#Drongar

[legends-expo]

Happy 19th release anniversary to MedStar I: Battle Surgeons by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry! Often referred to as M.A.S.H in Star Wars, this novel features padawan Barriss Offee as a Jedi healer working with a small medical unit to help injured clone troopers.

[archduke42]

Chapters: 8/8 Fandom: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Rating: Not Rated Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Asajj Ventress, Barriss Offee/Original Character(s) Characters: Original Characters, Barriss Offee, Luminara Unduli, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Grievous | Qymaen jai Sheelal, Dooku (Star Wars), Darth Plagueis, Asajj Ventress, Yoda, Sheev Palpatine, Darth Sidious, Shaak Ti, Mace Windu Additional Tags: Jedi, Sith, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Action/Adventure, Romance, Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Force Series: Part 7 of The Star Wars Saga by Lordhadrian Summary:

Conradin Hadranus is given one last chance to achieve victory for Dooku and the Separatist cause. He is sent to attack the planet of Drongar, currently used as a rest for wounded Clones and Jedi. Several members of the Jedi Council are gathered there to prepare strategies that could end the war.

General Grievous attempts to play a grand chess game with everyone, sabotaging Conradin's ship, and luring Asajj Ventress and Anakin Skywalker to Drongar to eliminate as many Jedi as possible with a bomb on Conradin's ship, a bomb that will wipe out everything on Drongar.

Darth Plagueis also schemes. His world, Korriban is dying, and he attempts to corrupt Conradin once more, to use him in the war against Sidious.

[stellanslashgeode]

I'm happily educating myself on all things Barriss via your wonderful blog. If you'd ever feel like unpacking more of your Wrong Jedi thoughts/intrigue, I'd love to hear more of your analysis.

Oh my, you've put a quarter in the machine now you have to hear the whole song.

The arc is very divisive with Barriss enjoyers because her character veers so far from her Legends depiction. She was a pretty prominent character in the original Clone Wars multimedia project and was a caring and selfless healer. And the arc doesn't do much to explain her motivations for turning.

Another thing that vexes me is because it is essentially a police procedural (they even hired a writer from Third Watch for this arc) so much occurs off-screen. So, we do not know quite what happened but have to infer.

Let's start with motivation. In her very few post The Wrong Jedi appearances they've tried to hint at Barriss falling mainly though post-traumatic stress disorder. And that's sort of a good explanation? She was at Geonsis at the start of the war, and was one of two Padawans we know of IN the arena who lived and the other was Anakin! You have to think this is a healer, someone who was trained to be a pacifist, and the battle was so sudden and frantic that she had to witness other Padawans she knew in the creche die all around her and she was too busy defending herself to do anything. So that's trauma and guilt. The short story A Jedi's Duty shows that she sat out nearly the entire first year of the war healing others back at the temple, explaining why she wasn't there to deal with Asajj Ventress with Luminara in TCW season 1. Also, she is having trouble sleeping because of memories of that first battle. She asked for help but they told her to meditate if she couldn't sleep, but she couldn't meditate properly because of this haze of the dark side invading her perceptions. She's even having trouble Force healing and she feels guilty that others are taking risks that she is unwilling to take. She consults with an old friend, Tutso Mara and is finally able to meditate, but right then Luminara calls her to a briefing, and wouldn't you know it, they're going to Geonosis again. She is frightened but memorizes the tunnel formations under the weapons factory they need to destroy because that's her duty to the Light and to her Order. The last scene is her joining Luminara and Gree to depart for the battle. And it's such an ironic story because Master Mara is one of her later victims and the place she bombs is right there in the temple hangar where the story ends. I think that's why she chose it as her target, it was the place she went from safety to chaos.

And what happens next? She almost is buried alive Right Away, then as she's reeling from that she gets a Geonocian brain worm. She was also at the Battle of Umbara, and you know how that goes. So I guess trauma is a fairly good reason, as well as her love and admiration of Jedi ethics and pedagogy that just went right out the window when the Jedi had to do what it took to fight in this war. Barriss is a bookworm, all that heritage meant something to her. And really, that was the purpose of the war, to isolate the Jedi by having them betray their morals and sully their reputation with the public.

Fanfiction writers also can pick and choose from Legends, such as all the crazy stuff that happened to her on Drongar but that's a story for another day.

So we get to the Wrong Jedi Arc itself. We aren't shown how she meets Letta Turmond, how much of a partnership that was. Letta says Barriss was the mastermind of the operation but that's after she's jailed. I don't trust her. I mean, Letta is a grown woman and while Barriss was an idealistic and heartsick Jedi at that point she's just 17-18 according to Feloni. I can see it as a situation where a teenager gets politically radicalized and taken advantage by a woman she trusts. If we get a Letta flashback in Tales of the Empire I will be so happy!

Ahsoka is framed. But there's a multi-step aspect to it. Part A, Letta calls Ahsoka to the prison because she was told she was the only Jedi her collaborator trusted and gets Force choked by someone we do not see. Part B, after she is arrested someone leaves a key card outside her cell and she follows a trail of first injured then dead clones to make it look like she broke out and went on a killing spree. Part C is the only one we actually see start to finish, where Ahsoka contacts Barriss and she lures her to the factory that made the nano-droids.

Barriss is guilty of Part C. But did she do Part A and B? She was at the funeral with Ahsoka and heard same time as her that she was transferred to a military compound. Then in the maybe hour, two hours Ahsoka was in a mission briefing Barriss supposedly broke into a brand-new high security compound, got in the walls, and strangled Letta as Ahsoka was in the cell alone with her. Then Part B, she hung around undetected for a few more hours to set up the escape while also erasing the audio off the recording of the murder.

I personally think Palpatine MIGHT have done part A. He has much greater access and he has the motive (to take away a pillar of stability for Anakin). If Barriss did do Part A, what was the motivation? The most pessimistic reading is she did it to save her own skin and purposely framed Ahsoka. Another is that Barriss genuinely talked up Ahsoka to Letta, and did NOT do so to set her up but because she was one of the lonely girl's only friends (and maybe love interest) and then Letta goes ahead and calls her there, Barriss is in the walls, and she just cannot have Ahsoka's opinion of her ruined. She killed Letta to silence her from tainting this one friendship she had left, did so out of panic, and wasn't thinking of the consequences. Then Part B, oh no I got my girlfriend framed for murder. So she springs her out. So why does she kill those clones to further frame her?

Consider the conversation after the funeral, "Ahsoka, do you think it is right for us to ignore our emotions?" I think the subtext there was "Ahsoka, I'm hurting so much, join me to stop me." She was feeling her out to see if she felt the same about the war as she did. And she did Part B to see if Ahsoka would run, SO THEY COULD RUN AWAY TOGETHER. Sure, it's manipulative as all Hell, but that's the dark side for you. It was a test, and Ahsoka failed because as soon as she gets out, she calls Barriss to help clear her name. So that she could get back to the war. The war Barriss hates with all her being. So that's why she did Part C. She had been alienated by the Order and her own master by all these deployments and the one person left who she valued was buying into the propaganda that the Jedi needed to finish this war. It broke her. And she did something awful.

All and all I think her fall is fascinating because it wasn't for personal power or attachments, she wanted to sacrifice her own grace to save the souls of all other Jedi. She did it out of love for the Order, even if it came in such a twisted and destructive form. That's also why she'd become a lousy Inquisitor. They're the anthesis of all she stood for, an army fighting for the dark side.

I know a lot of fans hate this arc but... man that speech! I spent the whole Prequel trilogy and TCW waiting for a Jedi to stand up and say "What we are doing is wrong, we should stop." Yoda and Mace know their path is leading to the dark, but they see no other way but through. I just wanted someone to say no with their whole chest. And it was Barriss. That's why I love her, your honor. I admire the idealists, her and Satine. They should have teamed up and put a stop too all that nonsense.

Sorry this is so long? I have a lot of FEELINGS and now you can see why I have a lot of trepidation about this Saturday. You know, I thought of you last night when I was rewatching Tales of the Jedi. It was the scene were Dooku was leaving to meet Palpatine with Yaddle following in The Sith Lord. I was imagining how you felt watching that for the first time, and I remembered my reaction was "Oh no, it's the temple hangar! Barriss is going to blow the shit out of this place in a decade and change!"

[archeo-starwars]

Barriss nodded, turned to the next stretcher, and gasped. Before her was a terrible sight: a trooper with all four limbs burned down to stumps, and nothing but red, suppurating tissue where his face had been. On Coruscant, or Corellia, or any of the other hundreds of civilized worlds, technology could attach cybernetic limbs and reconstruct his face-he would be a strange hybrid of machine and man, but at least he would be alive and relatively functional. But here on Drongar, they had no facilities even remotely capable of such things. She bit her lip and turned to the droid assigned to her. "Category X," she said.

Medstar: Battle Surgeons by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry

[polgarawolf1]

Barriss Day fanart collages

As I can no longer access/post on my original Tumblr account (under Polgarawolf), due to a dead computer during home rennovations and issues with the internet that resulted in losing the email attached to the account (and the apparent inability of Tumblr to do anything to help me), I have made a new account, Polgarawolf1. I'm the same person, though, and I'm still a big SW fan, though I generally lean more towards the old EU than the new DISNEY!SW version of SW canon. I tend to have elaborate headcanons for the things that I write or otherwise create in fandoms like this but I'm also an AU girl at heart, so I can and sometimes do entertain multiple possible headcanons for certain characters. I'm hoping to get something written for BarrissDay before the deadline, but that might or might not happen, due to real life issues. I'm not a techy person, so I hope that the person (or people) who has (or have) organized BarrissDay and the Barriss Offee Appreciation blog will know how to find this, based on the BarrissDay tag!

Please be aware that my version of Barriss Offee is based largely on the original version of the character, as she appears in cut scenes, etc., from AotC and RotS (and therefore has very little to do with Filoni's Star Wars: The Clone Wars nonsense, except for what I've modified to fit with my headcanon version of Barriss. Apologies, though, for the one image of Barriss with her hair loose/uncovered - it's how they drew her for the cover art of one of the MedStar books, during an unexpected attack, and unfortunately I'm just not artistically talented enough to believably alter it to try to cover her head/hair!), and as she was originally written in EU books such as The Approaching Storm and the MedStar duology. My Barriss is closer in age to Anakin Skywalker than Ahsoka Tano and is most emphatically not a terrorist who willingly helped bomb one of the hangars in the Coruscanti Jedi Temple, just in case anyone is wondering!

In any case, the collages are behind the cut! There are some just for Barriss, some for Barriss and Luminara as Padawan and Master, and a few based specifically on the MedStar books, with Barriss and Kornell "Uli" Divini (I have filled in for him as best I can, since there aren't any good images of him online. For those who are unfamiliar with the character, Uli is from Tatooine, attended Coruscant Medical, did his internship at "Big Zoo" or Galactic Polysapient Medical Center on Alderaan, and is something of a wonderkid, as he's already a fully qualified surgeon when either still eighteen or just nineteen, during the events of MedStar II: Jedi Healer, and is maybe barely 20 when the Clone Wars ends. Uli has something of a baby face but is extremely good at sabacc, which the various Healers - Jedi and otherwise - and surgeons and nurses of Republic Mobile Surgical Unit 7 often play with their friends during downtime. Uli's mother, renowned mudopterist Elana�� Divini, is known for collecting "Alderaanian flare-wings" and one of his first meetings with Barriss happens when she's out doing a lightsaber kata and accidentally injures herself while he's in the swamps of Drongar looking at the local insects, sees her, and helps deal with her injury), who were at the very least written as good friends with the potential for more (if not for Order 66, etc.).

Apologies in advance for repetitiveness - I figured more would be better, even if it meant that I basically had to keep using the same scant handful of official images for Barriss from the films over and over, plus a few from the various animated shows. I'm aware that hex signs are a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, but I've had it in my head for years (since long before Star Wars: The Clone Wars was made) that Mirialan art and particularly their folk art involve very similar motifs and also often the use of colorful stained glass and tiles, which is why I've used several of them here along with images meant to evoke stained glass artwork. No disrespect is meant to anyone and if anything bothers anyone, please let me know about it and why, so I can try to fix it or offer an alternative!

[forcesung]

“With all due respect, I seem to be making very little difference here. It’s like trying to move a beach full of sand one grain at a time. I could be replaced easily by any competent physician.” “And you think that your talents would be better utilized elsewhere.” It was not a question. “Yes, my Master. I do.” Master Unduli smiled. Even in the flickering projection Barriss could see those intensely blue eyes twinkle. “Of course you do. You are young, and your desire to be a shining force for good has blinded you somewhat to things all around you that still need attention. But I sense that you are not done there yet, my impatient Padawan. There are still lessons to be learned. Spirits require healing, too, as much or more than do bodies sometimes. I will contact you when I think it is time for you to leave Drongar.” Master Unduli’s image winked out.

—Medstar II: Jedi Healer, Michael Reaves

[cienie-isengardu]

The patient, who was now awake, mumbled that he was indeed feeling much better. Jos made polite doctor noises, automatically checked the man's vitals, then raised an eyebrow at Zan. "Doctor Yant, if I might speak with you in private?" Outside the building, Jos steered Zan into a patch of shade and relative coolness. "All right. What's going on here?" "Going on? What are you talking about?" Zan didn't meet Jos's eyes. "I'm talking about a patient who comes out of a life-threatening secondary infection so fast he leaves ion burns on his chart. I'm also talking about treatment with unmarked skinpoppers." Zan hesitated for a moment, then sighed in resigna-tion. In that short pause, Jos suddenly knew what had tran-spired. "You didn't, " he said. Zan said, "I did." "Zan, have you got an ingrown horn or something? You know what the risks are. If they catch you, you'll be court-martialed!" "If you see a fellow sentient drowning and there's a rope lying right next to your foot, are you going to worry about being accused of stealing the rope?" "If there's a good chance they'll hang me with it, yeah. This is not the same thing." "It isn't? We're on a planet with the biggest supply of a flat-out miracle drug in the galaxy-you can walk to a huge field of it in five minutes. We tried everything else on this guy, Jos - macromolecular regeneration, nanocell implants, maser cauterization - nothing worked. The man was dying. You've read the SGJ literature touting bota-an adaptogen that can cure everything but a rainy day in most humanoid phenotypes. We've had patients who died from infections we could probably have cured with one scale of it." Zan raised his hands, a gesture of inevitability. "I couldn't just watch him die. Not when there was the slightest chance..." Jos opened his mouth, but said nothing. What was there to say? Bota was valuable-so much so that the Republic deemed theft of it a crime to be severely pun-ished. The plant was, ultimately, why both they and the Separatists were on Drongar. And, ironically, the local Rimsoos were forbidden to use it because of its poten-tial offworld value. Before Jos could speak again, Zan said, "Nobody will miss a few plants. There are little pockets of bota all over the lowlands that nobody even knows about. Pluck a couple of scales, stick them in your pocket, hand-process them later... who's to know?" "Zan..." "Come on, Jos, you know a lot of the xenos around here sneak out and harvest the stuff for recreational use. Filba used to bliss out with a hookah full of it most every night. Everybody knows what it can do for them, and everybody looks the other way, as long as no one gets greedy. At least I'm using it to save lives-which is what the Republic says it's doing, too. Is the life of some-one a hundred parsecs from here more valuable than one in the next room? Can I stand by and let people die without doing everything in my power to save them?" "You didn't start this war, Zan. You're not responsi-ble for everybody who gets hurt in it." "Oh, that's good. This from the guy who once kicked a hole in a wall when he lost a patient to Draknahr Syndrome-something that all of Coruscant Med and a room full of Jedi and Silents couldn't treat." At a total loss for words, Jos looked at his friend, and saw nothing in front of him but a doctor who took his job as seriously as he himself did. He sighed. "Okay. But you've got to be more careful-there are a lot sharper eyes than mine around here who could notice a blank skinpopper." "Point made. I'll make sure they're marked from now on," Zan said. "I can even use dye to color the serum so it looks like polybiotic or spectacillin. Nobody will no-tice, Jos." "I hope not," Jos said. " 'Cause if someone does, your career could be smashed flatter than a mynock in a black hole." Zan grinned and clapped a hand on his friend's shoul-der, and the two turned and reentered the building.

Battle Surgeons by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry

[oleanderedits]

PART 2: THE DRONGAR INCIDENT is now up and finished!

Please read Imperial Trash first, and enjoy!

Summary: Excerpt of cover story Imperial Trash from EMPIRE NOW, volume 19, issue 1, Special Commemorative Hard-Print Flimsi Edition celebrating the Twenty-First Anniversary of the Galactic Empire.

Category: Gen

Fandoms: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy

Relationships: Luke Skywalker & Darth Vader, Sheev Palpatine & Luke Skywalker, Sheev Palpatine & Darth Vader

Characters: Luke Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader, Sheev Palpatine | Darth Sidious, Original Characters

Additional Tags: Fallen!Luke AU, Rebel to Imperial!Luke AU, Imperial Luke Skywalker, Imperial Prince Luke Skywalker, magazine excerpt format, media transcript format, In-world propaganda, Unreliable Narrator, lies and twisting them to suit whatever the narrative needs to be, in-world media format, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied/referenced non-consensual body modification, Father-Son Relationship, anti-rebellion propaganda, false facts, biggs is not the death star pilot, world building, how do they qualify who is legally human and who isn't?, I decided to make up something, luke has two fathers, they're the same father, but no one knows they're the same person, so legally they're two different people, blind character, mute character, disabled character

[whirlybirbs]

i hope the 111th had a good time celebrating the new year on felucia 😔

[jedimasterbailey]

A sneak peak into a future chapter of my Barrisoka Post Order 66 fic. This is how I imagine Luminara and Barriss’s final conversation with each other before the bombing going. Below is a flashback Luminara experiences in her Imperial cell. Mom Lumi and daughter Barriss is the hill I’m going to die on. Link to the fic below if you aren’t already reading!

Flashback

They’re sending you away again, aren’t they? And I won’t be coming with you?” Barriss concludes in an annoyed tone surprising the older woman walking beside her.

Luminara had just exited the Council chambers with her next assignment. She and Master Vos were to go to the jungle world of Drongar to investigate suspicious Spearatist activity involving a medicinal plant known as bota. Quinlan was going in Barriss’s place so that she can help with the sick and injured. Barriss’s healing gift was proving itself more valuable each day as the beds continue to fill up with no end of the war in sight.

“And this frustrates you?” Luminara questions gently, sending calming waves of the Force to soothe her Padawan.

“Yes it does, actually.” Barriss answers sharply, causing Luminara to stop in her tracks.

“Barriss, this isn’t like you. What is it?” Luminara asks placing a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

Barriss chews her lip, “I’m afraid Master.”

“Of what darling?” Luminara presses with a reassuring squeeze.

“Can we go somewhere more quiet?” Barriss pleads gesturing to the many Jedi that walked past them in the halls.

Luminara nods and guides them in an empty meditation room where they could speak in private. The Jedi Master then motions for her apprentice to take a seat on one of the mats on the floor to which she complies. Once both women sat down, Luminara offers Barriss a warm smile.

“What’s on your mind Padawan mine?”

Barriss struggles to maintain eye contact, “Master... I think there’s something wrong with me.”

Luminara’s heart skipped a beat, “What do you mean? Are you feeling alright?”

Barriss slowly nods, “Yes, I just don’t want you to go. I don’t know how much more I can take.”

Luminara deflates seeing how distraught her apprentice looked, “Tell me what’s on your heart Barriss. It hurts me to see you this way!”

Barriss steadies herself, “This war...it’s really taken it’s toll on me. The constant fighting, the death, it hurts me Master. I’m physically okay but every day I just feel myself slipping away. I hardly eat anymore, I can’t sleep without seeing people die... people I love...and they keep sending you away and I worry about you and...”

Barriss then broke into tears immediately causing Luminara to embrace the girl, rubbing soothing circles on her back as she cried.

“It’s okay Barriss... I’ve got you... Let it all out...”

And for several minutes thats how Master and apprentice stayed. While Barriss released her pain, Luminara sucked back tears of her own in order to stay strong for her Padawan. Since the war began, Luminara has despised Barriss’s involvement in it. She knew Barriss’s heightened sensitivity as a healer would make being deployed into battle difficult thus she considered bringing the idea of removing Barriss from the field to the Council. But Luminara knew that Barriss would not allow for it. It would undoubtedly hurt the young woman’s pride and possibly do more damage to her emotional health.

Luminara just couldn’t risk hurting Barriss in any way.

That’s why Luminara spent so much time over preparing for their missions. She wanted to do everything she can for the two of them to be successful, which is why their campaign on Geonosis was such a painful blow. Barriss was more than happy to utilize her photographic memory for an important assignment but it was Luminara’s plan that nearly cost the Padawans their lives. Had Barriss and Ahsoka perished, Luminara knew she would never forgive herself. She remained calm for Anakin, but little did the man know that she was falling apart on the inside as well. As much as her colleague wanted to deny it, Luminara didn’t want to give up on Barriss either. Losing Barriss would have shattered her beyond repair.

Barriss’s breathing then become more labored alerting her Master that a panic attack was underway.

“Breathe with me Barriss, stay with me. Deep breath through the nose in 3...2...1...” Luminara says before breathing deeply herself.

Barriss does as instructed and instantly grew calmer as she synchronized her breath with Luminara’s.

“That’s my girl...” Luminara whispers, kissing the top of Barriss’s head and combing her fingers through her hair.

After a moment of silence Barriss confesses, “There’s something I’ve been keeping from you...about the time I got possessed by the Geonosian parasite.”

Luminara winces at the memory, “Tell me...”

“There was a moment where I was lucid before I went unconscious, where the worm wasn’t speaking for me. I begged for Ahsoka to kill me and she told me she couldn’t and as grateful as I am... I remember feeling disappointed. I wanted to be free of the pain.” Barriss explains before Luminara pulls her chin upward.

Misty violet eyes locked on blue, “Do you still feel this way now?”

Barriss shakes her head, “No... but I fear it may happen again if something doesn’t change.”

Luminara cups Barriss’s cheeks, “Trust me when I say that I feel that same way you do about this war and our involvement in it. The Council isn’t always right, but I’m afraid our hands are tied on this one. It is up to us that we stand up for the millions who can’t defend themselves against evil. Remember what I told you when you kept having nightmares about Geonosis?”

Barriss smiles, “You mean about finding the light?”

Luminara beams with pride, pushing a stray bang from the girl’s face, “It’s always there like I’m always here. Barriss I love you and I promise that when this is all over, we will get you the help you need. I think it’s best we seek Minding services for you, maybe even some other treatment options too to help you cope. There is no shame is seeking help with needed my Padawan. And of course, I’d go with you because Force knows I’m not perfect either!”

The two women then shared a much needed laugh.

“Promise me something Barriss?” Luminara asks touching foreheads with her apprentice.

“Anything my Master.” Barriss says taking Luminara’s hands into her own.

“Stay strong my love and please if you need to talk do not hesitate to contact me. No matter the day or time, I will answer if I’m not in battle. You’ve been so brave through all of this and I’m so grateful you’ve opened up to me. When I come back, you will be receiving a couple tattoos for your courage. I couldn’t be more proud of you. “ Luminara professes before finishing with a proclamation Barriss could never see coming, “You will be a Knight very soon Barriss. You have grown into a far greater Jedi than I could ever hope to be. It will not be long before the Council sees you the way I see you.”

Barriss was speechless, but Luminara was able to see the happiness written all over her Padawan’s face. With another peck on the cheek, Luminara bids Barriss farewell.

“I have to get going now. Dont forget what I’ve said, I love you Barriss.”

Barriss then pulled them both up and gave Luminara the last hug the Jedi Master would ever receive from her Padawan.

“I love you too... May the Force be with you Master.”

[irrfahrer]

Wookiepedia on Healing Plants

Read the Original Texts Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here , Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, Here , Here, Here, Here, Here , Here, Here, Here, Here and Here!

Senoti The senoti was a species of tree native to the Outer Rim world New Canistel. The deep-rooted trees required an alkaline soil in which to grow, and produced a sap that was used for medicinal purposes. The trees were also found off New Canistel, with a small number growing wild on Endor. These were believed by Xenoarborists to be survivors from two Canistel AgriStar freighters that were lost in the Moddell sector. Endor's native Ewoks regarded the tree as holy due to its healing properties, and in 3 ABY, the Warrick family of Ewoks used senoti sap in a medicine administered to the shipwrecked youngling, Cindel Towani. Several senoti trees also grew in the Xenobotanical Garden of Garqi; however, these were burnt down during the first year of the Yuuzhan Vong War. The senoti was a species of tree.Mature senoti had brown, rough, gnarled bark, and could reach a girth several times that of an Ewok.The trees grew deep roots and required alkaline soil in order to thrive. Senoti seeds planted in acidic soil only grew into scrubby plants, if they survived at all. The senoti produced a watery sap, which had analgesic properties and could quell fevers. Kelari Lily The Kelari Lily was a rare Flower that could be used to treat battlefield injuries.Lorren Morrick sent a rebel patrol out to find Kelari Lilies because her medical supplies were running short.

Nysillin Nysillin, also known as sillum, or nysillim, was a healing herb grown as a common crop plant across the galaxy. On the planet Felucia, it was harvested by Casiss's farming village during the Clone Wars. Hondo Ohnaka's gang of pirates threatened the village into giving away a portion of the herbs, a portion they could not afford to give up, so Casiss hired a group of bounty hunters to fight them. They were soon joined by the Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano, who trained the Felucians to fight for themselves, prompting Ohnaka to give up.

Ice Mushrooms Ice mushrooms were found on various planets throughout the galaxy, including Neshtab. It appeared to have healing or analgesic properties, at least in Humans.  Greybush The Greybush was a ground hugging bush native to the planet Dathomir. The Singing Mountain Clan used leaves of this herbal plant for their healing properties while the Nightsisters used them to cause harm. Redweed Redweed was a fern with a distinctive red coloration native to the planet Dathomir. The Singing Mountain Clan used leaves of this herbal plant for their healing properties while the Nightsisters used them to cause harm.

Lesset Plant Lesset plant was a broad-leafed red-veined plant native to the planet Dathomir. The Singing Mountain Clan used leaves of this herbal plant for their healing properties while the Nightsisters used them to cause harm. It could often be found in the dense forests at the bottom of many valleys.

Ongmuel Plant The Ongmuel plant was a herbal plant with leaves that resembled dangling spiders native to the planet Dathomir. The Singing Mountain Clan used leaves of the Ongmuel plant for their healing properties while the Nightsisters used them to cause harm.

Rinor Rinor was a herbal plant with blade-like leaves native to the planet Dathomir. The Singing Mountain Clan used Rinor leaves for their healing properties while the Nightsisters used them to cause harm.

Barenth Healing Plant The Barenth healing plant was a endangered, natural, healing plant from Barenth. When a Ho'Din healer named Baji came to Barenth, he encountered them in an ancient laboratory. He observed them and tried to stay to continue observation and to eventually use them for healing purposes. Unfortunately, an earthquake struck and Baji was forced to leave. He grabbed some of them and left. Later, he came back only to find the sanctuary crushed. The plants were not destroyed, but badly contaminated. Baji had made a tough decision; he decided that for all his life, he would stay and help the remaining plants.

Savarium Herb The savorium herb was a kind of plant made by the Ithorian botanist Zorneth and another botanist, a Human named Klorr Vilia. When eaten, it would replace one's mind with nothing but peace and joy, and would give the consumer a new sense of submission and lack of inhibitions. Those under the influence of the herb were often referred to as Smilers due to the perpetual grins on their faces. It is said to be given the term "slave drug" considering slavers, pirates and other criminal personnel would have favored its mind-altering abilities.After Klorr had tried it, Zorneth wanted to mass-produce it so everyone would be happy. However, Vilia sacrificed himself to destroy all of the savorium herbs.There were rumors of savorium herb still existing, involving secret harvesting plantations in the galaxy, but it was unproved.

Viptiel Viptiel was a plant native to Nal Hutta. It was known for its therapeutic properties to the X'Ting for its hormone-balancing effects during that species' transition from one gender to the other; however, very few could afford it. Vippits also used viptiel as a medicinal supplement, especially during their mating periods. Twin-Scented Natterbloom The Twin-Scented Natterbloom was a rare medicinal herb native to the planet Talus. The plant exuded a pungent smell in its early growth, which changed during blooming season when the herb gave off a sweet citrus scent.The Drall hoped that the Natterbloom may prove to be a cure of an ancient Drall disease, the Balding Sickness. Some victims resisted bacta treatment, forcing the Drall to search for alternate solutions. With the help of the local Dearic Garden Club and a helpful spacer, the Drall ambassador to Talus Champhra Biahin was able to procure a sample of the Twin-Scented Natterbloom for further research.

Luna Weed Luna-weed was a plant native to Aduba-3. If chewed, it could produce delusional effects in the user. It gave rise to the phrase "chewing the luna-weed" when referring to someone who was acting crazy.

Guroot Guroot was a type of plant that could be grinded into powder and consumed. Many beings believed that consuming powdered guroot was good for one's health. Pommwomm Pommwomm plants were a hot-world shrub native to the Sif'kric system's inner planet. If they were properly processed within thirty hours of picking, they could be made into at least eight different medicinal substances, and at least sixteen different natural flavorings. Export of pommwomm plants made up about 20% of the Sif'kric economy.

Grey Gabaki A plant named for its drab color when dried, Grey Gabaki gives off a light and relaxing smoke when burned. It is commonly used in cantinas, but some merchants also burn it to make store fronts a more relaxing environment for customers.

Star Urchin Quill "Star urchin quills" was the name given by Ewok shamans to the venomous quills of the fftssfft, a species of semi-sapient plants also known as the "dandelion warriors." Despite their potentially lethal nature, those star-shaped quills could be used in traditional Ewok medicine.

Santherian TenHo Root Santherian tenho-root was a plant whose extract was also a potent drug. It was often used by abusers who desired a sense of escapism. When taking the drug, users often described it's effects as similar to that of watching a sunset.The extract was immensely effective on Falleen, who would experience intense psychotropic attacks after taking it.

Algarine Torve Weed Algarine torve weed was a kind of plant native to the Algaran system and could be used as a synthetic mood enhancer.

Relkass The Relkass sentinel plant was one of many cacti native to the planet of Relkass.The sentinel plant only bloomed during the planet's dry season. It also contained a chemical compound, which acted as a powerful narcotic. Even small amounts of the compound could drive a Draagax into a horrible madness.

Behot Behot was a species of herb that grew on the planet Mandalore. The herb was citrus-flavored and grew rapidly, making it the favored choice of ingredients for the Mandalorian beverage shig, a tisane brewed from a number of herbs. Behot was mildly antiseptic and stimulating, and capable of soothing an upset stomach. Shig brewed from behot possessed an amber color and the herb's citrus flavor. In 20 BBY, the Null-class ARC trooper Mereel used behot herbs in the shig he brewed for a pregnant Etain Tur-Mukan in order to help settle her stomach.bMereel's adopted father, Kal Skirata, also enjoyed a mug of behot-flavored shig when looking to calm his nerves. By the end of the Clone Wars, members of the anti-Imperial resistance on Toprawa had taken to growing behot locally on the Outer Rim world, using it to make their own shig. Resistance leader Degan Cor developed a fondness for shig brewed from behot, as did several of his rebel colleagues.

Kibo The Kibo was a rare, purple flowering plant native to Yavin 4. Its scent was strong and sweet and the seeds of the Kibo could restore sight.When Trioculus attacked Yavin 4 in 5 ABY, the fires he started brought the Kibo to the brink of extinction. Many years later, Galactic Alliance Chief of State Cal Omas kept a Kibo blossom in bronzium vase on his desk.

Bota Bota was a rare plant species native to very few planets in the galaxy such as Drongar. It was highly valued during the Clone Wars, as it had certain medicinal effects for each species and supposedly gave Jedi a stronger connection to the Force. It would become useless some time after it left the planet unless it was frozen in carbonite. 

[brooklynislandgirl]

tagged by: my dear @kylo-wrecked​, and thank you <33

last song: Wish You Were Here, NSP cover

currently reading: For once, nothing much. Have packed up a majority of my books and am not buying new ones.  Listening to Battle Surgeons {MedStar I} by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry, which is set during the Clone Wars.

As civil war between the Republic and the Separatists rages across the galaxy, nowhere is the fighting more fierce than on the swamp world of Drongar, where a beleaguered mobile hospital unit wages a never-ending war of its own….

A surgeon who covers his despair with wisecracks; another who faces death and misery head-on, venting his emotions through beautiful music … A nurse with her heart in her work and her eye on a doctor … A Jedi Padawan on a healing mission without her Master … These are the core members of a tiny med unit serving the jungle world of Drongar, where battle is waged over the control of a priceless native plant, and an endless line of medlifters brings in the wounded and dying—mostly clone troopers, but also soldiers of all species.

While the healers work desperately to save lives, others plot secretly to profit from the war—either by dealing on the black market or by manipulating the events of the war itself. In the end, though, all will face individual tests, and only those of compassionate hearts and staunch spirits can hope to survive to fight another day.

last movie: Wonder Woman 1984 aka 3 Years of My Life I Will Never Get Back. I didn’t really hate it...I kind of just ...nothing-ed it. It bored the ever living life out of me.

currently watching: I don’t really watch tv. But I absolutely have nothing to do with Herr Maus, aka Disney. Sometimes I will watch something that directly impacts my rp. Deadwood, NY Cop Shows. It’s a terrible fucking shame that they ended American Gods after two seasons.

currently craving: my sense of sanity to come back as I circle the drain of depression.

coming for: Anyone who would like to, Pirate Up.

[archeo-starwars]

"Who's that?" Uli asked, feeling like he should know. "Darth Vader," Zam said. "He's here on an inspection tour." "Inspection tour?" "Yes," said C-4ME-0, who had come up behind them. "This project is of prime concern to the Emperor." "And just how do you know this, Fourmio? Tight with the Emperor, are you?" "No, but I was put into service on Coruscant before it became Imperial Center. I've never had a mindwipe, so I have my memories of that time. Droids do sometimes talk to one another, you know. Word gets around." Uli nodded. Yes, that was true enough. There was a lot of truth in the old saw that said, If you want to know what goes on, ask the droids. They see, they hear, and they don't forget. He had known some droids who were every bit as clever and talkative as any natural-borns or clones he'd been around. There'd been that protocol droid back at Rimsoo Seven on Drongar-what had it been called?-who'd been self-aware enough to play sabacc and gloat over the winnings. It had had a sarcastic circuit a klick wide.

Death Star

[polgarawolf1]

Barriss Offee Day - Character Study

Sorry for the wonky format - it's because I'm too wordy for Tumblr's limits to have all my notes formatted like I want them to be!

This is rough and not really edited (the title is just a working title right now!), but I'm posting now because it's Barriss Day today!

I feel as if I can't say this enough: please be aware that this character study piece is meant to go along with a SW AU series of mine that I've been writing in, off and on, since the same summer that RotS came out in theatres! This is my headcanon Barriss for that specific AU series, which is my main SW AU series, so she's based mostly on the old SW EU (or Legends, as DISNEY calls it) with some of the newer DISNEY!SW canon adapted enough to be useful to me/make sense given that she's a Jedi Healer, but she's still an AU version of both versions of the official SW Barriss Offee character!

Title: “Barriss Chanah Offee: Jedi Healer and Jedi Commander”

Pairing: None as yet, though Kornell “Uli” Divini definitely has an enormous crush on Barriss during their shared time at Rimsoo (Republic Mobile Surgery Unit) 7, on Drongar, during the Clone Wars.

Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline PG-13, maybe (?)

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters from Star Wars, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .

Summary: This is thirty-three random but chronological moments from the life of Barriss Chanah Offee, a strongly Force-sensitive Mirialan given to the Coruscanti Jedi Temple for training as an infant. Barriss is technically not quite an agemate of Anakin Skywalker’s, though she’s often grouped with those who are. She becomes close friends with Ahsoka Tano over the course of the Clone Wars and is generally known for her empathetic heart, her healing touch, her calm and grace, and her unshakeable loyalty to her friends and Jedi family. There is an actual story here – one small thread among the vast woven tapestry of life that is the living history of the galaxy, stretched out and twisted, knotted into the whole, curled down among the roots of time, connecting various moments together – but one must read between the lines to capture it. It is not precisely the truth, for the subtle story of these moments is sketched out here in words, and, in the sin of writing down a life, it inevitably changes the shape of things. But it is nevertheless a form of truth. (From a certain point of view . . . )

Warning: This story functions as a sort of compressed codex for Barriss Chanah Offee’s life, as she has been and is going to be written (or at least referred to) in my not even nearly complete AU Star Wars series You Became to Me. If anything doesn’t make sense, please, feel free to ask!

Author’s Notes: 1.) For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series You Became to Me, including the trilogy Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith, if you squint at a few things sideways and view a couple others solely through the lens of Barriss’ eyes. This is probably also technically compatible with a lot of other potential AU ’verses where the Clone Wars do not, ultimately, end up going like Sidious plans, but the majority of it should be at least mostly consistent with the old EU (barring what I’ve altered about Ferus Olin, etc.), at least up until roughly the Battle of Coruscant during RotS.

2.) My Barriss is and has always been based on the version of the character as she originally appeared in certain scenes/cut scenes for AotC and RotS and was initially written in the old EU, prior to the reboot for the Clone Wars period associated with the animated film and TV series. Thus, she’s closer in age to Anakin Skywalker than she is to Ahsoka Tano, a natural Jedi Healer, and does not end up falling prey to despair and the Dark Side and bombing the Coruscanti Jedi Temple, as is portrayed in Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I have made some concessions to the version of Barriss found in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the current DISNEY!SW version of canon – she is about a year younger than in the old EU, for example, and does take part in some missions/battles that also involve Ahsoka and Anakin – and I am technically in the midst of revising/expanding Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith to include some more characters from the show, but please be aware that my main SW series is an AU and so certain characters and events and the timeline for the prequels/the war in general involve a slightly different/longer timeline as well as multiple changes from what’s depicted in the show (and even in the old EU, occasionally).I’m aware that Barriss is considered a Muslim-coded character, in large part due to the show, though it’s rather horrifying for me to consider that Filoni et al apparently made the choice to present her as being coded this way and yet still deliberately turned her into a terrorist bomber.

Please be aware that, since I first started writing what would become my Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith trio shortly after Revenge of the Sith first came out in theatres and I saw it and read (as fairly new hardbacks) both the novelization for RotS and James Luceno’s Labyrinth of Evil (which, for those who don’t know, acts essentially as an immediate predecessor for RotS) and I had it in my head from fairly early on that my AU ’verse would (eventually) involve the survival of a useful version of bota and, thus, Barriss Offee as a Jedi Healer (as I’d already read the MedStar duology by this point), a lot of my personal headcanon for Barriss (and also, by extension, for her Jedi Master, Luminara Unduli) and for Mirialan culture in general predates by at least three-four years both the start of the show and my awareness of the fact that she’s considered Muslim-coded. (It took me several years before I ever watched any of Star Wars: The Clone Wars and I am not a techy person, so it’s probably more like ten years plus before I had any actual personal knowledge from watching the parts of the show that include the ret-conned version of Barriss.) If anyone has any questions or is upset or bothered by anything, please let me know!

3.) Although this is technically modeled on part of a prompt set that I found ages ago and made a copy of from somewhere or another on the LJ, it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is or was that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Barriss and, since I’m working under a time constraint for the Barriss Day celebration, it’s entirely possible that I’ll come back to this and expand on it at some point in the future.

4.) Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters (such as Uli Divini) or for original characters (like Jedi Shadow Knight Leyala Riani), for that matter, should please just probably ask me, rather than consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ, since I need to update all of them and what’s on the LJ (https://polgarawolf.livejournal.com/) is very old! Please note that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish!

5.) Mirialans are considered near-human (they are cross-fertile with human norms in the EU and, likely, with many other types and/or species of near-humans, as well) and resemble human norms closely enough, physically, that I’ve always considered they may very well have originally evolved from human norms due to specific conditions found on their homeworld, Mirial (many of the “near-human” species in the GFFA seem to be humans with just enough genetic differences – from adapting to living on specific worlds/moons, mostly – and/or just enough cultural differences from more generic human norms to have been given a specific label, based on their homeworld). I mention this here because my headcanon is that Mirialans essentially age/mature like human norms do and also because I believe the tradition of Mirialan Jedi Knights/Masters taking on Mirialan Jedi apprentices is based on wanting to pass on direct knowledge of Mirialan culture and Force-based spirituality, not any form of xenophobia.

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“Barriss Chanah Offee: Jedi Healer and Jedi Commander”

01.) Incidence: Though one would hardly guess it, from the raw numbers alone (evident humans or human norms outnumbering so many other known sentient species in the galaxy by such a large margin), statistically speaking, as an entire species, Mirialans have an even higher overall incidence of sensitivity to the Force than human norms do (most likely due to the fact that survival on Mirial, their largely cold, dry homeworld, requires them to be more naturally in tune with their surroundings – and, thus, more open to the Force and its influence – than most of the worlds and moons where humans have proven both willing and able to settle); this greater percentage of Force-sensitives doesn’t always translate individually to higher levels of stronger Force-sensitivity, though, meaning that there are many Mirialans who make their homes both on Mirial and elsewhere who have midi-chlorian levels that are higher than average and yet still lower than is generally required for admittance to the Jedi Order for training, and so the number of Mirialan Force-sensitives in the Jedi Order is lower than that of human norms (and, indeed, several other types of near-humans, as well), enough so that the Mirialans in the Order thought it would be best to establish a tradition whereby Mirialan Jedi Knights/Masters would, whenever possible, take on Mirialan apprentices to train, so that Mirialan culture and customs could be taught directly from Master to Padawan, along with Jedi traditions and training.

02.) Process: Barriss Chanah Offee is found not on Mirial or any other inhabited planet, moon, or station, but rather on a starliner in deep space, by a Jedi not on a traditional Search but rather simply en route to Coruscant after a successful undercover mission in the Corporate Sector, who is still in the process of settling back into her own skin (after living under a false identity for the better part of four months rather than as Jedi Knight Leyala Riani) and is rather startled to find herself called to the ship’s infirmary, where a routine blood test given to a newborn has yielded a midi-chlorian count easily high enough to justify admittance to the Jedi Order for training (the infant is named by her tearful parents, given a slightly modified traditional blessing, and then promptly given over to the Jedi Shadow, who manages, after only a handful or so of incidences of usual unexpected interruptions, to safely get both herself and the by then several month old baby to the Coruscanti Temple).

03.) Routine: Barriss’ first real memories are of the Jedi Temple’s crèche – of having patient, kindhearted Jedi Carers helping her with her meals and with the layers of her youngling robes, modelled after the traditional Mirilian dress of a Force-sensitive spiritualist leader-in-training and a little more complicated than many of the robes worn by her crèchemates and friends; of accidentally running into a friendly Jedi Tender during a game of tag and being sent laughingly back to the proper Sept or age-group of her Initiate Clan; of going practically everywhere in a crowd of younglings, all in the same age-group or Phratry if not necessarily all belonging to the same Clan; of having a compassionate Twi’lek Docent gently drying her eyes after taking a hard tumble and spilling the contents of her lunch tray seemingly everywhere; of entering the Halls of Healing for a routine inoculation and being drawn to the Healing Crystals blazing with the Force in the hands of a gifted Jedi Healer, who, noticing her rapt attention, promptly made a notation in her permanent file indicating an interest in and likely proclivity towards Force healing – and of Master Yoda, watching her with a pleased, benevolent smile as she uses the Force to retrieve a favorite toy (a blue ball, just the right size for her small hands and exactly the same vivid color as her own eyes) gone astray, bouncing from the crèche out through an antechambers and into one of the main large open spaces of the Temple proper.

04.) Manage: Crèche Masters and other Jedi whose calling place them either exclusively in the crèche or else mainly in the Temple as trainers and teachers – the Jedi Carers and Tenders who specifically look after the younger Initiates; the Clan Leaders who are in charge of the various Initiate Clans and the Sept Heads who manage the specific Septs or age-groups of those Initiate Clans; and the Jedi Instructors and Pandits, as well as certain Jedi Artisans, who lead specific classes, training courses, and hands-on modules for both younglings in the crèche and Padawans who’re still in training – routinely go out of their way to offer both methods and means by which individual Initiates and Padawans can learn about and even (to an extent, at least) incorporate the cultures of the specific peoples and species from which they hail in their day-to-day activities and lives, though of course no one is ever forced to learn or to do anything in regards to such a culture if that individual finds a tradition or custom uncomfortable: Barriss thoroughly enjoys such cultural seminars (including almost all of the more generic modules that cover other near-human and humanoid cultures), though she takes it for granted that, if she eventually trains as a Jedi Knight (and eventual possible Master) instead of joining one of the branches of the Jedi Service Corps, she will eventually be taught more about Mirialan culture and spirituality when she’s taken on as an apprentice by a Mirialan Knight or Master.

05.) Path: Her personal path forward as a Jedi – whether as a Knight and possible future Master or as a member of a branch of the Jedi Service Corps – would be easier (or at least more assured) if she were only drawn towards healing or if she were only drawn to the path of Knighthood, since then she could either declare for the Medical Corps or else focus more on what would make her more likely to be chosen as a Padawan; however, she feels equally drawn towards both callings, which is somewhat problematic, given that all of the Mirialans currently in or associated with the Order are either younglings like her or else they’re members in good standing of one or another of the branches of the Jedi Service Corps or Knights or Masters of the Order, meaning that there are currently no Jedi Healers who are either Knights or Masters who are also Mirialan.

06.) Honor: When Luminara Unduli – a Mirialan Jedi Knight and a Master by courtesy (given that she is currently helping an orphaned Commenorian Padawan by the name of Suanne Tephee through what should, hopefully, be the last handful or so of years of training and preparation necessary to make her ready/able to pass the Trials of Knighthood) – approaches her, Barriss fears, at first, that she will be forced to make a decision between eventually training towards Knighthood and training as a Jedi Healer that, in her heart, she knows she cannot make and does not feel as if she should be forced into trying to make, either (she understands, logically, that, since the annihilation of the Sith and their Brotherhood of Darkness and the consequent end of the New Sith Wars, the so-called “restructuring” of the Galactic Republic and the Jedi Order by the Ruusan Reformations essentially dissolved the Jedi Army of Light and stripped the Jedi of much of their authority and power in the galaxy just when the Jedi would be most needed, out in the greater galaxy, in order to help heal the wounds of that disastrous and exhaustively extensive conflict, meaning that the pathway of Jedi Knights all but instantly became much more important than it had been even at the height of the war. That Barriss can understand it rationally, though, does not mean that she has to like the fact that, in almost thousand years since then, the prestige of being a Knight has grown so much that the pressure on Jedi Initiates to choose that particular pathway [whether it would suit them as individuals or not] has concomitantly increased, too, to the point where younglings consider themselves to be failures if they aren’t chosen as Padawans and instead end up in one of the branches of the Jedi Service Corps, such as the MedCorps, even though Jedi likely to be injured in combat logically would need trained Healers to tend to their injuries and Jedi Healers are, frankly, able to do things with the Force to help preserve life and speed healing that even the most gifted and experienced of non-Force-sensitive Healers simply cannot do); happily, though, Master Unduli indicates that, if Barriss continues to show excellent progress in her training as an Initiate and she is willing, Luminara will happily arrange for her to have further training in the healing arts with Jedi Healers if Barriss will do her the honor of one day becoming her apprentice.

07.) Attention: Although Barriss normally tends to listen to others more than she talks (except for in classes when she knows the answer to whatever the instructor happens to be asking and she’s not sensing anyone else particularly wanting to be the one to be called on to answer, of course), the Jedi Order is essentially one enormous extended family of choice made up of many, many generations of interlinking lineages of trained Force-sensitives and many more who might, one day, be given the choice to join and extend those lineages, so there actually are very, very few real (serious) secrets among its members (it’s not so much that Jedi are prone to idle chatter as it is misleading to claim that Jedi are too good – or too snobbish and self-important – to gossip when, at least most of the time, there’s simply no need for idle chatter or rumormongering when it comes to the vast majority of incidences that happen both in the Temple and during mandated missions since both any official reports and private, individual deductions and conjecture about such occurrences tend to all quickly become known by virtually everyone who’s paying even a modicum of attention to the Force – which, after all, is naturally constantly being influenced and shaped by the thoughts and actions of basically all living creatures, especially those strong in the Force, and also frequently quite deliberately being outright given strong emotions, both negative and positive, by Jedi who want to establish better control over themselves – and/or what’s going on around them in the Temple, including what individual Jedi are actually physically telling the High Council about their specific missions, when they return from them, and what those same individuals are also either gleefully spinning stories about or else quietly complaining about outside the Council Chamber) and, since scandals (or even just possible indignities or outrages) tend to spread at a speed easily comparable to that of light, especially when a Temple favorite or a favorite of Yoda and/or one of the other High Council Masters is involved, she’s well aware of (and has opinions about) Qui-Gon Jinn and his tendency to essentially blame everything on the will of the Force (often quite blatantly in order to win arguments or to get away with doing or not doing something he really shouldn’t be allowed to do or to shirk doing) long before he brings an almost ten-year-old boy by the name of Anakin Skywalker to the Temple and shocks everyone by telling the High Council that he ought to be allowed to take the youngling on as his apprentice (even though he already has a perfectly wonderful Padawan, one who, so far as Barriss can tell, most of the residents of the Temple all agree Qui-Gon Jinn does not deserve. She’s heard so many incredible stories about Obi-Wan Kenobi that, if she weren’t Mirilian, if Master Unduli hadn’t already spoken to her about becoming her Master, and if she weren’t aware of the fact that there’s at least one youngling, just enough older than her to be in the next age-group up from her, who’s made it extremely well known that he believes himself destined to one day become Obi-Wan’s Padawan, Barriss might actually be tempted to try to catch Obi-Wan’s eye, in hopes of eventually being asked to be his apprentice) because the boy’s midi-chlorian count is supposedly so high that (according to Jinn, who’s widely known, much like his former Master, Yannis Dooku, to be just a little bit too interested in Force prophecies, to the point where some claim that they’re both obsessed, to unhealthy degrees, with Jedi mystics and the records of their so-called “visions”) it must mean that he’s the Chosen One.

08.) Potential: Anakin Skywalker blazes in the Force like a star that’s somehow continually going nova – there’s no disputing this fact and Barriss honestly doesn’t see the point in even trying – but he’s simultaneously far too old for the crèche and both too untrained and too young to become the Padawan apprentice of anyone expecting to go on any active missions outside of the Temple for likely several years to come, and, from everything she’s heard, he also pretty clearly doesn’t have the right sort of temperament to become a Jedi (he’s afraid, but he not only won’t admit to it, he refuses to acknowledge his fear and even outright lies to the Council about what he’s afraid of/for and why; he’s unabashedly angry when the Council Masters try to point out that he’s not telling the truth about his fear and, worse, he behaves as though the Council Masters are the ones at fault for pointing out his lie, rather than him for his dishonesty; and he’s undeniably all too attached to the single parent he’s ever known, who has, for some reason, been left behind – in slavery, as it eventually comes out, months after the fact, when it also becomes widely known that Skywalker’s mother was left behind due to the fact that, even though Qui-Gon Jinn apparently thought nothing of gambling with the lives of others and even the potential wellbeing of an entire system’s worth of imperiled people, if it meant that he could legally take Anakin with him, even if it meant that he would have to take him as a slave, he evidently didn’t quite care enough to cheat on the bet that he made with Anakin’s owner sufficiently to include the boy’s mother in his potential winnings, along with the boy. There are many people in the Order, besides Barriss, who are quite upset, if perhaps not necessarily all that surprised, to learn about these facts, and many of them also feel sorry for the boy, though it’s difficult to maintain much empathy for someone who so clearly has a chip the size of a Hutt on his shoulder about his background – on Tatooine, a Hutt-controlled world in the Outer Rim Territories that Barriss is fairly certain she’s never even heard of, before, and which turns out to almost be far enough out to qualify as bordering on Wild Space), so she honestly doesn’t understand why it’s ever even a question whether or not Skywalker should be accepted for Jedi training (either with or without Qui-Gon Jinn), high midi-chlorian count or not and prophecies of the Chosen One or not, not when, if anything, Skywalker seems far more suited to something like the Exploration Corps.

09.) Secret: Barriss honestly can’t decide which piece of news from Naboo is more shocking and upsetting – that the Sith not only apparently survived Ruusan, somehow, but have continued to survive in secret for almost a thousand years and have not only revealed themselves now, in the process all but proving that they’ve been involved in some way with the Naboo Crisis, but have also killed a Jedi Master in the process, or that, following the death of his Master at the hands of one of those Sith, Obi-Wan Kenobi evidently not only swore that he would fulfill his Master’s dying wish and take on Anakin Skywalker as his Padawan, with or without the approval of the High Council (and, thus, the legitimacy and backing of the Jedi Order), but that he essentially told Master Yoda this (in effect essentially blackmailing the Grand Master of the entire Jedi Order into allowing him to apprentice Anakin, once he’d been acknowledged as a Jedi Knight, for having defeated and slain the Sith Lord who’d just murdered his Master) – but she knows that she’s not the only one who thinks that Knight Kenobi has gone from somehow having a Master who definitely didn’t deserve him to having a Padawan who almost certainly doesn’t deserve him, either, and she finds herself in the rather unexpected position of feeling sorry for Ferus Olin, currently one of the most popular and widely respected younglings near to her age in the crèche (even if, to be honest, she’s always felt somewhat ambivalent towards the slightly older boy. Ferus generally gives every indication of being a good sort, but everything always seems to come awfully easy for him, in a way that doesn’t feel quite right, somehow, and the way that some of the other younglings act around him – like they’d cheerfully do anything he might ever even think of asking them to do – makes her feel weirdly almost vulnerable, in a way that both bewilders her and makes her want to avoid him altogether, which makes it strange to feel sorry for him now), since a Jedi can only have one Padawan at a time and this means that (short of Anakin Skywalker somehow dying in the next two years or so, which she would never want to happen, no matter how messed up the whole situation with him and newly Knighted Obi-Wan Kenobi might be, and which seems extremely unlikely to happen, anyway, since he’s not likely to make it back out of the Temple again until he’s made a serious effort to catch up on all that he’s behind on, from having come to the Order so comparatively late in life and from almost certainly having a less than thorough education on Tatooine, even if that’s not exactly his fault) Ferus Olin can never become Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Padawan.

10.) Sense: One would think that a boy from a desert world would know better than to allow himself to be goaded into accepting a challenge involving swimming, of all absurdly unsuitable things for him to try to do, but then, Skywalker does seem to be rather more emotional than any Jedi with sense would ever allow themselves to be, so perhaps the overly emotional numpty will prove her wrong and actually manage to get his fool self killed at some point while essentially confined to the safety of the Temple and Obi-Wan Kenobi will once again be free to choose his apprentice by himself (rather than being stuck with his former Master’s choice, which is just so many different levels of wrong that it makes her want to grind her teeth down to dust for sheer frustration over the fact that Qui-Gon Jinn is dead and now she’ll never have a chance to get away with telling him to his face that he’s an arrogant, self-centered twat) and Ferus Olin will prove to have been right all along and will become Knight Kenobi’s new Padawan.

11.) Behind: Skywalker may very well be behind on essentially everything except for anything having to do with mechanics, droids, maintaining all sorts of different kinds of vessels (from basic skimmers to advanced starship fighters), and piloting in general – the stories about how he managed to accidentally destroy the Trade Federation’s Lucrehulk-class Droid Control Ship are entirely too crazy to be made up and actually makes Barriss want to like him, despite everything else (the Trade Federation did horrible things to her homeworld: as a Mirilian, she feels all but honor-bound to side with someone who’s had such an important role in thwarting their plans to do the same sort of awful things to another inhabited world and system, even if she’s starting to wonder if the High Council Masters only allowed Knight Kenobi to take Skywalker on as his Padawan learner just to keep him somewhere they could keep an eye on him and be sure that the Sith would have a hard time trying to get to him. Knight Kenobi might have killed the one Sith, but the general consensus is that there should have been two of them, meaning that the surviving Sith would have multiple reasons to be interested in a boy like Skywalker, who’s so strong in the Force, so emotional, and has the kind of traumatic background he has, especially since the Sith were so clearly involved in the Trade Federation’s plans for invading and conquering Naboo) – but it seems as though he’s a natural with a lightsaber and, much to her surprise, she finds herself enjoying the times when she’s practicing in the salles at the same time that he is, in part because it’s astonishingly fun to see how quickly he picks up many of the different formal katas meant to help students master some of the different forms of lightsaber combat and partially because he’s such a shockingly unpredictable fighter, when turned loose to spar instead of just practicing basic katas, that he seems determined to combine apparently random bits of various katas from entirely different combat forms (so it’s always interesting to see which combination of moves he attempts will or won’t actually work together, whether she’s the one who’s been tasked to spar with him or not, though some of his more disastrous efforts make her very, very glad that training ’sabers aren’t actually strong enough to do much worse than singe fabric. Sometimes, it’s even more fun – and even instructional, when some combination of moves that doesn’t seem as if it ought to work actually does – to watch than to be the one trying to match his unpredictability. They don’t really talk, much, but it doesn’t truly bother her, since she’s of the opinion that sparring partners are actually more useful when they aren’t also friends who might be tempted to hold back out of fear of hurting each other’s feelings), which tends to make sparring against him a nice challenge, even if he does tend to win a ridiculous number of bouts for someone so new to Jedi training.

12.) Fear: Her Healer training is going well – in addition to the more basic courses required of basically all Jedi Padawans, she studies under a handful of different Healers, based on who’s available when and who specializes in or knows more about what, all of them operating under the oversight of Master Healer Vokara Che, who’s already made it quite clear that she expects Barriss to one day join the Circle of Jedi Healers, which is simultaneously both a wonderful and a mildly terrifying thing to know, since the Circle is comprised of the most gifted and powerful and absolute best of all Jedi Healers – she’sfound her kyber crystal in the ice caves of Ilum and successfully built her own lightsaber, and Master Unduli is evidently so pleased with her overall progress that she’s already talking about how best to coordinate things so Barriss shouldn’t fall behind in her Healer training when they undertake her pilgrimage to Mirial (a time-honored sort of rite of passage generally undertaken around fifteen or so standard years of age), but Barriss is beginning to fear that her apparent inability to keep ahold of her new lightsaber long enough to truly master even the most basic of katas is going to end up rendering the entire issue moot and her apprenticeship with Master Unduli void when a Jedi Knight, noticing her struggles with her lightsaber in one of the smaller, less often frequented training salles, introduces himself as Tutso Mara (actually Tutsoded Bayardeth Mara, though few refer to the half Kiffar and half Chalactan Jedi by his full name, at least according to Knight Mara) and then kindly shows her the proper hand grip for her lightsaber (after which, with her permission, he physically adjusts and readjusts and keeps on readjusting her grip until Barriss finally has it down pat and her grip – evidently adequate enough for a training ’saber but not at all sufficient for the power of a real blade – is no longer throwing her off, no matter which training kata from which form of lightsaber combat she attempts), sparking a mentorship and eventual friendship that will push her to learn a Jar’Kai version of Djem So (a combat form using two lightsabers or a lightsaber – be it a single or a double blade – along with a shoto) as well as the Soresu and Shien that Master Unduli favors.

13.) Return: The traditional pilgrimage to Mirial (which is both colder and drier than the norm for most inhabitable planets/moons with Type I atmospheres and sentient populations, in ways that make the more customary sorts of Mirilian costumes, with their layers, long lengths, and head-coverings of one sort or another for essentially everyone, make all kinds of practical sense. Much of the land is either desert or tundra, with some taiga towards the far northern and the far southern tundra and some grasslands at the borders between the taiga and the deserts, much of it occasionally broken up by high plateaus and mostly extremely tall, jagged mountains. Though Mirial has technically been known to much of the greater galactic community and considered part of the Galactic Republic’s Outer Rim Territories for approximately four thousand years, when the Trade Federation “rediscovered” it some two hundred years ago, in one of the Great Reunification’s last pushes to supposedly “reconnect” with and discover more about the Outer Rim and Wild Space, its greedy representatives pillaged the entire system of much of its natural resources, often using crude, cheap strip mining techniques to get at precious ores and carelessly discarding slag and poisonous wastes without bothering to treat any of it, to the point where the planet is still recovering from all of the habitat destruction and environmental contamination. Truthfully, Barriss finds Mirial rather sad and, afterwards, is not entirely sure that she’s felt a real connection with either the planet or its people, even after all of her cultural studies and even though she truly does respect the traditional Mirial view of the Force and their widespread belief that each individual’s actions contribute not only to that specific person’s destiny, building on both past successes and failures to ultimately drive those beings towards their fates, but that such actions also ripple throughout the Force, affecting the destinies of not just the individuals directly involved but of whole peoples and, at least potentially, in some cases, even species all across the galaxy, which, to her, seems like a somewhat simplified version of the Jedi understanding of the Cosmic Force) goes well enough, but she’s both more tired and more glad than she’s expected to be, when they finally return to the Temple.

14.) Master: Luminara Unduli is, in many ways, a wonderful Jedi Master – she’s very grounded and steady, a formidable fighter who’s also a highly respected diplomat often called upon to act as an advisor to several high-profile system and planetary leaders and politicians, many of them in the Galactic Senate, meaning that she’s well-suited to understand the needs of an apprentice who’s drawn to what, to outsiders, might seem very opposing ways of being a Jedi – but she’s also downright tricky, sometimes (Barriss isn’t entirely sure she’s ever going to completely live down the fiasco of trying to force herself to master Floating Meditation in the space of a single afternoon, so she could rise high enough to accurately count the number of pastries in a bakery’s window across the way, when, at any time, she could’ve simply stood up on the balcony Master Unduli had brought her to in order to see them), often in ways that seem embarrassingly obvious after the fact and remind Barriss almost painfully of Master Yoda’s particular brand of teaching by trickery in order to fully and memorably drive a point home, and, though she’s increasingly sure that she wouldn’t ever want any other Master, sometimes Barriss can’t help but wish that her Master would spend just a little less time being cleverly oblique and a great deal more time just straight out telling her whatever lessons she’s trying to teach her, if only so she wouldn’t feel as if she’s wasting so much time failing to immediately grasp whatever moral or object lesson has been so cunningly hidden in or only hinted at sideways by whatever random task or strange, rambling story Master Unduli has decided to indulge in using to teach her by first tripping her up or otherwise tricking her.

15.) Hair: It takes multiple cups (and pots) of nice, calming teas and more than a few cups (and pots . . . and jugs) of tea bracing enough to (as Knight Suanne Tephee [“Suanne, please! Really, just Suanne is fine. You’ll make me feel old, otherwise, Barriss!”] would jokingly phrase it) put hair on one’s chest, but eventually, with some help from her not quite older sister in lineage (but not quite not, and so they all basically act as if she is, including Knight Suanne, on the rare times she’s in the Temple and not so exhausted or so injured, following a mission, that she’s stuck either in her rooms all the time or else in the Halls of Healing and so not up to visiting) and, shockingly enough, some really useful tips from Skywalker (who very nearly physically trips over her in the Room of a Thousand Fountains one day and ends up earnestly explaining that she’s focusing on the wrong bit of the exercise – the meditation part, not the floating, which, as Knight Kenobi has explained it to Skywalker, basically translates to a kind of very personalized field of antigravity – and that she should be thinking of it less as something mental or spiritual and more as something that can be physically done with the Force, closer to telekinesis than to actual meditation and strong enough, in an emergency, to help either save a Jedi who’s falling from a dangerous height or else to rescue someone else falling or about to fall from a potentially lethal height); much to her satisfaction, though, she does eventually manage to properly learn (if perhaps not to completely master, as she’s eventually capable of using it to keep herself from a bad end, after flinging herself – under Master Unduli’s watchful eyes, of course – multiple times out of various windows and off of several balconies in the Temple Council Towers, but isn’t entirely sure she’d be able to use it on someone else in a true emergency) Floating Meditation.

16.) Information: It’s next to impossible to truly keep secrets in the Jedi Temple – in terms of knowledge for training, information can be restricted to things like Jedi Holocrons, datachips, info crystals, and even old-fashioned books that are themselves regulated, so that only certain kinds of individuals can access them, but in terms of what happens in the Temple or what is spoken of in the Temple, well, it’s difficult to all but impossible to keep things a secret from individuals strong enough in the Force to not only regularly use it to help augment their senses and abilities but to be able to sense things (such as the thoughts and emotions of others) through their connection to the Force – which is why (even if impossible and improbable aren’t quite synonyms) it’s so weird that no one seems to really be talking much, afterwards, about the disastrous mission to Korriban, to apprehend dangerous criminals Jenna Zan Arbor and Granta Omega, even though four Masters and their Padawans were sent there but only the Masters and three of the Padawans returned alive . . . at least not until after Ferus Olin has been dismissed from the Order for intentionally manipulating the minds and wills of Jedi (from Masters all the way down to Initiates, apparently) and not only purposely causing a mechanical defect in the lightsaber of a fellow Padawan (Tru Veld, a fertile unfixed hermaphroditic metamorph Teevan – meaning that Tru can and often does phase from male to female and back again, basically at will – who’s apprenticed to Jedi Shadow Master Ouwain-Kli Ry-Gaul. Barriss isn’t much more than vaguely familiar with either one, since Jedi Shadows tend to keep to themselves and Veld’s nature has all but guaranteed that the Teevan would become a Shadow since the moment Veld first came to the Temple) that would directly lead to the death of another Padawan (the apprentice of Master Soara Antana, Darra Thel-Tanis, who apparently threw herself in the pathway of a deadly blaster shot, even though Tru almost certainly could have survived being struck by it, given the ridiculously rapid rate of regeneration Teevans are [in]famous for. Barriss is a little more familiar with Thel-Tanis, but can’t imagine why she’d ever do something so foolish, which makes her wonder, a little sickly, just how much influence Olin might have had over her, at the time), but attempting to conceal his actions by deliberately, maliciously shifting the blame for the lightsaber’s failure at the critical moment to yet another Padawan (Anakin Skywalker, whose Master evidently had to all but break down the doors of the Jedi High Council Chamber – and is rumored to have called on the Force in a way that somehow instantly shattered all of Ferus Olin’s manipulations – to save his apprentice from being wrongfully accused of negligence and being at cause for Darra Thel-Tanis’ death, which likely would’ve resulted in Skywalker being unjustly cast out of the Order), and then she’s left at least halfway wishing that the relative silence about the mission had never been broken, even though she knows, logically, that nothing good could have come of keeping Ferus Olin’s perfidy (which apparently even extended to his own Master, Siri Tachi, who’s such a wreck, afterwards, that the Council orders her on a five-month spiritual retreat, to recover) a secret.

17.) Help: It’s not exactly fair to feel wary of Skywalker, after the mess on Korriban and Ferus Olin’s banishment from the Order – Barriss knows that, even if it only serves to make her feel frustrated with herself for being overly cautious and even less inclined towards thinking all that kindly of (must less trusting) him – but she’s still not completely sure that having Skywalker on Ansion is going to be all that much help with the mission (even if it means that Obi-Wan Kenobi will also be with them) until after she’s been knocked off of her suubatar into Torosogt River, Skywalker’s immediately leapt into the water to try to save her, and they’ve both managed to survive their dunkings none the worse for wear (at which point she starts to think that it might actually be possible for them to become good friends, if only Skywalker will prove to be even halfway as willing to open up and speak honestly with her as he has been to fling himself – however wholly unnecessarily, if undeniably gallantly – headlong into danger on her behalf).

18.) Horror: Geonosis is . . . unspeakably terrible, so much needless death and suffering (and for what? For the pride and satisfaction of a former Jedi like Yannis Dooku, who deserted the Order after the murder of his former apprentice, Qui-Gon Jinn, during the Naboo Crisis? The traitor is essentially endorsing those responsible for the situation that allowed his former Padawan to be cornered and slaughtered by the Sith! If not for the greed of the Trade Federation, Master Jinn would [probably] still be alive, for pity’s sake!) that she’s quite certain that she’s going to have nightmares about it for the rest of her life . . . though the news, shortly afterwards, that the battle is only going to be the beginning and that the Republic is now officially at war with the self-declared Separatists is so awful that it very nearly eclipses even the horror of Geonosis.

19.) Fire: It’s not very Jedi-like of her, but after the third time that she essentially almost dies because of Geonosis and the second time that she’s only survived because of Ahsoka Tano’s ingenuity (and sheer stubborn refusal to ever give up) and just the absolute horror of one of those times involve parasitical brain worms that burrow into a host and essentially turn said host into a mindless zombie at the control of either the worms or the Geonosian Queen, Barriss believes that she should be forgiven for feeling as though they should just gather every ship they can get their hands on and have them all open fire on that entire blasted world from high orbit until there’s not a single living thing left alive on the entire accursed planet and it’s all reduced down to slag!

20.) Fortune: She honestly doesn’t expect to like Ahsoka Tano as much as she does – the young Togruta is almost painfully brash; she has no concept whatsoever of subtly; she’s so blasted busy rushing headlong into everything that she wouldn’t recognize the concept of strategic thinking if it became embodied and bypassed her two side lekku to deliberately bite her on her rear head-tail; and she quite clearly feels no loyalty whatsoever to her original Master, Togruta Jedi Master Yrannia Tey, since she’s thrilled when the idiots in the galactic press start calling her the Golden Child of the Golden Team (though, to be fair, as Barriss eventually finds out, there’s a very good reason for that. Xenophobia to the point where one believes that only a potential apprentice of the same species as one own self is not a good reason for taking on a Padawan, no matter what Master Tey might believe. Meanwhile, Master Kenobi and Knight Skywalker would literally give their lives for Ahsoka’s and she would do the same for either one of them in a heartbeat, so obviously she knows how to be faithful and she’s just as patently chosen the correct Jedi to give her devotion and allegiance to): on the other hand, she’s one of the most constant and reliable Jedi (if also easily one of the most stubborn, which is saying something, given she’s essentially been apprenticed by the Golden Team while her so-called “real” Master recovers from all of the damage she took at the First Battle of Geonosis. Master Unduli is right: those three Jedi truly do deserve one another, no matter what anyone else might seem to think on the subject, and they would all do anything and everything in their power to keep each other safe, just as they’d do all that they could to help a friend in need, as Barriss herself has had reason to learn, Ahsoka having saved her on more than one occasion that otherwise likely would’ve been hopeless) Barriss has ever had the good fortune to meet – but she trusts her to a degree that, rationally speaking, likely should be frightening, and faith, like friendship, is something that is not easily won, in these dark days of war, so Barriss fully intends to keep that trust and so remain worthy of their resultant friendship, however unexpected it might’ve initially been and however occasionally frustrating it might occasionally be.

21.) Fall: Umbara is such a complete horror show and Barriss is just so messed up from it (not only because of Jedi Master and General Pong Krell’s treachery and fall to the Dark Side, but because she can’t help but realize how much worse it could have so easily been, if Commander Rex had simply obeyed orders from Krell and hadn’t had the courage to contact Master Kenobi and, thus, discovered General Krell’s duplicity before he could deliberately pit unwitting clones from the 501st against clones of the 212th Attack Battalion. Krell still lost far too many men and slaughtered still more, when he was revealed as a traitor, but things came so appallingly close to being so much worse that Barriss feels sick whenever she thinks about it) that, afterwards, she barely even knows what she’s doing, much less what anyone else is saying or doing around her; that’s really no excuse for taking so long to realize that Letta Turmond (the wife of an Abyssin Temple worker and a self-professed pacifist who keeps trying to strike up a conversation with Barriss about why the Jedi aren’t doing more to end the war and how Barriss could be doing more to help stop the fighting) is a liar or just how conniving, hypocritical, and homicidal she actually is, though at least Barriss and Ahsoka manage to contain most of the explosions from the nano-droid bombs, even if they do kill both Turmond and her seemingly unwitting dupe of a husband and inflict enough damage on that specific Temple hangar both to injure a few dozen nearby Temple workers, clones, and even Jedi and to kill more than a handful of other innocent bystanders (though, thankfully, no Jedi die as a result of the only mostly thwarted bombing, or else Barriss honestly doesn’t know how she’d ever be able to live with herself, afterwards).

22.) Demand: It is not just and it is not right that the Jedi High Council should essentially punish Ahsoka for her efforts to help Barriss fix the mess that her distraction and failure to see what was directly in front of her nose so very nearly caused and, in some measure, did still cause, even with the both of them doing their utmost to try to either keep the explosions contained or else to channel them somewhere that they couldn’t cause any (measurable, irrevocable) harm – Yrannia Tey has no right to demand that Ahsoka be given back to her as if she were nothing more than a thing the Togruta felt she owned, as if she were a child throwing a tantrum because someone else has been playing with one of her toys while she’s been indisposed! Ahsoka may have said that she will go back to her old Master and Knight Skywalker and Master Kenobi may have allowed her to make that choice, but anyone who knows anything about any of the three Jedi involved in the decision must know that they have only done so because all of them are unwilling to be the cause for the High Council has a reason to issue the kind of formal censure and reprimand that would just end with all three of them being ordered apart from each other – and Barriss feels so betrayed by Yoda and the majority of the other High Council Masters (nine of whom have, like the Grand Master, backed Master Tey’s demand that her apprentice be returned to her) that, for a few moments, she almost wishes that she could just be selfish enough to simply turn her back and leave the Order that is so clearly failing three of the absolute best of its members behind.

23.) Bribe: Knighting Barriss so soon after Ahsoka has been ordered away from her true Masters and back to Yrannia Tey feels awfully like a bribe for not raising a fuss about such a perfidious act; Master Unduli insists that she deserves it (that what Barriss still has to learn of the Force can only be learned by taking on the duties and responsibilities of a Knight who might, one day, be both able and willing to take on an apprentice of her own), though, and, when Knight Skywalker and Master Kenobi (who know about it because Master Kenobi is a member of the High Council and apparently voted in favor of her being Knighted) take the time to comm and congratulate her on her Knighting, Anakin earnestly adds that, if she were able, Ahsoka would absolutely be the first in line to tell her that she deserves it, so, after most of a day and a night of quiet reflection, Barriss decides that she’ll allow herself to accept the honor, even though (in her heart of hearts) she’s still not entirely sure that she deserves it or that she even truly wants it, any longer.

24.) Chaos: Drongar somehow seems to evoke all the chaos and all the energy of the Living Force all concentrated into one bizarre planet of adaptogenic, mutagenic insanity and, if not for the bota fields (which both sides covet for its miraculous medical properties, though there are other forces at work – criminal cartels – who’d gladly steal the bota out from under them both if they could. No one has actually come out and said so, but she’s fairly certain that part of the reason why she’s been assigned here, to Republic Mobile Surgical Unit 7, is because someone in a position of power here is highly suspected to be working with one of those cartels and the High Council would prefer, if possible, to put an end to such nonsense without having to involve any military tribunals. Given what Tarkin almost managed to do to her and Ahsoka – which was only stopped because of the support that Master Kenobi and Knight Skywalker and, by extension, Ahsoka have in the Senate, not because of anything that the Council Masters did or said – she finds it almost painfully ironic that the Council has chosen to send her, rather than someone else, more likely to still feel strong bonds of trust and loyalty to the High Council), Barriss honestly isn’t sure that anyone would find the myriad (and often changing, usually for the worse) risks involved with trying to establish a military presence there at all worth it, particularly given the fact that almost everything else on Drongar except the bota seems designed to make trying to live on Drongar in any kind of safety as dangerous and close to impossible as is at all possible.

25.) Wrong: It is an injustice so great and so unequivocally wrong that a vicious, sadistic thug like Phow Ji should be reported as a hero, when he’s been caught on cam outright murdering Salissian mercenaries employed by the CIS who’ve already surrendered and has essentially deliberately suicided by Separatist drop ship and thermal grenade in order to escape the so-called dishonor of having to live with the knowledge that he not only owes his life to a Jedi Healer like Barriss, but that he owes his life to her specifically because she’s used the Force – which he’s always loudly claimed does not exist – in order to heal him, that she’s not at all surprised that Den Dhur (the Sullustan reporter who’d written an exposé about the Bundukian mercenary and Teräs Käsi champions murderous ways) ultimately refused to have his name on the story at all, after his editor essentially changed everything in it, with the excuse that the Republic needs more stories about heroes during such turbulent times (and not, apparently, hard-hitting exposés about war crimes being perpetrated by mercenaries on the Republic’s payroll).

26.) Amateur: Healer and specialist surgeon Kornell Divini of Tatooine – Uli Divini, as he smilingly insists on being called – is both younger than Barriss has expected (she knows that Jos Vondar, the Chief Medical Officer and another Healer who’s specialized in surgeries of all sorts on multiple kinds of sentient beings, likes to complain that Healer Divini looks as if he’s about fourteen, but that’s clearly an exaggeration – or even a complaint – and not to be taken seriously. She’s been expecting someone in his early- or even mid-twenties, given the sort of education and training he must’ve had, to be stationed on a Rimsoo, but “Uli” looks like he’s very close to her own age, meaning he’s almost certainly not even twenty standard years of age yet. He reminds her of Anakin Skywalker, in a way, and not just because of his accent or his fair hair and blue eyes, though his skills as a surgeon, however phenomenal, can’t quite compare with Skywalker’s prodigious strength in the Force), and kinder than she quite knows what to do with, particularly when he somehow charms her into letting him see to an injury she’s accidentally inflicted on her right foot that she could have dealt with entirely by herself, with the Force, explains that he’s out in the swamps of Drongar in the first place (after she challenges him about being in the swamp) because his mother (renowned mudopterist Elana Divini, as Barriss eventually realizes) collects Alderaanian flare-wings and he’s interested in seeing what sort of comparable insects might call Drongar’s jungles home, smiles in a way that makes her realize that, once he’s old enough to have laugh lines, he’s going to be stunningly handsome (though why such a thing should ever even occur to her – why she should be looking at the young man closely enough to ever realize something like that – completely escapes her ability to understand), and leaves her so unbalanced that she feels even more like a rank amateur pretending to be something/someone she’s not than she had when, only moments before, she’d somehow managed to let herself be startled enough by an unexpected, brief but strong shift in temperature to lose control in the midst of a routine kata to the point of hurting herself with her own lightsaber (even though she hasn’t fumbled her lightsaber badly enough to injure herself since she’d been nine, and then it had only been a small nick to her left wrist, far less serious than the puncturing gash she’d inflicted on her poor foot).

27.) Precious: Bota is known to act as a potent broad-based antibiotic on humans and to have similar effects on several kinds of near-humans, as well, and the clones, being based on the genetic profile of Jango Fett (a registered genetic [if borderline] human norm Mandalorian originally from Concord Dawn, according to the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, which keeps track of such things), qualify as human norms (for the most part, anyway, though the few truly obvious aberrations tend to number among those the Kaminoan cloners categorize as genetic deviants only worth decommissioning, so they often end up – occasionally after being literally rescued by Master Shaak Ti or another Jedi stationed on Kamino if Master Ti cannot be there, even though Knight Kenobi demanded that all such decommissionings stop when he “accepted” the clones from the Kaminoans and every Jedi on Kamino since then who’s been there long enough to speak to any of the Kaminoans about the progress of the clones still in training has reiterated this order – in support positions in the Temple, rather than in the fighting forces of the GAR), which is almost certainly why Zabrak Healer and specialist surgeon Zan Yant had gone to the trouble (prior to his tragic death, during a Separatist attack on the Rimsoo) to seek out patches of bota growing wild and to (illegally) process it (bota being so prized that all of it is supposed to be shipped offworld, for sale, the harvested and stabilized/processed bota being considered too valuable to “waste” on mere soldiers) and put the results in muscle-poppers in the first place, which is why (after Jos Vondar admits what he’s found, when gathering up and clearing out his friend’s belongings from their shared quarters, and they take the risk of trying it – to miraculous effect – on a dying clone soldier) Barriss thinks of attempting to use one of the precious few bota poppers on a Rodian lieutenant with chronic smashbone fever, in hopes it will help (she’s already decided that, if Healer Yant could be brave enough to find and illegally process wild bota, so he would have some on hand to use on the worst cases in the medical wards, then she can and must do the same. Bota grows wild in many places in and around the swamps and jungles. There will be more poppers, if this one is ineffective. It won’t be a waste to try it, and it could very well help with a disease that, as yet, has no cure), and why, when caught by surprise by a particularly strong muscle spasm, she ends up accidentally injecting herself with some of the bota.

28.) Unique: Bota, like basically all known lifeforms native specifically to Drongar, is naturally both adaptogenic and mutagenic and always has been, at least to some extent – though it’s not (yet) been proven so, logically speaking, it’s adaptogenic properties likely have a great deal to do with the fact that bota has different kinds of effects on and medical uses for so many different species and no known negative side effects to any of those species, even though they use it for such wildly different reasons (from narcotic painkillers to powerful stimulants to broad-based antibiotics) – so it probably shouldn’t be so surprising that the plants (which technically aren’t exactly plants, being instead a unique type of lifeform somewhere between a mold and a fungus. Since no one has yet bothered to try to formally classify what bota exactly is, yet – it being more important to protect it and harvest it so that it can be dispensed or tested further on new/different species – most beings refer to bota as a plant, anyway, for simplicity’s sake) are mutating (and apparently have been for some time, though someone with deep pockets – most likely hoping to profit from the information somehow – has apparently been going to great lengths to try to keep this fact from getting out) towards the likelihood that bota might, one day all too soon, become, for all extents and purposes, inert and therefore useless (and worthless) as any sort of drug; given the reactions Barriss has had both to her unintended injection and the injection she’s deliberately given herself, to see if it would replicate the effects of her accidental dose, though, the fact that they could lose bota before ever discovering what it could mean, to Forceful individuals like the Jedi, it means that she has to contact the Council of Reassignment and, thus, the Circle of Jedi Healers and the MedCorps, as well as the High Council, at once, so that the Masters will know what bota can do to strengthen/deepen one’s connection with the Force in time to try to do something to save it.

29.) Communiqué: She is, in all honesty, shocked to see Master Kenobi (he isn’t a Healer, after all, though he is known for being an excellent emergency battlefield medic and it is, thanks to the war, increasingly becoming obvious that he’s among one of a handful of the most powerful Jedi currently in the entire Order. He explains, only a little sardonically, that he has contacts with the AgriCorps and, since the hope is that a fixed or stabilized version of the most potent remaining extant strain of bota [which, hopefully, will be unlikely to ever mutate to an ineffective form] can be successfully transplanted to at least a few suitable planets/moons known only to members of the High Council and a few high-ranking [and/or sworn to secrecy members] of the ExplorCorps and then raised and harvested by highly gifted and thoroughly vetted AgriCorps members for processing by the MedCorps and use by them and Jedi Healers, he’s here at the request of both the Council of Reassignment and the rest of the High Council), among the various Jedi Healers and Jedi Service Corps members who’ve stealthily responded to her communiqué (she’s even more astonished to see him without Knight Skywalker at his side, though the explanation that a majority of the High Council has decided that his friendship with Chancellor Palpatine – who, after all, is responsible for the policy that forbids the Healers on Drongar from using bota on their patients – makes him too much of a security risk to know about what they’re trying to do here); ultimately, though, Barriss ends up being extremely glad that he’s come, as she’s almost certain that they wouldn’t have succeeded in their aims without Master Kenobi’s raw strength in the Force and his startling ability to persuade the bota to grow in a way that should make it much hardier (and, thus, more likely to survive being transplanted) and perhaps even more potent, in the long run, since its nature should now be prone to adapt only to make it harder to kill and not to keep wildly mutating until it share so few similarities with what it is now that it will no longer be effective as a drug.

30.) Traitor: To keep their actions (which are illegal according to the Chancellor’s policies and Republic law, though she would argue that it is the laws that are immoral, not the actions of the Jedi, especially not once she learns that the hope is that the transplanted bota will thrive so much that the MedCorps will be able to experiment a little and perhaps come up with a bacta-bota mix that can surreptitiously be added to every Jedi’s standard field pack and be regularly provided in bulk to clone medics and other such doctors and healers in the field, with the explanation that it’s an experimental Force-enhanced strain of extremely effective bacta, for emergency use. Bacta technically is also legally restricted – Chancellor Palpatine has, over the course of the war, quite foolishly limited its production even further than it used to be, instead of expanding it so that the GAR will be guaranteed more than enough supply, supposedly to make it harder for Separatists to get their hands on any of it – but it’s always been something of an open secret [among Jedi, in any case. It’s not their fault if the politicians and the corporations have forgotten!] that, because of their Service Corps, the Jedi can and do produce their own bacta, and frankly Barriss regards the decision to secretly try to save and transplant an effective strain bota as an extension of the same policy that’s seen the AgriCorps and the MedCorps producing bacta for Jedi use for the past four thousand years or so), a secret, she must act as if she’s dismayed when the secret comes out, about the bota mutating to uselessness and the order comes that the Republic is abandoning Drongar; she doesn’t expect another traitor (Eqani Minder Klo Merit, of all beings! The loss of his homeworld has evidently driven him mad – after all, the Jedi have no records of a Republic weapons test, such as he claimed destroyed Eqanus, and they would surely know, if it were true – as well as driving him to betray the Republic to the CIS) to be exposed and shot by Jos Vondar in the chaos of the Separatist attack that very nearly derails the Republic retreat, though!

31.) Two: Barriss knows that the High Council have been assigning both orphaned Padawans and Padawans whose individual Masters have been injured to the point where they can no longer adequately do their duty by their apprentices and continue see to their training to other available Knights and Masters without waiting to see if anyone will volunteer for such a responsibility or even bothering to ask, first, if anyone has a particular preference – she’s friends with Ahsoka Tano, so she cannot help but know how Master Yoda persuaded (most) of the rest of the High Council to assign Ahsoka to Knight Skywalker and Master Kenobi – but she’s barely been a Jedi Knight for two standard months, so the absolute last thing she’s expecting, when she returns to the Temple after Drongar, is to be summoned to the High Council Chamber and informed that she’s doing such an excellent job that the Council Masters are assigning her Selonian Padawan Zonder – whose Master, Armann Asantuen, one of the two dozen Corellian or Green Jedi who decided to fight with the Republic, even after Senator Garm Bel Iblis invoked Contemplanys Hermi and the entire sector technically closed its borders, back when the war was just beginning, is currently missing in action – until either Zonder’s Master can be found or else definitive proof the man’s demise is discovered.

32.) Awkward: She and Zonder are doing their utmost to try to make the best they can out of a truly awkward situation (though neither one of them is really all that comfortable with the High Council assigning them to one another. Zonder insists that his bond with his Master is unbroken, meaning the man is alive [a fact that she likely finds entirely too reassuring, given the likelihood that the High Council will just assign someone else to her if Zonder’s Master turns up and is able to take Zonder back on again], and that he should be out there looking for him, which Barriss can understand, even if she doesn’t quite agree with him. There are Jedi Shadows who are looking for Master Asantuen, after all, and Shadows are far more suited for such work than any Padawan could hope to be) and she’s tentatively beginning to think that they might be starting to find a rhythm together that works when the Separatists suddenly invade Coruscant, General Grievous kidnaps Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, and things proceed to pretty much try to go to the lowest levels of Sith hells in a bloody handbasket.

33.) Attack: They were supposed to be dispatched to Felucia, but the unexpected invasion of Coruscant and all of the chaos surrounding that derailed those orders long enough for Master Kenobi and Knight Skywalker both to discover that Palpatine, the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, is actually the mysterious second Sith Lord (Sidious, according to what little they’ve been able to uncover, since the Naboo Crisis) and has quite deliberately been playing both sides of the war all along and to then confront and defeat (and, in the process, dispatch) him, after which there was the attempted attack on the Temple to deal with (because, apparently, the clones all had biochip implants in their brains that could be triggered to force them to follow certain commands and the cowardly, traitorous Sith attempted to trigger Order 66 – labelling all Jedi traitors to the Republic and calling for their immediate execution – when confronted by Kenobi and Skywalker), and then, well . . . the war may essentially be over with, but Barriss is a Healer, so she’s going to be needed to help deal with both the problem of those Sith accursed biochips and the fact that the Kaminoans so cruelly designed the clones to age at twice the speed of average human norms, so no one can possibly ever highjack the free will of any of the clones ever again and the clones can hopefully still have long and productive lives as free citizens of whatever it is that the Republic is reorganizing itself to become, now that the Sith have been exposed and dealt with and their plans have also been exposed and ruined.

[eleventhsister]

(firstly, sorry for the wall of text. I got excited and this kinda got away from me.)

That is my general take on her character as well, I believe.

I see Barriss as a perfectionist who is greatly dedicated to her moral compass, focused on knowledge/logical efforts, and using it for good. However, she is challenged by the horrors of war and her active role as a soldier in it. She is someone who believes in diplomacy and avoiding violent confrontation as long as possible but becomes surrounded by violence and aggression on a near-constant basis. I see her as a pacifist but she is willing and able to defend others the moment it is called for.

I see her as a very introspective, contemplative person. She thinks deeply about everything. This helps play well into the traditional teachings she receives, but suddenly being introduced to other methodologies and the juxtaposition of war causes her to become a bit lost in her head. I imagine the constant switching between being thrown into battle and then getting quiet alone time afterwards takes a toll on her mental state as well.

(I also think that she probably struggles with the unfortunate trappings of being the 'gifted student' with extremely high expectations placed on her. That she is not only motivated by her strong sense of morality, but to also always perform well and please those, especially those in charge/higher ranking, around her. She pushes herself hard and places a lot of expectations on herself.)

Being a soldier also directly contrasts with her role as a healer. She not only experiences the traumas of war as a pawn, but also the effects on life, and the lives and minds of those she heals. As she spends time healing others in the Temple after Geonosis the first time, she struggles with the pain of it all. She is empathetic, and the pain of those under her care and the knowledge that she cannot heal their minds takes a great toll on her. (I also like to believe that she was inducted to the Circle of Jedi Healers after her mission to Drongar like in Legends.)

And maybe seeing the political aspects of the Senate continuously pushing more towards violence and war, and how the Order continues to become so entangled in it guides her thoughts. Peaceful, diplomatic solutions seem to get brushed off without any sense of serious consideration the longer the war goes on.

I think all this helps nurture her belief that the Jedi have become aggressors corrupted by the dark side, fallen so far from their guiding principles, eventually beginning to believe that the Order will only seriously listen to violence anymore. The Jedi were supposed to stand for peace, diplomacy, and settle conflict first and foremost, which significantly contrasts with the active role of being a soldier and military leader in charge of essentially conducting the war. Her issue was more with the Order, where they had guided all the members under it, and not with the Jedi themselves.

I see that her ultimate problem is that she cares so much for doing what is right and cares so deeply for the people of the galaxy, as well as the Jedi's role as apolitical peacekeepers and diplomats. Instead, they had become too embroiled in the politics of the Republic, becoming pawns in the upcoming fall of the Republic into darkness.

And like many who succumb to the dark side, this intense focus on something rightful and good leads her down a path of dark choices (for the right reasons). She was never a bad person. She was simply conflicted and wanted to perform the role she was always supposed to as a Jedi, and a more consular-focused Jedi at that.

She does what she ultimately does. She has time to reflect on her actions in prison (and during her training/time as an inquisitor). She begins to think on what it is she has done and grapples with it. I also think she is primarily driven by the innate need to live through her through her time in the Inquisitorius. She is lost, broken down, and on autopilot more or less. She wants nothing but to escape when she gets the opportunity to do so and return to the Jedi role she always believed in.

After running away, she dedicates her life to helping the people of the galaxy, partly because that is what she always believes to be right, but also perhaps because she is partly haunted by and driven by guilt. I think she would be at odds with herself, hating herself for what she had done.

After some time, she eventually finds peace and balance in herself, connecting fully with the Force and allowing herself to become the ideal Jedi she was always supposed to be. She dedicates herself fully to helping people, especially as a healer, and swears away combat (until there is no other option left, and she must protect an innocent).

Basically, I see her as a morally driven person who is dedicated to peace and protecting the galaxy. However, she becomes traumatized and conflicted by the war and is forced to be a warrior. She only believes that what she ultimately does is right, just, and aligned with the greater good—until she realizes that she made a mistake and seeks to make up for it, finally taking on the altruistic Jedi archetype she always believed in.

Oh man, I feel you on the Medstar books. And I, too, love to work them into my fics as often as possible. That and The Approaching Storm for good measure. It's also important that she was at Umbara.

Now that I finished the Medstar books later night, I just borrowed The Approaching Storm and plan on digging in to it!

I've been wanting to weave in the Umbaran Campaign into my story in some way beyond a simple mention, but I'm kind of stuck with no ideas on it rn unfortunately.

I wouldn't be surprised if they retcon it completely, but I also want to add her imprisonment on Felucia and subsequent rescue by Aayla shortly after her Knighting (since it's still considered to be canon in some way?). Of course the Legends story of it doesn't match with canon in any significant way so I would make major changes to it so it could fit into the timeline properly, but I feel like it could be a major turning point for her mentally—like the final nail in the coffin (or close to it) leading up to the Temple plot.

I have a lot of ideas and I really want to start writing it out, but at the same time I'm overly worried about characterization and it's completely stopping any progress. I really want to talk through my ideas before I work on it, but I don't really know anyone to talk to here other than my friend (who I assume would be willing to listen but she doesn't really know Barriss beyond looking over my shoulder while I was crying over TOTE).

Idk it's just super important to me that I do it well bc I love her character so much and I want to do right by her especially when she is so misunderstood

[sl-walker]

Preview

The air was still a little chilly as the city shook off night and headed into daylight, but despite not being dressed for it, Tally didn't really feel it.

"Mountain medicine?" he asked, incredulously. "Surgeon trained in the best medical schools in the galaxy and you used mountain medicine?"

Dawn was breaking over Aldera in pastel blues and golds; somehow, they had ended up out in the Royal Gardens surrounding the palace, pacing the tended paths and surrounded by the late spring flowers.  Before the pre-dawn glow had even come into the sky, Zan had taken him to an early-opening caf-and-tea shop called Turn Another Leaf on the boulevard that led to said palace, and had bought him a cup of herbal tea (citing that caffeine was the last thing he needed after his stim-overdosing) and the conversation hadn't paused but for that.

Now, Zan wagged a finger, grinning sheepishly. "I didn't use mountain medicine, Frayus did.  I just had it two-day shipped from my family on Talus and explained it to him once he asked me what I would suggest; we keep a stock there, imported from Iridonia.  I figured that your lieutenant probably hadn't been exposed to it, and he wouldn't have built up any tolerance to it, so it might do what it was originally used for."

The first thing they had done was circle each other in conversation, revealing bits and pieces back and forth.  Zan had apparently been a surgeon on Drongar, assigned to an RMSU, a pilot program that was quickly discontinued when the cost of maintaining the mobile surgical units and provisioning them became higher than just letting clone medics do what they could in the hopes of them eventually making it to a medical center.

Because, in the cold calculus of war, it turned out it was cheaper to let badly wounded clones die and be replaced than maintain dedicated on-planet facilities to keeping them alive.

Before that had happened, though, he'd had his hands inside the bodies of hundreds of Tally's brothers, while the GAR tried to protect the very expensive 'medical miracle' called bota.  Tally remembered some talk about it; it had been a cure-all, until a retrovirus introduced by someone -- no one even knew which side or if it was an outside group, everyone disclaimed responsibility -- had altered its genetic structure, making it permanently unusable and nothing more than a prolific weed.  Having no monetary investment to protect anymore, both sides abandoned Drongar.

"Someone reported me for using it on patients, back when it still worked -- troops and natural born soldiers -- and it turned into a mess," had been Zan's explanation, when it was still dark and they'd only just gotten started, and while that wasn't enough to win Tally's trust fully, his estimation of the zabrak went up several fold anyway.  Because bota was so expensive and coveted that of course it was for the rich and powerful civilians and not the people dying and bleeding to protect it; that Zan went against that (and paid for it) definitely was enough to catch Tally's attention and tentative admiration.  "I come from a wealthy, powerful family; they would have made an example of me if I hadn't.  Still, I was disgraced; I escaped criminal charges of treason and theft, but I was thrown out of the army and stripped of my accreditation in the civilian sector.  I had to pay back my wages, lousy as those were."  He had shaken his head there, heaving out a heavy-sounding sigh. "I'm good enough with a quetarra to live well, but--"

"Do you miss it?" Tally had asked, pointedly.

"I didn't think I would, but yeah."  Zan had held out his hands, fingers splayed, looking down at them. "At first, I was just relieved to get away without a criminal record, and to get away from the blood and gore and misery of the front lines, but-- yeah, I miss it.  Not war, but being a doctor.  Medicine.  Surgery."

In between all but interrogating Zan, Tally revealed little bits and pieces of how he knew what he did; it wasn't until they had been talking for awhile that he realized Zan was letting him get away with not ponying up an equal amount of information, and while that made him wary, he was kind of grateful for it, too.

Now, most of Zan's history was out in the open and the talk had turned to current medicine; in this case, a mountain flower native to Iridonia called rasash.  Because it was the first time Tally had ever had a doctor and a zabrak to prod for information and there was only so far that medical texts could take him.

"How'd you know that it would work on a hybrid?" he asked, plunking himself down to sit on a bench and finishing the dregs of his herbal tea; he'd gotten rid of the headache, but he could still feel his own exhaustion.

"I didn't, but even if it didn't work, it wouldn't have hurt him any.  Humans occasionally gain a taste for it; it doesn't have any medicinal effect on them, though."  Zan shrugged and lowered himself down to sit at the other end of the bench. "It was known to work on inflammation in zabraks long before we kept records of those things, old clan remedies.  Over the past tens of thousands of years, it became a common thing in most family pantries; everyone stocks it, drinks it, and it doesn't really do anything for anyone these days because it's so commonplace everyone's built up a tolerance.  It's tradition, it tastes good and reminds them of home or family.  But since he was isolated, I thought he probably hadn't been exposed to it and that it was worth a try as the most gentle way to get his immune response under control."

Tally had stolen Zan's datapad, which was networked to the palace's medical wing, and had called up Maul's stats.  And they were improved; it wasn't a cure-all, he was still a mess, but he was a mess whose status was under control and who was actually resting properly for the time being.  Slow-wave sleep, something Maul desperately needed at this point.  "How'd you know he was isolated?" Tally asked, bluntly.

Zan's usual reaction to his prodding, especially when it was sharper, seemed to be either amusement or sheepishness.  Now, he sucked a breath in through his teeth and rolled his shoulders in the warm morning light. "That's another long story.  Are you sure you want it now?  You look like you should probably go back to bed for awhile."

"I'm sure."  Tally smiled, just a hint of sharpness in it. "Because I might just be a medic--" And there, Zan snorted at him. "--and you might just be a quetarra player now, but let's not pretend there's no deeper reason why you're here to 'consult' with."

"I can't go into that part," Zan answered, raising his brows again. "Not yet.  That, you'll have to take up with Viceroy Organa."

"I intend to."

"As to the rest--"  The zabrak took a deep breath and let it out, then leaned back against the bench and tipped his head back, sprawling there.  "He approached me after I was back on Talus for a little while, feeling wretched.  He invited me to meet with him.  Then he proceeded to grill me to within a centimeter of my life.  You've talked with him-- he's a gentleman, but he's certainly not lacking any speed.  He had apparently been vetting me before I even knew his name, and he asked me enough questions to make it clear that he knew a lot more about me than any public records might show.  Then, just as I was feeling like I was either being recruited as a spy or about to be buried in an unmarked grave, he offered me a place in Aldera here, and an audition with the Orchestra."

Tally chewed on that for a few moments.  Long enough to feel a little shiver in his spine; a thrill of fear.  Or maybe hope.  Or maybe some tangled up combination of the two, a hint of something much bigger than expected on the horizon.

"And just in case you ever need to know, I'm working on Maul's situation too."

Tally knew his brain wasn't up to speed right now, but he was starting to get the sense of just how far Organa had been going since he'd told Tally that on Corellia.  He had thought the man was trying to find some legal loophole, but now -- presented with a compassionate, principled, disgraced zabrak surgeon who had apparently been maneuvered into this, if kindly -- he was starting to suspect that it was a hell of a lot more direct action in nature.  "He wants to know if those cybernetics can be cracked without killing Maul in the process, doesn't he?"

Zan reached over and swatted him on a shoulder. "Come on, don't push.  I'm sure he'll bring it to you before long.  He made it incredibly clear how much he respects you and how nothing gets done without your involvement."

Tally's eyes wanted to close without his permission (again), but his eyebrows went all the way up at that. And completely outwith himself, he felt a sharp rush of affection for the Senator from Alderaan.  His crush had died on Corellia, but the respect he had for Organa hadn't, and now here was another reminder of why: For Bail's faith in him, for the fact the man was working on exactly what he had said he would, but--

But also, for loving Maul that much.

For the first time since before Felucia, Tally could almost feel hope again.  The loss of Rabbit still was digging a hole in his heart, but he felt a little like he could breathe past it easier than he had been.