#I just had to make sure I established everything about the premise of race con in this one

[jessepinwheel]

happy may the fourth as a treat here's the entire uncut first chapter of race condition for you to chew on while I spend the next year or so finishing the story

All interrogations are kind of the same. The walls have slightly different coloring or there's a few chairs more or less, but in the end it's always a depressing room you're not allowed to leave, locked in with a person who thinks you've done something wrong and will do just about anything to get you to admit it.

It's not really about truth at that point. By the time you're under the hot lights, they've already decided you'll swing and are just waiting for you to supply the right noose. They know the game. They can twist your words around until they've got you saying things you never did or even thought of, anything so long as they can pin you and send you off to rot. It's like that every time--they'll tell you it isn't, but they're lying. You don't make friends in an interrogation.

I sat there, cuffed, across from a man with the same face as mine and sad eyes that could break even the hardest heart straight down the middle. He didn't look like a High General or a Master Jedi or an interrogator--he looked like a tired man who was trying his best, and maybe that's what he was. Maybe it really was breaking his heart to have to handle me this way, but it didn't matter. I'd known my plans would hurt people, even decent ones like him, and that made me sorry, but not sorry enough to stop. If he was anything like me, he would understand in the end. Maybe not enough to forgive me, but I wasn't doing all this for forgiveness.

At that point, we'd been at it for at least two hours, going around in circles. He was good at the questions game, but I was good at being difficult.

"Obi-Wan," he said in that Coruscanti accent of his. "Why did you do it?"

"You'll have to be more specific, dear," I replied.

"Infiltrating the army. Sabotaging Republic military engagements and stealing classified information. Collaborating with Sith. What's the point? What's your goal?"

I shrugged. "I didn't tell you the first ten times you asked, Master Jedi, so I don't see why you think I'll tell you now."

"I'm trying to understand," he said. "You're a reasonable man. You're loyal and intelligent and kind. Why would you betray everyone like this?"

It was flattering, I guess, that he thought so highly of me, despite what I'd done to him and was still planning to do in the near future.

"Betrayal only depends on your point of view, doesn't it?" I asked.

His brow furrowed. "Then what is your point of view, Obi-Wan?"

"You won't believe me," I said, leaning in towards him. "But Master Kenobi, I am trying to save the Jedi."

---

That's not where the story starts.

The story starts a lot earlier on a small trash-covered world on the Outer Rim called Lotho Minor. I'd never heard of it before a witch's Dark talisman had led me there. Even feeling the Force twine tightly around it as I approached, I had a hard time believing that anyone would end up on such a hellhole planet, much less stay there for any amount of time, though I suppose that hadn't been a choice. It wasn't my place to say how the Nightsisters' Dark magic worked, and wasn't as if Lotho Minor had a lot of functioning ships to go around.

It was obvious even from atmosphere that Lotho Minor was not a beautiful planet. Its entire surface was mottled gray and brown, covered over with refuse from other systems--the natural result of interstellar transport being simpler and cheaper than efficient recycling measures. Clouds of steam wafted off of the mountains of trash, either from the planet's natural heat or from bacterial decomposition. I landed my ship on the most stable-looking pile I could find and it creaked and cracked precariously under the weight. It didn't inspire a lot of confidence.

I stepped out of the ship, and even with a respirator the smell was revolting. From where I stood, the steam rising from the unpleasantly warm mountains of trash became endless fog that made it hard to see further than maybe a hundred meters and the sky was stained deep red from all the atmospheric contaminants. The very ground had an unsettling texture from the mix of broken droids and discarded electronics and rotting clothes and food, squelching under my boots on one step and crunching under the next. None of it felt very stable, and I could hear the low rumbling sound of piles shifting and resettling in the distance. I didn't like to think what could be hidden in these enormous mounds--they almost certainly didn't bother to sort their sharps or biohazards in a place like this. Not a safe place, indeed.

I ventured out, following the witch's talisman as its Force pressed against my mind and tugged me forwards. It was not a comfortable sensation--it felt almost like a compulsion and a malicious one at that, trying to claw into my psyche. It had been uncomfortable before, when I had reached orbit, but it was much stronger now that I was planetside, like an invasive weed putting roots through the back of my mind. It felt like obsession, as much of the Dark Side did, and it tried to push me faster and into recklessness.

I breathed deep and took hold of the feeling, then with a practiced hand, excised it. I was not a Master of anything, of the Force or the Light or the Dark, but only I controlled myself and I'd gone through too many of my own angers and obsessions to let someone else's undo me. I was here because I wanted to be, and I would go where I needed to in my own time.

Slowly and carefully, I descended the mountain, watching out for jagged edges and uneven footing all the while. The talisman led me through to a cave which appeared to be the hull of an ancient starship, corroded by chemical waste and partially collapsed from the weight of all the refuse piled on top of it. It was easier to navigate inside than outside--at least the floor was less likely to fall apart beneath me--but there was something supremely creepy about a dead dark rotting starship with all the systems down. Like walking through a towering corpse.

I lit a glow stick and held it out. Small device casings were littered everywhere, shucked for any valuable components and discarded. There were dark streaks across the floors, which I could only assume was blood or other body fluids, and heavy scrapes and scratches across the metalwork like from enormous claws. A few parts of the corridors looked like they had been haphazardly slashed with a lightsaber--out of anger or frustration, if I had to guess.

Even without the talisman, I felt I was close. The Force grew colder with the Dark Side the further I went, flowing slowly and thickly like sludge. It clung to me as I ventured deeper, like hands trying to drag me down into a deep dark hole where I couldn't escape. Someone had hurt here, very badly and for a very long time. I didn't like to think about the implications.

I followed the tracks back to what may have once been the ship's command center. Through the door, there was a muffled humming sound of a working generator. The door jammed slightly when I pushed, and I had to lever my mechanical hand against the frame to get it open. The inside reeked of death.

The first thing I noticed was a jury-rigged broadcasting box sitting on what used to be the data terminal dashboard. It was pretty big, large enough that I wouldn't be able to get both arms around it, and it seemed powerful, like the long-distance transmitters used for distress signals. Chances were, that was its intended purpose, though it wasn't currently operational--my ship would have received the transmission.

The second thing I noticed were the piles of discarded food containers and small animal bones and rotting skins littered across the floor. It seemed that even on a planet that consisted of only refuse, there was still a little sustenance to be found, whether it was refused packaged foods or vermin. Having scavenged for food in much the same way in the past, I could sympathize, though even I would balk at having to survive on it for as long as the size of the piles implied.

The third thing I noticed was the body.

It lay in the corner of the room, a Zabrak with red skin and black tattoos that were stark even under the dim light. It was sprawled on a mass of twisted metal, and it was only when I stepped closer that I realized the body was missing a bottom half.

"Oh, Maul," I murmured. "What happened to you?"

Maul remained senseless as I approached him. He was breathing shallowly and I could still feel the Force moving within him, so he was alive, though not by much. Closer inspection revealed the pile of metal was not droid refuse as I had suspected, but an actual cybernetic prosthesis, a grotesque one with too many limbs. It seemed to have been grafted directly to Maul's abdomen, without even a proper neural port or other surgical mount.

I grimaced. My experience with cybernetics was limited to what was necessary for my mechanical hand, but it didn't take an expert to realize that a bad surgery and a non-matched species prosthesis made for a very bad time.

I took it apart. I didn't really have a choice--Maul was clearly in no state to move himself and there was no way to carry both Maul and his enormous arachnid lower half all the way back to my ship. He could get a new prosthesis--a proper one--after we got off this hellish planet.

I was careful, but there's only so much you can do with a prosthesis that isn't designed for removal and I felt Maul's Force curling in pain as I used my multi-tool to cut connections and pry away layers of metal. It took maybe an hour to strip everything down to the crude socket, an ugly thing like a ragged and open wound in durasteel alloy. Looking at it directly, it was obvious that Maul had not had the luxury of a proper cybernetic technician, nor of any sort of post-op care. The socket was badly fitted, chafing against inflamed scar tissue all around his abdomen, and the prosthesis itself didn't look like it had been serviced once in the last decade. Maul's entire experience with cybernetics must have been excruciating.

I pulled my cloak off to make a sling for carrying Maul back to the ship, and it was in the middle of easing him into it when his eyes snapped open, the Force around him swirling like tongues of fire.

His red-and-gold gaze directly met mine and his lips curled back into a snarl. "Kenobi."

So at least he remembered me. They didn't seem like good memories.

I couldn't feel the Force the same way that Jedi did, but I didn't need that to feel the utter hatred spiraling out of him. I felt him lash out with the Force, whether trying to choke me or otherwise, and I tightened my grip on him.

"Maul," I said. "Calm down. I'm getting you off this planet."

Maul screamed something at me that sounded like a threat of bodily harm, which was pretty impressive considering his physical state.

I didn't have the time or energy to deal with it. I wanted to be off this planet as soon as possible, and the last thing I needed was Maul trying to strangle me on the way there. I pressed hard against Maul's diaphragm, driving the air out of him, and pushed my Force to my voice and said, "Sleep."

Maul flinched from the command, the scream dying in his throat.

"Sleep, Maul," I said, the Force vibrating through my words. It sank into him easily--he was too unbalanced or too unaware to keep it out. "You're safe now. I'm getting you out of here. Sleep."

Maul growled at me again, fighting it, but his eyes slipped closed as unconsciousness took him. When he was well and truly asleep, I secured him in the sling across my back. He was feverish and one of his horns dug uncomfortably into my shoulder, but he was so light that he was easy to carry--and not just because of the missing legs. He needed a lot of care, the professional kind. He needed it a long time ago.

"All right," I said, more to myself than to him. "Let's get off this dump."

---

I'm not a fan of hyperspace.

I'm not a fan of space travel in general, but hyperspace is the worst--it's a big reason why I settled down in Coruscant ten years ago with the intention of staying indefinitely. Hyperspace is empty and endless, and for someone like me who can feel the Force a little bit but not nearly enough, it's like staring straight into a black hole.

Dead and dark.

The only good thing about hyperspace was that it was dead time with nothing better to do, which meant I could finally sit down and think about what the hell was going on.

I had a lot of questions. I'm not unobservant--I can tell when things don't add up, and at the moment, a lot of things were not making sense. Least of all the half-a-Zabrak laying on the cabin bed, deep in Force-induced sleep.

Less than a tenday ago, I had killed Maul. I had shot him dead, a bullet through the heart, and held him until he breathed his last. Three days ago, I had arrived on his home planet of Dathomir and spoken to his family and buried him there according to his last wishes. His mother, the witch, wasn't happy about the situation, not that I expected her to be. She must have taken issue with Maul's death, because she did some kind of Dark magic on him, and maybe on me, though I don't know what--between the strength of the Dark Side on Dathomir and her magic, I blacked out pretty early on in the process.

When I awoke, she shoved a talisman into my hands and led me to a ship and told me to retrieve her son. I asked questions, obviously, but she wasn't in much of an answering mood. From what little she deigned to explain, Maul who was dead was no longer dead, and also on another planet several light years away, and this somehow made it my job to get him.

Fine, okay. I had killed Maul, so the least I could do was grab his resurrected self off whatever planet he'd landed on. I'm not the kind of scumbag who only cares about someone once they're dead, and I'm not the kind of idiot who tries to get on the bad side of a witch who's powerful enough to bring her son back to life, so of course I took the ship and the talisman and went. Magic could bring Maul back to life and resurrect him on a completely different planet than the one he'd been buried on? Sure, whatever. I didn't know a damn thing about magic, and as Master Jinn had once said a lifetime ago, through the Force all things were possible. I could suspend my disbelief long enough to check it out for myself.

I couldn't suspend my disbelief for this.

Maul--this Maul--was not the one I remembered. It wasn't just that he was missing his legs. It wasn't just that he was even more gaunt than the last time I had seen him.

It was that he had a cybernetic socket that looked like it was installed several years ago. It was that he had clearly lived in that alcove in that ancient starship for months, if not years.

The Maul lying on the bed beside me had no scar over his heart--not one where I had shot him dead, nor where Master Jinn had run him through with his lightsaber eleven years ago. I could believe that a magical resurrection might give him more injuries and scars, but to take them away? And not even all of his scars--only the one? That didn't make sense. It was too arbitrary.

This Maul was not my Maul. I could believe that. So why, then, had he recognized me? That didn't seem possible. I was missing something big. Until he awoke and answered some questions, I had no way to find out what.

I sighed and left the cabin. Maul would wake up in his own time, and I would feel it through the Force when he did. Hovering wouldn't help either of us.

I paced the ship slowly, Maul's lightstaff a heavy weight on my belt. That was another thing I couldn't reconcile, when to my knowledge his lightstaff had been stored in the Jedi Archive vaults eleven years ago after Master Jinn collected it from Naboo.

I didn't like to carry it--it's not right to carry a kyber crystal that isn't yours to begin with and the Force around this one was so volatile it was almost physically painful to touch. The crystal felt like it was weeping.

It made my heart hurt in a lot of ways. I hadn't ever seen a kyber crystal treated so cruelly--they were sacred to the Jedi and the Guardians of Jedha both, and respected as companions and for their connection to the Force. Kyber wasn't sentient the way a creature is, with discrete thoughts and feelings, but it was still alive in the Force, and it could hurt and care as much as anything else. For a Jedi, a chosen kyber crystal was practically an extension of the soul, and mutilating one this way was desecration of the worst sort, both to the Force and one's self.

I didn't know why Maul would do something like that--I asked the crystal, but my connection to the Force wasn't deep enough to understand anything from it except vague impressions of pain and blood. I suppose that was answer enough.

It would be nice to believe that Maul had been coerced into it all by his Sith Master and that he was really a decent person deep down, but chances were, that wasn't true. I already knew he was cruel. He had hurt himself and he had hurt others, and all things remaining equal, he would do it again.

Until I knew what was going on, until I knew it was safe, I would hold onto his lightstaff. I don't think Maul's kyber liked that very much, but it seemed to accept the necessity of it. It didn't like me much, either. I could respect that.

I went to the ship's kitchenette, not really out of a desire for food but just to keep moving. Hyperspace made me restless no matter the circumstances--a tendency that had greatly annoyed Jango in the years we had collaborated. Only now, I didn't have Jango to spar me to exhaustion. I was effectively alone in a two-cabin cruiser that was older than I was, whose previous owners were now assuredly dead by the Nightsisters' hands. I supposed I ought to be grateful it still worked at all.

It was a good thing I wasn't hungry, because the kitchenette had very little in the way of sustenance--mostly nutrient powder and other preserved foods which were edible enough, but whose taste, I had found out, had not improved over the years. Food was food, but I sincerely hoped that once we landed I could restock with something a bit more palatable.

Just then, the door slid open and the ship's astromech rolled in, a somewhat junky KY4 model that had gone through some hard times. Its chassis was a small box of about knee height with three omni wheels for movement and a wide-angle ocular sensor on top--an outdated style, but functional enough. I moved to the side so it could roll without tripping me, and it chirped to me in response. My Binary wasn't great, but I got the gist--that all systems were running steady. It was the third time in as many hours it had come to tell me so.

"Thank you, KY4. How much longer will we be in hyperspace?" I asked.

KY4 chirped that it would be about two more hours, then rushed to reassure me its navigation processors were completely functional and that there would be no problems with its calculated course. This was, again, something it had done multiple times over the course of transit.

"I believe you," I said. "Did you need anything else?"

KY4 chirped a negative and skittered off without waiting for a response.

I let it go. Droids might not have feelings the way a person did, but they tended to develop personalities if they went too long without refreshing their firmware, and for better or for worse, KY4 had been alone long enough to discover anxiety. Considering the fate of its previous owner, that was understandable. I didn't know much about dealing with skittish droids, or droids in general, but I'd give it space and maybe once it was used to me it wouldn't feel like it had to flee the moment it stopped talking. Chances were, it didn't know what to do with me under these strange new conditions. It would probably take a while before it felt like it was on level ground.

I guess that made two of us.

---

True to KY4's calculations, we dropped back to sublight just over two hours later. The two of us piloted the ship into low orbit over a small ocean moon known as Bantu IVb, the only inhabitable moon of six orbiting a gas giant in the Dothikan system on the Outer Rim. It was excessively obscure and there was very little notable about it except that I knew a medical professional lived there--Solis Greer, a Mandalorian Duros and acquaintance-slash-sort-of-family-member of Jango Fett. I knew about her because thirteen years ago, when Jango had picked me up with a crushed mechanical hand and a shoulder recently stabbed through with a lightsaber, he had brought me here for treatment.

It was a stretch to say that Solis and I were friends or even friendly--she had obviously known Jango well, but I was only ever her patient. Still, she was level-headed enough that I felt confident she wouldn't shoot me in the face before I could ask her to help Maul.

We held the ship in low orbit and I sent a transmission requesting landing clearance. Even on a planet without a spaceport, that was only polite.

The responding transmission arrived not ten minutes later, to the effect of "who the hell are you?" and also "where did you get those landing codes?", except in much coarser language. I guess Solis didn't remember me--it had been thirteen years, after all.

I responded that I was an old friend of Jango's, and that I had a patient in need of medical care. There was a little more back-and-forth, but about half an hour later she sent me a set of coordinates where I could land safely and said that she would meet me there. I thanked her and started the descent to the planet's surface.

It wasn't an easy landing--Bantu IVb had heavy winds and my ship was not designed for a single pilot with only one fully functioning hand, but between me and KY4, we made it down with only a minimum amount of damage. We landed on a rocky outcropping a few kilometers inland from the shore.

I stepped out onto the bluish shale, getting a feel for the slightly lower gravity, and breathed deep. The air smelled just like I remembered--damp and a bit metallic from dissolved mineral deposits. There were no trees on the island--or at all, if I remembered correctly--giving me a clear view of the moon's enormous oceans with gray hydroturbines and clumps of red algae floating in the distance. The skies were cloudless and tinted greenish-blue, with a large hazy orange crescent hanging a few hand-widths above the horizon--the gas giant this moon orbited. Despite the apparent barrenness, it was far from dead. I could feel the Force all around, flowing in slow currents from plant and animal life hidden just below the water's surface. It wasn't for me, but it was as good a place to live as any.

I felt eyes on me before I heard the footsteps. I turned to face them.

Solis stood ten paces back, in full armor with her blaster rifle aimed at my face. It was not, in short, the welcome I was hoping for. I held up my hands slowly.

Solis did not put the blaster down. "Why come here, Kenobi?" she asked in heavily accented Basic.

Okay. So maybe she did remember me, though everyone seemed unhappy about that lately. "Solis," I said. "I'm sorry for arriving without warning. There's a patient in the ship who needs medical care. You were the only medic I knew who could also do technician work. I have credits--I can pay." I didn't have too much, but it would be enough for this. "If you don't want me here, that's fine. Just tell me where I can go, and I'll leave."

"How do you know this place? Where do you know my name?" Solis demanded.

"I…what?" I asked. "Solis, you treated me, remember? Jango brought me here after I got stabbed with a lightsaber. You told me to get phrik plating for my hand."

This, if anything, made her angrier. "Do you hear words you're saying? Do you think I'm fool, jetii?"

My mind came to a screeching halt. "Jetii? Solis, I'm not a Jedi. I can't even use the Force. You knew my name; don't you remember me?"

"Only fool doesn't know your name. It's on all the HoloNet for the last year." I could hear the sneer in her voice. "High General Obi-Wan Kenobi."

That froze me.

That's a title I had never wanted to hear--one I never thought I would hear. I'd had my war on Melida/Daan and it had cost me my place with the Jedi Order, my hand, and the Force. That was enough war in a lifetime for anyone. Given the choice, I would never pick up that mantle of command again.

My mind whirled. Solis had recognized my face from the HoloNet, because I was apparently High General Obi-Wan Kenobi. A Jedi Master, maybe even a Councilor. That didn't make sense, but it was the start of a picture I could just about see the outlines of.

Solis didn't remember me from thirteen years ago because I hadn't come here thirteen years ago. Like Maul, this Solis was not my Solis.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I was not their Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The very idea of it was absurd. Not just that I could have somehow slipped from one reality to the next, but also that it could happen without my realizing it.

…But I had blacked out. The Force had taken me on Dathomir when the witch had done her magic, and she could have done anything then. Maybe even send me to another universe entirely.

I had a hard time believing it--anyone would--but it fit. It was why Maul was stranded on a distant trash planet for so long, bisected at the waist. It was why Solis would call me a Jedi when I had never told her about my connection to the Force or the Jedi Order.

The whine of a charging blaster coil shook me out of my thoughts.

"No words to say, jetii?" Solis asked.

"I--Solis…" I trailed off weakly. I didn't know how to play this. I didn't have enough information. "Solis, I don't know how to prove this to you, but I am not a High General." Just saying the title made me feel sick. "I'm not a Jedi."

"Playing no-memory now?"

"No, that's not--that's not what I meant. I mean, I'm not the Obi-Wan you know. I'm not a Jedi, Master or otherwise--I don't even have the Force. I'm a private detective on Coruscant and have been for the last ten years. I have my license in my pocket if you want to see it."

Solis tilted her head to one side. I couldn't see her expression under her helmet, but she seemed willing to humor me. "Give it," she said.

I tossed my wallet to her. She caught it with one hand and flipped it open, all while keeping the rifle aimed at me. She looked over my license, then went on to my other ID cards, which was frankly rude. When she seemed satisfied with what she saw, she closed it and tucked it into a pouch on her belt.

"Uh," I said.

"You get it back when I think I trust you. You say you know Jango?"

"I lived with him for two years. We worked together on jobs."

"Jango Fett works with no people," Solis said, then switching to Mando'a, "He certainly did not work with a beansprout like you."

"Don't call me a beansprout until you've fought me," I said, switching languages myself. "I've sparred Jango with or without weapons and won. I could do the same with you."

She paused. "You've got his accent."

"I should think so--he taught me the language," I replied. "He taught me a lot about fighting, too, which I'll happily demonstrate sometime after my friend gets medical attention and when you don't have a blaster pointed at me."

She looked over to my ship, where KY4 was sitting at the base of the ramp, doing the droid version of pacing nervously. "What condition is the patient in?"

"He's stable, but it's pretty bad. It's best if you see him yourself."

Slowly, Solis lowered her blaster and gestured to the ship. "Fine. Show the way, Detective. This isn't over, though. You owe me an explanation--one that isn't full of shit."

I was pretty sure that in this particular case, even the correct and full explanation would sound full of shit. Still, I said, "I'll be happy to explain what's going on as soon as I know what's going on. You said you have a HoloNet connection?"

---

The first thing I did once we transported Maul back to Solis' infirmary and she kicked me out to do her work was lock myself into a fresher and make sure my body was still mine.

I looked at myself in a mirror, visually tracing my features--same gray eyes, same nose, same mouth, same beard. I went on to catalog the scars across my body, from Melida/Daan to the lightsaber scar through my right shoulder to that time I got shot pushing Bail out of the way of an assassin--scars that a hypothetical Jedi version of myself shouldn't have. Everything seemed accounted for.

My hair was still the same length, coming down to my mid-back with singed edges where it had been recently sliced by a lightsaber and my mechanical hand looked like it was supposed to--prosthetic halfway up my right forearm with phrik plating. It was the same simple but robust Jedha model with limited motion in the wrist I was supposed to have. A Jedi wouldn't have chosen a model like this--it wasn't flexible or sensitive enough for saberwork.

I let out a slow breath in relief. By all accounts, I was still me. I didn't know how it could be otherwise, considering my clothes had remained the same through the transition between worlds, but there was so much I didn't know about the situation. I had to be sure, that's all.

The second thing I did was use a borrowed datapad to search myself on the HoloNet. Doing so was…overwhelming.

It took no time at all to find that Jedi Master--a Master at thirty-five? What the actual hell?--Obi-Wan Kenobi was a highly-regarded diplomat known for his calm disposition and charisma who had resolved hundreds of cases of governmental unrest or other diplomatic affairs across the galaxy. Now, with the Clone Wars, he had become notorious for his strategic brilliance as a High General of the Republic army. He wasn't just at the head of the war. He was the face of it.

My stomach churned at the thought.

There were holos of me--of him--everywhere. Candid snapshots, publicity holos of him interacting with younglings and soldiers and senators, blurry holovids of him deflecting storms of blasterfire with his lightsaber--

It was too much. Just about everyone in the Republic must know his name and face, and that was absolutely horrifying.

I found myself staring at a short holovid of him at some kind of Senatorial event--it didn't matter which one. He was dressed up in traditional Jedi robes and tabards and his hair was cut short, cropped at the nape of the neck, and he talked with a distinct Coruscanti accent, the way I used to when I was younger. His face looked just like mine.

That could have been me. In another life, in this life, that would have been me. Not a Temple reject who left the Order after less than a year of padawanship, but a man who fulfilled his dreams of becoming a Jedi Knight. A man who never had to leave his family in the Temple or become permanently disabled in both body and spirit. A man who was respected for doing good across the galaxy.

A perfect Jedi, they called him. Serene, level-headed, and competent--not angry and impulsive like I had been. Not a failure like I had been.

I didn't want to see this. I accepted a long time ago that the Jedi life was not the life for me, but what was I supposed to do when I saw evidence to the contrary so starkly? Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi fit. The life fit him so well that there wasn't any other path he could walk. He devoted himself to the Force and to helping others because that's where he was meant to be.

What did that say about me?

I don't know how long I sat there, staring at that holovid, looping again and again. All I know is that when I came back to myself, I had my face in my hands and the datapad was somewhere on the floor, timed out to sleep mode. I shook myself roughly to snap out of it. Time and place. There was a time and place for those thoughts, and it wasn't now. Jedi Obi-Wan was a personal problem, and I would deal with it later.

Right now, there were more important things to find.

I reached the datapad off the floor and booted it up again to search recent events--surely, my failure to become a Jedi was not the only divergence from what I remembered.

Well, it didn't take long to find out two key points: First, the Battle of Geonosis was fifteen months ago, making it now almost an entire year later than when I had left my world, and second, the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic was still one Sheev Palpatine.

Sheev Palpatine. The Sith Lord.

---

"Solis."

Solis looked up from her data terminal in the infirmary. She wasn't wearing full armor anymore. She'd never explained that to me--maybe as a medical professional it was inconvenient, or the years in near-isolation since Galidraan had made it less important. She looked just as I remembered: purple scaled skin, red pupil-less eyes, thin face, no hair, and a cybernetic left arm with a hand that didn't match--I vaguely recalled she swapped out different hands for different types of work. She had the same strange ageless quality that most Duros seemed to have, and except for modifications to her arm, she hadn't changed at all in the last thirteen years.

"Detective," she said tonelessly in Mando'a. I guess I'd made a good enough showing that she assumed I was fluent--which I was. "What do you want?"

"Is there a test you can run to see how old I am?" I asked.

"Shouldn't you know that already?" she asked. "You know what year you were born. Surely basic arithmetic isn't beyond you."

"I want to make sure I didn't black out for an entire year." Most likely, I had traveled through time as well as across dimensions, but the idea that I possibly hadn't--that I had been in the grip of the Force for an entire year on Dathomir where the witch could have done anything to me--made me nervous. I had already meditated for a while and verified that the Force within me was all mine, but I wanted the extra reassurance.

"Is that a…common issue with you?" Solis asked.

"Nothing that drastic, but I've had episodes," I replied, which was a mild way of saying my soul occasionally, annoyingly, left my body. "Can you find out my age or not?"

Solis hummed. "Hypothetically, yes. There's no magic indicator in a human body that tells you the age of the germ cell, but I can make an estimate based on certain biomarkers and gene sequences." She glanced back at me. "I would need to take needle biopsies."

"That's fine," I said. "Can you do it now?"

"Impatient, aren't you?" she tutted. "You haven't even explained what's happened to you or your friend yet."

"I don't think you'll like the explanation, but I'll tell you what I know now, if you want."

Solis thought about it for a bit, then said, "Fine. Go change into a gown and sit. I need to finish something first."

I nodded and did as she asked. It was a quiet wait, and not too long--maybe only fifteen minutes. Solis finished what she was doing, then had me lay prostrate on a bed and hooked up a vitals monitor to my arm.

She paused before prepping my back. "That's a lot of scarring," she said. "Does it hurt?"

"No. They're from a long time ago."

"Okay." Solis wiped the area clean. "Do you need general anesthesia?" She asked as she set up the appropriate medical droid.

I shook my head.

"All right." She held up a small hypo. "This is a mild nerve disruptor--it's to suppress pain and make it so you'll stay still while the medical droid does its work. It'll last about ten minutes. If you don't want that, the droid can use mechanical restraint instead."

"I can't use most painkillers--I'm allergic to spice."

"This is a different class of drug. It's not a spice derivative."

"Injection is fine, then."

"Okay. You'll feel a pinch in the side of your neck." She jabbed me with the hypo. It did, in fact, pinch, and I could feel an uncomfortable pins-and-needles sensation move down through my body. She stepped back and disposed of the hypo, then took a seat in front of me. "Now we let the droid do its work and in the meantime, you can explain what the hell is going on."

Considering the circumstances of my arrival, she had been very generous. An explanation was the least of what I owed.

I gave her what I could. I told her about where and when I had come from, and about Dathomir's witch and retrieving Maul from Lotho Minor and finding what I'd found on the HoloNet. She let me say it all without interruption, though all told, the story wasn't very long--I had only been in this universe for about two days, of which large parts were spent in hyperspace. Even for me, that wasn't a lot of time to accomplish anything.

"You realize this all sounds insane," Solis said after a long pause.

"Sure, I do. I hardly believe it myself, and I'm the one it happened to, but it's my best guess for what's going on," I said. "I don't really know how to prove it to you."

The medical droid beeped, indicating it had finished its work, and Solis checked its console report. "All three samples are good. I'll have these processed and I can calculate your results after I deal with your friend." She put some bacta patches on my punctures, checked my vitals, and helped me sit up as the drug wore off. "Crazy as it is, Detective, I believe you."

"You do?" I asked, rubbing my lower back. It throbbed a little, but it wasn't bad. With the bacta, it would probably be better tomorrow.

Solis nodded and returned my clothes, turning away so I could put them on with some privacy. "You seem smart enough to come up with a more believable cover story if you were lying, but honestly if you ignore the ridiculousness of it, your explanation makes the most sense. I checked your IDs--they're all legit, except for the fact that they shouldn't exist. You have Jan'ika's landing codes and you speak with his accent."

Jan'ika. Cute. He would have strangled me if I ever called him that.

"And of course, there's your hand," Solis continued. "I'd know my own work anywhere--it would be a pretty big coincidence if anyone besides me designed that. You said I suggested the phrik plating?"

"For defense against lightsabers, yes," I said as I got dressed. "The good news is: it works. The bad news is: even if it can stop the blade from cutting, the heat still gets you. My port got seared pretty badly and I had to get a new hand." I straightened out my shirt and sat back down on the bed. "I'm decent."

Solis nodded. "Well, we already knew the heat would be a problem, but the phrik kept you alive, didn't it? That means it did its job." She handed me a glass of water. "This will help with the pain."

I accepted the glass and drank. It made me feel better, more because of the water than the medication in it--I couldn't remember the last time I'd had anything to drink. Back on the ship, probably.

Solis sat down. "So. You've traveled from one universe to the next. What are you planning to do now, Detective?"

That was the million-credit question.

This galaxy was at war, and had been for over a year, Separatist droids against Republic clones. It was even worse than I had imagined it could be--worlds burned out, millions of people dead, and there was no end in sight. That alone made me ill, but there was more to it than that.

Chancellor Palpatine, the single most powerful man in the Republic, was Maul's Sith Master. He had told me that back in my universe, and there was all the evidence that it was the same in this one--the man had risen to office in the same way, and operated the Republic in the same way, accumulating power towards some horrible end that I couldn't yet see.

And nobody knew. This universe had progressed a year further than mine and nobody knew that the poison was coming from the very top of the system, flowing down to everything underneath--the army, the Jedi, the Republic itself. The circumstances that had led to my discovery of this deceit simply didn't exist here.

A low voice in the back of my mind murmured that I didn't have to do anything with that. This wasn't my universe. This wasn't my business. My concern should be returning to my own world, perhaps with Maul in tow, and going back to Coruscant to my life as a private investigator. It would probably even be easy--the witch had sent me here, so she could very well bring me back.

But I couldn't do that. Palpatine was plotting for a genocide--the genocide of my people. It didn't matter that they weren't my Order or my family. They were the Jedi Order, and while I could never be one of them again, I couldn't let them die just because this universe wasn't mine. I couldn't let a war so great and terrible go on when I could reasonably find a way to end it.

That only left me one option. "I…think I have to end this war."

Solis, to her credit, didn't laugh. "Easy enough to say. How will you do that?"

"I don't know. I know who's behind it and I know what he wants--the end of the Republic and the Jedi Order, and a powerful apprentice to serve him." Maul had told me that much, back in my universe. "I can't let that happen."

"If your problem is one man, then remove the man," Solis said. "Jan'ika taught you how to do that, yes?"

I shook my head. "It's not that simple. This man's got support that runs deep and his pieces are already moving. He's had years to prepare. If I go straight for him without any preparation, he'll kill me and a lot of other people, too. I don't even know if killing him will stop his momentum. I…need to figure out what he's trying to do, first."

That was the crux of the problem.

Palpatine was not stupid--he had a plan, and he was putting it to work as we spoke. How did you destroy a Republic and a people and a culture? Orchestrating a war and forcing Jedi to serve at the head of it was all well and good for thinning the numbers, but it wasn't as if all Jedi could serve in a war, nor would every Jedi who fought in the war fall. A war would find the Order depleted and weary, but they would recover, and I couldn't imagine Palpatine being satisfied with that. Attrition wasn't enough. There had to be something more. Something decisive.

I thought about the Republic's army, the millions of men with Jango's face, commissioned to fight for the Jedi. Jango had hated the Jedi, yet he had agreed to help build an army to fight for them. The Jango I had known wouldn't have done that--he would have died before helping the Jedi who had destroyed his home and his people, so why had he agreed? Even beyond that, the Jedi Mind Healers had detected some kind of Darkness within Captain Rex's mind--was that coincidence or somehow part of this plot, too?

That was the problem--I simply didn't know enough. I knew the man behind it and I knew the end goal, but not the path between the two.

Back in my world, I had gathered evidence against Palpatine--fraud, corruption, and other unsavory deeds--and given them to Bail, who had the resources and the support to raise a political movement against him. I had informed the Jedi High Council of the Sith Lord in their midst. I had spoken to soldiers about the conspiracy that might be brewing from the moment they were commissioned. In my world, a world where the war had only started, that may have been enough.

In this world, with a war that had dragged on for so long and a Chancellor who had gained unprecedented power and influence and the time to place his agents everywhere he needed them to be, there was no way. He was too well-rooted to be taken down unless I uncovered all of his schemes one by one and burned them out beyond any hope of recovery. If I couldn't do at least that, nothing I did to Palpatine would matter, and people would die.

"If you want my opinion," Solis said after a long silence, "I think you will need help to pull this off. I don't know what man you're trying to hunt down--and I don't need you to tell me--but he sounds powerful."

"He is very powerful."

"Then you'll need to fight smart, and you'll need help. Even the strongest fighter can't be in more than one place at a time, and it sounds like you'll need to be in more than one place at a time."

I nodded. "Is that an offer, dear?"

Solis sighed and clasped her hands. "No. You're a friend of Jan'ika's, so I'll help you if you come here, but this fight is yours, and I have my own duties. You're not the only one who comes flying in needing medical treatment."

"I understand."

"I have no love for the jetiise," she continued. "I can't blame them for killing us the way they did--it is only appropriate that the strong survive and the weak perish, and if we did not want to be cut down we should have been stronger before challenging them--but their victory ushered in the end of the True Mandalorians. I can't forgive that."

I bowed my head. "I understand."

"But the jetiise are yours, so you fight for them. It's one thing to hunt and kill in battle, but another thing entirely to purge an entire people, their home and culture and younglings included. There's no honor in that. I wouldn't wish it on anyone." She folded her fist over her chest. "So fight, Detective Kenobi. If you think you can end this war and save your people, then do so. Destroy the man who threatens your family and make it so he can never hurt anyone again."

I folded my own fist over my chest, hardening my resolve for what had to be done. "I will. I'll learn his plans, I'll dismantle each one in turn, and when I've rooted out all his traps and contingencies…I will kill him."

[fiction-in-my-blood]

Switching Sides: Part 2 (HLITF)

Aaaannndddd once again I would LOVE to thank my girl @theshove for being my editor in chief and making my writing reach a HIGHER level I could never reach without your help. Thank you so much for making sense of my poorly grammar-ed sentences haha. 

Also, if anyone possibly wants to get on a tag list I’d be happy to make one 

👉👈

If you wanna catch up, Part 1 is right here! Happy reading :)

Premise: Growing up in a life of crime in a Japanese mafia, Atsuko Motomori has seen enough injustice to last her a lifetime. To try and give back to the universe her family has taken so much from, she dreams of being a detective from a young age. Her twin, sharing her disgust for her father and many uncles, just wants an ordinary life away from the crime, paing and suffering. Instead, she wants to be in the spotlight with the soft notes she makes with her cello. In their escape of 2015, on their coming of age birthday, they must split ways, never to be together ever again. If one was found, they didn’t want the other dragged down with them. Atsuko, having changed her name and appearance as best she can without a scalpel, sets off to start her life of car chases and arrests.

Four years in a seemingly dead-end police station in the middle of nowhere, being passed over time after time for promotion, Atsuko finally gets a shot at her dream, having been sent to an academy for the best candidates in the country by her boss who had always kept an eye out for her. After discovering her boss may have made her bite off more than she could chew, Atsuko must become the slave of a dominating instructor!? Who so just happens to be the captain of the most famous police unit in Japan? Not to mention a total knockout! Will Atsuko finally achieve her dream? Or will her new instructor put her through the wringer?

Warnings: Language, reference to sexual activity/forceful nature.

~~~~~~

‘A servant? Did he confuse that with a full-time aid?’ I tried to reason with his wording of my job title. As the room was lit by the setting sun and filters out into the corridor, I stood there in silence, thinking about what I'd just gotten myself into.

"Motomori, who will you partner with?" Ishigami closed the book of names and held it under his arm, keeping a close eye on how I was reacting. Letting my eyes meet each one of the detectives' before me, I took in a deep breath to calm my nerves. 

"Instructor Kaga, please," I announced. Although he seemed the most stern out of all the men, I took that as a sign of someone worn away by his experience. Which only meant there was more to learn from him. Right?

The announcement of my choice of instructor led Shinonome to laugh at my bravado. "Now that's something. Choosing Hyogo is pretty fitting for our little overachiever." The youngest instructor couldn't help but sound amused as the man I had chosen showed a concerned expression. As he looked me up and down, I stood with more confidence than I really had. 

After the Captain's silent review of me, Ishigami progressed through the other pairings. I glanced at Kaga and saw him taking a phone call. "Yeah... I'll take care of it." With his back turned to me, I only heard a minuscule amount of the conversation. 

"Kaga, you'll be going after this person." When the other Captain tried to hand over a folder, which I was sure had the case we should be working on inside, Kaga continued his conversation while pointing in my direction. He told Ishigami to give me the folder holding the information we'd need for the undercover assignment. 

"These are documents for the instructor." Ishigami frowned, obviously tired of Kaga's dismissiveness. Kaga begrudgingly took the folder before thrusting it into my chest. 

"Read it." He demanded and then finished his phone call. 

"I'm sure you understand, but-" Ishigami was cut off by Kaga crossing his arms. 

"I understand perfectly well." His mood seemed to worsen as the two talked. They continued to bicker as the rest of the instructors watched. I'm sure it was difficult to butt in on the Captains' discussions. 

"Squad leaders should get along..." Shinonome frowned as we watched, me not knowing what else to do except just stand there. 

"These two will go as far as a fistfight." Instructor Soma's comment made me worry that all the expensive equipment in this room would be damaged if someone didn't intervene soon enough. When Soma directed a question to Goto to see if he agreed, the messy-haired man just stood there in silence. 

"I can hear all of you." Kaga scowled as he took a cigarette out of his suit pocket. I knew smoking wasn't allowed in the building, having seen the signs next to most of the doorways, however I decided it best not to make him aware. ‘I mean, he has worked here longer than me.’

‘He is the freaking instructor, Atsuko.’ The voice in my head made me want to metaphorically face-palm. It was clear just by the way the instructor stood he didn’t care much for rules or regulations. 

"Don't get in my way." As he walked towards the door, Kaga made what sounded like a threat to me. 

"Didn't even think about it." I forced a smile, knowing full well he would likely trample over me if I took even a step out of line. If I was going to learn from this man, I would have to watch what he did instead of asking questions. 

"What're you standing around for? Come." Turning back to where I had been standing, I woke myself up from the pit of despair I had thrown myself into. 

‘What did you think was going to happen?’ I quickly followed as he gestured me over with a jerk of his head. 

~~~~~~

Sitting in the Captain's car, I couldn't help but feel anxious with the silence that thickened the air. According to the file given to us by Ishigami, we had to infiltrate a beach bar... But we were heading in the opposite direction from the sea. We were driving downtown. 

"Umm, sir, the file says the destination is-" Kaga, once again, cutting somebody off mid sentence. 

"Shut up," he spat, taking me aback with how rude he was. 

‘I guess that ‘scum’ comment wasn't too out of character for him, then’ I thought, stricken into silence but sighing on the inside. I turned to gaze out the window, praying that I could get through the day without being caught out for being inferior to what my file suggested. 

~~~~~~

When we stopped, I found myself inside a love hotel. My heart raced with worry, recognising the name as a brand my father ran when I was still living at home. He was a gang leader. With a strong mafia at that. He had his dirty little fingers in every industry that had some form of shady business going on. It's what made me hate him so much. The things he did, the things he made me watch, it's what made me want to become a detective. I wanted to pay the universe back for all the bad stuff he had done, and maybe one day find the evidence to arrest him. God knows, the police he had under his claws and henchmen doing his dirty work had delayed that for long enough. 

We made our way to the room booked for us, or, more aptly, for Kaga. Meanwhile, I tried to hide my face from the receptionist as discreetly as I could, not wanting them to somehow recognise me. Even though I did my makeup differently from when I was younger, had dyed my hair black from its original brown, dressed differently and even held myself differently, there wasn't much else I could do to change my appearance without making it trackable. I couldn't get surgery because then I would be in the government system; I know, somehow, they'd be able to track me, even if the profile I had now was completely different. 

"Hey, um... What're we doing here?"  I asked as I closed the door behind me, the eeriness of the red room making my eyes dart around for any hidden cameras or listening devices. I remembered my father telling me about all the politicians he had on tape and all the people he’d bribed with that information.

"I'm pretty sure I said shut up." Kaga spat, also inspecting the room. I frowned at his rudeness and flipped the switch that turned on the electricity for the room. All the lights went out, causing Kaga to spin around and glare at me in the darkness.

"Don't you know what your position is? Don't interfere." His frown deepened as he stormed back to where I was standing. He was obviously offended I had turned off the lights. 

"Love hotels are famous for secret cameras. They're turned on when the electricity switch is flipped. I thought you wouldn't want to risk getting caught." I smiled up to him with a spiteful thought hidden behind it. ‘This guy…’

Probably annoyed with how much sense my statement made, Kaga turned back to the centre of the room. ‘Is he really that easily annoyed?’ I chuckled to myself, not wanting to be reprimanded for intentionally frustrating my instructor.

The two of us were now alone in a dark room with nothing but a bed and mirrors on the ceiling. Not to mention a love hotel. I was painfully aware of what the room represented and everything that had ever happened in it due to the stillness in the air with the air-con off. Memories of what my father encouraged my sister and I to do in our youth flashed back, causing me to shake them out of my head. 

"Why're you so nervous?" Sitting on the large bed, Kaga raised his brow at me while I stood awkwardly away from him. I could see a concerned look on the Captain's face as he brought me back to earth. I could tell he wasn't concerned about my feelings, but rather about how naive and stupid I must seem. I didn't want to walk any further into the establishment than I had to, so I stuck my ground. 

"N-No reason." I grew shy, knowing I had no connection to my past life on my file and not wanting him to have a clue to think I would. 

"Oh?" A mischievous grin grew on my instructor's face and my senses heightened. With that, Kaga grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me down onto the bed aggressively. Even though he was only holding my wrist, I struggled to move. My heart began to race in fear of what he was trying to do. Growing up with the most erratic people as guardians, I didn't want to guess what his plan was. 

"This morning was totally screwed up, thanks to you." He frowned down at me, that same demeaning look conveyed on his surprisingly handsome face. You would never guess his personality was as cruel as he was if it wasn't for the eternal crease between his brows. Feeling the anxiousness of an expected punishment, my breath gets caught in my throat. 

"How do you plan on making it up to me?" His grin returned as he held my wrists harder than necessary. Despite the smirk, his eyes were cold and expressionless. There was no way I was going to allow what he was insinuating to happen, so I pushed against his hands with all my might while somehow snaking my foot high enough to push on his stomach. 

However, before I could attempt to catapult him off, he covered my mouth with his hand. I looked at him like he was crazy, but because I hadn’t done much training lately, I couldn’t push him off me.

"Don't talk." He hissed, rising up from being inches away from my face. Then, I saw him pull something from my ear. It was an earpiece, making me wonder when he was able to put it there, not to mention without my knowing it was there. "This will make for a huge amount of evidence." He explained to himself. My mind, already in disarray, went into a confusion like no other. "It was worth the effort of getting it on." He looked at me suggestively as I sat up with unsure thoughts. 

‘So... He didn't lead me here for something worse?’ My brows furrowed as I thought back to the moments leading up to this, embarrassed and angry that I thought it would come to that. It was concerning to see his demeanour change from what I just saw to the victorious look on his face. He looked down at me, still sitting on the bed with a dejected expression, seemingly noticing my staring. 

"What're you just sitting there for?" He laughed at my appearance, my apprehension rising due to how laid back he was. Maybe it was because of where I was, but I was more sensitive to the casual restriction he just put me in. I looked away, not wanting to say something I'd regret. 

Then, I felt him leaning over me and I quickly turned my gaze back to him. I panicked. His face was nearer than I expected it to be as he jerked forward. I jumped back, the memories of intimidation tactics used on me before resurfacing from my past. 

"Did you really think I was being serious earlier?" He almost laughed at the notion. "Unfortunately for you, I don't have any problems with women." He inched closer again and it took everything in my being to not smack that pretty face of his. If I assaulted a detective, I would be expelled from the academy and likely arrested. Not to mention the scene it would cause being dragged out of here. "I'm not so desperate that I'd go after some inexperienced brat." He smirked before getting up from the bed, talking to me like I was the idiot. 

"What did you bring me here for..." Having had the time to understand that I would be safe and de-escalate my anger, I quickly regathered myself and straightened my back. "...If not for my training?" Looking at his suited back, I started to think back to why I was actually here. 

"I've got more important things to do than that useless nonsense." He explained spitefully. 

‘Then why become an instructor?’ I scowled to myself, knowing full well this man had no intention of teaching anyone anything. 

"Well, thanks to you so boldly choosing me, I pulled off some undercover work." He turned with another victorious smile. I was frozen silent, not knowing what would come out of this intimidating man's mouth next. Then, he pulled out his cellphone. 

"It's me. Yeah... the bug was a success. I've got enough evidence, so I'm withdrawing. You keep on going, sneak in and stay on the guy's tail." When he ended the call with his subordinate, the Captain quickly headed for the door. I was still frozen, trying to calm my racing heart from the panic I was in before.

"What're you doing?" Kaga turned back to me. "Staying?" My gaze darted up at the horrifying idea. 

"If you are, go search the room next door. Make sure you come back here." At the mere notion of real detective work,. Before I could say a thing, the frowning returned. 

"Too bad. You're not ready." The curt response was a deep cut to my confidence. Searching a room for anything fishy was probably one of the only things I came to the academy being able to do. But, before I could speak my piece, Kaga turned and left. 

~~~~~~

By that night, the long, rigorous day had completely worn me out; I'm sure my classmates also fared the same. I arrived at the dorms the academy made us stay in and threw myself onto my couch. ‘Could Kaga's mission possibly be for an investigation on my father?’ I thought back to where the excursion took place and the idea made my heart flutter. For years I had wished and prayed for retribution for all the wrong-doings my father and his goons had accomplished. The thought of his vicious crimes being aired out like dirty laundry brought a smile to my weary face. 

Getting off the comfortable couch, I retrieved a box from under my bed. It was small and light; there wasn't much in it. I opened it to find loads of old photographs. Some of them were heartwarming: my twin sister and I playing around or hugging each other. 

But, I’d only put them in there to hide what I was really storing: Pictures of crime scenes my father had left out in our living room or secluded garden. I once caught him in the act; that photo was in there too. I had an old tie with blood on it. A passport with a different identity than I had registered into the academy with. My mother's ring was knocking around in there somewhere. 

I hardly knew my mother. There are no pictures of us together and no one talked about her after she left us. The ‘family’. She couldn't take what my father and his ‘brothers’ did any longer and ran away, leaving her two daughters behind. I'm pretty sure she's dead now. Otherwise my father would have found her at some point. 

I came to realise that soon before my 18th birthday that my father didn't really care about us; he just wanted a lineage. So, I somehow convinced my sister to run with me. I assured her that I had a plan that would get us the lives we wanted for a little while. I had trained to go on the run; my father taught me all the techniques the cops used to track fugitives. That, along with a little help from a friend from my youth judo club, was all I needed to get us new identities and places to live. It wasn't easy at first, having to split from the person you had literally been with since birth. But, it was the only way to ensure one of us would be safe if the other was caught. 

It was also difficult to work up a good enough resume to get myself into the police force. The name Atsuko Motomori had never existed before four years ago. It was risky to lie about the qualifications I had when, in my past life, I never gained any. I was homeschooled to ensure I wouldn't be coaxed away by true, lawful policemen investigating my father or my ‘uncles’.

Looking through these memories and reliving my awful excuse for a childhood, I happily remembered why I was condemning myself to this place and people like Captain Kaga. I wanted to make sure my sister and I would be safe. And the only way I could do that was by locking them all up for the rest of their lives.

As I mulled over the bloody scenes within the box, I heard a knock at my door. I jumped, not used to company, and knocked the box off my lap. 

"Crap!" I whispered to myself, trying to clear everything away as quickly as possible. 

"Who is it?" I called out after collecting most of the contents, having double-checked the area for any compromising pictures. 

"Atsuko~! I come with food!" The cheery voice of my only female ally chimsed from the other side of the door. 

"Naruko, what're you doing here?" I questioned while opening the door. The food she was trying to bribe me with was a pack of potato chips and a soda from the vending machines downstairs. 

"I'm pooped, so I thought you might be even more worse off." The bubbly attitude helped her push herself into my dorm room. 

"You're not wrong there." Happy to have some form of womanly friendship after so many years of trying to keep to myself, I lazily followed her to the couch. 

"So how was it with the Satan reincarnate?" She giggled to herself, lowering her voice at the insulting part of her question. Maybe she feared he would hear her. I wouldn't be surprised if they had us under surveillance to see what we did after hours. Or if the Captain had supersonic, selective hearing. 

"It was... an experience." Trying to keep up my half of the deal I made with my instructor, I put on a tired smile. Kaga promised to pass me if I didn't tell anyone he had bunked the undercover training. 

"You want a drink? I think I've got some tea somewhere." Quickly attempting to change the subject, I wandered off to the small kitchenette in the corner of my room. 

As I prepared the beverages, Naruko spoke up out of nowhere. 

"Oh, Atsuko, what's this?" She called out and my blood ran cold. ‘Did I miss a picture? Was it something possibly incriminating?’ Wild thoughts circulated my brain at the possibility of getting caught. Having gory images of dead men stored away in my room wouldn't be easily explained. 

Hesitantly, I turned with a questioning smile, just waiting for her to let out some form of horror or disgust. Instead, though, I found her looking at an old polaroid photo with a loving smile. 

"You didn't tell me you had a sister!" She asked and I cocked my head, glancing at the image she waved at me. It was of my sister and I, building sandcastles on a beach when we were kids. My heart stopped as I remembered the scene.

That picture was of the day before my mother left. She had somehow convinced my father to let her take us out- which was a strange occurrence. Even if my father wasn't overbearing, which he definitely was, she didn't like going out much. It was summer and hot, and we would only annoy him, being locked in the house. I'm pretty sure I remembered at least three bodyguards surrounding our section of the sand, though.

I smiled at the painful memory, a happy one buried underneath so much hurt, and looked at the brown-haired girl with two short pigtails, dressed in a pink bathing suit. I don't think I've had a smile that big on my face in a long time. 

"Well, I, uh..." Not knowing how to respond, I just made noises. 

"She must be so proud of you for making it into this academy." She laughed and the statement only hurt me. 

"She's not really in my life anymore." I smiled sadly sitting next to her so I could look at the picture more in-depth. I could see a sliver of a man in a suit to the left of the picture's edge, closest to where I was, and something was slightly poking out of his waistband. To Naruko, it probably looked like a shadow of a tree or something less sinister than what it was, but it was likely one of the bodyguards with a gun hidden away. 

"O-Oh, I'm sorry, Atsuko." Naruko sounded so sad to hear I wasn't in contact with my sister anymore. We did look really happy in that picture. 

"Nah, it's alright. That's just how life goes." I took the picture from her and looked at it for a bit longer, concentrating more on my sister's face, even though it was an exact replica of mine, before slipping it through the crack between the lid of the box and the box itself. I didn't want my new friend catching a glimpse of anything in there.

"You sound so wise," Naruko giggled, maybe trying to help me feel happier again and lighten the mood.

"You make me sound like an old man," I laughed, jokingly hitting her arm like I was offended. 

"You shouldn't say such wistful things then." She laughed back as I headed back to the kettle to pour us some tea. 

We chatted for a little longer, mainly about what her training had consisted of, before Naruko went back to her room. Once she was gone, I sighed, glad that the picture she had found underneath my coffee table wasn't anything more frightening. Sliding the small box back under my bed, I began getting ready for a good night's rest. 

~~~~~~

Waking up the next day was... rough. Staying up later, thanks to Naruko, and the subconscious worry I’d because of what happened at the love hotel, I’d probably only got a few hours of sleep. 

‘Right, I have to get today right, at least’, I told myself, throwing my legs over the side of my bed. Ishigami already had it in for me because of the train situation - I'm sure all of the special instructors did - but I wasn't going to let that stop me from doing my best. ‘For us.’ Thinking back to the picture that had been found on my floor, I used that as encouragement to continue my life as though nothing had happened.

~~~~~~

In my first class, I could see Naruko already sitting down. She commented on how she hadn't seen me in the cafeteria for breakfast. "I wonder whose fault that is?" I playfully blamed her for making me wake up late. As we continued to chat mindlessly, I couldn’t help but think back to the limited facilities the academy had for women. ‘Well, at least the food and living quarters are good.’ 

"The real lectures are finally going to start today." Likely having it easier than I had yesterday, Naruko had a fire of ambition in her eyes. Luckily, our first class was in the classroom and not martial arts training, otherwise her passion might hurt someone. Our lectures consisted of a wide range of expert topics ranging from using tracking equipment to how to de-escalate a situation to undercover work. 

As we discussed what we would be studying here, the memory of how I was handled yesterday manifested on my wrists. I rubbed them, trying to get rid of the feeling of Kaga's hands. 

"Something wrong?" Noticing my anxiousness, Naruko peered into my face. As I told her “I’m fine”, she remembered how we never talked about my experiences yesterday. 

"I'm pretty sure I passed. If not, I don't think I'd still be here." I laughed off the subject, knowing how strict the instructors seemed to my friend. 

"Did you hear? Students who failed were severely punished." An uneasy expression laid itself on Naruko's face and I also started to feel sympathy for those that weren't as lucky as us. As we wondered about what the punishments were, Naruko got that grin she’d had during the ceremony yesterday. 

"I wonder what kind of punishment I would have gotten." The excited aura she was giving off only made a chill run down my back thinking about how much worse the Captain could be.

Intruding on my thoughts, the instructor delivering our lecture walked in and started the lesson. When it was over, I rushed to change into the attire I would need for our next bout of training on the grounds.

~~~~~~

As Naruko and I arrived on the pitch, everyone was lined up in front of Instructor Soma. He frowned at us, stating how late we were. "Sorry about that, Instructor. We took too long in the shower room." Maybe too casual with the man because of his usual laid back aura, we both bowed deeply. 

"Yes, there's no women's locker room, is there?" A small smile finally returned to his face as we rose again. "It's the first time, so I'll go easy on you. But, I won't go easy on you next time." Even though he looked kind, anyone could tell he didn't give any leeway. 

"There won't be a next time, sir," I replied rather confidently and the instructor almost seemed amused.

Naruko and I went to line up in the very back. The girl who couldn't seem to keep her feelings to herself whispered to me about how nice he seemed and how good looking he was. Thinking back to how Kaga treated me, I couldn't help but quietly agree. ‘There would definitely be no such leniency with him.’ I thought about all the awful punishments or torture methods the Captain could know as we continued our training.

Soma had us perform a fitness exam. We hadn't had a break since the class started when he called out my name to be tested. I stretched the pain out of my legs quickly, not wanting to cramp up. 

"Woah, Atsuko! You have a scary look in your eye!" Naruko, as tired out as I was, laughed nervously. You might say I was competitive. I would say I was trying to prove my worth to the classes of men who didn't think I belonged here. 

"Just tryna keep my head in the game." I jumped on my toes as the instructor called out my name again. "Coming!" 

Jogging over to him, I noticed that even the guys were looking visibly tired due to our endless training. I, on the other hand, although exhausted, had trained like this since I could walk. I was used to being able to hide the physical pain in order to not get shouted at for being weak. 

~~~~~~

For our last lecture of the day, feeling like I had been brought through the wringer, we all filtered into the Monitor Room. Maybe too nervous yesterday to get a good look at the room, I overheard my classmates gossiping about the surveillance equipment surrounding us. Not only were there cameras of the school grounds, but some screens showed destinations all over the country. 

"Don't you think just using this room would make for an easy investigation?" Overhearing one student comment, I couldn't help but agree. Knowing how much the pictures under my bed were worth, who knows how vital a video of a crime would be to an investigation. You just needed to be able to prove they weren't doctored. 

As the instructor lectured, I noticed Naruko resting on my shoulder. "Come on, Naruko. Just a bit longer." I shook her while keeping an eye out for anyone that might rat her out. 

"You can talk. You're a machine, Atsuko," she whined under her breath.

Suddenly, before I could laugh at her comment, another voice spoke up behind us. 

"Sasaki, go to the medical office if you're drowsy." Instructor Shinonome piped up and we both jumped to attention, having not felt anyone around us. Even though the man was grinning, there was something evil behind that childish face of his. 

"Ah! S-Sorry! I'm okay!" Naruko instantly woke up at the prospect of getting punished. 

"If anyone else wants to sleep, you can tell me. They put you through it on the first day, so I expect you're all tired." Shinonome's offer almost sounded like a chance to get us expelled. Or, it did to me anyway. Everyone else looked relieved at the kind sentiment. 

"Okay, that's all for today's class then. Great work everyone." A cheerful smile returned to his face as I eyed him suspiciously. The man I saw in the shower room on my first day was hidden under that friendly persona he had on. 

"Oh, right. Can those who I call stay after class for a moment?" And there it was! The not so innocent catch to his kind offer. Those who would be called were definitely being thrown to the wolves in order to save the rest of us.

As Shinonome began to read out the list, he directed his gaze to the monitor. He called out a few names before looking directly at me. "Lastly, Atsuko Motomori." His face had no note of malicious intent, however, I couldn't help but not trust it. As I gasped to myself, he dismissed our classmates. 

"Atsuko, what did you do?" Naruko whispered as our free classmates shuffled out around us. 

"I-I don't think I did anything?" I panicked, thinking back over the day, trying to find anything that could warrant me being reprimanded. Looking over to those also called, I could see they were just as nervous. Why were we the one's held back? 

‘Maybe... Kaga's mission was discovered?’ I couldn't help but wonder if we’d been caught as Naruko left me sitting where I was. 

"Don't be so nervous. I'm not going to get angry." The happy smile on Shinonome's face helped calm the others in the room. Even I was somewhat relieved by his words. "How were they? The lectures?" Directing his question at me, Shinonome looked over. 

"Educational! It's wonderful how good the facilities are." Trying to get on his good side, I didn't want to let myself look withered as I kept my voice light. 

"Well, the class seemed sleepy. Sasaki looked like she was nearly asleep." The comment didn't sit right with me, this being an elite academy and all.

"Well, as you said, they put us through it," I laughed, trying not to put Naruko in any deep water. 

"So, are you going to fall asleep on us as well? I'd have to punish you then." Shinonome cast me a look that probably didn't seem like anything to the other men in the room. But, to me, it seemed as untrustworthy as the rest of him. 

"Don't count on it." Not wanting to divulge my past of intense training, I just showed a soft smile. To be honest, I wouldn't mind a nap right now, but I wasn't going to admit that. The thought of any kind of punishment, which would likely be some form of harassment from him, had me on edge. 

"Too bad. I wonder if any students who I can have fun with will turn up soon?" His mischievous appearance reminded me of the look Kaga gave me yesterday and my eyes darted away. Even though Shinonome seemed actually happy and there was no emotion in Kaga's eyes, the concept of teasing made me uneasy. 

‘It's scary how he can talk like that and still smile.’ I thought about how his words didn't match the expression as the doors of the Monitor Room opened again. 

Throwing my gaze to the door, I watched Ishigami, Goto and Soma make their way inside. "You're all immediately going to be assigned as student aides to the instructors." Ishigami didn't miss a beat as all attention landed on him. 

"Simply put, you'll help the instructors file documents, prepare lectures and such," Soma added, helping the confused students out. I was shocked. I hadn't done anything special to get me a close position to any of the instructors, let alone have to deal with their grunt work. "Since we must continue our normal duties as Public Safety officers while we teach, we won't always have the time." With that comment, I finally understood why Kaga would agree to become an instructor- so he wouldn't have to do any of the work if he had a capable enough aide. I pitied the person that would have to undertake that role. 

"This is good experience, so although it will be difficult, we ask that you try." The encouraging words from Soma were much more trustworthy to me than Shinonome's slightly eerie ones. 

"Each instructor will get a full-time aide. Following the instructors will be an important role." Goto, as blunt as he had been at the introduction ceremony, crossed his arms as he stared down at all of us. Somehow, the silence that followed was more anxiety invoking than anything Shinonome could say. Soma was right, though. Being so close to an instructor all the time would be a perfect learning opportunity. 

"We will now announce the aides," Ishigami announced, retrieving his clipboard once again. "Instructor Kaga's aide will be Atsuko Motomori." The Captain was as stoic as ever as he read out the list. I, on the other hand, couldn't be more shocked. ‘Kaga seemed so annoyed by even my mere presence yesterday, why would he want me as an aide? He already thinks I'm a screw up because of the train incident.’ 

"What?" Ishigami glared at me as he heard my wordless gasp. 

"Nothing, sir. Sorry." I bowed my head in embarrassment of drawing attention to myself as I pondered over the events in the love hotel that could get me the chance to become an aide. ‘Is it because I chose him yesterday?’ I panicked, thinking back to the misplaced bravery I’d had when picking an instructor.

"Isn't this a good thing? You're one of the few to come back with him safely." Ayumu smirked at my worrisome state. ‘The only reason I was safe is because he didn't actually train me. There was no chance to get in harm's way. Except for the possible fallout of someone recognising me.’ 

"Shinonome, refrain from talking." Ishigami quickly progressed through the list of aides. Once he finished, he turned to me once again. He explained that Kaga was on an investigation mission and that I should go see him when he gets back. I hesitantly agreed, glad to have the time to prepare myself while he was out working. Unlike our permanent instructors, the guys from Public Safety weren't always around, which is probably why they need the help. 

As we were dismissed, I tried to remind myself what a good learning opportunity this could be.

~~~~~~

When the time came to see Instructor Kaga, as Shinonome had told me back in the Monitor Room, I headed to their staff room.

"Excuse me." I knocked on the door before opening it to find an office-like space. Kaga was sitting at one of the many chairs at the large table in the centre of the room. I stood in front of him in order to introduce myself. 

"I'm Motomori. Starting today I will be serving as your full-time aide." Straight-backed and trying to not look uncomfortable under his discerning gaze, I explained why I dared talk to him. 

"Oh?" His brows frowned, once again judging me for all I was worth. 

"I just came to let you know Instru-." However, before I could blame Ishigami for sending me here, I was interrupted.

"A full time aide?" He even seemed to ponder the idea before flat out rejecting me. "Useless, I have no need for an aide, so go." His blunt response threw me off a little. To be honest, I was surprised he didn't unenthusiastically jump at the idea for someone else to do his work. Losing the optimistic view of this assignment, I tried to explain that it had already been decided. 

"Don't need it." He quickly interrupted me again before turning his back on me. "Tell Ishigami for me," was the final thing he said before expelling my presence from the room.

~~~~~~

‘That was rougher than I thought it was going to be,’ I thought as I stood in the hallway, looking at the door signed 'Staff Room'. ‘But, I can't afford to back down here.’ More afraid of what Ishigami would say than what Kaga could do, I raised my fist to knock on the door. 

After hearing no reply, I began to get desperate. "Instructor, please!" I call out, not wanting to go back to Ishigami empty-handed.

"Shut up." The door flew open and there's Kaga, glaring down at me. The sudden action made me jump out of my skin in the silent corridor. "Let me spell this out for you since you don't seem to get it." The oncoming lecture was apparent when I felt like he was going to start insulting me for being so persistent. 

"I have no need for some useless piece." 

I won't lie, that statement struck home. The whole 'chessboard' way of thinking about people lower than you was exactly how my father treated us. I once confronted him about my mother's disappearance and all he could say was "she didn't know how to play the game. She's useless to us if she doesn't want to compete." That wording was something I never understood. How were you supposed to lead anyone if you didn't think anyone less than you was capable enough? 

As I thought about Kaga's statement, I tried to ignore the relation to the man who raised me. "If you give me a chance, I'm sure it'll get Ishigami off your back. He'll only complain to you if I go back to him now." I tried to reason with the side of him that hated his Captain counterpart and a wave of irritation flashed through his face. "I can do anything! I can file for you. I'll even do chores. Please!" I begged, hoping I was getting through to him. Maybe the idea of a maid would make him reflect on the idea. Then, he finally looked at me without that concerned expression. 

"Anything, you say?" He looked me up and down as I agreed, not thinking about the consequences of those words. Then, he narrowed his eyes and opened his mouth. 

"You can be my servant." The growing smirk on his face made me a little uneasy. It was that same grin of victory he’d showed when he’d collected the evidence from the love hotel. 

"Excuse me?" Was all I could utter out to ensure I’d heard him right. 

"You can be my full-time servant. How many times do I have to say it?" The disconcerting frown returned as his eyebrows creased together again. 

[terramythos]

Review: The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #3)

Length: 398 pages.

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Apocalyptic, Post-post-post Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Female Protagonist, Antagonist POV, First-Person, Second-Person, Third-Person, Gray Morality, Dark, Great Worldbuilding, Great Character Development, LGBT Characters, Diverse Cast, Trilogy, Perfect Score 

Warning(s): This is probably the most optimistic of the trilogy, but it’s still not a happy series. Abuse/torture, slavery, graphic violence and gore, and major body horror. References to child death. 

My Rating: 5 / 5 

**WARNING: THIS REVIEW (INCLUDING THE SUMMARY) CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO BOOKS. IF YOU WANT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW, PLEASE READ MY FIFTH SEASON REVIEW (X), OR, BETTER YET, JUST READ THE SERIES.**

My Summary:

The reckoning of the world has come. Essun, who has lived a life of suffering and loss, finally has a home to call her own. But she is one of the last living humans who can harness The Obelisk Gate and return the Moon to the world, finally quelling Father Earth’s rage and ending the apocalyptic Seasons forever. She knows such an act will  cost her life. 

Her daughter Nassun, meanwhile, has seen that the cruelty of the world cannot be reconciled. More powerful than her mother, she seeks the power of The Obelisk Gate for another purpose— to end the suffering of others, forever. 

And finally, Hoa reveals the origins of himself and the other stone eaters— the immortal, humanoid statues who have their own stakes and motives in this conflict. His is a chilling tale of a utopia built on the suffering of others… a cycle humanity seems unable to break, even 40,000 years after the Seasons began. 

Does humanity deserve another chance? Only one will decide the fate of the Earth.

Time grows short, my love. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.

Minor spoilers and my thoughts follow.

Here’s my dilemma— this is the final book in a series, and I find it impossible to talk about any final entry without reflecting on what came before it. For better or worse, everything ties together somehow in the last book. In this case I’d say “for better”, because this book was great, and an excellent way to conclude a thought-provoking and wonderful trilogy. But nevertheless, I’ll probably be discussing the series as a whole in this review.

So, yes, this was a really good conclusion. Definitely not where I expected things to end up, based on the opening premise, but that’s not a bad thing, and it’s been interesting to see how the story and characters have molded and changed. Honestly, I don’t have some master plan on how to style this review, except by discussing all the different parts of the story that really clicked for me.

I’m a sucker for “fate of the world” type stories, and I’m glad that The Stone Sky finally takes this direction. It’s really something to see how far Essun has come. She starts as a scared little girl hiding in a barn and is now a forty-something woman with the destiny of humanity in her hands. You can see all the steps that lead her to this point, but there’s something truly epic about any story that includes such a level of growth. It’s been an often-painful ride, but one I’ve really enjoyed nevertheless.

Obviously, I have to talk about the characters. Everyone was SO interesting. Even characters you were supposed to dislike initially had fascinating development over time. Schaffa is the obvious example, as we saw in The Obelisk Gate, but that continues in The Stone Sky as well. In this one there’s a minor antagonist from the previous book who gets called out on her bullshit and… changes her behavior accordingly. Hell, the leading antagonist of the entire series, Father Earth, the force that has caused the death and destruction of billions of people, has justifiable motives.

And you look at Essun, who is generally a good person at heart, and some of the terrible things she’s done (which is ESPECIALLY relevant since the narrator likes to see the best in her). Her daughter Nassun fills the “destroy the world” role, but even her motivations for doing so come from a place of compassion. It’s… interesting, to say the least. And that’s not to say that there aren’t minor characters who are pretty awful the whole time, but those are noticeably the irredeemable bigots, which makes sense for the type of story being told here.

You know what I mentioned in my Obelisk Gate review (x) about gray morality? Yeah. Everyone major is a complex character. Who knew?

As for specifics, I already named most of my favorite characters in my Obelisk Gate review, and that pretty much continues here. There are some new faces introduced (or re-introduced) in this one, but for the most part the focus is on an established cast, emphasizing how they’ve grown and changed over time. There’s plenty of examples. Essun, despite everything, has started to move past a lot of her trauma and open up to other people. Nassun has her own found family in Schaffa, but nevertheless continues to spiral down a destructive path. Probably the most significant development in this one is Hoa, our intrepid narrator, who finally reveals his origins and backstory. I found him fascinating because he directly states his motives several times, yet we don’t really know his intentions until this book. It’s been a ride back and forth, but I think he’s probably one of the most interesting characters in the series. He’s a far cry from the minor helper character he seems to be at first.  

While the first two books had snippets from Hoa’s perspective, he becomes a full-fledged perspective character in The Stone Sky, and reveals a lot about the world and general themes of the story. This entry also humanizes him a great deal. We already knew he identifies as a human, that he’s one of the oldest stone eaters alive, but not necessarily what that means to him until now. Most of his story explores how the world got to its current, cyclical apocalypse-state, tied to the origins of the stone eaters. Despite the time leaps, Jemisin keeps it all relevant and interesting; it never feels jarring to switch between disparate perspectives. That’s true for the other books as well, and I think it speaks quite well of her writing. One really satisfying part about Hoa’s perspective in this entry is we get an actual, canon explanation for why he’s narrating Essun’s life in second-person. Over the course of the series he lapses into first-person sometimes, or narrates in a very stylistic way, and all of that starts to make sense too. There’s even solid reasoning to the whole unreliable narrator thing! It was a nice touch to tie off the series.

This entry into the series also gives us a chance to look at long term worldbuilding. Specifically, there’s a LOT of slow burn/long con details about the world that we finally figure out here. One really interesting detail is the concept of “icewhite eyes”. Basically, it’s a rare eye color that’s commonly seen as a bad omen. The Fifth Season seems to play this straight; two named characters have icewhite eyes. One is the then-monstrous Schaffa. So, bad omen, check. The other is Hoa, who we figure out pretty early isn’t quite human (at least how we see it), and has mysterious— possibly sinister— intentions. So, check off the bad omen there, right? Except BOTH of these characters develop in unexpected ways. Schaffa becomes— of all things— a strong father figure for Nassun. Hoa is, well, Hoa, and full of spoilers, but it should be obvious by now he’s a pretty complex guy. Finally, in The Stone Sky, we learn where the negative beliefs about icewhite eyes come from, and it is… well, pretty fucked. It’s obviously allegorical, but the reader doesn’t really get the extent of it until this book, which makes it all the more insidious. It ties wonderfully to the anti-bigotry, anti-oppression themes of the novel, and does so by completely playing the reader.

This is just one example of many, and I’m willing to bet this series is a fun one to re-read due to all the future context. But now to focus on things that generally apply to the series, rather than something this book in particular focuses on.

Generally speaking, there are things about the world that I really like, now that I’ve had three books to consider them. One big thing that played with my expectations was orogeny as a concept; for all intents and purposes it feels like this world’s version of magic. But as the series goes on you learn orogeny isn’t magic at all; just an evolutionary trait future humans picked up (I mean, the term “oroGENE” implies this, but…). Not only that, but traditional magic does exist, and is very relevant to the story. The stone eaters were also super interesting. They were way different than most generic “fantasy races,” and getting their backstory in this entry made them even more compelling to me. They’re uncanny and sort of creepy at first, but the more you learn about them the more explainable their behavior becomes.

I’ve talked so much about the things I like about the series that I’ve neglected to mention the writing itself… it’s very good. Exquisite, even. I’m not sure how else to describe it— Hoa has a very strong voice— humorous (often bitterly) and cognizant of the little details. I loved the fun poetic bits that experiment with typeface and line breaks. There’s even a part where The Important Words Were Capitalized, which felt so natural with how people type now that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it much in literary works. The trilogy was very fun to read based purely on the writing. Even if it had been lacking in content, which it wasn’t, I think I still would have enjoyed it purely for the craft.

Certain themes are omnipresent in this series, and there were several that really struck a chord with me. Obviously, the cycles of oppression the characters face are allegorical to the real world. One thing I REALLY like about this series is how much it defends the downtrodden, something I feel mainstream fantasy often fails to do. So many series seem to WANT an oppressed class in their fantasy world, then are completely apathetic to what that means, or don’t bother to challenge the issues such an inclusion brings. It’s like “oh, well, this happens in the real world, so I should have some sort of allegory for racism/sexism/homo/transphobia”. Not so here— The Broken Earth is about the full implications of oppression and why it’s so wrong, why it’s so unjust. The Fifth Season’s dedication reads “For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question” and honestly that was the point I knew this series and I were going to click. Just because we are looking through a fantasy lens does not make these things any less horrible or ugly, and I’m glad the series takes such a strong stance against dehumanization and oppression.

Another overarching theme I was surprised impacted me so much was that of parenthood. A character early in the series says “Children will be the ruin of us.” It’s a haunting line in context, and thematically it sticks through the rest of the series. Essun’s motherhood is a central part of her character— striking because initially she has no desire to be a mother. She is, arguably, not even a very good mother in the traditional sense— but her protectiveness of her children ultimately defines a lot of the story. It’s hard to go into detail without broaching major spoiler territory, but it’s a consistent and heart-wrenching theme that persists all the way to the end. That particular line is literal for many, many events in the story.

I discussed representation in my previous reviews, so I won’t retread that much, but stories like this prove just how easy it is (and should be) to be inclusive. It makes sense that the cast is so diverse in this series, because it is very much about the oppressed and the issues they face. Wouldn’t make any sense to have that central concept, then focus on a bunch of straight white guys. But that being said, I think this series is a great example of how  writing can be better in terms of representation. This is the only fantasy series I’ve ever read where the main protagonist is a 40-something black mother. And there should be much, much more out there. Since getting into this series I’ve found myself looking critically at a lot of mainstream entertainment, and its failure to represent minority groups beyond a few token characters. It was a problem I was aware of, but this series makes it look so easy that I find myself even more annoyed that most people don’t bother.

I’m not going to lie— The Broken Earth is a pretty bleak series. A lot of really horrible shit happens to the main cast. Hell, the opening premise is that (a) a toddler was murdered by his father, and (b) the world is about to end forever, killing millions of people. Most of the early content focuses on a brutalized slave class, hated by society for the crime of having a certain evolutionary trait. But the series is also about the small moments of hope that shine through despite these things. Happiness and compassion are worth celebrating, because they remind us that there is something worth fighting for in the world, no matter how hopeless and awful things seem. We see characters who are victimized and beaten down ultimately come into their own truths and find their own families and reasons to live. So yeah, it’s a dark series, but I wouldn’t have had it other way. I hope someday I can meet N. K. Jemisin to thank her for writing these. They’ve given me a lot to think about.

[dellaliz19]

Black Panther movie review: spoilers!

So, I just went and saw Black Panther and yes, it deserves all the praise it’s getting. So, you know the drill, pros and (few) cons, here we go!

Pros:

1) The general look of Wakanda is stunning. It’s a perfect blend of “city of the future meets African heritage” and it’s just amazing to see it brought to life. The technology is visually so engaging, and it’s great that so much of the sets are really utilized. The fight in the mine with the train, for example is a really efficient way to not just have a fight in an empty field (or airport 😐) but to actually make use of the premise you’ve set up.

2) Shuri is perfect and that is final. But seriously, Shuri is such a great character. Her relationship with T’Challa feels so real. The scene with her remote driving the car while T’Challa is on top of it is some of the most amazing and imaginative team work I’ve ever seen on film, and it was great. And it’s fantastic that her intellect and technical skill are so celebrated, and that no one ever looks down on her for it. As a woman myself in a STEM field, I’m all for celebrating smart, capable women of science and Shuri is a great role model for little girls. Also, she’s the Queen of Memes, and I love her.

3) The Dora Miljae. The powerful women don’t stop with Shuri: the Dora Miljae are finally on full display, and I’m so on board with it! I love that the King’s personal guard are these strong, capable women, who kick some serious freaking ass. Point these ladies in the direction of Thanos and then just give everyone else the day off, they’ve got it handled.

4) Andy Serkis is clearly having the time of his life. His Ulysses Klaue is the fun, devil may care kind of villain the MCU could use some more of. He’s irreverent, in it for the money and just loving every second of being a bad guy. Thematically, I understand why he had to die, but damn, he was just so much fun to watch. I know Serkis is the undisputed motion capture king, but can we please let him act more with his real face?!

5) Speaking of villains the MCU could use more like, Eric Killmonger is the perfect villain for this story. His arc was personal and related to T’Challa: he was the dark mirror image of who T’Challa could be, and Michael B Jordan hit it out of the park. I can’t say I ever rooted for him, but I definitely identified with his belief that the powerful have a responsibility to protect the marginalized. I think it’s important that the movie made it clear that it wasn’t so much his ideology that was wrong, but his methods, and that that hatred had warped his ideals somewhat: that he had killed his own people and that he wanted to punish the world. And it was important to that it was clear that his beliefs impacted and helped change and shape T’Challa’s own actions. Killmonger was the “we make our own demons” villain finally done right, and his last line was so powerful and so in character.

6) Martin Freeman’s Everett Ross finally found his rhythm. He’s clearly the story’s comedic “straight man” but he was really well integrated into the narrative, and he never feels out of place or takes up too much screen time. His hero moment in the flight drone thing was a really fitting culmination to his character developed in this movie, and I’d enjoy seeing him in more MCU movies.

7) Danai Gurira’s Okoye is a definite stand out character. She gets great fight scenes, is compelling and wise and she’s a fabulously funny character as well. I would let her kick my ass any freaking day of the week.

8) Suprise Sterling K. Brown is always a treat. I loved his scenes in the spirit world with his son, and his flashbacks in the apartment were really powerful. In very short order we’re made to feel his entire arc, and how his living amongst oppressed people of his own race affected his ideology and his struggle to reconcile that with his loyalty to his country and his brother and that’s very much due to the strength of Brown’s performance.

8) Winston Duke’s M’Baku is definitely the other stand out character. He’s introduced in this very brutal, no nonsense way, and somehow he ends up being the funniest character by the end? His “I’m just kidding we’re vegetarians” line got an honestly to gosh snort out of me, and he was a great story beat in showing the traditional side of Wakanada vs the technological side, and how T’Challa will be a different king than his father.

9) It was nice to see Bucky, but to only have him be the post credits stinger. It’s clearly establishing why he’s awake and around for Infinity War, but I’m glad he wasn’t in the whole movie. Black Panther really let T’Challa and it’s characters be the star, and including Ross was a good way to tie it into the MCU without taking that focus away from where it needed to be.

10) Honestly, the whole cast does great work with their characters. Chadwick Boseman has really made T’Challa his own, and he’s a great character. Angela Basset is always good, and Lupita Nyong’o is also fantastic. I especially like that, for a Marvel romance, she and T’Challa don’t waste time on the will they/won’t they. They find a common goal, and then they’re united. I like it. Another.

Cons (these are pretty minor!)

1) Vibranium is starting to feel like “fairy dust.” Have a problem? Vibrainium will fix it. Shot in the spine? Stick a ball of that in there! (also, like T’Challa couldn’t take two seconds to throw a little of that Rhodey’s way?) Want to make super holograms? Use some of that. And so on. This one isn’t a massive point to me: clearly the in universe explaination is that the secret government white guys in the 40’s only had imaginations large enough to make a frisbee out of it, but it does almost reach the point of feeling like a writing crutch. Vibrainium does everything, so sure, it can do that thing! Again, not major for me, because the world Wakanda paints is so cool, but it did kind of bug me.

2) Forrest Whitaker’s wise man mentor Zuri is fine, but he’s probably the character most unchanged from his general stereotype. He’s a shaman, he’s wise, he dies. His character history is good though and very thematically relevant, and Whitaker does a good job with what he’s given.

3) Daniel Kaluuya’s W’Kabi could have used a little bit more background, especially in regards to his relationship with Okoye. He’s basically only given the motivation of wanting Klaue dead, and when Killmonger delivers him that he’s just suddenly on board with all this world conquering and murder in a way that seems out of proportion for the character we’ve seen. And he and Okoye really needed more introduction to their relationship, given that their falling on either sides of this civil war is a significant plot point. All we get is her calling him “my love” and he returning it: that meeting on the battlefield would have been a lot more powerful if we’d been able to see them be domestic and interact.

4) The bloodlessness. This isn’t the director or the movie’s fault really, it’s the MPAA but the fact that PG-13 movies can’t have too much blood is...kind of noticeable here. I think it might be because the Dora Miljae all use penatrative weapons and many other characters do as well, but if you have a giant fight with spears and no one is bleeding then it feels a little bit...empty. Like, Killmonger slits the throat of one of the Dora in front of Okoye there’s no blood. Again, I get why it’s happening, and I’m not blaming the movie, but it’s something that I definitely noticed, and although I’m not asking for gore I felt the total lack of blood detracted a little of the realness from the fights.

Obviously, Black Panther is a movie that has a very deliberate point to make about race. And, I say this as a white woman: I’m so glad it does. As a woman, watching Wonder Woman was an incredibly empowering and momentous thing for me. To be able to see a story about a strong, powerful good woman on screen - someone I could identify with, and picture myself as - made me feel like I could do anything, and I think everyone, no matter your race, colour, creed, gender, sexual orientation, should get to have that moment. And so no, Black Panther wasn’t going to be a movie that gave me that moment, but I’m so, so glad it’s clearly doing so for so many people. Black Panther is a movie that celebrates black excellence and also tells an engaging and powerful story, and I’m happy to be able to enjoy and celebrate that with everyone.

So, final verdict: 9/10 for me. In a universe that is getting increasingly crowded and teetering on the edge of fatigued, Black Panther is something new and different and wonderful that everyone can enjoy.

Bonus: best lines.

“WHAT ARE THOSE?!?”

“Are we in Wakanda?” “No, we’re in Kansas.”

“Don’t freeze.” “I never freeze.” Lands. Freezes. “Ngh...hi.”

“Bury me in the ocean with all my ancestors who jumped from the ships because they knew drowning was better than living in bondage.”

“No tears for me?” “Nah, everybody dies. That’s just how life is around here.”

“Are you recording this?” “For science.” T’Challa flies across the room. “Delete that clip!”

“What, do you have a mixtape coming out?” “I can send you a SoundCloud link if you want?” “Please don’t make me listen to your music.”

“Oh good, another broken white boy for us to fix!”

“If he touches you again, I am going to impale him to that desk.”

Also if Infinity War doesn’t include a scene where Tony Stark ends up in Shuri’s lab and she’s like, “aw, that’s so cute, your hologram reminds me of the stuff I was making when I was 5,” while Tony loudly just loses his geek mind, then what even is the point of it all?

[disruptedvice]

Creator tag meme 2018

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc!) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2018. Tag as many writers/artists/etc as you want (fan or original!) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

I was tagged by the lovely @startofamoment, and subsequently realized that I wrote over half of the fics I have on AO3 this year alone (67/109 total), so narrowing these down was fun. I joined new fandoms, so I had 3 OTPs that I mainly wrote for: peraltiago, starmora, thorkyrie (listed in the order I got into the fandom chronologically, of course) (and I just realized that even though I only chose one peraltiago fic, B99 is mentioned in three/four-ish of these reflections, so even if you only know me from one fandom, stick around, cause there’s a lot of cross pollination in these reflections)

Wedding Day -

As she sprinted through the fields, barefoot and free, it made her feel like a child again, racing through the fields of her home planet, because she had promised Mamma she would be home in time to help her with supper.

Her feet were dirty from playing outdoors all day, but, as green little toes pressed into the freshly tilled ground beneath her feet, she was fast, laughing like a wild child as she ran, confident that she’d make it in time to keep her promises.

This time, she had a different promise waiting for her.

It was a different ground beneath her, one she’d never been to before today, but running bare feet in the grass still felt good, just like she remembered. As she ran, long green toes were pressed into a soil that was a different color than she remembered, and her sprinting feet were long and sure as they pounded against the earth with the speed and grace of a gazelle in its natural habitat. Her feet were practiced now, balanced and efficient. This wasn’t the clumsy running of little feet slapping down with every step. This was quick, light, elegant movements, barely touching the ground before propelling into her next step, with long green toes covered in dirt of a foreign land.

Much had changed.

But she was still running and smiling like a wild child, racing home, because she had promises to keep.

If I had to pick an absolute favorite from this year, it would probably be this one, and the funny thing is it was almost never written at all. This was actually an anon prompt fic and kinda technically a starmora week fill. The prompt for day 6 was Wedding, and I made a self explanatory one shot titled Wedding Night

The day after I posted it, I received the anon ask “Starmora prompt: Peter and Gamora's wedding day.”

The thing is- I had no plans to ever write an actual wedding for them. I didn’t even have any ideas for what their wedding would look like when I got that prompt.

In an alternate reality that anon never sent that ask, and one of my favorite fics would have never even existed.

So really, to that anon, that you, because this is isn’t just one of my favorite fics of 2018, but one of my favorite fics I’ve ever written, so thank you for sparking it!

Whirlwind

The majority of my Brooklyn Nine Nine fics from this year were explicit peraltiago one shots, and this was no exception. Just the sex that immediately follows the decision to screw light and breezy on their second night. Kinda kinky, kinda awkward, kinda giggly, and definitely happy.

There’s a specific line in this fic that I love more than anything, and really don’t know why, just that I do.

Amy kissed him like finally and supposed to be.

Honestly, I think this is my favorite line of the year.

Like I just love the way it sounds, reading it aloud in my head. It just fits.

It’s always the best when people leave their favorite lines/parts in comments, and I’ve found that nothing pleases me like writing a mundane sort of detail and finding out that really made an impression on someone. There were a few specific lines left in the comments, but one comment really stood at to me, just in general and also cause of the line they chose:

She felt him stroking at her slicked up curls

Someone left a comment about just that line as a subtle detail being something they really liked. And I was like ‘huh, interesting’ because as far as just regular details go, I didn’t think anything of that line, and I had no idea how good it would feel in the center of my chest when someone left a comment on how much they loved what I just considered a regular sorta line

Healing

“There’s more to healing than what’s just physically necessary,” Val replied calmly, choosing to focus on treating and bandaging hand injuries rather than the weight behind her words. It’s a process, she thought, but didn’t say. She had a feeling he already knew.

Okay, so I actually got the term hand whump from a comment left on one of my older b99 fics, but it was so perfect the first time I read it cause like, that’s my favorite type of whump! I’m glad I’m not alone in being a sucker for hand injuries in the fanfic community. I don’t know what it is. Symbolism??? Maybe???

The first time I saw Thor Ragnarok, I was barely dipping my toes into the MCU fanfiction community with GOTG, so it wasn’t until I watched this movie again for the second time that I wrote my first Thorkyrie fic, cause, I mean, how could I not? How can you not just love everything about them?

Our Stories can Heal

“S’okay. I know this stuff is hard for you. Thanks for trusting me with that.”

Her heart swelled at that. There was a little ache at how he said that like it wasn't clearly just as hard for him, but mostly her heart felt warm and full.

“Thank you for being the kind of person I know I can trust,” she replied, and that earned her a chuckle.

This one is near and dear to my heart as a sexual abuse survivor myself- plus, I have a thing for badass couples supporting each other (can’t you tell from my OTPs?)

I pretty much wrote exclusively for B99 for almost three years, and while I love digging into emotional issues with a generous serving of comfort, I guess the most severe emotional issues I’d ever explored in a Peraltiago fic was Jake’s abandonment issues. While I’m clearly not opposed to exploring themes of support for traumatic experiences, I was never really able to do that until I had a ship that I could do that with in starmora.

It’s much easier for me to explore things like traumatic pasts in starmora fics because A: it’s canon that they both had traumatic childhoods with physical abuse and were both raised in just traumatic environments in general, and B: with pretty much every hurt/comfort fic I write (whether hand injuries or emotional issues) I like starting at the healing point.

With Peter and Gamora, the trauma already happened in the past, and I don’t have to establish it as an author (plus in the MCU meeting each other in the first movie and starting the Guardians of the Galaxy is where every member of the team’s life starts to get better). That’s all established canon.

If I were to write a soft peraltiago fic of  healthy relationships and emotional support involving past sexual abuse for either of them, I’d have to CREATE something in their backstories that led to that situation, and that’s just something that I honestly don’t wanna do.

I only have two starmora fics that touch on this, and tags for both of those are “implied/vaguely referenced past non-con” because I never actually state anything about it directly in the fics, and never go into what actually happened.

Seriously, in both fics, it’s impossible to tell if it was past CSA or if it was a past incident of sexual assault. That’s how vague it is. And I’m able to be that vague with it, because I don’t have to establish traumatic pasts, because their traumatic pasts are canon. Rather than having to create a trauma like I would have to if I wanted to explore these healing themes with peraltiago, with starmoa I just have to go sideways from what’s already canon, you know? (In Our Stories Can Heal they’ve both had vague past trauma, in this fic right here, Peter is the only one who’s had extremely vague past trauma- both are about healthy relationships and healing and emotional support)

The Hourglass Runs Out of Sand

Here is the exact summary for this

“You are always telling me that I am more than what I was made to do,” Gamora reminded him gently.

“Yeah, but you weren’t made for it,” Peter said, looking up at her with a sudden intensity she wasn’t ready for. The anguish in his eyes made her chest pang with a dull, resounding ache. “Your parents made you so you could be a kid, not a weapon. That’s what you were made for. To be a person. You weren’t supposed to be used to kill people or the entire universe. That’s not why you exist, not like me.”

(Or: Peter’s body isn’t reacting well to losing Ego’s light is one of the author’s favorite tropes)

This was such a self indulgent work of all my favorite tropes and themes. Emotional hurt/comfort? Check. Physical hurt/comfort? Check. Mutual comforting? Check.

I even put in the freakin’ summary that it’s written for my favorite tropes. So, I mean, of course it’s gotta make my top 5 of 2018

Plus, I actually had some fun working in ideas that I didn’t actually use, but still love as concepts.

And it was actually thanks to the comments on this fic from Wawa_Girl / @marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches that pushed this over into something extra special as an author.

She made a much better in depth analysis of this fic than I ever could, and her entire long ass comments on this fic made my entire fucking year

Like damn, you get yourself a cheerleader who leaves 2,000+ word comments on your fics, cause I got mine.

Here are just 3 subsections of her comments that meant the fucking world to me:

First of all, I love the very premise, the specific types of emotions and trauma Peter is going through here. It's twofold, and it's fascinating. 1) The idea that he was only "made" to be "used," discovering and contemplating and becoming self-loathing over the fact that the entire reason he was conceived was to be used to as a battery, a tool, a thing to help destroy the universe. WOW. That is a take I had never really considered, or at least never thought about for long. That would fuck anyone up, create serious identity problems, that at least on the side of his father, he was intentionally created for evil purposes, and not just to be a person. 2) Guilt over the thousands of innocent people he hurt while being used as a battery, although it was greatly out of his control. Because to someone who wants to be a hero and with such a big heart, the knowledge that he even involuntarily killed anyone through Ego's power is horrifying, to the point where the guilt is so high he feels he deserves any physical pain/illness/injury. Awww man, another take I would have never strongly considered. We've seen fanfics where Peter feels guilty in the aftermath of Ego, but it's usually in relation to how he treated the main characters (never appreciating Yondu or realizing he had a father all along; not listening to Gamora and yelling mean things to her during their fight; being too cocky and rude to Rocket in the beginning, overall wanting to be a better person/hero/boyfriend). NOT insane guilt over the strangers and planets he destroyed via Ego's light. Goddammit. :( This is the first time I've seen a fanfic address these two ideas. And it's realistic and creative and GOOD.

- How Gamora originally thought Peter "felt" the other children, his siblings dying, how seeing the bodies scared her for Peter's well-being so much, and how making Peter relive their deaths seemed like Ego's brand of sick, psychological torture. But also that Peter actually meant he felt the other strangers dying due to the expansion, scared and running away and being buried. Feeling that is horrifying, of course he would feel insane levels of guilt. The comparison that, despite Gamora's guilt over her victims under Thanos, she never felt them die, and not all at once but over the course of years. Again, great contrast. I still love her reminder "That wasn't you." That could never be Peter.

- Peter breaking down crying when Gamora says "Earth" instead of "Terra." That's so interesting, one of the most original concepts in this piece, how that slight name change would resonate with him so much. Fascinating. And heartbreaking. He held it together well, and that was the thing that broke the thread. Poor baby.”

If you’ve got anyone in your corner who builds you up like that, then you’re set for life, baby.

(I think that Gamora misinterpreting Peter’s statement and thinking he meant the other children when in fact he meant the people that died during the expansion is the example of working in ideas I didn’t actually use but just love as concepts)

And that last one kinda goes to the point I made in Whirlwind reflection about people liking what I thought of as regular/sorta mundane details- like obviously the part about Earth/Terra was supposed to be emotional and I wrote it that way on purpose, but I didn’t intend it to be even in the top 8 emotional hard hitting moments in this fic, so what she wrote about that little bit has always stuck with me

And turns out her favorite part was a last minute addition, which always makes me feel extra special, I don’t know why. Finding out that last minute inclusions are things that people loved just makes me glow

If you have a reader who sometimes gives you comments even half as good as marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches gives hers, then you too can consider yourself truly blessed (she writes freakin’ amazing starmora fics too, so she’s the kind of commenter I aspire to be as a fanfic writer, you know? If you don’t have your own marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches, you go be somebody else’s marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches. You go make somebody’s year just by being you)

I’ll be tagging @thehoneymoonbinder, @marypoppinswasmyfatherbitches, @ephemeralcontinuum, @nymphrea, and @startsrose3

Honorable mention for Falling, or the fic that made me realize that I have a pattern, and every time I have a new OTP, the first fic I post for them must be a pregnancy fic. First B99 fic? Peraltiago pregnancy one shot back in 2015.  Last February? Published my first GOTG fic, a starmora pregnancy one shot. Back in June? My first fic ever written for any of the Thor movies- Falling- a, you guessed it, Thorkyrie pregnancy one shot.

[terabitweb]

Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett

In the weeks leading up to re:Invent 2019, we’ll share conversations we’e had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

How long have you been at AWS, and what do you do enjoy most in your current role?

It’s been two and a half years already! Time has flown. I’m the product manager for AWS CloudHSM. As with most product managers at AWS, I’m the CEO of my product. I spend a lot of my time talking to customers who are looking to use CloudHSM, to understand the problems they are looking to solve. My goal is to make sure they are looking at their problems correctly. Often, my role as a product manager is to coach. I ask a lot of why’s. I learned this approach after I came to AWS—before that I had the more traditional product management approach of listening to customers to take requirements, prioritize them, do the marketing, all of that. This notion of deeply understanding what customers are trying to do and then helping them find the right path forward—which might not be what they were thinking of originally—is something I’ve found unique to AWS. And I really enjoy that piece of my work.

What are you currently working on that you’re excited about?

CloudHSM is a hardware security module (HSM) that lets you generate and use your own encryption keys on AWS. However, CloudHSM is weird in that, by design, you’re explicitly outside the security boundary of AWS managed services when you use it: You don’t use AWS IAM roles, and HSM transactions aren’t captured in AWS CloudTrail. You transact with your HSM over an end-to-end encrypted channel between your application and your HSM. It’s more similar to having to operate a 3rd party application in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) than it is to using an AWS managed service. My job, without breaking the security and control the service offers, is to continue to make customers’ lives better through more elastic, user-friendly, and reliable HSM experiences.

We’re currently working on simplifying cross-region synchronization of CloudHSM clusters. We’re also working on simplifying management operations, like adjusting key attributes or rotating user passwords.

Another really exciting thing that we’re working on is auto-scaling for HSM clusters based on load metrics, to make CloudHSM even more elastic. CloudHSM already broke the mold of traditional HSMs with zero-config cluster scaling. Now, we’re looking to expand how customers can leverage this capability to control costs without sacrificing availability.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

For one, time management. AWS is so big, and our influence is so vast, that there’s no end to how much you can do. As Amazonians, we want to take ownership of our work, and we want bias for action to accomplish everything quickly. Still, you have to live to fight another day, so prioritizing and saying no is necessary. It’s hard!

I also challenge myself to continue to cultivate the patience and collaboration that gets a customer on a good security path. It’s very easy to say, This is what they’re asking for, so let’s build it—it’s easy, it’s fast, let’s do it. But that’s not the customer obsessed solution. It’s important to push for the correct, long-term outcome for our customers, and that often means training, and bringing in Solutions Architects and Support. It means being willing to schedule the meetings and take the calls and go out to the conferences. It’s hard, but it’s the right thing to do.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

Shipping products. It’s fun to announce something new, and then watch people jump on it and get really excited.

I still really enjoy demonstrating the elastic nature of CloudHSM. It sounds silly, but you can delete a CloudHSM instance and then create a new HSM with a simple API call or console button click. We save your state, so it picks up right where you left off. When you demo that to customers who are used to the traditional way of using on-premises HSMs, their eyes will light up—it’s like being a kid in the candy store. They see a meaningful improvement to the experience of managing HSM they never thought was possible. It’s so much fun to see their reaction.

What does cloud security mean to you, personally?

At the risk of hubris, I believe that to some extent, cloud security is about the survival of the human race. 15-20 years ago, we didn’t have smart phones, and the internet was barely alive. What happened on one side of the planet didn’t immediately and irrevocably affect what happened on the opposite side of the planet. Now, in this connected world, my children’s classrooms are online, my assets, our family videos, our security system—they are all online. With all the flexibility of digital systems comes an enormous amount of responsibility on the service and solution providers. Entire governments, populations, and countries depend on cloud-based systems. It’s vital that we stay ten steps ahead of any potential risk. I think cloud security functions similar to the way that antibiotics and vaccinations function—it allows us to prevent, detect and treat issues before they become serious threats. I am very, very proud to be part of a team that is constantly looking ahead and raising the bar in this area.

What’s the most common misperception you encounter with customers about cloud security?

That you have to directly configure and use your HSMs to be secure in the cloud. In other words, I’m constantly telling people they do not need to use my product.

To some extent, when customers adopt CloudHSM, it means that we at AWS have not succeeded at giving them an easier to use, lower cost, fully managed option. CloudHSM is expensive. As easy as we’ve made it to use, customers still have to manage their own availability, their own throttling, their own users, their own IT monitoring.

We want customers to be able to use fully managed security services like AWS KMS, ACM Private CA, AWS Code Signing, AWS Secrets Manager and similar services instead of rolling their own solution using CloudHSM. We’re constantly working to pull common CloudHSM use cases into other managed services. In fact, the main talk that I’m doing at re:Invent will put all of our security services into this context. I’m trying to make the point that traditional wisdom says that you have to use a dedicated cryptographic module via CloudHSM to be secure. However, practical wisdom, with all of the advances that we’ve made in all of the other services, almost always indicates that KMS or one of the other managed services is the better option.

In your opinion, what’s the biggest challenge facing cloud security right now?

From my vantage point, I think the challenge is the disconnect between compliance and security officers and DevOps teams.

DevOps people want to know things like, Can you rotate your keys? Can you detect breaches? Can you be agile with your encryption? But I think that security and compliance folks still tend to gravitate toward a focus on creating and tracking keys and cryptographic material. When you try to adapt those older, more established methodologies, I think you give away a lot of the power and flexibility that would give you better resilience.

Five or more years from now, what changes do you think we’ll see across the security landscape?

I think what’s coming is a fundamental shift in the roots of trust. Right now, the prevailing notion is that the roots of trust are physically, logically, and administratively separate from your day to day compute. With Nitro and Firecracker and more modern, scalable ways of local roots of trust, I look forward to a day, maybe ten years from now, when HSMs are obsolete altogether, and customers can take their key security wherever they go.

I also think there is a lot of work being done, and to be done, in encrypted search. If at the end of the day you can’t search data, it’s hard to get the full value out of it. At the same time, you can’t have it in clear text. Searchable encryption currently has and will likely always have limitations, but we’re optimistic that encrypted search for meaningful use cases can be delivered at scale.

You’re involved with two sessions at re:Invent. One is Achieving security goals with AWS CloudHSM. How did you choose this particular topic?

I talk to customers at networking conferences run by AWS—and also recently at Grace Hopper—about what content they’d like from us. A recurring request is guidance on navigating the many options for security and cryptography on AWS. They’re not sure where to start, what they should use, or the right way to think about all these security services.

So the genesis of this talk was basically, Hey, let’s provide some kind of decision tree to give customers context for the different use cases they’re trying to solve and the services that AWS provides for those use cases! For each use case, we’ll show the recommended managed service, the alternative service, and the pros and cons of both. We want the customer’s decision process to go beyond just considerations of cost and day one complexity.

What are you hoping that your audience will do differently as a result of attending this session?

I’d like DevOps attendees to be able to articulate their operational needs to their security planning teams more succinctly and with greater precision. I’d like auditors and security planners to have a wider, more realistic view of AWS services and capabilities. I’d like customers as a whole to make the right choice for their business and their own customers. It’s really important for teams as a whole to understand the problem they’re trying to solve. If they can go into their planning and Ops meetings armed with a clear, comprehensive view of the capabilities that AWS offers, and if they can make their decisions from the position of rational information, not preconceived notions, then I think I’ll have achieved the goals of this session.

You’re also co-presenting a deep-dive session along with Rohit Mathur on CloudHSM. What can you tell us about the session that’s not described in the re:Invent catalog?

So, what the session actually should be called is: If you must use CloudHSM, here’s how you don’t shoot your foot.

In the first half of the deep dive, we explain how CloudHSM is different than traditional HSMs. When we made it agile, elastic, and durable, we changed a lot of the traditional paradigms of how HSMs are set up and operated. So we’ll spend a good bit of time explaining how things are different. While there are many things you don’t have to worry about, there are some things that you really have to get right in order for your CloudHSM cluster to work for you as you expect it to.

We’ll talk about how to get maximum power, flexibility, and economy out of the CloudHSM clusters that you’re setting up. It’s somewhat different from a traditional model, where the HSM is just one appliance owned by one customer, and the hardware, software, and support all came from a single vendor. CloudHSM is AWS native, so you still have the single tenant third party FIPS 140-2 validated hardware, but your software and support are coming from AWS. A lot of the integrations and operational aspect of it are very “cloudy” in nature now. Getting customers comfortable with how to program, monitor, and scale is a lot of what we’ll talk about in this session.

We’ll also cover some other big topics. I’m very excited that we’ll talk about trusted key wrapping. It’s a new feature that allows you to mark certain keys as trusted and then control the attributes of keys that are wrapped and unwrapped with those trusted keys. It’s going to open up a lot of flexibility for customers as they implement their workloads. We’ll include cross-region disaster recovery, which tends to be one of the more gnarly problems that customers are trying to solve. You have several different options to solve it depending on your workloads, so we’ll walk you through those options. Finally, we’ll definitely go through performance because that’s where we see a lot of customer concerns, and we really want our users to get the maximum throughput for their HSM investments.

Any advice for first-time attendees coming to re:Invent?

Wear comfortable shoes … and bring Chapstick. If you’ve never been to re:Invent before, prepare to be overwhelmed!

Also, come prepared with your hard questions and seek out AWS experts to answer them. You’ll find resources at the Security booth, you can DM us on Twitter, catch us before or after talks, or just reach out to your account manager to set up a meeting. We want to meet customers while we’re there, and solve problems for you, so seek us out!

You like philosophy. Who’s your favorite philosopher and why?

Rabindranath Tagore. He’s an Indian poet who writes with deep insight about homeland, faith, change, and humanity. I spent my early childhood in the US, then grew up in Bombay and have lived across the Pacific Northwest, the East Coast, the Midwest, and down south in Louisiana in equal measure. When someone asks me where I’m from, I have a hard time answering honestly because I’m never really sure. I like Tagore’s poems because he frames that ambiguity in a way that makes sense. If you abstract the notion of home to the notion of what makes you feel at home, then answers are easier to find!   Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

The AWS Security team is hiring! Want to find out more? Check out our career page.

Avni Rambhia

Avni is the Senior Product Manager for AWS CloudHSM. At work, she’s passionate about enabling customers to meet their security goals in the AWS Cloud. At leisure, she enjoys the casual outdoors and good coffee.

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Go to Source Author: Becca Crockett AWS Security Profiles: Avni Rambhia, Senior Product Manager, CloudHSM Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett In the weeks leading up to re:Invent 2019…