#revan/malak was it but nobody knows about them

[miladythewinter]

i don't care that people ship reylo, i'm 31 years old, but the problem with it is that it's a ship forced into existence. what i mean is, textually there's nothing really there because characters dynamics susceptible to shipping aren't there. it's a ship because people project themselves into rey or because they want to see them fuck etc. not because it's an actual thing the text was interested in developing or teasing (until the last minute for out of universe reasons).

anyway, related to that, even with all the headcannon extrapolation it's still a boring ship because rey is just clearly his victim and opponent. there's no other dynamic between them. it's supposed to be this dark, sexy ship but the characters aren't on the same level even. if you really want a good toxic ship then both characters need to be toxic, they both need to be codependent freaks, for example. otherwise it doesn't work.

though ofc the thing about reylo is that i feel the shippers want it to be the classic "romantic~~" trope of like dark broody guy with a secret good heart x submissive sensitive girl who can save him. when 1) that's not who they are and 2) the only way it could be good would be as a toxic ship lol like the only way that appeals to me is if both kylo and rey were on the same wavelength and had similar personalities. the push-pull of the dark side, morally questionable actions and all that should have been a shared trait. but it wasn't. anyway

[lavampira]

truth flows between us

summary: the nature of force bonds is a curious thing, as revan and bastila know all too well. pairing: vanna phy & bastila shan, vanna phy/malak (past) word count: 1.1k | rated: T | read on ao3 notes: an older fic that was once a prompt fill, twice rewritten and never reposted here before now, but an important facet of my revan's growing friendship with bastila in their canon. vanna also uses they/she pronouns.

Vanna gently rapped their knuckles against the door, announcing their presence before entering Bastila’s quarters with a soft whoosh of the door. Bastila was cross-legged on the floor with her hands resting on her knees and robes billowed around her, meditating, but didn’t bother to look up. She would know it was Vanna anyway through the bond they shared.

“I’m worried about you.”

Bastila still didn’t look up, not even opening her eyes to peek. “Me? Why?”

“Well, you haven’t left the room in a while, for starters.”

“I’ve been meditating. I… needed to clear my mind.”

Silence fell over them again. Determined to see this through, Vanna eased further into the room and settled onto the floor across from her. They could wait Bastila out until she was ready to talk. It was only a matter of time, considering how impatient Bastila could be, despite her stubborn nature. She would tire of Vanna intruding on her meditation and let down the wall she built to hide her emotions behind.

And she was right. Vanna had cleared their own mind of their thoughts, focused on the soft hum of the Ebon Hawk’s engines and energies of everyone on board, when the niggling sense of Bastila’s nervousness poked at their consciousness. It reminded them of the early days with Carth on Taris, sensing his underlying desire to talk about their situation and distrust, but this was deeper, almost part of themself as though the Force was spilling from Bastila into them.

“The bond we share,” Bastila finally began, causing Vanna to glance up, “it kept me from falling.”

“What do you mean?”

“Malak wanted to turn me into his acolyte. He tortured me, fed me lies about you and twisted my insecurity about the Order, but I clung to our bond. I knew the truth because I felt it in you.”

Vanna wasn’t sure what to say to that. They knew their bond was telling, considering they could feel just as much from Bastila as she did from them, but they also knew that Bastila was stronger than she gave herself credit. Sure, she was insecure and had her doubts. But nobody could coerce Bastila down a path that she did not want to take. Vanna just had no idea how to go about voicing that without immediately offending her and losing this large step in confidence.

They had been so worried from the time Bastila had been taken. At first, out of fear of what Malak would do to her, or if they would ever see their friend again. They hadn’t known each other long, technically, and they had started off on the wrong foot in more ways than one, but they had grown close. Their souls knew each other on an intimate level that only the Force could explain. And that was how they knew that Bastila was struggling with the aftermath of her capture, especially as they careened towards the inevitable—Bastila could lead the charge of the Republic forces with her battle meditation, Vanna would leave to face Malak on the Star Forge.

“Also, I didn’t say it before, but I’m sorry for my role in what happened to you.” Bastila reached for her hand, resting her own on top of it. “If I had known ahead of time…”

The unfinished thought weighed heavy between them. The unsaid maybe I wouldn’t have made the same choice was powerful, and it threatened to crack the harsh exterior built around Vanna’s admittedly fragile heart, but it dissipated just as quickly. They both knew it was a lie.

A small smirk pulled at Vanna’s lips. “You still would have saved me.”

Bastila ducked her head, huffing a soft laugh. “Yes.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Me, too.”

That had been on Vanna’s mind since they'd first learned the truth. They couldn’t remember their old self—only in fragments, pieces of memories that had been unlocked by Malak and resurfaced a little at a time, though they never quite resonated as real—but they knew what they had done. To be the cause of so much pain and destruction, sometimes they wondered if they should have died on that flagship, or if they could have even been redeemed without the mind wipe, but then they would look at Bastila and think there had to be a reason why this young and promising Jedi had saved Revan.

“My memories are resurfacing,” Vanna admitted. It was only fair, considering how much had been shared with them. And they saw Bastila in their peripheral glance at her with curiosity. “Not much, only pieces, and it feels disconnected from me in ways. But ever since he told me, it’s like I was unlocked.”

“Master Vrook worried about the risk of your true memory returning.”

Vanna scoffed. They weren't going to touch that subject. “It’s difficult. I know what Malak has done, but then these memories come to me, and he was my…”

“He was your friend.”

“My friend, my love,” they whispered, recalling flashes of two kids sparring and giggling on the Temple grounds as much as two young Knights sharing victorious kisses on the battlefield and the warmth of each other’s bodies pressed close in a tent away from the prying eyes of their soldiers. “No wonder he hates me so much.���

“Do not go down that road. Malak made his own choices.”

“Just as I made mine?”

Bastila squeezed their hand. They both knew that nothing could be said to that—Revan was given a second chance, albeit questionable and unfair, but Malak had not. Redemption was a fickle thing, as was fate. As was the will of the Force. But she was right, Vanna shouldn’t blame themself for how much farther that Malak had fallen.

“I want to go with you.”

Vanna gave her a sad smile. “The Republic needs your battle meditation. Besides, all of this was started by Revan and Malak, and so I need to face him alone.”

“I know you’re right, but I despise it.”

The silence that followed was a comfortable one, as if a weight that held them down had finally been lifted. Vanna supposed it had. Even with the looming threat of battle, something innately familiar in the pit of their gut from a life they barely remembered, they knew that they were there for each other—even across a galaxy, they would have each other—and their trust, their bond, was unbreakable. They could save the Republic together with their crew.

And they kept that in mind as they were offloading their friends, including Bastila. The time to go their separate ways to the final battle had arrived. The only ones who would follow Vanna were Carth and the droids, who all hovered behind them as they said their goodbyes to the others. They were ready to leave, already halfway up the ramp when that wait, I have something more to say feeling struck them again.

“Vanna?” They turned at Bastila’s voice, surprised when the woman barreled into them, throwing her arms around Vanna’s neck. “May the Force be with you.”

“And with you, my friend. I’ll see you soon.”

[sharkmobster]

“finishing KOTOR for the first time” moodboard…………..

[spectraspecs-writes]

Alderaan - Chapter 118

Link to the masterpost. Chapter 117. Chapter 119.

@averruncusho @ceruleanrainblues @chubbsmomma thank you for reading, you get a tag. @skelelexiunderlord thank you for support, you get a tag.

——–

I couldn’t manage to get back to sleep after I shocked myself again. So I’m up at three in the morning. I didn’t want to get out of bed. Didn’t want to move. I knew yesterday’s good day wouldn’t last.

I didn’t want to get up. But something pulls me. Urges me to go to the training room Master Zhar and I have been in. It’s almost like… whispers. Soft voices calling out from the training room. But nobody else is awake. I can feel it - there’s nobody else moving anywhere in the enclave besides a handful of cleaning droids. So whatever whispers I’m hearing… they’re not… real. What am I hearing?

I step into the training room. None of the droids are active, none of the computers. Just as dead as they were two days ago. But the footlocker… Revan’s mask. It’s practically shouting at me. But I can’t understand any of it - I can’t make out any words.

I throw open the footlocker. The whispers stop. Replaced by… I don’t really know how to describe it, it feels like something pushing down on me. I can’t take my eyes off the footlocker. It has a few vibroblades, some lightsaber parts, and the mask. Still shrouded in white. I don’t know why, but I reach down and uncover it. Which was a bad idea. The eyehole stares into me, just like it did two days ago. The black nothingness just sits in my heart and it hurts.

I manage to close my eyes. “Leave me alone.” My voice shudders. My fingers spark. Control the fear, Rena. Control the fear.

“You can’t really be as weak as all that.” My voice. But not my voice. I can’t feel anyone else in the room - the Force is telling me there’s nobody here. But the hairs on the back of my neck tell another story. There’s something here. Something dangerous. With my voice. Focus, Rena, focus on the sword in the footlocker. Call it into your hand. Breathe. Breathe. The sword overturns the mask and enters my hand. I pivot on my heel, ready to strike whoever’s here. Whoever escaped the eye of the Force but not my own instincts. Whoever is using my own voice against me.

A woman. My height. Boots, black cloak. Short hair. And my face. But not me. Revan. Relax, Rena. She’s not real, she can’t hurt you. So why can’t I lower my sword? “Weak enough to be scared by a piece of metal,” she says, slowly walking around me. I follow her with my eyes. “Can’t even manage to pick it up, can’t even manage to look at it. How could I become someone like you?”

“I’m not you.”

She throws her head back, laughs. “Keep telling yourself that, honey - maybe you’ll convince your friends, maybe even yourself, but you won’t convince me. And you certainly won’t convince that pretty little pilot of yours.”

I know, I know, Carth hates me and will never trust me again. But I can’t think about that right now. “Tell me something, sweetie - “ Why do I feel like I’m being demeaned? If a man talked to me this way he’d very quickly find his balls have left the building. “ - why are you letting the Jedi get away with this?”

I blink. “Get away with what?”

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Come on, you may be weak but you’re not stupid. The Jedi Council took your memories. Took your mind away without so much as a thought. I would have cut them all down the instant I found out. But instead you tried to hide in the desert. Not only are you weak, you’re a pushover. What are you going to let them take next?” She turns on her heel, tracing her path back. “Your dignity? Your dreams? Your life?”

They won’t, though. They won’t. Revan rolls her eyes at me again. “Of course you’re letting them get away with it, none of you have any idea what’s at stake here. There's so much more to be worried about than just Malak, but none of you can see it.” She pounds at her head with her fingers, exasperated and almost ranting.

What is she talking about? Malak is the biggest problem we’re dealing with right now. What do you mean, there’s more than just him to worry about? ‘What do you mean? What’s bigger than Malak?”

She rolls her head. Her eyes are like nails, fixed on mine. “You were in the middle of something,” she says, “Wouldn’t you like to know what it was?”

Can I really take on another problem right now? With Malak still the urgent problem, then you throw on this personal crisis and all it entails, I don’t think I can take anything else. But… it’s my own memory. I have to know. I don’t relax the sword for a moment, but I nod. She smiles. God, that’s chilling. “Touch the mask, then.”

“You can’t just, I don’t know, tell me?” What kind of bullshit is that?

“If you’re too scared to even touch it, how do you expect to deal with my apprentice?” she chides, “Even he, the sniveling traitor, had guts enough to confront me.”

I’m not scared of it, I just… okay, I’m scared of it. But… I have to know. I crouch down, sword still drawn. And reach my fingers towards the mask.

“Leave her alone, Revan.” I stop. My own voice again. But not me. And not Revan. I look towards the door, where the voice came from. This woman looks more like me. Hair still short, and messy but not as messy as Revan’s or mine. She stands with a gentle confidence. Easy to underestimate, but also fatal. She knows who she is. This is a woman who went to war, who fought a war, who won a war. And is ready to do it again. “She can’t help you.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Marina!” Revan fires back, “She has to. She’s the only one who can.”

“No, Revan,” Marina says calmly, “Look at her. She can’t help you. Not now.”

Revan laughs again, throwing her head back. “Not now? The entire galaxy is at stake, and you want to wait. I expected better from you. You know what’s at stake, you know why, you know why we need her.”

“Yes. I do,” she nods. She looks at me. Where Revan inspires terror, Marina inspires peace. Her eyes tell me everything is going to be okay. And I so desperately want to believe her. “She can’t do it.”

Revan’s fingers spark. Just like mine. “She has to. Because I’m gone. And you’re gone. She’s all that’s left.” Revan scoffs. “And what is she worried about? My traitorous apprentice, and her boy toy.”

Marina rolls her eyes. But not at me. She looks at me with love in her eyes. She comes over to me, crouches beside me. “I know you could do it,” she says, “You are so strong, and so capable. There isn’t a single problem you can’t solve. And if there’s anyone I’d trust with this problem, it’s you.” She smiles, so confident in me. “But you’re not ready. I wasn’t ready.” She glances at Revan. “And for all her bluster, she wasn’t ready either.” (Revan scoffs again, rolling her eyes, and turns away.)

“What is it?” I ask.

Marina shakes her head. “It’s better that you don’t know, for now at least,” she says, “Stick with one galaxy-saving quest at a time.” She smiles. So do I.

“As if Malak is that big of a problem,” Revan scoffs.

Marina stands to confront her again. “He is that big of a problem,” she says, “You know how insufferable Alek could be at the best of times. Now? With an army at his disposal and neither of us there to stand in his way?” Revan doesn’t say anything. “He’s the bigger problem right now and you know it. Stop berating her because she’s not you.” Revan still doesn’t say anything. Marina looks at me again. “You hear it calling you, don’t you?” she asks, “The mask, you can hear it.” She doesn’t need me to respond, but she allows time for one anyway. “It called to me, too, once - when I first found it. It showed everyone the massacre on Cathar, and got the Council to let us get involved in the war.” That’s a pretty heavy thing to bear witness to. ‘There are probably people who know more about this than I do, but I think all that, plus how significant a part of me it became, turned that mask into an artifact of the Force. It’s more than just a hunk of metal now. It’s a part of you. And you have to accept it.”

“I have accepted it.”

Revan scoffs again. “If you had, you wouldn’t be standing here, arguing with us.”

“She has a point,” Marina says, “I know you’ve been having a hard time with this, with everything. And that’s okay. This is big. But you can’t dwell on it forever.” No, I can’t. I have to get my ass in gear. We have to go. “Touch the mask. It won’t --”

“Hang on, hand on. Revan wanted me to touch it, and you stopped her, why are you telling me to touch it now?”

“I can’t say you’re wrong,” she says, “And I can’t blame you for being skeptical. But there are answers you’re looking for, and this won’t solve anything, but it’ll push you in the right direction.”

I don’t want to hurt anybody, and if I don’t get a solid handle on the lightning, then I might just hurt somebody. I can’t let that happen. Marina smiles at me again.

The mask is still face down in the footlocker. I take a breath and turn it over. It stares into me again, and neither Revan nor Marina say a word. I don’t even know if they’re still here, and I can’t bring myself to look. It weighs on me so heavily, sitting on my shoulders and pushing me down. I need to touch the face of it. I need to put my hands on it just like I used to. Like Revan used to.

Only way to do it is to just… do it. Take the plunge. Another deep breath, and I reach my hand to the mask, feeling the metal on my fingertips.

It’s warm. Not a good warm, not a bad warm, it just is. It’s a warmth of its own. The Force is leaking from it like a busted faucet. But it isn’t showing me anything like Marina said it would. It feels familiar. Which I understand but I hate.

Then. Justice. Marina donned the mask and swore to bring justice. To the Cathar and to everyone the Mandalorians hurt. Swore to make it right. To help people. By whatever means. In the end that was why she fell. I can’t see the whole reason why, like it’s being kept from me, but I know her intentions were good and right.

And my intentions are good and right. What’s to stop me from falling? What’s to stop that from happening to me, if I can’t see how she got there in the first place?

Nothing. I need to keep an eye on myself, I need to think hard about every choice I make, the consequences. To others, to myself, to the good of the galaxy. That’s the only way to stop myself from falling again. I am the only one who can stop this. The others can help but at the end of the day I have to fix it. I will face Darth Malak alone. I can’t let them get hurt because of me and I won’t. I will watch myself to make sure I don’t fall. Because if I do it’s over.

And so. The lightning. I need to trust myself otherwise people will get hurt. If I can’t trust that I won’t hurt people, then I will hurt them. No way around that. That’s the way it has to be. And the way it will be.

Carth hates me. And it’s probably better that way. I don’t think I could stop loving him if I wanted to, and I can’t say I like it either. I hate that it’s probably better he hates me, better that he keeps his distance. Because I know him - if he stays he’s going to throw himself in the line of fire for me. He is going to get himself hurt. And I know myself. I will walk through hell to keep him safe. When he walks away… I will let him go. I have to let him go.

If I had to fight Malak every day for the rest of my life, it still wouldn’t be as difficult as letting Carth go. But I can’t make him stay. He could keep me from falling but I need to look out for myself.

Because once I was Marina Ardan. But now my name is Rena Visz.

[thatwitchrevan]

Another on the endless things about KotOR that make no sense to me: during Carth's little briefing upon arriving on Taris, he keeps emphasizing how important it is that he and Revan get out there and find Bastila because she is too high profile to move freely on the planet (fair, although at least in terms of gameplay this is NOT reflected after her rescue) and in contrast, he and Revan are 'just' Republic soldiers, aka practically nobody (which ofc, that definitely seems to apply to Revan at this point as presumably neither of them have any idea that Revan is Revan). But like, is Carth not a pretty decorated vet himself? He's been fighting for the Republic twice as long as Bastila, ever since the Mandalorian Wars, and he's famous at least within the army for being a really hecking good pilot.

I can see how the average Sith grunt on Taris wouldn't recognize him out of uniform (and that's assuming he takes it off) but he's not exactly anonymous, right? How can he be sure he won't run into somebody who does know what Captain Carth Onasi looks like? Why's he lumping himself in with this rookie with absolutely zero reputation? I mean if nothing else, Malak absolutely knows who he is, and if he managed to find out who besides Bastila was on the Spire he might've even told his people to look out for Carth Onasi.

Tl:dr Carth tells Revan they can move about freely on Taris because neither of them is a big deal except Carth IS a big deal at least internally within the Republic military, and even if the Sith soldiers currently stationed on Taris don't know anything about him Malak is also a Mandalorian war vet and he does.

[visionmarred-archive]

OC Interview meme

couldn’t decide whether I wanted it pre-reveal or post-reveal so... guess I’m doing two different flavors for fun :^D

name ➔ Pre: “Amethylia Cypher. You can call me Amy.” Post: “Revan. The one and only.”

are you single ➔ Pre: “Yeah, because for some reason, women don’t seem to want to date cynical, rude schuttas without a filter. Can’t possibly imagine why.” She rolls her eyes and picks at her nails. Post: “...It’s complicated.” She says, with a slight smile. “No.”

are you happy ➔ “Do you care?”

are you angry ➔ “Keep asking me stupid questions and I’ll get there.”

are your parents still married ➔ Pre: “They’re dead. Thanks for the reminder.” Post: “Apparently they never were, and my father’s dead.”

NINE FACTS

birthplace ➔ Pre: “Deralia. Mom had me in a taxi before she could make it to the hospital.” Post: “None of your business.”

hair ➔ She stares derisively, then scoffs. “You blind? Black.”

eye colour ➔ She rolls her eyes. “Green. Next question.”

birthday ➔ “Autumn. Not telling you the date.” (she’s a Scorpio)

mood ➔ “Wondering why you feel this need to interview me. Don’t you have literally anything better to do?”

gender ➔ “Nonbinary. She or they, I don’t care which.”

summer or winter ➔ She wrinkles her nose. “Winter, I guess.”

morning or afternoon ➔ The wrinkle turns into an outright glare. “Pass.”

EIGHT THINGS ABOUT YOUR LOVE LIFE

are you in love ➔ Pre: Her expression softens, and she crosses her arms. “I, uh. Well.” She looks to the side, and then scratches the back of her head. “...Yeah, but it’s tricky. Sometimes I think Bas - she doesn’t like me very much. I can’t really blame her.” Post: Her expression softens. “...Yeah, I am. For some reason, she loves me back. Didn’t really see that one coming.”

do you believe in love at first sight ➔ She blushes. “Uh. Um. Krif, move on, would you?”

who ended your last relationship ➔  Pre: “Lia had a spice overdose and died in the ‘fresher.” She answers dryly. “Kidding. She dumped me. Who could’ve seen that one coming...” Post: “Not sure. Memories are still fuzzy.”

have you ever broken someone’s heart ➔  Pre: “That requires expectation, and people don’t usually have a lot for me. So I doubt it.” Post: She simply glares.

are you afraid of commitments ➔ “No. Stupid thing to be afraid of.”

have you hugged someone within the last week? ➔ Pre: She sneers. “Don’t touch me.” Post: “Yeah. Don’t touch me.”

have you ever had a secret admirer ➔ Pre: “I doubt it.” Post: “Wouldn’t be surprised if some horny ensign saw heroic Revan and sent her his nude photographs.”

have you ever broken your own heart? ➔ Pre: She simply glares. Post: “I had it coming.”

SIX CHOICES

love or lust ➔ “Love. But lust is fun.” She says, giving a slight smirk.

lemonade or iced tea ➔ “Don’t care. Iced tea, I guess.”

cats or dogs ➔ “Cats. Easier to take care of. But dogs are good, too.”

a few best friends or many regular friends ➔ “Few best friends. Less maintenance.”

wild night out or romantic night in ➔ “Romantic night in. I’ve done my partying, and I’m over it.”

day or night ➔ “Night.” Motioning to her all black clothing, she snarks, “Are you surprised?”

FIVE HAVE YOU EVERS

been caught sneaking out ➔ Pre: She shrugs. “Yeah, when I was a teenager. Grandfather caught me once or twice.” Post: “Apparently, Revan snuck out a lot when she was a teenager.”

fallen down/up the stairs ➔  Pre: “Yes, in the same tragic accident that claimed the life of my mother.” She says dryly. Post: “Yes. That’s how I got amnesia in the first place.” She says, with a deadpan expression.

wanted something/someone so badly it hurt? ➔ She scowls and looks away. “Move on.”

wanted to disappear ➔ She simply glares.

FOUR PREFERENCES

smile or eyes ➔ “...Eyes. Something striking about them.”

shorter or taller ➔ “Taller. Pretty easy to find, for someone short as me.”

intelligence or attraction ➔ “...That just depends on the situation. Intelligent people are attractive, though.”

hook-up or relationship ➔ “Hook-ups are nice, but I’d rather have a relationship.”

FAMILY

do you and your family get along ➔  Pre: “My grandfather and I get on just fine. Planning on messaging him later.” She says, with a slight smile. Post: She glares. “If I did before, I doubt I do now. How would you get along with people you didn’t know existed until now? I got along just fine with the family I thought I had, but he isn’t real. He never was.”

would you say you have a “messed up life” ➔  Pre: “Spice dealer and blaster smuggler turned Jedi? Probably.” Post: She just glares.

have you ever ran away from home ➔  Pre: “No, never. Loved my grandfather too much to think about it.” Post: “Do you read your history? I don’t feel like detailing my recruiting the Revanchists - space, and I named them after myself? How tacky can I get? - and running from the Jedi, thanks. That enough of an answer for you?”

have you ever gotten kicked out ➔  Pre: “No.” Post: “I should’ve been.”

FRIENDS

do you secretly hate one of your friends ➔ She scoffs. “You’ll know if I hate you.”

do you consider all of your friends good friends ➔ “Sure. Are we almost done?”

who is your best friend ➔  Pre: She smiles slightly. “Carth. Don’t tell him I said that. But I appreciate his honesty, and the guy’s funny.” Post: She frowns sadly. “I guess it used to be Malak. Alek. He was my best friend once. Then I dragged him to the Dark Side, and then I killed him. So I probably shouldn’t do best friends anymore.”

who knows everything about you ➔  Pre: “Nobody. That’s how I want it.” Post: “Bastila... she knows a lot, better than anybody else, but space, I hope she never learns everything. I want her to still like me.”

[coruscantexpat]

Bonds Unbroken - Chapter 21: Home Again

Meetra felt the heavy thud of the Ebon Hawk’s landing beneath her feet as she strode down the corridor from the starboard dormitory. She’d spent most of her time there in the last week since they’d left Telos, due both to her exhaustion and the tension on the ship. The Handmaiden rarely emerged from the cargo hold, but when she did, Atton and Bao-Dur would practically flee the common areas until she returned. Meetra hadn’t even seen Kreia since their departure. Every time she’d thought to check in on her, she’d felt an overwhelming unease, perhaps not entirely her own. If the old woman wanted to be left alone, Meetra would respect that.

As she passed through the main hold, she kept her eyes averted from the rust-colored droid standing in the small storage compartment. Discovered shortly after takeoff, Meetra and Atton had wanted to jettison it due to the uncomfortable resemblance to the HK-50s, but T3 wouldn’t hear it. Though reluctant, the little droid was adamant they leave the doppelganger where it was, and despite her misgivings, Meetra agreed. It was nonoperational anyway, though T3 suggested it could be restored with replacement parts.

“Thing’s the galaxy’s most terrifying scarecrow.” Atton emerged from the corridor to the cockpit and fell into step beside her, grimace still in place as he looked away from the droid. “Still don’t understand why the little trash can wouldn’t let us space it.”

“He said it’s a ‘friend,’ although he didn’t sound entirely confident.” Meetra frowned as she recalled T3’s explanation. Her Binary was near-fluent, but some of the more complex translations still gave her a little trouble. “‘Friend’ might be too strong… perhaps ‘ally’ is closer.”

“Oh, so like Kreia. Or the Snow Princess.” He made a face. “Droid Kreia. There’s a fear I didn’t know I had.”

“Don’t start,” Meetra warned, but she returned his grin. “How’s your arm?” After much grousing, she’d finally relented and allowed him to remove the sling the day before.

“It’s fine. Look —” He lifted the arm and rotated it for proof, though Meetra noticed the full range of motion had not completely returned. “Trust me, this is nothing.” Recalling the scars crossing his torso, she knew he was serious, joking tone aside. Atton brought his hand to the back of his neck, a gesture she’d come to associate with discomfort. “So… you’ve been to Dantooine before, right?”

“I grew up there.” She left it at that, and he didn’t press. “... but I haven’t been back since before my trial.” The thought brought back memories, both painful and pleasant, and she shied away from them. It felt like they belonged to a different person now.

Bao-Dur was at the workbench when they entered the garage, T3 at his feet. A new remote droid circled his shoulders and let out a sharp chirp at the sight of them. The Zabrak turned, sharp canines displayed in his welcoming smile. “On your way out to Dantooine, General?”

“Actually, I stopped by to see if you wanted to go with us.” Meetra didn’t see the sharp glance Atton gave her at the0- last word, or the small smile that tugged at his mouth.

Bao-Dur didn’t answer immediately; instead, he glanced back to the mess of circuitry and wiring on the workbench. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d prefer to stay here for now. I had my fill of excitement on Telos.” His grin returned. “Besides, there’s something I wanted to work on; a surprise initially, but I’m afraid I’ll need your help with it after all.” He rooted among the pile and produced the lightsaber component Chodo had gifted her. “I hope you don’t mind, General — I found it in your bag when I was looking for a medpac. I know your lightsaber was… well, I thought you might want to construct a new one, and I wanted to offer my assistance.”

Meetra eyed the cylinder like it was a fanged viper. To have a lightsaber again, to build a new weapon to her specifications — the temptation was strong. But so was her upbringing. “It’s a Jedi’s weapon, Bao-Dur. I don’t…” She struggled to find the words. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful for the offer, but she wasn’t sure it was a weapon she should, or even could wield again.

“It might make us even more of a target,” Atton offered when she fell silent. “I mean, sure, having a lightsaber to wave around would solve a lot of problems, it would also make the Exchange’s job a lot easier.”

“A fair point.” Bao-Dur returned the piece to the workbench, seemingly unperturbed. “However, if you change your mind, my offer still stands, General. The only thing I need are the remaining parts and your expertise.”

“I’ll think about it,” she promised and reached out to squeeze his arm. He laid a hand over hers, mouth turned up in a small smile, before returning to his project. Meetra waved for Atton to follow, and they resumed their walk toward the loading ramp, only to pause when T3 followed, beeping, in their wake. “Meetra knelt to put herself on the droid’s level. “You sure? It could be dangerous.” His indignant chirp pulled a laugh from her as she stood. “Alright, fair enough. I guess we have a third.”

“It's coming with us?” Atton scowled down at T3, who issued a rude buzz in return. “Tin can’ll probably get a rock in its treads as soon as we’re off the ramp.”

“He survived Peragus and Atris — I think he can take care of himself.” T3 extended his taser and flamethrower attachments and waved them to back up her claims. “I’ll take all the help you can offer, T3.” He chirped, pleased, and rolled past them toward the loading ramp. Meetra followed, Atton, still grousing, at her heels.

The setting sun hit them full force as they left the ship, and Meetra raised a hand to shield her face while her eyes adjusted. She registered the smell next, and her knees suddenly felt weak. Beneath the ship exhaust floated the thick grassy scent of Dantooine’s fields, spiked with the barest hint of lavender. The smell had haunted her dreams since leaving twenty-six years ago, and for a moment, she let herself pretend she never had. The breeze blew another whiff of lavender past her, cutting through the late afternoon heat, and she leaned into it for comfort.

A hand touched her shoulder. “Meetra?” Atton’s voice shattered the illusion, and Meetra pulled herself from childhood memories with a heavy sigh. She lowered her hand and opened her eyes to find him watching her with concern. She gave him a reassuring smile, and he hesitantly removed his hand as she turned to look around.

They had landed at a rudimentary dock, one she didn’t recognize. It still seemed fairly new; either it didn’t see a lot of traffic, or it had been built after Malak’s attack on the planet. The dock was little more than a durasteel pad with enough space for two large ships and heavy retaining walls. No other ships occupied the platform, though a few figures ambled across its surface. One of them, a dark haired woman dressed in a yellow and tan uniform and wielding a datapad like a club, approached. “Name?”

Meetra glanced at Atton quickly, but he only offered a shrug. “Ours, or the ship?”

“I couldn’t care less what your names are.” The woman’s attitude was impressively brusque. “I need to make a log of your arrival. Vessel name?”

“The Ebon Hawk.”

The woman snorted. “Yeah, okay. We’ll go with that. Wouldn’t mention it to the locals, though.” She entered the name into the datapad. “What’s the purpose of your arrival?”

Meetra shared another glance with Atton and opted to conceal their true intentions. “We’re heading to the Jedi Academy.”

“More salvagers huh?” Meetra frowned, but the other woman was focused on the datapad.  “Well, you gotta follow protocol like the rest. Nobody sets foot in the ruins without Administrator Adare’s permission.” Finished with the data entry, she turned and pointed at the path leading away from the dock. “Follow that up to Khoonda. Don’t get off the path, unless you like finding yourself ass-deep in kath hounds and raiders.”

“Wait, wait.” The woman scowled at Meetra, her face as severe as the bun on top of her head. “Sorry, I just need a little more information. What’s Khoonda?”

“First time on Dantooine?”

“... Sure.”

The woman shrugged. “It’s as close to city hall as we have around here. It used to be the Matale estate, but the whole family went missing right before the bombardment. The Administrator took advantage of a big empty building and rebuilt it as a new center of government four years ago.”

“That’s Adare?”

“Yeah, Terena Adare. She was the Agriculture Administrator, y’know, before.” She grimaced, and Meetra felt strangely guilty. Even though Malak’s actions had been his own, she still felt responsible for him and Revan. “Adare was the only government official to survive, and she stepped up in a big way. If not for her, this place would be nothing but raiders and wild animals. Well, more than it is now, anyway.” She jerked a thumb toward the path. “Now, no offense, but I’ve got work that needs doing. You want more information, the Administrator can give it to you.” Without waiting for a response, the woman turned away, headed toward the far end of the platform.

“Well, that was pleasant.” Atton glanced around the dock, eyeing the farmers and merchants milling about. “So, are we really wasting time with this Adare lady? You know where the Jedi Academy is, right?”

“I’d rather avoid antagonizing the locals, if possible. Besides, she might know where Vrook…” Meetra trailed off as she caught sight of a battered protocol droid stumbling near the entrance to the dock. His exterior was so scratched and pitted that the original color was indiscernible.

Atton glanced at her, then followed her gaze. “I think we’ve got enough droids for one ship. Maybe one too many.” T3 hissed at the insinuation and rolled closer to Meetra.

“No, I… I think I’ve seen him before.”

“Sure you have. They all look the same. Well, maybe not as run-down.”

“No, I mean —” Meetra shook her head and broke away, heading for the droid. “Never mind.” “Meetra.” When she didn’t turn around, he glanced down at T3 and gestured after her. “Come on.”

They caught up with Meetra as she reached the droid. It took him a moment to react to her presence, an indication of extensive sensor damage. “Salutations, ma’am. I welcome you to Dantooine on behalf of Administrator Adare and Khoonda. How may I be of service?”

“Do…” Meetra hesitated, questioning her own judgement. “Do you know me?”

The protocol droid was silent for a moment, and Meetra could practically feel the heat from his memory core as he struggled to process her question. “Apologies. There are many visitors to Khoonda, and I have no memory of the Sith invasion.”

She stiffened. “‘Sith invasion?’”

He jerked, the light behind his optical sensors flickering. “Resetting… Salutations, ma’am. I welcome you to Dantooine —”

“T3, could I get your help?” The astromech chirped and rolled up next to her while she waited for the protocol droid to finish his greeting. “Were you damaged in Malak’s bombing?”

“I believe I was, though I don’t recall it.” He fidgeted for a moment. “Administrator Adare did her best to find a mechanic, but self-diagnostics still indicate extensive damage to my exterior and memory core.”

“We could try to repair you,” Meetra offered, including both herself and T3 with a gesture. “At least internally. With your permission, of course.”

“Do we have time for this?” Atton muttered behind her, but Meetra ignored him.

The protocol droid glanced nervously between them. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt, but I must warn you that Administrator Adare may be displeased if I am further damaged.”

“We’ll be careful.” He turned so she could access the panel on his back. Meetra swung it open, setting the droid to low power before motioning T3 closer. Atton craned his neck to watch them work. “Care to fill me in?”

“I think he’s an Enclave droid. If I’m right — T3, wire these circuits together, please — he might know where Vrook is. Or at least, what he’s doing here.”

“Besides hiding?”

“Vrook’s smarter than that.” Meetra pulled her hands out of the protocol droid’s chassis to give T3 room to solder safely. “Malak may have bombed the surface, but Dantooine was always known for the Academy. The old man wouldn’t risk coming here if there wasn’t a reason.” T3 let out a sharp tweet and slid back. “Thanks, T3.” She returned the droid’s power to full and closed the panel, waiting until he turned to face her. “Do you know me?”

“Of course.” His voice was suddenly enthusiastic. “So good to see you again, Master Jedi.”

“Hey!” Meetra glanced up sharply. An old man in farmer’s garb approached, his face set in a furious scowl. “What did that droid just call you?” He didn’t give her a chance to answer. “It called you a Jedi, didn’t it?! I heard it!”

Meetra opened her mouth, scrambling for an excuse, but Atton’s hand fell on her shoulder as he stepped between her and the farmer. “Do we look like Jedi?” An easy, lopsided grin tugged at the corner of his mouth and he held his arms out loosely to either side; the very picture of friendly and easy-going to the untrained eye, but Meetra noted the stance gave him easy access to his blasters.

The farmer glanced at each of them in turn, taking in their weapons and lack of armor. “Well, no, but… I heard the droid call you Jedi; I know it did.”

“Yeah, but look at it.” Atton chuckled, and the old man answered with a weak laugh of his own. “Busted old clanker probably mistakes someone for a Jedi every other week. Your Administrator should really consider scrapping it if she can’t get it working properly.”

“Been saying as much for nearly a year,” the farmer agreed with a conspiratorial nod. “Sorry, miss. Jedi are a touchy subject for us locals.”

Meetra waved away the apology, grateful for Atton’s quick thinking. “It’s alright. Is it because of Malak?”

“Partly, him and Revan. But truthfully, it’s all of them. If they’re not lifting a finger to defend the Outer Rim from invaders, they’re turning on each other with innocent folk caught in the middle.” He shook his head. “Planet’s a sight better without them, maybe even the whole Rim. Anyway, my apologies again. If you all are headed up to Khoonda, best speak with Captain Zherron, as well as the Administrator. Dantooine’s not as safe as it used to be.” With a last wave, he headed back to the merchant stall he’d stormed away from.

Meetra let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

Atton nodded, then fixed the Enclave droid with a glare. “That’s not going to work again, so let’s try to keep the ‘J-word’ to minimum, huh?”

The droid bobbed his head. “Of course, sir; I do apologize. It’s just that it’s been so long since I last spoke to a member of the Order. My excitement got away from me.”

Disappointment settled over Meetra’s shoulders. “Then you haven’t spoken to Vrook Lamar.”

“No, not since before Malak’s attack. I fear I have no knowledge of the whereabouts for any member of the Council.”

Atton crossed his arms. “So, what can you tell us?”

The droid started to fidget again. “My apologies, but I’m afraid there is actually very little I am permitted to tell you.”

“And why is that?”

He turned his optical sensors on Meetra. “My apologies, Master, but you are Meetra Surik. You are listed in my records as one of the… initiates who followed Master Dekari into the Mandalorian Wars. I have been programmed to withhold any information pertaining to the Order since your departure.” He bowed his head. “I am sorry, Master; I wish it were not so.”

She managed a weak smile. “Me, too, but it’s not your fault.” Meetra turned and waved for Atton and T3 to follow. “Thank you, all the same.”

“Wait, Master Surik.” The droid hobbled after them. “Since you mention Master Lamar, I have a file in my records involving you both. I don’t know if it will help you, but as it originates before your departure, I can show it to you, if you wish.”

Meetra hesitated, then nodded. “Alright, but lower your volume and keep the projection small.”

“Of course, Master.” The light behind the Enclave droid’s optical sensors flickered and then glowed blue as he projected two figures: a marginally younger Vrook, still balding but less lined, and a small, wrinkled, bat-eared alien. The footage was staticy and the sound quality poor, the words cutting in and out.

Vrook’s voice came in mid-sentence. “... nearly broke my padawan’s arm! Kavar won’t reign her in, no matter how many times I speak to him. You have to step in, Vandar.”

“Your concern is noted, but she is not your responsibility.” Meetra’s heart lurched at the sound of Vandar’s voice. The old Jedi had always projected a calmness that put everyone at ease. “She is headstrong, but —” A burst of static erased the rest of his words.

“... is uncontrollable. No student… immune.” Vrook was uncharacteristically animated, shaking his head and throwing up his hands. “Half of them love her… them want her head! These emotions she engenders… lead them to the Dark Side! If you and Kavar won’t… do it myself.” The holorecord flickered and dissolved into static, the droid’s sensors returning to their usual yellow.

Atton glanced at Meetra cautiously. “That was about you?” She didn’t answer; she didn’t have one to give.

The Enclave droid watched her closely, his anxiety clear in the way he rocked from side to side. “Forgive me, Master. I hope I have not offended.”

“No, of course not.” She forced a smile. “Thank you; it’s a good reminder.” He nodded hesitantly, then offered a quick half bow before shuffling away. Meetra watched him go, heart heavy, until T3 bumped against her leg with a soft trill. “I’m alright. Thank you, though.” She sighed and looked to Atton, found him watching her. “You’re right - we’re wasting time. Let’s go talk to Adare.”

Atton fell into step beside her as they headed up the path, T3 rolling along on her other side. Out of the corner of her eye, Meetra caught Atton glance at her, then look away and back again before he spoke. “So… not a lot of love lost between you and this Vrook guy, huh?”

She let out a dry chuckle. “That’s one way to put it. Vrook was one of Revan’s biggest detractors; those of us who followed her were little better than Sith, as far as he was concerned.” Her smile faded. “Part of me wonders if he was right.”

“Well, I don’t know much about Jedi, but I don’t think he was right. About you, at least.” She smiled again, a genuine one this time, and he glanced away before she saw the extent of his feelings. “The other Jedi that droid mentioned, though… who was that?”

“Vandar? He was headmaster at the Academy.”

“No, the other one it talked about. Who’s Master Dekari?”

Meetra tensed, her pleased smile flattening into a thin line. “Her name wasn’t always Revan.” She quickened her pace, and Atton let her pass him without further comment. The completeness with which she’d shut down was startling, and he worried anything more would drive her further away. T3 swiveled toward him with an uncertain murmur, then sped up to match Meetra’s pace.

Full chapter on AO3 and FFN.

[vojir]

ugh well nobody i know is on tumblr anymore soooo ?? i’m turning to the ao3 tag to answer this question 

i have a bunch of unfinished / partially thought out fics rn. gonna list by pairing and give a lil synopsis. tell me what to work on bc i don’t even know anymore

KOTOR: carth/revan (past malak/revan), basically a character piece on my Revan and questioning humanity/the self post personality wipe. partially from carth’s perspective on knowing who Revan was but loving them anyway 

KOTOR 2: atton/the exile, similar idea to first, but more thinking about atton & why he sticks around; moral implications of the exile’s relationship w/ the force; general discussion of the overarching themes of death throughout the game

ME3: vega/shepard (past kaidan/shepard), almost a rom-com AU where kaidan gets jelly and makes vega recount the sixth months on earth, during which shepard and vega have started a semi-functional relationship that of course gets tested by the damn reaper war (basically every other shega fic lol but with MY shep and how i see vega)

ME:A: ryder/liam, mostly, though i have a tiny side thing w/ ryder/reyes because DAMN is that good; assumes ryder is p much just a shitty kid with too much responsibility pushed on them, so they do the same dumb shit that other folks in their mid-20s do and liam is just utterly charmed by it somehow

FO:NV: boone/courier, in-depth look at important questlines + discussion of boone’s past/handling of in-game events. assumes that the courier just kind of vanishes during DLC, so talks about that too, and how boone reacts to it pre-any sort of real relationship w/ the courier

and lastly...Wynonna Earp, haha, wynonna/dolls though i haven’t seen the second OR third seasons, soooo this one is a bit of a no-go at the moment but i figured i’d list it cause i have a fair amount from s1, mostly dolls being heart eyes @ wynonna bc she’s a raging alcoholic mess but also ... the best

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

Autumn Fic Meme: Garcy(att) - Matching Halloween Costumes

“You realize nobody’s going to know who we are,” Wyatt pointed out, double-checking himself in the mirror.

“You also realize you helped to suggest this idea?” Lucy replied, grabbing her mask. She’d made it herself–she’d made the entire Darth Revan outfit herself, spending two months on it because she was determined for it to be perfect.

Female Revan for the win, bitches.

“We can have fun telling people who we are, then,” Flynn said. He was lounging on the bed, already dressed as Darth Malak and having been that way for some time. Pre-metal jaw, since that had been a bit beyond his and Lucy’s creative crafting capabilities.

Wyatt folded his arms and arched an eyebrow up. Flynn grinned. “Just keep that expression for the next three hours, darling, it’s beautifully in character.”

Lucy laughed, grabbing their lightsabers. “Let’s be honest here, the Jedi Exile has a far better ability to resist Revan and Malak’s crazy schemes than Wyatt does ours.” She winked at her husband to soften the blow.

“This is our first real chance to meet the neighbors, that’s all,” Wyatt said, taking his lightsaber from Lucy and clipping it to his belt. “I… want to make a good impression.”

“Turn on that Texan charm and you’ll be fine,” Flynn said, standing up and taking his own lightsaber. “Besides, Rufus and Jiya are stopping by for the movie marathon later, that’ll give us an excuse to leave early if it’s awkward.”

Lucy put on her mask. “Damn I look badass.”

“All right, Darth, let’s go,” Wyatt said, dragging her away from the mirror before she could spend an hour admiring her handiwork. “Time to show our neighbors that we’re gay and massive nerds.”

Flynn snapped a quick picture of the three of them while Wyatt was distracted, sending it to Jiya. He got a response a moment later:

YOU SAID YOU WERE GOING AS KIRK MCCOY AND SPOCK YOU GODDAMN TRAITORS

He grinned, then hurried out after his spouses who were already arguing about whether candy corn was amazing (Lucy) or tasted like wax (Wyatt).

Personally, he was looking forward to the party. It could help to soothe Lucy and Wyatt’s nerves about moving into a new neighborhood and introducing themselves, fearing judgment.

And hey, if it all went to shit, he could make out with them and scandalize everyone. Because what was Halloween for if not terrifying your neighbors? And if they were terrifying by being polyamorous bisexual nerds dressed up like Star Wars video game characters, then so be it.

[badsithnocookie]

i will never understand (or concur with) people who wish for a direct translation of kotor/etc to other forms of media. like

the reason that kotor and k2 work is that they are video game narratives working with video game narrative techniques and archetypes. (k2 deconstructs some of them, but plays plenty of others entirely straight). ultimately the player characters are largely blank slates for the players to project themselves onto - the same is true of almost all role-playing games, at least in the western tradition. (jrpgs have the generic bishounen protag stereotype/trope/archetype for the same reason - a blank slate to act as the player-proxy. bonus points where said player-proxy gets the Girl(tm)). the narratives stick with us because, to an extent, they happened to us - or the us-proxies that are revan, the exile, the jk, the jc, etc. even where the projection is not complete (where the player character is not consciously intended as a self-insert), there is still an element of projection that is actively encouraged by the narrative (and deliberately so, as it results in player engagement with whatever narrative the author is attempting to sell)

but if you translate the kotor or k2 stories to a non-interactive medium, that element of projection is lost, and can no longer be used by the author to create that engagement and attachment. instead, the author has to work for that by making the revan/exile/etc a person in their own right, instead of a blank slate for the audience to project onto, otherwise the audience is liable to get bored and switch channel. but the very moment the author does that, they also invalidate the very thing that makes the kotor and k2 stories emotionally engaging for a lot of their fans - that is, the personal investment that they have in their personal experience of the game (the storyline, the interactions with npcs, etc).

now, this isn’t to say that this can’t be done well, or at the very least tolerably - i mean, the majority of people reading this write and/or consume fan content to some degree, which commits this exact sin - replacing the player-proxy with character in their own right, and having to then give reasons to be emotionally or intellectually interested/invested in this character and their Shenanigans. but here’s the thing: we all know, too, that not everyone likes everyone else’s OC. and that’s okay! not everyone is going to like everyone’s take on revan/the exile/etc. but canonising one particular OC above all others is going to sour people; if they learn nothing else from dk’s fanfic, let it please be that.

the other big reason that kotor/k2 and the like will not and cannot reasonably be translated to mass non-interactive media either faithfully or well is this: they are video game narratives.

kotor 1 is peak bioware rpg-by-numbers. this is not an aspersion on it, just a fact. it is the purest distillation of the bioware formula(tm) ever created, and while it works as an rpg, as a story? it would be incredibly fucking boring. go watch a let’splay sometime, but without commentary. just the cutscenes. the endless running back and forth, the predictable nature of the plot, even leaving aside issues around the Twist. it’s formulaic as hell, and more than that: it’s padded to hell and back, too. in k1, being dragged about all the various planets exists largely as padding, in order for you to be acquainted with the various npcs and invested in the storyline before malak shows up and gives his speech. watching it is boring. playing it is boring, that’s why the sidequests and planetary storylines and companion storylines exist.

k2, on the other hand, is obsidian taking broadshots off the main at bioware-rpg-by-numbers. which is fine! this is not an aspersion on it, just an opinion. but here’s the thing: remove it from the context of a bioware-rpg-by-numbers, and you lose a lot of the story’s impact. kreia’s declaration that there is no twist only has any impact because the bioware formula(tm) demands a twist. get it?

more than this, though, they are long. a good 40 hours each - steam gives my played time as 44 hours for k1 and 58 for k2, which considering i’ve played k1 once via steam and k2 once-and-a-bit via steam sounds about right. a lot of that is padding, yes, but a lot of that is the stuff that people love - the companion arcs, the meatbag jokes, the gizkas. a long hollywood movie is 3 hours. a standard american tv season is 26 episodes - about 19 and a half hours, without ad breaks.

moving either of these stories to a non-interactive format wouldn’t just mean you’d have to do a complete rewrite of the central protag in order to make them something other than a blank slate - you’d have to either completely rework or at least rework the presentation of the plot itself and what you’d end up with would end up satisfying exactly nobody - other, perhaps, than whoever ended up being commissioned to write it. probably, knowing my luck, dk himself.

[gizkasparadise]

top 5 and bottom 5 kudos fic

rules: tag the person who tagged you, always post the rules, answer the questions, and add the date! i was tagged by the fab @tryalittlejoytomorrow !.

What are your five most popular works? 

1.In Tandem (Han x Leia, 1k, 1814 kudos, one-shot December 2015)

Leia tries to picture Han as a father. She envisions her infant son being asked to hold a plasma torch as dad attempts to weld a coupling that’s come undone for the fifth or sixth time.

–

Han tries to picture Leia as a mother. He sees his kid, with tons of hair.

Just.

Lots and lots of hair.

i thiiiink this was my first TFA fic? or at least close to my first one. it has a podfic version that was done by the lovely sisi_rambles here and translated into chinese by the wonderful blankv here!

2. Van Gogh and Vodka / (Bellamy x Clarke, 28K, 1553 kudos, 5/6 June 2015)

Clarke Griffin’s new dormmate is a bully.

modern day college roommate au awww yeah. if only the 100 hadn’t made me so angry as a show i probably would’ve finished it. and who knows i might one day anyway since there’s only an epilogue left idk

3. Stars Don’t Come Down (Rey x Kylo, 104k, 1084 kudos, 26/26 August 2017)

Ben doesn’t know who it is, but he’s looking for someone.

 part two of the crossroads series! which is probably my most ambitious writing project that’s not work related ever and RECENTLY COMPLETED AW YEAH. the series is being translated into russian by the great AnnaVictoria here!

4. Life Stories are Second Date Material (Bellamy x Clarke, 3k, 1070 kudos, 1/1 November 2014)

Bellamy Blake hates picking up his sister from her job at the local coffee shop. A blonde pre-med student makes him hate it a little less.

look im a sucker for coffee shop aus forever

5. Stay in Motion (Jyn x Cassian, Baze x Chirrut, Han x Leia, 6k, 1057 kudos, 5/? January 2017)

Jyn’s eyes dart to the exit. A man in long-sleeved blue shirt and a brown vest speeds by. Stops. Doubles back. He grips the frame of her white door like something is about to blow him away.

“We did it!” He cries, eyes wide and teeth bared in a smile.“WE DID IT!”

Cheers, she realizes. They weren’t screams. They were cheers.

–

Short stories set in a universe where the Rogue One crewmembers survive

co-writing project with @starforged and @ignitesthestars !! 

What are your five least popular works?

not counting the original fics i’ve posted on ao3 (because duh), these are it:

1. meeting again (Sang Hwa x Sung Kyeong, 573 words, 10 kudos, 1/? June 2017)

He pitches forward, head-first into his half-eaten kimbap. A single cry follows him into the dark:

“YA! BASTARD!!”

And that’s how Sang Hwa starts dating his wife.

—

Short snapshots of how Sang Hwa & Sung Kyeong fell in love.

lol turns out romantic relationship fic for a korean zombie horror movie is a Niche (there’s 4 works total in Train to Busan on ao3)

2. Like an Island (Meetra Surik/The Exile + Revan + Malak, 782 words, 25 kudos, 1/1 January 2013)

pre-games. Revan has a conversation and Meetra makes a choice. No one can go home again.

lol a repost from my experimental livejournal writing days. uff

3. The End of Giants (Meetra Surik/the Exile + Revan + Malak, 428 words, 36 kudos, 1/1 January 2013) 

Revan survives, the Exile dies, and Malak rests.

another livejournal survivor

4. Eyes Fixed on the Sun (Meetra Surik/the Exile x Malak, implied Revan x Exile x Malak, 1.5k, 37 kudos, 1/1 January 2013)

The parts of the lightsaber line up perfectly. The memories that accompany them do not.

Nobody checking for my KOTOR fic!

5. Spirals (Cullen x mage!Trevelyan, 6k, 38 kudos, 2/20 August 2017)

An ex-Andrastian mage without a Circle. A former Templar in need of purpose. And a tear in the sky that truly does bring all sorts of people together.

i just picked this one up again after…two years of doing nothing with it so hopefully it’ll go up :|

tagging @starforged, @ignitesthestars, @mnemehoshiko, and @anythingtomakeyoustay!

[entergamingxp]

Five of the Best: Caves • Eurogamer.net

Each week, Five of the Best gives love to the overlooked parts of games. The things you don’t notice when you’re playing because you’re too busy doing more important things. But you remember them. They’re there in your memory all the same. So much so that when someone says something like, “Which are the best caves in games?” Some immediately spring to mind.

So: which are the best caves in games? Let’s give it a try, shall we?

I’ve been caving – spelunking – before, back when I was a teenager, and I’m not sure I could do it now. I remember having to swim in icy cold water under a stalactite and shimmy along tunnel-like passages. I don’t know how I did it – it gives me the shivers just thinking about it now.

But I have been in a cave since, in Thailand, and I was totally unprepared. I found myself on a makeshift tour, on my hands and knees, army-shuffling through what was basically a tunnel with the dimensions of an air duct. I remember seeing a cave spider on the wall – it was bloody dark in there – and thinking, ‘Oh god, are they all over the wall?’

Don’t worry, our guide said, it’s nothing compared to when he slept there overnight with nothing but a candle, which went out, and when he woke up to relight it, he found himself completely surrounded by cave spiders.

I was very reassured.

Still, there was an amazing moment where the guide pointed into the blackness of another chamber and it became slowly apparent he was pointing out a colony of bats. God knows how many were in there. Hundreds? Thousands?

I was quite relieved to get out.

Grow Home’s most elusive cave

There are great caves in Grow Home. They feel really, really cavey. Outside it’s a beautiful balmy day, but in here it’s dark and still and you can almost feel the cool air.

Brilliantly, I think there’s an Achievement for finding all the game’s caves. I remember this because for an age I had found all but one. I’d found the cave with the weird little glowing critters, the one with the bull, the one that you can drop down into by pulling the boulders aside…

Finally I had to go back to the very start. The really big sandy island at the very bottom of the game’s world was the first place I felt I had exhausted. But I had forgotten to look around the back of the main mountain. There, almost hidden by perspective, was the cave I was after. I went inside and, yes, wonderfully still and chilly. A perfect cave. So cavey!

Skip to 2.12!

The Batcave

The game’s getting on a bit now, but still: spoilers for Arkham Asylum

How many times have we been in the Batcave by this point? It’s been a hub, an upgrade menu, even a raiding area. There’s something really special about it each time, though, because it’s the Batcave. And there’s something especially special about it in Arkham Asylum.

Mid-way through Arkham Asylum there’s a huge reveal. It’s not the solution to the mystery or a sudden character death. It’s that Batman has a back-up Batcave on Arkham Island. There’s a lovely bit of theatre to the discovery, to the way he’s scanned in and allowed to enter. But more than that, there’s a real force of wonder to it, because…I had no idea!

A Batcave on Arkham Island was news to me, anyway. It felt brilliant: like Batman had been keeping a secret from us, the player, and he was finally letting us in a bit. And it’s a reminder that in Batman’s world, pretty much nobody knows about the Batcave anyway. What a lovely moment. And what a lovely cave.

The secret tomb in Knights of the Old Republic 2

I’m cheating a bit because it’s a tomb rather than cave, although you need to go through a cave to get to it. It’s on Korriban and it’s literally called the Secret Tomb. It’s optional, you don’t have to go there, but do. Go there because it’s a magical cave filled with Dark Side energy, like everything else on Korriban.

The tomb shows you visions and tests you. It shows you famous KOTOR characters Malak and Revan during the Mandalorian Wars, before they turned to the Dark Side. It’s a war you fought for them in but you don’t know much about it. Why did they disobey the Jedi Order? What did you do? It’s a theme running through the game, and there, in the tomb, you learn more while wrestling with what you think about it all.

I remember it still, nearly 15 years later. I think it stuck in my head because it made me think. It was more than another cave to kill-through and loot (although there is loot to be had – this is an RPG after all).

Honorable mention to The Witcher 3’s Cave of Dreams, which has a big blue floating whale and has similar magical visions to the Korriban tomb. It’s actually the cave which inspired this whole topic.

I mean, the graphics aren’t great now but…

Destiny’s loot cave

The infamous loot cave in Destiny represented the state of Bungie’s shared world shooter when it first launched – a place with so much potential, but which was also an incredible grind.

And so the loot cave itself – a spot you could sit and endlessly farm wave after wave of enemies as they spawned – gained notoriety as an exploit. It was a shortcut to some of Destiny’s rarest item drops. And while farming the loot cave wasn’t fun, it was efficient. It was the fastest way to get through Destiny’s grind.

When it was patched out, it was a relief. I no longer feel like I had to try this thing to keep up with everyone else doing the same. Bungie, correctly, realised it needed to provide better, faster ways of getting players to the game’s level cap. And in its place, one of the few examples where Bungie acknowledged the impact its players had – an Easter egg showing a pile of bones from all the enemies slain along the way.

Tom Phillips

Cheats!

Minecraft

Minecraft is a game of two worlds, really: the above and below. Every time a new world is generated, mountains spike up to the sky, and forests and grasslands spread further than the eye can see. For a blocky game it can create some gorgeous vistas. But what you can’t see, though, and what’s equally awe inspiring, is what lurks below.

Down there, huge black chambers await. Down there, abandoned mine shafts await. Down there, coal, iron, gold, gems, diamonds, all the things you need. But in the darkness, monsters await, too. And lava. And falls into fathomless black depths. Down there: danger.

But you are inextricably drawn towards them, drawn underground. And every time you see a cave opening or a chasm scarring the earth, or you begin a stepped tunnel down underground, you hope to hit upon the chamber of riches you see. But you never know. You break the block to reveal blackness and for a brief moment you are helpless to what lies beyond. It’s a cycle of excitement I will never tire of.

This is ridiculous! I’ve never seen a cave like this.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/five-of-the-best-caves-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-of-the-best-caves-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[3piox]

kotor character meme

based on this post :3 this got long as hell but it’s very self indulgent and mostly just for myself but i wanted to post it. under cut!

REVAN

NAME: vivza sanstar (i wanted to be EXTREMELY star wars-y. it’s no yolo ziff but i’m still pretty happy)

GENDER: f 

APPEARANCE: this one! i basically cast gong li. a la darth maul, much shorter than you might expect but threatening enough to make up for it (5′5″ but no napoleon complex, she’s VERY confident)

FAVORITE HOBBY: swoop racing. lol. or riling people up. she’s very into arcania, specifically into the force equivalent of universal string theory and quantum mechanics. she like, wrote papers on this stuff and everything. her ‘chill mode’ is banging ladies and building, like, rube goldberg machines. but she doesn’t really have a chill mode so.

BIRTH PLANET: tatooine. jk. a lush planet! some part of revan still loves the sense of rain through warm tropical canopies. her parents were normal people, maybe one mildly force sensitive. they were proud to send her to the jedi as a baby, but never recognized her in the famous war hero -- revan named herself that, and her birth name is lost to the sands of time. revan doesn’t spare them much thought.

PERSONALITY: scorpio/sagittarius cusp. lol. inventive, clever, outspoken, always ‘on’ in a way, but also laidback, the spirit of a wanderer, sees no limits. do or do not, there is no try? yeah, she always does. cocky, naturally. brutally analytical -- she can compartmentalize like nobody’s business, one of the things that made the mindwipe easier to take. totally utilitarian, but grows more empathy after the mindwipe. a strange, compelling gal with a frat boy’s sense of humour.

KREIA: “fine, master.” see above, about compartmentalizing? she can do this with relationships too. she loved kreia as any student loves their teacher, but once she felt kreia had nothing else to teach her, she was on to the next. kreia did not take well to this. when revan came back like nothing had changed, kreia was hard pressed to put her bitterness behind her, and revan saw it as criticism which her ego could not take, so their reunion didn’t last long. once again, revan took what she needed, and left. 

kreia still loves her, and she had dreams where they both got their redemption and stood shoulder by shoulder again, but -- she was too much of a realist to ever dwell on that. revan obvsly loves hilarious slammin’ frankness (see HK) and i believe kreia taught her that and it’s something she really admires about her. “speak your mind, padawan”

MALAK: best of bros. malak was a shy kid, very quiet, reserved, and like so many others was drawn to the sun of revan’s personality. she took him under her wing (figuratively, as he’s always been MUCH BIGGER than her) and she’s been treating him like a little brother/padawan since they were knee high. she loves telling people what to do, and malak was appropriately obedient while also having some fire to him. war forged them into closeness again after they drifted apart in their knighthoods, and malak followed her into hell with a grim smile. i think the turning point in their relationship wasn’t malak’s bitterness about being relegated to apprentice, but because revan -- who, while blunt to the point of rudeness at times, was ultimately very fair-minded and protective -- turned from teasing figure to a bully. malak felt emasculated and, well, one thing led to another. after realizing who she was, revan felt compelled to try and redeem malak, to prove that she wasn’t some fluke, and she mourns him still. 

EXILE: in my fantasies? they FUCKED. 

but seriously. i think there’s something to be said about revan sending the exile to die and thus probably not liking her very much, but for my revan and exile, it’s more a matter of revan’s utilitarian brutality overcoming any feelings she had. the exile was a threat because of her own sway, charm, and growing reluctance with the war -- the exile was talking about going home after malachor, and revan couldn’t have that. she was already thinking about the future, about parting ways with the jedi order and what she needed for that, which included jedi loyal to her and her alone.

before the war: while they were a few years apart in age (exile older) they were very similar, being charming prodigies and all, and i think the council was afraid of them meeting. their paths rarely intersected until knighthood, where they were goaded into a spar that still lives in legend in the halls of the dantooine temple. after that they had a friendly rivalry, but their personalities clashed enough that real socialization wasn’t a hobby of theirs. the exile did get along more with malak (they were both quiet types) so that was another connection they had.

after malachor v, the exile obviously survived, and she came to revan to tell her that she was returning. (she felt it was the courteous thing to do.) revan was angered, but she knew she couldn’t control the exile, so she let her go. they didn’t meet again until wild space and the exile rescuing her. the fact that they didn’t have a deep connection only increases revan’s shock at the exile doing this for her.

“I didn’t think you liked me very much,” she jokes.

“I don’t,” the Exile says. “But I do my duty. Come along.”

after that, they start to develop a real relationship, because pretty much no one else in the galaxy knows what they’ve been through

HERO OR TYRANT: revan told herself she was doing it for the good of the galaxy, but the truth is, she fell before she even really recognized this other threat. she had an ego (practically a god complex) and it drove her to do what had never been done before to prove her greatness -- she didn’t go to war to save people, she went to war because she knew she could stop the mandalorians. and they had to be stopped! so it was easy to justify. 

she ISN’T the type to destroy the galaxy -- she’s fascinated by it’s variations and complexities, and it’s her playground, so she did want to keep it safe. she would have done anything to save it, and to her, anyone who would argue with her methods just wasn’t #deep or #woke enough to see that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. she was probably the kind of kid who pulled legs off bugs, not a sociopath but the pursuit of knowledge, of truth, overwhelms everything.

MEMORIES: she was a spice smuggler and arms dealer, lol. i like to think the council picked that shady background because they wanted to cover up for what THEY saw as an unavoidable moral bankruptcy of character.

her birth planet was kept the same; they used a single mother and an absent dad in place of her single, female master, but also had her mother die young -- ‘vivza’ had to make her own way in the world. a han solo heart of gold type. the whole backstory was #fake but the council knew all the best lies are truths (from a certain point of view ...) so they kept her personality as intact as they could, maintained her most influential memories thru a different lens -- her relationship with her mom mirrors her one with kreia, some of the people she saved stayed the same even if her method was different, she still likes geek shit, etc.

i think there wasn’t really a whole real person���s worth of memories in there -- that would have been absurd to craft -- i think they just impressed the basic bio facts into her, empathized some stuff, then let the force and her own mind fill in the rest. and waking up on the spire, how would she know this wasn’t natural, the gaps of her memory and the like? she’s practically a newborn in some ways -- she doesn’t know that’s not what minds are supposed to be like, and so much of ‘original revan’ is there that she doesn’t feel broken. she kind of thinks she has amnesia for a while? but also doesn’t feel amnesiac. it’s a weird sensation, needless to say.

finding out these memories were fake was really, really hard for her. not so much because she’s attached to them -- since stuff like her mom and her smuggling days weren’t real it’s almost like they’re a dream to her. but the violation of it -- that really disturbed her. her identity was something she was used to trading on, as revan as as vivza the smuggling queen of the outer rim, and she felt like nothing after finding out. she desperately tried to claim again and again that she was vivza but with each moment after the reveal the name becomes more and more like a stranger to her. 

she doesn’t get her memories back in some huge flood, but she gets lots of visions of the past and the force/her mind subtly corrects and aligns some of the fake memories even more into a shape she once knew and she does start remembering things naturally over the years. a lot comes back when she’s alone in wild space. she comes to accept that she’s revan, but she’s scared of the idea of being her old mind -- she doesn’t like the person she was as a sith. she misses the ignorance of being vivza. vivza is, to her, both a punishment and a forgiveness, an old home she can’t return to, and something she could never have but wished to keep. 

vivza hated the sith. revan knows the sith can be redeemed. knows why you would become a sith. this dissonance is the one thing she really keeps from her days as vivza.

ROMANCE: bastila, duh. you give me that forbidden jedi romance with a prissy british beauty who has a deep connection with ur character, and i’m gonna smash that. she’s definitely revan’s type too. she likes someone she can rile up lol. the #reveal was a cold shower. again, massive violation, and a big gulf between them because in her mind bastila was this perfect jedi who had already ended their relationship for that reason, and now -- there was no way for them to reconcile. 

after everything, bastila was scarred by her own fall and her complicity in revan’s mindwipe/use as a tool. revan and her danced around each other for months after the war, both obstinately focused on rebuilding the republic/the order, but they still had their bond and revan knew bastila was deeply conflicted just as bastila knew that revan was reconciling more and more with her old self. one night revan comes to comfort bastila after a dream, and they talked all night and all day until the night again. after that, they tentatively rebuilt their relationship. and revan totally knocked her up w the ~magic of the force~ right before she had to go. 

sadly, they didn’t have much time together before revan went jetting off. bastila misses her like she misses a limb; she’s in a haze as the galaxy falls apart around her. revan does better b/c she’s still little miss compartmentalization but when she dreams at night, alone in empty space, it’s bastila she dreams about. a very deep, mutual love and respect between them.

FAVE CREWMEMBER: canderous was a HOOT -- after the reveal, revan was like “godDAMN, is the reason i love listening to canderous’s awful war stories because i was THERE?” -- they’d spend hours in the back, drinkin’ brewskies and making non-PC jokes LOL. also, jolee. she loves his views on the code -- it doesn’t matter if she’s vivza or revan, she appreciates a man who knows you can love without letting it rule you. his repeated insistence that she was some kind of dark thing really stuck under her skin; when he finally gave her his whole-hearted approval it really meant something. she never got that from kreia or any other master; some part of her responds to hearing it from him. also, they both like messing with people. all their conversations were just her acting the grumpy padawan and him the snarky master LOL.

after she learns who she was she daydreams that if jolee had actually been her master, she wouldn’t have fallen.

ENDING: the LS ending i’m a sappy good guy. bastila lives!

POST GAME: in short: revan and her pals try and restore the republic and the order and she patches things up with bastila, but soon is compelled to rush off to try and deal with this problem all on her own. it’s a redemption of sorts but also -- well, remember how i said her ego compelled her to dominate the galaxy? well, her ego also says that saving the galaxy isn’t ‘enough’ to prove herself -- she has to keep doing more, more, more. this restlessness will never fade. 

she goes thru hell out there in unknown space, captivity, torture, the insanity of loneliness, all that fun stuff. the exile rescues her and it takes months to come back home. she’s been gone for like, so many years. she’s back just in time to talk to canderous about not starting another war, but she’s also tired as fuck. mostly she just wants to sleep. 

bastila hovers but says nothing. it drives her up the wall. they have a big, big fight, and it looks like they’ll NEVER TALK AGAIN OH NO when bastila gets over her pride and takes her to see their kid -- still not force sensitive, but being raised in the order. “I see the heights he will rise to,” Bastila says. “Don’t you? Don’t you see everything we’ve built? Our legacy?” and revan knows she never wants to leave this woman’s side again. the only time she feels her soul settle is when she’s lost in bastila. 

they have an extremely delayed honeymoon period and actually get married and all that fun stuff. probably stuff happens but w/e i just want to maintain that they’re HAPPY but also kind of codependent and leave the galaxy to sort itself out for the most part -- they build up the jedi to staggering new heights in part just to keep another wall between themselves and the rest of the galaxy that has done nothing but stress them out for all their lives. retired lesbian’s, y’all.

jolee ends up in hiding and helping escaped jedi during kotor 2. he probably dies but i refuse to think about this. so in MY version he eventually turns up, grumpy and probably missing some body parts, insisting he DOESN’T want to have anything to do with anyone, but ends up a member of the high council anyways. the exile helps a lot, actually; she’s the sort of steady mind and “ok listen buddy i actually got KICKED OUT of the order so like, let’s talk.” please imagine him living like a long ass time and yelling at initiates to get off his metaphorical lawn and yet being super popular with them. mission and zaalbar travel a bunch and this leads to the whole business venture. i like to think they spent some time on kashyyyk where she became an honorary wookie and has a wookie name and everything ..... just like my headcanon for han solo lol. 

canderous rebuilds the mandalorians (more on that below.) carth is ofc an admiral and he really looks out for bastila when everything goes to shit. he totally gives revan a piece of his mind for leaving bastila and all of them when revan comes back, but as ever with carth, he goes from nuclear to chill in about .5 seconds and then they’re bros again. when vaner (who might have a diff name in mine because that one is LOL) becomes supreme chancellor carth is like, head of his security. he’s totally uncle carth even if bastila and revan aren’t traditional parents lmao. i didn’t save carth’s son (bc i didn’t realize i could ....) so carth definitely puts his parenting urges in there. i like to think he ends up adopting some war orphans down the line, idk.

RANDOM STUFF: she’s not an amazing fighter lol. or tech savvy or any of that. she main strengths are her mad charisma and her out of the box clever thinking. and a very crude application of the force ie i just spammed force wave through most enemy fields lol. before her mind wipe she was a really good brawler? like, she’d be from the anakin & luke skywalker school of “angry overhead chops at everything” lightsaber combat but her real love was just fucking throwing down. she was good at it too. i think the council sort of undid a lot of her fighting skills but they couldn’t erase her body memory so she has a very confused reaction between brain and body that makes her clumsy in fights. it gets better with training but she never totally shakes that particular lobotomy to her talents that the council did to hamper her ‘just in case.’

EXILE

NAME: bree rahanna

GENDER: f

APPEARANCE: this one! like her. tall af -- a bit over 6′. swole. powerhouse. she wields a double-bladed lightsaber and when she’s bearing down on you on the battlefield, you run. ear piercings, beaded hair (always trying new hairstyles), loves accessorizing. looks great in green. very beautiful, but she doesn’t think much of it. very jedi-like ‘my body is just a vessel’ attitude.

FAVOURITE HOBBY: definitely not swoop racing. she likes computer stuff -- the sort of impersonal element. even droids are a bit too much like people for her tastes at times. she’s an introvert, basically, she’d rather just write code and repair ships and such. she used to love to meditate before her exile -- after, without the force, it was just depressing. replaced it with music -- singing by herself, listening to others, she’s basically always humming. she likes how it fills up empty spaces. a bit of a hoarder -- in another life, she’s the kind of person who likes antiquing, and as is, she just collects various bits and bobs that catch her eye.

FROM? GOING?: i like to think she came more from the mid-rim. maybe like (na)jheda. was a little older when she was brought to the temple, maybe 4 or 5? it gave her a bit of a healthier concept of family/relationships. child of a single father who felt that he couldn’t provide for his daughter the way the jedi could. bree thinks of him, but also thinks it would be awkward to ever visit, since the jedi are her family now. she’s always wanted to go where she feels wanted and needed -- her greatest fear is stagnation.

PERSONALITY: capricorn. ambitious, practical, patient, fond of plans and figuring things out -- but she doesn’t like when things don’t fit her worldview and can get very #negative. she’s actually very charming -- her steady way of speaking, dry sense of humour, and habit of looking at whoever is talking like they’re the only person in the galaxy make her very popular, and she’s got a leader’s heart through and through. 

but she doesn’t consider herself charming because she’s not like, say, super gregarious cult leader revan type charming. she wants to be her best, and she has a deep sense of faith and loyalty -- she accepted her banishment from the order, would later accept their attempt to cut her off from the force again, and decided to return to the order once she felt worthy of it, not the other way around. 

BETWEEN THE WAR AND PERAGUS: she’s on the very edges of known space, not paying much attention to anything -- there are rumours of a war out there, but it’s not immediate to her. working as a repair person, she drifts in and out of various systems, relieved that nobody out there seems to know what a jedi is, that the faces are so different from everything she’s known. she’s a bit of an oddity wherever she goes, so she takes to hiding herself under masks and cloaks and the such, and thinks of revan whenever she does. wonders how revan’s identity maybe got lost when she first put on that mask. wonders if she lost herself. 

she’s very, very lonely -- she craves the stability of real relationships, a real routine and a home, but she feels like she shouldn’t, she can’t, out here. people are still drawn to her, but she turns them all away. her exile was just as much self-imposed as anything else.

REVAN: well, all of the above in revan’s section. from her side of things: she sometimes envied revan. most knights did; revan was the shining golden child of the order, and plenty were compared to her and found wanting. bree was one such; she never received the same kind of praise revan did. her ability to draw people to her made the council suspicious of her and she found herself under much scrutiny, and she rebelled by becoming a surer leader, gathering friends to protect her from the disregard of the council. revan, on the other hand, seemed beloved by all, with very little trouble.

these feelings, combined with the general clash of their personalities, means that bree always felt wrong-footed around revan. maybe this is what saved her; revan’s regard would make any person feel empowered, but bree’s reluctance to see them as friends meant that she didn’t get hooked on the idea of power. as is, it marks the differences between them; revan only creates the illusion of empowering others while keeping all control/power for herself, but bree genuinely does this, genuinely boosts people up. she’ll never know that revan was jealous herself of bree’s real connections; revan could feel lonely at times.

bree didn’t think revan would fall; like obi-wan about anakin, it was kind of a, “i trust my shady pal to reject the dark side.” she didn’t even realize that revan had fallen after malachor; she just thought revan couldn’t face what they’d done yet. it was a bit of a shock for her to come back to known space and learn that revan had gone FULL SITH and then gotten redeemed and saved the galaxy while she was away. it makes her realize she doesn’t know revan at all. this unexpectedly saddens her; her own time away from the order has allowed her to become more wholly critical of them, and she thinks that revan and her always had more in common than she’d care to admit.

it’s this, and knowing that revan is needed, and everything revan represents about herself and the war -- this is why she goes after revan in wild space, and this is part of her healing process. both of theirs, really, as they discover on the long trip back home.

ATRIS: bree doesn’t really ‘get’ her effect on others, so she has a hard time reading their feelings. it’s the flipside to the deep pull/ability to form bonds that she has: she brings people in, but she has no idea what to do with them when they’re there. atris is an example of this. she and atris were contemporaries and very good friends, but when atris came to realize the depth of feeling she had for bree, it scared her. she retreated into her histories and watched bree from afar, and bree was like, “um ... i think my friend doesn’t like me now??? ouch okay ... i will releasemy angst about this into the force and move on” and atris was like “oh i see how it is she’s forgotten about me, friend to all is friend to none!”

this righteousness (and sense of betrayal) continued when bree followed revan into war, but as the archivist recording the war and seeing its atrocities she found herself feeling guilty -- not just for doing nothing, but also for allowing bree to go off alone. she feels that bree, like so many others, has fallen for revan’s charms and it sparks envy in her. if only she had the nerve to do what revan and bree did, if only she were bolder, like this matched pair of sun and moon that revan and bree are -- an undeniable, natural force. she knows these feelings aren’t jedi-like and tries to smother them under anger at their treachery, but she continues to nurse this jealousy and it fuels her later actions.

she didn’t feel as triumphant about exiling bree as she thought she would, though. 

bree was hurt by atris’s negative feelings for her, and when it came to their final battle, all she wanted was a reason why. atris’s explanation of her feelings was not at all what she was expecting, but it was a relief to know it wasn’t just b/c atris saw some horrible thing in her. she didn’t want to kill atris -- in atris’s own fall, she saw what could have happened to her if her own jealousy of revan had become dark. she thinks of her and atris as two sides of the same coin in a way, and atris would be humbled to learn that bree sees them that way, since she felt unimportant to bree for so long.

KREIA: bree LOVED kreia because i loved kreia. her relationship with kreia was alike to her one with revan -- she felt kreia walked on a knife’s edge but figured it wasn’t a risk because she knew her. their bond was the deepest one she’s ever felt, since she never had a proper master. in many ways bree was starved for some teacherly affection lol so she clung to kreia. she didn’t agree with kreia’s utilitarian/nihilistic views (she’s more a ‘sacrifice herself first and foremost’ type) but she respected kreia’s wisdom. she flourished under kreia’s teachings, and her greatest hope was that she could teach kreia some things in turns -- they say a proper master/padawan relationship goes both ways. 

kreia was also someone who seemed to really understand what she’d been through -- bao-dur was also in the war, for example, but he didn’t have to make decisions the way bree had to. kreia knows what it is to make hard choices, and bree respects that. basically, kreia made her feel less alone. she would have done anything to redeem kreia in the end -- she came to terms with the fact that she didn’t fall (as she long suspected, since she was exiled) but the line between a jedi and a fallen jedi is a very thin one indeed. she realized she does believe in redemption, truly madly deeply, and if kreia had surrendered she would have welcomed kreia back with open arms. 

kreia loved and respected her too, and to me her death was akin to malak’s -- changing after so many years as a sith would have been the hardest thing they could have ever done, but revan and bree would have stood by them. like revan, bree mourns kreia’s passing. she likes to think that sometimes, she can still feel kreia, hear her as a whisper in the back of her head giving her advice, but that’s just a fancy.

MICAL OR BRIANNA: both! #MODS

REGRET: yes, definitely. her guilt about the war and malachor is strange -- because she cut herself off from the force to avoid the pain of it her brain sort of refuses to touch on it too closely, glosses over the details of what she’s done. it’s a quiet, pervasive sort of inner melancholia. yet she also stands by the fact that she did what she did to help the galaxy and she would do it all over again if need be -- she doesn’t believe in excuses, it’s more like, she’s very practical about the WHY of her doing it and accepting and seeking punishment for her culpability after the fact. she never wants to go to war again, that’s for sure -- but i think she can never regret the war to the point of never having wanted to do it in the first place because the idea of the war being pointless would shatter her.

TRAUMATIZED BY VISIONS: i think she was never the type to have much of the ‘unified force’ visions type, so the vividness of the experience was very weird for her. but she’s a good egg, so it worked out -- she rejected malak’s offer, she helped the republic soldiers (which made her realize that while she WOULD do it all over again, she would try and do it better, which is maybe a fallacy but she can be stubborn when she digs her heels in about something.) she defended kreia against her companions -- because from her POV, her companions were baselessly attacking kreia purely for being a sith when kreia hadn’t done anything yet and could be brought back. (she tried to just knock them out, but ofc kreia killed them all. she vows that if, in reality, kreia were to ever hurt her other friends she would do something about it. she won’t have their blood on her hands again.) some of this was seeing malak reminded her of revan ... and of course, revan is the final vision. 

the sight of herself as a darksider at revan’s side was the most unsettling part of the experience, actually. it was the moment she realized just how important she could have been to revan. revan was also the only one she couldn’t tell herself was a vision even though intellectually she knew it to be -- this was no thought exercise, no abstract vision from the force. this felt so real it was like she had actually fallen for a second. if she hadn’t been able to fight/slay revan, she would have been more fucked up, but still -- she’s a jedi and i think like? she ultimately treated the experience like the knighthood trials she’d had to do -- it’s not pretty to face the dark corners of your mind, but you must.

ROMANCE: lesbian triad with brianna and visas, natch!

LS/DS: lightsided all the way, baby

THE ORDER: now THERE’S a kettle of fish. otoh, the jedi are her family, her calling, her meaning. she’s a believer, and she accepts her punishments and that she could have had more faith in the council. otoh, being exiled from the order was a punch to the gut -- she’d have preferred execution, tbh. she was relieved to learn they hadn’t cut her off from the force but it stung that they had let her go on for all those years without the force, believing it a punishment, like they were piggybacking on her self-inflicted suffering to teach her a lesson. she sees their failings. she felt betrayed.

but she is a very level-headed person, and she’s not a blind follower. she has always been the type to question her masters. she thinks there are valid reasons to leave the order. she doesn’t by-the-book the code, more doing what the force tells her is right (no wonder she was so lost those years of travel! she had no guidance of any kind; she didn’t know how to be a person, it was a lesson she needed to learn.) 

ultimately, she is a jedi. for the first chunk of the journey she tried to hide from it, didn’t use the force, didn’t dress in the robes, didn’t identify as one and was defensive if someone called her a jedi. but coming to dantooine changed something in her -- she felt it would be callow to enter the temple dressed like some merc with a blaster. so she gave in to her lightsaber and her robes and entered as a jedi. the most important part was meeting the lost padawan thief -- in the girl’s childlike inability to survive/over-reliance on her master she saw what she wasn’t. she was a grown woman, a general, a knight, a master, someone who had survived a decade with no force, someone who had never needed a master to hold her hand. she knew right then that she would always be a jedi, and that there was more to being a jedi than simply calling yourself one. 

so she started to heal in her relationship with the order going forward. she started to talk more openly of jedi practises to her companions, and started to train them. she didn’t want the jedi order to die. she knew it was so much more than any one person, or even a temple of people -- it’s something necessary, and sacred.

POST-GAME: yes, fully reconnected with the force. and yes, as mentioned above, she finds revan. it’s a thrilling journey. bastila didn’t want her to go -- “the order needs you” “i’m a jedi, not a bureaucrat” “you are more than that. you are a light, a leader, a guiding star. i cannot --” “and yet, you will.” her friends wanted her to leave even less, but they understood it was something she needed to do, and were touched by the trust she placed in them. brianna totally tried to sneak into the cargo hold of her ship. visas joined her. bree had to practically carry them both out, lol. 

when she comes back with revan she’s surprised to find people still want her to lead, not revan. revan is all “omg sis please .... half of them are worried i’ll go sith again the other half don’t even know who i am ..... you’re the one who rebuilt the order” and yeah bree for grandmaster i don’t make the rules that’s just how it is. more jedi come out of the woodwork as things settle down and the order starts to flourish again and bree HATES having to deal with political types and all that but she does it because well. she gotta. 

her life is pretty quiet lol i actually think if any drama happens it’ll fall more on revan’s head than hers but if revan gets into trouble bree is there in a heartbeat. they’re bonded now (not force-wise, spiritually) and have become like sisters. bree probably outlives revan and it hurts.

POST-GAME FOR COMPANIONS: mira, mical, brianna and visas all become jedi. (mira and brianna after the game’s timeline because i could NOT with them for some reason lol ...) my atton died </3 and bree mourns him in quiet moments where she plays pazaak in her head against his ghost. visas turns out to be surprisingly good with younglings -- it’s been so long since she’s seen young lives brimming with the force, and it reminds her of home. and the kids LOVE her -- everyone wants visas as a master. there have been fistfights over this. (it took her a long time to accept being called master, side note.)

brianna is NOT good with kids and is like “i shall focus on improving security ...” but she totally creates a brand new form that really integrates hand-to-hand with lightsaber combat. it’s very popular. brianna also tries to go home but the sisters never do forgive her. (it’s hard for her loved ones to watch; she always needs to be told she has a new family.) canderous re-establishes mandalore and starts getting some ideas in his head about a new conquest to build up pride again but that’s when revan comes back and is like “no, bad boy, down, sit” and like, no mandalorian legend will EVER admit that the Savior of the Mandalorian Peoples Canderous Mandalore was totally whipped by a jedi. instead they focus on infrastructure! politics! social securities! other exciting things!

mira becomes something of an errant knight -- she’s not really into the trappings of the order at all, but she calls herself a jedi in honour of bree and the training she got. she likes to travel around and just help out where she can. she’s still very good at finding people; bounty proceeds mostly go to families of the victims of whomever she catches and other times it’s just like, finding a lost little girl. she loves it, and it’s a hell of a lot easier with the force. i also bet she leaves a trail of broken hearts all over the galaxy lol. 

mical works in the archives and bree likes to be like “hey you worked for the republic go talk to their representatives for me” and he only lets her get away with this 1/2 the time. the other 1/2 he’s like “you must forgive me i have holobooks to sort ....” and then disappears for like, a week, into the stacks. bree always has to send someone in there to find him and then inevitably they’ll learn he actually dipped out to go track down a rare copy of something or another on a planet a trillion miles away and he’ll be back in a month with super rare items and a mild “oh sorry you were looking for me?” it drives her up the wall.

t3 and hk go with her when she retrieves revan and stick close to the both of them for the rest of their lives, natch.

RANDOM STUFF: unlike revan, VERY good at fighting and tech stuff and all that. she’s mad talented. she has a lot of random skills that she happens to be AMAZING at, like, baking and droid design and fake crying and poetry writing and all this stuff. everyone’s used to saying “well, bree probably knows how...” 

the punchline is that she SUCKS at flying and the idea of swoop racing makes her want to vomit. revan loves that there’s this one thing she’s VASTLY better at and will challenge bree to flying/driving/swooping related challenges that she knows bree can’t help but accept even though she HATES it. it’s a running joke in the order that their famous, powerful grandmaster can’t even use a speeder without something going horribly wrong.

the running theme of all of these is I HAVE SUFFERED ENOUGH I DESERVE A SOFT EPILOGUE. also, as with luke in canon, and revan in swtor ‘canon’, i think there’s this ‘need’ you see in various fictions where a great hero cannot live a normal life in the ‘after’ -- they must either die, or disappear. it’s like we can’t accept the idea that they could be ‘ordinary’ and ‘brought down.’ that it’s a disservice to their story in some way. but one of my favourite fantasy authors is tamora pierce and i always loved that her heroes get to live, get to marry and settle down and appear in future stories centered on new heroes. i love the idea of a living legend who just wants to be a person like anyone else. i’m not opposed to further drama in their lives, keeps it spicy, but yeah -- i want revan and the exile to be around, to have to deal with the ins and outs of daily life, to do the hard work of rebuilding the order, the republic. i want them to be tangible beings. so. that’s my take on it.

[spectraspecs-writes]

Taris - Chapter 17 (Carth)

Link to the masterpost. Chapter 16. Chapter 18.

The entrance to the Undercity is completely past the Bek base and Matrik’s apartment, marked by a lone Sith trooper flanked by four or five automated gun turrets. When I walk up to him he stops me. “Hold on there, civilian!” he says, “Only those with official Sith business are allowed into the Undercity. Unless you've got the proper security papers you better just turn around and go back the way you came.”

Oh-ho-ho, sir, I have papers. “I've got my security papers right here,” I say, pulling out the papers from Gadon.

The Sith trooper looks over them. “Let me see…” he says, “...hmmm, these look to be in order. Okay, you can go down if you want. Can't say I envy you, though. The Undercity is crawling with mutants. Rakghouls, they call 'em. If you see anything moving down there, shoot first and ask questions later.”

“Thank you for the advice,” I say politely, as I open the elevator.

Right when the elevator opens, we’re confronted by two homeless guys. “You there! Up-worlder!” one of them shouts at us, “Anyone using this elevator has to pay the toll!”

“Yeah,” the other says, “this is our elevator! If you use it, you've got to give us something!”

Carth rolls his eyes. “I don't believe this planet! Even the beggars are trying to shake us down.”

“Five credits!” one of them says, “That's what it costs to use our elevator! Five credits!”

“And who are you guys to collect this toll?” I ask.

“We are the Outcasts,” one of them says, like he’s practiced this pitiful speech in the mirror, “banished and reviled by those who dwell above! Here in the filth and darkness we claw out a wretched existence, scavenging and begging just to survive long enough to see another wretched day.

“This is our village. We live here in the Undercity. You have to pay us five credits for using our elevator.”

You know, I almost want to pay him for his monologue alone. But I know a little of what it’s like to be in this position. Granted, as a scout, I put myself in that position, and I could get myself out of it, but still. “You know what, guys?” I say, “Here’s twenty credits. Go nuts.”

“Credits, my brother!” one of them exclaims, “We have credits! Now we can buy food and medicine!”

“Hush,” his brother urges, “or the others will hear us! They'll want our credits! We have to hide them!”

“Go on, you two!” a woman shouts at them, shooing them away, “Get out of here!

“I'm sorry about that…” she says to Carth and me, “those two beggars give everyone in the village a bad name! We aren't all like that, you know. Most of us are good people.”

“I'm sure you are, miss,” Carth says, “It's just too bad your little welcoming committee is there to give people a bad first impression.”

“Hi, I’m Rena Visz,” I introduce myself, “What’s your name?”

“My name is Shaleena... you're from the up-world, aren't you? I've... I've never seen it. I was born here in the Undercity. Is it as nice as they say up there?”

I have to think about this for a second. As far as planets go, Taris is by no means my favorite. (My favorite is actually Utapau, but that’s beside the point.) I don’t want to tell her a lie and say it’s nicer than it is. But on the other hand, if all you’ve known in your life is a ghetto, then I guess even a place like Taris would seem like a step up. So I have to figure out a way to say this politely without precisely lying. “It’s… not the best place I’ve been,” I say truthfully, and then move on to the lie, “but it certainly ranks pretty high.”

“I've never been to the surface,” she says longingly, “but sometimes I think I can see it in my dreams. The sun, the sky, the stars... it all sounds so... so... so wonderful. Gendar, the leader of our village, tells me I should spend more time trying to improve things down here and less time dreaming about something I can never have. Maybe he's right.

“You probably think I'm a fool, having dreams of a place I've never even seen. But when I was little, Rukil used to tell me stories of what it was like up there.”

“I have some questions for you, if I may,” I say.

“You'd probably get more information from Gendar, the village leader,” she says, “Or maybe Rukil. But I'll tell you whatever I can.”

I’m probably better off going to one of them, then. “Where might I find them?” I ask.

“Gendar will be somewhere in the village. I couldn't say where for sure. He's always busy, doing whatever he can to make the lives of the other villagers easier,” she says, “As for Rukil, he's wandering around somewhere on the south side of the village. He doesn't move too far... it's hard on his bones. He's over 100 years old! The children laugh at him and people think he's crazy because of his stories about the Promised Land, but he's really just a kind old man.”

“Well,” I say, “thank you very much. I’ll go find them.”

“Oh... okay. Well, if you ever need anything, or if you just feel like talking, come back and see me. I hardly ever get a chance to speak to someone from the up-world.” And she leaves.

I shake my head a little. “I’ve never felt so much like a celebrity,” I say to Carth.

I’m feeling a tad hungry, so we pick up some (admittedly overpriced) food from a merchant down here. And I feel like I want to talk to Carth some more, so I do. “Hey, Carth.”

“Yes? What’s on your mind?”

Does he answer everybody like that? “I just want to talk with you,” I say.

He scoffs a bit. “Oh? You want to argue some more, is that it?”

I swallow my food. “I’m always up for a fight. You wanna go? I’ve got a sword if you want it. I’m up for a fight if you want one.”

He laughs a little. “Can't say I've met a woman quite like you before,” he says, “You're really something.”

And then he looks a little sad. “I just don't trust easily,” he says, “and for good reasons… which are my own.”

“You know, I’m not gonna let up on this,” I say, “I’m going to keep asking until you talk. Trust me.”

He laughs again. “Well I might be willing to take you up on that challenge. But uh, you're just not going to let up, are you? Fine... you want to know why I don't trust anyone? Here goes.

“Five years ago the Jedi had just finished the war with the Mandalorians. Revan and Malak were heroes. I was damn proud to have served in their fleet. It was completely unexpected when they turned on us, invading the Republic while we were still weak. Nobody knew what to think, least of all me. Our heroes had become brutal, conquering Sith… and we were all but helpless before them. Think about it… if you can't even trust the best of the Jedi, who can you trust?”

“I suppose you can’t,” I say, trying to sympathize, “That must have been hard to take.”

“I… it wasn't even that. There were others: good, solid men. Trusted men who turned on us, as well, and joined their cause. Malak and Revan and the Sith deserve to die for what they've done… but the ones who fled the Republic and joined them are even worse. The Dark Side has nothing to do with why they joined the Sith. They deserve no mercy!”

I look at him softly, and say, “I haven’t joined the Sith, Carth.”

“I know,” he stammers a little, “I… should apologize to you. I've become so accustomed to expecting the worst in others, and you've done nothing to deserve that. It's just… never mind. Let's just continue with what we were doing. I'd rather not talk about it.”

“Okay,” I say gently, “If you do, you know where to find me.” But he doesn’t say anything. I guess he’s got a lot on his mind.

“You!” someone suddenly exclaims at me. I look around. It’s an old guy, who’s got a crazed look in his eye. But not crazed like Calo Nord. “You come from the world above!” he says, “Is this the time of destiny, then? Is this a portent of the salvation of my people? Or merely another false sign to mislead us from the path? Are you the herald of prophecy? The beacon to guide us through the darkness? Or are you merely another harbinger of shattered dreams and unfulfilled promises?”

Ahh! “Be careful…” Carth says, “this one might be crazy enough to be dangerous.”

“Speak to me, up-worlder!” the old man says, coming closer to me and sitting down a little too close for comfort, “Tell me what fate you unleash upon us – salvation or damnation! Speak, up-worlder – I beg you!”

“Uhh… what are you talking about?” I ask.

“A question,” he says, still with that crazed look, “You are uncertain. Bewildered. Perplexed. Understandable, I suppose. Even after a hundred years of life I myself still become confused at times.

“Perhaps I can make things more clear. Some things, at least. My name is Rukil, the oldest Outcast here in the village. Rukil Wrinkle-Skin, the children call me sometimes.”

Oh! It’s just the old guy. “Right, Shaleena mentioned you. Hi. I’m Rena Visz. Do you need something?”

“Once I was honoured for my wisdom,” he says, and I’m starting to think everyone down here has a rehearsed speech, “but over time the villagers fell away from the true path. Eventually there was only a single apprentice who followed me – and now she is gone, too.”

“What happened to your apprentice?” I ask.

“My apprentice is... lost,” he says slowly, “I sent her out into the Undercity to find... well, I cannot tell you. Not yet. Sadly, my apprentice has not returned. Please, up-worlder – will you help an old man? Will you seek out my apprentice in the Undercity? Her name is Malya. I must know of her fate, whatever it may be. I must know what she... found.”

“I’ll keep my eye out for her,” I say, and I think that’s the end of it.

But then he talks again. “Finding her may be difficult; Malya could be anywhere in the Undercity... but if you find her I will know you to be our true savior! Only then can I reveal my secret knowledge to you.”

I don’t really have any interest in his secret knowledge, but if someone’s lost out there, it’s the least I can do to help find her. “I'll be back if I find anything out,” I say.

“I wish you luck, up-worlder. Come speak with me again once you have discovered the fate of my apprentice.” And then he’s just gone. What a creepy old dude.

[thatwitchrevan]

Shooting star, parachute: any KOTOR OC of yours you'd like to talk about ^_^

I’ve already answered shooting star, but for parachute:

who does your OC(s) trust the most? who makes them feel safe? who would they do absolutely anything for?

Revanna: Rev trusts Alek the most until they become Sith and their relationship fractures to the point that she can’t anymore, and then she has nobody. Nobody the whole time she’s struggling with him, nobody the day he finally betrays her, nobody when the Jedi take her memories away and abandon her. And then, after a while, she meets Bastila, and she slowly builds with her an even stronger trust than she had with Malak.

Her crew as a whole makes her feel safe, especially Bastila and Carth. As for the people she’d ‘do anything’ for, she’d kill and die and burn down for and go through hell for either Malak or Bastila, but in the end only one of them will let her.

Meetra: She trusted Revan and Malak for a while, as well as their other friends: Annie, Selena, John. Everyone died or left or turned. For a long time she couldn’t even trust herself…then she meets Kreia and Atton. And she likes them, she would like to trust them, but she knows from the beginning that she absolutely cannot, so she tries really, really hard not too. Doesn’t always succeed. 

She grows to trust Mical, Visas, and Bao-Dur with her heart, her life, her friendship, and her training. They’re her safety net when she’s dealing with manipulation and lies. She also trusts Canderous better than Atton or Kreia, because even if he DID decide to fuck her over he’d be pretty blunt and honest about it. I think she feels most comfortable around Mical, though. He’s quiet, and meditation…he’s a nice break from Everything. She’d do almost anything to protect him and the others.