSED PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR it reads in gorgeous calligraphy, with a series of numbers and names beneath it that correspond to his now-defunct crystal number and his now-unoccupied office space. "And I'm a Private Investigator. I got my license last summer."

She smiles at the first part.

"Normal, where you're trained for adventure," she replies with a bit of an arched eyebrow.

She takes the business card and reads over it, tapping it against one hand.

"Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but you're kinda in the exceptional category."

"Hey, your normal's different from my normal too," Riz says, a laugh on his breath. "I'm not exceptional when there's, like, five hundred other students going to the exact same school as me."

Riz is, admittedly, at the top of the class -- but that means very little when Fig isn't doing so hot in hers, and she's a literal rock star, which means going to Bard Class is a little redundant.

"Don't get me wrong, my party and I are pretty top-notch. But we're still an adventuring-party-in-training."

The real adventuring parties -- now that's where the really cool stuff happens. Riz can't wait. Just him and his friends, going around on world-saving missions forever. It has not yet occurred to him that not all friend groups stay together after high school, but shhh. Don't tell him that.

Even if she knew about that, she wouldn't. But hers hasn't exactly been a regular education.

But she'll still give him a smile, offering the card back.

"Well, I think you're modest and are pretty something, and I'm rarely wrong. About other people, at least. So there."

She also shakes her head.

"Adventuring as an educated profession. That's something, too. We just have to wing it when the adventure finds us."

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